"Coldheart Canyon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

PART FIVE. DESIRE

ONE

The Canyon had once been a kind of Eden for Zeffer; its bowers had been places of comfort, an escape from a world that was growing too tawdry too quickly for his taste. But that was many, many years ago. Now he hated his sometime paradise. It was a place of confinement and punishment; a lush hell, made all the more agonizing because he knew that just beyond the perimeters his mistress Katya had set were streets that he'd once driven around like a lord. The passage of years had transformed them, of course; probably out of all recognition. Seven decades was a long time. And if he climbed the southern flank of the Canyon, and stood on the ridge -- which was on the very limits of his proscribed domain -- then he could see the towers of what looked to him like a city within a city, where in his day there had been little more than a dirt road and some sagebrush. They had owned land down there, he and Katya, once upon a time. Probably the lawyers had taken their profits and died by now. But then he couldn't remember signing papers over to any other authority, so it was just possible then if someone was to question who owned the land on which that gleaming city stood, the paper trail would lead back to Katya Lupescu and Willem Matthias Zeffer.

There had been a time when Katya had been quite acquisitive: she'd been rich, and the land had been cheap, so she'd had him buy large plots of it, hundreds of acres in fact, as an investment. She'd got the idea from Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who had also made large purchases, saying, with considerable foresight, that as long as there was a hunger for people to be distracted from their unhappiness, there would be a need for this new world of theirs, this Hollywoodland. It followed, then, that the ground on which that New World was built would only grow in value.

Many times Zeffer had been tempted to leave the Canyon and venture down the hill to discover what it all looked like now, but he didn't dare. Katya had told him plainly what the consequences would be if he ever tried to leave. There would be no way back for him. She would see to it that he was torn limb from limb by those amongst the haunters of these hills who were loyal to her; the creatures she referred to as los ni#241;os: the children.

He didn't doubt that she would enforce the edict. She knew what power she held, and how to keep it. His death would be a fine lesson for those amongst the dans here who were less than loyal, and muttered their unrest in the ears of coyotes, and plotted the undoing of their mistress. They called her by many names, in many languages, being men and women who had come from all over the world, and now, in this strange afterlife, were returning to the tongue they knew best. To some she was La Catin, the Bitch; to others she was simply the Duchess of Sorrows. But none of these name-callers dared confront her. Whatever they whispered, whatever they plotted, they were too afraid of what they would lose if they went up against her and failed to win the day. Not only did they hope for her clemency at some time in the future, but they prayed with all their hearts that they'd be let back into the house, so that they could once more venture down the stairs into the Devil's Country, where they had once tasted something that was in their blood now permanently and could not be satisfied, except by more of the same.

He understood their hunger. He shared it. And if she would let him back into the house then all the agonies of this half-life of his would be erased; all pain forgotten, all need dispatched. But Willem had few hopes of such clemency. Katya was crazy. She always had been, of course; indeed in earlier times it had been part of her glamour. Wasn't that part of what had made her so incredible to watch up there on the screen? A gleam of madness always lit up the eyes of her characters, whatever she was playing. Her innocents were crazy with their sinlessness; just as the vamps she played later were maddened by their sin. Of all the names that she was called, it was Cesar Romero's nickname that suited her best, La Puta Enojada, the Mad Bitch. That was the name Zeffer used when he talked about her. Katya, La Puta Enojada. But bitch or no, mad or no, she had the reins, and that was that. She was not going to wither any time soon, thanks to the machinations of that damnable room; nor was she likely to get up one morning and vacate her Canyon. She was just as afraid of the world beyond its perimeters as he was. In truth, for all her bombast and her brutality, it was fear that shaped her life.

Fear of living, fear of dying. Fear of staying, fear of going. Fear of remembering, and yes, fear of forgetting.

But every now and again, even in this despairing paradise, there would come a glimpse of hope; a hint of a chance that things might finally change for the better. Such hints and glimpses usually appeared in the form of interlopers; people whose unplanned presence in the Canyon had the potential to subtly change the balance of power in La Puta Enojada's feudal realm.

There had been perhaps a dozen such opportunities during in the time in which Zeffer had been a prisoner of the Canyon, all in their way dangers to the status quo, and all carefully managed by Katya, so as to prevent the destruction of her autocracy. The most notable, until now, had been the appearance of a runaway child, one Jerry Brahms, who had fled his minders into the Canyon, ignorant of the mysteries he was treading amongst. He'd almost brought her down, that one, coming into the house without anyone realizing he was there, and getting his fingers into places they had no business being. Opening doors; letting the ghosts sniff the Hunt. The fact that he was a child had made her indulgent of his mistakes. Rather than have him killed, Katya had let him live; brought him to her bosom, in fact.

It was an act of trust that had served her well as the years had passed. Brahms the boy had became Brahms the man, and his loyalty had remained unwavering. Zeffer had never entirely understood what had happened between them, but he had his suspicions. Katya had shown Brahms pleasures that had marked him as hers forever. That meant, most likely, that she had taken him down to see the Hunt. Once you'd walked in the Devil's Country, smelt its ancient air, you belonged to that place, in some unspeakable way. It owned you. He didn't need to look any further than his own body for evidence of this. Since Katya had forbidden him to enter the house -- keeping him from close proximity to the tiles -- he had started to look and feel his true age. His hair had turned white, his bones and joints ached perpetually. Why was he surprised? Nobody lived forever. Not movie goddesses, nor the men who served them. And certainly not houses, however much rapture they contained. Every facade cracked, finally; and crumbled; and went away to dust. It was only a question of time.

Which thought brought him back to the newest trespasser in their sealed world: the most promising opportunity for an undoing of long-held certainties he'd seen in many years. She was a strong one, this big-boned, big-breasted woman with her unhappy eyes. She was trouble, thank God. Under the right circumstances a woman like that could do all kinds of mischief. If, of course, she was still alive. She'd been snatched away by los ni#241;os, the corrupt children of the Canyon, offspring of unsavory couplings between animals and ghosts. Zeffer had witnessed such intercourse many times over the years; vile marriages between ghost women and coyotes; ghost men and deer, or dogs; even once, a woman and a bird. Somehow, such consummations were often fruitful, though the birthings were not anything he could have imagined until he laid eyes on them. The animals who produced infants this way almost always died in the process; every now and again he would come upon one of their rotted carcasses on the hillside, and he'd know that another hybrid had been added to that unholy tribe. The revenant women who allowed such congress (some of them famous in their day, reduced in their frustration and madness to mating with wild animals), these women seemed to show no signs of trauma when the birth was over, their bodies being less than flesh and more than ether; malleable, mendable. But that was not to say their matings were without consequence. These ghosts were also the wildest, in his experience; the most prone to sudden violence. The beast had got into them in more ways than one. They were touched by a kind of rabidity, which was in distressing contrast to what remained of their elegance. Their glossy skins were pulled tight over something feral; and their beauty could not conceal it. Women who had once been household names -- paragons of elegance and sophistication -- walking on all fours, their gait crabbed, their speed uncanny; baring their perfect teeth in the thicket and yelping like coyotes who'd just come upon a fresh kill.

There was reason, then, for him to believe the interloper had not survived her abduction. If they'd caught up with her, los ni#241;os might have toyed with her for awhile, but they were stupid things, and their attention spans were short. It would not take them long to decide that there'd be more sport in hurting the woman than in teasing her, and once her blood began to run they'd become frenzied, and fall upon her, taking her limb from limb.

That was his fear.

The source of his hope? That he had not heard any death-cries in the canyon since she'd been gone. It was a tiny reason to believe that something good might come of the woman's arrival here, but he had to have some little measure of hope, or there was nothing. So in the absence of hearing the woman's screams, he allowed himself to believe that there was one in the Canyon who would might the undoing of Katya Lupi.

TWO

Tammy was indeed alive. She knew she was alive because she was hungry. It was the only thing about her present condition which she really recognized; the rest was a kind of fever-dream, filled with blurred horrors; remote pieces of what might be real and what she hoped to God were not.

She had been carried by her abductors to the far end of the Canyon where there was no sign of any habitation. The area was pretty much jungle: dense thickets of barbed shrubs, overshadowed by stands of immense, shaggy palms. There was no way to climb up any of these trees, to escape those who'd brought her here (though even if she'd been able to do so, she was certain they would sniff her out); nor was there any way to move more than a few steps through the thicket. So she was left with only one option: she had to confront her abductors.

It was her mother's gift to her, this evenheadedness. In circumstances that would have brought lesser minds to the point of collapse, Edith Huxley Lauper (Ma Edie to everyone who'd ever knew her for more than a day), had been uncannily calm. And the more panicky people around her had become, the calmer she'd get. It made her an ideal nurse, which was the work she'd done all her life. She soothed the hurt, she soothed the dying, she soothed the bereft. Everything's fine, she would say in that soft voice of hers (another of her gifts to Tammy); and by some miracle everyone would believe her. Very often, because people believed her, the panic ceased and everything was fine. It was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So now, sitting in the thicket, in the midst of this fever dream, with its voices and its faces and its stink, she repeated Ma Edie's mantra to herself, over and over: Everything's fine, everything's fine, everything's fine, waiting for it to turn out true.

Her head still throbbed from the white light that had wiped out the world before her abduction; and her stomach was certainly in need of filling, but she still had all her limbs, for which she was grateful, and a voice in her throat. So, once she'd calmed herself down, she started to talk to whatever it was that had come after her, (and was still there, in the vicinity) her volume quiet, but her tone insistent enough that she would not be mistaken for somebody who was afraid.

"I'd like to get back to the house now," she said to them, "so will one of you please escort me?" She scanned the bushes. They were watching her. She could see the glitter of their eyes, the gleam of their teeth. What were they? They didn't seem quite substantial; she had the feeling that their flesh was not as solid as hers, as real perhaps; yet they'd possessed enough strength to remove her from the vicinity of Zeffer's cage to this corner of nowhere, so they weren't to be disrespected.

"Do you understand me?" she'd said, keeping her tone even. "I need to go back to the house."

Off to her left she saw a motion in the thicket, and one of the creatures approached her, coming close enough that for the first time she'd had a proper view of one of the abductors. It was a female, no doubt of that, and vaguely related to a human being. The creature's naked body was scrawny, her ribs showing through flesh that seemed to be covered with light gray-silver hair. The front limbs were extremely delicate, and she surely had hands and fingers not pads and claws. But the back legs were as crooked as a dog's, and rather too large for the rest of her anatomy, so that squatting her proportions were almost frog-like.

But the head: that was the worst of her. Her mouth was nearly human, as was her nose, but then the skull curved and suddenly flattened so that her eyes, which were devoid of whites, and set to either side of the skull, like the eyes of a sheep, stuck out, black and shiny and stupid.

She turned her head and stared at Tammy with her shiny eyes. Then, from those human lips came the scraps of a voice. "It's no use to beg," she told Tammy. "We eat you."

Tammy took this in her stride; or at least did all she could to give that impression. "I'm not begging you for anything," she said, very calmly. "And you're not going to eat me."

"Oh?" said another voice, this time over to her right.

Tammy moved slowly, so as not to invite anything precipitous. She looked at the second speaker, who -- like the female -- had come closer to her. She guessed this was a male; one of the creatures who'd snatched her away from between the cages. He had a head of ungainly size and shape, his nose flattened out like the nose of a bat, his mouth wide and lipless. Only his eyes were human; and they were unexpectedly and exquisitely blue.

"What shall we do with you then?" he said to Tammy, the slits of his nostrils flattening as he inhaled her scent.

"Help me," she said. The male lowered his lumpen head, and stared at her from under the weight of his brow. "I need to get back to the house," Tammy said.

"You know the Lady?" said the female. "What Lady?"

"In the house?"

A third voice now; a thin, reedy voice in the darkness behind the female. "Kat. Ee. A." the voice said.

"Katya?" Tammy said.

"Yes," said the male. "Katya."

He had come closer to her, and was now sniffing around her hair. She didn't protect herself, even though flecks of his cold phlegm were hitting her neck and face. She just kept her focus, as best she could. Perhaps these freaks, for all their bizarrity, knew something about why Todd was here. If she was going to free him she had to know what she was freeing him from.

"What do you want with Katya?" Tammy said, keeping her options open as to whether she knew the woman or not.

At the mention of Katya's name a series of little convulsions had taken over the female. She threw back her head, showing a throat as lovely as Garbo's. After a moment, the convulsions subsided. Once they were governed, the woman gave Tammy her answer.

"She is the one who has the Hunt."

There wasn't much illumination to be had from this. But Tammy pursued the questioning, not hoping for much. "What hunt?" she asked, keeping her voice low and even.

"The Devil's Hunt," said the male, still close to her.

"You seen it?" the female said.

"No," Tammy replied.

"Liar."

"If I'd seen it I'd tell you I'd seen it. But I haven't."

"You been in the house?"

"No I haven't," Tammy said. "Why, is this hunt you're talking about in the house?"

"The Hunt's in the house."

This part was even more puzzling than the earlier stuff. Plainly her sources were not terribly reliable. Were they referring to some sort of game that Katya played?

"Have you ever been in the house?" she asked them.

"No," said the female.

"But you want to go?"

"Oh yes," she said. "I want to see how it is."

"Well ... " Tammy said, "Perhaps I could help you get in ... to the house."

The female regarded her warily, moving her head back and forth to assess Tammy with both eyes.

"It's not possible," she said.

"Why not?"

It was the male who answered, and the phrase he used was powerful but incomprehensible. "Death at the threshold." he said.

There were mutters and growls from others in the undergrowth at the mention of the threshold. She had no doubt that for all their apparent strength these creatures were deathly afraid of the house, and, no doubt, of its mistress.

"Has this woman Katya done you some harm?" she asked the female. The creature shook its wretched head.

"Kill her one day."

"You want to kill her?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The woman just stared, her stare containing a profound distrust. Not just of Tammy, or indeed of Katya: of the world, but of being alive. It was as though every breathing moment was conditional; an agony. And despite the brutal foulness of the thing's appearance, Tammy felt some measure of sympathy for it.

"Maybe I could get this Katya to come out," Tammy suggested.

The male growled, deep in his chest. "You'd do that?" Tammy was ready to make any promise right now, to get out of her present predicament. She nodded.

There was a long moment, in which the freaks did not reply. Then, glancing around the company of her fellows, as if to check that she would not be challenged, the female caught hold of Tammy's wrist, and pulled her up out of the thicket.

"We're going?" Tammy said.

"Yes! Yes!" the female replied. "Quickly, though. Quickly." She didn't get any argument from Tammy, who was happy to be on her way. Whatever dangers the house held they could hardly be worse than staying out here in the open. The day was quickly passing away. It would soon be dark. And judging by the repeated glances the woman gave the sky, she too was cognizant of the failing light. After the third or fourth glance Tammy couldn't help but ask her what she was so nervous about. "Peacock," she said. A peacock? There had been peacocks here? It wasn't so surprising, on second thoughts. It fitted with the extravagance of the place. But they belonged on well-clipped lawns, not in this jungle of thorns and flowers. And even assuming the bird could push its way through the thicket without being stripped of all its finery, what could it do if did catch up with them? They had bad tempers, she remembered reading once, but they were nervous things. She'd just shoo it away.

"Nothing to be scared of," Tammy said.

The woman gave her another disconcerting sideways look. The male, meanwhile, came up beside Tammy and stared at her breasts. Not about to be intimidated, Tammy she stared back. There was something vaguely recognizable in this freak; a cast to his features which reminded her of somebody famous. Who the hell was it? Some movie star. Was it Victor Mature? Yes, it was. Victor Mature. It was uncanny.

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 grinned, almost moronically.

She wondered just for a moment if that was the answer to this mystery: that these pitiful remnants of humanity were cretins, mongols, 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.

"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 had 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 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 though 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 towards her. It was the bizarrest of the 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 backwards, intending to turn and run, but as she did so it raised its body up and she saw to her disgust that it 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 midst of pink-purple blossom. She cursed loudly and coarsely, grabbing onto 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 creature 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, dosing 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 -- "

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 confetti. 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. It's 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 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 freakish 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.

THREE

"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?"

"No, it was this strange picture directed by Edgar Kopel. Very shocking for its time. The bed was supposed to have been owned by the Devil, you see. Carved to his design. And then the hero, who was played by Ronald Coleman, inherits it, and he and his bride use it for the bridal bed. But the Devil comes for the bride, and then all Hell breaks loose."

"What happened in the end?"

"The Devil gets what he wants."

"You?"

"Me."

"I don't think that would work for modern audiences."

"Oh it didn't work in 1923. They stayed away in droves." They walked on for a while in silence. Finally Katya said: "What's troubling you?"

"I can't make sense of what you're telling me. The pieces don't fit -- "

"And it frustrates you."

"Yes."

"Maybe it's best you just don't think about it."

"How can I not think about it?" he said. "This place. You. The posters. The bed. What am I supposed to make of it all?"

"Make whatever pleases you," she said. "Why's it so important that you have an explanation for everything? I told you: things are different here."

She caught hold of his hand, and they stopped walking. There were insects in the grass all around them, making music; overhead, the stars were coming out, their patterns as familiar as the din of cicadas; and tonight, as strange. His doubts were contagious. The fact that he didn't understand how it was possible this woman could have lived the life she claimed to have lived spread confusion into every other sign the world brought him. What was he doing here, in between the music in the grass and the brightening stars? He suddenly seemed to understand nothing. His face throbbed, and his eyes stung.

"It's all right," she said softly. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

"I'm not afraid," he said.

It was the truth, in a way. What he felt was not fear, it was something far more distressing. He felt lost, cast off from every certainty.

But then he looked at her face, at her perfect face, and he felt a calm come over him. So what if he was adrift? So were they both. And wasn't it better to be with her, sharing her gentle madness, than to be alone in this unforgiving world?

He leaned towards her, and kissed her on the lips. Nothing overtly sexual; just a tender kiss.

"What was that for?" she asked him, smiling.

"For being here."

"Even though you think I'm a lunatic?"

"I didn't say that."

"No, but you think it. Don't you? You think I'm living in a fantasy land."

"I'm taking your advice," he replied. "I'm making whatever I like of it. And I like being here, right now, with you. So the rest can go to hell."

"The rest?"

"Out there," he said, waving his arm in the general direction of the city. "The people who used to run my life."

"To hell with them?"

"To hell with them!"

Katya laughed. "I like that," she said, returning his kiss in the midst of their laughter.

"Where now?" he said.

"Down to the pool?" she replied.

"You know the way?"

"Trust me," she said, kissing him again. This time he didn't let her escape so lightly, but returned her kiss with some force. His hand slipped up into her hair and made a cradle for her head. She put her arms around his waist, pressing so hard against him it was as though she wanted to climb inside his skin.

When they broke the kiss they gazed at one another for a little time.

"I thought we were going walking," he said.

"So we were," she said, taking his hand again. "The pool, yes?"

"Do you want to go back to the house?"

"Plenty of time for that later," she said. "Let's go down to the pool while there's still some light."

So they continued their descent, hand in hand. They said nothing now. There was no need.

Across the other side of the Canyon, a lone coyote began to yap; his voice was answered by another higher up on the ridge behind them, then another two in the same vicinity, and now another, and another, until the entire Canyon was filled with their glorious din.

When Todd and Katya reached the lawn there was a small, scrawny coyote loping across it, giving them a guilty backward glance as he disappeared into the undergrowth. As he vanished from sight, the pack ceased its din. There were a few moments of silence. Then the insects took up their music again.

"It's sad, the way things have declined." Katya said, looking at the sight before them. The starlight was forgiving, but it couldn't conceal the general condition of the place: the statues missing limbs, or toppled over and buried in vines; the pavement around the pool cracked and mossy, the pool itself stained and stinking.

"What's that?" Todd said, pointing out the one-story mock-classical structure half-hidden by the cypresses around the pool.

"That's the Pool House. I haven't been in there in a very long time."

"I want to see it."

It was a larger building than it had appeared from the front, and uncannily bright. There were several skylights in the ceiling, which ushered in the brightness of moon and stars, their light bouncing off the silky marble floor. In the centre stood a cocktail bar with mirrors of marbled glass behind the glass shelves. After all these years there were dozens of bottles on the shelves -- brandies, whiskies and liqueurs.

"You used the pool a lot?" Todd said.

"We had the best pool-parties in Hollywood." Their voices echoed off the glacial walls as they spoke, coming back to meet them. "And the people who came here, knew ... " Katya said. "They knew." Letting the thought go unfinished, she moved past him to the bar.

"What did they know?" he said.

"Not to make any judgments," she replied. She slipped behind the bar, and began to survey the rows of bottles.

"I don't think we should try drinking any of that stuff," he said. "I've got fresh booze in the house if that's what you want."

She didn't reply; simply continued to survey the selection. Finally she decided upon one of the brandies, and taking the bottle by the neck she pulled it forward. There was a grinding noise from behind the mirror as some antiquated mechanism was activated. Then the mirror slid sideways three or four feet, revealing a small safe.

Todd was intrigued. He hopped over the bar to get a better look at what Katya was up to. She was working on the tumble lock; he could hear a faint clicking as she flipped it back and forth.

"What's in there?" he said.

"We used to have a book -- "

"We?"

"Zeffer and I. We just kept it for fun."

"A book of what?"

"Of party pieces." she said, with a little smile. "Who did what to whom. And how many times."

"You're kidding!"

She turned the lock one more time, and then pushed down on the handle and pulled the door. There was a cracking sound, as the decayed rubber seal broke. Then the door swung wide.

"Are there any candles?" she said to him. "Look in the cupboard there between the columns, will you?"

Todd did as he was instructed, and found several boxes of plain white candles on the shelves. One was open, and the heat of many summers had turned the contents into a single box-shaped slab of white wax. But the contents of the other two boxes were in better condition: under the first layer, which was partially melted, there were salvageable candles. He set up six of them on the bar, seating them in their own dribblings so that they wouldn't fall over.

Their flickering yellow light flattered the marble interior; and by some strange arrangement of the walls it seemed he heard the whispering of the flames multiplied. Indeed they almost sounded like voices; uncannily so. He looked around, half-expecting to see somebody flitting between the columns.

"Ah, voil#225;!" said Katya, reaching into the depths of the safe.

She brought a small, thick book out of the little safe along with a sheaf of photographs and set them all down on the bar in the light from the candles. The book looked like a journal, bound in dark red leather. When she opened it he saw that its handwritten contents were arranged symmetrically; two columns to each page.

"Take a look," she said, obviously delighted with her find.

He picked up the book and flicked through it. Almost three-quarters of its pages were written on, sometimes in the two-column configuration, sometimes simply filled up from top to bottom. He turned to a page of the former variety. On the left hand side of the pages was a column of names; on the right hand, a column that was far harder to make sense of. Occasionally there were names, but more often letters and symbols, some of them resembling obscure mathematical equations. His puzzlement amused her.

"Think of it as a history book," she said, offering a teasing smile along with the clue.

"A history of what?"

"Of better times."

Todd flipped through the pages. Now and again, amongst the names, he came upon some he knew: Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara, John Gilbert, Clara Bow; all movie stars of another era.

"You knew all these people?" he said to her.

"Yes, of course. This was the place to come, when you wanted to have some fun. Every weekend, we'd have parties. Sometimes in the pool. Sometimes in the house. Sometimes we'd have hunts, all through the Canyon."

"Animal hunts?"

"No. People hunts. People treated like animals. We whipped them and we chained them up and ... well, you can imagine."

"I'm beginning to. Wow. You had Charlie Chaplin up here, I see."

"Yes, he came up here often. He used to bring his little girls."

"Little girls?"

"He liked them young."

Todd raised a quizzical eyebrow. "And you didn't mind?"

"I don't believe in Thou Shall Not. That's for people who are afraid to follow their own instincts. Of course when you're out there in the world you've got to play by the rules, or you'll spend your life behind bars. They'd lock you up and throw away the key. But this isn't the world. This is my Canyon. They called it Coldheart Canyon, because they said I have a soul like ice. But why should I care what people say? Let them say whatever they want to say, as long as their money pays for the little luxuries in life. I want my Kingdom to be a place where people could take their pleasures freely, without judgment or punishment.

"This is Eden, you see? Only there's no snake. No angel to drive you out either, because you did a bad thing. Why? Because there were no bad things."

"Literally none?"

She looked at him, her stare luminous. "Oh you mean murder, perhaps? We had one or two murderers here. And we had sisters who'd fucked their brothers, and sons who fucked their mothers, and a man who liked having children suck him off."

"What?"

"Ha! Now you're shocked. His name was Laurence Skimpell, and he was as handsome a man as I've ever met. He had a contract at Warner Brothers, and they were going to make him a star. A big star. Then this woman turns up at the studios with a child, who she said was Skimpell's. Warner Brothers have always been very loyal. They offered the woman money; said they'd put the child up for adoption. But as she got up and left she said: you don't understand, this isn't his offspring. This is his lover."

"Oh Jesus Christ."

"That was the last we ever heard of Laurence Skimpell."

"That's a ridiculous story. I don't believe a word of it."

She laughed, as though perhaps this time she was inventing a little. "You're in here," he said, coming to some mentions of Katya Lupi. "And there's a long list of Men ... "

"Oh that was a competition we had."

"You had all these men?"

"It was my canyon. It still is. I can do what I like here."

"So you let people do what they wanted?"

"More or less." She returned to the book. "You see the symbols beside the names?"

Todd nodded, somewhat tentatively. The conversation had taken a turn he was by no means certain he liked. It was one thing to talk about freedom in Coldheart Canyon; it was another to have her boasting about babies sucking dicks. "All the symbols mean something different," she said. "Look here. That squiggle there, that means snakes. That knotted rope? That means being bound up. The more knots in the rope the more bound the person likes to be. So ... here ... Barrymore ... his rope has six knots in it. So he liked to be very well tied up. And then there's a little flame beside him. That means -- "

"He liked to be burned?"

"When he was sober. In the end, I stopped inviting him because he got so drunk and so abusive he wasn't any fun."

"Ah! So you did make a judgment."

She considered this for a moment. "Yes. I suppose I did."

"Did he spoil the secret? Once you didn't invite him anymore. Did he start telling everyone about what it was like up here?"

"Of course not. What was he going to say? Even he had a reputation to keep. Besides, half of Hollywood swam in that pool at one time or another. And the other half wished they could. Nobody said anything but everybody knew."

"What ... exactly. That there were orgies here. That women got fucked with snakes?"

"All of that yes. But mostly that people came back from Coldheart Canyon spiritually changed."

"You mean that? Spiritually."

"Yes. Spiritually. Don't look so surprised. The flesh and the soul are tied together."

Todd looked confused.

"Louise Brooks said to me once: there's nothing they can give that would be worth my freedom. She parried with the rest of us, but in the end she gave it all up, and moved away. She said they were trying to take her soul by boring her to death."

"So she gave up making movies?"

"Indeed she did. But Louise was a rare example. You know what usually happens: you get addicted. And the studio knows you're addicted. You need your hit of fame every couple of years or you start to feel worthless. Isn't that right? So as long as they can keep giving you a little time in the spotlight, they've got you in their pocket."

Todd continued to flip through the book as Katya spoke, as much because he didn't want to meet her gaze as because he was interested in the pages. All that she said was true; and it hurt to hear it: especially when he had done himself so much harm because of his appetite for the spotlight.

A sound, behind him. He looked up at the mirror behind the bar. It wasn't his wounded face that caught his eye, however, it was a motion of something, or somebody, passing by the door.

"I think there's somebody out there," he whispered.

Katya looked unsurprised. "Of course. They know we're here." She took the book from his hand and closed it for him. "Let me introduce you to them," she said.

"Wait." He reached for the photographs that Katya had also brought out of the safe. They still lay where she had put them, on the top of the bar.

"You don't need to look at those now," Katya said.

"I just want to take a peek."

He began to flick through the sheaf of photographs. There were probably forty or so; most in worse condition than the book, the prints made hastily, and poorly fixed, so that large parts of the image had faded to speckled sepia or to black. But there were still sizeable portions of many of the photographs visible, and the scenes they depicted confirmed every obscene or outlandish detail she'd offered. They weren't simply images of men and women coupling, but pictures of the most extreme forms of sexual gratification. In one, a naked man was bound to a metal chain, the cords that held him biting deep into his flesh. A woman wearing just a black brassiere was flogging his chest and his groin. Assuming this wasn't a set-up (and something about the quality of all the photographs suggested that all of these were the real thing), then the woman was doing her victim some serious hurt. There was blood running down his chest and stomach from blows she'd delivered there; and there appeared to be welts on his thighs and his dick, which stood testament to the pleasure he was taking in this. In another picture, some way down the pile, the same man (his face seemed vaguely familiar to Todd, though he couldn't put a name to it) had been redeemed from his bondage and lay on the paving stone beside the pool while another woman (this second completely naked) squatted over him and loosed a stream of urine on his wounds. To judge by the expression on the masochist's face, this hurt more than the whipping. His teeth were gritted, his body locked, as though he were only just holding back an unmanly scream.

"Wait. I know who that is." Todd said, "That's -- Christ! It can't be."

"It is."

"He was always the Good Guy."

"Well, sometimes Good Guys like getting pissed on."

"And her? She was always so sweet in her movies. What's her name? Always the victim."

"Well, that was part of the game you got to play in the Canyon. Up here you do the things the studios wouldn't let you do. Rub your face in the dirt for a while. And then on Monday morning you could brush your teeth and smile and pretend you were all-American again. That's all people want. An illusion. You can do what the hell you like out of sight. Just don't spoil their dreams. They want to believe you're perfect. And it's hard to put on a perfect face every day without going crazy. Up here, nobody was perfect, and nobody cared."

"Jesus," Todd said, coming across a picture of scatology. "Who's the pooper?" Katya turned the picture round to get a dearer view of the woman's face. "That was Edith Vine. At least that was her real name. I can't remember what they called her. She had a seven year contract with RKO, but they never made a star out of her."

"Maybe they were afraid one of these would leak out and they'd lose their investment."

"No, she just kept getting pregnant. She was one of those women who just had to look at a man and bam, she was eating anchovies and ice cream. So she kept getting abortions. Two, three a year. And her body went to hell."

"Where did she end up?"

"Oh she's here," Katya said. "We don't just take the famous up here in the Canyon. We take the failures, too."

Without fully understanding what he'd just been told -- perhaps not entirely wanting to -- Todd moved on to another picture. A man who'd played cowboys most of his life was the centre of attention, all laced up in a girdle that made his waist as narrow as any showgirl's.

"That's one for the family album."

"He liked to be called Martha when he was dressed like that. It was his mother's name. In fact, I think it was his mother's corset."

Todd laughed, though he wasn't sure where the laughter was coming from. Perhaps it was simply that the parade of perversions was so excessive there was nothing to do, in the end, but laugh.

"Christ. What's that?"

"A jar of bees, and Claudette's breast."

"She liked to get stung?"

"She would scream like her lungs were going to give out. But then she'd have somebody pick the stings out with their teeth."

"Fuck."

"And she'd be so wet you could fill a shot-glass from what came out of her."

It was too much. He put the photographs down. Bees, piss, corsets. And they were only the pictures he could make sense of. There were plenty more that defied easy comprehension; arrangements of limbs and faces and artifacts which he had no appetite to interpret.

Before he left them where they lay there was one question remaining that he simply had to ask.

"Are you in any of these?"

"Well I'm in the book aren't I?"

"So all that stuff you were telling me in the Gaming Room, about offering yourself to the winner? All that was true?"

"All that was true."

"Just how far did you go?"

She turned the photographs over, putting their excesses out of sight.

"As far as you want," she said, smiling. "Then just a little further."

She unnerved him, and she knew it. She took hold of his hand. "Come on," she said, "Let's go outside. We're missing the dusk."

FOUR

They were too late. It had been twilight when they'd entered the Pool House. Now it was night. But that wasn't the only change that had taken place in the time they'd lingered there. The air Todd breathed when he stepped outside again was something more than a little colder, a little darker, than it had been. Though there was no wind (at least the trees weren't moving) still he felt movement around and against him; a delicate touch on his arm, on his shoulder, something touching the back of his head. He looked at Katya. There was precious little light out here, but he could see her face with curious clarity, almost as though it were lit from within. Her expression was one of considerable pleasure.

"Say hello, Todd ... " she told him.

"Who to?"

"Oh come on. Stop pretending to yourself. You know they're here."

There was something brushing his cheek, lightly. He flicked it away, as though it might be a moth, though he knew it wasn't.

"I don't understand what's going on," he said, his words a kind of plea. He'd thought earlier that he could do without answers; that having her here was enough. Now he was discomfited again; he wanted some explanations for these mysteries, which multiplied every time he turned round. First Katya and her stories of the Gaming Room, then the guesthouse and the life-masks and the posters, then the bath, and the Terror. Now this: the Pool House and its history of debaucheries, locked away for posterity; and as if all that weren't enough, they'd stepped out into these moth-wing touches against his cheek, his arm, his groin. He wanted to know what it all meant; but he was afraid of the answer. No, that wasn't it. He was afraid he already knew the answer.

"You don't need me to tell you what's going on here," Katya said, echoing his thoughts. "You can feel them, can't you?"

Oh God, yes, he could feel them. These weren't moths or mosquitoes around him. They were people. People, hidden in the air. "Say it."

"Ghosts."

"Yes. Of course. Ghosts."

"Oh, Jesus."

"The Canyon's full of ghosts."

"I don't believe in ghosts."

"You don't have to believe," she said, "It's nothing to do with believing or not believing. They're here. All around you. Just let yourself see them. You know they're here."

Of course he knew. In his gut, he'd known all along there was some mystery like this waiting in the wings. And what Katya said about belief was right. Whether he believed in the Life Everlasting or not was a grand irrelevance. The dead were here. He could feel their fingers, their breaths, their stares. And now, as they pressed closer, he began to see them. He had to work up some spit before he could speak again.

"Why can I see you and I'm only now seeing them?" he asked.

"Because I'm not dead, Todd. And if you're very good, in a little while I'll show you why. You're going to like it too. My special room -- "

At the mention of the room, the air, or rather those who moved invisibly through it, became agitated. The number of touches that Todd felt doubled, tripled. Apparently Katya felt them too, and she was somewhat irritated by them.

"Calm down, calm down," she said.

There were subtle smears of light in front of Todd, as though the emotion the ghosts were feeling -- spurred by Katya's mention of the room -- was causing them to show themselves. He thought he saw a face in one of the smears, or some part of a face: a row of perfect teeth; the gleam of a bright blue eye. The more he thought he saw, the more there was to support his suspicion. The smears grew more cogent, painting the forms of faces and shoulders and hands. They lasted only a little time -- like fireworks, bursting into glorious life then dying away -- but each time one was ignited its life lasted a little longer, and the form it etched in the darkness made more sense to him.

There were people everywhere around him. Not just a few. Dozens of them; the ghosts of parties past, lining up to touch the living.

"You begin to see them, don't you?" Katya said.

"Yes," he replied breathlessly. "I do ... begin ... to see them."

"Pretty people."

More than pretty. Beautiful; and in many cases famous. One woman -- was it Jean Harlow? -- wandered in front of him with her glittering dress torn away to expose her breasts. She was come and gone so quickly it was hard for Todd to be sure, but she seemed to have bite-marks on her flesh, clustered around her nipples. She'd no sooner passed from sight than two figures, tied together with ropes that went from neck to neck, came into view. Both were male. Both were naked. Both shone with a mixture of sweat and blood. This would have been distressing enough; but it was their smiles, their lunatic smiles, which made Todd flinch.

"Sal and Jimmy," Katya said. "They fool around like that all the time. It's a little lynching game."

He pulled his hand out of hers. "This is too much."

"It's all right," she said. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

He waved them away, like a child trying to ward off nightmares. "I don't want to see them."

Laughter came out of the darkness to meet his demand. The ghosts were apparently much amused. Their laughing made faces blossom all round him. Several he could name: famous beauties, returned to their perfection this bizarre after-life, as though they'd remembered themselves as their public would have willed them to be. Merle Oberon and George Sanders, Mary Pickford and Veronica Lake.

Todd started to retreat up the lawn, still waving them off. The phantoms came in giddy pursuit.

"All right, enough!" Katya yelled at them. "I said enough!" Her word was apparently law, even in such stellar company as this. The laughter rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressing toward him.

He took the moment to hasten his retreat, turning his back on the assembly and hurrying back in what he hoped was the general direction of the house. His thoughts were in chaos. It seemed at that moment that his life since Burrows had been one long downward spiral into a kind of insanity.

"Wait, love!" Katya had come after him, her voice as pliant as ever. She caught up with him.

"I'm losing my mind," he murmured. His hands went to his face, pressing his fingers into his tender flesh, as though the pain might help drag him back from the brink.

"You're not crazy, you're just seeing things clearly for the first time."

"Well I don't want to see them."

"Why not? Isn't it reassuring to know that death means nothing? That there's life after death? Pleasure after death."

"Pleasure. You call that -- " He glanced back at the Pool House, where he'd seen the excesses of so many of these people, recorded for posterity.

"We had no shame then. We have even less now."

As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous laughter from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a woman tied up in the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which ran like converging rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound together, and her arms lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her pale body shaped like a bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was laughing, despite the apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was a man on the ground between her legs, licking the base of her feet, while another, standing behind her and massaging her breasts, bit into the tender flesh of her shoulder and neck. The hands went from her breasts down to her groin, and parted her lips of her pussy, from which came a shimmering arc, raining down onto the man adoring at her feet.

The recipient began to masturbate, obviously moved to fever-pitch by the shower.

Aware of Katya's gaze, Todd glanced over at her.

"Would you like to fuck her?" she said.

The girl was beautiful, with long red hair and that frothy laugh of hers, which sounded so very much more innocent than what she was up to.

"She's yours if you want her. Ava!"

The girl looked up.

"This is Todd," Katya said.

"Hello, Todd."

"Go on," Katya said. Don't worry: I'm not going to get jealous. I'd like to see how you give pleasure to a woman."

Despite the hint of judgment in this remark, Todd might have taken the opportunity to have the woman if the man at Ava's feet hadn't suddenly began to moan, and raising his hips off the ground ejected a copious load of semen. The sight of this eruption was enough to keep Todd at bay.

"Another time," he said to Ava, moving away.

She called after him, but he didn't look back.

"There's plenty more where she came from," Katya said, catching up with him. Her hand casually brushed the front of his pants, as though to make the point that she knew he was aroused. "You should go to one of them," she said.

"Why?"

"Just to see what it's like ... "

"Fucking a ghost?"

"If you want to put it that way."

"I don't know. It's weird. I'm not sure -- "

Her hand went back to his hard-on. "Yes you are. You love the idea."

Her hand went from his groin to his wrist, which she caught hold of, drawing him away from Ava into a kind of bower lined with honeysuckle and night-blooming jasmine, their mingled perfumes so strong they were practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the trees where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in various combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch overhead, and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else came up behind him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he looked for Katya; and again found her close by, smiling.

"Katya?"

A girl's voice, off to the right, and Todd saw a naked young woman being carried towards Katya on the shoulders of three men, one at her head, the other two supporting her knees, in such a way as to hold her legs wide open. Even in the dim light Todd could see what a gloriously tender sight the girl presented. She had been shaved between her legs, making her look even younger than she was, which was surely less than twenty.

"Lick me, Katya," she said, her voice dreamy. "Will you please? Nobody does it to me like you. Lick me deep."

Katya glanced round at Todd.

"Do you mind?"

"Help yourself," he replied, as though the girl was a plate set before her.

Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl's thighs, venturing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite reached the place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tantalizing game, and it drove the girl crazy with anticipation.

"Oh please," she said. "Please, Katya, please."

Todd stepped a little to the side so as to have a better view of what was unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that now, as she approached the divide of the girl's legs, her nipples stroked her partner's thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl's labia, as though investigating the most exquisite of flowers.

Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no end to Katya's capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was beginning to get a grasp of the woman, she changed the rules in some subtle fashion and found a new way to astonish him. Was this really the same woman he'd discovered in bed a while ago, looking like a disheveled angel?

Katya glanced back at him one last time -- just to be sure that he was indeed watching her -- then she applied her mouth to the girl's flesh.

The recipient of this tonguing let out a long, contented sigh, stretching out on her bed of hands, opening her legs a little wider. Katya proceeded to press deeper into her, advancing with lickings and nibblings, occasionally seeming to murmur against the woman's sex. The girl was no longer relaxed. She had grabbed fistfuls of the hair of the men who supported her knees, pulling herself up almost into a sitting position one moment then falling back, her body convulsed with little shudders, her tiny nipples hard, her flat belly shiny with sweat.

Katya slowly escalated the sensations she was inducing in the woman's body until her victim (there was no other word for it) was thrashing and sobbing beneath the tiniest of touches.

Somewhere in the midst of this, another occupant of the bower, on her knees in the shadows beneath the spread-eagled girl, came forward and freed Todd's erection from his pants. He didn't attempt to dissuade her. The girl took him into her throat and kept him there. The mingling of the sight of Katya working on the girl, and this new sensation was almost too much for him. He had to gently ease himself out of the girl's mouth so as not to lose control too quickly.

She seemed to get the message because she crawled away, beckoning him to follow. He pulled off his shoes and socks, and then hauled down his trousers, stepping out of them as he followed. He doubted Katya had noticed what he was up to: she was too deeply engaged in driving her partner to distraction: the girl's sobs of pleasure were the loudest sound in the vicinity.

At ground level, beneath the spread shadow of the ecstatic girl, was a sub-world of shadowy bodies, touches and whispers. There were probably a dozen men and women down here, variously intertwined. Todd felt their hands at his backside, his face, his erection; heard an appreciative coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man's palm there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who'd beckoned to him grazing his lips with hers, saying something he couldn't catch.

He lost sight of her for a little while, then he heard her ahead of him, gasping with delight. Somebody had got their hands on her before him. He felt a spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of sweating bodies, to catch up with her. He'd got it into his head that the nameless girl was his for the having, and he wasn't about to be denied her.

She wasn't hard to find. In fact she found him: catching hold of his hand and drawing him towards her. The shadow of Katya's sobbing victim spilled across much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and Todd saw that this girl who'd gobbled him down so gluttonously looked barely old enough to be out of her parent's charge. She was dark: dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodies. She pulled him eagerly towards her and cupped his face with her hands, bringing his mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around and beneath her, but he was too turned on to pay much attention to such details. He kissed the girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Katya had paused in her ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she'd feel just a little pang of jealousy), and the girl returned his kiss, lavishly.

Was there something in her kiss -- some subtle tang to the juices of her mouth, some coldness to her lips -- which would have given away the fact that she was a spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was hotter than most women he'd been naked with; almost feverish. And despite the fact that his eyes had for so long failed to see the ghosts in the Canyon, she -- and all of those around him -- now seemed absolutely solid.

His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pursuit; the fact that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off these spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well, with her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him: what else mattered?

He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to help him. There was undoubtedly somebody else beneath her, but he or she didn't seem to care that he was kneeling on them.

"All the way," she insisted.

He slid into her, as she instructed, all the way to the root, and began to work his hips against her.

Her cunt was as agile as her throat; he felt a counter-rhythm moving beneath his dick, passing through the lower half of her vulva. The sensation was like nothing he'd ever experienced before; after just a few strokes he was brought to the edge. He slowly pulled out of her, to be sure he didn't ejaculate too quickly.

"You like that?" she said, putting her hand down between her legs, and guiding him back in.

"Yes. I like it a lot."

"Good."

"But go slowly. Please."

He let her take him inside again and she threw back her head, expelling a sigh of satisfaction.

"Go on." she said, her eyes fluttering closed. "All the way. Both of you."

Both? he thought, raising his head from her breast.

And as he formed the question he felt an arm, twice, three times as thick as hers, and deeply muscled, reach over and grab his neck.

He lifted his head as best he could, and saw the face of a man over the girl's shoulder. She was apparently lying on him, her back against his chest. He was black, and handsome, even in the shadows.

"She's good," he said, smiling. "Yeah?"

Tentatively Todd reached down into the moist muddle between their legs. He felt himself, hard as ever; and then, further back, buried in the girl's ass, the other man's dick. So that was what he had been feeling as he moved inside her. It wasn't a muscular contraction; it was the black man sliding in and out of her. In any other situation he would have been repulsed; would have pulled out and retreated. But this was the Canyon; Katya's Eden without the serpent. The part of him that would have been revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him harder thinking about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man; the fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his hand up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the black man's wrist, tightening the three-way knot.

The man laughed.

"You like that?" he said.

"I like that."

"Good," he said, licking the girl's neck, but keeping his eyes fixed hungrily on Todd. "'Cause we like to get real crazy."

Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played her until she started to scream with ecstasy.

Somewhere in the midst of this, the girl Katya was pleasuring began to utter gut-wrenching cries. A little time later Katya must have had mercy on her, and allowed her to be carried off, because when Todd was next getting close to coming (for the fifth or sixth time) he looked away from the blissed-out faces beneath him, and saw Katya sitting amongst the jasmine and the honeysuckle, with a young man lying naked at her feet, covering them with reverential kisses.

She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a cigarette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then -- before she could choose either to return the smile or ignore it -- he fell back into the bliss of his m#233;nage-#224;-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was like, then the living had a lot to learn.

FIVE

Tonight was one of those nights when Marco had decided to get drunk. An 'honourable occupation', as his father had always said. He didn't like to drink in company; in truth, he didn't much like company. People in this town were full of bullshit (his boss included, half the time) and Marco didn't want to hear it. He'd come out to Los Angeles after his career in professional wrestling had come to a premature conclusion, half-thinking he might have a crack at acting. Then someone had suggested that personal security might be a good job for a man like himself, since he not only looked intimidating, but had the moves to back up his appearance. So Marco had joined an agency, and after working for a succession of spoiled-brat movie-stars who treated him as though he was something they'd just found on their shoe, he was ready to head for home. Then, within days of his planned departure, the job with Todd Pickett had come along.

It turned out to be a perfect match. He and Todd hit it off from the start. They had the same taste in girls, cars and whisky, which was more or less the contents of Marco's fantasy world.

Tonight, he wanted a girl, and was tempted to go out, hit the clubs on the Strip, see if he got lucky. If not there was always the credit card: he had no qualms about paying for sex. It certainly beat the five-fingered widow.

But before he went out he always liked to get mellow with a whisky or two: it made him more sociable. Besides, there was something strange about the house tonight, though he didn't know what. Earlier on, he'd been tempted to go out and take a look around, just to be sure they didn't have any intruders, but by now the whisky had got him feeling too lazy to be bothered. Fuck it, they should get another dog. Dempsey had been a great early warning system. As soon as anyone came anywhere near the house he'd go crazy. Tomorrow, Marco thought as he headed down from his bedroom to get a fresh bottle of whisky, he'd talk to Todd again about buying a pup, using the security angle to get past Todd's loyalty to Dempsey.

He found the whisky, and poured himself a glass, taking it neat in one swallow. Then he looked at his watch. It was eleven-twenty. He'd better get moving. Los Angeles was an early town, he'd discovered, especially mid-week. If he didn't hurry he'd be too late to catch any of the action.

He started back upstairs to fetch his wallet, but halfway up he heard a noise at the bottom of the stairwell. It sounded like a door opening and closing.

"Boss?" he yelled down. "Is that you?"

There was no reply. Just the door, continuing to open and close, though there was no wind tonight to catch it.

"Huh," he said to himself. He went up, found his wallet, picked up his whisky glass from the kitchen on the way back down, and descended the stairs.

There were plenty of places around the house he hadn't explored: one of them was the very lowest level of the house, which Jerry had told him were just store-rooms. Nor had he advised using them. They were damp and anything put down there would be mildewed in a month, he said.

A few steps from the bottom of the stairs, Marco emptied his glass, and set it down. He was now drunk, he realized as he stood upright. Not paralytically; just nicely, pleasantly toasted. Smiling a little smile of self-congratulation for having achieved this blissful state, he continued down.

It was cold here, in the bowels of the house. But it wasn't the damp cold that Jerry had warned him about. This was an almost-bracing cold: like a late autumn night in his home town of Chicago. He went down the little corridor that led from the bottom of the stairs, at the end of which was the noisy door which had brought him down here. What the hell was making it open and close that way?

He felt the answer on his face the closer he got to the door. There was a wind blowing down here, unlikely as that seemed and it smelled not of small, mildewed rooms, but of wide green spaces.

For the second time in this journey, Marco said: "Huh."

He pushed open the door. There was complete darkness on the other side, but it was a high, wide darkness, his gut told him; and the wind that gusted against him came-though this was beyond reason-across a stretch of open land.

He wished he hadn't drunk the whiskies now. Wished he had his senses completely under his control, so that he could assess this phenomenon clearly.

He put his hand around the corner of the door, looking for a light switch. There wasn't one; or at least there wasn't one his fingers could find. Never mind. This would be a mystery for tomorrow. For now he'd just close the door and go back to his drinking.

He reached in and caught hold of the doorhandle. As he clasped it there was a flicker of light in the depths of the room. No, not of light, of lightning: a fragmentary flicker which was followed by three much longer flashes, in such quick succession they were almost a single flash.

By it, he saw the space from which the wind came, and had his instincts confirmed. Wide it was, and high. The thunderhead which spat the lightning was miles away, across a landscape of forest and rock.

"Oh, Jesus." Marco said.

He reached out for the doorhandle, caught hold of it, and slammed the door closed. There was a lock, but no key. Still, it seemed firmly enough closed, at least until he'd found Todd, and shown him.

He started yelling Todd's name as he ran up the stairs, but there was no reply. He went to the master bedroom, knocked, and entered. The room was empty, the French doors to the balcony open, the drapes billowing.

He went to the balcony. The wind that was moving the drapes was a California wind: warm, fragrant, gentle. It was not remotely like the wind that had blown against his face in the room below. That was a wind from a different country.

Todd was not on the balcony. But once Marco was out there he heard the sound of voices from somewhere in the Canyon. Women's voices, mostly, laughing. And lights, running between the trees.

"Sonofabitch," Marco said.

The boss was apparently having a party, and he hadn't invited Marco.

The evening was getting stranger by the minute. He went downstairs, through the kitchen and out to the back door. Anxiety had soured the drink in his stomach, and as he opened the back door a wave of nausea suddenly overcame him. He had no time to get outside. He puked on the threshold, the force of the feeling enough to fold his legs up beneath him.

He gazed weakly down at the splattered whisky and meatballs on the ground, his eyes vaguely comprehending the intricacy of five nails that were driven into the partially rotted wood of the threshold.

Then, from the darkness on the other side of the threshold there came a soft, infinitely sorrowful voice. The voice of a lost girl.

"Let me in," she said.

Marco looked up, his head still spinning. There was more vomit gurgling in his belly; he could feel his system preparing to revolt again. He tried to make sense of the girl who just begged entrance to the house, narrowing his eyes to see if he could separate her from the shadows.

There she was: a young woman with a face that his sickened eyes could not entirely fix nor be certain of, but who seemed to be more than passingly pretty. She had long blonde hair and pale, almost white, skin; and as suited her tone of supplication she was on her knees, her pose a mirror image of his own. She was wearing what appeared to be a man's shirt, which was unbuttoned. Had Marco been feeling more like himself, he might have hoped to persuade her to take the shirt off before he took pity on her. But the nausea overwhelmed all other responses: the girl's near-nakedness only made his belly churn harder. He looked away from her, hoping to postpone the next bout of vomiting until she was out of sight. She plainly took his averted eyes as a sign of rejection.

"Please." she said to him again, "I just want to get back into the house. You have to help me."

"I'm in no condition -- " he started, looking up at her to try and communicate with the expression just how dire he felt, but the few words he'd begun to say were enough to bring about a sudden and calamitous change in her.

She let out a shriek of frustration and rage, volume and shrillness uncanny. He felt his gorge rising, and as the woman's din reached its inhuman height, he puked up what was left of his dinner.

The worst was over now; but there was more to come from the woman outside. Feeling his stomach settling, he chanced a look up at her. It was an error. She was still letting out the remnants of that godless shriek of hers, and it seemed -- at least to Marco's sickened and bewildered eyes -- that the noise was taking some grotesque toll on her body. Her face -- which had been so beautiful just minutes before -- had become a grey, smeared form: her forehead swollen so that she looked cretinous, her eyes pulled into empty slits, her mouth running with saliva from its turned down corners. Her oversized shirt of hers had fallen open to reveal breasts that were gray scraps of dead flesh, hanging on the cage of her bones. Beneath them, he seemed to see her innards in frenzied motion, as though she had snakes nesting in her.

It was too much for Marco's already traumatized senses. He didn't give any further thought to finding Todd -- Christ, Todd was probably part of this insanity.

With his heels sliding in the mess he'd made, he hauled himself to his feet -- half expecting the abomination on the other side of the threshold to come after him. But for some reason she kept her distance, her transformation now so far advanced she was completely unrecognizable as the woman he'd first laid eyes on.

He retreated down the passageway -- still assuming this nightmare might come after him. But she matched his retreat with one of her own, melting into the shadows. Marco wasn't reassured. She'd probably gone to find others; he didn't want to be here when they came back. He raced into the kitchen and picked up his car keys, which were on the table. He gave a moment's consideration to the possibility of lingering to wash his face and hands (maybe even to changing his puke-splattered shirt), but he decided to forego cleanliness in favour of making a fast exit.

He drove down the serpentine road that led out of the Canyon as if he were being pursued by a horde of demon-women, and without even thinking about it took the same route he'd taken with Todd countless times: up onto Mulholland Drive. He opened the window as he drove, so as to have a sobering breeze blowing against his face, but it had very little effect. There was too much alcohol in his blood, and too much panic inflaming that alcohol, to make him a safe driver on such a notoriously tricky and dangerous stretch of road. He didn't care. He just wanted to put some distance between himself and that damn Canyon as fast as possible.

On one of the hairpin bends his clammy hands slid on the wheel, and he momentarily lost control of the car. He was a good enough driver -- even in his present state -- to recover quickly, and things might have been fine had another speed-freak not come barreling round the corner in the opposite direction. The other driver took quick evasive action, and was away round the bend before Marco lost what little control he had. The wheel slipped through his hands, and his drink-slurred foot was too slow on the brake to stop the car from skewing round, squealing loudly. There was no barrier between the road and the drop; not even a wooden fence. The front half of the vehicle went over the edge, and there it lodged for a moment, finely balanced between solid asphalt and oblivion. Marco muttered a little prayer, but God wasn't listening. The car tripped forward and slid off the road into darkness. It was a straight drop of perhaps forty or fifty feet.

The vehicle didn't hit solid ground, however. It fell into the massive boughs of a sycamore tree, which was large enough to hold the car, nose down, in its branches. Marco was thrown against the windshield. Through it he could see the yard in which the sycamore stood. There was a party going on down there. The pool was illuminated: its bright turquoise water twinkling. Lanterns hung in the bushes all around, swaying in the breeze. Marco had time to grasp the prettiness of all this, then something ignited in the engine, and the fume-filled air around him became a sheet of lurid orange flame. It enveloped him completely, the first burst of heat enough to sear the clothes from his body and set his hair and flesh alight.

Blindly, he fumbled for the handle of the door, and pulled on it. The rush of air only excited the flames further. Through the stench of gasoline and burning plastic he could smell the sickening tang of his own body being cooked. Still he fought to escape, and gravity was on his side. The car was so positioned that he had only to lean forward and fall out through the open door. The sycamore's boughs slowed his descent, but once he was dear of them there was an eighteen foot drop to the polished Mexican pavers around the pool.

He scarcely felt the impact. The fire had completely traumatized his nerve-endings. Nor could he see anything: his eyelids had been fused shut by the heat. He could still hear, though he wouldn't make much sense of the garbled cries of the people who had gathered to witness his agonies.

There was one person in the crowd who was willing to do more than stand and watch him burn. Marco felt arms grab hold of him; heard his savior yelling something about the pool. Then he was in free-fall again, as the man who'd picked him up threw him into the water.

The flames were instantly extinguished. But the cure was too much for his flesh to endure. The sudden shock of cold after the blistering heat of the fire sent his body into systemic failure.

His last breath -- a bubble of heated air -- escaped from his cooked lungs. Then he sank to the bottom of the pool.

Even so, the people around the pool didn't give up on him. Three of the partygoers dived into the pool and brought his blackened, fire-withered body up from the bottom. He was tenderly rifted onto the side of the pool, where one of the girls attempted to breathe some life back into him. But it was a lost cause. The man who'd made such a dramatic entrance into the gathering was dead, and beyond hope of saving.

This was not quite the end of events along that stretch of Mulholland Drive, however.

Just a few hours later, as the first light of dawn was breaking, a jogger, who ran a two-mile route along the Drive daily, rain or shine, saw a light on the road, close to the place where Marco's tires had left their blackened imprint on the asphalt. Apparently aware that it had an unwanted witness, the mysterious luminescence rose up into the brightening air and was gone.

The following evening, Paul Booth, the man who'd had the courage to carry the burning body of Marco Caputo to the pool -- went out into the back yard, alone. He was in a melancholy state of mind. The party he'd thrown the previous night had been in honour of his little sister's sixteenth birthday. Some celebration! Alice had barely stopped crying since. He could hear her now, sobbing in the house.

He took out the half-smoked reefer he'd been saving for a happier occasion, and lit it up. As he drew on the pungent smoke, he looked up and saw a patch of luminous air lingering at the edge of the pool. It had no discernible shape. It was simply a gentle brightness, which would have been invisible half an hour before, when the sun had still been up. He watched the brightness as it hung there for ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, then he nipped out his reefer, pocketed it, and went back inside to find someone to tell. He found his father; and together they emerged into the backyard.

The light had already gone from beside the pool.

"There!" Paul said, pointing up at something that could have been the light he'd seen, now up on Mulholland Drive. But it could just as easily have been the light of a car coming round the treacherous corner of the road. And anyway, it had gone in a heartbeat, leaving both father and son doubting what they'd seen.

SIX

In the depths of the Canyon, no more than half a mile from the pool and the lawn and the tree where Ava hung, Tammy lay in the dirt, and waited for the end. She'd done all she could do to survive: she had eaten berries and licked the dew off leaves, she'd fought off the fever-dreams which threatened to claim her consciousness; she'd forced herself to walk when she had no strength left in her limbs.

It had tricks, this canyon: ways to lead you round and round in circles, so that you burned up all your energies coming back to the place you'd started from. It put colors before your eyes that were so bewitching that you ended up turning round and round on the spot to catch them, like a dog chasing its own tail. And sometimes (this was its cleverest trick) it went into your head and found the voices there that were most comforting, then made them call to you. Arnie (of all people to find comforting, Mr. Zero Sperm Count); and the man who used to do her dry-cleaning in Sacramento, Mr. O'Brien, who'd always had a smile and a wink for her; and Todd, of course, her beautiful hero Todd, calling out to her just to make her stumble a few more steps. She hadn't quite believed any of these voices were real, but that hadn't stopped her following them, back and forth, around and about -- voices and colors -- until at last she had no strength left in her body, and she fell down.

So now she was down, and she was too weak to get up again; too damn heavy ever to get her fat ass up and moving. At the back of her head was the fear that the freaks would come and find her. But they didn't come, at least by daylight. Perhaps, she thought, they were waiting for darkness. Meanwhile, there were plenty of things that did come: flies, dragonflies, humming-birds, all flitting around.

As for the summonings from Arnie and Mr. O' Brien and Todd, once she was down on the ground none of these came either. The Canyon knew it had her beaten. All it had to do was wait, and she'd perish where she lay.

The day crept on. In the middle of the afternoon she fell into a stupefied daze, and when she woke experienced a short and surprising burst of renewed ambition to save herself. After much effort she managed to get to her feet, and started to walk in what she thought was the direction of the house (sometimes she seemed to see the roof through the trees, sometimes not), but after ten minutes the Canyon seemed to realize she was up and walking, and it began its little tricks afresh. The colors came back. So did the voices.

She fell to her knees, crying, begging it to leave her alone. But it was merciless; the voices were louder than ever, yelling incoherently in her head; the sky was every color but blue.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, okay. Just leave me alone to die. I won't get up again. I promise. I swear. Just leave me be."

It seemed to get the message, because by degrees the yelling receded, and the colors dimmed.

She lay back in the foliage, and watched the sky darken, the stars emerge. Birds flew overhead, returning to their nests before the onset of night. She envied them, just a little, but then what did she have to go home to, in truth? A house in the suburbs she'd never really loved; a husband, the same. What a mess she'd made of her life! What a ridiculous, empty mess! All that time wasted doting on a man she'd seen on a screen; hours spent flicking through her treasures, fantasizing. Never really living. That was the horror of it. She was going to die and she'd never really lived.

The sky was almost lightless now. She could barely see her hand in front of her face. She let her eyes slide closed, draping the stars. In the grass around her, the cicadas sang a rhythmical lullaby.

Suddenly, somewhere not very far off, there rose an unholy din; part howl, part yelp, part laughter. Her eyes sprang open. The hairs at her nape stood on end. Was this a farewell performance by the Canyon? One last attempt to squeeze her wits dry?

No; no. This wasn't for her benefit. It was too far away. Up at the house. Yes, that was it; somebody up at the house was having one hell of a party.

Curiosity got the better of her fatigue. Tammy pushed herself up onto her knees, and attempted to figure out where the cacophony was coming from. There was light visible between the trees; flickering, but not flames. This was too cold a light to be fire.

Perhaps this wasn't a party after all. The din was as nasty as it was raucous. Who the hell could be making such a noise? The freaks perhaps? It seemed the likeliest source. She pictured them laying siege to the house. Oh God in Heaven, suppose they'd gone after Todd? Sniffed him out in his weakened state, and attacked him?

The thought of harm coming to him was unbearable, even now. It forced her to get up off the ground, something she couldn't have done on her own behalf. For a few seconds she stood with legs wide planted, uncertain whether she was going to fall down again. Then, she told herself to move, and much to her surprise her body obeyed the instruction. Her legs felt like lead and her head as light as a helium balloon, but she managed to stagger five or six steps without falling down.

The noise from the house had subsided somewhat, but the lights were still visible between the trees. She paused for a moment to catch her breath, and while she did so she studied the lights, trying to make sense of them. Was it possible what she was seeing were people? Yes it was. Several of the figures had slipped away from the immediate vicinity of the house, and were coming closer to her. Some were zigzagging through the trees, as though they were engaged in a game of some kind. What sort of creatures were these, she wondered, that capered like children playing, but had such luminescence about them?

She stumbled on another two or three steps, but her body wasn't going to carry her much further, she knew. It was only a matter of time before she fell down again; and next time she knew she wouldn't have the strength to pick herself up.

Then, very close by, she heard the sound of something moving through the thicket. She looked in the direction of the sound. An animal perhaps? A coyote, or --

"Tammy?"

She held her breath, not quite daring to believe that she recognized the voice.

"It's Willem," he said.

Her legs almost gave out from sheer gratitude. He came out of the bushes and caught hold of her before she fell.

"I'm heavy," she warned him.

"I'm strong," he said.

So she let him take her weight, sinking against his chest. As she relinquished herself to him she heard a little girl somewhere nearby, sobbing pitifully. She was about to ask who the hell it was making such a noise when she realized it was her own voice.

"It's all right," Zeffer said. "I'm here now. Everything's going to be fine."

She wasn't sure that she believed him; it sounded like a bad piece of dialogue to her. But this was no time to be judgmental. He'd come to look for her, and she was grateful. She put her head on his chest, like a B-movie heroine snatched from the jaws of death, and laughing, then sobbing, then laughing again, let him put his arms around her, and rock her awhile.

SEVEN

Finally, it had not been Todd who'd lost control, but her other lover.

"I can't ... hold back ... much longer," he said.

The girl was beyond giving even the most rudimentary instructions: she lay in a daze of pleasure, her legs hoisted up by Todd so that he could see the wonderful machinery of their interconnected anatomies.

"Are you ready?" the other man said to him. His face was liquid shadow, his eyes wild.

"You say the word."

"Lift her legs higher."

Todd did as he was instructed, noticing as he did so that their game had brought all the other games in the immediate vicinity to a halt. Everyone was watching the spectacle, their gazes ravenous.

The girl's eyes were closed but there was no doubt that she had achieved, and was sustaining, some state of sexual Nirvana. There was a Gioconda smile on her wet lips, and when on occasion her lids did flutter open, only the whites of her eyes were visible.

The girl's other lover had one hand on her face, a thumb pressed between her lips, but his other hand was gripping the muscle that ran from Todd's nape to his shoulder, gripping it so hard it hurt. Todd was glad of the pain. It was just enough to keep him distracted from emptying himself.

The man's eyes opened wide. "Oh yeah!" he bellowed, and Todd came the closest he'd ever come to feeling another man's orgasm.

The girl opened her eyes, and looked at Todd. "You too," she said.

"No," said another voice.

Todd looked up. It was Katya who had spoken. She was looking at him with an appreciative smile on her face. Clearly she'd enjoyed watching the m#233;nage-#224;-trois. But it was clear she now wanted Todd to leave the game.

"Gotta go," he said to the girl.

She put her hand down between their legs, as though to hold him inside.

"Sorry," he said, and pulled out of her.

As he stood up there was a light patter of applause from the vicinity of the bower.

"Quite the performer." Katya said, as she stood up. She had his pants. He started to put them on, pressing his dick out of sight.

"You can come back and find them again another night." Katya said, as she hooked her arm through Todd's, and escorted him away from the place.

It seemed the scene in the night-blooming jasmine had begun a chain reaction amongst the ghosts. As they walked through the warm darkness he saw orgiasts on every side, involved in pleasuring themselves and one another. Clothes had been shed in the grass or hung in the branches like Hallowe'en spooks; kisses were being exchanged, murmurs of passion. As he'd already discovered, death had done nothing to dim the libidos of these people. Though their dust and bones lay in cold tombs and mausoleums across the city, their spirits were very much in heat here. And, as Katya had told him, nothing was forbidden. It was only curious to see so many familiar faces amongst the orgiasts. Faces he associated with everything but this: comedians and adventurers and players of melodrama. But never naked; never aroused. And again, as had been true in the bower, what he would have turned away from in revulsion in the company of the living, intrigued and inflamed him here, amongst the famous dead. Was that Gary Grant with his trousers around his ankles; and Randolph Scott paying tribute below? Was that Jean Harlow lying on one of the lower boughs of a tree, with her foot running up and down the erection of a man standing devotedly by? There were others, many others, he only half-recognized, or didn't recognize at all. But Katya supplied names as they wandered back to the house: Gilbert Roland and Carole Lombard, Frances X. Bushman and Errol Flynn. A dozen times, seeing some coupling in progress, he wanted to ask, was that so-and-so? Three of four times he did. When the answer was consistently yes, he gave up asking. As for what was actually going on, well the pictures in the Pool House had given him a good idea of how wild things could get, and now he was seeing those excesses proved in the flesh, for just about every sexual peccadillo was being indulged somewhere in the Canyon tonight. Nor did Todd discount the possibility that even more extreme configurations than those he could see were going on in the murk between the trees. Given what he'd ended up doing after only a short night here, imagine the possibilities an occupant in the Canyon might invent with an indeterminate number of nights to pass: knowing you were dead but denied a resting-place?

What new perversions would a soul invent to distract itself from the constant threat of ennui?

At last the crowd of fornicators thinned, and Katya led him -- by a path he hadn't previously seen, it being so overgrown -- back to the big house.

"What I am about to show you," she warned him as they went, "will change your life. Are you ready for that?"

"Is it something to do with why you're here?"

"Why I'm here, why they're here. Why the Canyon is the most sacred place in this city. Yes. All of the above."

"Then show me," he said. "I'm ready."

She took a tighter hold of his hand. "There's no way back," she warned him. "I want you to understand that. There is no way back."

He glanced over his shoulder at the party-goers cavorting between the trees. "I think that was true a long time ago," he said.

"I suppose it was," Katya replied, with a little smile, and led him out of the darkened garden and back into her dream palace.

EIGHT

"I'm hungry," Tammy told Zeffer. "Can't we get some food from the house before we leave?"

"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 wasn't there'd be no such thing as cinema." He turned and looked towards 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 amongst 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 amongst the revenants, and one by one they gave up their pleasures, whatever they'd been, and turned their hollow gazes towards 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 denied 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 re-ignite 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 Hill 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 screenwriting and move back to Wisconsin.

Todd heard it too, of course.

"What in God's name is that?"

He and Katya were deep in the bowels of the house, in a place he had never known existed, much less explored.

"Take no notice," Katya told him, as the noise came again, even louder and more plaintive. "Whatever it is, it's out there, it's not in here with us." She took hold of his arm, and kissed his cheek. He could smell Ava on her. His erection still throbbed. "Are you ready?" she said to him.

"Ready for what?"

They were approaching a door just a little smaller than the front door; and similarly medieval in style.

"On the other side of that door is something that was given to me a long time ago. It changed my life. As I told you, it will also change yours. When you first get in there, it's bewildering. You just have to trust me. I'm going to be with you all the time, even if you can't always see me. And I swear no harm is going to come to you. You understand me, Todd? This is my house. Even this place, which will seem very remote from everything you've seen so far, is also mine."

He didn't know quite what to make of any of this, but his curiosity was certainly piqued.

"So don't be afraid," she told him.

"I won't be," he said, wondering what kind of game she was playing now. She, who knew so many; what did she have up her sleeve?

As had happened so many times now, she read his thoughts. "This isn't a game," she said. "Or if it is, it's the most serious game in God's creation."

There was surely a trace of condescension here, but what the hell?

"I'm ready," he said.

She smiled. "In half an hour you'll realize what an absurd thing it is you've just said," she told him.

"Why?"

"Because nobody can be ready for this."

Then she pushed open the door.

Before Tammy went to find Todd, she had to eat. Had to.

So, while Todd was stepping over the threshold into a place that would change his life, Tammy was in the kitchen three stories above, at the open fridge, gorging on whatever her hands found. Cold chicken, potato salad, some Chinese takeaway.

"Do we have to do this now?" Zeffer said, looking around nervously. "She could come in here at any minute."

"Yes, well let her. I'm hungry, Willem. In fact I'm fucking starving. Give me a hand here, will you?"

"What do you want?"

"Something sweet. Then I'm done."

He dug around on the inner shelves of the fridge and found an almost-intact cherry pie, the sight of which made Tammy coo the way most women cooed when they saw babies. Zeffer watched her with an expression of bemusement on his face. She was too hungry to care. She lifted a slice of pie to her mouth, but before she could get it to her tongue, Zeffer caught hold of her wrist.

"What?" she said.

"Listen."

Tammy listened. She heard nothing, so she shook her head.

"Listen," he said again, and this time she heard what he was drawing her attention to. The windows were shaking. So were the doors. The cutlery on the sink was rattling; as were the plates in the cupboards.

She let the slice of pie drop from her fingers, her appetite suddenly vanished.

"What's going on?" she wanted to know.

"They're downstairs," Zeffer said, his voice tinged with superstitious awe. "Todd and Katya. They've gone downstairs."

"What are they doing there?"

"You don't want to know," Zeffer said hurriedly. "Please. I beg you. Let's just go."

The windows were shaking with mounting violence; the boards creaked beneath their feet. It was as though the entire structure of the house was protesting about whatever was happening in its midst.

Tammy went to the kitchen sink, ran some cold water, and washed the food from around her mouth. Then she skirted around Zeffer and headed to the door that led to the turret and the staircase.

"Wrong direction," Zeffer said. He pointed to the other door. "That's the safest way out."

"If Todd's down there, then that's the way I want to go," Tammy said.

As she spoke she felt a blast of chilly air coming up from below. It smelled nothing like the rest of the house, nor of the gardens outside. Something about it made the small hairs at her nape prickle.

She looked back down at Zeffer, with a question on her face.

"I think I need to tell you what's down there before you take one more step," he said.

Outside, the spirits of the dead waited and listened. They had heard the door that led into the Chamber of the Hunt opened; they knew some lucky fool was about to step into the Devil's Country. If they could have stormed the house and slipped through the door ahead of him, they would have gladly done so, at any price. But Katya had been too clever. She had put up defenses against such a siege: five icons beaten into the threshold of each of the doors that would drive a dead soul to oblivion if they attempted to cross. They had no choice, therefore, but to keep a respectful distance, hoping that some day the icons would lose their terrible potency; or that Katya would simply declare an amnesty upon her guests and tear the icons out of the thresholds, allowing her sometime lovers and friends back inside.

Meanwhile, they waited, and listened, and remembered what it had been like for them in the old days, when they'd been able to go back and forth into the house at will. It had been bliss, back then: all you had to do was step into the Devil's Country and you could shed your old skin like a snake. They'd come back to the chamber over and over, so as to restore their failing glamour, and it had dutifully soothed away their imperfections; made their limbs sleek and their eyes gleam.

All this was kept secret from the studio bosses, of course, and when on occasion a Goldwyn or a Thalberg did find out Katya made sure they were intimidated into silence. Nobody talked about what went on in Coldheart Canyon, even to others that they might have seen there. The stars went on about their public lives while in secret they took themselves up to Coldheart Canyon every weekend, and having smoked a little marijuana or opium, went to look at the Hunt, knowing that they would emerge rejuvenated.

There was a brief Golden Age, when the royalty of America lived a life of near-perfection; sitting in their palaces dreaming of immortality. And why not? It seemed they had found the means to renew their beauty whenever it grew a little tired. So what if they had to dabble in the supernatural for their fix of perfection; it was worth the risk.

Then -- but inexorably -- the Golden Age began to take its toll: the lines they'd driven off their faces began to creep back again, deeper than ever; their eye-sight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil's Country, desperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.

Terrible stories started to circulate amongst the lords of Tinseltown; nightmare stories. Somebody had woken up blind in the middle of the night, it was said; somebody else had withered before her lover's appalled eyes. Fear gripped the Golden People; and anger too. They blamed Katya for introducing them to this ungodly panacea, and demanded that she give them constant access to the house and the Hunt. She, of course, refused. This quickly led to some ugly scenes: people started appearing at the house in the Canyon in desperate states of need, beating at the door to be let in.

Katya hardened her cold heart against them, however. Realizing she would soon be under siege, she hired men to guard the house night and day. For several months, through the spring and summer of 1926, she and Zeffer lived in near isolation, ignoring the entreaties of her friends who came (often with magnificent gifts) begging for an audience with her; and for a chance to see the Devil's Country. She refused all but a very few.

In fact nobody truly understood what was happening in the bowels of the house. Why should they? They were dealing in mysteries even old Father Sandru, who had sold Zeffer the piece, did not understand. But their eager flesh had discovered what the dry intellect of metaphysicians had not. Like opium addicts denied their fix they went blindly after the thing that would heal their pain, without needing to understand the pharmacology that had driven them to such desperation.

For a time they had been happy in the Canyon, they remembered; happy in Katya's house, happy looking at the pictures of the Hunt on the tiled walls, which had moved so curiously before their astonished eyes. So it followed -- didn't it? -- that if they kept returning to the Canyon, and into that strange country of tile and illusion they would be happy and healthy again. But Katya wouldn't let them; she was leaving them to suffer, denied the only thing they wanted.

Of course Katya was no more knowledgeable about the alchemy at work in her dream palace than those in her doomed circle. She knew that the gift of healing and the fever of need that followed was all brought about by being in the Devil's Country, but how it worked, or how long it would operate before its engines were exhausted, she had no idea. She only knew that she felt possessive of the room. It was hers to give and take away, as her will desired.

Needless to say, the more tearful visitors she had at her gates, the more letters she received (and the more chaotic the tone of those letters) the less inclined she was to invite in those who'd written them, partly because she was afraid of the depth of addiction she had unleashed in these people, partly because she was anxious that the power of the Devil's Country might not be limitless, and she was not about to be profligate with a power that she needed as much as they.

There might come a time, she supposed, when she would need the healing effects of the house purely for herself, and when that time came she'd be covetous of every wasted jot of it. This wasn't something she could afford to be generous with; not any longer. It was her life she was playing with here; her life everlasting. She needed to preserve the power she had locked away below ground, for fear one day its sum was the difference between life and death.

And then -- as though things were not terrible enough -- they had suddenly got worse.

It began on Monday, the 23rd of August, 1926, with the sudden death of Rudy Valentino.

Only three weeks before he had managed to get past the guards in Coldheart Canyon (like one of the heroes he'd so often played, scaling walls to get to his beloved) and had pleaded with Katya to let him stay with her. He didn't feel good, he told her; he needed to stay here in the Canyon, where he'd spent so many happy times, and recuperate. She told him no. He became aggressive; told her -- half in Italian, half in English -- that she was a selfish bitch. Wasn't it time she remembered where she came from? he said. She was just a peasant at heart, like him. Just because she acted like a queen didn't make her one; to which she'd snappily replied that the same could not be said for him. He'd slapped her for that remark. She'd slapped him back, twice as hard.

Always prone to sudden emotional swings, Valentino had promptly started to bawl like a baby, interspersing his sobs with demands that she please God have mercy on him.

"I'm dying!" he said, thumping his gut with his fist. "I feel it in here!"

She let him weep until the carpet was damp. Then she had had him removed from the house by two of her hired heavies, and tossed into the street.

It had seemed like typical Rudy melodrama at the time: I'm dying, I'm dying. But this time he'd known his own body better than she'd given him credit for. He was the first to pay the ultimate price for visiting the Devil's Country. Three weeks after that tearful conversation he was dead.

The hoopla over Valentino's sudden demise hid from view a series of smaller incidents that were nevertheless all part of the same escalating tragedy. A minor starlet called Miriam Acker died two days after Rudy, of what was reported to be pneumonia. She had been a visitor to the Canyon on several occasions, usually in the company of Ramon Navarro. Pola Negri -- another visitor to the Canyon -- fell gravely ill a week later, and for several days hovered on the brink of death. Her frailty was attributed to grief at the passing of Valentino, with whom she claimed to have had a passionate affair; but the truth was far less glamorous. She too had fallen under the spell of the Hunt; and now, though she denied it, was sickening.

In fact death took an uncommonly large number of Hollywood's luminaries in the next few months. And for every one who died there were ten or twenty who got sick, and managed to recover, though none were ever possessed of their full strength, or flawless beauty, again. The 'coincidence' was not lost on either the fans or the journalists. "A harvest of death is sweeping Hollywood," Film Photoplay morbidly announced, "as star after star follows the greatest star of all, Rudolph Valentino, to the grave."

The idea that there was some kind of plague abroad caught the public's imagination and was fed voraciously by those who'd predicted for reasons of their own that judgment would eventually fall on Tinseltown. Preachers who'd fulminated against the sinners of the New Sodom were now quick to point out the evidence in support of their grim sermons. And the public, who'd a decade before taken pleasure in crowning actors as the new Royalty of America were now just as entertained by the spectacle of their fall from grace. They were fakes and foreigners anyway, it was widely opined; no wonder they were falling like flies; they'd come here like plague-rats in the first place.

Hollywood was going to Hell in a hand-cart, and it didn't matter how rich or beautiful you were, there was no escaping the cost of the high life.

Up in the Canyon, Katya dared believe she was safe: she'd added three German Shepherd dogs to the retinue guarding her; and she had men patrolling the ridges and the roads that led to the Canyon night and day. It was such a strange time. The whole community was unsettled. There was talk of lights being seen in the sky; especially in the vicinity of death-sites. A number of small cults came into being, all with their own theories of what was happening. The most extreme interpreted these lights as warnings from God: the end of the world was imminent, their leaders announced, and people should prepare themselves for the Apocalypse. Others interpreted the lights more benignly. They were messengers from God, this faction claimed; angels sent to guide the deceased out of the coil of mortal confusions into the next life. If this was the case then these heavenly presences were not happy that Hell now had a stronghold in the Canyon. Though the dead came there, the lights did not. Indeed on several occasions they were seen at the bottom of the hill, three or four of them gathered in a cloud of luminescence, plainly unwilling to venture into the Canyon.

For her part, Katya took such reports as evidence that her defenses were working. Nobody could get into her precious Canyon. Or such was her conviction.

In fact her sense of security, like so much else in her increasingly fragile life, was an illusion.

One evening, walking in the garden, the dogs suddenly got crazy, and out of the darkness stepped Rudy Valentino. He looked entirely unchanged by death: his skin as smooth as ever, his hair as brilliantly coifed, his clothes as flawless.

He bowed deeply to her.

"My apologies," he said, "for coming here. I know I'm not welcome. But frankly, I didn't know where else to go."

There was no hint of manipulation in this; it seemed to be the unvarnished truth.

"I went home to Falcon Lair," Rudy went on, "but it's been trampled over by so many people, it doesn't feel as though it's mine any more. Please ... I beg you ... don't be afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid of you," Katya replied, quite truthfully. "There were always ghosts in my village. We used to see them all the time. My grandmother used to sing me to sleep, and she'd been dead ten years. But Rudy, let's be honest. I know why you're up here. You want to get in to see the Hunt -- "

" -- just for a little while."

"No."

"Please."

"No!" she said, waving him away, "I really don't want to hear any more of this. Why don't you just go back to Sicily?"

"Costellaneta."

"Wherever. I'm sure they'll be pleased to see the ghost of their favorite son."

She turned her back on him and walked back towards the house. She heard him following on after her, his heels light on the grass, but solid enough.

"It's true what they said about you. Cold heart."

"You say whatever you like, Rudy. Just leave me alone."

He stopped following her.

"You think I'm the only one?" he said to her.

His words brought her to a halt.

"They're all going to come up here, in time. It doesn't matter how many dogs you have, how many guards. They'll get in. Your beautiful Canyon's going to be full of ghosts."

"Stop being childish, Rudy," she said, turning back to look at him.

"Is that how you want to live, Katya? Like a prisoner, surrounded by the dead? Is that the life you had in mind for yourself?"

"I'm not a prisoner. I can leave whenever I want to."

"And still be a great star? No. To be a star you will have to be here, in Hollywood."

"So?"

"So you will have company, night and day. The dead will be here with you, night and day. We will not be ignored."

"You keep saying we, Rudy. But I only see you."

"The others will come. They'll all find their way here, sooner or later. Did you know Virginia Maple hanged herself last night? You remember Virginia? Or perhaps you don't. She was -- "

"I know Virginia. And no, I didn't know she hanged herself. Nor, frankly, do I much care."

"She couldn't take the pain."

"The pain?"

"Of being kept out of this house! Being kept away from the Devil's Country."

"It's my house. I have a perfect right to invite whoever I like into it."

"You see nothing but yourself, do you?"

"Oh please, Rudy, no lectures on narcissism. Not from you, of all people."

"I see things differently now."

"Oh I'm sure you do. I'm sure you regret every self-obsessed moment of your petty little life. But that's really not my problem, now is it?"

The color of the ghost before her suddenly changed. In a heartbeat he became a stain of yellow and gray, his fury rising in palpable waves off his face.

"I will make it your problem," he shrieked. He strode towards her. "You selfish bitch."

"And what did they call you?" she snapped back. "Powder-puff, was it?"

It was an insult she knew would strike him hard. Just the year before an anonymous journalist in the Chicago Tribune had called him 'a pink powder puff'. 'Why didn't somebody quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias Valentino, years ago?' he'd written. Rudy had challenged the man to a boxing match, to see which of them was truly the more virile. The journalist had of course never shown his face. But the insult had stuck. And hearing it repeated now threw Valentino into such a rage that he pitched himself at Katya, reaching for her throat. She had half-expected his phantom body to be so unsubstantial that his hands would fail to make any real contact. But not so. Though the flesh and blood of him had been reduced to an urn full of ashes, his spirit-form had a force of its own. She felt his fingers at her neck as though they were living tissue. They stopped her breath.

She was no passive victim. She pushed him back with the heel of one hand, raking his features from brow to mid-cheek with the other. Blood came from the wounds, stinking faintly of bad meat. A disgusted expression crossed Valentino's face, as he caught a whiff of his own excremental self. The shock of it made him loose his hold on her, and she quickly pulled away from him.

In life, she'd remembered, he'd always been overly sensitive to smells; a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that he'd been brought up in the stench of poverty. His hand went up his wounded face, and he sniffed his fingers, a look of profound revulsion on his face.

She laughed out loud at the sight. Valentino's fury had suddenly lost its bite. It was as though in that moment he suddenly understood the depths to which the Devil's Country had brought him.

And then, out of the darkness, Zeffer called: "What the hell's going on out -- "

He didn't finish his question: he'd seen Valentino.

"Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.

Hearing the Lord's name taken in vein, Valentino -- good Catholic boy that he was -- crossed himself, and fled into the darkness.

Valentino's vengeful prediction proved entirely accurate: in the next few weeks the haunting of Coldheart Canyon began.

At first the signs were nothing too terrible: a change in the timbre of the coyotes' yelps, the heads torn off all the roses one night; the next all the petals off the bougainvillea; the appearance on the lawn of a frightened deer, throwing its glassy gaze back towards the thicket in terror. It was Zeffer's opinion that they were somehow going to need to make peace with 'our unwanted guests', as he put it, or the consequences would surely be traumatic. These were not ethereal presences, he pointed out, wafting around in a hapless daze. If they were all like Valentino (and why should they not be?) then they posed a physical threat.

"They could murder us in our beds, Katya," he said to her.

"Valentino wouldn't -- "

"Maybe not Valentino, but there are others, plenty of others, who hated you with a vengeance. Virginia Maple for one. She was a jealous woman. Remember? And then to hang herself because of something you did to her -- "

"I did nothing to her! I just let her play in that damn room. A room which you brought into our lives."

Zeffer covered his face. "I knew it would come down to that eventually. Yes, I'm responsible. I was a fool to bring it here. I just thought it would amuse you."

She gave him a strangely ambiguous look. "Well, you know, it did. How can I deny that? It still does. I love the feeling I get when I'm in there, touching the tiles. I feel more alive." She walked over to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to grant him some physical contact: a stroke, a blow, a kiss. He didn't really mind. Anything was better than her indifference. But she simply said: "You caused this, Willem. You have to solve it."

"But how? Perhaps if I could find Father Sandru -- "

"He's not going to take the tiles back, Willem."

"I don't see why not."

"Because I won't let him! Christ, Willem! I've been in there every day since you gave me the key. It's in my blood now. If I lose the room, it'll be the death of me."

"So we'll move and we'll take the room with us. It's been moved before. We'll leave the ghosts behind."

"Wherever the Hunt goes, they'll follow. And sooner or later they'll get so impatient, they'll hurt us."

Zeffer nodded. There was truth in all of this, bitter though it was.

"What in God's name have we done?" he said.

"Nothing we can't mend," Katya replied. "You should go back to Romania, and find Sandru. Maybe there's some defense we can put up against the ghosts."

"Where will you stay while I'm gone?"

"I'll stay here. I'm not afraid of Rudy Valentino, dead or alive. Nor that idiotic bitch Virginia Maple. If I don't stay, they'll find their way in."

"Would that be such a bad thing? Why not let them share the place? We could make a pile of them on the lawn and -- "

"No. That room is mine. All of it. Every damn tile."

The quiet ferocity with which she spoke silenced him. He just stared at her for perhaps a minute, while she lit a cigarette, her fingers trembling. Finally, he summoned up enough courage to say: "You are afraid."

She stared out of the window, almost as though she hadn't heard him. When she spoke again her voice was as soft as it had been strident a minute ago.

"I'm not afraid of the dead, Willem. But I am afraid of what will happen to me if I lose the room." She looked at the palm of her hand, as though she might find her future written there. But it wasn't the lines of her hand she was admiring, it was its smoothness. "Being in the Devil's Country has made me feel younger, Willem. It did that to everybody. Younger. Sexier. But as soon as it's taken away ... "

" ... yes. You'll get sick."

"I'm never going to get sick." She allowed herself the time for a smile. "Perhaps I'm never going to die."

"Don't be foolish."

"I mean it."

"So do I. Don't be foolish. Whatever you think the room can do, it won't make you immortal."

The wisp of a smile remained on her face. "Wouldn't you like that, Willem?"

"No."

"Just a little bit?"

"I said no," he shook his head, his voice dropping. "Not any more."

"Meaning what?"

"What do you think I mean? This life of ours ... isn't worth living."

There was a silence between them. It lasted two, three, four minutes. Rain began to hit the window; fat spots of it bursting against the glass.

"I'll find Sandru for you," Willem said finally. "Or if not him, somebody who knows how to deal with these things. I'll find a solution."

"Do that," she said. "And if you can't, don't bother to come back."