Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  So this was what it was like to be crazy, she thought. Sitting in the darkness, listening to the silence while you turned things over in your mind, going to the kitchen sometimes and staring into the fridge until she'd seen everything that was in there, the rotted things and the unrotted things, then closing it again without cleaning it out; and going upstairs and washing the bathroom floor, then going to lie down and sleeping ten, twelve, fourteen hours straight through, not even waking to empty your bladder. This is what it was. And if it didn't go away soon, she was going to be a permanent part of the madness; just another rag turning in the darkness, indistinguishable from the things she'd worn.

  Over and over and—

  The telephone rang. Its noise was so loud she jumped up from the chair in which she was sitting and tears sprang into her eyes. Absurd, to be made to weep by the sudden sound of a telephone! But the tears came pouring down, whether she thought she was ridiculous for shedding them or not.

  She had unplugged the answering machine a while ago (there'd been too many messages, mostly from journalists), so now the phone just kept on ringing. Eventually she picked it up, more to stop the din than because she really wanted to speak to anyone. She didn't. In fact she was perfectly ready to pick up the receiver and just put it straight down again, but she caught the sound of the woman at the other end of the line, saying her name. She hesitated. Put the receiver up to her ear, a little tentatively.

  "Tammy, are you there?" a voice said. Still Tammy didn't break her silence. "I know there's somebody on the line," the woman went on. "Will you just tell me, is this Tammy Lauper's house?"

  "No," Tammy said, surprised at the sound her own voice made when it finally came out. Then she put the receiver down.

  It would ring again, she knew. It was Maxine Frizelle, and Maxine wasn't the kind of woman who gave up easily.

  Tammy stared at the phone, trying to will the damn thing from ringing. For a few seconds she thought she'd succeeded. Then the ringing started again.

  "Go away," Tammy said, without picking up the receiver. The syllables sounded like gravel being shaken in a coarse sieve. The telephone continued to ring. "Please go away," she said.

  She closed her eyes and tried to think of the order in which she would need to put the words if she were to pick up the receiver and speak to Maxine, but her mind was too much of a mess. It was better not to even risk the conversation, if all Maxine was going to hear in Tammy's replies was the darkness churning around in her washing-machine of a head.

  All she had to do was to wait a while, for God's sake. The telephone would stop its din eventually. Maybe five more rings. Maybe four. Maybe three—

  At the last moment some deep-seated instinct for self-preservation made her reach down and pick up the receiver.

  "Hello," she said.

  "Tammy? That is you, isn't it?"

  "Maxine. Yes. It's me."

  "Good God. You sound terrible. Are you sick?"

  "I've had the flu. Really badly. I still haven't got rid of it."

  "Was that you when I called two minutes ago? I called two minutes ago. It was you, wasn't it?"

  "Yes it was. I'm sorry. I'd just woken up and as I say, I've been so sick.. ."

  "Well you sound it," Maxine said, in her matter-of-fact manner. "Look. I need to talk to you urgently."

  "Not today. I can't. I'm sorry, Maxine."

  "This really can't wait, Tammy. All you have to do is listen. The flu didn't make you deaf, did it?"

  This drew a silent smile from Tammy; her first in days. Same old Maxine: subtle as a sledgehammer. "Okay," Tammy said, "I'm listening."

  She was surprised at how much easier it was to talk once you got started. And she had the comfort that she was talking to Maxine. All she'd have to do, as Maxine had said, was listen.

  "Do you remember that asshole, Rooney?"

  "Vaguely."

  "You don't sound very sure. He was the Detective we talked to when we first went to the police. You remember him now? Round face, no hair. Wore too much cologne."

  For some peculiar reason it was the memory of the cologne, which had been sickly-sweet, which brought Rooney to mind.

  "Now I remember," she said.

  "Well he's been on to me. Did he call you?"

  "No."

  "Sonofabitch."

  "Why's he a sonofabitch?"

  "Because the fuckhead's got me all stirred up, just when I was beginning to put my thoughts in order."

  Much to Tammy's surprise, she heard a measure of desperation in Maxine's voice. She knew what it was because it was an echo of the very thing she heard in herself, night and day, awake and dreaming. Could it be that she actually had something in common with this woman, whom she'd despised for so many years? That was a surprise, to say the least.

  "What did the sonofabitch want?" she found herself asking. There was a second surprise here. Her mouth put the words in a perfectly sensible order without her having to labor over it.

  "He claims he's writing a book. Can you believe the audacity of the creep—"

  "You know, I did know about this," Tammy said.

  "So he talked to you."

  "He didn't, but Jerry Brahms did." The conversation with Jerry came back to her remotely, as though it had happened several months ago.

  "Oh good," Maxine said, "so you're up to speed. I've got a bunch of lawyers together to find out if he can do this, and it turns out—guess what?—he can. He can write what the hell he likes about any of us. We can sue of course but that'll just—"

  "—give him more publicity."

  "That's exactly what Peltzer said. He said the book would last two months on the shelves, three at the outside, then it would be forgotten."

  "He's probably right. Anyway, Rooney's not going to get any help from me."

  "That's not going to stop him, of course."

  "I know," Tammy said, "but frankly—"

  "You don't give a damn."

  "Right."

  There was a pause. It seemed the conversation was almost at an end. Then, rather quietly, Maxine said: "Have you had any thoughts at all about going back up to the Canyon?"

  There was a second pause, twice, three times the length of the first, at the end of which Tammy suddenly found herself saying: "Of course."

  It felt more like an admission of guilt than a straight-forward reply. And what was more, it wasn't something she'd consciously been thinking about. But apparently somewhere in the recesses of her churned-up head she'd actually contemplated returning to the house.

  "I have too," Maxine confessed. "I know it's ridiculous. After everything that happened up there."

  "Yes. .. it's ridiculous."

  "But it feels like . . ."

  "Unfinished business," Tammy prompted.

  "Yes. Precisely. Jesus, why didn't I have the wit to call you earlier? I knew you'd understand. Unfinished business. That's exactly what it is."

  The real meat of this exchange suddenly became clear to Tammy. She wasn't the only one who was having a bad time. So was Maxine. Of all people, Maxine, who'd always struck Tammy as one of the most capable, self-confident and unspookable women in America. It was profoundly reassuring.

  "The thing is," Maxine went on, "I don't particularly want to go up there alone."

  "I'm not even sure I'm ready."

  "Me neither. But frankly, the longer we leave it the worse it's going to get. And it's bad, isn't it?"

  "Yes . . ." Tammy said, finally letting her own despair flood into her words. "It's worse than bad. It's terrible, Maxine. It's just . . . words can't describe it."

  "You sound the way I look," Maxine replied. "I'm seeing a therapist four times a week and I'm drinking like a fish, but none of it's doing any good."

  "I'm just avoiding everybody."

  "Does that help?" Maxine wanted to know.

  "No. Not really."

  "So we're both in a bad way. What do we do about it? I realize we're not at all alike, Tammy. God knows I can be a bit
ch. Then when I met Katya— when I saw what kind of woman I could turn into—that frightened me. I thought: fuck, that could be me."

  "You were protecting him. You know, in a way, we both were."

  "I suppose that's right. The question is: have we finished, or is there more to do?"

  Tammy let out a low moan. "Do you mean what I think you mean?" she said.

  "That depends what you think I mean."

  "That you think he's still up there in the Canyon? Lost."

  "Christ, I don't know. All I know is I can't get him out of my head." She drew a deep breath, then let the whole, bitter truth out. "For some stupid reason I think he still needs us."

  "Don't say that."

  "Maybe it's not us," Maxine said. "Maybe it's you. He had a lot of feeling for you, you know."

  "If that's you trying to talk me into going back to the Canyon, it's not going to work."

  "So I take it you won't come?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "Well make up your mind one way or another," Maxine replied, exhibiting a little of the impatience which had been happily absent from their exchange thus far. "Do you want to come with me or not?"

  The conversation was making Tammy a little weary now. She hadn't spoken to anybody at such length for several weeks, and the chat—welcome as it was—was taking its toll.

  Did she want to go back to the Canyon or not? The question was plain enough. But the answer was a minefield. On the one hand, she could think of scarcely any place on earth she wanted to go less. She'd been jubilant when she'd driven away from it with Maxine and Jerry; she'd felt as though she'd escaped a death-sentence by a hair's-breadth. Why in God's name would it make any sense to go back there now?

  On the other hand, there was the issue she herself had raised: that of unfinished business. If there was something up there that remained to be done then maybe it was best to get up there and do it. She'd been hiding away from that knowledge for the last several weeks, churning her fears over and over, trying to pretend it was all over. But Maxine had called her bluff. Maybe they'd called each other's: admitted together what they could not have confessed to apart.

  "All right," she said finally.

  "All right, what?"

  "I'll go with you."

  Maxine breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God for that. I was afraid you were going to freak out on me and I was going to have to go up there on my own."

  "When were you planning to do this?"

  "Is tomorrow too soon?" Maxine said. "You come to my office and we'll go from there?"

  "Are you going to ask Jerry to come with us?"

  "He's gone," Maxine replied.

  "Jerry's dead?"

  "No, Key West. He's sold his apartment and moved, all in a week. Life's too short, he said."

  "So it's just the two of us."

  "It's just the two of us. And whatever we find up there."

  SEVEN

  On several occasions in the next twelve hours Tammy's resolve almost failed her and she thought about calling and telling Maxine that she wouldn't be coming to Los Angeles after all, but though her courage was weak it didn't go belly up. In fact she arrived at Maxine's office twenty minutes earlier than they'd arranged, catching Maxine in an uncharacteristic state of disarray, her hair uncombed, her face without blush or lipstick.

  She'd lost weight; shed perhaps fifteen pounds courtesy of the Canyon. So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.

  "You look better than you sounded," Maxine said. "When we first started talking I thought you were dying."

  "So did I, on and off."

  "It was that bad, huh?"

  "I locked myself in my house. Didn't talk to anyone. Did you talk to anybody?"

  "I tried. But all people wanted to know about was the morbid stuff. I tell you, there's a lot of people who I thought were friends of mine who showed their true colors over this. People I thought cared about Todd, who were about as crass as you can get. 'Was there a lot of blood?' That kind of thing."

  "Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away."

  "It's certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talk about death: as long as it's not theirs."

  Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very dark, very masculine: antique European furniture, Persian rugs. On the walls, photographs of Maxine in the company of the powerful and the famous: Maxine with Todd at the opening of several of his movies, Maxine with Clinton and Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, when the President-elect still had color in his hair, and a reputation to lose; Maxine with a number of A-list stars, some of whom had fallen from the firmament since the pictures had been taken: Cruise, Van Damme, Costner, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas (looking very morose for some reason), Mel Gibson, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy's eye: in it Todd was standing alongside a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.

  "Is that Bette Davis?"

  "Five months before she died. My first boss, Lew Wasserman, used to represent her."

  "Was she ever up in the Canyon, do you think?"

  "No, I don't think Bette's ghost is up there. She had her own circle. All the great divas did. And they were more or less mutually exclusive. At a guess a lot of Katya's friends had an interest in the occult. I know Valentino did. That's what took them up there at the beginning. She probably introduced them to it all very slowly. Maybe tarot cards or a Ouija board. Checking out which ones were in it for the cheap thrills and which ones would go the distance with it."

  "Clever."

  "Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this man's city, where all the studios had men at the top, she had her own little dominion, and God knows how many people wrapped around her little finger."

  "It sounds like you admire her a bit."

  "Well I do. I mean she'd broken every Commandment, and she didn't give a shit. She knew what she had. Something to make people feel stronger, sexier. No wonder they wanted to keep it to themselves."

  "But in the end it drove some of them crazy. Even the ones who thought they could take it."

  "It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn't suit us too well."

  "I should tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm."

  "You should have called me. We could have compared notes."

  "My mind was just going round and round. Nothing made sense anymore. I was ready to do myself in."

  "I don't want to hear that kind of talk," Maxine said. "The fact is: you're here. You survived. We both did. Now we have to do this one last thing."

  "What if we get up there and don't find anything?"

  "Then we just leave and get on with our lives. We forget we ever heard of Coldheart Canyon."

  "I don't think there's very much chance of that, somehow."

  "Frankly, neither do I."

  It was hot. In the Valley, the temperature at noon stood at an unseasonable one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.

  Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner's, there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic to reach the blaze, there'd already been five fatalities: a cameraman and a ménage-a-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that afternoon, along with the male star's fluffer, had all been cremated. There was very little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and silicone lingered i
n the air for several hours.

  Even if that particular stench didn't reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a repository for all manner of sickening stenches in the weeks since its sudden notoriety, as though the rot at its heart was drawing to it the smell of every horror in the heat-sickened city. Every unemptied Dumpster that concealed something for forensics to come look at; every condemned apartment or lock-up garage where somebody had died (either accidentally or by their own hand) and had not yet been discovered; every pile of once-bright flowers collected from the fresh graves of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, and were now piled high in the corner, along with their tags carrying messages of sympathy and expressions of loss, rotting together; all of it found its way into the cleft of the Canyon, and clung to the once-healthy plants, weighing them down like a curse laid on the air itself.

  "It's so damn quiet," Tammy said as she got out of Maxine's car in front of what had once been Katya Lupi's dream palace.

  There were a few birds singing in the trees, but there wasn't much enthusiasm in their trilling. It was too hot for music-making. The birds themselves sat in what little shade they could find beneath the leaves, and stayed still. The only exceptions to this were the falcons, which rode the rising tides of heat off the Canyon, their wings motionless, and the ravens, who dipped and banked as they chased one another overhead, landing in argumentative rows on the high walls around the house.

  The dream palace itself was in a shocking state, the damage the ghosts had done to the vast chamber on which the house sat throwing the whole structure into an accelerated state of decay. The once-magnificent façade, with its highlights of Moroccan tile, had not only cracked from end to end but had now fallen forward, exposing the lath-and-timber below. The massive door—which Tammy had imagined belonging to an Errol Flynn epic—had split in three places. The metal lock, which had been as vast and medieval as the rest of the thing, had been removed, sawn away by a thief with an electric saw. He'd made an attempt to take the antique hinges too, but the size of the job had apparently defeated him.