Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

"So you let people do what they wanted?"

  "More or less." She returned to the book. "You see the symbols beside the names?"

  Todd nodded, somewhat tentatively. The conversation had taken a turn he was by no means certain he liked. It was one thing to talk about freedom in Coldheart Canyon; it was another to have her boasting about babies sucking dicks. "All the symbols mean something different," she said. "Look here. That squiggle there, that means snakes. That knotted rope? That means being bound up. The more knots in the rope the more bound the person likes to be. So . . . here . . . Barrymore ... his rope has six knots in it. So he liked to be very well tied up. And then there's a little flame beside him. That means—"

  "He liked to be burned?"

  "When he was sober. In the end, I stopped inviting him because he got so drunk and so abusive he wasn't any fun."

  "Ah! So you did make a judgment."

  She considered this for a moment. "Yes. I suppose I did."

  "Did he spoil the secret? Once you didn't invite him anymore. Did he start telling everyone about what it was like up here?"

  "Of course not. What was he going to say? Even he had a reputation to keep. Besides, half of Hollywood swam in that pool at one time or another. And the other half wished they could. Nobody said anything but everybody knew."

  "What . . . exactly? That there were orgies here? That women got fucked with snakes?"

  "All of that, yes. But mostly that people came back from Coldheart Canyon spiritually changed."

  "You mean that? Spiritually?"

  "Yes. Spiritually. Don't look so surprised. The flesh and the soul are tied together."

  Todd looked confused.

  "Louise Brooks said to me once: there's nothing they can give that would be worth my freedom. She partied with the rest of us, but in the end she gave it all up, and moved away. She said they were trying to take her soul by boring her to death."

  "So she gave up making movies?"

  "Indeed she did. But Louise was a rare example. You know what usually happens: you get addicted. And the studio knows you're addicted. You need your hit of fame every couple of years or you start to feel worthless. Isn't that right? So as long as they can keep giving you a little time in the spotlight, they've got you in their pocket."

  Todd continued to flip through the book as Katya spoke, as much because he didn't want to meet her gaze as because he was interested in the pages. All that she said was true; and it hurt to hear it: especially when he had done himself so much harm because of his appetite for the spotlight.

  A sound, behind him. He looked up at the mirror behind the bar. It wasn't his wounded face that caught his eye, however, it was a motion of something, or somebody, passing by the door.

  "I think there's somebody out there," he whispered.

  Katya looked unsurprised. "Of course. They know we're here." She took the book from his hand and closed it for him. "Let me introduce you to them," she said.

  "Wait." He reached for the photographs that Katya had also brought out of the safe. They still lay where she had put them, on the top of the bar.

  "You don't need to look at those now," Katya said.

  "I just want to take a peek."

  He began to flick through the sheaf of photographs. There were probably forty or so; most in worse condition than the book, the prints made hastily, and poorly fixed, so that large parts of the image had faded to speckled sepia or to black. But there were still sizable portions of many of the photographs visible, and the scenes they depicted confirmed every obscene or outlandish detail she'd offered. They weren't simply images of men and women coupling, but pictures of the most extreme forms of sexual gratification. In one, a naked man was bound to a metal chain, the cords that held him biting deep into his flesh. A woman wearing just a black brassiere was flogging his chest and his groin. Assuming this wasn't a set-up (and something about the quality of all the photographs suggested that all of these were the real thing), then the woman was doing her victim some serious hurt. There was blood running down his chest and stomach from blows she'd delivered there; and there appeared to be welts on his thighs and his dick, which stood testament to the pleasure he was taking in this. In another picture, some way down the pile, the same man (his face seemed vaguely familiar to Todd, though he couldn't put a name to it) had been redeemed from his bondage and lay on the paving stone beside the pool while another woman (this second completely naked) squatted over him and loosed a stream of urine on his wounds. To judge by the expression on the masochist's face, this hurt more than the whipping. His teeth were gritted, his body locked, as though he were only just holding back an unmanly scream.

  "Wait. I know who that is," Todd said. "That's—Christ! It can't be."

  "It is."

  "He was always the Good Guy."

  "Well, sometimes Good Guys like getting pissed on."

  "And her? She was always so sweet in her movies. What's her name? Always the victim."

  "Well, that was part of the game you got to play in the Canyon. Up here you do the things the studios wouldn't let you do. Rub your face in the dirt for a while. And then on Monday morning you could brush your teeth and smile and pretend you were all-American again. That's what people want. An illusion. You can do what the hell you like out of sight. Just don't spoil their dreams. They want to believe you're perfect. And it's hard to put on a perfect face every day without going crazy. Up here, nobody was perfect, and nobody cared."

  "Jesus," Todd said, coming across a picture of scatology. "Who's the pooper?" Katya turned the picture round to get a clearer view of the woman's face. "That was Edith Vine. At least that was her real name. I can't remember what they called her. She had a seven-year contract with RKO, but they never made a star out of her."

  "Maybe they were afraid one of these would leak out and they'd lose their investment."

  "No, she just kept getting pregnant. She was one of those women who just had to look at a man and bam, she was eating anchovies and icecream. So she kept getting abortions. Two, three a year. And her body went to hell."

  "Where did she end up?"

  "Oh she's here," Katya said. "We don't just take the famous up here in the Canyon. We take the failures, too."

  Without fully understanding what he'd just been told—perhaps not entirely wanting to—Todd moved on to another picture. A man who'd played cowboys most of his life was the center of attention, all laced up in a girdle that made his waist as narrow as any showgirl's.

  "That's one for the family album."

  "He liked to be called Martha when he was dressed like that. It was his mother's name. In fact, I think it was his mother's corset."

  Todd laughed, though he wasn't sure where the laughter was coming from. Perhaps it was simply that the parade of perversions was so excessive there was nothing to do, in the end, but laugh.

  "Christ. What's that?"

  "A jar of bees, and Claudette's breast."

  "She liked to get stung?"

  "She would scream like her lungs were going to give out. But then she'd have somebody pick the stings out with their teeth."

  "Fuck."

  "And she'd be so wet you could fill a shot-glass from what came out of her."

  It was too much. He put the photographs down. Bees, piss, corsets. And they were only the pictures he could make sense of. There were plenty more that defied easy comprehension; arrangements of limbs and faces and artifacts which he had no appetite to interpret.

  Before he left them where they lay, there was one question remaining that he simply had to ask.

  "Are you in any of these?"

  "Well I'm in the book, aren't I?"

  "So all that stuff you were telling me in the Gaming Room, about offering yourself to the winner? All that was true?"

  "All that was true."

  "Just how far did you go?"

  She turned the photographs over, putting their excesses out of sight.

  "As far as you want," she said, smiling. "Then just a little f
urther."

  She unnerved him, and she knew it. She took hold of his hand. "Come on," she said, "let's go outside. We're missing the dusk."

  FOUR

  They were too late. It had been twilight when they'd entered the Pool House. Now it was night. But that wasn't the only change that had taken place in the time they'd lingered there. The air Todd breathed when he stepped outside again was something more than a little colder, a little darker, than it had been. Though there was no wind (at least the trees weren't moving), still he felt movement around and against him; a delicate touch on his arm, on his shoulder, something touching the back of his head. He looked at Katya. There was precious little light out here, but he could see her face with curious clarity, almost as though it were lit from within. Her expression was one of considerable pleasure.

  "Say hello, Todd . . ." she told him.

  "Who to?"

  "Oh come on. Stop pretending to yourself. You know they're here."

  There was something brushing his cheek, lightly. He flicked it away, as though it might be a moth, though he knew it wasn't.

  "I don't understand what's going on," he said, his words a kind of plea. He'd thought earlier that he could do without answers; that having her here was enough. Now he was discomfited again; he wanted some explanations for these mysteries, which multiplied every time he turned round. First Katya and her stories of the Gaming Room, then the guest-house and the life-masks and the posters, then the bath, and the Terror. Now this: the Pool House and its history of debaucheries, locked away for posterity; and as if all that weren't enough, they'd stepped out into these moth-wing touches against his cheek, his arm, his groin. He wanted to know what it all meant; but he was afraid of the answer. No, that wasn't it. He was afraid he already knew the answer.

  "You don't need me to tell you what's going on here," Katya said, echoing his thoughts. "You can feel them, can't you?"

  Oh God, yes, he could feel them. These weren't moths or mosquitoes around him. They were people. People, hidden in the air.

  "Say it."

  "Ghosts."

  "Yes. Of course. Ghosts."

  "Oh, Jesus."

  "The Canyon's full of ghosts."

  "I don't believe in ghosts."

  "You don't have to believe," she said. "It's nothing to do with believing or not believing. They're here. All around you. Just let yourself see them. You know they're here."

  Of course he knew. In his gut, he'd known all along there was some mystery like this waiting in the wings. And what Katya said about belief was right. Whether he believed in the Life Everlasting or not was a grand irrelevance. The dead were here. He could feel their fingers, their breaths, their stares. And now, as they pressed closer, he began to see them. He had to work up some spit before he could speak again.

  "Why can I see you and I'm only now seeing them?" he asked.

  "Because I'm not dead, Todd. And if you're very good, in a little while I'll show you why. You're going to like it too. My special room—"

  At the mention of the room, the air, or rather those who moved invisibly through it, became agitated. The number of touches that Todd felt doubled, tripled. Apparently Katya felt them too, and she was somewhat irritated by them.

  "Calm down, calm down," she said.

  There were subtle smears of light in front of Todd, as though the emotion the ghosts were feeling—spurred by Katya's mention of the room— was causing them to show themselves. He thought he saw a face in one of the smears, or some part of a face: a row of perfect teeth; the gleam of a bright blue eye. The more he thought he saw, the more there was to support his suspicion. The smears grew more cogent, painting the forms of faces and shoulders and hands. They lasted only a little time—like fireworks, bursting into glorious life, then dying away—but each time one was ignited its life lasted a little longer, and the form it etched in the darkness made more sense to him.

  There were people everywhere around him. Not just a few. Dozens of them; the ghosts of parties past, lining up to touch the living.

  "You begin to see them, don't you?" Katya said.

  "Yes," he replied breathlessly. "I do ... begin ... to see them."

  "Pretty people."

  More than pretty. Beautiful; and in many cases famous. One woman— was it Jean Harlow?—wandered in front of him with her glittering dress torn away to expose her breasts. She'd come and gone so quickly it was hard for Todd to be sure, but she seemed to have bite-marks on her flesh, clustered around her nipples. She'd no sooner passed from sight than two figures, tied together with ropes that went from neck to neck, came into view. Both were male. Both were naked. Both shone with a mixture of sweat and blood. This would have been distressing enough; but it was their smiles, their lunatic smiles, which made Todd flinch.

  "Sal and Jimmy," Katya said. "They fool around like that all the time. It's a little lynching game."

  He pulled his hand out of hers. "This is too much."

  "It's all right," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

  He waved them away, like a child trying to ward off nightmares. "I don't want to see them."

  Laughter came out of the darkness to meet his demand. The ghosts were apparently much amused. Their laughing made faces blossom all round him. Several he could name: famous beauties, returned to their perfection in this bizarre after-life, as though they'd remembered themselves as their public would have willed them to be. Merle Oberon and George Sanders, Mary Pickford and Veronica Lake.

  Todd started to retreat up the lawn, still waving them off. The phantoms came in giddy pursuit.

  "All right, enough!" Katya yelled at them. "I said enough!"

  Her word was apparently law, even in such stellar company as this. The laughter rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressing toward him.

  He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.

  "Wait, love!" Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.

  "I'm losing my mind," he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.

  "You're not crazy, you're just seeing things clearly for the first time."

  "Well I don't want to see them."

  "Why not? Isn't it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there's life after death? Pleasure after death."

  "Pleasure. You call that—" He glanced back at the Pool House, where he'd seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.

  "We had no shame then. We have even less now."

  As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted the lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.

  The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.

  Aware of Katya's gaze, Todd glanced over at her.

  "Would you like to fuck her?" she said.

  The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.

  "She's yours if you want her. Ava!"

  The girl looked up.
br />   "This is Todd," Katya said.

  "Hello, Todd."

  "Go on," Katya said. "Don't worry: I'm not going to get jealous. I'd like to see how you give pleasure to a woman."

  Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava's feet hadn't suddenly begun to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.

  "Another time," he said to Ava, moving away.

  She called after him, but he didn't look back.

  "There's plenty more where she came from," Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. "You should go to one of them," she said.

  "Why?"

  "Just to see what it's like . . ."

  "Fucking a ghost?"

  "If you want to put it that way."

  "I don't know. It's weird. I'm not sure—"

  Her hand went back to his hard-on. "Yes you are. You love the idea."

  Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.

  "Katya?"

  A girl's voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried toward Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.

  "Lick me, Katya," she said, her voice dreamy. "Will you please? Nobody does it to me like you. Lick me deep."