Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

"It has."

  "And you think it's got something to do with us being in the room?"

  "Put it this way: I went into that house with a malignant tumor, and when I came out again the tumor had gone. What can you say about a thing like that? It's either a coincidence or it's a miracle."

  "And you think it's a miracle?"

  "You know what?" He paused. "Now I am going to sound wacko, but I prefer to think of it as Katya's last present to me."

  "She didn't seem the gift-giving type."

  "You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere."

  "Is there?" Tammy replied. "I guess I'm still looking."

  FOUR

  Tammy desperately wanted to believe that she had indeed profited somehow from the madness-inducing journey she'd taken through the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. She didn't need anything as monumental as Jerry's healed tumor; just some modest sign to prove to her that, despite all the death and the suffering she'd witnessed, some palpable good had come of it.

  Every waking hour her thoughts circled on what she'd experienced, looking for some sign of hope. Not miracles, just hope. A light in the darkness; a reason to live. But the more she searched, the more absurd the search seemed to be.

  Common sense told her she should venture out into the world and start trying to live a normal life again. Perhaps if she joined a couple of women's clubs, or maybe even tried to find herself a lover—anything to change her focus; get her out of her head and back into a normal way of thinking. But she always found some reason to put off anything too adventurous. It was almost as though she'd used up her capacity for adventure during her time in the Canyon. Her trips into the dangerous territory over her front doorstep became briefer and briefer by the day. She started to get panicky when she got into her car, and the panic escalated so quickly that by the time she got to the end of the block she often had to turn round and head straight back home again. Going to the market had become impossible; she took to ordering essential food-stuffs by phone, and when the supplies arrived she'd make the exchange with the delivery guy as short as possible. She'd just take the stuff, pass over the money, and close the door, often not even waiting for the change.

  She realized that this odd behavior was beginning to get her a reputation around the neighborhood. More than once she peeped out between the closed drapes and saw that people were lingering outside her house, some on the sidewalk, some in cars, pointing or staring. She'd become, she supposed, the local eccentric; the woman who'd come back from the wilds of Hollywood in a state of mental derangement.

  All of this, of course, only added to her spiraling sense of anxiety, mingled with more than a touch of paranoia. If she answered the door to the delivery boy and caught sight of somebody in the street outside she naturally assumed the passer-by was spying on her. At night she heard noises on the roof and woke more than once certain that one of Katya's los niños had found its way to Rio Linda and was scrambling over the eaves, trying to get down to her bedroom window.

  In saner moments (which became fewer and fewer), she knew all this was nonsense. But the very fact that she had saner moments implied that she was slowly giving herself up to lunacy. It was all very fine for Jerry Brahms to talk about having his cancer cured by the power of the room (and maybe he had; she didn't discount the possibility), but she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. It was deconstructing her grip on reality, piece by piece. Some days when she woke the dreams remained attached to her all day like pieces of lint. She'd go through her waking hours in a half-stupefied state, coming into rooms and not knowing why she was there; leaving them again and remembering, then forgetting as she turned round. She was in a constant state of exhaustion. Her lids were like lead. Once, in the middle of the day, she found herself on her hands and knees in the bathroom, working at the tiles with her bare hands and Ajax, attempting to remove some spidery sketches of a certain country that she'd daydreamed into creation. Another time, she'd gone into the kitchen to find the faucet running, and a shape in the sink that looked like a piece of road-kill; a matted pelt, two rows of sharpened teeth set between black leathery lips. The force of the hot water slowly turned the cadaver over and showed her the broken head of something she'd seen in the Canyon, or in her dreams of the Canyon, foul beyond words.

  She turned off the faucet. Steam rose from the mouth of the thing, like a last breath. Then it melted, fur and teeth and all, and was gone down the drain.

  "Hmm," she said to herself, unimpressed by this ugly little show. Somehow she'd always imagined madness to be a more dramatic thing than this. Again the movies had it wrong. There was no grandeur in it; no exquisite folly. Just a pile of teeth and dirty fur in the kitchen sink.

  That said, she knew that her mental decline was gathering speed. She needed to do something about it soon, or this journey she was on was going to take her away from herself completely. She would be a blank-eyed thing sitting at the kitchen table, wiped clean by banalities.

  FIVE

  While Jerry was giving thanks for his new life, and Tammy was dealing with the grim illusions in her kitchen sink, Maxine was in a very different frame of mind. Her injuries were remarkably slight, given all that she'd gone through. Within a week she was physically ready to return to her offices and attempt to pick up business. But most of the calls she got in the first week weren't business calls at all but gently inquiring conversations that rapidly gave way to interrogation. It seemed as though everyone in Hollywood wanted to know about events at the house in Coldheart Canyon.

  In truth, she had no desire to tell her story to anyone, not even her closest friends. Ghosts and rooms laid with tile providing visions of another world—this was not the stuff she could have shared with any of her contemporaries without being mocked. But she had to say something, or she was going to start making even more enemies than she already had. So she concocted a version of events without supernatural elements. In the censored version, Todd had indeed been hiding away because of work done to his face (it was no use lying about that any longer: he'd admitted to the surgery at her party), and there he'd been stalked and finally— sadly—murdered by his stalker. Most of the people she talked to accepted this bowdlerized version of events, at least for the duration of the conversation. But those few loyal sources she still had around town reported something very different back to her. Everyone had his own version of what had happened in Coldheart Canyon, ranging from the ludicrous to the actionable, and they were spreading it around freely. Whatever the version of the story—and they ranged from murder mystery to ghost-stories—they had this in common: Maxine was the villain.

  She was to blame for knowingly putting her innocent client in a house that was haunted; she was to blame for not warning him that a close friend was a murderer (this version had started in The Enquirer, and required another star as murderer. The Enquirer, of course, claimed to know who it was, and would soon be in a position to reveal the name of the guilty party. What they could already say with confidence was that Maxine Frizelle had known of the plan against Todd's life, but simply hadn't taken it seriously). She, in short, was the reason he was dead. It seemed that nothing she could say or do persuaded people that this wasn't the case. Years of resentment toward her surfaced now as her enemies elaborated version after version of what had gone on in the Canyon, each one less flattering to Maxine than the one before.

  She eventually gave up attempting to put people straight on such matters. People would believe what the hell they wanted to anyway. She'd learned that after twenty-two years in the business. You could sometimes guide people's opinions, but if they didn't want to buy what you had to sell you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would never work.

  After a few days of fruitless endeavor she became curiously immune to all the gos
sip flying around, and just got on with trying to get to see some new talent. She was an agent without a major client, which meant that as far as the town was concerned there was no reason to take her calls, especially as she wasn't playing ball and offering up the inside scoop on what a psychic hired by the Fox Channel to wander round the Canyon called "the most haunted piece of real estate in Hollywood."

  In other words, everybody knew there was more to this—a lot more than they had been told so far—and it was only a matter of time before somebody started to talk.

  That somebody was Martin Rooney, the detective at the Beverly Hills Police Department who'd done the initial work on the Pickett case. At fifty-eight he was very close to retirement, and was looking at a life on a middle-ranking detective's pension. Life would not be lush, he knew. Although he didn't have an expensive life-style he had all the normal outgoings: alimony, a mortgage, car payments (he ran three cars, one of his few concessions to self-indulgence), plus a well-stocked bar and a habit of smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. He'd already calculated the dip in his standard of living he'd have to take when he left the force. It was going to be substantial.

  But here—dropping into his lap like a gift from God—was the answer to all his problems. He'd been told the story first by the Lauper woman, and later by Maxine Frizelle. Though their accounts had been outlandish, to say the least, they had also been remarkably consistent. Something weird had happened up in the Canyon and whether it was true in part or not at all scarcely mattered. What mattered to Rooney was that people loved this kind of thing. There was a profit to be made here. Enough to make his retirement look a lot more cozy.

  He began to make surreptitious copies of the interviews and smuggle them out of the station, with an eye to assembling them all into book form. It wasn't hard to do; if he asked for copies of a record in order to advance some particular aspect of the case then nobody challenged the request. In a short time he had amassed at home eleven bulging files of material on the "Canyon" case: enough to start editing and collating.

  What he needed was a point of view other than his own. After all, he wasn't at the heart of all this: he was simply an onlooker, coming in after the drama was over. What his book needed was an insider whose story would become its backbone. He decided to approach Maxine Frizelle.

  "You want to do what?"

  "I'm going to write a book about events in Coldheart Canyon, as everyone insists on calling it. I was hoping I could count on your involvement. Your point of view, Miss Frizelle, would make the book a good deal stronger."

  "You've had all the facts you're going to get from me, Detective."

  "Wait, wait!" Rooney said. "Before you put the phone down on me, think about it. Todd Pickett was your client for how long?"

  "Eleven years."

  "So think of this as your chance to set the record straight once and for all. The good, the bad and the ugly."

  "If I were ever to choose to set the record straight, Mister Rooney, it would not be with a cop as a co-author."

  "Oh, I wasn't going to write any of this. I was going to get a ghostwriter in to do that."

  "Then I'm really missing something here, Rooney," Maxine said, summoning up her most withering tone. "What exactly is your contribution to this project?"

  "My experience of almost four decades in the LAPD. I worked on the Manson case—"

  "This is nothing like Manson. Not remotely—"

  "Will you let me finish? I'm not saying the cases are identical. But we still have a lot of parallels. The brutal deaths of several high-profile Hollywood people, all with some connection to the occult."

  "Todd never had anything to do with that kind of thing. And you can quote me."

  "Well somebody in that house did. I have copies of photographs of every inch of the place. There are occult symbols hammered into all the thresholds, did you know that? Several symbols—probably East European in origin—were removed from the area around the back door around the time Mister Pickett died. He may even have been responsible for their removal. Do you have any comment to make about any of that?"

  "Yes. It's preposterous. And if you try to tie Todd to any of that kind of stuff you're going to be in deep trouble."

  "That's a risk I'm willing to take. But I am going to write the book, Ms. Frizelle, with or without your assistance."

  "I doubt you can do that, Rooney. You got that information because you were a cop. You can't go using it to make money."

  "I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last," Rooney said. "Frankly, I don't see what the hell your problem is, unless you were planning to do it yourself. Is that it? Am I rainin' on your parade here?"

  "No. I have no intention of writing my own version of events."

  "Then help me do mine," Rooney said, his tone perfectly reasonable. "I'll throw a piece of the action your way if that's what this is about. How does five percent sound?"

  "Don't make this any worse than it already is. I don't want your blood money. Have a little decency, for God's sake. Todd is dead. So are a lot of other people. This isn't the time to be thinking about making a profit."

  "I'm not going to do a hatchet job on him. I swear. Your ex-client's reputation is perfectly safe with me. Okay, so I hear he did a few drugs. A lot of coke, I hear, especially when he worked with Smotherman. And the plastic surgery. Again, no big deal. I mean, I'll have to write about it, but I won't make him look bad. I promise you."

  "Why the hell would I rely on your promises, Rooney?"

  There was a brief silence.

  "So that's a no?" Rooney finally said.

  "Yes. That's a big, fat no."

  "Well, don't say I didn't ask."

  "And for the record, Mister Rooney, let me say this: if you do want to try and write this book, you go ahead and try. I promise you will have so many lawyers crawling up your ass you'll think they're breeding up there."

  "Very nice. Very ladylike."

  "Nobody ever mistook me for a lady, Rooney. Now get the hell off my phone. I need to call my lawyer."

  SIX

  The call from Rooney stirred Maxine up. She contacted her lawyer, Lester Peltzer, as she said she would, and organized a conference call with several other lawyers in town whom she respected, so that everyone could give her the benefit of their very expensive opinion. Unfortunately, they all agreed on one thing: she didn't have a hope in hell of stopping Rooney from going ahead. When the book was written and being set for publication, that was a different matter, one of the lawyers pointed out. If he wrote something libelous, then they could go after him, and if it was obvious that he'd got access to police files then LAPD Internal Affairs might get riled up and take him to court. But there was no guarantee. The LAPD had a lousy record when it came to policing themselves.

  "So right now he's free to say whatever he wants to say?" Maxine raged. "Just for profit?"

  "It's the Constitution," one of the lawyers pointed out.

  "It's not against the law," Maxine's lawyer pointed out lightly. "You've made a good deal of money yourself over the years."

  "But I didn't lie to do it, Lester."

  "All right, Maxine, don't get your blood pressure up. I'm merely pointing out that this is America. We live and die by the rule of Mammon." He drew a deep breath; put on his most rational tone. "Maxine, ask yourself whether taking this guy to court over some book that'll be off the shelves in two, three months is worth your time and temper. You may end up giving him more publicity by suing him than he would ever have got if you hadn't. You'll make an issue of it and suddenly everybody's buying his damn book. I've seen it happen so many times . . ."

  "So you're saying I should let him do it?" Maxine said. "Let him write some shit about Todd—"

  "Wait, wait," Lester said. "In the first place, you don't know he's going to write shit. Maybe he'll be respectful. Todd was a very popular actor. An American icon for a while."

  "So was Elvis," Maxine pointed out. "It doesn't mean some sonofabitch didn
't write about every dirty little secret Elvis ever had. I know, because I read the book."

  "So what are you afraid of?"

  "That the same will happen to Todd. People will write bullshit, and in the end it'll be the bullshit that's remembered, not the work."

  Lester was usually quick with an answer, but this silenced him. Finally, he said: "Okay, let me ask you something. Do you think there's anything Rooney knows—as a matter of fact—which could be really destructive to Todd's long-term reputation?"

  "Yes. I do. I think—"

  "Don't," Lester said. "Please. Don't tell me. Right now, I think it might be simpler for everyone if I didn't know."

  "All right."

  "Let's all go away and think about this, Maxine. And you do the same thing. I can see your concern. You've got a legacy here you want to protect. I think the question is—do you do that best by drawing attention to Rooney with a lawsuit, or by letting him publish and be damned?"

  The phrase caught Maxine's attention. She'd heard it before, of course. But now it had new gravity, new meaning. She pictured Rooney publishing his book, and then having his soul dragged away to the Devil's Country for his troubles.

  "Publish and be damned?" she said. "You know, that I could maybe live with."

  Tammy hadn't seen a human face, real or televised, in four days; not even heard a voice. The Jacksons, her next-door neighbors, had gone off for a long weekend the previous Thursday, noisily departing with the kids yelling and car doors being slammed. Now it was Sunday. The street was always quiet on Sunday, but today it was particularly quiet. She couldn't even hear the buzzing of a lawn-mower. It was as though the outside world had disappeared.

  She sat in the darkness, and let the images that had been haunting her for so long tumble over and over in her head, like filthy clothes in a washing machine, over and over, in a gruel of gray-grimy water; the madness she'd seen and heard and smelled; over and over. The trouble was, the more she turned it all over, the dirtier the washing became, as if the water had steadily turned from gray to black, and now when she got up to go to the bathroom, or to climb the stairs, she could hear it sloshing around between her ears, the muck of these terrible memories, darkening with repetition.