Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  Katya glanced round at Todd.

  "Do you mind?"

  "Help yourself," he replied, as though the girl were a plate set before her.

  Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl's thighs, venturing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite reached the place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tantalizing game, and it drove the girl crazy with anticipation.

  "Oh please," she said. "Please, Katya, please."

  Todd stepped a little to the side so as to have a better view of what was unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that now, as she approached the divide of the girl's legs, her nipples stroked her partner's thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl's labia, as though investigating the most exquisite of flowers.

  Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no end to Katya's capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was beginning to get a grasp of the woman, she changed the rules in some subtle fashion and found a new way to astonish him. Was this really the same woman he'd discovered in bed a while ago, looking like a disheveled angel?

  Katya glanced back at him one last time—just to be sure that he was indeed watching her—then she applied her mouth to the girl's flesh.

  The recipient of this tonguing let out a long, contented sigh, stretching out on her bed of hands, opening her legs a little wider. Katya proceeded to press deeper into her, advancing with lickings and nibblings, occasionally seeming to murmur against the woman's sex. The girl was no longer relaxed. She had grabbed fistfuls of the hair of the men who supported her knees, pulling herself up almost into a sitting position one moment then falling back, her body convulsed with little shudders, her tiny nipples hard, her flat belly shiny with sweat.

  Katya slowly escalated the sensations she was inducing in the woman's body until her victim (there was no other word for it) was thrashing and sobbing beneath the tiniest of touches.

  Somewhere in the midst of this, another occupant of the bower, on her knees in the shadows beneath the spread-eagled girl, came forward and freed Todd's erection from his pants. He didn't attempt to dissuade her. The girl took him into her throat and kept him there. The mingling of the sight of Katya working on the girl and this new sensation was almost too much for him. He had to gently ease himself out of the girl's mouth so as not to lose control too quickly.

  She seemed to get the message because she crawled away, beckoning him to follow. He pulled off his shoes and socks, and then hauled down his trousers, stepping out of them as he followed. He doubted Katya had noticed what he was up to: she was too deeply engaged in driving her partner to distraction: the girl's sobs of pleasure were the loudest sound in the vicinity.

  At ground level, beneath the spread shadow of the ecstatic girl, was a sub-world of shadowy bodies, touches and whispers. There were probably a dozen men and women down here, variously intertwined. Todd felt their hands at his backside, his face, his erection; heard an appreciative coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man's palm there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who'd beckoned to him grazing his lips with hers, saying something he couldn't catch.

  He lost sight of her for a little while, then he heard her ahead of him, gasping with delight. Somebody had got his hands on her before him. He felt a spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of sweating bodies, to catch up with her. He'd got it into his head that the nameless girl was his for the having, and he wasn't about to be denied her.

  She wasn't hard to find. In fact she found him: catching hold of his hand and drawing him toward her. The shadow of Katya's sobbing victim spilled across much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and Todd saw that this girl who'd gobbled him down so gluttonously looked barely old enough to be out of her parents' charge. She was dark: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodies. She pulled him eagerly toward her and cupped his face with her hands, bringing his mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around and beneath her, but he was too turned on to pay much attention to such details. He kissed the girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Katya had paused in her ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she'd feel just a little pang of jealousy), and the girl returned his kiss, lavishly.

  Was there something in her kiss—some subtle tang to the juices of her mouth, some coldness to her lips—which would have given away the fact that she was a spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was hotter than most women he'd been naked with; almost feverish. And despite the fact that his eyes had for so long failed to see the ghosts in the Canyon, she—and all of those around him—now seemed absolutely solid.

  His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pursuit; the fact that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off by these spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well, with her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him: what else mattered?

  He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to help him. There was undoubtedly somebody else beneath her, but he or she didn't seem to care that he was kneeling on them.

  "All the way," she insisted.

  He slid into her, as she instructed, all the way to the root, and began to work his hips against her.

  Her cunt was as agile as her throat; he felt a counter-rhythm moving beneath his dick, passing through the lower half of her vulva. The sensation was like nothing he'd ever experienced before; after just a few strokes he was brought to the edge. He slowly pulled out of her, to be sure he didn't ejaculate too quickly.

  "You like that?" she said, putting her hand down between her legs, and guiding him back in.

  "Yes. I like it a lot."

  "Good."

  "But go slowly. Please."

  He let her take him inside again and she threw back her head, expelling a sigh of satisfaction.

  "Go on," she said, her eyes fluttering closed. "All the way. Both of you."

  Both? he thought, raising his head from her breast.

  And as he formed the question he felt an arm, twice, three times as thick as hers, and deeply muscled, reach over and grab his neck.

  He lifted his head as best he could, and saw the face of a man over the girl's shoulder. She was apparently lying on him, her back against his chest. He was black, and handsome, even in the shadows.

  "She's good," he said, smiling. "Yeah?"

  Tentatively Todd reached down into the moist muddle between their legs. He felt himself, hard as ever; and then, further back, buried in the girl's ass, the other man's dick. So that was what he had been feeling as he moved inside her. It wasn't a muscular contraction; it was the black man sliding in and out of her. In any other situation he would have been repulsed; would have pulled out and retreated. But this was the Canyon;

  Katya's Eden without the serpent. The part of him that would have been revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him harder thinking about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man; the fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his hand up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the black man's wrist, tightening the three-way knot.

  The man laughed.

  "You like that?" he said.

  "I like that."

  "Good," he said, licking the girl's neck, but keeping his eyes fixed hungrily on Todd. "'Cause we like to get real crazy."

  Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played her until she started to scream with ecstasy.

  Somewhere in the midst of this, the girl Katya was pleasuring began to utter gut-wrenching cries. A little time later Katya must have had mercy on her, and allowed her to be carried off, because when Todd was next getting close to coming (for the fifth or sixth time) he looked away from the blissed-out faces beneath him, and saw Katya sitting among the jasmine and the honeysuckle, with a young man lying naked at her feet, covering them with reverential kisses.


  She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a cigarette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then—before she could choose to either return the smile or ignore it—he fell back into the bliss of his ménage-a-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was like, then the living had a lot to learn.

  FIVE

  Tonight was one of those nights when Marco had decided to get drunk. "An honorable occupation," as his father had always said. He didn't like to drink in company; in truth, he didn't much like company at all. People in this town were full of bullshit (his boss included, half the time) and Marco didn't want to hear it. He'd come out to Los Angeles after his career in professional wrestling had come to a premature conclusion, half-thinking he might have a crack at acting. Then someone had suggested that personal security might be a good job for a man like himself, since he not only looked intimidating, but had the moves to back up his appearance. So Marco had joined an agency, and after working for a succession of spoiled-brat movie stars who treated him as though he were something they'd just found on their shoe, he was ready to head for home. Then, within days of his planned departure, the job with Todd Pickett had come along.

  It turned out to be a perfect match. He and Todd hit it off from the start. They had the same taste in girls, cars and whisky, which was more or less the contents of Marco's fantasy world.

  Tonight, he wanted a girl, and was tempted to go out, hit the clubs on the Strip, see if he got lucky. If not there was always the credit card: he had no qualms about paying for sex. It certainly beat the five-fingered widow.

  But before he went out he always liked to get mellow with a whisky or two: it made him more sociable. Besides, there was something strange about the house tonight, though he didn't know what. Earlier on, he'd been tempted to go out and take a look around, just to be sure they didn't have any intruders, but by now the whisky had got him feeling too lazy to be bothered. Fuck it, they should get another dog. Dempsey had been a great early warning system. As soon as anyone came anywhere near the house he'd go crazy. Tomorrow, Marco thought as he headed down from his bedroom to get a fresh bottle of whisky, he'd talk to Todd again about buying a pup, using the security angle to get past Todd's loyalty to Dempsey.

  He found the whisky, and poured himself a glass, taking it neat in one swallow. Then he looked at his watch. It was eleven-twenty. He'd better get moving. Los Angeles was an early town, he'd discovered, especially mid-week. If he didn't hurry he'd be too late to catch any of the action.

  He started back upstairs to fetch his wallet, but halfway up he heard a noise at the bottom of the stairwell. It sounded like a door opening and closing.

  "Boss?" he yelled down. "Is that you?"

  There was no reply. Just the door, continuing to open and close, though there was no wind tonight to catch it.

  "Huh," he said to himself. He went up, found his wallet, picked up his whisky glass from the kitchen on the way back down, and descended the stairs.

  There were plenty of places around the house he hadn't explored: one of them was the very lowest level of the house, which Jerry had told him was just store-rooms. Nor had he advised using them. They were damp and anything put down there would be mildewed in a month, he said.

  A few steps from the bottom of the stairs, Marco emptied his glass, and set it down. He was now drunk, he realized as he stood upright. Not par-alytically; just nicely, pleasantly toasted. Smiling a little smile of self-congratulation for having achieved this blissful state, he continued down.

  It was cold here, in the bowels of the house. But it wasn't the damp cold that Jerry had warned him about. This was an almost-bracing cold: like a late-autumn night in his hometown of Chicago. He went down the little corridor that led from the bottom of the stairs, at the end of which was the noisy door which had brought him down here. What the hell was making it open and close that way?

  He felt the answer on his face the closer he got to the door. There was a wind blowing down here, unlikely as that seemed, and it smelled not of small, mildewed rooms, but of wide green spaces.

  For the second time in this journey, Marco said: "Huh."

  He pushed open the door. There was complete darkness on the other side, but it was a high, wide darkness, his gut told him; and the wind that gusted against him came—though this was beyond reason—across a stretch of open land.

  He wished he hadn't drunk the whiskies now. Wished he had his senses completely under his control, so that he could assess this phenomenon clearly.

  He put his hand around the corner of the door, looking for a light switch. There wasn't one; or at least there wasn't one his fingers could find. Never mind. This would be a mystery for tomorrow. For now he'd just close the door and go back to his drinking.

  He reached in and caught hold of the doorhandle. As he clasped it there was a flicker of light in the depths of the room. No, not of light, of lightning: a fragmentary flicker which was followed by three much longer flashes, in such quick succession they were almost a single flash.

  By it, he saw the space from which the wind came, and had his instincts confirmed. Wide it was, and high. The thunderhead which spat the lightning was miles away, across a landscape of forest and rock.

  "Oh, Jesus," Marco said.

  He reached out for the doorhandle, caught hold of it, and slammed the door closed. There was a lock, but no key. Still, it seemed firmly enough closed, at least until he'd found Todd, and shown him.

  He started yelling Todd's name as he ran up the stairs, but there was no reply. He went to the master bedroom, knocked, and entered. The room was empty, the French doors to the balcony open, the drapes billowing.

  He went to the balcony. The wind that was moving the drapes was a California wind: warm, fragrant, gentle. It was not remotely like the wind that had blown against his face in the room below. That was a wind from a different country.

  Todd was not on the balcony. But once Marco was out there he heard the sound of voices from somewhere in the Canyon. Women's voices, mostly, laughing. And lights, running between the trees.

  "Sonofabitch," Marco said.

  The boss was apparently having a party, and he hadn't invited Marco.

  The evening was getting stranger by the minute. He went downstairs, through the kitchen and out to the back door. Anxiety had soured the drink in his stomach, and as he opened the back door a wave of nausea suddenly overcame him. He had no time to get outside. He puked on the threshold, the force of the feeling enough to fold his legs up beneath him.

  He gazed weakly down at the splattered whisky and meatballs on the ground, his eyes vaguely comprehending the intricacy of five nails that were driven into the partially rotted wood of the threshold.

  Then, from the darkness on the other side of the threshold there came a soft, infinitely sorrowful voice. The voice of a lost girl.

  "Let me in," she said.

  Marco looked up, his head still spinning. There was more vomit gurgling in his belly; he could feel his system preparing to revolt again. He tried to make sense of the girl who'd just begged entrance to the house, narrowing his eyes to see if he could separate her from the shadows.

  There she was: a young woman with a face that his sickened eyes could not entirely fix nor be certain of, but who seemed to be more than passingly pretty. She had long blonde hair and pale, almost white, skin; and as suited her tone of supplication she was on her knees, her pose a mirror image of his own. She was wearing what appeared to be a man's shirt, which was unbuttoned. Had Marco been feeling more like himself, he might have hoped to persuade her to take the shirt off before he took pity on her. But the nausea overwhelmed all other responses: the girl's near-nakedness only made his belly churn harder. He looked away from her, hoping to postpone the next bout of vomiting until she was out of sight.

  She plainly took his averted eyes as a sign of rejection.

  "Please," she said to him again, "I just want to get back into the house. You have to help me."

&nb
sp; "I'm in no condition—" he started, looking up at her to try to communicate with his expression just how dire he felt, but the few words he'd begun to say were enough to bring about a sudden and calamitous change in her.

  She let out a shriek of frustration and rage, volume and shrillness uncanny. He felt his gorge rising, and as the woman's din reached its inhuman height, he puked up what was left of his dinner.

  The worst was over now; but there was more to come from the woman outside. Feeling his stomach settling, he chanced a look up at her. It was an error. She was still letting out the remnants of that godless shriek of hers, and it seemed—at least to Marco's sickened and bewildered eyes—that the noise was taking some grotesque toll on her body. Her face—which had been so beautiful just minutes before—had become a gray, smeared form: her forehead swollen so that she looked cretinous, her eyes pulled into empty slits, her mouth running with saliva from its turned-down corners. Her oversized shirt had fallen open to reveal breasts that were gray scraps of dead flesh hanging on the cage of her bones. Beneath them, he seemed to see her innards in frenzied motion, as though she had snakes nesting in her.

  It was too much for Marco's already traumatized senses. He didn't give any further thought to finding Todd—Christ, Todd was probably part of this insanity.

  With his heels sliding in the mess he'd made, he hauled himself to his feet—half-expecting the abomination on the other side of the threshold to come after him. But for some reason she kept her distance, her transformation now so far advanced she was completely unrecognizable as the woman he'd first laid eyes on.

  He retreated down the passageway—still assuming this nightmare might come after him. But she matched his retreat with one of her own, melting into the shadows. Marco wasn't reassured. She'd probably gone to find others; he didn't want to be here when they came back. He raced into the kitchen and picked up his car keys, which were on the table. He gave a moment's consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forgo cleanliness in favor of making a fast exit.