Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "Yes . . ." he said, as though to silence her.

  "So I'll change again. I'll go out into the world and I'll be somebody new. There's a whole new life, still waiting to be lived."

  "Not a hope in Hell," Tammy said.

  "What?"

  "Let it go, Tammy," Jerry said.

  "Why? She may look like a million dollars but she's just a slice of the same stale ham that she always was. You know what? I love movies. Even the silent ones. Like Broken Blossoms. I love Broken Blossoms. It still makes me cry. There's some heart in it. Something real. But your . . . flicks?" She laughed, shaking her head. "They're dead. You see, that's the paradox. Mary Pickford's gone, and Fairbanks and Barrymore. They're all gone. But they live on because they made people laugh and cry. Whereas you? You're alive, and the shit you made isn't worth a damn."

  "That's not true," Katya said. "Jerry, tell her."

  "Yes, Jerry," Tammy said, quietly. "Tell her."

  "The truth is that you're not remembered quite as well as I may have—"

  "Let's not tell any more lies," Tammy said grimly. She looked at Katya. "Nobody knows who the fuck you are."

  Katya looked at Tammy for a moment, and then back to Jerry, who shook his head.

  "If they knew," Tammy said, "don't you think somebody would have recognized you when you came to get Todd?"

  Katya looked down at the cracked floor. She was absolutely still, except for her right hand, which was idly judging the heft of the knife. When she looked up again, her face carried a radiant smile.

  "All right. Enough recriminations. We've said our hard words. Now we must begin to forgive."

  Tammy looked at her with incredulity. How many faces did this woman have? "There's going to be no forgiving here," she said.

  "Will you shut up," Katya snapped, passing her hand over her brow. The smile dropped away for a moment, and there was a terrible vacuity in its place. As though the masks, however many there were, concealed nothing at all.

  But she put the smile on again, a little more tentatively, and looked at Jerry.

  "I'm in need of your help," she said. "Your help and your forgiveness. Please." She opened her arms. "Jerry. For old times' sake. I gave you a life. Didn't I? Being up here with me, wasn't it something to live for?"

  Jerry took a long time to answer. Then he said: "You smell of death, Katya."

  "Please. Jerry. Don't be cruel. Yes, I've hurt a lot of people. I realize that. Nobody regrets that necessity more than I do. But right from the beginning, I was trapped. What could I do? Zeffer was the one who brought the Hunt into this house, not me. I knew nothing about it. How can I be blamed for that?"

  "I think they blame you," Jerry said, nodding past Katya at the now-stilled fog; or rather, at what it concealed.

  At some point in this exchange, the revenants had left off their demolition, their fury momentarily calmed as they listened to Katya's self-justification. Many of them had been physically intertwined earlier, but they had separated themselves from one another, and, shrouded by the fog, listened to the woman play her parts.

  "They were your guests," Jerry said to Katya. "Some of them were great actors."

  "If they were so great, why did they become addicted so easily?"

  "So did you," he reminded her.

  "But the room was mine. They were just people who passed through. Yes, some of them were casual friends. Some of them were even casual lovers. But once they were dead? They were nothing."

  "I knew you were going to say that eventually," Tammy said. "You selfish bitch."

  "Jesus," Katya said. "I have heard enough from you."

  She lifted her knife and came at Tammy. In two seconds she would have had the blade buried in Tammy's heart, but before she could reach her target somebody stepped out of the mist and knocked the knife from her hand. It spun on the tile, but Katya was quick. She ducked down and snatched it up again, her gaze going to the figure who had stepped into her path.

  He had opened his arms, as though to formally present himself to her.

  "Rudy?" she said.

  The man in front of her bowed his gleaming head.

  "Katya," he replied.

  Tammy couldn't see his face but she thought there was some sorrow in the syllables; whether for Katya, or for himself, who could say?

  He'd no sooner spoken than from another spot, close to the door, somebody else spoke her name. This second voice was heavier than Valentino's; there was more anger in it than melancholy. "Remember me?" he said. "Doug Fairbanks?"

  Katya turned. "Doug? I didn't realize you were here too."

  “And me?" came a third voice, this time a woman's.

  "Clara?" Katya said.

  "Of course."

  The speaker walked up to Katya as she spoke, her stride remarkably confident. She was a shadow of her former self, but Tammy would still have recognized the face of Clara Bow. The bee-stung lips. The high, curved brows. The wide eyes, once filled with innocent high-spirits. But not now. Now they burned.

  Katya glanced over her shoulder. "Please, Clara," she said, "don't come so close."

  "Why should you care how close we get?" Clara Bow said.

  "Yes," came a fourth voice. "You're not to blame, remember?"

  "Anyway," came a fifth voice, "we're nothing."

  "Nothing," said a sixth voice. And a seventh.

  Katya turned, swinging her weapon in a wide arc. Even so, it missed its several marks. The ghosts were too quick for her; she was sluggish, even in her fury. Besides, Tammy thought, what possible harm could a kitchen knife do to these creatures? Yes, they had a corporeal existence; no question of that. But they were—as far as she understood it—spirit presences made of ether and memory. These people couldn't die. They were already dead; long, long dead.

  And they were assembling now in even greater numbers, having apparently given up looking for the Devil's Country.

  It was gone; the evidence of which was the fading lines on the walls of this melancholy chamber. All that remained by way of satisfaction, if that was the word, was to punish the woman who had kept them outside in her joyless Canyon for so many seasons, holding on to the hope that they would one day be let back into the house to satisfy their craving for the solace of their addiction.

  Katya was well aware that she was in jeopardy, and hopelessly outnumbered. While still holding the knife she raised both hands in a vague gesture of surrender.

  The dead seemed not to care. Their pale faces, which had always looked impersonal, were now—in the presence of the woman who had once been their confidante—assembling fragments of forgotten particularities. It was like a room full of Alzheimer's patients, recovering in the presence of some person they'd known well what they'd previously lost: themselves. Their eyes, which had been little more than lights in their heads, took on a specific shape and color. Their mouths, which had been slits, bloomed into sensuality.

  Tammy didn't think any of these reconfigurations were good news for Katya. Unobtrusively, she caught hold of the back of Jerry's shirt, and gently eased him out of Katya's immediate vicinity.

  She moved him not a moment too soon.

  An instant later one of the ghosts came barreling out of the mist and caught hold of Katya. Tammy didn't see the attacker's face, but she heard the guttural cry which escaped him as he swung his captive around to face the fog.

  Katya struggled, but he had her arms pinned behind her, and despite her considerable strength, he was the stronger.

  "Fuck you, Ramon!" she screamed.

  She made a second attempt to wrest herself free of Navarro's grip, and by sheer vigor succeeded in liberating one of her arms; the one with the knife. She then stabbed wildly at the man who had hold of her: Ramon Navarro. The knife slid into his side, and there it lodged.

  Before she could retrieve it he had caught hold of her flailing arm and had pinned it again. Though he had very firm hold of her she still continued to struggle and curse, giving up on English in favor of Romanian. And the
n, after perhaps thirty seconds of Romanian curses, she gave up completely, and fell silent.

  For a moment Tammy thought Navarro had killed her, her silence was so sudden and complete. But—as had always been the case in this house— the truth was not so simple.

  The curtain of fog shifted, as though several breezes had pierced it at the same moment. And then, like a troupe of actors appearing to take their final bow, the rest of the revenants began to appear from the mist; four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve—

  Their eyes were on Katya; all of them, on Katya.

  Now she began to struggle with fresh fervor, her movements chaotic and panicky, like those of a trapped animal. Much to Tammy's surprise, Navarro let her go. She turned on him, instantly, reaching for the knife that was still protruding from his side. But before she could catch hold of it he reached out and grabbed the front of Katya's dress. Then he pulled, tearing the light pink fabric away from her body and exposing her breasts.

  The look on her face changed, her fury apparently mellowing. Navarro bent forward and put his face between her breasts.

  She let out a light laugh, which was surely artificial, but nevertheless passed for the real thing well enough. He responded by licking the passage of flawless skin up to her throat, wetting it until it shone. Her nipples, aroused by his touch, were hard. Her eyes flickered closed as she murmured something in Romanian; words of appreciation to judge by their tone. Encouraged he moved his mouth down from her throat to her left breast; and as he did so he slipped his arms beneath her legs, and lifted her up.

  The ghosts still assembling behind her raised their heads, watching her elevation.

  She was laughing for real now, her head thrown back in abandon. Navarro was no longer licking her; he was putting all his effort into lifting her up, higher and higher still, until Katya and her laughter and her shining breasts were above his head.

  Katya opened her eyes. The laughter suddenly passed away from her face, as she realized what he'd done. Again, she spoke in Romanian, but this time the words were not so appreciative. Nor did she have long to speak them, before Navarro threw her to the assembled crowd.

  She seemed to hang for a long moment in the space between her deliverer's arms and the hands of those who were ready and eager to receive her.

  Then she fell.

  Down, down into their open arms; down to be caught by her dead, patient friends, who'd waited so very long to enjoy her hospitality again, and had been so bitterly disappointed.

  Finally, after all these years—all her cruelties, all her games, all her indifference—they had her.

  She screamed as they laid their cold hands on her flesh; shrieked like a little girl being violated. They ignored her protests, as she had ignored them over the years.

  They pulled her hair, so that it came out at the roots. They ripped at her smooth, sweet flesh, which showed no sign of the toll the years had taken on the rest of the world. They bit off her nipples, they tore off her labia, like shreds of tender meat, and shoved the pieces down her throat to silence her.

  Death had not made them kind. Time had not made them kind. Years of sitting in the Canyon—the Santa Anas in one season, rain in another, crucifying heat in another: none of it had made them kind.

  They pulled at her as though she were a perfect little doll that they'd been given and were now fighting over. The trouble was, she wasn't designed for such careless handling. She tore too quickly.

  In a matter of seconds what had once been Katya Lupi was a ruin: they broke her arms so that the bones poked through; they tore at her sex so that the gaping, lipless slit ran half way up her stomach. She had spat out her labia and now attempted to call them by name, to eke out a little mercy.

  But they had none to give.

  They had planned this martyrdom for years; each playing his or her horrid part. Someone got his fingers beneath the skin of her face and worked it off, inch by ghastly inch, leaving only the pinkness of her eyelids in a mass of red muscles. Two others (women, working together in smiling harmony) unseated her breasts from the bone, so that they hung down like sacks of fat, while the blood poured from the wounds where her nipples had been.

  And then—perhaps sooner than they'd wanted or planned—her body gave out.

  Her shrieks ceased. Her death-dance ceased.

  She hung in their arms like something that had once made sense but would never make sense again.

  Just to be sure there was no more fun to be had with her, Virginia Maple, who'd been the second victim of the scourge of stars that had begun with the death of Rudolph Valentino, drove her hand into the dead woman's mouth, and with the strength death and hatred had lent her, clawed out a fistful of the woman's brains, which she threw at the tiles.

  There they spattered, holding for a moment before sliding to the ground. Meanwhile someone else had gone in through her womb and pulled out her innards, like a magician's colored handkerchiefs coming one after the other (yellow, purple, red, brown), the coils of her guts, her stomach, and all the rest attached with loose strings of tissue and fat.

  Tammy saw it all.

  It was a good deal more than she wanted to see; but no less than her eyes could take in. Not once did she look away, though every second that it continued she told herself she should do so, because this was just a common atrocity now. It was nothing to look at, and nothing to be proud of looking at.

  But when it was over, and the ghosts dragged Katya's disemboweled remains away into the fog, to put to whatever grotesque purpose their anger still demanded, she at least knew that the bitch was finally dead. She voiced that opinion, and of course Jerry—never one to sweeten things unnecessarily—replied: "Things are never the way you think they'll be in Coldheart Canyon. We'll see how dead she really is."

  When they went upstairs, Maxine was in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with a blank expression on her face. She looked extremely weary, as though the toll of recent events had taken fifteen years off her life. She wouldn't get up, so Jerry went down on his haunches and started to quietly talk to her.

  Finally she spoke. She'd had every intention of coming downstairs to help them, she told him, tears streaming down her face, but then the noises started, those terrible noises, and she could no longer bring herself to do it. She went on in the same fashion for a while, circling on herself.

  "Why don't you try to get her to stand up?" Tammy suggested to Jerry. Then she went to pay her respects to Todd.

  The Golden Boy was lying where he'd fallen, more or less; looking peaceful, more or less. Eyes closed, mouth open; blood shining on the ground around his head.

  During the early years of her infatuation, Tammy had had dreams in which she would touch him. There'd been nothing sexual in these touches; or at least nothing explicitly so. Just his being there in an ordinary room, and saying to her, it's okay, you can come over here, you can touch me. That had been the sum of it.

  She'd always woken from those dreams with such a profound yearning in her heart: a yearning to confirm his existence in her waking world, simply by one day getting the chance to really touch him. Just to know that he wasn't simply a game played with light, but a real thing, of flesh and blood.

  Now here she was, and here he was, and she could touch him all she liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.

  What she'd been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be found. He'd gone, and what remained, as she'd just seen in the room below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.

  She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say good-bye to it, and finally—unable to resist the force of instinct—saying it anyway. Then she returned to the kitchen, where she found that Jerry had succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the fridge for something cold for her to drink.

  "I'm afraid there's only beer," he said. "Oh no, wait. There's some milk here too. You want some milk?"

  "Milk," she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like
a child's eyes. "Yes. A glass of milk."

  Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down, staring out of the window between gulps. "As soon as you're ready," Jerry prompted her, "we should go. Yes?" She nodded as she drank.

  There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.

  "Eppstadt?" Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk. "What happened to Eppstadt?"

  "I told you," Tammy reminded her.

  "Oh yes. He's dead, isn't he?"

  "Yes, he's dead."

  "And the waiter?"

  "Joe?"

  "Yes, Joe."

  "He's dead too."

  There was a long silence between them then, while Maxine emptied her glass, which gave Tammy an unhappy moment to picture the bodies that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.

  "We should be thankful," Jerry said.

  "For what?" Maxine wanted to know.

  "For getting out of here alive."

  "Let's be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard," she said, a little of the old Maxine showing, "not before."

  The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of black lightning.

  They got into Tammy's car, and drove down the hill. Maxine's spurt of fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but Tammy was having none of it.

  "Shush," she said, half gently, half not. "We're not having any of that, you hear? It's over, Maxine. It's over."