Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

For the second time in this journey, Marco said: 'Huh.'

He pushed open the door. There was complete darkness on the other side, but it was a high, wide darkness, his gut told him; and the wind that gusted against him came—though this was beyond reason—across a stretch of open land.

He wished he hadn't drunk the whiskies now. Wished he had his senses completely under his control, so that he could assess this phenomenon clearly.

He put his hand around the corner of the door, looking for a light switch. There wasn't one; or at least there wasn't one his fingers could find. Never mind. This would be a mystery for tomorrow. For now he'd just close the door and go back to his drinking.

He reached in and caught hold of the doorhandle. As he clasped it there was a flicker of light in the depths of the room. No, not of light, of lightning: a fragmentary flicker which was followed by three much longer flashes, in such quick succession they were almost a single flash.

By it, he saw the space from which the wind came, and had his instincts confirmed. Wide it was, and high. The thunderhead which spat the lightning was miles away, across a landscape of forest and rock.

'Oh, Jesus,' Marco said.

He reached out for the doorhandle, caught hold of it, and slammed the door closed. There was a lock, but no key. Still, it seemed firmly enough closed, at least until he'd found Todd, and shown him.

He started yelling Todd's name as he ran up the stairs, but there was no reply. He went to the master bedroom, knocked, and entered. The room was empty, the French doors to the balcony open, the drapes billowing.

He went to the balcony. The wind that was moving the drapes was a California wind: warm, fragrant, gentle. It was not remotely like the wind that had blown against his face in the room below. That was a wind from a different country.

Todd was not on the balcony. But once Marco was out there he heard the sound of voices from somewhere in the Canyon. Women's voices, mostly, laughing. And lights, running between the trees.

'Sonofabitch,' Marco said.

The boss was apparently having a party, and he hadn't invited Marco.

The evening was getting stranger by the minute. He went downstairs, through the kitchen and out to the back door. Anxiety had soured the drink in his stomach, and as he opened the back door a wave of nausea suddenly overcame him. He had no time to get outside. He puked on the threshold, the force of the feeling enough to fold his legs up beneath him.

He gazed weakly down at the splattered whisky and meatballs on the ground, his eyes vaguely comprehending the intricacy of five nails that were driven into the partially rotted wood of the threshold.

Then, from the darkness on the other side of the threshold there came a soft, infinitely sorrowful voice. The voice of a lost girl.

'Let me in,' she said.

Marco looked up, his head still spinning. There was more vomit gurgling in his belly; he could feel his system preparing to revolt again. He tried to make sense of the girl who'd just begged entrance to the house, narrowing his eyes to see if he could separate her from the shadows.

There she was: a young woman with a face that his sickened eyes could not entirely fix nor be certain of, but who seemed to be more than passingly pretty. She had long blonde hair and pale, almost white, skin; and as suited her tone of supplication she was on her knees, her pose a mirror image of his own. She was wearing what appeared to be a man's shirt, which was unbuttoned. Had Marco been feeling more like himself, he might have hoped to persuade her to take the shirt off before he took pity on her. But the nausea overwhelmed all other responses: the girl's near-nakedness only made his belly churn harder. He looked away from her, hoping to postpone the next bout of vomiting until she was out of sight.

She plainly took his averted eyes as a sign of rejection.

'Please,' she said to him again, 'I just want to get back into the house. You have to help me.'

'I'm in no condition—' he started, looking up at her to try to communicate with his expression just how dire he felt, but the few words he'd begun to say were enough to bring about a sudden and calamitous change in her.

She let out a shriek of frustration and rage, volume and shrillness uncanny. He felt his gorge rising, and as the woman's din reached its inhuman height, he puked up what was left of his dinner.

The worst was over now; but there was more to come from the woman outside. Feeling his stomach settling, he chanced a look up at her. It was an error. She was still letting out the remnants of that godless shriek of hers, and it seemed—at least to Marco's sickened and bewildered eyes—that the noise was taking some grotesque toll on her body. Her face—which had been so beautiful just minutes before—had become a gray, smeared form: her forehead swollen so that she looked cretinous, her eyes pulled into empty slits, her mouth running with saliva from its turned-down corners. Her oversized shirt had fallen open to reveal breasts that were gray scraps of dead flesh hanging on the cage of her bones. Beneath them, he seemed to see her innards in frenzied motion, as though she had snakes nesting in her.

It was too much for Marco's already traumatized senses. He didn't give any further thought to finding Todd —Christ, Todd was probably part of this insanity.

With his heels sliding in the mess he'd made, he hauled himself to his feet—half-expecting the abomination on the other side of the threshold to come after him. But for some reason she kept her distance, her transformation now so far advanced she was completely unrecognizable as the woman he'd first laid eyes on.

He retreated down the passageway—still assuming this nightmare might come after him. But she matched his retreat with one of her own, melting into the shadows. Marco wasn't reassured. She'd probably gone to find others; he didn't want to be here when they came back. He raced into the kitchen and picked up his car keys, which were on the table. He gave a moment's consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forgo cleanliness in favor of making a fast exit.

He drove down the serpentine road that led out of the Canyon as if he were being pursued by a horde of demon-women, and without even thinking about it took the same route he'd taken with Todd countless times: up onto Mulholland Drive. He opened the window as he drove, so as to have a sobering breeze blowing against his face, but it had very little effect. There was too much alcohol in his blood, and too much panic inflaming that alcohol, to make him a safe driver on such a notoriously tricky and dangerous stretch of road. He didn't care. He just wanted to put some distance between himself and that damn Canyon as fast as possible.

On one of the hairpin bends his clammy hands slid on the wheel, and he momentarily lost control of the car. He was a good enough driver— even in his present state—to recover quickly, and things might have been fine had another speed-freak not come barreling round the corner from the opposite direction. The other driver took quick evasive action, and was away round the bend before Marco lost what little control he had. The wheel slipped through his hands, and his drink-slurred foot was too slow on the brake to stop the car from skewing round, squealing loudly. There was no barrier between the road and the drop; not even a wooden fence. The front half of the vehicle went over the edge, and there it lodged for a moment, finely balanced between solid asphalt and oblivion. Marco muttered a little prayer, but God wasn't listening. The car tripped forward and slid off the road into darkness. It was a straight drop of perhaps forty or fifty feet.

The vehicle didn't hit solid ground, however. It fell into the massive boughs of a sycamore tree, which was large enough to hold the car, nose down, in its branches. Marco was thrown against the windshield. Through it he could see the yard in which the sycamore stood. There was a party going on down there. The pool was illuminated: its bright turquoise water twinkling. Lanterns hung in the bushes all around, swaying in the breeze. Marco had time to grasp the prettiness of all this, then something ignited in the engine, and the fume-filled air around him became a sheet of lurid orange flame. It enveloped him completely, the first burst of heat enough to sear the clothes from his body and set his hair and flesh alight.

Blindly, he fumbled for the handle of the door, and pulled on it. The rush of air only excited the flames further. Through the stench of gasoline and burning plastic he could smell the sickening tang of his own body being cooked. Still he fought to escape, and gravity was on his side. The car was so positioned that he had only to lean forward