Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

house.

There was a calamitous din coming from the center of the house. It sounded as though a hurricane had been loosed down there, and was moving from room to room, getting stronger as its frustration mounted.

Tammy went to the stairwell and stood there for a few moments, letting the tears fall. Why not? Why the hell not? What crazy person wouldn't weep, when they'd turned over the rock of the world, and they'd seen what was there, crawling around: the dead, the nearly dead, and the sorrow of every damn thing.

It wasn't just Todd she was weeping for. She was shedding a tear, it seemed, for everyone she'd ever known. For Arnie, for God's sake, who one night had told her how his grandfather Otis, when he was in his cups, would burn the eight-year-old Arnie's knuckles with cigarettes 'for the fun of it,' and how Arnie had said it was good they'd never have children because he was afraid he'd end up doing the same.

For the dead who'd waited outside this insane asylum for so long, waiting for their chance to get back over the threshold, and now they were in, they weren't happy, because what they'd come in search of was gone. That was their noise, she knew, their fury, circling below; their frustration, mounting with every turn.

For Todd, and all the imperfect people who'd loved him because they'd thought he was made of purer stuff than they. All the worshipers who'd sent him messages through her, begging him just to drop them a note, pick up the phone, tell them that he knew they existed.

She'd been one of those people herself, once upon a time.

In a way she'd been the worst of them, in fact, because although she'd got so close to understanding the ways of this grotesque town, and known it was a crock of deceits and stupidities, instead of turning her back on it all, burning Todd's pictures and getting herself a life worth living, she'd let herself become a propagator of the Great Lie. She'd done it in part because it made her feel important. But more because she'd wanted Todd to be the real thing, the dream come true, alive in the same imperfect world she'd lived in, but better than that dirty, disappointing world. And having once decided to believe, she had to keep on believing it, because once he fell from grace, there was nothing left to believe in.

It'll all end in tears, as her mother had been wont to say, and Tammy had despised the woman for her lack of faith in things; for her cynical certainty that everything was bound to sorrow. But in the end she'd been right. Tammy was standing in the creaking, raging ruins of that terrible truth: tears on her own face, shed for just about everything she'd ever known.

She wiped her cheeks, and looked down the stairwell. The last time she'd looked she'd seen Jerry sprawled at the bottom; another one of Katya's victims. But now he was gone. She didn't want to call his name. That risked drawing Katya's attention and, if she was in the vicinity, Tammy had already had enough of her to last several lifetimes.

She ventured cautiously down the stairs, holding the banisters with both hands. The wood reverberated beneath her palms, shaken by the noise of the dead.

About halfway down she felt a rush of icy air erupt from the stairwell, and a heartbeat later a flood of forms returned from the passageway that led to the Devil's Country. The revenants—or at least some of them— were coming back the way they'd gone.

Tammy let go of the banister and threw herself against the wall as half a dozen of the phantoms came roaring up the stairs.

'Gone . . .' she heard one of them saying, its voice a mournful howl, '. . . gone . . .'

More revenants were emerging from the Devil's Country now, all in a similar state of fury. One of them began to dig at the ground at the bottom of the stairs with his bare hands, attacking the boards with such violence they cracked. Then he tore them up, obviously looking for what was already lost.

Tammy stayed glued to the wall, and in that state slid down to the bottom of the flight, to see if she could spot Jerry. Zeffer's body had been shoved aside by the passage of the ghosts, and lay face down in the corner of the stairwell. Looking in the other direction she saw that the door to the Devil's Country was throwing itself open and closed, slamming with such violence that its framework had cracked. So had the plaster overhead. The light had dropped out of its fixture, and was dangling, along with a cloud of plaster, from a bare wire, describing a figure eight in the air as it swung.

It wouldn't have been Tammy's first preference to venture any closer to the slamming door than she'd already come but as she'd left the responsibility of Todd with Maxine, she knew it fell to her to protect Jerry.

The ghosts wouldn't hurt her, she hoped, as long as she didn't get in their way. She'd done nothing to harm them. If anything, she should be their heroine. But she wasn't sure that in their present state of high frustration they knew the difference between those who were on their side and those who weren't. They simply wanted to know where their long-awaited paradise had gone. Apparently some of them were certain it had been removed to some other part of the house to trick them: hence this crazy tearing up of the floor, and smashing of the walls. It was here somewhere, and they were going to tear up the fabric of the house until they found it.

Two of these berserkers emerged from the room, their faces smears of fury, and raced past her up the stairs. She waited until they'd disappeared and then she went to the door. With the light swinging giddily overhead the passageway pitched like a fun-house ride. She closed her eyes to snatch a much-needed moment of stillness, then opened them, and without waiting for the door to stop its lunatic slamming, she pushed it open and stepped into the space that had once been called the Devil's Country.

Maxine had had occasion to lie to Todd many times over the course of their working life together, but she had never lied more profoundly than when she'd told him—that day she'd announced she was no longer working for him—that there were more like him available on every plane. The image of hordes of potential Todd Picketts just waiting to be picked out of the hopefuls who flew into LAX every hour had been cruel nonsense. Sure, there were always good-lookers in any bunch; sometimes beauties. And sometimes—though very rarely—a beauty had some innate talent. But very few who came to Tinseltown hoping to snatch the brass ring had what the young Todd had possessed: the kind of effortless charm that an entire generation, men and women both, could fall in love with. He'd been that rarest of things: a universal object of desire.

Of course it didn't take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been lucky. Though in private he'd often been sour, envious and scornful, Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd's image had remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.

And even that, in the end, wouldn't have mattered, if he'd allowed it to take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part of who they were.

Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she'd been prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might even have persuaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief that would have prevented.

But instead she'd been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them? Well, a lot of things she'd have preferred never to experience. Being out in the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror she'd never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her, sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local bitch. There were no words for the horror of that.

And finally, this. Coming back inside the house to find Todd as near dead as made no difference, his face covered in wounds, his body all cut up. The emergency services were on their way, but even if the Canyon had been easy to find, which of course it wasn't, she didn't have much hope that they'd make it in time to help him.

He made a noise, his eyes fluttering.

'Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way.'

For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him.