Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  It was an astonishing transformation. In the four or five minutes since the child had been passed back to his mother and the Duke's curse had been lifted, the landscape through which Goga and his men (their flesh and bones now indistinguishable from the swampy earth in which they'd lain down to die) had ridden had undergone a sea-change: falling stars and falling lions, the air filled with the flutter of a million dragonflies and the howling of a thousand sun-blinded dogs; trees coming into sudden blossom, their buds so fat and fruitful they exploded like little bombs, so that a blizzard of petals drenched the air with perfume.

  And in the same moment as the dragonflies rose up, and the trees blossomed, Death caught a million throats, and with howls and shrieks and crazed cavorting, the Reaper claimed both the common dog and the fanciful beasts Lilith had hatched to make the Hunt more purgatorial for her victims. The chicken that had laid eggs filled with serpents was devoured by its brood in its dotage. A lizard with a dragonfly still fluttering in its jaws was taken by a beast only Lilith could have conjured: its back a shameless homage to the cunt, from its glorious labial head to the enormous golden eye buried in its depths like an opulent egg.

  A thousand thousand witnesses could not have catalogued what happened to the Devil's Country in those minutes. An army of chroniclers could not have caught a quarter of the stories here; they came and went too fast: birth, death and the madness between filling the senses to overflowing.

  At the door, Tammy had time to wonder if perhaps Eden had been like this. Not the calm hand of a placid creator moving over the dappled grass of paradise and leaving the lion, the lamb and all that lived in between where it passed, but rather this: the sun turned up as though by an impatient cook, frying life into being, in one frenzied, blazing carnival, its most exquisite beasts no more likely to survive the heat than its basest creations. Beauty of no importance, in the heat of the moment; nor poetry; nor intelligence. Just things rising and falling without judgment or consideration; the loveliest of beings dying before they had time to speak, while veils of flies descended to pump their eggs into the bed of their quickened rot.

  No wonder Lilith had said, so knowingly, that God sat perfectly well with her. Hadn't she been his first female creation; the bride for Adam which Yahweh had rejected? Hers the first womb, hers the first egg, hers the first blood shed in pain because a man had made it so.

  Tammy looked to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woman one last time, with this new notion in her head.

  But the air between where she stood and where the Queen of Hell had been standing was a maze of petals, flies, birds, seeds, scales and flakes of cooked corruption. Lilith was out of sight, and Tammy knew that if she was lucky she would never have occasion to look into the woman's eyes again.

  THREE

  Upstairs, in the great bed in the master bedroom, Katya had woken from one of the most restorative slumbers she'd enjoyed in years. No nightmares; not even dreams. Just a deep sense of well-being, knowing that she had finally found the man with whom to share the years in the privacy of the Canyon.

  A moment later, the comforts of her waking-state were dashed. The bed beside her was cold and empty and she heard voices; strangers in her house. That there might be people in the kitchen or the dining room would have been bad enough, but she knew instinctively where the voices were coming from. They were way downstairs, in that room, and given that Todd was not beside her, he was probably down there with them. The thought did not comfort her.

  She understood all too well the claim that place had. Nor did it play favorites. It beguiled, with equal eloquence, the genius and the dullard, the intellectual and the sensualist. She'd seen it happen over and over again. Lord knows, she'd had fixes enough from it herself over the years. It had kept her beautiful, kept her strong. But for her, being in the room was merely a function of cosmetics: it wiped away the years. Though perhaps it truly was the Devil's Country, she attached no great metaphysical significance to the place. It was her beauty parlor, nothing more. And if there were people in there now, using up her dwindling sum of perfection, then she wanted them out! Out!

  She got up and started to dress, going over the events of the previous evening as she did so. There was only one person she knew who might have seduced Todd away from her side: Tammy, the bitch who'd taken him away last time. For some reason Todd felt some sentimental attachment to Tammy. There was nothing wrong with that, in principle. It proved he had a heart. But the woman had no place in the scheme of things from this point on. She'd served her minor purpose; it was time she was removed.

  Dressed now, Katya went to the mirror. The sleep had done her good. There was a luminosity in her eyes that had not been there for many years. She could even bring herself to turn on a smile.

  It was unfortunate, she thought as she stepped out onto the landing, but there were bound to be these little challenges at the outset. Nothing, however, was going to get between her and her paradise. Zeffer had tried, and Zeffer was dead. This woman would probably try too, but she'd end up the same way he had. And, if things really went well, the killing blow would come from Todd. That would make things perfect: if he found the weapon and struck her down. It was essential to make him understand that anyone who endangered their little paradise would have to be killed. And there was nothing better for the cementing of a relationship than to spill a little blood together.

  Eppstadt had sent Pickett, the woman and Brahms running; but he'd stayed awhile to torment the strange woman he'd conjured up.

  It wasn't often he tangled with a woman whose intellect he respected. For a time Columbia had been run by just such a woman, Dawn Steel, and Eppstadt had always enjoyed a good debate with her. But she'd died of brain cancer, at some absurdly young age, and the loss had saddened him. True, there were a couple of actresses who had the wit to hold his attention for more than a sentence—Jamie Lee Curtis was surprisingly sharp, Susan Sarandon and Jodie Foster were worth his time; but mostly they were little more than bodies to him. So where, as he'd already asked himself, had he found the raw material for this baroque fantasy called Lilith? It wasn't just the beauty and eloquence of the woman, it was the whole implausible world that surrounded her, like an MGM musical designed by Hieronymus Bosch.

  "What are you staring at?" Lilith asked him. She had long ago begun her slow descent into the Underworld, but now—caught by Eppstadt's scrutiny—she had halted, and turned to face him again.

  "You," he said bluntly.

  "Well don't."

  So saying, she again turned her back and continued to descend into the earth.

  "Wait!" he demanded. "I want to talk with you."

  He caught hold of the rear of her trailing gown. "Didn't you hear me? I said wait."

  If there had been any trace of indulgence left on Lilith's face it had now disappeared. She assessed him with a merciless gaze.

  "Wait?" she said, her tone withering. "What makes you think I would obey any instruction of yours?"

  As she spoke she glanced down at Eppstadt's feet and he felt a motion under his heel. Odd, he thought. He stepped aside, only to find that a new crop of the shoots had sprung up before the opening of the Hell-Mouth. This time, however, they were more densely planted than before, and they were only growing in his immediate vicinity.

  "What is this?" he said.

  He felt the first needle-pricks in his ankles; little more than irritations really. But when he lifted his leg, he dragged the shoots out from under his skin, and they hurt. He yelped with pain. Hopping on one leg, he hoisted up his trouser leg. There were a dozen tiny wounds around his ankle where the shoots had entered his skin; all were bleeding.

  "Fuck," he said.

  There was nothing remotely entertaining about this dream now. He wanted it to stop. Meanwhile he felt the crop of shoots entering his other leg. He had no intention of repeating his error, so he stomped down the area of the shoots with his injured foot, and planted it there while he gingerly hoisted up his other trouser leg to exa
mine the damage. Impossible as it seemed, the shoots had already advanced through the muscle of his calf. He could see their trajectory through his skin; they were getting steadily more ambitious as they climbed; dividing and dividing again, forming a network through his flesh. He caught hold of one at his ankle, where it pierced his skin. It was no thicker than a few braided hairs, but it wriggled around between his finger and thumb as though determined to keep on climbing, keep on growing. He tried to pull on it but a spasm of pain ran up through his leg, following the path of the shoots' advance. It had almost reached his knee.

  There were tears of agony in his eyes now. He looked up at Lilith, blinking them away so as to see her better. She was still watching him.

  “All right," he said. "You made your point."

  She didn't reply.

  "Make it stop," he told her.

  She seemed to consider this for a moment, biting lightly on her lower lip as she turned the option over. As she did so he glanced down at his other foot. The plants he'd ground beneath his heel had been replaced by new growths, which were already four or five inches high, and piercing him afresh.

  "Oh God, no," he said, returning his gaze to his tormentor's face. "Please. I was wrong." He was barely able to get the words out, the pain was so intolerable. "Make it stop!"

  Though his vision was blurred he could see her response to his plea. She was shaking her head.

  "Damn you!" he said. "I made one fucking mistake! I've said I'm sorry. That should be good enough."

  Something burst just above his knee. He tore at his trouser leg, ripping the fabric with such pain-inspired force that it tore all the way up to his groin. There were flowers blossoming from the meat of his knee: six or seven small florets, each giving off a stink so pungent it made him giddy to inhale it. He glanced up at the woman who'd done this to him just one last time, hoping his tongue would be inspired to make her merciful. But she'd plainly already decided she knew how this would end. She had turned her back on him, and was continuing her descent into the Underworld.

  Eppstadt felt a new series of eruptions in his legs, leading all the way up from his knee to his groin. The large, pale muscle of his thigh had become a veritable garden; upward of twenty flowers had blossomed there. Blood ran from the places where they'd come forth, and it coursed around the back of his leg, soaking into the tatters of his trousers. The collected scent of the blossoms all but made him swoon. He toppled backward, and sprawled in the shoots that were waiting for him, like a death-bed welcoming him into its final comfort.

  "What the hell happened to Eppstadt?" Todd said, looking back.

  The brightening day had put a layer of haze between the Hell's Mouth and the door that led up into the house. The details of Eppstadt's condition were impossible to fathom. All they could see was that for some reason the man was lying back among flowers.

  "I thought he was in trouble a few moments ago," Jerry said. "He seemed to be crying out."

  "He's not crying out now," Tammy said. "Looks like he's taking a nap."

  "Crazy . . ." Todd said.

  "Well leave him to it, I say," Jerry remarked. "If he wants to stay, that's his damn business."

  There was no argument from the other two.

  "After you," Jerry said, stepping aside to let Tammy cross the threshold. He followed quickly after her, with Todd on his heels.

  Todd glanced back one last time at the transforming landscape. The ships had disappeared from the horizon, as though some long-awaited wind had finally come and filled their sails, and borne them off to new destinations. The little gathering of houses beside the river, with its two bridges, had been eroded by light, and even the snaking shape of the river itself was on its way to extinction. Though he'd doubted the tale Zeffer had told him it seemed now that it was true. This had been a prison painted to hold the Duke. Now that his Hunt was over and the Devil's child had been returned, the place no longer had any reason to exist.

  Age was catching up with it. The heat of its painted sun was undoing it, image by image, tile by tile.

  "Eppstadt?" he yelled. "Are you coming?"

  But the man in the long grass didn't move, so Todd let him lie there. Eppstadt had always been a man who did what he wanted to do, and to hell with other people's opinions.

  Sprawled on the ground, Eppstadt heard Todd's call, and half-thought of returning it, but he could no longer move. Several shoots had entered the base of his skull, piercing his spinal column, and he was paralyzed.

  The greenery pushing up through his brain, erasing his memories as they climbed, had not yet removed every last shred of intelligence. He realized that this was the end of him. He could feel the first insinuations of shoots at the back of his throat, and an itching presence behind his eyes, where they were soon to emerge and flower, but it concerned him far less than it might have done had he imagined this sitting in his office.

  It wasn't the kind of death he'd had in mind when he thought of such things, but then his life hadn't been as he'd expected it to be either. He'd wanted to paint, as a young man. But he'd had not the least talent. A professor for the Art School had remarked that he'd never met a man with a poorer sense of aesthetics. What would they have thought now, those critics who'd so roundly condemned him, if they'd been here to see? Wouldn't they have said he was passing away prettily, with his head full of shoots and color and his eyes . . .

  He never finished the thought.

  One of Lilith's flowers blossomed inside his skull, and a sudden, massive hemorrhage stopped dead every thought Eppstadt was entertaining, or would ever entertain again.

  Indifferent to his death, the plants continued to press up through his flesh, blossoming and blossoming, until from a little distance he was barely recognizable as a man at all: merely a shape in the dirt, a log perhaps, where the flowers had grown with particular vigor, hungry to make the most of the sun now that it was shining so brightly.

  FOUR

  Tammy knew there was trouble brewing the moment she set eyes on Katya. The woman was smiling down at them beatifically, but there was no warmth or welcome in her eyes; only anger and suspicion.

  "What happened?" she said, straining for lightness.

  "It's over," Todd told her, coming up the stairs, his hand extended toward her in a placatory manner. No doubt he also read the signs in the woman's eyes, and didn't trust what he saw there.

  "Come on," he said, laying his palm against her waist in a subtle attempt to change her direction.

  "No," she said, gently pressing past him so as to go down the stairs. "I want to see."

  "There's nothing to see," Jerry said.

  She didn't bother to sweeten her expression for Brahms. He was her servant; nothing more nor less. "What do you mean: there's nothing to see?"

  "It's all gone," he said, his tone tinged with melancholy, as though he were gently breaking the news of a death to her.

  "It can't be gone," Katya snapped, pushing on past Jerry and Tammy and heading down the stairs. "The Hunt goes on forever. How could Goga ever catch the Devil's child?" She turned at the bottom of the stairs, her voice strident. "How could any man ever catch the Devil's child?"

  "It wasn't a man," Tammy piped up. "It was me."

  Katya's face was a picture of disbelief. Obviously if the idea of a man bringing the Hunt to an end wasn't farcical enough, the notion that a woman—especially one she held in such plain contempt—had done so, was beyond the bounds of reason.

  "That's not possible," she said, departing from the bottom of the stairs and heading along the passageway.

  She was out of Tammy's view now; but everyone could hear Katya's bare feet on the floor, and the doorhandle being turned—

  "No!"

  The word was almost a shriek.

  Jerry caught hold of Tammy's elbow. "I think you should get out of here—"

  "No! No! No!"

  "—that room was the reason she stayed young."

  Now it made sense, Tammy thought.

  Th
at was why Jerry had sounded as though he were announcing a death: it was Katya's demise he was announcing. Denied her chamber of eternal youth, what would happen to her? If this was a movie, she'd probably come hobbling back along the passageway with the toll of years already overtaking her, her body cracking and bending, her beauty withering away.

  But this wasn't a movie. The woman who strode back into view at the bottom of the stairs showed no sign of weakening or withering: at least not yet.

  "That bitch!" she yelled, pointing at Tammy. "I want her killed. Todd? You hear me? I want her dead!"

  Tammy looked up the stairs to where Todd was standing. It was impossible to read the expression on his face.

  Meanwhile Katya ranted on. "She's spoiled everything! Everything!"

  "It had to end eventually," Todd said.

  As Todd spoke Tammy felt the pressure of Jerry's hand on her arm, subtly encouraging her to head on up the stairs while there was still time to do so. She didn't wait for a second prompt. She began to ascend, keeping her eyes fixed on Todd's face. What was he thinking?

  Look at me, she willed him. It's me, it's your Tammy. Look at me.

  He didn't, which was a bad sign. It would be easier to obey Katya if he didn't think of Tammy as a real human being; didn't look into her eyes; didn't see her fear.

  "Don't let her go!" Katya said.

  She was coming up the stairs now, taking them slowly, her pace casual.