Coldheart Canyon (80 page)

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Obviously Maxine hadn’t known about this little detail because a look of raw disgust came over her face.

“Jesus. This place never fails to . . .” She finished the sentence by shaking her head.

Tammy wiped her hands on her jeans and surveyed the steps that led down to the garden.

“There’s more of them down here,” she called back to Maxine.

“More?”

By the time Maxine’s curiosity had overcome her revulsion and she’d reached the first body, Tammy had already moved on to the second, third and fourth, then to a group of four more, all lying on the steps leading down to the lawn or at the bottom, and all in roughly the same position, face down, as though they’d simply fallen forward. It was a curiously sad scene, because there were so many different kinds of animals here: large and small, dark and striped and spotted; lush and bony.

“It looks like Jonestown,” Maxine said, surveying the whole sorry sight.

She wasn’t that far off the mark. The way bodies had all dropped in the grass, some lying alone, others in groups, looking as though they might have been hand in hand when the fatal moment came. It had the feel of a mass suicide, no question. Had the sun been on them directly, no doubt the stench would have been nauseating. But the air was cool beneath the heavy canopy; the smell was more like that of festering cabbages than the deeper, stomach-turning stench of rotting flesh.

“Why so few flies?”

Tammy thought on this for a moment. “I don’t know. They weren’t properly alive in the first place, were they? They had ghosts for fathers and animals for mothers. Or the other way round. I don’t think they were flesh and blood in the same way you and I are.”

“That still doesn’t explain why they came here to die like this.”

“Maybe the same power that ran through Katya and the ghosts ran through them too,” Tammy said. “And once it was turned off—”

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“They came back to the house and died?”

“Exactly.”

“And the dead?” Maxine said. “All those people. Where did they go?”

“They didn’t have anything to keep them here,” Tammy said.

“So maybe they’re out wandering the city?” Maxine said. “Not a very reassuring thought.”

As Maxine talked, Tammy plucked some large leaves from the jungle all around, and then went back among the corpses, bending to gently lay the leaves—which she’d chosen for their size—over the faces of the dead.

Maxine watched Tammy with a mingling of incomprehension and awe. It would never in a thousand years have occurred to her to do something like this. But as she watched Tammy going about this duty she felt a surge of simple affection for the woman. She’d endured a lot, and here she was, still finding it in her heart to think of something other than her own comfort, her own ease. She was remarkable in her way: no question.

“Are you done?” she asked, when Tammy was all but finished.

“Almost,” she said. She bowed her head. “Do you know any prayers?”

“I used to, but . . .” Maxine shrugged, empty-handed.

“Then I’m just going to make something up,” Tammy said.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” Maxine said, turning to go.

“No,” Tammy said. “Please. I want you to stay here with me until I’m finished.”

“Are you sure?”

“Please.”

“Okay,” Maxine said.

Tammy bowed her head. Then after taking a few moments to decide what she was going to say, she began. “Lord,” she said. “I don’t know why these creatures were born, or why they died . . .” She shook her head, in a kind of despair, though whether it was about the words or the situation she was attempting to describe, Maxine didn’t know; perhaps a little of both. “We’re in the presence of death, and when that happens we wonder, it
makes
us wonder, why we’re alive in the first place. Well, I guess I want to say that these things didn’t ask to be alive. They were born miserably.

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And they lived miserably. And now they’re dead. And I’d like to ask you, Lord, to take special care of them. They lived without any hope of happiness, but maybe you can give them some happiness in the Hereafter.

That’s all. Amen.”

Maxine tried to echo the
Amen
, but when she did so she realized that these hesitant, simple words coming from so unlikely a source had brought on tears.

Tammy put her arm around Maxine’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said.

“I don’t even know why I’m crying,” Maxine said, letting her head drop against Tammy’s shoulder while the sobbing continued to rack her. “This is the first time I’ve cried like this,
really
cried, in Lord knows how long.”

“It’s good to cry. Let it come.”

“Is it really good to cry?” Maxine said, recovering herself slightly, and wiping her nose. “I’ve always been suspicious when people say crying’s good for you.”

“Well it is. Trust me.”

“You know, Tammy, I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this, but you’re quite an amazing lady.”

“Oh really?” she said. “Well that’s kind of you. It’s not the sort of thing Arnie used to say.”

“Well then, Arnie was a fool,” Maxine said, recovering a little of her old edge.

“Are you ready to go back inside now?” Tammy said, a little embarrassed by Maxine’s compliment.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

They made their way through the dead to the steps, and started to climb. As they did so it occurred to Maxine that in laying the leaves on the dead, and offering up a prayer on their behalf, Tammy had brought the idea of forgiveness into Katya Lupi’s loveless domain. It was probably the first time the subject had been broached in this vicinity in three-quarters of a century. Katya hadn’t seemed too big on forgiveness. You erred against her, you suffered for it; and you kept suffering.

“What are you thinking about?” Tammy asked her.

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“Just this place.” Maxine looked up at the house, and turned to take in the rest of the Canyon. “Maybe the tabloids had it right.”

“About what?”

“Oh you know: the most cursed piece of real estate in Hollywood.”

“Bullshit,” Tammy said.

“You don’t think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?”

“I don’t want to know who made it,” Tammy said. “But I know who
fed
it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place.”

“That makes sense.”

“Places can’t be good or bad,” Tammy said. “Only people. That’s what I believe.”

“Did that make you feel better, by the way? What you did out there?”

Tammy smiled. “Bit crazy, huh?”

“Not at all.”

“You know, it did make me feel better. Much better. Those poor things didn’t have a hope.”

“So now we can go look for Todd?” Maxine said.

“And if we don’t find him in”—Tammy looked at her watch—“shall we say, fifteen minutes, we give it up as a bad idea? Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Where do you want to look first?” Tammy said.

“The master bedroom,” Maxine replied. “Whenever things didn’t go well, he used to go to his bedroom and lock the door.”

“Funny, Arnie would do the same.”

“You never told me anything about Arnie,” Maxine said, as she led the way through the chaos of the kitchen to the hallway.

“There wasn’t that much to tell. And there’s even less now he’s gone.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

“I don’t know,” Tammy said, sounding as though she didn’t care that much. “Depends on whether his new woman puts up with him or not.”

“Well, put it this way: do you want him back?”

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“No. And if he tries to make nice, I’m going to tell him to go fuck himself. Excuse my French.”

They stepped out into the hallway. “You want to go up there first?”

Tammy said. “He was your friend, or client, or whatever.” Maxine looked doubtful. “Go on,” Tammy urged her. “You go on up and I’ll try downstairs.”

“Okay,” Maxine said, “but stay in shouting distance.”

“I will. And if I don’t find anything down there I’ll come straight up and find you.”

Maxine started up the stairs two at a time. “I’m not spending another hour after dark in this Canyon,” she called as she went.

She watched Tammy descend as she ascended, and then, when the turn in the stairs put them out of sight of one another, she concentrated her attentions on the doorway in front of her. The landing she was crossing was creaking with every footfall: no doubt the damage the ghosts had done up here was as thorough as it had been below. God knows how profoundly they’d affected the sub-structure of the place. Another reason—if any were needed—to be out of here quickly. She’d read her Poe; she knew what happened to houses as psychotic as this had been. They came tumbling down. Their sins finally caught up with them and they collapsed on themselves like tumorous men, burying anyone and everyone who was stupid enough to be inside when the roof began to creak.

“Tammy!”

“I can hear you.”

“The place is creakin’ up here. Is it creakin’ down there?”

“Yep.”

“So let’s make this short an’ sweet, huh?”

“We already agreed—”

“Even shorter and sweeter.”

Maxine had reached the door of the master bedroom. She knocked, lightly at first. Then she called Todd’s name. There was no reply forthcoming so she tried the handle. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open. It grated over a scattering of dirt; and there was the sound of sev-

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eral irregular-shaped objects rolling behind it. She investigated. Besides the dirt there were some rocks behind the door, and several clods of earth, some with grass attached. Somebody appeared to have hauled a sack of earth up from the garden and it had split open behind the door.

“Todd?” she called again.

This time there was a mumbled reply. She stepped into the room.

The drapes were almost completely drawn, keeping out nine-tenths of the sunlight. The air smelled stale, as though nobody had opened the door in days, but it also smelled strongly of fresh dirt. She studied the gloom for a little time, until she saw the figure sitting up on the bed, his knees raised under what she took to be a dark coverlet. It was Todd. He was naked from the waist up.

“Hello, Maxine,” he said. There was neither music nor threat in his voice.

“Hello, Todd.”

“Couldn’t stay away, huh?”

“Tammy’s with me,” she said, shifting the blame.

“Yes, I heard her. And I expected her. No.
Half
-expected her. But I didn’t expect you. I thought it was all over with us once I was dead. Out of sight . . .”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“No, it isn’t, is it? If it’s any comfort, it’s true in both directions.”

“You think about me?”

“You. Tammy. The life I had. Sure. I think about it all the time. There isn’t much else to do up here.”

“So why are you up here?”

He moved in the bed, and there was a patter of dirt onto the bare boards. What she’d taken to be a blanket was in fact a pyramid of damp earth, which he’d piled up over the lower half of his body. When he moved, the pyramid partially collapsed. He reached out and pulled the dirt back toward him, so as not to lose too much over the edge of the bed.

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face was similarly recovered. The damage done by time, excess and Doctor Burrows’s scalpels eradicated.

“You look good,” she said.

“I don’t
feel
good,” he replied.

“No?”

“No. You know me. I don’t like being on my own, Maxine. It makes me crazy.” He wasn’t looking at her any longer, but was rearranging the mound of dirt on his lap. His erection, she now saw, was sticking out of the middle of the dirt.

“I wake up with this,” he said, flicking his hard-on from side to side with his hand. “It won’t go down.” He sounded neither proud of the fact nor much distressed by it: his erection was just another plaything, like the dirt heaped over his body.

“Why did you bring half the back yard up here?”

“Just to play,” he replied. “I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” she said to him.

“Okay I do. I’m dead, right. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew it,” he said, with the grim tone of a man who was having bad news confirmed. “I mean, I
knew
. As soon as I looked in the mirror, and I saw I wasn’t fucked up anymore, I thought: I’m like the others in the Canyon. So I went out to look for them.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to talk to somebody about how it all works. Being dead but still being
here
; having a body;
substance
. I wanted to know what the rules were. But they’d all gone.” He stopped playing with himself and stared at the sliver of light coming between the drapes. “There were just those things left—”

“The children?”

“Yeah. And they were droppin’ like flies.”

“We saw. They’re all around the house.”

“Ugly fucks,” Todd said. “I know why too.”

“Why what?”

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“Why they were droppin’.”

“What?”

He licked his lips and frowned, his eyes becoming hooded. “There’s something out there, Maxine. Something that comes at night.” His voice had lost all its strength. “It sits on the roof.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know what it is, but it scares the shit out of me. Sitting on the roof, shining.”

“Shining?”

“Shining, like it was a piece of the sun.” He suddenly started to make a concentrated effort to bury his erection, like a little boy abruptly obsessed with some trivial ritual: two handfuls of dirt, then another two, then another two, just to get it out of sight. It didn’t work. His cock-head continued to stick out, red and smooth. “I don’t want it to see me, Maxine,”