Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

by Clive Barker

  "At our age, nothing's too sudden," Maxine said. "But are you sure you want to go through all that stuff yourself? Can't you get one of the fans to do it?"

  "I could, I suppose," Tammy said. "But I'd feel better doing it myself."

  "Then we'll do it together."

  "It'll be boring. There's so much stuff. And Arnie's been using the house on and off so it'll be a pig-sty."

  "I don't care. When do you want to go?"

  "As soon as possible. I just want to get it over and done with."

  Tammy tried to find Arnie, first at the airport and then at his new girlfriend's house, just to warn him that they were coming into town, but she didn't get hold of him. Part of her was glad that Maxine was accompanying her, when there were so many variables she couldn't predict; but there was another part of her that felt a little uncomfortable at the prospect. Maxine lived in luxury. What would she think when she laid eyes on the scruffed, stuffed, little ranch-house where Tammy and Arnie had lived out the charmless farce of their marriage for fourteen-and-a-half years?

  They got an early plane out of Los Angeles, and were in Sacramento by nine-thirty in the morning. Maxine had arranged for a chauffeured sedan to meet them at the airport. The chauffeur introduced himself as Gerald, and said that he was at their disposal. Did they want to go straight to the address he'd been given? Tammy gave Maxine a nearly panicked look: the moment was upon her, and suddenly she was anxious.

  "Come on," Maxine said. "We'll face the horror together. Then we'll be out of here by the middle of the afternoon."

  Arnie hadn't bothered to mow the front lawn, of course, or weed the ground around the two rose bushes that Tammy had attempted to nurture. The bushes were still alive, but only just. The weeds were almost as tall as the bushes.

  "Of course he may have changed the lock," Tammy said as they approached the front door.

  "Then we'll just get Gerald to shoulder it in," Maxine said, ever practical. "It's still your house, honey. We're not doing anything illegal."

  In fact, the key fitted and turned without any problem; and it was immediately apparent from the general state of the place that Arnie hadn't after all been a very regular visitor here in a while. But the heating had been left turned up so it was stiflingly hot in all the rooms; a stale, sickly heat. In the kitchen there was some food left out and rotting: a half-eaten hamburger, a pile of fruit which had been corrupted into plush versions of the originals, two plates of pizza crusts. The stink was pretty offensive, but Tammy got to work quickly clearing up the kitchen, while Maxine went around the house opening the windows and turning down the heating. With the rotted food bagged and set outside, and bleach put down the sink to take away the stench, the place was a little more hospitable, but Tammy made it very clear that she wanted to stay here for as short a time as possible, so they set to work. Given the size of the collection it was obviously not going to be sorted through and disposed of in a day; all Tammy wanted to do was collect up all the stuff that was personal, and either burn it or take it away. The rest she would let members of the Appreciation Society come in and collect. They'd end up fighting over the choicest items no doubt; all the more reason not to be there when they came.

  "I didn't realize you had so much stuff," Maxine said, when they'd looked through all the rooms.

  "Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was organized." She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered through it till she found the file she wanted.

  "What's this?" Maxine said.

  "Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read."

  "I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I knew how."

  "And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did."

  "Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he'd have been less paranoid. Then we wouldn't have tried to hide him away, and none of this—"

  Tammy interrupted her. "Enough of that," she said. "Let's start a bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done."

  "A bonfire? For what?"

  "For things like these." She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. "Things it's nobody's business to ever see or read."

  "Is there much like that?"

  "There's enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I'll bring some more stuff out?"

  "Sure. Anywhere in particular?"

  "Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that."

  "Done."

  Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting other files that for one reason or another she didn't want people to see. She wasn't proud of what her over-bearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast dice and divide the lots.

  When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.

  "Is that all?"

  "No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."

  Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.

  "Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.

  "Like how?"

  "Write our own book."

  "Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife?"

  "Something like that."

  "It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favorite versions."

  "You think?"

  "For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's embedded. They believe what they believe."

  "I'll go get some more stuff."

  "Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?"

  "Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.

  Three or four trips out into the back yard and she'd done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where—hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills—was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.

  She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.

  The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to see how her fire-stoker was doing.

  "Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's arm.

  "No, I'm keeping this."

  "Oh? Okay."

  "It's just pictures of Todd."

  The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct—a kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often
on these pictures—made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the box and toss them into the middle of the fire.

  "Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.

  "Yep."

  The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but Maxine could see him clearly enough.

  "He was younger then."

  "Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."

  "Are those the negatives you're burning?"

  "Don't ask."

  "That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good-looking man."

  The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the third.

  "Are these the last of it, then?"

  "I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."

  "Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."

  "You want me to get you a Coke or a beer?"

  "No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."

  "Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already curled up into a little black ball.

  "Yes, home," Maxine said.

  She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."

  The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a few seconds it would be ashes.

  Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the flames, which only encouraged them.

  "Here," Maxine said and, snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand, dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.

  "You left it a bit late for a change of mind."

  Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.

  "You really want to keep that?"

  "Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the house where we can say hello to him once in a while."

  "Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport. Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to go?"

  "Just say the word."

  Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of a reunion in another, kinder place.

  She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so, she smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire to burn itself out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.

  THREE

  It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.

  The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.

  But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet fragrance of flowers.

  They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along the road that winds up the Canyon.

  Once in a while people will still make their way up that winding road, usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up. There's nothing here that gives them gooseflesh: just flowers and dragonflies. Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will give them something morbid to talk about once they get back to Tulsa or New Jersey.

  When people finally ask them whether they went up to that Godforsaken Canyon where all those Hollywood folks died, they say that yeah, they went and had a look, but it was a waste of gas and temper, because there was nothing to see. Not a thing.

  And so, over the next few summers, as people come and look and go away disappointed, word slowly spreads that Coldheart Canyon is a sham, a fake; not worth the effort.

  So people come less and less. And eventually the tourists don't come at all.

  There's only one kind of visitor who will still make the effort to find the place where Katya Lupi built her dream palace, and for this sort of sightseer, the Canyon will still put on a show.

  They come, always, in expensive vehicles, designed to be driven over rough, undomesticated land. They come with rolls of geological maps and surveyors' equipment, and talk proprietarily about how the Canyon would look if it had a five-star hotel, seven or eight stories high, built at the top end, with three swimming pools and a dozen five-grand-a-night bungalows, all arranged so that everybody has a little corner of the Canyon walled off for their private spa, the contours of the land altered so that it feels like a world within a world; an escape into paradise, just two minutes' drive from Sunset Boulevard.

  The Canyon has heard all this idle nonsense before, of course. And it has promised itself: never again.

  Hearing these men talk about the money they're going to make once they've done their digging and their planting, the Canyon loses its temper, and starts to show its displeasure as only dirt and rock given something close to consciousness by the magic worked in its midst can do.

  At first it simply shakes the ground a little, just enough to send some stones skipping down the Canyon's flanks to shatter the windshields on every vehicle on the road. Very often, a tantrum like this is enough to make the developers turn tail. But not always. Once in a while, there's somebody who refuses to be so easily intimidated, and the Canyon must escalate its assault.

  It shakes its flanks until it uncovers certain horrid forms: the mummified remains of the children of the ghosts and the animals who mated here in the dark days of the Canyon's shameful past.

  The revelation is brief. Just enough to say: this is the least of it, my friend. Dig and you will regret what I will show you for the rest of your life.

  The show works every time.

  Pragmatic though these men are, they feel the cold presence of the uncanny all around them, and suddenly they want no more of this place. In their panic they don't even bother to clear the granulated glass off their leather seats. They just get into their cars and drive away in clammy haste, leaving their maps and artists' renderings to decay in the dirt, and their ambitions to rot beside them.

  So the Canyon sits in the middle of the sprawling city, inviolate. Nobody will touch it now. All it has to do is wait; wait for a certain summons.

  There's no telling when it will come.

  Perhaps it's a hundred years away, this call. On the other hand, perhaps it will come tomorrow.

  All the Canyon knows is this: that at some point in the future a whisper will pass through its cracks and its vaults, and with one almighty heave, the canyons and the hills and the flatlands as far as the shore will stand up on end, and all the towers and the dams and the dream palaces that were bu
ilt here, along with their builders and their inheritors, will drop away into the deep, dark Pacific.

  The land will shake for a year or so, as it lays itself down again. Tremors will continue to convulse it. But by degrees, things will return to the way they were in an earlier time. The Santa Anas will blow in their season, and they'll carry into the Canyon the seeds of the flowers whose scents they bear, dropping them carelessly in the newly-churned dirt.

  After a few weeks of warm winter rain, the naked ground will be covered with grass and the shoots of young flowers; even the first spears of palm trees and bamboo. In the months to come they will flourish, transforming the land out of all recognition.

  And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

  Coldheart Canyon: The Revelations Interview

  Clive Barker took a break from writing Arabat, his new book for young readers, to speak with Phil and Sarah Stokes, creators of the Clive Barker website, Revelations. An excerpt from that July 10, 2001 interview, "Nips and Tucks, Tits and Fucks":

  Revelations: The first time we heard about Coldheart Canyon it was going to be a short novel - when did that turn into a 600-page epic?

  Clive Barker: In fact I do say at the beginning that even though I was sort of mourning my Dad, finding it difficult to write, I was at the same time finding the thing I needed to write, really, if I was going to pay respect to it as a subject, as an idea - I was going to need to tell it more fully than I had originally planned. I mean, the original thing had been, I don't know, 50,000, 60,000 words, I suppose and it had been originally told entirely from Todd's point of view. And it was really going to be a very simple book about a rather narcissistic actor in Hollywood who encounters some ghosts and we're not sure at the end of the short story or the novella, whatever it was going to be -novella, I suppose - whether he's really seen them or whether he hasn't. That was the book.