Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

sounded neither proud of the fact nor much distressed by it: his erection was just another plaything, like the dirt heaped over his body.

'Why did you bring half the back yard up here?'

'Just to play,' he replied. 'I don't know.'

'Yes you do,' she said to him.

'Okay I do. I'm dead, right. Right?'

'Yeah.'

'I knew it,' he said, with the grim tone of a man who was having bad news confirmed. 'I mean, I knew. As soon as I looked in the mirror, and I saw I wasn't fucked up anymore, I thought: I'm like the others in the Canyon. So I went out to look for them.'

'Why?'

'I wanted to talk to somebody about how it all works. Being dead but still being here; having a body; substance. I wanted to know what the rules were. But they'd all gone.' He stopped playing with himself and stared at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. 'There were just those things left—'

'The children?'

'Yeah. And they were droppin' like flies.'

'We saw. They 're all around the house.'

'Ugly fucks,' Todd said. 'I know why too.'

'Why what?'

'Why they were droppin'.'

'What?'

He licked his lips and frowned, his eyes becoming hooded. 'There's something out there, Maxine. Something that comes at night.' His voice had lost all its strength. 'It sits on the roof.'

'What are you talking about?'

'I don't know what it is, but it scares the shit out of me. Sitting on the roof, shining.'

'Shining?'

'Shining, like it was a piece of the sun.' He suddenly started to make a concentrated effort to bury his erection, like a little boy abruptly obsessed with some trivial ritual: two handfuls of dirt, then another two, then another two, just to get it out of sight. It didn't work. His cock-head continued to stick out, red and smooth. 'I don't want it to see me, Maxine,' he said, very quietly. 'The thing on the roof. I don't want it to see me. Will you tell it to go away?'

She laughed.

'Don't laugh at me.'

'I can't help it,' she said. 'Look at you. Sitting in a sackful of dirt with a hard-on talking about some light—'

'I don't even know what it is,' he said. Maxine was still laughing at the absurdity of all this. 'I'll tell Tammy to do it,' he said. 'She'll do it for me. I know she will.' He kept staring at the crack of light between the drapes. 'Go and get her. I want to see her.'

'So I'm dismissed, am I?'

'No,' he said. 'You can stay if you want or you can go if you want to. You've seen me, I'm okay.'

'Except for the light.'

'Except for the light. I'm not crazy, Maxine. It's here.'

'I know you're not crazy,' Maxine said.

He looked straight back at her for the first time. The light he'd been staring at had got into his eyes somehow, and was now reflected out toward her—or was that simply the way all ghosts looked? She thought perhaps it was. The silvery gaze that was both beautiful and inhuman.

'I suppose we both could be dreaming all this,' he went on. 'They don't call these places dream palaces for nothing. I mean ... I was dead, wasn't I? I know I was dead. That bitch killed me . . .' His voice grew heavy as he remembered the pain of his final minutes; not so much the physical pain, perhaps, as the pain of Katya turning on him, betraying him.

'Well, for what's it's worth,' Maxine said, 'I'm sorry.'

'About what?'

'Oh, a thousand things. But mainly leaving you when I did. It was Tammy who pointed it out. If I hadn't gone and left you, perhaps none of this would have happened.'

'She said that to you?' Todd replied, with a smile.

'Yep.'

'She's got a mouth on her when something strikes her.'

'The point is: she was right.'

Todd's smile faded. 'It was the worst time of my life,' he said.

'And I made it worse.'

'It's all right,' he said. 'It's over now.'

'Is it really?'

'Yes. Really. It's history.'

'I was so tired,' Maxine said.

'I know. Tired of me and tired of who you'd become, yes?'

'Yes.'

'I don't blame you. This town fucks people up.' He was looking at her with that luminous gaze, but it was clear his thoughts were wandering. 'Where's Tammy, did you say?'

'She went downstairs.'

'Will you please go get her for me?'

'Oh please now, is it?' she said, smiling. 'You have changed.'

'You know what starts to happen if you stay here long enough?' he said, apropos of nothing in particular.

'No, what?'

'You start to have these glimpses of the past. At least I do. I'm sitting here and suddenly I'm dreaming I'm on a mountain.'

'On a mountain?'

'Climbing, this sheer cliff.'

'That can't have been a memory, Todd. Or at least it can't have been a real mountain. You hated heights, don't you remember?'

He took his gaze off her and returned it to the crack between the drapes. Plainly, this news made him uncomfortable, questioning as it did the nature of his recollections.

'If it wasn't a real mountain, what was it?'

'It was a fake, built on one of the soundstages at Universal. It was for The Big Fall.'

'A movie I was in?'

'A movie. A big movie. Surely you remember?'

'Did I die in it?'

'No, you didn't die in it. Why do you want to know?'

'I was just trying to remember last night, what movies I'd made. I kept thinking if the light has to collect me, and I have to leave, and I have to tell it what movies I made—' He glanced at the wall beside the bed where he'd scrawled a list—in a large, untutored scrawl—of some of the titles of his films. It was by no means comprehensive; proof perhaps of a mind in slow decay. Nor were the titles he had remembered entirely accurate. Gunner became Gunman for some reason, and The Big Fall simply Fallen. He also added Warrior to the list, which was wishful thinking.

'How many of my pictures did I die in, then?'

'Two.'