Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had gathered behind it. The turret into which they stepped was still intact, all the way up to its vault, with its painted images of once-famous faces peering down. But the plaster on which the fresco had been made was now laced with cracks, and heaps of the design had fallen away, so that the vault looked like a partially-finished jigsaw. Underfoot, the missing pieces: fragments of Mary Pickford's shoulder and Lon Chaney Sr.'s crooked smile.

  "Is this earthquake damage?" Maxine said, looking up at the turret. There were places where the entire structure of the turret, not just the inner, painted layer, but the tiles too, had dropped out of place, so that the Californian sky was visible.

  "I don't see why the house would survive all these years of earthquakes without being substantially damaged, and then practically come apart in a 6.9."

  "It's weird," Maxine agreed.

  "Maybe the ghosts did it?"

  "Really? They got up there?" she said, pointing at the vault.

  "I bet you they got everywhere. They were pretty pissed off."

  Tammy stepped into the kitchen and had her thesis proved correct. The kitchen had been comprehensively ripped apart; shelves torn down, cutlery pulled out of drawers and scattered around. Plates smashed, frying pans used to beat at the tiled work-surfaces so that they were shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open—rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.

  But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure too, and they'd had the supernatural strength to cause considerable damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the support beams, some of which—through a massive effort by the phantom demolition team—had been unseated and pulled through the plaster fagade, jutting like vast broken bones.

  Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had preceded her out into the passageway where Todd had died. It was considerably darker than the kitchen. She instinctively reached round and flicked on the light. There was a sharp snap of electricity in the wall. The lights came on, flickered for a moment, then went out again. After a beat there was another noise in the wall, and an eruption of sparks from one of the light fixtures further down the wall. She thought about trying to switch the electricity off, but that didn't seem very smart under the circumstances: she was standing in half an inch of water with the power crackling in the walls. Better just leave it alone.

  The only reason she'd come out here was to be certain that the place where Todd had lain had been cleaned up. In fact, it hadn't been touched. The water from the kitchen had not reached as far as the spot where he had died, so the pools of blood that had come from his body were now dry, dark stains on the floor. There were other stains, too, where his body had lain, that she didn't want to think too much about.

  Further down the passageway, beyond the bloodstains, was the back door and the threshold where she'd dug out the icons. The nerves in the tips of her fingers twitched as she thought about those terrible minutes: hearing Todd and Katya fighting in the kitchen, while the ghosts waited on the threshold, bristling but silent; waiting for their moment. Her heart quickened at the thought of how close she'd come to losing the game she'd played here.

  Something crunched beneath her sole, and she stepped aside to find one of the icons was lying on the tile. She bent down and picked it up. There was nothing left of the force it had once owned so she pocketed it, as a keepsake. As she was doing so she caught sight of a body lying outside, in the shadows of the Noahic Bird of Paradise trees.

  "Maxine!" she called, suddenly alarmed.

  "I'm coming."

  "Be careful. Don't touch the light switches."

  As soon as she heard Maxine's footsteps splashing through the kitchen, Tammy ventured to the threshold, and stepped over it. The greenery smelled pungent back here; she was reminded of those dark, swampy parts of the Canyon where she'd almost lost her life during her night journey. The swamp had crept closer to the house, it seemed; there were mushrooms and fungi growing out of the wall, and the Mexican pavers were slick with green algae underfoot.

  "What's wrong?" Maxine wanted to know.

  "That." Tammy pointed to the body, which lay face down in the middle of a particularly fertile patch of fungi. Tammy wondered if perhaps he'd been trying to make a meal of them, and died in mid-swallow, poisoned.

  "Help me turn him over," Tammy said.

  "No thanks," Maxine said. "I'm as close as I need to get."

  Undaunted, Tammy went down on her haunches beside the body, pressing her fingers into the damp, sticky groove between the body and the tiles upon which it lay. The corpse was cold. She lifted it up an inch or two, peering down to see if she could get a better glimpse of the dead man. But she couldn't make out his features. She would have to turn the cadaver over. She pushed harder, and hoisted the body onto its side. Rivulets of pale maggots poured from its rot-bloated underbelly. She let it fall all the way over, lolling on the ground.

  Not only was it not a man, it was not, strictly speaking, a human being but one of what Zeffer had called the children, the hybrid minglings of ghost and animal. This one had been a female: part coyote, part sex-goddess. It had six breasts, courtesy of its bestial side, but two of them had gone to jelly. The four that remained, however, were as lush as any starlet's, adding a touch of surrealism to this otherwise repulsive sight. The creature's head was a mass of wormy life, except—for some reason—its lips, which remained large, ripe and untouched.

  "Who is it?" Maxine hollered from the interior of the house.

  "It's just an animal," Tammy said. "Sort of. The ghosts fucked the animals. And sometimes the animals fucked the ghosts. And these things, the children, were the result."

  Obviously Maxine hadn't known about this little detail because a look of raw disgust came over her face.

  "Jesus. This place never fails to . . ." She finished the sentence by shaking her head.

  Tammy wiped her hands on her jeans and surveyed the steps that led down to the garden.

  "There's more of them down here," she called back to Maxine.

  "More?"

  By the time Maxine's curiosity had overcome her revulsion and she'd reached the first body, Tammy had already moved on to the second, third and fourth, then to a group of four more, all lying on the steps leading down to the lawn or at the bottom, and all in roughly the same position, face down, as though they'd simply fallen forward. It was a curiously sad scene, because there were so many different kinds of animals here: large and small, dark and striped and spotted; lush and bony.

  "It looks like Jonestown," Maxine said, surveying the whole sorry sight.

  She wasn't that far off the mark. The way bodies had all dropped in the grass, some lying alone, others in groups, looking as though they might have been hand in hand when the fatal moment came. It had the feel of a mass suicide, no question. Had the sun been on them directly, no doubt the stench would have been nauseating. But the air was cool beneath the heavy canopy; the smell was more like that of festering cabbages than the deeper, stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh.

  "Why so few flies?"

  Tammy thought on this for a moment. "I don't know. They weren't properly alive in the first place, were they? They had ghosts for fathers and animals for mothers. Or the other way round. I don't think they were flesh and blood in the same way you and I are."

  "That still doesn't explain why they came here to die like this."

  "Maybe the same power that ran through Katya and the ghosts ran through them too," Tammy said. "And once it was turned off—"

  "They came back to the house and died?"

  "Exactly."

  "And the d
ead?" Maxine said. "All those people. Where did they go?"

  "They didn't have anything to keep them here," Tammy said.

  "So maybe they're out wandering the city?" Maxine said. "Not a very reassuring thought."

  As Maxine talked, Tammy plucked some large leaves from the jungle all around, and then went back among the corpses, bending to gently lay the leaves—which she'd chosen for their size—over the faces of the dead.

  Maxine watched Tammy with a mingling of incomprehension and awe. It would never in a thousand years have occurred to her to do something like this. But as she watched Tammy going about this duty she felt a surge of simple affection for the woman. She'd endured a lot, and here she was, still finding it in her heart to think of something other than her own comfort, her own ease. She was remarkable in her way: no question.

  "Are you done?" she asked, when Tammy was all but finished.

  "Almost," she said. She bowed her head. "Do you know any prayers?"

  "I used to, but . . ." Maxine shrugged, empty-handed.

  "Then I'm just going to make something up," Tammy said.

  "I'll leave you to it then," Maxine said, turning to go.

  "No," Tammy said. "Please. I want you to stay here with me until I'm finished."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Please."

  "Okay," Maxine said.

  Tammy bowed her head. Then after taking a few moments to decide what she was going to say, she began. "Lord," she said. "I don't know why these creatures were born, or why they died . . ." She shook her head, in a kind of despair, though whether it was about the words or the situation she was attempting to describe, Maxine didn't know; perhaps a little of both. "We're in the presence of death, and when that happens we wonder, it makes us wonder, why we're alive in the first place. Well, I guess I want to say that these things didn't ask to be alive. They were born miserably.

  And they lived miserably. And now they're dead. And I'd like to ask you, Lord, to take special care of them. They lived without any hope of happiness, but maybe you can give them some happiness in the Hereafter. That's all. Amen."

  Maxine tried to echo the Amen, but when she did so she realized that these hesitant, simple words coming from so unlikely a source had brought on tears.

  Tammy put her arm around Maxine's shoulder. "It's okay," she said.

  "I don't even know why I'm crying," Maxine said, letting her head drop against Tammy's shoulder while the sobbing continued to rack her. "This is the first time I've cried like this, really cried, in Lord knows how long."

  "It's good to cry. Let it come."

  "Is it really good to cry?" Maxine said, recovering herself slightly, and wiping her nose. "I've always been suspicious when people say crying's good for you."

  "Well it is. Trust me."

  "You know, Tammy, I don't know if anyone has ever told you this, but you're quite an amazing lady."

  "Oh really?" she said. "Well that's kind of you. It's not the sort of thing Arnie used to say."

  "Well then, Arnie was a fool," Maxine said, recovering a little of her old edge.

  "Are you ready to go back inside now?" Tammy said, a little embarrassed by Maxine's compliment.

  "Yeah. I guess so."

  They made their way through the dead to the steps, and started to climb. As they did so it occurred to Maxine that in laying the leaves on the dead, and offering up a prayer on their behalf, Tammy had brought the idea of forgiveness into Katya Lupi's loveless domain. It was probably the first time the subject had been broached in this vicinity in three-quarters of a century. Katya hadn't seemed too big on forgiveness. You erred against her, you suffered for it; and you kept suffering.

  "What are you thinking about?" Tammy asked her.

  "Just this place." Maxine looked up at the house, and turned to take in the rest of the Canyon. "Maybe the tabloids had it right."

  "About what?"

  "Oh you know: the most cursed piece of real estate in Hollywood."

  "Bullshit," Tammy said.

  "You don't think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?"

  "I don't want to know who made it," Tammy said. "But I know who fed it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place."

  "That makes sense."

  "Places can't be good or bad," Tammy said. "Only people. That's what I believe."

  "Did that make you feel better, by the way? What you did out there?"

  Tammy smiled. "Bit crazy, huh?"

  "Not at all."

  "You know, it did make me feel better. Much better. Those poor things didn't have a hope."

  "So now we can go look for Todd?" Maxine said.

  "And if we don't find him in"—Tammy looked at her watch—"shall we say, fifteen minutes, we give it up as a bad idea? Agreed?"

  "Agreed."

  "Where do you want to look first?" Tammy said.

  "The master bedroom," Maxine replied. "Whenever things didn't go well, he used to go to his bedroom and lock the door."

  "Funny, Arnie would do the same."

  "You never told me anything about Arnie," Maxine said, as she led the way through the chaos of the kitchen to the hallway.

  "There wasn't that much to tell. And there's even less now he's gone."

  "Do you think he'll come back?"

  "I don't know," Tammy said, sounding as though she didn't care that much. "Depends on whether his new woman puts up with him or not."

  "Well, put it this way: do you want him back?"

  "No. And if he tries to make nice, I'm going to tell him to go fuck himself. Excuse my French."

  They stepped out into the hallway. "You want to go up there first?" Tammy said. "He was your friend, or client, or whatever." Maxine looked doubtful. "Go on," Tammy urged her. "You go on up and I'll try downstairs."

  "Okay," Maxine said, "but stay in shouting distance."

  "I will. And if I don't find anything down there I'll come straight up and find you."

  Maxine started up the stairs two at a time. "I'm not spending another hour after dark in this Canyon," she called as she went.

  She watched Tammy descend as she ascended, and then, when the turn in the stairs put them out of sight of one another, she concentrated her attentions on the doorway in front of her. The landing she was crossing was creaking with every footfall: no doubt the damage the ghosts had done up here was as thorough as it had been below. God knows how profoundly they'd affected the sub-structure of the place. Another reason—if any were needed—to be out of here quickly. She'd read her Poe; she knew what happened to houses as psychotic as this had been. They came tumbling down. Their sins finally caught up with them and they collapsed on themselves like tumorous men, burying anyone and everyone who was stupid enough to be inside when the roof began to creak.

  "Tammy!"

  "I can hear you."

  "The place is creakin' up here. Is it creakin' down there?"

  "Yep."

  "So let's make this short an' sweet, huh?"

  "We already agreed—"

  "Even shorter and sweeter."

  Maxine had reached the door of the master bedroom. She knocked, lightly at first. Then she called Todd's name. There was no reply forthcoming so she tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open. It grated over a scattering of dirt; and there was the sound of several irregular-shaped objects rolling behind it. She investigated. Besides the dirt there were some rocks behind the door, and several clods of earth, some with grass attached. Somebody appeared to have hauled a sack of earth up from the garden and it had split open behind the door.

  "Todd?" she called again.

  This time there was a mumbled reply. She stepped into the room.

  The drapes were almost completely drawn, keeping out nine-tenths of the sunlight. The air smelled stale, as though nobody had opened the door in days, but it also smelled strongly of fresh dirt. She studied the gloom for a little time, until she saw the figure sitting up on the bed, his knees rai
sed under what she took to be a dark coverlet. It was Todd. He was naked from the waist up.

  "Hello, Maxine," he said. There was neither music nor threat in his voice.

  "Hello, Todd."

  "Couldn't stay away, huh?"

  "Tammy's with me," she said, shifting the blame.

  "Yes, I heard her. And I expected her. No. Half-expected her. But I didn't expect you. I thought it was all over with us once I was dead. Out of sight. . ."

  "It's not as simple as that."

  "No, it isn't, is it? If it's any comfort, it's true in both directions."

  "You think about me?"

  "You. Tammy. The life I had. Sure. I think about it all the time. There isn't much else to do up here."

  "So why are you up here?"

  He moved in the bed, and there was a patter of dirt onto the bare boards. What she'd taken to be a blanket was in fact a pyramid of damp earth, which he'd piled up over the lower half of his body. When he moved, the pyramid partially collapsed. He reached out and pulled the dirt back toward him, so as not to lose too much over the edge of the bed.

  His body, she saw, looked better than it had in years. His abdominals were perfectly cut, his pectorals not too hefty, but nicely defined. And his face was similarly recovered. The damage done by time, excess and Doctor Burrows's scalpels eradicated.

  "You look good," she said.

  "I don't feel good," he replied.

  "No?"

  "No. You know me. I don't like being on my own, Maxine. It makes me crazy." He wasn't looking at her any longer, but was rearranging the mound of dirt on his lap. His erection, she now saw, was sticking out of the middle of the dirt.

  "I wake up with this," he said, flicking his hard-on from side to side with his hand. "It won't go down." He sounded neither proud of the fact nor much distressed by it: his erection was just another plaything, like the dirt heaped over his body.

  "Why did you bring half the back yard up here?"

  "Just to play," he replied. "I don't know."