Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

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'Oh no. This isn't the end for me,' Katya replied calmly. 'This is the end for him. And for you—' She poked the knife in Tammy's general direction. 'Your miserable lives are certainly over. But not me. I was always a chameleon. Wasn't I, Jerry? From picture to picture, didn't I change?' He didn't reply to her, but she pressed the point, as though she simply sought verification of the truth. 'Well didn't I?' she said. 'Grant me that much.'

'Yes . . .' he said, as though to silence her.

'So I'll change again. I'll go out into the world and I'll be somebody new. There's a whole new life, still waiting to be lived.'

'Not a hope in Hell,' Tammy said.

'What?'

'Let it go, Tammy,' Jerry said.

'Why? She may look like a million dollars but she's just a slice of the same stale ham that she always was. You know what? I love movies. Even the silent ones. Like Broken Blossoms. I love Broken Blossoms. It still makes me cry. There's some heart in it. Something real. But your . . . flicks?' She laughed, shaking her head. 'They're dead. You see, that's the paradox. Mary Pickford's gone, and Fairbanks and Barrymore. They're all gone. But they live on because they made people laugh and cry. Whereas you? You're alive, and the shit you made isn't worth a damn.'

'That's not true,' Katya said. 'Jerry, tell her.'

'Yes, Jerry,' Tammy said, quietly. 'Tell her.'

'The truth is that you're not remembered quite as well as I may have—'

'Let's not tell any more lies,' Tammy said grimly. She looked at Katya. 'Nobody knows who the fuck you are.'

Katya looked at Tammy for a moment, and then back to Jerry, who shook his head.

'If they knew,' Tammy said, 'don't you think somebody would have recognized you when you came to get Todd?'

Katya looked down at the cracked floor. She was absolutely still, except for her right hand, which was idly judging the heft of the knife. When she looked up again, her face carried a radiant smile.

'All right. Enough recriminations. We've said our hard words. Now we must begin to forgive.'

Tammy looked at her with incredulity. How many faces did this woman have? 'There's going to be no forgiving here,' she said.

'Will you shut up,' Katya snapped, passing her hand over her brow. The smile dropped away for a moment, and there was a terrible vacuity in its place. As though the masks, however many there were, concealed nothing at all.

But she put the smile on again, a little more tentatively, and looked at Jerry.

'I'm in need of your help,' she said. 'Your help and your forgiveness. Please.' She opened her arms. 'Jerry. For old times' sake. I gave you a life. Didn't I? Being up here with me, wasn't it something to live for?'

Jerry took a long time to answer. Then he said: 'You smell of death, Katya.'

'Please. Jerry. Don't be cruel. Yes, I've hurt a lot of people. I realize that. Nobody regrets that necessity more than I do. But right from the beginning, I was trapped. What could I do? Zeffer was the one who brought the Hunt into this house, not me. I knew nothing about it. How can I be blamed for that?'

'I think they blame you,' Jerry said, nodding past Katya at the now-stilled fog; or rather, at what it concealed.

At some point in this exchange, the revenants had left off their demolition, their fury momentarily calmed as they listened to Katya's self-justification. Many of them had been physically intertwined earlier, but they had separated themselves from one another, and, shrouded by the fog, listened to the woman play her parts.

'They were your guests,' Jerry said to Katya. 'Some of them were great actors.'

'If they were so great, why did they become addicted so easily?'

'So did you,' he reminded her.

'But the room was mine. They were just people who passed through. Yes, some of them were casual friends. Some of them were even casual lovers. But once they were dead? They were nothing.'

'I knew you were going to say that eventually,' Tammy said. 'You selfish bitch.'

'Jesus,' Katya said. 'I have heard enough from you.'

She lifted her knife and came at Tammy. In two seconds she would have had the blade buried in Tammy's heart, but before she could reach her target somebody stepped out of the mist and knocked the knife from her hand. It spun on the tile, but Katya was quick. She ducked down and snatched it up again, her gaze going to the figure who had stepped into her path.

He had opened his arms, as though to formally present himself to her.

'Rudy?' she said.

The man in front of her bowed his gleaming head.

'Katya,' he replied.

Tammy couldn't see his face but she thought there was some sorrow in the syllables; whether for Katya, or for himself, who could say?

He'd no sooner spoken than from another spot, close to the door, somebody else spoke her name. This second voice was heavier than Valentino's; there was more anger in it than melancholy. 'Remember me?' he said. 'Doug Fairbanks?'

Katya turned. 'Doug? I didn't realize you were here too.'

“And me?' came a third voice, this time a woman's.

'Clara?' Katya said.

'Of course.'

The speaker walked up to Katya as she spoke, her stride remarkably confident. She was a shadow of her former self, but Tammy would still have recognized the face of Clara Bow. The bee-stung lips. The high, curved brows. The wide eyes, once filled with innocent high-spirits. But not now. Now they burned.

Katya glanced over her shoulder. 'Please, Clara,' she said, 'don't come so close.'

'Why should you care how close we get?' Clara Bow said.

'Yes,' came a fourth voice. 'You're not to blame, remember?'

'Anyway,' came a fifth voice, 'we're nothing.'

'Nothing,' said a sixth voice. And a seventh.

Katya turned, swinging her weapon in a wide arc. Even so, it missed its several marks. The ghosts were too quick for her; she was sluggish, even in her fury. Besides, Tammy thought, what possible harm could a kitchen knife do to these creatures? Yes, they had a corporeal existence; no question of that. But they were—as far as she understood it—spirit presences made of ether and memory. These people couldn't die. They were already dead; long, long dead.

And they were assembling now in even greater numbers, having apparently given up looking for the Devil's Country.

It was gone; the evidence of which was the fading lines on the walls of this melancholy chamber. All that remained by way of satisfaction, if that was the word, was to punish the woman who had kept them outside in her joyless Canyon for so many seasons, holding on to the hope that they would one day be let back into the house to satisfy their craving for the solace of their addiction.

Katya was well aware that she was in jeopardy, and hopelessly outnumbered. While still holding the knife she raised both hands in a vague gesture of surrender.

The dead seemed not to care. Their pale faces, which had always looked impersonal, were now—in the presence of the woman who had once been their confidante—assembling fragments of forgotten particularities. It was like a room full of Alzheimer's patients, recovering in the presence of some person they'd known well what they'd previously lost: themselves. Their eyes, which had been little more than lights in their heads, took on a specific shape and color. Their mouths, which had been slits, bloomed into sensuality.

Tammy didn't think any of these reconfigurations were good news for Katya. Unobtrusively, she caught hold of the back of Jerry's shirt, and gently eased him out of Katya's immediate vicinity.