Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

could have plowed into him (which would have made an ignominious end to the night's adventures) had he not stepped out of her way.

But at least the distracted look had gone from his face. When he got into the car there was a new and welcome urgency about his manner.

'We're out of here,' he said.

'I thought for a moment that you were planning to stay.'

'No ... I was just thinking .. . about what a fool I'd been.'

'Well, stop thinking for a while,' Tammy said. 'It'll slow us down.'

She put her foot down and they sped off down the winding street.

About halfway down the Canyon he said: 'Do you think she's going to come after us?'

'No,' Tammy said. 'I don't think her pride would let her.'

She had no sooner spoken than something sprang into the glare of the headlights. Todd let out a yelp of surprise, but Tammy knew in a heartbeat what it was: one of the hybrids she'd encountered on the slopes. It was ugly, even by the standards of its malformed breed: a loping, pasty thing with the flesh missing from the lower half of its face, exposing a sickly rictus.

Tammy made no attempt to avoid striking the beast. Instead she drove straight into it. The moment before it was struck the thing opened its lip-less mouth horribly wide, as though it thought it might scare the vehicle off. Then the front of the car struck it, and its body rolled up onto the hood, momentarily sprawling over the windshield. For a few seconds, Tammy was driving blind, with the face of the beast grotesquely plastered against the glass. Then one of her more suicidal swerves threw the thing off, leaving just a smudge of its pale yellow fluids on the glass.

Very quietly Todd said: 'What the fuck was that?'

'I'll tell you some other time,' Tammy said. And leaving the explanation there, she proceeded down the winding road in uncontested silence, bringing them finally to some anonymous but lamplit street, and so, out of the entrails of Coldheart Canyon, and back into the City of Angels.

PART SEVEN

The A-List

ONE

In March of 1962 Jerry Brahms had bought a small two-bedroom apartment a block or two within the gates of Hollywoodland, a neighborhood created in the twenties which encompassed a large parcel of land in the vicinity of the Hollywood sign. The house had cost him nineteen thousand seven hundred dollars, a relatively modest sum for a place so pleasantly situated. Back then, he'd still indulged the fantasy that one day he'd meet a soul-mate with whom he would share the house, but somehow his romantic entanglements had always ended poorly, and despite three attempts to bring someone in, the chemistry had failed miserably, and each time he'd sent the man-to-be on his way, and he'd ended up alone. He no longer hoped for an end to his solitude: even the most optimistic of the cancer doctors who'd seen him gave him at best a year. The tumor in his prostate was now inoperable, and spreading.

For all his love of the dreamy far-off days of Hollywood, Jerry was a practical man, and—at least when it came to himself—remarkably unsentimental. The prospect of dying did not move him particularly one way or another: he was not afraid of it, nor did he welcome the eventuality. It would simply happen—sooner rather than later. Sometimes, when he got melancholy, he contemplated suicide, and in preparation for such a moment had amassed a considerable number of sleeping pills, sufficient, he felt sure, to do the job. But though he had very bad days now, when the pain (and, for a man as fastidious as himself, the practical problems of advanced bowel disorders) was so nearly overwhelming that he thought hard about tying up all the loose ends of his life and simply knocking back the pills with a strong Bloody Mary, somehow he could never bring himself to do it.

He had a sense of unfinished business, though he could not quite work out what the business might be. His parents were long since dead, his only sibling, a sister, also passed away, tragically young. Of his few friends there weren't many that he cared to say anything of great profundity to. If he slipped away, there'd be little by way of tears: just some fighting over his collection of movie memorabilia—which he'd never had evaluated, but was probably worth half a million dollars at auction—and a few tear-sodden, bitchy remarks at Mickey's (his favorite bar) when he was gone. Lord knows, he'd made enough of those kinds of remarks in his life: he'd been the kind of queen with a feline answer to just about anything in his heyday. But there was no joy in that kind of thing anymore. His style of queendom was long out of fashion. He was a dinosaur with prostate cancer; soon to be extinct.

Lately he'd found that his condition made him vulnerable to every little sadness that touched his world. The passing of Todd's dog, Dempsey, had left him in tears all day, though he barely knew the animal. And then the death of Marco Caputo: such a senseless waste of life. He hadn't ever been close friends with Caputo, but on those few occasions when he'd met the man, Caputo had always been polite and professional, rare enough in these days of mediocrity.

The funeral had not done justice to the man, in Jerry's opinion. It had been small (there were a couple of family members in from Chicago, but they looked as though they were more interested in what his will would say than in mourning their brother). Todd, of course, was not on hand, though Maxine was there as his representative. Jerry took the opportunity to ask her how much longer she thought the stalker business would be going on for. Were the police trying to catch this woman, and prosecute her, or was poor Todd just going to have to sit it out? Maxine said she didn't know. She wouldn't be dealing with Todd's affairs for very much longer, she told him: it was a waste of time and energy.

The conversation, the tiny, disinterested congregation, the coffin and the thought of its unviewable contents, all sent Jerry back home to his apartment in a blacker mood than usual. But even so, even on a day when it seemed that all decency and all hope had gone from the world, he found it impossible to take his stash of pills and finish the business.

Why, for God's sake? Something nagged at him; that was all he knew. Something told him: wait, just a little longer.

'It's not over,' the opera-queens of his acquaintance used to say, ' till the fat lady sings.'

Well, somewhere deep in his soul, he knew that the fat lady still had an aria up her sleeve.

So he kept on living, which was often a wearisome business, all the while waiting for whatever was nagging at him to make itself apparent.

Finally, on the night of March 31st, it did.

The circumstances were peculiar: he had a dream so powerful that it woke him. This in itself was odd, because he usually went to bed with a couple of scotches to wash down his sleeping pills, and as a consequence seldom woke.

But he woke tonight, and the dream he'd dreamed was crystal clear.

He had dreamed that he was sitting on the toilet, of all places, in a state of agonizing constipation (which was in his waking life a consequence of the painkillers his doctor prescribed). As he sat there he realized that there were wooden boards on the floor of his toilet, not tiles as there were in life, and the cracks between the boards were so wide that he could see right down into the apartment below. Except that it wasn't another apartment, it was—in the strange logic of this dream—another house. Nor was it just any house. It was Katya's dream palace that was spread below him. And as he realized this, the gaps between the boards grew wider, so that he dropped down between them, slowly, as though he were feather-light.

And there he was, in Katya's house, in Coldheart Canyon. He pulled up his pants and looked around.

The dream palace was in a state of considerable disrepair. The windows were broken, and birds flew in and out, shitting on the fancy furniture. A coyote skulked around in the kitchen, looking for scraps. And outside in the tree there were dozens of little red-and-black-striped monkeys, chattering and screeching. This was not so fanciful