Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  There were enough diversions and wonders to keep them enchanted for decades to come. Though the heavens were fixed in the same configuration whenever she visited the Country, there was nevertheless evidence that the earth was still obeying some of its ancient rhythms.

  There was, for instance, in the swamp, a manmade lake perhaps half a mile wide, which seemed to have been for many generations the place where a certain species of eel, the infants silver-blue, with great golden eyes, came in their millions—each no longer than her little finger—but sufficient in number that they filled the place of their birth to brimming when they spawned. For a day—when the larval eels appeared—this Genesis Bowl, as Katya had named it, was a feasting place for birds of every kind, who were literally able to walk on the squirming backs of their feast, taking all they could before lifting off (some so fat with food they could barely fly) and retiring to the nearest branch to digest their mighty meal. The next day (if the Country could be said to have days) the Genesis Bowl was empty, but for a few thousand runts that had perished in the exodus, and were being picked up by carrion cows and wild dogs.

  She wanted to show this glorious spectacle to Todd; wanted to wade into the living mass of baby eels and feel them against her naked flesh.

  On another day they might go to a place she knew where there was a beast that spoke prophetic riddles; which had twice engaged her in conversation which she knew would make sense if she had the education to decode its strange poetry. It had the body of a huge bird, this riddler, with a man's head, and it sat, close to the ground, with a vast array of glittering gifts around the base of its tree, offered for its prophecies. She'd come to it a year ago, with some jewelry she had worn in Nefertiti.

  "Is it real, the gift you give me?" the creature, whose name was Yiacaxis, had asked her.

  "No," she had admitted. "I am an actress. These baubles are what I wore when I was an actress."

  "Then make them real for me," Yiacaxis had said, clicking his old gray tongue against his cracked beak. "Play me the scene in which you wore them."

  "It was silent," she said.

  "That's good," he replied. "For I am very deaf in my old age."

  She shed most of her clothes, and put on the jewelry. Then she played the scene from Nefertiti in which she discovers that her lover is dead by the order of the envious Queen, and she kills herself out of tragic longing for him.

  The old bird-man wept freely at her performance.

  "I'm pleased it moved you so much," Katya had said when she was done.

  "I accept your offering," the creature had replied, "and I will give you your answer."

  "But you don't even know my question yet."

  Yiacaxis clicked and cocked his head. "I know you wonder if there will ever be a love worth dying for in your life? Is that your question?"

  "Yes," she said. She would perhaps not have asked it that way, but the prophet was notoriously short-tempered with those who attempted to press him.

  "There are two multitudes," he said. "One within you. One without. Should he love you enough to name one of these legions, then you will live in bliss with the other."

  Of course she desperately wanted to ask him what this meant; but the audience was apparently already over, for Yiacaxis was raising his black wings, which were lined with little knots of human hair, tied up in ribbons that had long ago lost their color. Thousands of locks of hair, in wings that spread perhaps twenty feet from tip to tip. Without a further word, he closed them over his melancholy face, and the shadows of the tree seemed to close around him a second time, so that he was invisible.

  Perhaps, if she had the courage, she would go back to Yiacaxis, with Todd, and ask him another question. Or this time Todd should do the asking.

  And when they had questioned the Prophet Bird, and seen half a hundred other wonders in the Devil's Country, Katya would take Todd to a certain ship with which she was familiar, which had surely been made for a king, it was so finely wrought.

  It had foundered on some rocks along the shore, and there it had been left, high and dry, many years ago. For some reason no looters had ever attempted to despoil this sublime vessel, perhaps because they feared some royal revenge. The only damage done to the vessel was the breaking of its hull by the rocks; and the inevitable deterioration of its exterior paintwork by wind and rain. Inside, it remained a place of incomparable luxury, its beautiful carved bed heaped with white furs, the wine still sweet in its flagons, the tinder in its fireplace still awaiting a flame. She had often fantasized about taking a lover to the ship, making love to him on the furs. If they were lucky, the wind would get up when they were cradled in the comfort of one another's arms. The wind would whistle in the ropes and the scarlet sails would billow, and they would imagine, as they made love, that they were on a voyage to the edge of the world.

  It would be naive to speak lovingly of the Devil's Country without allowing that it had its share of horrors.

  There were species in the forests, and the ravines and the black silent pools between the rocks, that had been invented by some benighted mind. There were terrible arenas, where monsters were goaded to perform acts of horrible violation upon women, and sometimes upon men and even children. But having viewed several of these spectacles herself, she could not deny that they were perversely arousing. Some had the rigor of ceremonies, others seemed to be simple arenas of cruelty, where anything might be viewed if it was paid for.

  The point was that she'd seen so little, and that there was so much for her to see; a private wonderland where she and Todd could go adventuring whenever they tired of the Canyon. They could explore it to its very limits; and when they were weary and needed to sleep, they could simply step through the door and lock it, and retire to bed like any loving pair, and sleep peacefully in one another's arms.

  But first she had to find him; and to find him she needed a chauffeur. Only one man fitted that bill: Jerry Brahms. They had known one another for so many years. That was why she'd sent out the dream-summons to him. He was loyal; he would come without fail. It was only a matter of time before he turned up at the house, ready to do her bidding. He was probably on his way up, even now.

  • • •

  It didn't take her long to dress. She had wardrobes full of gowns designed by some of the greatest names in Hollywood history, but they were all too showy for this modest adventure. So she chose conservatively: an immaculately-tailored black dress. She kept her hair simple and her makeup discreet.

  She was all dressed and ready to go, but there was still no sign of Jerry. Thinking that perhaps he'd mistakenly assumed she would wait for him in the big house, she decided to wander down through the twilight to look for him. If he hadn't arrived, then she'd wait for him at the front gate, so that there'd be no chance of their missing one another.

  It was a walk she'd taken countless times, of course; though the pathway rose and dipped, she could have done it in safety blindfolded.

  The night wasn't as clear as it had been when she and Todd had come out walking; there were rainclouds banked in from the north, and the air was sultry. It was going to be one of those nights when you longed for a heaven-and-earth-shaking thunderstorm, the kind she remembered from her childhood. But such events were rare in Los Angeles. All the great storms she'd seen here had been cooked up by lighting men and rain-machines; pure artifice.

  She knew she was being watched as she walked. There wasn't a movement she made in the open air that the ghosts or their half-breed children did not observe. They had even made spy-holes in the walls of her little house, she knew. They watched her at her toilette; they watched her as she read and day-dreamed; they watched her as she slept.

  She'd several times attempted to stop them and punish their voyeurism; but every time Zeffer plugged up the holes more appeared, and finally she'd given up the game as fruitless. If they wanted to watch her while she slept, then let them go ahead. Indeed until Todd had come into her life the idea of having somebody to watch over her—e
ven if their motives were as hard to calculate as those of her voyeurs—was close to comforting.

  Needless to say there was also a measure of danger in the proximity of these revenants. Katya didn't doubt that there were among their number some who would gladly have seen her dead, blaming her for the fact that their afterlife in Coldheart Canyon was a pitiful thing. Of course she didn't blame herself. If her guests hadn't been so hungry to taste the pleasures of the Devil's Country then they wouldn't be so obsessively drawn to it. But as long as they kept a respectful distance (why would they not, when she controlled the very thing they wanted for themselves?) then she would not persecute them.

  They had their journey, she had hers.

  She had reached the unkempt lawn, and paused there to take in the spectacle of the house. The wind-chimes rang on four or five balconies, lending their beauty to the grand façade. As she listened to their music she heard sounds from the thicket on the other side of the lawn.

  She glanced back. There was still sufficient light in the evening sky to see the motion in the blossom-laden branches. There were several creatures following her, she guessed.

  She watched the bushes for half a minute, until the motion died down. It wasn't unusual for creatures to follow her when she went out walking, but there was something different about this. Or was it that she was different? That tonight she was alive as she'd not been alive in many years, her heart quickened by love; and that they sensed a new vulnerability in her?

  She didn't like that. The last thing she wanted was for them to imagine they could intimidate her, or somehow wrest a little power from her. Love might have made her step a little lighter, but she was still the Queen of Coldheart Canyon, and if they pushed her she would respond with her old severity.

  As she watched the thicket, the last of the light went from the sky, and the darkness revealed several bright points of light in the bushes, where the revenants were standing, watching her. Even after all these years she could still be discomfited by a sight like this; by the fact that the dead were around her in such numbers.

  Enough, she thought to herself, and turning on her heel hurried toward the stairs that led back up to the house.

  As she did so she heard the swish of grass against swiftly running limbs. They were coming across the lawn in pursuit of her.

  She picked up her pace, until she reached the relative safety of the stairs.

  Behind her, a soft voice, sounding as though it came from a palate full of pulp and disease, said: "Let us in."

  There was a moment's silence. Then another said, "We just want to come back into the house."

  "We won't do any harm," said a third.

  "Please, let us in . . ."

  She'd been wrong about the numbers of revenants assembled here, she slowly realized. She'd thought there were perhaps ten, but there were two or three times that number out there in the darkness. Whatever the decayed and corrupted condition of their palates, they all attempted to say the same thing:

  "Let us in. Let us in. Let us in."

  She would have ignored them, once upon a time: turned her back on their pleas and climbed the stairs. But she was changing. Katya the heart-breaker—the woman who'd never given a damn for what anybody but herself wanted—was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. If she was going to come back with Todd and live here, they couldn't enjoy the idyllic life she had in mind while these hungry souls waited outside. Even with the five iron icons hammered into the threshold of each of the doors, and in the sills of even the smallest windows, their presence preventing the dead from ever setting foot in the house, the occupants were in a state of siege. It was no place to have a honeymoon.

  She raised her hand to silence their murmuring.

  "Listen to me," she said.

  The chorus began to subside.

  "I'm going to be leaving the house for a few hours," Katya said, her voice a little tentative at the beginning, but gaining strength as she proceeded. "But when I come back I intend to make some changes. I don't want you living in misery. That has to stop."

  She started to turn away, intending to leave the statement there. But some of her congregation didn't want to let her go without hearing something more specific in her reply.

  "What changes are you going to make?" someone demanded.

  "Is that you, Roman?" Katya said, scanning the crowd.

  The speaker didn't have time to identify himself. There were more questions. Somebody wanted to know why she was leaving; somebody else demanded to know how long they would have to wait.

  "Listen to me, listen to me," she said, quieting the rising hubbub. "I understand that you all want to come into the house. But I don't think you understand the consequences."

  "We'll take them, whatever they are," somebody said. There was a general murmur of agreement to this.

  "If that's what you want," Katya replied, "I will consider it. When I get back—"

  "What if you don't come back?"

  "Trust me. I will."

  "Trust you? Oh please." The mocking voice emerged from a bitter, painted face among the crowd. "You tricked us all. Why the hell should we trust you now?"

  "Theda," Katya said, "I don't have the time to explain right now."

  "Well you hold on, honey, because we want some answers. We've had years of waiting to go back into that room—"

  "Then you can afford to wait a few hours more," Katya replied, and without waiting for Theda Bara to come back with a retort she turned and headed on up the steps to the top of the flight.

  There was a moment—just a quarter of a beat, there at the top of the stairs—when she thought she'd misjudged her audience, and they'd come up the stairs after her, their patience finally exhausted. But they'd stayed below. Even Theda. Perhaps somebody had caught hold of her arm, to keep her from doing something stupid.

  Katya opened the back door, stepping over the threshold. Occasionally, in the last several decades, one of the assembly outside had taken it into his head to test the power of the icons Zeffer had brought back from Romania and had personally hammered deep into the wood. The five icons were called, Zeffer had told her, the Iron Word. It was powerful magic designed to drive off anything that did not belong beside cot or hearth. Katya had never actually witnessed what happened when one of the phantoms had tested the threshold. She'd only heard the screams, and seen the looks of terror on the faces of those who'd goaded the victim. Of the trespasser himself, nothing remained, except a rise in the humidity of the air around the threshold, as though the revenant had been exploded into vapor. Even these traces lingered for only a moment. As soon as the air cooled, the witnesses retreated from the door, looks of terror still fixed on their faces.

  She had no idea how the Iron Word worked. She only knew that Zeffer had paid a member of Sandru's scattered brotherhood a small fortune to possess the secret, and then another sum to have the icons created in sufficient numbers that every door and window be guarded. It had been worth the investment: the Iron Word did its job. Katya felt like her mother, who'd always boasted that she kept a "clean house." Of course Mother Lupescu's definition of moral cleanliness had been purely her own.

  You could fuck her twelve-year-old daughter for a small coin, but you could not say Christ when you were shooting your load between her tiny titties without being thrown out of the house.

  And in her turn that twelve-year-old had grown up with her own particular rules of domestic cleanliness. In short: the dead did not cross the threshold.

  You had to draw the line somewhere, or all Hell would break loose. On that Mama Lupescu and her daughter would have agreed.

  She got herself a cup of milk from the refrigerator to calm her stomach, which always troubled her when, as now, she was unsettled for some reason or another. Then she went through the house, taking her time passing from one room to another, and as she came to the front door she heard the sound of a car coming up the street. She stepped outside, and walked along the front path until she reached the pool of lig
ht from the car's headlights.

  "Is that you, Jerry?"

  A car door opened.

  "Yes, it's me," he said. "Was I expected?"

  "You were."

  "Well, thank God for that."

  She went to the little gate, and stepped out onto the narrow sidewalk. Jerry had got out of the car. He had a barely-suppressed look of shock on his face, seeing her step beyond the bounds of her little dominion for the first time.

  'Are we actually going somewhere?" he asked her.

  "I certainly hope so," she said, playing it off lightly. She could not completely conceal her unease, however. It was there in her eyes. But there was also something else in her glance, besides the unease: something far more remarkable. A kind of sweetness, even innocence. She looked like a girl out on her first Prom Night, tiptoeing to the edge of womanhood.

  Amazing, Jerry thought. Knowing all that he did about Katya—all that she'd done and caused to have done—to be able to find that look in her memory banks, and put it up there on her face, so that it looked as real as it did; that was a performance.

  "Where will I be taking you tonight, ma'am?" Jerry asked her.

  "I'm not exactly sure. You see, we're going to be looking for somebody."

  "Are we indeed? And may I take a guess at who?"

  Katya smiled. "Too easy," she said.

  "We'll find him for you. Don't you worry."