mistress’s bedroom down below, boring straight through the bedrock of the mountain itself. Smiley hinted to the construction crew that the tunnel was for “business purposes.” The winking crew filled in the blanks; they knew how Smiley had made his dough back East; sex never even entered their minds.
Smiley kept the only key and made sure the door on the other side was hidden at the back of a large walk-in closet. Finally, he bribed the county officials to conveniently lose the architectural plans to both homes, which explained why—almost ninety years later—Factboy didn’t uncover a trace of this tunnel during his initial check on the Lowenbruck house.
And why Hardie and Lane were surprised to find themselves in a dank, stone-lined staircase in a corridor that seemed to stretch up into a dark forever.
Thick black smoke had poured in behind them; there really was no time for debate. Charlie used his forearms to push away the semirotted wood and clear the entranceway. There seemed to be nothing behind the wall at first, but Charlie figured nothing was better than dying from smoke inhalation. Maybe there was a crevice between the house and the mountain, and they could squeeze themselves out through it.
“Go,” Charlie said, hacking. “Go go go…”
Once they were inside the passageway, their eyes began to adjust, and they saw the stone walls, the cement stairs. They crawled up into the darkness. After a few steps Charlie reached out and grabbed Lane’s arm. She clutched his hand in return, holding on tight and limping all the way up the cement staircase into what seemed like total darkness.
She wondered if Andrew had any clue this passageway was here. She assumed not. He loved talking about the house, and he wouldn’t have been able to resist talking about a secret corridor. For a second, Lane thought he’d be excited by the discovery, but then she remembered his house was burning down, along with everything he owned and created.
Mann kept her eyes on the scene of the fire, trying to pull in any kind of detail that would be useful. Every few seconds she would ask O’Neal:
“Anything?”
“Nothing.”
Her eyes hurt, though. Their sockets were tender and her face throbbed so much that she couldn’t stop tearing up. She couldn’t take anything for the pain, because that would just fog her thinking. The more she stared up at the house, the more tears came. Blinking was agonizing, so she did it as little as possible. And with every blink, Mann was convinced the damage to her eyes worsened.
But she couldn’t leave. There was no one else to keep watch. What had begun as a team of six eyes had dwindled down to a pitiful two and a half—that’s all Mann really had, a kind of pathetic half vision.
If they were dead…
And this was where you went after you died…
Then they must have stumbled into a part of the afterlife that was still under construction. Hardie looked around at the buckets, the scaffolding, the painting tarps. The room reeked of caulk and cement and dust and paint, and harsh light blazed through uncovered windows. Still, you could tell that you were standing inside what most people would refer to as a castle.
And all at once, Lane figured it out.
“Oh God,” Lane said. “I know where we are.”
“A new wing of Hell?”
“No. We’re in the Smiley Castle. You can’t see it from the street, but it’s the next house up on the hill. This director I know bought the place a few months ago. He wants to do a movie about the guy who built this place. A real nutcase who turned into a cult leader.”
“I’m guessing your friend hasn’t moved in yet.”
“No. He’s having the whole place redone—he’s restoring it to the way it looked back in the nineteen thirties, from the flooring to the roof to the fixtures. Half the place is on order from antique dealers around the world, and it won’t be finished until early next year. It’s kind of his dream home and dream movie project wrapped up in one.”
“Groovy,” Charlie said.
Lane had read a long piece about it online a few months ago. Eventually, the massive room they were in would be restored to its Depression-era glory. Before that, it was a recording studio. Before that, a storage center for pornographic VHS cassettes. Before that, a playroom. Before that, a crime scene. And before that, not long after its construction, Jimmy Smiley’s secret full-service Polynesian-style bar, where the former bootlegger-turned- Hollywood-producer-turned-devil-worshipper would take a few nips of brown lightning before descending the concrete staircase to bow at the feet of his mistress—who, in time, would ascend to the level of Dark Satanic Goddess.
“Come on,” Lane said.
They wound their way through a series of halls until they reached the front doors. Outside, the roiling black smoke from the Lowenbruck house was filling the sky, and fire truck sirens were cycling down. Hardie and Lane were up too high on the hill to see the burning house below, so they had the illusion that the faux castle was floating on a polluted cloud. Behind them was the hazy apparition of the Hollywood sign, which only completed the picture. If he hadn’t been engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, Hardie might have stopped to appreciate it all, to savor the view. But they had to keep moving in case their tormentors realized they weren’t dead.
Hardie told Lane they needed to get the hell off these mountains and back on relatively flat ground—well, flat for California.
Lane shook her head.
“No. We need to go up.”
—James M. Cain
UP?
Up seemed insane. A dead end at the top of some mountain peak. Enough time to touch the
“Trust me,” she said. “I know this area. I used to go running around here all the time.”
“What’s up there?”
“Come on.”
Hardie followed her up a set of concrete stairs that ran away from the castle along the side of one steep slope. Then they were back on Durand Drive and headed up again. None of this made sense. Who the fuck designed Hollywood, anyway—M. C. Escher? Homes were stacked on either side of the road, offering a corridor of sorts. And the road kept climbing up, up, up. The ascent was hard, sweaty work—definitely not something a man who’s been skewered and poisoned and choked and nearly burned to death should be doing. Hardie was about to complain, when he saw that Lane was still limping, biting her lip with every step. She was suffering, too.
As they walked past windows, Hardie imagined one of their surprise tormentors popping out of a window, bow and arrow or some other crazy weapon in their hands
