Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

her life.

Fear of living, fear of dying. Fear of staying, fear of going. Fear of remembering, and yes, fear of forgetting.

But every now and again, even in this despairing paradise, there would come a glimpse of hope; a hint of a chance that things might finally change for the better. Such hints and glimpses usually appeared in the form of interlopers; people whose unplanned presence in the Canyon had the potential to subtly change the balance of power in La Puta Enojada's feudal realm.

There had been perhaps a dozen such opportunities during the time in which Zeffer had been a prisoner of the Canyon, all in their way dangers to the status quo, and all carefully managed by Katya, so as to prevent the destruction of her autocracy. The most notable, until now, had been the appearance of a runaway child, one Jerry Brahms, who had fled his minders into the Canyon, ignorant of the mysteries he was treading among. He'd almost brought her down, that one, coming into the house without anyone's realizing he was there, and getting his fingers into places they had no business being. Opening doors; letting the ghosts sniff the Hunt. The fact that he was a child had made her indulgent of his mistakes. Rather than have him killed, Katya had let him live; brought him to her bosom, in fact.

It was an act of trust that had served her well as the years had passed. Brahms the boy had became Brahms the man, and his loyalty had remained unwavering. Zeffer had never entirely understood what had happened between them, but he had his suspicions. Katya had shown Brahms pleasures that had marked him as hers forever. That meant, most likely, that she had taken him down to see the Hunt. Once you'd walked in the Devil's Country, smelled its ancient air, you belonged to that place, in some unspeakable way. It owned you. He didn't need to look any further than his own body for evidence of this. Since Katya had forbidden him to enter the house—keeping him from close proximity to the tiles— he had started to look and feel his true age. His hair had turned white, his bones and joints ached perpetually. Why was he surprised? Nobody lived forever. Not movie goddesses, nor the men who served them. And certainly not houses, however much rapture they contained. Every facade cracked, finally; and crumbled; and went away to dust. It was only a question of time.

Which thought brought him back to the newest trespasser in their sealed world: the most promising opportunity for an undoing of long-held certainties he'd seen in many years. She was a strong one, this big-boned, big-breasted woman with her unhappy eyes. She was trouble, thank God. Under the right circumstances a woman like that could do all kinds of mischief. If, of course, she was still alive. She'd been snatched away by los ninos, the corrupt children of the Canyon, offspring of unsavory couplings between animals and ghosts. Zeffer had witnessed such intercourse many times over the years; vile marriages between ghost women and coyotes; ghost men and deer, or dogs; even once, a woman and a bird. Somehow, such consummations were often fruitful, though the birthings were not anything he could have imagined until he laid eyes on them. The animals who produced infants this way almost always died in the process; every now and again he would come upon one of their rotted carcasses on the hillside, and he'd know that another hybrid had been added to that unholy tribe. The revenant women who allowed such congress (some of them famous in their day, reduced in their frustration and madness to mating with wild animals), these women seemed to show no signs of trauma when the birth was over, their bodies being less than flesh and more than ether; malleable, mendable. But that was not to say their matings were without consequence. These ghosts were also the wildest, in his experience; the most prone to sudden violence. The beast had got into them in more ways than one. They were touched by a kind of rabidity, which was in distressing contrast to what remained of their elegance. Their glossy skins were pulled tight over something feral; and their beauty could not conceal it. Women who had once been household names— paragons of elegance and sophistication—walking on all fours, their gait crabbed, their speed uncanny; baring their perfect teeth in the thicket and yelping like coyotes who'd just come upon a fresh kill.

There was reason, then, for him to believe the interloper had not survived her abduction. If they'd caught up with her, los ninos might have toyed with her for a while, but they were stupid things, and their attention spans were short. It would not take them long to decide that there'd be more sport in hurting the woman than in teasing her, and once her blood began to run they'd become frenzied, and fall upon her, taking her limb from limb.

That was his fear.

The source of his hope? That he had not heard any death-cries in the Canyon since she'd been gone. It was a tiny reason to believe that something good might come of the woman's arrival here, but he had to have some little measure of hope, or there was nothing. So in the absence of hearing the woman's screams, he allowed himself to believe that there was one in the Canyon who might be the undoing of Katya Lupi.

TWO

Tammy was indeed alive. She knew she was alive because she was hungry. It was the only thing about her present condition which she really recognized; the rest was a kind of fever-dream, filled with blurred horrors; remote pieces of what might be real and what she hoped to God was not.

She had been carried by her abductors to the far end of the Canyon, where there was no sign of any habitation. The area was pretty much jungle: dense thickets of barbed shrubs, overshadowed by stands of immense, shaggy palms. There was no way to climb up any of these trees, to escape those who'd brought her here (though even if she'd been able to do so, she was certain they would have sniffed her out); nor was there any way to move more than a few steps through the thicket. So she was left with only one option: she had to confront her abductors.

It was her mother's gift to her, this even-headedness. In circumstances that would have brought lesser minds to the point of collapse, Edith Huxley (Ma Edie to everyone who'd ever knew her for more than a day) had been uncannily calm. And the more panicky people around her became, the calmer she'd get. It made her an ideal nurse, which was the work she'd done all her life. She soothed the hurt, she soothed the dying, she soothed the bereft. Everything's fine, she would say in that soft voice of hers (another of her gifts to Tammy); and by some miracle everyone would believe her. Very often, because people believed her, the panic ceased and everything was fine. It was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So now, sitting in the thicket, in the midst of this fever-dream, with its voices and its faces and its stink, she repeated Ma Edie's mantra to herself, over and over: Everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, waiting for it to turn out true.

Her head still throbbed from the white light that had wiped out the world before her abduction; and her stomach was certainly in need of filling, but she still had all her limbs, for which she was grateful, and a voice in her throat. So, once she'd calmed herself down, she started to talk to whatever it was that had come after her (and was still there, in the vicinity), her volume quiet but her tone insistent enough that she would not be mistaken for somebody who was afraid.

'I'd like to get back to the house now,' she said to them, 'so will one of you please escort me?' She scanned the bushes. They were watching her. She could see the glitter of their eyes, the gleam of their teeth. What were they? They didn't seem quite substantial; she had the feeling that their flesh was not as solid as hers, as real perhaps; yet they'd possessed enough strength to remove her from the vicinity of Zeffer's cage to this corner of nowhere, so they weren't to be disrespected.

'Do you understand me?' she'd said, keeping her tone even. 'I need to go back to the house.'

Off to her left she saw a motion in the thicket, and one of the creatures approached her, coming close enough that for the first time she had a proper view of one of the abductors. It was a female, no doubt of that, and vaguely related to a human being. The creature's naked body was scrawny, her ribs showing through flesh that seemed to be covered with light gray-silver hair. The front limbs were extremely delicate, and she surely had hands and fingers, not pads and claws. But the back legs were as crooked as a dog's, and rather too large for the rest of her anatomy, so that when she was squatting, her proportions were almost frog-like.

But the head: that was the worst of her. Her mouth was nearly human, as was her nose, but then the skull curved and suddenly flattened so that her eyes, which were devoid of whites, and set to either side of the skull, like the eyes of a sheep, stuck out, black and shiny and stupid.

She turned her head and stared at Tammy with her shiny eyes. Then, from those human lips came the scraps