Coldheart Canyon (79 page)

On several occasions in the next twelve hours Tammy’s resolve almost failed her and she thought about calling and telling Maxine that she wouldn’t be coming to Los Angeles after all, but though her courage was weak it didn’t go belly up. In fact she arrived at Maxine’s office twenty minutes earlier than they’d arranged, catching Maxine in an uncharacteristic state of disarray, her hair uncombed, her face without blush or lip-stick.

She’d lost weight; shed perhaps fifteen pounds courtesy of the Canyon.

So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.

“You look better than you sounded,” Maxine said. “When we first started talking I thought you were dying.”

“So did I, on and off.”

“It was that bad, huh?”

“I locked myself in my house. Didn’t talk to anyone. Did you talk to anybody?”

“I tried. But all people wanted to know about was the morbid stuff. I tell you, there’s a lot of people who I thought were friends of mine who showed their true colors over this. People I thought cared about Todd, who were about as crass as you can get. ‘Was there a lot of blood?’ That kind of thing.”

“Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away.”

“It’s certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talk about death: as long as it’s not theirs.”

Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 601

COLDHEART CANYON

601

dark, very masculine: antique European furniture, Persian rugs. On the walls, photographs of Maxine in the company of the powerful and the famous: Maxine with Todd at the opening of several of his movies, Maxine with Clinton and Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, when the President-elect still had color in his hair, and a reputation to lose; Maxine with a number of A-list stars, some of whom had fallen from the firmament since the pictures had been taken: Cruise, Van Damme, Costner, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas (looking very morose for some reason), Mel Gibson, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy’s eye: in it Todd was standing alongside a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.

“Is that Bette Davis?”

“Five months before she died. My first boss, Lew Wasserman, used to represent her.”

“Was she ever up in the Canyon, do you think?”

“No, I don’t think Bette’s ghost is up there. She had her own circle. All the great divas did. And they were more or less mutually exclusive. At a guess a lot of Katya’s friends had an interest in the occult. I know Valentino did. That’s what took them up there at the beginning. She probably introduced them to it all very slowly. Maybe tarot cards or a Ouija board. Checking out which ones were in it for the cheap thrills and which ones would go the distance with it.”

“Clever.”

“Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this
man’s
city, where all the studios had men at the top, she had her own little dominion, and God knows how many people wrapped around her little finger.”

“It sounds like you admire her a bit.”

“Well I do. I mean she’d broken every Commandment, and she didn’t give a shit. She knew what she had. Something to make people feel stronger, sexier. No wonder they wanted to keep it to themselves.”

CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 602

602

CLIVE BARKER

“But in the end it drove some of them crazy. Even the ones who thought they could take it.”

“It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn’t suit us too well.”

“I should tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm.”

“You should have called me. We could have compared notes.”

“My mind was just going round and round. Nothing made sense anymore. I was ready to do myself in.”

“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk,” Maxine said. “The fact is: you’re here. You survived. We both did. Now we have to do this one last thing.”

“What if we get up there and don’t find anything?”

“Then we just leave and get on with our lives. We forget we ever heard of Coldheart Canyon.”

“I don’t think there’s very much chance of that, somehow.”

“Frankly, neither do I.”

It was hot. In the Valley, the temperature at noon stood at an unseason-able one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.

Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner’s, there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic to reach the blaze, there’d already been five fatalities: a cameraman and a ménage-à-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that afternoon, along with the male star’s fluffer, had all been cremated. There was very little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and silicone lingered in the air for several hours.

Even if that particular stench didn’t reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 603

COLDHEART CANYON

603

repository for all manner of sickening stenches in the weeks since its sudden notoriety, as though the rot at its heart was drawing to it the smell of every horror in the heat-sickened city. Every unemptied Dumpster that concealed something for forensics to come look at; every condemned apartment or lock-up garage where somebody had died (either acciden-tally or by their own hand) and had not yet been discovered; every pile of once-bright flowers collected from the fresh graves of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, and were now piled high in the corner, along with their tags carrying messages of sympathy and expressions of loss, rotting together; all of it found its way into the cleft of the Canyon, and clung to the once-healthy plants, weighing them down like a curse laid on the air itself.

“It’s so damn quiet,” Tammy said as she got out of Maxine’s car in front of what had once been Katya Lupi’s dream palace.

There were a few birds singing in the trees, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in their trilling. It was too hot for music-making. The birds themselves sat in what little shade they could find beneath the leaves, and stayed still. The only exceptions to this were the falcons, which rode the rising tides of heat off the Canyon, their wings motionless, and the ravens, who dipped and banked as they chased one another overhead, landing in argumentative rows on the high walls around the house.

The dream palace itself was in a shocking state, the damage the ghosts had done to the vast chamber on which the house sat throwing the whole structure into an accelerated state of decay. The once-magnificent façade, with its highlights of Moroccan tile, had not only cracked from end to end but had now fallen forward, exposing the lath-and-timber below. The massive door—which Tammy had imagined belonging to an Errol Flynn epic—had split in three places. The metal lock, which had been as vast and medieval as the rest of the thing, had been removed, sawn away by a thief with an electric saw. He’d made an attempt to take the antique hinges too, but the size of the job had apparently defeated him.

Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 604

604

CLIVE BARKER

gathered behind it. The turret into which they stepped was still intact, all the way up to its vault, with its painted images of once-famous faces peering down. But the plaster on which the fresco had been made was now laced with cracks, and heaps of the design had fallen away, so that the vault looked like a partially-finished jigsaw. Underfoot, the missing pieces: fragments of Mary Pickford’s shoulder and Lon Chaney Sr.’s crooked smile.

“Is this earthquake damage?” Maxine said, looking up at the turret.

There were places where the entire structure of the turret, not just the inner, painted layer, but the tiles too, had dropped out of place, so that the Californian sky was visible.

“I don’t see why the house would survive all these years of earthquakes without being substantially damaged, and then practically come apart in a 6.9.”

“It’s weird,” Maxine agreed.

“Maybe the ghosts did it?”

“Really? They got up there?” she said, pointing at the vault.

“I bet you they got
everywhere
. They were pretty pissed off.”

Tammy stepped into the kitchen and had her thesis proved correct.

The kitchen had been comprehensively ripped apart; shelves torn down, cutlery pulled out of drawers and scattered around. Plates smashed, frying pans used to beat at the tiled work-surfaces so that they were shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open—rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.

But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure too, and they’d had the supernatural strength to cause considerable damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the support beams, some of which—through a massive effort by the phantom demolition team—had been unseated and pulled through the plaster façade, jutting like vast broken bones.

CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 605

COLDHEART CANYON

605

Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had preceded her out into the passageway where Todd had died. It was considerably darker than the kitchen. She instinctively reached round and flicked on the light. There was a sharp snap of electricity in the wall. The lights came on, flickered for a moment, then went out again. After a beat there was another noise in the wall, and an eruption of sparks from one of the light fixtures further down the wall.

She thought about trying to switch the electricity off, but that didn’t seem very smart under the circumstances: she was standing in half an inch of water with the power crackling in the walls. Better just leave it alone.

The only reason she’d come out here was to be certain that the place where Todd had lain had been cleaned up. In fact, it hadn’t been touched.

The water from the kitchen had not reached as far as the spot where he had died, so the pools of blood that had come from his body were now dry, dark stains on the floor. There were other stains, too, where his body had lain, that she didn’t want to think too much about.

Further down the passageway, beyond the bloodstains, was the back door and the threshold where she’d dug out the icons. The nerves in the tips of her fingers twitched as she thought about those terrible minutes: hearing Todd and Katya fighting in the kitchen, while the ghosts waited on the threshold, bristling but silent; waiting for their moment. Her heart quickened at the thought of how close she’d come to losing the game she’d played here.

Something crunched beneath her sole, and she stepped aside to find one of the icons was lying on the tile. She bent down and picked it up.

There was nothing left of the force it had once owned so she pocketed it, as a keepsake. As she was doing so she caught sight of a body lying outside, in the shadows of the Noahic Bird of Paradise trees.

“
Maxine!
” she called, suddenly alarmed.

“I’m coming.”

“Be careful. Don’t touch the light switches.”

As soon as she heard Maxine’s footsteps splashing through the kitchen, Tammy ventured to the threshold, and stepped over it. The greenery CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 606

606

CLIVE BARKER

smelled pungent back here; she was reminded of those dark, swampy parts of the Canyon where she’d almost lost her life during her night journey. The swamp had crept closer to the house, it seemed; there were mushrooms and fungi growing out of the wall, and the Mexican pavers were slick with green algae underfoot.

“What’s wrong?” Maxine wanted to know.

“That.” Tammy pointed to the body, which lay face down in the middle of a particularly fertile patch of fungi. Tammy wondered if perhaps he’d been trying to make a meal of them, and died in mid-swallow, poisoned.

“Help me turn him over,” Tammy said.

“No thanks,” Maxine said. “I’m as close as I need to get.”

Undaunted, Tammy went down on her haunches beside the body, pressing her fingers into the damp, sticky groove between the body and the tiles upon which it lay. The corpse was cold. She lifted it up an inch or two, peering down to see if she could get a better glimpse of the dead man. But she couldn’t make out his features. She would have to turn the cadaver over. She pushed harder, and hoisted the body onto its side.

Rivulets of pale maggots poured from its rot-bloated underbelly. She let it fall all the way over, lolling on the ground.

Not only was it not a man, it was not, strictly speaking, a human being but one of what Zeffer had called the children, the hybrid minglings of ghost and animal. This one had been a female: part coyote, part sex-goddess. It had six breasts, courtesy of its bestial side, but two of them had gone to jelly. The four that remained, however, were as lush as any starlet’s, adding a touch of surrealism to this otherwise repulsive sight. The creature’s head was a mass of wormy life, except—for some reason—its lips, which remained large, ripe and untouched.

“Who is it?” Maxine hollered from the interior of the house.

“It’s just an animal,” Tammy said. “Sort of. The ghosts fucked the animals. And sometimes the animals fucked the ghosts. And these
things
, the children, were the result.”