Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  Of course that wasn't strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures she'd encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil's Country worked upon the anatomies of those who'd ventured there? She vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some considerable time in that godless place, would have something to show for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at least for a while.

  By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.

  "We have to go and report all this to the police," Tammy said. "Together."

  "Now?" Maxine said. "I couldn't possibly."

  "We have to, Maxine. There are bodies up there. We don't want to be accused of murder."

  "They're going to think we're all crazy," Maxine commented.

  "Well, that's easily solved," Jerry said. "We'll bring them up here, and they can see it all for themselves. That'll change their minds."

  "Suppose they do think we're responsible?" Maxine said. "People like to point fingers in this damn town."

  "Well they won't be pointing any fingers at us," Tammy said. "We'll explain."

  "Explain?" Maxine said. "How the hell will we ever explain?"

  "We'll start at the beginning and go on until we're done. We've got nothing to hide."

  "There'll be no end to it," Maxine said. "Now Todd's dead, the press is going to be all over us. They're going to be digging up every sordid little story about him, whether it's true or not. They'll print any piece of garbage that floats down the sewer. It's going to go on for months. And you think in the middle of all this the truth is going to be heard? Forget it. It's going to be a circus."

  "You don't have to be a part of the circus," Jerry said. "None of us do. We can just say no, and walk away. Let them write whatever they want to write. They're going to do it anyway."

  "True enough," Maxine sighed. "I just wanted to try to guard his reputation."

  "Maybe if you'd guarded him a little better when he was still around we wouldn't be in this mess," Tammy said. She caught Maxine's reflection in the mirror; the corners of her mouth turned down in misery. "I'm sorry," Tammy said. "Maybe that was a bit sharp."

  "No," Maxine replied. "I let him down. He needed me and I walked in the opposite direction. Mea culpa."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I'm responsible?" Maxine said. "And I am. Don't think I don't know it."

  Her reply brought an end to the exchange. They drove on in silence until they reached Langley Road, which in turn brought them on to Doheny Drive, and finally down onto Sunset Boulevard.

  It was a busy intersection, the lights slow. They had to wait through three changes, creeping closer to the main tide of traffic; but there was a simple contentment for all three in sitting in the car and watching the buses and the messenger bikes and the Beverly Hills Rolls-Royces drive on past. Life going on, in other words, in its usual way. People going east, people going west, all oblivious to the fact that just a short drive from this loud, bright place was a cleft in the rock of the City of Angels which was deep enough to conceal miracles.

  PART ELEVEN

  The Last Chase

  ONE

  News, like a life-form, is divided into orders and classes and kinds. Thus, what was deemed worthy of note on the front page of Variety (the grosses of Todd Pickett's last four pictures, the fact that his agent, Maxine Frizelle, had been present at the death-scene, some sketchy details about the history of the house in the Canyon) was not thought appropriate for the front page of the LA Times (the fact that there were multiple bodies at the scene, suggesting some vague connection with the horrors of the Manson Murders; a brief synopsis of Todd's career; elsewhere, an obituary, and elsewhere again a sincere, if hastily edited, appreciation of Pickett's contribution to cinema); none of which was again deemed appropriate for The National Enquirer, which put together a special edition centered on the deaths of Todd, Gary Eppstadt and—as they put it—"the unfortunate, unnamed victims who were pulled down into the same spiral of decadence and death that claimed the Hollywood power-players," but padded the issue out with the Old Faithfuls: Haunted Hollywood, The Tragic Deaths of the Young and the Beautiful—Marilyn; James Dean; Jayne Mansfield— "Doomed Souls Who Paid the Ultimate Price for Fame!"; and all this gutter journalism of a high order by comparison with the real bottom-feeders, the journalists of The Globe, who printed, among countless lurid absurdities which they had clearly invented at their editorial meetings, a number of facts that were paradoxically closer to the truth of the events than anything in any other newspaper or magazine. Given their notoriously low standards of veracity, however (The Globe's editors considered crudely-doctored pictures of Pyramids hovering over the Pentagon hard news), the publication of these reports made the truest parts of the story unprintable in any other journal. The facts became tainted by association; poisoned, in fact. If it appeared in The Globe, how could it be true?

  The only items of the story that appeared in every location were those that were related to the hard facts of death in Tinseltown.

  Todd Pickett, everyone agreed, had been on some kind of downward spiral. The cause might be disputed, but the fact that he was no longer the Most Beautiful Man in the World (People Cover, Jan. 1993) or the Most Successful Male Star of the Year (ShoWest, five years running) was not. In the eternal game of snakes-and-ladders that was Hollywood, Todd Pickett had done all the climbing he was ever going to do. If he'd survived, it would all have been downhill from here.

  There was in fact a widely-held opinion which stated that in dying young—even dying violently—Todd had made the best career move of his life. He'd gone while the going was relatively good; and in a fashion that would assure his name was never forgotten.

  "For Todd Pickett fans the world over," Variety opined, "today's tragic news brings the curtain down on a stellar career filled with glorious moments of pure cinematic magic. But there must be many of those admirers who are relieved that their hero will never disappoint them again. His run of spectacular successes (all of which were produced by Keever Smotherman, who died less than a year ago at the age of forty-one) was plainly drawing to an end. All that remained was the sad, and regrettably all-too-common spectacle of a great star eclipsed."

  TWO

  Tammy saw that word everywhere now: eclipsed. It sat hidden in otherwise innocent sentences, waiting to mess with her mind. The instant she saw it she was back in the Devil's Country, staring up at the shape of that black moon obscuring the face of the sun. She could feel the contrary winds against her face. She could hear the sound of horses' hooves, or worse, the wailing of Qwaftzefoni.

  When that happened, she would have to put down whatever it was she was reading that had concealed the treacherous word and direct her attention back to the real world: the room in which she was sitting, the view through the window, the weight of the flesh on her bones.

  Of course, the word wasn't the only trap. Though she'd come back to the house on Elverta Road and valiantly tried to pick up the rhythm of her briefly forsaken life, she knew it would be a long time until the bad times passed away. She'd simply seen too much; and the threads of what she'd seen were intimately woven into the world she'd returned to. Though she'd put all the objects around the house that were connected to Todd (and there were a lot of them) away in the big front bedroom with the rest of her memorabilia, out of sight was not out of mind. She knew she was going to have to deal with all that stuff in a more thorough way before too long; and the prospect weighed heavily upon her.

  Meanwhile, she was alone in the house. Just under three weeks after her return to Sacramento, Arnie had announced that he was moving out in order to move in with Maureen Ginnis, a bottle-blonde who worked as a dispatcher at the FedEx offices at the airport. In a way, Tammy was glad.

  She knew Maureen a little, and she was a nice woman; a better match for Arnie than Tammy had ever been. And having the house to herself— knowing that when
she got up in the morning she didn't need to see anybody or speak to anybody if she didn't want to (and there were days, sometimes four or five in a row, when her mood fell into a kind of trough, and she was so sluggish she could barely keep her eyes open; then others when she would turn on the television and some stupid quiz show would make her bawl like a baby)—made the craziness she felt itching inside her a little easier to cope with, because she didn't have to conceal it from anyone. She could just take the phone off the hook, lock the doors, draw the drapes and act like a crazy lady.

  She got a bad cold a couple of weeks after Arnie left, and bought up a cabinetful of over-the-counter cold, flu, congestion and expectorant medications. They usually made her feel so dopey that she avoided taking them, but in her present situation it scarcely mattered if she felt half-comatose. Having bought the medicines she dosed herself to the gills with cure-all syrups the color of fancy French liqueurs, and went to bed in the middle of the afternoon to sweat it out. It was a bad move. She woke about one in the morning from a dream in which she'd been lying in bed with the goat-boy clamped to her breast, suckling noisily. She could smell the meaty sweetness of her breast-milk as it seeped from the corner of his hairy mouth, and heard the long middle nail of his foot catching on the comforter as he jerked around in animal bliss.

  With the weird logic of dreams she had very reasonably told Qwaftzefoni that she felt feverish and he would have to stop. She had pulled him off her breast with some difficulty, only to discover that he had hold of her hand, the sharp nail of his thumb pressed hard against the pulsing vein in her wrist as though threatening to pop it at a moment's notice. Then he had guided her palm down to the clammy place beneath the curve of his stomach, where his prodigiously veined prick stuck out from folds of infant fat. She felt a row of tiny objects down the underside of his shaft.

  "They're black pearls," he said, before she asked the question. "They'll increase your pleasure."

  In her fever-dream, she barely had time to register what the little bastard was proposing before he was climbing up onto her, her tit spurting in his fist as he milked her, her screams going for nothing. In the hellish heat of the room the spilled milk went bad in a heartbeat, souring on the sheets. It stank as if they'd been soaked in vomit, the stench rising around her with physical weight, as though it might smother her.

  She had begged for the goat-boy to leave her alone, but he clutched her hand so tightly she was afraid he'd break the bones if she didn't obey him. So she had taken hold of his pearl-lined ding-a-ling and proceeded to jerk it.

  "You want it over with quickly?" he had said to her.

  "Yes . . ." she had sobbed, hoping he'd let her go. Men knew how to do it better than women anyway. Arnie had always turned up his nose at the offer of a hand-job. "You never do it right. I'd prefer to do it myself." But there were no easy get-outs here.

  "Then stay still!" the goat-boy had said, flipping over backward, still keeping his grip on her fountaining breast, but relinquishing the enforced masturbation for a grosser game. He was straddling her head now, his thick little legs just long enough to raise the cushy divide of his ass six or seven inches above her nose. The coarse hair on his goaty legs pricked her face. It thickened around his buttocks, and he'd long since given up trying to clean it. The stench made her gag.

  "Open your mouth. Put out your tongue."

  She could bear it no longer. She reached up and grabbed his balls hard, throwing the little fuck forward, so that he was sprawled on the milk-soaked bed. Then she lifted his tail and started to beat his ass with her palm, for all the world like a mother chiding a monstrous child. He started to sob, and shit, the groove of his buttocks filling up with the turd he would have dumped on her face if he'd had the chance. She was past caring about how dirty her hands were. She just kept beating the little fucker, until he had no more tears left, and he was reduced to hiccups.

  No, the hiccups weren't his, they were hers.

  Her eyes fluttered open. The fever had broken, and she was alone in a bed that was damp with all the sweat she'd shed, but otherwise sweet-smelling. The cretinous horror she'd brought from the Devil's Country was gone; shit, hair and all.

  She got up out of bed and flushed all the medicines down the toilet, determined to let the flu pass from her system of its own accord. She was crazy enough, without the aid of medication.

  THREE

  "Jerry."

  "Tammy. My dear. Whatever happened to you? I wondered when you were going to call."

  "You could have called me."

  "Well, to be perfectly honest," he said, "I didn't want to trouble you. Unlike me, you've got a life to live."

  "Well, actually, Arnie left me."

  "Oh, I am sorry."

  "Don't be. It's for the best."

  "You mean it?"

  "I mean it. We weren't meant for one another. It just took us a long time to find out. What about you?"

  "Well, since we made the news I've been invited out to a few more fancy dinners than I used to be. People are curious. So they wine me and dine me and then they casually interrogate me. I don't mind, really. I've met a lot of people, mostly young men, who have a faintly morbid interest in what went on up in the Canyon, which they pass off as an interest in me. I play along. I mean, why not? At my age, you don't argue. Interest is interest."

  "And what do you tell them?"

  "Oh, bits and pieces. I've got quite adept at figuring out who can take what. You know, the ones who say tell me everything are the ones who go clammy when they're told—"

  "Everything?"

  "No. Never everything. I don't think anybody I've met is ready for everything."

  "So how do people respond?"

  "Well, they're usually ready for something fairly wild. If they sought me out in the first place it's because they know something. They've heard some rumor. Some little piece of gossip. So it keeps the conversation interesting. Now: you. What about you? Have you been sharing our adventures with anybody?"

  "No."

  "Nobody?"

  "No. Not really."

  "You should, you know. You can't keep it all bottled up. It's not healthy."

  "Jerry, I live in Rio Linda, Sacramento, not Hollywood. If I started spouting off about going to the Devil's Country my neighbors would probably never talk to me again."

  "Would you care? Be honest."

  "Probably not."

  "What about Rooney?"

  "Who?" Tammy frowned.

  "Rooney. The detective who interviewed us, remember? Over and over."

  "His name was Rooney? I thought it was Peltzer."

  "No, that's one of Maxine's lawyers, Lester Peltzer."

  "Okay. So Peltzer's a lawyer, and Rooney's who?"

  "You haven't heard from him? He's the Detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who first talked to us. Have you been checking your messages?"

  She hadn't but she said she had.

  "Strange," Jerry said. "Because he's called me six or seven times, pressing me for details. Then I called the Department, replying to one of his calls, and you know what? He was fired two weeks ago."

  "So why's he calling you?"

  "I think the sonofabitch is writing a book."

  "About what happened to us?"

  "I guess we'll find that out when it's published."

  "He can do that?"

  "Maybe he'll change the names. I don't know."

  "But it's our story. He can't go round telling our story."

  "Maybe we should all talk to Peltzer and see if we can stop him."

  "Oh God," Tammy said softly. "Life used to be so simple."

  "Are you having a hard time?" Jerry said.

  "Yeah. I guess. No, what am I saying? I'm having a horrible time. Really bad dreams."

  "Is that it? Dreams? Or is there more?"

  She thought about her reply for a moment, wondering if she should share the problems she'd been having with him. But what was the point? Though they'd been through hell
together she didn't really know him all that well. How did she know he wasn't planning to write a book too? So she said: "You know all things considered, I'm doing just fine."

  "Well that's good," Jerry said, sounding genuinely pleased. "Have the reporters stopped bothering you?"

  "Oh I still get the occasional journalist on the doorstep, but I had one of those little spy-hole things put in the door, and if I think he looks like a reporter then I just don't open the door."

  "Just as long as you're not a prisoner in your own house."

  "Oh Lord, no," she lied.

  "Good."

  "Well... I should let you go. I've got a thousand—"

  "One other thing."

  "Yes."

  "This is going to sound a little wacko."

  "Oh. Okay."

  "But I wanted to tell you about it. Just... for old times' sake, I suppose."

  "I'm listening."

  "You know we never really discussed what happened to us in the house."

  "No. Well I figured we all knew—"

  "I didn't really mean what happened to everybody. I meant you and me, down in that room. You know that there was a lot of power in those tiles. Visiting the Devil's Country kept Katya looking perfect all those years . . ."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "As I said, it's going to sound wacko, but I guess we're both used to that by now, yes?" He took a deep breath. "You see, I had cancer; inoperable. The doctors gave me nine months to a year to live. That was December of last year. Christmas Eve, actually."

  "God, Jerry, I'm so sorry."

  "No, Tammy, you're not listening. I said, I had a tumor."

  "What?"

  "It's gone."

  "Completely?"

  "Every detectable trace. Gone. The doctors can't believe it. They've done the scan five times to be absolutely sure. And now—finally—they are absolutely sure. Jerry Brahms's tumor has disappeared, and according to them that simply can't happen. Ever."

  "But it has."