Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

'You really want to find Todd,' Zeffer said. 'Admit it.'

'No, I don't care.' She stopped herself in mid-lie. 'Well, maybe a little,' she said. 'I just want to check that he's all right.'

'I can tell you the answer to that. He's not all right. He's with her. Frankly, that means you may as well forget about him. When Katya wants a man Katya gets him.'

'Were you married to her?'

'I was married when I met Katya, but I never became her husband. She never wanted me. I was just there to serve her, right from the start. To make her life easier. Todd's a different story. She's going to suck him dry.'

'Like a vampire, you mean?' Tammy said. After all she'd seen the idea didn't seem so preposterous.

'She's not the kind who takes your blood. She's the kind who takes your soul.'

'But she hasn't got Todd yet, has she?' Tammy said. 'I mean, he could still leave if he wanted to.'

'I suppose he could,' Zeffer said, his voice laced with doubt. 'But, Tammy, I have to ask you: why do you care about this man so much? What's he ever done for you?'

It took Tammy a few moments to muster a reply. 'I suppose if you look at it that way, he hasn't done anything . . . tangible. He's a movie star, and

I'm one of his fans. But I swear, Willem, if he hadn't been around over the last few years I would have had nothing to live for.'

'You would have had your own life. Your marriage. You're clearly a sensible woman—'

'I never wanted to be sensible. I never really wanted to be a wife. I mean, I loved Arnie—I still do, I suppose—but it's not a grand passion or anything. It was more a convenience thing. It made things easy when tax- time came around.'

'So what did you really want for yourself ?'

'For myself? You won't laugh? I wanted to be the kind of woman who comes into a room and instantly everybody's got something to say about her. That's what I wanted.'

'So you wanted to be famous?'

'I guess that was part of it.'

'You should ask Katya about fame. She's always said it was overrated.'

'How did we get off the subject of Todd?'

'Because it's impossible to help him.'

'Let me just go into the house and talk to him for a while. And maybe get something to eat while I'm there.'

'Haven't you seen enough of this place to be afraid of it yet?' Zeffer said.

'I'm almost past being afraid,' Tammy replied. It was the truth. She'd seen her share of horrors, but she'd lived to tell the tale.

They were twenty yards from one of the several staircases that ran up from the garden into the house.

'Please,' she said to Zeffer. 'I just want to go inside and warn him. If that doesn't work, I'll leave and I'll never look back, I swear.'

Zeffer seemed to sense the power of her will on the subject. He put up no further protest but simply said: 'You realize if you get in Katya's way, I can't step in to help you? I have my own allegiances, however foolish you may think they are.'

'Then I'll make sure I don't get in her way,' Tammy said.

'I'm not even supposed to go into the house, believe it or not.'

'Not allowed on the furniture, either?'

'If you're saying I'm little better than her dog, you're right. But it's my life. I made my choices just as you made yours.' He sighed. 'There are some days when I think hard about killing myself. Just to be free of her. But it might not work. I might slit my throat and wake up back where I started, her dead dog instead of her living one.'

Tammy's gaze slid past him to study the luminous people playing between the trees. The sight should have astonished her; but she'd seen too much in the last little while for this to impress her much. The scene before her was just another piece of the Canyon's mystery.

'Are they all dead?' she asked, in the same matter-of-fact way she'd sustained through much of their exchange.

'All dead. You want to go look?' He studied her hesitation. 'You do but you don't want to admit to it. It's all right. There's a little voyeur in everybody. If there weren't there'd be no such thing as cinema.' He turned and looked toward the flickering figures weaving between the trees. 'She used to have orgies all the time in the Golden Age, and I liked nothing better than to pick my way among the configurations and watch.'

'But not now?'

'No. There's only so much human intercourse anyone can watch.'

'Do they look horrible?'

'Oh no. They look the way they looked at the height of their beauty, because that's the way they want to remember themselves. Perfect, forever. Or at least for as long as God allows this place to last.'

Tammy caught the apocalyptic undertone in this. 'What do you mean?' she said.

'That sooner or later there'll be an end to this endless indulgence. A Day of Judgment, if you will. And I think'—he dropped his voice to a whisper, though there was no one nearby—'you may be its Deliverer.'

'Me?' She also dropped her voice. 'Why me?'

'It's just a hunch. A piece of wishful thinking if you like. They've had their time. And I think some of them know it. They're a little more desperate than they used to be. A little more shrill.'

'Why don't they just leave?'

'Ah. We had to come to that at last. The reason's very complex, and to tell you the truth I would not really know where to begin. Let me put it this way. They are afraid that if they leave this Canyon they may break the spell that keeps them in their strange state of perfection.'

'And do you believe that?'

'Yes, I believe it. They're prisoners here. Beautiful prisoners.'

A few minutes after Katya and Todd had left the party out on the night-lawn, a whisper went among the revenants, and one by one they gave up their pleasures, whatever they'd been, and turned their hollow gazes toward the house.

There are only so many times you can play out the old flesh games without losing interest in them. Yes, you could add piquancy if you introduced a whip, or some rope; you could mate with somebody of your own sex (or, if that was what you'd done in your lifetime, with somebody of the opposite gender). But all of it grew wearying with repetition. No feast can ever be so tempting that finally the act of eating doesn't lose its appeal. Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

It was the same for the ghosts. They'd been here in the presence of their own perfection for decades; and now it meant nothing to them. They'd seen that beauty defiled and debauched, they'd seen it locked in every configuration lust could devise, and there was nothing left to surprise them. The presence of living flesh, in the form of Todd Pickett, might momentarily reignite some old flames, but the conflagration quickly died away once he was removed from their company.

Now their eyes went to the house, and though they said nothing, the same thought went through all their melancholy heads.

Maybe tonight, something would change. Maybe tonight, with this man in her company, the Queen of Sorrows would make a mistake...

A few of them began to move in the general direction of the house, attempting to seem casual, but fixing their silvery eyes on their destination.

A bank of cloud had come in off the Pacific and covered both moon and stars. On the ridge of the opposite side of the Canyon some of the grotesque offspring of these weary beauties began a wordless howling in the darkness. The sound was loud enough to carry down the hill to Sunset and the Beverly Hills flats. Several valets parking cars for a private party on Rexford Drive paused to comment on the weird din from up in the hills; a couple of patients, close to death at Cedars-Sinai, called for their priests; a man who lived next door to the house on Van Nuys where Lyle and Eric Menendez had murdered their mother and father decided—hearing the sound—to give up