Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  There seemed little hope of that. Though they'd fought to their feet again, it was becoming harder and harder for either man to land a solid blow in this slippery environment. Finally Eppstadt swung wide and went down in the mud, falling heavily. He struggled to get up, the heels of his hands sliding in the mud, but before he could succeed, Todd clambered on top of him, and straddled him, his hands at the man's throat. There was no fight left in Eppstadt. All he could do was gasp and shake his head.

  "You fuckhead," Todd said. "None of this would have happened ... if you . . . had made my fucking movie."

  Eppstadt had by now recovered enough energy to speak. "I wouldn't put you in a movie if my fucking life depended on it."

  At which point, Tammy made her presence known. "Todd?"

  It was Eppstadt who looked up first. "Oh Jesus," he said. "I wondered when you were going to show your fat ass."

  Tammy wasn't in the mood for long speeches. "Leave the shithead in the mud, Todd," she said, "and let's just get out of here."

  Todd grinned through his mask of mud; the megawatt smile. "It would be my pleasure."

  He got to his feet and stepped away. Eppstadt pulled his rather ungainly bulk to his knees. He had lost one of his choice Italian shoes in the melee, and now began to search for it. In fact, it had been flung wide of the mud, close to where Tammy was standing.

  "Looking for this?" she said.

  "Yes," he glared, beckoning with his fingers.

  She tossed it in the thorn bushes.

  "Cunt."

  "Faggot."

  "No. I am many things but a bugger I am not. Right, Brahms?"

  "Don't bring me into this," Jerry said. "I just want us all out of here."

  "We're coming, Jerry!" Todd said, not looking at him. "You go on and take Tammy."

  "Not without you," she said.

  "Oh, how touching," Eppstadt said. "The fat girl is loyal to the end, even though she doesn't have a hope in hell of getting a fuck out of it."

  Tammy had kept her fury limited to that one casual toss of the Italian shoe, but now it erupted; all her fury toward Eppstadt and his kind. The Mister-High-and-Mightys who thought that fat fan-girls were less than shit.

  "You are such scum!" she said. "You nasty-minded tiny-peckered little piece of excrement!"

  She approached him as she yelled, but after the fight with Todd the last thing Eppstadt wanted was this woman laying her hands on him.

  "Keep her away from me, Jerry," he demanded, raising his hands, palms out. As he did so he retreated toward the copse of trees. "Jerry? You hear me?"

  "Leave him, Tammy."

  "Well, he's scum."

  "And tell her to cover herself up," Eppstadt fired back. "The sight of her cellulite makes me gag."

  Jerry had caught hold of Tammy's arm.

  Luckily for him, Tammy had suddenly lost interest in all this score-settling. She was studying a group of horsemen who were following a winding road that would eventually bring them, she quickly realized, to this very spot. "Todd . . ." she said.

  "Yes, I saw."

  "We have visitors."

  Duke Goga, of course, along with his entourage.

  They had plenty of time to get to the door, Tammy reckoned. The hunters were still some distance away, and it didn't seem that they'd yet spotted the interlopers. Jerry was already on his way to the exit. Todd had found some clean water to wash his wounds but he could be up and gone in a couple of seconds.

  Eppstadt was the exception. He'd gone into the thorn-thicket to fetch his Italian shoe, and as he did so, something moved among the mass of thorny branches off to the left of him.

  He stopped reaching for his shoe, and studied the shadows. Whatever it was seemed to have become snagged in there, because it shook itself. Then it let out a kind of mewling sound and shook itself again, this time more violently. The maneuver worked, however. Freed of the thicket it stumbled out into view. It was the goat-boy. He started to pull thorns out of his flesh, the pain of it making him weep, softly, to himself.

  Eppstadt knew what this creature was capable of from his previous encounter and he had no desire to draw the attention of the beast. He gave up on his shoe and set his eyes on the door. Jerry Brahms was right: it was time they got the hell out of here.

  The goat-boy had stopped weeping now, and for some reason had fixed his gaze upon Tammy. Or more particularly, upon her breasts. There was no equivocation in his stare; no attempt to pretend he was looking elsewhere. He simply stared lovingly at the upper part of Tammy's torso, and licked his lips.

  Tammy had heard the boy's sobbing complaints, and was staring at him. So was Todd.

  "Come on, Tammy," Todd said.

  Tammy let her gaze go from the boy to the approaching hunters. Plainly they'd also heard the sound of the child's wails because they'd picked up their speed and were approaching at a hard gallop.

  Tammy looked back at Lucifer's child, in all his goaty glory. His tears had dried now, and he was less interested in picking thorns out of his flesh. They'd done some damage, she saw; little rivulets of dark red blood ran down his limbs from the places where he'd been pierced. There was one spot that looked particularly tender, deep in the groove of his groin. He worked the thorn out a little, but not once did he take his eyes off the objects of his present devotion. He didn't even glance over at the horsemen, though he must have heard their approach. He obviously knew how to out-maneuver them. He'd been doing it for centuries. He had a warren of hidey-holes to tuck himself away.

  Tammy glanced up at the sky: at the moon locked in its unnatural position in front of the sun. Then she looked around at the landscape which that half-clouded light illuminated: the road and the approaching horsemen, the cluster of boulders where Todd was standing, stripped of his torn T-shirt, doing his best to lift handfuls of clean water up to his wounded face.

  The goat-boy would be gone in a moment, Tammy knew. And when it was gone the Hunt would, as Zeffer had told her, continue in the same weary way it had been going for centuries.

  Perhaps it was time to bring the whole sorry thing to an end, once and for all: to see if she, little Tammy Lauper from Sacramento, couldn't deliver the Devil's child back into the hands of the Duke, who could then return him to its mother, and bring an end to this long, weary chase.

  She knew of only one, desperate method by which she might do this. She didn't waste time enacting it. She unbuttoned her torn blouse, starting at the top. She had every jot of the goat-boy's attention from the moment her fingers touched the first button. He forgot about removing thorns from his flesh. He simply watched.

  "Like them?" she said to him so softly she was certain nobody would hear.

  The goat-boy heard her, as she knew he would. He had an animal's ears.

  By way of reply he nodded; very slowly, indeed almost reverentially.

  There were two buttons remaining. Two buttons, and her blouse would fall open, and he'd have a feast of her, hanging in front of his eyes. She stopped unbuttoning. He made a little growl in his throat. The smile suddenly went from his face. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there seemed to be a flicker of fire in his eyes.

  She stopped her teasing and put her hands back up to the first of the remaining buttons. He rewarded her with a little smile, which showed her a detail she'd missed until now. His teeth, though small, were all sharpened to a fine point. He had the smile of a piranha. She literally felt the flesh around her nipple tighten up at the prospect of those needles coming anywhere near her.

  She chanced a quick look in the direction of the horsemen, but they had disappeared from sight for a time. The road that was bringing them here had wound into an expanse of pine forest. She looked back at the goat-boy. He was tapping his left foot, which appendage boasted a nail that would not have shamed a raptor. Plainly he was just a little anxious about the proximity of the Duke and his men: he did not wish to be caught. But just as plainly he was not going to leave. Not yet; not until he'd seen what Tammy had to offer.
br />   He pointed at her. Made a little waggling motion with his forefinger. "Show me," he said.

  She smiled at him, but she didn't move to oblige.

  "Show," he said again.

  She continued to smile at him, all the while assessing how many strides of his flat little feet it would take for him to reach her, should he take it into his head to run. He could be on her in five strides, she guessed. Four if he pushed it.

  She slipped one of the two buttons out of its hole. The blouse fell open a little, giving him a peek at her left nipple. She flashed, suddenly, on some hot summer's day in her fourteenth year, when she'd crept into her parents' room in the middle of the afternoon, and played striptease in the mirror. She had more to boast about than any of the other girls in her class. Bigger breasts, and hair down between her legs. Her life would have been a lot happier if her breasts had stopped growing that day. But they'd had a long way to go. By the time she was fifteen she was like a young Shelley Winters; and it just got worse from there.

  Strange how things came round. How something that had become a source of shame for her was now, out of nowhere, redeemed. She let her fingers slip down to the last button, knowing that the goat-boy's gaze would go with them, and she would have a chance, however slim, to look up past him and see whether the horsemen had emerged from the forest.

  The news was bad. There was no sign of the Duke and his men. Had they perhaps taken a wrong turning in the forest? Surely not. Surely they knew this entire territory, after so many years of riding it.

  "Show me your tits," the goat-boy demanded.

  As he spoke he lifted his left leg and struck a stone with his raptor claw.

  A bright spark leapt from the place and landed on a tuft of gray grass, where it erupted into a little fire. It had too little fuel to keep it sustained for long, but in the five or six seconds that it took for the cycle of spark, fire and extinction to play out Tammy heard the sound of the Duke's horses, and from the corner of her eye saw them emerging from between the trees.

  The goat-boy narrowed his eyes to golden slits. The corners of his mouth turned down, showing the lower row of monstrous teeth.

  "Show me," he said again.

  Plainly he wasn't going to be toyed with any longer. He wanted to see what she had, and he wanted to see them now.

  She didn't pretend that the horsemen's proximity was not of interest to her. What was the use? Everybody was in on this ridiculous game, the goat-boy included. He dropped his head a little, which should have been a sign for Tammy as to what he would do next, but she was too busy thinking about how long the Duke would take to get off his horse to realize that the goat-boy was making a run at her. And by the time she did realize, he was already halfway there, and there was nothing between her bare breasts and his hands, his mouth, his teeth, but a prayer.

  EIGHT

  Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the muddy, bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her blouse fell open, unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally stopped the Devil's child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool ran from it.

  Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no sentimentalist. He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would have lost it.

  The Devil's child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled—yes, crawled—into Tammy's arms. His hands went greedily up to one of her breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for a moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted off his terrible teeth.

  "Please God . . ." Todd murmured.

  It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy's thirty-four years, the feeling of the Devil's child's mouth around her left nipple. There had been a moment—as he closed his mouth around her—when it had crossed her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he could give her an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew he would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshiped them, in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact she suspected he'd somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.

  Then, as though all this weren't peaceful and domestic enough, the Devil's child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.

  Goga had been searching for Lilith's child for many centuries now, under a sky that—though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear—always showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his imprisonment in the Devil's Country had lasted; his mind had long ago lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate what they'd hunted—rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig—they would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and where they now were. It was the Duke's opinion that this was not a real place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their condition? The same ships forever heading toward the horizon; the same roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven, half-blinded by the same black moon?

  But in the last few days—if days and nights could truthfully be said to pass here—there had been signs that things were changing in what had been hitherto a virtually changeless place. There had always been strangers coming and going (trapped, the philosophizing Duke surmised, in the same infernal dream where they found themselves). But whereas in the past visitors had little or no effect upon the world they were wandering through, the trespassers of recent times had not been quite so guileless or so lucky. Several had perished in the region around the forest.

  And now—as if all this were not strange enough—a new spectacle, stranger by some measure than all that had preceded it:

  Sitting beside the road—nursing the object of their long search as though he were a commonplace baby—was a bare-breasted woman.

  The Duke dismounted a few yards from where Tammy sat in the dirt, rocking the goat-boy in her arms. His lieutenants had dismounted several horse-lengths away, and were now creeping around the nursing woman, swords drawn.

  Tammy saw all of this, but she registered nothing—not a word, not the raising of a finger—for fear of alerting the contented child to the fact that his time in this idyllic state was about to end.

  Very cautiously, the Duke approached the woman and child, beckoning to his men to take their final positions. One of the men had brought a wooden box; clearly his own crude handiwork which he now opened and positioned behind the pair.

  The goat-boy didn't open his eyes, but he pulled his mouth away from Tammy's breast long enough to say: "You don't all have to creep around like that. I know what you're up to." He'd no sooner spoken than his interest in the Duke's men was forgotten again and he was back to stroking the ample flesh in front of him. "Beautiful," he said to Tammy. "Do you have names for your tits?"

  "Names?" Tammy said. "Actually, no."

  "Oh you should. They're amazing." He kissed them, first left, then right, then left again, tender, affectionate kisses. "May I name them myself?" He asked this question with the greatest delicacy, stumbling over the words. Plainly the last thing he would have wished to do was cause offense.

  "Of course," she said.

  "I may? Oh thank you. Then this must be Helena, who I sucked on, and this one I'll call Beatrice." He looked at Tammy, framed by her breasts. "And you? Who are you?"

&nbsp
; "Tammy."

  "Just Tammy?"

  "Tammy Jayne Lauper."

  "I'm Qwaftzefoni," the goat-boy said. "Are you on the run from somebody, Tammy?"

  "I was, I suppose, in a way."

  "Who?"

  "My husband, Arnie."

  "He doesn't appreciate you?"

  "No."

  The goat-boy began to lick Helena and Beatrice, again big sloppy tonguings that made Tammy shudder with pleasure.

  "No children?" he said in the middle of a stroke.

  "No. Arnie can't . . ."

  "But you could, Tammy." He laid his head against her pillows. "Believe me, I know about these things. You're fertile as the Nile. As soon as you get pregnant these beautiful mammaries will become milk-machines. And your children will be strong and healthy, with strong, healthy hearts, like you." Finally, he opened his eyes just a slit, his gaze first settling on her face then slipping sideways, to get a glimpse of the cage. "So what's your opinion? " he said to her.

  "About what?"

  "Should I give myself up, or let the chase go on?"

  "What happens if you give yourself up?"

  "I go home. With my mother, Lilith. Back to Hell."

  "Isn't that where you should be?"

  "Yes, I suppose so. But how would you feel if I said you should be back with Arnie?"

  "Oh no . . ."

  "So, you understand," he said, running an appreciative palm over the smooth globes, then putting his head down between them, his chin in the groove. "Sometimes you just have to get away, at least for a while. But you know, now that I lie here, I think, maybe it's time to give up. I've been running for years. Never let anybody lay a finger on me. Until you." His voice, already low, went to a barely audible whisper, almost a hiss. "Are they very close now?" he said.

  "Yes," she told him. "They're very close."

  He toyed with her hardened nipple. "If I give myself up, what will happen?"

  "I think we'll all leave this country, one way or another."

  "And ... in your opinion . .. would that be such a bad idea?"