Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "Lilith looked at him for a long while, assessing the worth of his appeal.

  " 'Well, hereafter, my lord,' she said finally, 'it is my pleasure that you and your men will hunt here always.'

  "Another bitter breath up out of Hell to accompany these words. The woman's long hair rose up around her body, a few of its strands grazing Goga's upturned face.

  " 'Get back on your horses, hunters,' Lilith said. 'Return to your hunt. There are boar in the thicket, waiting to be driven out. There are birds in the trees, ready to be shot while they sing. Kill them at will, as it pleases you to do so. There will be no charge for your sport.'

  "The Duke was astonished to hear this mild invitation, after all that had just taken place, and thinking perhaps his plea for clemency had carried some weight with Lilith, he very slowly got to his feet, thanking her.

  " 'It's most kind of you,' he said, 'to invite me to hunt. And perhaps another day I will come back here and accept your invitation. But today my heart is heavy—'

  " 'As well it might be,' the woman replied.

  " 'So I think instead I will return to the Fortress and—'

  " 'No,' she said, raising her hand. 'You will not return to the Fortress. You will hunt.'

  " 'I could not, madam. Really, I could not.'

  " 'Sir,' she replied, with a little inclination of her head. 'You misunderstood me. You have no choice. You will hunt, and you will go on hunting, until you find my son a second time, and bring him back to me.'

  " 'I don't understand.'

  " 'A second time.'

  "She pointed to the corpse of the goat-child, which lay in its cooling blood. Her hair drifted over the sprawled cadaver, lightly touching the boy's chest and stomach and private parts. Much to the Duke's astonishment the child responded to his mother's caresses. As the hair touched his chest his lungs drew a little breath, and his penis—which was disproportionately large for one his age—grew steely.

  " 'Take your sword out of him,' Lilith instructed the Duke.

  "But the Duke was too terrified at this scene of infernal resurrection to go near the boy. He kept his distance, filling his breeches in fear.

  " 'You men are all the same!' Lilith said contemptuously. 'You find it easy enough to drive the sword in, but when it comes to taking it out you can't bring yourself to do it.'

  "She stepped into the puddle of her son's blood, and reached to take hold of the sword. The boy's eyes flickered open as he felt his mother's hand upon the pommel. Then he lifted his hands and caught hold of the blade with his bare palms, almost as though he were attempting to keep her from extracting it. Still she pulled, and it slowly came out of him.

  " 'Slowly, Mama,' the goat-boy said, his tone almost lascivious. 'It hurts mightily. '

  " 'Does it, child?' Lilith said, twisting the blade in the wound as though to perversely increase her child's distress. He threw back his head, still looking at her from the bottom of his eyes, his lips drawn back from his little, pointed teeth. 'And this?' she said, turning the blade the other way. 'Does this bring you agony?'

  "'Yes, Mama!'

  "She twisted it the other way. 'And this?'

  "Finally, it was too much for the child. He let out a hissing sound, and spat from his erection several spouts of semen. Its sharp stink made the Duke's eyes sting.

  "Lilith waited until the boy had finished ejaculating, then she drew out the sword. The goat-boy sank back on the wet earth, with a look of satisfaction on his face.

  " 'Thank you, Mama,' he said, as though well pleasured by what had just happened.

  "The wound on his belly was already closing up, the Duke saw. It was as though it were being knitted by agile and invisible fingers. So too the wounds on his hands, incurred when he had seized the blade. In a matter of perhaps half a minute the goat-boy was whole again."

  "So if the child wasn't dead," Todd said, "why was the Duke guilty of murdering him?"

  Katya shook her head. "He'd committed the crime. The fact that the boy was an immortal was academic. He'd murdered the child, and had to be punished for it."

  Todd's gaze went again to the trees where the Duke and his men had disappeared, picturing the look of hope that had appeared on the men's faces when they'd heard the sound of the child's cries. Now all that made sense. No wonder they'd ridden off so eagerly. They were still hoping to find the boy, and earn their release from the Devil's Country.

  A wave of claustrophobia came up over Todd. This was not the limitless landscape it had first appeared to be: it was a prison, and he wanted to be free of it. He turned, and turned again, looking for some crack in the illusion, however small. But he could find none. Despite the immensity of the vistas in all directions, and the height of heavens above him, he might as well have been locked in a cell.

  His breath had quickened; his hands were suddenly clammy.

  "Which way's the door?" he asked Katya.

  "You want to leave? Now?"

  "Yes, now."

  "It's just a story," she said.

  "No it's not. I saw the Duke. We both saw him."

  "It's all part of the show," Katya said, with a dismissive little shrug. "Calm down. There's no harm going to come to us. I've been down here hundreds of times and nothing ever happened to me."

  "You saw the Duke here before?"

  "Sometimes. Never as close as we saw today, but there are always hunters."

  "Well ask yourself: why are there always hunters? Why is there always an eclipse?"

  "I don't know. Why do you always do the same thing in a movie every time it runs—"

  "So things are exactly the same, every time you come here, like a movie?"

  "Not exactly the same, no. But the sun's always like that: three-quarters covered. And the trees, the rocks ... even the ships out there." She pointed to the ships. "It's always the same ships. They never seem to get very far."

  "So it's not like a movie," Todd said. "It's more like time's been frozen."

  She nodded. "I suppose it is," she said. "Frozen in the walls."

  "I don't see any walls."

  "They're there," Katya said, "it's just a question of where to look. How to look. Trust me."

  "You want me to trust you," Todd said, "then get me out of here."

  "I thought you were enjoying yourself."

  "The pleasure went out of it a while back," Todd said. He grabbed her arm, hard. "Come on," he said. "I want to get out."

  She shook herself free of him. "Don't touch me that way," she said, her expression suddenly fierce. "I don't like it." She pointed past him, over his right shoulder. "The door's over there."

  He looked back. He could see no sign of an opening. Just more of the Devil's Country.

  And now, to make matters worse, he once again heard the sound of hooves.

  "Oh Christ . . ."

  He glanced back toward the trees. The Duke and his men were riding toward them, empty-handed.

  "They're coming back to interrogate us," Todd said. "Katya! Did you hear me? We need to get the hell out of here."

  Katya had seen the horsemen, but she didn't seem overly unnerved. She watched them approaching without moving. Todd, meanwhile, made his way in the general direction of the door; or at least where she had indicated it stood. He scanned the place, looking for some fragment—the corner of the doorframe, the handle, the keyhole—to help him locate it. But there was nothing.

  Having no other choice he simply walked across the stony ground, his hands extended in front of him. After proceeding perhaps six strides, the empty air in front of him suddenly became solid, and his hands flattened against cold, hard tile. The instant he made contact, the illusion of the painters' trompe l'oeil was broken. He could not believe he had been so easily deceived. What had looked like infinite, penetrable reality two strides before now looked absurdly fake: stylish marks on pieces of antiquated tile, plastered on a wall. How could his eyes have been misled for an instant?

  Then he looked back over his shoulder, to call Katya ov
er, and the illusion in which she stood was still completely intact—the expanse of open ground between where they stood and the galloping horsemen apparently a quarter-mile or more, the trees beyond them twice that, the sky limitless above. Illusion, he told himself, all illusion. But it meant nothing in the face of the trick before him, which refused to bow to his doubt. He gave up trying to make it concede, and instead turned back to the wall. His hands were still upon it, the tiles still laid out under his palms. Which direction did the door lie in?

  "Right or left?" he called to Katya.

  "What?"

  "The door! Is it to the right or left?"

  She took her eyes off the riders, and scanned the wall he was clinging to. "Left," she said, casually.

  "Hurry then—"

  "They didn't find the child."

  "Forget about them!" he told her.

  If she was attempting to impress him with her fearlessness she was doing a poor job. He was simply irritated. She'd shown him the way the room worked, for God's sake; now it was time to get out.

  "Come on!" he cried.

  As he called to her he moved along the wall, a step to his left, then another step, keeping his palms flat to the tiles every inch of the way, as though defying them to play some new trick or other. But it seemed that as long as he had his hands on the tiles—as long as he could keep uppermost in his mind the idea that this was a painted world—it could not start its trickeries afresh. And on the third step—or was it fourth?—along the wall his extended hand found the doorjamb. He breathed out a little sigh of relief. The doorjamb was right there under his hand. He moved his palm over it onto the door itself which, like the jamb, was tiled so that there was no break in the illusion. He fumbled for the handle, found it and tried to turn it.

  On the other side, Tammy had found her way along the passageway and chosen that precise moment to turn the handle in the opposite direction.

  "Oh Jesus—" Todd said. "It's locked."

  "You hear that?" Tammy gasped. "That's Todd? Todd!"

  "Yeah it's me. Who's this?"

  "Tammy. It's Tammy Lauper. Are you turning the handle?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well let go of it. Let me try."

  Todd let go. Tammy turned the handle. Before she opened the door she glanced back at Zeffer. He was still one flight up the stairs, staring out of the window.

  "The dead . . ." she heard him say.

  "What about them?"

  "They're all around the house. I've never seen them this close before. They know there are people passing back and forth through the door, that's why."

  "Do I open the door? Todd's on the other side."

  "Are you sure it's Todd?"

  "Yes, it's Todd."

  Hearing his name called, Todd impatiently yelled from the other side. "Yes, it's me. And Katya. Will you please open the fucking door?"

  Tammy's hands were sweaty, and her muscles weary; the handle slid through her palm. "I can't open it. You try."

  Todd struggled with the handle from his side, but what had seemed as though it were going to be the easiest part of the procedure (opening the door) was proving the most intractable. It was almost as though the room didn't want him to leave; as though it wanted to hold on to him for as long as possible, to exercise the greatest amount of influence over him; to addict him, second by second, sight by sight.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. Katya was staring up at the sky, moving her hands down over her body, as though she were luxuriating in the curious luminosity of this enraptured world. For a moment he imagined her naked, cradled in the heavenly luminescence, but he caught himself in the midst of the fantasy. It was surely just another of the room's tricks to keep him from departing. The damn place probably had a thousand such sleights-of-mind: sexual, philosophical, murderous.

  He closed his eyes hard against the seductions of the Country and put his head against the door. The tile was clammy; like a living thing.

  "Tammy?" he said. "Are you still here?"

  "Yes?"

  "When I count three, I want you to push. Got it?"

  "Got it."

  "Okay. Ready?"

  "Ready."

  "One. Two. Three!"

  She pushed. He pulled. And the door fell open, presenting Todd with one of the odder juxtapositions he'd witnessed in his life. In the hallway on the other side of the door stood a woman who looked as though she'd gone several rounds with a heavy-weight boxer. There were bloody scratches on her face, neck and arms; her hair and clothes were in disarray. In her eyes she had a distinctly panicked look.

  He recognized her instantly. She was the leader of his Fan Club, a woman called Tammy Lauper. Yes! The missing Tammy Lauper! How the hell had she got up here? Never mind. She was here, thank God.

  "I thought something terrible had happened to you," Lauper said.

  "Give it time," he quipped.

  Behind him, he heard the horsemen approaching. He glanced around, calling again to Katya.

  "Hurry up, will you?"

  When he returned his gaze to Tammy it was clear that she'd taken in, as best her disbelief would allow, the incredible sight over his shoulder. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, her jaw slack.

  "So this is what it looks like."

  "Yes," he said to her. "This is it."

  Tammy threw a look back at a stooped, older man standing on the stairs behind her. He looked almost incapacitated with fear. But unlike Tammy, whose expression was that of someone who had never seen anything like this before, it was Todd's sense that her companion knew exactly what he was seeing, and would have liked nothing better than to turn right there and flee.

  Then Todd heard Katya calling from behind him, naming the man.

  "Zeffer," she said, the word freezing the man where he stood.

  "Katya . . ." he said, inclining his head.

  Katya came up behind Todd, pressing him aside in order to cross over the threshold. She pointed at the trespasser as she did so.

  "I told you never to come back into this house!" she yelled at Zeffer. "Didn't I?"

  He flinched at this, though it was difficult to believe she posed much physical threat to him.

  She summoned him down the stairs. "Come here," she said. "You worthless piece of shit! I said: come here!"

  Before he could obey her, Tammy intervened. "It's not his fault," she said. "I was the one who asked him to bring me down here."

  Katya gave her a look of complete contempt; as though anything she might have to contribute to the conversation was worthless.

  "Whoever the hell you are," she said, "this is none of your business."

  She pushed Tammy aside and reached out to catch hold of Zeffer. He had dutifully approached at her summons, but now avoided her grasp. She came after him anyway, striking his chest with the back of her hand, a solid blow; and another; and another. As she struck him she said: "I told you to stay outside, didn't I?"

  The blows were relatively light, but they carried strength out of all proportion to their size. They knocked the breath out of him, for one thing, and she'd come back with a second blow before he'd drawn breath from the first, which quickly weakened him. Tammy was horrified, but she didn't want to interfere, in case she simply made the matter worse. Nor was her attention entirely devoted to the sight of Todd, or to the assault upon Zeffer. Her gaze was increasingly claimed by the sight visible through the open door. It was astonishing. Despite the fact that Zeffer had told her the place was an illusion, her eyes and her mind were wholly enamored by what she saw: the rolling forest, the rocks with their thickets of thorn bushes, the delta and the distant sea. It all looked so real.

  And what was that?

  Some creature that looked like a feathered lizard, its coxcomb yellow and black, scuttled into view, and out again.

  It halted, seeming to look back through the door at her: a beast that belonged in some book of medieval monsters rather than in such proximity to her.

  She glanced back at Zeffer, who
was still being lectured by Katya.

  With the door open, and the visions beyond presented to her, she saw no reason not to step over the threshold, just for a moment, and see the place more plainly. After all, she was protected against its beguilements. She knew it was a beautiful lie, and as long as she remembered that, then it couldn't do her any harm, could it?

  The only thing in the landscape that was real was Todd, and it was to him that she now went, crossing the dirt and the windblown grass to reach him. The feathered reptile lowered its coxcomb as she crossed the ground, and slunk away, disappearing into a crack between two boulders. But Todd wasn't watching animal-life. He had his eyes on several horsemen who were approaching along a road that wound through a dense stand of trees. They were moving at speed, kicking up clods of earth as they came. Were they real, Tammy wondered, or just part of the landscape? She wasn't sure, nor was she particularly eager to put the question to the test.

  Yet with every passing second she was standing in this world, the more she felt the power of the room to unknit her doubts. She felt its influence seeping through her sight and her skin into her mind and marrow. Her head grew giddy, as though she'd downed two or three glasses of wine in quick succession.

  It wasn't an unpleasant sensation by any means, especially given the extreme discomfort of the last few hours. She felt almost comforted by the room; as though it understood how she'd suffered of late, and was ready to soothe her hurts and humiliations away. It would distract her with its beauty and its strangeness; if she would only trust it for a while.

  "Tammy . . ." she heard Zeffer say behind her. His voice was weak, and the effect his summons had on her was inconsequential. She didn't even acknowledge it. She just let her eyes graze contentedly on the scene before her; the trees, the horsemen, the road, the rocks.

  Soon, she knew, the riders would make a turn in that road, and it would be interesting to see how their image changed when they were no longer moving in profile, but were coming toward her.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. It wasn't far to the door: just a few yards. Her eyes didn't even focus on whatever was going on in the passageway. It seemed very remote from her at that moment.