Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  Always prone to sudden emotional swings, Valentino had promptly started to bawl like a baby, interspersing his sobs with demands that she please God have mercy on him.

  "I'm dying!" he said, thumping his gut with his fist. "I feel it in here!"

  She let him weep until the carpet was damp. Then she had him removed from the house by two of her hired heavies, and tossed into the street.

  It had seemed like typical Rudy melodrama at the time: I'm dying, I'm dying. But this time he'd known his own body better than she'd given him credit for. He was the first to pay the ultimate price for visiting the Devil's Country. Three weeks after that tearful conversation he was dead.

  The hoopla over Valentino's sudden demise hid from view a series of smaller incidents that were nevertheless all part of the same escalating tragedy. A minor starlet called Miriam Acker died two days after Rudy, of what was reported to be pneumonia. She had been a visitor to the Canyon on several occasions, usually in the company of Ramon Navarro. Pola Negri—another visitor to the Canyon—fell gravely ill a week later, and for several days hovered on the brink of death. Her frailty was attributed to grief at the passing of Valentino, with whom she claimed to have had a passionate affair; but the truth was far less glamorous. She too had fallen under the spell of the Hunt; and now, though she denied it, was sickening.

  In fact death took an uncommonly large number of Hollywood's luminaries in the next few months. And for every one who died there were ten or twenty who got sick, and managed to recover, though none were ever possessed of their full strength, or flawless beauty, again. The "coincidence" was not lost on either the fans or the journalists. "A harvest of death is sweeping Hollywood," Film Photoplay morbidly announced, "as star after star follows the greatest star of all, Rudolph Valentino, to the grave."

  The idea that there was some kind of plague abroad caught the public's imagination and was fed voraciously by those who'd predicted for reasons of their own that judgment would eventually fall on Tinseltown. Preachers who'd fulminated against the sinners of the New Sodom were now quick to point out the evidence in support of their grim sermons. And the public, who a decade before had taken pleasure in crowning actors as the new Royalty of America, were now just as entertained by the spectacle of their fall from grace. They were fakes and foreigners anyway, it was widely opined; no wonder they were falling like flies; they'd come here like plague-rats in the first place.

  Hollywood was going to Hell in a hand-cart, and it didn't matter how rich or beautiful you were, there was no escaping the cost of the high life.

  Up in the Canyon, Katya dared believe she was safe: she'd added three German Shepherd dogs to the retinue guarding her; and she had men patrolling the ridges and the roads that led to the Canyon night and day. It was such a strange time. The whole community was unsettled. There was talk of lights being seen in the sky; especially in the vicinity of death-sites. A number of small cults came into being, all with their own theories of what was happening. The most extreme interpreted these lights as warnings from God: the end of the world was imminent, their leaders announced, and people should prepare themselves for the Apocalypse. Others interpreted the lights more benignly. They were messengers from God, this faction claimed; angels sent to guide the deceased out of the coil of mortal confusions into the next life. If this was the case then these heavenly presences were not happy that Hell now had a stronghold in the Canyon. Though the dead came there, the lights did not. Indeed on several occasions they were seen at the bottom of the hill, three or four of them gathered in a cloud of luminescence, plainly unwilling to venture into the Canyon.

  For her part, Katya took such reports as evidence that her defenses were working. Nobody could get into her precious Canyon. Or such was her conviction.

  In fact her sense of security, like so much else in her increasingly fragile life, was an illusion.

  One evening, walking in the garden, the dogs suddenly got crazy, and out of the darkness stepped Rudy Valentino. He looked entirely unchanged by death: his skin as smooth as ever, his hair as brilliantly coiffed, his clothes as flawless.

  He bowed deeply to her.

  "My apologies," he said, "for coming here. I know I'm not welcome. But frankly, I didn't know where else to go."

  There was no hint of manipulation in this; it seemed to be the unvarnished truth.

  "I went home to Falcon Lair," Rudy went on, "but it's been trampled over by so many people, it doesn't feel as though it's mine anymore. Please ... I beg you . . . don't be afraid of me."

  "I'm not afraid of you," Katya replied, quite truthfully. "There were always ghosts in my village. We used to see them all the time. My grandmother used to sing me to sleep, and she'd been dead ten years. But Rudy, let's be honest. I know why you're up here. You want to get in to see the Hunt—"

  "—just for a little while."

  "No."

  "Please."

  "No!" she said, waving him away. "I really don't want to hear any more of this. Why don't you just go back to Sicily?"

  "Costellaneta."

  "Wherever. I'm sure they'll be pleased to see the ghost of their favorite son."

  She turned her back on him and walked back toward the house. She heard him following on after her, his heels light on the grass, but solid enough.

  "It's true what they said about you. Cold heart."

  "You say whatever you like, Rudy. Just leave me alone."

  He stopped following her.

  "You think I'm the only one?" he said to her.

  His words brought her to a halt.

  "They're all going to come up here, in time. It doesn't matter how many dogs you have, how many guards. They'll get in. Your beautiful Canyon's going to be full of ghosts."

  "Stop being childish, Rudy," she said, turning back to look at him.

  "Is that how you want to live, Katya? Like a prisoner, surrounded by the dead? Is that the life you had in mind for yourself?"

  "I'm not a prisoner. I can leave whenever I want to."

  "And still be a great star? No. To be a star you will have to be here, in Hollywood."

  "So?"

  "So you will have company, night and day. The dead will be here with you, night and day. We will not be ignored."

  "You keep saying we, Rudy. But I only see you."

  "The others will come. They'll all find their way here, sooner or later. Did you know Virginia Maple hanged herself last night? You remember Virginia? Or perhaps you don't. She was—"

  "I know Virginia. And no, I didn't know she hanged herself. Nor, frankly, do I much care."

  "She couldn't take the pain."

  "The pain?"

  "Of being kept out of this house! Being kept away from the Devil's Country."

  "It's my house. I have a perfect right to invite whoever I like into it."

  "You see nothing but yourself, do you?"

  "Oh please, Rudy, no lectures on narcissism. Not from you, of all people."

  "I see things differently now."

  "Oh I'm sure you do. I'm sure you regret every self-obsessed moment of your petty little life. But that's really not my problem, now is it?"

  The color of the ghost before her suddenly changed. In a heartbeat he became a stain of yellow and gray, his fury rising in palpable waves off his face.

  "I will make it your problem," he shrieked. He strode toward her. "You selfish bitch."

  "And what did they call you?" she snapped back. "Powder-puff, was it?"

  It was an insult she knew would strike him hard. Just the year before an anonymous journalist in the Chicago Tribune had called him "a pink powder puff."

  "Why didn't somebody quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias Valentino, years ago?" he'd written. Rudy had challenged the man to a boxing match, to see which of them was truly the more virile. The journalist had of course never shown his face. But the insult had stuck. And hearing it repeated now threw Valentino into such a rage that he pitched himself at Katya, reaching for her throat. She had half-e
xpected his phantom body to be so unsubstantial that his hands would fail to make any real contact. But not so. Though the flesh and blood of him had been reduced to an urn full of ashes, his spirit-form had a force of its own. She felt his fingers at her neck as though they were living tissue. They stopped her breath.

  She was no passive victim. She pushed him back with the heel of one hand, raking his features from brow to mid-cheek with the other. Blood came from the wounds, stinking faintly of bad meat. A disgusted expression crossed Valentino's face, as he caught a whiff of his own excremental self. The shock of it made him loose his hold on her, and she quickly pulled away from him.

  In life, she'd remembered, he'd always been overly sensitive to smells; a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that he'd been brought up in the stench of poverty. His hand went up his wounded face, and he sniffed his fingers, a look of profound revulsion on his face.

  She laughed out loud at the sight. Valentino's fury had suddenly lost its bite. It was as though in that moment he suddenly understood the depths to which the Devil's Country had brought him.

  And then, out of the darkness, Zeffer called: "What the hell's going on out—"

  He didn't finish his question: he'd seen Valentino.

  "Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.

  Hearing the Lord's name taken in vain, Valentino—good Catholic boy that he was—crossed himself, and fled into the darkness.

  Valentino's vengeful prediction proved entirely accurate: in the next few weeks the haunting of Coldheart Canyon began.

  At first the signs were nothing too terrible: a change in the timbre of the coyotes' yelps; the heads torn off all the roses one night; the next all the petals off the bougainvillea; the appearance on the lawn of a frightened deer, throwing its glassy gaze back toward the thicket in terror. It was Zeffer's opinion that they were somehow going to need to make peace with "our unwanted guests," as he put it, or the consequences would surely be traumatic. These were not ethereal presences, he pointed out, wafting around in a hapless daze. If they were all like Valentino (and why should they not be?), then they posed a physical threat.

  "They could murder us in our beds, Katya," he said to her.

  "Valentino wouldn't—"

  "Maybe not Valentino, but there are others, plenty of others, who hated you with a vengeance. Virginia Maple for one. She was a jealous woman. Remember? And then to hang herself because of something you did to her—"

  "I did nothing to her! I just let her play in that damn room. A room which you brought into our lives."

  Zeffer covered his face. "I knew it would come down to that eventually. Yes, I'm responsible. I was a fool to bring it here. I just thought it would amuse you."

  She gave him a strangely ambiguous look. "Well, you know, it did. How can I deny that? It still does. I love the feeling I get when I'm in there, touching the tiles. I feel more alive." She walked over to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to grant him some physical contact: a stroke, a blow, a kiss. He didn't really mind. Anything was better than her indifference. But she simply said: "You caused this, Willem. You have to solve it."

  "But how? Perhaps if I could find Father Sandru—"

  "He's not going to take the tiles back, Willem."

  "I don't see why not."

  "Because I won't let him! Christ, Willem! I've been in there every day since you gave me the key. It's in my blood now. If I lose the room, it'll be the death of me."

  "So we'll move and we'll take the room with us. It's been moved before. We'll leave the ghosts behind."

  "Wherever the Hunt goes, they'll follow. And sooner or later they'll get so impatient, they'll hurt us."

  Zeffer nodded. There was truth in all of this, bitter though it was.

  "What in God's name have we done?" he said.

  "Nothing we can't mend," Katya replied. "You should go back to Romania, and find Sandru. Maybe there's some defense we can put up against the ghosts."

  "Where will you stay while I'm gone?"

  "I'll stay here. I'm not afraid of Rudy Valentino, dead or alive. Nor that idiotic bitch Virginia Maple. If I don't stay, they'll find their way in."

  "Would that be such a bad thing? Why not let them share the place? We could make a pile of them on the lawn and—"

  "No. That room is mine. All of it. Every damn tile."

  The quiet ferocity with which she spoke silenced him. He just stared at her for perhaps a minute, while she lit a cigarette, her fingers trembling. Finally, he summoned up enough courage to say: "You are afraid."

  She stared out of the window, almost as though she hadn't heard him. When she spoke again her voice was as soft as it had been strident a minute ago.

  "I'm not afraid of the dead, Willem. But I am afraid of what will happen to me if I lose the room." She looked at the palm of her hand, as though she might find her future written there. But it wasn't the lines of her hand she was admiring, it was its smoothness. "Being in the Devil's Country has made me feel younger, Willem. It did that to everybody. Younger. Sexier. But as soon as it's taken away . . ."

  ". . . yes. You'll get sick."

  "I'm never going to get sick." She allowed herself the time for a smile. "Perhaps I'm never going to die."

  "Don't be foolish."

  "I mean it."

  "So do I. Don't be foolish. Whatever you think the room can do, it won't make you immortal."

  The wisp of a smile remained on her face. "Wouldn't you like that, Willem?"

  "No."

  "Just a little bit?"

  "I said no." He shook his head, his voice dropping. "Not anymore."

  "Meaning what?"

  "What do you think I mean? This life of ours . . . isn't worth living." There was a silence between them. It lasted two, three, four minutes. Rain began to hit the window; fat spots of it bursting against the glass.

  "I'll find Sandru for you," Willem said finally. "Or if not him, somebody who knows how to deal with these things. I'll find a solution."

  "Do that," she said. "And if you can't, don't bother to come back."

  PART SIX

  The Devil's Country

  ONE

  Todd knew the mechanics of illusion passably well. He'd always enjoyed watching the special effects guys at work, or the stuntmen with their rigs; and now there was a new generation of illusionists who worked with tools that the old matte painters and model-makers of an earlier time could not even have imagined. He'd been in a couple of pictures in which he'd played entire scenes against blank green screens, which were later replaced with landscapes which only existed in the ticking minds of computers.

  But the illusions at work in this room of Katya's were of another order entirely. There was a force at work here that was both incredibly powerful and old; even venerable. It did not require electricity to fuel it, nor equations to encode it. The walls held it, with possessive caution, beguiling him by increments.

  At first he could make virtually no sense of the images. It simply seemed that the walls were heavily stained. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to reading the surface, he realized he was looking at tiles, and that what he'd taken to be stains were in fact pictures, painted and baked into the ceramic. He was standing in a representation of an immense landscape, which looked more realistic the longer he studied it. There were vast expanses of dense forests; there were stretches of sun-drenched rock; there were steep cliff-walls, their crannies nested by fearless birds; there were rivulets that became streams, in turn converging into glittering rivers, which wound their way toward the horizon, dividing into silver-fringed deltas before they finally found the sea. Such was the elaboration of the painting that it would take many hours of study, perhaps even days, to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And that would only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which, as he was now astonished to see, was not the case.

  There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket; one of those fear
less birds wheeled away from the cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through the undergrowth, noses to the ground.

  "Katya . . . ?" Todd said.

  There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she'd last been standing); so he looked back. She wasn't there. Nor was the door through which he'd stepped to come into this new world. There was just more landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.

  The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were ripples on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea, being hurried along by the same wind that filled the sails of the ships that moved below. There were men, too, all around. Riders, moving through the forest; some solitary, some in groups of three or four; one procession of five horses mounted by richly attired men, parading solemnly between the trees. And fishermen on the banks of the streams; and on little boats, bobbing around the sandbars at the delta; and in one place, inexplicably, two men laid out naked on a rock, and in another, far more explicable, another pair hanging from a tree, while their lynchers sat in the shade of the old tree they'd put to such guilty use, and looked out at the rest of the world as they shared a flagon of beer.

  Again he looked around for Katya, but she wasn't to be seen. But she'd said she'd be close by, even if—as now—he couldn't see her. The room, he began to understand, had control of his eyes. He found his gaze repeatedly led away from where she might be, led skyward, to gawk at some passing birds (there were tiles on the vaulted roof, he saw; he could hear the squeak of the birds' wings as they passed overhead); led into the forest, where animals he could not name moved as if in some secret ceremony, and others fought; and others lay dead; and still others were being born. (Though like did not spring from like in this world. In one spot an animal the size and shape of a tiger was giving birth to half a dozen white lizards; in another a hen the size of a horse was retreating from her eggs in panic, seeing that they'd cracked open and were spilling huge blue flies.)