by Kage Baker
“You could say that,” he growled, mopping spilled coffee from his chin with one hand. “It’s just the biggest damn one on the continent, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I said. “Does that mean I can’t go there?”
“Not alone, you can’t, you of all people, and not without the right field gear. What the hell do you want there, anyway?”
“Well . . . it has all those steep isolated canyons and drastic heights and depths. There are probably a lot of rare endemic species of plants growing there. I’d be stupid not to look for them. And what do you mean, me of all people?”
He looked over uneasily at Einar, who was grooming Marcus, and at Juan Bautista, who was watching him. “Okay,” he said in a lower voice, not answering my question. “I guess there’s stuff back up in there worth collecting at that. But you’re going to take the following precautions, understand? Now listen carefully . . .”
Two hours later:
“God, I feel stupid,” I moaned to Einar as we approached the canyon on horseback. “What if mortals see us?”
“We shoot ’em,” he said glumly. I hoped he was joking. We were wearing absurd-looking helmets with Crome filter lenses and a lot of other cunning little mechanisms built into them with no consideration for style or convenience. We wore gauntlets full of wiring and large, ugly, and ill-fitting boots with circuitry patterns on the outside. Things like Batman’s utility belt were cinched about our waists. To make matters worse, we were tethered each to the other by a long silver line. If one of our horses startled and bolted, somebody would be dragged.
“We look like extras in a cheap science-fiction film,” I complained.
“In a damned expensive science-fiction film,” Einar retorted. “You know how much it cost to make this stuff, here in 1862? And these are the only sets of this gear in the continental U.S. at this time. They were made just so we could go into Laurel Canyon, if we had to. So enjoy the fantasy. Tell yourself we’re explorers on a forbidden planet or something.”
“It can’t be that weird, no matter what Porfirio says,” I muttered. But as we came to the entrance of the canyon, I fell silent.
I saw a narrow passage between soaring walls of granite, thinly grown with whatever little plants could cling to their vertical surfaces. The way in followed a creek bed through which water was still cascading down. From the wreckage of broken trees and from the high-water mark on the cliff faces, you knew that this was no place to stand during the winter floods. Water must come thundering down that channel like cannon fire. A dramatic scene, with the leaning dead cottonwoods and the majestic atmosphere, the mountains impossibly high on either side. A little trail led into the canyon, a sandy embankment on the left-hand side above the water, and disappeared into dark trees.
Einar unslung his shotgun and cocked it. Cautiously we rode in.
“Now, remember,” said Einar, “don’t scan. Every conditioned reflex and instinct you’ve got is telling you to, but don’t. Let the helmet do it for you. If you try, yourself, you’re going to pick up data you won’t believe.”
“This is nuts,” I said, as my horse picked its way timidly. “How are mortals going to live here? But they are, aren’t they? And this is right in the heart of Hollywood.”
“I know,” he said. “They just . . .become part of the strangeness. Raymond Chandler wrote about it in his Philip Marlowe stories, but he didn’t tell half of what he knew. There’ll be a murder that happens right up there”—he pointed up a nearly vertical slope—”that he writes about in The Big Sleep. But it doesn’t happen the way he says, it never makes the papers, and it’s never solved, either. The guy isn’t a pornography dealer, he’s a high-ranking member of a hermetic brotherhood. There’s a brilliant flash and a scream, all right, and a naked girl and some ancient earrings with a curse on them. The curse doesn’t make it into the book, but a lot of the other details do.”
“How lurid,” I said, and then started, because I heard a sound I shouldn’t have heard in that place, not for another half century at least. I turned my head to stare down the trail behind us. I knew that sound from cinema: the rattle of an internal combustion engine, the rush of displaced air as something sped toward us, but I had no visual input at all. Forgetting myself, I scanned, and knew there was something approaching. In my desperation I yanked up the Crome screen visor so I could see with my eyes.
“Mistake,” Einar gasped. He was right. Without my visor the place lit up, every tree, rock, shrub, and blade of grass outlined in blue neon. The automobile was lit up like that too, a 1913 Avions Voisin, a lovely, elegant thing except for being glowing blue, slightly transparent, and a little out of place in 1862. Einar leaned over and got a firm grip on my horse’s reins, or I’d have been away from there in an instant. The car zoomed up, till I was right between its bug-eyed headlights, and I got a clear glimpse of the hood ornament in the shape of a rearing cobra.
With a crackle of static the car whooshed through me and on, up the canyon. My mouth was open. Einar managed to reach out and click my visor down. Visual references were once again normal.
“Told you not to scan,” he said reprovingly.
“Was that a ghost?” I asked at last. At least it hadn’t been a sixteenth-century Protestant martyr.
“Or a temporal anomaly, or a hallucination, or—anything. Keep the visor down, don’t scan, and start looking for rare plants now. The sooner you get what you’re after, the sooner we get out of here.”
“Okay,” I said, and we rode on.
The road continued up, clinging to the hillside above the creek bed, and I saw condors wheeling in the sky and deer leaping away from us, and they were really there. I saw a coyote loping along in broad daylight across the canyon, and he was really there too. It was the sounds that dismayed. There were gunshots (which may or may not have been real), and there were more whizzing automobiles, and there was singing and chanting. How was I supposed to look for rare endemic plants with all that going on?
“All right,” I said at last. “I give up. What’s the deal here? And does it get any better, do we ride out of it?”
“No, it gets worse,” Einar said. “We’re still on the edge. We haven’t come to Lookout Mountain Drive yet.”
I frowned. “Lookout Mountain Drive? That sounds familiar.”
“Here’s the explanation as I understand it: weird geology around here. Look at all this decomposing granite. It’s quartz-bearing, crystals all through the rock if you know where to look. There’s another outcropping of high quartz concentration over in what’ll be Griffith Park, and that place has some bizarre happenings of its own, but this place is the mother lode.” Einar turned uneasily in his saddle, starting to scan, and stopped himself with visible effort. Something enormous went snorting and blowing past us, and we heard small trees snapping and big trees being pushed aside.
“I knew it would be bad, but not like this. The local Indians say the canyon was cut through by the God Himself, that He was chasing Coyote who’d stolen the moon, and Coyote had burrowed down under these mountains with it, and God grabbed the mountaintops and ripped them apart, made this long fissure, to get to where the moon was hidden. It was down so deep, though, that God gave up and threw a buffalo gourd up in the sky to be the moon instead, and the old moon’s still buried here somewhere.
“An interesting story, in light of the fact that the biggest damn quartz deposit in the known universe lies about a thousand feet below the intersection of Laurel Canyon Drive and Lookout Mountain Drive. We know it’s there; the Company did radar imaging of the whole area, once they noticed this place is so full of Crome’s radiation, it can wipe out our sensory displays. Apparently there’s a single crystal down there the size of—of that thing that just went stomping by us. And that’s just some of what they found. Nothing supernatural or extraterrestrial, you understand, just the biggest naturally occurring Crome spectral sponge in the world. As near as Dr. Zeus can figure out, it stores Crome’s radiation generated by anything passi
ng over it that has a nervous system. Animals, Indians, and bandits is about all there is now; but as people begin moving in here, there will be a lot more energy absorbed.
“And every so often it discharges, and then all hell breaks loose, and that’s what we’re seeing now,” Einar concluded.
“It figures, that this is supposed to be Coyote’s fault,” I said disgustedly. I saw a bush I didn’t recognize and stopped. Handing the reins to Einar, I slid down and bent to examine it. Yes, it was really there. “But why are we seeing it now? There’s nobody living up here yet to generate all this stuff,” I argued, groping for my collecting gear. Damn this visor anyway. How was I supposed to take readings? “What’s causing the blue lights and the auditory illusions?”
“It could be picking up Crome from us. One theory is that every time it discharges, it sets up a shock wave that puts stress on the temporal field, and the whole fabric of time ripples. My guess is, they’re afraid we might slip through a hole or something, and that’s why the connecting cable. If one of us goes through, the other can pull him out.” Einar lifted his gun to his shoulder involuntarily, then lowered it. “We’re also recording and broadcasting data to Central HQ, I’m sure. So, is that a rare plant?”
“Looks like a mutation of Myrica californica,” I said in satisfaction. “Jackpot, on the first try. Not that I can tell much about it in all this armor.”
“Cut a couple of branches and let’s go, okay?”
“Are you scared?” I looked up at him. My own fear had evaporated the second the bush read positive for mutation. What else might I find up here?
“Me? Hell no, I’d love nothing better than to get myself sucked through a temporal rift into Jurassic times or something.” Einar turned his head, sweeping the area visually. “Let’s move on. Want to see where the Haunted Tavern will be? It’s just up ahead.”
“Neat,” I replied, tucking the specimens into my collecting bag and climbing into the saddle again. We rode on, though unseen sirens screamed past us.
A few hundred feet ahead, the gorge widened to a sort of clearing, with another steep canyon opening to the left. Immense sycamores darkened the way ahead of us. We rode to the center of the clearing. For the moment, all we heard were natural sounds, the creek bubbling to our right, the wind in the leaves.
“Nice spot, isn’t it?” said Einar, actually relaxing a little. “Someone will build a brick commercial building here. The top part will be the Canyon Store, eventually, and a lot of famous rock stars will buy their groceries here. Around the corner and downstairs, though”—he pointed over his horse’s tail—“is where the Haunted Tavern will be. The earliest record of it is as a speakeasy, then later it’s a cozy bar. Nice little watering hole for thirsty movie people going home to Encino after a day at RKO, or going home to Beverly Hills after a day at Universal or Republic. They’ll shortcut through Laurel Canyon with a stop right here. It’s private, it’s unfashionable, it’s hard for wives or reporters or detectives to find them in the little dark basement bar.” He leaned forward in the saddle, and his crazy smile looked crazier than usual under the visor of the absurd helmet.
“Now, you’ve heard the story about John Barrymore’s wake? How, after he dies, a bunch of his drinking buddies steal his body from the funeral parlor and take it with them for one last night on the town? He’s supposed to be carried all over Hollywood during this one long wild night before his funeral. That much is legendary.
“What didn’t make it into the legend was how the party finished up. This part of the story is supposed to have been told to a male nurse at the hospital where W. C. Fields died. According to the nurse, the last stop on the route was this basement bar. The place was locked for the night, but Gene Fowler picked the lock, and they got in. Laid out cash on the bar and mixed themselves drinks. At this point, Barrymore is supposed to have sat up in his coffin and demanded to know where his drink was. They were in a pretty philosophical mood by that time, so they just poured him a martini. I don’t know what’s supposed to have happened after that, but people say . . .”
“What?” I shivered, hearing an invisible glass break.
“Well, the place operates on and off after that. Sometimes it’s a bar, sometimes it’s a restaurant, sometimes it closes down for years at a time. But whenever it’s a bar, sooner or later, John Barrymore comes in for a drink. And once he’s seen, the new owners know they might just as well give notice to the Realtor and move on; because before long the place is packed after hours with the thirsty dead, W. C. Fields and Victor McLaglen and Erroll Flynn, to name but a few. They drink the booze, they break the glasses, they have loud conversations in the parking lot at four A.M. Local residents get mad as hell and call the cops. What can the cops do? No use for the bar’s owners to swear that they close at midnight, either. The place gets shut down again, until the next hapless guy comes along and decides it’s a great place to open a cozy little bar.”
Smash! This time it was a bottle breaking, and my horse shied and started forward.
“Let’s go on,” I said.
We rode up the canyon, with me stopping at frequent intervals to investigate the truly amazing number of unusual endemics that began to occur as we drew closer to Lookout Mountain Drive. I found a purple form of Marah macrocarpus, a variant of Lonicera subspicata with scarlet flowers, and the strangest-looking Baccharis glutinosa I’d ever encountered. I was so absorbed in my discoveries that I paid little attention to the trumpeting mammoths, trolley cars, and bagpipers that passed me on the way. Einar had to reach into his saddlebags, though, where he’d stashed a whole box of Theobromos, the Mexican kind that comes in six round cakes in an octagonal box. He just kept unwrapping them and wolfing them down, working his way through them as though they were rice cakes. As a result, he was mellower than usual by the time we got to Lookout Mountain Drive, and swaying gently in the saddle.
“An’ here it is,” he said, swinging an arm in a half circle. “The strange heart of all strangeness anyplace. Look normal to you? Ah, but we know better.”
Actually it didn’t look normal to me, even through the visor, though it was just a sunny clearing opening up to the sky. There was something a little skewed in the perspective. I couldn’t quite tell how wide the clearing was.
“So this is the mystery spot?” I tried to sound nonchalant.
“Yes, but not some lousy little carney mystery spot with trick angles and optical illusions,” said Einar. “If you took that visor off, this place would light up like Times Square. All kinds of unusual mortals will be drawn here. One guy, he’ll be a naval officer and engineer with a wife who’s a practicing witch. They’ll settle here for a while, and he’ll actually write an exposé of the place. Then he’ll think things over and rewrite it as a piece of science fiction. Did you ever hear of Dr. Montgomery Sherrinford?”
I did a fast access on the name. All that turned up was a footnote in a biography of Aleister Crowley and a half paragraph in a work on theosophy.
“Some kind of Freemason?” I asked.
“Starts out as one. They eject him. He becomes a Rosicrucian, and they throw him out too. Same thing with the Order of the Golden Dawn. Madame Blavatsky gives him the heave-ho, and so do those people up at Summerland. He travels all over the place before he finds Lookout Mountain Drive, but then, man, his luck changes. He builds a kind of temple right there”—Einar pointed to our left—”and he builds a mansion up there on the hill. In later years people will call it Houdini’s mansion, but no—it was built by Dr. Sherrinford. He knows the vibrations on this spot are like nothing else anywhere. Gets himself a cult going, becomes its high priest, lots of spooky goings-on all around this very intersection. A lot of famous players and their bosses too, from the early days of movies, come to ‘services’ here. Not because of the guy’s charisma, but because he has real powers—also he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, metaphorically and otherwise.”
“I never heard about any of this,” I said doubtfully.
> “You have to know where to look, but the references are there. In this correspondence, in that library collection. Anyway, Dr. Sherrinford has this big thing going. Silent-film stars at his beck and call. Blackmail money. Devoted followers who set about the task he sets them, which seems to be tunneling into Laurel Canyon. He gets them looking for the source of the power. He’s never too clear on what it is, but he’s got a good idea where it is. He’ll completely undermine his temple with tunnels. And it seems he gets all the way down to the big crystal, too, because all these rumors start flying around of an incredible discovery and miracles and contact with the other world.
“Now, we know you can’t do anything with Crome’s radiation, not anything useful anyway. Dr. Sherrinford won’t know that. He’ll think it’ll give him power. He builds an underground chapel a thousand feet below, reached by a little elevator going down a shaft, and he takes his disciples down there, and they hold chanting services.
“You know what happens when you have a lot of people generating a Crome-effect field around a spectral sponge. Just like electricity, it absorbs the charge, absorbs the charge, until finally it discharges, boom! And all hell breaks loose, ripples in the temporal field, ghosts, visions, apports, you name it. It happens, or seems to.
“That’s what Dr. Sherrinford’s disciples keep praying for. It’s like a bunch of monkeys in a cage, hitting the same lever over and over again until the bell rings and a bucket of monkey treats are dumped on them. Or it’s like somebody with a cup of nickels playing a slot machine. Mostly Dr. Sherrinford’s crystal spirit ignores its worshipers, but every so often it blasts them with a miracle and a lot of stimulation of the hippocampal region of their brains.
“Harry Houdini is in California making a movie for Lasky, it’s called Terror Island, and he’s doing location shooting over on Catalina. And this guy comes up to him in the restaurant at the Hotel Metropole and tells him about the goings-on at Dr. Sherrinford’s temple and asks if he wants to come attend a service there. It’s implied that the dead speak at these parties.