Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  "I should have married a blue-collar worker," Maxine said when they got back inside. "Hamburgers, beer and a good fuck on a Saturday night. I always overcomplicated things."

  "Arnie's blue-collar. And he was a terrible lover."

  "Oh yes, Arnie. It's time we talked about Arnie."

  "What about him?"

  "Well for one thing, he's a louse."

  "Tell me something I don't know. What's he been up to?"

  "Are you ready for this? He's been selling your life-story."

  "Who to?"

  "Everyone. You're hot news, right now. In fact I had a call from someone over at Fox wondering if I could sell you on the idea of having your life turned into a Movie of the Week."

  "I hope you said no."

  "No. I just said I'd talk to you about it. Honestly, Tammy, there's a little window of opportunity in here when you could make some serious money."

  "Selling my life-story? I don't think so. I don't have one to sell!"

  "That's not what these dodos think. Look at these."

  Maxine went into her bag, brought out a sheaf of magazines and laid them on the bed. The usual suspects: The National Enquirer and The Star plus a couple of more up-market magazines, People and Us. Tammy was still too stiff to lean forward and pick them up, so Maxine went through them for her, flicking to the relevant articles. Some carried photographs of Todd at the height of his fame; the photographs often emblazoned with melodramatic questions: Was Fame Too Much for the World's Greatest Heart-throb? on one; and on another: His Secret Hideaway Became a Canyon of Death. But these lines were positively restrained in contrast with some of the stuff in the pages of The Globe, which had dedicated an entire "Pull-out Special your family will treasure for generations" to the subject of Haunted Hollywood; or, in their hyperbolic language: "The Spooks, the Ghosts, the Satan-worshippers and the Fiends Who Have Made Tinseltown the Devil's Fanciest Piece of Real Estate!"

  There were pictures accompanying all the articles, of course: mostly of Todd, occasionally of Maxine and Gary Eppstadt, and even—in the case of The Enquirer and The Globe—pictures of Tammy herself. In fact she was the subject of one of the articles, which was led off by a very unflattering picture of her; the article claiming that "According to her husband, Arnold, obsessive fan Tammy Jayne Lauper probably knows more about the last hours of superstar Todd Pickett's life than anybody else alive—but she isn't telling! Why? Because Lauper (36) is the leader of a black magic cult, which involves thousands of the dead star's fans worldwide, who were attempting to psychically control their star, when their experiment went disastrously and tragically wrong."

  "I was of two minds whether to show you all this," Maxine said. "At least yet. I realize it probably makes your blood boil."

  "How can they write such things? They're just making it up . . ."

  "There were worse, believe me. Not about you. But there's a piece about me I've got my lawyers onto, and two pieces about Burrows—"

  "Oh, really?"

  "One of them was a very long list of his . . . how shall I put this? His 'less than successful' clients."

  "So Todd wasn't the first?"

  "Apparently not. Burrows was just very good at buying people's silence. I guess nobody really wants to talk about their unsuccessful ass-lifts, now do they?"

  Maxine gathered all the magazines up and put them into the drawer of the bedside table. "That's actually put some color back into your cheeks."

  "It's indignation," Tammy said. "It's fine to read all that nonsense in the supermarket line. But when it's about you, it's different."

  "So shall I not bring any more of them in?"

  "No, you can bring 'em in. I want to see what people are saying about me. Where are the magazines getting my photographs from? That one of me looking like a three-hundred-pound beet—"

  Maxine laughed out loud. "You're being a little harsh on yourself. But, you're right, it's not flattering. I guess the photographer himself gave them the picture. And you know who that was?"

  "Yes. It was Arnie. It was taken last summer."

  "He's probably gone through all your family photographs. But look, don't get stirred up. He's no better or worse than a thousand others. Believe me, I've seen this happen over and over. When there's a little money to be made—a few hundred bucks even—people come up with all these excuses to justify what they're doing with other people's privacy. America deserves to be told the truth, and all that bullshit."

  "That's not what Arnie thought," Tammy said. "He just said to himself: I deserve to make some money for putting up with that fat bitch of a wife all these years."

  There was no laughter now; just bitterness, deep and bleak.

  "I'm sorry," Maxine said. "I really shouldn't have brought them in."

  "Yes, you should. And please, don't apologize. I'm not really all that surprised. What are they saying about you ... if you don't mind me asking?"

  Maxine exhaled a ragged sigh: "She was exploitative, manipulative, never did anything for Todd except for her own profit. That kind of stuff."

  "Do you care?"

  "It's funny. It used not to hurt. In fact, I used to positively wallow in being people's worst nightmare. But that was when Todd was still alive ..." She let the thought go unfinished. "What's the use?" she said at last, getting up from beside the bed. "We can't control any of this stuff. They'll write whatever they want to write, and people will believe what they want to believe." She leaned in and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "You take care of yourself. Doctor Zondel—is that it, Zondel?"

  "I think so."

  "Sounds like a cheap white wine. Well, anyway, he thinks you're remarkable. And I said to him: 'this we knew.'"

  Tammy caught hold of her hand. "Thank you for everything."

  "Nothing to thank me for," Maxine said. "We survivors have got to stick together. I'll see you tomorrow. And by the way, now that you're compos mentis—I warn you—there's a chance you're going to have nursing staff coming in to ask you questions. Then selling your answers. So say nothing. However nice people are to you, assume they're fakes."

  Maxine came every day, often with more magazines to show. But on Wednesday—three weeks and a day after Tammy had returned to consciousness—she had something weightier to place on her bed.

  "Remember our own Norman Mailer?"

  "Detective Rooney?"

  "Ex-Detective Martin Ray Rooney. The same. Behold, he did labor mightily and his gutter publishers saw that it was publishable and they did a mighty thing, and put it in print in less than three weeks."

  "No!"

  "Here it is. In all its shoddy glory."

  It wasn't a big book—a mere two hundred and ninety-six pages—but what it lacked in length it made up for in sheer bravura. The copy described it as a story too horrific for Hollywood to tell. On the cover was a photograph of the house in Coldheart Canyon, with the image of a glowering demon superimposed on the clouds overhead.

  "He says you, I and a woman called Katya Lupescu were in it together. Like the three witches in Macbeth."

  "You mean you actually read it?"

  "Well, I skimmed. It's not the worst thing I've read. He spells all our names right, most of the time, but the rest? Oh God in Heaven! I don't know where to begin. It's a big sticky mess of Hollywood myths and

  Manson references and completely asinine pieces of detective work. Basically, he's convinced everyone is in on this massive conspiracy—"

  "To do what?"

  "Well. . . that's the thing. He's not really sure. He claims Todd found out about it, so he was murdered. Same with Joe. Same with Gary Eppstadt, though of course everybody in Hollywood had a reason to murder Gary Eppstadt."

  "I didn't know books could be published so fast."

  "Well it's just hack-work. It'll be off the shelves in a month. But Rooney got a quarter of a million dollars' advance for it. Can you believe that?"

  Tammy picked up the book—which was called Hell's Canyon—and flicked through it.
<
br />   "Did he interview Arnie?"

  "Well I didn't read it that closely, but I didn't see his name."

  "Oh, there's pictures," Tammy said, coming to the eight-page section in the middle of the book. To give him his due, Rooney—or somebody working on his behalf—had done a little research. He'd turned up two photographs from the archives of some silent-movie enthusiast. One was a picture of Katya Lupi, dressed in a gown so sheer it looked as though it had been painted on, the other a much more informal photograph which showed Katya, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Ramon Navarro and a host of other luminaries at a picnic in the shadow of the dream palace in Coldheart Canyon. At the back of the crowd—separated from Katya by several rows of smiling, famous faces—was Willem Zeffer. Tammy closed the book.

  "Don't want to see any more?"

  "I don't think so. Not today."

  "I've been thinking . . . Doctor Zinfandel"—Tammy laughed at Maxine's perfectly deliberate error—"has told me you'll be out of here in a week, ten days at the most. I don't want you going back to Rio Linda, at least not yet. I want you to come and stay with me at the house in Malibu, if it doesn't have too many distressing memories."

  Tammy had been worrying about how she'd cope when she was released from the hospital; the offer made her burst with tears of relief.

  "Oh Christ, I hadn't realized you hated the place that much!"

  Laughter appeared through the tears. "No, no, I'd love to come."

  "Good. Then I'm going to send Danielle—she's my new assistant—to Sacramento and have her pick up some of your things, if that's okay with you."

  "That would be perfect."

  Nine days later, Tammy moved out of Cedars-Sinai and Maxine ferried her down to the beach-house. It looked much smaller by day; and somehow more ordinary without the twinkle lights in the trees, and the cars driving up, full of the great and the good. Perhaps it was simply that she'd come to know Maxine so well in the past few weeks (and how strange was that—to have become so fond of this woman she'd despised for years, and to have her sentiments so sweetly returned?), that the house didn't seem at all alien to her. It was very far from her taste of course (or more correctly, far from her pocketbook) but it was modestly stylish, and the objects on the shelves were elegant and pretty. Sitting on the patio on the second or third evening, sipping a Virgin Mary, the wind warm off the Pacific, she asked Maxine if she'd decorated the place herself, or had it done professionally.

  "Oh I'd love to say I chose every object in the house, but it was all done for me. Actually Jerry selected the paintings. He's got a good eye for art. It's a gay thing."

  Tammy spluttered into her drink.

  "He's flying back to California next weekend, to see a friend in the hospital. So I said he should call in. That's all right, yes? If you don't feel up to it, you don't have to see him."

  "I'm fine, Maxine," Tammy said. "Believe me, I'm fine."

  TWO

  As it turned out, the following Saturday, when Jerry came to visit, Tammy was feeling anything but fine. Doctor Zondel had warned her that there would be some days when she felt weaker than others, and this was certainly one of those. She only had herself to blame. The previous day she had decided to take a walk along the beach and, as the day was so sunny, and the air so fresh, she'd completely lost track of time. What she'd planned as a twenty-minute stroll turned into an hour-and-a-quarter trek, which had not only exhausted her, but made her bones and muscles ache. She was consequently feeling frail and tender when Jerry came by the following day, and in no mood for intensive conversation. It didn't matter. Jerry had plenty to talk about without need of prompting: mainly his new and improved state of health.

  "I'm trying not to be too much of a Pollyanna about it all in case something goes horribly wrong and the tumor comes back. But I don't think it's going to. I'm fine. And you, honey?"

  "I have good days and bad days," Tammy said.

  "Today's a bad day," Maxine said, chucking Tammy under the chin to get a smile.

  "Look at you, Maxine. If I didn't know better I'd say you had a gay gene in you someplace."

  Maxine gave him a supercilious smile. "Well if I did I certainly wouldn't tell you about it."

  "Are you implying I gossip?"

  "It was not an implication," Maxine dead-panned. "It is a fact of life."

  "Well I'll keep my mouth closed about this, I promise," Jerry said, with a mischievous glint. "But were you not once a married lady, Tammy?"

  "I'm not getting into this," Tammy said.

  "All right, I will say no more on the subject. But I see what I see. And I think it's very charming. Men are such pigs anyway."

  Maxine gave him a fierce look. And beneath her makeup, Tammy thought, she was blushing.

  "You said you had pictures to show us?" Maxine said.

  "I did? Oh yes, I did."

  "Pictures of what?" Tammy said, her mind only a quarter committed to the subject at hand, distracted as she was by the exchange that had just taken place between Maxine and Jerry. She knew exactly what Jerry was implying, and although she couldn't remember thinking that she and Maxine had been nesting just like a couple of lesbians, she could see that his innuendo was not without plausibility, from the outside, at least.

  And besides, men were pigs; or at least most of the men it had been her misfortune to become attracted to.

  Jerry had brought out his pictures now, and passed them over to Maxine, who started to look through them.

  "Oh my Lord . . ." she said softly. Maxine handed the photographs over to Tammy one by one, as she'd finished looking at them.

  "They were taken by my old camera, so they're not very good. But I stayed all day, to watch the whole thing from beginning to end."

  "The thing" Jerry had watched, and had photographed (rather better than his disclaimer suggested), was the Los Angeles Public Works' demolition of Katya Lupi's dream palace.

  "I didn't even know they were going to knock it down," Maxine said.

  "Well apparently there was a fierce lobby from your gang, Tammy—"

  "My gang?"

  "The Appreciation Society."

  "Oh."

  "—to keep the place as some kind of Todd Pickett shrine. You didn't hear about that?" Tammy shook her head. "My, my, you two have had your heads in the sand. Well, there was a petition, saying that the house should be left standing, but the authorities said no, it had to come down. Apparently, it was structurally unsafe. All the foundations had gone. Of course we know why but nobody else can figure it out. Anyway, they sent in the bulldozers. It was all over in six hours. The demolition part at least. Then it took another five or six hours to put the rubble in trucks and drive it away."

  "Did anybody come to watch?" Tammy asked.

  "Quite a few, coming and going. But not a crowd. Never more than twenty at any one time. And we were kept a long way back from the demolition, which is why the pictures are so poor."

  The women had been through all the pictures now. Tammy handed them back to Jerry, who said: "So that's another piece of Hollywood history that's bitten the dust. It makes me sick. This is all we've got faintly resembling a past in this city of ours, and we just take a hammer and knock it all down. How sensible is that?"

  "Personally, I'm glad it's gone," Tammy piped up. Another wave of weakness had come over her as she looked at the pictures, and now she felt almost ready to pass out.

  "You don't look too good," Maxine said.

  "I don't feel too good. Would either of you mind if I went to lie down?"

  "Not at all," Jerry said.

  Tammy gave him a kiss and started toward her bedroom.

  "Aren't you going to tuck her in, Maxine?" Tammy heard Jerry say.

  "As it happens, yes." And so saying, she followed Tammy into the bedroom.

  "You know, you mustn't let anything Jerry says bother you," Maxine said, once Tammy was lying down. She stroked the creases from the pillow beside Tammy's head.

  "I know."

/>   "He doesn't mean any harm."

  "I know that too." She looked at Maxine, seeking out her gray eyes. "You know . . . just for the record . . ."

  "No, Tammy. We don't have to have this conversation. You don't have a lesbian bone in your body."

  "No, I don't."

  "And if I do . . . well, I haven't discovered it yet. But, as you raised the subject, I could quite happily take care of you for as long as you'd like. I like your company."

  "And I like yours."

  "Good. So let's have the world believe whatever it wants to believe."

  "Fine by me."

  Tammy made a weak little smile, mirrored on Maxine's face.

  "Who'd have thought?" Maxine murmured.

  She leaned forward and kissed Tammy very gently on the cheek. "Go to sleep, honey. I want you well."

  When she'd gone, Tammy lay beneath the coverlet, listening to the reassuring rhythm of conversation between Maxine and Jerry from next door, and the draw and boom of the Pacific.

  Of all the people to have found such comfort with: Maxine Frizelle. Her life had taken some very odd turns, no question about that.

  But somehow it still seemed right. After the long journeys of late, the pursuits and the revelations, the terrors that could not speak, and those that spoke all too clearly, she felt as though Maxine was somehow her reward; her prize for staying the terrible course.

  "Who'd have thought?" she said to herself.

  And with Maxine's words on her lips, she fell asleep.

  "I want to go back to Rio Linda," Tammy announced two days later. They were sitting on their favorite spot, out on the patio, and today there was a splash of vodka mixed the with tomato juice in Tammy's glass.

  "You want to go home?" Maxine said.

  Tammy took her hand. "No, no," she said. Then, more fiercely: "God, no. That's not my home any longer."

  "So—?"

  "Well, I had this huge collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. And I want to get rid of it. Then I want to think about selling the house."

  "Meaning you'll move in with me?"

  "If it isn't too sudden?"