Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

THREE

It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.

The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.

But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet fragrance of flowers.

They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along the road that winds up the Canyon.

Once in a while people will still make their way up that winding road, usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up. There's nothing here that gives them gooseflesh: just flowers and dragonflies. Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will give them something morbid to talk about once they get back to Tulsa or New Jersey.

When people finally ask them whether they went up to that Godforsaken Canyon where all those Hollywood folks died, they say that yeah, they went and had a look, but it was a waste of gas and temper, because there was nothing to see. Not a thing.

And so, over the next few summers, as people come and look and go away disappointed, word slowly spreads that Coldheart Canyon is a sham, a fake; not worth the effort.

So people come less and less. And eventually the tourists don't come at all.

There's only one kind of visitor who will still make the effort to find the place where Katya Lupi built her dream palace, and for this sort of sightseer, the Canyon will still put on a show.

They come, always, in expensive vehicles, designed to be driven over rough, undomesticated land. They come with rolls of geological maps and surveyors' equipment, and talk proprietarily about how the Canyon would look if it had a five-star hotel, seven or eight stories high, built at the top end, with three swimming pools and a dozen five-grand-a-night bungalows, all arranged so that everybody has a little corner of the Canyon walled off for their private spa, the contours of the land altered so that it feels like a world within a world; an escape into paradise, just two minutes' drive from Sunset Boulevard.

The Canyon has heard all this idle nonsense before, of course. And it has promised itself: never again.

Hearing these men talk about the money they're going to make once they've done their digging and their planting, the Canyon loses its temper, and starts to show its displeasure as only dirt and rock given something close to consciousness by the magic worked in its midst can do.

At first it simply shakes the ground a little, just enough to send some stones skipping down the Canyon's flanks to shatter the windshields on every vehicle on the road. Very often, a tantrum like this is enough to make the developers turn tail. But not always. Once in a while, there's somebody who refuses to be so easily intimidated, and the Canyon must escalate its assault.

It shakes its flanks until it uncovers certain horrid forms: the mummified remains of the children of the ghosts and the animals who mated here in the dark days of the Canyon's shameful past.

The revelation is brief. Just enough to say: this is the least of it, my friend. Dig and you will regret what I will show you for the rest of your life.

The show works every time.

Pragmatic though these men are, they feel the cold presence of the uncanny all around them, and suddenly they want no more of this place. In their panic they don't even bother to clear the granulated glass off their leather seats. They just get into their cars and drive away in clammy haste, leaving their maps and artists' renderings to decay in the dirt, and their ambitions to rot beside them.

So the Canyon sits in the middle of the sprawling city, inviolate. Nobody will touch it now. All it has to do is wait; wait for a certain summons.

There's no telling when it will come.

Perhaps it's a hundred years away, this call. On the other hand, perhaps it will come tomorrow.

All the Canyon knows is this: that at some point in the future a whisper will pass through its cracks and its vaults, and with one almighty heave, the canyons and the hills and the flatlands as far as the shore will stand up on end, and all the towers and the dams and the dream palaces that were built here, along with their builders and their inheritors, will drop away into the deep, dark Pacific.

The land will shake for a year or so, as it lays itself down again. Tremors will continue to convulse it. But by degrees, things will return to the way they were in an earlier time. The Santa Anas will blow in their season, and they'll carry into the Canyon the seeds of the flowers whose scents they bear, dropping them carelessly in the newly-churned dirt.

After a few weeks of warm winter rain, the naked ground will be covered with grass and the shoots of young flowers; even the first spears of palm trees and bamboo. In the months to come they will flourish, transforming the land out of all recognition.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.