Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  He listened at the door and then very gingerly unlocked it and opened it an inch. He could hear an exchange from below, which seemed to be led by Eppstadt. Jesus, of all people to be up here among Katya's mysteries: Mister Bottom-line himself, Gary Eppstadt. There was no sign of an opinion from

  Maxine, which was unusual. She was normally vocal in any debate, however little she knew about the subject. Then Todd remembered her phobia about quakes. She always fled for the open air at the first sign of a trembler, and no doubt she'd done exactly that. He was tempted to go onto the balcony and see if he could spot her in the back yard—just to see the bitch in a state of agitation—but there wasn't time. There was too much going on downstairs. He ventured out of the bedroom a step, and peered over the rail, in time to see somebody—it was a young man, either a waiter brought from the party, or one of Maxine's new boys (or both), heading down the spiral into the darkness there, where a door was banging.

  Next he heard footsteps, and felt certain that Eppstadt was about to appear from the kitchen door. Before he was spotted, Todd slid back into the bedroom, and gently closed the door. It made a barely perceptible click; certainly nothing audible with so much else going on in the vicinity.

  He knew what that banging door was all about. The earthquake had thrown open the door to the Devil's Country, and it looked as though Eppstadt had convinced some dope to go down and close it. Idiots! Didn't they have any instincts? Didn't something whisper at the back of their heads that when a door slammed in this house, you let it slam, you let it slam till it chose to stop. What you didn't do was head on down the stairs to close it. That was suicide, or the next best thing.

  He put his head around the corner and peered into the bedroom. Katya was still fast asleep. He briefly contemplated waking her, then thought better of it. All her life she'd had men following her around asking what they should do next. He wasn't going to be numbered among them.

  No, he would deal with this on his own. After all, the house was going to be his home as much as it was hers. His word should be law here. He just had to work out how best to proceed, and without a shot of espresso to quicken his sluggish thoughts, it might take a while. No matter, the answer would come to him, in time.

  He sat with his back against the wall, and tried to put out of his head the image of the innocent stranger heading down the spiral staircase to close the door to the Devil's Country.

  FOUR

  Todd stayed put behind the door for several minutes, his thoughts describing vague circles. In truth he was still hoping that it would not take any action on his part to fix the problem. The preferable solution would be this: somebody (perhaps Maxine, out there in the back yard) would encounter something that would raise the panic-level in the house, and there would be a mass exodus. Perhaps it was too much to hope for, but every other option (diversions, locating keys to side exits) required a higher degree of wit than he possessed in his present exhausted state.

  He finally got up from behind the door and returned through the bedroom, past his sleeping beauty, to the balcony. He stepped out. The dull dawn had ushered in a dull day. Later, perhaps, the marine layer would burn off and they'd have some sun, but for now, the sky was a wall of dead cloud. He looked down into the greenery, hoping to spot Maxine, but the thickness of the jungle all around the house—especially the gigantic Bird of Paradise trees—made it virtually impossible to see very much.

  And then, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a motion. Somebody was running through the thicket, throwing panicked backward glances as he went. It wasn't Maxine, it was her assistant, Sawyer, who'd been with her for the last three years. He wasn't any more than thirty, but he'd let his body get out of shape. Too many hurried lunches, snatched because Maxine had more work for him than he could ever possibly finish; too much after-work socializing, knocking back his single malts and beluga at fancy premieres; not to mention the Bavarian creme-filled donuts he would bring into the office in boxes of six, to help him through his day with a well-timed sugar rush.

  Thanks to the donuts and hamburgers, and his neat scotches, he couldn't run very fast. And he certainly couldn't yell for help while he was running: he didn't have enough breath for both. All he could do was sob between gasps, throwing panicking glances over his shoulder. His pursuers were closing on him. Todd could see the bushes thrashing around immediately behind him; and something else—something smaller and more nimble—was throwing itself from branch to branch overhead, to keep up with its quarry.

  "M . . . Max . .. Maxine!" he managed to get out, in between gasps.

  "I'm over here!" Maxine yelled. "Sawyer! I'm at the cages!"

  Todd followed the sound of Maxine's voice, and located her. She was a considerable distance from the house, and had clambered up on top of one of a series of cages. There she was kneeling, with a gun in her hand. She'd always kept guns around the house, Todd knew, but this was the first occasion he'd seen her using one.

  "Keep following my voice," she yelled to Sawyer. "Look for a tree with bright yellow flowers, like big bells—"

  "I'm looking!" Sawyer sobbed.

  From his vantage point on the balcony, Todd felt like a Caesar at the Colosseum, watching the lions and the Christians. He could see the Christians perfectly clearly, and now—as the gap between the pursuer and the pursued closed—he began to glimpse the lions too.

  In the bushes no more than a yard or two behind Sawyer was one of the dead's children: a foul hybrid of ghost woman and—of all things— jaguar. The latter must have been a prisoner in Katya's menagerie, but the marriage of anatomies had turned its sleek perfection into something rougher, uglier and entirely more bizarre. The human element had been female; no doubt of that. The face—when Todd glimpsed it—was two-thirds humanoid. The high cheekbones, the icy stare: it was surely the face of Lana Turner. Then the creature opened its mouth, and the bestial third showed itself: vast teeth, top and bottom, a mottled throat, a black tongue. It let out a very unladylike roar, and pounced on Sawyer, who threw himself out of its path with inches to spare.

  'Are you okay?" Maxine yelled.

  All that Sawyer could manage was: "No!"

  "Are you close to me?" Maxine said.

  "I can't see you," he cried. The branches over his head were shaking violently.

  "Look for the yellow flowers."

  ". . . yellow . . . flowers . . ."

  It would have been easy for Todd to direct Sawyer through this maze, but that would have taken all the fun out of it. Better to keep his silence and let the man find his own way. It was the kind of game he knew Katya would love. He was tempted to wake her, but it would be over in the next few seconds, he guessed. Sawyer was a few yards from the cages, and safety. Having failed to catch its victim on its first pounce, the Lana, as Todd had mentally dubbed the creature, had returned to her stalking. Todd caught glimpses of her mottled back as she slid through the thicket. Her intentions were clear, at least from Todd's point of view. She was moving to cut Sawyer off from the gallery of cages. Sawyer and Maxine kept a banal exchange going meanwhile, so that Sawyer could find his way to her.

  "You're getting louder."

  "Am I?"

  "Sure. You see the yellow flowers, yet?"

  "Yeah. I see them."

  "You're really close."

  "I'm under them—"

  He stopped talking because he heard the low growl of the Lana. Todd could hear the creature too, though he couldn't see it. He silently willed Sawyer not to make any sudden moves; just stand still, shut up, and maybe the animal would lose interest. Sawyer could stand still without any problem, but could he shut up? No, he could not. Sawyer was a gabber. "Oh God, Maxine. Oh God. It's close to me."

  "Shush," Maxine advised.

  He stopped talking, but it was too late. The Lana knew exactly where Sawyer was positioned. She launched herself out of the thicket, striking Sawyer so that he fell sideways, through the very patch of yellow flowers which had been his beacon.

  H
e was now in view of Maxine, who yelled to him to get up, get up quickly—

  He started to do so, but the breath had been knocked out of him by the blow, and before he could get to his knees the creature was on him a second time, her claws digging deep into the mass of his shoulder-muscle.

  From her perch on the cage Maxine was attempting to get a clear shot, but it would have been difficult for anyone, however sophisticated his skill with guns, to put a bullet in the animal and not wound Sawyer in the process. But Maxine was ready to give it a try. She'd been taking lessons with an ex-cop from the LAPD for several months; she knew to keep a steady hand and her eye fixed on the target.

  Sawyer couldn't have moved if his life had depended upon it. The creature had him held in a death-grip.

  Maxine fired. The sound was sharp in the still air of the Canyon, like a whip-crack. It echoed off the other wall of the Canyon, the blow of the bullet throwing Sawyer's attacker off her victim. She lay, this not-so-distant relation of the exquisite Miss Turner, on the ground beside Sawyer, whom she'd loosed as soon as she was hit. Blood ran copiously from them both, mingling on the ground between them.

  "Get up," Maxine said to Sawyer.

  It was good advice. The Lana was still alive, her breathing quick and shallow.

  Sawyer wasn't so badly injured that he failed to realize the danger he was still in. He rolled away from his attacker and started to get to his feet. As he did so, the creature suddenly sat up beside him and, opening her sizable jaws, lunged. She took a chunk from Sawyer's leg, twisting her head to take away the bulk of his calf. He screamed, and fell forward onto his hands.

  Maxine had a clear shot at the beast, and took it. But her second shot was not as efficient as her first; it struck the creature's shoulder, passing through the muscle without appearing to significantly slow the animal, which threw itself on top of Sawyer as though she were attempting to mount him.

  Seconds later, the Lana opened her mouth and sank her teeth into the bones of Sawyer's skull. The man's sobs ceased instantly, and what little strength his limbs had possessed fled. He hung beneath the Lana's body like a zebra's corpse from the jaws of a lion, glassy-eyed and lifeless.

  Todd heard Maxine say, "Oh Christ... oh Christ . . ."

  But the horror wasn't over with yet. The creature apparently wanted to get her teeth into her wounder, because having dispatched Sawyer she let the body drop from her jaws and began to move toward the cage on which Maxine was crouched. Even in her hurt state there was no doubt that she had the physical power to get up onto the cage and attack Maxine. In fact, the wounds she had sustained didn't seem to be hurting her that much; her hybrid face carried a look that was somewhere between an animal snarl and a human smile. Maxine didn't hesitate. Taking a bead on the animal, she fired. The bullet struck the creature in the middle of her face, taking out the flat nose and the top half of the mouth.

  For one long moment she seemed not to comprehend the fatal damage she had sustained. She lifted her front leg, which ended in a hand which erupted into claws, toward her face, almost as though she intended to explore the damage she had sustained. But before her corrupted limb could reach her face the creature's system closed down, and she fell forward, dead.

  There had been a good deal of motion in the foliage throughout this episode; Todd had the sense that there were several other creatures watching to see how this proceeded before they showed their own faces. Now, with the death of Lana, the thicket was still. Nothing moved; nothing breathed.

  The only sound Todd could hear was the very soft sound of Maxine saying Oh God to herself, over and over. She quickly got control of her horror and her fear and started to clamber down off the cage where she'd been perched.

  Todd was half-tempted to call down to her, to offer some word of encouragement, but he refrained from doing so. For one thing, he didn't want to admit that he'd stood as a spectator to this whole drama; second, he was afraid of distracting Maxine while she was down there. Certainly her killing of the creature had silenced its brethren in the thicket, but their silence didn't mean they'd given up their stalking. They were simply sitting in the shadows waiting for Maxine to make a mistake, when no doubt they would fall upon her in a vengeful mob.

  Thus, keeping his silence, Todd watched Maxine make her way between the cages, glancing back at the house constantly, as though she was trying to find a path that would lead her back to safety but was at present only able to find one that ran parallel to the house. She was now thirty or forty yards from the cages, which was a good thing, because that meant she couldn't see what was happening on the walkway beneath them.

  A minute or two after her exit, a few of Lana's family members appeared from the thicket where—as Todd had known—they'd been waiting. Now about six of them came out of hiding. They had no interest in the corpse of their sibling. It was Sawyer they wanted. Surrounding his body they began to play with the corpse like children with some gruesome toy. They tore off his clothes, and bit off his penis and balls. They followed that by biting off fingers, knuckle by knuckle, and spitting the pieces out. They seemed to take infantile pleasure in the mess they were making. Todd was horribly disgusted by the spectacle, but he kept watching until they were finished with the fingers and began to disembowel the man. Only then did he retreat from the balcony railing and go back inside.

  It would not necessarily be easy for Maxine to find her way back up to the house, he realized. Many of the pathways were overgrown, and in her present, no doubt panicked, state of mind, she could easily lose her way and keep on losing it. He would have to go outside and find her.

  Katya was still sleeping. The shots hadn't even stirred her. Indeed, she seemed to have scarcely moved, so profound was her slumber. Her hand was still up at her mouth, limply curled round on itself.

  He kissed her, saw that this did not wake her either, and left her to her slumbers.

  FIVE

  Eppstadt was in the Devil's Country. A fine drizzle, almost a mist, was drooping from the bloated clouds; it came in soft waves against his face, cooling his flushed skin. If he doubted the reality of this place, its chill seemed designed to undo his doubt.

  He hated the idea that what he was witnessing was real; doing so violated all his logical faculties. But what was the alternative? That he'd slipped and fallen, and was now lying at the bottom of the stairs in a semi-comatose state, imagining all this? It was a pretty solution, but as he had no way of knowing whether it was true or not, his only option was to find Joe and get the hell out of here before the place began to get even crazier than it already was. The less he knew about this country—the less its grotesqueries lodged in his psyche—the happier the rest of his life would surely be.

  With that thought he began a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scanning of the landscape, calling Joe's name as he did so. His din (even his simple presence) was enough to stir life in the bushes and trees. He felt himself watched by several species of unlikely animal, their eyes huge and luminous, their postures, and in some cases the details of their physiognomies, vaguely human, as though this twilight world had witnessed all kinds of criminal couplings.

  Finally, he heard a response from Joe.

  "Who's there?"

  "Eppstadt."

  "Come over here. Quickly. You gotta help me."

  He followed the sound of the man's shouting. There was a small copse ahead, and Joe had clambered a few feet into a tree by means of a crude wooden ladder which had been propped against one of the trunks.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Eppstadt wanted to know.

  Joe simply repeated his plea: "You gotta help me."

  "There's no time, Joe," Eppstadt said. "You've got to come back with me. Right now. Christ, I sent you down to close the door. Why'd you come in?"

  "For the same reason you did," Joe said. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Are you going to help me or not?"

  Eppstadt had pressed his way into the midst of the thicket as he and Joe spoke, snagging his suit on the
briars that grew in profusion here several times as he did so. The tableau that now came into view appalled him.

  There was a man crucified among the higher branches of the tree Joe had climbed, the deed done with both rope and nails. Joe had already managed to remove a couple of the nails (spattering his arms and face with blood in the process) and was now pulling at the knotted rope with his teeth. He was desperate to get the man down from the tree, and he had reason. The branches around the man's head were bustling with birds, the Devil's Country's version of carrion-crows: bigger, crueler versions. They'd clearly made several assaults on the man's face already. There were deep gouges around the victim's sockets where the birds had gone after his eyes. Blood from the wounds poured down his face. He might have resembled Christ but for the brightness of his blonde hair, which fell in dirty curls to his shoulders.

  "I need a stone!" Joe yelled down at Eppstadt.

  "What for?"

  "Just find me a fucking stone, will you?"

  Eppstadt didn't like to take orders—especially from a waiter—but he saw the urgency of the situation, and did as he was asked, looking around until he laid his hands on a long, sharp stone, which he passed on up to Joe. From his perch on the ladder, Joe took aim at the closest of the carrion crows. It was a good throw. The stone struck the most ambitious of the flock—who had apparently decided to come in for the kill—and messily smashed open the bird's head, but its companions did not fly off, as Joe had hoped. They simply retreated up the tree a branch or two, squawking in fury and frustration, while the dead bird dropped from the perch.