Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

it scarcely mattered now. They were committed to this. The angel was already pricking up its ears, no doubt.

'Get in,' she hissed.

Todd ducked into the back. Maxine opened the passenger door and slid in with something less than grace. Then she slammed the door so hard it was probably audible in Santa Barbara.

'Sorry,' she slurred. 'Force of habit.'

Todd leaned over from the back seat and put his hand on Tammy's shoulder.

'Give it all you've got,' he said.

'I'll do what I can,' she said, and slipped the key into the ignition.

Even as she was instructing her fingers to turn the key, the moon came out above Coldheart Canyon. Except, of course, that it wasn't the moon, it was the messenger of God, roused from its meditations, and climbing a silent ladder into the dark air over their heads.

'Fuck and double fuck,' Todd said.

It moved straight toward the house, and—perhaps because the evening was a little damp, and the marine layer had come in off the ocean—it had collected around it a cloak of mist. Now, instead of simply being a light, it looked like a cloud with a white fire burning at its core; trailing a tail like a comet.

Tammy wasn't intimidated. She turned on the car engine. It roared, reassuringly loud.

'Handbrake!' Maxine said. 'Handbrake!'

'I've got it,' Tammy said. She took off the handbrake, and put the vehicle into gear. Then she slammed her foot down, and they took off.

'Todd!' she yelled over her shoulder. 'I want you to keep an eye on that sonofabitch for me.'

Todd was already doing just that, peering out of the back window. 'It's still above the house,' he reported. 'Maybe it thinks we're still in there.'

'I don't think it's that dumb somehow,' Maxine said.

Tammy drove the car up the street, and around two wide curves, before she found a place where it was possible to turn round. It was a squealing, messy five- or six-point turn in the narrow street, and the last maneuver delivered the back end of the car into the shrubbery. No matter. Tammy hauled the wheel round and accelerated. Todd went to the other side of the back seat, and looked out.

'Huh,' he said.

'What?'

'The damn thing still hasn't moved.'

'Maybe it's lost interest,' Tammy said.

It was a forlorn hope, of course, scarcely worth voicing. But every moment the thing failed to come after them was blessed.

'By the way,' she said, as she turned the first wide corner south of the house, 'I got a little taste of what that thing does to you, Todd—'

'You mean the memories?'

'Yeah.'

'Did it freak you out?'

'No. It was just sort of banal, really. It has a memory of my Aunt Jessica—'

'It's coming.'

'Oh shit!'

Tammy glanced in her rearview mirror: nothing. Looked over her shoulder: nothing.

'I don't see it!'

'It's after us.'

'I don't see it!'

She caught a glimpse of Todd's face in the mirror, his eyes turned directly upward; and she knew where it was. The next moment there was a light on the road all around the car, as though a police helicopter had appeared over the ridge with a spotlight, and caught them in it.

There was a turn up ahead. She took it at sixty-five miles an hour, wheels shrieking, and for a moment the cloud overshot the road, and she was driving in near-darkness. Losing the light so suddenly left her utterly disoriented and she took the next curve, which came fifteen yards after the previous one, so tightly that the left- hand side of the car was clawed by twigs and branches. Todd whooped.

'Hell, woman! You're quite a driver! Why didn't you tell me?'

'You never asked!' Tammy said, steering the car back into the middle of the road.

'We could have gone drag-racing together. I always wanted to find a woman I could go drag-racing with.'

'Now you tell me.'

Another curve came up, as tight as the one before. But this time she took it without any problem. They were halfway down the hill by now, and Tammy was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they were going to reach Sunset Boulevard without their pursuer catching up with them.

'If we do get to Sunset,' she said, 'what happens then? Do you think the damn thing will give up?'

She'd no sooner spoken than the light reappeared on the street ahead of them. It was no longer hovering in the air above the street but had descended to block the road from one side to the other.

Tammy slammed on the brakes, but as she did so a sliver of the angel's light came through the windshield to meet her mind, its freight familiar from their previous encounter. The road ahead of her was instantly erased, replaced with the fagade of the house on Monarch Street. She heard Maxine, somewhere to her right, let out a yell of panic, and then felt her reaching over to wrest control of the car from her. There was a brief, chaotic moment when Tammy's panic overwhelmed the angel's gift of memory, and she saw, to her horror, that the car had swerved off the road and was speeding into the dense thicket that grew between the trees. The image lasted for a moment only. Then it was gone, the approaching trees, Maxine's fumbling hands, her curses: all of it erased.

In its place, Tammy was standing at the door of her Aunt Jessica's house, in the dappled sunlight, and Aunt Jessica was telling her that her papa had gone down to the fire station—

The car struck a tree, and the windshield smashed, but Aunt Jessica smiled on. They hit another tree, and another, though Tammy saw none of it. She didn't hear the splinter of wood, or the shrieks from Maxine. Nor did she hear the din of tearing metal as a door was torn off. Her foot was still jammed on the brakes but they didn't seem to be slowing the vehicle's momentum. What eventually brought the car to a halt was a boulder, which lifted it up and threw it over onto its left side.

At the instant of impact the angel's vision faltered again, and Tammy saw the world as it really was—a blur of tumbling trees and raining glass. She saw her arms in front of her, her white-knuckled hands still seizing the wheel. She saw blood on her fingers, and then a little storm of shredded leaves coming in through the broken window, their sweetness reminding her, even in the midst of this chaos, of quieter times. Mown lawns on a Sunday afternoon; grass in her hair when she'd been play-wrestling with Sandra Moses from next door. Pieces of green memory, which flickered into her mind's eye between the tumbling view through the windshield and the last, brief appearance of Aunt Jessica's doorstep.

She knew it was the last because this time, as the car came to a halt, and Tammy slumped in her seat, her consciousness decided to forsake the pain of her broken bones (of which there were many) or the sound of Maxine's screaming (of which there was much) and just go away into the reassuring gloom of Aunt Jessica's house.

'Why did you not come when I called?' Aunt Jessica demanded. Kindly though she was, she didn't like to be disobeyed.

Tammy looked at the woman through her eleven-year-old's eyes, and fumbled for an answer to the old lady's question. But nothing she could say to Aunt Jessica would make any sense, now would it? Canyon, car, angel, crash. How could she possibly understand?

Anyway, Aunt Jessica didn't really want an answer. She had her niece inside the house where she wanted her, and that was all that was really important. Tammy walked down the hallway, into this brown comfortable memory, and let Aunt Jessica close the door behind her, so that the screaming and the raining glass and the world turned upside down could be forgotten, and she could go wash her hands before sitting down to a plate of Aunt Jessica's special meatloaf.