Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "Maxine?"

  Sawyer was leading a stricken Jerry up onto the patio. At some point in the recent past his rug had become partially unglued and now sat off-center on his head.

  "Todd's gone," he said.

  "We can't be sure yet, Jerry. Sawyer, get Mister Brahms a scotch and soda. Light on the scotch. Jerry, this is Mister Eppstadt, from Paramount."

  "I'm familiar . . ." Jerry said, his gaze going from Eppstadt as soon as he'd laid eyes on him, and drifting off again toward the water. "It's useless. I don't know why they keep searching. They've been swept away by now."

  "The house, Jerry."

  "What?"

  "In the Canyon," Eppstadt said. "I've been hearing about it from Maxine."

  "Oh. I see. Well... there's not a lot I can tell you. I just used to go there as a child. I was an actor, you see, when I was much younger."

  "And were there other children there?"

  "No. Not that I remember, at least. Just a woman called Katya Lupi— who took me under her wing. She's the one . . ." he pointed out toward the waterline ". . . who took Todd."

  "No, Jerry," Maxine said. "Whoever that woman was, she was young."

  "Katya was young."

  "This girl looked twenty-five."

  "Katya looked twenty-five." He accepted his scotch and soda from Sawyer. "She wasn't, of course. She was probably a hundred."

  "Then how the hell can she have looked twenty-five?" Eppstadt demanded.

  Jerry had two words by way of reply.

  "Coldheart Canyon."

  Eppstadt had no reply to this. He just stared at Brahms, bewildered.

  "She looks young," Jerry said. "But she isn't. That was her out there, no doubt about it. Personally, I think it was some kind of a suicide pact between them."

  "That's ridiculous!" Maxine snorted. "Todd's got his whole life in front of him."

  "I think he may have been more desperate than you realized," Jerry said. "Perhaps if you'd been a little better as friends, he'd still be with us."

  "I don't think it's very useful to toss that kind of accusation around," Eppstadt said. "Especially when we don't know the facts."

  "I think the facts are very plain," Jerry said. "I still read Variety." He pointed at Maxine. "You decided to give up on representing him when he was having difficulties with his career. And you"—now the accusatory finger went in Eppstadt's direction—"canceled a movie which he had his heart set on. Not to mention the fact that you"—the finger returned to Maxine—"just made a public display of humiliating him. Is it any wonder he decided to put an end to his life?"

  Neither accusee attempted a defense. What was the use? What Jerry had said was a matter of public record.

  "I want to see this Canyon," Eppstadt said. "And the house."

  "The house has nothing to do with any of this," Jerry said. "Frankly, I suggest you keep your distance from it. You've already—"

  Eppstadt ignored him. "Where is it?" he demanded of Maxine.

  "Well I've never been able to find it on a map but the Canyon runs parallel with Laurel Canyon. I don't think it's even got a proper name."

  "Coldheart Canyon," Brahms said again. "That's what they used to call it in the Silent Era. Because she was supposed to have such a cold heart, you see."

  "You know your way there?" Eppstadt asked Maxine.

  "I... suppose I could find my way . . . but I'd prefer somebody to drive me."

  "You," Eppstadt said. It was his turn to point.

  Jerry shook his head.

  "It's either you taking me, or the police."

  "Why'd you want to call the police?"

  "Because I think there's some kind of conspiracy going on. You.

  Pickett. The woman who went into the sea with him. You're all in this together."

  "To do what, for God's sake?"

  "I don't know: promote that asshole's career?"

  "I assure you—"

  "I don't care to hear your assurances," Eppstadt said. "I just need you to take me to this Canyon of yours."

  "It's not mine. It's hers. Katya's. If we went there we'd be trespassing on her property. "

  "I'll take that risk."

  "Well I won't."

  "Maxine, tell him he's coming."

  "I don't see why you want to go," Jerry pleaded.

  "Let's just make Mister Eppstadt happy right now, shall we?"

  "I just don't want to trespass," Jerry said again.

  "Well you can blame me," Eppstadt said. "Tell this Lupi woman—if she ever surfaces again—that I forced you to take me. Where's the waiter? Joe!"

  Eppstadt's makeshift bodyguard came over. "We're going to make a little field-trip. I'd like you to come with us."

  "Oh? Okay."

  "Maxine, do you have a gun?"

  "I'm not going with you."

  "Yes you are, m'dear. A gun. Do you have one?"

  "Several. But I'm not going. I've had enough excitement for one night. I need some sleep."

  "Well here's your choices. Come now and let's find out what the hell's going on up there, together. Or sit tight and wait for my lawyer to call you in the morning."

  Maxine looked at him blankly.

  "Do I take that as a yes?" he said.

  There were five in the expedition party. Maxine's assistant, Sawyer, armed with one of Maxine's guns, drove Maxine. And in a second car, driven by Jerry, went Eppstadt and Joe. The larger of Maxine's guns, a .45, was in Eppstadt's possession. He claimed he knew how to use it.

  By the time they had left, many of the party-goers had already drifted away, leaving a hard core of perhaps thirty-five people, many of them still on the beach, waiting to see if anything noteworthy was going to happen. About fifteen minutes after Eppstadt's expedition had departed for the hills the Coast Guard called off the helicopter. There had been a boating accident up the coast—nine people in the water—and air support was urgently needed. One of the two search boats was also called off, leaving the other to make wider and wider circles as any hope that the lost souls were still alive and close to the shore steadily grew more remote, and finally, faded entirely.

  PART EIGHT

  The Wind

  at the Door

  ONE

  The night was almost over by the time the two cars bearing Eppstadt's little expeditionary force made their way up the winding road that led into Coldheart Canyon. The sky was just a little lighter in the east, though the clouds were thick, so it would be a sluggish dawn, without an ounce of the drama which had marked the hours of darkness. In the depths of the Canyon itself, the day never truly dawned properly at all. There was a peculiar density to the shadows between the trees today; as though the night lingered there, in scraps and rags. Day-blooming flowers would fail to show themselves, even at the height of noon; while plants that would normally offer sight and scent of themselves only after dark remained awake through the daylight hours.

  None of this was noticed by Eppstadt or the others in his party; they were not the sort of people who noticed things to which so little value could be readily attached. But they knew something was amiss, even so, from the moment they stepped out of their vehicles. They proceeded toward the house exchanging anxious looks, their steps reluctant. Even Eppstadt, who had been so vocal about seeing the Canyon when they'd all been down in Malibu, plainly wished he'd not talked himself into this. Had he been on his own he would undoubtedly have retreated. But he could scarcely do so now, with so many people watching. He could either hope that something alarming (though inconsequential) happened soon, and he was obliged to call a general retreat in the interest of the company, or that they'd get into the house, make a cursory examination of the place, then agree that this was a matter best left with the police, and get the hell out.

  The feeling he had, walking into the house, was the same feeling he sometimes got going onto a darkened soundstage. A sense of anticipation hung in the air. The only question was: what was the drama that was going to be played out here? A continuation of
the farce he'd been so unwillingly dragged into on the beach? He didn't think so. The stage was set here for some other order of spectacle, and he didn't particularly want to be a part of it.

  In all his years running a studio he'd never green-lit a horror movie, or anything with that kind of supernatural edge. He didn't like them. On the one hand, he thought they were contemptible rubbish; and on the other, they made his flesh creep. They unnerved him with their reports from some irrational place in the psyche; a place he had fled from all his life. The Canyon knew that place, he sensed. No, he knew. There were probably subjects for a hundred horror movies here, God help him.

  "Weird, huh?" Joe remarked to him.

  Eppstadt was glad he'd brought the kid along. Though Eppstadt didn't have a queer bone in his body there was still something comforting about having a big-boned, Midwestern dumb-fuck like Joe on the team.

  "What are we looking for, anyhow?" Joe asked as Maxine led the way into the house.

  “Anything out of the ordinary," Eppstadt replied.

  "We don't have any right to be here," Maxine reminded him. 'And if Todd is dead, the police aren't going to be very happy that we touched stuff."

  "I get it, Maxine," he said. "We'll be careful."

  "Big place," Joe said, wandering into the lounge. "Great for parties."

  "Let's get some lights on in this place, shall we?" Eppstadt said. He'd no sooner spoken than Sawyer found the master panel, and flipped on every one of the thirty switches before him. Room after dazzling room was revealed, detail after glorious detail.

  Jerry had seen the dream palace countless times over the years, but for some reason, even in its early days when the paint was fresh and the gilding perfect, he'd never seen the house put on a show quite like this. It was almost as if the old place knew it didn't have long to live and—knowing its span was short—was making the best of the hours remaining to it.

  "The woman on the beach," Eppstadt said. "She built this place?"

  "Yes. Her name was Katya Lupi and—"

  "I know who she was," Eppstadt replied. "I've seen some of her movies. Trash. Kitsch trash."

  It was impossible, of course, that the woman who'd built this Spanish mausoleum was the same individual who'd escorted Todd Pickett into the surf. That woman might have been her grandchild, Eppstadt supposed, at a stretch; a great-grandchild more likely.

  He was about to correct Brahms on his generational details when a chorus of yelping coyotes erupted across the Canyon. Eppstadt knew what coyotes sounded like, of course. He had plenty of friends who lived in the Hills, and considered the animals harmless scavengers, digging through their trash and occasionally dining on a pet cat. But there was something about the noise they were making now, as the sun came up, that made his stomach twitch and his skin crawl. It was like a soundtrack of one of the horror movies he'd never green-lit.

  And then, just as suddenly as the chorus of coyotes had erupted, it ceased. There were three seconds of total silence.

  Then everything began to shake. The walls, the chandelier, the ancient floorboards beneath their feet.

  "Earthquake!" Sawyer yelled. He grabbed hold of Maxine's arm. She screeched and ran for the kitchen door.

  "Outside!" she shrieked. "We're all safer outside!"

  She could move fast when she needed to. She dragged Sawyer after her, down to the back door. Jerry tried to follow, but the shaking in the ground had become a roll, and he missed his handhold.

  Joe, Midwestern boy that he was, had never experienced an earthquake before. He just stood on the pitching ground repeating the name of his savior over and over and over again, in perfect sincerity.

  It's going to stop any minute, Eppstadt thought (he'd lived through many of these, big and small), but this one kept going, escalating. The floor was undulating in front of him. If he'd seen it in dailies he would have fired the physical effects guy for creating something that looked so phony. Solid matter like wood and nails simply didn't move that way. It was ludicrous.

  But still it escalated, and Joe's calls to his savior became shouts:

  "Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ!"

  "When's it going to stop?" Jerry gasped.

  He'd given up trying to rise. He just lay on the ground while the rattling and the rolling continued unabated.

  There was a crash from an adjacent room, as something was thrown over. And then, from further off, a whole succession of further crashes, as shelves came unseated, and their contents were scattered. A short length of plaster molding came down from the ceiling and smashed on the ground a foot from where Eppstadt was standing, its shards spreading in all directions. He looked up, in case there was more to come. A fine rain of plaster-dust was descending, stinging his eyes. Meanwhile, the quake continued to make the house creak and crack on all sides, Eppstadt's semi-blinded condition only making the event seem all the more apocalyptic. He reached toward Joe, who was hoarse from reciting his one-word prayer, and caught hold of him.

  "What's that noise?" the kid yelled over the din.

  It seemed like a particularly witless question in the midst of such a cacophony, but interestingly, Eppstadt grasped exactly what the kid was talking about.

  There was one sound, among the terrifying orchestration of groans and crashes from all over the house, that was deeper than all the others, and seemed to be coming from directly beneath them. It sounded like two titanic sets of teeth grinding together, grinding so hard they were destroying themselves in the process.

  "I don't know what it is," admitted Eppstadt. Tears were pouring from his eyes, washing them clear of the plaster-dust.

  "Well I want it to fucking stop," Joe said with nice Midwestern directness.

  He'd no sooner spoken than the noise in the earth started to die away, and moments later the rest of the din and motion followed.

  "It's over . . ." Jerry sobbed.

  He'd spoken too soon. There was one last, short jolt in the ground, which brought a further series of crashes from around the house, and from below what sounded like a door being thrown open so violently it cracked its back against the wall.

  Only then did the noises and the deep-earth motion finally subside and die away. What was left, from far off, was the sound of car alarms.

  "Everybody okay?" Eppstadt said.

  "I'll never get used to those damn things," Jerry said.

  "That was a big one," Eppstadt said. "6.5 at least."

  "And it went on, and on . . ."

  "I think we should just get the hell out of here," Joe said.

  "Before we go anywhere," Eppstadt said, venturing into the kitchen, "we wait for any aftershocks. We're safer inside than out there right now."

  "How do you figure that?" Joe said, following Eppstadt into the kitchen.

  It was chaos. None of the shelves had come off the walls, but they'd been shaken so violently they'd deposited their contents on the tiled floor. A cabinet holding booze had been shaken down, and several of the bottles broken, filling the air with the sharp tang of mingled liquors. Eppstadt went to the refrigerator—which had been thrown open by the quake, and had half its contents danced off the shelves—and found a can of Coke. He cracked it carefully, letting its excitability fizz away by degrees, then poured it as though this sickly soda were a hundred-year-old brandy, and drank.

  "Better," he said.

  "I'll take one of those," Joe remarked.

  "What color do I look?"

  Scowling, Joe kicked his way through the fractured crockery to the refrigerator, and got himself a Coke.

  "What the hell happened to Maxine?" Eppstadt wondered.

  "She went out back with Sawyer," Joe said, averting his face from a fan of erupting Coke.

  Eppstadt went out into a passageway that led down to an open door, kicking a few pieces of fallen plaster out of the way as he went.

  "Maxine!" he called. "Are you okay?"

  There was no reply.

  Without waiting for anyone to join him, he headed down to the b
ack door. There was more plaster dust underfoot, and several large cracks in the walls and ceiling. Unlike other areas of the house this portion looked less solid to his eye, and very much less elegant. A hurried later addition, he guessed, and probably more vulnerable to shocks than the older parts of the house. He called out for Maxine again, but again there was no reply forthcoming. He wasn't surprised. The area just outside the door looked squalid; large masses of rotted vegetable matter covered the walkway on the other side of the threshold, giving off a sickly stench. The foliage overhanging the area was so thick that the area was practically benighted.

  He went to the threshold, intending to call for Maxine again, but before he could do so he heard the sound of low, sibilant laughter. Since childhood he'd always been certain that laughter heard in his vicinity was laughter heard at his expense, and even though his therapist had worked hard for sixteen years to dissuade him of this neurosis, it lingered. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of the shadows beneath the trees; dividing form from apparition. Obviously, the laughter had a source, perhaps more than one. He just couldn't make it out.

  "Stop that," he ordered.

  But the laughter continued, which enraged him. They were laughing at him, he was certain of it. Who else would they be laughing at? Bastards.

  He stepped over the threshold, ready to sue. The air was cold and clammy. This wasn't a very pleasant house, he'd decided very quickly, and this was a particularly unpleasant corner of it. But the laughter continued, and he couldn't turn his back on it, not until he'd silenced it.

  "Who the hell are you?" he demanded. "This is private property. You hear me? You shouldn't even—"

  He stopped now because there, in the shadow of a humongous Bird of Paradise tree, he made out a human form. No, two. No, three. He could barely see their features, but he could feel the imprint of their stares upon him.

  And then more laughter, mocking his protests.