Coldheart Canyon (31 page)

The lookalike, meanwhile, leaned forward, hooked a long, cold finger through a hole in Tammy’s blouse and before she could do a damn thing about it, tore the light cotton blouse away from her skin.

“You keep away from me,” she told the offender.

He bared his teeth at her. “Pretty boobies,” he said.

“What?”

The forbidding grimace had transformed into a weird version of a smile. “Titties,” he said.

He reached out and touched the side of her breast with his open palm, stroking it. “Jugs. Knockers—”

“Baby feeders,” Tammy added, figuring it was better to play along with the joke, however witless.

“
Fun bags
,” he said, grinning, almost moronically.

She wondered just for a moment if that was the answer to this mystery: that these pitiful remnants of humanity were cretins, mongoloids, retards; the children of Hollywood parents who could not bear the idea that they’d produced such freaks, and given them over to somebody who’d simply dumped them in the empty Canyon. No, that was ridiculous. Atrocities like that didn’t happen in this day and age; it was unthinkably callous. But it did go some way to explaining the curious passages of starry flesh and bone she kept seeing: Garbo’s throat on the woman, Victor Mature in this breast-obsessed male.

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“Udders,” he said.

“Jigglies,” she countered. “Chi-chis. Kazooms—”

Oh, she had a million. So presumably did every woman with larger-than-average breasts in America. It had started when she was twelve, when thanks to an unfortunate hormonal trick she was walking around with a bosom that would have looked just fine on a big-boned twenty-two-year-old. Suddenly men were looking at her, and the dirty words just came tumbling out of their mouths. She went through a phase when she thought every man in Sacramento had Tourette’s Syndrome. Never mind that the girl with the hooters was twelve; men got diarrhea of the mouth at the sight of large breasts. She heard them called everything: “the twins,”

“skin-pillows,” her “rack,” her “set,” her “mounds,” her “missiles,” her

“melons,” her “milk-makers.” At first it upset her to be the object of fun, but after a while she learned not to listen to it anymore, unless some unusual name came along to swell the lexicon, like “global superstars,” or

“bodacious ta-tas,” both of which had brought a despairing smile to her face.

Of course in two years’ time all her girlfriends had got bosoms of their own—

“Wait.”

The female had halted, its body suddenly besieged by nervous tics.

“What’s wrong?” Tammy said.

The woman governed her little spasms and stood still, listening. Then pointed, off to her right, and having pointed she quickly bounded away, dragging Tammy after her.

As they fled—and that’s what it was suddenly,
fleeing
—Tammy glanced back over her shoulder. They were not taking this journey unaccompanied. There was a contingent of freaks coming after them, though they were keeping their distance. But it was not the freaks, however, that the female was so afraid of; it was something else.

“What?” Tammy gasped. “What?”

“
Peacock,
” the woman replied. She didn’t speak again. She simply let go of Tammy’s arm and threw herself into the cover of the thicket. Tammy CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 233

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turned, and turned again, looking for the creature that had caused this unalloyed panic. For a moment, she saw nothing; and all she heard was the sound of the female racing off through the thicket.

Then, almost total silence. Nothing moved, in any direction. And all she could hear was a jet, high, high above her.

She looked up. Yes, there it was, crawling across the pristine blue, leaving a trail of vapor tinted amber by the setting sun. She was momentarily enchanted; removed from her hunger and her aching bones.

“Beautiful,” she murmured to herself.

The next moment something broke cover not more than ten yards from her.

This time Tammy didn’t stand there mesmerized, as she had at the cages. She threw herself out of the path of the shape that was barreling toward her. It was the bizarrest of all the freaks she’d encountered. Like all its kin it had some of her own species in its genes but the animal it was crossed with—yes,
a peacock
—was so utterly unlike a human being that the resulting form defied her comprehension. It had the torso of a man, and the stick-thin back legs, scaly though they were, also belonged to a human being. But its neck was serpentine and its head no larger than a fist. Its eyes were tiny black beads, and between them was a beak that looked as though it could do some serious damage. Having missed her on the first assault it now turned around and came at her again, loosing a guttural shriek as it did so. She stumbled backward, intending to turn and run, but as she did so it raised its body up and she saw to her disgust that its underbelly was made exactly like that of a man, and that it was in a state of considerable arousal. The moment of distraction cost her dearly.

She fell back against a blooming rhododendron bush, and lost her footing in a mist of pink-purple blossom. She cursed loudly and coarsely, grabbing on to whatever she could—blossom, twig, root—to haul herself up.

As she attempted to do so she saw the creature slowly lower its sleek turquoise head, and one of its scaly forelimbs—withered remnants of arms and hands—went to its chin, where it idly scratched at a flea.

Then, while she struggled like an idiot to get back on her feet, the crea-

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ture lifted up its backside and spread its glorious tail. By some quirk of genetics, it had inherited its father’s glory intact. The tail opened like God’s own fan, compensating for every other grotesque thing about the beast. It was beautiful, and the creature knew it. Tammy stopped struggling for a moment, thinking perhaps she could talk some sense into this thing.

“Look at you,” she said.

Was there brain enough in that little skull to understand that it was being flattered? She frankly doubted it. But the creature was watching her now, its head cocked to one side. She kept talking, telling it how fine it looked, while tentatively reaching around to find a branch large enough to carry her weight, so that she could pull herself to her feet. The creature shook its tail, the feathers hissing as they rubbed against one another. The iridescent eyes in their turquoise setting shimmered.

And then, without warning, it was on her. It moved so suddenly she didn’t have a chance to clamber out of its way. She fell back into the blossoms for a second time, and before she could raise her arms to ward it off, the peacock came down against her body, trapping her.

She felt its erection against her body, and its wizened hands clawing at her breasts. Its beak snapped above her face, threatening her eyes.

For a moment she lay still, afraid of what it would do to her if she resisted it. But then it began to thrust its hips against her, and a spasm of revulsion overcame her better judgment. She reached up and caught hold of the thing’s neck, just below the head, her fingers digging deep into its blotchy, corrugated flesh. Even so, it continued to grind its body against her. She raised her other hand to join the first, and started to strangle the thing. Still it pumped on, as though so stupefied with lust it was indifferent to its own jeopardy. She pressed hard on its throat, closing off its windpipe. Its grindings continued unabated. She pressed harder, and harder still. Then it seemed to reach a point of no return, and a series of shudders passed through its body. She felt something wet spurting on her belly, where its rhythms had pushed up the rags of her blouse.

“Oh
God
,” she said. “You
filthy, dirty
—”

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Its climax over, it belatedly seemed to realize that it couldn’t breathe and started to thrash about. Its claws raked her breasts, which stung like fury, but she refused to let go of its scrawny throat. If she gave it an inch it would surely kill her. Her only hope was to dig deep and hold on until the thing lost consciousness.

But it was easier said than done. The bird’s orgasm hadn’t exhausted its energies. It thrashed maniacally, beating its stunted wings against the blossoms, so that a blizzard of pink petals came down upon them like con-fetti. Tammy kept her teeth and her hands locked together, while the would-be rapist’s panic became a frenzy. It was making ghastly, guttural noises now, its mottled tongue sticking straight out of its mouth. Spittle fell on her upturned face, stinging her eyes. She closed them, and kept on clutching, while the peacock clawed and flapped and thrashed.

The struggle had already gone on for three or four minutes, and her strength was giving out. The pain from her scratched breasts was excruciating, and her hands were numb. But by degrees the bird’s rallies lessened.

She didn’t relax her grip on it, however, suspicious that if she did so, it would recover itself somehow and renew its attack. She held on to its silken throat while its wings slowed their moronic flapping. She opened her eyes. The expression on the creature’s face suggested that it was close to death. Its tongue lolled against its lower beak. Its gaze was unfocused.

Most telling of all, its glorious tail had drooped to the dirt.

Still she held on, pressing her thumbs hard against its windpipe until every last twitch had gone out of it. Only then did she let go; not with both hands, but with one, and started to pull herself up from beneath the body of the creature. She felt its semen cold on her belly, and her own blood hot on her breasts. A fresh wave of repugnance passed through her.

But she had survived; that was the point. This creature had done its worst, and she’d overcome it. Grabbing hold of a branch she pulled herself to her feet. The peacock hung from her hand, its body sprawled on a bed of fallen blossoms. A spasmodic rattle passed through its gleaming tail feathers, but that was the last of it.

She let it go. It dropped to the ground, its head resembling some absurd CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 236

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little sock puppet that its owner had abandoned in the grass; the rest of its body a grotesque amalgam of forms.

“I killed you . . .” Tammy said softly. “You sonofabitch.”

She lifted her gaze and surveyed the bushes around her. All this had been witnessed, she knew; the creatures that shared this beast’s grotesque tribe were all out there in the twilight, watching their battle. She could not see those who were scrutinizing her, not even the gleam of a tooth or eye, but she knew they must be thinking twice about attacking her. On the other hand, she was seriously weakened. If they were to launch such an assault she would be lost; her energies were all but spent.

She looked down at her bosom. Her blouse was in rags and her skin had been deeply scored by the freak’s claws. She touched the wounds. They stung, but the blood would soon start to clot. She wasn’t a bleeder, luckily.

But she was going to need something to clean the wounds if they weren’t to become infected—God knows what kind of shit and dirt the creature had had beneath its claws—which meant finding her way, as quickly as possible, back to the house: to clean running water and fresh dressings.

But there was one other matter to deal with before she moved from this place: a bit of cleaning up that couldn’t wait until she had water. She picked up a fistful of grass, and wiped her belly, removing as best she could the remnants of the creature’s semen. It took more than one fistful to do the job; but when she had cleaned herself (and then cleaned her hands with a third portion of grass) she left the body where it lay, and went on her way.

She listened, as she went, for the sound of pursuit: the rustle of leaves, the snapping of twigs. But she heard nothing. Either the rest of the freak-ish clan had decided she was too dangerous to pursue, given that she’d just slaughtered one of their more fearsome members, or else the game of pursuit no longer amused them and they’d gone back to whatever crimes they committed in the stinking darkness.

Tammy didn’t much care.

As long as they left her alone, she thought, they could do what the hell they liked.

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“Tell me about all the stuff in the guest-house,” Todd asked Katya as they walked. “Where does it all come from?”

“The large tapestry in the living room was made for
The Sorrows of
Frederick
, which was a terrible picture, but the designs were magnificent.

The castle they made for the banquet scene! You never saw anything so grand in your life. And all the Egyptian stuff was from
Nefertiti
.”

“You played Nefertiti?”

“No, Theda Bara played Nefertiti, because the front office said she was a bigger star than I was. I played her handmaiden. I didn’t mind that much because in my mind it was a better role. Theda just vamped her way through her part. Oh Lord, she was bad! But I got a little chance to act. In the end Nefertiti had my lover killed because he was in love with me, not her, so I threw myself off a boat into the Nile.”

“And drowned?”

“I suppose so. Either that or I was eaten by crocodiles.” She laughed. “I don’t know. Anyway, I got some of my best reviews for
Nefertiti
. Somebody said I could have stepped right out of history . . .”

The evening was beginning to draw on as they walked, taking the simple and relatively direct path which Todd had failed to find on his way up.

It was the first night in a long time that Todd hadn’t sat at his bedroom window, drinking, brooding and popping pills.

“What about the bed?” Todd said. “Where did that come from?”

“That was from
The Devil’s Bride
.”

“A horror movie?”

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