Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "Yes you do," she said to him.

  "Okay I do. I'm dead, right. Right?"

  "Yeah."

  "I knew it," he said, with the grim tone of a man who was having bad news confirmed. "I mean, I knew. As soon as I looked in the mirror, and I saw I wasn't fucked up anymore, I thought: I'm like the others in the Canyon. So I went out to look for them."

  "Why?"

  "I wanted to talk to somebody about how it all works. Being dead but still being here; having a body; substance. I wanted to know what the rules were. But they'd all gone." He stopped playing with himself and stared at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. "There were just those things left—"

  "The children?"

  "Yeah. And they were droppin' like flies."

  "We saw. They 're all around the house."

  "Ugly fucks," Todd said. "I know why too."

  "Why what?"

  "Why they were droppin'."

  "What?"

  He licked his lips and frowned, his eyes becoming hooded. "There's something out there, Maxine. Something that comes at night." His voice had lost all its strength. "It sits on the roof."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I don't know what it is, but it scares the shit out of me. Sitting on the roof, shining."

  "Shining?"

  "Shining, like it was a piece of the sun." He suddenly started to make a concentrated effort to bury his erection, like a little boy abruptly obsessed with some trivial ritual: two handfuls of dirt, then another two, then another two, just to get it out of sight. It didn't work. His cock-head continued to stick out, red and smooth. "I don't want it to see me, Maxine," he said, very quietly. "The thing on the roof. I don't want it to see me. Will you tell it to go away?"

  She laughed.

  "Don't laugh at me."

  "I can't help it," she said. "Look at you. Sitting in a sackful of dirt with a hard-on talking about some light—"

  "I don't even know what it is," he said. Maxine was still laughing at the absurdity of all this. "I'll tell Tammy to do it," he said. "She'll do it for me. I know she will." He kept staring at the crack of light between the drapes. "Go and get her. I want to see her."

  "So I'm dismissed, am I?"

  "No," he said. "You can stay if you want or you can go if you want to. You've seen me, I'm okay."

  "Except for the light."

  "Except for the light. I'm not crazy, Maxine. It's here."

  "I know you're not crazy," Maxine said.

  He looked straight back at her for the first time. The light he'd been staring at had got into his eyes somehow, and was now reflected out toward her—or was that simply the way all ghosts looked? She thought perhaps it was. The silvery gaze that was both beautiful and inhuman.

  "I suppose we both could be dreaming all this," he went on. "They don't call these places dream palaces for nothing. I mean ... I was dead, wasn't I? I know I was dead. That bitch killed me . . ." His voice grew heavy as he remembered the pain of his final minutes; not so much the physical pain, perhaps, as the pain of Katya turning on him, betraying him.

  "Well, for what's it's worth," Maxine said, "I'm sorry."

  "About what?"

  "Oh, a thousand things. But mainly leaving you when I did. It was Tammy who pointed it out. If I hadn't gone and left you, perhaps none of this would have happened."

  "She said that to you?" Todd replied, with a smile.

  "Yep."

  "She's got a mouth on her when something strikes her."

  "The point is: she was right."

  Todd's smile faded. "It was the worst time of my life," he said.

  "And I made it worse."

  "It's all right," he said. "It's over now."

  "Is it really?"

  "Yes. Really. It's history."

  "I was so tired," Maxine said.

  "I know. Tired of me and tired of who you'd become, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "I don't blame you. This town fucks people up." He was looking at her with that luminous gaze, but it was clear his thoughts were wandering. "Where's Tammy, did you say?"

  "She went downstairs."

  "Will you please go get her for me?"

  "Oh please now, is it?" she said, smiling. "You have changed."

  "You know what starts to happen if you stay here long enough?" he said, apropos of nothing in particular.

  "No, what?"

  "You start to have these glimpses of the past. At least I do. I'm sitting here and suddenly I'm dreaming I'm on a mountain."

  "On a mountain?"

  "Climbing, this sheer cliff."

  "That can't have been a memory, Todd. Or at least it can't have been a real mountain. You hated heights, don't you remember?"

  He took his gaze off her and returned it to the crack between the drapes. Plainly, this news made him uncomfortable, questioning as it did the nature of his recollections.

  "If it wasn't a real mountain, what was it?"

  "It was a fake, built on one of the soundstages at Universal. It was for The Big Fall."

  "A movie I was in?"

  "A movie. A big movie. Surely you remember?"

  "Did I die in it?"

  "No, you didn't die in it. Why do you want to know?"

  "I was just trying to remember last night, what movies I'd made. I kept thinking if the light has to collect me, and I have to leave, and I have to tell it what movies I made—" He glanced at the wall beside the bed where he'd scrawled a list—in a large, untutored scrawl—of some of the titles of his films. It was by no means comprehensive; proof perhaps of a mind in slow decay. Nor were the titles he had remembered entirely accurate. Gunner became Gunman for some reason, and The Big Fall simply Fallen. He also added Warrior to the list, which was wishful thinking.

  "How many of my pictures did I die in, then?"

  "Two."

  "Why only two? Quickly."

  "Because you were the hero."

  "Right answer. And heroes don't die. Ever, right?"

  "I wouldn't say ever. Sometimes it's the perfect ending."

  "For example?"

  "A Tale of Two Cities."

  "That's old. Anyway, don't quibble. The point is: I don't care about what the light wants. I'm the hero."

  "Oh, I get where this is headed."

  "I'm not going, Maxine."

  "Suppose it wants to take you somewhere better?"

  "Like where?"

  "I don't know . . ."

  "Say it. Go on. You see . .. you can't even say it."

  "I can say it. Heaven. The afterlife."

  "Is that where you believe it wants me to go?"

  "I don't know where it wants you to go, Todd."

  "And I'm never going to find out because I'm not going to go. I'm the hero. I don't have to go. Right?"

  What could she say to this? He had the idea so very firmly fixed in his head that it wasn't going to be easily dislodged.

  "I suppose if you put it that way," she said, "you don't have to go anywhere you don't want to."

  He put his heel behind a small portion of dirt and pushed it off the edge of the bed. It rattled as it rained down on the bare boards.

  "It's all bullshit anyway," he said.

  "What's bullshit?"

  "Movies. I should have done something more useful with my life. Donnie was right."

  "Donnie?"

  "Yes." He suddenly looked hard at her. "Donnie was real, wasn't he? He was my brother. Tell me I didn't dream him."

  "No, you didn't dream him."

  "Oh good. He was the best soul I ever met in my life. Sorry, but he was."

  "No, he was your brother. It's good you love him."

  "Hmm." A silence; a long silence. Then: "Life would be shit if I'd just dreamed him."

  EIGHT

  At the bottom of the stairs Tammy discovered that the entire sub-structure of the house—the floor once occupied by the Devil's Country—was now reduced to heaps of rubble, with a few support pillars here and there, which
were presumably the only things keeping the house from collapsing upon itself completely. Seeing the tenuous state of things, Tammy was tempted to go straight back upstairs to warn Maxine, but then she figured that there was probably no tearing urgency. The house had managed to stay upright in the weeks since the ghosts had wreaked this havoc, and wasn't likely to collapse in the next five minutes: she would risk looking around for a little while, just to be sure she'd understood as much of this mystery as was comprehensible before she turned her back on it forever.

  The last few steps of the stairway had been torn away by the revenants' assault, but there was a heap of its own rubble directly beneath it, so it wasn't much of a leap for her. Even so, she landed awkwardly, and slid gracelessly down the side of the heap, puncturing her ankles and calves on the corners of the shattered tiles.

  She stumbled away from the bottom of the stairs and through the doorway, the naked framework of which was still standing, surprisingly enough, though the walls to the right and left of it were virtually demolished, and the ceiling brought down, exposing a network of pipes and cables. There was very little light, beyond the patch in which she stood, which had leaked in from the turret. Otherwise, it was murky in every direction. She strayed a little distance from the doorway, taking care not to hobble herself on a larger piece of masonry, and careful too not to lose her bearings.

  Every now and again something on a higher floor would creak or grind, or somewhere in the darkness around her she'd hear a patter of dry plaster-dust. Then the creaking would stop, the pattering would stop, and her heart would pick up its normal rhythm again.

  Of one thing she was pretty certain: there were no ghosts here. They'd wreaked their comprehensive havoc and gone on their melancholy way, leaving the house to creak and settle and eventually, when it could no longer support its own weight, collapse.

  She'd seen enough. She moved back to the doorway and returned through it to the stairs, climbing over the rubble onto the lowest step. The staircase swayed ominously as she heaved herself onto it, and she saw that it had become disconnected from the wall a few feet up and was therefore "floating," a fact she had failed to grasp during her descent. She ascended with a good deal more caution and reached the relatively solid ground at the top of the stairs with an inwardly spoken word of thanks.

  The door to the master bedroom was open, she saw. A moment later, Maxine emerged and beckoned her to come up.

  "Todd's here and he wants to see you," she explained.

  "Is he all right?" Tammy asked, fully realizing, even as she said this, that it was a damn-fool question to ask about a man who'd been recently murdered.

  By way of reply Maxine made a strange face, as though she didn't have the least clue what the man in the master bedroom was up to.

  "You should just come up and see for yourself," she said.

  As they crossed on the stairs Maxine took the opportunity to whisper: "I hope to hell you can make more sense of him than I could."

  "Hello, Tammy."

  Todd was lying in the bed, with a pile of dirt covering his lower half. There was dirt on the floor too; and on his hands.

  "You're a mess," she remarked brightly.

  "I've been playing in the mud."

  "Can I open the drapes a little, or put on a lamp? It's really gloomy in here."

  "Put on a lamp if you really must."

  She went to the table in the corner and switched on the antiquated lamp, doing so tentatively given her problem with the electricity on the lower floor. Then she went to look out of the narrow gap between the drapes. Maxine had been right; the evening was coming on quickly. Already the opposite side of the Canyon was purple-gray, and the sky above it had lost all its warmth. There were no stars yet, but the moon was rising in the north-eastern corner of the Canyon.

  "Don't look out there," Todd said.

  "Why not?"

  "Just close the drapes. Please."

  She obviously wasn't quite quick enough for him, because he sprang out of bed, scattering dirt far and wide. His sudden movement startled her a little. It wasn't that she was afraid of him exactly; but if death emphasized people's natural propensities, as it seemed it did, then there was a good chance he'd be wilder in death than he had been alive. He took the drape from her hand—snatched it, almost—and pulled it closed.

  "I don't want to see what's out there," he said. "And neither do you."

  She looked down at his groin. How could she help herself? He was as hard as any man she'd laid eyes on, his dick moving even though he was standing still, bobbing to the rhythm of his pulse.

  It would be ridiculous, she thought, not to mention it. Like his standing there with a pig under his arm, and making no reference to that.

  "What's that in honor of?" she said, pointing down at the pulsing length. "Me?"

  "Why, would you like it?"

  "It's covered in dirt."

  "Yeah." He took hold of the lower four inches of his dick and began to brush the soil off the top four, twisting his dick round (in a manner that looked painful to Tammy) so that he could fetch out the particles of dirt in the ridges of his circumcision scar.

  "I didn't think I'd see you again," he said, as he worked. He let his dick go. It thumped against his belly before settling back into its head-high position. "I was beginning to think this was my only friend," he said. He knocked his dick sideways with a little laugh.

  "I'm sorry," Tammy said. "I wasn't feeling well enough to come before now."

  Todd wandered back over to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. More dirt fell onto the floor. He folded his arms, bunching the muscles of his shoulders and chest.

  "Are you mad at me?" she said.

  "A little, I guess."

  "Because I didn't visit?"

  "Yeah."

  "I wouldn't have made very good company. I thought I was going crazy."

  "You did?" He was interested now. "What happened?"

  "I locked myself up in my house. I wouldn't see anybody. I was just about ready to kill myself."

  "Oh shit," he said. "There's no reason to do that. All the bad times are over, Tammy. You can go off and live your life."

  "What life? I don't have a life," she sighed. "Just that stupid little home filled with Todd Pickett memorabilia."

  "You could sell it all."

  "I'm going to, trust me. Maybe take a cruise around the world."

  "Or better still, stay up here with me."

  "I don't think—"

  "I mean it. Stay here."

  "Have you been downstairs?"

  "Not recently. Why?"

  "Because this house is going to fall down, Todd. Very soon."

  "No it isn't," he said. "Did you know there are dozens of small earthquakes in California every day? Well there are. And this place is still standing."

  "It doesn't have any bottom floor left, Todd. Katya's guests dug it all up."

  He turned to the bed, and started to pull armfuls of the dirt off the sheet.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Persuading you to stay," he said, still pulling at the earth. When he had almost all the dirt removed from the bed he pulled the sheet out and went around the other side of the bed, throwing the corners of the sheet into the middle, and then bundling up both sheet and dirt. He pushed the bundle off the bed, and got up onto the clean mattress, sitting with his head against the board, and his legs crossed. His balls were tight and shiny. His dick was hard as ever. He gave her a lascivious grin.

  "Climb aboard," he said.

  Here, she thought, was an invitation in a million. And there would have been a time, no doubt, when she would have swooned at the very idea of it.

  "I think you should cover yourself up," Tammy said, keeping the tone friendly, but firm. "Haven't you got a pair of pants you can wear?"

  "You don't want this?" he said, running his fingers over the smooth head of his cock.

  "No," she said. "Thank you."

  "It's because I'm dead, isn't
it?"

  She didn't reply to him. Instead she wandered through to the closet— which was enormous; barely a tenth of it was filled—and started to go through the trousers and jeans on the hangers, and found an old, much-patched pair of jeans, their condition suggesting that he was fond of them, because he'd had them fixed so often.

  As she pulled them off the hanger she heard a sound on the roof, like something scraping over the Spanish tiles.

  "Did you hear that?" she called through to Todd.

  There was no answer from the room next door. Bringing the jeans with her, she made her way back into the bedroom. Todd was no longer on the bed. He had snatched the dirt-stained sheet up off the floor and had wrapped it haphazardly around his body, the result being something between a toga and a shroud, and was now crawling around in the corner of the room in this bizarre costume, his eyes turned up toward the roof. He beckoned Tammy over, putting his forefinger to his lips to ensure her silence. There were more noises on the roof; scraping sounds that suggested the animal, whatever it was, had some considerable bulk.

  "What is it?" she said. "That's not a bird."

  He shook his head, still staring up at the ceiling.

  "What then?"

  "I can't see what it is, it's too bright."

  "Oh so you have looked."

  "Yes of course I've looked," he said, very softly. "Shit, this always happens. It's like they're its chorus."

  He was referring to the coyotes, which had begun a steady round of almost panicked yelpings from the other side of the Canyon. "Whenever the light appears, the damn coyotes start up."

  He had begun to shudder. Not from the cold, Tammy thought, but from fear. It crossed her mind that this was very far from the conventional image of ghost-hunting. The phantom naked and afraid; her proffering a pair of jeans to cover him up.

  "It's come here for me," Todd said, very quietly. "You know that."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "Because I can feel it. In my chest. And in my balls. The first time it came here it actually got into the house. I was asleep, and I woke up with this terrible ache in my balls. And that"—he pointed down between his legs—"was so hard it hurt. I was terrified. But I yelled at it to go away, and off it went. I think I must have startled it."

  "How many times has it been back since that first time?"