Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

As if awoken from a grateful sleep by the din of the birds, the crucified man raised his head, and opened his mouth. A black snake, no thicker than a baby's thumb, slid out from between his lips in a thin gruel of blood, spittle and bile. The snake dangled from the man's lower lip for a few moments, hooked by its tail. Then it fell to the ground, a foot from Eppstadt.

He stepped away in disgust, throwing a backward glance at the door, just to reassure himself that his means of escape from this insanity was still in view. It was. But the snake had changed his perspective on this mercy mission.

'The guy's on the way out,' Eppstadt said to Joe. 'You can't do anything for him.'

'We can still get him down.'

'And I'm telling you he's beyond help, Joe. Look at him.'

There did indeed seem little purpose in laboring to depose the man; he was obviously close to death. His eyes had rolled back beneath fluttering eyelids, showing nothing but white. He was attempting to say something, but his mind and his tongue were beyond the complex business of speech.

'You know what?' Eppstadt said, glancing around the landscape. 'This is a set-up.' There were indeed dozens of hiding places for potential attackers—human or animal—within fifty yards of them: rocks, holes, thicket. 'We should just get the hell out of here before whoever did this to him tries the same on us.'

'Leave him, you mean?'

'Yes. Leave him.'

Joe just shook his head. He had succeeded in getting this far, and wasn't going to give up now. He pulled on the rope that held the man's right hand. The arm fell free. Blood pattered on the leaves over Eppstadt's head, like a light rain.

'I'm almost done,' Joe said.

'Joe, I—'

'Get ready,' Joe said again, leaning across the victim's body to untie the other hand. 'You're going to have to catch him,' he warned Eppstadt.

'I can't do that.'

'Well who else is going to do it?' Joe snapped.

Eppstadt wasn't paying attention, however.

He'd heard a noise behind him, and now he turned to find that a freakish child, naked and runty, had appeared from somewhere, and was looking up at him.

'We've got company,' he said to Joe, who was still struggling to free the crucified man's other hand.

When Eppstadt looked back at the freak, it had approached a few steps, and Eppstadt had a clearer view of it. There was something goatish in the gene-pool, Eppstadt decided. The child's bandy legs were sheathed with dirty-yellow fur, and his eyes were yellow-green. From beneath the pale dome of his belly there jutted a sizable erection, which was out of all proportion to the rest of his body. He fingered it idly while he watched.

'Why are you taking the man down?' he said to Joe. Then, getting no answer from Joe, directed the same question at Eppstadt.

'He's in pain' was all Eppstadt could find to say, though the phrase scarcely seemed to match the horror of the victim's persecution.

'That's the way my mother wants him,' the goat-boy said.

'Your mother?'

'Lil-ith,' he said, pronouncing the word as two distinct syllables. 'She is the Queen of Hell. And I am her son.'

'If you're her son,' Eppstadt said, playing along for time until a better way to deal with this absurdity occurred, 'then it follows, yes . . . she would be your mother.'

'And she had him put up there so I could see him!' the goat-boy replied, the head of his pecker echoing his own head in its infuriated nodding.

The angrier he became, the more the evidence of his extreme inbreeding surfaced. He had a hare-lip, which made his outrage harder to understand, and his nose—which was scarcely more than two gaping wet holes in his face—ran with catarrhal fluids. His teeth, when he bared them, were overlapped in half-a-dozen places, and his eyes were slightly crossed. In short, he was an abomination, the only perfect piece of anatomy he'd inherited was that monstrous member between his legs, which had lost some of its hardness now, and hung like a rubber club between his rough-haired legs.

'I'm going to tell my mother about you!' he said, stabbing a stunted forefinger in Eppstadt's direction. 'That man is a crinimal.'

'A crinimal?' Eppstadt said, with a supercilious smirk. The idiot-child couldn't even pronounce the word correctly.

'Yes,' the goat-boy said, 'and he's supposed to hang there till the birds pluck out his eyes and the dogs eat out his end tails.'

'Entrails.'

'End tails!'

'All right, have it your way. End tails.'

'I want you to leave him up there.'

During this brief exchange, Eppstadt's gaze had been drawn to the goat-boy's left foot. The nail of his middle toe had not been clipped (he guessed) since birth. Now it looked more like a claw than a nail. It was six, perhaps seven, inches long, and stained dark brown.

'Who the hell are you talking to?' Joe yelled down from the top of the ladder. The density of the foliage made it impossible for him to see the goat-boy.

'Apparently he's up there as a punishment, Joe. Better leave him there.'

'Who told you that?'

Joe came down the ladder far enough to have sight of the goat-boy. 'That?'

The boy bared his teeth at Joe. A dribble of dark saliva came from the corner of his mouth and ran down onto his chest.

'I really think we should just get going . . .' Eppstadt said.

'Not until this poor sonofabitch is down from here,' Joe said, returning up the ladder. 'Fucking freak.'

'This isn't our business, Joe,' Eppstadt said. There was something about the way the air was roiling around them; something about the way the clouds churned overhead, covering the already depleted light of the sun, that made Eppstadt fearful that something of real consequence was in the offing. He didn't know what this place was, or how it was created; nor, at that moment, did he care. He just wanted to be out through the door and upstairs again.

'Help me!' Joe yelled to him.

Eppstadt went to the bottom of the ladder and peered up. The crucified man had dropped forward over Joe's broad shoulder. Even in his semi-comatose state he could still beg for some show of compassion. 'Please . . .' he murmured. 'I meant no offense . . .'

'He wouldn't fuck my mother,' said the goat-boy, by way of explanation for this atrocity. He was just a foot or two behind Eppstadt, staring up at Joe and the man he was attempting to save. He turned briefly; surveyed the sky. The wind was getting gusty again, slamming the door and then throwing it open.

'She's coming,' the goat-boy said. 'Smell that bitterness in the air?'

Eppstadt could indeed smell something; strong enough to make his eyes water.

'That's her,' the goat-boy said. 'That's Lilith. She's bitter like that. Even her milk.' He made an ugly face. 'It used to make me puke. And me? I love to suckle. I love it.' He was getting hard again, talking himself into a fine little fever. He put his thumb in his mouth, and pulled hard on it, making a loud noise as he did so. He was every inch an irritating little child, excepting those inches where he was indisputably a man.

'I'd put him back if I were you,' he said, pushing past Eppstadt to stand at the bottom of the ladder.

Eppstadt's gaze returned to the heavens. The sky was the color of cold iron, and the bitterness the child had said was his mother's stench was getting stronger with every gust of the cold wind. Eppstadt looked off into the distance, to see if there was any sign of an arrivee on the winding roads. But they were almost deserted. The only person on any of the roads right now was a man some two or three miles away, who was lying sprawled, his head against a stone. Eppstadt had no logical reason to believe this, but he was somehow certain the man was dead, his