Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  He drove down the serpentine road that led out of the Canyon as if he were being pursued by a horde of demon-women, and without even thinking about it took the same route he'd taken with Todd countless times: up onto Mulholland Drive. He opened the window as he drove, so as to have a sobering breeze blowing against his face, but it had very little effect. There was too much alcohol in his blood, and too much panic inflaming that alcohol, to make him a safe driver on such a notoriously tricky and dangerous stretch of road. He didn't care. He just wanted to put some distance between himself and that damn Canyon as fast as possible.

  On one of the hairpin bends his clammy hands slid on the wheel, and he momentarily lost control of the car. He was a good enough driver— even in his present state—to recover quickly, and things might have been fine had another speed-freak not come barreling round the corner from the opposite direction. The other driver took quick evasive action, and was away round the bend before Marco lost what little control he had. The wheel slipped through his hands, and his drink-slurred foot was too slow on the brake to stop the car from skewing round, squealing loudly. There was no barrier between the road and the drop; not even a wooden fence. The front half of the vehicle went over the edge, and there it lodged for a moment, finely balanced between solid asphalt and oblivion. Marco muttered a little prayer, but God wasn't listening. The car tripped forward and slid off the road into darkness. It was a straight drop of perhaps forty or fifty feet.

  The vehicle didn't hit solid ground, however. It fell into the massive boughs of a sycamore tree, which was large enough to hold the car, nose down, in its branches. Marco was thrown against the windshield. Through it he could see the yard in which the sycamore stood. There was a party going on down there. The pool was illuminated: its bright turquoise water twinkling. Lanterns hung in the bushes all around, swaying in the breeze. Marco had time to grasp the prettiness of all this, then something ignited in the engine, and the fume-filled air around him became a sheet of lurid orange flame. It enveloped him completely, the first burst of heat enough to sear the clothes from his body and set his hair and flesh alight.

  Blindly, he fumbled for the handle of the door, and pulled on it. The rush of air only excited the flames further. Through the stench of gasoline and burning plastic he could smell the sickening tang of his own body being cooked. Still he fought to escape, and gravity was on his side. The car was so positioned that he had only to lean forward and fall out through the open door. The sycamore's boughs slowed his descent, but once he was clear of them there was an eighteen-foot drop to the polished Mexican pavers around the pool.

  He scarcely felt the impact. The fire had completely traumatized his nerve-endings. Nor could he see anything: his eyelids had been fused shut by the heat. He could still hear, though he wouldn't make much sense of the garbled cries of the people who had gathered to witness his agonies.

  There was one person in the crowd who was willing to do more than stand and watch him burn. Marco felt arms grab hold of him; heard his savior yelling something about the pool. Then he was in free-fall again, as the man who'd picked him up threw him into the water.

  The flames were instantly extinguished. But the cure was too much for his flesh to endure. The sudden shock of cold after the blistering heat of the fire sent his body into systemic failure.

  His last breath—a bubble of heated air—escaped from his cooked lungs. Then he sank to the bottom of the pool.

  Even so, the people around the pool didn't give up on him. Three of the partygoers dived into the pool and brought his blackened, fire-withered body up from the bottom. He was tenderly lifted onto the side of the pool, where one of the girls attempted to breathe some life back into him. But it was a lost cause. The man who'd made such a dramatic entrance into the gathering was dead, and beyond hope of saving.

  • • •

  This was not quite the end of events along that stretch of Mulholland Drive, however.

  Just a few hours later, as the first light of dawn was breaking, a jogger who ran a two-mile route along the Drive daily, rain or shine, saw a light on the road, close to the place where Marco's tires had left their blackened imprint on the asphalt. Apparently aware that it had an unwanted witness, the mysterious luminescence rose up into the brightening air and was gone.

  The following evening, Paul Booth—the man who'd had the courage to carry the burning body of Marco Caputo to the pool—went out into the back yard, alone. He was in a melancholy state of mind. The party he'd thrown the previous night had been in honor of his little sister's sixteenth birthday. Some celebration! Alice had barely stopped crying since. He could hear her now, sobbing in the house.

  He took out the half-smoked reefer he'd been saving for a happier occasion, and lit it up. As he drew on the pungent smoke, he looked up and saw a patch of luminous air lingering at the edge of the pool. It had no discernible shape. It was simply a gentle brightness, which would have been invisible half an hour before, when the sun had still been up. He watched the brightness as it hung there for ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, then he nipped out his reefer, pocketed it, and went back inside to find someone to tell. He found his father; and together they emerged into the backyard.

  The light had already gone from beside the pool.

  "There!" Paul said, pointing up at something that could have been the light he'd seen, now up on Mulholland Drive. But it could just as easily have been the light of a car coming round the treacherous corner of the road. And anyway, it was gone in a heartbeat, leaving both father and son doubting what they'd seen.

  SIX

  In the depths of the Canyon, no more than half a mile from the pool and the lawn and the tree where Ava hung, Tammy lay in the dirt and waited for the end. She'd done all she could do to survive: she had eaten berries and licked the dew off leaves, she'd fought off the fever-dreams which threatened to claim her consciousness; she'd forced herself to walk when she had no strength left in her limbs.

  It had tricks, this Canyon: ways to lead you round and round in circles, so that you burned up all your energy coming back to the place you'd started from. It put colors before your eyes that were so bewitching that you ended up turning round and round on the spot to catch them, like a dog chasing its own tail. And sometimes (this was its cleverest trick) it went into your head and found the voices there that were most comforting, then made them call to you. Arnie (of all people to find comforting, Mister Zero Sperm Count); and the man who used to do her dry-cleaning in Sacramento, Mister O'Brien, who'd always had a smile and a wink for her; and Todd, of course, her beautiful hero Todd, calling out to her just to make her stumble a few more steps. She hadn't quite believed any of these voices were real, but that hadn't stopped her following them, back and forth, around and about—voices and colors—until at last she had no strength left in her body, and she fell down.

  So now she was down, and she was too weak to get up again; too damn heavy ever to get her fat ass up and moving. At the back of her head was the fear that the freaks would come and find her. But they didn't come, at least not by daylight. Perhaps, she thought, they were waiting for darkness. Meanwhile, there were plenty of things that did come: flies, dragon-flies, humming-birds, all flitting around.

  As for the summonings from Arnie and Mister O'Brien and Todd, once she was down on the ground none of these came either. The Canyon knew it had her beaten. All it had to do was wait, and she'd perish where she lay.

  The day crept on. In the middle of the afternoon she fell into a stupefied daze, and when she woke experienced a short and surprising burst of renewed ambition to save herself. After much effort she managed to get to her feet, and started to walk in what she thought was the direction of the house (sometimes she seemed to see the roof through the trees, sometimes not), but after ten minutes the Canyon seemed to realize she was up and walking, and it began its little tricks afresh. The colors came back. So did the voices.

  She fell to her knees, crying, begging it to leave her alone. But it was mer
ciless; the voices were louder than ever, yelling incoherently in her head; the sky was every color but blue.

  "Okay," she said. "Okay, okay. Just leave me alone to die. I won't get up again. I promise. I swear. Just leave me be."

  It seemed to get the message, because by degrees the yelling receded, and the colors dimmed.

  She lay back in the foliage, and watched the sky darken, the stars emerge. Birds flew overhead, returning to their nests before the onset of night. She envied them just a little, but then what did she have to go home to, in truth? A house in the suburbs she'd never really loved; a husband, the same. What a mess she'd made of her life! What a ridiculous, empty mess! All that time wasted doting on a man she'd seen on a screen; hours spent flicking through her treasures, fantasizing. Never really living. That was the horror of it. She was going to die and she'd never really lived.

  The sky was almost lightless now. She could barely see her hand in front of her face. She let her eyes slide closed, draping the stars. In the grass around her, the cicadas sang a rhythmical lullaby.

  Suddenly, somewhere not very far off, there rose an unholy din; part howl, part yelp, part laughter. Her eyes sprang open. The hairs at her nape stood on end. Was this a farewell performance by the Canyon? One last attempt to squeeze her wits dry?

  No; no. This wasn't for her benefit. It was too far away. Up at the house. Yes, that was it; somebody up at the house was having one hell of a party.

  Curiosity got the better of her fatigue. Tammy pushed herself up onto her knees, and attempted to figure out where the cacophony was coming from. There was light visible between the trees; flickering, but not flames. This was too cold a light to be fire.

  Perhaps this wasn't a party after all. The din was as nasty as it was raucous. Who the hell could be making such a noise? The freaks perhaps? They seemed the likeliest source. She pictured them laying siege to the house. Oh God in Heaven, suppose they'd gone after Todd? Sniffed him out in his weakened state and attacked him?

  The thought of harm coming to him was unbearable, even now. It forced her to get up off the ground, something she couldn't have done on her own behalf. For a few seconds she stood with legs wide planted, uncertain whether she was going to fall down again. Then, she told herself to move, and much to her surprise her body obeyed the instruction. Her legs felt like lead and her head as light as a helium balloon, but she managed to stagger five or six steps without falling down.

  The noise from the house had subsided somewhat, but the lights were still visible between the trees. She paused for a moment to catch her breath, and while she did so she studied the lights, trying to make sense of them. Was it possible that what she was seeing were people? Yes it was. Several of the figures had slipped away from the immediate vicinity of the house, and were coming closer to her. Some were zigzagging through the trees, as though they were engaged in a game of some kind. What sort of creatures were these, she wondered, that capered like children playing, but had such luminescence about them?

  She stumbled on another two or three steps, but her body wasn't going to carry her much further, she knew. It was only a matter of time before she fell down again; and she knew that next time she wouldn't have the strength to pick herself up.

  Then, very close by, she heard the sound of something moving through the thicket. She looked in the direction of the sound. An animal, perhaps? A coyote, or—

  "Tammy?"

  She held her breath, not quite daring to believe that she recognized the voice.

  "It's Willem," he said.

  Her legs almost gave out from sheer gratitude. He came out of the bushes and caught hold of her before she fell.

  "I'm heavy," she warned him.

  "I'm strong," he said.

  So she let him take her weight, sinking against his chest. As she relinquished herself to him she heard a little girl somewhere nearby, sobbing pitifully. She was about to ask who the hell it was making such a noise when she realized it was her own voice.

  "It's all right," Zeffer said. "I'm here now. Everything's going to be fine."

  She wasn't sure that she believed him; it sounded like a bad piece of dialogue to her. But this was no time to be judgmental. He'd come to look for her, and she was grateful. She put her head on his chest, like a B-movie heroine snatched from the jaws of death, and laughing, then sobbing, then laughing again, let him put his arms around her, and rock her awhile.

  SEVEN

  Finally, it had not been Todd who'd lost control, but her other lover.

  "I can't . . . back . . . much longer," he said.

  The girl was beyond giving even the most rudimentary instructions: she lay in a daze of pleasure, her legs hoisted up by Todd so that he could see the wonderful machinery of their interconnected anatomies.

  "Are you ready?" the other man said to him. His face was liquid shadow, his eyes wild.

  "You say the word."

  "Lift her legs higher."

  Todd did as he was instructed, noticing as he did so that their game had brought all the other games in the immediate vicinity to a halt. Everyone was watching the spectacle, their gazes ravenous.

  The girl's eyes were closed but there was no doubt that she had achieved, and was sustaining, some state of sexual Nirvana. There was a Gioconda smile on her wet lips, and when on occasion her lids did flutter open, only the whites of her eyes were visible.

  The girl's other lover had one hand on her face, a thumb pressed between her lips, but his other hand was gripping the muscle that ran from Todd's nape to his shoulder, gripping it so hard it hurt. Todd was glad of the pain. It was just enough to keep him distracted from emptying himself.

  The man's eyes opened wide. "Oh yeah!" he bellowed, and Todd came the closest he'd ever come to feeling another man's orgasm.

  The girl opened her eyes, and looked at Todd. "You too," she said.

  "No," said another voice.

  Todd looked up. It was Katya who had spoken. She was looking at him with an appreciative smile on her face. Clearly she'd enjoyed watching the ménage-a-trois. But it was clear she now wanted Todd to leave the game.

  "Gotta go," he said to the girl.

  She put her hand down between their legs, as though to hold him inside.

  "Sorry," he said, and pulled out of her.

  As he stood up there was a light patter of applause from the vicinity of the bower.

  "Quite the performer," Katya said as she stood up. She had his pants. He started to put them on, pressing his dick out of sight.

  "You can come back and find them again another night," Katya said as she hooked her arm through Todd's and escorted him away from the place.

  It seemed the scene in the night-blooming jasmine had begun a chain reaction among the ghosts. As they walked through the warm darkness he saw orgiasts on every side, involved in pleasuring themselves and one another. Clothes had been shed in the grass or hung in the branches like Halloween spooks; kisses were being exchanged, murmurs of passion. As he'd already discovered, death had done nothing to dim the libidos of these people. Though their dust and bones lay in cold tombs and mausoleums across the city, their spirits were very much in heat here. And, as Katya had told him, nothing was forbidden. It was only curious to see so many familiar faces among the orgiasts. Faces he associated with everything but this: comedians and adventurers and players of melodrama. But never naked; never aroused. And again, as had been true in the bower, what he would have turned away from in revulsion in the company of the living, intrigued and inflamed him here, among the famous dead. Was that Cary Grant with his trousers around his ankles; and Randolph Scott paying tribute below? Was that Jean Harlow lying on one of the lower boughs of a tree, with her foot running up and down the erection of a man standing devotedly by? There were others, many others, he only half-recognized, or didn't recognize at all. But Katya supplied names as they wandered back to the house: Gilbert Roland and Carole Lombard, Frances X. Bushman and Errol Flynn. A dozen times, seeing some coupling in progress, he
wanted to ask, was that so-and-so? Three or four times he did. When the answer was consistently yes, he gave up asking. As for what was actually going on, well the pictures in the Pool House had given him a good idea of how wild things could get, and now he was seeing those excesses proved in the flesh, for just about every sexual peccadillo was being indulged somewhere in the Canyon tonight. Nor did Todd discount the possibility that even more extreme configurations than those he could see were going on in the murk between the trees. Given what he'd ended up doing after only a short night here, imagine the possibilities an occupant of the Canyon might invent with an indeterminate number of nights to pass: knowing you were dead but denied a resting-place?

  What new perversions would a soul invent to distract itself from the constant threat of ennui?

  At last the crowd of fornicators thinned, and Katya led him—by a path he hadn't previously seen, it being so overgrown—back to the big house.

  "What I am about to show you," she warned him as they went, "will change your life. Are you ready for that?"

  "Is it something to do with why you're here?"

  "Why I'm here, why they're here. Why the Canyon is the most sacred place in this city. Yes. All of the above."

  "Then show me," he said. "I'm ready."

  She took a tighter hold of his hand. "There's no way back," she warned him. "I want you to understand that. There is no way back."

  He glanced over his shoulder at the party-goers cavorting between the trees. "I think that was true a long time ago," he said.

  "I suppose it was," Katya replied, with a little smile, and led him out of the darkened garden and back into her dream palace.

  EIGHT

  "I'm hungry," Tammy told Zeffer. "Can't we get some food from the house before we leave?"

  "You really want to find Todd," Zeffer said. "Admit it."