Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  "No, I don't care." She stopped herself in mid-lie. "Well, maybe a little," she said. "I just want to check that he's all right."

  "I can tell you the answer to that. He's not all right. He's with her. Frankly, that means you may as well forget about him. When Katya wants a man Katya gets him."

  "Were you married to her?"

  "I was married when I met Katya, but I never became her husband. She never wanted me. I was just there to serve her, right from the start. To make her life easier. Todd's a different story. She's going to suck him dry."

  "Like a vampire, you mean?" Tammy said. After all she'd seen the idea didn't seem so preposterous.

  "She's not the kind who takes your blood. She's the kind who takes your soul."

  "But she hasn't got Todd yet, has she?" Tammy said. "I mean, he could still leave if he wanted to."

  "I suppose he could," Zeffer said, his voice laced with doubt. "But, Tammy, I have to ask you: why do you care about this man so much? What's he ever done for you?"

  It took Tammy a few moments to muster a reply. "I suppose if you look at it that way, he hasn't done anything . . . tangible. He's a movie star, and

  I'm one of his fans. But I swear, Willem, if he hadn't been around over the last few years I would have had nothing to live for."

  "You would have had your own life. Your marriage. You're clearly a sensible woman—"

  "I never wanted to be sensible. I never really wanted to be a wife. I mean, I loved Arnie—I still do, I suppose—but it's not a grand passion or anything. It was more a convenience thing. It made things easy when tax-time came around."

  "So what did you really want for yourself ?"

  "For myself? You won't laugh? I wanted to be the kind of woman who comes into a room and instantly everybody's got something to say about her. That's what I wanted."

  "So you wanted to be famous?"

  "I guess that was part of it."

  "You should ask Katya about fame. She's always said it was overrated."

  "How did we get off the subject of Todd?"

  "Because it's impossible to help him."

  "Let me just go into the house and talk to him for a while. And maybe get something to eat while I'm there."

  "Haven't you seen enough of this place to be afraid of it yet?" Zeffer said.

  "I'm almost past being afraid," Tammy replied. It was the truth. She'd seen her share of horrors, but she'd lived to tell the tale.

  They were twenty yards from one of the several staircases that ran up from the garden into the house.

  "Please," she said to Zeffer. "I just want to go inside and warn him. If that doesn't work, I'll leave and I'll never look back, I swear."

  Zeffer seemed to sense the power of her will on the subject. He put up no further protest but simply said: "You realize if you get in Katya's way, I can't step in to help you? I have my own allegiances, however foolish you may think they are."

  "Then I'll make sure I don't get in her way," Tammy said.

  "I'm not even supposed to go into the house, believe it or not."

  "Not allowed on the furniture, either?"

  "If you're saying I'm little better than her dog, you're right. But it's my life. I made my choices just as you made yours." He sighed. "There are some days when I think hard about killing myself. Just to be free of her. But it might not work. I might slit my throat and wake up back where I started, her dead dog instead of her living one."

  Tammy's gaze slid past him to study the luminous people playing between the trees. The sight should have astonished her; but she'd seen too much in the last little while for this to impress her much. The scene before her was just another piece of the Canyon's mystery.

  "Are they all dead?" she asked, in the same matter-of-fact way she'd sustained through much of their exchange.

  "All dead. You want to go look?" He studied her hesitation. "You do but you don't want to admit to it. It's all right. There's a little voyeur in everybody. If there weren't there'd be no such thing as cinema." He turned and looked toward the flickering figures weaving between the trees. "She used to have orgies all the time in the Golden Age, and I liked nothing better than to pick my way among the configurations and watch."

  "But not now?"

  "No. There's only so much human intercourse anyone can watch."

  "Do they look horrible?"

  "Oh no. They look the way they looked at the height of their beauty, because that's the way they want to remember themselves. Perfect, forever. Or at least for as long as God allows this place to last."

  Tammy caught the apocalyptic undertone in this. "What do you mean?" she said.

  "That sooner or later there'll be an end to this endless indulgence. A Day of Judgment, if you will. And I think"—he dropped his voice to a whisper, though there was no one nearby—"you may be its Deliverer."

  "Me?" She also dropped her voice. "Why me?"

  "It's just a hunch. A piece of wishful thinking if you like. They've had their time. And I think some of them know it. They're a little more desperate than they used to be. A little more shrill."

  "Why don't they just leave?"

  "Ah. We had to come to that at last. The reason's very complex, and to tell you the truth I would not really know where to begin. Let me put it this way. They are afraid that if they leave this Canyon they may break the spell that keeps them in their strange state of perfection."

  "And do you believe that?"

  "Yes, I believe it. They're prisoners here. Beautiful prisoners."

  A few minutes after Katya and Todd had left the party out on the night-lawn, a whisper went among the revenants, and one by one they gave up their pleasures, whatever they'd been, and turned their hollow gazes toward the house.

  There are only so many times you can play out the old flesh games without losing interest in them. Yes, you could add piquancy if you introduced a whip, or some rope; you could mate with somebody of your own sex (or, if that was what you'd done in your lifetime, with somebody of the opposite gender). But all of it grew wearying with repetition. No feast can ever be so tempting that finally the act of eating doesn't lose its appeal. Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

  It was the same for the ghosts. They'd been here in the presence of their own perfection for decades; and now it meant nothing to them. They'd seen that beauty defiled and debauched, they'd seen it locked in every configuration lust could devise, and there was nothing left to surprise them. The presence of living flesh, in the form of Todd Pickett, might momentarily reignite some old flames, but the conflagration quickly died away once he was removed from their company.

  Now their eyes went to the house, and though they said nothing, the same thought went through all their melancholy heads.

  Maybe tonight, something would change. Maybe tonight, with this man in her company, the Queen of Sorrows would make a mistake...

  A few of them began to move in the general direction of the house, attempting to seem casual, but fixing their silvery eyes on their destination.

  A bank of cloud had come in off the Pacific and covered both moon and stars. On the ridge of the opposite side of the Canyon some of the grotesque offspring of these weary beauties began a wordless howling in the darkness. The sound was loud enough to carry down the hill to Sunset and the Beverly Hills flats. Several valets parking cars for a private party on Rexford Drive paused to comment on the weird din from up in the hills; a couple of patients, close to death at Cedars-Sinai, called for their priests; a man who lived next door to the house on Van Nuys where Lyle and Eric Menendez had murdered their mother and father decided—hearing the sound—to give up screenwriting and move back to Wisconsin.

  Todd heard it too, of course.

  "What in God's name is that?"

  He and Katya were deep in the bowels of the house, in a place he had never known existed, much less explored.

  "Take no notice," Katya told him, as the noise came again, eve
n louder and more plaintive. "Whatever it is, it's out there, it's not in here with us." She took hold of his arm, and kissed his cheek. He could smell Ava on her. His erection still throbbed. "Are you ready?" she said to him.

  "Ready for what?"

  They were approaching a door just a little smaller than the front door; and similarly medieval in style.

  "On the other side of that door is something that was given to me a long time ago. It changed my life. As I told you, it will also change yours. When you first get in there, it's bewildering. You just have to trust me. I'm going to be with you all the time, even if you can't always see me. And I swear no harm is going to come to you. You understand me, Todd? This is my house. Even this place, which will seem very remote from everything you've seen so far, is also mine."

  He didn't know quite what to make of any of this, but his curiosity was certainly piqued.

  "So don't be afraid," she told him.

  "I won't be," he said, wondering what kind of game she was playing now. She, who knew so many; what did she have up her sleeve?

  As had happened so many times now, she read his thoughts. "This isn't a game," she said. "Or if it is, it's the most serious game in God's creation."

  There was surely a trace of condescension here, but what the hell?

  "I'm ready," he said.

  She smiled. "In half an hour you'll realize what an absurd thing it is you've just said," she told him.

  "Why?"

  "Because nobody can be ready for this."

  Then she pushed open the door.

  Before Tammy went to find Todd, she had to eat. Had to.

  So, while Todd was stepping over the threshold into a place that would change his life, Tammy was in the kitchen three stories above, at the open fridge, gorging on whatever her hands found. Cold chicken, potato salad, some Chinese takeaway.

  "Do we have to do this now?" Zeffer said, looking around nervously. "She could come in here at any minute."

  "Yes, well, let her. I'm hungry, Willem. In fact I'm fucking starving. Give me a hand here, will you?"

  "What do you want?"

  "Something sweet. Then I'm done."

  He dug around on the inner shelves of the fridge and found an almost-intact cherry pie, the sight of which made Tammy coo the way most women cooed when they saw babies. Zeffer watched her with an expression of bemusement on his face. She was too hungry to care. She lifted a slice of pie to her mouth, but before she could get it to her tongue, Zeffer caught hold of her wrist.

  "What?" she said.

  "Listen."

  Tammy listened. She heard nothing, so she shook her head.

  "Listen," he said again, and this time she heard what he was drawing her attention to. The windows were shaking. So were the doors. The cutlery on the sink was rattling; as were the plates in the cupboards.

  She let the slice of pie drop from her fingers, her appetite suddenly vanished.

  "What's going on?" she wanted to know.

  "They're downstairs," Zeffer said, his voice tinged with superstitious awe. "Todd and Katya. They've gone downstairs."

  "What are they doing there?"

  "You don't want to know," Zeffer said hurriedly. "Please. I beg you. Let's just go."

  The windows were shaking with mounting violence; the boards creaked beneath their feet. It was as though the entire structure of the house were protesting about whatever was happening in its midst.

  Tammy went to the kitchen sink, ran some cold water, and washed the food from around her mouth. Then she skirted around Zeffer and headed to the door that led to the turret and the staircase.

  "Wrong direction," Zeffer said. He pointed to the other door. "That's the safest way out."

  "If Todd's down there, then that's the way I want to go," Tammy said.

  As she spoke she felt a blast of chilly air coming up from below. It smelled nothing like the rest of the house, nor of the gardens outside. Something about it made the small hairs at her nape prickle.

  She looked back down at Zeffer, with a question on her face.

  "I think I need to tell you what's down there before you take one more step," he said.

  Outside, the spirits of the dead waited and listened. They had heard the door that led into the Chamber of the Hunt opened; they knew some lucky fool was about to step into the Devil's Country. If they could have stormed the house and slipped through the door ahead of him, they would gladly have done so, at any price. But Katya had been too clever.

  She had put up defenses against such a siege: five icons beaten into the threshold of each of the doors that would drive a dead soul to oblivion if it attempted to cross. They had no choice, therefore, but to keep a respectful distance, hoping that someday the icons would lose their terrible potency; or that Katya would simply declare an amnesty upon her guests and tear the icons out of the thresholds, allowing her sometime lovers and friends back inside.

  Meanwhile, they waited, and listened, and remembered what it had been like for them in the old days, when they'd been able to go back and forth into the house at will. It had been bliss, back then: all you had to do was step into the Devil's Country and you could shed your old skin like a snake. They'd come back to the chamber over and over, so as to restore their failing glamour, and it had dutifully soothed away their imperfections; made their limbs sleek and their eyes gleam.

  All this was kept secret from the studio bosses, of course, and when on occasion a Goldwyn or a Thalberg did find out, Katya made sure he was intimidated into silence. Nobody talked about what went on in Coldheart Canyon, even to others that they might have seen there. The stars went on about their public lives while in secret they took themselves up to Coldheart Canyon every weekend, and having smoked a little marijuana or opium, went to look at the Hunt, knowing that they would emerge rejuvenated.

  There was a brief Golden Age, when the royalty of America lived a life of near-perfection; sitting in their palaces dreaming of immortality. And why not? It seemed they had found the means to renew their beauty whenever it grew a little tired. So what if they had to dabble in the supernatural for their fix of perfection; it was worth the risk.

  Then—but inexorably—the Golden Age began to take its toll: the lines they'd driven off their faces began to creep back again, deeper than ever; their eyesight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil's Country, desperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.

  Terrible stories started to circulate among the lords of Tinseltown; nightmare stories. Somebody had woken up blind in the middle of the night, it was said; somebody else had withered before her lover's appalled eyes. Fear gripped the Golden People; and anger too. They blamed Katya for introducing them to this ungodly panacea, and demanded that she give them constant access to the house and the Hunt. She, of course, refused. This quickly led to some ugly scenes: people started appearing at the house in the Canyon in desperate states of need, beating at the door to be let in.

  Katya hardened her cold heart against them, however. Realizing she would soon be under siege, she hired men to guard the house night and day. For several months, through the spring and summer of 1926, she and Zeffer lived in near-isolation, ignoring the entreaties of her friends who came (often with magnificent gifts) begging for an audience with her; and for a chance to see the Devil's Country. She refused all but a very few.

  In fact nobody truly understood what was happening in the bowels of the house. Why should they? They were dealing in mysteries even old Father Sandru, who had sold Zeffer the piece, did not understand. But their eager flesh had discovered what the dry intellect of metaphysicians had not. Like opium addicts denied their fix they went blindly after the thing that would heal their pain, without needing to understand the pharmacology that had driven them to such desperation.

  For a time they had been happy in the Canyon, they remembered; happy in Katya's house, happy looking at the pictures of the Hunt on the tiled walls, which had moved so curiously before their astonished eye
s. So it followed—didn't it?—that if they kept returning to the Canyon, and into that strange country of tile and illusion, they would be happy and healthy again. But Katya wouldn't let them; she was leaving them to suffer, denied the only thing they wanted.

  Of course Katya was no more knowledgeable about the alchemy at work in her dream palace than those in her doomed circle. She knew that the gift of healing and the fever of need that followed was all brought about by being in the Devil's Country, but how it worked, or how long it would operate before its engines were exhausted, she had no idea. She only knew that she felt possessive of the room. It was hers to give and take away, as her will desired.

  Needless to say, the more tearful visitors she had at her gates, the more letters she received (and the more chaotic the tone of those letters), the less inclined she was to invite in those who'd written them, partly because she was afraid of the depth of addiction she had unleashed in these people, partly because she was anxious that the power of the Devil's Country might not be limitless, and she was not about to be profligate with a power that she needed as much as they.

  There might come a time, she supposed, when she would need the healing effects of the house purely for herself, and when that time came she'd be covetous of every wasted jot of it. This wasn't something she could afford to be generous with; not any longer. It was her life she was playing with here; her life everlasting. She needed to preserve the power she had locked away below ground, for fear one day its sum would be the difference between life and death.

  And then—as though things were not terrible enough—they had suddenly got worse.

  It began on Monday, the 23rd of August, 1926, with the sudden death of Rudy Valentino.

  Only three weeks before he had managed to get past the guards in Coldheart Canyon (like one of the heroes he'd so often played, scaling walls to get to his beloved) and had pleaded with Katya to let him stay with her. He didn't feel good, he told her; he needed to stay here in the Canyon, where he'd spent so many happy times, and recuperate. She told him no. He became aggressive; told her—half in Italian, half in English— that she was a selfish bitch. Wasn't it time she remembered where she came from? he said. She was just a peasant at heart, like him. Just because she acted like a queen didn't make her one; to which she'd snappily replied that the same could not be said for him. He'd slapped her for that remark. She'd slapped him back, twice as hard.