Cold heart canyon
by
clive Barker


Clive Barker

Harper publisher.

coldheart canyon. Copyright  2001 by Clive Barker. All rights
reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
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Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

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First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Harper Collins Publishers.
A signed limited edition was published by B. E. Trice Publishing, New Orleans.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Joseph Rutt Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 0-06-018297-0

01 02 03 04 05 */RRD 10 987654321

For David Emilian Armstrong

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a lot of people to thank for helping me bring this one home.
It was a devil of a book to write, for a host of reasons. For one thing,
I began writing it the week before my father passed away, and inevitably
the long shadow of that event dimmed the joy of writing, at least for
the first six months or so, slowing it to a crawl.

Paradoxically, even as my production of usable text diminished, I could
feel the scale of the story I wanted to tell getting bigger. What had
originally begun life as an idea for a short, satiric stab at Hollywood
began to blossom into something larger, lusher, and stranger: a fantasia
on Hollywood both in its not-so-innocent youth and in its present,
wholly commercialized phase, linked by a sizable cast and a mythology
which I would need to create and explain in very considerable detail.

I don't doubt that this second incarnation of the book will be much more
satisfying a read than the first--which I had written almost in its
entirety before changing direction--but Lord, it was a sonofabitch to
get down onto the page.

Forgive me, then, if the list of people I'm thanking is longer than
usual.

And believe me when I tell you every one of them deserves this nod of
recognition, because each has helped get Coldheart Canyon out of my head
and into print.

Let me begin with the dedicatee of this book, David Emilian Armstrong,
my husband and in every sense of the word my partner: the one who was
with me when one of our five dogs, Charlie, passed away (Charlie's
loving

 presence, and the sadness and frustration of losing him, is recorded
in this novel). David always has faith in my capacity to go one step
further: to make the tale I'm telling a little richer, the picture I'm
painting a little brighter, the photograph I'm taking a little sexier.

My thanks to Craig Green and Don Mackay, to whom I first gave the
handwritten pages to be typed; and most especially to David John
Dodds--my oldest and dearest friend--who worked through much of the
Christmas period (with the Seraphim offices deserted around us)
polishing the text, then polishing the polishes, so that the immense
manuscript would be ready to be dispatched to my publishers before I
went to recuperate in Kauai.

To Bob Pescovitz, my researcher, and Angela Calm, my translator, my
thanks.

To Michael Hadley Joe Daley and Renee Rosen, who run all the various
aspects of my creative life outside writing and painting (films,
television, theme park mazes and toy-lines, web-sites, photographs--and
the endless business of promoting the above), my gratitude. In the last
year and a half, I have often been an absentee boss, because I've been
in the wilds of Coldheart Canyon. During that period, they have worked
together to make our businesses prosper. Let me not forget Ana Osgood
and Denny Mclain, to whom fall the very considerable responsibilities of
organizing and archiving my visual work, especially the many enormous
paintings for my next books, The Abarat Quartet.

Then there are the two people--Toya Castillo and Alex Rosas--who make
the homes in which we work run smoothly. Who feed David and myself, and
wash our clothes; who make sure there's shampoo in our shower and our
dogs smell sweet. Again, I have been something of a phantom of myself
for much of the last year, passing through the house on my way to write
or paint with a distracted look. They kindly indulge my craziness, and
my endless calls for cups of hot sweet tea.

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Doctor Alex del Rosario, and his
assistant, Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect "artist's
doctor."

He has guided me through some lengthy periods of sickness in the

 last couple of years, understanding as no other physician in my
history has the fierce and sometimes self-wounding passion that makes
artists attempt to do the impossible: to paint another world into being,
while writing a two-hundred-thousand-word novel while producing a couple
of movies, for instance. For me, this is my natural, albeit obsessive,
behavior.

But my body isn't that of a thirty-year-old any longer (or even that of
a forty-year-old!). It complains now when I drive it hard; as I do
daily. It has taken a massive contribution of sympathetic counsel,
medication and alternative therapies to keep body and spirit together
since my father's death and I owe Alex a huge debt of thanks for my
present good health.

Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my
Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often
maligned (in this book, for instance) as being for cold, artistically
disinterested men and women. My thanks and great admiration go to the
lawyer who has helped shape my business life in the last two years,
David Golden.

The Abarat deal with the Disney Company was the largest literary deal
made in Hollywood last year, and it covers every possible shape and
permutation that my invented world might take, in the hands of Disney's
imagineers. To give you a taste of what kind of wordage David Golden has
minutely analyzed on my behalf: the Disney contract had three pages
alone devoted to listing its contents!

On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tender
est heart of any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of
monsters like myself, has been a constant source of encouragement, and a
fearless champion when--on occasion--the machinations of the corporate
world proved painful and incomprehensible.

And last--but oh, you both know, never least--my editors.

In New York, Robert Jones (who's had his own wars to fight of late, and
has still always been there with a witty word of support; or some
wonderfully dry remark at the expense of the many idiocies of the
publishing world).

And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor of
Editors, who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper.

 Increasingly, Jane, I think I write to entertain you, to please you.
We have survived for many years together on a raft of shared beliefs
about the necessity of dreams, tossed around in the tumultuous seas of
modern publishing. In that time, Jane has lost countless colleagues to
exhaustion, frustration and despair, and yet she manages to be a
mistress of beautiful prose as well as an editor of a stable of authors,
who, like me, could not imagine their literary lives continuing without
her.

I would have given up the increasingly problematic ambition of having a
broad audience for my work, and fled into the minor, the hermetic and
the oblique, without her tireless encouragement.

My love to you, my Jane; and, as always, my heartfelt thanks.

Here's another tale for you, saved from the flood.

CB

PROLOGUE

The Canyon



It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind comes off the desert.

The Santa Anas, they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave,
bringing malaise, and the threat of fire. Some say they are named after
Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, others that they are named after one
General Santa Ana, of the Mexican cavalry, a great creator of dusts;
others still that the name is derived from santanta, which means Devil
Wind.

Whatever the truth of the matter, this much is certain: the Santa Anas
are always baking hot, and often so heavily laden with perfume that it's
as though they've picked up the scent of every blossom they've shaken on
their way here. Every wild lilac and wild rose, every white sage and
rank jimsonweed, every heliotrope and creosote bush: gathered them all
up in their hot embrace and borne them into the hidden channel of
Coldheart Canyon.

There's no lack of blossoms here, of course. Indeed, the Canyon is
almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants here were brought in from
the world outside by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; others
were dropped in the feces of the wild animals who wander through--the
deer and coyote and raccoon; some spread from the gardens of the great
dream palace that lays solitary claim to this corner of Hollywood. Alien
blooms, this last kind--orchids and lotus flowers--nurtured by gardeners
who have long since left off their pruning and their watering, and
departed, allowing the bowers which they once treasured to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blooms
here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these
days by the presence of sightseers who have come to see Tinseltown, do
not

 linger in the Canyon for very long. Though the deer venture along the
ridge and down the steep slopes of the Canyon, and curiosity, especially
among the younger animals, often leads them over the rotted fences and
toppled walls into the secret enclaves of the gardens, they seldom
choose to stay there for very long.

Perhaps it isn't just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps
there are too many whisperings in the air around the ruined gazebos, and
the animals are unnerved by what they hear. Perhaps there are too many
presences brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the
clotted pathways. Perhaps, as they graze the overgrown lawns, they look
up and mistake a statue for a pale fragment of life, and are startled by
their error, and take flight.

Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.

Perhaps.

The Canyon is familiar with perhaps; with what may or may not be.

And never more so than on such a night as this, when the winds come
sighing off the desert, heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the
Canyon hosts express their longing for something they dreamed they had,
or dreamed that they dreamed, their voices so tenuous tonight that
they're inaudible to the human ear, even if there were someone to hear
them, which there never is.

That's not entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough
to find his way into this vale of luxury and tears; a tourist, perhaps
even a family of tourists, foolishly determined to discover what lies
off the prescribed route; looking for some famous heart-throb's
love-nest, or a glimpse of the idol himself, caught unawares as he walks
with his dog.

There are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way
here intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure
accounts of Old Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these few. Indeed
there is often something close to reverence in the way they enter
Coldheart Canyon. But however these visitors arrive, they always leave
the same way: hurriedly, with many a nervous backward glance. Even the

 rassest of them--even the ones who'd claim they don't have a psychic
bone in their bodies--are discomfited by something they sniff here.
Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far more acute than they had
thought.

Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager shadows of the Canyon and
they are back in the glare of the billboards on Sunset Boulevard, do
they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves how it was that
in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.



The Price of the Hunt



"Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister
Zeffer?" Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle
aged man with the handsome, sad face had come alone.

"The lady is not my wife," Zeffer explained.

"Ah ..." the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice
indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya's charms. "A pity
for you, yes?" "Yes," Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.

"She's a very beautiful woman."

The monk studied Zeffer's face as he spoke, but having said what he'd
said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.

"I'm her manager," he explained. "That's all there is between us."

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet.

"After the two of you departed yesterday," he said, his English colored
by his native Romanian, "one of the brothers remarked that she was the
most lovely woman he had ever seen ..." he hesitated before committing
to the rest of the sentence "... in the flesh." "Her name's Katya, by
the way," Zeffer said.

"Yes, yes, I know," said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted
gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in
his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

"She is a movie star, yes?"

"You saw one of her films?"

 Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. "No, no," he
said. "I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a
little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there
quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there's
a ... vamp ... is that the word?" "Yes," Zeffer replied, somewhat amused
by this conversation. "Vamp's the word."

"Called Theda Bara."

"Oh, yes. We know Theda."

In that year--which was 1920--everybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of
the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were
famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.

"I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her,"
Father Sandru said.

"I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara
portrays?" Zeffer replied.

Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. "I am not born yesterday, Mister
Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They're
whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be
destroyed by them?"

Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru's description. "I suppose
that's about right," he said.

"And in real life?" Sandru said.

"In real life Theda Bara's name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in
Ohio."

"But is she a destroyer of men?"

"In real life? No, I doubt it. I'm sure she harms a few egos now and
again, but that's about the worst of it."

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. "I shall tell the brothers
what you told me," he said. "They'll be very interested. Well then ...
shall I take you inside?"

Willem Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome,
London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised
himself that he would leave Los Angeles--where there was neither art nor
the ambition to make art--as soon as the public tired of lionizing
Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed,
and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its
bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her
to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d'art
he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the
statuary.

They would suffice, until they could find a chateau in the Loire, or
perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of
Hollywood wouldn't curdle his blood.

"You like Romania?" the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door
that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

"Yes, of course," Zeffer replied.

"Please do not feel you have to sin on my account," Sandru said, with a
sideways glance.

"Sin?"

"Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it's just a little one, but it's
a sin nevertheless."

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I've slipped from the simple
proprieties!

Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every
hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little
lies.

But he wasn't in Hollywood now. So why lie? "You're right. I don't like
this country very much at all. I'm here because Katya wanted to come.

Her mother and father--I'm sorry, her stepfather--live in the village."

"Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman."

"You're her priest?"

"No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of Saint
Teodor exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress." He pushed the door
open. A dank smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

"Excuse me for asking," Zeffer said. "But it was my understanding from
yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there's nobody here."

"Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers."

"So what are you keeping your eyes on?" Sandru smiled thinly. "I will
show you," he said. "As much as you wish to see."

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large
tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so gray with age and
dust as to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he
did so. "I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a
purchase," he said.

"Of what?" Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn't encouraged by what he'd seen so far. A few of the pieces
of furniture he'd spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but
nothing he could imagine buying.

"I didn't realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress."

Sandru made a little groan. 'Ah ... I'm afraid to say we must sell in
order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer that the finer
things went to someone who will take care of them, such as yourself."

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a
fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was
bigger than the floor above. Corridors ran off in all directions.

"But before I begin to show you," Sandru said, "you must tell me--are
you in a buying mood?" Zeffer smiled. "Father, I'm an American. I'm
always in a buying mood."

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous
day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that
had sounded bogus. The Order of Saint Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had
something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place
steeped

secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles
fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its
courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual
forthright manner, had said that she didn't believe this to be true.

"When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this
place," she said. "I heard horrible things were done here. That it was
human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children."

"I'm sure you must have been mistaken," the Father had said.

"Absolutely not. The Devil's wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they
called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came
back."

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an
exceptionally good one. "Who told you these tales?" he said.

"My mother."

"Ah." Sandru had shaken his head. 'And I'm sure she wanted you in bed,
hushed and asleep, before the Devil came to cut off your head."

Katya had made no reply to this. "There are still such stories, told to
children.

Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is
not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was."

Despite Sandru's plausibility, there'd still been something about all of
this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his
return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own
definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man
protecting?

Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely
carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved
a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he'd already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be
persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of
hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject
of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.

"I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take
back to Hollywood," he said. "She's built a huge house, so we have
plenty of room."

"Oh, yes?"

"And of course, she has the money."

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety
seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

"How much are we talking about?" the Father asked mildly.

"Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am
authorized to buy whatever I think might please her."

"Then let me ask you: what pleases her?"

"Things that nobody else would be likely to--no, could
possibly--possess, please her," Zeffer replied. "She likes to show off
her collection, and she wants everything in it to be unique."

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. "Everything here is unique."

"Father, you sound as though you're ready to sell the foundations if the
price is right."

Sandru waxed metaphysical. 'All these things are just objects in the
end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be
made in time, to replace them."

"But surely there's some sacred value in the objects here?"

The Father gave a little shrug. "In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would
not want to sell you, let us say, the altar." He made a smile, as though
to say that under the right circumstances even that would have its
price. "But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular
purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees
it now ... except a few travelers such as yourselves, passing through
... I don't see why the Order shouldn't be rid of it all. If there's
sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed among the poor."

"There are certainly plenty of people in need of help," Zeffer said.

He had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the
people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than
gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but
fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains--the Bucegi range to the
east, to the west the Fagaras Mountains--their bare lower slopes as gray
as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters
were like in this

lace' when even the dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river
froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling
down from the mountain heights.

The day they'd arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that
she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he'd had
proof aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died.

It was not the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was
the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants:
babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief
that was represented by these hundreds of graves had moved him deeply:
the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It
was nothing he had remotely expected, and it had made him sick with
sorrow.

For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of
her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this
was the world in which she'd been raised; it wasn't so surprising,
perhaps, that she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn't she once
told him she'd had fourteen brothers and sisters, and only six of them
were left living?

Perhaps the other eight had been laid to rest in the very cemetery where
they'd walked together. And certainly it would not be uncommon for Katya
to look coldly on the business of the heart. It was what made her so
strong; and it was her strength--visible in her eyes and in her every
movement --that endeared her to her audiences, particularly the women.

Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he'd spent time here
with her. Seeing the house where she'd been born and brought up, the
streets she'd trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have
viewed her appearance in their midst as something close to a miracle:
this perfect rose-bud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her
utterly apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya's
mother had put such beauty to profrtful work at the age of twelve, when
the girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets,
and--at least according to Katya--offer her favors to men who'd pay to
have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had quickly fled
such servitude, only to find that what she'd had to do for her family's
sake she had no choice but to do

for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Zeffer had met her, singing
for her supper on the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in
all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all who witnessed it.
For three nights he'd come to the square where she sang, there to join
the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this
child-enchantress. It hadn't taken him long to conceive of the notion
that he should bring her back with him to America. Though he'd had at
that time no experience in the world of the cinema (few people did; the
year was 1916, and film was a fledgling), his instincts told him there
was something special in the face and bearing of this creature. He had
influential friends on the West Coast--mostly men who'd grown tired of
Broadway's petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for
a new place to put their talents and their investments--who reported to
him that cinema was a grand new frontier, and that talent scouts on the
West Coast were looking for faces that the camera, and the public, would
love. Did this child-woman not have such a face, he'd thought? Would the
camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet
lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?

He'd inquired as to the girl's name. She was one Katya Lupescu from the
village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a
meal of cabbage-rolls and cheese, what he was thinking. She was
curiously sanguine about his whole proposal; practically indifferent.
Yes, she conceded, it sounded interesting, but she wasn't sure if she
would ever want to leave Romania. If she went too far from home, she
would miss her family.

A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in America--
she no longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her
manager--they'd revisited this very conversation, and Zeffer had
reminded her how uninterested she'd seemed in his grand plan. Her
coolness had all been an illusion, she'd confessed; a way in part to
keep herself from seeming too gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to
prevent her hopes getting too high.

But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which
the indifference she'd demonstrated that first day they'd met (and--more
recently--in the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her,
perhaps, by a bloodline that had suffered so much loss and anguish over
the generations that nothing was allowed to impress itself too severely:
neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a
creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for
public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience in the
square had come to witness night after night. And it was this same power
she would unleash when she appeared before the cinematographic camera.

Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the
previous day.

In fact, it was almost as though she'd been playing a part: the role of
a rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her
gaze had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer
than usual, her vocabulary--which often tended to the salty--sweet and
compliant.

Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated;
but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one
point he'd put his hand under Katya's chin to raise her face, telling
her there was no reason to be shy.

Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called shy
woman was capable of! The parties she'd master-minded up in her
Canyon--the place gossip-columnists had dubbed Coldheart Canyon; the
excesses she'd choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer
filth she was capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask
she'd been wearing had slipped for a heartbeat, and the poor, deluded
Father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have locked
himself in a cell and sealed the door with prayers and holy water to
keep her out.

But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.

Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi's whole life had now become a
performance.

When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering, abused
orphans half her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to
believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of
sight of the people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw the
sort of parties for the other idols of Hollywood--the vamps and the
clowns and the adventurers--which would have horrified her fans had they
known what was going on. Which Katya Lupi was the real one? The weeping
child who was the idol of millions, or the Scarlet Woman who was the
Mistress of Coldheart Canyon? The orphan of the storm or the dope-fiend
in her lair? Neither? Both?

Zeffer turned these thoughts over as Sandru took him from room to room,
showing him tables and chairs, carpets and paintings; even mantelpieces.

"Does anything catch your eye?" Sandru asked him eventually.

"Not really, Father," Zeffer replied, quite honestly. "I can get carpets
as fine as these in America. I don't need to come out into the wilds of
Romania to find work like this." Sandru nodded. "Yes, of course," he
said. He looked a little defeated.

Zeffer took the opportunity to glance at his watch. "Perhaps I should be
getting back to Katya," he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to
the village and sitting in the little house where Katya had been born,
there to be plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while
Katya's relatives came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief)
their American visitors, did not enthrall him at all. But this visit
with Father Sandru was becoming increasingly futile, and now that the
Father had made his mercenary ambitions so plain, not a little
embarrassing. There wasn't anything here that Zeffer could imagine
transporting back to Los Angeles.

He reached into his coat to take out his wallet, intending to give the
Father a hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce
the note the Father's expression changed to one of profound seriousness.

"Wait," he said. "Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe we
understand one another. You are looking to buy something you could find

 'n no other place. Something that's one of a kind, yes? And I am
looking to make a sale."

"So is there something here you haven't shown me?" Zeffer said.

"Something special?"

Sandru nodded. "There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared
with you," he said. 'And with good reason, let me say. You see there are
people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand
you now, Mister Zeffer. You are a man of the world."

"You make it all sound very mysterious," Zeffer said.

"I don't know if it's mysterious," the priest said. "It is sad, I think,
and human. You see, Duke Goga, the man who built this Fortress--was not
a good soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a child--"

"Were true?"

"In a manner of speaking. Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always
limit his quarry to animals."

"Good God. So she was right to be afraid."

"The truth is, we are all a little afraid of what happened here," Sandru
replied, "because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do,
young and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God's care
when we're in this place."

Zeffer was intrigued now.

"Tell me then," he said to Sandru. "I want to know what went on in this
place."

Believe me, please, when I tell you I would not know where to begin,"
the good man replied. "I do not have the words."

"Truly?"

"Truly."

Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a
blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of
certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily
familiar with it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed
distasteful--not to mention pointless--to press the man to say more than
he expressed himself capable of saying.

"Let's change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the
ordinary," Zeffer said. "Then I'll be satisfied."

Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn't convincing. "It isn't much," he
said.

"Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places," Zeffer said, and
as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind's eye;
pale in a blue twilight.



Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather
smaller than the oak door they'd come through to get to this level. Out
came his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer's surprise he and the
priest were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet
deeper into the Fortress.

"Are you ready?" the Father asked.

"Absolutely," Zeffer said.

Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more
frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he
glanced back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he
still had Zeffer on his heels, but the expression on his face was far
from happy, as though he rather regretted making the decision to bring
Zeffer here, and would have turned on his heel and headed back up to the
relative comfort of the floor above at the least invitation.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together
vigorously.

"I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of
something to warm us," he said. "What do you say?"

"I wouldn't say no," Zeffer said.

The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the
bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two
glasses. Zeffer didn't remark on the liquor's proximity; nor could he
Wame the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when

 they came down here. Though the lower level was supplied with
electricity (there were lengths of electric lamps looped along the walls
of the corridor) the light did nothing to warm the air nor comfort the
spirit.

Father Sandru handed Zeffer a glass, and took the cork out of the
bottle.

The pop echoed off the naked stone of walls and floor. He poured Zeffer
a healthy measure of the liquor, and then an even healthier measure for
himself, which he had downed before Zeffer had got his own glass to his
lips.

"When I first came here," the Father said, refilling his glass, "we used
to brew our own brandy, from plums we grew on our own trees."

"But not now?" "No," the Father said, plainly saddened at the fact that
they were no longer producers of liquor. "The earth is not good any
longer, so the plums never ripen properly. They remain small and sour.
The brandy made from such fruit is bitter, and nobody wants to drink it.
Even I will not drink it, so you can judge for yourself how bad it must
be!" He laughed at his self-deprecation, and used the laughter as a cue
to fill his glass up again. "Drink," he said to Zeffer, tapping his
glass against Zeffer's glass as though this were the first he'd had.

Zeffer drank. The brandy was stronger than the stuff he'd had at the
hotel in Brascov. It went down smoothly, warming his belly when it
arrived.

"Good, yes?" the Father said, having downed his second glass.

"Very."

"You should have another before we go on." And he filled Zeffer's glass
without waiting for a reply. "We're a long way below ground here, and it
gets hellishly cold ..." Glasses were filled, and emptied. The Father's
mood was noticeably better now, and his tone chattier. He put the
glasses and the bottle back in the hole in the wall, and then led the
way down the narrow corridor, talking as he went. "When the Order first
came to the Fortress, there were plans to found a hospital here. You
see, there are no hospitals within a hundred and twenty miles of here.
It would be very practical. But this is not a place for the sick. And
certainly not the dying."

 "So: no hospital?"

"Well, we made preparations. You saw yesterday one of the wards--"

Zeffer remembered. He'd glanced through an open door and there'd been
two rows of iron beds, with bare mattresses.

"I thought it was a dormitory for the brothers."

"No. We each have our own cells. There are only eleven of us, so we can
each have a place in which to meditate and pray ..." He offered Zeffer a
glance, accompanied by a small smile. 'And drink."

"I can't imagine it's a very satisfying life," Zeffer said.

"Satisfying?" The idea was obviously a little confounding to Sandru.

"Meaning what?"

"Oh, just that you don't get to work in the community. You can't help
people."

They had come to the end of the passageway, and Sandru sorted through
his collection of keys in order to open the third and final door.

"Who can truly be helped?" he said, his face turned down to the labor of
sorting. "I suppose perhaps children can be comforted, sometimes, if
it's dark and they're afraid. You can tell them you're with them; and
that will sometimes stop them crying. But for the rest of us? Are there
really any words that help? I don't know of any." He had found the right
key, and now slipped it noisily into the antiquated lock. As he did so,
he glanced up at Zeffer. "I think there's more comfort to he had from
seeing beautiful women on the cinema screen than in any prayer I know.
Well, perhaps not comfort. Distraction." He turned the key in the lock.

"And if that sounds like heresy, well so be it."

Sandru pushed the door open. The room was in darkness, but despite that
fact there was a warmth in the air; at least in contrast to the chill of
the passageway. Perhaps the difference was no more than two or three
degrees, but it felt significant.

Will you wait here a moment?" Sandru said. "I'll just bring a light."

Zeffer stayed where he was, staring into the darkness, enjoying the s%ht
rise in temperature. There was enough illumination spilling from

 the passageway behind him to light the threshold. There, carved into
stone beneath his feet, was a curious inscription:

Quamquam infundis inferiorum sumus, oculos angelorum tenebimus.

He didn't linger to puzzle over this for more than a few seconds, but
instead let his eyes drift up and into the room itself. The chamber
before him was large, it seemed; and unlike the rest of the rooms and
corridors, which were simply constructed, far more elaborate. Could he
make out pillars, supporting several small vaults? He thought so. There
were chairs and tables within a few yards of where he stood, and what
appeared to be lamps or the like heaped on top of them.

The confusion inside was explained a moment later, when the Father
returned with one of the bare bulbs, attached to a length of electric
cord.

"We use this as a storeroom," he said. "Many of the items we found in
the Fortress when we arrived we put down here, just to get them out of
the way." He lifted the light to give Zeffer a better view.

Zeffer's estimation of the size of the place, and of the complexity of
its construction, had been conservative, it now turned out. The chamber
was fully thirty-five feet long; and almost as broad, the ceiling (which
was indeed divided into eight elaborately-vaulted sections, divided by
pillars) higher than the passageway by six feet or more. The floor was
littered with furniture and crates; the place plainly filled by hands
that had little or no respect for the objects they were moving; wishing
only to put them quickly out of sight. It occurred to Zeffer that if
indeed there were treasures here the chances of finding them--or indeed
of their being in reasonable condition when discovered--were remote.
Still, the Father had brought him this far at no little inconvenience to
himself; it would be discourteous to now show no interest in what the
chamber contained.

"Did you have a part in moving all of this?" he asked Sandru, more out
of a need to fill the silence between them than because he was genuinely
curious.

"Yes, I did," the Father replied. "Thirty-two years ago. I was a much
younger man. But it was still a back-breaking labor. They built things
big here. I remember thinking that maybe the stories were right ..."

 "Stories about--"

"Oh ... nonsenses. About this furniture having been built for the
retinue of the Devil's wife."

"The Devil's wife."

"Lilith, or Lilitu. Sometimes called Queen of Zemargad. Don't ask me
why."

"This is the same woman Katya spoke about?"

Sandru nodded. "That's why the locals don't have much hope for the sick
if they stay here. They think Lilith's curse is on the place. As I say:
nonsenses."

Whether it was nonsense or not, the story lent some flavor to this banal
adventure. "May I look more closely?" Zeffer asked.

"That's what we're here for," Father Sandru replied. "I hope there's
something that catches your eye, for your sake. All these stairs and
doors.

I'd forgotten how far down it was ..."

"I'm sorry to have made this so burdensome," Zeffer said, quite
sincerely.

"If I'd known you were going to go to so much trouble I wouldn't have--"

"No, no," Sandru said. "It's not a trouble to me. I only thought there
might be an item here that pleased you. But now I'm down here I doubt
it. To be truthful I believe we should have taken all this trash up the
mountain and thrown it in the deepest gorge we could find."

"Why didn't you do just that?"

"It wasn't my choice. I was just a young priest at the time. I did as I
was told. I moved tables and chairs and tapestries, and I kept my
counsel. Our leader then was Father Nicholas, who was very clear on the
best thing to be done--the safest thing for our souls--and would not be
moved on the subject. So we did as we were told. Father Nicholas, by the
way, had the foulest temper of any man I ever knew. We all lived in fear
of him."

Zeffer moved into the room, talking as he went: "May I say something
that I hope won't offend you?"

"I'm not easily offended, don't worry."

"Well ... it's just that the more I hear about your Order, the less like

 priests you seem to be. Father Nicholas's temper and the brothers all
familiar with Theda Bara. And then the brandy." "Ah, the sins of the
flesh," Father Sandru said. "We do seem to have more than our share,
don't we?"

"I have offended you."

"No. You've simply seen the truth. And how can a man of God be justly
offended by that? What you've observed is no coincidence. We are all ...
how shall I put this?... men who have more than our share of flaws. Some
of us were never trusted with a flock. Others, like Father Nicholas,
were.

But the arrangement was never deemed satisfactory."

"His temper?"

"I believe he threw a Bible at one of the parishioners who was sleeping
through the good Father's sermon." Zeffer chuckled; but his laughter was
silenced a moment later. "It killed the man."

"Killed--"

"An accident, but still ..."

"--with a Bible? Surely not."

"Well, that's how the rumor went. Father Nicholas has been dead twenty
years, so there's no way to prove it or disprove it. Let's hope it isn't
true, and if it is, hope he's at peace with it now. The fact is, I'm
glad I was never trusted with a parish. With a flock to tend. I couldn't
have done much for them." "Why not?" Zeffer asked, a little impatient
with Sandru's melancholy now. "Do you have difficulty finding God in a
place like this?"

"To be honest, Mister Zeffer, with every week that passes--I almost want
to say with every hour--I find it harder to see a sign of God anywhere.
It would not be unreasonable, I think, to ask Him to show Himself in
beauty. In the face of your lady-companion, perhaps ... ?"

Katya's face as proof of God's presence? It was an unlikely piece of
metaphysics, Zeffer thought.

"I apologize," Sandru said. "You didn't come here to hear me talk about
my lack of faith."

"I don't mind."

 "Well I do. The brandy makes me maudlin."

"Shall I take a look then?" Zeffer suggested, 'At whatever's in here?"

"Yes, why don't we?" Sandru replied. "I wish I could give you some kind
of guidance, but ..." He shrugged; his favorite gesture. "Why don't you
start looking, and I'll go back and get us something more to drink?"

"Nothing more for me," Zeffer replied.

"Well then, for me," Sandru said. "I'll only be a moment. If you need
me, just call. I'll hear you."

Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let
his thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly
enough, there was something mildly chaotic about his thought processes.

One minute he was talking about furniture, the next about the mad Duke
and his hunter's habits, the next about the fact that they couldn't make
a hospital here because the Devil's wife had cursed the place.

When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture
and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare
bulbs were stark, of course, and their light far from flattering, but
even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that
caught Zeffer's eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question;
but nothing extraordinary.

And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze
moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest
instead on the walls beyond.

The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with
tile. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no
ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulbs threw
upon them, and viewed by Zeffer's weary eyes, it was clear they were of
incredible sophistication and beauty.

He didn't wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push
through the piles of furniture toward the designs that covered the
walls.

They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber
was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.

In all his years of traveling and collecting he'd never seen anything
quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust-laden webs which covered
every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall.
It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of
his pocket and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tile. It
had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately
designed, but now, as he cleared a swath across four or five, he
realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation.
There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another,
adjacent to it, a man on a white horse.

The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked
about ready to prance off around the room.

"It's a hunt."

Sandru's voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so
suddenly that it was as though he'd had his face in a vacuum, and was
pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his
eye; saw it flying toward the cleaned tile, defying gravity as it broke
on the flank of the painted horse.

It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time
to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man
was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father's shape until his
eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the
brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more
potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of
his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the
world he'd been looking at--the painted man on his painted horse, riding
past a painted tree--was more real than the old priest standing there in
the doorway.

"A hunt?" he asked at last. "What kind of hunt?"

"Oh, every kind," Sandru replied. "Pigs, dragons, women--"

"Women?"

Sandru laughed. "Yes, women," he said, pointing toward a piece of the
wall some yards deeper into the chamber. "Go look," he said. "You'll
find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted
this place

must have had some strange dreams, let me tell you, if this is what
they saw."

Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the
wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden
catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his
jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose
up in his face.

"Where now?" he asked the Father when he'd got to the other side of the
catafalque.

"A little further," Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly
taking a swig from the bottle.

"I need some more light back here," Zeffer said.

Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He
rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his
palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the
lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play,
and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where
Zeffer was standing.

The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of
the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and
right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading
beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the
design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large
cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its
own.

Closer," Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to
clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about
six inches square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one
another with a minimum of grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of
the picture.

Despite the sickly light off the bulb, its luminescence still showed
that the color of the image had not been diminished by time. The beauty
of the renderings was perfectly evident. There 'were a dozen kinds of
green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them.
Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the
trunks

and branches, skillfully highlighted to lend the impression that light
was falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles
were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.

Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some
the work of journeymen; some--especially those that were devoted to
areas of pure foliage--the handiwork of apprentices, working on their
craft by filling in areas that their masters had neither the time nor
perhaps the interest to address.

But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the
discontinuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions
of the world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the
abstract and the representational sitting side by side on the wall, all
part of one enormous story.

And what was that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had
listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far
more ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches
from the wall, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

"I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here,"
Sandru said. "It's a view, from the Fortress Tower."

"But not realistic?"

"It depends what you mean by realistic," Sandru said. "If you look over
the other side"--he pointed across the room--"you can see the delta of
the Danube." Zeffer could just make out the body of water, glittering in
the gloom: and closer by, a mass of swampy land, with dozens of inlets
winding through it, on their way to the sea. 'And there!" Sandru went
on, "to the left"--again, Zeffer followed Sandru's finger--"at the
corner of the room, that rock--"

"I see it."

The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs
springing from its flank.

"That's called the May Rock," Sandru said. "The villagers dance there,
on the first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and
try

to make children. It's said the women always became pregnant if they
stayed with their men on May Rock."

"So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there."

"Yes, it's right outside the Fortress."

"And so all those other details? The delta--"

"Is nine miles away, in that direction." Sandru pointed at the wall upon
which the Danube's delta was painted.

Zeffer smiled as he grasped what the artists had achieved here. Down in
the depths of the Fortress, at its lowest point, they had re-created in
tile and paint what could be seen from its pinnacle.

And with that realization came sense of the inscription he'd read on the
threshold.

Though we are in the bowels of Hell, we shall have the eyes of Angels.

This room was the bowels of Hell. But the tile-makers and their artist
masters, wherever they'd been, had created an experience that gave the
occupants of this dungeon the eyes of angels. A paradoxical ambition,
when all you had to do was climb the stairs and see all this from the
top of the tower. But artists were often driven by such ambition; a
need, perhaps, to prove that it could even be done.

"Somebody worked very hard to create all this," Zeffer said.

"Oh indeed. It's an impressive achievement." "But you hide it away,"
Zeflfer said, not comprehending the way the room had been treated. "You
fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy."

"Whom could we show it to?" the Father replied. "It's too disgusting
..."

"I see nothing--" He was about to say disgusting, when his eye alighted
on a part of the tile-work that he'd cleaned with his arm but had not
closely studied. In a large grove a round stadium had been set up, with
seating made of wood. The perspective was off (and the solution to the
perspective changed subtly from tile to tile, as various hands had
contributed their piece of the puzzle. There were perhaps twenty tiles
that had some portion of the stadium represented upon them; the work of

perhaps five artists). The steep benches were filled with people, their
bustle evoked with quick, contentious strokes. Some people seemed to be
standing; some sitting. Two more groups of spectators were approaching
the stadium from the outside, though there was no room for them inside.

But what drew Zeffer's eye, and made him realize that the Father had
been right to wonder aloud whom he might show this masterwork to, was
the event these spectators had assembled to witness. It was an arena of
sexual sport. Several performances were going on at the same time, all
unapologetically obscene. In one section of the arena a naked woman was
being held down while a creature twice her size, his body bestial, his
erection monstrous, was being roped back by four men who appeared to be
controlling his approach to the woman. In another quarter, a man had
been stripped of his skin by three naked women. A fourth straddled him
as he lay on the ground in his own blood. The other three wore pieces of
his skin. One had on his whole face and shoulders, her breasts sticking
out from beneath the ragged hood. Another sat on the ground, wearing his
arms and pulling on the skin of his legs like waders. The third, the
queen of this quartet, was wearing what was presumably the piece de
resistance, the flesh which the unhappy owner had worn from
mid-breast-bone to mid-thigh. She was cavorting in this garish costume
like a dancer and, by some magic known only to the maker of the mystery,
the usurped skin still boasted a full erection.

"Good God ..." Zeffer said.

"I told you," Sandru said, just a little smugly. 'And that's the least
of it, believe me."

"The least of it?"

"The more you look, the more you see."

"Anywhere in particular?"

"Go over to the Wild Wood. Look among the trees."

Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he
couldn't make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful
advice.

"Step away a foot or so."

In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too
lose to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and
to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with
figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all
unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum
headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a
flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another
was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the
tree.

Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).

"Is it like this all over?" Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.

"All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight
tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and
ninety-eight of them."

"You've obviously made a study," Zeffer observed.

"Not I. An Englishman who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting.
For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it's old age.
Things you want to remember, you can't. And things that don't mean
anything stick in your head like a knife."

"That's not a pretty image, with respect."

"With respect, there's nothing pretty about the way I feel," Sandru
replied. "I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in
the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead."

"Lord."

Sandru shrugged. "That's what living in this place does to you after a
while. Everything drains out of you somehow."

Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and
he had no patience with Sandru's melancholy; his thoughts were with the
walls, and the pictures on the walls.

Are there records documenting how this was created? It is a masterpiece,
in its way." "One of a kind," Sandru said.

"Absolutely one of a kind."

"To answer your question, no, there are no records. It's assumed that it

was funded by Duke Goga, who had lately returned from the Crusades with
a large amount of booty, claimed from the infidel in the name of
Christ."

"But to build a room like this with money you'd made on the Crusades!"
Zeffer said incredulously.

"I agree. It seems like an unlikely thing to do in the name of God. Of
course none of this is proved. There are some people who will tell you
that Goga went missing on one of his hunts, and it wasn't he who built
this place at all."

"Who then?"

"Lilith, the Devil's wife," the Father said, dropping his voice to a
whisper.

"Which would make this the Devil's Country, no?"

"Has anybody tried to analyze the work?"

"Oh yes. The Englishman I spoke of, George Soames, claimed he had
discovered evidence of twenty-two different styles among the designs.

But that was just the painters. Then there were the men who actually
made the tiles. Fired them. Sorted out the good from the bad. Prepared
the paint. Cleaned the brushes. And there must have been some system to
align everything."

"The rows of tiles?"

"I was thinking more of the alignment of interior with the exterior."

"Perhaps they built the room first."

"No. The Fortress is two-and-a-half centuries older than this room."

"My God, so to get the alignment so perfect--?"

"Is quite miraculous. Soames found fifty-nine geographical markers--
certain stones, trees, the spire of the old abbey in Darscus--which are
visible from the tower and are also painted on the wall. He calculated
that all fifty-nine were correctly aligned, within half a degree of
accuracy."

"Somebody was obsessive."

"Or else, divinely inspired."

"You believe that?"

"Why not?"

Zeffer glanced back at the arena on the wall behind him, with all its

libidinous excesses. "Does that look like the kind of work that
somebody would do in the name of God?" "As I said," Sandru replied, "I
no longer know where God is and where

He isn't."

There was a long silence, during which Zeffer continued to survey the
walls. Finally he said: "How much do you want for it?"

"How much do I want for what?"

"For the room?"

Sandru barked out a laugh.

"I mean it," Zeffer said. "How much do you want for it?"

"It's a room, Mister Zeffer," Sandru said. "You can't buy a room."

"Then it's not for sale?"

"That's not my point--"

"Just tell me: is it for sale or not?"

Again, laughter. But this time there was less humor; more bemusement.

"I don't see that it's worth talking about," Sandru said, putting the
brandy bottle to his lips and drinking.

"Let's say a hundred thousand dollars. What would that be in lei?

What's the lei worth right now? A hundred and thirty-two-and-a-half to
the dollar?"

"If you say so."

"So that's what? Thirteen million, two hundred and fifty thousand lei."

"You jest."

"No."

"Where would you find such money?" A pause followed. "If I may ask?"

"Over the years, I've made some very lucrative investments on behalf of
Katya. We own large parts of Los Angeles. Half a mile of Sunset
Boulevard is in her name. Another half mile in mine."

"And you would sell all that to own this!"

"A little piece of Sunset Boulevard for your glorious Hunt? Why not?"

"Because it's just a room covered with filthy tile."

"So I have more money than sense. What does it matter to you? A hundred
thousand dollars is a great deal of money."

"Yes, it is."

"So, do we have a deal or not?"

"Mister Zeffer, this is all too sudden. We're not talking about a chair
here. This is part of the fabric of the Fortress. It has great
historical significance."

"A minute ago it was just a room covered with filthy tile."

"Filthy tile of great historical significance," Sandru said, allowing
himself a little smile.

"Are you saying we can't find some terms that are mutually satisfying?

Because if you are--"

"No, no, no. I'm not saying that. Perhaps we could eventually agree on a
price, if we talked about it for a while. But how would you ever get it
back to California?"

"That would be my problem. This is the twenties, Father. Anything's
possible."

"And then what? Suppose you could get everything back to Hollywood?"

"Another room, the same proportions--"

"You have such a room?"

"No. I'd build one. We have a house in the Hollywood Hills. I'd put it
in as a surprise for Katya."

"Without telling her?" "Well if I told her it wouldn't be a surprise."

"I'm just astonished that she would allow you to do such a thing. A
woman like that."

"Like what?"

The question caught Sandru off-balance. "Well ... so ..."

"Beautiful?"

"Yes."

"I think our conversation's come full-circle, Father."

Sandru conceded the point with a little nod, lifting the brandy bottle
as he did so.

"So she's not as perfect as her face would suggest?" he asked at last.

"Not remotely. Thank God."

"This place, with all its obscenities, would please her?"

"Yes, I think it would. Why? Does that make you more open to the idea of
selling it to me?"

"I don't know," Sandru replied, frowning. "This whole conversation
hasn't turned out the way I thought it would. I expected you to come
down here and maybe buy a table, or a tapestry. Instead you want to buy
the walls!" He shook his head again. "I was warned about you Americans,"
he added, his tone no longer amused.

"What were you warned about?"

"Oh, that you thought nothing was beyond your grasp. Or beyond your
pocket."

"So the money isn't enough."

"The money, the money." He made an ugly sound in the back of his throat.
"What does the money matter? You want to pay a hundred thousand dollars
for it? Pay it. I'll never see a lei so why should I care what it costs
you? You can steal it as far as I am concerned."

"Let me understand you clearly. Are you agreeing to the sale?"

"Yes," Father Sandru said, his tone weary now, as though the whole
subject had suddenly lost all trace of pleasure for him. "I'm agreeing."

"Good. I'm delighted."

Zeffer returned through the maze of furniture to the door, where the
priest stood. He extended his hand. "It's been wonderful dealing with
you, Father Sandru."

Sandru looked down on the proffered hand, and then--after a moment of
study--took it. His fingers were cold, his palm clammy. "Do you want to
stay and look at what you've bought?"

"No. I don't think so. I think we both need a little sun on our faces."
Sandru said nothing to this; he just turned and led the way out along
the corridor to the stairs. But the expression on his face, as he
turned, was perfectly clear: there was no more pleasure to be found
above than there was down here in the cold; nor prospect of any.

 There were ten thousand things Zeffer had not -witnessed, or even
glimpsed, in his brief visit to the vast, mysterious chambers in the
Fortress's bowels; images haunting the tiles which he would not discern
until the heroic labor of removing the masterwork from the walls and
shipping it to California was complete.

He was a literate man; better educated than most of his peers in the
burgeoning city of Los Angeles, thanks to parents who had filled the
house with books, even though there was often precious little food on
the table.

He knew his classics, and the mythologies from which the great books and
plays of the ancients had been derived. In time he would discover dozens
of images inspired by those same myths on the tiles. In one place women
were depicted like the Maenads immortalized by Euripides; maddened souls
in service of the god of ecstasies, Dionysus. They raced through the
trees with bloody hands, leaving pieces of male flesh scattered in the
grass. In another place, single-breasted Amazons strode, drawing their
mighty bows back and letting fly storms of arrows.

There were other images--many, many others--that were not rooted in any
recognizable mythology. In one spot, not far from the delta, huge
fishes, which had sprouted legs covered with golden scales, came through
the trees in solemn shoals, spitting fire. The trees ahead of them were
aflame; burning birds rose up from the canopy.

In the swamp, a small town stood on long limbs, its presence appearing
to mark the position of some place that had existed there once but had
been taken by time, or a prophecy of some settlement to come. The

artists had taken liberties with the rendering, foreshortening the
scene so that the occupants of the city were almost as big as their
houses, and could be plainly seen. There were excesses here, too;
perversities just as profound as anything the Wild Wood was hosting.
Through one of the windows a man could be seen spread-eagled on a table,
around which sat a number of guests, all watching a large worm enter him
anally and then erupt from his open mouth. Another was the scene of a
strange summoning, in which a host of black birds with human heads rose
up from the ground, circling a girl-child who was either their invoker
or their victim.

In a third house a woman was squatting and shedding menstrual blood
through a hole in the floor. Several men, smaller than the woman above
by half, were swimming in the water below and undergoing some calamitous
transformation, presumably brought on by the menses. Their heads had
flowered into dark, monstrous shapes; demonic tails had sprouted from
their backsides.

As Father Sandru had warned (or was it boasted'?) to Zeffer, there was
no part of the landscape depicted there on the walls that was not
haunted by some bizarre sight or other. Even the clouds (innocent
enough, surely) shit rains of fire in one place, and evacuated skulls in
another. Demons cavorted unchallenged over the open sky, like dancers
possessed by some celestial music, while stars fell between them; others
rose over the horizon, leering like emaciated fools. And in that same
sky, as though to suggest that this was a world of perpetual twilight,
teetering always on the edge of darkness and extinction, was a sun that
was three-quarters eclipsed by an exquisitely rendered moon, the latter
painted so cunningly it seemed to have real mass, real roundness, as it
slid over the face of the daystar.

In one place there was painted a line of crowned figures--the kings and
queens of Romania, back to ancient times--painted marching into the
ground. The noble line rotted as it proceeded into the earth, carrion
birds alighting on the descending lineage, plucking out regal eyes and
law-giving tongues. In another place a circle of witches rose in a
spiral from a spot marked by standing-stones; their innocent victims,
babies whose fat had

been used to make the flying ointment in which they had slathered
themselves, lay scattered between the stones like neglected dolls.

And all through this world of monstrous hurts and occasional miracles,
the Hunt.

Many of the scenes were simply documents of the vigorous beauty of the
chase; they looked as though they could have been painted from life.

There was a pack of dogs, white and black and pie-bald (one bitch
charmingly attending to her suckling pups); some being muzzled by
peasants, others straining on their leashes as they were led away to
join the great assembly of hunters. Elsewhere, the dogs could be seen
accompanying the hunters. Where the Duke had chosen to kneel and pray, a
white dog knelt beside him, his noble head bowed by the weight of shared
devotion.

In another, the dogs were splashing in a river, attempting to catch the
huge salmon outlined in the stylized blue waters. And in a third place,
for no apparent reason but the playfulness of the artists, the role of
dogs and men had been reversed. A long, beautiful decorated table had
been set up in a clearing among the trees, and at it sat a number of
finely-bred dogs, while at their booted feet naked men fought over
scraps and bones. Closer examination showed the arrangement of figures
to be even more anarchic than it first appeared, for there were thirteen
dogs at the table, and in their center sat one dog with a halo perched
between his pricked ears: a canine Last Supper. An informed observer,
knowing the traditional positions of the Apostles, could have named them
all. The writers of the Gospels were there in their accustomed seats;
John sitting closest to his master, Judas sitting at the perimeter of
the company, while Peter (a Saint Bernard) brooded at the other end, his
furrowed brow suggesting he already knew he would betray his master
three times before the long night was over.

Elsewhere in the landscape, the dogs were painted at far crueler work.

Tearing rabbits apart in one place, and ripping the flesh from a
cornered stag in another. In a third they were in a contest with a lion,
and many had been traumatically injured by the battle. Some crawled away
from the place, trailing their bowels; one had been thrown up into the
trees, and its corpse hung there, tongue lolling. Others lay sprawled in
the grass in

nools of blood. The hunters kept their distance, no doubt waiting for
the lion to become so weakened by blood-loss that they could close in
and claim the heroic moment for themselves.

But the most perverse of all the scenes were those in which erotic love
and hunting were conjoined.

There was, for instance, a place where the dogs had driven a number of
naked men and women up a gorge, where they had encountered a group of
hunters armed with spears and nets. The terrified couples clung to one
another, but the netters and the spearers knew their business. Men were
separated from women and the men were run through with spears, the women
all bundled up in the nets, heaped on carts, and carried away. The
sexual servitude that awaited them was of a very particular kind.
Reading the walls from left to right the viewer's eye found that in an
adjacent valley the women were freed from the nets and strapped beneath
the bodies of massive centaurs, their legs stretched around the flanks
of the animals.

The women's response to this terrible violation was something the
artists had taken some trouble to detail. One was screaming in agony,
her head thrown back, as blood ran from the place where she was being
divided. Others appeared to be in ecstasy at this forced marriage,
pressing their faces joyously to the necks of their deflowerers.

But this part of the story did not finish there. If the "reader,"
scanning these walls, had continued his inquiry, he would have found
that some of the men had survived the massacre in the gorge, and
returned, on a later sequence of tiles, to hunt the creatures that had
their wives in sexual thrall. These were some of the most brilliantly
painted sequences on the walls: the surviving lovers returning on
horseback, so as to match their speed to that of the centaurs. Lassos
circling in the air over their heads, they closed on the centaurs, who
were slowed down by the very women they carried around to pleasure them.
Several were brought down by ropes around the neck, others were speared
in the throat or flank. The women they carried were not always lucky in
these encounters. Though no doubt their rescuers intended to free them,
it was often the case that they perished beneath the weight of their
violators, as the dying centaurs

rolled over, crushing them. Perhaps there was some moral here--some
lesson about the vulnerability of the innocent women when two tribes of
males were set against one another; but the artists seemed to take too
much grisly pleasure in their depictions for this to be the case.
Rather, it appeared to be done for the pleasure of the doing; of the
imagining, and of the rendering. There was no moral from one end of this
world to the other.

It would be possible to go on listing at great length the horrors and
the spectacles of the scenes laid out on the tile: the fields of dancing
demons, the fairy races, the succubi squatting on roofs, the holy fools
draped in coats of cow-dung, the satyrs, the spirits of graveside,
roadside and hearthside; the weasel-longs and the bloated toads; and so
on, and so on, behind every tree and on every cloud, sliding down every
waterfall and lingering beneath every rock: a world haunted by the
shapes of lust and animal lust and all that humanity called to its bosom
in the long nights of its despair.

Though Hollywood--even in its fledgling years--was presenting itself to
the world as the very soul of the imagination, there was nothing going
on before the cameras there (nor would there be, ever) that could
compete with what the master tile-painters and their apprentices had
created.

It was, as Sandru has said, the Devil's Country.

Zeffer went to Brascov to hire men, at prices five or six times what he
would have paid locally, because he wanted hands that could do the job
with some finesse, and minds that could count to a higher number than
their fingers. He devised the means by which the masterpiece could be
removed himself. The tiles were meticulously numbered on the reverse
sides and a huge legend made of the room by three cartographers he had
also hired in the city, so that there would be a meticulous record of
the way the design had been laid out; and an obsessive accounting of how
the tiles were numbered, stacked and packed away; including a detailed
description of which tiles were cracked or damaged before they were

acked, which had been mislaid by the original tilers (there were a
hundred and sixteen such tiles; most turned ninety or a hundred and
eighty degrees by an artisan too tired, too bewildered or perhaps too
drunk to realize his error); all so that when the tiles were unpacked at
the house in Coldheart Canyon there would be no difficulty reordering
them into the original design.

It was a long process; a total of eleven weeks were to pass before the
crated tiles were finally transported from the Fortress.

All the work had drawn much attention, of course; from the brothers
themselves, who knew what was going on because Father Sandru had told
them, and from the villagers, who had only the vaguest of ideas of what
all this was about. There were rumors flying around that the removal was
being undertaken because the tiles had put the souls of the Fathers in
spiritual jeopardy, but precise details of this jeopardy changed from
account to account.

The vast sum of money that was now in the possession of the Order did
very little to transform the lives of the priests, apart from inspiring
some of the most embittered exchanges in the history of the brotherhood.

Several of the priests were of the opinion that the tiles should not
have been sold (not because of their merit, but because it was not wise
to loose such unholy images on the secular world). To this, Father
Sandru-- who was more often, and more publicly, drunk by the
day--offered only a sneering dismissal.

What does it matter:' he said to the complainers: they are only tiles,
for God's sake.

There were a good number of shaken heads by way of response, and a very
eloquent riposte from one of the older Fathers, who said that God had
put the tiles into their protection, and it was cynical and careless of
him to let them go. What damage might they not do, out there in the
world, he said; what hurt to innocent souls?

Sandru was unmoved by all this. There were no innocent souls in
Hollywood, he had learned; nor was there any sin or excess painted in
the wes that the people of that city were not intimately familiar with.
He

 spoke with an authority which he didn't in truth possess, but it
sufficiently impressed the brothers--or at least a greater number of
them--so that the nay-sayers were finally silenced.

There was much debate about what should happen to the money. One
faction, led by the older men, believed it had been acquired by dubious
means, and the only uncorrupted way to dispose of it was to distribute
it among the poor. Surprisingly, very few voices supported this
solution; some part of the money might be given to the needy in the
village, the priests agreed, but there were other causes that should be
attended to.

There was some lobbying for a complete removal of the Order to some
other place than the Fortress; a more comfortable place, where they
could find their way to God without the Devil's shadow falling across
their path.

It was Sandru who was the most eloquent advocate of their staying in the
Fortress. His tongue well lubricated with wine, he explained that he
felt no sense of regret that he'd sold the tiles; it was a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he was glad he'd taken it. Now, he
said, they should use the money to rejuvenate the place. Get the
hospital up and running, as had always been the plan; see what they
could do about refertilizing the land, so that the vineyard would
prosper as it had in the old days.

"Our path is perfectly clear!" he said to the Brothers. "Whether our
faith in the Lord is secure or not, we can heal here, and we can grow
the grape, and pass our lives with purpose." He smiled as he spoke. That
word--purpose--had not been on his lips for many years, and it gave him
pleasure to speak it. But even as he spoke the smile started to die
away, and the color shrank from his ruddy face.

"I beg you to excuse me," he said, putting his hand to his belly, "I am
sickened by too much brandy."

With that he pulled out of his robes the bottle from which he had been
drinking since early morning, and set it clumsily down on the table in
front of him. Then he turned and stumbled out to get a breath of fresh
air.

Nobody went after him; he had no friends left in the Fortress. His old
allies were too embarrassed by his excesses to publicly share his
opinions; fearful that his behavior might reflect poorly on them, and
keep them

from advancement. So he was alone as he wandered giddily through the
ruins of the dead vines. It was evening, and now that the summer was
oast the air was beginning to get chilly. But the sky overhead was a
perfect blue and there was a new moon, its pallid crescent just clearing
the mountains.

Sandru tried to let the sight of the sky and moon calm him; have them
placate the pain of his heart, give life back to his numbed fingers. But
the trick was beyond them. He realized suddenly that this was not a
spasm brought on by too much brandy. He was dying.

The Brothers had medicines for weakness of the heart, he knew; it would
not be the end of him if he got back to them quickly enough. He turned
on his heel, attempting to voice a shout of alarm. But his panicked
chest would provide no breath for him to cry for help. His legs began to
fail him, and down he went, face first, into the dirt. He tasted the
soil in his mouth, bitter and unappetizing. He spat it out; and with the
last of his strength he pushed himself up out of the filth and let
gravity roll him over.

He could not move, but it didn't matter. The darkening sky overhead was
spectacle enough. He lay there for six or seven shortening gasps, while
a star, lonely in its solitude, brightened at his zenith. Then he let
life go.

The Brothers did not find him until the middle of the night, by which
time a frost had settled on the old vineyard, the first frost of that
autumn. It glittered on the bulk of the dead Father; on his bulbous nose
and in the knots of his beard. It had even inscribed its filigrees on
his unblinking eyes.

There was no hospital established at the Fortress; then or ever. Nor
was there any attempt to replant the vineyard, or make the grounds
around the Fortress in any way flourish. With Father Sandru's passing
(at the relatively tender age of sixty-two), what little enthusiasm
there had been for change withered. The younger men decided to leave the
Fortress; three of them left the Order entirely and became members of
the secular community.

Of the three, one--a young man by the name of Jan Valek--took his own
life less than a year later, leaving a long suicide note, a kind of
epistle to his sometime Brothers, in which he wrote of how he'd had a
dream after the death of Father Sandru, in which

"I met the Father in the vineyards, which were all burning. It was a
terrible place to be. Black smoke was filling the sky, blotting out the
sun. He said to me that this was Hell, this world, and there was only
one way to escape it, and that was to die. His face was bright, even in
the darkness. He said he wished he'd died earlier, instead of going on
suffering in : the world.

"I asked him if they allowed him to drink brandy wherever he was now. He
said he had no need of brandy; his existence was happy; there was no
need to conceal the pain with drinking.

"Then I told him I still had a life to live in the world, whereas he had
been an old man, with a weak heart. I was strong, I said, and there was
a good chance I'd be alive for another thirty, maybe forty years, which
was an agony to me, but what could I do?

" 'So take your own life,' he said to me. He made it sound so simple.
'Cut your throat. God understands."

 " 'He does?' I said to him.

" 'Certainly,' he told me. 'This -world is Hell. Just look around. What
do you see?" "I told him -what I saw. Fire, smoke, black earth.

"'See?'he said. 'Hell'

"I told him, though of course I was still dreaming, I was going to take
his advice. I was going to go back to my room, find a sharp knife, and
kill myself. But for some reason, as often happens in dreams, I didn't
go home. I went into Bucharest. To the cinema where Brother Stefan used
to bring me sometimes, to see films. We went inside. It was very dark.
We found seats and Stefan had me sit down. Then the film began. And it
was a film about some earthly paradise. It made me weep, it was so
perfect, this place. The music, the way the people looked.

Beautiful men and women, all so lovely it took my breath away to look at
them.

There was one young man in particular--and it makes me ashamed to write
this, but if I don't do it here, in my last confession, where will I do
it?--a young man with dark hair and light-filled eyes, who opened his
arms to me. He was naked, on the screen, with open arms, inviting me
into his embrace. I turned to Father Stefan in the darkness, and he said
the very thing that was going through my mind. 'He wants to take you
into his arms." "I started to deny it. But Stefan  me and said: 'Look at
him. Look at his face. It's flawless. Look at his body. It's perfect.
And there--between his tegs--"

"I covered my face in shame, but Stefan pulled my hands from my face and
told me not to be ashamed, just to look, and enjoy looking. 'God made
all of this for our pleasure,' he said. 'Why would He give us such a
hunger to look at nakedness unless He wanted us to take pleasure in it?"
"I asked Stefan how he knew it was God's work. Perhaps the Devil had
made nakedness, I said, to tempt us and ensnare us. He laughed, and put
his arm around me, and kissed me on the cheek as though I were just a
little child.

' 'This isn't the Devil's work,' he said. 'This is your invitation to
paradise.' * Then he kissed me again, and I felt a warm wind blowing, as
though it were spring in whatever country they had created on the
screen. And the wind made me want to die with pleasure, because it
smelled of a time I remembered from long ago.

 "So now I have come back to my room. I have a knife. When I have
finished writing this I will leave what I have written on the table, and
I will go out into the field, and cut my wrists. I know we are taught
that self-slaughter is a sin, and that the Lord does not wish us to harm
ourselves, but if He does not wish me to end my life, why is this knife
within reach of my hand, and why is my heart so much at peace?"

His body was found about a hundred yards from the place where Sandru's
frost-covered body had been discovered. Coming so soon upon the death of
the old priest, the death of Jan Valek undid the Brotherhood completely.
Orders came from Bucharest, and the Brotherhood was disbanded.

There was no need to guard the Fortress any longer, the Archbishop said.
The brothers would be more useful to the Church if they worked with the
sick and the dying, to offer the Lord's comfort where it was most
needed.

Within a week, the Order of Saint Teodor had left the Fortress Goga.

There were those among the villagers who felt that the Fortress had
invited its abandonment, and began its own process of self-slaughter.

Superstition, no doubt; but it was certainly strange that after five
centuries of life, during which span it had remained strong, a quick
process of disintegration should begin as soon as the community of
caretakers departed.

True, the winter immediately following was particularly severe. But
there had been heavier snows on the roofs and they had not bowed beneath
the -weight; there had been stronger winds through the casements and
they'd not broken open and smashed; there had been more persistent
floodings of the lower floors, and the doors had not been carried off on
their rotted hinges.

By the time the spring came round--which was late April that year-- the
Fortress had effectively become uninhabitable. It was as though its soul
had gone out of it, and now all it wanted was to allow the seasons to
take their steady toll. They were guileless collaborators. The summer
was as violently hot as the winter had been bitter, and it bred all
manner of

 destroyers in the fabric of the building. Worm and fly and wasp
contributed to the baking heat of the sun with their burrowings and
layings and nestings. Beams that had taken ten men to lift them became
dusty, hollow things, as delicate as the bones of immense birds. Unable
to support their own weight, they collapsed upon themselves, bringing
down entire floors as they fell. By the time September arrived, the
Fortress was open to the elements. The ward where the Brothers had
optimistically laid out rows of beds now had a ceiling of cloud. When
the first rains of autumn came the mattresses were soaked; fungus and
mildew sprouted where the sick would have lain. The place stank of rot
from end to end.

And finally, somewhere in the middle of the second winter in its empty
state, the floorboards cracked and opened up, and the lowest level of
the Fortress, the level where Father Sandru had brought Zeffer to show
him the tiled chamber, became available to sky and storm. If anyone had
ventured into the Fortress that winter he would have witnessed the most
delicate of spectacles. Through the eight vaults above the once-tiled
room--which were now all cracked like eggs--snow came spiraling down. It
fell into a room denuded. The workmen Zeffer had hired to do the work of
removing the tiles had first been obliged to empty the room of all the
monks had left in there. Some of the furniture had subsequently been
stolen, some broken up for firewood, and the rest--perhaps a quarter of
the bounty-- simply left to decay where it had been piled up. The snow,
spiraling down, settled in little patches on the floor; patches which
would not melt for the next four months, but only get wider and deeper
as the winter's storms got worse, the snow heavier.

Just before the thaw, in the middle of the following April, the weight
of snow and ice finally brought the vaults down, in one calamitous
descent.

There was nobody there to witness it, nor anyone within earshot to hear
rt. The room which had contained the Hunt was buried in the debris of
all the vaults, plaster and wood and stone filling the chamber to the
middle r the walls. Nobody who visited the Fortress in subsequent
years--and there were a few explorers who came there every summer,
usually imagining they'd stumbled on something darkly marvelous--a
Fortress, per haps belonging to Vlad the Impaler, whose legendary
territories lay only a few hundred miles off to the west, in
Transylvania--none of these visitors dug through the overgrown ruins
with any great enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves what
function the half-buried room might once have served. Nor, should it be
said, would they have been able to guess, even the cleverest of them.
The mystery of the ruined chamber had been removed to another continent,
where it was presently unfolding its dubious raptures for the
delectation of a new and vulnerable audience.

Men and women who--like the tiles--had in many cases lately left their
homelands; and in their haste to be famous left behind them such
talismans as hearth and altar might have offered by way of protection
against the guileful Hunt.

ONE

There's a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
The Chinese has been housing such events since 1927, but of course the
crowds were much larger back then, tens of thousands of people,
sometimes even hundreds of thousands, would block Hollywood Boulevard in
their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight's event is nowhere
near that scale. Though the studio publicists will massage the numbers
for tomorrow's Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a crowd of
four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance
of the star of tonight's movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in
fact less than half that.

Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few
cop cars in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.

As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in
the black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to
open the doors, a few "screamers," paid and planted in the crowd by the
studio publicity people to get a little excitement going, start to do
their job, yelling even before the face of the limo's passenger has been
seen.

There's a large contingent of A-list names on tonight's guest-list, and
plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn't here,
but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the
picture as the retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom
ur hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his
tune comes round, or--should he refuse--be pursued by the ghosts of
several generations of former incarnations of the character, to persuade

him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the
curse of Gallows once before, to whom Pickett's character must go when
the phantom pursuers are almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman's is
greeted by a genuine roar of approval from the fans, who are devoted to
her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to be taken, but
she doesn't go near the crowd. She's had experiences with
overly-possessive fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the
red carpet, where ; she's out of reach of their fingers. Still they
shout, "We love you Ripley!," which is the character she plays in the
Alien movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she
dies. She waves, even when they call the., name Ripley, but her eyes
never focus on anybody in the crowd for more 1 than a moment.

The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of Gallows, Suzie
Henstell, named by this month's Vanity Fair one of the Ten Hottest |

1 '/f

Names in Hollywood. She is petite (though you'd never know it on the \
screen), blonde and giggly; she's shared a little marijuana with heri
boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as
she 1 steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks
to sev  eral months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth
interviews, to j think of this woman as a full-blown star, even though
they have yet to see| more than a few frames of her acting ability from
the trailer for Gahowj. J So what do they care if she looks a little out
of it? Unlike Ms. Weaver, whol wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing
the photographers just a minute oi two to catch her, the new girl is
still hungry for adulation. She go straight to the barricades, where a
number of young women with souj venir programs for Gallows are waving
them around. She signs a few, giv*l ing her boyfriend, who is a six-foot
Calvin Klein model hunk, a goof "gee-I-must-be-famous!" look. The model
looks back vacantly, which : the only look in his repertoire. He can
give it to you vacantly with a semi-| hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly
with his ass hanging out of his Y-fronts|| Either way, it is
heart-achingly beautiful; almost troublingly so.

The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security!

men start to look a little worried. It was some bright publicist's idea
torn

huild two gallows, as a kind of gateway through which the audience for
the premiere will need to come. Not, it now seems, a clever notion. The
eallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so they're made of
light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or
worse, pick then up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light
though they are, they could do some serious damage if they fell.

Four of the ushers from inside the theater are summoned from their
duties and told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side,
holding on to them as casually as possible. Security is told that the
publicity people only need five more minutes. As soon as Suzie Henslett
can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the building (which
at present she is showing no desire to do), the director's, Rob
Neiderman's, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and
most important of the bunch, Todd Pickett.

The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive
decision is made to bring Neiderman's limo in, and if Suzie's screaming
fans are visible waving like lunatics behind Neiderman in his press
pictures, so be it. This isn't a perfect world. It's already 8:13 p.m.
At this rate the picture won't be able to begin until half past the
hour, which wouldn't be a problem if the damn thing weren't so long, but
Neiderman's cut came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though
the studio appealed to Pickett to get him to shave the thing down to a
tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked the picture pretty much
as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means it'll
be past eleven before the picture's finished, and almost midnight by the
time everybody's assembled at the party venue. It's going to be a long
night.

Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss. Henslett away from
her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The
ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the
perpendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to
the curb. Even before the door has opened, the fans--especially the
women-- are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.

"Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!"

 The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore!

of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.

And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows, the reason whyl
ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next
Friday I (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male
action-'!

movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincin|
nati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.

He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the!

shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold <
the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned!

model-turned-actress-turned-model-again, with whom he has been see at
parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will sa
anything about the relationship other than that they're good friends.

He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get picl
tures of them together. Then, arm in arm, through the blizzard of light
and the barrage of We love you, Todd! coming at them from every side, 1
pair make their way to the cinema doors, which, having gathered the most
important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if td
divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid
fror.

those who are simply objects of the night's wind.

Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone
involve with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some
ninety I lion dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another
thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.

It is, in the words of Corliss's review in Time, "an old fashioned
action^ horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand
guignol, and thesav John-Woo-style action piece audiences have come to
expect. One minute Schwar.

enegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling
successor, is play ing his scenes as though he's Hamlet on a
particularly dreary night in Denmar From beginning to end, Gallows is
bad noose."

Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already know what
Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the pictur

plain in a piece about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks
before. Nor does it take an oracle to predict that there will be others
who will not like the picture. But the extent of vitriol will prove
astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In the next
forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews
of the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers
empowering minor names to pull out the stops. Besides the
incomprehensible script, everyone agrees, there is a lackluster quality
to the picture that betrays the cast's indifference to the entire
project. Performances aren't simply uneven, they seem designed for
entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst
culprit in this regard? There is no question about that. All the
reviewers will agree that the most inadequate performance comes from its
star, Todd Pickett.

People writes that: "Mister Pickett is plenty old enough to know better.

Thirty-something-year-olds don't act the way Mister Pickett acts here:
his trademark 'young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt
smile,' which was looking stale the second (all right, the third) time
he did it, seems particularly out-of-place here. Though it seems
incredible that time has passed so fast since America first swooned to
the charms of Mister Pickett--he's now simply too old to play the
twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent's
Prozac-chewing sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She
has an elegant, beautijully-proportionedface, and she can turn a line
with the snappy, East coast smarts of a young Katharine Hepburn. She's
wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time would be wasted here were she
not in the movie."

The premiere audience didn't seem to mind it. On occasion there were
audible gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a
little fake) for the jokes, but there were several long stretches in the
Second Act when the movie seemed to lose their interest. Even in the
Third Act, when the action relocates to the orbiting space station, and
the special effects budget soared, there was very little real
enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the
villain's planet-destroying Weapon actually went off, against
expectation, and Washington, D. C., is

 fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the new
Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became
restless again.

About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled, a member of the
audience got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A
few people caught a look at the man's face as he looked back at the
screen.

It was Todd Pickett, lit by the light of his own face. Nobody got up to
ask for his autograph.

Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back
on it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn't go to the
restroom.

Instead he asked one of the ushers if he could be allowed out through
the back of the building. The usher explained that the area around the
back had no security.

"I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me," Todd explained. '

The usher said, sure, why not, and led Todd down a passageway that< ran
behind the screen. Todd looked up at his reversed image. All he could;
remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomforts| able
his costume had been.

"Here you go," the usher said, unlocking the doors at the end of the ^
corridor, and letting Todd out into an area lit only by the ambient
light from the Boulevard.

"Thanks," Todd said, giving him a twenty-buck bill. "I'll be back out!

front by the time the credits roll."

The usher thanked him for the twenty-note and left him to himself.

Todd took out a cigarette, but it never got to his lips. A wave of
nausea | overtook him, so powerful and so sudden that it was all he
could do not to j puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he'd
had in the limo asl he drove on down to the premiere, and the pepperoni
pizza, with three!

cheeses and extra anchovies, he'd had to add ballast. With the first
heave | over (something told him there were more to come) he had the
presence, of mind to look around, and confirm that this nasty little
scene was not J being spied on, or worse, photographed. Luckily, he was
alone. All he had | for company back here was the detritus of premieres
past; piles of {

standees and gaudy scenery pieces designed to advertise movies gone by:
Mel Gibson against an eruption of lurid flame; Godzilla's eye; the
bottom half of a girl in a very short dress. He got to his feet and
stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this
graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in
which to hide his giddy head. Behind him, through the still-open door,
he could hear the sound of gunfire, and the muted sound of his own
voice:

"Come on out, you sonofabitch," he was yelling to somebody. By now, if
the movie had been working, the audience would have been yelling and
screaming, wild with blood-lust. But despite the over-amped soundtrack,
nobody was yelling, because nobody gave a damn. The movie was dying on
its feet.

Another wave of nausea rose up in him. He reached out to catch hold of
something so that he wouldn't fall down and his outstretched hand
knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backward
and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed against a cardboard
Mightyjoe Young, and so on and so forth, like a row of candy-colored
dominoes, stars falling against ships falling against monsters, all
toppling back into a darkness so deep they were an indistinguishable
heap.

Luckily, the noise of his vomiting was covered by the din of his own
movie. He puked again, twice, until his stomach had nothing left to give
up. Then he turned his back on the vomit and the toppled idols, and
stepped away to find a lungful of clean air to inhale. The worst was
over.

He lit his cigarette, which helped settle his stomach, and rather than
returning inside, where the picture was two minutes from finishing, he
walked along the side of the building until he found a patch of
streetlight where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was
unspattered.

There was a spot of vomit on his shoe, but he cleaned it off with his
handkerchief (which he tossed away) and then sprayed his tongue and
throat with wintergreen breath-cleanser. His hair was cropped short
(that was the way it was in the movie, and he'd kept the style for
public appearances), so he had no fear that it was out of place. He
probably looked a lit de pale, but what the hell? Pale was in.

There was a gate close to the front of the building, guarded by a
security officer. She recognized Todd immediately, and unlocked the
gate.

"Getting out before it gets too crazy?" she said to him. He smiled and
nodded. "You want an escort to your car?"

"Yeah, thanks."

One of the executive producers, an over-eager Englishman called George
Dipper, with whom Todd had never worked before, was standing on the red
carpet, his presence ignored by the press, who were standing around
chatting to one another, or checking their cameras before the luminaries
reappeared. George caught Todd's eye, and hurried over, dragging on his
own cigarette as though his life depended on its nicotine content.

There was scattered applause from inside, which quickly died away.

The picture was over.

"I think it played brilliantly," George said, his eyes begging for a
syllable of agreement. "They were with us all the way. Don't you think
so?" "It was fine," Todd said, without commitment.

"Forty million, the first weekend."

"Don't get your hopes up."

"You don't think we'll do forty?"

"I think it'll do fine."

George's face lit up. Todd Pickett, the man he'd paid twenty million
dollars to (plus a sizable portion of the back-end), was declaring it
fine. God was in His Heaven. For a terrible moment Todd thought the man
was going to weep with relief.

"At least there's nothing big opening against it," Todd said, "so we've
got one weekend clear."

"And your fans are loyal," George said. Again, the desperation in the
eyes.

Todd couldn't bear to look at him any longer.

"I'm just going' to make a quick getaway," Todd said, glancing toward the
theater doors.

The first of the crowd were emerging. If the expressions on the first
five faces he scanned were an omen, his instincts were right: they did
not have a

He turned his back on the crowd, telling George he'd see him later.

"You are coming to the party?" George said, hanging on to him as he
headed down the carpet.

Where was Marco? Todd thought. Trusty Marco, who was always there when
he was needed. "Yes, I'll pop in later," he said, glancing back over his
shoulder at George to reassure him.

In the seconds since he'd turned away, the audience spilling from the
theater door had jumped from five to a hundred. Half of them saw him.

In just a few seconds they'd be surrounding him, yelling his name,
telling him they loved this and they hated that, touching him, pulling
on him--

"Here, boss!"

Marco called to him from the curb. The limo door was open. God bless
him! Todd raced down the carpet as people behind him started to call his
name; cameras started to flash. Into the limo. Marco slammed the door.

Todd locked it. Then Marco dashed around to the driver's seat with a
remarkable turn of speed given his poundage, and got in.

"Where to?"

"Mulholland."

Mulholland Drive winds through the city like a lazy serpent for many
miles; but Marco didn't need to know where along its length his boss
wanted to be taken. There was a spot close to Coldwater Canyon, where
the undulating drive offers a picture-perfect view of the San Fernando
Valley, as far as the mountains. By day it can be a smog-befouled
spectacle, brown and gray. But by night, especially in the summer, it is
a place of particular enchantment: the cities of Burbank, North
Hollywood and Pasadena laid out in a matrix of amber lights, receding to
the dark wall of the mountains. And moving against the darkness, the
lights of planes circling as they await their instruction to land at
Burbank Airport, or the police helicopters passing over the city,
spitting a beam of white light.

Often there were sightseers parked at the spot, enjoying the scene. But
tonight, thank God, there were none. Marco parked the car and Todd got
ut, wandering to the cliff-edge to look at the scene before him.

Marco got out too, and occupied his time with wiping the windshield of
the limo. He was a big man with the bearded face of a bear recently
woken from hibernation, and he possessed a curious mixture of talents: a
sometime wrestler and ju-jitsu black belt, he was also a trained Cordon
Bleu cook (not that Todd's taste called for any great culinary
sophistication) and a twice-divorced father of three with an
encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Wagner. More important, he was
Todd's right-hand man; loyal to a fault. There was no part of Todd's
existence Marco Caputo did not have some part of. He took care of the
hiring and firing of domestic staff and gardeners, the buying and the
driving of cars, and of course all the security duties.

"The movie's shit, huh?" he said matter-of factly.

"Worse than."

"Sorry 'bout that."

"Not your fault. I should never have done it. Shit script. Shit movie."

"You want to give the party a miss?" "Nah. I gotta go. I promised
Wilhemina. And George."

"You got something going with her?"

"Wilhemina? Yeah. I got something. I just don't know whether I want to.
Plus she's got an English boyfriend."

"The English are all fags."

"Yeah."

"You want me to swing by the party and bring her back up to the house
for you?" "Suppose she says no?"

"Oh come on. When did any girl say no to you?" Todd said nothing. He
just stared out over the vista of lights. The wind came up out of the
valley, smelling of gas fumes and Chinese food. The Santa Anas, hot off
the Mojave, gusted against his face. He dosed his eyes to enjoy the
moment, but what came into his head was an image of himself: a still
from the movie he'd fled from tonight. He studied the face in his mind's
eye for a moment.

Then he said: "I look tired."

 Todd Pickett had made two of his three most successful pictures under
the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of
them was called Gunner; the kind of high-concept, testosterone-marinated
picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd-- who
was then an unknown from Ohio--a bona-fide movie-star, if not overnight
then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn't been required to turn
in a performance. Smotherman didn't make movies that required actors,
only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that.
Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the
scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to
watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked
the same magic on celluloid.

In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short
side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the
screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly
perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an
uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty
had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first,
extraordinary summer of coming to-fame his image, dressed in an
immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become
an indelible piece of cinema iconography.

Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many
just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd
Pickett. This was what he'd been polishing himself for since the moment

 his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema
in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of
faces pass before him, he'd known instinctively (at least so he later
claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he
willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a
matter of time before he joined the parade.

After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labors of
being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and
self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most
cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn't cocky;
loyal to his Midwestern roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most
attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor.
There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action
blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on
Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens,
and then, for the Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a
sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite
Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model-turned-actress who had been tabloid
fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and
abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a
charm, and the reviews for Todd's performance were especially kind.

While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed,
there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full
responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his
audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he
was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The
picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the
year had Todd's name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some
of his pictures performed better than others, but even the
disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labors of
most of his contemporaries.

Of course, he wasn't making the choice of material on his own. From the
beginning he'd had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine
Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who'd once
been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when
the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress.

Though she'd been representing other clients when she first took Todd on
she'd let them all go once his career began to demand her complete
attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business,
controlling every element of his life, private and professional. The
price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard-of
heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an
opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors,
art-directors, costume designers and directors of photography. Her only
concern was the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an
older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne;
and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble
hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.

Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn't remain unchallenged forever.

There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new
smiles appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of
devotion the audience that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties
began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn't that his pictures
performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new
definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like
Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that
pictures which would once have been called major hits were now in
contrast simply modest successes.

Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into
business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory
days together. The project they'd elected to do together was a movie
called Warrior: a piece of high-concept junk about a street-fighter from
Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a future earth in a
cattle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction
of

cliches pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movie of the
fifties, and| an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the
region of a hundred 1 million dollars simply to get it on screen, but
Smotherman was confident!

that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. Thei
show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive
fightingi man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using
cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for
state-oftheaitl effects; and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his
sleep: an ordinaryl man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a
no-brainer, all round, studios would be fools not to green-light it; it
had all the marks of a ma sive hit.

He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almc a
parody of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and^
over-sexed. There was never an absence of "babes," as he still called
them!

in his immediate vicinity; all were promised leading roles when they'd!

!m performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course,
weresj discarded the instant he tired of them.

Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable
happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died*

1 He'd always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest
iris the gamier part of any city. The circumstances of his death were
perfectly!

consistent with this reputation: he'd died sitting at a table in a
private clut in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that
had fellec him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken
by before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile
cocaine when he was found, a drug he'd continued to consume in heroic
quantities long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and
had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. It was one of the
thirty-five illeg substances found in his system at the autopsy.

He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his willl
He'd been happiest there, he'd always said, with everything to win and
everything to lose.

This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing itji

Todd felt trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman
had known, and been at peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown
was a game--and it could be lost in a heartbeat. Smotherman had been a
gambling man. He'd taken pleasure in the possibility of failure and it
had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even
played the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there
listening to the hypocrites--most of whom had despised Smotherman--
stand up and extol the dead man, he realized that Keever's passing cast
a pall over his future. The golden days were over. His place in the sun
would very soon belong to others; if it didn't already.

The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine.

She was all reassurance.

"Smotherman was a dinosaur," she said as she sipped her vodka. "The only
reason people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he
made everybody a lot of money. But let's be honest: he was a lowlife.

You're a class act. You've got nothing to worry about."

"I don't know," Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks.
"I look at myself sometimes ..."

"And what?"

"I'm not the guy I was when I made Gunner."

"Damn right you're not. You were nobody then. Now you're one of the most
successful actors in history."

"There's others coming up."

"So what?" Maxine said, waving his concerns away.

Don't do that!" Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table.

Don t try and placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going
to put me back on top, and now the sonofabitch is dead!"

All right. Calm down. All I'm saying is that we don't need Smotherman.

We'll hire somebody to rework the script, if that's what you want.

Then we'll find somebody hip to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary
style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. Everything had to be wg. Big
explosion. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don't care about any of that
anymore. You need to be part of what's coming up, not what hap pened
yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever's dying is the
best thing that could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new
Todd Pickett." "You think it's as simple as that?" Todd said. He wanted
so much to believe that Maxine had the problem solved.

"How difficult can it be?" Maxine said. "You're a great star. We just
need to get people focused on you again." She pondered for a moment.

"You know what? We should set up a lunch with Gary Eppstadt."

"Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck."

"An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And
if J he's going to put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the
table for your services to art, you can make nice with the sonofabitch
for an hour."

 It wasn't simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to
Eppstadt so unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was
the ugliest man in Los Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been
called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His mother, in a fit of blind
affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All this said,
the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most
expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass; his fingernails were
manicured with obsessive precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed
hair every morning, having shaved him first with a straight razor.

There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the
years, entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed
life.

He'd gone from strength to strength as he moved around the studios,
claiming the paternity of every success, and blaming the failures on
those who stood immediately behind him on the ladder, whom he promptly
fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked
flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power,
and studios were run by committees of business-school graduates and
lawyers with an itch to have their fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt
was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest in the company of
somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a hundred
subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need
beauty for, when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybel

He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met
for lunch on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a



brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt had taken a hand in making, firing
j the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings,
i and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in |
which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her
attacker with a hedge-cutter.

"Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days," he preened. "In 1
January. That's a hit. And you know what? There's nobody in the picture.
| Just a couple of no-name TV stars. It was all marketing."

"Is the picture any good?" Todd asked.

"Yeah, it's fucking Hamlet," Eppstadt said, without missing a beat.

"You're looking weary, my friend," he went on. "You need a vacation.
I've been taking time at this monastery--"

"Monastery?"

"Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquillity.

And they take Jews. Actually, I've seen more Jews there than at my J
nephew's Bar Mitzvah. You should try it. Take a rest."

"I don't want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for
Warrior."

Eppstadt's enthusiastic expression dimmed. "Oh, Christ. Is that what
this little lunch is all about, Maxine?"

"Are you making it or not?" Todd pressed. "Because there's plenty of J
other people who will if you won't."

"So maybe you should take it to one of them," Eppstadt said, his gaze
hooded. "You can have it in turnaround, if that's what you want. I'll
get | business affairs on it this afternoon."

"So you're really ready to let it go?" Maxine said, putting on an air of
,<j indifference.

"Perfectly ready, if that's what Todd wants. I'm not going to stand in 1
the way of you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine."

"I am surprised. A package like that ... it's a huge summer movie for |
Paramount."

"Frankly I'm not sure this is the right time for the company to be
making that kind of picture, Maxine. It's a very hard market to read
right now.

 And these expensive pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well
north of a hundred thirty million by the time we've paid for prints and
advertising. I'm not sure that makes solid fiscal sense." He tried a
smile; it was lupine. "Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you.
Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you've been a
gold-mine for us over the years. But there's a generation coming up--and
you know the demographics as well as I do--these kids filling up the
multiplexes, they don't have any loyalty to the past."

Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savoring
every last drop of it.

"You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars
through a weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was
being paid a weekly wage. You could afford a year or two of poor
performance.

But you're expensive, Todd. You're crucifyingly expensive. And I've got
Viacom's shareholders to answer to. I'm not sure they'd want to see me
pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only gross ...
what did your last picture do? Forty-one domestic? And change?" Maxine
sighed, a little theatrically. "I'm sorry to hear that, Gary."

"Look, Maxine, I'm sorry to be having to say it. Really I am. But
numbers are numbers. If I don't believe I can make a profit, what am I
doing making the movie? You see where I'm coming from? That simply
doesn't make sense."

Maxine got up from the table. "Will you excuse me a minute? I've got to
make a call."

Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine's voice.

No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner."

Maxine didn't reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at
a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare
tuna, then put down his fork. "It's times like this I wish I still
smoked." He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. "Don't let
her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I'm cornered I'm going
to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we'll all have a
mess on our hands."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning ..." Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist were
at work on him under the chair. "You can't keep massaging numbers so
your price looks justified when we all know it isn't."

"You were saying I'd been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes
ago you said that."

"That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is
post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed."

"So what are you saying?"

"Well ... let me tell you what I'm not saying," Eppstadt replied, his
tone silky. "I'm not saying you don't have a career."

"Well that's nice to hear," Todd said sharply.

"I want to find something we can do together."

"But ..."

"But?"

Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke.

Finally, he said: "You've got talent, Todd. And you've obviously built a
loyal fan-base over the years. What you don't have is the drawing power
you had back in the old days. It's the same with all of you really
expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone." He took a moment, then
leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
"You want the truth?

You look weary. I mean, deep down weary." Todd said nothing. Eppstadt's
observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. "Sorry to be blunt.

It's not like I'm telling you something you don't already know."

Todd was staring at his hand, wondering what it would feel like to make
a fist and beat it against Eppstadt's face; over an dover an dover.

"Of course, you can have these things fixed," Gary went on chattily. "I
know a couple of guys older than you who went to see Bruce Burrows and
looked ten years younger when he was finished working on them."

Still idly contemplating his hand, Todd said: "Who's Bruce Burrows?"

"Well, in many people's opinion he's the best cosmetic surgeon in the
country. He's got an office on Wilshire. Very private. Very expensive.
But you can afford it. He does it all. Collagen replacements, lifts,
peels, lipo sculpture ..."

"Who went to see him?"

"Oh, just about everybody. There's nothing to be ashamed of: it's a fact
f life At a certain age it's harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You
get laueh-lines, you get frown-lines, you get those little grooves
around your mouth."

"I haven't got grooves around my mouth." "Give it time," Eppstadt said,
a touch avuncular now.

"How long does it take?"

"I don't know. I've never had any of it done. If I went in there, I'd
never get out again."

"Too much to fix."

"I think it's bad taste to jump on somebody else's self-deprecation,
Todd. But I forgive you. I know it hurts to hear this. The fact is, I
don't have to have my face out there fifty feet high. You do. That's
what they're paying for." He pointed at Todd. "That face"

"If I was to get something done ..." Todd said tentatively, "about the
lines, I mean?"

"Yes?"

"Would you make Warrior then?"

He had opened the door to Eppstadt's favorite word: "Maybe. I don't
know. We'd have to see. But the way I look at it, you haven't got much
to lose getting the work done anyway. You're a heart-throb. An
old-fashioned heart-throb. They want to see you kick the shit out of the
bad guy and get the girl. And they want their heart-throb perfect." He
stared at Todd. "You need to be perfect. Burrows can do that for you. He
can make you perfect again. Then you get back to being King of the Hill.
Which is what you want, I presume." Todd admitted it with a little nod,
as though it were a private vice.

Look, I sympathize," Eppstadt went on, "I've seen a lot of people just
told up when they lose their public. They come apart at the seams. You
haven't done that. At least not yet." He laid a hand on Todd's arm. "You
go have a word with Doctor Burrows. See what he can do for you. Six
months. Then we'll talk again."

Todd didn't mention his discussion about Doctor Burrows to Maxine. He!

I didn't want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was
some-f thing he wanted to think through for himself.

Though he didn't remember having heard of Burrows before, he wasj
perfectly aware he was living in the cosmetic-surgery capital of the
world. | Noses were fixed, lips made fuller, crow's-feet erased, ears
pinned back,!

laugh-lines smoothed, guts tucked, butts lifted, breasts enhanced. Justi
about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems couldl
be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally, of course,
it!

had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of suchi
handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who'd|

made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years

I before, but had begun to lose it to gravity, had returned to the
screen last!

year looking more pumped than ever, his perfect abdominals and swelling
j pectorals--even his sculpted calf muscles--surgically-implanted. The
healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the
remodeli!

ing. He'd been out of commission for five months--hiding in Tuscany,
the!

gossip went--while he mended. But it had worked. He'd left the screen|
looking like a beaten-up catcher's mitt, and come back spanking new.

Todd began by making some very circuitous inquiries, the sort of ques|
tions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came bac that
the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough gu) had
ended up wishing they'd never invited the doctors to mess with them;!

Is the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if
you j didn't like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more
fixesji wounds on wounds, pain on pain.

But Todd wasn't discouraged by the news. In fact in a curious way it!

made the idea of undergoing the procedures more palatable to him, play-f
ing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of
I masochism.

Besides, was there any pain on God's green earth as agonizing as read:
ing Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren't in its pages?
That j

ther actors--names sometimes you'd never heard of--were getting the
cripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your
lap a matter of course? There was no pain as sharp or as deep as the
news of somebody else's success. If it was an actor older than himself
that was bad enough. But if it was a contemporary--or worse, somebody
younger, somebody prettier--it made him so crazy he'd have to go pop a
tranquilizer or three to stop himself getting morose and foul-tempered.
And even the happy pills didn't work the way they had in the old days.
He'd taken too many; his body was too used to them.

So: what to do, what to do?

Should he sit on his slowly-expanding ass and start to avoid the mirror,
or take the bull by the horns and get an appointment with Doctor
Burrows?

He remained undecided for about a week. And then one evening, sitting at
home alone nursing a drink and flipping the channels of his sixty inch
TV, he came upon a segment from the telecast of last year's Oscar
ceremony. A young actor, whom he knew for a fact was not one of the
smartest bunnies in town, was receiving his third Oscar of the night,
for a picture he had--at least according to the credits--written,
directed and starred in. The latter? Well there was no disputing that.
He was in every other frame of the damn picture, back-lit and golden. He
was playing a stuttering, mentally unstable poor boy from the Deep
South, a role which he claimed he had based on the life of his father's
brother, who had died tragically at the hands of a lynch mob that had
mistaken him for a rapist.

It was all perfect Oscar-fodder: the ambitious young artist bucking the
star system to tell a tale of the human spirit, rooted in his own family
history.

Except that the truth was neither so moving nor so magical. Far from
having been lynched, the "dead" uncle was still very much alive (or so
gossip around town went), having spent twenty-two years in jail for a
rape that he did not to this day contest. He had received a healthy
payback from the studio that released the picture to stay conveniently
quiet, so that his story could be told the Hollywood way, leaving the
Golden Boy with his ten-thousand-watt smile to walk off with three
Oscars for his

 mantelpiece. Todd had it on good authority that his directorial sk
extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

He wasn't the only one aspiring to snatch Todd's throne. There we plenty
of others, chirpy little cock-suckers swarming out of the woe work to
play the King of Hollywood, when Todd had yet to vacate role.

Well fuck 'em. He'd knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sonso|
bitches. He'd have the limelight back in a heartbeat--all that glory,
all 1 love--and they'd be back on the casting couch in a week with their
fannie in the air.

So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth I
just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they rea
they'd got greedy a decade too early.

Contrary to recent opinions, the King of the Heart-throbs was not dead!

He was coming home, and he was going to look like a million dollars.

 On the day Todd had booked to see Burrows for a first consultation, he
had to cancel at the last minute.

"You're not going to believe my excuse," he told the receptionist, "but
I swear it's the truth."

"Go on."

"My dog's sick."

"Well that's not one we hear very often. So, gold star for originality."

The fact was that Dempsey, his mutt, was not looking too good that sj
morning; he'd got up to go out into the backyard for his morning piss
and I he'd stumbled, as though one of his legs were numb. Todd went down
to ifc see if he was okay. He wasn't. Though he still put on a happy
face for his boss, his expression looked strangely dislocated, as though
he were having difficulty focusing on Todd.

"What's wrong with you, boy?"

Todd went down on his haunches in front of the dog, and stroked his
ears. Dempsey growled appreciatively. But he felt unsteady in Todd's
arms; as though at any moment he might keel over.

Todd called Maxine and told her he'd be at the vet's for the next few
hours.

Something wrong with that flatulent old dog of yours?"

You 11 be flatulent when you get to his age," Todd said. 'And yeah.
*There is something wrong. He keeps falling over."

He'd had Dempsey eleven years. He'd bought the dog as a pup jv before
he'd started to shoot Gunner. As a consequence the dog's first rea
experience of life beyond his mother's teat was being carried around
movie studio by his owner and adored; all of which he thereafter took;
his God-given right. Dempsey had been with Todd on every set since; I
two were inseparable. Todd and Dempsey; Dempsey and Todd. Tha to those
early experiences of universal affection he was a confident dog afraid
of nobody, and--unless somebody was afraid of him--predispos to be
friendly.

The vet's name was Doctor Spenser; an ebullient black woman who'cj been
looking after Dempsey since puppyhood. She did a few tests and toll Todd
that yes, there were definitive signs that Dempsey was having cog nitive
difficulties.

"How old is he now?"

"He'll be twelve next March."

"Oh that's right--we didn't know his birthday so we said--"

"--Oscar Night."

"What's wrong, boy?" Doctor Spenser said to Dempsey, ruffling 1 under
the chin. "He's certainly not his usual happy self, is he?"

"Nope."

"Well, I'd like to keep him in here for a few tests."

"I brought a stool sample like you asked."

"Thanks."

Todd produced a small Tupperware container of dog poop. "Well we'l have
that analyzed. You want the container back? Just kidding. Don't loc so
grim, Todd--"

"I don't like seeing him like this."

"It's probably a virus he's picked up. We'll give him a few antibiotic
and he'll be good as new."

"But there's something weird about his eyes. Look. He's not ev focussing
on us."

Dempsey had raised his head, knowing full well he was being talked

but plainly he was having some difficulty fixing his gaze on whoever
was doing the talking.

"This couldn't just be old age, could it?"

"I doubt it. He's been a very healthy dog so far, and it's my experience
that a mutt like Dempsey is going to last a lot longer than some over
bred hound. You leave him with me. Check in with me at the end of the
day."

Todd did that. The news was there was no news. The stool sample had gone
to the lab to be analyzed, and meanwhile Dempsey was looking weak,
perhaps a little disoriented, but there'd been no noticeable
deterioration in his condition.

"You can either take him home tonight or leave him here. He'll be
perfectly fine here. We don't actually have anybody monitoring the dogs
from eleven p.m. till six in the morning, but the chances of--"

"I'm going to come and collect him."

Despite Doctor Spenser's reassurances that there had been no
deterioration, Todd disagreed. Usually when he arrived at the vet's
after Dempsey had stayed in for a couple of hours, either for a shot, or
his six month check-up, he was greeted by the dog in crazy mode, yapping
his delight at seeing his boss again, and ready to be out of the door
before they could stick another damn needle in his backside. But today,
when Dempsey came round the corner it seemed to take a moment before the
dog even realized it was his master at the door, calling to him. And
when he came, though some of his old enthusiasm returned, he was a
shadow of his former self. Doctor Spenser had already gone off-duty for
the night.

Todd asked if he could have her home number, but there were some things,
it seemed, even being Todd Pickett couldn't get you.

She's got kids to take care of," the male nurse said. "She likes to keep
this place and her home-life very separate."

But if there's an emergency?"

I recommend going to the twenty-four-hour animal hospital on oepulveda.
There'll be doctors there all night if anything were to happen.

But honestly, I think it's some virus he's picked up out at the dog
park, and!

it'll just take a course of antibiotics." "Well can I take some
antibiotics then?" Todd said, getting a little irri-1 tated with the
casual way Dempsey's case was being treated.

"Doctor Spenser doesn't want to give Dempsey anything till she's got 1
some results from the stool sample, so I'm afraid there'll be no drugs
forl Dempsey until tomorrow."

Dempsey didn't eat. He just looked at the bowl of food Marco had pre-1
pared for him, and turned up his nose at it.

Then he went to lie on the back step and stayed there for the rest of
the evening.

In the middle of the night Todd was woken by what sounded like the?

effects track from The Exorcist, a stomach-wrenching series of mumbling
and eruptions. He switched on the bedroom light to find Dempsey at thel
bottom of his bed, standing in a pool of bright yellow puke. He lookec
horribly ashamed of having made a mess, and at first wouldn't come to
Todd to be petted, but when he did--and Todd had his arms around the
dog--it was clear he was in a bad way. Dempsey's whole body was cold;|
and he was trembling violently.

"Come on, m'man," he said. "We're gonna take you to get some!

proper doctoring."

The noise had woken Marco, who got dressed to drive while Todd held on
to Dempsey, who was wrapped in his favorite comforter, a quilt Todd'|
grandmother had made for her grandson. The dog lay sprawled o\ Todd's
knee, all one hundred pounds of him, while Marco drove throu the almost
empty streets to Sepulveda.

It was five minutes after five in the morning when they arrived at th^
animal hospital, and there were just two people waiting with their pets
1 be helped. Even so, it took twenty-five minutes before a doctor could
1 freed up to see Dempsey, during which time it seemed to Todd Dempsey's
condition worsened. His shaking became more violent that

ver and in the midst of one of his spasms, he convulsively shit brown
eruel, mostly on the floor, but on Todd's leg and shoe too.

"Well now," said the night doctor brightly, "what seems to be the
trouble?"

Todd gave him an exhaustive run-down on the events of the last day.

He then asked Todd to pick Dempsey up and put him on the examination
taye_choosing this particular instant to remark what a fan of Todd's he
was, as though Todd could have given a damn at that moment.

Then he examined the dog, in a good and thorough manner, but making
asides throughout as to which movies of Todd's he and his wife had
particularly enjoyed and which they hadn't. After about five minutes of
this, seeing the expression of despair and anger on Todd's face, Marco
quietly mentioned that Mister Pickett was really only interested right
now in the health of his dog. The doctor's mouth tightened, as though
he'd just been badly offended, and his handling of Dempsey (at least to
Todd's eyes) seemed to become a little more brusque.

"Well, you have a very sick dog," he said at the end of the examination,
not even looking at Todd but talking to Marco. He was plainly
embarrassed by his earlier show of fanboy enthusiasm, and was now
overcompensating for it wildly.

Todd went to sit on the examination table to cradle Dempsey, which put
him right in the doctor's line of sight.

Look," he said quietly, "I'm sorry if I'm not being quite as
appreciative of ... your support of my pictures as I would normally be,
Doc. It's nothing personal. I'm sure we could have a great conversation
about it under different circumstances. But I'd like Dempsey comfortable
first. He's sick and I want him better."

Finally the doctor managed a little smile, and when he spoke his voice
had also quieted, matching Todd's. "I'm going to put Dempsey on a saline
"rip, because he's obviously lost a lot of fluids in the last twelve to
twenty tour hours. That should make him feel a whole lot happier.
Meanwhile, you said Doctor Spenser over at Robertson VGA was doing stool
checks?" "She said it could be a virus."

"Well ... maybe. But looking at his eyes, it seems more systemic to me.

If he were a younger dog I'd say parvo or heartworm, which is a
parasite.

But again, we commonly see toxo in pound dogs or strays, and I'm sure
he's had his heartworm medications. Anyway, we'll see from the stool ;
results tomorrow."

"Wait, wait. You're saying it could be parvo or heartworm, but you:
don't really think it's either of these?"

"No."

"So what do you think it is?"

The doctor shook his head. "I'd say there's a better than fifty-fifty^
chance he's got some kind of tumor. On the brain or on the brainstem."

"And if he has?"

"Well, it's like a human being. You can sometimes fix these things--"

At this juncture, as though to demonstrate that things were not in a :
very fixable state right now, Dempsey started to shudder in Todd's arms^
his claws scrabbling against the metal table as he tried to stay
upright.

"It's okay, boy! It's okay!"

The doctor went for a nurse, and came back with an injection.

"What's that for?"

"Just to calm him down a little, so he can get some sleep."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure. It's a mild tranquilizer. If you don't want me to give
it to| the dog, Mister Pickett ..."

"Yes. Yes. Give it to him."

The injection did indeed subdue Dempsey's little fit. They wheelec him
away into another room to be given an intravenous infusion, leaving!

Todd with the quilt.

"Damn dog," he said, now Dempsey was out of earshot, "more trou-1 ble
than he's worth." Tears very close.

"Why don't we get a cup of coffee?" Marco suggested. 'And we can talk!

to the doctor more when we get back?"

There was a little donut shop in the mini-mall at the top of Sepulveda,
and . had just opened. They were the first customers of the day. Todd
knew the instant he walked in that both the women serving recognized
him, so he turned round and walked out again rather than risking getting
caught in a conversation: Marco brought out two coffees and two bear
claws in greaseproof paper, still warm from the oven. Though he hadn't
thought he had an appetite, the pastry was too good not to be eaten; so
he ate.

Then, coffee in hand, they walked down to the hospital, the eyes of the
women in the donut shop glued to Todd until he had disappeared from
sight.

They said nothing as they walked. The day was getting underway; the
traffic on Sepulveda backing up as it waited to take its turn to get
onto the freeway. These were people with two-hour commutes ahead of them
before they got to their place of work; people with jobs they hated,
houses they hated and a pay-check at the end of the month that wouldn't
even cover the cost of the mortgage, the car payments, the insurance.

"Right now," Todd said, "I'd give my eye teeth to be one of them,
instead of having to go back in there."

"I can go in for you."

"No." "Dempsey trusts me," Marco said.

"I know. But he's my dog."

 Again, there was no news. Dempsey had been hooked up to a saline dripj
and looked as though the tranquilizer had taken its effect. He wasn't
quite!

asleep, but he was dazy.

"We'll do an X-ray today, and see how he looks," the doctor said. "We *
should have the results back by the end of the day. So why don't you two
gal home, we'll keep Dempsey here and see what we can do to get him
well?" 1

"I want to stay."

"Well that's going to be very uncomfortable for you, Mister Pickettl We
don't have a room we can put you in, and frankly you both look as|
though you didn't get a full night's sleep. Dempsey's mildly sedated,
and we'll probably keep him that way But it's going to be six or seven
hours| before we get any answers for you. We share our X-ray technician
wit our hospital in Santa Monica, so she won't even be in to look at
Demps until eleven at the earliest."

"I still want to stay. You've got a bench out there. You're not going I
throw me out if I sit on that, are you?"

"No. Of course not."

"Then that's where I'll be."

The doctor looked at his watch. "I'll be out of here in half an hour
an(] the day-doctor, Doctor Otis, will be taking over Dempsey's case. I
will I course bring him up to speed with everything we've done so far
and if sh^ feels there's something else she wants to try--"

"She'll know where to find me."

"Right."

The doctor gave up a wan smile, his second and last of the night.
"Well, T incerely hope you have good news with Dempsey, and that by the
time I come in again tonight you've both gone home happy."

Todd would not be dissuaded from staying on the bench, even though it
was situated a few steps away from the front counter, next to the soda
machine, and would leave him in full view of everyone who came through
the next few hours. Marco said that he would come back with a Thermos of
good coffee and something to eat, and left Todd there.

The parade of the needy began early. About two minutes after Marco had
gone, a distraught woman came in saying that she'd struck a cat with her
car, and the victim was now in her car, alive, but terrified and badly
hurt.

Two nurses went out with well-used pairs of leather gloves and a syringe
of tranquilizer to subdue the victim. They came back with a weeping
woman and a corpse. The animal's panicked self-defenses had apparently
used up what little energies its broken body had possessed. The woman
was inconsolable. She tried to thank the nurses for their help but all
she could do was cry. There were six more accidents that rush hour, two
of them fatalities. Todd watched all this in a dazed state. Lack of
sleep was beginning to catch up with him. Every now and then his eyes
would flicker closed for a few seconds, and the scene in front of him
would jump, like a piece of film which had had a few seconds' worth of
action removed and then been spliced back together again. People moved
abruptly from one place to another. One moment somebody was coming in,
the next he was engaged in conversation (often tearful, sometimes
accusatory, always intense) with one of the nurses; the next he'd gone,
or he was on his way out.

Much to his surprise, nobody gave him more than a cursory glance.
Perhaps, they thought, that can't possibly be Todd Pickett, sitting on a
broken down old bench next to a broken-down old soda machine in a
twenty-four hour animal hospital. Or perhaps it was just that they saw
him, recognized and didn't care. They had other things to think about
right now, more

pressing than the peculiar presence of a weary-looking movie star on ;
broken-down bench. They had a rat with an abscess, a cat that had had
si| kittens but had got the seventh stuck, a guinea pig in a shoe box
that dead when the box was opened; a poodle that kept biting itself; a
proble with fleas, a problem with mange, two canaries that hated one
another, an j so on and so forth.

Marco came back with coffee and sandwiches. Todd drank some cofs, fee,
which perked him up.

He went to the front desk and asked, not for the first time, to see I
day-doctor. This time, he got lucky. Doctor Otis, a pale and slight you.

woman who looked no more than eighteen, and refused to look Todd I the
face (though this, he realized, was her general practice: she was same
with Marco and with the nurses, eyes constantly averted), appeared and
said that there was nothing to report except that Dempsey would 1 going
for X-rays in about half an hour, and they would be available viewing
tomorrow. At this point, Todd lost his temper. It happened rareli but
when it did it was an impressive spectacle. His neck became blotc red,
and the muscles of his face churned; his eyes went to ice-water.

"I brought my dog in here at five o'clock this morning. I've been wa ing
here--sitting on that bench--that bench right there, you see it?'. you
see that bench?"

"Yes, I--"

"That's where I've been since six o'clock. It is now almost elev
o'clock. I've asked on several occasions for you to have the commo
decency to come out and tell me what's happening to my dog. Alwa|
politely And I've been told, over an dover again, that you're very busy"
I

"It's been a crazy morning, Mister--?"

"Pickett is my name."

"Well, Mister Pickett, I'm afraid I can't--"

"Stop right there. Don't say you can't get the X-rays until tomorr
because you can. You will. I want my dog looked after and if you won't <
it I'll take him some place where he can be taken care of and I'll make
every damn newspaper in the State of California--"

At this moment an older woman, obviously the hospital manager, ed into
view and took Todd's hand, shaking it. "Mister Pickett. My e's cordelia
Simpson. It's all right, Andrea, I'll take care of Mister Pickett from
here."

The young woman doctor retreated. She was two shades whiter than she'd
been at the beginning of the conversation.

"I heard most of what you were telling Andrea--"

"Look, I'm sorry. That's not my style. I don't like losing my temper,
but--"

"No, it's okay. I understand. You're tired and you're concerned
about--?"

"Dempsey."

"Dempsey. Right." "I was told he'd be X-rayed today and we'd have the
results back this afternoon."

"Well, the speed of these things all depends on the volume of work,
Mister Pickett," Cordelia said. She was English, and had the face and
manner of a woman who would not be pleasant if she were riled, but was
doing her best right now to put on a gender face. "I read a piece about
you in the LA Times last year. You were on the cover with Dempsey, as I
remember. Clearly you're very close to your dog. Here's what I'm going
to do." She consulted her watch. "Dempsey is being seen by the
radiographer right now, and I guarantee that we'll have the results back
by ... six.

It might be earlier but I think six we can guarantee."

"So how long before I can take him home?"

"You want to take him now?"

"Yes."

You'll find him rather dopey. I'm not sure he could walk."

"I can carry him."

Cordelia nodded. She knew an immovable object when she saw one.

well 111 have one of the nurses come fetch you when he's ready. Is that
his?"

She pointed to the quilt on the bench. Quite unconsciously, Todd had
Deen nursing it while he waited. No wonder people had kept their
distance.

"Yes."

"Do you \vant me to have him wrapped up in it?"

"Thank you."

Cordelia picked up the quilt. 'And my apologies, Mister Pickett, for;
difficulties you may have had. Our doctors are horribly overworked. And
I'm afraid to say, often people who are wonderful with animals ar always
terribly good with human beings."

Ten minutes later a burly Latino appeared with a sleepy-eyed Demps
wrapped in his quilt. His ears pricked up just a little at the sight of
To enough for Todd to know that his holding the dog, and whispering to 1
meant something.

"We're going home, old guy," Todd murmured to him, as he carried 1 down
the steps into the street and round to the little parking lot her the
building, where Marco was backing out the car. "I know you did like it
in there. All those people you didn't know with needles and st Well,
fuck them." He put his nose into the cushion of baby fur her.

Dempsey's ear, which always smelled sweetest. "We're going home."

For the next few hours Dempsey slept in the quilt, which Todd had pxi on
his big bed. Todd stayed beside him, though the need for sleep caug up
with him several times, and he'd slide away into a few minutes
dreamland: fragments of things he'd seen from his bench in the wait
room, mostly. The box containing the dead guinea pig, that absurd pc
die, nipping its own backside bloody; all just pieces of the day,
coming; going. Then he'd wake and stroke Dempsey for a little while,
talk to 1 tell him everything was going to be okay.

There was a sudden rally in Dempsey's energies about four o'clc which
was when he was usually fed, so Todd had Marco prepare a sick-t version
of his usual meal, with chicken instead of the chopped horse-he or
whatever the hell it was in the cans, and some good gravy. Dempsey '< it
all, though he had to be held up to do so, since his legs were unreliabb
He then drank a full bowl of water.

"Good, good," Todd said.

Dempsey attempted to wag his tail, but it had no more power in it than
his legs had.

Todd carried him outside so he could shit and piss. A slight drizzle was
coming down; not cool, but refreshing. He held on to the dog, waiting
for the urge to take Dempsey, and he turned his face up to the rain,
offering a quiet little prayer.

"Please don't take him from me. He's just a smelly old dog. You don't
need him and I do. Do you hear me? Please ... hear me. Don't take him."

He looked back at Dempsey to find that the dog was looking back at him,
apparently paying attention to every word. His ears were half pricked,
his eyes half-open.

"Do you think anyone's listening?" Todd said.

By way of reply, Dempsey looked away from him, his head bobbing uneasily
on his neck. Then he made a nasty sound deep in his belly and his whole
body convulsed. Todd had never seen the term projectile vomit displayed
with such force. A stream of chewed chicken, dog mix and water squirted
out. As soon as it stopped, the dog began to make little whining sounds.
Then ten seconds later, Dempsey repeated the whole spectacle, until
every piece of nourishment and every drop of water he'd been given had
been comprehensively ejected.

After the second burst of vomiting he didn't even have the strength to
whine. Todd wrapped the quilt around him and carried him back into the
house. He had Marco bring some towels and dried him off where the rain
had caught him.

I don't suppose you care what's been going on all day, do you?" Marco
said.

"Anything important?"

Great foreign numbers on Gallows, particularly in France. Huge hit in
rrance, apparently. Maxine wants to know if you'd like to do a piece
about empsey's health crisis for one of the women's magazines."

"No."

"That's what I told her. She said they'd eat it up, but I said--"

"No! Fuck. Will these people never stop? No!"

"You got a call from Walter at Dream Works about some charity thing |

he's arranging, I told him you'd be back in circulation tomorrow."

"That's the phone."

"Yeah. It is."

Marco went to the nearest phone, which was in the master bathroom,!

while Todd went back to finish drying the dog.

"It's Andrea Otis. From the hospital. I think it's the nervous young
woman you saw this morning." "Stay with him," Todd said to Marco.

He went into the bathroom, which was cold. Picked up the phone.

"Mister Pickett?"

"Yes."

"First, I want to say I owe you an apology for this morning--"

"No, that's fine."

"I knew who you were and that threw me off--"

"Dempsey."

"--a little. I'm sorry."

"Dempsey."

"Yes. Well, we've got the X-ray results back and ... I'm afraid the the\
isn't very good."

"Why not? What's wrong with him?"

"He is riddled with cancer."

Todd took a long moment to digest this unwelcome news. Then said:
"That's impossible."

"It's in his spine. It's in his colon--"

"But that can't be."

"And it's now spreading to his brain, which is why we've only just I
covered it. These motor and perception problems he's having are all pa
of the same thing. The tumor's spreading into his skull, and pushing oe
his brain."

"Oh God."

"So ... I don't know -what you want to do."

 "I want this not to be happening."

"Well yes. But I'm afraid it is."

"How long has he got?"

"His present condition is really as good as things are going to get for
him." She spoke as though she were reading the words from an idiot
board, careful to leave exactly the same amount of space between each
one. "All that is really at issue is how quickly Dempsey becomes
incapacitated."

Todd looked through the open door at the pitiful shape shuddering
beneath the quilt. It was obvious that Dempsey had already reached that
point. Todd could be absurdly optimistic at times, but this wasn't one
of them.

"Is he in pain?" he asked the doctor.

"Well, I'd say it's not so much pain we're dealing with as anxiety. He
doesn't know what's happening to him. And he doesn't know why it's
happening. He's just suffering, Mister Pickett. And it's just going to
get worse."

"So you're saying I should have him put down?"

"It's not my place to tell you what to do with your dog, Mister
Pickett."

"But if he was your dog."

"If he was my dog, and I loved him as you obviously love Dempsey, I
wouldn't want him suffering ... Mister Pickett, are you there?" Here,"
Todd said, trying to keep the sound of tears out of his voice.

"So really it's up to you."

Todd looked at Dempsey again, who was making a mournful sound in his
sleep.

"If I bring him back over to the hospital?"

"Yes?"

Would there be somebody there to put him to sleep?"

"Yes, of course. I'll be here."

"Then that's what I want to do."

I'm so very sorry, Mister Pickett."

"It's not your fault."

Dempsey roused himself a little when Todd went back to bed, but it was
; barely more than a sniff and a half-hearted wag.

"Come on, you," he said, wrapping Dempsey tightly in the quilt, and
lift- ] ing him up, "the sooner this is done the sooner you're not an
unhappy; hound. Will you drive, Marco?"

It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and though the drizzle had ceased,
j the traffic was still horrendous. It took them fifty-five minutes to
get down!

to the hospital, but this time--perhaps to make up for her
unavailabilityj the last time he'd been there--Doctor Otis was at the
counter waiting for;!

him. She opened the side door, to let him into the non-public area.

"You want me to come in, boss?" Marco asked.

"Nah, it's okay. We'll be fine."

"He looks really out of it," the doctor remarked.

Dempsey had barely opened his eyes at the sound of Todd's voice.!

"You know, I realize this may seem like a strange thing to say, but in a
way| we're lucky that this caught him so fast. With some dogs it takes
weeks and months ..."

"In here?" Todd said.

"Yes."

The doctor had opened a door into a room not more than eight by j

I eight, painted in what was intended to be a soothing green. On one
walli was a Monet reproduction and on another a piece of poetry that
Toddl couldn't read through his assembling tears.

"I'll just give you two some time," Doctor Otis said. "I'll be back in
al few minutes."

Todd sat down with Dempsey in his arms. "Damn," he said softly. | "This
isn't fair."

Dempsey had opened his eyes fully for the first time in several hours, j
probably because he'd heard the sound of Todd crying, which had always j
made him very attentive, even if the crying was fake. Todd could be'
rehearsing a sad scene from a picture, memorizing lines, and as soon as

he first note of sadness crept into his voice Dempsey would be there,
his aws on Todd's knees, ready to give comfort. But this time the animal
didn't have the strength to help make the boss feel better. All he could
do was stare up at Todd with a slight look of puzzlement on his face.

"Oh God, I hope I'm doing the right thing. I wish you could just tell
nje that this is what you want." Todd kissed the dog, tears falling in
Dempsey's fur. "I know if I was you I wouldn't want to be shitting
everywhere and not able to stand up. That's no life, huh?" He buried his
face in the smell of the animal. For eleven years--whether Todd had had
female company or not--Dempsey had slept on his bed; and more often than
not been the one to wake him up, pressing his cold nose against Todd's
face, rubbing his neck on Todd's chest.

"I love you, dog," he said. 'And I want you to be there when I get to
Heaven, okay? I want you to be keeping a place for me. Will you do that?

Will you keep a place for me?"

There was a discreet knock on the door, and Todd's stomach turned.

"Time's up, buddy," he said, kissing Dempsey's burning-hot snout. Even
now, he thought, I could say no, I don't want you to do this. He could
take Dempsey home for one more night in the big bed. But that was just
selfishness.

The dog had had enough, that 'was plain. He could barely raise his head.
It was time to go.

"Come in," he said.

The doctor came in, meeting Todd's gaze for the first time. "I know how
hard this is," she said. "I have dogs myself, all mutts like Dempsey."

"Dempsey, did you hear that?" Todd said, the tears refusing to abate.

"She called you a mutt."

"They're the best."

"Yeah. They are."

"Are you ready?"

Todd nodded, at which point she instantly transferred her loving
attention to the dog. She lifted Dempsey out from Todd's arms and put
him on the steel table in the corner of the room, talking to him all the
while.

Hey there, Dempsey. This isn't going to hurt at all. Just a little
prick--"

She pulled a syringe out of her pocket, and exposed the needle. At the
back of Todd's head that same irrational voice was screaming: "Tell her
no! Knock it out of her hand! Quickly! Quickly!" He pushed the thoughts
away, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, because
he didn't want to be blinded by them when this happened. He wanted to
see it all, even if it hurt like a knife. He owed that to Dempsey. He
put his hand on Dempsey's neck and rubbed his favorite place. The
syringe went into Dempsey's leg. He made a tiny little grunt of
complaint.

"Good boy," Doctor Otis said. "There. That wasn't so bad now, was it?" :

Todd kept rubbing Dempsey's neck.

The doctor put the top back on the syringe and pocketed it. "It's all|
right," she said. "You can stop rubbing. He's gone."

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at
the body on the table. Dempsey's eye was still half-open, but it didn'if
look back at him any longer. Where there'd been a sliver of bright
life,;| where there'd been mischief and shared rituals--where, in short,
there'dj been Dempsey--there was nothing.

"I'm very sorry, Mister Pickett," the doctor said, "I'm sure you loved^
him very much and speaking as a doctor, I know you did the right thing
for j him."

Todd sniffed hard, and reached over to pluck a clump of tissues from ;
the box. "What does that say?" he said, pointing to the framed poster
on| the wall. His tears made it incomprehensible.

"It's a quote by Robert Louis Stevenson," Andrea said. "You know, the 5
man who wrote Treasure Island4?"

"Yeah, I know ..." "It says: 'Do you think dogs will not be in heaven? I
tell you, they will be there \ long before any of us.'"

 He waited until he got home, and he'd governed his tears, to make
arrangements for Dempsey's cremation. He left a message with a firm that
was recommended by the animal hospital for their discreet handling of
these matters. They would pick Dempsey's body up from the hospital
mortuary, cremate him and transfer his ashes, guaranteeing that there
was no mingling of "cremains"--as they described them--but that the
ashes they delivered to the owner would be those of their pet. In other
words they weren't putting canaries, parrots, rats, dogs and guinea pigs
in the oven for one big bonfire and dividing up the "cremains" (the word
revolted Todd) in what looked to be the appropriate amounts. He also
called his accountant at home and made arrangements for a ten-thousand
dollar donation to the hospital, the only attendant request being that
five hundred of that money be spent on putting in a more comfortable
bench for people to sit on while they waited.

He slept very well with the aid of several Ambien and a large scotch,
until about four-thirty in the morning, when he woke up and felt Dempsey
moving around at the bottom of the bed. The drugs made his thought
processes muddy. It took him a few seconds of leaning over and putting
the coverlet at the bottom of the bed to bring his consciousness up to
speed. Dempsey wasn't there.

Yet he'd felt the dog, he would have sworn to it on a stack of Bibles,
getting up and walking around and around on the same spot, padding down
the bed until it was comfortable for him.

He lay back on the pillow and drifted back to sleep, but it wasn't aj
healthy sleep thereafter. He kept half-waking, and staring down at the I
darkness of the bottom of the bed, wondering if Dempsey was a ghost |
now, and would haunt his heels until the dog had the sense to go on his
| way to Heaven.

He slept in until ten, when Marco brought him the phone with a woman!

1

called Rosalie from the Pet Cremation Service. She was pleasant in her
no-l nonsense way; no doubt she often had people in near hysteria at the
other!

end of the telephone, so a little professional distance was necessary.
She!

had already been in contact with the hospital this morning, she said,
and!

they had informed her that Dempsey had a collar and quilt with him. Did!

Todd want these items returned, or were they to be cremated with his
pet?

"They were his," Todd said, "so they should go with him." "Fine," said
Rosalie. "Then the only other question is the matter of the| urn. We
have three varieties--"

"Just the best you've got."

"That would be our Bronze Grecian Style."

"That sounds fine."

"All I need now is your credit card number."

"I'll pass you back to my assistant. He can help you with all that."

"Just one other question?"

"Yes."

"Are you ... the Todd Pickett?"

Yes, of course, he was the real Todd Pickett. But he didn't feel like
the real!

1 thing; more like a badly bruised lookalike. Things like this didn't
happeb|

to the real Todd Pickett. He had a way with life that always made it she
the bright side.

He went back to sleep until noon then got up and ate some lunch, hisl
body aching as though he were catching a heavy dose of the flu. His
foodl unfinished, he sat in the breakfast nook, staring blankly at the
potted]

lants artfully arranged on the patio; plants he'd never persuaded
Dempsey not to cock his leg against every time he passed.

"I'm going back to bed," he told Marco.

"You don't want to put a holding call in to Maxine? She's called nine
rnnes this morning. She says she has news about a foreign buyer for
Warrior"

"Did you tell her what happened to Dempsey?"

"Yes."

"What did she say?" "She said: oh. Then she went back to talking about
the buyer." Todd sighed, defeated by the woman's incomprehension. "Maybe
it's time I got out of this fucking business," he said to Marco. "I
don't have the balls for it any longer. Or the energy."

Marco put up no protest at this. He hated everything about the business,
except Todd, and always had. "Why don't we go down to Key West like we
always promised ourselves? Open a bar. Get fat and drunk--"

"--and die of heart attacks at fifty."

"You're feeling morbid right now."

"A little."

"Well it won't last forever. And one of these days, we'll have to honor
Dempsey and get another dog."

"That wouldn't be honoring him, that'd be replacing him. And he was
irreplaceable. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because he was there when I was nobody."

"You were pups together."

This got a smile out of Todd; the first in forty-eight hours. "Yeah ..."
he said, his voice close to breaking again. "We were pups together." He
tried to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. "What is wrong with
We? he said. "He was a dog. I mean ... come on. Tell me honestly, do you
think Tom Cruise cries for a day if one of his dogs dies?"

"I don't think he's got dogs."

"Or Brad Pitt?"

"I don't know. Ask 'em. Next time you see 'em, ask 'em."

"Oh sure, that's going to make a dandy little scene. Todd Pickett a Brad
Pitt: 'Tell me, Brad, when your dog died did you wail like a girl: two
days?'"

Now it was Marco who laughed. "Wail like a girl?"

"That's how I feel. I feel like I'm in the middle of some stupid
weepie.|

"Maybe you should call Wilhemina over and fuck her."

"Wilhemina doesn't do fucks. She does lovemaking with candles and \ lot
of wash-cloths. I swear she thinks I'm going to give her something."

"Fleas?"

"Yeah. Fleas. You know, as a last act of rebellion on behalf of Demps
and myself I'd like to give fleas to Wilhemina, Maxine and--"

"Gary Eppstadt."

Both men were laughing now, curing the hurt the only way it could 1
cured, by being included in the nature of things.

Speaking of inclusion, he got a call from his mother, about six o'clock.
Si was at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but sounded ready to ji the
first plane and come visit. She was in one of her

"I've a funny feelings moods.

"What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Yes there is."

She was inevitably right; she could predict with startling accuracy I
times she needed to call her famous son and the times when she show keep
her distance. Sometimes he could lie to her, and get away with it. B
today wasn't one of those days. What was the point?

"Dempsey's dead."

"That old mutt of yours."

"He was not an old mutt and if you talk about him like that then I
conversation ends right here." "How old was he?" Patricia asked.

"Eleven, going on twelve."

"That's a decent age."

"Not for a dog like him."

"What kind of dog would that be?"

"You know--"

"A mutt. Mutts always live longer than thoroughbreds. That's a fact of
life."

"Well, mine didn't."

"Too much rich food. You used to spoil that dog--"

"Is there anything else you want besides lecturing me about how I killed
my dog with kindness?"

"No. I was just wanting to chat, but obviously you're in no mood to
chat."

"I loved Dempsey Mom. You understand what I'm saying?"

"If you don't mind me observing something--"

"Could I stop you?"

"--it's sad that the only serious relationship you've had is with a dog.

It's time you grew up, Todd. You're not getting any younger, you know.

You think about the way your father aged."

"I don't want to talk about this right now, okay?"

"Listen to me."

"Mom. I don't--"

"You've got his genes, so listen for once, will you? He was a good
looking man, your father, till he was about thirty-four, thirty-five.
Now, granted he didn't take care of himself and you do--I mean he smoked
and he drank a lot more than was good for him. But his looks went
practically overnight."

"Overnight? That's ridiculous. Nobody's looks go--"

"All right, it wasn't overnight. But I was there. I saw. Believe me, it
was quick. Five, six months and all his looks had gone."

Even though this was an absurd exaggeration, there was an element of
truth in what Patricia Pickett was saying. Todd's father had indeed lost
his looks with remarkable speed. It would not have been the kind of
thing a son would have noticed, necessarily, but Todd had a second
point-of-view

on his father's sudden deterioration: his best friend Danny had been
raised by a single mother who'd several times made her feelings for
Merric Pickett known to her son. The rumors had reached Todd, of coursej
Indeed they'd become practically weekly reports, as Danny's mother's
plans to seduce the unwitting subject of her desires were laid (and
failed| and re-laid.

All this came back to Todd as his mother went on chatting. Eventually he
said, "Mom, I've got to go. I've got to make some decisions about the
cremation."

"Oh, Lord, I hope you're keeping this quiet. The media would have ;
party with this: you and your dog."

"Well all the more reason for you to clam up about it," he warned. "If
anybody calls, saying they want a quote."

"I know nothing."

"You know nothing."

"I know the routine by now, honey. Don't worry, your secret's sa with
me."

"Don't even tell the neighbors."

"Fine! I won't."

"Bye, Mom."

"I'm sorry about Brewster."

"Dempsey."

"Whatever."

It was true, when Todd gave the subject some serious thought: Merric
Pickett had indeed lost his looks with startling speed. One day he'd bee
the best-looking insurance agent in the city of Cincinnati, the next
(it| seemed) Danny's mother wouldn't look twice at him. Suppose this
wasl hereditary? Suppose fifty percent of it was hereditary?

He called Eppstadt's office. It took the sonofabitch forty-eight
minutes| to return the call and when he did his manner was brusque.

"I hope this isn't about Warrior?"

"It isn't."

"We're not going to do it, Todd."

"I get it, Gary. Is your assistant listening in on this conversation?"

"No. What do you want?"

"When we had lunch you recommended a guy who'd done some work for a few
famous names."

"Bruce Burrows?"

"How do I get hold of him? He's not in the book."

"Don't worry. I'll hook you up."

"Thanks."

"You're making a good call, Todd. I hope we can get back in business as
soon as you're healed."

Once he had the number, Todd didn't leave himself further room for
hesitation.

He called Burrows, booked the consultation, and tentatively chatted over
some dates for the operation.

There was one piece of outstanding business before he could move on: the
disposal of Dempsey's ashes. Despite the reassurances of Robert Louis
Stevenson, Todd did not have any clear idea as to the permanence of any
soul, whether animal or human. He only knew that he wanted Dempsey's
mortal remains to be placed where the dog had been most happy. There was
no doubt about where that was: the backyard of the Bel Air house, which
had been, since his puppyhood, Dempsey's unchallenged territory: his
stalking ground, his school-yard when it came to learning new tricks.
And it was there, the evening before Todd put himself into the hands of
Bruce Burrows, that he took the bronzed plastic urn provided by the
cremation company out into the yard. The urn contained a plastic bag,
which in turn contained Dempsey's ashes. There were a lot of them; but
then he'd been a big dog.

Todd sat down in the middle of the yard, where he and Dempsey had so
often sat and watched the sky together, and poured some of the ashes wto
the palm of his hand. What part of this gray sand was his tail, he
wondered, and which his snout? Which part the place behind his ear he'd
love you forever if you rubbed? Or didn't it matter? Was that the point
about

 scattering ashes: that in the end they looked the same? Not just the
snoutl and the tail, but a dog's ashes and a man's ashes. All reducible,
with thej addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust? He put his
lips to it, once,!

to kiss him good-bye. In his head he could hear his mother telling him
thatf it was a gross, unhealthy thing to do, so he kissed it again, just
to spite her,!

Then he stood up and cast Dempsey's ashes around, like a farmer sowing
seeds. There was no wind. The ash fell where he threw it, evenly dist
uted over the mutt's dominion.

"See you, dog," he said, and went back into the house to get himself j
large bourbon.

 For four months, in the summer of his seventeenth year, Todd had
worked at the Sunset Home for the Elderly on the outskirts of Orlando,
where he'd got a job through his Uncle Frank, who worked as an
accountant for Sunset Homes Incorporated. The place was little more than
a repository for the nearly-dead; working there had been the most
depressing experience of his young life. Most of his duties did not
involve the patients--he had no training as a nurse, nor did he intend
to get any. But the care of one of the older occupants, a man by the
name of Duncan Mcfarlane, was given over to him because Mcfarlane was
prone to unruliness when he was being bathed by the female nurses.
Mcfarlane was no great trouble to Todd. He was just a sour sonofabitch
who wasn't going to make anybody's life one jot easier if he could
possibly avoid it.

The ritual of giving a bed-bath to his patient was Todd's particular
horror; the sight of his own body awoke a profound self-disgust in the
old man.

Asking around, Todd had discovered that Mcfarlane had been an athlete in
his prime. But now--at the age of eighty-three--there was no trace of
toe strength or the beauty his body had once possessed. He was a pallid
sack of shit and resentment, revolted by the sight of himself.

Look at me, he would say when Todd uncovered him, Christ, look at me,
Christ, look at me. Every time it was the same murmured horror. Look at
the, Christ, look at me.

To this day, the image of Mcfarlane's nakedness remained with Todd m all
its grotesque particulars. The little beard of dirty white hair that
hung from the old man's scrotum; the constellation of heavy, dark warts

 above his left nipple; the wrinkled folds of pale, spotted flesh that
hi; under his arms. Todd felt guilty about his disgust, and kept it to
himself] until one day it had been the subject of discussion in the
day-room, he'd discovered that his feelings were shared, especially by
the male mem| hers of the nursing staff. The female nurses seemed to
have more cor passion, perhaps; or were simply indifferent to the facts
of creeping ser ity. But the other men on the staff--there were four of
them besid Todd--were afterward constantly remarking on the foulness of
then charges. One of the quartet--a black guy from New Orleans called
Aust Harper--was particularly eloquent on the subject.

"I ain't endin' up like any o' these of' fucks," he remarked on more I
one occasion, "I'd blow my fuckin' brains out 'fore I'd sink that fuc
low." "It won't happen," Todd had said.

"How'd you reckon that, white boy?" Austin had said. He'd pat Todd on
his backside; which he took every possible opportunity to do. 1

"When we're as old as these folks there'll be ways to fix it," Tod
replied.

"You mean we'll live forever? Bullshit. I don't buy any of that science
fiction crap, boy."

"I'm not saying we'll live forever. But they'll have figured out wh
gives us wrinkles, and they'll have a way to smooth them out."

"Will they now? So you's going' to be all smoothed out, is you?"

"I sure as hell am."

"You'll still die, but you'll die all smoothed out an' pretty?" He
tapped] Todd's ass appreciatively again.

"Will you quit doin' that?" Todd said.

"I'll quit when you quit wavin' it in my nose." Austin laughed, slapped
Todd's ass a third time, a stinging swat.

"Anyways," Todd said, "I don't give a shit what you think. I'm going 1
die pretty."

The phrase had lingered. To die pretty; that was the grand ambition To
die pretty, and not find yourself like poor old Duncan Mcfarlane, look

down at his own nakedness and saying, over an dover: Oh Christ, look at
me. Oh Christ, look at me. Oh Christ ... Two months after Todd had left
Florida to go to Los Angeles for a screen test he'd got a scrawled note
from Austin Harper, who--given that it was more or less certain that
they'd never see one another again--figured it was okay for Todd to know
that if Austin had had a chance he would have plowed Todd's ass "all the
way to Key West and back"

".nd then you'd be all smoothed out, baby," Harper had written.

"Oh, and by the way," he'd added, "that old fuck Mcfarlane died a week
ago. Tried to give himself a bath in the middle of the night.

Drowned himself in three inches of water. That's what I call a damn fool
thing to do.

"Stay smooth, m'man. You're going to do great. I know it. Just remember
to thank me when they gives you an Oscar."

 "Kiddo?"

Todd was floating in a blind black place, his body untethered.

couldn't even feel it.

"Kiddo? Can you hear me?"

Despite the darkness all around, it was a comfortable place to be it
There were no predators here in this no-man's-land. There were no shark
circling, wanting ten percent of his flesh. Todd felt pleasantly remov
from everything. Except for that voice calling him.

"Kiddo? If you can hear me, move your finger."

It was a trick, he knew. It was a way to get him to go back to the worli
where once he'd lived and breathed and been unhappy. But he didn't wa to
go. It was too brittle, that place; brittle and bright. He wanted to
staf where he was, here in the darkness, floating and floating.

"Kiddo ... it's Donnie."

Dannie?

Wait, that couldn't be right. His older brother, Donnie? They hadn'i
talked in months. Why would he be here, trying to seduce him out of 1
comfortable hideaway? But then, if not Donnie, then who? Nobody el ever
called him Kiddo.

Todd felt a dim murmur of anxiety. Donnie lived in Texas, for Godl sake.
What was he doing here?

"Talk to me, Kiddo."

Very reluctantly, Todd forced himself to reply to the summons, through

hen he finally coaxed his lips to shape it the sound he made was as
ternote as the moon.

"Donnie?"

"Well, howdy. I must say it's good to have you back in the land of the
livin' " He felt a hand laid on his arm. The sensation, like Donnie's
voice, and his own, felt distant and dulled.

"You had us a bit stirred up for a while there."

"Why's ... it ... so dark in here?" Todd said. "Will you have someone
turn on the lights?"

"Everything's going to be okay, buddy."

"Donnie. Pkase. Turn on the lights."

"They are on, Kiddo. It's just you've got some bandages over your face.

That's all it is. You're going to be just fine."

Bandages on his face.

Now it all started to come back to him. His last memories. He'd been
going under Burrows's knife for the big operation.

The last thing he remembered was Burrows telling him to count backward
from ten. Burrows had been smiling reassuringly at him, and as Todd
counted he had thought: I wonder how much work he's had done on that
face of his? The nose for sure. And all the lines gone from around his
eyes--

"Are you counting, Todd?" Burrows had said.

"Ten. Nine. Eight--"

There hadn't been a seven. Not that Todd could remember. The drugs had
swept him off to their own empty version of La-La Land.

But now he was back from that dreamless place, and Donnie was here at
his bedside, all the way from Texas. Why? And why the bandages over his
eyes? Burrows hadn't said anything about bandages.

"My mouth's so dry," Todd whispered.

No problemo, buddy," Donnie replied gently. "I'll get the nurse in
here."

have a vodka ... straight up."

Donnie chuckled. "I'll see what I can do."

Todd heard him get up and go to the door, and call for a nurse. His con
sciousness wavered, and he felt himself slipping back into the void from
which he'd just been brought by Donnie's voice. The prospect of that k
darkness didn't seem quite as comforting as it had a few moments befor
He started to panic, scrambling to keep hold of the world, at least
until ] knew what had happened to him.

He called out to Donnie:

"Where are you? Donnie? Are you there?"

Footsteps came hurriedly back in his direction.

"I'm still here, Kiddo." Donnie's voice was tender. Todd coulc remember
ever hearing such tenderness in it before now.

"Burrows didn't tell me it'd be like this," Todd said.

"There's nothing to get worked up about," Donnie replied.

Even in his semi-drugged state, Todd knew a lie when he heard one.;

"You're not a very good actor," he said.

"Runs in the family," Donnie quipped, and squeezed Todd's arm a "Just
kidding."

"Yeah ... yeah ..." Todd said. As he spoke a spasm of pain ran from I
bridge of his nose and spread across his face in both directions. He
suddenly in excruciating agony. "Jesus," he gasped. "Jesus. Make it
stop!|

He felt Donnie's reassuring hand go from his arm; heard his brot
crossing to the door again, yelling as he went, his voice suddenly st
with fear: "Will somebody get in here. Right now! Christ!"

Todd's panic, momentarily soothed by his brother's voice, started to 1
up in him again. He raised his hand to his face. The bandages were
tight; smooth, like a visor over his head, sealing him in. He started to
hyper late. He was going to die in here, if he didn't get this
smothering stuff 4 his face. He began to claw at the bandages. He needed
air. Right now!

Air, for Christ's sake, air--

"Mister Pickett, don't do that! Please!"

The nurse caught hold of Todd's hands, but the panic and the ] made him
strong and she couldn't prevent him from digging his fing beneath the
bandages and pulling.

There were flashes of light in his head, but he knew it wasn't the
light f the outside world he was seeing. His brain was overloading; fear
was

leaping like lightning across his skull. His blood roared in his ears.
His body thrashed around in the bed as though he were in the grip of a
seizure.

"All right, nurse. I've got him now."

Suddenly, there were hands around his wrists. Somebody stronger than the
nurse was gently but insistently pulling his fingers away from his face.

Then a voice came to find him through the sound of his own sobs.

"Todd? This is Doctor Burrows. Everything is fine. But please calm dawn.
Let me explain what's going on. There's nothing to worry about."

He spoke like a hypnotist, the cadence of his sentences even, his voice
completely calm. And while he went on speaking, repeating the same
information--that everything was fine, all Todd had to do was breathe
deeply, deeply--he held Todd's arms against the bed.

After a few moments, the bright bursts of light began to become less
frequent. The din of blood began to recede. So, by degrees, did the
waves of panic.

"There," Doctor Burrows said, when the worst of it was over. "You see?

Everything's fine and dandy. Now why don't we get you a fresh pillow?

Nurse Karyn? Would you please get Mister Pickett a nice fresh pillow?"

Oh so gently, Burrows raised the upper half of Todd's body off the bed,
talking to him all the while: the same calming monologue. All the
strength to resist, indeed all need to do so, had gone out of Todd. All
he could do was abandon himself to Burrows's care.

Finally he said: "What's ... wrong ... with me?"

"First let's get you comfortable," Burrows replied. "Then we'll talk it
all through."

Todd felt the motion of the nurse as she slipped the fresh pillow into
place behind him. Then, with the same tenderness as he used to lift him
up, Burrows carefully lowered Todd back down upon the pillow.

There. Isn't that better?" Burrows said, finally letting his patient go.

Todd felt a pang of separation, like a child who'd been abruptly
deserted.

"I'm going to let you rest for a while," Burrows went on. "And whe
you've slept, we'll talk properly." "No ..." Todd said.

"Your brother Donald's here with you."

"I'm here, Todd."

"I want to talk now," Todd said. "Not later. Now. Donnie! Make stay."
"It's okay, Kiddo," Donnie said with just the right edge of threap
"Doctor B.'s not going' anywhere. Answer his question, Doc." "Well, first
things first," Burrows said. "There's absolutely not wrong with your
eyes, if that's what you're worried about. We just ha to keep the
dressings in place around your eye-sockets."

"You didn't tell me I'd be waking up in the dark," Todd said.

"No ..." Burrows replied. "That's because the procedure didn't quite as
we planned. But every operation is a little different, as you'] remember
I explained to you. I'm sorry I wasn't here when you woke.., Now that he
was calmer, Todd began to recall some of the things abo  Burrows that
had irritated him. One of them was that voice of his: fake basso
pro/undo that was a practiced attempt to conceal his queenine and to
match his voice to the heroic proportions of his body. An artific body,
of course. The man was a walking advertisement for his craft, was
fifty-five at least, but he had the skin of a baby, the arms and the <
of a body-builder and the wasp-waist of a showgirl.

"Just tell me the truth," Todd said to him. "Did something go wr I'm a
big boy. I can take it."

There was a pin-drop silence. Todd waited. Finally, Burrows said: had a
few minor complications with your procedure, that's all. I'l explained
it all to your brother Donald. There's nothing--absoh nothing--for you
to be concerned about. It's just going to take a lit more time than
we'd--"

"What kind of complications?"

"We don't need to go into that now, Todd."

 "Yes, we do," Todd said. "It's my face, for fuck's sake. Tell me
what's acini on. And don't screw around with me. I don't like it."

"Tell him, Doc," Donnie said, quietly but firmly.

Todd heard Burrows sigh. Then that studied voice again: "You'll remember
that during the preparation evaluation I did warn you that on occasion
there were reactions to chemical peels which could not be predicted.

And I'm afraid that's what happened in your case. You've had an extreme,
and as I say completely unpredictable, allergic response to the peel. I
don't believe for one moment there's going to be any significant damage
in the long term. You're a healthy young man. We're going to see some
swift epidermal regeneration--"

"What the fuck's that?"

"Your skin's gonna grow back," Donnie replied, his Texan drawl turning
the remark into a piece of cold comedy.

"What do you mean?" Todd said.

"The effect of the procedure we use--as I explained in our evaluation,
and is fully described in the literature I gave you--"

"I didn't read it," Todd said. "I trusted you."

"--the procedures we use may be likened to a very controlled chemical
burn, which produces changes in the dermis and the epidermis. Damaged or
blemished skin is removed, and after forty-eight hours at the most, new,
healthy skin is naturally generated, which has pleasing characteristics.

The client regains a youthful--"

This time it was Donnie who interrupted Burrows's molassic flow.

Tell him the rest," Donnie said, his voice thick with anger. "If you
don't tell him, I will," Donnie went on. He didn't give Burrows a chance
to make the choice. "You've been out of it since you had the operation,
Kiddo. In a coma. For three days. That's why they sent for me. They were
getting worried. I tried to have you moved to a proper hospital, but
that bitch of a manager--Maxine, is it?--she wouldn't let me. She said
you'd want to stay here. Said she was afraid the press would find out if
you were transferred."

"We're perfectly capable of looking after Mister Pickett here," Burrows
said. "There isn't a hospital in California that could give him better
care."

"Yeah, well, maybe," Donnie said. "Seems to me he'd still be better off
in Cedars-Sinai."

"I really resent the implication--" Burrows began.

"Will you just shut thejuck up?" Donnie said wearily. "I don't give a
monkey's ass what you resent. All I care about is getting my brother
properly fixed up and out of here."

"And as I say--"

"Yeah. As you say. Tell you what, why don't you and Nurse Karyn there I
step out for a few minutes and let me have a private word with myi
brother?"

Burrows didn't attempt any further self-justification, and Todd knew
why. He could imagine Donnie's expression in perfect detail: both
broth.?

ers got color in their faces when they were riled up; and a cold eye.

Burrows duly retreated, which was the wisest thing he could have done.

"I want to get you out of here, Kiddo," Donnie said as soon as they had|

gone. "I don't trust these people as far as I could throw 'em. They're
full' of shit."

"I need to talk to Maxine before we do anything."

"What the fuck for? I don't trust her any more than I trust these sons
of I bitches."

There was a long silence. Todd knew what was coming next; so he just!

waited for it.

"Just so you know," Donnie said, "you've done some damn-fool things in I
your life, but this whole deal is the stupidest idea I ever heard.
Gettin' youm self a fuckin' face-lift? What kinda thing is that? Christ.
Does Momma!

know about this?"

"No. I put you down as next of kin. I thought you'd understand."

"Well I can't say I do. It's a mess. It's a goddam mess. And I've got to
go  back to Texas tomorrow."

"Why so soon?"

"Because I've got a court appearance at eight o'clock on Thursday I

morning. Linda's tryin' to take away my weekends with Donnie Junior,
and if I'm not i*1 court ner lawyer's going to get the judge to rule
against me. I've been up before him a couple of times, and he doesn't
like me. So, I'm going to have to love you and leave you, which I don't
much like doin'. I guess I could call Momma and--"

"No! No, Donnie, please. I don't want her here." Todd reached out blind;
caught hold of Donnie's arm. "I'll be okay. You don't have to worry
about me. I'll be just fine."

"All right. I hear you. I won't call Momma. Besides, the worst's over.

I'm sure that's right. But listen to me, you get yourself the hell out
of here and go to a proper hospital."

"I don't want the press finding out about this. If Maxine thinks--"

"Have you heard a fuckin' word I said?" Donnie said, his voice getting
louder. "I don't trust that bitch. She's out for herself. That's all she
cares about. Her piece of the action."

"Don't start shouting."

"Well, what the fuck do you expect? I've been sitting here for seventy
two hours straight wondering how I was going to tell Mom that you died
having plastic fucking surgery on your fucking face--" He paused for a
breath. "Christ, if Dad was alive ... he'd be so damned ashamed."

"Okay, Donnie. I get the message. I'm a fuck-up."

"You're surrounded by so many ass-kissers, you're not getting good
advice. It makes me wanna puke. I mean, these people. They're all
puttin' on some show--tellin' me this, tellin' me that--and meanwhile
you're lying there at death's door.

And will they give you a straight answer? Will theyjuck!" He paused to
draw sufficient breath to launch in afresh. "What happened to you,
Kiddo?

Ten years ago you would have laughed your butt off at the thought of
getting a facelift."

Todd let go of Donnie's arm. He drew a deep, sorrowful breath. "It's
hard to explain," he said. "But I got to stay on top of the heap
somehow.

Younger guys keep coming along ..."

So let 'em. Why do you need to stay on top? Why not walk away from

 it? You've had a good run, for Christ's sake. You've had it all, I'd
say. All an| more. I mean fuck! What more do you want? Why do this to
yourself?" , "Because I like the life, Donnie. I like the fame. I like
the money."

Donnie snorted. "How much more money do you damn well need You've got
more than you can spend if you--"

"Don't tell me what I've got and I haven't got. You don't know what I
costs to live. Houses and taxes." He stopped his defense; took a
differei tack. 'Anyhow, I don't hear you complaining--" "Wait--" Donnie
said, knowing what was coming. But Todd wasnlj about to be stopped.

"--when I send you money."

"Don't start that."

"Why not? You sit there tellin' me what a fuck-up I am, but you never
said no to the cash when you needed it. Which is all the time. Who pa
your last legal bills, Donnie? And the mortgage on the house so you cor
start over with Linda, for the third time or fourth time or whatever it
wa Who paid for that mistake?"

He let the question hang there, unanswered. Eventually, very quiet
Donnie said: "This is so fucked. I came here--"

"--to see whether I was dead or alive."

"--to look after you." "You never cared before," Todd said, with painful
bluntness. "Well < you? All these years, when have you ever come out
here and spent with me?"

"I was never welcome."

"You were always welcome. You just never came because you were to
fucking jealous. Why don't you admit it? At least once, between us, say
it you were so fucking jealous you couldn't stand the idea of coming of
here."

"You know what? I don't need to hear this," Donnie said.

"You should have heard it years ago."

"I'm outta here."

"Go on. You did your gloating. Now you can go home and tell everyone
what an asshole your brother is." "I'm not going to do that," Donnie
said. "You're still my brother, whatever you do. But I can't help you if
you surround yourself--" "__with ass-kissers. Yeah. You said that."

Todd heard Donnie get up and cross to the door, dragging his feet as he
always had.

"What are you doing?" Todd said.

"I'm leaving. Like I said I would. You're going to be fine. That faggot
Burrows will take very good care of you."

"Don't I get a hug or something?"

"Another time. When I like you better," Donnie said.

"And when the hell will that be?" Todd yelled after him.

But all he got by way of reply was the echo of his own voice off the
opposite wall.

 Maxine turned up a little after seven, and after a few perfunctory
expr sions of relief that Todd was "back from the dead," as she
indelicately pq it, quickly moved on to the news she was here to debate.

"Somebody in this place has a big mouth," she said. "I got a call fror.

the editor of the Enquirer this afternoon, asking if it was true that
youl been admitted to a private hospital. I told him absolutely not;
this was| lie, garbage, etc., etc. And I said that if he published that
you were in I hospital or anything vaguely resembling that, we'd sue him
and wretched rag. Ten seconds later I've got Peter Bart calling from
Varie asking the same damn question. And while I'm on with Peter, trying
nc to tell him an out-and-out lie 'cause he has a nose for bullshit, I
have a < from People on the other line, asking the same question.
Coincidence?!

don't think so."

Todd moaned behind his mask of bandages.

"I've told Burrows we have to move you," Maxine went on.

"Wait, Donnie said yesterday you told him that you wanted me to st
here."

"That was before I got the calls. Now it's just a matter of time befoij
some photographer finds his way in here."

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

"That would make a nice little picture, wouldn't it?" Maxine said, jv in
case Todd hadn't already got a snapshot in his mind's eye. "You lying)
bed with your face all bandaged up." "Wait!" Todd said. "They'd never be
able to prove it was me."

 "The point is: it is you, Todd. Whoever's put out the word about your
being here is working in this building. They've probably got access to
your records, your charts--"

Todd felt a spasm of the same panic that had seized him when he'd first
woken up. The horror of being trapped. This time he governed it,
determined not to let Maxine see him losing control.

"So when are you getting me out of here?" he said.

"I've got a car coming at five tomorrow morning. I've told Burrows I
want the security in this place tripled till you leave. We'll take you
to the beach house in Malibu until we find somewhere more practical." "I
can't go home?" Todd said, knowing even as he floated the idea that it
was out of the question. That would be the first place the journalists
and the paparazzi would come looking for him.

"Maybe we should fly you out of state when you're feeling a little
better.

I'll call John; see if I can get him to fly you up to Montana."

"I don't want to go to Montana."

"You'd be a lot more secure up there than here. We could arrange for
round-the-clock nursing--"

"I said no. I don't want to be that far away from everything."

"M right, we'll find some place here in the city. What about your new
lady-friend, Miss. Bosch? She's going to be asking questions too. What
do you want me to tell her?"

"She's gone. She's shooting something in the Cayman Islands."

She was fired," Maxine said. " 'Creative differences,' apparently. The
director wanted her to show her tits and she said no. Though God knows
some of her runway work has left little to the imagination. I don't know
why she's got coy all of a sudden. Anyway, she wants to talk to you.
What do I say?"

Anything you like."

So you don't want her in on this?"

Fuck no. I don't want anybody to know."

Okay. It's going to be difficult, but okay. I've got to go. Do you want
e to send a nurse in to give you something to help you sleep?"

 "Yeah ..."

"We'll find a place for you, until you mend. I'll ask Jerry Brahms. He
knows the city back to front. All we need's a little hideaway. It
needn't be fancy."

"Just make sure he doesn't get wind of what's going on," Todd said.

"Jerry talks."

"Give me a little credit," Maxine replied. "I'll see you tomorrow
morning.

You get some sleep. And don't worry, nobody's going to find out, where
you are or what's happened. I'll kill 'em first."

"Promise."

"With my bare hands."

So saying, she was out of the room, leaving Todd alone and in the dark.

Donnie was right, of course. This was undoubtedly the stupidest thing he
had ever done. But there was no going back on it. Life, like a movie,
only made sense running in one direction. What could he do but go with
the flow and hope to hell there was a happy ending waiting for him in
the last reel? =

A storm moved in off the Pacific in the middle of the night; the seventh
storm of that winter, and the worst. Over the next forty-eight hours it
would dump several inches of rain along the coast from Monterey to San
Diego, creating a catalogue of minor disasters. Storm-drains overflowed
and turned the streets of Santa Barbara into white-water rivers; two
citizens and seven street-people were swept away and drowned.
Power-lines were brought down by the furious winds, the most badly
struck area being Orange County, where a number of communities remained
without power for the next three days. Along the Pacific Coast Highway,
where the wildfires of the previous autumn had stripped the hillsides of
] vegetation, the naked earth, no longer knitted together by roots,
turned into mud and slid down onto the road. There were countless
accidents; fourteen people perished, including a family of seven
Mexicans, who'd only been in the promised land four hours, having
skipped over the border illegally. All burned up together, trapped in
their overturned truck. In

Pacific Palisades, the deluge carried away several million-dollar
homes; in Topanga Canyon, the same.

Of course all this made the business of getting Todd from the hospital
to Maxine's beach-house both more lengthy and more frustrating than it
would have been otherwise, but it may have helped to keep the endeavor
secret. Certainly there were no photographers at the hospital door when
they left; nor anybody waiting for them in the vicinity of the
beach-house.

But that didn't mean they were out of danger. Calls to Maxine's offices
inquiring about Todd's condition had multiplied exponentially, and they
were now coming in from further afield--several from Japan, where
Gallows had just opened--as the rumors spread. One of the German
reporters had even had the temerity to suggest that Todd was undergoing
plastic surgery.

"I gave him hell. Fucking Kraut."

"Aren't you German on your mother's side?"

"He's still a fucking Kraut."

Todd was sitting in the back of Maxine's Mercedes, with Nurse Karyn--who
had been thoroughly investigated by Maxine and judged reliable--at his
side. The nurse was a woman of few words: but those she chose to utter
usually carried some punch.

"I don't see why y'all give a damn. I mean, what does it matter if
somebody gets wind of it? He just got a chemical peel and a few nips and
tucks.

What's the big deal?"

It s not something Todd's fans need to know about," Maxine replied.

They've got a certain idea of who Todd is."

So they'd think it wasn't too masculine"?" Nurse Karyn said.

Shall we just move on from this?" Maxine said, catching Nurse Karyn's
gaze in the driving mirror, and shaking her head to indicate that the
conversation --or at least this portion of it--was at an end. Todd, of
course, saw none of this. He was still bandaged blind.

How are you doing, Todd?" Maxine said.

Wondering how soon--" Soon," Maxine said. "Soon. Oh, by the way, I had a
word with Jerry

Brahms, and told him exactly what we needed. Two hours later he came '
back to me, said he had the perfect house for you. I'm going to see it
with him tomorrow."

"Did he tell you where it was?"

"Somewhere up in the hills. Apparently, it was a place he used to go and
play when he was a kid. I guess this is in the forties. He says it's
completely secluded. Nobody's going to come bothering you."

"He's full of shit. They have fucking bus tours up in the hills. Every:
other house has somebody famous living in it." "That's what I told him.
But he swore this house was ideal. Nobody \ even knows about the canyon
it's in. That's what he said. So we'll see. If it isn't any good for
you, I'll keep looking."

Later that afternoon, Burrows came out to the beach-house to change
Todd's dressings. It was a surreal ritual for all concerned: Todd
semirecumbent on the Deco sofa in the large window overlooking the
beach, Maxine sitting at a distance, nursing an early vodka stinger,
Burrows--his ' confidence tentatively back in place after the prickly
exchanges of the previous day--chatting about the rain and the
mud-slides while he delicately removed the bandages.

"Now the area around your eyes is going to be a little gummed up," he
warned Todd, "so don't try and open your eyes until I've done some
cleaning." Todd said nothing. He was just listening to the boom of his
heart in his head, and outside, the boom of the storm-stirred waves.
They were out of step with one another.

"I wonder," Burrows said to Maxine, "if you'd mind closing the blinds a
little way? I don't want it to be too bright in here when I uncover
Todd's eyes."

Todd heard Maxine crossing to the window; then the mechanical hum of the
electric blinds as they were lowered.

"I think that'll be far enough," Burrows said. A click, and the burn
stopped. "Now, let's see how things look. Hold very still, Todd,
please."

 Todd held his breath as the dressing which the bandages had kept in
lace was gently teased away from his face. It felt as though a layer of
his skin were coming away along with the gauze. He heard a little intake
of breath from Maxine.

"What?" he murmured.

"It's okay," Burrows said softly. "Please hold still. This is a very
delicate procedure. By the way, when I put the new dressing on, I'll be
leaving holes for your eyes, so you'll be able to ... very still, please
... good, good ... so you'll be able to see."

"Maxine ... ?"

"Please, Todd. Don't move a muscle."

"I want her to tell me what it looks like."

"She can't see yet, Todd."

Burrows said something to his nurse, half under his breath. Todd didn't
catch the words. But he heard the gauze, which had now been stripped
from his face completely, dropped with a wet plop into a receptacle. He
imagined it soaked with his blood, shreds of his skin stuck to it. His
stomach turned.

"I want to puke," he said.

"Shall I stop for a moment?" Burrows asked.

"No. Just get it over and done with."

"Right. Well then I'm going to start cleaning you up," Burrows said.

Then we'll see how you're healing. I must say, it's looking very good so
far."

"I want Maxine to take a look."

"In a minute," Burrows said. "Just let me--" Now," Todd said, nausea
fueling his impatience. He raised his hand blindly and pushed at
Burrows. The man moved aside. "Maxine?" Todd said.

"I'm here."

Todd beckoned in the direction of Maxine's voice. "Come and look at me,
will you? I want you to tell me what I look like."

He heard Maxine's heels on the polished wood floor.

"Hurry." Her step quickened. Now she was dose by him. "Well?" hel said.

"To be honest, it's hard to tell till he--"

"Christ! I knew it! I fucking knew it! He fucked me up!" "Wait, wait,"
Maxine said. "Calm down. A lot of it's just the ointment he put on you.
Let him clean it off before we get hysterical." Todd reached out to her.
She caught hold of his hand. "It's going to be okay," she said though
her grip was clammy. "Just be patient. Why can't men be patient?1

"You're not patient," he reminded her.

"Just let him work, Todd."

"But you're not. Admit it."

"All right. I'm not patient."

Burrows set to work again, meticulously swabbing around Todd's eyes j
cleaning his gummed lashes. The stink of cleaning fluid was sharp in 1
nostrils, his sinuses ran, and his eyes, when he finally opened them,
well awash.

"Welcome back," Maxine said, unknitting her fingers from his, though a
little embarrassed by the intimacy. It took a couple of minut for Todd's
sight to clear, and another two for his eyes to become ace tomed to the
dimmed light in the room. But part by part, face by face, tm| world came
back to him. The large, half-blinded window, and the rail lashed deck
beyond it. The expensive ease of the room; the Indian rug, 1 leather
furniture, the Calder mobile, in yellow, red and black, which hu below
the sky-light. Burrows's knitted brow, and fixed, nervous smiw The
nurse, a pretty blonde woman. And finally Maxine, her face ashe Burrows
moved away, like a portrait painter stepping back from a canva to check
the effect he'd achieved.

"I want to see," Todd said to him.

"Give yourself a minute," Maxine said. 'Are you still feeling sick?"

"Why? Is it going to make me heave?"

"No," she said. He almost believed her. "You just look a little pv
that's all. And a little raw. It's not so bad."

 "You used to be such a good liar."

"Really," she insisted. "It's not so bad."

"So let me look." Everyone in the room remained still. "Will somebody
get me a mirror? Okay--" He started to push himself up out of the chair.

"I'll get one myself."

"Stay where you are," Maxine said. "If you really want to see. Nurse?

What's your name?"

"Karyn."

"Go up into the bedroom, and you'll find a little hand mirror there on
the vanity. Bring it down."

It seemed to Todd the girl took an eternity to fetch the mirror. While
they waited, Burrows stared out at the rain. Maxine went to refresh her
stinger.

Finally, the girl returned. Her eyes were on Burrows, not on Todd.

"Tell her to give it to me," Todd said.

"Go on," Burrows said.

The nurse put the mirror into Todd's hand. He took a deep breath, and
looked at himself.

There was a moment, as his eyes fixed on his reflection, when reality
fluttered, and he thought: none of this is real. Not the room, nor the
people in it, nor the rain outside, nor the face in the mirror.
Especially not the face in the mirror. It was a figment, fluttering and
fluttering and--

"Jesus ..." he said, like Duncan Mcfarlane, "look at me--"

The strength in his hand failed him, and the mirror dropped to the
ground. It fell face down. The nurse stooped to pick it up, but he said:
"No. Leave it."

She stepped away from him, and he caught a look of fear in her eyes.

What was she afraid of? His voice, was it? Or his face? God help him if
it was his face.

"Somebody open the blinds," he said. "Let's get some light in here. It's
not a fucking funeral."

Maxine went to the switch, and flipped it. The mechanism hummed; the
blind rose, showing him an expanse of rain-soaked deck, some furniture;
and beyond the deck the beach. One solitary jogger--probably some famous
fool like himself, determined to preserve his beauty even in the pouring
rain--was trudging along the shore, followed by two bodyguards.

Todd got up from his chair and went to the window. Then, despite the
presence of strangers, he laid his hand against the cold glass and began
to weep.

 Burrows had brought both painkillers and tranquilizers that Todd
supplemented with a large order from Jerome Bunny, a ratty little
Englishman who'd been his supplier of illicit pharmaceuticals for the
last four years.

Under their influence, Todd spent the next twenty-four hours in a semi
somnambulant state.

The rain was unrelenting. He sat in front of Maxine's immense television
screen and watched a succession of images of other people's pain--
houses gone, families divided--dreamily wondering if any of them would
exchange their misery for his. Every now and then a memory of the visage
he'd seen in the mirror--vaguely resembling somebody he'd known, but
horribly wounded, filled with pus and blood--would swim up before him,
and he'd take another pill, or two or three, and wash it down with a
shot of single malt, and wait for the opiates to drive the horror off a
little distance.

The new dressings Burrows had put on, though as promised they indeed
left his eyes uncovered, were still oppressive, and more than once
Todd's hands went up to his face unbidden, and would have ripped the
bandages off had he not governed himself in time. He felt grotesque,
like something from a late-night horror movie, his face--which had been
his glory-- become some horrible secret, festering away beneath the
bandages. He asked Maxine what movie it was--some Rock Hudson weepie--in
which a roan was covered up this way. She didn't know.

And stop thinking about yourself for a while," she said. "Think about
something else."

Easily said; the trouble was thinking about himself came naturally I
him. In fact, it had become second-nature to him over the years to put;
other considerations out of sight: to care only about Todd Pickett, and
(c occasion) Dempsey. Not to have done so would have meant a diminutic
of his power in the world. After all, he'd been playing a game in whic
only the truly self-obsessed had a chance of victory. All others were
boun to fall by the wayside. Now, when it would have been healthier to
direc his attention elsewhere, he'd simply lost the knack. And he had no
dogl his side to love him for being the boss, whatever the hell he
looked like.

Late in the day Maxine came back from her visit to the Hideaway,: she
had now dubbed it, with some good news. The house in the hills wa just
as Jerry Brahms had advertised.

"It's the only house in the canyon," she said.

"Which canyon?"

"I don't even think it's got a name."

"They've all got names, for God's sake."

"All I can tell you is that it's somewhere between Coldwater and Laurel
To be perfectly honest I got a little lost following Jerry up there. He
drives like the Devil. And you know my sense of geography."

"Who does the house belong to?"

"Right now it's practically empty. There's some old stuff in there looks
like it goes back to the fifties, maybe earlier--but nothing you*^ want
to use. I'll have Marco choose some furniture from the Bel Air hot and
move it over. Get you comfortable. But really it's ideal for what"

need right now. By the way, Ms. Bosch has been calling my office. She go
quite pushy with Sawyer. She's absolutely certain you're in Hawaii
screw!

ing some starlet."

"If that's what she wants to think."

"You don't care?"

"Not right now."

"You're certain you don't want to see her?"

"Christ. See her? No, Maxine. I do not want to see her."

"She was pretty upset."

"That's because she wanted a part in Warrior, and she thought I'd get
it for her."

"Okay. End of discussion. If she calls again--?"

"Tell her she's right. I'm in Hawaii fucking the ass off anyone you care
to name. Manipulative little bitch."

"So here," Maxine said. She proffered an envelope.

"What's this?"

"They're the pictures I took of the Hideaway."

He took the envelope. "It'll be fine," he said before he'd even looked
at the photographs.

"You might be there for a few weeks. I want you to be comfortable."

Todd pulled out the photographs.

"They're not the best, I'm afraid," Maxine said. "It's one of those
throwaway cameras. And it was raining. But you get the idea."

"It looks big."

"According to Jerry they used to call them dream palaces. All the rich
stars had them. It's hokey, but it's got a lot of atmosphere. There's a
huge master bedroom with a view straight down the canyon. You can see
Century City; probably the ocean on a clear day. And the living room's
as big as a ballroom. Whoever built it put a lot of love into it. All
the moldings, the doorhandles, everything is top of the line. Of course
it gets campy. There's a fresco on the ceiling of the turret. All these
faces leaning over looking down at you. Famous movie stars, Jerry said.
I didn't recognize any of 'em but I guess they were from silent movies."
She paused, waiting for judgment. Todd just keep looking at the
pictures. "Well?"

Maxine finally said. "Too Old Hollywood for you?"

No. It's fine. Anyway, isn't that what I am now?"

"What?"

"Old Hollywood."

 Jerry Brahms had been a child-actor in the late thirties, but his
career hadn| lasted into puberty. He'd been at his "most picturesque,"
as he liked to pi] it, at the age of nine or ten, after which it had all
been downhill. Todd 1 always thought of Brahms as being slightly
ridiculous: with his overly coiffed silver hair, his mock-English
diction, and his unforgiving bitchine about the profession to which he'd
once aspired.

But Jerry knew his Hollywood, there was no doubt of that. He live<j and
breathed the place: its scandals, its triumphs. He was most informe
about the Golden Age of Tinseltown, which coincided, naturally enoug
with the years of his employment. In matters relating to this period '
knowledge was encyclopedic, as he'd proved three years before, whet Todd
had been looking for a new house. Jerry had volunteered his vices as a
location scout, and after a week or two had taken Todd Maxine on a grand
tour of properties he thought might be suitable. Tod had not wanted to
go; he found Jerry's chatter grating. But Maxine ha| insisted. "He'll be
heartbroken if you don't go," she'd said. "You knc how he idolizes you.
Besides, he might have found something you like."!

So Todd had gone along; and it had turned out to be quite a trip. Jer
had organized the tour as though he were entertaining royalty (whic
perhaps, as far as he was concerned, he was). He'd hired a stretch, sup
plied a champagne-and-caviar hamper from Greenblatt's in case the wanted
to picnic along the way, and a map of the city, on which he'd
meticulously marked their route. They went down to the Colony ii Malibu,
they wound their way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills; they!

 looked at Hancock Park and Brentwood, their route plotted by Jerry so
that he could show off his knowledge of where the luminaries of
Hollywood had lived and died. They passed by Falcon Lair on Bella Drive,
which Valentine had built at the height of his fame. They went to the
Benedict Canyon Drive home where Harold Lloyd had spent much of his
life, and past Jayne Mansfield's Pink Palace, which was as gaudy as
ever, and the house where Marilyn and Dimaggio had briefly lived in
wedded bliss. They visited homes occupied, at one time or another, by
John Barrymore ("It still smells of liquor/' Jerry had remarked), Ronald
Colman, Hearst's love, Marion Davies, Clara Bow, Lucille Ball and Mae
West. Not all the houses were for sale, nor open for inspection; in some
cases Jerry's research had simply turned up a property close by, or one
that resembled the house in which some luminary had lived. Other
properties were located in areas that had become shadows of their
glamorous selves, but Jerry didn't seem to care, or perhaps even notice.
The fact that stars whose faces had become legendary--whose names evoked
lives of elegance and luxury--had lived in these homes blinded him to
the fact that there was often decay around them. They were like sacred
sites, and he a pilgrim.

Todd had found the tenderness with which he talked about these places,
and about the people who'd once occupied them, curiously touching.

Four or five times during the trip Jerry had directed the driver to a
certain spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to
show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on
precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the
places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and
sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn't realized until then
how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The
greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial facades.
The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever
ceased to pump, then this verdant world, with its palaces and its
swooning falls of bougainvillea, would pass away.

As it turned out, Todd hadn't ended up buying any of the properties
Jerry had shown them that day, which "was probably for the best. He
finally

 decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it.
H didn't matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on
whethe Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever
lived there.

Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get I
move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which Todd spent sitting
at the window of the Malibu house, staring at the pale reflection of ;
bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the painkiller
Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfor
whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some Bunny's
specials, not a minute of that day passed without his beir acutely aware
of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face.4 He morbidly
wondered if perhaps he wouldn't be left with this residue o| feeling for
the rest of his life; he'd heard of people who'd had certain ope ations
who were made much worse by the surgeon's knife, and indeed were never
the same again. The thought terrified him: that he'd dor something
completely irreversible. But there was no use regretting it..

he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication,;
Burrows insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he'd have his fac
back intact. He wasn't even hoping for improvement at this point. Just
the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines
and; In the early evening Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the
mor ing moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with 1
in the sedan, Maxine and Jerry followed on.

"I got lost twice this morning," Marco said, "going back and forth from
the old house to the new one. I don't know why the hell it happened,
buff twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset
again." 1

"Weird," Todd said.

"There are no street signs up there."

"No?"

"There aren't many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbors.

No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls."

"Dempsey used to get them!"

"Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy?

Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey's teeth clamped in his ass and
then--"

"Tries to sue you."

"--tries to sue me."

They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a
while.

 "So what exactly did Jerry tell you about this place?" Todd asked
Maxine as they stood outside the Hideaway.

"Not much. I told you he'd played here as a kid? Yes, I did. Well, he
saicjj he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all."

Maxine hadn't taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining
sol hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house
appeared muchl larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of
the term "dreanii palace." He couldn't get a complete grasp of its size
because the vegetation!

around it had been left to run wild. A large grove of bamboo to the
right of the front door had grown fully thirty feet, its tallest stalks
standing higheri than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillea grew everywhere
in lunatic abunf dance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble
ferns, planted ini the shade of the perimeter wall, had flourished
there, and grown antediluvian.

There was room beneath the fronds to stand with your hands raised!

and still not touch the nubby spores on their underbellies.

The house itself was palatial Spanish in style, with more than a hint of
Hollywood fantasy in its genes. The stucco was a washed-out pink, thel
roof a washed-out red. There was a great deal of elaborate tilework at
thel j front steps, and around the windows, the tiles themselves still
bright bluer!

and turquoise and white, the complex interplay of their patterns
lending!

a touch of Moorish beauty to the facade. The front door looked as
though!

it had been purloined from the set of a medieval epic; the kind of door|
Douglas Fairbanks Senior might have slammed and bolted shut to keepj out
an army of evil-doers. It would have sufficed too, in its enormity.!

Maxine had to push hard to open it; and when it finally swung wide it
did so not with a gothic creak but with a deep rumble, as a system of
counterweights hidden in the wall aided her labor.

"Very dramatic," Todd remarked, playing it off. In truth, he was
impressed by the scale of the place; by its scale and theatricality. But
guileless enthusiasm he'd had shamed out of him long ago. It wasn't cool
to like anything too much, except yourself.

Maxine led the way through the turret, with its grandiose spiral
staircase and its trompe 1'oeil ceiling, into the house. The photographs
she'd taken had come nowhere near doing the place justice. Even stripped
of most of its furniture, as it was, and in need of repair, it was still
nothing short of magnificent. There was everywhere evidence of master
craftsmen at work: from the pegged wood floors to the elegantly carved
ceiling panels; from the exquisite symmetry of the marble mantels to the
filigree of the wrought iron handrails, only the best had been good
enough for the man or woman who'd owned this place.

Marco had artlessly arranged a few items of Todd's furniture in the
living room, a little island of brittle modernity in the midst of
something older and more mysterious. Todd made a mental note to give
everything he owned away, and start again. In future, he was going to
buy antiques.

They went through to the kitchen. It was built on the same heroic scale
as everything else: ten cooks could have happily worked in it and not
got in one another's way.

"I know it's all ridiculously old-fashioned," Maxine said. "But it'll do
for a little while, won't it?" "It'll do just fine," Todd said, still
surprised at how much the place pleased him. "What's out back?"

Oh the usual. A pool. Tennis courts. And a huge koi pond. Probably a
Polo field for all I know."

"Any fish in the pond?"

"No. You want fish?"

"It's no big deal."

I can get koi for you if you want them. Just say the word."

 "I know. But it's not worth it. I'll be here a month and gone."

"So take them with you."

"And where would I put them?"

"Okay," Maxine shrugged. "No fish." She went to the kitchen window and
continued her description of the real estate. "The whole canyo belongs
to the house, as far as I can see, but the gardens spread down the hill
an acre and a half and all the way up to the top of the hill behind us
There's a guest-house up there. Perhaps two. I didn't go look: I figured
you wouldn't be having any visitors."

"Does Jerry know anything about the history of the place?"

"I'm sure he does, but to be honest I didn't ask."

"What did you tell him about me?" "I told him you had a stalker, and she
was getting dangerous. You'

4

needed to get out of the Bel Air house for a while until the police hach
caught her. Frankly, I'm not sure he bought it. He's got to have heard
the!

rumors. I think we'd be best letting him in on what's been
happening--"|j

"We've had this conversation once--"

"Hear me out, will you? If we make him feel like he's part of the con^
spiracy, he'll stay quiet, just because he wants to please you. He'll
only get I chatty if he thinks we kept him out because we didn't trust
him."

"Why the hell would he want to please me?"

"You know why, Todd. He's in love with you."

Todd shook his bandaged head, which was a mistake. The room!

around him swam for a moment, and he had to grab hold of the table.

"You okay?" Maxine said.

He raised his hands, palms out, in mock surrender. "I'm fine. I just
need!

a pill and a drink."

"You've had so many pills. Are you sure--"

"I sent Marco out to get some liquor."

"Todd,... it's not even noon."

"So? If I stay here and get shit-faced every day for the next month
who's; going to care? Find me something to drink, will you?"

"What about Jerry? We didn't finish--"

"We'll talk about Jerry some other time."

"Am I telling him or not?"

"I said I don't want to talk about it anymore."

"All right. But if he starts to gossip, don't say I didn't warn you."

"If he tells the fucking National Enquirer it's my fault. Happy?"

Todd didn't wait for a reply. Leaving Maxine to search for the liquor,
he wandered out to the back of the house. The lawn--which lay at the
bottom of a long flight of steps from the house, their railings entirely
overtaken by vines--was the size of a small field, but it had been
invaded on every side by the offspring of the plants, shrubs and trees
which surrounded it, many of them in premature flower. Bird of Paradise
trees twenty feet tall, sycamore and eucalyptus, rose bushes and
foxgloves, early California poppies shining like satin in the grass;
meadowfoam and corn lily, hairy honeysuckle and wild grape, golden
yarrow; blue blossom and red huckleberry. And everywhere, of course, the
ubiquitous pampas grass; soft, fleecy plumes swaying in the sun. It was
uncommon, even uncanny, verdancy.

Todd strode across the lawn, which was still wet from the rain, down to
the pool. Dragonflies flitted everywhere; bees wove their nectar trails
through the balmy air. The pool was a baroque affair, descending from
the relatively restrained style of the main house into pure Hollywood
kitsch. The model, perhaps, was Cecil B. Demille Roman. A large mock
classical bronze fountain was set at the back of the pool, the
intertwined limbs of its figures--a sea-god and his female
attendants--rendered more baroque still by the tracery of living vines
which had crept up over it. A sizable conch in the sea-god's hands had
once been a source of rejuvenating waters for the pool, but those waters
had ceased to flow a long time ago. Todd was mildly disappointed. He
would have liked to see sparkling blue water in the pool instead of the
few inches of bottle-green rainwater that were there at the bottom.

He turned and looked back toward the house. It was still more impressive
from this side than it had been from the front, its four floors rising
like the tiers of a wedding cake, its walls lush with ivy in places, and
in others

naked. Beyond it, further up the hill, Todd could just see a glimpse of
< of the guest-houses that Maxine had mentioned. Altogether, it really'
an impressive parcel of land, with or without the buildings. Had Jer
shown it to him as part of the grand tour Todd might well have bee
tempted to invest. The fact that Jerry hadn't done so probably meant t
it had not belonged to anyone of significance, though that seemed oc
This wasn't just any Hollywood show-place: it was the creme de la crer a
glorious confection of a residence designed to show off all the wealti
power and taste of a great star.

By the time he'd made his way back inside, Marco had turned up I
Greenblatt's with a car-load of supplies. He welcomed his boss with 1
usual crooked smile and a generous glass of bourbon.

"So what do you think of the Old Dark House?"

"You know ... in a weird way I like it here." "Really?" said Maxine.
"It's nothing like your taste." She was pi; still mildly irritated by
their earlier exchange, though for Todd it was pa history, soothed away
by his wanderings in the wilderness.

"I never really felt comfortable in Bel Air," he said. "That house ha
always been more like a hotel to me than a home."

"I wouldn't say this place was exactly cozy," Maxine remarked.

"Oh, I don't know," Todd said. He sipped on his bourbon, smiling inc his
glass. "Dempsey would have liked it," he said.

 On Thursday, the 18th of March, Maxine got a call that she knew was
coming. The caller was a woman named Tammy Lauper, who ran the
International Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, which despite its
highfalutin title had its headquarters, Maxine knew, in the Laupers'
house in Sacramento. Tammy was calling to ask a very simple question,
one that she said she was "passing on" to Maxine from millions of Todd's
fans worldwide: Where was Todd?

Maxine had dealt with Tammy on many occasions in the past, though if she
possibly could she ducked the calls and let Sawyer deal with them.

The trouble was that Tammy Lauper was an obsessive, and though in the
eight years she'd been running the Appreciation Society--(she'd once
said to Maxine she hated to hear it called a fan dub. "I'm not a
hysterical teenager," she'd said. This was true: Tammy Lauper was
married, childless, and, when last spotted, an overweight woman in her
middle thirties) --though in that time she'd done a great deal to
support Todd's movies, and could on occasion be a useful disseminator of
deliberately erroneous information, she was not somebody Maxine had much
time for. The woman annoyed her, with her perpetual questions about
trivia, and her unspoken assumption that somehow Todd belonged to her.

When she was obliged to speak to the Lauper woman--because there was
some delicate matter in the air, and she needed to carefully modulate
the now of news--she always aimed to keep the exchanges brief. As
courteous as possible--Tammy could be prickly if she didn't feel as
though she was being given her due--but brief.

Today, however, Tammy wasn't about to be quickly satisfied; she like a
terrier with a rat. Every time Maxine thought she'd satisfied woman's
curiosity, back she'd come with another inquiry.

"Something's wrong," she kept saying. "Todd's not been seen by an^ one.
Usually when he goes away, members of the Society spot him, they report
to me. But I haven't heard one word. Something's wrong Because I always
hear."

"I'm sure you do."

"So what's going on? You've got to tell me."

"Why should anything be going on?" Maxine said, doing her best I
maintain her equilibrium. "Todd's tired and he needs a break, so he we
away for a few weeks."

"Out of state?"

"Yes. Out of state."

"Out of the country?" "I'm afraid he asked me not to say."

"Because we've got members all over the world."

"I realize that, but--"

"When he went on his honeymoon to Morocco," Tammy went on," had six
reports of sightings." (This was a reference to the event which 1 caused
Maxine more publicity problems than any other in Todd's life: 1
short-lived marriage to the exquisitely emaciated model Avril Fox, whic
had been strewn with potentially image-besmirching scenes: adulteries, I
menage-a-trois involving Avril's sister, Lucy, and a spot of domestic
vie lence.)

"Sometimes," Maxine said, a trace of condescension creeping into 1 voice
now, "Todd likes to be out in public. Sometimes he doesn't."

"And right now?"

"He doesn't."

"But why would he mind being seen?" Tammy went on. "If there*| nothing
wrong with him ..."

Maxine hesitated, wondering how best to calm the suspicions she clearly
arousing. She couldn't just drum up an excuse and jump off th^

 hone; that would make the Lauper woman even more curious than she
already was. She had to maneuver the conversation away from this
dangerous area as carefully as possible.

"I'll tell you why," she said, dropping her voice a little, as though
she were about to share something of real significance with Tammy. "He's
got a secret project in the works." "Oh?" Tammy said. She didn't sound
persuaded. "This isn't Warrior, is it? I read that script, and--"

"No, it isn't Warrior. It's a very personal piece, which Todd is writing
himself."

"He's writing it? Todd is writing something? He said in an interview
with People last July he hated writing. It was too much like hard work."

"Well, I lied a little," Maxine said. "He's not doing the actual
writing.

He's working with somebody on the project. A very well-respected
screenwriter, actually. But he's pouring out his heart, so it'll be a
very personal project." There was a silence. Maxine waited. Had Tammy
taken the bait or not?

"So this is autobiographical, this movie?" "I didn't say it was a
movie," Maxine said, taking some petty pleasure in catching Tammy out.
"It may end up on the screen, but right now he's just working hard to
get his feelings down. He and the writer, that is."

"Who is the writer?"

"I can't say."

You know it would make all this very much more believable if you gave me
some more details," Tammy said.

That was it. Maxine lost her composure. How dare this little bitch
suggest her lies weren't believable?

You know I've really said more than I should already, Tammy," she
snapped. 'And I've got six calls waiting. So if you'll excuse me--"

Wait--what am I going to tell the members?" "What I just told you."

"You swear Todd's fine?"

Good God, how many times? Yes. Todd is perfectly fine. In fact, he's

never been better." She drew a deep breath, and attempted to calm herse
a little before she ended up saying something she would regret. "Loc
Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd
privacy, as I'm sure you understand. He needs a little time away from 1
pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when
1 finished I'm sure you'll be one of the first to hear about it. Now
really, I'jj got to go."

"One more question," Tammy said.

"Yes."

"What's it called?"

"What's what called?" Maxine replied, playing for time.

"The script. Or the book. Or whatever it's going to be. What's I
called?" Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the
hell n j give the damn woman a title? She'd lied herself into a hole as
it was, < more shovelful wouldn't hurt. She pictured Todd in an image
now inde bly inscribed in her mind's eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to
start cuttk away the bandages. And the title came:

"The Blind Leading the Blind," she said.

"I don't like that," Tammy said, already proprietorial.

"Neither do I," Maxine replied, thinking not just of the title, but of t
whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. "Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I."

Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento,!

a one-story ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramenl
International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years;
baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this!

of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm cov Tammy
didn't mind much. Just because God had given her breasts size of
watermelons didn't mean she was born for motherhood. And I course the
absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all 1 files
relating to what Arnie sneeringly called

"Tammy's little fan club."

"It isn't a fan club," Tammy had pointed out countless times, "it's I

kmreciation Society." Arnie said Tammy wasn't no appreciator, she was a
fan plain and simple, and he knew every time they'd used to sleep
together and she closed her eyes it was that dickhead Pickett she'd been
imagining on top of her fat ass, and that was the whole unvarnished
truth of it. When Arnie got to talking like that, Tammy would just tune
him out. He'd stop eventually when he knew she wasn't listening; go back
to sitting in front of the TV with a beer.

The main center of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society's operations
was the front bedroom. The room she and Arnie slept in was considerably
smaller, but as she'd pointed out to him, it didn't really matter since
all they did was sleep in it. They still had a double bed, though God
knows why; he never touched her; and a couple of years back she'd
stopped wanting him to. The third bedroom (and all the closets) were
used for storage: files of clippings, issues of the fanzine (quarterly
for the first year, then monthly, now quarterly again), photographs and
biographies to be distributed to new members, copies of press kits from
every film Todd had ever made, in twenty-six languages. Downstairs, in
what would have been the family room, she kept the Collection. This was
made up of items related to Todd and his career, all of them relatively
rare, some one-of-a kind items. Hanging in zipped-up plastic laundry
bags were articles of clothing made for the cast and crew of his
pictures. On the mantelpiece, still sealed in their boxes, were six Todd
Pickett dolls that had been the hot thing to own during his teen-idol
period, the boxes signed by Todd.

Preserved in a vacuum pack were several unused latex makeup pieces for
his Oscar-nominated performance as the maimed firefighter in The Burning
Year. She didn't ever look at those. She'd been warned that they
deteriorated when they were exposed to sunlight.

The collection also contained a comprehensive library of scripts for his
movies, with all their addenda, including one marked up in Todd's
handwriting, along with a complete set of novelizations of the movies,
leather bound with gilt lettering. There were also credit-listings on
all the crews who worked with him, costume sketches and call-sheets, and
of course, posters of every size and nationality. If the Smithsonian
ever wanted to

open a wing dedicated to the life and career of Todd Pickett, Tammy haj

1

once boasted, they need look no further than her front room. Once, she'|
attempted to enumerate the items she owned. It was something in region
of seventeen thousand three hundred, not including those piece of which
she had more than one copy.

It was to this shrine that Tammy had come after her frustratir exchange
with Maxine Frizelle. She closed and locked the door (thov Arnie would
not be back from work and his after-hours carousing for; eral hours),
and sat down to think. After a few minutes, turning over I conversation
she'd just had, she went to the very back of the room,; took from its
place among the treasure-trove a box of photographs. The were her
special pride and joy: pictures of Todd (fourteen of them in; which
she'd managed to buy from somebody who'd known the still phc tographer
on Todd's fourth picture, Life Lessons. This was Todd's cor of-age
picture: the one in which he'd changed from being a Boy to beingjf Man.
Of course, his smile would always be a boy's smile, that was part < its
magic, but after Life Lessons he went on to play tougher roles: a hor
coming soldier, a firefighter, a man wrongfully accused of his own7
murder. Here then, caught in the moment before his cinematic adute hood,
was the boy-man of Tammy's dreams. She had even purchased 1 negatives
from which the series of pictures had been printed, and aloe with them
the assurance from the person she'd got them from that the had been
"lost" in the production offices before they were ever seen by t
director, the producer or by Todd himself. In short, she had the copies.

Their rarity wasn't the reason she valued them so highly, ho\ What made
them her special treasure--the quality that made her ret to them over
an dover, -when Arnie was out at work, and she knew she ha time for
reverie--was the fact that the photographer had caught his I ject
unawares. Well, shirtless and unawares. Todd was sleek and pale, body
not heavy at all, not all muscle and veins popping out, just a nic
ordinary body; the body of the boy next door if the boy next door haj
pened to be perfect. She had never seen a body she thought so beaut

Then there was his face. Oh that face! She'd seen literally thousands
of nhotographs of Todd in the last eleven years--and to her adoring eyes
he xyas handsome in every single one of them--but in these particular
pictures he was something more than handsome. There was a certain lost
look in his eyes that allowed her to indulge the belief that if she'd
been there at that moment--if he'd seen her and looked at her with the
same forsaken feeling in his heart as was in his eyes--everything in her
life would have been different; and maybe, just maybe, everything in
his.

When she was thinking clearly, she knew all this was romantic nonsense.

She was a plain woman; and, even though she'd shed thirty-two pounds in
the last two years, was still thirty overweight. How could she hope to
compare with the glossy beauties Todd had romanced, both on screen and
off? Still she allowed herself the indulgence, once in a while. It made
life in Sacramento a little more bearable to know that her secret
glimpses of Todd were always there, hidden away, waiting for her. And
best of all, nobody else had them. They were hers and hers alone.

There was one other wonderful thing about the fourteen pictures: they
had been snapped in such quick succession that if she leafed through
them fast enough she could almost create the illusion of movement. She
did that now, while she thought about the way Maxine had talked to her
on the phone. That nonsense about Todd going away to write his life
story, or whatever she'd said it was going to be; it didn't ring true.
It simply wasn't like Todd to be so inaccessible. Every vacation he'd
taken--in India, in New Guinea, in the Amazon, for God's sake--he'd been
spotted.

Somebody had had a camera, and he'd posed; smiled, waved, goofed around.
It just wasn't like him to disappear like this.

But what could she do about it? She wasn't going to get any answers out
of anybody close to Todd: they'd all trot out the same story. She'd
already exhausted her contacts at the studios, all of whom claimed not
to nave seen Todd in a while. Even over at Paramount, where he was
supposedly making his next picture, nobody had seen him in many months.

Nor, according to her most reliable source over there, the secretary to
nerry Lansing's assistant, were there any meetings on the books, with

either Todd or any of his production team. It was all very strange, and
I made Tammy afraid for her man. Suppose they were covering sometr.

up? Suppose there'd been an accident, or an assault, and Todd had bee
hurt? Suppose he was in a hospital bed somewhere on life-support, his ]
slipping away, while all the sonsofbitches who'd made fortunes off his I
ent were lying to themselves and anyone who'd listen, pretending it w (
going to be okay? Things like that happened all the time; especially ;
Hollywood. Everyone lied there; it was a way of life.

Her thoughts circled on these terrible images for an hour or mor while
she sat among her treasures. At last, she came to a momentous de sion.
She could do nothing to solve this mystery sitting here Sacramento. She
needed to go out to Los Angeles, and confront some I these people. It
was easy to tell somebody a lie on the telephone. It w; harder to do
when you were face-to-face with someone; when you looking into their
eyes.

She took one last look through the sequence of photographs, linger on
the last of the fourteen, the one in which Todd's gaze was closest I
making contact with the camera. Another shot, and he would have be
looking directly at her. Their eyes, as it were, would have met. She
smile at him, kissed his picture, then put the photographs away, tucked
the 1 out of sight and went through to the kitchen to call Arnie at the
airpor and tell him what she planned to do. He was in the middle of his
shift, I couldn't come to the phone. She left a message for him to call
her; I she made a reservation on Southwest for the flight to Los
Angeles, booked a room in a little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, "which
she'd stay in once before when she'd come into LA for a Todd Pickett
convention^

The flight was scheduled for 3:10 that afternoon, and was to get: Los
Angeles at 4:15, but the departure was delayed for almost two hou and
then they circled over LAX for almost three quarters of an holij before
they could land, so it wasn't until half-past seven that she stepp out
of the airport into the warm, sweet-smog air of her beloved's city. I

She didn't know what she was going to do, now she was here; how < where
she was going to begin. But at least she wasn't sitting at hoc

 brooding. She was closer to him, here, whatever Maxine Frizelle had
said bout him being off in some faraway place. That was a lie; Tammy
knew it in her bones. He was here. And if he was in any trouble, then by
God she would do her best to help him, because whatever anybody might
say she knew one thing for certain: there wasn't a soul on earth who
cared for the well-being of Todd Pickett more than she. And somewhere,
tucked away in a shameful corner of her head, she almost hoped that
there was some conspiracy here; because that would give her a chance to
come to his rescue; to save him from people like Frizelle, and make him
understand who really cared about him. Oh, wouldn't that be something!
She didn't dare think about it too much; it made her sick with guilt and
anticipation. She shouldn't be wishing anything but the best for her
Todd. And yet the same thought kept creeping back: that somewhere in
this city he was waiting for her--even if he didn't know it yet; waiting
to be saved and comforted.

Yes, she dared think it: perhaps even loved.

 Todd and Marco had settled into life at the Hideaway in the Canyon qn
easily. Todd occupied the enormous master bedroom which had Maxine had
boasted) an extraordinary view down the Canyon. On I days, of which
there were many in that early March, Todd could sit at I window and
watch the ocean, glittering beyond the towers of Cent City. On
exceptional days, he could even make out the misty shape Catalina
Island.

Marco had taken a much smaller bedroom on the floor below, with 4
adjacent sitting room, and did much as he had in the Bel Air home: that
served with uncanny prescience the needs of his boss, and having pr
vided such services as were required, then retreated into near-invisibi]

The area was much quieter than Bel Air. There seemed to be through
traffic on the single road that wound up through the Canyon^ apart from
the occasional sound of a police helicopter passing over, I siren
drifting up from Sunset, Todd heard nothing from the city that 1 such a
short distance below. What he did hear, at night, were coyotes,1 seemed
to haunt the slopes of the Canyon in significant numbers, some nights,
standing on one of the many balconies of his new ma nursing a drink and
a cigarette, he would hear a lone animal beginl urgent yapping on the
opposite slope of the Canyon, only to hear its I answered from another
spot, then another, the din rising into a whoc chorus from the darkness
all around him, so that it seemed the ent Canyon was alive with them.
They'd had coyotes up in Bel Air too,'| course. Their proximity to the
house would always send Dempsey int

frenzy of deep-chest barking, as though to announce that the dog of the
house was much larger than he was, in reality.

"I'm surprised we've got so many coyotes up here," Marco said, after one
particularly noisy night. "You'd think they'd go somewhere with a lot
more garbage. I mean, they're scavengers, right?" "Maybe they like it
here," Todd observed.

"Yeah, I guess."

"There's no people to fuck with them."

"Except us."

"We won't be here long," Todd said.

"You don't sound too happy about that."

"Well I guess I could get used to it here."

"Have you been up on the ridge yet?"

"No. I haven't had the energy."

"You should go up there. Take a look. There's quite a view." The
exchange, brief as it was, put the thought of a trip up the hill into
Todd's head. He needed to start exercising again, as Maxine had pointed
out, or he was going to find that his face was all nicely healed up and
his body had gone to fat. He didn't believe for a minute that his face
was anywhere near being healed, but he took her point. He was drinking
too much and eating too many Elvis Midnight Specials (peanut butter,
jelly, crispy bacon and sliced banana on Wonder Bread sandwiches, deep
fried in butter) for the good of his waistline. His pants were feeling
tight, and his ass--when he glimpsed it in the mirror--was looking
fleshy.

In a while he'd have to get back to some serious training: start running
every morning; maybe have his gym equipment brought over from the Bel
Air house and installed in the guest-house. But in the meantime he'd
ease back into the swing of things with a few exploratory walks: one of
which, he promised himself, would be up to the top of the hill, to see
what the view was like when you got to the end of the road.

ourrows and Nurse Karyn came every other day to change the dressings ^d
assess the condition of his face. Though Burrows claimed that the

 healing process was going well, his manner remained subdued and can
tious: it was clear that the whole sorry business had taken a toll upon
] confidence. His sun-bed tan could not conceal a certain sickliness in
] pallor; and the skin around his eyes and mouth, taut from a series of
tuc and tightenings, had an unnatural rigidity to it, like a teak mask
und which another, more fragile, man was trapped. Superficially, he
remaine unfailingly optimistic about Todd's prognosis; he was certain
there won be no permanent scarring. Indeed he was even willing to chance
the opiij ion that things were going to work out "as planned," and that
Todd going to emerge from the whole experience looking ten years
younger.|

"So how long is it going to be before I can take off the bandages?"

"Another week, I'd say."

"And after that ... how long before I'm back to normal again?"

"I don't want to make any promises," Burrows said, "but inside month. Is
there some great urgency here?"

"Yeah, I want people to see me. I want them to know I'm not dead."
"Surely nobody believes that," Burrows said.

Todd summoned Marco. "Where are those tabloids you brought I he asked.
"The doctor's not been reading the trash in his waiting-rooe recently."

Marco left the room and reappeared with five magazines, droppii them on
the table beside Burrows. The top one had a blurred, black-a white
photograph of a burial procession, obviously taken with extremely
long-distance lens. The headline read: Superstar Todd Pick Buried in
Secret Ceremony. The magazine beneath had an unsmiling pic of Todd's
ex-girlfriend, Wilhemina Bosch, and announced, as thou from her grieving
lips: "I never even had a chance to tell him goodbye." underneath, a
third magazine boasted that it contained Todd Pickett's J Words! "I saw
Christ standing at his death-bed, claims nurse." Burrows did bother with
the others.

"Who starts bullshit like this?"

"You tell me," Todd replied.

 "I hope you're not implying that it was somebody in my surgery,
because I assure you we've been vigorous--" "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Todd
said. "You're not responsible for anything. I know. See? I finally got
smart. I read the small print."

"Frankly, I don't see where your problem lies. All you'd have to do is
make one call, tell them who you are, and the rumors would be laid to
rest."

"And what would he say?" Marco asked.

"It's obvious. He'd say: I'm Todd Pickett and I'm alive and well, thank
you very much."

"And then whatf" Todd said. "When they want to come to take a photograph
to confirm that everything's fine? Or they want an interview,
face-to-face. Face. To. Face. With this?"

His face was presently unbandaged. He stood up and went to the mirror.

"I look like I went ten rounds with a heavyweight."

"I can only assure you that the swelling is definitely going down. It's
just going to take time. And the quality of the new epidermis is
first-rate. I believe you're going to be very pleased at the end of
everything." Todd said nothing for a moment. Then, with a kind of simple
sincerity he'd seldom--if ever--achieved in front of a camera, he turned
and said to Burrows: "You know what I wish?" Burrows shook his head. "I
wish I'd never laid eyes on you, you dickhead."

 Tammy knew only a very few people in Los Angeles, all of them mer.
hers of the Appreciation Society, but she decided not to alert anybody^
the fact that she'd come into town. They'd all want to help her with he
investigations, and this was something she preferred to do alone, at le
at the outset.

She checked herself into the little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, wit a
few hundred yards of the Westwood Memorial Park, where a host I stars
and almost-stars were buried or interred. She'd made her rounds 4 the
famous who rested there on her last visit. Donna Reed and Nata Wood were
among them, so was Darryl F. Zanuck and Oscar Levant.'. the Park's real
claim to fame--the presence that brought sightseers I all over the
world--was Marilyn Monroe, who was laid to rest in a bli concrete crypt
distinguished only by the number of floral tributes!

attracted. The crypt beside it was still empty, kept--so it was
said--for t mortal remains of Hugh Heftier.

Tammy had not much enjoyed her visit to the Park. In fact it depressed
her a little. She certainly had no intention of going back I time. It
was the living she was concerned with on this visit, not the de

When she was settled in she called Arnie, gave him her room numb| in
case of emergency and told him she'd be back in a couple of days | most.
She heard him pop a can of beer while she was talking--not, judge by his
slightly slurred speech, his first of the night. He'd be without her,
she thought. Probably happier.

She ordered up some room-service food, and then sat plotting how she'd
proceed the next day. Her first line of inquiry would be the most
direct: she'd go up to Todd's home in Bel Air and try to find out
whether or not he was there. His address was no secret. In fact she had
pictures of every room in the house, including the en suite bathroom
with the sunken tub, taken by the realtor when the house was still on
the market, though of course it had been remodeled since and its layout
had probably changed. She knew that her chances of even getting to the
front door-- much less of seeing him--were remote. But it would be
foolish of her not to try. Maybe she'd catch him going out for a jog, or
spot him standing at a window. Then all her concerns would be laid to
rest and she would be able to go back to Sacramento happy, knowing that
he was alive and well.

She'd hired a car at the airport, and had planned to drive up to Bel Air
the evening she arrived, but after the hassles of the delayed flight she
was simply too tired, so she went to bed at ten and rose bright and
early. The room service offered at the hotel was nothing special--and
she liked a good breakfast--so she crossed over Wilshire and went into
Westwood Village, found herself a diner, and ate heartily: scrambled
eggs, bacon, hash browns, white toast and coffee. While she ate she
skimmed People and USA Today. Both had pieces about the up-coming
Oscars, which were now only three days away. Todd had never won an Oscar
(which Tammy believed to be absolute proof of the corruption of the
Academy) but he'd been nominated four years ago for The Burning Year,
one of his less popular pictures. She'd been very proud of him: he'd
done fine work in the movie and she'd thought he had a crack at winning.
Watching the ceremony had been nearly impossible. Her heart had hammered
so hard as Susan Sarandon, who'd been presenting the award, had fumbled
with the envelope; Tammy thought she was going to pass out from
anticipation before the winner was even named. And then, of course,
Sarandon had named the winner, and it hadn't been Todd. The cameras had
been on nim throughout the whole envelope-fumbling routine, and there'd
been a moment between the naming of the winner and his applauding when
his

 disappointment had been perfectly clear: at least to someone who knew
the language of his face as well as Tammy.

She'd only seen one of the movies in this year's race, and she'd onljf
gone to that because Tom Hanks was in it, and he seemed such a likabli
man. She skimmed the articles rather than reading them, hoping mayt
there'd be some reassuring mention of Todd. But there was nothing.

Breakfast finished, she walked back to the hotel, left a message Arnie
at the airport, just to say all was fine, and then picked up a map \ the
front desk in case her sense of direction failed her. Thus prepared,:
set off for Todd's home.

It took twenty-five minutes driving through the heavy morning traf to
get up into the narrow, winding streets of Bel Air. There wasn't mvuj to
see; most of the mansions were hidden behind high walls, brist with
spikes and video cameras. But there was no doubting the fact she was in
a very select neighborhood. The cars parked on the nar thoroughfares
were all expensive (in one spot she maneuvered past a cc fee-and-cream
Rolls-Royce on the left and a red Porsche on the right). < another
street she encountered some glamorously-hooded superstar oil running, a
black limo following close behind, presumably carrying bottled water and
the granola bars.

What must it be like, she wondered as she drove, to be so pampe and
cosseted? To know that if there was no toilet paper in the house,: ice
cream in the freezer, then it was somebody else's damn job to go; get
it. Never to have to worry about taxes or mortgage payments. nct to wake
up at three in the morning and think: Who am If I'm nobody, died
tomorrow nobody would really notice, nobody would really care.

Of course she knew there were plenty of responsibilities that along with
all this wealth and comfort. And they took their toll on sot folks: it
drove them to drink and drugs and adultery. It was hard to be id ized
and scrutinized. But she'd never had much sympathy for the cats
plainers. So, people paid you millions to see you smile, and it made
feel inadequate. Tough shit.

She found Todd's house readily enough. There was no number, but s

recognized the castellated wall and the square lamps on either side of
the gate. She drove on up the street, found a parking spot, and wandered
back toward the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as any
two-hundredandthree-pound woman in orange polyester pants could. When
she reached the gates she saw that there was a car parked in the
driveway, twenty yards inside the gates, its trunk open. There was no
sign of anyone loading or unloading. She watched from the street for a
minute or two, her courage alternately rising then failing her. She
couldn't just go up to the gate and ring the bell. What would she say?
Hello, I'm Todd's Number One Fan, and I was wondering if he was feeling
okay? Ridiculous! They'd think she was a stalker and have her arrested.
In fact they might be watching her right now, on a hidden camera:
calling the police.

She stood there, quietly cursing herself for not having thought this
through properly before she came up here. She didn't know whether to
stand her ground, and make the best of this nightmarish situation, or
attempt to casually slip away.

Then a door slammed, somewhere out of sight. She wanted to make a run
for it, but she was too far from the car to make a quick retreat. All
she could do was stand there and hope to God there was nobody looking at
the security monitors at that particular moment.

Now came the sound of somebody whistling, and seconds later the whistler
himself stepped into view. Tammy recognized him instantly. It was Marco
Caputo, Todd's assistant and bodyguard. She'd encountered the man twice
before, once at the premiere party for The Burning Year, and the second
time in Las Vegas, when Todd had been named Actor of the Year at
Showest. She'd very politely presented her credentials as the President
of the Appreciation Society, and politely asked Caputo if she could have
a minute to talk with Todd. On both occasions he'd been rude to her. The
second time, in fact, he'd called her "a crazy bitch," which she d
complained to Maxine Frizelle about. Maxine had apologized in a
naif-hearted way, and said it would never happen again, but Tammy wasn't
about to put Caputo's temper to the test a third time, especially 'Wider
these dubious circumstances.

 Before he could look up and see her she backed off into the thicket I
blackberry bushes that grew unchecked on the other side of the stree She
kept her eyes on him at all times; he was too busy with his preset
labors to notice her, thank God; and now, hidden in the bushes, she ]
the perfect vantage point from which to observe him as he went back I
forth between the house and the car. He was loading his vehicle up witj
an odd assortment of things: including several awards she knew belong to
Todd. He was also removing some other items: a variety of fancy or
ments, a marijuana plant in a pot, some framed photographs. All this,
phi nine or ten sealed cardboard boxes, carefully placed in the trunk or
on I back seat of his car. There was no sign of Todd through the
process; n<i did she hear any exchange from inside the house. If Todd
was here, he I not engaged in conversation with Marco. But her instincts
told her he 1 not here.

For fully a quarter of an hour she watched him work and finally--pu ting
all the evidence together--she came to the conclusion that she
witnessing an act of theft. Of course, her dislike of the thief factored
ini her assessment, but there was no doubt that Caputo looked furtive as
1 went about his labors. Every now and then he'd glance up as if he wa
afraid he was being watched (perhaps he sensed that he was); and whe he
did she saw that his face was ill-shaven and his eyes heavy. Sleep
wasix| coming too easily of late.

She had already decided what she was going to do well before he'd I
ished with his felony. She'd follow him when he departed and find oil
where he was dropping off all his booty. Then she'd call the police and
1 him arrested. Hopefully that would improve Maxine's low opinion of he
She might even find herself trusted enough to be invited into the <
circle around Todd. Well, perhaps that was a little too much to hope :
But at the very least she'd be stopping Caputo profiting from his theft.

With the car now filled to capacity, Caputo slammed the trunk, headed
back to the house, presumably to lock up. Once he'd gone Tar
disentangled herself from the blackberry bushes and hurried back to h^
own car. It was getting warm. She felt sweat running from beneath hrf!

breasts, and her underwear was bunched in the groove of her butt. She
turned the air-conditioning to its coldest setting, then drove on up the
street a little way until she had sufficient room to turn around, and
came back down in time to see Caputo's black Lexus easing out of the
driveway.

He was the only occupant of the vehicle.

Keeping her distance, she followed the Lexus down through the maze of
Bel Air's walls and cameras to Sunset Boulevard. She almost lost her
quarry at the lights, but luckily the eastbound traffic on Sunset was
heavy, and with a little discourteous driving she was able to keep him
in sight, finally catching up with him again. He drove with ease and
impatience, slipping lanes to overtake tardy drivers; but she was a
match for him.

Wherever he was going, she was going to be on his thieving tail.

She had no time to consult the maps she'd picked up, she was too busy
keeping her eyes on him. So when he suddenly swung a left, and took off
up into the hills again, she instantly lost all sense of where they were
headed. The traffic soon grew sparse, the streets narrow and serpentine.

Once he halted at a stop sign and he looked back over his shoulder. She
was certain he'd realized he was being followed, and prepared herself
for a confrontation. But no; something he'd laid on the back seat had
moved, it seemed, and he was simply leaning over to reposition it. The
job done, he then proceeded on his way, and she continued to follow, at
a discreet distance.

The road wound so tightly on itself as it ascended that she let him slip
out of sight several times rather than risk his realizing he was being
pursued.

But she didn't fear losing him. Unlike Bel Air, which was made up of a
warren of small streets, the Canyon into which they were climbing seemed
to have only one thoroughfare, and they were both on it. What little
sign of habitation she saw--a wall, and occasionally a gate in a
wall--suggested this was not particularly well-fancied real estate,
which Was surprising given its location. The trees had been allowed to
grow over the road, in some places intertwining their brandies to form a
leafy vault overhead. In one spot, where a number of tall palm trees grew
close to the r ad, fallen fronds lay in a brittle carpet on the potholed
tarmac.

 She began to get just a little anxious. Although she reassured her
that she was just a couple of minutes' drive away from Sunset, this felt
1 a very different world; a backwater, where who knew what went on?"
very fact, of course, supported her shadier suspicions. This was a
perfec place for an illegal transaction: there didn't appear to be
anybody here witness Caputo's dealing. Except, of course, herself.

The black Lexus had been out of sight for quite a while when, as sh
turned a corner, she came upon it parked so badly that she might ha
plowed into the back of it had she not acted quickly to avert the
collisioi She swung wide of it, glancing back to see Caputo manually
openings pair of immense gates. The thief started to look round at her,
but she pu her foot on the accelerator and was out of sight before he
could fix '.

gaze. She drove on a considerable distance, but the road came to a
dead-^ end, which left her with two options. One, to turn round and make
a cor spicuous retreat past the gates, so that he was certain she'd
gone; or hope that the urgency of his mission would make him careless
about I presence, and by the time she'd trekked back to his thieves'
lair she would| have been forgotten. She decided on the latter. She'd
come too far to tur and run off now with her tail between her legs.

The first thing she noticed when she got out of her car was the deep hu
of the Canyon. Though the Bel Air house was nicely situated, away from
the din of any major thoroughfare, she'd still been aware that she was I
the middle of a city. But here the only sound was the music of birds,
insects in the grass. She was careful not to slam the door. Leaving the
he in the car, and the door just slightly ajar in case she needed to
make a fas getaway, she headed back down the street to the gate.

There were no cameras mounted along the perimeter this time," surprised
her; but then perhaps she was walking into a nest of infamov felons, and
everyone in the vicinity knew to keep their distance. If: the people
Marco was doing business with were real villains--then was in trouble.
She was alone up here; and nobody knew where gone.

This is insanity, she thought to herself as she walked. But she kept on
walking. The prospect of coming out of this the unlikely heroine was
simply too attractive to be turned down. Yes, there was a risk. But then
perhaps it was time she took a few, instead of hiding away in her house
and doting on her picture collection. She was in the thick of things
now, and she wasn't going to allow herself to turn her back on this
adventure.

If she did--if she got in her car and drove away--wouldn't she always
wonder how different things might have been if for once in her life
she'd had the courage of her instincts?

Arnie had always called her a dreamer, and maybe he was right about
that. Maybe she'd been living in a dream world for too long, with her
little museum of photographs to dote on; hoping--though it could never
happen, of course--that one day, when she flicked through the pictures,
Todd would look at her and smile at her and invite her into his world,
to stay. It was a silly dream, and she knew it. Whereas being here now,
walking on the hard street in the hot sun, with an old cracked wall to
the left of her--all that was real, perfectly real. So perhaps today was
the day when the photographs became real too; the day when she finally
found her way to a man of flesh and blood; to a Todd who would return
her look, finally; see her and smile at her.

The thought made her quicken her step; and she arrived at the gates
breathing a little faster, exhilarated by the prospect that with the
hazards she imagined the house contained there was one possibility she
could not properly imagine (though Lord knows she'd tried to conjure it
over an dover): the image of her idol, appearing before her, and her
with so much to say she wouldn't know where to begin.

She scanned the area around the gates (the bars of which were exquisit
interwoven with both wrought iron vines and the living variety) in sear
of the inevitable security cameras, but to her surprise found none, were
either extremely well concealed, or else the owners of this hoi were so
certain that their Canyon was safe from visitors that they did feel the
need of them. More surprisingly still, the gates had no locks;: was able
to push one of them open wide enough for her to slip throu|

She could see some of the house from where she stood, though it ^ mostly
hidden by the great riot of shrubs and trees that lined the cur
driveway. Caputo's car was parked close to the front door. The trunk7
open, and he was now unloading his loot. She wished she'd brought j
camera; then she could have simply photographed him in the middle I his
illicit transaction, and left with her evidence. But as it was, she
obliged to get a little closer, and find out who he was dealing with. If
I didn't have some further evidence, it was going to end up being his
against hers; and she, after all, was the trespasser here. Her accusatic
weren't going to carry much weight unless she could be very spec about
what she had witnessed.

She waited until Caputo had gone into the house, and then cref toward
the front door, covering perhaps half the distance between doe and gate
before the thief strode out of the house again, and returned 1 the car.
She ducked for cover behind a Bird of Paradise, its sickly gummy beneath
her heels. From there she watched while Caputo hauk

 another load of booty up out of the trunk. As he did so there was a
shout from inside the house; the voice curiously muted.

"Marco! This picture's cracked."

"Shit."

Marco set down the box he was lifting from the trunk, and went back to
the doorstep. As he did so, the owner of the picture, and of that
curiously muffled voice, came out of the house. The sight of him made
Tammy's heart quicken. First, he was shirtless, his slacks hanging low
on his hips. His torso was tanned, but far from trim. He looked to have
a body that had once been well cared for but was now quickly going to
seed. The muscles of his upper arms were soft, and he had the beginnings
of love-handles spilling over his belt. His face was swathed in
bandages.

They weren't tight to his skull, like the bandaging on a mummy. They
were more irregular; patches of gauze held against his cheeks and brow
and jaw and neck, with lengths of bandaging running all the way around
his head to secure them and locks of his lush dark hair stuck up out of
the bandages like tufts from the pate of a clown. All in all, that was
what he resembled, with his ill-fitting pants, and his little paunch:
something from a circus. Part clown, part freak.

He lifted up the picture for Marco to see. "Look."

"It's just the glass that's cracked. Easy fix."

"You're careless." "I said I'd get it fixed, boss."

"That's not the point. You're fucking careless."

Only as the clown returned into the house, dropping the offending
picture against the door-jamb for Marco to pick up, did Tammy realize
who she'd just seen.

It was Todd. Oh my Lord ... It was Todd standing there on the doorstep,
with his face all bandaged up and

"W stomach hanging over his trousers.

Tammy heard herself gasping. She put her hand over her mouth to silence
the sound, but she needn't have bothered. The men's fractious

exchange had escalated into an argument loud enough to drown out; noise
she might make.

"You're so fucking clumsy."

"Some of the stuff slipped off the back seat, that's all. No big deal, j
was an accident."

"Well, there's too many fucking accidents around here for my liking

"Hey ... I said I'm sorry."

"It's a picture of the house where I was born."

"Yeah? Well I'll get a new frame for it on Monday."

The exchange about the broken glass apparently came to a halt the Tammy
watched while Caputo stood on the step, staring into the how muttering
something under his breath. Whatever it was, it wasn't Todd's ears; he
was just quietly letting off steam. He leaned on the car, ] a cigarette
and soothed himself with a smoke.

Tammy didn't dare move. Even though Caputo wasn't looking dire at her,
there was a better than even chance that he'd catch sight of her| she
broke cover. All she could do was stay where she was, her mind I with
feverish explanations for what she'd just seen.

Obviously something horrible had happened to Todd, but what? He first
thought was that one of his ex-girlfriends had tried to harm him (he'|
always had poor judgment when it came to women). Either that there'd
been some kind of accident (was that what his remark about "to many
accidents" had meant?). Whatever it was, he was in terrible pain, < else
why would he be acting the way he just had? Her heart went out I him.
And to be stuck up here in this God-forsaken place with only cretin
Caputo for company: it would drive anybody crazy.

Finally, Caputo dropped his cigarette, ground it out, and went back!

his work. Tammy waited until he'd disappeared inside the house stepped
out of her hiding place. What now? Back to the gate, up the I to her
car, and away? Clearly that was the most sensible thing to do.

that would mean leaving without finding out what was wrong with poor
Todd. She couldn't do that. It was as simple as that. She couldn't do I

She was going to have to find a way into the house, and then discc

orne means to speak to him before Caputo intervened. Obviously the
front door wasn't the way to go; not with the thug standing right there.

She was going to have to try around the back. She retraced her sticky
steps a few yards, and then crossed to the corner of the house. A
paving-stone path led down the flank of the house. It was a narrow,
steep descent, and it plainly hadn't been used in many years. Roots had
cracked the stones, and shrubbery choked the path in several places. It
took her fully ten minutes to make her cautious descent, but it
delivered her into a far more beautiful spot than she'd expected.
Somebody had once created a wonderful garden back here; and now, with
spring early this year throughout the state, the place was glorious.
Everywhere there were bursts of brilliant color--and hummingbirds, going
from flower to flower, and butterflies, drying their newly-exposed wings
to the sun.

The beauty of the place put all thoughts of jeopardy out of Tammy's
head, at least for a few moments. She made her way through the bushes to
what had once been an enormous lawn--though there were so many wild
flowers in the tall grass, and so much grass sprouting in the border,
that lawn and border had become virtually indistinguishable--and looked
back up at the house, her gaze going from window to window, balcony to
balcony, to see if there was anybody watching her. She saw nobody, so
she grew a little more confident and strode out into the middle of the
lawn so that she could get herself a good look at the house. It was much
larger than she'd assumed from the front, and even in its dilapidated
state it was an elegant place, the curves of its balconies echoing one
another, the ironwork of its railings delicate.

That said, it was a strange house for Todd to be living in. She knew how
hard he'd worked to perfect his residence in Bel Air (four architects;
two interior designers; millions of dollars spent): so why was he here?
There could be only one explanation. He was in hiding. He didn't want
anyone to see him in his wounded state. She understood the logic of
that. There were some people--some of his fans--who wanted to think he
was perfect.

Luckily, she wasn't one of those people. Far from it. The fact that he
was here, all locked away, hurting and angry, made her feel all the more

love for him. If she got a chance, she'd tell him so. If he'd let her,
she'd j those stifling bandages off his face. She didn't care what he
looked '. underneath; it was still her Todd, wasn't it? Still the man
she idolized.: once the fact that her breasts were too big would be a
Godsend. They'd 1 a comfortable place for him to lay his hurt head. She
could rock him; keep him there, safe and sound.

From the corner of her eye, she saw something move in the foliag The
blissful imaginings fled. Very slowly, she looked toward the si where
she'd seen the motion. The sun was bright, the shadows dark; solid. The
leaves shook in the light breeze. Was that what she'd seen?" leaves
shaking? Apparently so, for there was nothing else visible.

She returned her gaze to the house, looking for the best way for her ^
get in. There were no open windows on the garden level--at least non|
that she could see--and the doors all looked to be securely locked,
pushed her way through a line of shrubs so as to see if the house was;
more vulnerable elsewhere, but the foliage grew thicker around her as s
proceeded, and then she somehow managed to become disorient^!

because when she turned back to try another way she found that shel lost
sight of both the lawn and the house. She felt like Alice, sudde
shrinking away; the flowers around her were huge, like sunflowers, or
purple and scarlet, and the scent they gave off was achingly sweet."
grew so tall, however, and in such preternatural numbers, that she con
not see the house at all--not a chimney pot, not a balcony. Her only he
was to make a guess at the direction in which the house lay, which she (
plunging on through the enormous blooms. But her guesswork hopelessly
amiss. The shrubbery simply thickened, the sunflowers givil way to
bushes whose branches carried bell-shaped yellow blossoc almost the size
of her head. She couldn't yell for help, of course; would bring Caputo
running. She had no choice but to head on in same hopeless fashion,
until at last the thicket cleared somewhat, and!

had sight of the sky again.

Emerging from the shrubbery she was instantly on her guard, in ca she'd
come to a place where she could be spotted. But she needn't ha

worried. Her travels had brought her down the hill, and put a line of
cypress trees (which she could not remember moving through) between
herself and the house. Only one reasonably sensible option presented
itself. Directly ahead of her was a narrow pathway--as overgrown as the
one that had brought her down the side of the house. She had no idea
where it led, but it was a pathway; it implied that others had been here
before her, perhaps in the same predicament, and this trail of trodden
ground marked their exit. If it had worked for them, why not for her?

Pulling pieces of twig and blossom from her hair and blouse as she went,
she followed the path.

She suddenly had a mental picture of herself in her present state. What
a sight she must be, stumbling out of the greenery like some crazed
explorer. What the hell was she thinking of? Out there on the open
street it had been easy to talk herself into this trespass. Now she was
beginning to think the whole idea wasn't so smart. It wasn't the fact
that she was lost in the environs of the house that discomfited her:
she'd find her way back to the street eventually. Nor was she
particularly concerned about the threat posed by Caputo; not now that
she knew Todd was here. Caputo might yell a bit, and threaten her with
the police if she didn't leave; but he was more bark than bite. No, what
had brought her to a halt was the distinct sense that she wasn't alone
out here in the undergrowth. There was somebody close by. She couldn't
see anybody, but the feeling was too strong to be ignored.

She slowly started to turn on her heel, viewing the scene around her.

Whoever you are ..." she said, doing her best to keep her voice as quiet
and non-confrontational as possible, "please show yourself."

There was a motion in the undergrowth, five or six yards from where she
stood. Somebody--or something--had apparently moved from its hid fflg
place. There was more than one creature in the vicinity, she guessed;
there were several. There was foliage moving all around her now, as
though those hiding in the shrubbery were getting ready to show
themselves.

She started walking again, faster than before, and her walking brought
er into a place where the shrubbery cleared a little, presenting her
with a

most unexpected sight. There were perhaps seven or eight cag arranged
on either side of a wide, flagged walkway. They varied in : The largest
might have housed two horses and left some room for mane ver, the
smallest was perhaps half that size. Vines had wrapped the selves around
the bars and fell here and there, in tattered green curt as though to
conceal what lay inside the cages. In fact, there was not to conceal.
The occupants of this menagerie had long since disappea

She moved down the walkway cautiously, increasingly certain that hi
stalkers were matching her motion step by step on the other side of 1
cages. Some of the cages had high wooden bars, which suggested they
housed small monkeys. Others were built more robustly, their bars I or
three times the thickness. What kind of animal had been held in a ca$
like this? It was too small to comfortably accommodate a rhinoceros,
even a bear or tiger. And in a day rife with unanswered questions, here
I another one: what had happened to the occupants of this tawdry priv
zoo? Was there a graveyard somewhere in the thicket where the ar had
been laid to rest? Or had their owner set them free to roam Canyon?

She was almost at the end of the walkway now. The final cage on he right
was in a much better state than the others. Foliage had been int woven
with the bars so cunningly that there was practically nothing I the
interior visible. Its gate, which was similarly covered, stood a little
aji Tammy peered in. The air inside smelled of some subtle perfume,
source the candles which were set in a little cluster at the far end of
I cage. There was a small cot set against the wall to her right, some'V
incongruously made up with two oversized red silk pillows and a dirty]
low comforter. There was a chair and a tiny table on the other side of t
cage, and on the table paper and pen. Beside the cot there was an upenc
wooden box, which also functioned as a table. Books were piled upon it.
But her attention didn't linger on the books. It was drawn to 1 cluster
of candles at the far end of the cage. There was a kind of alt there,
roughly made; set on a few pieces of wood raised up on rocks, the middle
of the altar was what Tammy first thought was a piece

culpture, representing the face of a beautiful young woman. When she of
closer to it, however, she saw that it was a life-mask. The mouth
carried an oh-so-subtle smile; and there was a slight frown on the
subject's otherwise perfect brow. Such beauty! Whoever this woman
was--or had jjeen_it was easy to understand why she'd been elected for
this place of honor in the candlelight. It was the kind of face that
made you gape at its perfection. The kind the camera loved.

Ah now; the mysteries of this house and place began to seem more
soluble.

Was this beauty the owner of this once-great house; remembered here by
some obsessive fan? Was this shrine made out of devotion for a woman
who'd walked in these gardens, once upon a time?

Tammy took another step toward the altar, and saw that besides the
life-mask there were a number of other, smaller items set there. A scrap
of red silk, one edge of it hemmed; a cameo brooch, with the same
woman's face carved in creamy stone; a little wooden box, scarcely
larger than a matchbox, which presumably held some other treasure; and
lying flat beneath all of these a cut-out paper doll, about twelve
inches tall, of a woman dressed in the frilly underwear of a bygone era.
The paper from which the doll was made had yellowed, the colors of the
printing faded. It was something from the twenties, Tammy guessed. Her
knowledge of that era of cinema was sketchy, but the three faces, one of
cardboard, one of plaster, one of stone, teased her: she knew the woman
whose image was thricefold copied here. She'd seen her flickering
black-and-white picture on some late-night movie channel. She tried to
put a name to the face, but nothing came.

Despairing of the puzzle, she took a step back from the altar, and as
she did so she felt a rush of cool air against the back of her neck. She
turned, completely unprepared for what met her gaze. A man had come into
the cage behind her, entering so silently he was literally a foot from
her and she hadn't heard his approach. There were places in the leafed
and barred roof where the sun broke through, and it fell in bright
patches upon him.

 the of them fell irregularly upon his face, catching both his eyes, and
part f his nose, and the corner of his mouth. She saw immediately that
it

wasn't Caputo. It was a much older man, his eyes, despite the sun that
ilhj minated them, gray, cold and weary, his hair, what was left of it,
gro\> out to shoulder length and quite white. He was gaunt, but the lack
I flesh on his skull flattered him; he looked, she thought, like a saint
in 1 grandmother's old Bible, which had been illustrated with pictures
by I Old Masters. This was a man capable of devotion; indeed addicted to
it^

He raised his hand and put a homemade cigarette to his lips. Theij with
a kind of old-fashioned style, he flicked open his lighter, lit the cig
rette and drew deeply on it.

"And who might you be?" he said. His voice was the color of his eyes|

"I'm sorry," Tammy said. "I shouldn't be here." "Please," he said
gently, "let me be the judge of that." He drew on t cigarette again. The
tobacco smelled more pungent than any cigareti she'd ever inhaled. "I'd
still like your name." "Tammy Lauper. Like I said--"

"You're sorry."

"Yes."

"You don't mean to be here."

"No."

"You got lost, I daresay. It's so easy, in the garden."

"I was looking for Todd." "Ah," the stranger said, glancing away at the
roof for a moment." cigarette smoke was blue as it rose through the
slivers of sun. "So you with Mister Pickett's entourage."

"Well no. Not exactly."

"Meaning?"

"I just ... well, he knows me ..."

"But he doesn't know you're here."

"That's right."

The man's gaze returned to Tammy, and he assessed her, his though
insistent, oddly polite. "What are you to our Mister Pickett?" said. 'A
mistress of his, once?"

 Tammy couldn't help but smile at this. First, the very thought of it;
then, the word itself. Mistress. Like the flick of his lighter, it was
pleasantly old-fashioned. And rather flattering.

"I don't think Todd Pickett would look twice at me," she said, feeling
^g need to be honest with this sad, gray man.

"Then that would be his loss," the man replied, the compliment offered
so lightly that even if it wasn't meant it was still beguiling. Out of
nowhere she remembered a phrase her mother had used, to describe Jimmy
Mackintosh, the man she'd eventually divorced Tammy's father to pursue.
"He could charm the birds off of the trees, that one." She'd never met a
man with that kind of charisma before, in the flesh. But this man had
it. Though their exchange so far had been brief and shallow, she knew a
bird-charmer when she met one.

"May I ask ..."

"Ask away."

"... who are you?"

"By all means. One name deserves another. I'm Willem Zeffer." "I'm
pleased to meet you," Tammy said. "Again, I'm sorry." She made a
half-hearted glance over her shoulder at the altar. "I shouldn't have
come in here."

"You weren't to know. It's easy to get lost in this ... jungle. We
should have it all cut back." He smiled thinly. "You just can't get the
staff these days." "That woman," Tammy said. "The one in the mask?" "In
the mask?" Zeffer said. "Oh. I see. Yes. In the mask."

"Who is she?"

He stepped to the side, in order to have a clear view of the altar and
what was upon it. "She was an actress," he explained, "many, many moons
ago." "I thought I recognized her."

"Her name's Katya Lupi."

Yes?" The name rang a bell, but Tammy still couldn't name any of the
"levies this woman had been in.

"Was she very famous?"

"Very. She's up there with Pickford and Swanson and Theda Bara.

she was."

"She's dead?"

"No, no. Just forgotten. At least that's my impression. I don't get <
into the world anymore, but I sense that the name Katya Lupi does mean
very much."

"You'd be right."

"Well, she's lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldhe
Canyon."

"Coldheart?"

"That's what they called the place. She was such a heartbreaker, see.
She took so many lovers--especially in the early years--and when s was
done with them, she just threw them aside."

"Were you one of them?"

Zeffer smiled. "I shared her bed, a little, when I first brought her
America. But she got tired of me very quickly."

"What then?"

"I had other uses, so she kept me around. But a lot of the men loved her
took her rejection badly. Three committed suicide with bullefi A number
of others with alcohol. Some of them stayed here, where th| could be
close to her. Including me. It's foolish really, because there's l way
back into her affections."

"Why would you want to be ... back, I mean?" Tammy said. "She mu be very
old by now."

"Oh time hasn't staled her infinite variety, as the Bard has it. She's
sts beautiful."

Tammy didn't want to challenge the man, given that he was pla besotted
with this Lupi woman, but the idol of his heart must approaching a
hundred years of age by now. It was hard to imagine he any of her beauty
remained.

"Well, I guess I should be getting along," Tammy said.

She gently pressed past Zeffer, who put up no resistance, and stepped
nt of the cage onto the walkway. It was so quiet she could hear her
stom- ch rumble. Her Westwood breakfast seemed very remote now; as did
the little diner where she'd eaten it.

Zeffer came after her, out into the open air, and she saw him clearly
for the first time. He had been extremely handsome once, she thought;
but his face was a mess. He looked as though he'd been attacked; punched
repeatedly. Raw in places, pale and powdery in others, he had the
appearance of a man who had suffered intensely, and kept the suffering
inside, where it continued to take its toll. She couldn't make quite so
hurried an attempt to abandon him now that she'd seen him plainly. He
seemed to read her equivocation, and suggested that she stay.

"Are you really in such a hurry?"

He looked around him as he spoke; he seemed to be reading the peculiar
stillness in the air.

"Perhaps we could walk together a ways. It isn't always safe up here."

Before she could ask him what he meant by this he turned his back to the
door of the cage and picked up a large stick that was set there. The way
he wielded it suggested he'd used it as a weapon in the past, and had
some expectation of doing so again now.

"Animals?" she said.

He looked at her with those sorrowful gray eyes of his. "Sometimes
animals, yes. Sometimes worse."

"I don't understand."

"Perhaps, with respect, it would be better not to try," he advised. The
stillness seemed to be deepening around them, the absence of sound
becoming heavier, if that were possible. She didn't need any further
encouragement from Zeffer to stay close to him. Whatever this stillness
"id, she didn't want to face it alone. "Just take it from me that
Coldheart Canyon has some less-than-pretty occupants."

Something behind the cages drew Zeffer's attention. Tammy followed the
direction of his gaze. "What were the cages for?" she asked him.

"Katya went through a phase of collecting exotic animals. We had af tie
zoo here. A white tiger from India, though he didn't live very lc Later,
there was a rhinoceros. That also perished."

"Wasn't that cruel? Keeping them here, I mean? The cages look small."

"Yes, of course it was cruel. She's a cruel woman, and I was cruel j
doing her bidding. I have no doubt of that. I was probably unspea cruel,
in my casual way. But it takes the experience of living like an:
mal"--he glanced back at the cage--"to realize the misery they must 1
suffered."

Tammy watched him scrutinizing the shrubbery on the far side of 1 cages.

"What's out there?" she said. "Is it animals that--" "Come here" Zeffer
said, his voice suddenly dropping to an whisper. "Quickly."

Though she still saw nothing in the shrubbery, she did as she was 1

As she did so, there was a blast of icy air down the narrow between the
cages, and she saw several forms--human forms, but torted, as though
they were in a wind-tunnel, their mouths blown int dark circle lined
with needle teeth, their eyes squeezed into dots--cod racing toward her.

"Don't you dare!" she heard Zeffer yell at her side, and saw him raise!

stick. If he landed a blow she didn't see it. The breath was knocked I
her as two of her attackers threw themselves upon her.

One of them put a hand over her face. A spasm of energy pa through her
bone and brain, erupting behind her eyes. It was more her mind could
take. She saw a white light, like the light that floods a < ema screen
when the film breaks. si

The cold went away in the same instant: sounds and sights and all 1
feelings they composed, gone.

The last thing she heard, dying away, was Willem Zeffer's voice ye

"Damn you all!"

Then he too was gone.

 in the passageway in front of Katya's long-abandoned menagerie, Willem
Zeffer watched as the forces that had broken cover carried Tammy Lauper
away into their own horrid corners of the Canyon, leaving him-- as he
had been left so often in this godless place--helpless and bereft.

He threw the stick down on the ground, his eyes stinging with tears.

Then the strength ran out of him completely, and he went down on his
knees at the threshold of his hovel, cursing Katya. She wasn't the only
one to blame, of course. He had his own part to play in this tragic
melodrama, as he'd admitted moments before. But he still wanted Katya
damned for what she'd done, as he was damned: for the death of tigers
and rhinoceros, and the murder of innocent women.

 Life After Fame

 Three days after Tammy had pursued Marco Caputo up Sunset Boulevard
and into the mysterious arms of Coldheart Canyon was Oscar Night: the
Night of Nights, the Show of Shows, when billions of people across the
world turned their eyes on Tinseltown and Tinseltown did a pirouette and
a curtsy and pretended it was a lady not a five-buck whore.

Todd had known from the start that there was no chance of his attending
the ceremony. Though he could now see that his wounded face was indeed
healing properly, it was plain that he was in no condition to step into
the limelight anytime soon. He had briefly considered hiring one of the
great makeup men of the city to disguise the worst of the discoloration,
but Maxine quickly dissuaded him. Such a plan would require them to
share their secret with somebody else (this in itself was risky: makeup
personnel were legendary gossips) and there was always the chance that,
however good the cover-up was, the illusion of perfection would be
spoiled under the blaze of so many lights. All it required was the lucky
photographer to catch a crack in the painted mask, and all their hard
work would be undone. The rumor-mill would grind into motion again.

Anyway," she reminded him, "you loathe the Oscars."

This was indeed true. The spectacle of self-congratulation had always

Sickened him. The ghastly parade of nervous smiles as everyone traipsed
tttto the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the shrill laughter, the sweaty

S'nces. Then, once everyone was inside, the circus itself. The lame
jokes, gushing speeches, the tears, the ego. There was always a minute
or

two of choreographed mawkishness, when the Academy carted out son
antiquated star and gave him a last chance to flicker. Occasionally, the
taste level plummeted further than usual, the Academy chose son poor
soul who'd already been stricken by a stroke or was in the ea| stages of
Alzheimer's. There'd be a selection of clips from the poor >

tim's great pictures, then, fumbling and bewildered, he or she would ]

led out to stand alone on the stage while the audience rose to appl
them, and you could see in their eyes that this was some kind of Hell:^
have their finest moments thrown up on a screen--their faces strong;
shining--and then have the spotlight show the world what age and I ease
had done to them.

"You're right," he'd said to Maxine. "I don't want to be there."

So why, if he truly didn't want to be there, was he sitting at his bee
window tonight, staring down the length of the Canyon toward the I
feeling so damn sorry for himself? Why had he started drinking, drinking
hard, at noon, and by two-thirty--when he knew the first ] ousines were
beginning to roll up to the Pavilion--was he in the dept despair?

Why, he asked himself, would he want to keep company with the hollow,
sour people? He'd fought the battle to get to the top of Hollywood Hill
long ago, and he'd won it. He'd had his face plastered!

on ten thousand billboards across America, across the world. He'd 1
called the Handsomest Man in the World, and believed it. He'd wa into
rooms the size of football fields and known that every eye was 1 in his
direction, and every heart beat a little faster because he'd appea Just
how much more adulation did a man need?

The truth?

Another hundred rooms filled with people stupefied by worship' not be
enough to satisfy the hunger in him; nor another hundred hund He needed
his face plastered on every wall he passed, his movies lauc the skies,
his arms so filled with Oscars he couldn't hold them all.

It was a sickness in him, but what was he to do? There was no cure |

this emptiness but love; love in boundless amounts; the kind of love
God Himself would be hard-pressed to deliver.

As the cloudless sky darkened toward night he started to pick out the
Klieg lights raking the clouds: not from the Pavilion itself (that lay
to the west, and was not visible from the Canyon), but from the many
locations around the city where his peers, both prize-winners and
losers, would in a few hours come to revel. Members of the press were
already assembling at these sacred sites--Morton's, Spago's, the
Roosevelt Hotel--ready to turn their cameras on the slick and the
stylishly unkempt alike. A smile, a witticism, a look of glee from those
burdened with victory. They'd have it all in the morning editions.

Picturing the scene was too much for him. He got up and went down to the
kitchen to fix himself another drink. By now he was on the second cycle
of intoxication; having drunk himself past the point of nausea by
mid-afternoon, he was moving inexorably toward a deep luxurious
drunkenness; the kind that flirted with oblivion. He'd suffer for it for
whatever part of tomorrow he saw, of course, and probably the day after
that. He was no longer young enough or resilient enough to shrug off the
effects of a hinge like this. But right now he didn't give a rat's ass.
He simply wanted to be insulated from the pain he was feeling.

As he opened the immense fridge to get himself ice, he heard, or thought
he heard, somebody, a woman, say his name.

He stopped digging for the ice and looked around. The kitchen was empty.
He left the fridge open and went back to the door. The turret was also
deserted, and the dining room dark, the empty table and chairs
silhouetted against the window. He walked on through it into the living
room, calling for Marco. He flipped on the light. The fifty-lamp
chandelier blazed, illuminating an empty room. There were several boxes
of his belongings sitting there, still unopened. Moved from Bel Air but
still ^packed. But that was all.

He was about to go back to the kitchen, assuming the voice he'd heard
was alcohol-induced, when he heard his name called a second time. He
ooked back into the dining room. Was he going crazy?

"Marco?" he yelled.

There was a long, empty moment. Somewhere in the darkness of I Canyon a
solitary coyote was yelping. Then came the sound of a dc opening, and he
heard Marco's familiar voice: "Yes, boss?"

"I heard somebody calling."

"In the house?" "Yeah. I thought so. A woman's voice."

Marco appeared on the stairs now, looking down at his employer ^ an
expression of concern. "You okay?"

"Yeah. I just got unnerved, is all."

"You want me to go check around?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I don't even know where it was coming from. Bi heard
somebody. I swear."

Marco, who'd emerged from his bedroom in his boxers, headed ba upstairs
to get dressed. Todd went back to the kitchen, feeling a little \ pid.
There wasn't going to be anybody here, inside the house or Every
stalker, every voyeur, every obsessive was canvassing the around the
Pavilion, looking for a way to slide past the security gua under the
velvet rope, and into the company of their idols. They well wasting their
time stumbling around in the darkness hoping for a ; of Todd Pickett,
all fucked up. Nobody even knew he was here, Christ's sake. Worse;
nobody cared.

As he returned to the business of making his drink, he heard Ma coming
down back the stairs, and was half tempted to tell him to for But he
decided against it. No harm in letting one of them feel tonight. He
dropped a handful of ice-cubes into his glass, and filled I with scotch.
Took a mouthful. Topped it up. Took another mout And the voice came
again.

If there had been some doubt in his head as to whether he'd act heard
the call or simply imagined it, there was now none. Somebody^ here in
the house, calling to him.

It seemed to be coming from the other side of the hallway. He sel

jj-jjjc down on the counter and quietly crossed the kitchen. The turret
deserted. There was nobody on the stairs either above or below.

He took the short passageway down to what Marco had dubbed the Casino,
an immense wood-paneled room, lit by a number of low-slung lights, which
indeed looked as though it had been designed to house a roulette wheel
and half a dozen poker tables. Judging by the distance of the voice it
seemed the likeliest place for whoever had spoken to be lurking.

As he walked down the passageway it briefly occurred to him that to make
this investigation without Marco at his side was foolishness. But the
drink made him bold. Besides, it was only a woman he'd heard. He could
deal with a woman.

The door of the Casino stood open. He peered in. The windows were
undraped; a few soft panels of gray light slid through them,
illuminating the enormity of the place. He could see no sign of an
intruder. But some instinct instructed him not to believe the evidence
of his eyes. He wasn't .alone here. The skin of his palms pricked. So,
curiously, did the flesh beneath his bandages, as though it were
especially susceptible in its newborn state.

"Who's there?" he said, his voice less confident than he'd intended.

At the far end of the room one of the pools of light fluttered.
Something passed through it, raising the dust.

Who's there?" he said again, his hand straying to the light switch.

He resisted the temptation to turn it on, however. Instead he waited,
and watched. Whoever this trespasser was, she was too far from him to do
any harm.

You shouldn't be in here," he said gently. "You do know that, don't
you?"

Again, that subtle motion at the other end of the room. But he still
couldn't make out a figure; the darkness beyond the pool of light was
too "^Penetrable.

Why don't you step out where I can see you?" he suggested.

This time he got an answer.



"I will ..." she told him. "In a minute."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Katya."

"How did you get in here?"

"Through the door, like everybody else," she said. Her tone was or.

gentle amusement. It would have annoyed Todd if there hadn't also 1 a
certain sweetness there. He was curious to see what she looked like. ]
the more he pressed her, he thought, the more she'd resist. So he kept!

conversation off the subject, and casually wandered across the imma
lately laid and polished floor as he talked.

"It must have been hard to find me," he said.

"Not at all," she said. "I heard you were coming from Jerry."

"You know Jerry?"

"Oh, yes. We go way back. He used to come up here when he wa child. You
made a good choice with him, Todd. He keeps secrets."

"Really? I always thought he was a bit of a gossip."

"It depends if it's important or not. He never mentioned me to did he?"

"No."

"You see? Oh yes, and he's dying. I suppose he didn't mention either."

"No he didn't."

"Well he is. He has cancer. Inoperable." "He never said a thing," Todd
said, thinking not only of Jerry bvi sick, silent Dempsey.

"Well why would he? To you of all people. He idolizes you."

Her familiarity with Jerry, and her knowledge of his sickness, added to
the puzzle of her presence.

"Did he send you up here?" Todd said.

"No, silly," the woman replied. "He sent you. I've been here all\ time."

"You have? Where?"

"Oh, I mostly stay in the guesthouse."

She spoke so confidently, he almost believed her. But then surely if
she *re occupying the guest-house, Brahms would have warned Maxine? He
knew how important Todd's security was. Why would he let Maxine see the
property, and not mention the fact that there was somebody else living
in the Canyon?

He was about halfway across the room now, and he could see his visitor's
outline in the darkness. Her voice had not misled him. She was a young
woman; elegantly dressed in a long, silver gown, highlighted with
sinuous designs in gold thread. It shimmered, as though it possessed a
subtle life of its own.

"How long have you been staying here?" he said to her.

"A lot longer than you," she replied.

"Really?"

"Well, of course. When I first met Jerry, I'd been here ... twenty,
twenty-five years."

This was an absurd invention, of course. Even without seeing her
clearly, it was obvious to him that she was less than thirty; probably
considerably less.

"But you said Jerry was a boy when you met him?" Todd said, thinking
he'd quickly catch the woman in her lie.

"He was."

"So you can't have known him ..."

"I know it doesn't seem very likely. But things are different here in
the Canyon. You'll see. If you stay, that is. And I hope you will."

"You mean buy the house?"

"No. I mean stay."

"Why would I do that?" he said.

There was a moment's pause; then, finally, she stepped into the light.

Because I want you to," she replied.

It was a moment from a movie; timed to perfection. The pause, the move,
the line.

And the face, that was from a movie too, in its luxury, in its
perfection.

Her eyes were large and luminous, green flecked with lilac. Their bright
ness was enhanced by the darkness of her eyeshadow, and the thicknes
her lashes. Neither her nose nor her mouth was delicate; her lips were I
her chin robust, her cheekbones high; almost Slavic. Her hair was bl;
and fell straight down, framing her face. She wore plenty of jewelry,;
it was all exquisite. One necklace lay tightly in the valley of her
another--much, much looser--fell between her breasts. Her ear were gold;
her bracelets--several on each wrist--all elaborately wrot Yet she
carried all this effortlessly, as though she'd been wearing a quetj
ransom in jewelry all her life.

"I'm sure you could find plenty of company besides me," Todd said

"I'm sure I could," she replied. "But I don't want plenty of comp want
you."

Todd was totally bewildered now. No part of this puzzle fitted with <
other. The woman looked so poised, so exquisite, but she spoke nonse She
didn't know him. She hadn't chosen him. He'd come up here of| own free
will, to hide himself away. Yet she seemed to insinuate that| was here at
her behest, and that somehow she intended to make him!

It was all pure invention.

Still she didn't look crazy; anything but. She looked, in fact, as thou
she'd just stepped out of her limo at the Pavilion and was about to down
the red carpet to a roar of adulation from the crowd. He woulcj have
minded being beside her, either, if she had been taking that They would
have made quite a couple.

"You haven't looked around the house very much," she said.

"How do you know?"

"Oh ... I have eyes everywhere," she teased. "If you'd been in sor the
rooms in this house, I'd know about it, believe me." "I don't find any
of this very comforting," he said. "I don't like peti spying on me." "I
wasn't spying," she said, her tone going from pleasing to fierce I
heartbeat.

"Well what would you call it?"

"I'd call it being a good hostess. Making sure your guest is comfortab

 "I don't understand."

"No," she said, more softly now, "y u don't. But you will. When we've
had a chance to spend some time with one another you'll see what's
really going on here."

"And what's that?"

She half-turned from him, as though she might leave, which was the last
thing he wanted her to do. "You know, maybe we'd be better leaving this
for another night," she said.

"No," he said hurriedly.

She halted, but didn't turn back.

"I'm sorry," he said. They were rare words from his mouth.

"Truly?" she said. Still she didn't turn. He found himself longing to
feel her gaze on him, as though--absurd as this was--she might go some
way to filling the void in him.

"Please," he said. "I'm truly sorry." "Ml right," she said, apparently
placated. She looked back at him.

"You're forgiven. For now."

"So tell me what I've missed. In the house."

"Oh, all that can wait."

"At least give me a clue."

"Have you been downstairs? I mean all the way down to the bottom?"

"No." "Then don't," she said, lowering her head and looking up at him
with a veiled gaze. 'Til take you there myself." Take me now," he said,
thinking it would be a good opportunity to find out how real all her
claims were.

"No, not tonight."

"Why not?"

"It's Oscar Night."

"So?"

So it's got you all stirred up. Look at you. You think you can drink the
pain away? It doesn't work. Everyone here's tried that at some point or
other--"

"Everyone?"

"In the Canyon. There are a lot of people here who are feeling es like
you tonight."

"And how's that?"

"Oh, just wishing they'd had a few prizes for their efforts."

"Well they don't give Oscars to actors like me."

"Why not?"

"I guess they don't think I'm very good."

"And what do you think?" He mused on this for a moment. Then he said:
"Most of the time j just being me, I guess." "That's a performance,"
Katya said. "People think it's easy. But it's if Being yourself ...
that's hard."

It was strange to hear it put that way, but she was right. It wasn't <
playing yourself. If you let your attention drop for a moment, there'
nothing there for the camera to look at. Nothing behind the eyes, seen
it, in his own performances and in those of others: moments the
concentration lapsed for a few seconds and the unforgiving revealed a
vast vapidity.

"I know how it hurts," she said, "not to be appreciated."

"I get a lot of other stuff, you know."

"The other stuff being money."

"Yes. And celebrity."

"And half the time you think: it doesn't matter, anyway. They'r
ignoramuses at the Academy, voting for their friends. What do you' from
them? But you're not really convinced. In your heart you want I
worthless little statues. You want them to tell you they know how mil
you work to be perfect."

He was astonished at this. She had articulated what he'd felt decade of
Oscar Nights; an absurd mixture of contempt and envy. It1 as though she
were reading his mind.

"How did you figure all that out?"

"Because I've felt the same things. You want them to love you, but ]

hate yourself for wanting it. Their love isn't worth anything, and you
know it-"

"But you still want it."

"You still want it."

"Damn."

"Meaning yes?"

"Yes. That's it. You got me."

It felt good, for once, to be understood. Not the usual nodding, what
ever-you-say-Mister-Pickett bullshit, but some genuine comprehension of
the mess inside him. Which made the mystery of its source all the
stranger. One minute she was telling him lies (how could she possibly
have known Brahms as a child?), the next she was seeing into his soul.

"If you really do own this house," he said, "why don't you live in it?"

"Because there are too many memories here," she said simply. "Good and
bad. I walk in here and"--she smiled, though the smile was thin--"it's
filled with ghosts."

"So why not move away?"

"Out of Coldheart Canyon? I can't."

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"Another time. This is a bad time to tell that story." She passed her
delicate hand over her face, and for a moment, as the veil of her
fingers covered her features, he saw her retreat from her beauty, as
though for a moment the performance of selfhood was too much for her.

You ask me a question," he suggested.

Her hand dropped away. The light shone out of her face again.

"You swear you'll answer me truthfully if I do?"

"Sure."

"Swear." "I said so."

Does it hurt behind the bandages?"

"Oh." You said you'd answer me."

"I know. And I will. It's uncomfortable, I'll tell you that. But it
doesn't

really hurt anymore. Not like it used to. I just wish I'd never messed
^ this. I mean, why couldn't I be happy the way I was?"

"Because nobody is. We're always looking for something we haveij got. If
we weren't, we wouldn't be human." "Is that why you came spying on me?"
he said, matching her miser, with some of his own. "Looking for
something you haven't got?"

"I'm sorry. It was rude of me: watching you, I mean. Spying. You've j
much right to your privacy as I have to mine. And it's hard to prot
yourself sometimes. You don't know who's a friend and who's not.

can make you crazy." Her eyes flashed, and the playfulness was bad "Then
again, sometimes it's good to be crazy."

"Yes?"

"Oh sure. Sometimes it's the only thing keeps you sane."

"You're obviously talking from experience."

"Of getting crazy once in a while? Sure. I'm talking from intimji
experience."

"Care to give me an example?"

"You don't want to know. Really you don't. Some of the things 1*1 done
in this very room ..."

"Tell me."

"I wouldn't know where to begin."

Her gaze flitted off around the room, as though she were looking I some
cue for her memories. If it was an act, it was a very good one. In 1
this whole performance was looking better and better.

Finally, she said: "We used to play poker here. Sometimes roulette.^

"Marco and I figured that out." "Sometimes," she said, her gaze
returning to him, "I was the prize."

"You?"

"Me."

"I don't think I understand."

"You understand perfectly well."

"You'd give yourself to the winner?"

"See? You understood. I didn't do it every night. I'm not that much cm

slut." She was smiling as she spoke, lapping up his disbelief. She
began to walk toward him, slowly, matching her approach to the rhythm of
her words. "But on the nights when you need to be crazy--"

"What did you give them? A kiss!"

"Pah! A kiss! As if I'd be satisfied with so little. No! Down on the
floor in front of the losers, that's what I'd give them. Like dogs, if
we felt like it."

The way she stared at the ground as she spoke, it was clear she was
remembering something very specific. The subtlest of motions went
through her, as though her body were recalling the sensation of pressing
back against a man; to take him, all of him, inside her.

"Supposing somebody won that you didn't like?"

"There was no such man. Not here, in my house. They were all gods.

Beautiful men, every single one. Some of them were crude at first. But I
taught them." She was watching Todd closely as she spoke, measuring his
response. "You like hearing this?"

He nodded. It wasn't quite the way he'd expected this conversation to
go, but yes, he liked her confessions. He was glad his pants were baggy,
now that she was so close to him, or she'd have seen for herself how
much he liked them.

"So let me be sure I got this right. The winner would fuck you, right
here on the ground--"

"Not on the bare boards. There used to be carpets. Beautiful Persian
carpets. And there were silk cushions, red ones, which I kept in a heap
over there. I like to make love among cushions. It's like being held in
somebody's hand, isn't it?" She opened her cupped hand in front to
demonstrate the comfort of it. "In God's hand."

She lifted the bed of her palm in front of his eyes, and then, without
warning, she reached out and touched his face. He felt nothing through
the bandages, but he had the illusion that her hand was like a balm upon
his cheek, cooling his raw flesh.

"Does that hurt?"

"No."

"Do you want me to go on telling you?"

"Yes, please."

"You want to hear what I did ..."

"... on the cushions. Yes. But first, I want to know--"

"Who?"

"No, not who. Why?"

"Why? Lord in Heaven, why would I/kcfe? Because I loved it! It gave \
pleasure." She leaned closer to him, still stroking his cheek. He smell
her throat on the breath she exhaled. The air, for all its invisit was
somehow enriched by its transport into her and out again. He < the men
who'd taken similar liberties. In and out; in and out. Wonder

"I love to have a man's weight bearing down on me," she went on. ' be
pinned, like a butterfly. Open. And then, when he thinks he's got I
completely under his thumb, roll him over and ride him." She laughed.*!

wish I could see the expression on your face." "It's not pretty under
there." He paused, a chilling thought on his 1

"The answer's no," she said.

"The answer to what?"

"Have I spied on you while your bandages were being changed?

haven't."

"Good." He took a deep breath, wanting to direct the conversati| away
from talk of what was behind his mask. "Go back to the game," I said.

"Where was I?"

"Riding the lucky sonofabitch."

"Horses. Dogs. Monkeys. Men make good animals. Women too sob times."

"Women got to play?"

"Not in here. I'm very old-fashioned about things like that. In Roma a
woman never played cards."

"Romania. That's where you're from?"

"Yes. A little village called Ravbac, where I don't think any woman 1
ever had pleasure with a man."

"Is that why you left?"

"One of many reasons. I ran away when I was barely twelve. Came to his
country when I was fifteen. Made my first picture a year later."

"What was it called?"

"I don't want to talk about it. It's forgotten."

"So finish telling me--"

"_about riding the men. What else is there to say? It was the best game
in the world. Especially for an exhibitionist, like myself. You too."

"What about me?"

"You've done it in front of people. Surely. Don't tell me you haven't. I
won't believe you."

What the hell? This woman had him all figured out. Pinned. Like a
butterfly.

There didn't seem to be much purpose in denying it.

"Yes, I've had a few public moments at private parties."

"Are you good?"

"It depends on the girl." She smiled. "I think you'd be wonderful, with
the right audience," she said.

Her hand dropped from his cheek, and she started to walk back across the
room, weaving between imaginary obstacles as she picked up her erotic
tale.

"Some nights, I would simply walk naked among the tables while the men
played. They weren't allowed to look at me. If they looked, I would
thrash them. And I mean thrash. I had a whip for that. I still have it.
The Teroarea. The Terror. So ... that was one of the rules. No looking
at the prize, no matter what it did to tempt them." She laughed. "You
can imagine, I had a hundred ways. Once I had a little bell, hooked
through the hood of my clitoris. Tinkling as I walked. Somebody looked,
I remember.

And oh they suffered."

She was at the mantelpiece now, reaching up and under the fireplace, ^d
took a long, silver-handled switch from its hiding place. She tested it
n the air, and it whined like a vengeful mosquito. "This is the
Teroarea. I nad it made by a man in Paris, who specialized in such
things. My name is chased into the handle." She passed her thumb over
the letters: "Katya

Lupescu, it says. Actually it says more. It says: 'This is her
instrument!

make fools suffer.' I regret having that written there, really."

"Why?"

"Because a man who takes pleasure in being given pain is not a He's
simply following his instincts. Where's the foolishness in that?"

"You're big on pleasure," Todd said.

She didn't seem to understand what he meant; she cocked her he puzzled.

"You talk about it a lot."

"Twice I've mentioned it," she said. "But it's been in my mind a' more
than that."

"Why?" "Don't be coy," she said, a little sternly. "Or I'll beat you."

"I might not like that."

"Oh, you would." "Really ..." he said, with just a touch of anxiety in
his voice. He I not imagine having that thing, her Terror, give him
pleasure, how^ expertly it was wielded.

"It can be gentle, if I want it to be." "That?" he said. "Gentle?"

"Oh yes." She made a scooping motion with her free hand. "If I had|
man's sex in my palm, here." He got an instant and uncannily sharp \
ture of what she had in mind. Her victim on all fours, and that scoop
motion of hers; the taking up of his cock and balls, ready for
Completely vulnerable; completely humiliated. He'd never let a wot do
anything like that to him, however much she promised it was to : him
pleasure.

"I can see you're not convinced," she said, "even when I don't your face
to look at. So you'll just have to take it on trust. I could to | men
with this and they'd shoot like sixteen-year-olds. Even Valentino.?|

"Valentino?"

"And he was queer."

"Rudolph Valentino?"

 "Yes. You didn't know he was that way?"

"No, it's just ... he's been dead a long time."

"Yes, it was sad to lose him so quickly," she said.

She obviously had no difficulty agreeing with him about how long the
Great Lover had been deceased, even though it made nonsense of her story

"We had a great party for him, out on the lawn, two weeks after he'd
been taken from us." She turned away from him and laid the switch back
on the mantelpiece. "I know you don't believe a word of what I've told
you. You've done the mathematics, and none of it's remotely possible."

She leaned on the mantelpiece, her chin on the heel of her hand. "What
have you decided? That I'm some kind of trespasser? A little sexually
deranged but essentially harmless?"

"I suppose something like that." "Hmm." She mused on this for a moment.
Then she said: "You'll change your mind, eventually. But there's no
hurry. I've waited a long time for this."

"This?"

"You. Us." She left the thought there to puzzle, him a moment, then she
turned, the dusting of melancholy that had crept into her voice over the
course of the last few exchanges brushed away. She was bright again;
gleaming with harmless trouble-making.

Have you ever done it with a man?"

"Oh, Jesus."

"So you have!"

He was caught. There was no use denying it.

"Only ... twice. Or three times."

You can't remember."

"Okay, three times."

"Was it good?"

111 never do it again, so I guess that's your answer."

Why are you so sure?" "There's some things you can be that sure of," he
said. Then, a little) confidently, 'Aren't there?"

"Even men who aren't queer imagine other men sometimes. Yes?"

"Well ..."

"Perhaps you're the exception to the rule. Perhaps you're the one;j
Canyon isn't going to touch." She started to walk back toward him.

don't be too certain. It takes the pleasure out of things. Maybe you she
let a woman take charge for a while."

"Are we talking about sex?"

"Valentine swore he only liked men, but as soon as I took charge .

"Don't tell me. He was like a naughty schoolboy."

"No. Like a baby." Her hand went to her breast, and she squeeze catching
the nipple in the groove between her thumb and forefinger,!

though to proffer it for Todd to suckle.

He knew it wasn't smart to show too much emotion to the wor there was
some genuine streak of derangement in her, it would empower her more.
But he couldn't help himself. He took half a backward, aware that the
trenches of his mouth were suddenly rv with spit at the thought of her
nipple in his mouth.

"You shouldn't let your mind get between you and what your wants," she
said. She took her hand from her breast. The nipple hard beneath the
light fabric.

"I know what my body wants."

"Really?" she said, sounding genuinely surprised at the claim, know what
it wants deep down! All the way down to the very darkest pli

He didn't reply.

She reached out and took gentle hold of his hand. Her fingers cold and
dry; his were clammy

"What are you afraid of?" she said. "Not me, surely."

"I'm not afraid," he said.

"Then come to me," she told him, softly. "I'll find out what you -1 He
let her draw him closer to her; let her hands move up over his < toward
his face.

"You're a big man," she murmured.

Her fingers were at his neck now. Whatever she was promising about
/Jjscovering his desires, he knew what she wanted; she wanted to see his
face. And though there was a part of his mind that resisted the idea,
there was a greater part that wanted her to see him, for better or
worse. He let her hands go up to his jawline; let her fingers rest on
the adhesive tape that held the mask of gauze against his wound.

"May I ... ?" she asked him.

"Is this what you came here to do?"

She made a small, totally ambiguous smile. Then she pulled at the tape.

It came away with a gentle tug. He felt the gauze loosen. He stared down
into her face, wondering--in this long moment before it was done and
beyond saving--if she would reject him when she saw the scars and the
swelling. A scene from that same silent horror movie he'd seen in his
mind's eye many times since Burrows had done his brutal work nickered in
his head: Katya as the appalled heroine, reeling away in disgust at what
her curiosity had uncovered. He the monster, enraged at her revulsion
and murderous in his self-contempt.

It was too late to stop it now. She was pulling at the gauze, coaxing it
away from the hurts it concealed.

He felt the cool air upon his wounds, and cooler still, her scrutiny.
The gauze dropped to the floor between them. He stood there before her,
more naked than he'd ever been in his life--even in nightmares of
nakedness, more naked--awaiting judgment.

She wasn't horrified. She wasn't screaming, wasn't flinching. She simply
looked at him, without any interpretable expression on her face.

"Well?" he said.

He made a mess of you, no doubt about that. But it's healing. And if my
opinion is worth anything to you, I'd say you're going to be fine.

Better than fine."

She took a moment to assess him further. To trace the line of his jaw,
the curve of his temple.

But it's never going to be perfect," she said.

His stomach lurched. Here was the heart of it: the bitter part not had
wanted to admit to him; not even himself. He was spoiled. Pert just a
little, but a little was all it would take to shake him from his perch.
His precious face, his golden face, the beauty that had made ] the idol
of millions, had been irreparably damaged.

"I know," Katya said, "you're thinking your life won't be worth j But
that's just not true."

"How the hell do you know?" he said, smarting from the truth, ar by her
honesty.

"Because I knew all the great stars, in the silent days. And believe I
the smart ones--when they weren't making the money any longer shrugged
and said okay, I've had my time."

"What did they do then?"

"Listen to yourself! There's life after fame. Sure, it'll take some get
used to, but people have perfectly good lives--"

"I don't want a perfectly good life. I want the life I had." "Well you
can't have it," she said, very simply.

It was a long time since somebody had told Todd Pickett that"

couldn't have something, and he didn't like it. He took hold of heri and
pulled her hands away from his face. A quick fury had risen in him. |
wanted to strike at her, knock her stupid words out of her mouth.

"You know, you are crazy," he said.

"Didn't I tell you?" she said, making no attempt to touch him ag "Some
nights I'm so crazy I'm ready to hang myself. But I don't, know why? I
made this hell for myself, so it's up to me to live in it, isn't!

He didn't respond to her; he was still in a filthy rage about what!

said.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I think I've had it with your advice for the night," he said, "so don't
you just go back wherever you came from--"

In mid-sentence he heard Marco calling.

"Boss? Are you okay? Where the hell are you?"

He looked toward the door, half-expecting to see Marco already stand.

_ there. He wasn't. Todd then looked back at Katya, or whoever the hell
she was. The woman was retreating from him, shaking her head as if to
say: don't tell.

"It's okay!" he yelled to Marco.

"Where are you?"

"I'm fine. Go make me a drink. I'll meet you in the kitchen!"

Katya had already retreated to the far end of the room, where the
shadows from which she had originally emerged were enclosing her.

"Wait!" Todd said, his fury not yet completely abated.

He wanted to make sure the woman didn't leave thinking she would be
allowed to come back, come stalking him while he slept, damn her. But
she had turned her back on him now, ignoring his instruction. So he went
after her.

A door opened in the darkness ahead of him, and he felt a wave of
night-air, cool and fragrant, come in against his face. He hadn't known
that there was a door to the outside of the house at the far end of the
Casino, but she was out through it in a heartbeat (he saw her silhouette
as she flitted away along a starlit path), and by the time he reached
the door she was gone, leaving the shrubs she'd brushed as she ran
shaking.

He stepped over the threshold, and looked around, attempting to orient
himself. The path Katya had taken led up the hill, winding as it went.

Back to the guest-house, no doubt. That was where the crazy lady was in
residence. She'd made herself a nice little nest in the guest-house.
Well, that was easily fixed. He'd just send Marco up there tomorrow to
evict her.

"Boss?"

He walked back into the Casino and stared down at the expanse of floor
where she'd had him picturing her making love. He'd believed her, too; a
little. At least his dfck had.

Marco was at the other end of the room.

"What the hell's going on?" he said.

Todd was about to tell him there and then--about to send him up I hill
to oust the trespasser--but Marco was bending down to gingerly pii
something up from the ground. It was Todd's discarded bandages.

"You took 'em off," he said.

"Yeah."

The rage he'd felt started to seep out of him now, as he remember the
tender way she'd looked at him. Not judging him, simply looking.

"What happened, Boss?" "I found another door," he said rather lamely.

"Was there somebody here?" Marco said.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe. I was just wandering around, and came
down here ..."

"The door was open?" "No, no," Todd said. He closed the door with a
solid slam. "I just trii it and it was unlocked."

"It needs a new lock then," Marco said, his tone uncertain, as through he
was suspicious of what he was being told, but playing along.

"Yes, it needs a new lock."

"Okay."

They stood for a moment at opposite ends of the room, in silence.

"Are you all right?" Marco said after a pause.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

"You know pills 'n' liquor'll be the death of you."

"I'm hopin'," Todd replied, his joviality as forced as Marco's.

"Okay. If you say you're okay, you're okay."

"I'm okay."

Marco proffered the bandages. "What do you want me to do wit these?"

"What do you think?" Todd said, getting back into the normal rhy of
their exchanges now. The door was closed. The woman and the pati and the
nodding shrubs were out of sight. Whatever she'd said, he cou forget, at
least for tonight. "Burn them. Where's that drink? I'm going 1
celebrate."

 "What are you celebrating?"

"Me losing those damn bandages. I looked like God knows what."

"Burrows might want you to keep 'em on."

"Fuck Burrows. If I want to take the bandages off, it's my choice."

"It's your face." "Yeah," Todd said, staring again at the ground where
the crazy woman had claimed she'd lain, imagining her there. "It's my
face."

 Maxine came up to the house the following afternoon to tell Todd ab
the Oscar festivities, reporting it all--the ceremony itself, then the
ties--with a fine disregard for his tenderness. Several times he stopped
her and told her he didn't want to hear any more, curiosity silenced
him. He still wanted to know who'd won and lost.

There'd been the usual upsets, of course, the usual grateful the usual
surprised ing6nues, all but swooning away with gratitude.

year, there'd even been fisticuffs: an argument had developed in the ing
lot at Spago's between Quincy Martinaro, a young, fast-talking maker
who'd made two movies, been lionized, and turned into a endary ego all
in the space of fifteen months, and Vincent Dinny, a writer for Vanity
Fair who'd recently profiled Martinaro most ingly. Not that Dinny was a
paragon himself. He was a waspish, tered man in his late sixties,
who--having failed in his ascent of Hollywood aristocracy--had turned to
writing about the town's bell Nobody could have given a toss for his
pieces had they not carried certain sting of truth. The piece on
Martinaro, for instance, had tioned a certain taste for heroin; which
was indeed the man's vice choice.

"So who won?" Todd wanted to know.

"Quincy broke two fingers when he fell against his car, and Dinny a
bloody nose. So I don't know who won. It's all so children."

"Did you actually see them fighting?'"

"No, but I saw Dinny afterward. Blood all over his shirt.'" There was a
pause. "I think he knows something.'"

"What?"

"He was quite civilized about it. You know how he is. Shriveled-up
little prick. He just said to me: I hear Todd's had some medical
problems, and now you've got him under lock and key. And I just looked
at him. Said

nothing. But he knows."

"This is so fucked."

"I don't know how we deal with it, frankly. Sooner or later, he's going
to suggest a piece to Vanity Fair, and they're going to jump on it.'"
"So fucked," Todd said, more quietly. "What the hell did I do to deserve
this?"

Maxine let the question go. Then she said, "Oh, by the way, do you
remember Tammy Lauper?"

"No."

"She runs the Fan Club."

"Oh yeah."

"'Fat."

"Is she fat?'"

"She's practically obese.'"

"Did she come to the office?'"

"'No; I got a call from the police in Sacramento, asking if we'd seen
her.

She's gone missing.'"

"And they think I might have absconded with her?"

"I don't know what they think. The point is, you haven't seen her up
here?"

"Nope.'"

"Maybe over in Bel Air?'"

"I haven't been over in Bel Air. Ask Marco." "Yeah, well I said I'd ask
you and I asked.'"

Todd went to the living-room window, and gazed out at the Bird of
Paradise trees that grew close to the house. They hadn't been trimmed in

many years, and were top-heavy with flowers and rotted foliage, the
immensity blocking his view of the opposite hill. But it didn't take muc
of an effort of imagination to bring the Canyon into his mind's eye."
palm-trees that lined the opposite ridge; the pathways and the sec
groves; the empty swimming pool, the empty koi-pond; the statue standing
in the long grass. He was suddenly seized by an overwhel: desire to be
out there in the warm sunshine, away from Maxine and hif brittle gossip.

"I gotta go," he said to Maxine.

"Go where?" "I just gotta go," he said, heading for the door.

"Wait," Maxine said. "We haven't finished business."

"Can't it wait?"

"No, I'm afraid this part can't."

Todd made an impatient sigh, and turned back to her. "What is it?"

"I've been doing some thinking over the last few days. About our wof ing
relationship."

"What about it?"

"Well, to put it bluntly, I think it's time we parted company."

Todd didn't say anything. He just looked at Maxine with an expressic of
utter incomprehension on his face, as though she'd just spoken to 1 in a
foreign language. Then, after perhaps ten seconds, he returned ' gaze to
the Birds of Paradise.

"You don't know how wearying it gets," Maxine went on. "Waking 1
thinking about whether everything's okay with Todd, and going to sle
thinking the same damn thing. Not having a minute in a day when I'm I
worrying about you. I just can't do it anymore. It's as simple as that.
M making me ill. I've got high blood pressure, high cholesterol--"

"I've made you a lot of money over the years," Todd broke in to obse

"And I've taken care of you. It's been a very successful partnership. Yo
made me rich. I made you famous."

"You didn't make me famous."

"Well, if I didn't I'd like to know who the hell did."

"Me," Todd replied, raising the volume of his voice just a fraction.
"It's we people came to see. It's me they loved. I made myself famous."
"Don't kid yourself," Maxine said, her voice a stone.

There was a long silence. The wind brushed the leaves of the Bird of
Paradise trees together, like the blades of plastic swords being brushed
together.

"Wait," Todd said. "I know what this is about. You've got a new boy.

That's it, isn't it? You're fucking some kid, and--"

"I'm not fucking anybody, Todd."

"You fucked me."

"Twice. A long time ago. I wouldn't do it today."

"Well just for the record neither would I."

Maxine looked at him coldly. "That's it. I've said what I needed to
say."

She went to the door. Todd called after her. "Why do it to me now?

Why wait till I'm so fucking tired I can hardly think straight!" His
voice continued to get louder, creeping up word on word, syllable on
syllable.

"And then screw me up like this?"

"Don't worry, I'll find somebody else to look after you. I'll train
them.

You'll be taken good care of. It's not like I'm walking out on you."

"Yes you are."

He turned to look at her, finally. The blood had rushed to the surface
of his half-mended face. It was grotesquely red.

"You think I'm finished, so you're leaving me to be crucified by every
piece of shit journalist in the fucking country."

Maxine ignored the outburst, and picked up what she was saying. 'Til
find somebody to take over, -who'll protect you better than I can.
Because I m just as tired as you are, Todd. Then I'm going to have one
last party down at the beach-house, and get the hell out of this city
before it kills me."

Well I'm not going to let you go."

Oh, now don't start threatening--"

I'm not starting anything. I'm just reminding you. We've got a contract.

I'm not going to allow you to make a fortune out of me and then Just
walk away when things get difficult. You owe me."

"I what?"

"Whatever's on the contract. Another two years."

"I can't do it. I won't do it."

"Then I'll sue your ass, for every fucking cent you earned off me."

"You can try."

"And I'll win." "Like I said, you can try. If you want all our dirty
washing dragged < for everyone to see, then do it. I guarantee you'll
come out looking wor than I will. I've covered for you so many times,
Todd/'

"And you signed a confidentiality agreement. If you break it, I'll you
for breaking that, too."

"Who cares? Nobody gives a rat's ass about me. I'm just a professior
parasite. You're the movie star. You're the all-American boy. The one wi
the reputation to lose." She paused. Then murmured, almost tively: "The
tales I could tell ..."

"I can tell just as many."

"There's nothing anyone can call me that I haven't been called a fuj
dred times. I know everyone says I'm a cunt. That's what they say, rig
"How can you work with that fucking cunt?' If I have to hear it in a cov
room one more time, I can take that, as long as when it's all over I dou
have to hear your whining and complaining anymore."

"Okay," Todd said. "If that's the way you want to play it."

Maxine headed for the door. "For your information," she said, "I coi||
go down to LAX right now, and I could fill a limo with kids who have I
times your talent. They're all coming here, looking to be the next Tq
Cruise, the next Leonardo Dicaprio, the next Todd Pickett. Pretty with
tight asses and nice abs who'll end up, most of 'em, selling their tig
asses on Santa Monica Boulevard. The lucky ones'll end up waiters.

"If I wanted to, I could make any one of them a movie star. Maybe 1 a
star like you. But then again maybe bigger. Right face, right time, rig
movie. Some of it's luck, some of it's salesmanship. The point is, I 50|
you, Todd. I told people you were going to be huge, and I said it so of
that it became the truth. And you were so sweet back then. So ... natura

You were the boy next door, and yes--for your information--I was a
little in love with you, like everyone else. But it didn't last long.
You changed. I changed. We both got rich. We both got greedy." She put
her hand to her mouth, and gently passed her fingers over her lips. "But
you know what, Todd? Neither of us was ever happy. Am I right? You were
never happy, even when you had everything you'd ever dreamed of
wanting."

"What's your point?"

"I don't know what the point is," she said softly. "I guess that's the
problem in a nutshell, isn't it? I don't know what the point is." She
stared into the middle distance for a while. "You'll be fine, Todd," she
said finally.

"Things will work out better without me, you'll see. I'll find someone
to take care of you, Eppstadt'll find a movie for you, and you'll be
back in front of the cameras in a few months, looking perfect. If that's
what you want."

"Why wouldn't I want that?" he said to her.

She looked at him wearily. "Maybe because none of it's worth a damn."

He knew he had a riposte for that; he just couldn't figure out what it
was at that particular moment. And while he was trying to figure it out,
Maxine turned her back on him and walked out.

He let her go. What was the use of a feud? That was for the lawyers.

Besides, he had more urgent business than trading insults with her. He
had to find Katya.

The afternoon sun was not just warm, it was hot, and the foliage was
busy with hungry hummingbirds and the Canyon was quiet and perfect.

He threaded his way through the overgrown bushes, past the tennis courts
and the antique sundial, up toward the guest-house. The gradient became
quite steep after a time, the narrow steps decayed by time and neglect,
so that in some spots they'd collapsed completely. After a while, "e
realized the path had divided at some earlier point, and that he'd taken
"ie wrong turning. The mistake took him on a picturesque tour of the
garden's hidden places, bringing him first to a small grove of walnut
trees, in the middle of which stood a large gazebo in an advanced state
of < pair, and then into a garden within a garden, bounded by an unke
privet hedge. Here there were roses, or rather the remains of last ye
blooms, the bushes fighting for space, and strangling each other ir
process. There was no way through the thorny tangle to pick up the ] on
the other side, so he was obliged to try to get around the garden I the
outside, staying close to the hedge. It was difficult to do. Though I
plants he was striding through didn't have thorns, they were still and
wild; twigs and dead flowers scraped at his face, his shirt was quie
soiled, his sneakers filled with stony dirt. By the time he got to the
of side of the garden, and took to the path again, he was short of
breath; patience; and had two dozen little nicks and scratches to call
his own."

His wanderings had brought him to a spot that offered a spectac view. He
could see the big house below him surrounded by palms ; Birds of
Paradise; he could see the baroque weathervane on the top oft gazebo
he'd passed on his way here, and the orchid house, which he come upon
during one of his earlier trips around the garden. All bathed in clear
warm California light; the crystalline light which brought film makers
here almost a century before. Not for the first since coming to the
house he had a pleasurable sense of history; measure of curiosity as to
the people who might once have walked he talked here. What ambitions had
they plotted, as they ambled throu these gardens? Had they been
sophisticates, or simpletons? What little knew about Old Hollywood he'd
heard from Jerry Brahms, which me he'd only ever really been
half-listening. But he knew enough to be ce those times had been good,
at least for a man like himself. Dot Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino,
Charlie Chaplin, the Barrymore and all the rest had been like royalty,
lording it over their new dominior the West. A bean-counting prick like
Eppstadt--with his demograf and his endless corporate maneuvering--would
have had no power in J world this Canyon still preserved.

Having caught his breath, he now continued his ascent. The shrubt became
denser the closer he got to the guest-house. He would

 ceded a machete to hack through it efficiently; but, lacking one, had
to do with a branch he picked up on his way. The flowers gave up their
perfume as he beat his way through them, and he recognized their scent.
It was her scent. The scent on Katya's skin. Did she walk naked among
them, he wondered, pressing the flowers against her body? Now that would
be a sight to see.

The thought of this had stirred him up; he actually had a hard-on. Not
an everyday order of hard-on either, but the kind that was so strong it
actually hurt. It was a long time since he'd had a woodie so fierce, and
it added immeasurably to his sense of well-being. With the guesthouse
now in view he pressed toward his goal, feeling curiously, happily,
adolescent.

So what the hell if Maxine was deserting him? What the hell if he'd
never be a Golden Boy again? He was still alive and kicking, still had a
stick in his hand, and a woodie in his pants, and the thought of Katya's
flower bath in his mind's eye.

The thicket had finally thinned, and he was at last delivered onto a
small unkempt lawn. The house before him was a two-story affair, built
in the same style as the main house, simply on a much more modest scale.

Above the door, set into the stucco, was a single tile, with a man on a
horse painted upon it. He glanced up at it for only a moment. Then he
pressed his flattened hand down the front of his jeans to push his
erection into a less obvious position on the clock, and knocked on the
madwoman's door.

 There was no reply from within, nor any sound of movement in resp to
his knocking. He knocked a second time, and then--after a pause--a
third. Still there was no response, so he tried the latch. The < was
unlocked. He pushed it open, and stepped out of the sunlight into 1 cool
interior of the house.

At first glance he assumed that he'd misunderstood what Katya '. told
him, and the house was not occupied after all; merely used as a st age
space of some kind. The room before him, which was large and I
ceilinged, was little more than a junk-room, filled with furniture andbr
a-brac. But as his eyes became more accustomed to the murky light,; the
blaze of sun outside, he began to make sense of what he was see Yes, the
place was over-filled, but the contents of the room were far I junk. On
the wall to the left hung an enormous tapestry depicting a sc of
medieval revelry; on the wall opposite was a series of white marble 1
reliefs that looked to have been niched from a Roman temple. In the:
corner, close to a great oak door, were more slabs of stone, these car
with hieroglyphics. There was an elegant chaise longue in front of
massive fireplace; and a table, its legs elaborately carved with bar
grotesqueries, stood in the middle of the room. All of this had presi
ably been removed from the big house at some point, but that har
explained the strange confusion of periods and styles.

Moving deeper into the room, Todd called out again to announce presence.
Again, there was no reply. He didn't linger now to study the I niture or
the antiquities, but crossed the room to the large oak door. He

again he knocked, but receiving no reply, he turned the carved handle,
and pushed the door open. Given its size, he'd expected it to be heavy,
but it wasn't. On the other side was a wide hallway, the walls of which
were hung with white masks. No, not masks, life-casts; white plaster
faces, all caught with that expression of eerie, enforced repose that
such masks always wore. He'd had similar things made of his own face, by
special effects men. Once for the face wound in Gunner, once for a
bullet wound.

It was an eerie experience, to look at the finished work. This is what
I'll look like when I'm dead, he'd thought when he'd been shown the
final results.

There were thirty or forty masks displayed on the wall; mostly of men.

He thought that he vaguely recognized some of the faces, but he couldn't
have put names to any of them. They were all handsome; some of them
almost beautiful. He remembered Katya's crazy talk about the parties
she'd had in the house. How she'd seduced Valentine. Was this collection
the inspiration for that fantasy? Had she dreamed of fucking the famous
because she had plaster copies of their faces up on her wall?

The door at the other end of the wall of life-masks was, like the last,
deceptively light. This time he paused to puzzle out why, and examining
it a little more closely, had his answer. It was fake. The large rusted
nails weren't iron at all, but carved and stippled wood; the patina of
antiquity had been achieved by a skilled painter. It was a door from a
movie-set; all illusion. And if the doors had been made that way, what
about the tapestry and the has-reliefs and table carved with
grotesqueries? They were all most likely fakes. Stolen off a back-lot,
or bought from a studio fire-sale.

None of it was real.

He pushed the door open, and came into a second room, this one much
smaller than the first, but just as cluttered. On the wall opposite him
hung a large mirror, its gilt frame elaborately carved with naked
figures, men and women knotted together in configurations which looked
both sensual and tormented. He seldom let a mirror go by without putting
it to Use, and even now--knowing he wouldn't like what he saw--he paused
^d assessed his reflection. He was a sad sight, his clothes in disarray
from

his trip through the shrubbery, his face like an inept copy of its
finer I He wondered if perhaps he shouldn't turn back; he was in no
condition present himself to Katya. Even as he was thinking about this
the doc the left of the mirror creaked a little, and--caught by the
wind--op a couple of inches. Forsaking his sorry reflection, he went to
the door; peered into the room beyond.

The sight before him put all thought of retreat from his mind. Inside I
an enormous four-poster bed, its columns decorated in the same k erotic
style as the gilded frame of the mirror. A swath of dark purple ^ hung
in ripe folds like a half-raised curtain. The red pillows heaped on \
bed were just as excessive, creamy silk fringed with lace. The sheet,
was also silk, was pulled back, so that the sleeper was left uncovered.

It was Katya, of course.

There she lay, face down; her hair unloosed, her body naked.

He stood at the door, enraptured. The pillow she lay on was so soft I
deep that her face was almost concealed, but he could still see the
curve of her cheek, the tender pink of her ear. Was she awake behind^
pale lids, he wondered, her nakedness a deliberate provocation? He ;
pected not. There was something too artless about the way her legs1
splayed, too childlike about the way her hands were tucked up against!

breasts. And the final proof? She was snoring. If this was indeed a ;
formance then that was a touch of genius. The perfectly human which made
all the rest so believable.

His eyes went to the cleft of her buttocks; to the gloss of the haird
showed between her legs. He was suddenly stupid with lust.

He took a step toward the bed. The floor creaked under his weight*?

thankfully the noise wasn't loud enough to stir her. He continuedf
approach, his gaze fixed upon her face, looking for the merest flutter*
lash. But there was none. She was deeply asleep; and dreaming. He^?

close enough now to see that her eyes were in motion behind her;
watching something happening in another place.

At the bedside, he dropped down onto his haunches, his left knee ] ping
loudly. There was a faint dusting of gooseflesh on her limbs, he J

rje couldn't resist the temptation to reach out and touch her skin, as
though he might smooth the gooseflesh away with his fingertips. Surely
she would wake now, he thought. But no, she slept on. The only sign that
she might be surfacing from sleep was the slowing of the motion of her
pupils. The dream was leaving her; or she was departing from the dream.

He was suddenly alarmed. What would she think if she woke to find him
this close to the bed, his intent so unquestionably voyeuristic?

Perhaps he should go; quickly, before she woke. But he couldn't bring
himself to move an inch. All he could do was kneel there, like a
suppliant, his heart beating furiously, his face a furnace.

Then, in her sleep, she murmured something. He held his breath, trying
to catch the words. It wasn't English she was speaking, it was an
Eastern European language; probably her native Romanian. He could make
no sense of what she was saying, of course, but there was a softness to
the syllables; a neediness, which suggested they were supplications. She
turned her face up from the pillow, and he saw that her expression was
troubled. Her brow was furrowed, and there were tears welling beneath
her lids. The sight of her distress bothered him. It brought back
memories of his mother's tears, which he'd watched her shed so often as
a child.

Tears shed by a woman left to raise her sons alone. Tears of frustrated
rage, sometimes; but more often tears of loneliness.

"Don't ..." he said to her softly.

She heard him speaking, it seemed. Her entreaties grew quieter. Then she
said: "Willem?"

"No ..."

The frown nicking her brow deepened and her lids began to flutter. She
^as waking up now, no doubt of that. He got to his feet, and began to
retreat to the door, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. Only when he
reached the door did he finally, regretfully, relinquish sight of her
and turn away.

As he slipped through the door he heard her speak. "Wait," she said.

He was sorely tempted to exit rather than turn and face her, but he
resisted his cowardice and looked back toward the bed.

She had pulled the sheet a little way up, to partially cover her I
ness. Her eyes were open, and the tears her dreams had induced were I
running down her cheeks. Despite them, she was smiling.

"I'm sorry," Todd said.

"For "what?"

"Coming in here uninvited." "No," she said sweetly. "I wanted you to
come."

"Still, I shouldn't have stayed ... watching you. It's just that you'
talking in your sleep."

"Well it's nice to have somebody listening," she said. "It's a long I
since anyone was with me when I slept." She wiped the tears from),
cheeks.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

"Yes, I'm fine."

"Were you having a bad dream?" "I can't remember," she said, glancing
away from him. He knew I his acting coach what such glances indicated: a
lie. She knew exactly1 she'd been dreaming about; she just didn't want
to tell him. Well, than her business. God knows everybody was allowed
their share of secret

"What time is it?" she said.

He glanced at his watch. "Almost four-thirty."

"You want to go for a walk before it gets too dark?" she said.

"Sure."

She threw off her sheet, and got up out of bed, glancing up at To she
did so, as though to assure herself of his scrutiny.

"I'm going to bathe first," she said. "Would you do me a little favc the
meantime?"

"Sure."

"Go back to the Gaming Room, where we met last night, and--"

"Don't tell me. Fetch your whip." She smiled. "You read my mind."

"As long as you promise not to be beating me with it."

"Nothing could be further from my mind," she said.

"Okay. I'll get it ... but no beating."

"Take your time. There's still plenty of light in the sky."

He left her feeling oddly light-footed, pleased to have an errand from
her. What did that say about their relationship? he wondered as he ran.

That he was naturally subservient? Ready to do her will at the snap of
her fingers? Well, if so, so.

He found his way back down to the big house without difficulty. Marco
heard him in the Gaming Room, heavy-footed as ever, and came to see what
all the noise was about.

"You okay?"

"That's all you ever ask. Am I okay? Yes. I'm better than okay."

"Good. Only I heard from Maxine--"

"Fuck Maxine."

"So it doesn't bother you?"

"No. We had a good run together. Now it's over."

He picked up the switch from the mantelpiece.

"What the hell is that?"

"What does it look like?"

He beat the air two or three times. The switch was beautifully balanced;
he could imagine learning how to use it with considerable cunning.

Perhaps she would let him stroke her body with it.

Marco studied him in silence for a few moments; then he said: "You never
told me why you took your bandages off. Were they too tight?"

"I didn't take them off. She took them off."

"Who's 'she'?"

The woman who owns this house. Katya Lupescu."

"I'm sorry, you've lost me." Todd smiled. "No more explanations," he
said. "You'll meet her later. I gotta go."

He left Marco standing at the door with a befuddled expression on his
kce, and headed out into the light again, climbing the slope toward
Katya's house, aware that he was behaving like a man who'd just been
given a new lease on life.

He didn't call her name as he entered this time. He simply made I way
through the rooms of fake relics.

The sound of running water came from the room adjacent to the 1 room.
Apparently, Katya was still running her bath.

He paused and looked around the bedroom. There were several I mous
posters on the wall, which he had not noticed until now. Fra posters:
one-sheets for movies, many decades old to judge by the styl graphics
and the yellowing of the paper they were printed on. The image dominated
all seven posters: that of a woman's face. She was; resented in two of
them as a waif, a child-woman lost in a predati world. But in the others
she'd matured beyond the orphan, and were the images that reminded him
of the woman he'd met last nig an exquisite femme fatale glowering from
the frames as she planned ] next act of anarchy. There was, of course,
no question who the wor was. Her name was on the posters, big and bold.
The Sorrows of Frede starring Katya Lupi. The Devil's Bride, starring
Katya Lupi. Shem Destruction, starring Katya Lupi.

What the hell was he to make of this new piece of evidence? Of could it
was possible that Katya had paid to have seven posters representing I
titious films printed on aged paper and framed to look like objects I
antiquity, but it wasn't very likely. Was it possible this Katya
Lupi--^v bore such a resemblance to the Katya he knew--was hardly the
woman at all but a granddaughter, with an uncanny resemblance to 1 older
relative? It was a more plausible solution than any other he co| think
of. Certainly the flawless woman he'd seen naked minutes bef her face
without so much as a wrinkle upon it, could not be the wor who'd starred
in these movies. There had to be some other explanatic

He was about to call out and announce his presence when he hea soft
intake of breath echoing off the bathroom walls. He went quiet the door,
and glanced in. In a large, old-fashioned ceramic bath, half-f with
water, lay Katya, her legs spread, her hips lifted clear of the wate
that he could see how her fingers slid inside her. Her eyes were
closed)!

Not for the first time this afternoon, Todd could feel the head of his
dick tapping out the rhythm of his pulse against the inside of his
pants.

Rut he had no desire to interrupt Katya's game. He was perfectly happy
to watch her: her face in ecstasy, her breasts clearing from the water
as her body arched, her legs lifted up and straddling the sides of the
bath. The mysteries of who she was and how she came to be here suddenly
seemed absurdly irrelevant. What the hell did it matter? Look at her!

"Did you bring it?"

He'd had his eyes on her cunt; but when he looked back up at her face
she was staring at him, her expression fierce with need.

"The Teroarea. Did you bring it?"

He was mortified with embarrassment, but plainly she couldn't have cared
less. She had other priorities.

"Yes," he said, showing her the switch. "I brought it."

"So use it."

"What?"

She lifted her hips even higher, spreading her legs to give him a full
view of her sex. It was ripened by her own touches; but also, he knew,
from the anticipation of his return.

"Touch it," she said. "Lightly."

His target stood proud of its hood, presented for his delectation.

"Please," she begged.

He took four steps to the bottom of the bath, keeping his eyes fixed
upon her. He felt the weight of the switch in his hand. He'd never done
anything remotely like this before, but something about the way her body
was contorted to offer her sex up to him lent him confidence.

"Are you ready?"

"Just do it!"

He lifted the Terror. Her clitoris looked as hard and as red as a ruby.
He lay the switch on it with a short little stab that made her sob.

Again!" she demanded immediately.

The ruby was already a little redder.

"Again!" she said.

He struck her again, twice, three times, four and five and six, every
muscle in her body went rigid so as to be his perfect target.

"More?" he said.

There were tears on her face, but she simply growled at him between!

'4

gritted teeth. He took it to mean yes, and went to work again, until
thei sweat was running from his face, and down his back, his breath was
rough!

jjf with exertion. But she would not let him stop. Her gaze, her sneer,
herl offered body spoke the same demand, and he dutifully answered it,
over!

an dover an dover and--

Suddenly her eyes rolled up in her head. Her mouth opened. He could!

barely make sense of the words, they were so thick with feeling.

"Again." Her pupils had almost gone from sight. "Once."

He lifted the Terror, which for all its litheness, its lightness,
suddenly felt j

I brutal in his aching hand. Her body had started to shake. He was
shaking!

too, now. But the Terror had its own imperative. Down it came once more.
1 She let out a cry that sounded more like something a bird would utterl
than a woman. Then her limbs lost their solidity, and her legs slipped!

gracefully off the sides of the bath. A tiny plume of crimson tinted the
j water.

He dropped the switch and retreated to the door, in a kind of childish!

1 terror at what he'd done; and at how much it had aroused him. Katya
si eyes had closed. The expression on her face was one of childish
content-J ment; an infant sleeping in the arms of innocence.

He slid down the doorframe into a squatting position, and there, I
exhausted by the intensity of the previous minutes, he must have briefly
I fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes again the water was
still j moving, but Katya had vacated the tub. Vacated the bathroom too,
in facti He didn't have to get up to find her. He merely had to swing
his head| round, to see that she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her
legs open;!

looking at her reflection in the long oval mirror. The expression of
con| tentment had not left her face; but now there was a little smile on
herj lips too.

 She had a wide repertoire of smiles, he thought; or at least it seemed
he'd seen a lot in the short time they'd known one another. There was
her teasing smile, her mischievous smile, her dark smile, her dry smile.
This one had a little of everything in it. She knew he was watching her,
so there was something of her performance smile in it. But it certainly
wasn't phony. How fake could someone be when she'd just let her body
lead her into such extremes? Surely he was one of a rare order of men:
those to whom she'd given herself in that profound way. He thought of
the tinted blood rising up between her legs, and felt a peculiar
mingling of retroactive alarm (what had he been doing, risking her most
tender anatomy with nothing but the look on her face to guide him?) and
exhilaration that they'd come through it together: their first shared
insanity. Whoever she was, trespasser, lunatic, stalker, star, all other
possible definitions paled before this: she was the woman who had taught
him how insignificant the flesh between his legs was when it came to the
pleasuring of certain women.

"Come here," she said.

He pushed himself up off the doorframe and went over to her. "Let me
see," she said, unbuckling his pants.

"I came ..."

"I know."

His trousers were massively too big, which was the way he liked to wear
them. As soon as his belt was unbuckled, they fell down. He was afraid
his dick would make a sorry show by now, shriveled up in a crinkled skin
of dried semen. But no. His erection had been so furiously hard it
remained quite impressive, even though it was sodden. He could not
imagine any other woman with whom he'd had sex taking such guileless
pleasure in the perusal of his quarter-hard dick. Nor would any of those
Women have leaned forward, as Katya now did, and kissed it.

"May I look at you?" he said.

She assumed he didn't mean her face. She spread her legs. He hoisted his
pants back up and went down on his knees.

"Does it hurt?" he said.

"Yes," she said. She put her hand on the back of his head, gently pres
ing him toward her body. "Look inside me," she said. "Don't be afra You
did it. See what you did?"

He could see without opening her up. Her whole pubic region puffy and
inflamed.

"Go on, look," she said. "Enjoy what you did."

He gently parted her labia, which were sticky beneath his fingertip Not
blood, not sweat. Just the natural juices of an aroused body.

"You see?" she said, pressing his fingers deeper into her. She was ]
furnace in there. "You've got thoughts going round in your head yq never
imagined having. Am I right?"

He replied by gently scooping her juices out on his fingers and put them
deep into his mouth.

"You want to lick me out?"

He shook his head.

"I'm afraid I'd draw more blood."

"Maybe I'd like that."

"Give me time."

She took his fingers out of his mouth and replaced them with tongue.

"You're right," she said, when they'd finished kissing. "We've got all t
time in the world."

She stood up. He stayed where he was, at her feet, still not quite belie
ing they'd come so far so fast.

"It isn't a dream," she said, reading his doubts as she'd read so :
other thoughts of his in the last twenty-four hours. "Sometimes it see
that way, but that's just the Canyon."

He held on to her leg for a moment, kissing the inside of her thigh.;

"We were going to walk, remember?" she said.

"You still want to?"

"Oh yes. I'd love to. It's a perfect night for introductions."

 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 that if someone
were 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 f
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 followe
then, that the ground on which that New World was built would grow in
value.

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

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

He understood their hunger. He shared it. And if she would let back into
the house then all the agonies of this half-life of his would q erased;
all pain forgotten, all need dispatched. But Willem had few he of such
clemency. Katya was crazy. She always had been, of cour indeed in
earlier times it had been part of her glamour. Wasn't that parti what
had made her so incredible to watch up there on the screen? A gle of
madness always lit up the eyes of her characters, whatever she

 nlaying- 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 Enoiada, 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
anytime 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 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
among.

He'd almost brought her down, that one, coming into the house without
anyone's 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
happened between them, but he had his suspicions. Katya had she Brahms
pleasures that had marked him as hers forever. That meant,: likely, that
she had taken him down to see the Hunt. Once you'd wa in the Devil's
Country, smelled its ancient air, you belonged to that pla^i in some
unspeakable way. It owned you. He didn't need to look any J ther than
his own body for evidence of this. Since Katya had forbic him to enter
the house--keeping him from close proximity to the tile he had started
to look and feel his true age. His hair had turned white, J bones and
joints ached perpetually. Why was he surprised? Nobody ] forever. Not
movie goddesses, nor the men who served them. And < tainly not houses,
however much rapture they contained. Every fa$ cracked, finally; and
crumbled; and went away to dust. It was only a que tion of time.

Which thought brought him back to the newest trespasser in sealed world:
the most promising opportunity for an undoing of Ic held certainties
he'd seen in many years. She was a strong one, this boned, big-breasted
woman with her unhappy eyes. She was troubl thank God. Under the right
circumstances a woman like that could do!

kinds of mischief. If, of course, she was still alive. She'd been snatc
away by los ninos, the corrupt children of the Canyon, offspring of I
vory couplings between animals and ghosts. Zeffer had witnessed
intercourse many times over the years; vile marriages between women and
coyotes; ghost men and deer, or dogs; even once, a wor and a bird.
Somehow, such consummations were often fruitful, thon the birthings were
not anything he could have imagined until he laid < on them. The animals
who produced infants this way almost always I in the process; every now
and again he would come upon one of their I ted carcasses on the
hillside, and he'd know that another hybrid had 1 added to that unholy
tribe. The revenant women who allowed such cfi gress (some of them
famous in their day, reduced in their frustration I madness to mating
with wild animals), these women seemed to show I signs of trauma when
the birth was over, their bodies being less than He

 and more than ether; malleable, mendable. But that was not to say
their mating5 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 ninos might
have toyed with her for a while, 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 might be the undoing of Katya Lupi.

 Tammy was indeed alive. She knew she was alive because she was hu It
was the only thing about her present condition which she really I nized;
the rest was a kind of fever-dream, filled with blurred horr remote
pieces of what might be real and what she hoped to God was I

She had been carried by her abductors to the far end of the Ca where
there was no sign of any habitation. The area was pretty muchjl gle:
dense thickets of barbed shrubs, overshadowed by stands of ir shaggy
palms. There was no way to climb up any of these trees, to es those
who'd brought her here (though even if she'd been able to do so,!

was certain they would have sniffed her out); nor was there any wayijj
move more than a few steps through the thicket. So she was left with <
one option: she had to confront her abductors.

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

So now, sitting in the thicket, in the midst of this fever-dream,
voices and its faces and its stink, she repeated Ma Edie's mantra to
herself, over an dover: 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 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 when she was 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,"| told
Tammy. "We eat you."

Tammy took this in her stride; or at least did all she could to give I
impression. "I'm not begging you for anything," she said, very "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, looked at
the second speaker, who--like the female--had come clos her. She guessed
this was a male; one of the creatures who'd snatched 1 away from between
the cages. He had a head of ungainly size and I his nose flattened out
like the nose of a bat, his mouth wide and'. Only his eyes were human;
and they were unexpectedly and exquis blue.

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

"Help me," she said. The male lowered his lumpen head, and: her from
under the weight of his brow. "I need to get back to the hot 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 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, I
didn't protect herself, even though flecks of his cold phlegm were hit
her neck and face. She just kept her focus, as best she could. Perhaps I
freaks, for all their bizarrity, knew something about why Todd was her
she was going to free him she had to know what she was freeing from.

"What do you want with Katya?" Tammy said, keeping her optic 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 he 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 out
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 appa
strength these creatures were deathly afraid of the house, and, no doxj
of its mistress.

"Has this woman Katya done you some harm?" she asked the fer

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, just of
Tammy, or indeed of Katya, or of the world, but of being; was as though
every breathing moment was conditional; an agony.; despite the brutal
foulness of the thing's appearance, Tammy felt: 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!

present predicament. She nodded.

There was a long moment, in which the freaks did not reply. Thl glancing
around the company of her fellows, as if to check that she' not be
challenged, the female caught hold of Tammy's wrist, and pu 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| way.
Whatever dangers the house held they could hardly be worse ' staying out
here in the open. The day was quickly passing away. It ^ soon be dark.
And judging by the repeated glances the woman gav sky, she too was
cognizant of the failing light. After the third or foil glance Tammy
couldn't help but ask her what she was so nervous at

"Peacock," she said.

A peacock? There had been peacocks here? It wasn't so surprising second
thought. It fitted with the extravagance of the place. But belonged on
well-clipped lawns, not in this jungle of thorns and flc

 And even assuming the bird could push its way through the thicket
without being stripped of all its finery, what could it do if it 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 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 said, grinning, almost moronically.

She wondered just for a moment if that was the answer to this mystery:
that these pitiful remnants of humanity were cretins, mongoloids,
retards; the children of Hollywood parents who could not bear the idea
that they'd produced such freaks, and given them over to somebody who'd
simply dumped them in the empty Canyon. No, that was ridiculous.

Atrocities like that didn't happen in this day and age; it was
unthinkawy 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 la
than-average breasts in America. It had started when she was tweli) when
thanks to an unfortunate hormonal trick she was walking arov with a
bosom that would have looked just fine on a big-boned twenj|
two-year-old. Suddenly men were looking at her, and the dirty words j^
came tumbling out of their mouths. She went through a phase when;
thought every man in Sacramento had Tourette's Syndrome. Never I that
the girl with the hooters was twelve; men got diarrhea of the mot at the
sight of large breasts. She heard them called everything: "the I
"skin-pillows," her "rack," her "set," her "mounds," her "missiles,"
"melons," her "milk-makers." At first it upset her to be the object of ]
but after a while she learned not to listen to it anymore, unless sorr|
unusual name came along to swell the lexicon, like "global superstars,"
< "bodacious ta-tas," both of which had brought a despairing smile to ;
face.

Of course in two years' time all her girlfriends had got bosoms of the5
own--

"Wait."

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

"What's wrong?" Tammy said.

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

As they fled--and that's what it was suddenly, fleeing--Tammy gla back
over her shoulder. They were not taking this journey unaccor nied. There
was a contingent of freaks coming after them, though were keeping their
distance. But it was not the freaks, however, that I 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 j
of Tammy's arm and threw herself into the cover of the thicket. Tar

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

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

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

"Beautiful," she murmured to herself.

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

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

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

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

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

ture lifted up its backside and spread its glorious tail. By some qv
genetics, it had inherited its father's glory intact. The tail opened!

God's own fan, compensating for every other grotesque thing aboutf^
beast. It was beautiful, and the creature knew it. Tammy stopped st
gling for a moment, thinking perhaps she could talk some sense into <
thing.

"Look at you," she said.

Was there brain enough in that little skull to understand that iti being
flattered? She frankly doubted it. But the creature was watching!

now, its head cocked to one side. She kept talking, telling it how :
looked, while tentatively reaching around to find a branch large enc to
carry her weight, so that she could pull herself to her feet. The creai
shook its tail, the feathers hissing as they rubbed against one
another." iridescent eyes in their turquoise setting shimmered.

And then, without warning, it was on her. It moved so suddenly;] didn't
have a chance to clamber out of its way. She fell back into the 1 soms
for a second time, and before she could raise her arms to ward it| the
peacock came down against her body, trapping her.

She felt its erection against her body, and its wizened hands I 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!

sisted it. But then it began to thrust its hips against her, and a spa
revulsion overcame her better judgment. She reached up and caughtl of
the thing's neck, just below the head, her fingers digging deep inu
blotchy, corrugated flesh. Even so, it continued to grind its body ag
her. She raised her other hand to join the first, and started to strar
thing. Still it pumped on, as though so stupefied with lust it was and
ent to its own jeopardy. She pressed hard on its throat, closing off its
^ pipe. Its grindings continued unabated. She pressed harder, and still.
Then it seemed to reach a point of no return, and a series of shuc
passed through its body. She felt something wet spurting on her 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. Its tongue lolled against its lower beak. Its gaze was
unfocused.

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

Still she held on, pressing her thumbs hard against its windpipe until
every last twitch had gone out of it. Only then did she let go; not with
both hands, but with one, and started to pull herself up from beneath
the body of the creature. She felt its semen cold on her belly, and her
own Wood 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
< 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 ] been
witnessed, she knew; the creatures that shared this beast's grotes tribe
were all out there in the twilight, watching their battle. She cc not
see those who were scrutinizing her, not even the gleam of a toot eye,
but she knew they must be thinking twice about attacking her.| the other
hand, she was seriously weakened. If they were to launch I 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 j been
deeply scored by the freak's claws. She touched the wounds, stung, but
the blood would soon start to clot. She wasn't a bleeder, luc But she
was going to need something to clean the wounds if they we to become
infected--God knows what kind of shit and dirt the crea had had beneath
its claws--which meant finding her way, as quickly as j sible, back to
the house: to clean running water and fresh dressings.

But there was one other matter to deal with before she moved from 1
place: a bit of cleaning up that couldn't wait until she had water. She
pic up a fistful of grass, and wiped her belly, removing as best she
could I remnants of the creature's semen. It took more than one fistful
to dc job; but when she had cleaned herself (and then cleaned her hands'
third portion of grass) she left the body where it lay, and went on her1

She listened, as she went, for the sound of pursuit: the rustle of lea
the snapping of twigs. But she heard nothing. Either the rest of the I
ish clan had decided she was too dangerous to pursue, given that: just
slaughtered one of their more fearsome members, or else the \ of pursuit
no longer amused them and they'd gone back to what 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|
they liked.

 "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 shoe for
its time. The bed was supposed to have been owned by the Devil J see.
Carved to his design. And then the hero, who was played by rq Colman,
inherits it, and he and his bride use it for the bridal bed. Bu 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!

bling 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 posl The
bed. What am I supposed to make of it all?" "Make whatever pleases you,"
she said. "Why's it so important that!

have an explanation for everything? I told you: things are different he

She caught hold of his hand, and they stopped walking. There <I insects
in the grass all around them, making music; overhead, the| were coming
out, their patterns as familiar as the din of cicac tonight, as strange.
His doubts were contagious. The fact that he < understand how it was
possible this woman could have lived the claimed to have lived spread
confusion into every other sign the : brought him. What was he doing
here, in between the music in the| and the brightening stars? He
suddenly seemed to understand not 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 r 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 toward 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 Was waist, pressing so hard against him it was
as though she wanted to dinib 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 while
there's still some light." So they continued their descent, hand in
hand. They said nothing j There was no need.

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

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

"It's sad, the way things have declined," Katya said, looking at the!

before them. The starlight was forgiving, but it couldn't conceal the j
eral condition of the place: the statues missing limbs, or toppled over!

buried in vines; the pavement around the pool cracked and mossy, pool
itself stained and stinking.

"What's that?" Todd said, pointing out the one-story mock-da 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 I nily
bright. There were several skylights in the ceiling, which usher the
brightness of moon and stars, their light bouncing off the silky 1
floor. In the center stood a cocktail bar with mirrors of marbled behind
the glass shelves. Even after all these years there were dc 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 bac

 eet 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 tumbler 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 ayer, which was partially melted, there were salvageable candles.
He set

 up six of them on the bar, seating them in their own dribblings so <
they wouldn't fall over.

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

"Ah, voiw." said Katya, reaching into the depths of the safe.

She brought a small, thick book out of the little safe along with a!

of photographs and set them all down on the bar in the light from the|
dies. The book looked like a journal, bound in dark red leather. Whe
opened it he saw that its handwritten contents were arranged syr cally;
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-qu its pages
were written on, sometimes in the two-column configura sometimes simply
filled up from top to bottom. He turned to a page < former variety. On
the left-hand side of the pages was a column of I on the right hand, a
column that was far harder to make sense of. Occ ally there were names,
but more often letters and symbols, some of 1 resembling obscure
mathematical equations. His puzzlement amused]

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

"A history of what?"

"Of better times."

Todd flipped through the pages. Now and again, among the I came upon
some he knew: Norma Talmadge, Theda Bara, John' 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| some
fun. Every weekend, we'd have parties. Sometimes in the Sometimes in the
house. Sometimes we'd have hunts, all throug 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 Sholt 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 nicked 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 Skimpelts.

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 "You're in
here," he said, coming to some mentions of Katya Lupl!

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 1 the
names?"

Todd nodded, somewhat tentatively. The conversation had ta turn he was
by no means certain he liked. It was one thing to talk; freedom in
Coldheart Canyon; it was another to have her boasting < babies sucking
dicks. "All the symbols mean something different,*!

said. "Look here. That squiggle there, that means snakes. That'. rope?
That means being bound up. The more knots in the rope the 1 bound the
person likes to be. So ... here ... Barrymore ... his rop six knots in
it. So he liked to be very well tied up. And then there's a;| flame
beside him. That means--"

"He liked to be burned?"

"When he was sober. In the end, I stopped inviting him because I 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, start
telling everyone about what it was like up here?"

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

kt

"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 partied 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 t
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 ] ably
forty or so; most in worse condition than the book, the prints I
hastily, and poorly fixed, so that large parts of the image had fac
speckled sepia or to black. But there were still sizable portions of ma
the photographs visible, and the scenes they depicted confirmed obscene
or outlandish detail she'd offered. They weren't simply imaji men and
women coupling, but pictures of the most extreme forms o| ual
gratification. In one, a naked man was bound to a metal cords that held
him biting deep into his flesh. A woman wearing: black brassiere was
flogging his chest and his groin. Assuming this1 a set-up (and something
about the quality of all the photographs gested that all of these were
the real thing), then the woman was her victim some serious hurt. There
was blood running down his < and stomach from blows she'd delivered
there; and there appeared I welts on his thighs and his dick, which
stood testament to the plea was taking in this. In another picture, some
way down the pile, the: man (his face seemed vaguely familiar to Todd,
though he couldn't ] name to it) had been redeemed from his bondage and
lay on the pa stone beside the pool while another woman (this second
compl naked) squatted over him and loosed a stream of urine on his wot
judge by the expression on the masochist's face, this hurt more
whipping. His teeth were gritted, his body locked, as though he were |
just holding back an unmanly scream.

"Wait. I know who that is," Todd said. "That's--Christ! It can't 1

"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 : Always the
victim."

"Well, that was part of the game you got to play in the Canyc here you
do the things the studios wouldn't let you do. Rub your 1

ki

he dirt for a same- And then on Monday morning you could brush your
teeth and smile and pretend you were all-American again. That's what
_people want. An illusion. You can do what the hell you like out of
sight.

lust 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 clearer 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 barn, she was eating anchovies and icecream.

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 center 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?"

Ajar of bees, and Claudette's breast."

"She liked to get stung?"

"She would scream like her lungs were going to give out. But 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 of her."

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

Before he left them where they lay, there was one question rema 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 < ing
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 sig

"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. "C on,"
she said, "let's go outside. We're missing the dusk."

 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, ttst Katya and her stories of the Gaming Room, then the
guesthouse ^d the life-masks and the posters, then the bath, and the
Terror. Now t^s: the Pool House and its history of debaucheries, locked
away for pos- I Cfity; 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 wants know
what it all meant; but he was afraid of the answer. No, that > it. He
was afraid he already knew the answer.

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

Oh God, yes, he could feel them. These weren't moths or mosqu 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 be or
not believing. They're here. All around you. Just let yourself see I You
know they're here."

Of course he knew. In his gut, he'd known all along there was I mystery
like this waiting in the wings. And what Katya said about 1 was right.
Whether he believed in the Life Everlasting or not was a j irrelevance.
The dead were here. He could feel their fingers, their br their stares.
And now, as they pressed closer, he began to see them. H^ 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 3 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 movedi ibly
through it, became agitated. The number of touches that To doubled,
tripled. Apparently Katya felt them too, and she was some irritated by
them.

"Calm down, calm down," she said.

There were subtle smears of light in front of Todd, as though the I tion
the ghosts were feeling--spurred by Katya's mention of the I was causing
them to show themselves. He thought he saw a face in <

 he 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
sup nort 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'd 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 in
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 j toms
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 I laughter
rapidly subsided, and the divine faces stopped pressk ward him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if to prove Katya's point there was an eruption of libidinous 1 ter
from somewhere nearby, and Todd followed the sound to see a ^ tied up in
the trees, naked but for a long string of pearls which converging
rivulets between her breasts. Her wrists were bound tog and her arms
lifted high above her head, so that she hung, her palei shaped like a
bow, her toes grazing the ground. It was she who was 1 ing, despite the
apparent vulnerability of her situation. There was I on the ground
between her legs, licking the base of her feet, another, standing behind
her and massaging her breasts, bit into I der flesh of her shoulder and
neck. The hands went from her

 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. Aval"

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
begun 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|
practically intoxicating. It was darker here than it had been under the<
where Ava hung, but Todd could see bodies on the ground, in va
combinations of coupling. Somebody reached down from a branch I head,
and ran his or her fingers through Todd's hair; someone else I up behind
him and pulled his shirt out from his trousers. Again, he lc for Katya;
and again found her close by, smiling.

"Katya?"

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

"Lick me, Katya," she said, her voice dreamy. "Will you pli 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 were a plate set be her.

Katya smiled, her hands going up to the insides of the girl's thighsjj
turing up to the spot where they met but then before they quite rea the
place and offered any satisfaction, retreated again. It was a tant 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 wha
unfolding here. Katya had very quickly bared her breasts, so that nc she
approached the divide of the girl's legs, her nipples stroked her ]
ner's thighs. Her hands were delicately parting the girl's labia, as the
investigating the most exquisite of flowers.

Todd could feel the blood thumping at his groin. Was there no < Katya's
capacity to surprise him? Whenever he thought he was begii

I et 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 ue'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
apprec coo from someone who weighed the mass of his balls (a man'Sii
there, surely; but he was past caring); and the girl who'd beckoned t
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 I
gasping with delight. Somebody had got his hands on her before ] felt a
spasm of possessiveness, and crawled on, over a couple of s bodies, to
catch up with her. He'd got it into his head that the I 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 I hand and
drawing him toward her. The shadow of Katya's sobbing I spilled across
much of her body, but her face lay clear of it, and To that this girl
who'd gobbled him down so gluttonously looked bar enough to be out of
her parents' charge. She was dark: dark skin;!

hair, dark eyes. And she was already lying back on a bed of bodie pulled
him eagerly toward her and cupped his face with her hands, 1 ing his
mouth to hers. There was some confusion of bodies around beneath her,
but he was too turned on to pay much attention to details. He kissed the
girl (wondering, indeed half-hoping, that Kat paused in her
ministrations to see what he was up to; wishing she'djj 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 < mouth,
some coldness to her lips--which would have given away 1 that she was a
spirit? Not that he could tell. If anything she was than most women he'd
been naked with; almost feverish. And des fact that his eyes had for so
long failed to see the ghosts in the Ca she--and all of those around
him--now seemed absolutely solid.

His dick had lost none of its rigidity through this fumbling pur fact
that the air was humid and pungent with the heat given off by 1
spirit-forms only aroused him more. Katya had prepared him well,!

her talk of shamelessness. He wanted the girl, and she wanted him:1 else
mattered?

He put the head of his cock into her. She lifted her legs a little, to
help run 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 nioved 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 be revolted had been sweated out of him. It only made him
harder 1 about the woman being sandwiched between him and the other man;
I fine sheath of her muscle dividing the two of them. He brought his ha
up from the swamp between their legs and grabbed hold of the bl; 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 kb grily on Todd. " 'Cause we like to get real crazy."

Todd had found the rhythm of this now; and together they played 1 until
she started to scream with ecstasy.

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

She was watching Todd, her expression inscrutable. Somebody lit a <
arette for her. Todd smiled at her, and then--before she could choose|
either return the smile or ignore it--he fell back into the bliss of
menage-a-trois, thinking that if this was what sex with the dead was 1
then the living had a lot to learn.

 Tonight was one of those nights when Marco had decided to get drunk.

"An honorable occupation," as his father had always said. He didn't like
to drink in company; in truth, he didn't much like company at all.
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 were 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 bee
great early warning system. As soon as anyone came anywhere near I house
he'd go crazy. Tomorrow, Marco thought as he headed down 1 his bedroom
to get a fresh bottle of whisky, he'd talk to Todd again abc buying a
pup, using the security angle to get past Todd's loyalty; Dempsey.

He found the whisky, and poured himself a glass, taking it neat in I
swallow. Then he looked at his watch. It was eleven-twenty. He'd bet get
moving. Los Angeles was an early town, he'd discovered, especia
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 hea
noise at the bottom of the stairwell. It sounded like a door opening I
closing.

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

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

"Huh," he said to himself. He went up, found his wallet, picked up 1
whisky glass from the kitchen on the way back down, and descended 1
stairs.

There were plenty of places around the house he hadn't explored: I of
them was the very lowest level of the house, which Jerry had told 1 was
just store-rooms. Nor had he advised using them. They were 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, >
set it down. He was now drunk, he realized as he stood upright. Not ]
alytically; just nicely, pleasantly toasted. Smiling a little smile of :
congratulation for having achieved this blissful state, he continued dov

It was cold here, in the bowels of the house. But it wasn't the cold
that Jerry had warned him about. This was an almost-bracing cc like a
late-autumn night in his hometown of Chicago. He went down 1 little
corridor that led from the bottom of the stairs, at the end of7 was the
noisy door which had brought him down here. What the hell1 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
dearly.

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 he the
sound of voices from somewhere in the Canyon. Women's voie mostly,
laughing. And lights, running between the trees.

"Sonofabitch," Marco said.

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

The evening was getting stranger by the minute. He went downst through
the kitchen and out to the back door. Anxiety had soured drink in his
stomach, and as he opened the back door a wave of nav suddenly overcame
him. He had no time to get outside. He puked onl threshold, the force of
the feeling enough to fold his legs up beneath ] He gazed weakly down at
the splattered whisky and meatballs on-) ground, his eyes vaguely
comprehending the intricacy of five nails were driven into the partially
rotted wood of the threshold.

Then, from the darkness on the other side of the threshold there < 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!

gling in his belly; he could feel his system preparing to revolt again."
tried to make sense of the girl who'd just begged entrance to the hou
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 coc not
entirely fix nor be certain of, but who seemed to be more than ] ingly
pretty. She had long blonde hair and pale, almost white, skin;; suited
her tone of supplication she was on her knees, her pose a image of his
own. She was wearing what appeared to be a man's which was unbuttoned.
Had Marco been feeling more like himself^ might have hoped to persuade
her to take the shirt off before he tookj on her. But the nausea
overwhelmed all other responses: the girl's nakedness only made his
belly churn harder. He looked away from 1 hoping to postpone the next
bout of vomiting until she was out of si

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 hot
You have to help me."

"I'm in no condition--" he started, looking up at her to try to
communicate with his 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 gray, 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 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 j
decided to forgo cleanliness in favor of making a fast exit.

He drove down the serpentine road that led out of the Canyon as if were
being pursued by a horde of demon-women, and without thinking about it
took the same route he'd taken with Todd counti times: up onto
Mulholland Drive. He opened the window as he drove;!

as to have a sobering breeze blowing against his face, but it had very
lie effect. There was too much alcohol in his blood, and too much pa
inflaming that alcohol, to make him a safe driver on such a notoriov;
tricky and dangerous stretch of road. He didn't care. He just wanted!

put some distance between himself and that damn Canyon as fast as ]
sible.

On one of the hairpin bends his clammy hands slid on the wheel,; he
momentarily lost control of the car. He was a good enough drw even in
his present state--to recover quickly, and things might have 1 fine had
another speed-freak not come barreling round the corner I the opposite
direction. The other driver took quick evasive action, was away round
the bend before Marco lost what little control he The wheel slipped
through his hands, and his drink-slurred foot was to slow on the brake
to stop the car from skewing round, squealing loud There was no barrier
between the road and the drop; not even a woe fence. The front half of
the vehicle went over the edge, and there it Ic for a moment, finely
balanced between solid asphalt and oblivion. Ma muttered a little
prayer, but God wasn't listening. The car tripped for and slid off the
road into darkness. It was a straight drop of perhaps fo or fifty feet.

The vehicle didn't hit solid ground, however. It fell into the ma boughs
of a sycamore tree, which was large enough to hold the car, nfi down, in
its branches. Marco was thrown against the windshie Through it he could
see the yard in which the sycamore stood. There' a party going on down
there. The pool was illuminated: its turquoise water twinkling. Lanterns
hung in the bushes all around,!

ing 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 clear 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 lifted 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 Mulhol]
Drive, however.

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

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

He took out the half-smoked reefer he'd been saving for a happier (
sion, and lit it up. As he drew on the pungent smoke, he looked up ands
a patch of luminous air lingering at the edge of the pool. It had no'|
cernible shape. It was simply a gentle brightness, which would have be
invisible half an hour before, when the sun had still been up. He wat
the brightness as it hung there for ten, perhaps fifteen seconds, the
nipped out his reefer, pocketed it, and went back inside to find some!

to tell. He found his father; and together they emerged into the bac

The light had already gone from beside the pool.

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

 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 energy 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, Mister Zero Sperm Count); and the man who used to do her
dry-cleaning m Sacramento, Mister 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
neavy 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 not by daylight. Perhaps, she thought, they were waiting for
dark ness. Meanwhile, there were plenty of things that did come: flies,
drag flies, humming-birds, all flitting around.

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

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

She fell to her knees, crying, begging it to leave her alone. But it'
merciless; the voices were louder than ever, yelling incoherently in .

head; the sky was every color but blue.

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

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

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

The sky was almost lightless now. She could barely see her hand I front
of her face. She let her eyes slide closed, draping the stars. In '
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?

They 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 that 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 ^es, 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 she knew that next time she wouldn't havej
strength to pick herself up.

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

"Tammy?"

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

"It's Willem," he said.

Her legs almost gave out from sheer gratitude. He came out of 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:
quished herself to him she heard a little girl somewhere nearby, sot
pitifully. She was about to ask who the hell it was making such a n|
when she realized it was her own voice.

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

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

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

"I can't ... 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 "ie
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 ] with
an appreciative smile on her face. Clearly she'd enjoyed watching t
menage-a-trois. But it was clear she now wanted Todd to leave the ga

"Gotta go," he said to the girl.

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

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

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

the bower.

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

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

It seemed the scene in the night-blooming jasmine had begun a < reaction
among the ghosts. As they walked through the warm darls he saw orgiasts
on every side, involved in pleasuring themselves and I another. Clothes
had been shed in the grass or hung in the branches ] Hallowe'en spooks;
kisses were being exchanged, murmurs of passici As he'd already
discovered, death had done nothing to dim the libidos!

these people. Though their dust and bones lay in cold tombs and soleums
across the city, their spirits were very much in heat here. And Katya
had told him, nothing was forbidden. It was only curious to se many
familiar faces among the orgiasts. Faces he associated with ev thing but
this: comedians and adventurers and players of melodrama, never naked;
never aroused. And again, as had been true in the what he would have
turned away from in revulsion in the company ofij living, intrigued and
inflamed him here, among the famous dead, that Gary Grant with his
trousers around his ankles; and Randolph I paying tribute below? Was
that Jean Harlow lying on one of the lc boughs of a tree, with her foot
running up and down the erection > man standing devotedly by? There were
others, many others, he only 1

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 or 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 of 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
"im. "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 e darkened garden and back into her dream palace.

 "I'm hungry," Tammy told Zeffer. "Can't we get some food front!

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 lit
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 withrjl
Frankly, that means you may as well forget about him. When Katya ^ a man
Katya gets him."

"Were you married to her?"

"I was married when I met Katya, but I never became her husband.!

never wanted me. I was just there to serve her, right from the start*!

make her life easier. Todd's a different story. She's going to suck him
I

"Like a vampire, you mean?" Tammy said. After all she'd seen the-|
didn't seem so preposterous.

"She's not the kind who takes your blood. She's the kind who I your
soul."

"But she hasn't got Todd yet, has she?" Tammy said. "I mean, he I still
leave if he wanted to."

"I suppose he could," Zeffer said, his voice laced with doubt. ?1 Tammy,
I have to ask you: why do you care about this man so What's he ever done
for you?"

It took Tammy a few moments to muster a reply. "I suppose if you Mj at
it that way, he hasn't done anything ... tangible. He's a movie stalil

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 &at 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
Go 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'i
life. I made my choices just as you made yours." He sighed. "The some
days when I think hard about killing myself. Just to be free of But it
might not work. I might slit my throat and wake up back > started, her
dead dog instead of her living one."

Tammy's gaze slid past him to study the luminous people plj between the
trees. The sight should have astonished her; but she'd 1 too much in the
last little while for this to impress her much. The : 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
tained through much of their exchange.

"All dead. You want to go look?" He studied her hesitation. "You ddl you
don't want to admit to it. It's all right. There's a little voyeur in <
body. If there weren't there'd be no such thing as cinema." He turne<f|
looked toward the flickering figures weaving between the trees. "Shei to
have orgies all the time in the Golden Age, and I liked nothing 1 than
to pick my way among the configurations and watch."

"But not now?"

"No. There's only so much human intercourse anyone can watch. S

"Do they look horrible?"

"Oh no. They look the way they looked at the height of their 1 because
that's the way they want to remember themselves. Perfec ever. Or at
least for as long as God allows this place to last."

Tammy caught the apocalyptic undertone in this. "What do you I she said.

"That sooner or later there'll be an end to this endless indulgeiiij Day
of Judgment, if you will. And I think"--he dropped his voic whisper,
though there was no one nearby--"you may be its Deliv

"Me?" She also dropped her voice. "Why me?"

"It's just a hunch. A piece of wishful thinking if you like. Theys their
time. And I think some of them know it. They're a little mof perate 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 among the revenants, and one by one they gave up
their pleasures, whatever they'd been, and turned their hollow gazes
toward 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, ought momentarily reignite 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, [ tempting 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;
stars. On the ridge of the opposite side of the Canyon some of grotesque
offspring of these weary beauties began a wordless howli the darkness.
The sound was loud enough to carry down the hill to Sv and the Beverly
Hills flats. Several valets parking cars for a private parrel Rexford
Drive paused to comment on the weird din from up in the'. couple of
patients, close to death at Cedars-Sinai, called for their prie man who
lived next door to the house on Van Nuys where Lyle and ] Menendez had
murdered their mother and father decided--hearing I 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 1 never
known existed, much less explored.

"Take no notice," Katya told him, as the noise came again, even lou and
more plaintive. "Whatever it is, it's out there, it's not in here with 1
She took hold of his arm, and kissed his cheek. He could smell Ava on 1
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 dc and
similarly medieval in style.

"On the other side of that door is something that was given to : long
time ago. It changed my life. As I told you, it will also change; When
you first get in there, it's bewildering. You just have to trust me.

going to be with you all the time, even if you can't always see me.

swear no harm is going to come to you. You understand me, Todd?" is my
house. Even this place, which will seem very remote from ever you've
seen so far, is also mine."

He didn't know quite what to make of any of this, but his curiosity, J
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 cut-1
lery 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
van-i I ished.

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

"They're downstairs," Zefifer said, his voice tinged with superstitiousl
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
were protesting about whatever was happening in its midst.

Tammy went to the kitchen sink, ran some cold water, and washed thej
food from around her mouth. Then she skirted around Zeffer and headeclf
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. Ii
smelled nothing like the rest of the house, nor of the gardens outsider
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 mor
step," he said.

Outside, the spirits of the dead waited and listened. They had heard!
door that led into the Chamber of the Hunt opened; they knew sona^ 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, the would
gladly have done so, at any price. But Katya had been too clevefl

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 it attempted to cross. They had no choice, therefore, but to
keep a respectful distance, hoping that someday 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 an dover, 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 he was
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 eyesight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil's
Country, aesperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could
not be arrested.

Terrible stories started to circulate among the lords of Tinseltown;
nightmare stories. Somebody had woken up blind in the middle .

night, it was said; somebody else had withered before her lover's at
eyes. Fear gripped the Golden People; and anger too. They blamed 1 for
introducing them to this ungodly panacea, and demanded give them
constant access to the house and the Hunt. She, of cc refused. This
quickly led to some ugly scenes: people started appea the house in the
Canyon in desperate states of need, beating at the| to be let in.

Katya hardened her cold heart against them, however. Rea would soon be
under siege, she hired men to guard the house nighlj day. For several
months, through the spring and summer of 1926, I Zeflfer lived in
near-isolation, ignoring the entreaties of her friends!

came (often with magnificent gifts) begging for an audience with hersj
for a chance to see the Devil's Country. She refused all but a very
fe\$|

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

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

Of course Katya was no more knowledgeable about the alche work in her
dream palace than those in her doomed circle. She kne the gift of
healing and the fever of need that followed was all br about by being in
the Devil's Country, but how it worked, or how lc would operate before
its engines were exhausted, she had no idea

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 would
be 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 Valentine.

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, Valentine had proc started to
bawl like a baby, interspersing his sobs with demands that please God
have mercy on him.

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

She let him weep until the carpet was damp. Then she had him remc 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 <fying, i
dying. But this time he'd known his own body better than she'd given J
credit for. He was the first to pay the ultimate price for visiting the
1 Country. Three weeks after that tearful conversation he was dead.

The hoopla over Valentine's sudden demise hid from view a : smaller
incidents that were nevertheless all part of the same esc tragedy. A
minor starlet called Miriam Acker died two days after Rud what was
reported to be pneumonia. She had been a visitor to the Ca on several
occasions, usually in the company of Ramon Navarro.

Negri--another visitor to the Canyon--fell gravely ill a week later, <
several days hovered on the brink of death. Her frailty was attribut
grief at the passing of Valentine, with whom she claimed to have 1
passionate affair; but the truth was far less glamorous. She too had I
under the spell of the Hunt; and now, though she denied it, was sic

In fact death took an uncommonly large number of Hollywood's 1 naries in
the next few months. And for every one who died there wettff or twenty
who got sick, and managed to recover, though none were^ possessed of
their full strength, or flawless beauty, again. The "ce dence" was not
lost on either the fans or the journalists. "A harvest of 6 is sweeping
Hollywood," Film Photoplay morbidly announced, "as start star follows
the greatest star of all, Rudolph Valentino, to the grave."

The idea that there was some kind of plague abroad caught the pub
imagination and was fed voraciously by those who'd predicted for rea of
their own that judgment would eventually fall on Tinselto Preachers
who'd fulminated against the sinners of the New Sodom1 now quick to
point out the evidence in support of their grim serm^ And the public,
who a decade before had taken pleasure in crov

 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 ut
of the darkness stepped Rudy Valentine. He looked entirely unchanged by
death: his skin as smooth as ever, his hair as brilliandy coiffed, his
clothes as flawless.

He bowed deeply to her.

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

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

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

"I'm not afraid of you," Katya replied, quite truthfully. "There always
ghosts in my village. We used to see them all the time. My j mother used
to sing me to sleep, and she'd been dead ten years. But 1 let's be
honest. I know why you're up here. You want to get in to seel Hunt--"

"--just for a little while."

"No."

"Please." "No!" she said, waving him away. "I really don't want to hear
any I 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 J ite
son."

She turned her back on him and walked back toward the house, j heard him
following on after her, his heels light on the grass, but I 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 1 many
dogs you have, how many guards. They'll get in. Your beaut] 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?"

"Ohplease, 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 toward 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
^onymous journalist in the Chicago Tribune had called him "a pink powder
puff."

"Why didn't somebody quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias

Valentine, years ago?" he'd written. Rudy had challenged the man to a|
ing match, to see which of them was truly the more virile. The joi had
of course never shown his face. But the insult had stuck. And hea it
repeated now threw Valentine into such a rage that he pitched 1 at
Katya, reaching for her throat. She had half-expected his phantom 1 to
be so unsubstantial that his hands would fail to make any real cc But
not so. Though the flesh and blood of him had been reduced I urn full of
ashes, his spirit-form had a force of its own. She felt his 1 at her
neck as though they were living tissue. They stopped her breat:

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

In life, she'd remembered, he'd always been overly sensitive to sme
consequence, perhaps, of the fact that he'd been brought up in the st of
poverty. His hand went up his wounded face, and he sniffed his 1 a look
of profound revulsion on his face.

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

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

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

"Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.

Hearing the Lord's name taken in vain, Valentine--good Catholic!

that he was--crossed himself, and fled into the darkness.

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

At first the signs were nothing too terrible: a change in the timb the
coyotes' yelps; the heads torn off all the roses one night; the the

the petals off the bougainvillea; the appearance on the lawn of a
frightened deer, throwing its glassy gaze back toward 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 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 bac Romania, and
find Sandru. Maybe there's some defense we can puf 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 j
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 placet 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 stare'l
her for perhaps a minute, while she lit a cigarette, her fingers tremb
Finally, he summoned up enough courage to say: "You are afraid."

She stared out of the window, almost as though she hadn't heard 1 When
she spoke again her voice was as soft as it had been stride minute ago.

"I'm not afraid of the dead, Willem. But I am afraid of what will 1 pen
to me if I lose the room." She looked at the palm of her ha though she
might find her future written there. But it wasn't the line her hand she
was admiring, it was its smoothness. "Being in the Country has made me
feel younger, Willem. It did that to everyb 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 sr
"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 doll 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 anymore."

"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."

 The Devil's Country

NE

Todd knew the mechanics of illusion passably well. He'd always enjoyed
watching the special effects guys at work, or the stuntmen with their
rigs; and now there was a new generation of illusionists who worked with
tools that the old matte painters and model-makers of an earlier time
could not even have imagined. He'd been in a couple of pictures in which
he'd played entire scenes against blank green screens, which were later
replaced with landscapes which only existed in the ticking minds of
computers.

But the illusions at work in this room of Katya's were of another order
entirely. There was a force at work here that was both incredibly
powerful and old; even venerable. It did not require electricity to fuel
it, nor equations to encode it. The walls held it, with possessive
caution, beguiling him by increments.

At first he could make virtually no sense of the images. It simply
seemed that the walls were heavily stained. Then, as his eyes became
accustomed to reading the surface, he realized he was looking at tiles,
and that what he'd taken to be stains were in fact pictures, painted and
baked into the ceramic. He was standing in a representation of an
immense landscape, which looked more realistic the longer he studied it.
There were vast expanses of dense forests; there were stretches of
sun-drenched rock; there were steep cliff-walls, their crannies nested
by fearless birds; there were rivulets that became streams, in turn
converging into glittering rivers, which wound their way toward the
horizon, dividing into silver fringed deltas before they finally found
the sea. Such was the elaboration

of the painting that it would take many hours of study, perhaps even <
to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And would
only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which,; was now
astonished to see, was not the case.

There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of shook the
tangle of a thicket; one of those fearless birds wheeled av from the
cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through undergrowth,
noses to the ground.

"Katya ... ?" Todd said.

There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she'd last 1
standing); so he looked back. She wasn't there. Nor was the door
throttle which he'd stepped to come into this new world. There was just
nm landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.

The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were I pies
on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea, being h|j
ried along by the same wind that filled the sails of the ships that me
below. There were men, too, all around. Riders, moving through the I
est; some solitary, some in groups of three or four; one procession of-l
horses mounted by richly attired men, parading solemnly between trees.
And fishermen on the banks of the streams; and on little boats, 1 bing
around the sandbars at the delta; and in one place, inexplicably, I men
laid out naked on a rock, and in another, far more explicable, anot pair
hanging from a tree, while their lynchers sat in the shade of the I tree
they'd put to such guilty use, and looked out at the rest of the' as
they shared a flagon of beer.

Again he looked around for Katya, but she wasn't to be seen. But ; said
she'd be close by, even if--as now--he couldn't see her. The root began
to understand, had control of his eyes. He found his gaze edly led away
from where she might be, led skyward, to gawk at I passing birds (there
were tiles on the vaulted roof, he saw; he could 1 the squeak of the
birds' wings as they passed overhead); led into the I est, where animals
he could not name moved as if in some secret I mony, and others fought;
and others lay dead; and still others were 1

born. (Though like did not spring from like in this world. In one spot
an animal the size and shape of a tiger was giving birth to half a dozen
white lizards; in another a hen the size of a horse was retreating from
her eggs in panic, seeing that they'd cracked open and were spilling
huge blue flies.)

And still he kept looking. And still he kept seeing, and though there
were horrors here, to be sure, nothing in him made him want to leave off
his seeing.

There was a curious calm upon his soul; a kind of dreamy indifference to
his own situation. If he'd reasoned this out perhaps he would have
concluded that he wasn't afraid because none of this could possibly be
real.

But he did not reason it out. He was beyond reasoning at that moment.

Beyond anything, indeed, but witnessing. He had become a living
instrument; a flesh-and-blood camera, recording this wonderland. He kept
turning on his heel, counter-clockwise, as sights caught his attention
off to his left; and left again; and left again.

Everything here had a miraculous shine to it, as though whatever
divinity had made it had an army of workers at His or Her command,
perpetually polishing the world. Every leaf on every tree had its gloss;
every hair on every mammal and every scale on every reptile had its
sheen; every particle of dirt, down to the shit from the flea-infested
backside of a boar, had a glamour all of its own. A rat sniffing in the
carcass of a gored hound came away with drops of corruption on its
whiskers as enchanting as a lover's eyes. The earth at his feet (yes,
there were tiles there too, painted with as much love as forest or
cloud) was a surfeit of glories: a worm his heel had half-killed was
lovely in its knotted agonies.

Nothing was inconsequential here. Except, perhaps, Todd Pickett. And if
that was the case, then he wasn't about to dispute the point. He would
not wish anything here other than the way it was, including--for the
first time in his life--himself.

This thought--that he was finally at peace with himself--came over "im
like a breaking wave, cooling a long and exhausting fever. If he was
nothing here, he thought, except the eyes with which these strangenesses

could be glorified, then that suited him fine. And if in the end the :
nessing burned him up, and made an end to him, that was fine too; fectly
fine, to die here, watching this shining world. It would hear no <
plaint from him.

"You like it?"

Ah, there was Katya. Off to his right, a little distance, staring up
atfl glamorous sky.

He followed her gaze, and saw something he'd missed until now:| sun was
three-quarters eclipsed by the moon. That was why the light| so peculiar
here; it was the light of a world in permanent semi-dark murk which had
inspired everything that lived here to catch its own| ticular fire. To
snatch every last gleam of light out of the air and ma| it; to be its
own exquisite advertisement.

"Yes," he said to her, hearing something very close to tears in his ^ "I
like it very much."

"Not everybody does, of course," she said, glancing over at "Some I
brought here were so afraid that they ran. And of course, I not a very
smart thing to do here."

"Why not?"

She wandered over to him, assessing him as she did so, as though to if
he was telling the truth, and that he really liked what he saw. Appa
satisfied, she laid a light kiss on his cheek: it almost felt as though
she< congratulating him. Coming here had been a test, he realized; and<|
passed.

"You see over there, just beyond the hill? The deep forest there?" |

"Yes."

"Then you also see the horsemen coming through the trees?"

"They're the reason we shouldn't run?"

"They are."

"Why?"

"They're hunters. The Duke Goga, who leads them, counts all lands as his
own."

"They're getting closer."

"Yes they are."

"How is that possible?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean: how is it possible that they're getting closer to us? They're
in the walls."

"Is that what you think?" she said, coming closer to him. "Is that what
you really believe?"

He stood still for a moment, and listened to his heart. What did his
heart tell him? The wind gusted, cold against his face. It was not a
Californian wind. Overhead, the sun remained eclipsed, though he knew
there was no possible way to see the sky from this deep a place in the
house.

"I'm in another world."

"Good," she said.

"And it's real."

"Again, good. And does it trouble you, to be in the middle of such a
mystery?"

"No," he said. "I don't know why and I'm not sure I care."

She put her arms around him, holding him tighter than she'd held until
now, and looked deep into his eyes, looking deeper than she'd ever
looked. "It doesn't matter, my love. Whether it's in my head, or your
head, or the head of God--"

"--or the Devil?"

"--or the Devil. It doesn't matter. Not to us." She spoke the last three
words as a near-whisper, close to his ear. He kissed her. He realized
now how cannily she'd led him--teasing him with outlandish
visions--ghosts and ungodly pleasures, slowly deconstructing his beliefs
about what was real and what was not. All in preparation for this wonder
of wonders.

Nothing matters to us, huh?" he said between kisses.

We're above it all," she said. As she spoke she put her hand down
between his legs. He was like a rock.

You want to make love to me?"

"Of course I do."

"You want to go back up to bed?"

"No. I want to do it right here." He pointed to the hard ground at 1
feet.

Again, she laughed. This new-found fire in him seemed to entertain f She
lifted up her dress, so that he could have sight of her. She was na

"Lie down," he told her.

She did so without a second instruction, lifting and parting her le she
lay at his feet, so that he should have full disclosure of her. She I
hand over herself. Into the groove, and out again, wet, to touch her; He
could hear the rhythm of the hunters' horses in the ground I foot. Duke
Goga and his party were getting closer. Todd glance toward the trees. He
could no longer see the men: the forest had 1 too deep. But they were
nearby.

No matter. He could watch the hunters another day. Right now he| sport
of his own. He unbuttoned his pants and let his dick spring I Katya sat
up instantly and took it in her hand, rubbing it.

"So big."

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. He liked the fact that she said it.'l
there was an appetite for it in her eyes, the likes of which he'd never
t on a woman's face before. She started to pull on his cock, not to plea
him, simply to bring him down to her; into her.

He went down on his knees between her legs. Such was the lightnti her
dress that it could be lifted up almost to her neck, to expose her I and
breasts. He put his face down against her flat stomach, lickingl navel
then going up to her breasts. It had always been a fantasy of 1 wash a
woman with his tongue, every inch of her, from the corners of eyes, to
the cleft of her buttocks, simply to be her servant, bat with his
tongue. This was the woman he would realize that fantasy-J he knew. This
was the woman he would realize every fantasy wit!

hers was the body with which he could play freely, doing anyt heart
desired; anything.

That was the only word of this sexual delirium that escaped "...
anything."

But she seemed to know what it meant because she raised his face from
her breasts, and smiled at him. "Yes, I know," she said. 'Anything you
want. And for me--"

"Anything you want."

"Yes."

She took hold of the collar of his shirt, and drew his face closer to
hers.

They kissed, while she moved beneath him, seeming not to care about the
hard dirt against her naked buttocks, her naked back. He had his hands
either side of her, to support himself. But that was all he needed to
do. She was perfectly capable of doing the rest. She lifted her hips a
little and caught the head of his cock between her labia, then, sighing,
she delivered herself up and upon it in one sweet motion.

Now she put her arms around his neck, and let out a most extraordinary
sigh: a sound of complete abandonment.

Todd looked down at her face with something that began to feel like
helpless adoration. The polishers who'd put a shine on everything in
this strange world must have saved their best labors for her. The down
on her cheek, the dark curve of her lashes, the fabulous hierarchy of
lilacs and blues and turquoise in her eyes, all were perfect. She was
almost unbearably beautiful: his eyes stung at the sight of her.

"I love you," he said.

The words came out with such ease that they were said before he had a
chance to spoil them by making a performance out of them.

Of course he'd said it before, plenty of times (too many times, in
truth) but never like this. It sounded, for the first time, simple.
Simple and true.

She raised her head from the ground, until her lips were almost touching
his.

"I love you too," she whispered.

"Yes?"

You know I do. You're the one I've waited for, Todd. All these years. We
been patient, because I knew you'd come." She  her hips up toward him,
sheathing him completely. Then, I *U1 holding on to him, she began to
pull herself off him a little way, just

until the head of his dick was about to find the air, then smother
again, down to the root.

There was a heavy reverberation in the ground. Todd could fee through
his palms.

"The hunters ..." he said.

"Yes," she said, as though this were of little consequence. "Gc close.
We should stay very still until he's passed by."

She drew Todd down on top of her. He couldn't see the huntsmen!

but the noise was getting louder nevertheless. The reverberations : the
little shards of rock around her head, decorated with tiny frag of
fossil, dance.

Finally, they came into view, rising over the crest of a hill some twe
five or thirty yards from where they lay, locked together.

There were five of them in the Duke's party, and they looked as the
they'd been riding for a very long time. Their horses shone with I and
the men--all of whom were dressed in tattered tunics--showed s of
extreme fatigue. But even their exhaustion had a kind of livid beaut it.
Their skin was as bright as, or brighter than, the bone that it concea
their eyes, which were sunk deep in their sockets, had a fevered br in
them. Todd wasn't surprised they looked so harried, given the ord beast
he'd glimpsed here. Yes, there were wild pigs and stags, but I were
other kinds of creature, far less easily categorized; things that Ic as
though the Devil had had a hand in their design. Lethal qv doubt. Indeed
there were signs that the party had been recently attac One of the
horses had a number of deep gashes on its rump, and its:) had clearly
suffered in the encounter. His left arm hung limply, and a I dark
bloodstain had spread from a place under his arm across a third ( upper
body. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in pain, his < drooping.

Even if Katya hadn't named the leader, it would have been cle Todd that
he was of a higher social standing than his companion horse a more
finely-bred animal than those the others rode, its ma tail braided. As
for the man himself, he was almost as beautifully I

as his mount, his full, dark beard well-shaped, his long hair a good
deal cleaner than that of his companions. But these cosmetic polishes
aside, he was in no better shape than his fellow riders. His eyes were
sunk deep into his skull and his body, for all the upright position he
held in his saddle, was full of little tics, as though he were
uncomfortable in his own skin. In his left hand he held the reins of his
horse. His right rested on the golden pommel of his sword, ready to
unsheathe the blade in a heartbeat.

Todd had never played in a medieval movie--his face was far too
contemporary, and his acting skills too rudimentary for an audience to
believe him as anything but a modern man. But he'd seen his share of
epics: the kind Heston had made in the fifties and early sixties: all
rhetoric and pose-striking. The men approaching them looked nothing like
the well-fed heroes of those epics. Their bodies were wizened, their
looks so intense they seemed more like escaped lunatics than hunters.

Goga raised his right hand (which was missing two fingers) and with a
silent gesture slowed the advance of the party. The men--sensing their
leader's apprehension--proceeded to scan the landscape around them,
looking for some sign of their enemy, whoever, or whatever, it was.

Todd stayed very still, just as Katya had instructed. Had these men been
gun-slingers, he would have described them as trigger-happy. Plainly
they were nervous and exhausted; not men to meddle with.

But even as he lay there, barely daring to breathe, he felt Katya reach
down between his legs and proceed to stroke his balls. He gave her an
astonished look, which she returned with a mischievous little smile. She
stroked him back to full erection, and then subtly maneuvered her body
so that he was once again fully sheathed by her. The sensation felt even
more extraordinary than it had a few minutes before. Without seeming to
move her hips she contrived to make waves of motion move up and down her
channel, massaging him.

All the while, the horsemen approached, and the closer they came the
more desperate they looked. These were men who apparently lived in a c
nstant state of fear, to judge by their expressions. One of the Duke's
lour followers, the oldest and the most scarred, mumbled a prayer to him
self as he rode, and in his hand he clutched a plain wooden cross, more
than once he kissed, for comfort's sake.

Todd was somewhere between ecstasy and panic. He didn't dare me even if
he'd wanted to. Katya, meanwhile, was free to play havoc with ]
nerve-endings. He didn't move his hips; he didn't need to. She had all |
moves. Her internal manipulations were becoming more elaborate all I
time, driving him closer and closer to losing control.

Todd had always been a noisy lover; sometimes embarrassingly soa
memorable night with a girlfriend in a suite at the Chateau Marmont 1
been brought to a premature halt when the manager had called up;!

room to regretfully report that the guests in an adjacent suite could
sleep for all his moans.) Now the best he could do was bite his lip
until j tasted blood, and will himself not to let a sound escape him.

The horsemen were so close now that he did not dare move his head| look
at them. But he could just see them from the corner of his eye.

The Duke gave an order, in Romanian: "Stail N-auzi ceva?"

The men brought their horses to a halt, the Duke no more than: yards
from where Todd and Katya lay on the ground. Had it not been I the fact
that the eclipse rendered the light here so deceptive, the would surely
have been seen, and dispatched: a single blade skewe them both in an
instant. But as far as Todd's limited vision could tell, t men were
looking further afield for their quarry, scanning the landscape rather
than the ground yards from their horses' hooves.

There was another exclamation from the Duke, and this response from one
of his men. Todd had the impression that they were 1 tening for
something. He listened along with them. What could he 1 Nothing out of
the ordinary. The cry of birds, wheeling overhead; coarse breathing and
snorting of the horses; the slap of the reins their massive necks. And
closer by the breathing of the woman bene him; and--a smaller sound
still--the rhythmical click of a beetle made its clockwork way over the
small stones close to his hand, to?

mind's eye all of this around the tender place where their bodies meta|
bird and the horse and the stones and the beetle, orbiting his pleast

He saw her smile beneath him, and with the tiniest contraction of her
vulva she brought him to the point of no return. There was a flash of
brightness in his head, which momentarily washed everything out. She
came back out of the fog to meet him with her eyes half-closed, her
pupils so full beneath them that they seemed to edge out the whites.
Then her lids fluttered closed completely and he started to spurt into
her. He could not have stopped crying out if his life had depended on
it. No; it did. And still he let out a sob of relief--

There was a shout. The Duke was issuing an order. It made no sense to
Todd, but he looked up anyway, as his body continued its spastic motion,
emptying itself into her. The man who'd dismounted was now striding
toward them, unleashing his sword.

The Duke spoke again:

"Cine sunt acejti oameni?"

He obviously wanted to know who the hell these people were, because by
way of reply there were shrugs from the other men. The last spasm passed
through Todd's body, and with it went the idiot sense of his own
inviolability. The bliss was gone. He was empty, and mortal again.

The man with the sword put his boot into Todd's side. It was a hard
kick, and threw him off Katya. He rolled over in the dirt, which got a
laugh from the youngest of the men, seeing the lovers wetly parted thus.

The Duke was issuing further orders, and in response another of the
riders dismounted, his sword drawn. Todd spat out a mouthful of earth,
and made an attempt to push his rapidly wilting erection back into his
pants before it became a target. Katya was still lying on the ground
(though she too had managed to cover her nakedness); the first of the
men who'd dismounted was standing over her, his sword dropped so that
its point hung no more than two or three inches above her pale, slender
neck.

The first word out of Todd's mouth was: "Please ..."

The nobleman was looking at him with a strange expression on his race:
part amusement, part suspicion.

I don't know if you can understand me," Todd said to him. "But we
meantnoharm."

 He glanced down at Katya, who was staring up at the blade.

"'He doesn't know what you're saying," she said. "Let me try."

spoke now in the language of the lord. "Doamne, eu  i 1)rietenul rneu
vizitatori prin locurile astea. N-am sttut c este proprietatea domniei
tale."

Todd looked and listened, wondering what the hell she her explanation,
whatever it was, didn't seem to be making any change in their
circumstances. The sword was still at her throat, while second horseman
was now within two or three yards of Todd, own blade around in a highly
menacing fashion.

Todd glanced up at the Duke again. The trace of amusement thought he'd
seen there had gone. There was only suspicion crossed Todd's mind that
perhaps it had been an error for Katya to in the man's tongue; that
perhaps she'd only deepened his belief these/overs were more than
over-heated trespassers.

He felt a prick in the middle of his chest. The cold point of the was
pressed into his skin. A small pool of blood was already the spot,
spreading through the weave of his shirt.

Katya had stopped talking for a moment Todd thought realized she was
doing more harm than good--but now she began making whatever pleas she
could.

The man on the braided horse raised his hand.

"Liniste,'" he said.

He'd obviously told her to shut the hell up, because that was what she
did.

There was a sound on the wind; and it instantly had all of the man's
attention. Somewhere not so far away a baby was crying: ful wail of a
sound that--though it was surel3 the noise the coyotes would make some
nights in the Canyon.

After a few moments of listening, the Duke let out a stream of

"Lasafi-i! Pe cai! Jla-i copilul!"

The two men who'd been threatening Katya and Todd swords and returned to
their mounts. The baby's cry seemed to moment, and Todd feared it would
fade completely and the

would return to their threats, but then the infant seemed to find a new
seam of grief to mine, and the wail rose up again, more plaintive than
ever.

The men were exchanging more urgent words; and pointing in the direction
from which the sound was coming.

"Este acolo! Grdbii-vd!"

"In padurer. Copilul este n padure!"

Katya and Todd were summarily forgotten. The horsemen were by now all
re-mounted, and the Duke was already galloping away, leaving his weary
company to follow in his dust.

Todd felt a curious sense of betrayal; the kind felt when a story takes
an unanticipated turn. That he should have come into this half-eclipsed
world and been made to bleed at the point of a sword seemed absolutely
apt. That the man who'd threatened him had ridden away to pursue a
crying baby did not.

"'What the hell is going on?" he said as he bent to help Katya up off
the ground.

"They heard Qwafrzefoni, the Devil's child," she said.

"Who?"

She looked back in the direction of the riders. They were already
halfway to the line of densely packed trees from which the pitiful
summons had seemed to come, receding into the quarter-light as though
being steadily erased.

"'It's a long story," she said. "I heard it first when I was a child..,
and it used to frighten me ..." "Yes?" he said. "'Oh yes."

"Well," Todd said, a little impatiently, "'are you going to tell me?"

"'I don't know if it'll frighten you."

He wiped the blood from the middle of his chest with the heel of his
batad. There was a deep nick in his chest, which instantly welled with
blood again.

"Tell me anyway," he said.

 Though it had been Zeffer who'd offered the explanation of what down
in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation wil question
that had been niggling at her since she'd first come into!

place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she'd been eatingk
cherry pie, sat down and said: "What are you afraid of?" "I told you
twice, three times: I shouldn't be in here. She'll be; "That doesn't
answer the question. Katya's just a woman, for G<j sake. Let her be
angry!"

"You don't know what she can be like."

"Why don't you try telling me? Then maybe I'll understand."

"Tell you," he said flatly, as though the request were impossible. "I
can I tell you what this place has seen? What I was? What she was?"

"Try." "I don't know how," he said, his voice getting weaker, syllable
on 2 ble, until she seemed sure it would crack and break. He sat down ;
table opposite her, but he said nothing.

"All right," Tammy said. "Let me give you a hand." She thought 1 moment.
Then she said: "Start with the house. Tell me why it was 1 Why you're in
it. Why she's in it."

"Back then we did everything together."

"Who is she?"

"Til tell you who she was: she was Katya Lupi, a great star. One <
greatest, some would once have said. And in its day this house was < the
most famous houses in Los Angeles. One of the great dream pala

"And the rest of the Canyon is hers too?"

"Oh yes, it's all hers. Coldheart Canyon. That's what they called it.
She had a reputation, you see, for being a chilly bitch." He smiled,
though there was more rue in the expression than humor. "It was
deserved."

"And the things out there?"

"Which things?" "Which things?" Tammy said, a little impatiently. "The
freaks. The things that attacked me."

"Those? Those are the children of the dead."

"You say these things so casually. The children of the dead. Believe it
or not, the dead don't have kids in Sacramento. They just rot away
quietly."

"Well it's different here."

"Willem, I don't care how different it is: the dead can't have
children."

"You saw them. Believe your eyes."

Tammy shook her head. Not in disbelief, rather in frustration. How could
it be that the rules of the world worked one way in one place, and so
very differently in another?

"The truth is: I don't know," Zeffer said, answering her unspoken
question.

"Over the years the ghosts have mated with the animals, and the results
are those things. Maybe the dead are closer to the condition of animals.
I don't know. I only know it's real. I've seen them. You've seen them.

They're hybrids. Sometimes there's a kind of beauty in them. But mostly
... ugly as sin."

"All right. So I buy the hybrids. But why here? Is it her?"

"In a roundabout way, I suppose ..." He mused for a moment, and
then--apparently with great effort, as though since they'd come into the
house a lifetime of suffering had caught up with him--he got to his
feet.

He went to the sink, and turned on the faucet, running the water hard.

Then, cupping his hand, he took some up to his lips and drank noisily,
This done, he turned off the faucet and looked over his shoulder at her.

I know in my heart you deserve to know everything, after all you've been
through. You've earned the truth." He turned fully to her. "But before I
tell you, let me say I'm not sure I understand any of this much 'more
than you do."

"Well I understand nothing," Tammy said.

He nodded. "Well, then. How do I start this? Ah. Yes. Romania."

put his hand up to his face, and wiped some water off his lower lip. "I
was born Katya Lupescu in Romania. In a tiny village called Ravbac..

in the summer of 1921, just after we'd built this house, I went backi
her to her homeland, because her mother was sick and was not expec to
live more than another year.

"She'd been brought up in utter poverty. Abuse and poverty. But I she
was a great star, coming home, and it was extraordinary, really, to;j
how she had transformed herself. From these beginnings to the wor she'd
become.

"Anyway, there was a fortress close to the village where Katya born, and
it was run by the Order of Saint Teodor, who made it thl business to
protect the place. When we arrived, Katya and myself; both been given a
tour, but she wasn't very interested in the old for and the priests with
halitosis. Neither was I, frankly, but I wanted to le her with her
family to talk over old times, so I went back to the Fortress a second
day. The monk who took me round made it clear l the Order had fallen on
hard times, and the brothers needed to sellj what they could.
Tapestries, chairs, tables: it was all up for sale.

"Frankly, I didn't care for much of it, and I was about to leave.

"Then he said: let me show you something special, really special.
thought: what the hell? Ten more minutes. And he took me down se flights
of stairs into a room the likes of which I'd never seen before."; j

"What was in there?"

"It was decorated with tiles--thousands of tiles--and they well painted,
so when you walked into the room it was almost as though.-? it was as
though you were walking into another world." He paused, j templating the
memory of this; awed by it still, after all these years.

"What kind of a world?" Tammy asked him.

"A world that was both very real and completely invented. It had!

for sky and sea and birds and rabbits. But it also had a little pinch of
]

in the mix, just to make things more interesting for the men who lived
in that world."

"What men?"

"Well, one man in particular. His name was Duke Goga. And he was there
in the walls, on a hunt that would last until the end of time."

"The man on the horse," Katya said, "was the Duke." "I got that," Todd
said.

"He lived a long time ago. I'm not sure exactly when. When you're a
little child you don't listen to those kinds of details. It's the story
you remember. And the story was this:

"One day in autumn the Duke went out hunting, which he did all the
time--it was his favorite thing to do--and he saw what he thought was a
goat, trapped in a briar-thicket. So he got off his horse, telling his
men that he wanted to kill this animal himself. He hated goats, having
been attacked by one and badly hurt as a baby. He still had scars on his
face from that attack, and they ached in the cold weather, all of which
served to keep his hatred of goats alive. Perhaps it was a petty thing,
this hatred; but sometimes little things can be the unmaking of us.
There's no doubt that Goga would not have pursued his goat as far as he
did had he not been injured as a child. And then--to make matters
worse--as he approached the animal, history virtually repeated itself.
The animal reared up, striking the Duke with its black hoof and cracking
his nose.

The goat then ran off.

"Goga was furious, beside himself with fury! To have been mistreated by
a goat twice! He got straight back on his horse, blood pouring from his
broken nose, and went after the animal, riding hard through the forest
to catch up with it. His entourage went with him, because they were
bound to follow the Duke wherever he went. But they were beginning to
suspect that there was something strange about where they were headed
and that rt would be better for them all if they just turned round and
rode back to the Fortress."

"But Goga wouldn't do that?"

"Of course not. He was determined to chase down the animal that 1 struck
him. He wanted revenge on the thing. He wanted to stick his swob through
it, and cut out its heart and eat it raw. That was the kind of rag he
was in.

"So he kept riding. And his men, out of loyalty, kept following, furt
and further from the Fortress and the paths they knew, into the depths I
the forest. Steadily even the Duke began to realize that what his men ^
whispering was right: there were creatures here, lurking about, the of
which God had not made. He could see things between the trees didn't
belong in any of the bestiaries he had in the Fortress. Stra ungodly
creatures."

As Katya told her story, Todd glanced at the dark mass of trees which
Goga and his men had just ridden. Was that the Deep Wood : had just
described? Surely it was. The same horsemen. The same trees. ] other
words, he was standing in the middle of Katya's story.

"So ... the Duke kept riding, and riding, driving his poor horse as'.
followed the leaping goat deeper and deeper into the forest, until the
were in a place where they were certain no human being had ever ven|
tured before. By now, all the men, even the most loyal, the bravest
them, were begging the Duke to let them turn back. The air was bit and
sulfurous, and in the ground beneath the horses' hooves the me could
hear the sound of people sobbing, as though living souls had bee buried
alive in the black, smoking dirt.

"But the Duke would not be moved from his ambition. 'What kind < hunters
do you call yourselves,' he said to his men, 'if you won't go after a go
Where's your faith in God? There's no danger to us here, if our hearts
arepure$

"So on they went, the men quietly offering up prayers for the safety <
their souls as they rode.

"And eventually, after a long chase, their quarry came in sight aga The
goat was standing in a grove of trees so old they had been plante before
the Flood, in the tangled roots of which grew mushrooms that

the smell of dead flesh. The Duke got off his horse, drew his sword and
approached the goat.

" 'Whatever thingyou are,' he said to the animal, 'breatheyour last.'"

"Nice line," Todd remarked.

"The animal reared up, as though it was going to strike the Duke with
its hoof a third time, but Goga didn't give it the opportunity. He
quickly drove his sword up into the belly of the animal.

"As soon as it felt the sword entering its flesh the goat opened its
mouth and let out a pitiful wail ..." Katya paused here, watching Todd,
waiting for him to put the pieces together.

"Oh Christ," he said. "Like a baby?"

"Exactly like a baby. And hearing this pitiful human sound escaping the
animal, Goga pulled his sword from the goat's body, because he knew
something unholy was in the air. Have you ever seen an animal
slaughtered?"

"No."

"Well there's a lot of blood. A lot more than you think there's going to
be."

"It was like that now?"

"Yes. The goat was thrashing around in a pool of red, its back legs
kicking up the wet dirt, so that it spattered Goga and his men. And as
it did so, it started to change."

"Into what?" Katya smiled the smile of a storyteller who had her
audience hooked by some unexpected change of direction.

"Into a little child," she said. "A boy, a naked little boy, with a nub
of a tail and yellow eyes and goat's ears. So now the Duke is looking
down at this goat-boy, twitching in the mud made of dirt and blood, and
the superstitious terror which his men had felt finally seizes hold of
him too. He starts to speak a prayer.

"Tdtal Nostru care the e ti in Ceruri, sfinfeasca-se numele Tdu. He
Impdrdtia Ta, facd-se voia Ta, precum in cer a a si pe pdmdnt."

Todd listened to the unfamiliar words, knowing in the cadence what
Katya was reciting was not just any prayer; it was the Lord's 1

"Pdinea noastrd cea de toate zilele dua. the.-o noua azi si the iartd noud
gre.

noa tre."

He scanned the landscape as he heard the prayer repeated; not changed
since he'd first set eyes on the place. The light of the eclipse j
everything in suspension: the trees, the ships, the lynchers at their t

The rush of pleasure he'd experienced when he first arrived had < ished
somewhere in the midst of Katya's tale-telling. In its place thereof now
a profound unease. He wanted to stop her telling her story, but I reason
could he give that didn't sound cowardly?

So she continued.

"The Duke retreated, leaving his sword stuck deep in the body of
goat-boy. He intended to climb back onto his horse and ride away, bu
steed had already bolted in terror. He called to one of his men to|
mount, so that he might have the man's horse, but before the fellow <
obey the rock beneath their feet began to shake violently, and a chasm
opened up in the ground in front of them.

"The men knew what they were witnessing. This was the very m 3 of Hell,
gaping in the earth beneath their feet. It was thirty forty!

wide, and the roots of those ancient trees lined it like the veins J
skinned body. Smoke rose up out of the maw, stinking of every foul <
imaginable, and a good deal that was not. It was such a bitter stenc the
Duke and his men began to weep like children.

"Half-blinded by his own tears, and without a horse, Goga choice but to
stay where he was, on the lip of the Hell's Mouth, clc where his victim
lay. He tore his gloves from his hands and did his 1 clear the tears
from his eyes.

"As he did so he saw somebody coming up out of the earth. It' woman, he
saw; with hair so long it trailed the ground fully six feet!

her. She was naked, except for a necklace of white fleas with eyesl
burned like fires in their tiny heads. Thousands of them, moving bac

 forth around the woman's neck and up over her face, busy about the
business of prettifying her.

"She was not looking at the Duke. Her black-red eyes, which had neither
lashes nor brows, were on the goat-boy. In the time it had taken for the
mouth of Hell to open, the last of the boy's life had poured out of him.
Now the child's corpse lay still in the wet dirt.

" 'You killed my child,' the woman said as she emerged from the infernal
mouth. 'My beautiful Qwaftzefoni. Look at him. Barely a boy. He was
perfect. He was my joy. How could you do such a heartless thing?"

"At that moment one of the horsemen behind the Duke attempted to make an
escape, spurring his horse. But the goat-boy's mother raised her hand
and at her instruction a gust of wind came up out of the depths of Hell,
so strong that it drew her hair around her and forward, like a thousand
filament fingers pointing toward the escaping man. He didn't get very
far. The wind she'd summoned was filled with barbs; like the vicious
seedlings of ten thousand flowers. They spiraled as they flew, and they
caught the Duke's man in a whirling of tiny hooks. Blinded by the
assault, the man toppled from his horse, and attempted to outrun the
barbs. But they were fastened onto him, and their motion continued,
circling his body, so that the man's flesh was unraveled like a ball of
red twine. He screamed as the first circling took off his skin, and
redoubled his shrieks when a second cloud of barbs caught his naked
muscle, and repeated the terrible cycle. Having drawn off a length of
the man's tissue, they described a descending spiral around him, leaving
the victim clear for a third and fourth assault. His bone was showing
now; his screams had ceased. He dropped to his knees and fell forward in
his own shred dings, dead.

Overhead, carrion birds circled, ready to gorge themselves as soon as
"ie body was abandoned.

This man is the lucky one among you,' the woman said to the Duke.

He has escaped lightly. The rest of you will suffer long and hard for
what you have done today."

"She looked down at the goat-boy's corpse, her hair crawling around her
heels to fondly touch the body of the child.

"The Duke fell to his knees, knotting his hands together to make his
plea. 'Lady/ he said to her, in his native tongue. This was an accident.
I believed the boy to be an animal. He was running from me in the form
of a goat."

"That is his father's chosen form, on certain nights,' the woman
replied. Goga knew, of course, what was signified by this. Only the
Devil himself took the form of a goat. The woman was telling him that
she was Lilith, the Devil's wife, and that the child he had killed was
the Devil's own offspring. To say this was not good news was an
understatement.

The Duke concealed his terror as best he could, but it was terror he
felt.

To be standing on the lip of Hell, accused of the crime before him, was
a terrifying prospect. His soul would be forfeit, he feared. All he
could do was repeat what he'd said: 'I took the boy to be a goat. This
was a grievous error on my part, and I regret it with all my heart--"

"The woman raised her hand to silence him.

" 'My husband has seventy-seven children by me. Qwaftzefoni was his
favorite. What am I supposed to tell him when he calls for his beloved
boy, and the child does not come as he used to?"

"The Duke had barely any spittle in his throat. But he used what little
j he had to reply. 'I don't know what you will say."

" 'You know who my husband is, don't you? And don't insult me by pre-1
tending innocence."

" 'I think he is the Devil, ma'am,' the Duke Goga replied.

" That he is,' the woman said. And I am Lilith, his first wife. So now^
what do you think your life is worth?"

"Goga mused on this for a moment. Then he said: 'Christ save my souli I
fear my life is worth nothing.'" "So," said Zeffer, "Goga's Hunt was
painted on every wall of this roor Not just the walls. The ceiling, too.
And the floor. Every inch of the plac

was covered with the genius of painter and tile-maker. It was
astonishing.

And I thought--"

"You'd give this astonishing thing to the woman you idolized."

"Yes. That's exactly what I thought. After all, it was utterly unique.

Something strange and wonderful. But that "wasn't the only reason I
wanted to buy it, now I look back. The place had a power over me. I felt
stronger when I was in that room. I felt more alive. It was a trick, of
course. The room wanted me to liberate it--"

"How can a room want anything?" Tammy said. "It's just four walls."

"Believe me, this was no ordinary room," Zeffer said. He lowered his
voice, as though the house itself might be listening to him. "It was
commissioned, I believe, by a woman known as the Lady Lilith. The
Devil's wife."

This was a different order of information entirely, and it left Tammy
speechless. In her experience so far, she'd found the Canyon a
repository of grotesqueries, no doubt; but they'd all been derived from
the human, however muddied the route. But the Devil? That was another
story; deeper than anything she'd encountered so far. And yet perhaps
his presence, or the echo of his presence, was not so inappropriate.
Wasn't he sometimes called the Father of Lies? If he and his works
belonged anywhere, Hollywood was probably as good a place as any.

"Did you have any idea what you were buying?" she said to Zeffer.

"I had a very vague notion, but I didn't really believe it. Father
Sandru had talked about a woman who'd occupied the Fortress for several
years while the room was made."

"And you think this woman was Lilith?"

"I believe it was," Zeffer said. "She made a place to trap the Duke in,
you see."

"No, I don't see."

"The Duke had killed her beloved child. She wanted revenge, and she
"wanted it to be a long, agonizing revenge.

"But it had been an accident--an honest error on the Duke's part--and

she knew the law would not allow her to take the soul of a man who
killed her child."

"Why would she care about the law?"

"It wasn't our human law she cared about. It was God's law, which
governs Earth, Heaven and Hell. She knew that if she was going to make
the Duke and his men suffer as she wished to make them suffer, she would
have to find some secret place, where God would not think to look. A
world within a world, where the Duke would have to hunt forever, and
never be allowed to rest ..."

Now Tammy began to understand.

"The room," she murmured.

"Was her solution. And if you think about it, it's a piece of genius.
She moved into the Fortress, claiming that she was a distant cousin of
the missing Duke--"

"And where was he?"

"Anybody's guess. Maybe she held him in his own dungeons, until the
hunting grounds were ready for him.

"Then she brought tile-makers from all over Europe--Dutch, Portuguese,
Belgians, even a few Englishmen--and painters, again from every place of
excellence--and they worked for six months, night and day, to create
what awaits you downstairs. It would look like the Duke's hunting
grounds--at least superficially. There would be forests and rivers and,
somewhere at the horizon, there'd be the sea. But she would play God in
, this world. She'd put creatures into it that she had conjured up from
her own personal menagerie: monsters that the painters in her employ
would render with meticulous care. And then she'd take the souls of the
Duke and his men--still living, so that she remained within the law--and
she'd put them into the work, so that it would be a prison for them.
There they would ride under a permanent eclipse, in a constant state of
terror, barely daring; to sleep for fear one of her terrible beasts
would take them. Of course that's ;i not all that's on the walls down
there. Her influence invaded the minds of J the men who worked for her,
and every filthy, forbidden thing they'd ever | dreamed of setting down
they were given the freedom to create.

 "Nothing was taboo. They took their own little revenges as they
painted: particularly on women. Some of the things they painted still
shock me after all these years."

"Are you certain all of this is true?"

"No. It's mostly theory. I pieced it together from what I researched.

Certainly Duke Goga and several of his men went missing during an
eclipse on April 19th, 1681. The body of one of them was found stripped
of its skin. That's also documented. The rest of the party were never
found. The Duke had lost his wife and children to the plague, so there
was no natural successor. He had three brothers, however, and--again,
this is a matter of documented history--they gathered the following
September, almost six months to the day after the Duke's disappearance,
to divide their elder brother's spoils. It was a mistake to do so. That
was the night the Lady Lilith took occupancy of the Goga Fortress."

"She killed them?"

"No. They all left of their own free will, saying they wanted no part of
owning the Fortress or the land, but were giving it over to this
mysterious cousin, in their brother's name. They signed a document to
that effect, and left. All three were dead within a year, by their own
hands."

"And nobody was suspicious?"

"I'm sure a lot of people were suspicious. But Lilith--or whoever she
was--now occupied the Fortress. She had money, and apparently she was
quite liberal with it. Local merchants got rich, local dignitaries were
rather charmed by her, if the reports are to be believed--"

"Where did you find all these reports?"

"I bought most of the paperwork relating to the Fortress from the
Fathers. They didn't want it. I doubt they even knew what most of it
was.

And to tell the truth a lot of it was rather dull. The price of pigs'
carcasses; the cost of having a roof made rain-proof ... the usual
domestic business."

"So Lilith was quite the little homemaker?"

"I think she was. Indeed I believe she intended to have the Fortress as
a place she could call her own. Somewhere her husband wouldn't come;
couldn't come, perhaps. I found a draft of a letter which I believe she
wrote, to him--"

"To the Devil?" Tammy replied, scarcely believing she was giving the
idea the least credence.

"To her husband," Zeffer replied obliquely, "whoever he was/' Hel tapped
his pocket. "I have it, here. You want to hear it?"

"Is it in English?"

"No. In Latin." He reached into his jacket and took out a piece of
much-folded paper. It was mottled with age. "Take a look for yourself,"
hel said.

"I don't read Latin."

"Look anyway. Just to say you once held a letter written by the Devil's!

wife. Go on, take it. It won't bite."

Tammy reached out and took the paper from Zeffer's hand. None of | this
"was proof, of course. But it was more than a simple fabrication, that \
much was clear. And hadn't she seen enough in her time in the Canyon
toij be certain that whatever was at work here was nothing she could
explain1| by the rules she'd been taught in school?

She opened the letter. The hand it had been written in was exquisite;'
the ink, though it had faded somewhat, still kept an uncanny luster, as
: though there were motes of mother-of-pearl in it. She scanned it, all
thej way down to the immaculate and elaborate Lilith that decorated the
hot-| torn portion of the page.

"So," she said, handing it back, her fingers trembling slightly. "What!

does it say?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

Zeffer began translating it without looking at the words. Plainly he
had!

the contents by heart.

"Husband, she writes, I am finding myself at ease in the Fortress Goga,
and\ I believe will remain here until our son is found--"

"So she didn't tell him?"

"Apparently not." Zeffer scanned the page briefly, "She talks a little j

 about the work she's doing on the Fortress ... it's all very matter-of
fact ... then she says: Do not come, husband, for you will find no
welcome in my bed. If there is some peace to be made between us I cannot
imagine it being soon, given your violations of your oath. I do not
believe you have loved me in many years, and would prefer you did not
insult me by pretending otherwise."

"Huh."

Whatever the source of the letter, its sentiments were easily
understood.

Tammy herself might have penned such a letter--in a simpler style,
perhaps; and a little more viciously--on more than one occasion.

God knows, Arnie had violated his own vows to her several times,
shamelessly.

Zeffer folded the letter up. "So, you can make what you want of all
this.

Personally I think it's the real thing. I believe this woman was Lilith,
and that she stayed in the Fortress to work on her revenge, where
neither God nor her husband would come and bother her. Certainly
somebody created that room, and it was somebody who had powers that go
far beyond anything we understand."

"What happened when she was finished?" Tammy asked.

"She packed up and disappeared. Got bored perhaps. Went back to her
husband. Or found a lover of her own. The point is, she left the
Fortress with the room still intact. And with Goga and his men still in
it."

"And that's what you bought?"

"That's what I bought. Of course it took a little time to realize it,
but I purchased a little piece of Hell's own handiwork. And let me tell
you--to make light of all this for a moment--it was Hell to move. There
were thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles. They all
had to be removed, cleaned, numbered, packed away, shipped and then put
up again in exactly the same order that they'd been assembled in. I
timed it so that the work could be done while Katya was off on a world
tour, publicizing one of her pictures."

"It must have driven you half crazy ..."

"I kept thinking about how much pleasure Katya would derive from the
room when it was finished. I was oblivious to the human cost. I just

wanted Katya to be astonished; and then, to look at me--who'd given her
1 this gift--with new eyes. I wanted her to be so grateful, so happy,
she'd fling herself into my arms and say I'll marry you. That's what I
wanted."

"But that's not the way it turned out?"

"No, of course not."

"What happened? Did she dislike the room?"

"No, she understood the room from the beginning, and the room understood
her. She started to take people down there, to show the place | off. Her
special friends. The ones who were obsessed with her. And there || were
plenty of those. Men and women both. They'd disappear down I there for a
few hours--"

"These were people she was having sex with?"

"Yes." "You said both men and women?"

"Preferably together. That's what she liked best. A little of both."

"And did everybody know?"

"About her tastes? Of course. Nobody cared. It was rather chic at the
Jjj time. For women anyway. The nancy-boys like Navarro and
Valentino,.-.

they had to cover it up. But Katya didn't care what people thought./!

Especially once she had the room."

"It changed her?"

"It changed everyone "who went into it, myself included. It changed .I
our flesh. It changed our spirits."

"How?"

"All you have to do is look at me to see how I changed. I was born in
1893. But I don't look it. That's because of the room. It has energies,
you ,1

if see, painted into the tiles. I believe it's Lilith's magic in the
tiles. She used!

her infernal skills to lock the Duke and his men and all those animals
into j the illusion: that's strong magic. The monks knew that. But they
had the 1 good sense to keep their distance from the place."

"So did everyone who went down there stay young?"

"Oh no. By no means. It affected everyone a little differently Some peo-
1

 pie simply couldn't take it. They went in for a minute, and they were
out again in a heartbeat."

"Why?"

"It's the Devil's Country, Tammy. Believe me, it is."

Tammy shook her head, not knowing what to believe. "So some people left,
because they thought the Devil was in there?"

"That's right. But most people felt some extra burst of energy when they
went in the room. Maybe they felt a little younger, a little stronger, a
little more beautiful."

"And what was the price of it all?" "Good question," he said. "The fact
is, everyone's paid a different price.

Some people went crazy because of what they saw in there. A few
committed suicide. Most ... went on living, feeling a little better
about themselves.

For a while at least. Then the effect would wear off, and they'd need to
come back for another fix ... "I knew a number of opium addicts in my
life. One of them was a Russian designer, Anatole Vasilinsky. Ever heard
of him?" Tammy shook her head. "No real reason why you should. He worked
for the Ballets Russes, under Diaghilev. A brilliant man. But completely
enslaved to 'The Poppy' as he used to call it. He came to the house only
once, and of course Katya showed him the room. I remember the expression
on his face when he came out. He looked like a man who'd just seen his
own death. He was stricken; clammy-white, shaking. 'I must never come
here again,' he said.

"I don't have enough room in my life for two addictions. It would be the
death of me."

"That's what the room was, of course: an addiction. It addicted the
flesh, by making you feel stronger, sleeker. It addicted the spirit, by
giving you visions so vivid they were more real than real. And it
addicted the soul, because you didn't want any other kind of comfort,
once you'd been in the room. Prayer was no use to you, laughter was no
use to you, friends, ideals, ambitions ... they all seemed
inconsequential in that perpetual twilight.

When you were here, you thought all the time about being there."

Again Tammy shook her head. There was so much here to try to make sense
of. Her mind was reeling.

"Do you see now why you must leave, and forget about Todd? He's seen the
room. That's where she took him."

"Are you sure?"

"He's down there right now," Zeffer said. "I guarantee it. Where else
would she take him?"

Tammy got up from the table. The food had done her good. Though she
still felt a little light-headed, she was considerably stronger.

"There's nothing heroic about sacrificing yourself for him," Zeffer
pointed out. "He wouldn't do it for you."

"I know that."

Zeffer followed her to the kitchen door. "So don't. Leave, while you
can. Tammy, I beg you. Leave. I'll lead you out of the Canyon and you
can go home."

"Home," Tammy said. The word, the idea, seemed hollow, valueless.

There was no home for her after this. Or if there was, it wasn't the one
: she'd had. Arnie, the little house in Sacramento. How could she even
think of going back to that?

"I have to find Todd," she said. "That's what I came here to do."

Without waiting for Zeffer to lead her or escort her, she left the
kitchen and went to the top of the stairs. He called after her. Another
attempt at; persuasion, no doubt; or some more fancy storytelling. But
she ignored him this time, and started down the stairs. '

 Katya had a little more of her story still to tell.

" 'My life is worth nothing,' the Duke had told the Devil's wife. He who
had led armies and triumphed in his crusades against the infidel now
found his life was at an end. And why? Because he had chased and killed
what he took to be a goat?

" 'It was an accident!' he said, his fury at the injustice of this
suddenly getting the better of him. 'I demand to be seen by some higher
judge than you."

" 'There is only one higher,' Lilith replied. 'And that's my husband."

"The Duke met her cold gaze, the profundity of his terror paradoxically
making him brave.

" 'There is a God in Heaven,' he said.

" 'Is there now?' said Lilith. Are you certain? I saw Him only once, the
day He made me. Since then He has never shown His face. This is the
Devil's Country, Goga. My Lord Lucifer rules here. Or in his absence,
me. I doubt your God will stretch out His hand to save your soul."

" 'Then I shall ride out of here,' the Duke replied.

" 'You saw what happened to your comrade. I'll do the same to you,
before you reach your horse. I'll have you wailing like a baby at my
feet."

"Goga wasn't a stupid man. He knew there was no use in contradicting the
woman. He'd already seen one of his men horribly slaughtered by her.

He would surely follow if he attempted to escape. All he could do was
throw himself upon Lilith's mercy.

"He went down on his knees, and composing himself as best he could, he
addressed her:

 "' 'Please, gentle lady, listen to me."

""

"I'm listening."

""

"I have lost children of my own, all six of them dead by the plague.

And my wife the same way. I know the pain you are suffering, and I'm
sick that I was its cause. But what's done is done. I made a mistake
that I bitterly regret. But how can I take it back? Had I known I was on
your husband's land I would not even have hunted here."

"Lilith looked at him for a long while, assessing the worth of his
appeal.

""

"Well, hereafter, my lord,' she said finally, "it is my pleasure that
and your men will hunt here always."

"Another bitter breath up out of Hell to accompany these words. The
woman's long hair rose up around her body, a few of its strands grazing
Goga's upturned face.

"' 'Get back on your horses, hunters," Lilith said. 'Return to your
hunt.

There are boar in the thicket, waiting to be driven out. There are birds
in the trees, ready to be shot while they sing. Kill them at will, as it
pleases you to do so. There will be no charge for your sport."

"The Duke was astonished to hear this mild invitation, after all that
had just taken place, and thinking perhaps his plea for clemency had
carried some weight with Lilith, he very slowly got to his feet,
thanking her.

"" "It's most kind of you,' he said, 'to invite me to hunt. And perhaps
another day I will come back here and accept your invitation. But today
my heart is heavy--"

" As well it might be," the woman replied.

"'So I think instead I will return to the Fortress and--"

" "No," she said, raising her hand. "You will not return to the
Fortress. You will hunt."

""

"I could not, madam. Really, I could not."

"" 'Sir," she replied, with a little inclination of her head. "You
misunderstood me. You have no choice. You will hunt, and you will go on
hunting, until you find my son a second time, and bring him back to me."

"" 'I don't understand."

 "" 'A second time."

"She pointed to the corpse of the goat-child, which lay in its cooling
blood. Her hair drifted over the sprawled cadaver, lightly touching the
boy's chest and stomach and private parts. Much to the Duke's
astonishment the child responded to his mother's caresses. As the hair
touched his chest his lungs drew a little breath, and his penis--which
was disproportionately large for one his age--grew steely.

""

"Take your sword out of him,' Lilith instructed the Duke.

"'But the Duke was too terrified at this scene of infernal resurrection
to go near the boy. He kept his distance, filling his breeches in fear.

" 'You men are all the same!' Lilith said contemptuously. 'You find it
easy enough to drive the sword in, but when it comes to taking it out
you can't bring yourself to do it."

"'She stepped into the puddle of her son's blood, and reached to take
hold of the sword. The boy's eyes flickered open as he felt his mother's
hand upon the pommel. Then he lifted his hands and caught hold of the
blade with his bare palms, almost as though he were attempting to keep
her from extracting it. Still she pulled, and it slowly came out of him.

"'Slowly, Mama," the goat-boy said, his tone almost lascivious. 'It
hurts mightily."

"'Does it, child?" Lilith said, twisting the blade in the wound as
though to perversely increase her child's distress. He threw back his
head, still looking at her from the bottom of his eyes, his lips drawn
back from his little, pointed teeth. And this?' she said, turning the
blade the other way.

"Does this bring you agony?"

"' "Yes, Mama!"

"She twisted it the other way. And this?"

"'Finally, it was too much for the child. He let out a hissing sound,
and

spat from his erection several spouts of semen. Its sharp stink made the

Duke's eyes sting.

"Lilith waited until the boy had finished ejaculating, then she drew out
the sword. The goat-boy sank back on the wet earth, with a look of
satisfaction on his face.

 " Thank you, Mama,' he said, as though well pleasured by what had!

just happened.

"The wound on his belly was already closing up, the Duke saw. It was 1
as though it were being knitted by agile and invisible fingers. So too
the!

wounds on his hands, incurred when he had seized the blade. In a matter!

of perhaps half a minute the goat-boy was whole again." "So if the child
wasn't dead," Todd said, "why was the Duke guilty off murdering him?"

Katya shook her head. "He'd committed the crime. The fact that the boy
was an immortal was academic. He'd murdered the child, and had 1 be
punished for it."

Todd's gaze went again to the trees where the Duke and his men ha
disappeared, picturing the look of hope that had appeared on the men's'

:.-j faces when they'd heard the sound of the child's cries. Now all
that made!

sense. No wonder they'd ridden off so eagerly. They were still hoping to
j find the boy, and earn their release from the Devil's Country.

A wave of claustrophobia came up over Todd. This was not the limiftl
less landscape it had first appeared to be: it "was a prison, and he
wanted to be free of it. He turned, and turned again, looking for some
crack in the| illusion, however small. But he could find none. Despite
the immensity < the vistas in all directions, and the height of heavens
above him, he migh| as well have been locked in a cell.

His breath had quickened; his hands were suddenly clammy. >?" "Which
way's the door?" he asked Katya.

"You want to leave? Now?"

"Yes, now."

"It's just a story," she said.

"No it's not. I saw the Duke. We both saw him." "It's all part of the
show," Katya said, with a dismissive little sh "Calm down. There's no
harm going to come to us. I've been down he hundreds of times and
nothing ever happened to me."

"You saw the Duke here before?"

 "Sometimes. Never as close as we saw today, but there are always
hunters."

"Well ask yourself: why are there always hunters? Why is there always an
eclipse?"

"I don't know. Why do you always do the same thing in a movie every time
it runs--"

"So things are exactly the same, every time you come here, like a
movie?"

"Not exactly the same, no. But the sun's always like that:
three-quarters covered. And the trees, the rocks ... even the ships out
there." She pointed to the ships. "It's always the same ships. They
never seem to get very far."

"So it's not like a movie," Todd said. "It's more like time's been
frozen."

She nodded. "I suppose it is," she said. "Frozen in the walls."

"I don't see any walls." "They're there," Katya said, "it's just a
question of where to look. How to look. Trust me."

"You want me to trust you," Todd said, "then get me out of here."

"I thought you were enjoying yourself."

"The pleasure went out of it a while back," Todd said. He grabbed her
arm, hard. "Come on," he said. "I want to get out."

She shook herself free of him. "Don't touch me that way," she said, her
expression suddenly fierce. "I don't like it." She pointed past him,
over his right shoulder. "The door's over there."

He looked back. He could see no sign of an opening. Just more of the
Devil's Country.

And now, to make matters worse, he once again heard the sound of hooves.

"Oh Christ ..."

He glanced back toward the trees. The Duke and his men were riding
toward them, empty-handed.

"They're coming back to interrogate us," Todd said. "Katya! Did you hear
me? We need to get the hell out of here."

 Katya had seen the horsemen, but she didn't seem overly unnerved.

She watched them approaching without moving. Todd, meanwhile, made his
way in the general direction of the door; or at least where she had
indicated it stood. He scanned the place, looking for some fragment
--the corner of the doorframe, the handle, the keyhole--to help him
locate it. But there was nothing.

Having no other choice he simply walked across the stony ground, his
hands extended in front of him. After proceeding perhaps six strides,
the empty air in front of him suddenly became solid, and his hands
flattened against cold, hard tile. The instant he made contact, the
illusion of the painters' trompe 1'oeil was broken. He could not believe
he had been so easily deceived. What had looked like infinite,
penetrable reality two strides before now looked absurdly fake: stylish
marks on pieces of antiquated tile, plastered on a wall. How could his
eyes have been misled for an instant?

Then he looked back over his shoulder, to call Katya over, and the
illusion in which she stood was still completely intact--the expanse of
open ground between where they stood and the galloping horsemen
apparently a quarter-mile or more, the trees beyond them twice that, the
sky limitless above. Illusion, he told himself, all illusion. But it
meant nothing in the face of the trick before him, which refused to bow
to his doubt. He gave up trying to make it concede, and instead turned
back to the wall.

His hands were still upon it, the tiles still laid out under his palms.
Which direction did the door lie in?

"Right or left?" he called to Katya.

"What?"

"The door! Is it to the right or left?"

She took her eyes off the riders, and scanned the wall he was clinging |
to. "Left," she said, casually.

"Hurry then--"

"They didn't find the child." "Forget about them!" he told her.

 If she was attempting to impress him with her fearlessness she was
doing a poor job. He was simply irritated. She'd shown him the way the
room worked, for God's sake; now it was time to get out.

"Come on!" he cried.

As he called to her he moved along the wall, a step to his left, then
another step, keeping his palms flat to the tiles every inch of the way,
as though defying them to play some new trick or other. But it seemed
that as long as he had his hands on the tiles--as long as he could keep
uppermost in his mind the idea that this was a painted world--it could
not start its trickeries afresh. And on the third step--or was it
fourth?--along the wall his extended hand found the doorjamb. He
breathed out a little sigh of relief. The doorjamb was right there under
his hand. He moved his palm over it onto the door itself which, like the
jamb, was tiled so that there was no break in the illusion. He fumbled
for the handle, found it and tried to turn it.

On the other side, Tammy had found her way along the passageway and
chosen that precise moment to turn the handle in the opposite direction.

"Oh Jesus--" Todd said. "It's locked."

"You hear that?" Tammy gasped. "That's Todd? Todd!"

"Yeah it's me. Who's this?"

"Tammy. It's Tammy Lauper. Are you turning the handle?"

"Yeah."

"Well let go of it. Let me try."

Todd let go. Tammy turned the handle. Before she opened the door she
glanced back at Zeffer. He was still one flight up the stairs, staring
out of the window.

"The dead ..." she heard him say.

"What about them?"

"They're all around the house. I've never seen them this close before.

They know there are people passing back and forth through the door,
that's why."

"Do I open the door? Todd's on the other side."

 "Are you sure it's Todd?"

"Yes, it's Todd."

Hearing his name called, Todd impatiently yelled from the other side.
"Yes, it's me. And Katya. Will you please open the fucking door?"

Tammy's hands were sweaty, and her muscles weary; the handle slid
through her palm. "I can't open it. You try."

Todd struggled with the handle from his side, but what had seemed as;
though it were going to be the easiest part of the procedure (opening
the door) was proving the most intractable. It was almost as though the
room didn't want him to leave; as though it wanted to hold on to him for
as long as possible, to exercise the greatest amount of influence over
him; to addict him, second by second, sight by sight.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Katya was staring up at the sky,
moving her hands down over her body, as though she were luxuriating in
the curious luminosity of this enraptured world. For a moment he
imagined her naked, cradled in the heavenly luminescence, but he caught
himself in the midst of the fantasy. It was surely just another of the
room's tricks to keep him from departing. The damn place probably had a
thousand such sleights-of-mind: sexual, philosophical, murderous.

He closed his eyes hard against the seductions of the Country and put
his head against the door. The tile was clammy; like a living thing.

"Tammy?" he said. 'Are you still here?"

"Yes?" :

"When I count three, I want you to push. Got it?" :

"Got it." ;

"Okay Ready?" ;

"Ready."

"One. Two. Three!"

She pushed. He pulled. And the door fell open, presenting Todd with ,
one of the odder juxtapositions he'd witnessed in his life. In the
hallway on the other side of the door stood a woman who looked as though
she'd gone several rounds with a heavy-weight boxer. There were bloody

scratches on her face, neck and arms; her hair and clothes were in
disarray.

In her eyes she had a distinctly panicked look.

He recognized her instantly. She was the leader of his Fan Club, a woman
called Tammy Lauper. Yes! The missing Tammy Lauper! How the hell had she
got up here? Never mind. She was here, thank God.

"I thought something terrible had happened to you," Lauper said.

"Give it time," he quipped.

Behind him, he heard the horsemen approaching. He glanced around,
calling again to Katya.

"Hurry up, will you?"

When he returned his gaze to Tammy it was clear that she'd taken in, as
best her disbelief would allow, the incredible sight over his shoulder.

Her eyes were wide with astonishment, her jaw slack.

"So this is what it looks like."

"Yes," he said to her. "This is it."

Tammy threw a look back at a stooped, older man standing on the stairs
behind her. He looked almost incapacitated with fear. But unlike Tammy,
whose expression was that of someone who had never seen anything like
this before, it was Todd's sense that her companion knew exactly what he
was seeing, and would have liked nothing better than to turn right there
and flee.

Then Todd heard Katya calling from behind him, naming the man.

"Zeffer," she said, the word freezing the man where he stood.

"Katya ..." he said, inclining his head.

Katya came up behind Todd, pressing him aside in order to cross over the
threshold. She pointed at the trespasser as she did so.

"I told you never to come back into this house!" she yelled at Zeffer.
"Didn't I?"

He flinched at this, though it was difficult to believe she posed much
physical threat to him.

She summoned him down the stairs. "Come here," she said. "You worthless
piece of shit! I said: come here!"

 Before he could obey her, Tammy intervened. "It's not his fault," she
said. "I was the one who asked him to bring me down here."

Katya gave her a look of complete contempt; as though anything she might
have to contribute to the conversation was worthless.

"Whoever the hell you are," she said, "this is none of your business."

She pushed Tammy aside and reached out to catch hold of Zeffer. He had
dutifully approached at her summons, but now avoided her grasp.

She came after him anyway, striking his chest with the back of her hand,
a solid blow; and another; and another. As she struck him she said: "I
told you to stay outside, didn't I?"

The blows were relatively light, but they carried strength out of all
proportion to their size. They knocked the breath out of him, for one
thing, and she'd come back with a second blow before he'd drawn breath
from the first, which quickly weakened him. Tammy was horrified, but she
didn't want to interfere, in case she simply made the matter worse. Nor
was her attention entirely devoted to the sight of Todd, or to the
assault upon Zeffer. Her gaze was increasingly claimed by the sight
visible through the open door. It was astonishing. Despite the fact that
Zeffer had told her the place was an illusion, her eyes and her mind
were wholly enamored by what she saw: the rolling forest, the rocks with
their thickets of thorn bushes, the delta and the distant sea. It all
looked so real.

And what was that?

Some creature that looked like a feathered lizard, its coxcomb yellow I
and black, scuttled into view, and out again.

It halted, seeming to look back through the door at her: a beast that j
belonged in some book of medieval monsters rather than in such prox|
imity to her.

She glanced back at Zeffer, who was still being lectured by Katya.

With the door open, and the visions beyond presented to her, she sawf no
reason not to step over the threshold, just for a moment, and see the|
place more plainly. After all, she was protected against its
beguilements.

She knew it was a beautiful lie, and as long as she remembered that,
thett| it couldn't do her any harm, could it?

 The only thing in the landscape that was real was Todd, and it was to
him that she now went, crossing the dirt and the windblown grass to
reach him. The feathered reptile lowered its coxcomb as she crossed the
ground, and slunk away, disappearing into a crack between two boulders.

But Todd wasn't watching animal-life. He had his eyes on several
horsemen who were approaching along a road that wound through a dense
stand of trees. They were moving at speed, kicking up clods of earth as
they came. Were they real, Tammy wondered, or just part of the
landscape?

She wasn't sure, nor was she particularly eager to put the question to
the test.

Yet with every passing second she was standing in this world, the more
she felt the power of the room to unknit her doubts. She felt its
influence seeping through her sight and her skin into her mind and
marrow. Her head grew giddy, as though she'd downed two or three glasses
of wine in quick succession.

It wasn't an unpleasant sensation by any means, especially given the
extreme discomfort of the last few hours. She felt almost comforted by
the room; as though it understood how she'd suffered of late, and was
ready to soothe her hurts and humiliations away. It would distract her
with its beauty and its strangeness; if she would only trust it for a
while.

"Tammy ..." she heard Zeffer say behind her. His voice was weak, and the
effect his summons had on her was inconsequential. She didn't even
acknowledge it. She just let her eyes graze contentedly on the scene
before her; the trees, the horsemen, the road, the rocks.

Soon, she knew, the riders would make a turn in that road, and it would
be interesting to see how their image changed when they were no longer
moving in profile, but were coming toward her.

She glanced back over her shoulder. It wasn't far to the door: just a
few yards. Her eyes didn't even focus on whatever was going on in the
passageway.

It seemed very remote from her at that moment.

She looked back toward the horsemen. They had turned the corner in the
road, and were now coming directly toward the spot where Todd and she
stood. It was the oddest visual spectacle she'd ever witnessed, to see

them growing larger as they approached, like illustrations emerging
from a book. The landscape around them seemed to both recede and advance
at the same moment as they approached, its motion throwing them forward
as the ground beneath their horses drew back like a retreating wave.

It was an utterly bewildering spectacle, but its paradoxical beauty
enthralled her. All thought of Zeffer's summons, or indeed his safety,
were forgotten: it was as though she were watching a piece of film for
the first time, not knowing how the mechanism worked upon her.

She felt Todd throw her a side-ways glance.

"Time to go," he said.

The earth beneath their feet reverberated as the horsemen approached.

They'd be at the door in thirty or forty seconds.

"Come on," he said.

"Yes ..." she murmured. "I'm coming."

She didn't move. It wasn't until Todd caught hold of her arm and pulled
her back toward the door that she eventually obeyed the instruction and
went. Even then she kept looking back over her shoulder, astonished.

"I don't believe what I'm seeing," she said.

"It's all real. Trust me on that," he said. "They can do you harm."

They had reached the threshold now, and she reluctantly allowed herself
to be coaxed back over it and into the passageway. She was amazed at
the< speed with which the room had caught her attention; made itself the
center of her thoughts.

Even now, it was still difficult to focus her attention on anything but
the scene beyond the door, but finally she dragged her eyes away from
th&J| approaching horsemen and sought out Zeffer.

He had fallen to his knees three or four yards from the door, putting up
| no defense against Katya's assault.

"I told you, didn't I?" she said, slapping his head. "I never wanted to
sees!

you in this house ever again. You understand me? Ever again." "I'm
sorry," he said, his head bowed. "I just brought--"

"I don't care who you brought. This house is forbidden to you."

 "Yes ... I know."

His acquiescence did nothing to placate her. The reverse, in fact: it
seemed to inflame her. She kicked him.

"You revolt me," she said.

He bent over, as though to present a smaller target to her. She pushed
him, hard, and he fell. She moved in to kick him again, aiming for his
face, but at that moment Tammy saw what she was about to do, and let out
a cry of protest.

"Leave him alone!" she said.

Katya turned. "Whatt

"You heard me. Leave him alone!"

Katya's beauty was disfigured by the naked contempt on her face. She was
breathing heavily, and her face was flushed.

"I'll do what it suits me to do in my own house," she said, her lip
curling.

"And no fat, ugly bitch like you is going to tell me otherwise."

Tammy knew plenty about Katya Lupi by now, of course; her intimidating
reputation went before her. But at that moment, seeing Zeffer lying on
the floor, and hearing what the woman had just said, any trace of
intimidation was burned away by a blaze of anger. Even the glories of
the Devil's Country were forgotten at that moment.

She walked straight toward Katya and pushed her hard, laying her hands
against the bitch's little breasts to do so. Katya was clearly not used
to being manhandled. She came back at Tammy in an instant.

"Don'tyou dare touch me!" she shrieked. Then she back-handed Tammy; a
clean, wide strike.

Tammy fell back, the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. There were
three sickening heartbeats when she feared the force of Katya's blow was
going to knock her unconscious. Darkness pulsed at the corners of her
vision. But she was determined not to be floored by one blow, even if it
did have something more than ordinary human force behind it, as she
suspected it did.

She reached out for something to steady her, and her hand found the
doorjamb. As she caught hold of it, she glanced back over her shoulder,
remembering her proximity to the strange beauty of the Devil's Country.

But the power of the room's illusion had been momentarily knocked from
her head. The walls were simply covered in tiles now. There were trees
and rocks and a painted river on those tiles, but none of it was so
finely rendered that it could have been mistaken for reality. The only
part of the scene before her that was real was Todd, who was still
lingering at' the threshold. Apparently he could see what Tammy could
not because at that moment he threw himself over the threshold like a
man in fear of I

I something coming close on his heels. He caught hold of the doorhandle,
1

and started to pull the door closed, but as he did so Katya came back
into 1 view and blocked the door with her foot.

"Don't close it!" she told Todd.

Todd obeyed her. He let go of the handle. The door struck Katya's leg
and bounced open again.

Now the machinations of the room began to work on Tammy afresh;!

The gloomy air seethed, and the shapes of four horsemen appeared out o|
the murk, still riding toward the door.

The leader--the Duke, Tammy thought, this is the Duke--pulled hard oi5
the reins to slow his mount. The animal made a din, as though its
primi?| tive gaze was failing to make sense of what was ahead of it.
Rather that advance any further it came to a panicked halt, throwing up
clods of < as it did so. Goga jumped from the saddle, shouting a number
of incor prehensible orders back at his men, who had also brought their
animals 1 a stop. They proceeded to dismount. There were whispers of sup
tious doubt between the men: plainly whatever they were witnessing (t
door, the passageway), they could make little or no sense of it. That fa
pounds didn't slow their advance, however. They dutifully followed their
leac toward the door, swords drawn.

By now Tammy had recovered sufficiently to grab hold of Todd's ; and
pull him back from the threshold.

"Come away," she urged him.

He looked round at her. She was probably more familiar with his 1 and
with his limited palette of expressions, than she was with her ov

 But she'd never seen the look of stupefaction he wore right now. The
veins at his temples were throbbing, his mouth was slack; his bloodshot
eyes seemed to have difficulty focusing on her.

She tugged harder on his arm, in the hope of shaking him out of his
stupor. Behind him she could see the horsemen approaching the door,
their step more cautious now that they were almost at the threshold.

Having stopped the door from being closed, Katya had stepped away from
it, leaving Todd the closest of them all to the horsemen. So close, in
fact, that had the Duke so chosen, he could have lunged from where he
stood, and killed Todd with a single stroke.

He did not do so, however. He hung back from the door, eyeing it with
suspicion and awe. Though none of the light from the hallway seemed to
illuminate the world on the other side of the doorway, Tammy could see
the man's face quite clearly: his severely angular features, his long,
braided beard, black shot through with streaks of gray; his dark,
heavy-lidded eyes. He was by no means as beautiful as Todd had once
been, but there was a gravitas in his physiognomy which Todd's corn-fed
charm could never have approached. No doubt he was responsible for all
manner of crimes--in such a landscape as he'd ridden, who would not lay
claim to their share of felonies?--but in that moment, in the midst of a
dark journey of her own, Tammy would have instinctively preferred the
eloquence of this face for company to Todd's easy beauty.

Indeed, if she had ever been in love with Todd Pickett--which by many
definitions she had--she fell out of love with him at that moment,
comparing his face with that of Duke Goga, and finding it wanting.

That was not to say that she didn't want Todd safe from this place; from
the house and all its inhabitants, especially Katya. So she hauled on
his arm again, yelling for him to get away from the door, and this time
her message got through to him.

Todd retreated, and as he did so Katya caught hold of Zeffer by the hair
and lifted him up. Tammy was too concerned with reclaiming Todd from the
threshold to do anything to save Zeffer. And Zeffer in turn did nothing
to save himself. He simply let the woman he had adored pick him up, and

with the same nearly-supernatural strength Tammy herself had felt just
moments before, Katya pitched Zeffer through the open door.

The horsemen were waiting on the other side, swords at the ready.

Only now, as he stumbled across the ground before them, did Zeffer raise
his arms to protect himself against the swordsmen. Whether the Duke took
this harmless motion as some attempt at aggression, and reacted to
protect himself, or whether he simply wanted to do harm, Tammy would
never know. The Duke lifted his sword and brought it down in a great
swooping arc that cut through the meat of Zeffer's right hand, taking
off all four of his fingers, and the top half of his thumb.

Blood spurted out from the wounds, and Zeffer let out a cry that was one
part disbelief to two of agony. He stared at his maimed hand for a.';
moment, then he turned from his mutilator and stumbled back toward the
door.

For an instant, he lifted his gaze, and his eyes met Tammy's. They had a
moment only to look at each other. Then Duke Goga came at Zeffefj again
and drove his sword through the middle of his back.

There was a terrible cracking sound, as the blade shattered Zeffer's1*
breast-bone and then the point emerged from the middle of his chest.

Zeffer threw back his head, and caught hold of the edge of the doof |
with his unmaimed hand. He had his eyes fixed on Tammy as he did so,;
though he were drawing the power to do whatever he was planning to dj|
from her. There was a long moment when in fact he did nothing; or
teetered on the threshold, his eyelids growing lazy. Then--summor one
last Herculean effort of will--he gave Tammy a tiny smile and clos | the
door in her face.

It was like being woken from a dream. One moment Tammy had 1 staring
into Zeffer's stricken face, while the men closed in on him fro!

behind, and the sky seethed overhead. The next the door had shut this 1
rible vision out, and she was back in the little hallway with Todd at
side.

The sight of Zeffer's execution had momentarily distracted Katya I

any further mischief. She was simply staring at the door as though she
could see through it to the horror on the other side.

Tammy didn't give her a chance to snap out of the trance. She started up
the stairs, pulling Todd after her.

"Christ ..." Todd muttered to himself. "Christ oh Christ oh Christ ..."

Five stairs up, Tammy chanced a backward glance, but Katya was still
standing in front of the door.

What was she thinking? Tammy wondered. What have I done? Did a woman
like that ever think what have I done? With Zeffer gone, she would be
alone in Coldheart Canyon. Alone with the dead. Not a pretty prospect.

Perhaps she was regretting. Just a little.

And while she regretted (if regretting was what she was doing), Tammy
continued to haul Todd after her up the stairs.

Six steps now; seven, eight, nine.

Now the escapees were on the half-landing. Through the window off to
their left Tammy could see the sight that had held Zeffer's attention
just minutes before: the occupants of Coldheart Canyon pressing against
the glass.

Why didn't they simply break in? she wondered. They weren't, after all,
insubstantial. They had weight, they had force. If they wanted to get in
so badly, why didn't they simply break the glass or splinter the doors?

The question went from her head the next instant, driven out by a wail
of demand from below.

"Todd?"

It was Katya, of course. She had finally stirred from her fugue state
and was coming up the stairs after them. Speaking in her sweetest voice.
Her come-hither voice.

"Todd, where are you going?"

Tammy felt nauseated. Katya could still do them harm. She still had
power over Todd and she knew it. That was why she put on that
little-girl questioning voice.

"Todd?" Katya said again. "Wait, darling."

If she let go of him, Tammy guessed, he would obey Katya's request.

And then they'd be lost. Katya would never let him go. She'd kill him
rather than let him escape her a second time.

There wasn't much advice Tammy could give to Todd except: "Don't look
back."

He glanced at her, his expression plaintive. It made her feel as though
she were leading a child rather than a grown man.

"We can't just leave her here," he said.

"After what she just did!"

"Don't listen to her," Katya said, her voice suddenly a siren-song, the
little-girl lightness erased in favor of something more velvety. "She
just wants you for herself."

Todd frowned.

"You can't leave me, Todd."

And then more softly still: "I won't let you leave me."

"Just remember what she did down there," Tammy said to Todd. "f

"Zeffer was a nuisance," Katya said. She was getting closer, Tammy knew;
her voice had dropped to a sultry murmur. "I never loved him, Todd. You
know that. He hung around causing trouble. Listen to me. You don't want
to go with this woman. Look at her, then look at me. See what a choice
you're making," Tammy half-expected Todd to obey Katya's instruction.
But Todd sim' ply studied the stairs as they climbed, which under the
circumstances wa$| a minor triumph. Perhaps he still had the will-power
in him to resist!

Katya, Tammy thought. He wasn't her object yet.

Even so, the murdering bitch wasn't ready to give up.

"Todd?" Katya said, now casual, as though none of this were of anyf
great significance. "Will you turn round for a moment? Just for a|
moment? Please. I want to see your face before you go. That's not as
much, now is it? Just one more time. I can't bear it. Phase. Todd ... /.
can't ... bear it."

Oh Lord, Tammy thought, she's turning on the tears. She knew how

potent a well-timed flood of tears could be. Her sister had always been
very quick to turn on the waterworks when she wanted something; and it
had usually done the trick.

"Please, my love ..."

It was almost believable; the words catching in her throat, the soft
sob.

"... don't go. I won't be able to live without you."

They were still a few strides from the front door. Then, once they were
out, they had to get along the pathway and onto the street. Somehow she
doubted Katya's power extended far beyond the limits of the house. The
Canyon might have been hers once upon a time, but she'd lost control of
it in the decades since her heyday. Now it belonged to the ghosts and
the animals, and the bestial offspring of both.

Still coaxing Todd after her, Tammy made her way across the hallway to
the front door.

Behind them, Katya kept up her tearful appeals: declarations of love,
interspersed with sobs. Then more appeals for him to turn around and
look at her.

"You don't want to go," she called to Todd, "you know you don't.

Especially with her. Lord, Todd, look at her. You really want that?"

Finally, Tammy snapped. "How the hell do you know what he wants, bitch?"
she said, turning to look round at the woman on their heels.

"Because we're soul-mates," Katya said.

Her eyes were swollen and red, Tammy noted with some satisfaction, and
there were tears pouring down her face. Her mascara was running down her
pale cheeks in two black rivulets. "He knows it's true," Katya went on.
"We've suffered the same way. Haven't we, Todd? Remember how you said it
was like I was reading your mind? And I said it was because we were the
same, deep down? Remember that?" "Ignore her," Tammy said. They were no
more than three strides from the front door.

But Katya--realizing she was close to losing--had one last trick up her
sleeve. One final power-play. "If you step out of this house," she said
to Todd, "then it's over between us. Do you understand me? If you
stay--oh, if you stay, my darling--then I'm yours. I'm yours body and
soul--I mean it: body and soul. But if you go it'll be as though you
never existed."

Finally, something she said carried enough weight to stop Todd in his
tracks.

"Ignore her," Tammy said. "Please."

"You know I can do that," Katya went on.

Todd turned, and looked back at her, which was exactly what Tammy was
praying he wouldn't do. Katya was standing in the darkness close to the
top of the stairs but the shadows did not conceal the fierce brilliance
of her stare. Her eyes seemed to flicker in the murk, as though there
were flames behind them.

Now she had succeeded in making him look at her again, she softened her
tone. She certainly had quite a repertoire, Tammy thought. First
demands; then pleas and siren-songs; then tears and threats. Now what?

"I know what you're thinking ..." she said.

Ah, mind reading.

"... you're thinking that you've got a life out there. And it's calling
you 1 back."

Tammy was puzzled. This sounded like a self-defeating argument.

"You're thinking you want to be back in the spotlight, where you belong
..."

While Katya talked, Tammy made a momentous decision. She let go off
Todd's hand. She'd done all that she could. If after all this Todd
decided!

that he wanted to turn back and give himself to the wretched woman,'|
then there was nothing more Tammy could do about it. He was a losm
cause.

She crossed swiftly to the front door, and opened it. The first tug was
a J little difficult. Then the door swung open easily, majestically.
There werej no ghosts on the threshold, only the refreshing night air,
sweetened by th | scent of night-blooming jasmine.

Behind her, in the house, Katya was finishing her argument. "The fac
is," she said, "there's nothing out there for you now. Do you understand
me, Todd? There's nothing."

Tammy stepped out onto the front steps. She looked back at Todd, in
time to catch a look of pitiful confusion on his face. He literally
didn't know which way to turn.

"Don't look at me," Tammy said to him. "It's your choice."

His expression became still more pained. That wasn't what he wanted to
hear.

"Look, you're a grown man," Tammy said. "If you want to stay with her,
knowing what she's capable of, then you stay. I hope you'll be very
happy together." "Todd ..." Katya murmured.

She stepped out of the shadows now, choosing her moment, as ever,
beautifully. The demonic Katya, the woman who'd thrashed Zeffer, then
thrown him to Goga, had vanished completely. In her place was a sad,
gentle woman--or the appearance of such--who opened her arms to Todd
like a loving mother.

"Come back to me," she said.

He made the tiniest nod of his head and Tammy's heart sank.

He started to turn his back on the door, but as he did so there was a
sudden and furious eruption of noise from the depths of the house.
Somebody in the Devil's Country was beating on the door: a furious
tattoo.

It came at the perfect moment. At the sound from below Todd seemed to
snap out of his mesmerized state and instead of heading for Katya's open
arms he began to retreat toward the door.

"You know what?" he said to Katya. "I can't take this place any longer.

I'm sorry. I've got to get out."

Katya flew at him, her arms outstretched, her eyes wide. "No!" she
cried. "I want you here!"

It was more than Todd could take. He backed away from her and stumbled
out over the step.

"Finally," Tammy said.

He grabbed hold of her hand. "Get me the fuck out of here," he said.

This time there was no hesitation in his voice, no turning back. They
ran to the gate and out into the street, not stopping for a moment.

Tammy slammed the gate loudly, not so much because she felt it would<]
keep the bitch from following, but because it made the point to the ent
Canyon that they were indeed out of the house and away.

"My car's up the road," she told Todd, though of course it was nc three
days since she'd left it, and there was no guarantee it would still 1
sitting there. And the keys; what about the keys? Had she left them in I
ignition? She thought she had; but she "was by no means certain. So muc
had happened to her in the intervening time; she had no clear memory I
what she'd done with the keys.

"I'm assuming you're going to come with me?" she said to Todd.

He looked at her blankly.

"To the car," she said, for emphasis.

"Yes."

"It's up the street."

"Yes. I heard you."

"Well, shall we go then?"

He nodded, but he didn't move. His gaze had drifted back to the how
Leaving him to stare, Tammy set oft" up the road to where she'd left
thel!

car. There was neither moon nor stars in the sky; just a blanket of ambe
tinted cloud. She soon lost sight of Todd as she headed up the benight
road. Memories of her night-journey through the place, with all its
attenj dant miseries and hallucinations, rose up before her, but she
told her to put them out of her head. She was going to be out of this da
Canyon in a few minutes, long before it got back into her mind again,;
started its tricks.

The car, when she reached it, was unlocked. She opened the door: slipped
into the driver's seat, fumbling for the ignition. Yes! The keys we
there. "Thank you, God," she said, with a late show of piety.

She turned on the engine, and switched on the headlights. They lit uf
the whole street ahead. She put the car into gear and brought it roar
around the corner. Todd had wandered out into the middle of the road and
she could have plowed into him (which would have made an igno-1 minious
end to the night's adventures) had he not stepped out of her wayf 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

About halfway down the Canyon he said: "Do you think she's going to come
after us?" "No," Tammy said. "I don't think her pride would let her."

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

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

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

 The A-List

 In March of 1962 Jerry Brahms had bought a small two-bedroom apartment
a block or two within the gates of Hollywoodland, a neighborhood created
in the twenties which encompassed a large parcel of land in the vicinity
of the Hollywood sign. The house had cost him nineteen thousand seven
hundred dollars, a relatively modest sum for a place so pleasantly
situated. Back then, he'd still indulged the fantasy that one day he'd
meet a soul-mate with whom he would share the house, but somehow his
romantic entanglements had always ended poorly, and despite three
attempts to bring someone in, the chemistry had failed miserably, and
each time he'd sent the man-to-be on his way, and he'd ended up alone.

He no longer hoped for an end to his solitude: even the most optimistic
of the cancer doctors who'd seen him gave him at best a year. The tumor
in his prostate was now inoperable, and spreading.

For all his love of the dreamy far-off days of Hollywood, Jerry was a
practical man, and--at least when it came to himself--remarkably
unsentimental.

The prospect of dying did not move him particularly one way or another:
he was not afraid of it, nor did he welcome the eventuality. It would
simply happen--sooner rather than later. Sometimes, when he got
melancholy, he contemplated suicide, and in preparation for such a
moment had amassed a considerable number of sleeping pills, sufficient,
he felt sure, to do the job. But though he had very bad days now, when
the pain (and, for a man as fastidious as himself, the practical
problems of advanced bowel disorders) was so nearly overwhelming that he
thought hard about tying up all the loose ends of his life and simply
knocking back

 the pills with a strong Bloody Mary, somehow he could never bring
him-1 self to do it.

He had a sense of unfinished business, though he could not quite work :
out what the business might be. His parents were long since dead, his
only sibling, a sister, also passed away, tragically young. Of his few
friends there weren't many that he cared to say anything of great
profundity to. If he slipped away, there'd be little by way of tears:
just some fighting over his collection of movie memorabilia--which he'd
never had evaluated, but was probably worth half a million dollars at
auction--and a few tear sodden, bitchy remarks at Mickey's (his favorite
bar) when he was gone.

Lord knows, he'd made enough of those kinds of remarks in his life: he'd
been the kind of queen with a feline answer to just about anything in
his heyday. But there was no joy in that kind of thing anymore. His
style of queendom was long out of fashion. He was a dinosaur with
prostate cancer; soon to be extinct.

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

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

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

Why, for God's sake? Something nagged at him; that was all he knew.

Something told him: wait, just a little longer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as he realized this, the gaps between the boards grew wider, so that
he dropped down between them, slowly, as though he were feather-light.

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

The dream palace was in a state of considerable disrepair. The windows
were broken, and birds flew in and out, shitting on the fancy furni

ture. A coyote skulked around in the kitchen, looking for scraps. And
outside in the tree there were dozens of little red-and-black-striped
monkeys, chattering and screeching. This was not so fanciful a detail as
it might have seemed to someone who'd not known the house, as he had, in
its heyday.

There had been monkeys there--escapees from Katya's private menagerie;
and for a while it seemed the climate suited them and they would
proliferate, but after a year or two some virus had decimated them.

Something about the place in its present condition made him want to
leave. He knew, however, that he couldn't. Not without paying his
respects to the lady of the house. So rather than wait for her to show
herself, he went to look for her, figuring that the sooner he found her
the sooner he'd be released from this dream. He started up the stairs.
There were flies crawling on the ground beneath his feet, so densely
assembled and so sluggish that they refused to move as he ascended,
obliging him to crush them under his bare feet as he climbed.

The door to the master bedroom was open. He stepped inside, somewhat
tentatively. He had only been in the room once before. He remembered it
as being large; but here in his dream it was immense. The drapes were
partially drawn, and the sunlight that streamed between them was a
curious color, almost lilac.

There was an enormous, but extremely plain, bed in the room. And sitting
on the bed was the only woman, besides his mother, whom Jerry had loved:
Katya. She was naked; or--more correctly stated--unclothed.

Ninety percent of her body's surface was covered with large snails, the
common tortoiseshell variety that every gardener curses. They were
moving all over her skin. They were on her face, on her breasts and
belly, on her thighs and shins. Her hair was matted with their silvery
trails, and thirty or forty of them were arranged on her head like a
grotesque crown. Her legs were open, and they were also investigating
the crevice between her thighs.

As is so often the case in dreams, he saw all this with horrid
particularity.

Saw the way their boneless gray-green bodies extended from their shells
as they moved over Katya's skin; their horns reaching out tentatively as
they advanced, then retracting as they encountered an obstacle--a
nipple, an I

 ear, the knuckle of her thumb--only to stretch out again when they
were certain there was no danger in the encounter.

Without speaking, Katya looked down and very delicately plucked one of
the creatures off her breast. Then she spread her legs a little wider,
so that Jerry had an even more intimate view of her private parts. He
was no connoisseur, but even he could see that there was a certain
prettiness to the configuration of her labia; she had the pussy of a
young girl. Putting her hands down between her legs she spread her lips
and delicately applied the snail she'd taken from her breast to the
flesh there.

Jerry watched with a kind of appalled fascination as it responded to its
new perch, expanding its horns and investigating her.

Katya sighed. Her eyes fluttered closed. Then, suddenly, they opened
again. When they did they were fixed on him, with startling fierceness.

"There you are, Jerry," she said, her voice full of the music he
remembered from his childhood: the kind of bitter-sweet music by which
he had judged the voice of every woman he'd met since.

Later he'd learned that silent-movie stars had been notorious for having
voices that precluded them from careers in the sound cinema: but Katya
had been one of the exceptions to that rule. She had the slightest
foreign inflection (nothing recognizable; just enough to add a certain
poignancy to her sentences); otherwise she spoke with a beguiling
elegance.

"I need help," she said to him. "Jerry, will you come to the house?

Please. I am alone here. Utterly alone."

"What happened to Todd?" he said to her.

"He walked out on me."

"I can't believe that."

"Well it's true. He did. Are you going to choose between him and me?"

"No, of course not."

"He was just another empty shell, Jerry. There was no substance to him.
And now I'm alone, and it's worse than death."

His dream-self was about to get clever and ask her how she could
possibly know what death felt like, but then he thought better of asking
her.

Perhaps she did indeed know. It wasn't beyond the bounds of
possibility.

He'd never understood exactly how her life had worked, up there in the
house in the Canyon, but he suspected there were terrible secrets in
that place.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked her.

"Come back up to the Canyon," she said.

That was the end of the dream, at least as he remembered it when he
woke. The image of her body covered with snails disgusted him, of
course; especially its sexual details. Had she conjured that, in
dispatching this dream, or had he dug it out of the recesses of his own
subconscious?

Whichever it was, it had done its duty: making certain he understood the
pitiful state she was in.

All through the following day, as he went about his chores--down to the
market, back from the market, cooking himself chicken, eating the
chicken, washing the plate from which he'd eaten the chicken, talking
with Luis, who lived below, about how the apartments all needed
painting, and who was going to talk to the manager because it had to be
done soon; and so on, and so forth--through all of this he kept thinking
about the dream, and whether it was really trying to tell him something
or not.

Out of the blue, he said to Luis: "Do you believe in dreams?"

Luis was a plump, amicable man who'd been in Christopher Street the 1
night of the Stonewall riots, in full drag, or so he claimed. "Like
how?" he said. "Give me an example."

"Like: you have a dream and it seems like it's telling you something."

"Oh yeah. I've had those."

"And were they?" "Like I had a dream in which my mother told me to get
out of this rela- | tionship I was in with a guy. I don't know if you
met him. Ronnie?"

"I remember Ronnie."

"Well he was a sonofabitch. He used to beat me up, he'd get drunk on |
tequila and beat me up."

"What's this got to do with the dream?" v

"I told you: my mother said throw him out. In the dream. She said throw
him out or he'll kill you."

"What did you do?"

"I threw him out. I mean, I was ready to do it anyhow. The dream just
confirmed what I'd been feeling."

"Did he just go?"

"No. He got physical, and we ended up fighting and--" Luis pulled up his
sleeve, exposing a six-inch scar, pale against his mocha skin. "It got
nasty."

"He did that?"

"We were fighting. And I fell on a glass-topped coffee-table. I needed
sixteen stitches. By the time I got back from the hospital, the
motherfucker had gone. He'd taken all my shoes. And they weren't even
his size."

"So you do believe in dreams?"

"Sure I believe. Why'd you want to know?"

"I'm trying to figure something out."

"Well, you want my opinion? Dreams can be useful doing that sometimes.

Then again, sometimes they're full of shit. It depends on the dream. You
know how I know? My momma got really sick with pneumonia, and she was in
the hospital in New York. And I had this dream, and she was telling me
she was fine, there was no need to spend the money and fly out East,
because she was going to get better. Next day, she was dead."

Jerry went back to his apartment and thought about his dream some more,
and about what Luis had said. Gradually, it crept up on him why he was
being so reluctant about the decision. He was afraid that if he went up
to Coldheart Canyon (if he sided with Katya, knowing her capacity for
cruelty), it would be the end of him. He'd seen so many movies in which
the queen ended up dead in the second act, superfluous to the real heart
of the story. Wasn't that him? Hadn't he lived his life at the edge of
Katya's grand drama; never important enough to be at the heart of
things? If events in Coldheart Canyon were indeed coming to an end--as
it seemed

they were--then what was the likelihood of his surviving to the final
reel?

Little or none.

And yet, if this was the inescapable truth of his life, then why fight
it?

Why lock himself away in his little apartment, watching game-shows and
eating frozen dinners for one, when the only drama he'd ever really been
a part of was playing out to its conclusion twenty minutes' drive away?

Wasn't that just throwing more time away: waste on waste?

Damn it, he would go. He'd obey the summons of the dream and go back to
Coldheart Canyon.

This course determined, he set about preparing himself for an audience
with the Lady Katya. He chose something elegant to wear (she liked an
elegant man, he'd heard her once say); his linen suit, his best Italian
shoes, a silk tie he'd bought in Barcelona, to add just a touch of color
to the otherwise subdued ensemble. With his clothes chosen, he showered
and shaved and then--having worked up a bit of a sweat shaving--showered
again.

It was late afternoon by the time he started to get dressed. It would.;
soon be cocktail hour up in Coldheart Canyon. Tonight, at least, Katya
would not have to drink alone.

 About the time Jerry Brahms had been waking up from his dream of Katya
and the snails--which is to say, just half an hour before dawn-- Tammy
and Todd were slipping--"quietly, quietly," she kept saying-- into the
little hotel where Tammy had been staying. The last few days had
provided Tammy with a notable range of unlikely experiences but surely
this was up there among the weirdest of them--tip-toeing along the
corridor of her two-star hotel with one of the most famous celebrities
in the world in tow, telling him to hush whenever his heel squeaked on a
board.

"The room's chaos," she warned him as she let him in. "I'm not a very
tidy person ..."

"I don't care what it looks like," Todd said, his voice so drained by
exhaustion it had no color left in it whatsoever. "I just want to piss
and sleep."

He went directly into the bathroom, and without bothering to close the
door, unzipped and urinated like a racehorse, just as though the two of
them had been married for years and he didn't give a damn about the
niceties. Telling herself she shouldn't be taking a peek, Tammy did so
anyway.

Where was the harm? He was bigger than Arnie, by a couple of sizes.

He shook himself, wetting the seat (just like Arnie), and went to the
sink to wash, splashing water on his face in a half-hearted fashion.

"I keep thinking--" he called through to her. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes, I can hear you fine."

"I keep thinking this is all a dream and I'm going to wake up." He

 turned the water off and came to the door, towel in hand. He patted
his wounded face dry, very gently. "But then I think: if this was a
dream, when did it begin? When I first saw Katya? Or when I first went
up to Coldheart Canyon? Or when I woke up from the operation, and it had
all gone wrong?"

He tossed the towel onto the floor of the bathroom; something else Arnie
always did. It used to irritate the hell out of Tammy, forever chasing
around after her spouse, picking up stuff he'd dropped: towels in the
bathroom, socks and skid-marked underwear in the bedroom, food left out
of I the refrigerator, where the flies could get at it. Why were those
habits so hard for men to change? Why couldn't they just pick things up
and put; them away in their proper place?

Todd was still talking about when his dream had begun. He'd decided it
started when Burrows put him under.

"You're not serious?" she told him.

"Absolutely. All this ..." he made an expansive gesture that took in the
I room and Tammy "... is part of the same hallucination."

"Me, included?"

"Sure."

"Todd, you're being ridiculous," Tammy said. "You're not dreaming' this,
and neither am I. We're awake. We're here." "Here, I don't mind," Todd
said, looking around the room. "I can takel being here. But Tammy, if
this room exists, then so does all that shit we,| saw up at Katya's
house. And I'm not ready to believe in that." He bit hisl nails as he
spoke, pacing the floor. "You saw what was in the room?"

"Not really. I mean I saw the man who killed Zeffer--"

"And the ghosts. You saw the ghosts."

"Yes, I saw them. And worse."

"And you believe all that's real?"

"What's the alternative?"

"I've told you. It's all just some hallucination I'm having."

"I think I'd know if I was having an hallucination."

"Have you ever done LSD? Really good LSD? Or magic mushrooms?"



"No."

"See, you do some of that stuff and it's like you never look at the real
world the same way again. You can never really trust it. I mean it's all
consensual reality anyhow, right?"

"I don't know what the hell that is."

"It's a phrase my dealer uses. Jerome Bunny is his name. He's a real
philosopher. It isn't just drugs with him, it's a way of looking at the
world.

And he used to say we all just agree on what's real, for convenience'
sake." "I still don't get it," Tammy said wearily.

"Well he used to explain it better." "Anyway I thought you didn't do
drugs. You said in People you were horrified to see what drugs had done
to friends of yours."

"Did I name anyone?" "Robert Downey Jr. was one. A great actor,' you
said, 'killing himself for the highs,' you said."

"Well I don't fry my brains every night like Robert did. I know my
limits.

A little pot. A few tabs of acid--" He stopped, looking a little
irritated.

"Anyway, I don't have to justify myself to you."

"I didn't say you did."

"Quoting me--"

"Well that's what you said."

"Well it's bullshit. It's his life. He can do what the hell he likes
with it.

Where did all this start anyhow?"

"You saying--"

"Oh yeah, we're having this dream together, because that way Cold heart
Canyon doesn't exist. Can't exist. It's all something invented. I mean,
how can any of that be real?" "I don't know," said Tammy flatly. "But
whatever you say about dreams or consenting reality or whatever it was:
that place is real, Todd. It's up there in the hills right now. And
she's there too. And she's planning her next move."

"You sound very sure." He was studying his reflection in the mirror of
the dresser as he talked to her.



"I am sure. She's not going to let go of you. She'll find a way to get
you back."

"Look at me," he said.

"I think you look fine."

"I'm a mess. Burrows fucked it all up." His hands went up to his face.

"It's gotta be a dream ..." he said, returning to his old theme. "I
can't look like this in the real world."

"I do," Tammy said, considering her own unhappy reflection. "I look like
this." She pinched herself. "I'm real," she said.

"Yeah?" he said softly.

"I know who I am. I know how I got here, where I came from, where my
husband works."

"Your husband?"

"Yes, my husband. Why? Are you surprised a woman with my dress size has
got a husband? Well, I have. His name's Arnie, and he works at
Sacramento Airport. And you don't know anything about him, do you?"

"No."

"So you can't have dreamed him, can you?"

"No."

"See? That's my life. My problem."

"Why's it a problem?"

"Because he drinks too much and he doesn't love me and he's having an
affair with this woman who works at the Fedex office."

"No shit. Is he the violent type?"

"He would be if I let him."

"But you don't."

"I fractured one of his ribs the last time he tried something stupid
like that. He was drunk. But that's no excuse."

"So why do you stay with him?"

"You really want to know?"

"Yeah."

"Sound like you mean it."

"I mean it."

 "If I tell you, you've got to promise me one thing."

"What's that?"

"Promise first."

"Shit. I promise. Scout's honor. Why'd you stay with him?"

"Because being alone is the worst. Especially for a woman. I walked out
on him two and a half years ago, when I found out about one of his
women, but after a month I had to go back to him. Being on my own made
me crazy. I made him tell me he was sorry for humiliating me and that
he'd never do it again, but I knew that wasn't true. Men can't help
being pigs. It's the way God made them."

"And I suppose women are--"

"Bitches, most of us. Me included. But sometimes you need to be a bitch
so you can get through the day."

"And Katya?"

"I wondered how long it would take you to get round to her," Tammy said.
"Well I'll tell you how much of a bitch she was. You know the man she
threw into the room?" Todd nodded. "His name was Zeffer. He was the man
who made her into a movie star. That's the kind of woman she was."

"There was another side to her, believe me."

"Don't tell me: she loves dogs." "Wait ..." he said wearily, waving away
her cynicism. "I'm trying to explain something here."

"I don't want to hear about her kinder, gentler side."

"Why not?"

"Because she's a bad woman, Todd. They named Coldheart Canyon after her,
for God's sake. Did you know that? Anyway, we're neither of us going
back up there. Agreed?"

Todd didn't reply. He simply stared at the faded photograph of the
Hollywood sign that hung above the bed. "Didn't somebody throw
themselves off that?" he said finally.

"Yeah. Her name was Peg Entwistle. She was a failed actress. Did you
hear what I said?"

 "About what?"

"Neither of us is going back up to see Katya again, agreed? You're not
going to try and sneak back up there the moment my back's turned?" "Why?
Would it matter so much if I did?" he said. His belief that all this was
a dream seemed to have lost credibility in the last few minutes.

"You're never going to see me again after this anyway."

It was true, of course: this was the first and last time she'd sit in a
motel room and have a conversation with Todd Pickett. But it still stung
her to I hear it said. Hurt, she stumbled after a response. "It only
matters because | I want the best for you." "Then move over," he said,
coming to the bed, "and let me lie down | and sleep. Because that's what
I want right now."

She got up off the bed.

"You're not going to sleep?" he said.

"There isn't room for both of us."

"Sure there is. Lie down and get some rest. We'll talk about this whenj
we've had some sleep."

He slipped off his shoes and lay down, placing one of the paper-thin '$
pillows beside the other so they'd both have somewhere to lay their
heads.

"Go on," he said. "Lie down. I won't bite."

"You do know how weird all this is for me, don't you?"

"Which part: the girl, the house, the Devil's wife--"

"No. You and me, together in one bed."

"Don't worry, I'm not going to be making sexual advances--"

"I know that--"

"--I'm just suggesting we get some sleep."

"Yeah. Well. Okay. But it's still weird. You know, you used to be some
body I idolized."

"With a heavy emphasis on the used to be," Todd said, opening one I and
looking at her.

"Don't be so sensitive."

"No. I get the message. It was the same when I met Paul Newman,: the
flesh." He closed his eye again. "I always used to think he was I'll

 coolest of all the cool guys. He had those ice-blue eyes, and that
easy way of ..." His words were getting slower, dreamier. "... walking
into a room ... and I used to think ... when I'm famous ..." The words
trailed away.

"Todd?"

He opened his eyes a fraction and looked at her between the lashes.

"What was I saying?"

"Never mind," she said to him, sitting on the bed. "Go to sleep."

"No, tell me. What was I saying?"

"How much you wanted to be like Paul Newman."

"Oh yeah. I just used to practice my Newman act for hours on end. The
way everything he did was so relaxed. Sometimes he looked so relaxed you
couldn't believe he was acting at all. It looked so ... easy ..."

While he talked Tammy took off her own shoes (her feet were filthy, and
ached, but she didn't have the strength to get into a shower), and then
lay down beside Todd. He didn't even seem to realize she was there
beside him. His monologue continued, though it became less coherent, as
sleep steadily made his tongue more sluggish.

"When I met him ... finally met him ... he was ... so ... small ..."

His conclusion reached, he began to snore gently.

Tammy sat up on her elbows and looked at him, lying there, wondering how
she would have felt if she'd been told a few days ago that she'd be
sharing a bed with Todd Pickett. It would have made her heart jump a
beat to even contemplate the possibility. And yet here she was, lying
down beside him, and she felt nothing; nothing except a vague irritation
that she was not going to get a fair share of the bed with him sprawled
out over it.

Oh well, she had no choice. She could either sleep on the bed with
Mister Heart-throb, or take the floor.

She closed her eyes.

She was exhausted: sleep came in a matter of moments. There were no
dreams.

 While the two mismatched adventurers slept in the subterranean murk of
Room 131 in the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, a sleep too deep to be called
comfortable; too close to death, in fact--the city of Los Angeles got up
and went about its daily business. There was profit to be made. There
were movies being shot all over the city. Joyless little pornos being
made in ratty motels, witless spectacles with budgets that could have
supported small nations made on the soundstages of Culver City and
Burbank; penniless independent films about the lives of hustlers, whores
and penniless filnv makers shot wherever a room could be found and the
actors assembled.

Some would go on to glory; even the pornos had their nights of prize
giving now, when the lucky lady voted Best Cock-Sucker was called to the
podium to humbly thank her agent, her mother, and Jesus Christ.

But the fictions, whether sex or science-fiction, were not the only dra
mas that would be played out today. This was a city that made its profit
by j selling dreams, not least of itself, and so every day young
hopefuls arrived?!

by bus and by plane to try their luck. And every day a few of those
dream-i ers, having been here a few months (sometimes a few years),
realized thafl their place in the food chain of fame was lower than a
piece of week-old sushi. It was not going to happen for them: they
weren't going to be the next Meryl Streep, the next Todd Pickett, the
next Jim Carrey. They'd ha\ to wait another lifetime for their slice of
fame; or the lifetime after that, I the lifetime after that. And for
some, it wasn't news they could bear take home with them. Better to buy
a gun (as Ryan Tyler, real nar Norman Miles, did that morning) and go
back to your one-room apartf]

 ment and blow out your brains. He'd had two lines in one of the Lethal
Weapon movies, which he'd told everyone in Stockholm, Ohio, was the
beginning of a great career. But the lines had been cut, and for some
reason he'd never caught a director's eye ever again. Not once in six
years, since he'd had those two lines, had he been called back for an
audition.

The bullet was kinder than the silent phone. His death didn't make the
news.

The suicide of one Rod Mccloud did, but only because he'd thrown himself
off a bridge onto the 405 and brought the morning traffic in both
directions to a halt for an hour. Mccloud had actually won an Oscar;
he'd been the co-recipient (with four other producers) of the coveted
little icon fourteen years earlier. There hadn't been time for him to
reach the microphone and thank his agent and Jesus Christ; the orchestra
had started playing the exit music before the man in front of him had
finished giving his thanks; then it was too late.

At noon, another suicide was discovered; that of a man who, unlike
Mccloud--who had been sixty-one--was still at the beginning of his life.

Justin Thaw, who two years ago had been named by Vanity Fair the Most
Powerful Agent in LA Under Twenty-five (he was twenty-two at the time),
and had been groomed by the greatest of the city's agent-deities as the
inheritor of his chair, made a noose and hanged himself in his brother's
garage, leaving a suicide letter that was arranged as a series of
bullet-points (in the style his ex-boss had taught him), for maximum
clarity.

He could no longer fight his addiction, he said; he was too tired of
feeling as though he was a failure, just because he was hooked on
heroin. He was sorry for all the heartless things he'd said and done to
those he loved; it had been the drug doing, the drug saying: but it was
he who was sorry, and he who was glad to be leaving today, because life
wasn't worth the effort anymore. He was wearing the ten-thousand-dollar
suit he'd had made for himself in Milan, the shoes he'd purchased in
Rome, and (so as not to make as much of a mess of his death as he had of
his life) a pair of adult diapers.

The news of Justin's death would spread quickly, and a few executives'

 doors would be closed for a while, giving the men behind them a moment
to remember the occasions they'd got high with Justin, and wonder
whether it wasn't time they asked for help from Narcotics Anonymous.

Then the phones from their powerful contemporaries started to ring
again, and the pressure of the day meant that meditation had to be put
off for a while; they took a snort or two of coke to put Justin out of
their minds, and got on with the deal-making. They could think about him
again at the funeral.

Speaking of which: the ashes of one Jennifer Scarscella were on a
Chicago-bound plane that afternoon, headed for interment in the city of
her birth. Jennifer had died nine months ago, but her body had only
recently been found and identified in the LA Morgue. She had left home
seven years before, without telling her parents where she was headed,
though it wouldn't have been hard for the Scarscellas to figure out that
their daughter had left to try her luck in Tinseltown: all she'd ever
wanted to do was be a movie star. She had been murdered by her
boyfriend, because she'd refused, he said, to take a role in an X-rated
movie. He was > now in jail, and Jennifer was going home, having kept
her ambitions high, and died for doing so.

And so the day went on, the shadows of the city lengthening as the sun
began to drop from its high-point at noon.

At a little after four, there was a crisis at Warner's, when a set under
| construction caught fire, gutting an entire soundstage, and badly
darnagff ing two adjacent soundstages. Nobody was killed, but there were
still| grim faces in the boardroom that afternoon. Insurance would cover
the| reconstruction of the stages, but the set had been built for the
Warner $|

Christmas offering Dark Justice. With an elaborate post-production
scheds is ule for the picture that required the main shoot to be over in
a month'q time, things looked bad. There had been a great deal of
"creative debate^ about the script, which had no fewer than fourteen
writers present attached to it. Arbitration by the Writers Guild would
thin those nu hers , but nothing would make the calculation look any
better if the pi< ture missed its Christmas release date, which it now
looked likely to dc

 Two executives received calls from their superiors in New York,
pointing out that if they hadn't warred so much about the script the
picture would have been shot by now and the agonizingly slow
post-production underway.

Instead they had a smoking shell of a building where the big scenes were
to have been shot, starting in two days. There was a fiscal disaster in
the offing, and certain people should be ready to hand in their
resignations before they were embarrassed into leaving by the imminent
and unflattering analysis as to why ninety pages of dialogue about a man
who dressed up as a jaguar to fight the villains of some fictional
metropolis could not have been agreed on earlier, when there was four
and a half million dollars' worth of writing talent on the job. The
observation that "we're not making fucking Citizen Kane here" dropped
from several mouths that day; more often than not from men who had never
seen Kane, nor would have cared for it even if they had.

By five, with the freeways bumper to bumper as people got out of town
for the weekend, there was a plethora of accidents, but nothing of
consequence. Scripts were delivered for the weekend read; writers
crossed their fingers and hoped that somebody would read what they'd
slaved over without kids fighting at their feet or their dick in
somebody's mouth or a smudge of coke on their nose; plans were made for
weekend adulteries; those letters of resignation "were penned by smiling
assistants.

And through it all Todd and the woman who had once idolized him slept
side by side in the stale darkening air of Room 131.

 Tammy woke first, rising up out of a dream of the very room in which
she \ was sleeping, except that all the furniture had for some
unfathomable rea; son been piled against one end of the room, including
the frame of the bed I in which she was sleeping, leaving her on a
mattress on the floor. When she woke, of course, nothing had changed. It
was still an ordinary room with | one extraordinary element, surreal in
its lack of likelihood: the sleeping fig- ij ure of Todd Pickett. There
he was, sprawled across three-quarters of the| bed, his head deep in the
pillow, his face--his poor, wounded face--free, M seemed, of troubled
dreams.

What she would have given, once upon a time, for a moment like this |j a
chance to lean over and kiss him awake. But she'd lost faith in such
fairyij stories. She'd seen too much of their dark side, and she never
wanted 1 go there again, even for the kissing of princes. Better to let
them wake < their own accord, dragon-breath and all.

She glanced at the cheap digital clock on the bedside table. It was fiv|
twenty-one in the afternoon. Surely that couldn't be right? That they
sle for almost eleven hours? And Todd still sleeping?

Well, the latter she could believe. She knew from her years with, how
some men loved to sleep. In Arnie's case he'd loved it more than < thing
else. More than eating, more than drinking, certainly more than I

She left Todd to it, went into the tiny bathroom and switched on' light.
God, she looked terrible! How had he ever consented to get: the same bed
as her? She started her clean-up by vigorously scrubbii her teeth, then
ran the shower very hot, the way she liked it even

 she felt clean, and got in. Oh, it felt good! The soap smelled
flowery, and the cheap shampoo didn't work up a satisfying lather, but
she was happy nevertheless, getting herself clean for the first time in
days: washing off the freaks, the ghosts, the dirt, the darkness. By the
time she drew back the plastic curtain the steam was so dense she could
barely see across the bathroom to the door. But it was being opened,
that much she could see, and there was Todd, standing looking at her.
She grabbed the towel off the sink where she'd left it, and used it as
best she could to cover her considerable nakedness.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good afternoon," she replied.

"It isn't." "Almost five-thirty," she said. "There's a clock beside the
bed. Why don't you go look? And close the door after you."

"I gotta take a leak first. I'm sorry. But I gotta."

"Let me get out first." "Just don't look," he said, unzipping himself.

She drew the shower curtain back, and continued to dry herself, while
for the second time in the last twelve hours she heard the solid splash
of him emptying his bladder. He took an age. By the time he was finished
she was almost done drying herself.

"Okay, I'm done," he said, with evident relief. "Does this place have
room service?"

"Yes."

"You want something to eat?" This was no time to be ladylike, she told
herself. "I'm starving," she said.

"What do you want?"

"Justfood. Nothing fancy."

"I shouldn't think there's much danger of that."

She waited until she heard the door click closed, then she pulled the
shower curtain back and finished drying her nooks and crannies. She
could hear his voice as he ordered food on the phone. It sounded like
the

soundtrack of a Todd Picket! movie playing on the television next door.

Stepping out of the bath, she cleared a hole in the steamed-up mirror
with the ball of her hand and regarded her reflection balefully. She was
cleaner, but that was about the only improvement. She opened the door a
crack.

"I need some clean clothes."

Todd was sitting on the bed. He'd finished making his order and had
turned on one of the late-afternoon chat shows.

"You can come in here and get dressed," he said, not turning from the
screen. "I won't look."

She discarded her sodden towel and ventured in, sorting through the
meager contents of her suitcase for something presentable.

"I ordered club sandwiches," Todd said. "That was pretty much all they
had. And coffee."

"Fine."

As she pulled on her underwear she glanced up at the television. A woman
in a red polyester blouse three sizes too small for her was complaining
vociferously to the host of the show that her daughter, who j

?

looked about eleven, went out every night "dressed like a cheap little
slut." 1

"I love this shit," Todd said.

"People's lives," Tammy replied.

"I guess they're happy. They get their fifteen minutes."

"Did you like yours?"

"I got more than fifteen," he said.

"I didn't mean to offend you. I was just asking."

"Sure, I enjoyed it. Who wouldn't? The first few times you're in a|
restaurant and a waiter recognizes you, or somebody sends over a drink,!

you get a buzz out of that. In fact, you feel like you're the only
person wh<!

matters ..." His voice trailed away. The daughter on the screen, who had
the seeds of whoredom in her pre-pubescent features, was telling thfi
audience that if she wanted to dress like a slut that was her business,
and anyway who did she learn it from? She stabbed her finger in the
direction of her mother, who did her best to look virtuous, but given
what she'C

 chosen to do with her hair, makeup and outfit didn't have a chance.
Todd laughed, then went back to what he was telling Tammy.

"The whole 'look at me, I'm a star thing gets old pretty quickly. And
after a while you start to wish people didn't know who you were."

"Really?"

"Actually, it's more that you want to be able to turn it on or off. Oh
shit, look at this--"

The sluttish daughter was now up off her chair, and attempting to attack
her mother. Luckily, there was a security man ready to step in and stop
her. Unluckily, he wasn't quite fast enough to do so. The girl threw
herself upon her mother with such violence the woman's chair toppled
over, and the security man, who had by now taken hold of the girl to
keep her from doing harm, fell forward too, so that chair, mother,
daughter and security man ended up on the studio floor together. Todd
continued to talk through it.

"There are days when you really want to feel good about yourself; you
want to be recognized, you want people to say: I loved your movie so
much I saw it six times. And then there are other days when it's a curse
to have people know who the hell you are, because there's no privacy, no
way to just go out and be yourself. Everything becomes a performance."

He pointed at the brawlers on television. "Look at these stupid bitches.

What are they going to say when their friends see this?" He pondered his
own question for a moment, then he said: 'Actually, I know exactly what
they're going to say. They're going to say: did you see me on the TV?

That's all that matters. Not: did you see me being smart or looking
beautiful: just did you see me?"

He watched the women's antics for a while longer, shaking his head.

Then he glanced over at Tammy and said: "I've been thinking maybe I'm
done with the movies. Or movies are done with me. It's time to buy a
ranch in Montana and raise horses."

"Really?" Tammy had finally got dressed, and came to sit down on the
unmade bed beside Todd. "You're going to retire?"

He laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Oh, just hearing the word. Retire. At thirty-four." "I thought you were
thirty-two. Your bio--"

"I lied."

"Oh."

"But I'm still young. Right? I mean, thirty-four is still young."

"A mere kitten."

"I just can't face the idea of that circus for one more day ..." He
turned ( off the television. The room was suddenly very silent.

After a few moments Tammy said: 'Are we going to talk about itj or not?"

Todd stared at the blank television. She couldn't see his expression but
she was certain it was just as vacant as the screen.

"The Canyon, Todd," she said again. 'Are we going to talk about what |
happened in the Canyon or not?"

"Yes," he replied finally. "I suppose so." "Last night you said it
wasn't real."

"I was tired."

"So?"

"It's real. I knew last night I was talking bullshit ..."

He kept his back to her through this, as though he didn't want to let he
see his incomprehension; as though it were something to be ashamed of

"You saw more than I did," she said to Todd. "So you've probably got I
clearer idea of what's going on. And you talked to--"

"Katya."

"Yes. And. What did she tell you?" "She told me the room downstairs had
been given to her."

"By Zeffer. Yes, I know that part." "Then what are you asking me for?"
he said. "You probably know ; much as I do."

"What about Maxine?"

"What about her?"

 "She must have checked out the house for you--"

"Yeah. She took photographs--"

"Maybe she has some answers."

"Maxine?" He got up off the bed and went to the table to pick up his
cigarettes. He took one out of the packet and lit it, inhaling deeply.
'As soon as she'd moved me into that fucking house she told me she
didn't want to manage me any longer," he said.

There was a knock at the door. "Room service."

Tammy opened the door and an elderly man, who frankly looked as though
this might be the last club sandwiches and coffee he delivered, tottered
in, and set the laden tray on the table.

"I asked for extra mayonnaise," Todd said.

"Here, sir." The old man proffered a small milk jug, into which several
spoonfuls of mayonnaise had been deposited.

"Thank you, it's all fine," Tammy said.

Todd went into his jeans pocket and pulled out a bundle of notes. He
selected a twenty--much to the antiquated waiter's delight--and gave it
to the man.

"Thank you very much, sir," he said, exiting rather faster than he'd
entered, in case the man in the filthy jeans changed his mind.

They set to eating.

"You know what?" Todd said.

"What?"

"I think I should go and see Maxine. Ask her what she knows, face-to
face. Maybe this was all some kind of setup--"

"If you get her on the phone--?"

"She'll lie."

"You've had that experience?"

"Several times."

"Where does she live?"

"Well she's got three houses. A house in Aspen, a place in the Hamptons
and a house in Malibu." "Oh how she must suffer," Tammy said, teasing a
piece of crispy bacon

out of her sandwich and nibbling on it. "Only three houses? How does
she manage?"

"So eat up. We'll just drop in on her."

"Both of us?"

"Both of us. That way she can't tell me I'm crazy. What I saw, you saw."

"Actually I saw some shit you didn't see."

"Well, we'll be sure to get some answers from her."

"Are you certain you want me to come?"

"There's safety in numbers," Todd said. "Drink your coffee and let's get
| going."

 Katya hadn't wasted any time weeping over Todd's departure. What was
the use? She'd shed more than her share of tears over men and their
betrayals across the years. What good had any of her weeping ever done
her?

Besides, it wasn't as if she'd truly lost the man; he'd simply drifted
away from her for a few hours, that was all. She'd get him back, humbled
and begging to be returned into her company. After all, hadn't she let
him kiss her? Hadn't she let him fuck her, there in the Devil's Country?
He could never forget those memories.

Oh, he could try. He could put a hundred women, a thousand, between the
two of them, but it wouldn't work. Sooner or later he'd come crawling
back to her for more of what only she could give him, and nothing that
fat bitch of a woman who'd coaxed him away could say would keep him from
coming back. A man like Todd had nothing in common with a creature like
that. He understood the world in ways she could not even guess at. What
hope did she have of seeing with his eyes, even for a moment? None. She
was a workhorse. Todd had lived with beauty too long to put up with the
presence of something so charmless for very long.

After a few hours of her clumsy company, he'd be off.

She had only one fear: that owing to the artful way her Canyon had been
hidden, he wouldn't be able to find his way back to her.

The city had never been a simple place even during the years she'd lived
in it; it was easy to get lost or distracted. How much more complicated
would it be now, especially for someone like her poor Todd, whose soul
was

so muddled and confused. She knew how that felt, to have everyone
falling over themselves to adore you one moment, and the next to find
that those same people had given their devotion over to somebody else.
It turned everything upside down when that happened; nothing made sense
anymore.

You started looking around for something to hold on to; something firm
and solid, that wouldn't be taken away. In such a mood of desperation,
it was possible you could make a mistake: choose the wrong person to
believe in, the wrong path to follow. Even now, he could be moving away
.> from her.

The more she contemplated that prospect the more it became appar-1 ent
that she was going to have to go and find him.

The idea of venturing out of her Canyon filled her with a mingling of|
fear and anticipation.

The world! The great, wide world!

It was three-quarters of a century since she'd stepped beyond the|

Hi bounds of the Canyon; and though she'd had plenty of clues as to the
wsq|| things had changed, from those who'd come here after their
decease,: would still be an intimidating experience for her to venture
out there,8' even on a mission of love.

But what other choice did she have? Without him, her hopes were itf|
ruins. She had to go and find him, it was as simple as that. And on the
back, once they were together again, maybe she'd have the strength heart
to visit some of the places she'd known and loved in her youth; just 1
see how time had altered them. But then again perhaps that wouldn't 1
such a good idea. It troubled her enough to look out of the window and I
the stretches of land that had been dust roads and shacks and orange j
in her time now completely transformed into towers of steel and What if
she were to discover that some precious place she'd loved had 1
desecrated; rendered unrecognizable? Though she liked to think she
fearless, in truth time was taking its toll on the resilience of her
soul.

But then, of course, this whole quest was a test of her streng wasn't
it?

Venturing beyond the perimeters of her Canyon, beyond the reach <

the magic that had preserved her perfection, was gambling with her
life.

She had no way of knowing for certain but she guessed that the further
she ventured, and the longer she remained away from the Canyon, from the
house and all it contained, the more vulnerable she'd be to the long-
postponed indignities of old age. After all, beneath this veneer of
youth she was a Methuselah. How long could she afford to be out in the
rap tureless world before the shell cracked and the crone inside, the
hag that the Devil's Country had obscured with its magic, was unveiled?

It was terrifying. But in the end, it came down to this: finding Todd
was worth the risk. If she survived the journey they would come back to
the Canyon and initiate a new Golden Age. It wouldn't be like the
previous Age of Gold, with its foolish excesses. This would be a more
profoundly felt time, when instead of using the Devil's Country like a
cross between a two-bit ghost-train ride and a fountain of youth, it
would be respected as the mystery it was.

Despite the perverse pride she'd taken in showing Todd the orgiasts in
the Canyon, and in letting him share their excesses, Katya's appetite
for the witless hedonism of the twenties had long since passed away. And
though Todd had happily played the sensualist, she was sure that he too
had seen enough of the tawdriness of such spectacles. It was time they
behaved as owners of something genuinely marvelous; and treated it
respectfully. Together, they would begin an exploration of the world
Lilith had made. Katya had never possessed the courage to explore it as
it deserved to be explored, road by road, grove by sacred grove.
Certainly she'd seen plenty there over the years that had inflamed her
sexual self (women tethered to the underbellies of human-horses, in a
constant state of ecstatic agony); and she would not scorn such
spectacles if they came on them again. But these were other sights,
designed to arouse the spirit not the loins; and it was to those places
she wanted to take Todd.

There were enough diversions and wonders to keep them enchanted for
decades to come. Though the heavens were fixed in the same configuration
whenever she visited the Country, there was nevertheless evidence that
the earth was still obeying some of its ancient rhythms.

There was, for instance, in the swamp, a manmade lake perhaps half a
mile wide, which seemed to have been for many generations the place
where a certain species of eel, the infants silver-blue, with great
golden eyes, came in their millions--each no longer than her little
finger--but sufficient in number that they filled the place of their
birth to brimming when they spawned. For a day--when the larval eels
appeared--this

Genesis Bowl, as Katya had named it, was a feasting place for birds of I

"I every kind, who were literally able to walk on the squirming backs of
|

their feast, taking all they could before lifting off (some so fat with
food!

they could barely fly) and retiring to the nearest branch to digest
their!

mighty meal. The next day (if the Country could be said to have days)
the J Genesis Bowl was empty, but for a few thousand runts that had
perished| in the exodus, and were being picked up by carrion cows and
wild dogs.

She wanted to show this glorious spectacle to Todd; wanted to wadej into
the living mass of baby eels and feel them against her naked flesh.

On another day they might go to a place she knew where there was; beast
that spoke prophetic riddles; which had twice engaged her in cor
versation which she knew would make sense if she had the education to"

decode its strange poetry. It had the body of a huge bird, this riddler,
withj a man's head, and it sat, close to the ground, with a vast array
of glittering gifts around the base of its tree, offered for its
prophecies. She'd come t(3 it a year ago, with some jewelry she had worn
in Nefertiti.

"Is it real, the gift you give me?" the creature, whose name Yiacaxis,
had asked her.

"No," she had admitted. "I am an actress. These baubles are what | wore
when I was an actress."

"Then make them real for me," Yiacaxis had said, clicking his old j
tongue against his cracked beak. "Play me the scene in which you wofl
them." "It was silent," she said.

"That's good," he replied. "For I am very deaf in my old age."

She shed most of her clothes, and put on the jewelry. Then she play the
scene from Nefertiti in which she discovers that her lover is dead by t

order of the envious Queen, and she kills herself out of tragic longing
for him.

The old bird-man wept freely at her performance.

"I'm pleased it moved you so much," Katya had said when she was done.

"I accept your offering," the creature had replied, "and I will give you
your answer."

"But you don't even know my question yet."

Yiacaxis clicked and cocked his head. "I know you wonder if there will
ever be a love worth dying for in your life? Is that your question?"
"Yes," she said. She would perhaps not have asked it that way, but the
prophet was notoriously short-tempered with those who attempted to press
him.

"There are two multitudes," he said. "One within you. One without.

Should he love you enough to name one of these legions, then you will
live in bliss with the other."

Of course she desperately wanted to ask him what this meant; but the
audience was apparently already over, for Yiacaxis was raising his black
wings, which were lined with little knots of human hair, tied up in
ribbons that had long ago lost their color. Thousands of locks of hair,
in wings that spread perhaps twenty feet from tip to tip. Without a
further word, he closed them over his melancholy face, and the shadows
of the tree seemed to close around him a second time, so that he was
invisible.

Perhaps, if she had the courage, she would go back to Yiacaxis, with
Todd, and ask him another question. Or this time Todd should do the
asking.

And when they had questioned the Prophet Bird, and seen half a hundred
other wonders in the Devil's Country, Katya would take Todd to a certain
ship with which she was familiar, which had surely been made for a king,
it was so finely wrought.

It had foundered on some rocks along the shore, and there it had been
left, high and dry, many years ago. For some reason no looters had ever
attempted to despoil this sublime vessel, perhaps because they feared

 some royal revenge. The only damage done to the vessel was the
breaking of its hull by the rocks; and the inevitable deterioration of
its exterior paintwork by wind and rain. Inside, it remained a place of
incomparable luxury, its beautiful carved bed heaped with white furs,
the wine still sweet in its flagons, the under in its fireplace still
awaiting a flame. She had often fantasized about taking a lover to the
ship, making love to him on the furs. If they were lucky, the wind would
get up when they were crav died in the comfort of one another's arms.
The wind would whistle in the ropes and the scarlet sails would billow,
and they would imagine, as they made love, that they were on a voyage to
the edge of the world.

It would be naive to speak lovingly of the Devil's Country without
allowing that it had its share of horrors.

There were species in the forests, and the ravines and the black silent
pools between the rocks, that had been invented by some benighted mind.
There were terrible arenas, where monsters were goaded to per; form acts
of horrible violation upon women, and sometimes upon menl and even
children. But having viewed several of these spectacles herself, I she
could not deny that they were perversely arousing. Some had the rigor of
ceremonies, others seemed to be simple arenas of cruelty, where- I
anything might be viewed if it was paid for.

The point was that she'd seen so little, and that there was so much I
her to see; a private wonderland where she and Todd could go advent ing
whenever they tired of the Canyon. They could explore it to its ver
limits; and when they were weary and needed to sleep, they could simplj
step through the door and lock it, and retire to bed like any loving pa
and sleep peacefully in one another's arms.

But first she had to find him; and to find him she needed a chauffev
Only one man fitted that bill: Jerry Brahms. They had known one anot for
so many years. That was why she'd sent out the dream-summons > him. He
was loyal; he would come without fail. It was only a matter I time
before he turned up at the house, ready to do her bidding. He probably
on his way up, even now.

It didn't take her long to dress. She had wardrobes full of gowns
designed by some of the greatest names in Hollywood history, but they
were all too showy for this modest adventure. So she chose
conservatively: an immaculately-tailored black dress. She kept her hair
simple and her makeup discreet.

She was all dressed and ready to go, but there was still no sign of
Jerry.

Thinking that perhaps he'd mistakenly assumed she would wait for him in
the big house, she decided to wander down through the twilight to look
for him. If he hadn't arrived, then she'd wait for him at the front
gate, so that there'd be no chance of their missing one another.

It was a walk she'd taken countless times, of course; though the pathway
rose and dipped, she could have done it in safety blindfolded.

The night wasn't as clear as it had been when she and Todd had come out
walking; there were rainclouds banked in from the north, and the air was
sultry. It was going to be one of those nights when you longed for a
heaven-and-earth-shaking thunderstorm, the kind she remembered from her
childhood. But such events were rare in Los Angeles. All the great
storms she'd seen here had been cooked up by lighting men and rain
machines; pure artifice.

She knew she was being watched as she walked. There "wasn't a movement
she made in the open air that the ghosts or their half-breed children
did not observe. They had even made spy-holes in the walls of her little
house, she knew. They watched her at her toilette; they watched her as
she read and day-dreamed; they watched her as she slept.

She'd several times attempted to stop them and punish their voyeurism;
but every time Zeffer plugged up the holes more appeared, and finally
she'd given up the game as fruitless. If they wanted to watch her while
she slept, then let them go ahead. Indeed until Todd had come into her
life the idea of having somebody to watch over her--even if their
motives were as hard to calculate as those of her voyeurs--was close to
comforting.

Needless to say there was also a measure of danger in the proximity of
these revenants. Katya didn't doubt that there were among their number
some who would gladly have seen her dead, blaming her for the fact that

their afterlife in Coldheart Canyon was a pitiful thing. Of course she
didn't blame herself. If her guests hadn't been so hungry to taste the
pleasures of the Devil's Country then they wouldn't be so obsessively
drawn to it. But as long as they kept a respectful distance (why would
they not, when she controlled the very thing they wanted for
themselves?) then she would not persecute them.

They had their journey, she had hers.

She had reached the unkempt lawn, and paused there to take in the
spectacle of the house. The wind-chimes rang on four or five balconies,
lending their beauty to the grand facade. As she listened to their music
she heard sounds from the thicket on the other side of the lawn.

She glanced back. There was still sufficient light in the evening sky to
see the motion in the blossom-laden branches. There were several
creatures following her, she guessed.

She watched the bushes for half a minute, until the motion died down. >
It wasn't unusual for creatures to follow her when she went out
walking,!

but there was something different about this. Or was it that she was
differ* ent? That tonight she was alive as she'd not been alive in many
years, her heart quickened by love; and that they sensed a new
vulnerability in her?

She didn't like that. The last thing she wanted was for them to imagine
1 they could intimidate her, or somehow wrest a little power from her.
Lovel might have made her step a little lighter, but she was still the
Queen Coldheart Canyon, and if they pushed her she would respond with he
old severity.

As she watched the thicket, the last of the light went from the sky, and
the darkness revealed several bright points of light in the bushes, whe
the revenants were standing, watching her. Even after all these years :
could still be discomfited by a sight like this; by the fact that the
dead we around her in such numbers.

Enough, she thought to herself, and turning on her heel hurried towa the
stairs that led back up to the house.

As she did so she heard the swish of grass against swiftly running lirnt
They were coming across the lawn in pursuit of her.

She picked up her pace, until she reached the relative safety of the
stairs.

Behind her, a soft voice, sounding as though it came from a palate full
of pulp and disease, said: "Let us in." There was a moment's silence.
Then another said, "We just want to come back into the house."

"We won't do any harm," said a third.

"Please, let us in ..."

She'd been wrong about the numbers of revenants assembled here, she
slowly realized. She'd thought there were perhaps ten, but there were
two or three times that number out there in the darkness. Whatever the
decayed and corrupted condition of their palates, they all attempted to
say the same thing:

"Let us in. Let us in. Let us in."

She would have ignored them, once upon a time: turned her back on their
pleas and climbed the stairs. But she was changing. Katya the heart
breaker--the woman who'd never given a damn for what anybody but herself
wanted--was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. If she was going to
come back with Todd and live here, they couldn't enjoy the idyllic life
she had in mind while these hungry souls waited outside. Even with the
five iron icons hammered into the threshold of each of the doors, and in
the sills of even the smallest windows, their presence preventing the
dead from ever setting foot in the house, the occupants were in a state
of siege. It was no place to have a honeymoon.

She raised her hand to silence their murmuring.

"Listen to me," she said.

The chorus began to subside.

"I'm going to be leaving the house for a few hours," Katya said, her
voice a little tentative at the beginning, but gaining strength as she
proceeded.

"But when I come back I intend to make some changes. I don't want you
living in misery. That has to stop."

She started to turn away, intending to leave the statement there. But
some of her congregation didn't want to let her go without hearing
something more specific in her reply.

"What changes are you going to make?" someone demanded.

"Is that you, Roman?" Katya said, scanning the crowd.

The speaker didn't have time to identify himself. There were more
questions. Somebody wanted to know why she was leaving; somebody else
demanded to know how long they would have to wait.

"Listen to me, listen to me," she said, quieting the rising hubbub. T
understand that you all want to come into the house. But I don't think
you I understand the consequences."

"We'll take them, whatever they are," somebody said. There was a gen- j
eral murmur of agreement to this.

"If that's what you want," Katya replied, "I will consider it. When I
gets back--"

"What if you don't come back?"

"Trust me. I will."

"Trust you? Oh please." The mocking voice emerged from a bitterj painted
face among the crowd. "You tricked us all. Why the hell should we trust
you now?"

"Theda," Katya said, "I don't have the time to explain right now."

"Well you hold on, honey, because we want some answers. We've hac years
of waiting to go back into that room--"

"Then you can afford to wait a few hours more," Katya replied, without
waiting for Theda Bar a to come back with a retort she turned; headed on
up the steps to the top of the flight.

There was a moment--just a quarter of a beat, there at the top of 1
stairs--when she thought she'd misjudged her audience, and they'd cor up
the stairs after her, their patience finally exhausted. But they'd st
below. Even Theda. Perhaps somebody had caught hold of her arm, keep her
from doing something stupid.

Katya opened the back door, stepping over the threshold. Occasiona in
the last several decades, one of the assembly outside had taken it ii
his head to test the power of the icons Zeffer had brought back frol
Romania and had personally hammered deep into the wood. The icons were
called, Zeffer had told her, the Iron Word. It was power

magic designed to drive off anything that did not belong beside cot or
hearth. Katya had never actually witnessed what happened when one of the
phantoms had tested the threshold. She'd only heard the screams, and
seen the looks of terror on the faces of those who'd goaded the victim.
Of the trespasser himself, nothing remained, except a rise in the
humidity of the air around the threshold, as though the revenant had
been exploded into vapor. Even these traces lingered for only a moment.
As soon as the air cooled, the witnesses retreated from the door, looks
of terror still fixed on their faces.

She had no idea how the Iron Word worked. She only knew that Zeffer had
paid a member of Sandru's scattered brotherhood a small fortune to
possess the secret, and then another sum to have the icons created in
sufficient numbers that every door and window be guarded. It had been
worth the investment: the Iron Word did its job. Katya felt like her
mother, who'd always boasted that she kept a "clean house." Of course
Mother Lupescu's definition of moral cleanliness had been purely her
own.

You could fuck her twelve-year-old daughter for a small coin, but you
could not say Christ when you were shooting your load between her tiny
titties without being thrown out of the house.

And in her turn that twelve-year-old had grown up with her own
particular rules of domestic cleanliness. In short: the dead did not
cross the threshold.

You had to draw the line somewhere, or all Hell would break loose. On
that Mama Lupescu and her daughter would have agreed.

She got herself a cup of milk from the refrigerator to calm her stomach,
which always troubled her when, as now, she was unsettled for some
reason or another. Then she went through the house, taking her time
passing from one room to another, and as she came to the front door she
heard the sound of a car coming up the street. She stepped outside, and
walked along the front path until she reached the pool of light from the
car's headlights.

"Is that you, Jerry?"

A car door opened.

"Yes, it's me," he said. "Was I expected?"

"You were."

"Well, thank God for that."

She went to the little gate, and stepped out onto the narrow sidewalk.;
Jerry had got out of the car. He had a barely-suppressed look of shock
on I his face, seeing her step beyond the bounds of her little dominion
for thesj first time.

"Are we actually going somewhere?" he asked her.

"I certainly hope so," she said, playing it off lightly. She could not
com-!

If.

pletely conceal her unease, however. It was there in her eyes. But
there!

was also something else in her glance, besides the unease: something fad
more remarkable. A kind of sweetness, even innocence. She looked like a
girl out on her first Prom Night, tiptoeing to the edge of womanhood.

Amazing, Jerry thought. Knowing all that he did about Katya--all thatl
she'd done and caused to have done--to be able to find that look in he
memory banks, and put it up there on her face, so that it looked as real
asi it did; that was a performance.

"Where will I be taking you tonight, ma'am?" Jerry asked her.

"I'm not exactly sure. You see, we're going to be looking for some<|
body."

"Are we indeed? And may I take a guess at who?" Katya smiled. "Too
easy," she said.

"We'll find him for you. Don't you worry."

"You were the one who got him to come up here in the first place,
Jerryjj So you're the match-maker. And thank you. From both of us, thank
yc It's been quite a remarkable time for me, Jerry. I never thought I'd
ever I in love again. And with an actor." She laughed. "You'd think I'd
ha learned by now."

"I hope it's a happy mistake."

"Oh it is, Jerry. It's perfect. He's perfect."

"Is he?"

"For me. Yes. Perfect for me."



"So will you be joining him somewhere?"

"Yes."

"But you're not exactly sure where!"

"That's right."

"Well, I'm going to hazard a guess and say he's at Maxine's, because I
know she's having a big bash tonight. Do you want me to call her, and
ask her if he's there? Maybe tell her I'm bringing a special guest?"

"No, I think it's best we just do this quietly, don't you?"

"However you prefer. Tonight's your night." "I don't want any big
hoopla," Katya said. "I just -want to find him."

For a moment the illusion disappeared completely, and reality showed
itself: the desperate hunger of a woman who needed to find the love of
her life. Not tomorrow, or the day after, but tonight. She had no time
to waste, this woman; no time for error or procrastination.

"Shall we go?" she said.

"Ready when you are."

She went to the car and started to fumble with the doorhandle.

"Please," Jerry said. 'Allow me." He came round to the passenger side
and opened the door.

"Thank you, Jerry. How nice. Old-fashioned manners," she said. She got
into the car in one elegant movement. Jerry closed the door and went to
the driver's side. She was trembling, he saw; just the slightest tremor.

"It's going to be all right," he reassured her when he was settled in
beside her.

"Is it?" she said, with a smile too tentative to survive more than a
breath.

"Yes. It's going to be fine."

"He's the one, Jerry. Todd is the one. If he were to turn me down--"

"He's not going to do that, now is he?" Jerry said. "He'd be a fool to
say no to you. And whatever else Todd is, he's no fool."

"So find him for me. Will you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then I can start to live again."

 It had taken Todd a few minutes to get used to sitting behind the
wheel of the old Lincoln sedan which Marco had chosen, many years
before, as the vehicle in which he preferred to anonymously chauffeur
Todd around.

Sitting in the seat adjusted for Marco's huge frame made him
realize--for the first time in the chaotic sequence of dramas that had
unraveled since Marco's sudden death--how much he would miss the man.

Marco had been a stabilizing influence in a world that was showing signs
of becoming more unstable by the hour. But more than that: he'd been
Todd's friend. He'd had a good nose for bullshit, and he'd never been
afraid of speaking his mind, especially when it came to protecting his
boss.

There would come a time, Todd had promised himself, when he would sit
down and think of something to do that would honor Caputo's name.

He'd been no intellectual, so the founding of a library, or the funding
of .

the Caputo Prize for Scholastic Achievement, wouldn't really be
pertinent: it would need some serious thought to create a project that
reflected and honored the complexity of the man.

"You're thinking about Marco Caputo," Tammy said as she watched Todd
adjust to the spatial arrangements of the driver's seat.

"The way you said that, it didn't sound as though you liked him very
much." ;

"He was rude to me on a couple of occasions," Tammy said, making light
of it now. "It was no big deal."

"The fact is he was more of a brother to me than my own brother," he ;

replied. 'And I'm only now realizing how much I took him for granted.

Christ. First I lose my dog, then my best buddy--"

"Dempsey?"

"Yeah. He died of cancer in February."

"I'm sorry." Todd turned on the ignition. His thoughts were still with
Marco. "You know what I think?" he said.

"What?"

"I think that the night he got killed he wasn't just drunk. He was
panicked and drunk."

"You mean he'd seen something?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I mean. He'd seen something up at the house
and was running away." He drew a loud breath through his nose. "Okay.
Enough of the detective work. We can do some more of that when all this
is over. Right now, we're heading for Malibu."

On the way down to the ocean, Todd provided Tammy with a little portrait
of where they were going. She knew about the Colony, of course-- the
guarded community of superstars who lived in houses filled with Picassos
and Miros and Monets, with the ever-unpredictable Pacific a few yards
from their back doors, and--just a jump across the Pacific Coast
Highway--the Malibu Hills, which had been the scene of countless
wildfires in the hot season, and mud-slides in the wet. What she didn't
know was just how exclusive it was, even for those who were powerful
enough to write their own rules in any other circumstances.

"I was planning to buy this house next door to Maxine's place, way
back," Todd told her, "but my lawyer--who was this wily old fart called
Lester Mayfield--said: 'You're going to want to rip out that concrete
deck and take off the old shingle roof, aren't you?' And I said: 'You
betcha.' And he said: 'Well, dream on, buster, 'cause they won't let
you. You'll spend the next ten years fighting with the Colony Committee
to change the color of your toilet seat."

"So I didn't buy the place. They've lightened up on the rules a lot
since

then. I guess somebody must have pointed out that they were preserving
some pieces of utter shit."

"Who ended up buying the house next door to Maxine?"

"Oh ... he was a producer, had a deal with Paramount. Made some very
successful movies for them. Then the IRS taps him on the shoulder and
asks why he hasn't paid his taxes for six years. He ended up going to
jail, and the house stood empty."

"Nobody else bought it?"

"No. He wanted to be back making movies when he got out of the slammer.
Which is what he did. Went straight back into the business.

Made six more huge movies. And he still snorts coke from between the
tits of loose women. Bob Graydon's his name."

"Isn't he the one who had an artificial septum put in his nose because
he'd had the real thing eaten away by cocaine?"

"That's Bob. Where'd you hear that?"

"Oh, the National Enquirer probably. I buy them all in case there's
something about you. Not that I believe everything I read--" she added
hur- riedly.

"Just the juicy bits."

"Well after a time you get a feeling about what's true and what's not
true."

"Care to give me an example?"

"No."

"Go on."

"That's not fair. I'm screwed whatever I say. No! Wait! Here's one!
About two years ago they said you were going into a private hospital in|
Montreal to have your ding-a-ling enlarged."

"My ding-aling?"

"You know what I mean."

"Do you say ding-a-ling to Arnie? It is Arnie, isn't it?"

"Yes it's Arnie and no I don't say ding-aling."

"Tell me about him."

"There isn't much to tell."

"Why'd you marry him? Tell me that."

"Well it wasn't because of the size of his dick."

"Dick! That's what you call it: dick." "I guess I do," Tammy said,
amused, a little embarrassed to have let this slip. 'Anyway back to the
story in The Enquirer. They said you were in Montreal getting your
thingie--your dick--made bigger. Except I knew that wasn't true."

"How come?"

"It just didn't make any sense. Not after the articles I'd read about
you." "Go on," Todd said, fascinated.

"Well ... you know I read everything that's ever been written about you?
Everything in English. And then if there's a really important interview
in, say, Paris Match or Stern, I get it translated."

"Jesus. Really? What for?"

"So I can keep up with your opinions. And ... sometimes in the foreign
magazines they write the kind of things you wouldn't read in an American
magazine. One of them did a piece about your love-life. About all the
ladies you'd dated, and the things they'd said about you--"

"My acting?"

"No. Your ... other performances."

"You're kidding." "No. I thought you knew about these things. I thought
you probably signed off on them."

"If I read every article in every magazine--"

"You'd never make another movie."

"Exactly. So, go back to the article. The ladies, talking about me. What
does that have to do with the story in The Enquirer!"

"Oh just that here were all these women talking about you in bed--and a
few of them were not exactly happy with the way you treated them-- but
none of them said, even vaguely intimated that ..."

"I had a small dick."

"Right." "So I thought, there's no way he's gone to Montreal to have his
ding-a

ling enlarged because it's just fine as it is. Now. Can we move on, or
shall I throw myself out of the window from sheer embarrassment?"

Todd laughed. "You are an education, do you know that?"

"I am?"

"You are."

"In a good way?"

"Oh yeah, it's all good. It's all fine."

"You realize, of course, that there's stuff being written about you
right now, a lot of people upset and worried."

"Why?"

"Because nobody knows what happened to you. There are plenty of people,
fans of yours, like me, who think of you practically as a member of the
family. Todd did this. Todd did that. And now, suddenly, Todd's missing.
And nobody knows where he's gone. They start to fret. They start to make
up all kinds of ridiculous reasons. I know I did. It's not that they're
crazy--"

"No, look. I don't think you, or any of them, are crazy. Or if you are,
it's a good crazy. I mean, what you did last night ... none of my family
would have done."

"You'd be surprised how many people love you."

"They love something but I don't think it's me, Tammy."

"Why not?"

"Well for one thing, if you could get inside here, in my head with Todd
1 Pickett, you wouldn't find much worth idolizing. You really wouldn't.
I| am painfully, excruciatingly, ordinary. My brother, Donnie, on the
other!

hand: he's worth admiring. He's smart. He's honest. I was just the one!

with this." He turned on his smile as he drove and gave her the benefit
of its luminosity. Then, just as easily, he turned it off. "See, you
learn to do| that," he went on. "It's like a faucet. You turn the smile
on, and people| bathe in it for a while, then you turn it off and you go
home and wonc what all the fuckin' fuss was about. It's not like I
deserve the adulation of millions. I can't act. And I've got the reviews
to prove it." He chuckled a  his self-deprecation. "That's not mine," he
said, "it was Victor Mature."

"Okay, so you're not the best actor in Hollywood. You're not the worst
either."

"No. I grant you, there's worse."

"A lot worse."

"All right, a lot worse. Still doesn't make me a good actor."

He obviously wasn't going to be moved on the subject, so Tammy left it
where it was. They drove on in silence for a while. Then he swung the
mirror round, and checked out his face. "You know I'm nervous?"

"Why?"

"In case there's anybody at Maxine's place." He went back and forth
between studying his face and checking the road.

"You look fine," Tammy told him.

"I guess it's not so bad," he said, assessing his features.

"You just look a little different from the way you used to look."

"Different enough that people will notice?"

Tammy couldn't lie to him. "Sure they'll notice. But maybe they'll say
you look better. I mean, when everything's properly healed and you've
had a month's vacation."

"You will come in with me, won't you?"

"To see Maxine? My pleasure."

"Mind if I smoke?" He didn't wait for a reply. He just rolled down the
window, pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes, and lit up. The rush
of nicotine made him whoop. "That's better! Okay. We're going to do
this.

You and me. We're going to ask Maxine a lot of very difficult questions,
and figure out whether she's lying to us or not."

They had reached the Pacific Coast Highway, and the roar of the traffic
through the open window made any further talk impractical for a time.

They drove north for perhaps five miles, before coming off the PCH and
heading west. The area wouldn't have been Tammy's idea of idyllic.

Somehow she'd imagined Malibu being more like a little slice of Hawaii;
but in fact it was just a sliver of real estate two or three houses
deep, with the incessant din of the Pacific Coast Highway on one side
and a narrow strip of beach on the other. They'd scarcely driven more
than a quarter of

a mile when they came to the Colony gates. There was a guard-house, and
a single guard, who was sitting with his booted feet up beside a small
television.

The set went off as soon as they drove up, a broad smile appearing on
the man's face.

"Hey, Mister Pickett. Long time, no see."

"Ron, m'man. How goes it?"

"It goes good, it goes good."

The guard was clearly delighted that his name had been remembered.

"Are you going to Ms. Frizelle's party?"

"Oh ... yeah," Todd said, throwing a panicked glance at Tammy.

"We're here for that."

"That's great." He peered past Todd, at the passenger. 'And this is?"

"Oh, this is Tammy. Tammy, Ron. Ron, Tammy. Tammy's my date for the
night."

"Good going'," Ron said, to no one and about nothing in particular. Just
a general California yea-saying to the world. "Let me just call Ms.
Frizelle,:, and tell her you're on your way down."

"Nah," Todd said, sliding a twenty-dollar bill into Ron's hand. "We're*
going to surprise her." "No problem," Ron said, waving them by. "Good to
see you, by the I way--"

It took Tammy a moment to realize that Ron was talking to her.

"It's always good to meet a new friend of Mister Pickett's." The didn't
seem to be any irony in this: it was a genuine expression of feeling a

"Well, thank you," Tammy said, thrown a little off-kilter by this.

"Fuck. She's having a party," Todd said to her as they left the guar
house behind them.

"So."

"So there'll be lots of people. Looking at me."

"They've got to do it sooner or later."

Todd stopped the car in the middle of the street.

"I can't. I'm not ready for this."

"Yes you are. The more you put it off the more difficult it's going to
be."

Todd sat there shaking his head, saying: "No. No. I can't do it."

Tammy put her hand over his. "I'm just as nervous as you are," she said.
"Feel how clammy my hand is?"

"Yeah." "But we said we'd get answers. And the longer we take to ask
her, the more lies she'll have ready." "You do know her, don't you?" he
said.

"She's my nightmare."

"Really. Why?"

"Because she stood between me and you."

"Huh."

Silence.

"So what are we going to do?" Tammy said finally.

"Shit. I don't want to do this."

"So that makes two of us. But--"

"I know, I know, if we don't do it now ... All right. You win. But I
will beat the living shit out of the first person who says one word
about my face."

They drove on, the houses they were driving past far more modest in
scale and design than she'd expected. There was very little here of the
kitsch of Beverly Hills: no faux-French chateaux sitting side by side
with faux-Tudor mansions. The houses were mostly extremely plain,
boxlike in most cases, with very occasional architectural flourishes.
They were also very close to one another. "You wouldn't get much privacy
there," Tammy commented.

"I guess everybody just pretends not to look at everybody else. Or they
just don't care. That's more like it. They just don't care."

"That's the connection between you and Katya, isn't it? You've both been
looked at so much ... and the rest of us don't know what that feels
like."

"It feels like somebody's siphoning out your blood, pint by pint."

"Not good."

"No. Not good."

They rounded a corner, bringing their destination into view. The party
house was decorated with thousands of tiny white twinkle lights, as were
the two palm trees that stood like sentinels to left and right of the
door.

"Christmas came early this year," Tammy remarked.

"Apparently."

There were uniformed valets working the street; taking cars from the
guests and spiriting them away to be parked somewhere out of sight.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Todd asked Tammy.

"No more than you are."

"Want to go one more circle around the block?"

"Yes."

"Uh-oh. Too late."

Two valets were coming at the car bearing what must have been bur|
densome smiles. As the doors were opened, Todd caught tight hold of|
Tammy's hand. "Don't leave my side," he said. "Promise me you won't." "I
promise," she said, and raising her head she put on her best imper- j
sonation of someone who was rich, famous and belonged at Todd!

Pickett's side. Todd relinquished the keys to the valet.

"May I assume this is your first A-list Hollywood party in the flesh?||
Todd said to Tammy.

"You may."

"Well then this could be a lot of fun. In a grotesque, 'there's a shark
I the swimming pool' sort of way."

 There came a point, as Jerry's car was carrying Katya out of Coldheart
Canyon for the first time in the better part of three-quarters of a
century, when her fears seemed to get the better of her. Jerry heard a
voice, as dry as a husk, out of the darkness behind him: "I'm sorry ...
I don't know that I can do this."

"Do you want me to turn around?" he asked her. "I will if you want me
to."

There was no reply. Just the soft sound of frightened weeping. "I wish
Zeffer was still here. Why was I so cruel to him?" None of this seemed
to be for open discussion. It was more like a private confessional. "Why
am I such a bitch? Jesus. Jesus. Everything I've ever loved ..." She
stopped herself, and looked up at Jerry, catching his reflection in the
mirror. "Don't mind me. It's just a crazy old woman talking to herself."

"Maybe we should go back and find Mister Zeffer? He could come with you.
I realize there was some bad blood between you--"

"Zeffer's dead, Jerry. I lost my temper with him, and--"

"You killed him?"

"No. I left him in the Devil's Country. Wounded by one of the hunters."

"Lord."

Jerry brought the car to a halt. He stared out of the window, horrified.

What would you like me to do?" he said after a while. "If you can't go
on without him, I mean." "Take no notice of me," Katya said, after a
short period of reflection.

I'm just feeling sorry for myself. Of course I can go on. What other
choice do I have?" She took another moment to study the passing world.
"It's just that it's been a long time since I was out in the real
world."

"This isn't the real world, it's LA."

She saw the joke in that. They laughed together over the remark, and
when their laughter had settled into smiles, he got the car going again,
down the hill. At some unidentified point between the place where her
faith had almost failed her and Sunset Boulevard, they crossed the
boundary of Coldheart Canyon.

Their destination was already decided, of course, so there wasn't much
reason to talk as they went. Jerry left Katya to her musings. He knew
his Hollywood history well enough to be sure that she would be
astonished by what she was seeing. In her time Sunset Boulevard had been
little more than a dirt track once it got east of what was now Doheny.
There'd been no Century City back then, of course, no four-lane highways
clogged with sleek vehicles. Just shacks and orange groves and dirt.

"I've been thinking," Katya said, somewhere around Sepulveda.

"About what?"

"Me and my wickedness."

"Your what? Your wickednessy'

"Yes, my wickedness. I don't know why it came into my mind, but it did.
If I think about the women I've played in all my really important
pictures, they were all wicked women. Poisonous. Adulterers. One who
kills her own child. Really unforgivable women."

"But don't most actors prefer to play bad characters? Isn't it more
fun?" j

"Oh it is. And I had a lot to inspire me."

"Inspire you?"

"As a child, I saw wickedness with my own eyes. It had its hands on me/
Worse, it possessed me." Her voice grew cold and dark. "My mother ran a|
whorehouse, did I ever tell you that? And when I was ten or so, she jv
decided one night it was time to make me available to the customers."

"Jesus." "That's what I said to myself. Every night, I said: Jesus,
please help \ Jesus, please come and take me away from this wicked
woman. Take me Heaven. But he never came. I had to run away. Three times
I ran away I my brothers found me and dragged me back. Once she let them
have I as a reward for finding me."

 "Your own brothers?"

"Five of them."

"Christ."

"Anyway, I succeeded in escaping her eventually, and when you're a
thirteen-year-old, and you're out in the world on your own, you see a
lot thirteen-year-olds shouldn't have to see."

"I'm sure you did."

"So I put all that I saw into those women. That's why people believed in
them. I was playing them for real." She fumbled at the inside of the
door. "Is there some way to open this window?"

"Oh yes. It's right there. A little black button. Push it down."

She pushed and opened the window a crack. "That's better," she said.

"You can have it all the way down."

"No, this is fine. I'll take it in stages, I think."

"Yes, of course."

"Going back to the pictures, I wonder if you'd do me a favor, when we
get back to the house?"

"Of course. What?"

"In my bedroom in the guest-house there are six or seven posters from
those early films of mine. I've had them up there for so long all around
the bed, I think it's time I got rid of them. Will you burn them for
me?"

"Are you sure you want them burned? They're worth a fortune."

"Then take them for yourself. Put them up for auction. And the bed. You
want the bed too?"

"There isn't room for it in my apartment, but if you want me to get rid
of it for you--"

"Yes, please."

"No problem."

"If you make some money from it, then spend it. Enjoy it."

"Thank you."

"No, it's me who should be thanking you. You've been a great comfort to
me."

"May I ask you why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you getting rid of all that stuff now?"

"Because everything's changed for me. That woman I used to be has gone.
So are all the things she stood for."

"They were just films."

"They were more than that. They were my memories. And now's the time to
let go of them. I want to start over with Todd."

Jerry drew a deep breath to reply to this, but then thought better of it
and kept his silence. Katya was acutely aware of every nuance in her
immediate locality, however; even this.

"Say what's on your mind," she said.

"It's none of my business."

"Say it anyway. Go on."

"Well I just hope you're not relying too much on Todd Pickett. You know
he's not all that reliable. None of them are, these younger guys.

They're all talk."

"He's different."

"I hope so."

"We can't ever know why things happen between two people. But' when it
feels right, you have to go with your instincts."

"If he's so right for you, why did he run out on you?"

"That was my fault, not his. I showed him some things which were3 more
than he was ready to see. I won't make that mistake again. And ther he
had some woman with him, Tammy Somebody-or-Other, who just trying to
steal him away. Do you know her?"

"Tammy? No. I don't know a Tammy. Oh wait. I do. I had a call froflj the
police in Sacramento. She went missing."

"And they called you? Why?"

"Because I know Todd. Apparently, this Tammy woman runs his club."

Katya started to laugh.

"That's all she is to him?" she said.

"Apparently."

"She runs his fan club?"

 "That's my understanding."

"So there's no romance between them?"

"No. I don't even think they really know one another."

"Well, that solves that."

"It does and it doesn't," Jerry said cautiously. "She still persuaded
him to go with her."

"Then it's up to me to persuade him to come home," Katya purred.

She pressed her window button, and kept it down until the window was
entirely open. Jerry caught a glimpse of her in the mirror. The last of
her caution and her fear had evaporated. She was luxuriating in the warm
wind against her face; eyes closed, hair shining.

"How much farther?" she asked him, without opening her eyes.

"Another ten minutes."

"I can smell the ocean."

"Well, we're at Fourth Street. Four blocks over, there's the beach."

"I love the sea."

"Todd has a yacht, did you know that? It's docked in San Diego."

"You see? Perfect." She opened her eyes, catching Jerry's gaze in the
mirror, demanding a response from him.

"Yes, it's perfect," he said.

She smiled. "Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For everything. Bringing me here. Listening to me, indulging me.

When things have settled down and Todd and I have made the Canyon a more
civilized place, we're going to start inviting people over, just a few
special friends, to share the beauty of the place. You never saw the
house at its best. But you will. It is magnificent."

"Oh I'm sure."

"And that's how it's going to be again, after tonight."

"Magnificent?"

"Magnificent."

 This was Tammy's Cinderella moment: her dream come true. All right^f
perhaps all the details weren't perfect. She could have looked a little
morel glamorous, and she would have liked to lose another twenty-five
pounds.?!

And they could have been coming in through the front door instead ofjj
slipping in at the side to avoid the photographers. But she was happy to
j take what fate was giving her: and fate was giving her a chance to
walk!

into an A-list party on the arm of Todd Pickett.

Everywhere she looked there were famous faces, famous smiles,!

famous gazes, famous figures swathed in gowns by famous designers,
famous fools making jokes that had everyone in their circle breathless!

'3

with laughter, famous power-brokers telling tales of how they'd made al
million in a minute, and the less famous wives of these power-brokers 1
tening with their lids half-closed because if they had a buck for every
I they'd heard these tired old tales they'd be able to divorce their
dead weights of husbands.

And hanging on the arms of the famous (much as she was hanging < Todd's
arm) were younger men and women who watched their compa long with the
kind of eyes Tammy was reserving for the hors d'oeu\ There was appetite
in those eyes. One day, those gazes seem to say, I' have all that you
have. I will own cars and yachts and palaces and hot I will have a small
vineyard in Tuscany and a large ranch in Big Si Country. There will be
no door that will be closed to me; no ear that ^ not attend to my
concerns. When I drop my purse, somebody will pi<*| up for me. When my
car is empty of gas, it will be miraculously filled (a

 the ashtrays emptied). If the drink in my hand is getting low, it will
be replenished without my requesting it. When I am hungry, somebody will
make food that will be so exquisitely shaped that every mouthful will be
like a little meal unto itself.

In fact, the food was drawing her attention about as much as the famous
faces. She'd never seen such exquisite little confections, and each one
had a description, proffered by its server, much of which was so remote
from Tammy's experience she didn't understand it. Slices of rare
marinated this on slices of smoked that, drizzled with--

Oh what the hell? She'd take two. No, make that three. It was only
finger-food, for God's sake, and she was hungry.

To wash it all down she'd accepted a Bellini from a dazzling waiter as
soon as she'd stepped inside, and it tasted so sweet and harmless she
downed two-thirds of her glass before she realized how potent it was. In
truth, however, it would scarcely have mattered if she'd downed five
Bellinis and fallen flat on her face. She was invisible as far as these
people were concerned. The glacial beauties and their handsome swains,
the deal-makers and the word-splitters, none of them wanted to concede
her ragged presence in their gilded midst: so they simply looked the
other way. Once or twice she caught the tail of a mystified glance laid
upon her, but these were from amateurs at the game. To the true
professionals --which is to say most of the people in this assembly--she
was simply a non-presence. She could have been standing right in their
line of vision and somehow their gaze would have slid off her and around
her; anything to avoid seeing her.

She caught tight hold of Todd's hand. So much for the Cinderella
fantasy.

It was a nightmare.

Much to her delight Todd clutched her hand in return. His palm was
pouring sweat.

"They're all looking at me," he said, leaning close to her.

"No, they're not."

"Hi, Todd."

"Hi, Jodie. Good to--see that? They say hi then they move on. She's

gone already Hi, Steven! When are you--? Too late. He's off It's
fucking I uncanny."

"Where's Maxine?"

"I haven't seen her yet. She's probably out back. She likes to sit and
hold J court at these things. She says only hostesses circulate."

"And she's not the hostess?"

"Fuck, no. These aren't her guests. They're her supplicants."

Tammy had seen some attractive-looking hors d'oeuvres sailing by. I
"I'll have one of those," she said, tapping the waiter on the shoulder.
"I; you don't ask in this place," she explained, as she took three, "you
don'tj get."

"Are they good?"

"What do I know? They're filling a hole. Very slowly. Doesn't anybody
have any appetite around here?"

"Not publicly."

To get to the back of the house he had led her into a larger roor
which--despite the fact that it was packed with guests--was almost
hushed as a library. A few people looked round at Todd--a few ever
attempted tentative smiles--but nobody made any move to break offi|
their whispered exchanges and approach him, for which Tammy wa grateful.
The density of famous faces was much the same in here as it 1 been next
door. This really was the creme de la creme: the people wb could get a
studio to spend several million dollars developing a script 1 simply
hinting that they might be in it when it was finished; the name above
the title that audiences knew so well they only used an actor's give
name when they were talking about the show: Bruce and Julia and Br3 and
Tom and all the rest. Next year, some portion of the crowd won have
slipped onto the B-list, after a dud or two. But tonight they were '<
the top of their game; famous among the famous. Tonight there wasn't
agency in the city that wouldn't have signed them on the spot; or a la!

night talk-show that wouldn't have bumped Einstein, Van Gogh and 1 Pope
to have them on. They were American royalty, the way that Pick and
Fairbanks had been royalty in the early years. Yes, there were me

 crowns now; more thrones. But there were also more fans, in every
corner of the world, men and women ready to fawn and obsess. In short,
none of these were people who hurt for want of admiration. They had a
surfeit of it, the way the rest of the world had a surfeit of
credit-card debt.

It was harder, in this more densely-populated space, for people not to
concede the presence of Todd, who took hold of several unoffered hands
and grabbed a couple of shoulders as he crossed the room, determined
that nobody would get away with pretending they hadn't seen him. And
when a fragment of conversation did spring up, as it occasionally did,
Todd very rapidly (and rather gallantly) made certain that Tammy was
introduced into the exchange.

"You don't need to do that," Tammy said, after the third such occasion.

"Yes, I do," Todd replied. "These sonsabitches think they can look the
other way and pretend you don't exist. Well fuck 'em. I've starred in
movies with some of these assholes. Movies you paid your seven bucks to
see. And they were mostly shit pictures. So I figure they owe you a
seven buck handshake."

She laughed out loud, thoroughly entertained by his heretical talk.

Whatever happened after this, she thought (and no fairy-tale lasted
forever), she'd at least have this extraordinary memory to treasure:
walking arm-in-arm with the only man she'd ever really loved through a
crowd of fools, knowing that even if they didn't look at her they still
knew she was there. And when she'd gone she'd be somebody they'd never
be able to figure out, which suited her just fine. Let them wonder. It
would give them something to do when they were studying their
reflections in the morning.

"There's Maxine," Todd said. "Didn't I say she'd be holding court?"

It was a couple of years since Tammy had seen Maxine Frizelle in the
flesh. In that time she had projected upon the woman an aura of power
which in truth she didn't possess. She was smaller and more fretful
looking than Tammy remembered: the way she was perched in a high backed
chair, her bare feet off the ground, was presumably designed to give off
the aura of childlike vulnerability, but in fact suggested just its

opposite. The pose looked awkward and artificial; her gaze was woe
rather than happy, and her smile completely false.

Todd let go of Tammy's hand.

"Are you doing this on your own from here?" she said to him.

"I think I ought to."

Tammy shrugged. "Whatever you want."

"I mean, it's going to be difficult." "Yeah ..." she said, the
observation given credence by the frigid st they were getting from the
patio.

"She's seen you," Tammy said.

She smiled in Maxine's direction. The woman was getting up off he chair,
her expression more bemused than angry. She leaned over and ^ pered
something to the young man at her side. He nodded in response, and left
the patio, heading indoors and weaving his way through the party-goers
toward Tammy and Todd.

Tammy grabbed hold of Todd's hand again. "You know what?" said.

"What?"

"I was wrong. We're going to do this together."

 Out on the street, Katya let the valet open the car door for her, her
eyes fixed on the house into which she was about to make an entrance. A
hundred thoughts were crowding into her head at the same time, all
demanding attention. Would anybody recognize her? Jerry had told her
many times her films remained widely seen and appreciated, so it was
inevitable somebody was going to figure out who she was. On the other
hand it had been the style in those days to slather your face in makeup,
so perhaps nobody would think to associate her with the high style of
those movies.

Nor, of course, would anybody assume that the Katya Lupi of The Sorrows
of Frederick or Nefertiti could possibly resemble the young woman she
still seemed to be. So again, perhaps her fears were groundless. And if
somebody did recognize her, against all the odds, then she'd swiftly
find some witty riposte about the brilliance of modern science, and let
them wonder. If she sent a few admirers off shaking their heads,
mystified by her untouched beauty, would that be such a bad thing?

She had nothing to fear from these people.

She was beautiful. And beauty was the only certain weapon against a
brutal mind or a stupid world. Why should that power have deserted her?

She looked around, subduing a little burst of panic, to find that Jerry
was not at her side.

"I'm here," he said, sauntering over from a very handsome and now
well-tipped valet. "I've been getting the scoop. Todd arrived a few
minutes ago."

Her face blossomed. "He's here?"



"He's here."

She was suddenly like a little child. "I knew this was going to work!" |
she said. "I knew! I knew!" Then, just as suddenly, a doubt: "Is that
woman 1 with him?"

"Tammy Lauper? Yes she is."

"I want you to separate them."

"Just like that?"

41 "Yes," she said, deadly serious. "Do whatever you have to do. I
justl want you to part them, so that I can talk to Todd on his own. As
soon as I| get a chance to do that, the three of us can be out of here."

"Suppose he wants to stay?"

"With herr

"No. Among his friends." "He can't," she said. "He won't want to, when
he sees me. He'll ji come. You'll see."

Her confidence was beguiling, whether it was fake or not. She took 1
arm, and they headed into the house. If Jerry had been expecting somi
grotesque echo of Sunset Boulevard he was pleasantly disappointed. Kat
met the cameras at the door with an expression of familiarity on her
face as though she were saying to the world: oh, there you are. She let
go of 1 hand at the threshold like a ship that suddenly finds the wind
again ; remembers what it has to do effortlessly. She turned and the
camerame got greedy for her: the flashes a blinding barrage, and she
bathing in 1 light as it glazed her bones and filled her eyes.

Of course none of them knew who the hell she was, so they reduced to
snapping their fingers and calling

"Miss. uh--?!"

"Over he Miss.--?" But she knew her job. She gave them all something
wonder something miraculous, and just as the frenzy was approaching its
heig abruptly refused to continue, thanking them all and sweeping away
in| the house, leaving them begging for more.

This sudden burst of activity had attracted attention, of course, the
faces in the room were turned toward the door when Katya enter wondering
who the hell could have just arrived. When it turned out to \

 a woman they did not even know the house became a gallery of whispers.

Jerry stayed two or three steps behind Katya as she crossed the room, so
he was able to see the range of responses her presence created. Envy,
more than anything: particularly on the faces of women who assumed they
were Katya's contemporaries. Who was this woman who was as young as or
younger than they were, prettier than they were, getting all the
attention they should have been getting?

On the faces of the young men, there were similar questions being
silently asked. Why is this damn woman more perfect than I am? Why does
she have more eyes undressing her than I do? Then there was that other
contingent of young men who were simply calculating their chances of
getting across the room to her side with a drink or a witty pickup line
before the opposition.

Katya played it perfectly. She was careful not to lock eyes with anyone,
so that she didn't get caught up in a conversation she wanted no part
of.

She looked back at Jerry, who pointed on across the room toward Todd.

And there he was, standing on the patio with Maxine. They were in the
midst of what looked to be a very unpleasant exchange. She was shaking
her head, turning away from him; he was following her, poking her in the
shoulder like a kid who's not getting his mother's full attention.

She ignored his importuning, and headed down a flight of stairs, which
led off the other side of the patio, down onto the beach.

The argument between Todd and Maxine had not gone unnoticed by the other
occupants of the room. Ever since Todd's appearance at the party, all
other subjects of whispered conversation had fallen by the wayside. It
was Pickett the guests were talking about. They were chiefly debating
his wounded appearance, of course, but now they were also discussing the
way he stumbled in angry pursuit of Maxine, and the subject of their
exchange, which had unfortunately now been taken out of earshot.

There were plenty of people in the room who would have liked to go out
onto the patio and follow Todd and Maxine down onto the sand, but the
only one who did so was Tammy. She pushed through a group standing

 between her and the patio door, maneuvered her way around a waiter
and\ a sofa, and headed outside.

The wind had got up a little since she and Todd had arrived. It blew
off!

the ocean, bringing with it the sound of raised voices. Tammy heard!

Maxine's voice first. She was demanding to know how Todd dared showf his
face--

Tammy crossed the patio to see if she could get a look at Todd. Did 1
need her help or not? As she approached the wooden railing an officiov
little man, with the improbable face of an ill-tempered troll, got in he
way. "Excuse me, but who the hell are you?"

"I'm a friend of Todd's. Are you the maitre d'?" There was a barely-sup
guffaw from one corner of the patio,!

Tammy glanced round to see a young man, almost as well dressed as the;
troll, composing his face.

"My name's Gary Eppstadt. I'm the Head of Paramount." "Oh," Tammy said.
"So?"

"So, you obviously don't belong on this patio."

"In point of fact, I think she did come with Todd," said anothe
onlooker, a woman in black, who was lounging against the railing as she
sipped her cocktail.

Eppstadt looked Tammy up and down as though he were assessing I
particularly unappealing heifer. The nakedness of his look so infuriat
her that she simply shoved him out of her way and went to the railing.

"Get security," Eppstadt said. "I want this bitch thrown out or I; lodge
a charge of assault." "Oh, for God's sake, Gary," the woman said,
"you're making a fool | yourself."

Only now did Tammy recognize the woman's soft drawl. It was Fa Dunaway
Her weary glance fell momentarily on Tammy. "She's doing any harm," Faye
went on. "Go inside and get yourself a Tammy glanced back over her
shoulder. Eppstadt was obviously unc tain how to respond. He first threw
a fiery glance at Dunaway, promptly threw it straight back. Then he
snapped at one of the three younger men doomed to be out here on the
patio at the same time.

"Christian?"

"Yes, sir?"

"What did I just say?"

"That ... you wanted security, sir?"

"And what are you doing?"

"Going to get them," the man said, hurrying away.

"Christ!" Dunaway murmured. "Didn't you hear what I said? She came in
with Todd."

"Well she doesn't belong in here," Eppstadt said. "With him or without
him. She's up to no good. Mind you, so's he. He wasn't invited either. I
should have security cart him away too."

Tammy turned from her spot at the railings.

"What is your problem?" she said. "This is nothing to do with you."

"Where the fuck did you come from?" he asked. "You look like a street
person. Is this Todd's idea of a joke? Bringing a street-person in
here?"

"Who are you, honey?"

"My name's Tammy Lauper, and I'm a friend of Todd's."

Eppstadt cut in here. "Friend in the sense of--?" "Friend as in friend,"
Tammy said. "Todd's been going through some hard times recently."

"No? Do tell."

"I'm afraid I'm not at liberty--" "He's working you, honey," Faye said.
"He knows all about the bad surgery.

The whole town does."

"As it happens I suggested the surgeon," Eppstadt said. "Brace Burrows.
He normally does first-rate work. Didn't he do some for you, Faye?"
"No," said Ms. Dunaway. "I don't need it yet."

"My mistake."

"But when I do I'll be sure to avoid him, judging by what he did to

Todd. That boy used to be damn-near perfect. The way Warren was perfect
fifty years ago. I mean, they were uncanny, both of them."

Tammy didn't bother to listen to the rest of the conversation. Instead
she slipped down the creaking wooden steps that led off the patio and
down onto the sand. The wash of light from the house lit the beach as
far as the surf, which was breaking quite boisterously. The beach, as
far as she could see, was immaculately clean. No doubt the residents
hired somebody to vacuum every morning, so that nothing unpredictable--a
whisky bottle, a stray condom, a dead fish--would disfigure the
perfection of their stretch of coastline.

The only items she could see on the beach were two human figures.

If Todd and Maxine had realized that Tammy was there, they gave not sign
of it. They simply kept up what they'd been doing for the last ten
minutes: arguing.

The wind carried most of their words away, but every now and again a
phrase would reach Tammy's ears. Maxine called him a "waste of time" at
one point, "all ego and no brains" at another. He called her "a
talentless bitch" and "a parasite." She mentioned, by way of response to
one of his assaults, that "the whole town knows you got a face-lift, and
that it went to hell." ;

"I don't care," Todd replied.

"Then you're even more of a fool than I thought you were," Maxindf
yelled back, "because that's your fucking reputation out the window."
"Watch my lips," Todd said, pointing to his mouth. "I don't care."

Several exchanges followed of which Tammy did not catch a singlej word.
She continued to approach the pair slowly, expecting at moment to be
seen by one or the other But they were too deeply involved| in
expressing their rage at one another to take notice of her.

The conversation had definitely changed direction, however, becav now,
when the wind brought fresh words in Tammy's direction, the sub-f ject
of the Canyon was under debate. And Todd was shouting.

"You set me up! You knew something weird was going on up there and you
set me up!"

 It was time to make this into a three-way conversation, Tammy decided,
stepping into Maxine's line of sight. But Maxine wasn't going to be
distracted from the subject at hand by Tammy.

"All right," she said to Todd. "So the house has a history. Is that such
a big deal?"

"I don't like messing with that stuff, Maxine. It's not safe."

"By that 'stuff' you mean what exactly?"

Todd dropped his voice to a near-whisper, but Tammy was close enough to
hear it. "The Canyon's full of dead people."

Maxine's response was to laugh; her laughter unfeigned. 'Are you high?"

"No."

"Drunk?"

"No." Todd wasn't about to be laughed off. "I've seen them, Maxine.

I've touched them."

"Well then you should file a report to the National Enquirer, not come
whining to me about it. As far as I'm concerned, this is our last
conversation."

"I want an explanation!"

"I'll give you one," Maxine said: "You're crazy."

"Jerry?"

Katya was at Jerry's side, her expression troubled. "Is there a way down
onto the beach along the side of the house?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Why?"

"Todd's down on the beach, being abused by that bitch of a manager."

"I'm sure he can stand up for himself."

"I just want to take him away, and I don't want to have to come back
through the crowd when I bring him back."

"Well let's see," Jerry said. He took hold of Katya's arm and together
they went back to the front door.

"I hate these people," Katya said, when they reached the foyer.

"You don't know any of them," Jerry said. "With respect."

"Oh believe me I do. They're the same old whores, fakes and fools. 1
Only the names have changed."

"Will you be leaving?" the valet wanted to know as they emerged from I
the house.

"No," Jerry said. "I was just showing my friend around the house. Do j
you know if there's a way down onto the beach?"

"Yes, of course. Just go back through the house--"

"We'd prefer not to go through the house."

"Well. I guess there's a pathway which runs down the side of the, house,
which takes you to the beach. But it's much easier--" "Thank you," Katya
said, catching hold of the man's gaze and smiling!

at him. "I'd just like to get away from the crowd."

If the man had any objections they faded away on the spot. He blushed,
at the directness of Katya's look, and stood aside. "It's all yours," he
said.

 On the beach Todd looked up toward the house. The patio was now so
crowded with spectators that people had gone into the kitchen and up to
the bedrooms so they could look out at the beach and watch the exchange
between himself and Maxine. A few of the partyers had wandered down the
patio, and were watching intently from there. The general level of
hubbub from inside had also dropped considerably. Word had got around
that a war of words was being fought on the sand, and if everyone would
just shut up for a minute or two, it would be more audible.

"You wish you'd never started this, now, don't you?" Maxine said.

"All I want is some answers."

"No, you don't. You want to embarrass me in front of my friends because
I let you go. Well, Todd, I'd had enough of you. It's as simple as that.
I was tired. I wanted to be free of you and your endless demands."

Maxine closed her eyes as she spoke, and for the first time in her life
Tammy had a morsel of sympathy for the woman. Despite her makeup and her
immaculate coiffure, nothing could disguise her genuine exhaustion.

When she said she wanted to be free of Todd, Tammy believed her.

"When I arranged for you to move into that house it was because it
seemed to serve your comforts. That was all I cared about. Now, you come
here yelling and swearing, and I think, to hell with your comforts.

It's about time they all heard the truth."

"Don't go there, Maxine."

"Why not? Why the hell not? You came here to cause trouble. Well

you're going to get trouble." She had raised her voice, so that she was
no\i plainly audible to the audience assembled on the patio and gathered
at the!

windows.

Todd had nowhere to run. The closer she got to him, the more he wasf
forced to retreat toward the house, and the more audible her wor became.

"Just tell the damn woman you're sorry, Todd," Tammy said. 'And let's!

get the hell out of here. This isn't the time or the place."

Maxine glanced at Tammy, conceding her existence here with them I the
first time. "You think he's going to apologize? To me? He doesn'|
understand the word sorry. You know why? He's never been wrong. At lea
the way he tells it."

"Well, he can make an exception, right, Todd?"

"Keep out of this," Todd snapped.

"I hid you away in that house because you asked me to hide you away--"
Maxine went on, her recollections delivered in the direction the
spectators. "You needed time to heal." "I'm warning you," Todd said.

Maxine went on, unintimidated. 'As I recall," she said, "your fac looked
like a piece of hammered steak, thanks to Doctor Burrows." "All right,
you win," Todd said. "Just stop right there."

"Why? They already know the truth, Todd. The whole town's bee gossiping
about your Phantom of the Opera act for weeks."

"Shut up, Maxine."

"No, Todd, I will not shut up. I've kept your fucking secrets for yea
and I'm not going to do it any longer." "Perhaps we should just go,
Todd," Tammy said.

"Don't waste your breath on him," Maxine said. "He's not going I sleep
with you. That's what you're hoping for, isn't it?"

"God," Tammy said. "You people."

"Don't deny it," Maxine snapped.

"Well, I am denying it. You think the world revolves around sex.

pathetic."  "Anyway, I didn't," Todd said, as though he wanted to be
sure that Maxine was not misled on the subject.

Something about his eagerness to have this particular fact set straight
distressed Tammy. She knew why. He was ashamed of her. Damn him!

Still concerned about his stupid reputation.

Maxine must have seen the anger and disappointment on Tammy's face,
because the rage in her own voice mellowed. "Don't let him hurt you,"
she said. "He's not worth it. Really he's not. It's just that he doesn't
want them up there"--she jabbed her finger in the direction of the
house-- "thinking he'd ever sink so low as to sleep with the likes of
you. Isn't that right, Todd? You don't want people thinking you fucked
the fat girl?"

The knife turned a second time in Tammy. She wished the beach would just
open up beneath her and swallow her, so she'd never have to see any of
these people ever again.

But there was still enough self-esteem left in her to challenge the son
ofabitch. What had she got to lose?

"Is that right, Todd?" she said. 'Are you ashamed of me?"

"Oh Jesus ..." Todd shook his head, then cast a furtive glance at the
house. There were probably sixty people on the patio and balconies now,
enjoying the spectacle below.

"You know what?" he said. "Fuck both of you."

With that he turned his back on Tammy and Maxine and started to walk off
down the beach. But Maxine wasn't going to let him get away so easily.
"We didn't finish talking about your healing, Todd."

"Leave it, Maxine--"

"The operation? The one to make you look a few years younger? The
facelift?"

He swung around at her. "I said: leave it or I will sue your fucking
ass."

"On what grounds? I'm just telling the truth. You're an arrogant,
spoiled, talentless--"

Todd stopped his retreat. His face looked blotchy in the light thrown
from the house; there was a tic beneath the left side of his mouth. The
expression of empty despair on his mis-made face silenced Maxine. Todd

 looked past both the women at the crowd that was watching all this 1
unfold.

Then he started to yell.

"Have you had enough? Well? Have you? She's right! It's all true! I did
get a jucking face-lift. You know why? That cunt! Eppstadt! Yes, you,
you fucking Quasimodo! You!"

Eppstadt had found a prime grandstand position to watch the I encounter
between Todd and Maxine, so there were plenty of eyes turned 1 in his
direction now. He didn't like the scrutiny any more than Todd had.

He shook his head and waved Todd's accusations away, then turned his, |
back and tried to disappear into the crowd.

But Todd kept on haranguing him. "You're the freak here, you know that?"
Todd yelled. "You fuck with our lives, you fuck with our heads, j Well,
you're not going to fuck with me anymore, because I'm not playing : your
game anymore. Hear me? I'm not playing!"

Todd suddenly ran at the patio and reached up through the railing tost
catch hold of Eppstadt's pants leg. Eppstadt turned on him.

"Get your hands off me!" he shouted, kicking at Todd as though he were s
a crazed dog.

Todd simply pulled harder on his leg, so that Eppstadt had to grab
hold1!

of somebody beside him to stop himself falling over. His face was
white,] with fury. The assault went to the very heart of his dignity;
this was a livfl ing nightmare for him, the mad-dog actor, the audience
of people whoi despised him, all drinking his embarrassment down like a
fine charn| pagne.

"You ain't getting away so easy, ugly-boy!" Todd said. "We're all in I
together."

"Pickett! Let go of me!" Eppstadt demanded. His voice had become; with
rage, beads of sweat popping out all over his face. "You hear me? J me
go!"

"When I'm done," Todd said. He pulled on Eppstadt again, dragging him a
few inches closer. "You miserable fucking shit. How many people have you
told to get their faces fixed, huh?"

"You \vere looking old," Eppstadt said.

"I was looking old? Ha! Look at you!"

"I'm not a movie star."

"No, and neither am I. I'm over all that. You know why? I've seen where
they go, Eppstadt. All the beautiful people, the stars. I've seen where
they end up."

"Forest Lawn?"

"Oh no. They're not in graves, Eppstadt. That's too easy. They're still
out there. The ghosts. Still thinking some fuck like you will give them
another chance."

"Will somebody get this crazy sonofabitch off me?" Eppstadt shrieked.

One of the waiters went down on his haunches in front of the railing,
took hold of Todd's hands and started pulling off his fingers one by
one.

"You better let go, man," the waiter quietly warned, "or I'm going to
start hurtin' you. And I don't want to do that."

Todd ignored him. He simply hauled on Eppstadt, which threw the older
man off-balance. The woman Eppstadt had been holding on to also toppled,
and would have come down hard had the crowd around her not been so
thick. Eppstadt was not so lucky, however. The people in his immediate
vicinity had moved away as soon as Todd had caught hold of his leg. Down
he went, catching the waiter a blow with his knee as he fell, so that
the other man was also sent sprawling.

Todd dragged Eppstadt toward the edge of the patio. There wasn't a
single witness to all of this who, knowing Eppstadt, didn't take
pleasure in the indignity they saw being visited on the man. People he'd
scorned and made to look like fools were now all silently hoping this
farce would escalate.

But Eppstadt was made of sterner stuff. He kicked at his attacker, the
first blow striking Todd's shoulder, the second hitting his nose and
mouth, a brutal blow. Todd let go of Eppstadt and fell back on the sand,
blood pouring from both nostrils, like two faucets switched on full
power.

Eppstadt scrambled to his feet, yelling: "I want that man arrested!
Right now! Right! Now!"



Todd looked up from his sprawl, his hand going to his face, coming away
red. A hundred faces now stared down at him. There wasn't a person at
the party--whether bartender, guest, waiter, toilet attendant or
valet--who had not forsaken the house to come out and see what all the
hubbub was about. They were all staring down at the famous, bloody face
on the sand, and the sprawled Eppstadt on the patio. Scandal didn't get
much better than this; this was a story to dine out on for years.

A few people had come down onto the sand, on the pretext of helping
Todd, perhaps, but actually, of course, to see better what was going on
and so have a clearer account for later. Nobody lent Todd a hand; not
even Tammy. She had retreated some distance, unwilling to provide these
witless fools with something else to laugh at.

Todd scrambled to his feet without help, and instinctively turned his
back on his audience. They'd already seen and heard far more than he
wanted them to see or hear. All he wanted now was to get away from their
snickering assessments.

"Fuck you all ..." he muttered to himself, wondering which way he should
go along the beach, left or right?

And then, straight ahead of him, he had his answer. Standing there at
the water-line, watching him, was Katya.

At first he didn't believe it was really her. What was she doing so far*
from her sanctuary? But if it wasn't her, then who?

He didn't wait for his senses to catch up with what his instinct already
I knew. Without looking back at the ridiculous circus behind him he
stum4| bled down the beach toward her.

Despite all that Katya had done, all that she was associated with in
Todd's mind, her smile was welcome to him now: her madness infinitely
prefer, able to that of Eppstadt and the mob behind him. He was done wit
them. Forever. This last humiliation was simply the final proof that did
not belong at this party any longer. For better or worse, he belongs in
the Canyon, with the woman standing at the water's edge, beckonii to
him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

She smiled. Oh that smile; still an astonishment!

"What do you think? I came to find you."

"I thought you'd never leave the Canyon."

"Sometimes I surprise myself."

He put his arm around her. An ambitious wave came up around their legs
and rilled his shoes with cold saltwater. He laughed, snorting through
the blood. It spattered her.

"God, I'm sorry. That's gross."

He went down on his haunches and brought a handful of water up to wash
his face, inhaling to cleanse his nostrils. The saltwater stung.

Katya came down to crouch in the surf beside him, her gaze going over
his shoulder.

"They're coming down from the house to get you," she warned.

"Fuck." He didn't need to glance back to confirm what she was saying.

Eppstadt would enjoy what came next, of course: having Todd arrested for
assault, hauled up before a judge. It would be headlines tomorrow; and
attached to it every detail of what Maxine had proclaimed to her guests.
Burrows would be shooed out of hiding, wherever he was, to tell his half
of the story; or--if he chose to stand by his Hippocratic oath and
remain silent--somebody would invent the details, or a nurse would spill
them. However it was verified (as though anything needed verification)
the secret was out.

But his story was only part of this. Katya? What about her secret? If
they got her into the spotlight as well as Todd, then the mystery of
Cold heart Canyon would become part of tomorrow's headlines. The
sanctuary would be violated by police and press; and when they'd gone,
by the public.

"I can't bear this," he said. He was ready to weep, for them both.

She took hold of his hand. "Then don't," she said.

She stood up, facing the sea, pulling on his hand so that he stood with
her. There were a few lights out there in the ocean, very remote.
Otherwise it was completely dark.

 "Walk with me," she said.

She couldn't mean: into the water?

Yes, she did.

She was already walking, and he was following, not because he liked I
the idea of striding off into the icy, roaring Pacific, but because the
alternative --the mockery of the audience on the shore; all the
interrogations that awaited him--was too much to contemplate. He wanted
to be away from all that, and if the only direction he could take led
him into the ocean, then so be it. He had her hand in his. That was all
he needed. For the first time in his life, that was all he needed.

"There are currents ..." he said.

"I know."

"And sharks."

"I'm sure."

He almost looked back but stopped himself.

"Don't bother," she said. "You know what they're doing."

"Yes ..."

"Staring at us. Pointing at us."

"Coming after us?"

"Yes. But not where we're going."

The water was up to Todd's waist now; and higher still on Katya, who ;
was a good six inches shorter than he. Though the waves weren't large I
tonight as they'd been at the height of the storm, they still had
sufficient ji power to throw them backward when they broke against their
bodies.

The force of one wave separated them, and Katya was carried back to
shore a few yards. Todd turned and went back to get her, glancing up at
j the beach as he did so. Though they were probably less than
twenty-five| yards out, the land already seemed very distant: a line of
sand scattered!

with people who'd come down to the water's edge to get a better view of|
whatever was going on. And beyond them, the houses, all bright with I
lights; Maxine's in particular. Down the path between the houses he
could J see the flashing yellow and blue of a police-car. It would only
be a matter|

 of time, he thought, before they sent a helicopter after them, with a
searchlight.

He reached Katya and caught hold of her hand. The glimpse of land had
filled him with new determination.

"Come on," he said. "I'll carry you."

She didn't protest this; rather, let him gather her up in his arms so
that they could continue their escape. He had become, he thought, a
monster in an old horror movie: grabbing the girl and carrying her off
into the night. Except that it was she who'd led him this far. So that
made them both monsters, didn't it?

She slipped her arms around his neck, and laid her head against his
chest. The water was so deep now that when the waves came and lifted
them up, his toes no longer touched the bottom. Curiously, he wasn't
afraid. They were going to drown, most probably, but what the hell? The
water was so cold his body was already becoming numb, and his eyelids
felt heavy.

"Keep ... hold ... of me ..." he said to her.

She pressed her mouth to his neck. She was warmer than he was, which for
some inexplicable reason he found amusing. She, who was so old, was the
one with the fever. The thought of that, of her body's heat, made him
voice his one regret.

"We ... never did it properly ... in a bed, I mean." "We will," she
said, kissing him on the mouth.

Another wave came, larger than most that had preceded it, and picked
them both up.

They did not break their kiss, though the water closed over their heads.

On the shore, there was plenty of commotion, but Tammy kept away from
the heart of it, moving off down the beach. She had watched Todd and
Katya getting smaller and smaller, her panic growing. Now they were
gone. Perhaps she just couldn't make them out any longer, and they'd
reappear in a moment, but she didn't have very high hopes of that. There

 had been such determination in the way they'd headed out into the
dark-j ness; plainly they weren't going out to enjoy a little swim, then
turn round!

and head back to shore. They were escaping together, in the only direcl
tion left for them.

She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach: part horror at what I
she'd just witnessed, part envy He had made his choice, finally And
no\v; he was gone.

She heard the throb of rotor-blades, and she looked up to see a police!

:1

helicopter coming from the south, following the line of the surf as it|
approached the place where the lovers had disappeared. Its powerful
spo&i light illuminated the water with uncanny brightness.

Tammy looked back at the people assembled along the shoreline* 1 Almost
all the guests had vacated the house and were milling around on the
sand. She couldn't see Maxine, but she could name a few famous folks,\
mainly from the color of their clothes. Glenn Close was in white; Bradq

Pitt in a powder-blue suit; Madonna was in red. They were briefly
iuumi<-|

' "I nated by the flood of the searchlight, then the helicopter veered
off sea|

ward, and Tammy followed its progress as it swooped down close to the'
water. Surely Todd and Katya couldn't have gone that far out. Even if
the J current had caught them, they couldn't have been swept more than a
few J hundred yards in the short time since they'd entered the water.

But then the current wasn't the only variable here, was it? There also
their own ambition. They had gone out intending to be lost. And k they
were.

Suddenly, she was crying. Standing outside the wedge of light thro?

by the house, and beyond the presence of anyone who could possib comfort
her; dirty and cold and alone, she sobbed like a baby. She mad no
attempt to stop the flood. "Better out than in," her mother had at said;
and it was true. She could never think straight when she had a got of
tears waiting in the wings. It was wiser to just weep them out, and 1
done with them.

At last her grief began to subside, and she cleared the tears from h^
cheeks with her hands. The helicopter was now some distance from I

 shore, and had dropped even closer to the water, hovering over one
particular place. She tried to make sense of the waterscape. Had the men
in the helicopter located the bodies? She stared at the spotlit water
until her eyes started to ache, but she could make no sense of what she
was seeing.

Just the spume, being whipped up off the water, so that it looked like
snow in the column of white light.

After a few minutes the helicopter moved away from that position,
turning off its searchlight for a while as it headed down the beach.
When the light was turned on again and the brightness struck the water
the search had moved much further out to sea. Still Tammy kept watching,
desperately trying to make sense of the sight. But at last it simply
became too frustrating, and turning her back on the water, she walked up
the side of the house to the street, where many of the same people she'd
seen down by the water earlier, enjoying the spectacle along with their
champagne, were now waiting to pick up their cars. They were quiet, eyes
downcast, as though they felt just a tiny prick of guilt at having
treated the death of one of their number as a spectator sport.

Whatever interest Tammy might once have had in these people was gone.
The fact that she was practically rubbing shoulders with Brad and Julia
and half-a-dozen other luminaries was a matter of complete indifference
to her. Her thoughts were still out there in the dark waters of the
Pacific.

Finally somebody spoke; some imbecilic remark about how valets were
getting slower every day. It was all this air-headed company needed to
throw off their show of introspection. Chatter sprang up, and on its
heels, laughter. By the time Tammy's car had arrived the group was in a
fine mood, exchanging jokes and telephone numbers; the scene on the
beach--the tragedy they'd all just witnessed together--already a thing
of the past.

 Along the beach a hundred and fifty yards from where Tammy was stand*!

ing all eyes were also directed seaward, and, like Tammy's eyes, saw
nothl ing but the uncanny, almost beatific, light from the hovering
helicopter as? f it passed back and forth over the surface of the water.

Eppstadt had his lawyer, Jacob Lazlov, on the line while he watched
the-; water. At his side, Maxine.

"I want this sonofabitch Pickett prosecuted to the full extent of the
la\ Jacob. What do you mean: what did he do? He practically tore off my
le that's what he did. In public. Jesus, Jacob, it was an attack, a
physical attack. And now the bastard's trying to drown himself."

"Isn't this all a little premature?" Maxine remarked dryly. "He's proba
| bly drowned by now."

"Then I'll sue his fucking estate. I can sue the estate, can't I, Jacot
Speak up, I can't hear you. The helicopter--"

"You are a piece of work, you know that," Maxine said.

"I'll call you back, Jacob." Eppstadt snapped his phone closed and:
lowed Maxine back across the beach to the house. On the way the
encountered the waiter who'd come to Eppstadt's aid during Todct|
attack.

"What's your name, son?"

"Joseph Finlay sir."

"Well, Joe, I'd like you to do me a favor and stay within ten yards of I
till I tell you otherwise. Will you do that? I'll pay you very well for
yoi) services. And if you see anything you don't like, son--"

 "I'm there, sir."

"Good. Good. But you can start by getting me a brandy. Be quick." Joe
hurried away. "Didn't you have any security at this damn party, Maxine?"

"Of course!"

"Well where the fuck was it when I was having my leg torn off ? Jacob's
going to be asking some questions, Maxine, and you'd better have some
damn good answers."

"Todd wasn't some trespasser--" Maxine said. She had reached the patio,
and now turned to face Eppstadt, tears filling her eyes. "I've known him
ten years. Everyone knows him."

"Well apparently none of us knew him well enough. He was ready to kill
me."

"He was nowhere near killing you," Maxine said, weary of Eppstadt's
self-dramatization. She sank down into the chair where she'd been
sitting when Todd had arrived, turning it round so she could watch the
beach.

"Your brandy, sir."

Eppstadt took his brandy. Joe pulled a chair up, and Eppstadt sat down
in it. "Ten yards," he said to Joe.

"I'm here."

Joe stepped back a little distance to give Eppstadt and Maxine a measure
of privacy. Eppstadt took out a pack of cigarettes; offered one to
Maxine, who took it with trembling fingers. He lit both, and leaned back
in his chair.

"Sonofabitch," he said. "Who'd ever have thought he'd pull a stunt like
this?"

"I think it all got too much for him," Maxine said. "He cracked."

"No doubt. What was he talking about: some house you put him in?"

"Oh yes, that house," Maxine said. "It all began with that fucking
house.

Where's Jerry Brahms?"

"Who?"

Maxine couldn't see Jerry, but she spotted Sawyer, her assistant, who
was inside the house, eating. He came at her summons, mouth stuffed with
canapes. She told him to find Jerry, pronto.

 "I think we have to assume the current took them," Eppstadt said,
directing Maxine's attention at the helicopter, which had steadily moved
further and further out from the beach in its search. There were now two
Coast Guard boats bobbing around in the water, mounted with
searchlights.

"Have people no taste!" Maxine said, surveying the condo on the beach.
To make matters worse, something of the party atmosphere had returned to
the gathering. The waiters were weaving among the guests, refreshing
drinks or offering finger food. It was not being refused. People seemed
to be of the opinion that the evening's drama was best viewed as part of
the fun.

A "waiter brought a platter to Maxine's side. "Sushi?" he said. She
looked at the array of raw fish with almost superstitious disgust.

"Oh God, why not?" Eppstadt said, a little too heartily. "In fact you
can leave the platter."

"How can you eat?"

"I'm hungry. And if I were you, I'd keep me happy. Treat me very deli-J
cately" He examined the piece of yellow-tail in his fingers. "I suppose
at] this point I could get all stirred up wondering what the fish was
eating before it was caught ... but why wonder?"

Maxine got up from her chair and walked over to the railing. "I ahvays|
thought you liked Todd." "I thought he was acceptable company up to a
point. But then he \ full of himself, and he became impossible. Your
handiwork, of course.":;

"What?"

"Telling him he was the next best thing to sliced bread, when all alor
he was just another pretty face. And now not even that, thanks to Doc
Burrows." He picked up a second piece of sushi. "I tell you, if Todd I
dead, then he's done the best thing he could do for his reputation. I
knc how that sounds, but it's the truth. Now he's got a crack at being a
leger If he'd lived, grown old, everyone would have realized he couldn't
act 1 way out of a damp paper bag. And it would have made us all look 1
fools. You for representing him, me for spending all that money on over
the years."

 "Maxine?"

Sawyer was leading a stricken Jerry up onto the patio. At some point in
the recent past his rug had become partially unglued and now sat off
center on his head.

"Todd's gone," he said.

"We can't be sure yet, Jerry. Sawyer, get Mister Brahms a scotch and
soda. Light on the scotch. Jerry, this is Mister Eppstadt, from
Paramount."

"I'm familiar ..."Jerry said, his gaze going from Eppstadt as soon as
he'd laid eyes on him, and drifting off again toward the water. "It's
useless. I don't know why they keep searching. They've been swept away
by now."

"The house, Jerry."

"What?"

"In the Canyon," Eppstadt said. "I've been hearing about it from
Maxine."

"Oh. I see. Well ... there's not a lot I can tell you. I just used to go
there as a child. I was an actor, you see, when I was much younger."

"And were there other children there?"

"No. Not that I remember, at least. Just a woman called Katya Lupi-- who
took me under her wing. She's the one ..." he pointed out toward the
waterline "... who took Todd."

"No, Jerry," Maxine said. "Whoever that woman was, she was young."

"Katya was young."

"This girl looked twenty-five."

"Katya looked twenty-five." He accepted his scotch and soda from Sawyer.
"She wasn't, of course. She was probably a hundred."

"Then how the hell can she have looked twenty-five?" Eppstadt demanded.

Jerry had two words by way of reply.

"Coldheart Canyon."

Eppstadt had no reply to this. He just stared at Brahms, bewildered.

"She looks young," Jerry said. "But she isn't. That was her out there,
no doubt about it. Personally, I think it was some kind of a suicide
pact between them."

"That's ridiculous!" Maxine snorted. "Todd's got his whole life in
front of him."

"I think he may have been more desperate than you realized," Jerry said.
"Perhaps if you'd been a little better as friends, he'd still be with
us."

"I don't think it's very useful to toss that kind of accusation around,"
Eppstadt said. "Especially when we don't know the facts."

"I think the facts are very plain," Jerry said. "I still read Variety."
He pointed at Maxine. "You decided to give up on representing him when
he was having difficulties with his career. And you"--now the accusatory
finger went in Eppstadt's direction--"canceled a movie which he had his
heart set on. Not to mention the fact that you"--the finger returned to
Maxine--"just made a public display of humiliating him. Is it any wonder
he decided to put an end to his life?"

Neither accusee attempted a defense. What was the use? What Jerry s had
said was a matter of public record.

"I want to see this Canyon," Eppstadt said. 'And the house."

"The house has nothing to do with any of this," Jerry said. "Frankly,]
suggest you keep your distance from it. You've already--"

Eppstadt ignored him. "Where is it?" he demanded of Maxine.

"Well I've never been able to find it on a map but the Canyon runs pafij
allel with Laurel Canyon. I don't think it's even got a proper name."
"Coldheart Canyon," Brahms said again. "That's what they used to < it in
the Silent Era. Because she was supposed to have such a cold hea you
see."

"You know your way there?" Eppstadt asked Maxine.

"I ... suppose I could find my way ... but I'd prefer somebody to drr
me."

"You," Eppstadt said. It was his turn to point.

Jerry shook his head.

"It's either you taking me, or the police."

"Why'd you want to call the police?"

"Because I think there's some kind of conspiracy going on. Yq

 Pickett. The woman who went into the sea with him. You're all in this
together."

"To do what, for God's sake?"

"I don't know: promote that asshole's career?"

"I assure you--"

"I don't care to hear your assurances," Eppstadt said. "I just need you
to take me to this Canyon of yours."

"It's not mine. It's hers. Katya's. If we went there we'd be trespassing
on her property."

"I'll take that risk."

"Well I won't."

"Maxine, tell him he's coming."

"I don't see why you want to go," Jerry pleaded.

"Let's just make Mister Eppstadt happy right now, shall we?"

"I just don't want to trespass," Jerry said again.

"Well you can blame me," Eppstadt said. "Tell this Lupi woman--if she
ever surfaces again--that 1 forced you to take me. Where's the waiter?

Joe!"

Eppstadt's makeshift bodyguard came over. "We're going to make a little
field-trip. I'd like you to come with us."

"Oh? Okay."

"Maxine, do you have a gun?"

"I'm not going with you."

"Yes you are, m'dear. A gun. Do you have one?"

"Several. But I'm not going. I've had enough excitement for one night. I
need some sleep."

"Well here's your choices. Come now and let's find out what the hell's
going on up there, together. Or sit tight and wait for my lawyer to call
you in the morning."

Maxine looked at him blankly.

"Do I take that as a yes?" he said.

There were five in the expedition party. Maxine's assistant, Sawyer,
armed with one of Maxine's guns, drove Maxine. And in a second car,
driven by Jerry, went Eppstadt and Joe. The larger of Maxine's guns, a
.45, was in Eppstadt's possession. He claimed he knew how to use it.

By the time they had left, many of the party-goers had already drifted
away, leaving a hard core of perhaps thirty-five people, many of them
still on the beach, waiting to see if anything noteworthy was going to
happen.

About fifteen minutes after Eppstadt's expedition had departed for the
hills the Coast Guard called off the helicopter. There had been a
boating I accident up the coast--nine people in the water--and air
support was urgently needed. One of the two search boats was also called
off, leaving the other to make wider and wider circles as any hope that
the lost souls were still alive and close to the shore steadily grew
more remote, and finally, faded entirely.

 The Wind at the Door

 The night was almost over by the time the two cars bearing Eppstadt's
little expeditionary force made their way up the winding road that led
into Coldheart Canyon. The sky was just a little lighter in the east,
though the clouds were thick, so it would be a sluggish dawn, without an
ounce of the drama which had marked the hours of darkness. In the depths
of the Canyon itself, the day never truly dawned properly at all. There
was a peculiar density to the shadows between the trees today; as though
the night lingered there, in scraps and rags. Day-blooming flowers would
fail to show themselves, even at the height of noon; while plants that
would normally offer sight and scent of themselves only after dark
remained awake through the daylight hours.

None of this was noticed by Eppstadt or the others in his party; they
were not the sort of people who noticed things to which so little value
could be readily attached. But they knew something was amiss, even so,
from the moment they stepped out of their vehicles. They proceeded
toward the house exchanging anxious looks, their steps reluctant. Even
Eppstadt, who had been so vocal about seeing the Canyon when they'd all
been down in Malibu, plainly wished he'd not talked himself into this.

Had he been on his own he would undoubtedly have retreated. But he could
scarcely do so now, with so many people watching. He could either hope
that something alarming (though inconsequential) happened soon, and he
was obliged to call a general retreat in the interest of the company, or
that they'd get into the house, make a cursory examination of the

 place, then agree that this was a matter best left with the police,
and get the hell out.

The feeling he had, walking into the house, was the same feeling hel
sometimes got going onto a darkened soundstage. A sense of anticipatior
hung in the air. The only question was: what was the drama that wa|jj
going to be played out here? A continuation of the farce he'd been
unwillingly dragged into on the beach? He didn't think so. The stage set
here for some other order of spectacle, and he didn't particularly wa to
be a part of it.

In all his years running a studio he'd never green-lit a horror movie, I
anything with that kind of supernatural edge. He didn't like them. On I
one hand, he thought they were contemptible rubbish; and on the othei
they made his flesh creep. They unnerved him with their reports froml
some irrational place in the psyche; a place he had fled from all his
The Canyon knew that place, he sensed. No, he knew. There were prob bly
subjects for a hundred horror movies here, God help him.

"Weird, huh?" Joe remarked to him.

Eppstadt was glad he'd brought the kid along. Though Eppstadt die have a
queer bone in his body there was still something comforting about having
a big-boned, Midwestern dumb-fuck like Joe on the team.

"What are we looking for, anyhow?" Joe asked as Maxine led the' into the
house.

"Anything out of the ordinary," Eppstadt replied.

"We don't have any right to be here," Maxine reminded him. "A Todd is
dead, the police aren't going to be very happy that we tov stuff."

"I get it, Maxine," he said. "We'll be careful." "Big place," Joe said,
wandering into the lounge. "Great for partie

"Let's get some lights on in this place, shall we?" Eppstadt said. He'd
sooner spoken than Sawyer found the master panel, and flipped on < one
of the thirty switches before him. Room after dazzling room revealed,
detail after glorious detail.

Jerry had seen the dream palace countless times over the years, bii

some reason, even in its early days when the paint was fresh and the
gilding perfect, he'd never seen the house put on a show quite like
this. It was almost as if the old place knew it didn't have long to live
and--knowing its span was short--was making the best of the hours
remaining to it.

"The woman on the beach," Eppstadt said. "She built this place?"

"Yes. Her name was Katya Lupi and--"

"I know who she was," Eppstadt replied. "I've seen some of her movies.
Trash. Kitsch trash."

It was impossible, of course, that the woman who'd built this Spanish
mausoleum was the same individual who'd escorted Todd Pickett into the
surf. That woman might have been her grandchild, Eppstadt supposed, at a
stretch; a great-grandchild more likely.

He was about to correct Brahms on his generational details when a chorus
of yelping coyotes erupted across the Canyon. Eppstadt knew what coyotes
sounded like, of course. He had plenty of friends who lived in the
Hills, and considered the animals harmless scavengers, digging through
their trash and occasionally dining on a pet cat. But there was
something about the noise they were making now, as the sun came up, that
made his stomach twitch and his skin crawl. It was like a soundtrack of
one of the horror movies he'd never green-lit.

And then, just as suddenly as the chorus of coyotes had erupted, it
ceased. There were three seconds of total silence.

Then everything began to shake. The walls, the chandelier, the ancient
floorboards beneath their feet.

"Earthquake!" Sawyer yelled. He grabbed hold of Maxine's arm. She
screeched and ran for the kitchen door.

"Outside!" she shrieked. "We're all safer outside!"

She could move fast when she needed to. She dragged Sawyer after her,
down to the back door. Jerry tried to follow, but the shaking in the
ground had become a roll, and he missed his hand hold.

Joe, Midwestern boy that he was, had never experienced an earthquake
before. He just stood on the pitching ground repeating the name of his
savior over an dover an dover again, in perfect sincerity.

 If I going to stop any minute, Eppstadt thought (he'd lived through ma

of these, big and small), but this one kept going, escalating. The floor
was!

"H undulating in front of him. If he'd seen it in dailies he would have
fired thef physical effects guy for creating something that looked so
phony. Soli matter like wood and nails simply didn't move that way. It
was ludicrousj;!

But still it escalated, and Joe's calls to his savior became shouts:

"Christ! Christ! Christ! Christ!"

"When's it going to stop?" Jerry gasped.

He'd given up trying to rise. He just lay on the ground while the ratl
ding and the rolling continued unabated.

There was a crash from an adjacent room, as something was throv over.
And then, from further off, a whole succession of further crashes,:
shelves came unseated, and their contents were scattered. A short
length,!

of plaster molding came down from the ceiling and smashed on the ground
a foot from where Eppstadt was standing, its shards spreading '& all
directions. He looked up, in case there was more to come. A fine I of
plaster-dust was descending, stinging his eyes. Meanwhile, the qua
continued to make the house creak and crack on all sides, Eppstadt's ser
blinded condition only making the event seem all the more apocalypt He
reached toward Joe, who was hoarse from reciting his one-woe prayer, and
caught hold of him.

"What's that noise?" the kid yelled over the din.

It seemed like a particularly witless question in the midst of
cacophony, but interestingly Eppstadt grasped exactly what the kid'
talking about.

There was one sound, among the terrifying orchestration of , and crashes
from all over the house, that was deeper than all the other and seemed
to be coming from directly beneath them. It sounded like 1 titanic sets
of teeth grinding together, grinding so hard they were des ing
themselves in the process.

"I don't know what it is," admitted Eppstadt. Tears were pouring I his
eyes, washing them clear of the plaster-dust.

"Well I want it to fucking stop," Joe said with nice Midwestern
directness.

He'd no sooner spoken than the noise in the earth started to die away,
and moments later the rest of the din and motion followed.

"It's over ..."Jerry sobbed.

He'd spoken too soon. There was one last, short jolt in the ground,
which brought a further series of crashes from around the house, and
from below what sounded like a door being thrown open so violently it
cracked its back against the wall.

Only then did the noises and the deep-earth motion finally subside and
die away. What was left, from far off, was the sound of car alarms.

"Everybody okay?" Eppstadt said.

"I'll never get used to those damn things," Jerry said.

"That was a big one," Eppstadt said. "6.5 at least."

"And it went on, and on ..."

"I think we should just get the hell out of here," Joe said.

"Before we go anywhere," Eppstadt said, venturing into the kitchen, "we
wait for any aftershocks. We're safer inside than out there right now."

"How do you figure that?" Joe said, following Eppstadt into the kitchen.

It was chaos. None of the shelves had come off the walls, but they'd
been shaken so violently they'd deposited their contents on the tiled
floor.

A cabinet holding booze had been shaken down, and several of the bottles
broken, filling the air with the sharp tang of mingled liquors. Eppstadt
went to the refrigerator--which had been thrown open by the quake, and
had half its contents danced off the shelves--and found a can of Coke.
He cracked it carefully, letting its excitability fizz away by degrees,
then poured it as though this sickly soda were a hundred-year-old
brandy, and drank.

"Better," he said.

"I'll take one of those," Joe remarked.

"What color do I look?"

 Scowling, Joe kicked his way through the fractured crockery to the',
refrigerator, and got himself a Coke.

"What the hell happened to Maxine?" Eppstadt wondered.

"She went out back with Sawyer," Joe said, averting his face from a fan
= of erupting Coke.

Eppstadt went out into a passageway that led down to an open doorj
kicking a few pieces of fallen plaster out of the way as he went.

"Maxine!" he called. 'Are you okay?"

There was no reply.

Without waiting for anyone to join him, he headed down to the backlf
door. There was more plaster dust underfoot, and several large cracks Vm
the walls and ceiling. Unlike other areas of the house this portion
looked less solid to his eye, and very much less elegant. A hurried
later addition, |

Tlf he guessed, and probably more vulnerable to shocks than the older
parts!

"If of the house. He called out for Maxine again, but again there was no
repraj forthcoming. He wasn't surprised. The area just outside the door
look squalid; large masses of rotted vegetable matter covered the
walkway < the other side of the threshold, giving off a sickly stench.
The foliage over^l hanging the area was so thick that the area was
practically benighted.

He went to the threshold, intending to call for Maxine again, but befo
he could do so he heard the sound of low, sibilant laughter. Since hood
he'd always been certain that laughter heard in his vicinity laughter
heard at his expense, and even though his therapist had we hard for
sixteen years to dissuade him of this neurosis, it lingered. He I rowed
his eyes, trying to make sense of the shadows beneath the dividing form
from apparition. Obviously, the laughter had a source, haps more than
one. He just couldn't make it out.

"Stop that," he ordered. **

But the laughter continued, which enraged him. They were lau  him, he
was certain of it. Who else would they be laughing at? Bast

He stepped over the threshold, ready to sue. The air was cold clammy.
This wasn't a very pleasant house, he'd decided very quickly, '<

this was a particularly unpleasant corner of it. But the laughter
continued, and he couldn't turn his back on it, not until he'd silenced
it.

"Who the hell are you?" he demanded. "This is private property. You hear
me? You shouldn't even--"

He stopped now because there, in the shadow of a humongous Bird of
Paradise tree, he made out a human form. No, two. No, three. He could
barely see their features, but he could feel the imprint of their stares
upon him.

And then more laughter, mocking his protests.

"I'm warning you," he snapped, as though he were talking to children.

"Get away from here. Go on! Get away!"

But instead of stopping, the addled laughter grew louder still, and its
owners decided to step out from under the shade of the Bird of Paradise.

Eppstadt could see them more clearly now. They were indeed trespassers,
he guessed, who'd been up here partying the night away. One of them, a
very lovely young woman (she couldn't have been more than seventeen, to
judge by the tautness of her skin), was bare-breasted, her brunette hair
wet and pressed to her skull. He vaguely thought he knew her; that
perhaps as a child actress she'd been in a movie he'd produced over at
Paramount, or during his earlier time at Fox. She was certainly
developing into a beautiful woman. But there was something about the way
she stepped out of the shadows--her head sinking down, as though she
might at any moment drop to the ground and imitate some animal or
other-- that distressed him. He didn't want her near him, even with her
tight skin, her lovely nubs of nipples, her pouty lips. There was too
much hunger in her eyes, and even if he wasn't the focus of that
appetite, he didn't want to be caught between such a mindless hunger and
its object of desire, whatever it might be.

And then there were the others, still lurking close to the tree behind
her. Wait, there were more than two. There was a host of others, whose
gaze he now felt on him. They were everywhere out here, in this
uncertain dawn. He could see the foliage moving where some of them had

slunk, their naked bellies flat on the ground. And they were up in the
j \ branches too; rotted blossoms came down to add to the muck that
slick- <

ened the Mexican pavers underfoot.

Eppstadt took a tentative backward step, regretting that he'd ever if
stepped out of the house. No, not just that. At that moment he was
regretting the whole process of events that had brought him to this
damned house in the first place. Going to Maxine's asinine party; having
that witless argument with Pickett; then the interrogation of Jerry
Brahms and the choice to come up here. Stupid, all of it.

He took a second backward step. As he did so, the eyes of the exhibi-1
tionist girl who'd first appeared became exceptionally bright, as though
I something in her head had caught fire. Then, without warning, she
broke !f| into a sudden run, racing at Eppstadt. He turned back toward
the door, ,1 and in the instant that he did so he saw a dozen--no, two
dozen--figures 1 who'd been standing camouflaged in the murk break their
cover and join, her in her dash for the door.

He was a step from reaching the threshold when the young bitch I caught
hold of his arm.

"Please--" she said. Her fingers dug deep into the fat where healthier |
men had biceps.

"Let me go." "Don't go in," she said.

She pulled him back toward her, her strength uncanny. He reached ov and
grabbed the doorjamb, thinking as he did so that he'd got through 1 last
twenty-five years of his life without anyone laying an inappropriat hand
upon him, and here he was in the midst of his second such indij in the
space of twenty-four hours.

The woman still had fierce hold of him, and she wasn't about to le him
go.

"Stay out here," she implored.

He flailed away from her. His Armani shirt tore, and he seized moment to
wriggle free. From the corner of his eye he saw a lot of face eyes
incandescent, converging on the spot.

Terror made him swifter than he'd been in three decades. He leapt over
the threshold, and once he got inside, he turned on a quarter, throwing
all his weight against the door. It slammed closed. He fumbled with the
lock, expecting to feel instant pressure exerted from the other side.

But there was none. Despite the fact that the trespassers could have
pushed the door open (smashed it open, lock and all, if they'd so
chosen) they didn't. The girl simply called to him through the door, her
voice well modulated, like that of someone who'd been to a high-grade
finishing school:

"You should be careful," she said, in an eerie sing-song. "This house is
going to come down. Do you hear me, mister? It's coming down."

He heard; he heard loud and clear. But he didn't reply. He simply bolted
the door, still mystified as to why they hadn't attempted to break in,
and ran up the passageway back to the kitchen. Before he reached the
door Joe rounded the corner, coming from the opposite direction, gun in
hand.

"Where the hell were you?" Eppstadt demanded.

"I was just about to ask you the same--"

"We're under siege."

"From what?"

"There are crazy people out there. A lot of crazy, fucking people."

"Where?"

"Right outside that door!"

He pointed back down the passageway. There was nothing visible through
the glass panel. They'd retreated in four or five seconds, taking refuge
in the murk.

"Trust me," Eppstadt said, "there's twenty or thirty people waiting on
the other side of that door. One of them tried to drag me out there with
them." He proffered his torn shirt and bloodied arm as proof. "She was
probably rabid. I should get shots."

"I don't hear anybody," Joe said.

"They're out there. Trust me."

He went back to the kitchen, with Joe on his heels.

Jerry was running water into the sink, and splashing it on his temple.

Joe went straight to the window to see if he could verify Eppstadt's
story, while Eppstadt snatched a handful of water to douse his own
wound.

"The line's down, by the way," Jerry said.

"I've got my portable," Eppstadt said.

"They're not working either," Joe said. "The earthquake's taken out the
whole system." "Did you see Maxine or Sawyer out there?" Jerry said.

"I never got out there, Brahms. There are people--"

"Yes I know."

"Wait. Turn off the water."

"I haven't finished washing." "I said: turn it off."

Brahms reluctantly obeyed. As the last of the water ran off down the
pipes, another cluster of noises became audible, rising from the bowels
off the house.

"It sounds like somebody left a television on down there," Joe said, |
splendidly simpleminded.

Eppstadt went to the door that led into the turret. "That's no televi!5
sion," he said.

"Well what the hell else would it be?" Joe said. "I can hear horses,
and| wind. There's no wind today."

It was true. There was no wind. But somewhere it was howling like th^
soundtrack on Lawrence of Arabia.

"You'll find this place gets crowded after a while," Jerry said matter-"
factly. He patted dry the wound on his face. "We shouldn't be here,"
reiterated.

"Who are they out there?" Eppstadt said.

"Old movie stars mainly. A few of Katya's lovers."

Eppstadt shook his head. "These weren't old. And several of the were
women."

"She liked women," Jerry said, "on occasion. Especially if she cou play
her little games with them."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Joe said.

"Katya Lupi, who built this house--"

"Once and for all," Eppstadt said, "these were not Katya Lupi's lovers.

They were young. One of them, at least, looked no more than sixteen or
seventeen."

"She liked them very young. And they liked her. Especially when she'd
taken them down there." He pointed to the turret door through which the
sounds of storm-winds were still coming. "It's another world down there,
you see. And they'd be addicted, after that. They'd do anything for her,
just to get another taste of it." "I don't get it," Joe said.

"Better you don't," Jerry replied. "Just leave now, while you still can.

The earthquake threw the door open down there. That's why you can hear
all the noise." "You said it was coming from some other place?" Joe
said.

"Yes. The Devil's Country."

"What?"

"That's what Katya used to call it. The Devil's Country."

Joe glanced at Eppstadt, looking for some confirmation that all this was
nonsense. But Eppstadt was staring out of the window, still haunted by
the hungry faces he'd met on the threshold. Much as he would have liked
to laugh off what Jerry Brahms was saying, his instincts were telling
him to be more cautious.

"Suppose there is some kind of door down there ..." he said.

"There is, believe me."

"All right. Say I believe you. And maybe the earthquake did open it up.

Shouldn't somebody go down there and close it?"

"That would certainly make sense."

"Joe?"

"Aw shit. Why me?"

"Because you're the one who kept telling us how good you are with a gun.
Anyway, it's obvious Jerry's in no state to go."

"What about you?"

"Joe," Eppstadt said. "You're talking to the Head of Paramount."

"So? That doesn't mean a whole heap right now, does it?"

"No, but it will when we get back to the real world." He stared at Joe,
I with an odd little smile on his face. "You don't want to be a waiter
all your f life, do you?"

"No. Of course not."

"You came to Hollywood to act, am I right?"

"I'm really good."

"I'm sure you are. Do you have any idea how much help I could be 1 to
you?"

"If I go down there--?"

"And close the door."

"Then you make me a movie star?"

"There are no guarantees in this town, Joe. But put it this way. You've
got a better chance of being the next Brad Pitt--"

"I see myself more as an Ed Norton."

"Okay. Ed Norton. You stand a better chance of being the next Norton if
you've got the Head of Paramount on your side. You under4j stand?"

Joe looked past Eppstadt at the doorway that led to the turret. Thajj
noise of the storm had not abated a jot. If anything the wind had becor
louder, slamming the door against a wall. If it had just been the whine
o| the wind coming from below, no doubt Joe's ambitions would have him
halfway down the stairs by now. But there were other sounds be carried
on the back of the wind, some easy to interpret, others not so ea He
could hear the screech of agitated birds, which was not too distressit
But there were other species giving voice below: and he could put a na
to none of them.

"Well, Joe?" Eppstadt said. "You want to close that door? Or do want to
serve canapes for the rest of your life."

"Fuck."

"You've got a gun, Joe. Where's your balls?"

"You promise you'll get me a part? Not some stinking little walk-onq

"I promise ... to do my best for you."

Joe looked over at Jerry. "Do you know what's down there?"

"Just don't look" was Jerry's advice. "Close the door and come back up.

Don't look into the room, even if it seems really amazing."

"Why?"

"Because it is amazing. And once you've looked you're going to want to
go on looking."

"And if something comes out after me?"

"Shoot it."

"There," said Eppstadt. "Satisfied?"

Joe turned the proposition over in his head for a few more seconds,
weighing the gun in his hand as he did so. "I've been in this fucking
town two, almost three, years. Haven't even got an agent."

"Looks like this is your lucky day," Eppstadt said.

"Better be," Joe replied.

He drew a deep breath, and went out into the hallway. Eppstadt smiled
reassuringly at him as he went by, but his features weren't made for
reassurance.

In fact at the sight of Eppstadt's crooked smile, Joe almost changed his
mind. Then, thinking perhaps of what his life had been like so far--the
casual contempt heaped on waiters by the famous--he went out to the head
of the stairs and looked down. Reassuringly, the door had stopped
slamming quite so hard. Joe took a deep breath, then he headed down the
flight.

Eppstadt watched him go. Then he went back to the window.

"The people out there ..." he said to Jerry.

"What about them?"

"Will they have harmed Maxine?"

"I doubt it. They don't want blood. They just want to get back into the
house."

"Why didn't they just push past me?"

"There's some kind of trap at the door that keeps them out."

"I got in and out without any problem."

"Well, you're alive, aren't you?"

"What?" "You heard what I said."

"Don't start with the superstitious crap, Brahms. I'm not in the mood."

"Neither am I," Jerry said. "I wish I were anywhere but here, right
now." "I thought this was your dream palace?"

"If Katya were here, it would be a different matter."

"You don't really think that woman on the beach was Katya Lupi^: do
you?"

"I know it was her for a fact. I drove her down to Malibu myself."

"What?"

Jerry shrugged. "Playing Cupid."

"Katya Lupi and Todd Pickett? Crazy. It's all crazy."

"Why? Because you refuse to believe in ghosts?"

"Oh, I didn't say that," Eppstadt replied, somewhat cautiously. "I
didn't say I didn't believe. I've been to Gettysburg and felt the
presence of the; dead. But a battlefield is one thing--"

"And an old Hollywood dream palace is another? Why? People suffered!

here, believe me. A few even took their own lives. I don't know why I'r
telling you. You know how people suffer here. You cause half of it.

miserable town's awash with envy and anger. You know how cruel L&J makes
people. How hungry."

The word rang a bell. Eppstadt thought of the face of the woman a| the
back of the house. The appetite in her eyes.

"They might not be the kind of ghosts you think you hear moaning \
Gettysburg," Jerry went on. "But believe me, they are very dead and 1
are very desperate. So the sooner we find Maxine and Sawyer and get o\
of here the better for all of us." "Oh dear God," Eppstadt said softly.

"What?"

"I'm starting to believe you."

"Then we've made some progress, I suppose."

"Why didn't you tell me all this before we came up here?"

"Would it have stopped you coming?"

"No."

"You see? You needed to see for yourself."

"Well, I've seen," Eppstadt said. 'And you're right. As soon as Joe's
closed the door, we'll all go out and find Maxine and Sawyer. You're
sure those things--"

"Use the word, Eppstadt."

"I don't want to."

"For God's sake, it's just a word."

"All right ... ghosts. Are you sure they won't come after us? They
looked vicious." "They want to get into the house. It's as I said:
that's all they care about.

They want to get back into the Devil's Country."

"Do you know why?"

"I've half a notion, but I don't fancy sharing it with you. Shall we not
waste time standing around trying to guess what the dead want?" He
returned his gaze to the expanse of green outside the window.

"Well all of us know sooner than we care to."

 At 5:49 a. m., when the 6.9 earthquake (later discovered to have had
its epi'l center in Pasadena) had shaken Los Angeles out of its pre-dawn
doze,!

Tammy had been standing on the nameless street outside Katya Lupi's
house in Coldheart Canyon, drawn back to the place with an ease that|
suggested she had it in her blood now, for better or worse.

She had left the party at the Colony a few minutes after the departure!

,,-J

of Eppstadt's expedition, having decided that there was little point in
he J waiting on the beach. If Todd and Katya were still in the water,
then the were dead by now, their corpses carried off by the tide toward
Hawaii or f! Japan. And if by some miracle they had survived, then they
surelyj wouldn't go back to Maxine's house. They would head home to the
Canyon.

Her initial plan was to give up on this whole sorry adventure, return 1
the hotel on Wilshire, shower, change into some fresh clothes and the
get the first available flight out of Los Angeles. She'd done all she
could I Todd Pickett. More than he deserved, Lord knows. And what had
she j for her trouble? In the end, little more than his contempt. She
wasnl going to put herself in the way of that ever again. If she wanted
to cat herself pain all she had to do was bang her head against the
kitchen doo| She didn't need to come all the way to Los Angeles to do
that.

But as she drove back to the hotel, fragments of things that she'd see|
in the Canyon, and later in the house, came back to her; images inspired
more awe in her soul than terror. She would never get anot

chance to see such sights this side of the grave, certainly; should she
not take the opportunity to go back, one last time? If she didn't go
now, by tomorrow it would be too late. The Canyon would have found new
protections against her--or anybody else's--inquiry; new charms and
mechanisms designed to conceal its raptures from curious eyes.

And, of course, there was always the remote possibility that Todd had
survived the ocean and made his way back up there. That, more than any
other, was the strongest reason to return.

Her decision made, she drove on up to Sunset--forgetting about the
shower and change of clothes--and made her way back to the Canyon.

No doubt it was foolhardy, returning to a place where she had endured so
much but, besides her desire to see the spectacles of the place one last
time, and putting aside any hopes she might have for Todd's survival,
she could not shake the niggling suspicion that her business at the
house was not at an end. She had no intellectual justification for such
a feeling; just a certainty, marrow-deep, that this was the case. She'd
know when it was over. And it was not.

It had been an eerie drive up the winding Canyon road in the predawn
gloom. She had deliberately switched off her headlights so as to attract
as little attention as possible, but that made her feel even more
vulnerable somehow; as though she were not quite real herself, here in
this Canyon of a Thousand Illusions.

Twice something had moved across the road in front of her, its gray form
unfkable in the murk. She put on the brakes, and let the creature cross.

Once she got to the house she realized she was not the first visitor.

There were two cars already parked outside. She was crossing the street
to examine the other two when the earthquake hit.

She'd been in earthquakes before, but she'd never actually been standing
so close to the bedrock while one took place. It was quite an
experience.

She almost lost control of her bladder, as the road idled under her
feet, and the trees, especially the big ones, creaked and churned. She
stood and waited for the first shock wave to pass, which seemed an
eternity.

Then, when her heart had recovered something approximating its natural
rhythm, she headed toward Katya Lupi's dream palace.

Eppstadt was in the hallway, looking down the stairwell. It was dark at
the bottom, but he thought he saw a motion in the darkness; like motes
of pale dust, spiraling around.

"Joe?" he called. 'Are you there? Answer me, will you?"

The sound from below had died away: the din of beasts was now barely
audible. All that remained was the sound of the wind, which was
remarkably consistent, lending credence to the notion that what he was
hearing was a soundtrack, not reality. But where the hell had Joe got
to? It was fully five minutes since he'd disappeared down the stairs to
close the slamming door.

"I wouldn't go down there if I were you."

Eppstadt glanced over his shoulder to see that Brahms had forsaken his
place at the window, and had come into the hallway.

"He doesn't answer me," Eppstadt said. "I thought perhaps he'd fallen,
or ... I don't know. The door's still slamming. Hear it?"

"Of course."

"I don't suppose you want to go down there and close it for me?"

"You're big on delegation, aren't you? Do they teach you that in busi.;
ness school?"

"It's just a door."

"So close it yourself."

Eppstadt threw Brahms a sour look. "Or don't. Leave him down the if
that's what your instincts are telling you."

"And if I do?"

"Put it this way: the longer you wait, the less chance there is you'll <
see him again."

"I should never have sent him down there," Eppstadt said.

"Huh. I never thought I'd hear that from you."

"Hear what?"

"Regret. This place is changing you. Even you. I'm impressed."

Eppstadt didn't reply. He simply stared down the long curve of the
stairway, still hoping he'd see Joe's well-made face emerging from the
shadows.

But the only motion down there was the dust stirred up by the wind,
circling on itself.

"Joe!" he yelled.

There wasn't even an echo from below. The bowels of the house seemed to
consume the shouted syllable.

"I'm going upstairs," Jerry said, "to see if there's anybody up there."

"Is Maxine still out back?"

"I assume so. And if I remember from previous quakes she'll stay out
there a while. She doesn't like being under anything, even a table,
during a 'quake. She'll come in when she's ready."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"You don't like me, do you?" Eppstadt said out of nowhere.

Jerry shrugged. "Hollywood's always had its share of little Caligulas."

So saying, he left Eppstadt to his dilemma, and went on up the stairs.

He knew the geography of the house pretty well. There were three doors
that led off the top landing. One went to a short passageway, "which led
in turn to a large bedroom, with en suite bathroom, which had been
occupied, until his death, by Marco Caputo. One was a small writing
room.

And one was the master bedroom, with its astonishing view, its immense
closet and sumptuous, if somewhat over-wrought, bathroom.

Jerry had only been in the master bedroom two or three times; but it
held fond memories for him. Memories of being a young man (what had he
been, twelve, thirteen at the most?) invited in by Katya. Oh, she'd been
beautiful that night; it had been like lying in the bed of a goddess.
He'd been too frightened to touch her at first, but she'd gently
persuaded him out of his fears.

As his life had turned out, she'd been the only woman he'd ever slept
with. In his early twenties he was certain his queerness was a result of
that

night. No other woman, he would tell himself, could possibly be the
equal of Katya Lupi. But that was just self-justification. He'd been
born queer, and Katya was his one grand exception to the rule.

As he reached the door of the master bedroom, there was an aftershock.

A short jolt, no more; but enough to set the antiquated chandelier that
hung in the turret gently swaying and tinkling again. Jerry waited for a
few moments, holding on to the banister, waiting to see if there were
going to be any more shocks coming immediately upon the heels of this
one. But there were none.

He glanced down the stairwell. No one was in view. Then he tried the
bedroom door. It was locked from the inside. There was only one thing
to.

construe from this: the room had an occupant, or occupants. He glanced
down at the shiny boards at his feet, and saw that there were a few
droplets of water on the polished timber.

It wasn't hard to put the pieces of this puzzle together; nor to imagine
the scene on the other side of the locked door. Todd and Katya had
survived their brush with the Pacific. They were alive; sleeping, no
doubt, in] the great bed. The voyeur in him would have liked very much
to slide through the closed door and spy on the lovers as they slept;
both naked, Todd lying face up on the bed, Katya pressed to his side.
She was probably snoring, as he'd heard her do several times when she'd
cat-napped in his : presence.

He didn't blame Katya for her covetousness one iota. If being hungrya
for life meant being hungry for an eternity of nights wrapped in the ar
of a man who loved you, then that was an entirely understandable!

appetite.

And there was just a little part of him which thought that if he stay
loyal to her long enough--if he played his part--then she would let I
have a piece of her eternity. That she would show him how the ye could
be made to melt away.

He retreated from the door and headed downstairs, leaving the sleep ers
to their secret slumber.

 When he got to the mid-level landing Eppstadt had gone. Apparently,
he'd made the decision to go downstairs and search for Joe. Jerry looked
over the balcony. There was no sound from below. The wind had died away
to nothing. The door was no longer slamming.

He went from the stairs to the front door, which stood ajar.

Perhaps this was his moment to depart. He had nothing more to contribute
here. Katya had her man; Todd had found some measure of peace after his
own disappointments. What else was there for Jerry to do but make his
silent farewells and slip away?

He stood at the front door for two or three minutes, unable to make the
final break. Eventually, he convinced himself to linger here just a
little longer, simply to see the look on Maxine's face when she realized
Todd was still alive. He went back into the kitchen, and sat down,
waiting--like anyone who'd spent his time watching other lives rather
than having one of his own--to see what happened next.

Eppstadt had been two steps from the bottom of the stairs when the
aftershock hit. He was by no means an agile man, but he leapt the last
two steps without a stumble. There were ominous growlings in the walls,
as though several hungry tigers had been sealed up in them. This was, he
knew, one of the most foolish places to be caught in an earthquake,
especially if (as was perfectly possible) the aftershock turned out not
to be an aftershock at all, but a warm-up for something bigger. It would
be more sensible--much more sensible--to ascend the stairs again and
wait until the tigers had quieted down. But he wasn't going to do that.
He'd been sensible for most of his life; always taking the safe road,
the conservative route. For once, he wanted to play life a little
dangerously, and take the consequences.

That said, he didn't have to be suicidal. There was a door-lintel up
ahead. He'd be safer under there than he was in the open passageway. He
made a dash for the spot, and as he did so, the aftershock abruptly
ceased.

He took a deep breath.

Then he glanced over his shoulder into the room behind him. Presumably
this was the place Joe had disappeared into; there was nowhere else for
him to go.

He went to the door. Looked inside. He could see nothing at first, just
1 undivided gloom. He reached in, as many had done before him, to mm- f|
ble for a light switch, and failing to find one, allowed a little surge
of curiosity to take hold of him. Hadn't he said to himself he wanted to
live 1 a little more riskily? Well, here was his opportunity. Stepping
into this | strange room at the bottom of this lunatic house was
probably the most $ foolish thing he'd ever done, and he knew it.

A cold wind came to greet him. It caught hold of his elbow, and drew 1
him over the threshold into the world--yes, it was a world--inside. He I
looked up at the heavens; at that three-quarter-blinded sun, at the high
;' herringbone clouds that he remembered puzzling over as a child, won-
1 dering what it was that laid them out so carefully, so prettily. A
star fell earthward, and he followed its arc with his eyes, until it
burned itself out, | somewhere over the trees.

Far off, many miles beyond the dark mass of the forest, he could see the
;| sea, glittering. This was not the Pacific, he could see. The ships
that,!

moved upon it were like something from an Errol Flynn flick, The Sefljl
Hawk or some such. He'd loved those movies as a kid; and the ships in|
them. Especially the ships.

It was twenty-six seconds since the man from Paramount, who'd spe his
professional life keeping the dreamy, superstitious child in silenced by
pretending a fine, high-minded superiority to all things smelled of
grease-paint and midnight hokum, had entered the Devil'^ Country; and
had lost himself in it.

"Come on, don't be afraid," the wind from the sea whispered in his <

And in he went, all cynicism wiped from his mind by the memory' wheeling
ships beneath a painted sky, still young enough to believe might grow up
a hero.

 Todd stirred from a state closer to a stupor than a sleep. He was
lying on the immense bed of the master bedroom in the house in Coldheart
Canyon. Katya was lying beside him, her little body gathered into a
tight knot, pressed close to him. One arm was beneath him, the other on
top, as though she'd never let go of him again. She was snoring in her
sleep, as she had been that day he'd found her in her bedroom at the
guesthouse.

The human touch. It was more eloquent now than ever, given what they'd
gone through together.

There had been some terrifying moments for them both in the last few
hours; fragments of them played in Todd's head as he slowly extricated
himself from her embrace, and slid slowly out of the bed. First, there'd
been that breath-snatching moment when he'd turned his back on the
Malibu house and headed out into the dark waters of the Pacific with
Katya. He'd never been so frightened in his life. But then she'd
squeezed his hand, and looked around at him, her hair blowing back from
her face, showing off the glory of her bones, and he'd thought: even if
I die now, I will have been the luckiest man in creation. I will have
had this woman by my side at the end. Who could ask for more than that?

It hadn't been quite so easy to hold on to those feelings of gratitude
in the chaotic minutes that followed. Once they were out of their depth,
and in the grip of the great Pacific, the bitter-sweet joy of what they
were doing became a shared, instinctive attempt to survive in the dark,
bruising

waters. Fifty yards out, and the big waves, the surfers' waves, started
to!

pick them up and drop them down again into their lightless troughs. It 1
was so dark he could barely see Katya's face, but he heard her choking
on seawater, coughing like a frightened little girl.

And suddenly the idea of just dying out here, beaten to death by the
waves, didn't seem so attractive. Why not try to live! he found himself?

thinking. Not the kind of life he'd had before (he wouldn't want that
again, ever) but some other kind of life. Traveling around the world,
perhaps, incognito; just the two of them. That wouldn't be so bad, would
it?: And when they were bored with travel they could find some sunny
beach* down in Costa Rica and spend every day there drunk among the
parrots.

There they could wait out the years until the big, glossy world he'd
once given a shit for had forgotten he even existed.

All these thoughts came in flashes, none of them really coherent. The
only thought that took any real shape was the means by which they could
escape this dark water alive.

"We're going to dive!" he yelled to Katya. "Take a deep breath."

He heard her do so; then, before another pulverizing wave could comd "*
along and knock them out, he drove them both into a teetering wall of ?

water, diving deep into the placid heart of the wave. They must have
done ;

f this half a hundred times; diving down, rising up again gasping,
therij watching for the next monstrous wall to be almost upon them
before drvij ing again. It was a desperate trick, but it worked.

It was clearly preventing them from getting a terrible beating, but I
was steadily taking its toll on their energies. He knew they couldn't
corml tinue to defy the violence of the water for very much longer.
Their musll cles were aching, their senses were becoming unreliable. It
would only bel a matter of time before the force of the water got the
better of them,; they sank together, defeated by sheer fatigue.

But they had counted without the benign collusion of the tide, whichl
all this time had been slowly bearing them south, and--as it did
so--hadj

also been ushering them back toward the shore. The tumult of water*!

around them began to die down, and after a few minutes their toes begam

 to brush some of the taller coral towers. A few minutes later they had
solid ground beneath their feet, and shortly after that they were
stumbling ashore at Venice.

For five minutes or so they lay on the dark sand together, spitting up
water and coughing, and then eventually finding it in them to laugh, and
catch each other's hands.

Against all the odds, they'd survived.

"I guess we ... we weren't ready ... to die," Todd gasped.

"I suppose so," Katya said. She dragged her head over the sand, to put
her lips in reach of his. It wasn't a kiss, so much as a sharing of
breath.

They lay there, mouth to mouth, until Katya's teeth began to chatter.

"We have to get you back to the Canyon," he said, hauling himself to his
knees. The lights of the Venice boardwalk seemed impossibly remote.

"I can't," she said.

"Yes you can. We're going home. We're going back to the Canyon.

You'll feel stronger and warmer once we're walking. I promise."

He helped her get to her knees and then practically lifted her to her
feet. Arms around one another they stumbled toward the boardwalk, where
the usual tourist-trap entertainments were still going on, despite the
lateness of the hour. They wove between the people, unrecognized, and in
a back street Todd found a kid with a beaten-up Pinto to whom he offered
three hundred waterlogged bucks if he'd take them back home, and another
three hundred, dry, if he promised not to mention what he'd done and
where he'd been, to anyone.

"I know who you are," the kid said.

"No you don't," Todd said, snatching the three hundred back from the
kid's hand.

"Okay, okay. I don't," the kid replied, gently reclaiming the money.

"You gotta deal."

Todd knew that there wasn't much chance that the driver's promise would
last very long, but they had no choice in the matter. They made their
makeshift chauffeur close all the windows and turn up the heating, and
they clung together in the back of the car trying to get some warmth

back into their blood. Todd got him to drive as fast as the vehicle was
capable of going, and twenty minutes later he was directing the kid up
the winding road into Coldheart Canyon.

"I've never been up here before," the kid said when they were outside
the house.

Katya leaned in and stared at him.

"No," she said. 'And you never will again." Something about the way she
said it made the kid feel very nervous.

"Okay, okay," he said. "Just give me the rest of the money."

Todd went inside for another three hundred dollars in dry bills, and a
few minutes later the guy drove off, six hundred bucks the richer and
none the wiser, while Todd and Katya dragged themselves up the turret
stairs to ?

the master bedroom, sloughing off their cold damp clothes as they crept
toward the bed they'd thought they'd never see again.

It took Todd a long time to get across the bedroom to the closet: his
body!

ached to his marrow, and his thoughts were as sluggish as his body.
Only!

as he was pulling on a clean pair of jeans did he realize there were
voices' in the house.

"Shit ..." he murmured to himself.

He decided not to wake Katya. Instead he would try to get rid of the
people himself, without unleashing her righteous fury on them.

He went back into the bedroom. Despite the hullabaloo from belc Katya
showed no sign of waking. This was all to the good. She was of ously
healing the hurts of recent days. He lingered at the bed-side, stud ing
her peaceful features. The seawater had washed every trace of roug or
mascara from her face; she could have been a fifteen-year-old, ly there,
dreaming innocent dreams.

Of course that innocence was an illusion. He knew what she was capafc
of; and there was a corner of his brain that never completely ceased ^
him of that fact. But then hadn't she come to the beach to save him?

else would have done that, except perhaps for Tammy? All anybody had <
done for him was use him, and as soon as they'd got what they'd the

 they'd moved on. But Katya had proved she was made of more loyal
stuff.

She'd been ready to go all the way with him; to death if necessary.

So what if she was cruel? What if she had committed crimes that would
have her behind bars if anybody knew about them? Her sins mattered very
little to him right now. What mattered was how she'd taken his hand as
they'd turned their back on the lights of the beach and faced the dark
waters of the Pacific; and how hard she'd struggled to keep holding on
to it, however much the tide had conspired to divorce them.

The voices below had quieted.

He pulled on a white T-shirt, and went to the door. As he did so there
was a small earthquake. The door rattled in its frame. It was a short
jolt, and he guessed it was probably an aftershock. If so, then perhaps
what had woken him in the first place was the big shaker. Why else would
he have woken? He was still very much in need of sleep, God knows.
Nothing would have given him more pleasure than to strip off his jeans
and T-shirt and crawl back into bed beside Katya for another three or
four hours of blissful slumber.

But he could scarcely do that with a search party in the house. He heard
Eppstadt's voice among the exchanges. Fuck him! It was typical that the
little prick would get his nose in their business sooner or later. Todd
had hoped that he and Katya would get some quiet time together to plan
their next move: to search the house (and of course the Pool House) for
incriminating evidence of scandal, and destroy it; then to hide in the
depths of the Canyon until the investigators were satisfied that there
was nothing here worth investigating, and left, taking Eppstadt and
whoever the hell else was here (Maxine, no doubt) back with them. But
Eppstadt had ruined that hope. Before these interlopers left they were
going to search every damn room, no doubt of that: the master bedroom
included.

He was going to need to find a way to spirit Katya and himself out of
the house and away before they came looking.

He listened at the door and then very gingerly unlocked it and opened it
an inch. He could hear an exchange from below, which seemed to be led by
Eppstadt. Jesus, of all people to be up here among Katya's mysteries:
Mister Bottom-line himself, Gary Eppstadt. There was no sign of an
opinion from

 Maxine, which was unusual. She was normally vocal in any debate,
however little she knew about the subject. Then Todd remembered her
phobia about quakes. She always fled for the open air at the first sign
of a trembler, and no doubt she'd done exactly that. He was tempted to
go onto the balcony and see if he could spot her in the back yard--just
to see the bitch in a state of : agitation--but there wasn't time. There
was too much going on downstairs.

He ventured out of the bedroom a step, and peered over the rail, in time
to see somebody--it was a young man, either a waiter brought from the
party, or one of Maxine's new boys (or both), heading down the spiral
into the darkness there, where a door was banging.

Next he heard footsteps, and felt certain that Eppstadt was about toj

| appear from the kitchen door. Before he was spotted, Todd slid back
into!

the bedroom, and gently closed the door. It made a barely perceptible
click; certainly nothing audible with so much else going on in the
vicinity <

He knew what that banging door was all about. The earthquake had;|
thrown open the door to the Devil's Country, and it looked as though!

Eppstadt had convinced some dope to go down and close it. Idiots!
Didn't!

they have any instincts'? Didn't something whisper at the back of their
heads that when a door slammed in this house, you let it slam, you let
it slam till it chose to stop. What you didn't do was head on down the
stairs!

to close it. That was suicide, or the next best thing.

He put his head around the corner and peered into the bedroom. Kat was
still fast asleep. He briefly contemplated waking her, then through better
of it. All her life she'd had men following her around asking wrri they
should do next. He wasn't going to be numbered among them.

No, he would deal with this on his own. After all, the house was goal to
be his home as much as it was hers. His word should be law here, just
had to work out how best to proceed, and without a shot of espres to
quicken his sluggish thoughts, it might take a while. No matter, answer
would come to him, in time.

He sat with his back against the wall, and tried to put out of his he
the image of the innocent stranger heading down the spiral staircasel
close the door to the Devil's Country. <

 Todd stayed put behind the door for several minutes, his thoughts
describing vague circles. In truth he was still hoping that it would not
take any action on his part to fix the problem. The preferable solution
would be this: somebody (perhaps Maxine, out there in the back yard)
would encounter something that would raise the panic-level in the house,
and there would be a mass exodus. Perhaps it was too much to hope for,
but every other option (diversions, locating keys to side exits)
required a higher degree of wit than he possessed in his present
exhausted state.

He finally got up from behind the door and returned through the bedroom,
past his sleeping beauty, to the balcony. He stepped out. The dull dawn
had ushered in a dull day. Later, perhaps, the marine layer would burn
off and they'd have some sun, but for now, the sky was a wall of dead
cloud. He looked down into the greenery, hoping to spot Maxine, but the
thickness of the jungle all around the house--especially the gigantic
Bird of Paradise trees--made it virtually impossible to see very much.

And then, out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed a motion. Somebody
was running through the thicket, throwing panicked backward glances as
he went. It wasn't Maxine, it was her assistant, Sawyer, who'd been with
her for the last three years. He wasn't any more than thirty, but he'd
let his body get out of shape. Too many hurried lunches, snatched
because Maxine had more work for him than he could ever possibly finish;
too much after-work socializing, knocking back his single malts and
beluga at fancy premieres; not to mention the Bavarian creme-filled
donuts

 he would bring into the office in boxes of six, to help him through
his day with a well-timed sugar rush.

Thanks to the donuts and hamburgers, and his neat scotches, he couldn't
run very fast. And he certainly couldn't yell for help while he was
running: he didn't have enough breath for both. All he could do was sob
between gasps, throwing panicking glances over his shoulder. His
pursuers were closing on him. Todd could see the bushes thrashing around
immediately behind him; and something else--something smaller and more
nimble--was throwing itself from branch to branch overhead, to keep up
with its quarry.

"M ... Max ... Maxine!" he managed to get out, in between gasps.

"I'm over here!" Maxine yelled. "Sawyer! I'm at the cages!"

Todd followed the sound of Maxine's voice, and located her. She was a
considerable distance from the house, and had clambered up on top of one
of a series of cages. There she was kneeling, with a gun in her hand,
She'd always kept guns around the house, Todd knew, but this was the
first occasion he'd seen her using one.

"Keep following my voice," she yelled to Sawyer. "Look for a tree with
bright yellow flowers, like big bells--"

"'I'm looking!" Sawyer sobbed.

From his vantage point on the balcony, Todd felt like a Caesar at
Colosseum, watching the lions and the Christians. He could see tians
perfectly dearly, and now--as the gap between the pursuer pursued
closed--he began to glimpse the lions too.

In the bushes no more than a yard or two behind Sawyer was one the
dead's children: a foul hybrid of ghost woman and--of all jaguar. The
latter must have been a prisoner in Katya's menagerie, marriage of
anatomies had turned its sleek perfection into rougher, uglier and
entirely more bizarre. The human element female; no doubt of that. The
face--when Todd glimpsed it--was thirds humanoid. The high cheekbones,
the icy stare: it was surely face of Lana Turner. Then the creature
opened its mouth, and the third showed itself: vast teeth, top and
bottom, a mottled throat, tongue. It let out a very unladylike roar,
and pounced on Sawyer, who threw himself out of its path with inches to
spare.

"Are you okay?" Maxine yelled.

All that Sawyer could manage was: "No!'" "Are you close to me?" Maxine
said.

"'I can't see you," he cried. The branches over his head were shaking
violently.

"Look for the yellow flowers."

.. yellow.., flowers ..."

It would have been easy for Todd to direct Sawyer through this maze, but
that would have taken all the fun out of it. Better to keep his silence
and let the man find his own way. It was the kind of game he knew Katya
would love. He was tempted to wake her, but it would be over in the next
few seconds, he guessed. Sawyer was a few yards from the cages, and
safety. Having failed to catch its victim on its first pounce, the Lana,
as Todd had mentally dubbed the creature, had returned to her stalking.
Todd caught glimpses of her mottled back as she slid through the
thicket. Her intentions were dear, at least from Todd's point of view.
She was moving to cut Sawyer off from the gallery of cages. Sawyer and
Maxine kept a banal exchange going meanwhile, so that Sawyer could find
his way to her.

"You're getting louder."

"Am I?'"

"Sure. You see the yellow flowers, yet?"

"Yeah. I see them."

"You're really close."

"I'm under them--"

He stopped talking because he heard the low growl of the Lana. Todd
could hear the creature too, though he couldn't see it. He silently
willed Sawyer not to make any sudden moves; just stand still, shut up,
and maybe the animal would lose interest. Sawyer could stand still
without any problem, but could he shut up? No, he could not. Sawyer was
a gabber

"Oh God, Maxine. Oh God. It's close to me."

"Shush," Maxine advised.

Sawyer so that he fell sideways, through the very patch of yellow
flowers which had been his beacon.

He was now in view of Maxine, who yelled to him to get up, get up
quickly--

He started to do so, but the breath had been knocked out of him by the
blow, and before he could get to his knees the creature was on him a
second time, her claws digging deep into the mass of his
shoulder-muscle. ;

!

From her perch on the cage Maxine was attempting to get a clear shot, I
but it would have been difficult for anyone, however sophisticated his
skill 1 with guns, to put a bullet in the animal and not wound Sawyer in
the 1 process. But Maxine was ready to give it a try. She'd been taking
lessons with an ex-cop from the LAPD for several months; she knew to
keep a 1 steady hand and her eye fixed on the target.

Sawyer couldn't have moved if his life had depended upon it. The crea*|
ture had him held in a death-grip.

Maxine fired. The sound was sharp in the still air of the Canyon, like
a'^ whip-crack. It echoed off the other wall of the Canyon, the blow of
the?| bullet throwing Sawyer's attacker off her victim. She lay this
not-so-a distant relation of the exquisite Miss. Turner, on the ground
beside Sawyerj whom she'd loosed as soon as she was hit. Blood ran
copiously from the both, mingling on the ground between them.

"Get up," Maxine said to Sawyer.

It was good advice. The Lana was still alive, her breathing quick:
shallow.

Sawyer wasn't so badly injured that he failed to realize the danger he I
still in. He rolled away from his attacker and started to get to his
feet. As J did so, the creature suddenly sat up beside him and, opening
her ; jaws, lunged. She took a chunk from Sawyer's leg, twisting her
head to 1 away the bulk of his calf. He screamed, and fell forward onto
his hands.

Maxine had a clear shot at the beast, and took it. But her second shot I
not as efficient as her first; it struck the creature's shoulder,
passing throus

 the muscle without appearing to significantly slow the animal, which
threw itself on top of Sawyer as though she were attempting to mount
him.

Seconds later, the Lana opened her mouth and sank her teeth into the
bones of Sawyer's skull. The man's sobs ceased instantly, and what
little strength his limbs had possessed fled. He hung beneath the Lana's
body like a zebra's corpse from the jaws of a lion, glassy-eyed and
lifeless.

Todd heard Maxine say, "Oh Christ ... oh Christ ..."

But the horror wasn't over with yet. The creature apparently wanted to
get her teeth into her wounder, because having dispatched Sawyer she let
the body drop from her jaws and began to move toward the cage on which
Maxine was crouched. Even in her hurt state there was no doubt that she
had the physical power to get up onto the cage and attack Maxine. In
fact, the wounds she had sustained didn't seem to be hurting her that
much; her hybrid face carried a look that was somewhere between an
animal snarl and a human smile. Maxine didn't hesitate. Taking a bead on
the animal, she fired. The bullet struck the creature in the middle of
her face, taking out the flat nose and the top half of the mouth.

For one long moment she seemed not to comprehend the fatal damage she
had sustained. She lifted her front leg, which ended in a hand which
erupted into claws, toward her face, almost as though she intended to
explore the damage she had sustained. But before her corrupted limb
could reach her face the creature's system closed down, and she fell
forward, dead.

There had been a good deal of motion in the foliage throughout this
episode; Todd had the sense that there were several other creatures
watching to see how this proceeded before they showed their own faces.

Now, with the death of Lana, the thicket was still. Nothing moved;
nothing breathed.

The only sound Todd could hear was the very soft sound of Maxine saying
Oh God to herself, over an dover. She quickly got control of her horror

Sawyer so that he fell sideways, through the very patch of yellow
flowers 1 which had been his beacon.

He was now in view of Maxine, who yelled to him to get up, get up
quickly--

He started to do so, but the breath had been knocked out of him by the 1
blow, and before he could get to his knees the creature was on him a
sec- I and time, her claws digging deep into the mass of his
shoulder-muscle.

From her perch on the cage Maxine was attempting to get a clear shot, I
but it would have been difficult for anyone, however sophisticated his
skill?; with guns, to put a bullet in the animal and not wound Sawyer in
the | process. But Maxine was ready to give it a try. She'd been taking
lessons with an ex-cop from the LAPD for several months; she knew to
keep a 1 steady hand and her eye fixed on the target.

Sawyer couldn't have moved if his life had depended upon it. The crea*|
ture had him held in a death-grip.

Maxine fired. The sound was sharp in the still air of the Canyon, like
al whip-crack. It echoed off the other wall of the Canyon, the blow of
thcsj bullet throwing Sawyer's attacker off her victim. She lay this
not-so-| distant relation of the exquisite Miss. Turner, on the ground
beside Saw whom she'd loosed as soon as she was hit. Blood ran copiously
from the both, mingling on the ground between them.

"Get up," Maxine said to Sawyer.

It was good advice. The Lana was still alive, her breathing quick;
shallow.

Sawyer wasn't so badly injured that he failed to realize the danger he'
still in. He rolled away from his attacker and started to get to his
feet. As ^ did so, the creature suddenly sat up beside him and, opening
her jaws, lunged. She took a chunk from Sawyer's leg, twisting her head
to 1 away the bulk of his calf. He screamed, and fell forward onto his
hands, if

Maxine had a dear shot at the beast, and took it. But her second shot1
not as efficient as her first; it struck the creature's shoulder,
passing throv

 the muscle without appearing to significantly slow the animal, which
threw itself on top of Sawyer as though she were attempting to mount
him.

Seconds later, the Lana opened her mouth and sank her teeth into the
bones of Sawyer's skull. The man's sobs ceased instantly, and what
little strength his limbs had possessed fled. He hung beneath the Lana's
body like a zebra's corpse from the jaws of a lion, glassy-eyed and
lifeless.

Todd heard Maxine say, "Oh Christ ... oh Christ ..."

But the horror wasn't over with yet. The creature apparently wanted to
get her teeth into her wounder, because having dispatched Sawyer she let
the body drop from her jaws and began to move toward the cage on which
Maxine was crouched. Even in her hurt state there was no doubt that she
had the physical power to get up onto the cage and attack Maxine. In
fact, the wounds she had sustained didn't seem to be hurting her that
much; her hybrid face carried a look that was somewhere between an
animal snarl and a human smile. Maxine didn't hesitate. Taking a bead on
the animal, she fired. The bullet struck the creature in the middle of
her face, taking out the flat nose and the top half of the mouth.

For one long moment she seemed not to comprehend the fatal damage she
had sustained. She lifted her front leg, which ended in a hand which
erupted into claws, toward her face, almost as though she intended to
explore the damage she had sustained. But before her corrupted limb
could reach her face the creature's system closed down, and she fell
forward, dead.

There had been a good deal of motion in the foliage throughout this
episode; Todd had the sense that there were several other creatures
watching to see how this proceeded before they showed their own faces.

Now, with the death of Lana, the thicket was still. Nothing moved;
nothing breathed.

The only sound Todd could hear was the very soft sound of Maxine saying
Oh God to herself, over an dover. She quickly got control of her
horrorencouragement, but he refrained from doing so. For one thing, he
didn't!

':'

want to admit that he'd stood as a spectator to this whole drama;
second^I he was afraid of distracting Maxine while she was down there.
Certainly her killing of the creature had silenced its brethren in the
thicket, but their I silence didn't mean they'd given up their stalking.
They were simply sitting in the shadows waiting for Maxine to make a
mistake, when no doubt 1 they would fall upon her in a vengeful mob.

Thus, keeping his silence, Todd watched Maxine make her way!

between the cages, glancing back at the house constantly, as though sh |
was trying to find a path that would lead her back to safety but was at
presll ent only able to find one that ran parallel to the house. She was
now l or forty yards from the cages, which was a good thing, because
that me she couldn't see what was happening on the walkway beneath them.

A minute or two after her exit, a few of Lana's family member^!

appeared from the thicket where--as Todd had known--they'd beenf
waiting. Now about six of them came out of hiding. They had no inter in
the corpse of their sibling. It was Sawyer they wanted. Surrounding 1
body they began to play with the corpse like children with some grue
some toy. They tore off his clothes, and bit off his penis and balls.
Thefi followed that by biting off fingers, knuckle by knuckle, and
spitting 1 pieces out. They seemed to take infantile pleasure in the
mess they' making. Todd was horribly disgusted by the spectacle, but he
kept wate ing until they were finished with the fingers and began to
disembowel 1 man. Only then did he retreat from the balcony railing and
go backinsid

It would not necessarily be easy for Maxine to find her way back upl the
house, he realized. Many of the pathways were overgrown, and in 1
present, no doubt panicked, state of mind, she could easily lose her1
and keep on losing it. He would have to go outside and find her.

Katya was still sleeping. The shots hadn't even stirred her. Indeed, I
seemed to have scarcely moved, so profound was her slumber. Her I was
still up at her mouth, limply curled round on itself.

He kissed her, saw that this did not wake her either, and left her to 1
slumbers.

 Eppstadt was in the Devil's Country. A fine drizzle, almost a mist,
was drooping from the bloated clouds; it came in soft waves against his
face, cooling his flushed skin. If he doubted the reality of this place,
its chill seemed designed to undo his doubt.

He hated the idea that what he was witnessing was real; doing so
violated all his logical faculties. But what was the alternative? That
he'd slipped and fallen, and was now lying at the bottom of the stairs
in a semicomatose state, imagining all this? It was a pretty solution,
but as he had no way of knowing whether it was true or not, his only
option was to find Joe and get the hell out of here before the place
began to get even crazier than it already was. The less he knew about
this country--the less its grotesqueries lodged in his psyche--the
happier the rest of his life would surely be.

With that thought he began a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree scanning of
the landscape, calling Joe's name as he did so. His din (even his simple
presence) was enough to stir life in the bushes and trees. He felt
himself watched by several species of unlikely animal, their eyes huge
and luminous, their postures, and in some cases the details of their
physiognomies, vaguely human, as though this twilight world had
witnessed all kinds of criminal couplings.

Finally, he heard a response from Joe.

"Who's there?"

"Eppstadt."

"Come over here. Quickly. You gotta help me."

He followed the sound of the man's shouting. There was a small copse
ahead, and Joe had clambered a few feet into a tree by means of a crude
wooden ladder which had been propped against one of the trunks.

"What the hell are you doing?" Eppstadt wanted to know.

Joe simply repeated his plea: "You gotta help me."

"There's no time, Joe," Eppstadt said. "You've got to come back with me.
Right now. Christ, I sent you down to close the door. Why'd you come
in?"

"For the same reason you did," Joe said. "I couldn't believe what I was
seeing. Are you going to help me or not?" Eppstadt had  his way into the
midst of the thicket as he and Joe spoke, snagging his suit on the
briars that grew in profusion here several times as he did so. The
tableau that now came into view appalled him.

There was a man crucified among the higher branches of the tree Joe had
climbed, the deed done with both rope and nails. Joe had already ;|
managed to remove a couple of the nails (spattering his arms and face 1
with blood in the process) and was now pulling at the knotted rope with
1 his teeth. He was desperate to get the man down from the tree, and he
had reason. The branches around the man's head were bustling with;|
birds, the Devil's Country's version of carrion-crows: bigger, crueler
ver1 sions. They'd clearly made several assaults on the man's face
already,,; There were deep gouges around the victim's sockets where the
birds hasi gone after his eyes. Blood from the wounds poured down his
face. Hfipl might have resembled Christ but for the brightness of his
blonde hair which fell in dirty curls to his shoulders.

"I need a stone!" Joe yelled down at Eppstadt.

"What for?"

"Just find me a fucking stone, will you?"

Eppstadt didn't like to take orders--especially from a waiter--but 1 saw
the urgency of the situation, and did as he was asked, looking arov
until he laid his hands on a long, sharp stone, which he passed on up 1
Joe. From his perch on the ladder, Joe took aim at the closest of the
rion crows. It was a good throw: The stone struck the most ambitious <

the flock--who had apparently decided to come in for the kill--and
messily smashed open the bird's head, but its companions did not fly
off, as Joe had hoped. They simply retreated up the tree a branch or
two, squawking in fury and frustration, while the dead bird dropped from
the perch.

As if awoken from a grateful sleep by the din of the birds, the
crucified man raised his head, and opened his mouth. A black snake, no
thicker than a baby's thumb, slid out from between his lips in a thin
gruel of blood, spittle and bile. The snake dangled from the man's lower
lip for a few moments, hooked by its tail. Then it fell to the ground, a
foot from Eppstadt.

He stepped away in disgust, throwing a backward glance at the door, just
to reassure himself that his means of escape from this insanity was
still in view. It was. But the snake had changed his perspective on this
mercy mission.

"The guy's on the way out," Eppstadt said to Joe. "You can't do anything
for him."

"We can still get him down."

"And I'm telling you he's beyond help, Joe. Look at him."

There did indeed seem little purpose in laboring to depose the man; he
was obviously close to death. His eyes had rolled back beneath
fluttering eyelids, showing nothing but white. He was attempting to say
something, but his mind and his tongue were beyond the complex business
of speech.

"You know what?" Eppstadt said, glancing around the landscape. "This is
a set-up." There were indeed dozens of hiding places for potential
attackers--human or animal--within fifty yards of them: rocks, holes,
thicket. "We should just get the hell out of here before whoever did
this to him tries the same on us."

"Leave him, you mean?"

"Yes. Leave him."

Joe just shook his head. He had succeeded in getting this far, and
wasn't going to give up now. He pulled on the rope that held the man's
right hand. The arm fell free. Blood pattered on the leaves over
Eppstadt's head, like a light rain.

"I'm almost done," Joe said.

"Joe, I--"

"Get ready," Joe. said again, leaning across the victim's body to untie
the other hand. "You're going to have to catch him," he warned
Eppstadt..j

"I can't do that." ;i

"Well who else is going to do it?" Joe snapped.

Eppstadt wasn't paying attention, however.

He'd heard a noise behind him, and now he turned to find that a freakr
ish child, naked and runty, had appeared from somewhere, and was look*';
ing up at him. (

"We've got company," he said to Joe, who was still struggling to free
the crucified man's other hand. } '>

When Eppstadt looked back at the freak, it had approached a few steps,
and Eppstadt had a clearer view of it. There was something goatish in
the'?

gene-pool, Eppstadt decided. The child's bandy legs were sheathed with
dirty-yellow fur, and his eyes were yellow-green. From beneath the
pal$<l dome of his belly there jutted a sizable erection, which was out
of all pro*; portion to the rest of his body. He fingered it idly while
he watched.

"Why are you taking the man down?" he said to Joe. Then, getting no
answer from Joe, directed the same question at Eppstadt. ;

"He's in pain" was all Eppstadt could find to say, though the phrasg;
scarcely seemed to match the horror of the victim's persecution.

"That's the way my mother wants him," the goat-boy said.

"Your mother?"

"Lil-ith," he said, pronouncing the word as two distinct syllables. "S.

is the Queen of Hell. And I am her son."

"If you're her son," Eppstadt said, playing along for time until a
bettt!

way to deal with this absurdity occurred, "then it follows, yes ..

would be your mother."

"And she had him put up there so I could see him!" the goat-boy rep the
head of his pecker echoing his own head in its infuriated nodding.

The angrier he became, the more the evidence of his extreme breeding
surfaced. He had a hare-lip, which made his outrage harder

 understand, and his nose--which was scarcely more than two gaping wet
holes in his face--ran with catarrhal fluids. His teeth, when he bared
them, were overlapped in half-a-dozen places, and his eyes were slightly
crossed. In short, he was an abomination, the only perfect piece of
anatomy he'd inherited was that monstrous member between his legs, which
had lost some of its hardness now, and hung like a rubber club between
his rough-haired legs.

"I'm going to tell my mother about you!" he said, stabbing a stunted
forefinger in Eppstadt's direction. "That man is a crinimal."

"A crinimal?" Eppstadt said, with a supercilious smirk. The idiot-child
couldn't even pronounce the word correctly.

"Yes," the goat-boy said, "and he's supposed to hang there till the
birds fluck out his eyes and the dogs eat out his end tails."

"Entrails."

"End tails!"

"All right, have it your way. End tails."

"I want you to leave him up there."

During this brief exchange, Eppstadt's gaze had been drawn to the
goat-boy's left foot. The nail of his middle toe had not been clipped
(he guessed) since birth. Now it looked more like a claw than a nail. It
was six, perhaps seven, inches long, and stained dark brown.

"Who the hell are you talking to?" Joe yelled down from the top of the
ladder. The density of the foliage made it impossible for him to see the
goat-boy.

"Apparently he's up there as a punishment, Joe. Better leave him there."
"Who told you that?"

Joe came down the ladder far enough to have sight of the goat-boy.
"That?"

The boy bared his teeth at Joe. A dribble of dark saliva came from the
corner of his mouth and ran down onto his chest.

"I really think we should just get going ..." Eppstadt said.

"Not until this poor sonofabitch is down from here," Joe said, returning
up the ladder. "Fucking freak."

 "This isn't our business, Joe," Eppstadt said. There was something'
about the way the air was roiling around them; something about the way;
the clouds churned overhead, covering the already depleted light of the
sun, that made Eppstadt fearful that something of real consequence was
in the offing. He didn't know what this place was, or how it was
created; nor, at that moment, did he care. He just wanted to be out
through the door and upstairs again.

"Help me!" Joe yelled to him.

Eppstadt went to the bottom of the ladder and peered up. The cruri* fied
man had dropped forward over Joe's broad shoulder. Even in his'j
semi-comatose state he could still beg for some show of compassion^
"Please ..." he murmured. "I meant no offense ..."

"He wouldn't fuck my mother," said the goat-boy, by way of explanation
for this atrocity. He was just a foot or two behind Eppstadt, staring up
I at Joe and the man he was attempting to save. He turned briefly;
surveyed^

|

the sky. The wind was getting gusty again, slamming the door and then|
throwing it open.

"She's coming," the goat-boy said. "Smell that bitterness in the air?"

Eppstadt could indeed smell something; strong enough to make hisj eyes
water.

"That's her," the goat-boy said. "That's Lil-ith. She's bitter like that
Even her milk." He made an ugly face. "It used to make me puke, me? I
love to suckle. I love it." He was getting hard again, talking himsd||
into a fine little fever. He put his thumb in his mouth, and pulled hard
I it, making a loud noise as he did so. He was every inch an irritating
lit child, excepting those inches where he was indisputably a man.

"I'd put him back if I were you," he said, pushing past Eppstadt to st
at the bottom of the ladder.

Eppstadt's gaze returned to the heavens. The sky was the color of cc
iron, and the bitterness the child had said was his mother's stench was
j ting stronger with every gust of the cold wind. Eppstadt looked off
int?

the distance, to see if there was any sign of an arrivee on the wine
roads. But they were almost deserted. The only person on any of

roads right now was a man some two or three miles away, who was lying
sprawled, his head against a stone. Eppstadt had no logical reason to
believe this, but he was somehow certain the man was dead, his brains
spattered on the stone where he laid his head.

Otherwise, the landscape was empty of human occupants.

There were plenty of birds in the air, struggling against the
increasingly violent gusts to reach the safety of their roosts; and
small animals, rabbits and the like, scampering through the whipping
grass to find some place of safety. Eppstadt was no nature-boy, but he
knew enough to be certain that when rabbits were making for their
bolt-holes, it was time for human beings to get out of harm's way.

"We've got to go," he said to Joe. "You've done all you can."

"Not yet!" Joe yelled. The wind was strong enough to make even the heavy
branches of the tree sway. Dead leaves were shaken down all around.

"For God's sake, Joe. What the fuck is wrong with you?"

He took a step up the ladder and caught hold of Joe's belt. Then he
tugged. "You're coming, or I'm going without you."

"Then go--" Joe began to say. He didn't finish because at that instant
the ladder, which was presently bearing the weight of Eppstadt, Joe the
Samaritan, and the crucified man, broke.

Eppstadt was closest to the ground, so he sustained the least damage.

He simply fell back on the sharp stones in which the copse and its briar
thicket were rooted. He scrambled to his feet to find out what had
happened to the other two men. Both had fallen among the thorns, the
crucified man spread-eagled on top of Joe. Only now were the man's
wounds fully displayed. Besides the peckings around his eyes, there were
far deeper wounds--certainly not made by birds--in his chest. Somebody
had had some fun with him before he was nailed up there, cutting star
patterns around his nipples.

Joe struggled to get himself out from under the man, but his flailing
only served to catch him in the thorns.

"Help me," he said, throwing his hand back over his head toward
Eppstadt. "Quickly. I'm being pricked to death here!"



Eppstadt approached the thicket and was about to take hold of Joe's hand
when two of the largest wounds on the crucified man's chest gaped, and
the flat black heads of two snakes, each ten times the size of the
serpent that had slipped out of his throat, pressed their blood-soaked
snouts out of the layers of flesh and yellow fat, and came slithering
out of his torso. One of them trailed a multitude of what Eppstadt took
to be eggs, suspended in a jellied mass of semi-translucent phlegm.

Eppstadt stepped away from the thicket, and from Joe. The serpents
crisscrossed as they emerged, their beady white eyes seeking out some
new warm place to nest.

"Are you going to help me or not?" Joe said.

Eppstadt simply shook his head.

"Eppstadt!" Joe wept. "For God's sake get me out."

Eppstadt had no intention of getting any closer to the snakes than he
already was: but the goat-boy had no such scruples. He pushed past
Eppstadt and grabbed hold of Joe's outstretched hand. His strength, like
his member, was out of all proportion to his size. One good haul, and he
had Joe halfway freed from the thorn bushes. Joe screamed as his back
was scored by the thorns, which had been pressed deep into his flesh by
the weight of the man on top of him.

"Ah now, shut up!" the goat-boy yelled over Joe's complaints. Hanging
out of the thicket, poor Joe looked half-dead. The pain had made him ;

vomit, and it was running from the side of his mouth. His demands had J

-j become pitiful sobs in the space of a few seconds. Horrified though
hej was--and guilty too (he'd come down here to help Joe; and now look
at 3 him)--Eppstadt still couldn't bring himself to intervene. Not with
the| snakes raising their heads from the body in which they'd nested,
still eage*l for another victim.

Ignoring Joe's weak protests, the goat-boy pulled on him a secon<f|
time, and then a third, which was the charm. Joe fell free of the
thicket;| landing heavily on his pierced back. Sheer agony lent him the
strength tdf| throw himself over onto his stomach. His back was nearly
naked; the vie

 lence of the goat-boy's haulings had torn open his shirt. He lay face
down in the dirt, retching again.

"That'll teach you," the goat-boy said. "Playing with crinimals! You
should get some of your own!"

While he was addressing Joe in this witless fashion, Eppstadt chanced to
look up at the man still sprawled on the bed of thorns. The two snakes
had slithered over his chest and were now entwined around his neck. He
was too close to death to even register this last assault. He simply lay
there, eyelids fluttering over sightless eyes, while the life was
throttled out of him.

"See that?" the goat-boy said. "So much for you and your tricks. Now I
lost my toy and your little friend is dead. Why couldn't you stay out of
it, huh? He was mine!" The boy's fury had him jumping up and down now.

"Mine! Mine! Mine!"

And suddenly he was up on Joe's back, dancing a tarantella on the mess
of thorns and wounds and blood. "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

It was a show of petulance; no more nor less. Joe rolled over and threw
the boy off. Then he started to get to his feet. But before he could do
so, the goat-boy came at him, his step still reminiscent of some
peculiar little dance.

"Get up!" Eppstadt yelled to Joe, not certain what the goat-boy was up
to, but certain it was mischief. "Quickly!"

Despite his agonized state, Joe started to push himself off his knees.
As he did so the goat-boy made a high slashing kick. Joe's hand went up
to his neck, and he fell back in the dirt.

The foot which had struck Joe was the one with the long middle nail, and
what had looked to Eppstadt like a glancing blow had in fact slashed
open Joe's windpipe.

Both Joe's hands were at his neck now, as blood and air escaped his
throat. He turned his gaze toward Eppstadt for a moment, as though the
Head of Paramount might know why Joe was lying in the dirt of a place he
couldn't even name while his last breath whined out between his fingers.

 Then the look of incomprehension went out of his eyes, to be replaced
f with a blank stare. His hands dropped away from his neck. The whining
sound died away, and he rolled forward. All the while the goat-boy went
on dancing, out of pure pleasure.

Eppstadt didn't move. He was afraid to draw the murderer's attention.

But then the boy seemed to take it into his half-witted head to go find
1 some other plaything, and without looking back at Eppstadt again, he
ran off, leaving Joe dead in the dirt and the man who'd come to save him
alone I in the darkening air.

 Tammy had come into the house cautiously, not at all certain what she
was going to find. In fact what she found was Jerry Brahms. He was
standing in the hallway, looking down the stairwell, his face
ashen--except where it was bloody from his fall--his hands trembling.
Before he could get a word out of his mouth there came a din of shrieks
from below.

"Who's down there?" Tammy asked Jerry.

"Some boy we came up here with from Maxine's party. A waiter. And
Eppstadt. And God knows what else."

"Where's Maxine?"

"She's outside. She fled into the back yard when the earthquake hit."

There were more noises from below, and then a rush of wind, coming up
the stairwell. Tammy peered down into the darkness. There was somebody
down at the very bottom, lying on the floor. She studied the figure.

It moved.

"Wait a minute," she said, half to herself, "that's Zeffer!"

It was. It was Zeffer. And he was alive. There was blood all over him,
but he was definitely alive. She went to the top of the stairs. He'd
heard her call his name, and his shining eyes had found her; were fixed
on her. She started down the stairs.

"I wouldn't go down there ..." Brahms warned her.

"I know," she replied. "But that's a friend of mine."

She glanced up at Brahms as she took her second step. There was a look
of mild astonishment on his face, she wasn't sure why. Was it because
peo

 pie didn't have friends in this God-forsaken house; or because she was
going down the stairs despite the cold, dead smell on the wind?

Zeffer was doing his best to push himself up off his stomach, but he
didn't have the strength to do it.

"Wait," she called to him, "I'm coming."

She picked up her speed to get to him. Once she reached the bottom she
tried not to look toward the door through which he'd crawled, but she
could feel the wind gusting through it. There was a spatter of rain in
that wind. It pricked her face.

"Listen to me ..." Zeffer murmured.

She knelt beside him. "Wait. Let me turn you over."

She did her best to roll him over, so he wouldn't be face to the ground,
and managed to lift him so that his head was on her lap, though his
lower body was still half-twisted around. He didn't seem to notice. He
appeared, in fact, to be beyond comfort or discomfort; in a dreamy state
which was surely the prelude to death. It was astonishing that he'd
survived this long, given the wounding he'd sustained. But then perhaps
he had the power of | the Devil's Country to thank for that.

"Now," she said. "What do you want to tell me?"

"The horsemen," he said. "They're coming for the Devil's child ..."

"Horsemen?"

"Yes. The Duke's men. Goga's men."

Tammy listened. Zeffer was right. She could hear hooves on the wind, or
in the ground; or both. They sounded uncomfortably close.

"Can they get out?" she asked Zeffer.

"I don't know. Probably." His eyes closed lazily, and for a terriblej|
moment she feared she'd lost him. But they opened again, after a time,3
and his gaze fixed on her His hands reached up and took hold of Tammy'*}
arm, though his grip was feeble. "I think it's time the dead came in,
dorrt| you?" he said to her. His voice was so softened by weakness she
was not;| sure she'd heard it right at first.

"The dead?" she said.

He nodded. "Yes. All the ghosts, outside in the Canyon. They want to
come into the house, and we've kept them out all these years."

"Yes, but--"

He shook his head, as if to say: don't interrupt me, I don't have time.

"You have to let them in," he told her.

"But they're afraid of something," Tammy said.

"I know. The threshold. Remember how I told you I went back to Romania?"

"Of course."

"I found one of the Brotherhood there. A friend of Father Sandru's. He
taught me a method of keeping the dead from coming into your house.

What you have to do is undo what I did. And in they'll come. Believe me.

In they'll come." "How?" she said. If time was so short, and he was so
certain, why waste a breath on argument?

"Go into the kitchen and get a knife," he told her. 'A strong knife, one
that's not going to break on you. Then go to the back door and dig in
the threshold."

"The threshold?"

"The wood frame you step over to go outside. There are five icons in the
wood. Ancient Romanian symbols."

"And all I have to do is remove them?"

"You just remove them. The dead will be ready, as soon as the threshold
is clear. They've waited a very long time for this. Been very patient."

He allowed himself the smallest of smiles as he spoke; clearly the
prospect of the dead invading the house pleased him. "Will you do this
for me, Tammy?"

"Of course. If that's what you want."

"It's what's right."

"Then I'll do it. Of course I'll do it."

"You only need open one door, they'll all find their way in. I suggest
the back door, because it's rotting. The threshold will be easier to
..." He

 stopped, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace. The wound
was taking its terrible toll. Fresh blood came from between his fingers.

"You don't need to tell me any more," she told him. "You just lie
quietly.

I'll go get some help."

"No," he said.

"You need help." "No," he said again, shaking his head. "Just get to
work."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. This is more important."

"All right, I'll--"

She was about to repeat her reassurance when she realized he'd stopped
breathing. His eyes were still open, and there was still a lively gloss
in them, but no life there; nothing. Willem Zeffer's long and agonizing
life was at an end.

On the floor above, Jerry looked up as the door to the master bedroom
opened and Todd emerged.

"Hello, Jerry," he said as he started down the stairs. "You got hurt?"

"I fell during the quake."

"We need to get outside and find Maxine."

"Really?"

"She's lost out there. And Sawyer's dead. I'm afraid if somebody doesn't
get to her--"

"I heard the shouts," Jerry said vaguely, looking and sounding like a
man; who'd lost all interest in the drama that was being played out
around him. 1

"Who else is here?" Todd asked him.

"Eppstadt's downstairs with some kid he brought from the party--"

"Yes, I saw him. Is he one of Maxine's new superstars?"

"No. He's just a waiter," Jerry said.

Todd looked down the rest of the flight. There was a body at the hot-1
torn of the stairs, and somebody else, a woman, bent over, touching the
| face of the dead man. With great gentility, she closed the dead man's
eyes;; Then she looked up the stairwell.

"Hello, Todd," she said.

"Hello, Tammy." "I thought you were drowned."

"Sorry to disappointment you." He started down the stairs toward her.

She turned her face from him, returning her gaze to the body.

"Did you see Eppstadt?" he asked her as he came down the flight.

"You mean that sonofabitch from the studio?"

"Yes. That sonofabitch."

"Yes, I saw him." She glanced up at Todd. There were tears in her eyes,
but she didn't want to shed them in front of him. Not after what had
happened on the beach. He'd been so horribly careless of her feelings.
She wasn't going to show any vulnerability now, if she could help it.

"Where did he go?" Todd asked her, as if there were much choice in the
matter.

She nodded down the passageway toward the door to the Devil's Country.

"He went in there, I think. I didn't see it. Jerry told me."

"How long ago?"

"I don't know," she said. 'And frankly, I don't really care right now."

Todd put his hand on Tammy's shoulder. "I'm sorry. This is a bad time. I
never was very good expressing my feelings."

"Is that supposed to mean you're sorry?" she said.

"Yeah," he replied, the word hardly shaped; more like a grunt than an
apology. She made the tiniest shrug of her shoulder, to get him to take
his hand off her, which he did. There was so much she wanted to say to
him, but this was neither the time nor the place to say it.

He got the message. She didn't have to look back to see that he'd gone;
she heard his footsteps as he headed off down the passageway. Only after
ten or fifteen seconds did she look up, and by that time he was stepping
through the door.

Suddenly, the tears she'd held back broke: a chaotic cluster of feelings
battling to surface all at once: gratitude that Todd was alive, sorrow
that Zeffer was dead, anger that Todd had no better way to show his
feelings

 than to grunt at her that way. Didn't he know how much he'd hurt her?

"Here."

The voice at her shoulder was that of Jerry Brahms. He was offering her
a cleanly pressed handkerchief: a rather old-fashioned gesture but very
much appreciated at that particular moment. "Which one are you crying
over?"

She wiped her tears from her eyes.

"Because if it's Todd," he went on, "I wouldn't bother. He'll survive
this and go on and forget all of us. That's the kind of man he is."

"You think so?"

"I'm sure of it."

She wiped her nose. Sniffed.

"What was he talking to you about?" Jerry asked.

"He wanted to know about Eppstadt."

"Not Todd. Zeffer."

"Oh. He ... he had something he wanted me to do for him."

She wasn't sure she wanted to share Zeffer's proposal with Jerry This I
was a world filled with people who had extremely complicated
allegiances.

Suppose Jerry, out of some misplaced loyalty to Katya, tried to stop
her? It was perfectly possible that he might try. But then how the hell
did she get rid of him, so that she could go upstairs and do what she
had 4 to do?

One obvious way presented itself, although it was playing with fire. Iff

'&

she went to the door of the Devil's Country, Jerry would probably
follo^J her The place had a way of holding your attention, she knew. And
if il| held his for long enough, then she could slip away upstairs into
the kitchen. Find a knife. Go to the threshold, and get to work.

It wasn't her favorite plan (the further she stayed away from that door|
the happier she was) but she had no alternative at that moment. And st
needed to act quickly.

Without saying anything she got up and walked off down the passag way
toward the door. The wind came out to meet her, like an eager hos ready
to slip its arms through hers and invite her in. She didn't need I

look over her shoulder to know that Jerry was coming after her. He was
talking to her, just a step behind.

"I don't think you should go any further," he said.

"Why not? I just want to see what's in here. Everybody talks about it. I
think I'm the only one who hasn't actually seen it properly for myself."

As she spoke she realized that there was more truth to this than she was
strictly admitting. Of course she wanted to see. Her little plot to lure
Jerry's attention away was also a neat opportunity to excuse her own
curiosity. Talk about muddled allegiances. She had some of her own. One
more glimpse into that other world was on her own subconscious agenda,
for some reason.

"It's not good to look in there for too long," Jerry said.

"I know that," she replied, a little testily. "I've been in there. But
another peek can't hurt, can it? I mean, can it?"

She'd reached the door, and without further debate with Brahms, pushed
it open and stared at the landscape before her with eyes that had
recently been washed with tears. Everything was in perfect focus; and it
was beautiful. She didn't hesitate to debate the matter with her
conscience, Brahms or God in Heaven. She just stepped out of the
passageway and followed where Todd had gone just a couple of minutes
before.

 It wasn't difficult for Todd to find Eppstadt. Unlike his first visit
to this little corner of Hell, when his eyes had taken some time to
become usedl to the elaborate fiction that the tiles were creating for
him, this time everything was warmed up and ready to go. He looked
through the door and there it was, in all its glory, from the spectacle
of the eclipse overhead to a single serrated blade of grass bent beneath
the toe of his shoe, alongj which a little black beetle was making its
way.

And standing in the midst of all this, looking as appropriate as a hard*
on in the Vatican, was Eppstadt. He'd obviously had some problems while
he was here. The man who'd been several times cited as the "best-dressed
\ man in Los Angeles" was looking in need of a tailor. His shirt was
torn j and severely stained with what looked like blood, his face was
covered inl sweat, and his hair--which he obsessively combed over the
bald patch| (where the hair plugs hadn't taken)--had fallen forward,
exposing an; of shiny pink scalp, and giving him a ridiculous fringe.

"You!" he said, pointing directly at Todd. "You fucking lunatic! You
di<J this deliberately! And now people are dead, Pickett. Real people.
Dead because of your stupid games."

"Hey, hey, slow down. Who's dead?"

"Oh, as if you give a damn! You trick us all into following you int this
... this ... obscenity ..."

Todd looked around as Eppstadt ranted. Obscenity? He saw no obsce ity.
Given the shortness of his acquaintance with this place he had ce

 tainly felt a lot of different things about it. He'd been enchanted
here, he'd been so terrified that he'd thought his heart would burst,
he'd been absurdly aroused and as close to death as he ever wanted to
get. But obscene? No. The Devil's Country was simply the ultimate
E-Ticket Ride.

"If you don't like it," he said to Eppstadt, "why the hell did you come
in here?"

"To help Joe. And now he's dead."

"What happened to him?"

Eppstadt glanced over his shoulder, dropping his voice to a whisper.

"There's a child around here. Only it's not a child. He's a goat."

"So he's the Devil's kid?"

"Don't start with that Devil shit. I never made one of those movies--"

"This isn't a movie, Eppstadt."

"No, you're quite right. It isn't a movie. It's a fucking--"

"Obscenity. Yeah, so you said." "How can you be so casual?" Eppstadt
said, taking a stride toward Todd. "I just saw somebody sliced to
death."

"What?"

"The goat-boy did it. Just opened up Joe's throat. And it's your fault."

Eppstadt's stride had picked up speed. He was getting ready to do
something stupid, Todd sensed; his terror had become a capacity for
violence.

And even though there'd been times (that lunch, that long-ago lunch,
over rare tuna) when Todd had wanted to beat the crap out of Eppstadt,
this was neither the time nor the place.

"You want to see what you caused?" Eppstadt said.

"Not particularly."

"Well you're going to."

He caught hold of the front of Todd's T-shirt.

"Let go of me, Eppstadt."

Eppstadt ignored him. He just turned and hauled Todd after him, the
volatile mixture of his fear and rage making him impossible to resist.

Todd didn't even try. Katya had given him a lesson in how to behave
here.

You kept quiet, or you drew attention to yourself. And somehow--it was

 something about the way the wind seemed to be blowing from all quart |
ters at once, something about the way the grass seethed at his feet and
the 1

trees churned like thunderheads--he thought it wasn't just Eppstadt who
was in a state of agitation. This whole painted world was stirred up.

By now the hunters' dogs probably had their scent, and the Duke was on
his way.

"Just chill," Todd said to Eppstadt. "I'm not going to fight you. If you
J want me to see something then I'll come look. Just stop pulling on me,
1 will you?"

Eppstadt let him go. His lower lip was quivering, as though he wassl
about to burst into tears, which for Todd's money was worth the price of
1 admission.

"You follow me," Eppstadt said. "I'll show you something."

"Keep your voice down. There are people around here you don't want j to
have coming after you."

"I met one of them already," Eppstadt said, walking on toward a small;!

group of trees. 'And I never want to see anything like it again."

"So let's get out of here."

"No. I want you to see. I want you to take full responsibility for what
jl happened here."

"I didn't make this place," Todd said.

"But you knew it was here. You and your little lover. I'm putting I
picture together now. Don't worry. I've got it all."

"Somehow I doubt that."

Eppstadt was searching the ground now, his step more cautious, though he
was afraid of treading on something.

"What are you looking for?" He glanced back at Todd. "Joe," he said. And
then, returning his \ to the ground, he pointed. "There," he said.

"What?"

"There. Go look. Go on." "Who was he?" Todd said, staring down at the
maimed body in dirt, its throat gaping.

"His name was Joe Something-or-Other, and he was a waiter at Maxine's
party. That's all I know."

"And the goat-kid did this to him?"

"Yeah."

"Why, for Christ's sake?"

"Amusement would be my closest guess."

Todd passed a clammy hand over his face. "Okay. I've see him now. Can we
get the hell out of here and find Maxine?"

"Maxine?"

"Yeah. She went outside with Sawyer--"

"I know."

"And now Sawyer's dead."

"Christ. We're being picked off like flies. Who killed him?"

"Some ... animal. Only it wasn't any kind of animal I ever saw before."

"All right, I'm coming," Eppstadt said. "But you listen to me, Pickett.
If we survive this, you've got a fuck of a lot to answer for."

"Oh, like you don't."

"Me? What the hell do I have to do with this?"

"I'll tell you."

"I'm listening."

"I wouldn't be here nor would you or Maxine or any other poor fuck--"

He glanced at Joe's corpse. "If you hadn't sounded off at the beach.
Or--if you really want to go back to the start of things--how about a
certain conversation we had, during which you suggested I get my face
fixed?"

"Oh, that."

"Yes that."

"I was wrong. You should never have done it. It was a bad call."

"That was life. My flesh and--" He froze, for something had emerged from
the undergrowth: a beast that was a vague relative of a lizard, but
shorter, squatter, its back end having, instead of a long and serpentine
tail, an outgrowth of two or three hundred pale, bulbous tumors. It went
directly to the remains of Joe.

"No, no, no," Eppstadt said quietly. Then suddenly, running at the crea

ture the way he might at a dog who'd come sniffing at his gate. "Get
away!" he yelled. "For God's sake, get awayl"

The lizard threw the yellow-blue gaze of one of its eyes up in
Eppstadt's direction, was unimpressed, arid returned to sniffing around
the sliced-open neck. It flicked the wound with its tongue.

"Ohjesus. Ohjesus," Eppstadt gasped.

He picked up a rock and threw it at the animal, striking its leathery
hide. Again, the cold, reptilian assessment, and this time the creature
opened its throat and let out a threatening hiss.

Todd caught hold of Eppstadt, wrapping his arms around him from behind,
to keep him from getting any more belligerent with the animal.

They were lucky the beast was so interested in the remains of Joe, he
knew; otherwise it would have turned on them.

The lizard averted its gaze from Eppstadt again, and started to tear at
the raw meat around Joe's neck so that Joe's head was thrown back and
forth as it secured itself a mouthful.

Eppstadt was no longer attempting to free himself from Todd's bear- |
hug, so Todd let his hold slip a little, at which point he turned on
Todd, slamming the heel of his hand against Todd's shoulder.

"That should have been you!" Eppstadt said, following the first blow
with a second, twice as strong.

Todd let him rant. Over Eppstadt's shoulder he saw the lizard retreating
into the undergrowth from which it had emerged, dragging the remains of
Waiter Joe after him.

"You hear me, Pickett?"

"Yeah, I hear you," Todd said wearily.

"That's all you're good for: lizard food. Lizard! Food!" The blows were
coming faster and harder now. It was only a matter of time before Todd;
hit him back, and they both knew it. Knew it and wanted it. No more |
innuendo; no more lawyers; just fisticuffs in the mud.

"All right," Todd said, bitch-slapping Eppstadt for the fun of it. "I
get I it." He struck him again, harder. "You want to fight?" A third
blow, harder | still, which split Eppstadt's lip. Blood ran from his
mouth.

And then suddenly the two of them were at it, not exchanging clean,
neat blows the way they did in the movies but knotted up together in a
jumble of gouges and kicks; years of anger and competition emptying in a
few chaotic seconds. They could not have chosen a less perfect place or
time to settle a personal score if they'd looked a lifetime, but this
wasn't about making sensible decisions. This was about bringing the
other son ofabitch down. As it was they both went down, having wrestled
their way into muddy terrain. Their feet slid from under them and down
they went, locked together, like two boys.

Tammy saw them fall.

"Oh no," she said, half to herself. "Not here. Don't do it here."

"I wouldn't go any closer if I were you," Brahms advised her.

"Well you're not me," Tammy said, and without waiting for any further
response she pressed on over the uneven ground toward the two men in the
mud. There were sounds of birds overhead, and she glanced up at the sky
as she walked toward the men. It was spectacularly beautiful, and for a
moment her thoughts were entirely claimed by the piled cumulus and the
partially-blinded sun. The darkness of the heavens between the clouds
was profound enough that the brightest of the stars could be seen, set
in velvet gray.

When she looked back at Todd and Eppstadt, they were almost
indistinguishable from one another physically--both liberally coated in
mud.

But it was still clear which one was Eppstadt. He was letting out a
virtually seamless monologue about Todd. The general sense of which was
that Todd was a vapid, over-paid, talentless sonofabitch. Furthermore,
when all this insanity was over he, Eppstadt, was going to make certain
that everybody knew that Todd had caused the death of a number of
innocent people with his arrogance.

As Tammy got closer to the fight it became evident to Tammy that this
wasn't going to end quickly or easily. Neither man was going to be
talked down from his fury; it had escalated too far. She could only hope
they exhausted each other quickly, before they attracted unwanted
attention.

There seemed little hope of that. Though they'd fought to their feet
again, it was becoming harder and harder for either man to land a solid
blow in this slippery environment. Finally Eppstadt swung wide and went
down in the mud, falling heavily. He struggled to get up, the heels of
his hands sliding in the mud, but before he could succeed, Todd
clambered on top of him, and straddled him, his hands at the man's
throat. There was no fight left in Eppstadt. All he could do was gasp
and shake his head.

"You fuckhead," Todd said. "None of this would have happened ... if you
... had made my fucking movie."

Eppstadt had by now recovered enough energy to speak. "I wouldn't put
you in a movie if my fucking life depended on it."

At which point, Tammy made her presence known. "Todd?"

It was Eppstadt who looked up first. "Oh Jesus," he said. "I wondered
when you were going to show your fat ass."

Tammy wasn't in the mood for long speeches. "Leave the shithead in the
mud, Todd," she said, "and let's just get out of here."

Todd grinned through his mask of mud; the megawatt smile. "It would; be
my pleasure."

He got to his feet and stepped away. Eppstadt pulled his rather ungainly
bulk to his knees. He had lost one of his choice Italian shoes in the
melee, and now began to search for it. In fact, it had been flung wide
of the mud;; close to where Tammy was standing.

"Looking for this?" she said.

"Yes," he glared, beckoning with his fingers.

She tossed it in the thorn bushes.

"Cunt."

"Faggot."

"No. I am many things but a bugger I am not. Right, Brahms?" "Don't
bring me into this," Jerry said. "I just want us all out of here.'fl

"We're coming, Jerry!" Todd said, not looking at him. "You go on; take
Tammy."

"Not without you," she said.

"Oh, how touching," Eppstadt said. "The fat girl is loyal to the el

even though she doesn't have a hope in hell of getting a fuck out of
it."

Tammy had kept her fury limited to that one casual toss of the Italian
shoe, but now it erupted; all her fury toward Eppstadt and his kind. The
Mister-High-and-Mightys who thought that fat fan-girls were less than
shit.

"You are such scum!" she said. "You nasty-minded tiny-peckered little
piece of excrement!"

She approached him as she yelled, but after the fight with Todd the last
thing Eppstadt wanted was this woman laying her hands on him.

"Keep her away from me, Jerry," he demanded, raising his hands, palms
out. As he did so he retreated toward the copse of trees. "Jerry? You
hear me?"

"Leave him, Tammy/'

"Well, he's scum."

"And tell her to cover herself up," Eppstadt fired back. "The sight of
her cellulite makes me gag."

Jerry had caught hold of Tammy's arm.

Luckily for him, Tammy had suddenly lost interest in all this score
settling. She was studying a group of horsemen who were following a
winding road that would eventually bring them, she quickly realized, to
this very spot. "Todd ..." she said.

"Yes, I saw."

"We have visitors."

Duke Goga, of course, along with his entourage.

They had plenty of time to get to the door, Tammy reckoned. The hunters
were still some distance away, and it didn't seem that they'd yet
spotted the interlopers. Jerry was already on his way to the exit. Todd
had found some clean water to wash his wounds but he could be up and
gone in a couple of seconds.

Eppstadt was the exception. He'd gone into the thorn-thicket to fetch
his Italian shoe, and as he did so, something moved among the mass of
thorny branches off to the left of him.

He stopped reaching for his shoe, and studied the shadows. Whatever

it was seemed to have become snagged in there, because it shook itself.

Then it let out a kind of mewling sound and shook itself again, this
time more violently. The maneuver worked, however. Freed of the thicket
it stumbled out into view. It was the goat-boy. He started to pull
thorns out of his flesh, the pain of it making him weep, softly, to
himself.

Eppstadt knew what this creature was capable of from his previous
encounter and he had no desire to draw the attention of the beast. He
gave up on his shoe and set his eyes on the door. Jerry Brahms was
right: it was time they got the hell out of here.

The goat-boy had stopped weeping now, and for some reason had fixed his
gaze upon Tammy. Or more particularly, upon her breasts. There was no
equivocation in his stare; no attempt to pretend he was looking
elsewhere.

He simply stared lovingly at the upper part of Tammy's torso, and licked
his lips.

Tammy had heard the boy's sobbing complaints, and was staring at him. So
was Todd.

"Come on, Tammy," Todd said.

Tammy let her gaze go from the boy to the approaching hunters.

Plainly they'd also heard the sound of the child's walls because they'd
picked up their speed and were approaching at a hard gallop.

Tammy looked back at Lucifer's child, in all his goaty glory. His tearsj
f had dried now, and he was less interested in picking thorns out of
his|

flesh. They'd done some damage, she saw; little rivulets of dark red
bloodl ran down his limbs from the places where he'd been pierced. There
wa^l one spot that looked particularly tender, deep in the groove of his
groin.; He worked the thorn out a little, but not once did he take his
eyes off t objects of his present devotion. He didn't even glance over
at the hor men, though he must have heard their approach. He obviously
knew he to out-maneuver them. He'd been doing it for centuries. He had a
war of hidey-holes to tuck himself away.

Tammy glanced up at the sky: at the moon locked in its unnatural ] tion
in front of the sun. Then she looked around at the landscape whie that
half-clouded light illuminated: the road and the approaching hor

men, the cluster of boulders where Todd was standing, stripped of his
torn T-shirt, doing his best to lift handfuls of clean water up to his
wounded face.

The goat-boy would be gone in a moment, Tammy knew. And when it was gone
the Hunt would, as Zeffer had told her, continue in the same weary way
it had been going for centuries.

Perhaps it was time to bring the whole sorry thing to an end, once and
for all: to see if she, little Tammy Lauper from Sacramento, couldn't
deliver the Devil's child back into the hands of the Duke, who could
then return him to its mother, and bring an end to this long, weary
chase.

She knew of only one, desperate method by which she might do this.

She didn't waste time enacting it. She unbuttoned her torn blouse,
starting at the top. She had every jot of the goat-boy's attention from
the moment her fingers touched the first button. He forgot about
removing thorns from his flesh. He simply watched.

"Like them?" she said to him so softly she was certain nobody would
hear.

The goat-boy heard her, as she knew he would. He had an animal's ears.

By way of reply he nodded; very slowly, indeed almost reverentially.

There were two buttons remaining. Two buttons, and her blouse would fall
open, and he'd have a feast of her, hanging in front of his eyes.

She stopped unbuttoning. He made a little growl in his throat. The smile
suddenly went from his face. Perhaps she was imagining it, but there
seemed to be a flicker of fire in his eyes.

She stopped her teasing and put her hands back up to the first of the
remaining buttons. He rewarded her with a little smile, which showed her
a detail she'd missed until now. His teeth, though small, were all
sharpened to a fine point. He had the smile of a piranha. She literally
felt the flesh around her nipple tighten up at the prospect of those
needles coming anywhere near her.

She chanced a quick look in the direction of the horsemen, but they had
disappeared from sight for a time. The road that was bringing them

here had wound into an expanse of pine forest. She looked back at the |
goat-boy. He was tapping his left foot, which appendage boasted a nail
that would not have shamed a raptor. Plainly he was just a little
anxious 1 about the proximity of the Duke and his men: he did not wish
to be f caught. But just as plainly he was not going to leave. Not yet;
not until he'd seen what Tammy had to offer.

He pointed at her. Made a little waggling motion with his forefinger.

"Show me," he said.

She smiled at him, but she didn't move to oblige.

"Show," he said again.

She continued to smile at him, all the while assessing how many strides
of his flat little feet it would take for him to reach her, should he
take it f into his head to run. He could be on her in five strides, she
guessed. Four if he pushed it.

She slipped one of the two buttons out of its hole. The blouse fell open
a little, giving him a peek at her left nipple. She flashed, suddenly,
on some I hot summer's day in her fourteenth year, when she'd crept into
her par- ;JJ ents' room in the middle of the afternoon, and played
striptease in the mirror. She had more to boast about than any of the
other girls in her class. Bigger breasts, and hair down between her
legs. Her life would have :| been a lot happier if her breasts had
stopped growing that day. But they'd ?

had a long way to go. By the time she was fifteen she was like a young J
Shelley Winters; and it just got worse from there.

Strange how things came round. How something that had become ai source
of shame for her was now, out of nowhere, redeemed. She let hell

1 fingers slip down to the last button, knowing that the goat-boy's
gazel would go with them, and she would have a chance, however slim, to
look up past him and see whether the horsemen had emerged from the
foresej

The news was bad. There was no sign of the Duke and his men. Ha they
perhaps taken a wrong turning in the forest? Surely not. Surely the knew
this entire territory, after so many years of riding it.

"Show me your tits," the goat-boy demanded.

As he spoke he lifted his left leg and struck a stone with his raptor
clav

A bright spark leapt from the place and landed on a tuft of gray grass,
where it erupted into a little fire. It had too little fuel to keep it
sustained for long, but in the five or six seconds that it took for the
cycle of spark, fire and extinction to play out Tammy heard the sound of
the Duke's horses, and from the corner of her eye saw them emerging from
between the trees.

The goat-boy narrowed his eyes to golden slits. The corners of his mouth
turned down, showing the lower row of monstrous teeth.

"Show me," he said again.

Plainly he wasn't going to be toyed with any longer. He wanted to see
what she had, and he wanted to see them now.

She didn't pretend that the horsemen's proximity was not of interest to
her. What was the use? Everybody was in on this ridiculous game, the
goat-boy included. He dropped his head a little, which should have been
a sign for Tammy as to what he would do next, but she was too busy
thinking about how long the Duke would take to get off his horse to
realize that the goat-boy was making a run at her. And by the time she
did realize, he was already halfway there, and there was nothing between
her bare breasts and his hands, his mouth, his teeth, but a prayer.

 Fearing the worst, Todd let out a yell, and started racing across the
muddy; bloody ground to do whatever he could to stop the goat-boy
attacking Tammy. But before he could get there she had taken matters
into her own hands. She let the last of the six buttons slip, and her
blouse fell open, I unveiling her breasts. The sight of them literally
stopped the Devil's child in his tracks. He opened his mouth and drool
ran from it.

Tammy was smart enough not to reject this sign of adoration, however j
crude. Instead, she opened her arms, inviting him into her embrace. Todd
would have betted against the wisdom of this. The goat-boy was no
sentimentalist.

He wanted to play rough. But had he made that bet, he would f' have lost
it.

The Devil's child fell to his knees, laughing. Then he crawled--ye
crawled--into Tammy's arms. His hands went greedily up to one of he
breasts, and he held the unwieldy bubble of flesh before his eyes for I
moment of devotion. His mouth was slick and wet; the saliva glinted <
his terrible teeth.

"Please God ..." Todd murmured.

It was very possibly the strangest sensation of Tammy's thirty-four yea
the feeling of the Devil's child's mouth around her left nipple. There
h^J been a moment--as he closed his mouth around her--when it crossed
her mind that she should be afraid; that with one chomp he cov give her
an instant mastectomy if he so chose. But somehow she knew.1

 would not. He was in love with her breasts. Instead he worshiped them,
in his way. Though his mouth was tight around her flesh, she felt not so
much as the lightest of scratches from those shark-like teeth. In fact
she suspected he'd somehow sheathed them, the way a snake sheathed its
fangs, because as he sucked and sucked all she felt was a slightly
guilty rush of pleasure as his suction drew the blood to the nipple, and
the flesh surrounding the nipple, sensitizing the entire area.

Then, as though all this weren't peaceful and domestic enough, the
Devil's child closed his eyes, his fat little hands holding the source
of his bliss, and Tammy gently rocked him in her arms.

Goga had been searching for Lilith's child for many centuries now, under
a sky that--though it was sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear--always
showed the sun eclipsed. He had no real idea of how long his
imprisonment in the Devil's Country had lasted; his mind had long ago
lost any grasp on the passage of time. He and his men had passed the
centuries in a kind of fugue state. Sometimes, when they rested and ate
what they'd hunted--rabbit on occasion, or venison, or wild pig--they
would talk about what had happened to them that day on the hunt, and
where they now were. It was the Duke's opinion that this was not a real
place at all, but a kind of dream that the Devil was dreaming, and they
were trapped in it. How else to explain the curious limitations of their
condition? The same ships forever heading toward the horizon; the same
roads haunted by the same beasts; the same sun in the same heaven,
half-blinded by the same black moon?

But in the last few days--if days and nights could truthfully be said to
pass here--there had been signs that things were changing in what had
been hitherto a virtually changeless place. There had always been
strangers coming and going (trapped, the philosophizing Duke surmised,
in the same infernal dream where they found themselves). But whereas in
the past visitors had little or no effect upon the world they were
wandering through, the trespassers of recent times had not been quite so
guileless or so lucky. Several had perished in the region around the
forest.

 And now--as if all this were not strange enough--a new spectacle,
stranger by some measure than all that had preceded it:

Sitting beside the road--nursing the object of their long search as
though he were a commonplace baby--was a bare-breasted woman.

The Duke dismounted a few yards from where Tammy sat in the dirt,
rocking the goat-boy in her arms. His lieutenants had dismounted several
horse-lengths away, and were now creeping around the nursing woman,
swords drawn.

Tammy saw all of this, but she registered nothing--not a word, not the
raising of a finger--for fear of alerting the contented child to the
fact that his time in this idyllic state was about to end.

Very cautiously, the Duke approached the woman and child, beckoning to
his men to take their final positions. One of the men had brought a
wooden box; clearly his own crude handiwork which he now opened and
positioned behind the pair.

The goat-boy didn't open his eyes, but he pulled his mouth away from|
Tammy's breast long enough to say: "You don't all have to creep around4
like that. I know what you're up to." He'd no sooner spoken than his
interest in the Duke's men was forgotten again and he was back to
stroking the ample flesh in front of him. "Beautiful," he said to Tammy

"Do you hamj names for your tits?" "Names?" Tammy said. 'Actually, no."

"Oh you should. They're amazing." He kissed them, first left, then
rigbj: then left again, tender, affectionate kisses. "May I name them
myself?" I asked this question with the greatest delicacy, stumbling
over the wor Plainly the last thing he would have wished to do was cause
offense.

"Of course," she said.

"I may? Oh thank you. Then this must be Helena, who I sucked on,!

this one I'll call Beatrice." He looked at Tammy, framed by her breas
"And you? Who are you?"

"Tammy."

"Just Tammy?"

"Tammy Jayne Lauper."

"I'm Qwaftzefbni," the goat-boy said. 'Are you on the run from somebody,
Tammy?"

"I was, I suppose, in a way."

"Who?"

"My husband, Arnie."

"He doesn't appreciate you?"

"No."

The goat-boy began to lick Helena and Beatrice, again big sloppy
tonguings that made Tammy shudder with pleasure.

"No children?" he said in the middle of a stroke.

"No. Arnie can't ..."

"But you could, Tammy." He laid his head against her pillows. "Believe
me, I know about these things. You're fertile as the Nile. As soon as
you get pregnant these beautiful mammaries will become milk-machines.

And your children will be strong and healthy, with strong, healthy
hearts, like you." Finally, he opened his eyes just a slit, his gaze
first settling on her face then slipping sideways, to get a glimpse of
the cage. "So what's your opinion?" he said to her.

"About what?"

"Should I give myself up, or let the chase go on?"

"What happens if you give yourself up?"

"I go home. With my mother, Lilith. Back to Hell."

"Isn't that where you should be?"

"Yes, I suppose so. But how would you feel if I said you should be back
with Arnie?"

"Oh no ..."

"So, you understand," he said, running an appreciative palm over the
smooth globes, then putting his head down between them, his chin in the
groove. "Sometimes you just have to get away, at least for a while. But
you know, now that I lie here, I think, maybe it's time to give up. I've
been run ning for years. Never let anybody lay a finger on me. Until
you." His voice, already low, went to a barely audible whisper, almost a
hiss. 'Are they very close now?" he said.

"Yes," she told him. "They're very close."

He toyed with her hardened nipple. "If I give myself up, what will
happen?"

"I think we'll all leave this country, one way or another."

"And ... in your opinion ... would that be such a bad idea?" "No," she
told him. "In my opinion it would be a very good idea."

"And they won't hurt me?"

"They won't hurt you."

"You promise?"

She looked into his eyes, brown into gold. "I promise they won't hurt
you."

"All right," he said, lifting his arms up and putting them round herj
neck. "It's time we put an end to this. But first you have to kiss me."

"According to who?"

"According to me."

She kissed his grizzled lips. And as she did so, he leapt out of her
arms^l as though he'd been slick with butter; a jump that carried him
three or| four feet above her head.

"Prindefi-V." the Duke yelled.

His men weren't about to come so close to their quarry and lose : again.
They each caught hold of an arm and leg of the child, and carrie him,
squealing more like a pig than a goat, to the wooden crate.

Before they could get him safely locked away, however, there came'1
shout from Eppstadt. "Where are you going with that thing?" he demand

"They're taking it away," Todd explained.

"Oh, no they're not. Absolutely not. I saw it commit murder. I want t|
see it tried in a court of law."

He started toward the two men who had taken hold of the creat The Duke,
sword drawn, instantly came to stand between them.

Tammy, meanwhile, even before she'd buttoned herself up, was rea

 to add her own voice to the argument. "Don't you interfere," she told
Eppstadt. "You'll fuck up everything."

"Are you crazy? Well, yes, why am I asking? Of course you're crazy.

Letting that thing suck on you that way. You obscene woman."

"Just do it!" Todd urged the men, hoping his miming of the boy's
imprisonment would help the men understand his meaning.

It did. While the Duke held Eppstadt at swordpoint, his men put the
goat-boy into the crate, the wooden bars of which were decorated with
small iron icons, hammered into the timber. Whatever their meaning, they
did the trick. Though Qwaftzefoni was easily strong enough to shake the
crate apart he did not so much as lay his hands on the bars, but sat
passively in his little prison, awaiting the next stage of the
proceeding.

The Duke issued a new round of orders, and the men lifted the crate onto
the back of one of the horses, and started to secure it there.

While they did so the Duke made a short, but apparently deeply sincere,
speech to Tammy, thanking her, she assumed, for her part in this
dangerous enterprise. All the while he kept an eye on Eppstadt, and with
his sword ready should the man attempt to interfere. Eppstadt was
obviously equally aware that the Duke meant business, even if he didn't
understand the exchange, because he kept his hands raised throughout,
and his mouth shut.

Todd, meanwhile, stood watching the sky. There was, it seemed, a subtle
change in the configuration of the heavens. The moon was very slowly
moving off the face of the sun.

Suddenly, there was a shriek from one of the Duke's men. The goat boy
had found a place where his hand and arm could fit through the bars
without touching the icons, and using a moment of the man's distraction,
had reached out and was digging his short-fingered hand into the meat
around the man's eye. He had firm hold of it; firm enough to shake the
man back and forth like a puppet. Blood gushed from the place, splashing
against the goat-boy's palm and running down his victim's face.

The horse on which the crate was set reared up in panic, and the crate,
which had not yet been firmly fixed to the saddle, slid off. The
creature did

not let go of his victim. He hung on to the man's face as the crate
crashed to the ground. It did not break open, as no doubt the goat-boy
had hoped; and in a fit of frustration he started to tear the man's
flesh open still further.

The Duke was swift. He came to the place in two strides and with a
single swing of his sword separated the goat-boy's hand from his wrist.
The creature let out a sickening, shrill wail.

Tammy--who'd watched all this in a state of horrified disbelief (how
could this cruel monster be the same childish thing she'd had sucking on
her moments ago?)--now covered her ears against the noise of both
victims, man and boy. Though she'd muted the scene she couldn't take her
eyes off it: the hunter, dropping to his knees with the child's hand
still fixed in his face like some foul parasite; the goat-boy in his
crate, stanching his stump with his other hand; the Duke, wiping the
blood off his blade There was a short moment of calm as the goat-boy's
sobs became subdued and the wounded man, having pulled the hooked finger
out of his flesh, covered his wound with a cloth, to slow the flow of
blood.

The calm lasted no more than twenty seconds. It was broken by a grinding
sound in the earth, as though a machine made of stone and iron was on
the move down there. (

"What fresh hell is this?" Jerry murmured.

Tammy's eyes were on the crate, and its contents. The goat-boy had;
given up all his complaints, and was peering between the bars with his;
mouth open and slack. He knew exactly what was about to happen.

"Earthquake?" Eppstadt said.

"No," Tammy replied, reading the look on the goat-boy's face. "Lilith.

ONE

The ground opened up as though it were going to bring forth some
fantastic spring: red shoots, as fine as needles, appeared in their tens
of thousands, pierced the ground. A V-shaped crack, each side perhaps
twenty feet in length, then erupted into the burgeoning ground, the apex
no more than a yard from the spot where the goat-boy's crate sat.

The steady reverberation of immense machinery increased, and it now
became apparent what purpose this machine had, for an opening appeared
in the earth, resembling the upper part of some vast reptilian snout.
The red needles continued to grow, in both size and number, especially
around the lip; and at a certain point, when they were perhaps a foot
tall, or taller, they produced hosts of tiny purple-black flowers, which
gave off a scent no one in the vicinity (except, of course, Qwaftzefoni)
was familiar with. It was pungent, like a spice, but there was nothing
about it which would ever have persuaded a cook to use it: the smell,
and thus presumably the taste, was so powerful that it would have
overwhelmed even the most robust dish. It made everyone feel faintly
nauseated by its forcefulness. Eppstadt, who had the weakest stomach,
actually threw up.

By the time he'd done with his retching the extraordinary growth-cycle
of the plant had carried it past its peak, however. The small black
blossoms were in sudden decay, their petals losing their color. And now,
in its autumnal mode, the odor of the plant changed. What had been an
almost unbearable stench a minute before became transformed by the
process of corruption, its foulness entirely evaporated.

What remained was a scent that somehow conspired with the souls of
everyone present to put them in mind of some sweet memory: something
lost; something sacrificed; something taken by time or circumstance.
Nor, though their bodies were held in the embrace of these feelings,
could they have named them. The scent was too subtle in its workings to
be pinned to any one memory. All that mattered was the state of utter
vulnerability in which it left everyone. By the time the Hell's Mouth
had opened, and Lilith herself had stepped out of its long, sharp
shadows, her flora had enraptured the souls of everyone who stood before
her. Whatever they saw from now on, whatever they said and did, was
colored by the way the scent of her strange garden had touched them.

Was she beautiful? Well, perhaps. The scent was beautiful, so it seemed
she--who was shaped by the scent, as if her body were carved from
perfumed smoke--was surely beautiful too, though a more logical
assessment might have pointed out how curiously made her face was, close
in color and texture to the blossoms in their corrupted phase.

Her voice, that same less dreamy assessor might have said, was
unmusical, and her dress, despite its great size and elaboration (tiny,
incomprehensible motifs hand-sewn in neat rows, millions of times), more
proof of obsession, even of madness, than of beauty.

Even allowing that there can be not one good and reliable report of
Lilith, the Devil's wife, some things may still be clearly said of her.
She was happy, for one. She laughed with almost indecent glee at the
sight of J her caged child, though she plainly saw that he was missing a
hand. And ; her manner, when dealing with the Duke, was nothing short of
exquisite^

"You've suffered much for your crime against my household," she saidj 1
speaking in cultured English, which--by some little miracle of her
mafc?| ing--he understood. "Do you have any idea how many years have
passeoi since you first began to hunt for that idiot child of mine?" She
stabbed J finger at the creature in the crate, who started to moan and
complaii until she shushed him by slapping the bars.

The Duke replied that no, he did not know.

 "Well, perhaps it's best you don't," Lilith told him. "But what you
should know, because it will shape what happens when I have taken this
imp of mine back, is that your natural life-span--your three score years
and ten--was over centuries ago."

The Duke looked puzzled at this; and then aghast, as he realized the
consequences of what she was telling him: that he and his men had hidden
their lives away in this fruitless Hunt; around and around and around,
chasing a baby who'd put on perhaps two years in the period of the
pursuit.

"My father?" he said. "My brother?"

"All dead," Lilith said, with some little show of sympathy. 'All that
you knew and remembered has gone."

The Duke's face remained unchanged, but tears filled up his eyes and
then spilled down his cheeks.

"Men and your hunts," Lilith went on, addressing, it seemed, some larger
error in the Duke's sex. "If you hadn't been out killing healthy stags
and boars in the first place, you could have married and lived and
loved.

But"--she shrugged--"we do as our instincts dictate, yes? And yours
brought you here. To the very edge of your own grave."

She was telling him, it seemed, that he'd run out of life and now, after
all the sacrifices of his Hunt, his reward would be death: pure, simple
and comfortless.

"Let me have my child then," she said. "Then we'll have this wretched
business over and done with."

It was at this point that Eppstadt spoke up once more. He'd had a
twitching little smile on his face for a while, the reason for which was
simple enough: this latest spectacle (the earth opening up, the flowers,
the scent that toyed with memory) had finally convinced him that one of
his earlier explanations for all of this was most likely the correct
one. He was lying unconscious somewhere in the house (probably having
been struck by a falling object during the earthquake) and was
fantasizing this whole absurd scene. He very seldom felt as self-willed
in dreams as he felt in this

one; indeed, he seldom dreamed at all; or at least remembered his
dreams.

But now that he had this nonsense in his grasp, he wasn't ready to let
it go just yet. Ever the negotiator, he stepped forward and put out his
hand, to prevent the Duke passing over the child.

"I don't suggest you do that just yet," he said, not sure whether the
man understood him or not, though the gesture was clear enough. "The
moment you hand over the brat, you're dead. You understand?"

"Don't do this, Eppstadt," Todd advised.

"Why the hell not? It's just a dream--" "It's not a dream," Jerry said.
"It's real. Everything down here is as--"

"Oh Christ, Brahms, shut up. You know what I'm going to do when I'm
finished sorting this out? I'm going to kick your faggot ass." He
grinned, obviously hugely satisfied to be so politically incorrect.

"You're going to regret this," Todd said. "Jerry's right."

"How can he be right?" Eppstadt said, his voice dripping contempt.

"Look at this place! How can any of this fucking idiocy be real? It's
all going on in my head! And I bet you thought I had the dull little
mind of a business school executive!" "Eppstadt," Todd said. "This is
not going on in your mind."

Eppstadt made the donkey-bray buzz that accompanied the wrong answer on
a quiz show. He was riding high on his newfound comprehension of his
situation. "Wrong, baby. Fuck! So very, very wrong. Can I say something,
while we've got this moment, and it's my dream so I'll fuck- ,'| ing say
it anyway? You are a terrible actor. I mean, we would get the dailies in
at Paramount and we would howl, I mean we would fucking howl, at I some
of the takes. Tears pouring down our faces while you attempted to. J
emote."

"You are such a cunt."

"That I am. And you're a millionaire many times over because I peril
suaded a bunch of losers who wouldn't know a crass commercial decision j
from a hole in their asses to pay you an obscene amount of money to j
parade your God-given attributes." He turned to Lilith, who had beenj

 watching this outburst as though amused by the cavorting of an antic
dog.

"Sorry. There I go mentioning the G-word. Probably doesn't sit well with
you?" "God?" Lilith said. "No. God sits perfectly well with me."

Eppstadt was clearly about to make some boorish reply to this but Lilith
ignored him.

She let out a rhythmical whistle, and up from the dark throat of the
earth came two women, bald and bare-breasted. At the sight of either
faces or breasts, perhaps both, the goat-boy in the crate started to get
voluble again, wailing and chattering.

"This is the end, then," Lilith said to the Duke. "I'm taking him. Do
you have any final words?"

The Duke shook his head, and raised his sword--jabbing it in Epp stadt's
direction in order to persuade him to stay out of these proceedings.

Eppstadt stood his ground, until the point of the Duke's sword pierced
his mud-caked shirt. Then he yelped and duly stepped back to prevent
worse coming his way.

"Hurt, did it?" Jerry said.

"Shut the fuck up," Eppstadt snapped.

He made no further attempt to agent the exchange between Lilith and the
Duke, however. The crate was unbolted, and Lilith reached in, grabbing
her one-handed offspring by his dick and balls.

"Take him, ladies," she said to the women, and in a most unmotherly
fashion she threw him into the arms of her maidservants, who seized him
between them and carried him off down the slope and into the darkness.

"So it finishes," Lilith said to the Duke.

She turned on her heel, catching hold of her insanely embroidered
garment, and lifting it up to clear her step. Then she glanced back.
"Did you have children?" she asked the Duke.

He shook his head.

"Then you'll lie with those who went before you but not with any that
came after. That's good. It would be mournful to meet your children in

the grave tonight." She inclined her head. "Farewell then, my lord. It
seems to me you've earned your rest." She had said all she intended to
say, and again made to depart, but Eppstadt wasn't quite done.

"You're good," he said. "I mean, realgravitfls. I don't see that a lot.
And you're beautiful. You know, it's usually one or the other. Tits or
brains.

But you've got both. I almost wish I wasn't dreaming."

Lilith gave him a stare which would have sent wiser men running. But
Eppstadt, still believing himself the master of his own dream, was noil
going to be cowed by any of its cast. >.,.

"Have I met you somewhere before?" he said. "I have, haven't I? I'm
conjuring you up from a memory."

"Oh don't do this," Todd murmured.

"Don't what?" Eppstadt snapped.

"Play. Not here. Not now."

"It's my sand-box. I'll play if I want to. But the rest of you can get
the; fuck out! That means you, faggot, and her--" He pointed at Tammy
'Andjf you, Pickett. Out! Go on! I want you out!"

For some reason, Todd looked to Lilith for permission to depart. She
nodded, first at Todd, then at Tammy, finally at Jerry.

"Are you sure you don't want to make a graceful exit?" Todd said tol
Eppstadt.

"Fuck you."

Jerry had already turned his back on the Hell's Mouth, and was hea ing
back toward the threshold. Tammy had also turned, but had halt caught by
the sight of the Duke and his two men, who were lying on 1 ground at the
edge of the trees. How they had got there--what inst had driven them to
lie down like this--she didn't know.

Their bodies were already in advanced states of corruption, even That
they were still alive and they were gazing up at the slowly-changing sk
their faces cleansed of any expression of resentment or need or pa They
seemed perfectly resigned to their decease, as though after all the
years trapped in a circle they could not break, they were simply
grateful \

be leaving it. So there they lay, maggots at their nostrils, beetles at
their ears, their sight drowning in pools of rot.

She didn't watch to the end. She wasn't that brave. Instead she turned
away and followed Jerry to the door.

As she came to his side he said: "Look."

"I saw."

"No, not there," Jerry said. "That's too sad for words. Look up. It's
almost over."

 So it was.

The sun was now over halfway uncovered, and with every passing moment
the landscape it had lit with so miserly a light for the better part of
four hundred years was growing brighter. The thinnest clouds--those most
susceptible to heat--had already evaporated. Now the cumulus were in
retreat, showing a bank of blue through which clusters of falling stars
came blazing down, as though to celebrate the passing of the Hunt.

Some of the braver beasts in this extraordinary landscape--creatures
that had lived contentedly in the perpetual twilight but were curious to
see what change the sun would bring--were venturing out of their dens
and caves and squinting up at the spectacle overhead. A lion blessed
with wings strong enough to carry it aloft rose from its imperial seat
among the branches of a Noahic oak, as though to challenge the sun
itself. It was instantly overcome by the incandescence that filled the
heavens, and turn-1 bled back to earth, shedding feathers the size of
swords.

Jerry saw the lesson clearly enough. "It's all going to change very|
quickly now," he said.

There was indeed a general sense of panic in the landscape. E species
that had learned to prosper in the silver-dim light was in a suddeoj
terror, fearful that whatever the sun was shedding--light, heat or boi
it would be their undoing. In every corner of this painted world, crea
were scuttling and scampering, fighting over the merest sliver of shad
It was not just the lion that had been brought down. Several flocks
birds, confounded by the sudden blaze, panicked in mid-flight, 
descended in squawking confusion. On the roads, wild dogs went noonday
crazy, and set on one another's throats in bursts of overheated rage;
the air was suddenly populated with myriad tiny gnats and dragonflies,
which rose from the grass in such swarming abundance they could only
have been born that moment, their eggs cracked by the abrupt rise in
temperature.

And where there were flies, of course, there were fiy-catchers. Rodents
leapt up out of the grass to feed on the sudden bounty. Lizards and
snakes swarmed underfoot.

It was an astonishing transformation. In the four or five minutes since
the child had been passed back to his mother and the Duke's curse had
been lifted, the landscape through which Goga and his men (their flesh
and bones now indistinguishable from the swampy earth in which they'd
lain down to die) had ridden had undergone a sea-change: falling stars
and falling lions, the air filled with the flutter of a million
dragonflies and the howling of a thousand sun-blinded dogs; trees coming
into sudden blossom, their buds so fat and fruitful they exploded like
little bombs, so that a blizzard of petals drenched the air with
perfume.

And in the same moment as the dragonflies rose up, and the trees
blossomed, Death caught a million throats, and with howls and shrieks
and crazed cavorting, the Reaper claimed both the common dog and the
fanciful beasts Lilith had hatched to make the Hunt more purgatorial for
her victims. The chicken that had laid eggs filled with serpents was
devoured by its brood in its dotage. A lizard with a dragonfly still
fluttering in its jaws was taken by a beast only Lilith could have
conjured: its back a shameless homage to the cunt, from its glorious
labial head to the enormous golden eye buried in its depths like an
opulent egg.

A thousand thousand witnesses could not have catalogued what happened to
the Devil's Country in those minutes. An army of chroniclers could not
have caught a quarter of the stories here; they came and went too fast:
birth, death and the madness between filling the senses to overflowing.

At the door, Tammy had time to wonder if perhaps Eden had been like
this. Not the calm hand of a placid creator moving over the dappled
grass

of paradise and leaving the lion, the lamb and all that lived in
between where it passed, but rather this: the sun turned up as though by
an impatient cook, frying life into being, in one frenzied, blazing
carnival, its most exquisite beasts no more likely to survive the heat
than its basest creations.

Beauty of no importance, in the heat of the moment; nor poetry; nor
intelligence. Just things rising and falling without judgment or
consideration; the loveliest of beings dying before they had time to
speak, while veils of flies descended to pump their eggs into the bed of
their quickened rot.

No wonder Lilith had said, so knowingly, that God sat perfectly well
with her. Hadn't she been his first female creation; the bride for Adam
which Yahweh had rejected? Hers the first womb, hers the first egg, hers
the first blood shed in pain because a man had made it so.

Tammy looked to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woman one last
time, with this new notion in her head.

But the air between where she stood and where the Queen of Hell had been
standing was a maze of petals, flies, birds, seeds, scales and flakes of
cooked corruption. Lilith was out of sight, and Tammy knew that if she
was lucky she would never have occasion to look into the woman's eyes
again.

 Upstairs, in the great bed in the master bedroom, Katya had woken from
one of the most restorative slumbers she'd enjoyed in years. No
nightmares; not even dreams. Just a deep sense of well-being, knowing
that she had finally found the man with whom to share the years in the
privacy of the Canyon.

A moment later, the comforts of her waking-state were dashed. The bed
beside her was cold and empty and she heard voices; strangers in her
house. That there might be people in the kitchen or the dining room
would have been bad enough, but she knew instinctively where the voices
were coming from. They were way downstairs, in that room, and given that
Todd was not beside her, he was probably down there with them.

The thought did not comfort her.

She understood all too well the claim that place had. Nor did it play
favorites. It beguiled, with equal eloquence, the genius and the
dullard, the intellectual and the sensualist. She'd seen it happen over
an dover again. Lord knows, she'd had fixes enough from it herself over
the years.

It had kept her beautiful, kept her strong. But for her, being in the
room was merely a function of cosmetics: it wiped away the years. Though
perhaps it truly was the Devil's Country, she attached no great
metaphysical significance to the place. It was her beauty parlor,
nothing more. And if there were people in there now, using up her
dwindling sum of perfection, then she wanted them out! Out!

She got up and started to dress, going over the events of the previous
evening as she did so. There was only one person she knew who might have
seduced Todd away from her side: Tammy, the bitch who'd taken

him away last time. For some reason Todd felt some sentimental
attachment to Tammy. There was nothing wrong with that, in principle. It
proved he had a heart. But the woman had no place in the scheme of
things from this point on. She'd served her minor purpose; it was time
she was removed.

Dressed now, Katya went to the mirror. The sleep had done her good.

There was a luminosity in her eyes that had not been there for many
years. She could even bring herself to turn on a smile.

It was unfortunate, she thought as she stepped out onto the landing, but
there were bound to be these little challenges at the outset. Nothing,
however, was going to get between her and her paradise. Zeffer had
tried, and Zeffer was dead. This woman would probably try too, but she'd
end up the same way he had. And, if things really went well, the killing
blow would come from Todd. That would make things perfect: if he found
the weapon and struck her down. It was essential to make him understand
that anyone who endangered their little paradise would have to be
killed.

And there was nothing better for the cementing of a relationship than to
spill a little blood together.

Eppstadt had sent Pickett, the woman and Brahms running; but he'd stayed
awhile to torment the strange woman he'd conjured up.

It wasn't often he tangled with a woman whose intellect he respected.

For a time Columbia had been run by just such a woman, Dawn Steel, and
Eppstadt had always enjoyed a good debate with her. But she'd died of
brain cancer, at some absurdly young age, and the loss had saddened him.

True, there were a couple of actresses who had the wit to hold his
attention for more than a sentence--Jamie Lee Curtis was surprisingly
sharp, Susan Sarandon and Jodie Foster were worth his time; but mostly
they were little more than bodies to him. So where, as he'd already
asked himself, had he found the raw material for this baroque fantasy
called Lilith? | It wasn't just the beauty and eloquence of the woman,
it was the whole implausible world that surrounded her, like an MGM
musical designed by Hieronymus Bosch.

COLDHEAR1 CANYON

521

"What are you staring at?" Lilith asked him. She had long ago begun her
slow descent into the Underworld, but now--caught by Eppstadt's
scrutiny--she had halted, and turned to face him again.

"You," he said bluntly.

"Well don't."

So saying, she again turned her back and continued to descend into the
earth.

"Wait!" he demanded. "I want to talk with you."

He caught hold of the rear of her trailing gown. "Didn't you hear me? I
said wait."

If there had been any trace of indulgence left on Lilith's face it had
now disappeared. She assessed him with a merciless gaze.

"Wait?" she said, her tone withering. "What makes you think I would obey
any instruction of yours?"

As she spoke she glanced down at Eppstadt's feet and he felt a motion
under his heel. Odd, he thought. He stepped aside, only to find that a
new crop of the shoots had sprung up before the opening of the
Hell-Mouth.

This time, however, they were more densely planted than before, and they
were only growing in his immediate vicinity.

"What is this?" he said.

He felt the first needle-pricks in his ankles; little more than
irritations really. But when he lifted his leg, he dragged the shoots
out from under his skin, and they hurt. He yelped with pain. Hopping on
one leg, he hoisted up his trouser leg. There were a dozen tiny wounds
around his ankle where the shoots had entered his skin; all were
bleeding.

"Fuck," he said.

There was nothing remotely entertaining about this dream now. He wanted
it to stop. Meanwhile he felt the crop of shoots entering his other leg.
He had no intention of repeating his error, so he stomped down the area
of the shoots with his injured foot, and planted it there while he
gingerly hoisted up his other trouser leg to examine the damage.
Impossible as it seemed, the shoots had already advanced through the
muscle of his calf. He could see their trajectory through his skin; they
were getting

steadily more ambitious as they climbed; dividing and dividing again,
forming a network through his flesh. He caught hold of one at his ankle,
where it pierced his skin. It was no thicker than a few braided hairs,
but it wriggled around between his finger and thumb as though determined
to keep on climbing, keep on growing. He tried to pull on it but a spasm
of pain ran up through his leg, following the path of the shoots'
advance. It had almost reached his knee.

There were tears of agony in his eyes now He looked up at Lilith, f
blinking them away so as to see her better. She was still watching him.

"All right," he said. "You made your point."

She didn't reply.

"Make it stop," he told her.

She seemed to consider this for a moment, biting lightly on her lower
lip as she turned the option over. As she did so he glanced down at his
other foot. The plants he'd ground beneath his heel had been replaced by
new growths, which were already four or five inches high, and piercing
him afresh.

"Oh God, no," he said, returning his gaze to his tormentor's face.

"Please. I was wrong." He was barely able to get the words out, the pain
,| was so intolerable. "Make it stop!"

Though his vision was blurred he could see her response to his plea. :|
She was shaking her head.

"Damn you!" he said. "I made one fucking mistake! I've said I'm
ioiryc1;!

That should be good enough."

Something burst just above his knee. He tore at his trouser leg,
ripping; || the fabric with such pain-inspired force that it tore all
the way up to hisf groin. There were flowers blossoming from the meat of
his knee: six of| seven small florets, each giving off a stink so
pungent it made him giddyi to inhale it. He glanced up at the woman
who'd done this to him just ona last time, hoping his tongue would be
inspired to make her merciful. Bufi| she'd plainly already decided she
knew how this would end. She had turne her back on him, and was
continuing her descent into the Underworld. f|

Eppstadt felt a new series of eruptions in his legs, leading all the way
I



from his knee to his groin. The large, pale muscle of his thigh had
become a veritable garden; upward of twenty flowers had blossomed there.
Blood ran from the places where they'd come forth, and it coursed around
the back of his leg, soaking into the tatters of his trousers. The
collected scent of the blossoms all but made him swoon. He toppled
backward, and sprawled in the shoots that were waiting for him, like a
death-bed welcoming him into its final comfort.

"What the hell happened to Eppstadt?" Todd said, looking back.

The brightening day had put a layer of haze between the Hell's Mouth and
the door that led up into the house. The details of Eppstadt's condition
were impossible to fathom. All they could see was that for some reason
the man was lying back among flowers.

"I thought he was in trouble a few moments ago," Jerry said. "He seemed
to be crying out."

"He's not crying out now," Tammy said. "Looks like he's taking a nap."
"Crazy ..." Todd said.

"Well leave him to it, I say," Jerry remarked. "If he wants to stay,
that's his damn business."

There was no argument from the other two.

"After you," Jerry said, stepping aside to let Tammy cross the
threshold.

He followed quickly after her, with Todd on his heels.

Todd glanced back one last time at the transforming landscape. The ships
had disappeared from the horizon, as though some long-awaited wind had
finally come and filled their sails, and borne them off to new
destinations. The little gathering of houses beside the river, with its
two bridges, had been eroded by light, and even the snaking shape of the
river itself was on its way to extinction. Though he'd doubted the tale
Zeffer had told him it seemed now that it was true. This had been a
prison painted to hold the Duke. Now that his Hunt was over and the
Devil's child had been returned, the place no longer had any reason to
exist.

Age was catching up with it. The heat of its painted sun was undoing it,
image by image, tile by tile.

"Eppstadt?" he yelled. 'Are you coming?"

But the man in the long grass didn't move, so Todd let him lie there.

Eppstadt had always been a man who did what he wanted to do, and to hell
with other people's opinions.

Sprawled on the ground, Eppstadt heard Todd's call, and half-thought of
returning it, but he could no longer move. Several shoots had entered
the base of his skull, piercing his spinal column, and he was paralyzed.

The greenery pushing up through his brain, erasing his memories as they
climbed, had not yet removed every last shred of intelligence. He
realized that this was the end of him. He could feel the first
insinuations of shoots at the back of his throat, and an itching
presence behind his eyes, where they were soon to emerge and flower, but
it concerned him far less than it might have done had he imagined this
sitting in his office.

It wasn't the kind of death he'd had in mind when he thought of such
things, but then his life hadn't been as he'd expected it to be either.
He'd wanted to paint, as a young man. But he'd had not the least talent.
A professor for the Art School had remarked that he'd never met a man
with a poorer sense of aesthetics. What would they have thought now,
those critics who'd so roundly condemned him, if they'd been here to
see? Wouldn't they have said he was passing away prettily, with his head
full of shoots and color and his eyes ... <.

He never finished the thought.

One of Lilith's flowers blossomed inside his skull, and a sudden,
massive hemorrhage stopped dead every thought Eppstadt was
entertainingj| or would ever entertain again.

Indifferent to his death, the plants continued to press up through hm iw
flesh, blossoming and blossoming, until from a little distance he wasl
barely recognizable as a man at all: merely a shape in the dirt, a log
pe*~5 haps, where the flowers had grown with particular vigor, hungry to
ma the most of the sun now that it was shining so brightly.

 Tammy knew there was trouble brewing the moment she set eyes on Katya.
The woman was smiling down at them beatifically, but there was no warmth
or welcome in her eyes; only anger and suspicion.

"What happened?" she said, straining for lightness.

"It's over," Todd told her, coming up the stairs, his hand extended
toward her in a placatory manner. No doubt he also read the signs in the
woman's eyes, and didn't trust what he saw there.

"Come on," he said, laying his palm against her waist in a subtle
attempt to change her direction.

"No," she said, gently pressing past him so as to go down the stairs. "I
want to see."

"There's nothing to see," Jerry said.

She didn't bother to sweeten her expression for Brahms. He was her
servant; nothing more nor less. "What do you mean: there's nothing to
see?" "It's all gone," he said, his tone tinged with melancholy, as
though he were gently breaking the news of a death to her.

"It can't be gone," Katya snapped, pushing on past Jerry and Tammy and
heading down the stairs. "The Hunt goes on forever. How could Goga ever
catch the Devil's child?" She turned at the bottom of the stairs, her
voice strident. "How could any man ever catch the Devil's child?"

"It wasn't a man," Tammy piped up. "It was me."

Katya's face was a picture of disbelief. Obviously if the idea of a man
bringing the Hunt to an end wasn't farcical enough, the notion that a
woman--especially one she held in such plain contempt--had done so, was
beyond the bounds of reason.

"That's not possible," she said, departing from the bottom of the
stairs and heading along the passageway.

She "was out of Tammy's view now; but everyone could hear Katya's bare
feet on the floor, and the doorhandle being turned--

"No!"

The word was almost a shriek.

Jerry caught hold of Tammy's elbow. "I think you should get out of
here--"

"No! No! No!"

"--that room was the reason she stayed young." Now it made sense, Tammy
thought.

That was why Jerry had sounded as though he were announcing a death: it
was Katya's demise he was announcing. Denied her chamber of eternal
youth, what would happen to her? If this was a movie, she'd probably
come hobbling back along the passageway with the toll of years already
overtaking her, her body cracking and bending, her beauty withering
away.

But this wasn't a movie. The woman who strode back into view at the
bottom of the stairs showed no sign of weakening or withering: at least
not yet.

"That bitch!" she yelled, pointing at Tammy. "I want her killed. Todd?

You hear me? I want her dead!"

Tammy looked up the stairs to where Todd was standing. It was impossible
to read the expression on his face.

Meanwhile Katya ranted on. "She's spoiled everything! Everything!"

"It had to end eventually," Todd said.

As Todd spoke Tammy felt the pressure of Jerry's hand on her arm;;
subtly encouraging her to head on up the stairs while there was still
tim6| to do so. She didn't wait for a second prompt. She began to
ascend, keep| ing her eyes fixed on Todd's face. What was he thinking?

Look at me, she willed him. It's me, it's your Tammy. Look at me.

He didn't, which was a bad sign. It would be easier to obey Katya if 1

 didn't think of Tammy as a real human being; didn't look into her
eyes; didn't see her fear.

"Don't let her go!" Katya said.

She was coming up the stairs now, taking them slowly, her pace casual.

Todd just stood there, and for once Tammy was glad of his passivity.

She slipped by him without being apprehended, and headed on to the top
of the stairs.

"Todd!"

The cry was from Jerry, not from Katya. Tammy looked back. For some
reason, Todd had caught hold of him, and was preventing him from
following Tammy.

From the expression on his face, it was clear Jerry knew he was in
trouble.

He struggled to pull himself away from Todd, but he was much the weaker
man.

"I looked after you, didn't I?" Katya said to Jerry. "When you didn't
have a friend in the world, I was there for you, wasn't I? And now you
let this happen."

"It wasn't my fault. 1 couldn't stop it."

Katya was right in front of him now, her palm flat against his chest.
She didn't seem to be exerting any pressure, but whatever power she was
exercising through her hand was enough to make him sink back against the
wall.

"It wasn't your doing?" Katya said incredulously. "You could have killed
her. That would have stopped her interfering." "Killed her?" Jerry said,
plainly horrified at the idea; as though he'd not realized until now
that the stakes were so high, or that the prospect of murder--casual,
inevitable--was so close. Perhaps, most of all, not realizing that the
woman he'd obviously fallen in love with should now show herself to be
as cold as the Queen of Hell.

"You little fake!" Katya said, putting her hand on Jerry's head and
ripping at the hair sewn into his scalp. She pulled, and a flap of skin
came away in her hand. Blood ran down over Jerry's face.

"Jesus, Katya," Todd said. "There's no need--"

"No need to what?" she broke in, her face perfect in its fury, those
won- f derful bones, that exquisite symmetry, rinding in rage its best
purpose.

"No need to punish him? He knows what he did."

She tossed away the flap of hair and skin and slapped Jerry across his 1
face. Tammy had witnessed this kind of cruelty from her before; the last
f time Zeffer had been its target. And, just like Zeffer, Jerry seemed
almost mesmerized by her show of fury, powerless to defend himself
against her.

But Tammy wasn't about to watch him kicked half to death the way I
Zeffer had been kicked, even if in some twisted way Brahms was ready to
1 accept that fate.

"You know how pathetic you are?" she said to Katya. "Slapping around old
men? Pathetic. He didn't do anything down there. I did it. I did it all.

Tell her, Todd."

"It wasn't Jerry's fault. It wasn't Tammy's, either."

"Yours, then?" Katya said, shifting her burning gaze to Todd.

As she spoke she put her hand on Jerry's face and pushed him. He 1
reached out to stop himself tumbling back down the stairs, but there was
nothing to catch hold of. Down he went, head over heels.

Tammy peered over the stairwell. Jerry was sprawled at the bottom, J
still breathing, but apparently unconscious. She was almost grateful;
Better that Katya dismiss him, and come after her instead. She could
stiltf

'$

run; she could still defend herself. And she certainly wasn't about to
bel hypnotized by the bitch's gaze. ffl

She didn't wait for Katya to start up the flight in pursuit of her. She
leftl the banister and headed into the kitchen.

"She's crazy."

It was Todd. He'd followed her in, shaking his head. "You gotta go!"'
said to Tammy.

"Catch her!" Katya yelled. She was obviously taking her sweet tim coming
up the stairs, confident, even now, that she had this under cont "Todd?
You hear me? Catch her!"

 "What are you: her dog?" Tammy said. "Is that what she's reduced you
to?"

"Just go," Todd said. "She's all I've got left."

"She'll kill you too if it suits her," Tammy said. "You know it."

"Don't say that," Todd begged. "I've got to stay with her. If I don't,
what have I got? You were at the party! You heard what they said. It's
all over for me. I don't have anything left, except her. She loves me,
Tammy."

"No she doesn't."

"She does."

"No! She's just using you. That isn't love."

"Who the hell are you to say--"

"--as good as anybody else. Better, where you're concerned. The years I
wasted thinking about you."

"Wasted?"

"Yes, wasted. I wanted you to love me. But you never did. Now you want
her to love you. And she won't. Not ever. She's incapable of love."

It hurt him to hear that. It hurt because he believed her, much as he
didn't want to. It was the truth. She knew it, and so--to judge by those
despairing eyes of his--did he. His gaze went to the window. He studied
the glass for a time.

"Do you think they're still out there?" Todd said.

"What? The dead? Yes ..."

Even as she was speaking she was thinking about Zeffer's last request.

The madness of the Devil's Country had put it out of her head.

"Suppose I said I knew a way to get them into the house?" Tammy said.

"Is that possible?"

"It's possible," Tammy said cautiously.

He went back to the door he'd just stepped through. "How?" he asked,
lowering his voice.

Tammy was still uncertain of his allegiances. She didn't want to tell
him everything in case he was still going to side with Katya. But on the
other hand, she needed his help.

 "It's just something somebody told me," she said. She wanted to
believe she had him on her side, but she was far from certain.

Katya was calling from the stairs again. "Todd? Have you got her?"
"Close the door," Tammy said. "Keep her out." She started to look around
the kitchen. Which of the drawers was most likely to contain a knife? A
good strong steak knife. No, better, a fat-bladed chopping knife.

Something that wouldn't snap under pressure.

"Todd?" Katya sounded as though she was in the hallway.

"Close the door," Tammy repeated. "Please."

Todd glanced back in Katya's direction. Then, God bless him, he closed
the door.

"What are you doing?" Tammy heard her say.

"It's all right!" Todd called back to her.

Tammy started going through the drawers, as quickly as possible.

There seemed to be dozens of them. Did she want aluminum foil and
plastic bags? No. Spoons and ladles? No. Cutlery? There were a few
knives in here, but they were too flimsy for her purposes. She needed a
blade she; 1 could use to dig at the wood. If she didn't get the icons
out of the threshold, the ghosts would stay out there.

"Todd! Let me in!" "You have to go," Todd said to Tammy.

"Not until I've got a--"

"I Yes! A knife! The ninth drawer she opened was a treasure trove ofi|
knives; large, small, middle-sized. Knowing she could only have a few
secf | onds left before Katya came in, Tammy simply gathered up a
handful of|| knives--five or six--and headed back to the passageway.

As she reached the door, she heard Katya's voice from across the room.|

"You think you're going to save yourself with those?"

Tammy looked back over her shoulder. Katya had pushed the dc open, and
shoved Todd aside, raising her hands as she approached, read to take
Tammy by the throat.

Todd raced ahead of her to stand between the two women.

"Hey now," he said. "Let's just calm down. Nobody's going to hurt
anybody."

Katya seemed to listen to him. Her agitation quieted. "All right," she
said, looking at Todd with wide, dark eyes. "What do you suggest?"

Tammy didn't trust this little performance at all; but it gave her time
to back off toward the door. As she reached it, one of her
hastily-collected knives slipped from her hand. She bent down to pick it
up, and in attempting to do so, lost her grip on all the others. She
cursed as they went spinning across the polished tiles in all
directions.

"Pick them up, Todd," Katya said.

"Later," Todd replied, his tone still mellow.

In response she slapped him, hard, across his already-wounded face,
striking blood from it. "I want them picked up."

He stared at her for a minute. Then, very calmly, he caught hold of her
hand and said: "Don't do that."

"You want to hit me back?" Katya said. "Go on. If that's what you want
to do, then do it! No, you won't, will you? You're too damn weak. All
you men. Too damn weak."

As if to prove the point she pulled her hand out of Todd's grip and
pushed past him, heading straight for Tammy.

Faced with the choice of waiting a few seconds to see if Todd would come
to her rescue, or making an escape while she could, Tammy snatched up
the first knife to hand, which was neither the largest nor the toughest
of the blades, and made a run for the door.

Katya came after her; Tammy stumbled as she got up, and Katya would
probably have caught her if Todd hadn't finally found the courage to put
his arms around Katya from behind, and hold her back.

"All right!" he yelled to Tammy. "Go!"

Tammy didn't need a second invitation. She ran out into the passage and
slammed the door after her. It had a lock but regrettably no key.

She looked down the passageway to the back door. There was a glass panel
in it. The glass wasn't flawless, but it was clear enough for Tammy

 to see the shapes of the ghosts, assembled like a pack of hungry dogs
eager to be let into the house. She could hear the odd, listless
murmuring they made, the words like objects that had been used so many
times they had lost all their shape.

Did they know, somehow, that she was on her way to let them in? Was that
why their murmuring became a little more urgent as she opened the door,
and the silvery stare in their eyes a little brighter?

"Wait," she said to them. "I'm going to do this. But you have to wait."

There was noise from the kitchen behind her. Plainly Katya was
attempting to persuade Todd to go and fetch her--probably kill her. I
Tammy couldn't make sense of the words, and that was probably for the
best. She couldn't afford to be panicked any more than she already was,
or she'd screw this up.

Tammy glanced back over her shoulder, to check that Katya wasn't |
already in the passageway, then she went down on her hands and knees and
examined the threshold. The wood was worn with time, and rot had | got
into it, softening it. She ran her fingers over the full length of it,
clearing away the dirt. The area smelled vaguely of vomit, but she
supposed that was the rot she was smelling. At three- or four-inch
intervals along the length of the threshold there were metal markers,
like nails with | large, elaborately configured heads, hammered into the
timber. She dug I around one of them with the nail of her forefinger. It
seemed very solidly | embedded in the wood. But she had no doubt she was
on the right track^; meddling with these things, because as soon as she
started to do so thefl ghosts' murmuring became almost reverent in tone;
worshipful.

She looked up at them. The light they emitted had grown brighter!!

either that or they'd narrowed their eyes. Yes, that was it; they
narrowecf| their eyes to study what she was doing.

"This is it, isn't it?"

They answered the only way they could: they fell completely silentil
This was not a procedure they wanted to put at risk by making so mucra
as a single sound.

There were five icons in the threshold, the middle one slightly bigge?

than the other four, which was a circle with two irregularly-shaped
"arms"

coming from it, at noon and seven o'clock on its dial.

She dug her knife into the center of the symbol. "Okay," she said softly
to it, "out you come."

The wood was so wormy it crumbled beneath her knife-point. She dug
deeper, exposing parts of the icon that were still clean. It gave off a
subtle iridescence, like mother-of-pearl. Her confidence growing, she
kept digging until she had cleared the wood away around the whole thing.
Then she put her knife-tip under the rim and tried to lever it out. Much
to her disappointment, it wouldn't budge; not even a little bit.

"Damn," she said softly.

She worked at it a little more, then remembered the old school adage,
trotted out before every test. "If you can't answer the first question,
don't waste time on it. Move on to the next one."

That's what she did. She moved left, and started to stab at the wood
around the icon at the far end of the row. If anything, the threshold
was even more rotted here than it was at the center; the wood came away
in fat splinters.

There was more noise from the kitchen shouting now, but she ignored it.
Just kept digging. Bigger splinters flew. She felt a rush of certainty.
She was going to do this. She pressed the knife under the edge of the
icon.

There was a moment of resistance, then the pressure of the blade on a
nerve in her hand sent a spasm of pain up her arm. She yelped. And in
the same moment the icon jumped free of the wood, landing on the tile
outside.

The din from the kitchen suddenly became very specific. She heard Todd
say:

"Don't do that."

It was a voice she'd never heard from him before, not even in a movie.

There was fear in his voice. Something Katya was doing, or was about to
do, had made him afraid. Not a very comforting thought.

Without wasting time looking over her shoulder, she quickly went to the
other end of the threshold, and started to work there. Though there

was plenty of light between the trees, she was cold. There was a length
of clammy flesh down her spine, and another across her shoulderblades,
as though somebody had painted a cold cross on her skin. Her teeth
chattered lightly.

But again, she was in luck. The wood around the icon came away in three
or four large pieces. She pressed the knife as deep under the device as
it would go and levered. The thing shifted instantly; and as it did so
the same spasm she'd felt before ran up her arm. It wasn't a nerve she
was striking, she realized. It was a j olt of energy given off by the
metalwork as it was levered out. It hurt so much she dropped the knife
for a moment, to massage her hand. Her fingers were getting numb.

She looked up at her silent witnesses. "Yes, I know," she said. "Hurry
up. I know."

She picked up the knife again, and moved left. Long strips of splinters
had already come out of the wood at that end, so some of the work was
done. And now she had a technique. She ferreted around with the
knife-.^j

'jj point close to the metal, looking for a weakness; then she dug out a
few!

large pieces of wood, and went in for the kill. The third one was the
easfol est so far, except for the pain, which was excruciating. It ran
all the way up

4

to her shoulder joint, and into her neck. Her hand was beginning to
feel:* stupid with numbness. Still, there were only two icons left to
move. Surely!

they weren't beyond her capabilities.

Some instinct made her go back to the middle icon, thinking that st
might get lucky. But it was a waste of time. The damn thing was
immovable as it had been previously. She went on to the right of it, dug
around the second of the remaining pair. The wood was just as nerable as
it had been on the other side, but her numbed muscles nowhere near as
strong now as they'd been a minute ago. She took got hands to the blade,
but she wasn't as smart with her left hand as she' with her right, and
it added little by way of leverage. Her breath was cot ing in short
gasps, her frustration mounting.

She glanced up at the ghosts, as though the fierceness of their need to
I inside would lend her some strength. To her surprise she found that
one <

 them had come forward and crouched down to examine one of the icons.

It apparently carried no power now that it was out of its place in line,
like a letter lifted from a curse-word, and rendered harmless. The man
was so close to her she could have touched him if she'd raised her hand.

Very quietly, the dead man spoke.

"The bitch is coming," he said.

Tammy glanced over her shoulder. There was nobody in the passageway
behind her, yet; nor was there any sound from the kitchen. Still she
didn't doubt that what the man had said was true.

She willed her hands to grasp the knife a little harder, and they seemed
to oblige her, just a little. She pushed the blade deeper into the wood
and the icon shifted. She twisted and felt what was by now a familiar
jolt of power from the metalwork. This time it passed through both
hands. The icon was spat from the wood, and fell, spinning, on the
tiles.

But she had no reason to celebrate. Her hand was now so weak that the
knife fell from her grip and clattered on the floor between her knees.

There was no feeling remaining in her right hand; and her left was not
going to be much use to her on the remaining icon.

Still, what choice did she have? She picked the knife up in her left
hand anyway, and using the numbed wrist of her right, guided it to the
hole she'd dug around the central icon. Perhaps if she just wriggled the
point of the blade around for long enough, she'd locate a weak spot. She
leaned forward, to put the weight of her body into the calculation.

"Come on," she murmured to it, "you sonofabitch ... move for Momma."

There was a sound behind her. A soft sound. A groan.

She looked back, fearing the worst, and the worst it was.

Todd had swung around the doorjamb coming from the kitchen, his hand
clutching his lower belly. There was blood running between his fingers;
and blood on his trousers, a lot of it.

"She stabbed me," he said, his tone one of near-disbelief. He kept his
eyes fixed on Tammy, as though he couldn't bear to inspect the damage.

"Oh Jesus, she stabbed rne."

He leaned forward, and for a moment Tammy thought he was simply!

going to fall over. But he reached out and caught hold of the lips of
one < the four alcoves carved into the walls of the passageway.

"You have to get out of here," he said to Tammy.

She got to her feet, ready to help him, but he waved her away.

"Just go! Before she--" Comes, he would have said. But it was academic.
Katya was there I already coming round the corner, the knife in her
hand, his blood on ifc| Todd turned back to look at her.

She was moving at her old, leisurely pace, as though they had all time
in the world to play out the last reel of this tragedy.

Todd reached into the alcove and found an antique pitcher there, body
blocked what he was doing from Katya's view, but even if she'd seen?;
what he was up to, Tammy thought, she would still have kept cor She had
the knife, after all. And more than that, she had the certainty I Todd
had nowhere else to go; nowhere to fall, finally, except into arms; into
her knife. That was what the pace of her approach announc that she
expected him to die in her embrace.

Todd grasped the pitcher and swung it round. It caught Katya's shoi der,
and shattered, shards of ceramic flying up into her face.

The impact was sufficient to throw her back against the wall, and I
knife dropped from her hand, but the effort had used up a significant pa
of what was left of Todd's energies. He stumbled across the passages his
arms outstretched, and fell against the opposite wall.

His face was ashen, his teeth clenched--his eyelids lazy with pain.

"Let them in," he murmured to Tammy. "What are you waiting I Let. Them.
In!"

At the other end of the passageway, Tammy felt Katya's gaze fix on 1 A
ceramic chip had nicked the skin beneath her eye; a single drop of bk
ran down over her flawless cheek. She didn't trouble herself to away.
She simply dropped to her haunches and casually picked up knife.

Even in the chaos of her thoughts, the symmetry of all this was not I

on Tammy. Two women, each with a knife. And dying between them, the man
they'd both loved; or imagined they had.

As Tammy's mother had been fond of saying, when the subject of love had
come up in conversation, as it would from time to time: it'll all end in
tears.

Well, so it had. And more to come, no doubt. Plenty more to come.

She tore her gaze from Katya, picked up the knife with her left hand and
guided it with her right back to the assaulted wood around the middle
icon.

Again, she leaned into the task, put every pound to work. She twisted
the knife to the left. A few small splinters came away. She twisted
again, this time to the right, wanting nothing in the world as much as
she wanted that sickening jolt through her bones. She could see more of
the icon's depth now, embedded in the wood. It went far deeper than the
others, she saw. That was why it refused to budge. It wasn't just wider,
it was longer.

She glanced up at the ghosts. They'd missed nothing of what was going on
in the passageway. Eyes like slits, they'd all come a little closer to
the threshold, daring its consequences.

Behind her, Todd said: "Tammy?"

He was sliding down the wall, his gaze fixed on her. Katya had
apparently used the knife on him again, but hadn't lingered to finish
him off.

She was moving past him, her eyes on Tammy.

"It'll all end in tears ..." Tammy murmured to herself, and then turned
one more time to the challenge of the central icon.

For the last time, she threw her weight down upon it, using her weakened
left hand and her benumbed right to twist the knife-blade in the groove
beneath the metal ridge.

Another two or three small splinters came away.

"Come on," she begged. "Pkase, God. Move."

Katya was right behind her now. She could feel her presence at her back.
And of course Tammy was a perfect target, right now, but there wasn't a
thing in Hell she could do about that, not if she wanted to keep going,
keep pushing, keep hoping the damn thing would--

It moved!

She looked down at the icon, and yes, God love it, the thing had lifted
out of the wood a little. Scarcely at all, in truth, but movement was
movement.

She twisted again, using what little strength her left hand had. And
suddenly the jolt came up out of the icon with such force that it threw
her backward, so that she landed in front of Katya, deposited before her
like a sacrificial lamb.

The pain in her hands and her arms was so severe this time that she had
| difficulty staying conscious.

The image of Katya loomed above her, knife in hand. Blotches of darkness
invaded it from the corners of her sight. But she held on by force of
*<jp will, determined not to lie there passively while Katya leaned over
and slit her throat.

"You interfering bitch," Katya said, raising the knife. She took hold of
.;f.| Tammy's hair, pulling back her head to expose her throat.

But before she could deliver the cut, something else drew her atten*:$
tion. It seemed she had not realized until this moment that all her"*
defenses had been breached.

"Jesus Christ," she said.

Weak as she was, Tammy was still capable of feeling a little
satisfaction | as she saw the look on Katya's face go from murderous
intent to puzzle*?

ment, and then--very suddenly--to fear.

"What have you done?" she murmured.

Tammy didn't have the energy or the wit for a pithy reply. But she:|
didn't really need one. Events would speak for themselves now.

The door was open and the threshold cleared.

After years of frustration and exile, Katya's long-neglected guests well
coming back to reacquaint themselves with the mysteries of the Devil'1
Country.

ONE

They came almost silently at first, and cautiously, as though even now
they suspected Katya had laid some trap to catch them once they were
inside the house. But as soon as four or five of them were safely over
the threshold, and it became obvious that there were no traps, their
silence erupted into a horrid din of triumph, and their caution turned
into an ungainly torrent of desperate spirits, all struggling to get
through the door at the same time.

Though Tammy's consciousness was still slippery, she had enough strength
left to protect her face from the feet of those coming through, rolling
herself into a semi-fetal position to avoid the worst.

There were so many revenants, and the door through which they were
attempting to pass was so narrow, that impatience soon ignited among the
crowd. Arguments became physical assaults, as the stronger pushed the
weaker aside so they could be the first down the stairs, the first
through the door that would take them into the Devil's Country. Tammy
had her hands over her face, but between her fingers she saw Katya put
up a vain protest against this invasion. She shouted something, but it
was lost in the din of triumph and argument. A moment later, she too was
lost, as the wave of exiles threw themselves against her and carried her
away. This time Tammy did hear her, though it was not a word she uttered
but a scream, a furious scream.

They were in her dream palace-- These things, which had once been her
friends, her beautiful friends, the virile and the beautiful deities of
a lost Golden Age, reduced by

hunger and despair to the filleted, smeared, wasted dregs of humanity,
now bore her away.

The noises they made as they came--and came, and came--were some of the
most distressing sounds Tammy had ever heard.

Slaughterhouse shrieks and plague-pit moans, chattering and curses that
were more like the din out of a padded cell than anything that should
have come from an assembly of once-sophisticated souls.

Finally, however, the noise and the kicking of her body by passing feet,
slowed and ceased.

The procession of the dead had passed over the threshold, along the
corridor and into the house. It had taken perhaps five minutes to get
the entire assembly inside. Now they were gone. The passageway was
deserted, except for Tammy and Todd.

Tammy waited another minute or two before gathering the strength to
unknot her weary limbs and roll herself over. She gave thanks, as she
did so, to her mother, of all people, who had been an unpleasant piece
of work (especially in her latter years) but had possessed the
constitution of a horse, which Tammy had inherited. Most of the women
Tammy knew would not have survived the brutal physical assaults and
violations that had punctuated the adventures of her last few days.
Thanks to Momma, Tammy had.

She fixed her gaze on Todd, who had apparently also survived both
Katya's attack and the revenants' tide.

He was half-sitting, half-slumped, against the wall further down the
passageway, staring at the alcove from which he'd grabbed the antique
pitcher. His breathing was ragged, but at least he was still alive. It
was a 1 short drive to Cedars-Sinai from here, if she could get help to
carry him to | the car.

She crawled over to him. He was doing nothing to stanch the wounds
(Katya had stabbed him at least twice, possibly three times); the blood
was pulsing out of him. He saw her coming from the corner of his eye.
Very slowly, he turned his head toward her. "You let them in," he said.

"Yes. I let them in."

 "You ... had it planned all along then?"

"Not really. It was Zeffer's idea."

He made a long, soft moan, as he saw the neatness of this. Zeffer, the
first exile from the dream palace; Zeffer, who'd been the
bitch-goddess's dog, finally become her undoer. And Tammy, his agent.

"So you were in this together," he said.

"I'll tell you about it later. Right now we should get out of here."

He made a very small, very weary shake of his head. "I don't think ...
I'll be going anywhere anytime soon. She meant to kill me. And I'm
afraid ... she has. She knew in the end I'd sided with you. And that
meant I'd betrayed her."

"You didn't--"

"Yes, I did. I knew the last thing she wanted was that the ghosts get
in."

He shook his head, his eyes sliding closed. "But I had to. It was the
right thing." He opened his eyes again, and looked down at the blood.
'And her killing me, that was right, too."

"Christ, no ..."

"It's all ... ended up ... the way it should." "Don't say that," Tammy
murmured. "It's not over yet." She pushed herself up onto her knees,
then grabbed hold of the edge of one of the alcoves, and hauled herself
to her feet. The numbness was passing from her hands. Now they simply
tingled, as though they'd been trapped under her while she slept.

She heard the sound of footsteps outside, and she looked round to see
Maxine stumbling up the steps from the garden, in a state of total
disarray.

In any other circumstance, Tammy might have found the sight funny;
Maxine's clothes were torn, her face scratched and grimy. But right now
she was just one more victim: of Katya, of the house, of the Canyon.

"My God," she said, seeing Todd sitting there, the blood pooling on the
floor. "What the hell happened?" "Katya ..." Tammy said. It was all the
explanation she had energy for.

Once over the threshold, Maxine closed the door and locked it, her hands
trembling.

"There's things out there--"

"Yes, I know."

"They killed Sawyer."

For a moment it looked as though she was going to succumb to tears, but
she fought them off, and came along the passageway, her expression
turning from one of imminent tears to shock.

"Wait ..." she said. "Is that Toddr

Was he that unrecognizabk? Tammy thought. It seemed he was. In the hours
since Maxine had last set eyes on him Todd taken a hell of a beating.

By the sea, by Eppstadt, by Katya. Now he looked like a boxer who'd gone
twenty rounds with a man twice his strength: both his eyes puffed up,
his lower lip swollen and jutting, his whole face a mass of colors,
bruises old and new, cuts old and new, all spattered with dried mud.

Looking at him afresh, with Maxine's appalled gaze, Tammy realized that
she could have shown this poor broken face to a thousand members of the
Todd Pickett Appreciation Society and not a single one would have known
who they were looking at; and that probably included herself.

How far they'd all fallen; the gods and their admirers both.

"We have to get an ambulance up here," Maxine said. She bent down to
speak to Todd. "We're getting an ambulance."

"No," he said weakly, lifting his hand. "Stay with me."

Maxine looked at Tammy, who gave her a small nod. Maxine took hold of
Todd's hand.

"What happened to Eppstadt?" Maxine asked.

"Last time I saw him he was in Hell," Tammy replied.

There was something rather satisfying about being able to say that, even
if she didn't really know what they'd all experienced behind that door
downstairs. Whatever it was, it was real. Her breast still tingled from
the goat-boy's suckling.

"And the woman? Katya?"

"I don't know where she went. But if you'll take care of Todd, I'd like
to find out."

Todd gave his own, misshapen reply to this suggestion. "Be ...
careful."

As he spoke he raised his free hand in Tammy's direction. It was
impossible to interpret the expression on his face, but the fact that he
was afraid for her spoke volumes. And she in her turn was afraid; afraid
that if she didn't find some excuse to leave now, she'd be left here
watching him die.

She pressed his fingers, and he returned the pressure. "It's good," he
said. "Better see. That bitch."

She nodded, and headed off back down the passageway. As she went she
heard Maxine dialing 911 on her portable phone, which had apparently
survived the traumas of her journey through the wilderness behind the
house.

There was a calamitous din coming from the center of the house. It
sounded as though a hurricane had been loosed down there, and was moving
from room to room, getting stronger as its frustration mounted.

Tammy went to the stairwell and stood there for a few moments, letting
the tears fall. Why not? Why the hell not? What crazy person wouldn't
weep, when they'd turned over the rock of the world, and they'd seen
what was there, crawling around: the dead, the nearly dead, and the
sorrow of every damn thing.

It wasn't just Todd she was weeping for. She was shedding a tear, it
seemed, for everyone she'd ever known. For Arnie, for God's sake, who
one night had told her how his grandfather Otis, when he was in his
cups, would burn the eight-year-old Arnie's knuckles with cigarettes
"for the fun of it," and how Arnie had said it was good they'd never
have children because he was afraid he'd end up doing the same.

For the dead who'd waited outside this insane asylum for so long,
waiting for their chance to get back over the threshold, and now they
were in, they weren't happy, because what they'd come in search of was
gone.

That was their noise, she knew, their fury, circling below; their
frustration, mounting with every turn.

For Todd, and all the imperfect people who'd loved him because they'd

thought he was made of purer stuff than they. All the worshipers who'd
sent him messages through her, begging him just to drop them a note, |
pick up the phone, tell them that he knew they existed.

She'd been one of those people herself, once upon a time.

In a way she'd been the worst of them, in fact, because although she'd
!'< got so close to understanding the ways of this grotesque town, and j
known it was a crock of deceits and stupidities, instead of turning her
1 back on it all, burning Todd's pictures and getting herself a life
worth living, she'd let herself become a propagator of the Great Lie.
She'd done it; in part because it made her feel important. But more
because she'd \ wanted Todd to be the real thing, the dream come true,
alive in the same ; imperfect world she'd lived in, but better than that
dirty, disappointing world. And having once decided to believe, she had
to keep on believing it, because once he fell from grace, there was
nothing left to believe in.

It'll all end in tears, as her mother had been wont to say and Tammy had
I despised the woman for her lack of faith in things; for her cynical
certainty that everything was bound to sorrow. But in the end she'd been
right) Tammy was standing in the creaking, raging ruins of that terrible
truth: tears on her own face, shed for just about everything she'd ever
known.

She wiped her cheeks, and looked down the stairwell. The last time-,
she'd looked she'd seen Jerry sprawled at the bottom; another one of;
Katya's victims. But now he was gone. She didn't want to call his
names," That risked drawing Katya's attention and, if she was in the
vicinit$j Tammy had already had enough of her to last several lifetimes.

She ventured cautiously down the stairs, holding the banisters witftj
both hands. The wood reverberated beneath her palms, shaken by noise of
the dead.

About halfway down she felt a rush of icy air erupt from the stai and a
heartbeat later a flood of forms returned from the passageway led to the
Devil's Country. The revenants--or at least some of th were coming back
the way they'd gone.

Tammy let go of the banister and threw herself against the wall as a
dozen of the phantoms came roaring up the stairs.

"Gone ..." she heard one of them saying, its voice a mournful howl,
"... gone ..."

More revenants were emerging from the Devil's Country now, all in a
similar state of fury. One of them began to dig at the ground at the
bottom of the stairs with his bare hands, attacking the boards with such
violence they cracked. Then he tore them up, obviously looking for what
was already lost.

Tammy stayed glued to the wall, and in that state slid down to the
bottom of the flight, to see if she could spot Jerry. Zeffer's body had
been shoved aside by the passage of the ghosts, and lay face down in the
corner of the stairwell. Looking in the other direction she saw that the
door to the Devil's Country was throwing itself open and closed,
slamming with such violence that its framework had cracked. So had the
plaster overhead.

The light had dropped out of its fixture, and was dangling, along with a
cloud of plaster, from a bare wire, describing a figure eight in the air
as it swung.

It wouldn't have been Tammy's first preference to venture any closer to
the slamming door than she'd already come but as she'd left the
responsibility of Todd with Maxine, she knew it fell to her to protect
Jerry.

The ghosts wouldn't hurt her, she hoped, as long as she didn't get in
their way. She'd done nothing to harm them. If anything, she should be
their heroine. But she wasn't sure that in their present state of high
frustration they knew the difference between those who were on their
side and those who weren't. They simply wanted to know where their long
awaited paradise had gone. Apparently some of them were certain it had
been removed to some other part of the house to trick them: hence this
crazy tearing up of the floor, and smashing of the walls. It was here
somewhere, and they were going to tear up the fabric of the house until
they found it.

Two of these berserkers emerged from the room, their faces smears of
fury, and raced past her up the stairs. She waited until they'd
disappeared and then she went to the door. With the light swinging
giddily overhead the passageway pitched like a fun-house ride. She
closed her eyes to

snatch a much-needed moment of stillness, then opened them, and without
waiting for the door to stop its lunatic slamming, she pushed it open
and stepped into the space that had once been called the Devil's
Country.

Maxine had had occasion to lie to Todd many times over the course of
their working life together, but she had never lied more profoundly than
when she'd told him--that day she'd announced she was no longer working
for him--that there were more like him available on every plane. The
image of hordes of potential Todd Picketts just waiting to be picked out
of the hopefuls who flew into LAX every hour had been cruel nonsense.

Sure, there were always good-lookers in any bunch; sometimes beauties.

And sometimes--though very rarely--a beauty had some innate talent.

But very few who came to Tinseltown hoping to snatch the brass ring had
what the young Todd had possessed: the kind of effortless charm that an
entire generation, men and women both, could fall in love with. He'd
been that rarest of things: a universal object of desire.

Of course it didn't take much to taint such purity. But Todd had been
lucky. Though in private he'd often been sour, envious and scornful,
Maxine had successfully kept all that from the fans. Todd's image had
remained damn near perfect. His only enemy was time.

And even that, in the end, wouldn't have mattered, if he'd allowed it to
take its toll without shame. Look at Paul Newman, practically sainted at
J seventy. It would have been the same for Todd. People would have loved
him as he grew old the way they loved certain songs: because he was part
of wko they were.

Maxine could have said all of this to him on the beach, if she'd been 1
prepared to eat enough humble pie. Her words might even have per^ 1
suaded him not to go into the water with Katya, and what a lot of grief
.| that would have prevented.

But instead she'd been stupid and let the lie stand. And now they were
here at the end of it all, and what had their petty warring earned them?

Well, a lot of things she'd have preferred never to experience. Being
out in*|

 the back yard with the ghosts, for one: that had been almost more than
her sanity could endure. Seeing Sawyer torn apart that way was a horror
she'd never be able to get out of her head. And then to make her way
back through the undergrowth while some of his mutilators stalked her,
sniffing after her as though they were dogs in heat and she the local
bitch.

There were no words for the horror of that.

And finally, this. Coming back inside the house to find Todd as near
dead as made no difference, his face covered in wounds, his body all cut
up. The emergency services were on their way, but even if the Canyon had
been easy to find, which of course it wasn't, she didn't have much hope
that they'd make it in time to help him.

He made a noise, his eyes fluttering.

"Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way."

For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making
an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him.

"It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?"

There was no recognition in his eyes. His breathing, which had steadily
become shallower, was now so shallow she could scarcely see his chest
rising and falling.

She dropped her head toward his, and spoke softly into his ear, as if to
a child.

"Please don't go," she said to him. "You're strong. You don't have to
die here if you don't want to."

He opened his mouth a little; his breath smelled metallic, as though
he'd just swallowed a mouthful of old pennies. She thought he intended
to tell her something, and put her ear to his lips. His mouth continued
to move, but no sound came out, except the wet sounds of his throat and
tongue working. She was bent forward for perhaps half a minute, hoping
for something from him, but the posture was making her back creak, so
she sat up again.

In the fifteen seconds it took her to lift herself up from her bowed
position and sit up straight, the man she was tending died.

It was only when she started to speak to him---just repeating his name,
in the hope that she might get some response from him--that she realized
every trace of animation had gone out of him.

Very tenderly, she put her hand up to Todd's battered face, and touched
his cheek. Many times over the years she'd gone on set to find that the
makeup people had given him swellings or wounds that had looked
grotesquely realistic. But they'd always been "movie wounds"; however
bloody they got--and however much he was supposed to have suffered in
their getting--they were never disfiguring. The Todd Pickett whom
audiences had come to see, with his blue-green eyes, his dark, lush
hair, his symmetry--his smile--none of that was ever spoiled.

But this, lying before her, this was a different spectacle entirely.
Once she had closed his eyes, there was nothing left visible of the Todd
Pickett the world had loved.

She extricated herself from beneath his corpse with some difficulty. It
bothered her to be leaving his body just sprawled here in the passageway
in such an undignified manner, but she didn't know what else to do. She
needed to find Tammy, Jerry and a vodka, not necessarily in that order!

Anyway, she thought, as she looked down at the corpse, what the hell did
Todd care where he was lying? He was gone, hopefully about some better
business than the rest of the ghosts who lingered around this damnable
house.

The thought of them--of the undeniable fact of them, which she'd
witnessed just a few minutes before--made her heart quicken. If the dead
| lived on after their demise, did that mean that was Todd's spirit in
the vicinity right now, hovering around before he decided where he was
-ik headed?

She could feel herself blushing with self-consciousness, wondering what
she'd done in the few minutes since his passing that he might have
witnessed. Had she said anything asinine; or let go of some gas, in her
| nervousness?

Feeling a little foolish, but knowing she couldn't take a step without
speaking, she said: "Todd? Are you here?"

Then she waited, looking around.

A fly had buzzed in from the back yard where the door was still open,
and it now landed in the pooling blood between Todd's legs, where it
supped eagerly.

She bent down and shooed it away. It rose giddily into the air, as
though stupefied by the sheer scale of the feast that lay below. She
swatted at it with the back of her hand and, to her surprise, she struck
it. Down it went on its back, its buzz suddenly manic, as it careened
around on the tile beside Todd's body.

Had Maxine been a deeper thinker she would perhaps have hesitated to
kill the thing. But there'd never been any room for metaphysics in her
life, and though she might once have heard in conversation that in some
cultures a fly attending on a corpse must be treated reverentially, in
case it carried the soul of the deceased, such possibilities were very
remote from her way of thinking.

She put her foot down on the upturned fly without a moment's hesitation,
and headed back into the kitchen.

 The tiled room was hazy when Tammy stepped inside. Though the walls
were now quite solid--she could see the grout between the tiles, and the
cracks on the surfaces of the tiles--there was a dense, cold fog in the
place which made deep breathing difficult, and seeing any great distance
more difficult still.

The air smelled rank; like a very intense mildew. Apparently one of the
illusions the room had been capable of creating was the illusion of
smell.

There had been the fragrance of greenery in here when she'd last
entered; the smell of rain on leaves, and damp earth, and the pungent
aroma of horse manure from a dump left by one of the Duke's horses. But
apparently all that had been masking the real smell of the place, which
was this smothering fungoid stench.

She advanced cautiously, fearful of suddenly encountering somebody , in
the fog, and not leaving herself time to retreat. She could hear the '
ghosts now and again; their howls and their complaints strobed through |
the fog-thickened air, making it hard for her to judge their distance.
For safety's sake she kept one of the walls in sight to her left, as a
point of ref- I erence.

It possessed only a shadow of its former genius for deception. The
landscape that had once seemed so real was now reduced to outlines.

Even these were not complete. In some places they had deteriorated to .;
near-abstractions, in others they'd gone entirely But then in other
places j there were still large expanses of paintwork intact, where she
could make out the whole visual structure of a picture. In one place
there were tufts

of grass and small white flowers that, spreading from the bottom of the
walls across the ground, created the illusion that the visitor was
walking over fertile ground. In another, rocks and boulders were strewn
about, some cracked open by ambitious shrubs which had settled in their
cracks as seeds. And more distantly, here and there she could still see
copses and forests, roads and rivers, which cloud-shadows had once
passed over most convincingly; and beasts had haunted; and men lived and
died in.

The hues of all these fragments of the Country had faded, needless to
say, burned away by the unveiled sun. All the richness of the rendering,
all the detail of the painters' craft, was lost. What remained was
almost as simple as the outlines in a child's coloring book.

Once in a while, as she walked, the fog would become a little thinner
overhead, and she'd catch a glimpse of the ceiling. It was in much the
same state as the walls and floor. The outlines of cloud formations were
still visible, but without the brushwork and color to lend them life
they looked even more abstracted than the landscape: just meaningless
shapes.

Only the sun, whose appearance had begun the process of destruction,
retained some lifelike qualities. The brightness it shed was sickly,
however, as though it were blazing too brightly to stay aloft and alight
for long, and would soon be consumed by its own fever.

And still she walked, with the wall on her left, certain that she'd soon
come to the corner of the room. But the journey went on, and on, much to
her astonishment. The room must truly have been enormous, as Zeffer had
boasted. She remembered the pride on his face when he'd described how
they'd built the room. How the tiles had been numbered so that they
could be put up in the exact order he'd found them in. Only now, with
the deceptions of the room removed, did she better understand why he'd
felt such pride. The achievement had been substantial. Lunatic, but
substantial.

Finally, the wall turned a corner, leading away from her, which was a
surprise. She began to wonder if this search wasn't becoming foolhardy.

How much further should she explore, hugging the wall for security's
sake but getting further and further away from the door? Should she take
a chance and step out into the dark, featureless fog, hoping her sense
of

 direction would guide her back to the place she'd come from? No, that
I wasn't sensible. She decided on the more conservative option. She
simply !| turned on her heel and, putting the wall that had been on her
left on her 1 right, returned the way she'd come. Her only concession to
risk was to venture perhaps six or seven yards from the wall, which put
it at the limit 1 of her sight, given the density of the mist. In this
manner she proceeded 1 tentatively back the way she'd come.

The trek back to the door was not the uneventful journey the outward
bound trip had been. She'd taken perhaps five strides from the turnabout
| spot when she heard the whooping clamor of ghosts, and a body of
them-- ;1 smeared together in their grief, melded, it seemed, into one
furious 1 being--appeared from the fog. Their faces were bitter:
turned-down s| mouths and burning, cold blue eyes like the luminous eyes
of deep-sea fish.

She'd not been terrified of them at the threshold, but she was terrified
now. Not because they would see her and recognize her and blame her for
I the absence of their consolation, but because they could catch her up
in .r| their momentum, and carry her away with them. She instinctively I
dropped to the ground as they approached, and they moved on past her, %
wailing and cursing. She heard cracking sounds as they passed by, and
when they'd gone she saw that the tiles which they'd passed over had
shattered.

She stayed pressed on the ground, while the fog roiled around her,:
afraid that they'd come back.

They didn't return, thank God; but it was clear that this wasn't a safe
| place to be. She could hear other packs of ghosts roving around in the
fogi!

making their own terrifying din. The fog, she assumed, had delayed
thetfj full realization that this place was a shadow of its former self.
That wasf

"M why some of them kept on searching, hoping that the power they'd fed
01} 1

in the good old days was still here somewhere. Of course it was not; and
1 by degrees the bitter word was spreading, so that each of the groups|
searching the room slowly grasped the disastrous truth. And as soon all
they did they went crazy.

"Tammy?"

 She looked up. Close to the ground the fog thinned somewhat, and she
could see twice as far as she could when standing. And there, at the
limit of her vision, lying on the ground like her (and probably for the
same reason), was Jerry Brahms.

"Oh thank God ..."

There was a dark smear on his face, which she guessed was blood.

Otherwise, he seemed to be all right. He crawled toward her on his
belly, like a soldier under fire. As she approached she saw that the
smear was indeed blood, its source the patch of skin which Katya had
torn out of his scalp. When he reached her he caught hold of her hand.

"My dear, thank the Lord you're still alive. I feared the worst, I truly
did. Somebody let the ghosts in."

"That was me."

"In God's name why?"

"Because Todd wanted me to," she said. It wasn't the whole truth, of
course, but it was enough for now.

"Where is Todd?"

She looked away from him, just for a moment. It was all she needed to
do.

"Oh Lord, no. Not my Todd."

"She stabbed him--"

"Katya stabbed him? Why?"

"It's too complicated ..."

"Well, later then. Where's Katya now?"

"I think she's in here somewhere."

"So why did you come down?"

"Why'd you think? To find you."

"Oh you sweet ..." He grasped her hand hard.

"Now can we please go?" she said.

"Do you know the way to the door?"

She glanced over her shoulder. The wall she'd strayed from was still
visible.

"Yes. I think so. Back to the wall. Make a right. And then we follow it
until we reach the door, which will be on the left."

 "Very organized."

"I hope I'm right," Tammy said. She started to get to her feet. Jerry
tried to persuade her back down on the ground.

"I'm too big to be crawling around like this," she said.

Jerry nodded. "And you know what? I'm too old," he said. "If she sees
us, she sees us. Yes?"

He scrambled to his feet, and together they headed back to the relative
security of the wall. There were noises from every direction. Some were
the by-now-familiar cries of frustrated ghosts; but there were now also
sounds of mounting destruction. The revenants were venting their fury by
taking the room apart. Tammy could hear them tearing at the walls,
bringing down waves of tiles. And after the shrill crash of breaking
tiles came the deeper din of wood beams being smashed, timber wrenched
from timber with the squeal of unseated nails.

Tammy and Jerry stayed close to the wall; but the air was quickly
filling with particles of dust, which suggested the destruction was
getting closer to them. It was impossible to tell from which direction:
perhaps from all.

"May I?" Tammy said, slipping her hand into Jerry's.

"Be my guest."

The door was in sight now, and though the din was sickening, Tammy dared
to think they might get out of this alive, with a little luck.

No sooner had it crossed her mind than there was a massive disturbance
in the fog close by--so large a disturbance that the fog actually parted
like a pair of drawn drapes.

Tammy dragged Jerry back the way they'd come, two or three steps, no
more.

As she did so the ghosts came out of the gaping fog, and flung them;,1

selves at the wall around the door. They tore at it--and at the wall
surrounding it--with such force that part of the ceiling above the door
came crashing down. Pieces of shattered tiles, splintered wood and
plaster flew | in all directions. Tammy and Jerry turned away and
shielded their faces. A barrage of shards peppered their backs.

When the noise of the demolition ceased and Tammy looked back, a I

haze of plaster dust had replaced the fog. She inhaled and it caught in
her throat, reducing her to a coughing, tearful mess. Jerry was in the
same, or worse, condition.

Tammy spat out a mouthful of the white soot, and wiped her eyes with the
heel of her hand. Not the smartest thing to do. She felt plaster
particles scrape between her irises and her lids; a new flood of tears
came. As she wiped them away she felt Jerry catch hold of her arm,
seizing her so hard that she stopped coughing, and blinked the tears out
of her eyes to cleanse them. Then she looked round at him.

The ghosts who'd demolished the wall were now tearing at the exposed
sub-structure of the wall, reducing it to splinters. But it wasn't the
scene of destruction Jerry was looking at. He was staring ahead, back
toward the center of the room.

"She always knew how to make an entrance," he whispered.

Tammy followed his gaze.

The drapes of mist were beginning to close again slowly. But walking up
between them, like a diva preparing to take her place center-stage, and
armed for this final scene with the knife she'd used to stab Todd, was
Katya Lupi.

 "Hello, Tammy," she said. "I suppose you thought you were going to get
out of here alive. Well you're not. Sorry to disappoint you."

"Enough's enough, Katya," Jerry said, doing his best to sound
authoritative.

"Oh you know me better than that, Jerry," Katya replied. "Enough's never
been enough for me." She looked at Tammy. "Did he tell you I took his
virginity? No? He didn't. Well I did. He was a sad little thirteen-year
old, with a dick about as big as this." She waggled her pinkie. "Do I
exaggerate, Jerry?" Jerry said nothing. She went on, her tone darkening.
'All that I've done for you, and you're ready to creep away, ready to
leave me alone. That's all you men ever do, isn't it? You creep away."

"Not Todd," Tammy said. "Todd wanted to trust you."

"Shut up. You couldn't possibly understand what was between us." She
pointed the bloody knife at Jerry. "But you. You understood. You knew
how I'd been deserted in the past."

This was the big scene, Tammy thought; no doubt about that. And she was
playing it for all she was worth, as though she could finally be]
absolved of all she'd done, in the name of deserted womanhood.

"You're pathetic!" Tammy cried. "Why don't you do something useful!

with that knife and slit your fucking wrists!"

"Oh no. This isn't the end for me," Katya replied calmly

"This is the| end for him. And for you--" She poked the knife in Tammy's
generaij direction. "Your miserable lives are certainly over. But not
me. I wasj always a chameleon. Wasn't I, Jerry? From picture to picture,
didn't

change?' He didn't reply to her, but she pressed the point, as though
she simply sought verification of the truth. "Well didn't I?" she said.
"Grant me that much." "Yes ..." he said, as though to silence her.

"So I'll change again. I'll go out into the world and I'll be somebody
new. There's a whole new life, still waiting to lie lived."

"Not a hope in Hell," Tammy said.

"What?" "Let it go, Tammy," Jerry said.

"Why? She may look like a million dollars but she's just a slice of the
same stale ham that she always was. You know what? I love movies. Even
the silent ones. Like Broken Blossoms. I love Broken Blossoms. It still
makes me cry. There's some heart in it. Something real. But your ...
flicks?" She laughed, shaking her head. "They're dead. You see, that's
the paradox.

Mary Pickford's gone, and Fairbanks and Barrymore. They're all gone.

But they live on because they made people laugh and cry. Whereas you?

You're alive, and the shit you made isn't worth a damn."

"That's not true," Katya said. "Jerry, tell her."

"Yes, Jerry," Tammy said, quietly. "Tell her."

"The truth is that you're not remembered quite as well as I may have--"

"Let's not tell any more lies," Tammy said grimly. She looked at Katya.

"Nobody knows who the fuck you are."

Katya looked at Tammy for a moment, and then back to Jerry, who shook
his head.

"If they knew," Tammy said, "don't you think somebody would have
recognized you when you came to get Todd?"

Katya looked down at the cracked floor. She was absolutely still, except
for her right hand, which was idly judging the heft of the knife. When
she looked up again, her face carried a radiant smile.

"All right. Enough recriminations. We've said our hard words. Now we
must begin to forgive."

Tammy looked at her with incredulity. How many faces did this woman
have? "There's going to be no forgiving here," she said.

"Will you shut up," Katya snapped, passing her hand over her brow. The
smile dropped away for a moment, and there was a terrible vacuity in its
place. As though the masks, however many there were, concealed nothing
at all.

But she put the smile on again, a little more tentatively, and looked at
Jerry.

"I'm in need of your help," she said. "Your help and your forgiveness.

Please." She opened her arms. "Jerry. For old times' sake. I gave you a
life.

Didn't I? Being up here with me, wasn't it something to live for?"

Jerry took a long time to answer. Then he said: "You smell of death,
Katya."

"Please. Jerry. Don't be cruel. Yes, I've hurt a lot of people. I
realize that. Nobody regrets that necessity more than I do. But right
from the beginning, I was trapped. What could I do? Zeffer was the one
who brought the Hunt into this house, not me. I knew nothing about it.
How can I be blamed for that?"

"I think they blame you," Jerry said, nodding past Katya at the now-;
stilled fog; or rather, at what it concealed.

At some point in this exchange, the revenants had left off their
demolition, their fury momentarily calmed as they listened to Katya's
self justification. Many of them had been physically intertwined
earlier, but.

they had separated themselves from one another, and, shrouded by the |
fog, listened to the woman play her parts.

"They were your guests," Jerry said to Katya. "Some of them were| great
actors."

"If they were so great, why did they become addicted so easily?"

"So did you," he reminded her.

"But the room was mine. They were just people who passed through*!

Yes, some of them were casual friends. Some of them were even casual|
lovers. But once they were dead? They were nothing."

"I knew you were going to say that eventually," Tammy said. "You selfes
ish bitch." "Jesus," Katya said. "I have heard enough from you."

She lifted her knife and came at Tammy. In two seconds she would have
had the blade buried in Tammy's heart, but before she could reach her
target somebody stepped out of the mist and knocked the knife from her
hand. It spun on the tile, but Katya was quick. She ducked down and
snatched it up again, her gaze going to the figure who had stepped into
her path.

He had opened his arms, as though to formally present himself to her.

"Rudy?" she said.

The man in front of her bowed his gleaming head.

"Katya," he replied.

Tammy couldn't see his face but she thought there was some sorrow in the
syllables; whether for Katya, or for himself, who could say?

He'd no sooner spoken than from another spot, close to the door,
somebody else spoke her name. This second voice was heavier than
Valentine's; there was more anger in it than melancholy. "Remember me?"
he said. "Doug Fairbanks?"

Katya turned. "Doug? I didn't realize you were here too."

"And me?" came a third voice, this time a woman's.

"Clara?" Katya said.

"Of course."

The speaker walked up to Katya as she spoke, her stride remarkably
confident. She was a shadow of her former self, but Tammy would still
have recognized the face of Clara Bow. The bee-stung lips. The high,
curved brows. The wide eyes, once filled with innocent high-spirits. But
not now. Now they burned.

Katya glanced over her shoulder. "Please, Clara," she said, "don't come
so close."

"Why should you care how close we get?" Clara Bow said.

"Yes," came a fourth voice. "You're not to blame, remember?"

"Anyway," came a fifth voice, "we're nothing."

"Nothing," said a sixth voice. And a seventh.

Katya turned, swinging her weapon in a wide arc. Even so, it missed its
several marks. The ghosts were too quick for her; she was sluggish, even

in her fury. Besides, Tammy thought, what possible harm could a kitchen
knife do to these creatures? Yes, they had a corporeal existence; no
question of that. But they were--as far as she understood it--spirit
presences made of ether and memory. These people couldn't die. They were
already dead; long, long dead.

And they were assembling now in even greater numbers, having apparently
given up looking for the Devil's Country.

It was gone; the evidence of which was the fading lines on the walls of
this melancholy chamber. All that remained by way of satisfaction, if
that was the word, was to punish the woman who had kept them outside in
her joyless Canyon for so many seasons, holding on to the hope that they
would one day be let back into the house to satisfy their craving for
the solace of their addiction.

Katya was well aware that she was in jeopardy, and hopelessly
outnumbered.

While still holding the knife she raised both hands in a vague gesture
of surrender.

The dead seemed not to care. Their pale faces, which had always looked
impersonal, were now--in the presence of the woman who had once been
their confidante--assembling fragments of forgotten particularities.

It was like a room full of Alzheimer's patients, recovering in the
presence of some person they'd known well what they'd previously lost:
themselves. Their eyes, which had been little more than lights in their
heads, took on a specific shape and color. Their mouths, which had been
slits, bloomed into sensuality.

Tammy didn't think any of these reconfigurations were good news for
Katya. Unobtrusively, she caught hold of the back of Jerry's shirt, and
gently eased him out of Katya's immediate vicinity. '

She moved him not a moment too soon. '

An instant later one of the ghosts came barreling out of the mist and
caught hold of Katya. Tammy didn't see the attacker's face, but she
heard the guttural cry which escaped him as he swung his captive around
to face; the fog.

Katya struggled, but he had her arms pinned behind her, and despite her
considerable strength, he was the stronger.

"Fuck you, Ramon!" she screamed.

She made a second attempt to wrest herself free of Navarro's grip, and
by sheer vigor succeeded in liberating one of her arms; the one with the
knife. She then stabbed wildly at the man who had hold of her: Ramon
Navarro. The knife slid into his side, and there it lodged.

Before she could retrieve it he had caught hold of her flailing arm and
had pinned it again. Though he had very firm hold of her she still
continued to struggle and curse, giving up on English in favor of
Romanian.

And then, after perhaps thirty seconds of Romanian curses, she gave up
completely, and fell silent.

For a moment Tammy thought Navarro had killed her, her silence was so
sudden and complete. But--as had always been the case in this house--
the truth was not so simple.

The curtain of fog shifted, as though several breezes had pierced it at
the same moment. And then, like a troupe of actors appearing to take
their final bow, the rest of the revenants began to appear from the
mist; four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve--

Their eyes were on Katya; all of them, on Katya.

Now she began to struggle with fresh fervor, her movements chaotic and
panicky, like those of a trapped animal. Much to Tammy's surprise,
Navarro let her go. She turned on him, instantly, reaching for the knife
that was still protruding from his side. But before she could catch hold
of it he reached out and grabbed the front of Katya's dress. Then he
pulled, tearing the light pink fabric away from her body and exposing
her breasts.

The look on her face changed, her fury apparently mellowing. Navarro
bent forward and put his face between her breasts.

She let out a light laugh, which was surely artificial, but nevertheless
passed for the real thing well enough. He responded by licking the
passage of flawless skin up to her throat, wetting it until it shone.
Her nipples, aroused by his touch, were hard. Her eyes flickered closed
as she

murmured something in Romanian; words of appreciation to judge by their
tone. Encouraged he moved his mouth down from her throat to her left
breast; and as he did so he slipped his arms beneath her legs, and
lifted her up.

The ghosts still assembling behind her raised their heads, watching her
elevation.

She was laughing for real now, her head thrown back in abandon.

Navarro was no longer licking her; he was putting all his effort into
lifting J her up, higher and higher still, until Katya and her laughter
and her shining breasts were above his head.

Katya opened her eyes. The laughter suddenly passed away from her face,
as she realized what he'd done. Again, she spoke in Romanian, but I this
time the words were not so appreciative. Nor did she have long to speak
them, before Navarro threw her to the assembled crowd.

She seemed to hang for a long moment in the space between her
deliverer's arms and the hands of those who were ready and eager to
receive her. ||

Then she fell. ;

Down, down into their open arms; down to be caught by her dead; patient
friends, who'd waited so very long to enjoy her hospitality again, '"
and had been so bitterly disappointed.

Finally, after all these years--all her cruelties, all her games, all
her indifference--they had her.

She screamed as they laid their cold hands on her flesh; shrieked like I
I little girl being violated. They ignored her protests, as she had
ignoreclji them over the years.

They pulled her hair, so that it came out at the roots. They ripped at
hesj smooth, sweet flesh, which showed no sign of the toll the years had
takenj on the rest of the world. They bit off her nipples, they tore off
her labia like shreds of tender meat, and shoved the pieces down her
throat silence her.

Death had not made them kind. Time had not made them kind. Yea of
sitting in the Canyon--the Santa Anas in one season, rain in anothe
crucifying heat in another: none of it had made them kind.

They pulled at her as though she were a perfect little doll that they'd
been given and were now fighting over. The trouble was, she wasn't
designed for such careless handling. She tore too quickly.

In a matter of seconds what had once been Katya Lupi was a ruin: they
broke her arms so that the bones poked through; they tore at her sex so
that the gaping, lipless slit ran half way up her stomach. She had spat
out her labia and now attempted to call them by name, to eke out a
little mercy.

But they had none to give.

They had planned this martyrdom for years; each playing his or her
horrid part. Someone got his fingers beneath the skin of her face and
worked it off, inch by ghastly inch, leaving only the pinkness of her
eyelids in a mass of red muscles. Two others (women, working together in
smiling harmony) unseated her breasts from the bone, so that they hung
down like sacks of fat, while the blood poured from the wounds where her
nipples had been.

And then--perhaps sooner than they'd wanted or planned--her body gave
out.

Her shrieks ceased. Her death-dance ceased.

She hung in their arms like something that had once made sense but would
never make sense again.

Just to be sure there was no more fun to he had with her, Virginia
Maple, who'd been the second victim of the scourge of stars that had
begun with the death of Rudolph Valentino, drove her hand into the dead
woman's mouth, and with the strength death and hatred had lent her,
clawed out a fistful of the woman's brains, which she threw at the
tiles.

There they spattered, holding for a moment before sliding to the ground.
Meanwhile someone else had gone in through her womb and pulled out her
innards, like a magician's colored handkerchiefs coming one after the
other (yellow, purple, red, brown), the coils of her guts, her stomach,
and all the rest attached with loose strings of tissue and fat.

Tammy saw it all.

It was a good deal more than she wanted to see; but no less than her

eyes could take in. Not once did she look away, though every second
that 51 it continued she told herself she should do so, because this was
just a com- f mon atrocity now. It was nothing to look at, and nothing
to be proud of looking at.

But when it was over, and the ghosts dragged Katya's disemboweled f
remains away into the fog, to put to whatever grotesque purpose their
anger still demanded, she at least knew that the bitch was finally dead.
She voiced that opinion, and of course Jerry--never one to sweeten
things I unnecessarily--replied: "Things are never the way you think
they'll be in I Coldheart Canyon. We'll see how dead she really is."

When they went upstairs, Maxine was in the kitchen, squatting in the |
corner with a blank expression on her face. She looked extremely weary,
as though the toll of recent events had taken fifteen years off her
life. She 1

"ish wouldn't get up, so Jerry went down on his haunches and started to
qui .1|

etly talk to her.

Finally she spoke. She'd had every intention of coming downstairs tol
help them, she told him, tears streaming down her face, but then the ,|
noises started, those terrible noises, and she could no longer bring
herself | to do it. She went on in the same fashion for a while,
circling on herself.

"Why don't you try to get her to stand up?" Tammy suggested to Jerrjyj
Then she went to pay her respects to Todd.

The Golden Boy was lying where he'd fallen, more or less; look peaceful,
more or less. Eyes closed, mouth open; blood shining on ground around
his head.

During the early years of her infatuation, Tammy had had dreams I which
she would touch him. There'd been nothing sexual in the touches; or at
least nothing explicitly so. Just his being there in an ordina room, and
saying to her, it's okay, you can come over here, you can tou me. That
had been the sum of it.

She'd always woken from those dreams with such a profound year in her
heart: a yearning to confirm his existence in her waking world, ply by
one day getting the chance to really touch him. Just to know that 1

wasn't simply a game played with light, but a real thing, of flesh and
blood.

Now here she was, and here he was, and she could touch him all she
liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.

What she'd been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be
found. He'd gone, and what remained, as she'd just seen in the room
below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.

She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say good-bye to it,
and finally--unable to resist the force of instinct--saying it anyway.
Then she returned to the kitchen, where she found that Jerry had
succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the
fridge for something cold for her to drink.

"I'm afraid there's only beer," he said. "Oh no, wait. There's some milk
here too. You want some milk?"

"Milk," she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like a child's eyes.
"Yes.

A glass of milk."

Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down,
staring out of the window between gulps. 'As soon as you're ready,"
Jerry prompted her, "we should go. Yes?" She nodded as she drank.

There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to
fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of
their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.

"Eppstadt?" Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk.

"What happened to Eppstadt?" "I told you," Tammy reminded her.

"Oh yes. He's dead, isn't he?"

"Yes, he's dead."

"And the waiter?"

"Joe?"

"Yes, Joe."

"He's dead too."

There was a long silence between them then, while Maxine emptied her
glass, which gave Tammy an unhappy moment to picture the bodies

 that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer
somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of
the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.

"We should be thankful," Jerry said.

"For what?" Maxine wanted to know.

"For getting out of here alive."

"Let's be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard," she said, a little of
the old Maxine showing, "not before."

The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy
looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two
inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of
black lightning.

They got into Tammy's car, and drove down the hill. Maxine's spurt of
fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but
Tammy was having none of it.

"Shush," she said, half gently, half not. "We're not having any of that,
you hear? It's over, Maxine. It's over."

Of course that wasn't strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures
she'd encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What
would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil's
Country worked upon the anatomies of those who'd ventured there? She;
vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some
considerable time in that godless place, would have something to showj
for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at
least j for a while.

By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.

"We have to go and report all this to the police," Tammy said. "To|
gether." "Now?" Maxine said. "I couldn't possibly."

"We have to, Maxine. There are bodies up there. We don't want to accused
of murder."

"They're going to think we're all crazy," Maxine commented.

 "Well, that's easily solved," Jerry said. "We'll bring them up here,
and they can see it all for themselves. That'll change their minds."

"Suppose they do think we're responsible?" Maxine said. "People like to
point fingers in this damn town."

"Well they won't be pointing any fingers at us," Tammy said. "We'll
explain." "Explain?" Maxine said. "How the hell will we ever explain?"

"We'll start at the beginning and go on until we're done. We've got
nothing to hide."

"There'll be no end to it," Maxine said. "Now Todd's dead, the press is
going to be all over us. They're going to be digging up every sordid
little story about him, whether it's true or not. They'll print any
piece of garbage that floats down the sewer. It's going to go on for
months. And you think in the middle of all this the truth is going to be
heard? Forget it.

It's going to be a circus."

"You don't have to be a part of the circus," Jerry said. "None of us do.

We can just say no, and walk away. Let them write whatever they want to
write. They're going to do it anyway." "True enough," Maxine sighed. "I
just wanted to try to guard his reputation."

"Maybe if you'd guarded him a little better when he was still around we
wouldn't be in this mess," Tammy said. She caught Maxine's reflection in
the mirror; the corners of her mouth turned down in misery. "I'm sorry,"
Tammy said. "Maybe that was a bit sharp."

"No," Maxine replied. "I let him down. He needed me and I walked in the
opposite direction. Men culpa."

"What does that mean?"

"I'm responsible?" Maxine said. 'And I am. Don't think I don't know it."

Her reply brought an end to the exchange. They drove on in silence until
they reached Langley Road, which in turn brought them on to Doheny
Drive, and finally down onto Sunset Boulevard.

It was a busy intersection, the lights slow. They had to wait through
three changes, creeping closer to the main tide of traffic; but there
was a

 simple contentment for all three in sitting in the car and watching
the!

buses and the messenger bikes and the Beverly Hills Rolls-Royces drive
onl past. Life going on, in other words, in its usual way. People going
east,:!

people going west, all oblivious to the fact that just a short drive
from this!

loud, bright place was a cleft in the rock of the City of Angels which
wa$;l deep enough to conceal miracles.

 The Last Chase

 News, like a life-form, is divided into orders and classes and kinds.
Thus, what was deemed worthy of note on the front page of Variety (the
grosses of Todd Pickett's last four pictures, the fact that his agent,
Maxine Frizelle, had been present at the death-scene, some sketchy
details about the history of the house in the Canyon) was not thought
appropriate for the front page of the LA Times (the fact that there were
multiple bodies at the scene, suggesting some vague connection with the
horrors of the Manson Murders; a brief synopsis of Todd's career;
elsewhere, an obituary, and elsewhere again a sincere, if hastily
edited, appreciation of Pickett's contribution to cinema); none of which
was again deemed appropriate for The National Enquirer, which put
together a special edition centered on the deaths of Todd, Gary Eppstadt
and--as they put it--"the unfortunate, unnamed victims who were pulled
down into the same spiral of decadence and death that claimed the
Hollywood power-players," but padded the issue out with the Old
Faithfuls: Haunted Hollywood, The Tragic Deaths of the Young and the
Beautiful--Marilyn; James Dean; Jayne Mansfield-- "Doomed Souls Who Paid
the Ultimate Price for Fame!"; and all this gutter journalism of a high
order by comparison with the real bottom-feeders, the journalists of The
Globe, who printed, among countless lurid absurdities which they had
clearly invented at their editorial meetings, a number of facts that
were paradoxically closer to the truth of the events than anything in
any other newspaper or magazine. Given their notoriously low standards
of veracity, however (The Globe's editors considered crudely doctored
pictures of Pyramids hovering over the Pentagon hard news), 

the publication of these reports made the truest parts of the story
unprintable in any other journal. The facts became tainted by
association; poisoned, in fact. If it appeared in The Globe, how could
it be true?

The only items of the story that appeared in every location were those
that were related to the hard facts of death in Tinseltown.

Todd Pickett, everyone agreed, had been on some kind of downward spiral.
The cause might be disputed, but the fact that he was no longer the Most
Beautiful Man in the World (People Cover, Jan. 1993) or the Most
Successful Male Star of the Year (Showest, five years running) was not.
In the eternal game of snakes-and-ladders that was Hollywood, Todd
Pickett had done all the climbing he was ever going to do. If he'd
survived, it would all have been downhill from here.

There was in fact a widely-held opinion which stated that in dying
young--even dying violently--Todd had made the best career move of his
life. He'd gone while the going was relatively good; and in a fashion
that would assure his name was never forgotten.

"For Todd Pickett fans the world over," Variety opined, "today's tragic
news brings the curtain down on a stellar career filled with glorious
moments of pure cinematic magic. But there must be many of those
admirers who are relieved that their hero will never disappoint them
again. His run of spectacular successes (all of which were produced by
Keever Smotherman, who died less than a year ago at the age of
forty-one) was plainly drawing to an end. All that remained was the sad,
and regrettably all-too-common spectacle of a great star eclipsed."

[

Tammy saw that word everywhere now: eclipsed. It sat hidden in otherwise
innocent sentences, waiting to mess with her mind. The instant she saw
it she was back in the Devil's Country, staring up at the shape of that
black moon obscuring the face of the sun. She could feel the contrary
winds against her face. She could hear the sound of horses' hooves, or
worse, the wailing of Qwaftzefoni.

When that happened, she would have to put down whatever it was she was
reading that had concealed the treacherous word and direct her attention
back to the real world: the room in which she was sitting, the view
through the window, the weight of the flesh on her bones.

Of course, the word wasn't the only trap. Though she'd come back to the
house on Elverta Road and valiantly tried to pick up the rhythm of her
briefly forsaken life, she knew it would be a long time until the bad
times passed away. She'd simply seen too much; and the threads of what
she'd seen were intimately woven into the world she'd returned to.
Though she'd put all the objects around the house that were connected to
Todd (and there were a lot of them) away in the big front bedroom with
the rest of her memorabilia, out of sight was not out of mind. She knew
she was going to have to deal with all that stuff in a more thorough way
before too long; and the prospect weighed heavily upon her.

Meanwhile, she was alone in the house. Just under three weeks after her
return to Sacramento, Arnie had announced that he was moving out in
order to move in with Maureen Ginnis, a bottle-blonde who worked as a
dispatcher at the Fedex offices at the airport. In a way, Tammy was
glad.

 She knew Maureen a little, and she was a nice woman; a better match
for Arnie than Tammy had ever been. And having the house to herself--
knowing that when she got up in the morning she didn't need to see
anybody or speak to anybody if she didn't want to (and there were days,
sometimes four or five in a row, when her mood fell into a kind of
trough, and she was so sluggish she could barely keep her eyes open;
then others when she would turn on the television and some stupid quiz
show would make her bawl like a baby)--made the craziness she felt
itching inside her a little easier to cope with, because she didn't have
to conceal it from anyone.

She could just take the phone off the hook, lock the doors, draw the
drapes and act like a crazy lady.

She got a bad cold a couple of weeks after Arnie left, and bought up a
cabinetful of over-the-counter cold, flu, congestion and expectorant
medications.

They usually made her feel so dopey that she avoided taking them; but in
her present situation it scarcely mattered if she felt half-comatose'.

Having bought the medicines she dosed herself to the gills with cure-all
syrups the color of fancy French liqueurs, and went to bed in the middle
ofj the afternoon to sweat it out. It was a bad move. She woke about one
in the morning from a dream in which she'd been lying in bed with the
goat-boy clamped to her breast, suckling noisily. She could smell the
meaty sweetness of her breast-milk as it seeped from the corner of his
hairy mouth, andj heard the long middle nail of his foot catching on the
comforter as M| jerked around in animal bliss. '1|

"A

With the weird logic of dreams she had very reasonably told Qwaftzefl
fbni that she felt feverish and he would have to stop. She had pulled
hiii| off her breast with some difficulty, only to discover that he had
hold of I hand, the sharp nail of his thumb pressed hard against the
pulsing vein: her wrist as though threatening to pop it at a moment's
notice. Then had guided her palm down to the clammy place beneath the
curve of.

stomach, where his prodigiously veined prick stuck out from folds infant
fat. She felt a row of tiny objects down the underside of his shafb|j

"They're black pearls," he said, before she asked the question. "They'|
increase your pleasure."

 In her fever-dream, she barely had time to register what the little
bastard was proposing before he was climbing up onto her, her tit
spurting in his fist as he milked her, her screams going for nothing. In
the hellish heat of the room the spilled milk went bad in a heartbeat,
souring on the sheets. It stank as if they'd been soaked in vomit, the
stench rising around her with physical weight, as though it might
smother her.

She had begged for the goat-boy to leave her alone, but he clutched her
hand so tightly she was afraid he'd break the bones if she didn't obey
him.

So she had taken hold of his pearl-lined ding-a-ling and proceeded to
jerk it.

"You want it over with quickly?" he had said to her.

"Yes ..." she had sobbed, hoping he'd let her go. Men knew how to do it
better than women anyway. Arnie had always turned up his nose at the
offer of a hand-job. "You never do it right. I'd prefer to do it
myself." But there were no easy get-outs here.

"Then stay still!" the goat-boy had said, flipping over backward, still
keeping his grip on her fountaining breast, but relinquishing the
enforced masturbation for a grosser game. He was straddling her head
now, his thick little legs just long enough to raise the cushy divide of
his ass six or seven inches above her nose. The coarse hair on his goaty
legs pricked her face. It thickened around his buttocks, and he'd long
since given up trying to clean it. The stench made her gag.

"Open your mouth. Put out your tongue."

She could bear it no longer. She reached up and grabbed his balls hard,
throwing the little fuck forward, so that he was sprawled on the milk
soaked bed. Then she lifted his tail and started to beat his ass with
her palm, for all the world like a mother chiding a monstrous child. He
started to sob, and shit, the groove of his buttocks filling up with the
turd he would have dumped on her face if he'd had the chance. She was
past caring about how dirty her hands were. She just kept beating the
little fucker, until he had no more tears left, and he was reduced to
hiccups.

No, the hiccups weren't his, they were hers.

Her eyes fluttered open. The fever had broken, and she was alone in a
bed that was damp with all the sweat she'd shed, but otherwise sweet 
smelling. The cretinous horror she'd brought from the Devil's Country I
was gone; shit, hair and all.

She got up out of bed and flushed all the medicines down the toilet,
determined to let the flu pass from her system of its own accord. She
was crazy enough, without the aid of medication.

 "Jerry."

"Tammy. My dear. Whatever happened to you? I wondered when you were
going to call."

"You could have called me."

"Well, to be perfectly honest," he said, "I didn't want to trouble you.

Unlike me, you've got a life to live."

"Well, actually, Arnie left me."

"Oh, I am sorry."

"Don't be. It's for the best."

"You mean it?"

"I mean it. We weren't meant for one another. It just took us a long
time to find out. What about you?"

"Well, since we made the news I've been invited out to a few more fancy
dinners than I used to be. People are curious. So they wine me and dine
me and then they casually interrogate me. I don't mind, really. I've met
a lot of people, mostly young men, who have a faintly morbid interest in
what went on up in the Canyon, which they pass off as an interest in me.
I play along. I mean, why not? At my age, you don't argue. Interest is
interest."

"And what do you tell them?"

"Oh, bits and pieces. I've got quite adept at figuring out who can take
what. You know, the ones who say tell me everything are the ones who go
clammy when they're told--"

"Everything?"

"No. Never everything. I don't think anybody I've met is ready for
everything."

"So how do people respond?"

"Well, they're usually ready for something fairly wild. If they sought
me out in the first place it's because they know something. They've
heard some rumor. Some little piece of gossip. So it keeps the
conversation interesting. Now: you. What about you? Have you been
sharing our adventures with anybody?"

"No."

"Nobody?"

"No. Not really."

"You should, you know. You can't keep it all bottled up. It's not
healthy."

"Jerry, I live in Rio Linda, Sacramento, not Hollywood. If I started
spouting off about going to the Devil's Country my neighbors would
probably never talk to me again."

"Would you care? Be honest."

"Probably not."

"What about Rooney?"

"Who?" Tammy frowned.

"Rooney. The detective who interviewed us, remember? Over an dover."
"His name was Rooney? I thought it was Peltzer."

"No, that's one of Maxine's lawyers, Lester Peltzer."

"Okay. So Peltzer's a lawyer, and Rooney's who?"

"You haven't heard from him? He's the Detective at the Beverly Hills
Police Department who first talked to us. Have you been checking your
messages?" She hadn't but she said she had.

"Strange," Jerry said. "Because he's called me six or seven times,
pressing me for details. Then I called the Department, replying to one
of his | calls, and you know what? He was fired two weeks ago."

"So why's he calling you?"

"I think the sonofabitch is writing a book."

 "About what happened to us?"

"I guess we'll find that out when it's published."

"He can do that?"

"Maybe he'll change the names. I don't know."

"But it's our story. He can't go round telling our story."

"Maybe we should all talk to Peltzer and see if we can stop him."

"Oh God," Tammy said softly. "Life used to be so simple."

"Are you having a hard time?" Jerry said.

"Yeah. I guess. No, what am I saying? I'm having a horrible time. Really
bad dreams."

"Is that it? Dreams? Or is there more?" She thought about her reply for
a moment, wondering if she should share the problems she'd been having
with him. But what was the point?

Though they'd been through hell together she didn't really know him all
that well. How did she know he wasn't planning to write a book too? So
she said: "You know all things considered, I'm doing just fine."

"Well that's good," Jerry said, sounding genuinely pleased. "Have the
reporters stopped bothering you?"

"Oh I still get the occasional journalist on the doorstep, but I had one
of those little spy-hole things put in the door, and if I think he looks
like a reporter then I just don't open the door."

"Just as long as you're not a prisoner in your own house."

"Oh Lord, no," she lied.

"Good."

"Well ... I should let you go. I've got a thousand--"

"One other thing."

"Yes."

"This is going to sound a little wacko."

"Oh. Okay."

"But I wanted to tell you about it. Just ... for old times' sake, I
suppose."

"I'm listening."

"You know we never really discussed what happened to us in the house."

"No. Well I figured we all knew--"

"I didn't really mean what happened to everybody. I meant you and me,
down in that room. You know that there was a lot of power in those
tiles.

Visiting the Devil's Country kept Katya looking perfect all those years
..."

"What are you getting at?" "As I said, it's going to sound wacko, but I
guess we're both used to that by now, yes?" He took a deep breath. "You
see, I had cancer; inoperable.

The doctors gave me nine months to a year to live. That was December of
last year. Christmas Eve, actually."

"God, Jerry, I'm so sorry."

"No, Tammy, you're not listening. I said, I had a tumor."

"What?"

"It's gone."

"Completely?"

"Every detectable trace. Gone. The doctors can't believe it. They've
done the scan five times to be absolutely sure. And now--finally--they
are absolutely sure. Jerry Brahms's tumor has disappeared, and according
to them that simply can't happen. Ever."

"But it has."

"It has."

"And you think it's got something to do with us being in the room?"

"Put it this way: I went into that house with a malignant tumor, and
when I came out again the tumor had gone. What can you say about a thing
like that? It's either a coincidence or it's a miracle."

"And you think it's a miracle?"

"You know what?" He paused. "Now I am going to sound wacko, but I prefer
to think of it as Katya's last present to me."

"She didn't seem the gift-giving type."

"You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I
think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the
darkness, somewhere."

"Is there?" Tammy replied. "I guess I'm still looking."

 Tammy desperately wanted to believe that she had indeed profited
somehow from the madness-inducing journey she'd taken through the wilds
of Coldheart Canyon. She didn't need anything as monumental as Jerry's
healed tumor; just some modest sign to prove to her that, despite all
the death and the suffering she'd witnessed, some palpable good had come
of it.

Every waking hour her thoughts circled on what she'd experienced,
looking for some sign of hope. Not miracles, just hope. A light in the
darkness; a reason to live. But the more she searched, the more absurd
the search seemed to be.

Common sense told her she should venture out into the world and start
trying to live a normal life again. Perhaps if she joined a couple of
women's clubs, or maybe even tried to find herself a lover--anything to
change her focus; get her out of her head and back into a normal way of
thinking. But she always found some reason to put off anything too
adventurous. It was almost as though she'd used up her capacity for
adventure during her time in the Canyon. Her trips into the dangerous
territory over her front doorstep became briefer and briefer by the day.

She started to get panicky when she got into her car, and the panic
escalated so quickly that by the time she got to the end of the block
she often had to turn round and head straight back home again. Going to
the market had become impossible; she took to ordering essential
food-stuffs by phone, and when the supplies arrived she'd make the
exchange with the



delivery guy as short as possible. She'd just take the stuff, pass over
the money, and close the door, often not even waiting for the change.

She realized that this odd behavior was beginning to get her a
reputation around the neighborhood. More than once she peeped out
between the closed drapes and saw that people were lingering outside her
house, some on the sidewalk, some in cars, pointing or staring. She'd
become, she supposed, the local eccentric; the woman who'd come back
from the wilds of Hollywood in a state of mental derangement.

All of this, of course, only added to her spiraling sense of anxiety,
mingled with more than a touch of paranoia. If she answered the door to
the delivery boy and caught sight of somebody in the street outside she
naturally assumed the passer-by was spying on her. At night she heard
noises on the roof and woke more than once certain that one of Katya's
los nines had found its way to Rio Linda and was scrambling over the
eaves, trying to get down to her bedroom window.

In saner moments (which became fewer and fewer), she knew all this was
nonsense. But the very fact that she had saner moments implied that she
was slowly giving herself up to lunacy. It was all very fine for Jerry
Brahms to talk about having his cancer cured by the power of the room
(and maybe he had; she didn't discount the possibility), but she felt as
though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting
her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing.

Quite the reverse. It was deconstructing her grip on reality, piece by
piece.

Some days when she woke the dreams remained attached to her all day like
pieces of lint. She'd go through her waking hours in a half-stupefied
state, coming into rooms and not knowing why she was there; leaving them
again and remembering, then forgetting as she turned round. She was in a
constant state of exhaustion. Her lids were like lead. Once, in the
middle of the day, she found herself on her hands and knees in the
bathroom, working at the tiles with her bare hands and Ajax, attempting
to remove some spidery sketches of a certain country that she'd
daydreamed into creation. Another time, she'd gone into the kitchen to
find the faucet running, and a shape in the sink that looked like a
piece of road  kill; a matted pelt, two rows of sharpened teeth set
between black leathery lips. The force of the hot water slowly turned
the cadaver over and showed her the broken head of something she'd seen
in the Canyon, or in her dreams of the Canyon, foul beyond words.

She turned off the faucet. Steam rose from the mouth of the thing, like
a last breath. Then it melted, fur and teeth and all, and was gone down
the drain.

"Hmm," she said to herself, unimpressed by this ugly little show.

Somehow she'd always imagined madness to be a more dramatic thing than
this. Again the movies had it wrong. There was no grandeur in it; no
exquisite folly. Just a pile of teeth and dirty fur in the kitchen sink.

That said, she knew that her mental decline was gathering speed. She
needed to do something about it soon, or this journey she was on was
going to take her away from herself completely. She would be a blank
eyed thing sitting at the kitchen table, wiped clean by banalities.

 While Jerry was giving thanks for his new life, and Tammy was dealing
with the grim illusions in her kitchen sink, Maxine was in a very
different frame of mind. Her injuries were remarkably slight, given all
that she'd gone through. Within a week she was physically ready to
return to her offices and attempt to pick up business. But most of the
calls she got in the first week weren't business calls at all but gently
inquiring conversations that rapidly gave way to interrogation. It
seemed as though everyone in Hollywood wanted to know about events at
the house in Coldheart Canyon.

In truth, she had no desire to tell her story to anyone, not even her
closest friends. Ghosts and rooms laid with tile providing visions of
another world--this was not the stuff she could have shared with any of
her contemporaries without being mocked. But she had to say something,
or she was going to start making even more enemies than she already had.
So she concocted a version of events without supernatural elements. In
the censored version, Todd had indeed been hiding away because of work
done to his face (it was no use lying about that any longer: he'd
admitted to the surgery at her party), and there he'd been stalked and
finally-- sadly--murdered by his stalker. Most of the people she talked
to accepted this bowdlerized version of events, at least for the
duration of the conversation.

But those few loyal sources she still had around town reported something
very different back to her. Everyone had his own version of what had
happened in Coldheart Canyon, ranging from the ludicrous to the
actionable, and they were spreading it around freely. Whatever the /

version of the story--and they ranged from murder mystery to ghost
stories--they had this in common: Maxine was the villain.

She was to blame for knowingly putting her innocent client in a house
that was haunted; she was to blame for not warning him that a dose
friend was a murderer (this version had started in The Enquirer, and
required another star as murderer. The Enquirer, of course, claimed to
know who it was, and would soon be in a position to reveal the name of
the guilty party.

What they could already say with confidence was that Maxine Frizelle had
known of the plan against Todd's life, but simply hadn't taken it
seriously).

She, in short, was the reason he was dead. It seemed that nothing she
could say or do persuaded people that this wasn't the case. Years of
resentment toward her surfaced now as her enemies elaborated version
after version of what had gone on in the Canyon, each one less
flattering to Maxine than the one before.

She eventually gave up attempting to put people straight on such
matters.

People would believe what the hell they wanted to anyway. She'd learned
that after twenty-two years in the business. You could sometimes guide
people's opinions, but if they didn't "want to buy what you had to sell
you could shout yourself hoarse trying to make them do it and it would
never work.

After a few days of fruitless endeavor she became curiously immune to
all the gossip flying around, and just got on with trying to get to see
some new talent. She was an agent without a major client, which meant
that as far as the town was concerned there was no reason to take her
calls, especially as she wasn't playing ball and offering up the inside
scoop on what a psychic hired by the Fox Channel to wander round the
Canyon called "the most haunted piece of real estate in Hollywood."

In other words, everybody knew there was more to this--a lot more than
they had been told so far--and it was only a matter of time before
somebody started to talk.

That somebody was Martin Rooney, the detective at the Beverly Hills
Police Department who'd done the initial work on the Pickett case. At
fifty-eight he was very close to retirement, and was looking at a life
on a

middle-ranking detective's pension. Life would not be lush, he knew.

Although he didn't have an expensive life-style he had all the normal
outgoings: alimony, a mortgage, car payments (he ran three cars, one of
his few concessions to self-indulgence), plus a well-stocked bar and a
habit of smoking between forty and fifty cigarettes a day. He'd already
calculated the dip in his standard of living he'd have to take when he
left the force. It was going to be substantial.

But here--dropping into his lap like a gift from God--was the answer to
all his problems. He'd been told the story first by the Lauper woman,
and later by Maxine Frizelle. Though their accounts had been outlandish,
to say the least, they had also been remarkably consistent. Something
weird had happened up in the Canyon and whether it was true in part or
not at all scarcely mattered. What mattered to Rooney was that people
loved this kind of thing. There was a profit to be made here. Enough to
make his retirement look a lot more cozy.

He began to make surreptitious copies of the interviews and smuggle them
out of the station, with an eye to assembling them all into book form.
It wasn't hard to do; if he asked for copies of a record in order to
advance some particular aspect of the case then nobody challenged the
request. In a short time he had amassed at home eleven bulging files of
material on the

"Canyon" case: enough to start editing and collating.

What he needed was a point of view other than his own. After all, he
wasn't at the heart of all this: he was simply an onlooker, coming in
after the drama was over. What his book needed was an insider whose
story would become its backbone. He decided to approach Maxine Frizelle.

"You want to do what?"

"I'm going to write a book about events in Coldheart Canyon, as everyone
insists on calling it. I was hoping I could count on your involvement.

Your point of view, Miss. Frizelle, would make the book a good deal |
stronger."

"You've had all the facts you're going to get from me, Detective."

"Wait, waitl" Rooney said. "Before you put the phone down on me, think
about it. Todd Pickett was your client for how long?"

"Eleven years."

"So think of this as your chance to set the record straight once and for
all. The good, the bad and the ugly."

"If I were ever to choose to set the record straight, Mister Rooney, it
would not be with a cop as a coauthor."

"Oh, I wasn't going to write any of this. I was going to get a
ghostwriter in to do that."

"Then I'm really missing something here, Rooney," Maxine said, summoning
up her most withering tone. "What exactly is your contribution to this
project?"

"My experience of almost four decades in the LAPD. I worked on the
Manson case--"

"This is nothing like Manson. Not remotely--"

"Will you let me finish? I'm not saying the cases are identical. But we
still have a lot of parallels. The brutal deaths of several high-profile
Hollywood people, all with some connection to the occult."

"Todd never had anything to do with that kind of thing. And you can
quote me."

"Well somebody in that house did. I have copies of photographs of every
inch of the place. There are occult symbols hammered into all the
thresholds, did you know that? Several symbols--probably East European
in origin--were removed from the area around the back door around the
time Mister Pickett died. He may even have been responsible for their
removal. Do you have any comment to make about any of that?"

"Yes. It's preposterous. And if you try to tie Todd to any of that kind
of stuff you're going to be in deep trouble."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take. But I am going to write the book,
Ms. Frizelle, with or without your assistance."

"I doubt you can do that, Rooney. You got that information because you
were a cop. You can't go using it to make money."

"I wouldn't be the first and I won't be the last," Rooney said.
"Frankly, I don't see what the hell your problem is, unless you were
planning to do it yourself. Is that it? Am I rainin' on your parade
here?"

"No. I have no intention of writing my own version of events." "Then
help me do mine," Rooney said, his tone perfectly reasonable.

"I'll throw a piece of the action your way if that's what this is about.
How does five percent sound?"

"Don't make this any worse than it already is. I don't want your blood
money. Have a little decency, for God's sake. Todd is dead. So are a lot
of other people. This isn't the time to be thinking about making a
profit."

"I'm not going to do a hatchet job on him. I swear. Your ex-client's
reputation is perfectly safe with me. Okay, so I hear he did a few
drugs. A lot of coke, I hear, especially when he worked with Smotherman.
And the plastic surgery. Again, no big deal. I mean, I'll have to write
about it, but I won't make him look bad. I promise you."

"Why the hell would I rely on your promises, Rooney?"

There was a brief silence.

"So that's a no?" Rooney finally said.

"Yes. That's a big, fat no."

"Well, don't say I didn't ask."

"And for the record, Mister Rooney, let me say this: if you do want to
try and write this book, you go ahead and try. I promise you will have
so many lawyers crawling up your ass you'll think they're breeding up
there."

"Very nice. Very ladylike."

"Nobody ever mistook me for a lady, Rooney. Now get the hell off my
phone. I need to call my lawyer."

 The call from Rooney stirred Marine up. She contacted her lawyer,
Lester Peltzer, as she said she would, and organized a conference call
with several other lawyers in town whom she respected, so that everyone
could give her the benefit of their very expensive opinion.
Unfortunately, they all agreed on one thing: she didn't have a hope in
hell of stopping Rooney from going ahead. When the book was written and
being set for publication, that was a different matter, one of the
lawyers pointed out. If he wrote something libelous, then they could go
after him, and if it was obvious that he'd got access to police files
then LAPD Internal Affairs might get riled up and take him to court. But
there was no guarantee. The LAPD had a lousy record when it came to
policing themselves.

"So right now he's free to say whatever he wants to say?" Maxine raged.

"Just for profit?"

"It's the Constitution," one of the lawyers pointed out.

"It's not against the law," Maxine's lawyer pointed out lightly. "You've
made a good deal of money yourself over the years."

"But I didn't lie to do it, Lester."

"All right, Maxine, don't get your blood pressure up. I'm merely
pointing out that this is America. We live and die by the rule of
Mammon." He drew a deep breath; put on his most rational tone. "Maxine,
ask yourself whether taking this guy to court over some book that'll be
off the shelves in two, three months is worth your time and temper. You
may end up giving him more publicity by suing him than he would ever
have got if you hadn't. You'll make an issue of it and suddenly
everybody's buying his damn book. I've seen it happen so many times ..."

"So you're saying I should let him do it?" Maxine said. "Let him write
some shit about Todd--" "Wait, wait," Lester said. "In the first place,
you don't know he's going to -write shit. Maybe he'll be respectful.
Todd was a very popular actor. An American icon for a while."

"So was Elvis," Maxine pointed out. "It doesn't mean some sonofabitch
didn't write about every dirty little secret Elvis ever had. I know,
because I read the book."

"So what are you afraid of?"

"That the same will happen to Todd. People will write bullshit, and in
the end it'll be the bullshit that's remembered, not the work."

Lester was usually quick with an answer, but this silenced him. Finally,
he said: "Okay, let me ask you something. Do you think there's anything
Rooney knows--as a matter of fact--which could be really destructive to
Todd's long-term reputation?"

"Yes. I do. I think--"

"Don't," Lester said. "Please. Don't tell me. Right now, I think it
might be simpler for everyone if I didn't know."

"All right."

"Let's all go away and think about this, Maxine. And you do the same
thing. I can see your concern. You've got a legacy here you want to
protect. I think the question is--do you do that best by drawing
attention to Rooney with a lawsuit, or by letting him publish and be
damned?"

The phrase caught Maxine's attention. She'd heard it before, of course.

But now it had new gravity, new meaning. She pictured Rooney publishing
his book, and then having his soul dragged away to the Devil's Country
for his troubles.

"Publish and be damned?" she said. "You know, that I could maybe live
with."

Tammy hadn't seen a human face, real or televised, in four days; not
even heard a voice. The Jacksons, her next-door neighbors, had gone off
for a long weekend the previous Thursday, noisily departing with the
kids

 yelling and car doors being slammed. Now it was Sunday. The street was
always quiet on Sunday, but today it was particularly quiet. She
couldn't even hear the buzzing of a lawn-mower. It was as though the
outside world had disappeared.

She sat in the darkness, and let the images that had been haunting her
for so long tumble over an dover in her head, like filthy clothes in a
washing machine, over an dover, in a gruel of gray-grimy water; the
madness she'd seen and heard and smelled; over an dover. The trouble
was, the more she turned it all over, the dirtier the washing became, as
if the water had steadily turned from gray to black, and now when she
got up to go to the bathroom, or to climb the stairs, she could hear it
sloshing around between her ears, the muck of these terrible memories,
darkening with repetition.

So this was what it was like to be crazy, she thought. Sitting in the
darkness, listening to the silence while you turned things over in your
mind, going to the kitchen sometimes and staring into the fridge until
she'd seen everything that was in there, the rotted things and the
unrotted things, then closing it again without cleaning it out; and
going upstairs and washing the bathroom floor, then going to lie down
and sleeping ten, twelve, fourteen hours straight through, not even
waking to empty your bladder.

This is what it was. And if it didn't go away soon, she was going to be
a permanent part of the madness; just another rag turning in the
darkness, indistinguishable from the things she'd worn.

Over an dover and--

The telephone rang. Its noise was so loud she jumped up from the chair
in which she was sitting and tears sprang into her eyes. Absurd, to be
made to weep by the sudden sound of a telephone! But the tears came
pouring down, whether she thought she was ridiculous for shedding them
or not.

She had unplugged the answering machine a while ago (there'd been too
many messages, mostly from journalists), so now the phone just kept on
ringing. Eventually she picked it up, more to stop the din than because
she really wanted to speak to anyone. She didn't. In fact she was
perfectly

ready to pick up the receiver and just put it straight down again, but
she caught the sound of the woman at the other end of the line, saying
her name. She hesitated. Put the receiver up to her ear, a little
tentatively.

"Tammy, are you there?" a voice said. Still Tammy didn't break her
silence. "I know there's somebody on the line," the woman went on.

"Will you just tell me, is this Tammy Lauper's house?"

"No," Tammy said, surprised at the sound her own voice made when it
finally came out. Then she put the receiver down.

It would ring again, she knew. It was Maxine Frizelle, and Maxine wasn't
the kind of woman who gave up easily.

Tammy stared at the phone, trying to will the damn thing from ringing.

For a few seconds she thought she'd succeeded. Then the ringing started
again.

"Go away," Tammy said, without picking up the receiver. The syllables
sounded like gravel being shaken in a coarse sieve. The telephone
continued to ring. "Please go away," she said.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of the order in which she would
need to put the words if she were to pick up the receiver and speak to
Maxine, but her mind was too much of a mess. It was better not to even
risk the conversation, if all Maxine was going to hear in Tammy's
replies was the darkness churning around in her washing-machine of a
head.

All she had to do was to wait a while, for God's sake. The telephone
would stop its din eventually. Maybe five more rings. Maybe four. Maybe
three--

At the last moment some deep-seated instinct for self-preservation made
her reach down and pick up the receiver.

"Hello," she said.

"Tammy? That is you, isn't it?" ,?

"Maxine. Yes. It's me."

"Good God. You sound terrible. Are you sick?"

"I've had the flu. Really badly. I still haven't got rid of it."

"Was that you when I called two minutes ago? I called two minutes | ago.
It was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes it was. I'm sorry. I'd just woken up and as I say, I've been so
sick ..."

"Well you sound it," Maxine said, in her matter-of-fact manner. "Look. I
need to talk to you urgently."

"Not today. I can't. I'm sorry, Maxine."

"This really can't wait, Tammy. All you have to do is listen. The flu
didn't make you deaf, did it?"

This drew a silent smile from Tammy; her first in days. Same old Maxine:
subtle as a sledgehammer. "Okay," Tammy said, "I'm listening."

She was surprised at how much easier it was to talk once you got
started. And she had the comfort that she was talking to Maxine. All
she'd have to do, as Maxine had said, was listen.

"Do you remember that asshole, Rooney?"

"Vaguely."

"You don't sound very sure. He was the Detective we talked to when we
first went to the police. You remember him now? Round face, no hair.

Wore too much cologne."

For some peculiar reason it was the memory of the cologne, which had
been sickly-sweet, which brought Rooney to mind.

"Now I remember," she said.

"Well he's been on to me. Did he call you?"

"No."

"Sonofabitch."

"Why's he a sonofabitch?"

"Because the fuckhead's got me all stirred up, just when I was beginning
to put my thoughts in order."

Much to Tammy's surprise, she heard a measure of desperation in Maxine's
voice. She knew what it was because it was an echo of the very thing she
heard in herself, night and day, awake and dreaming. Could it be that
she actually had something in common with this woman, whom she'd
despised for so many years? That was a surprise, to say the least.

"What did the sonofabitch want?" she found herself asking. There was a
second surprise here. Her mouth put the words in a perfectly sensible
order without her having to labor over it.

 "He claims he's writing a book. Can you believe the audacity of the
creep--" "You know, I did know about this," Tammy said.

"So he talked to you."

"He didn't, but Jerry Brahms did." The conversation with Jerry came back
to her remotely, as though it had happened several months ago.

"Oh good," Maxine said, "so you're up to speed. I've got a bunch of
lawyers together to find out if he can do this, and it turns out--guess
what?--he can. He can write what the hell he likes about any of us. We
can sue of course but that'll just--"

"--give him more publicity."

"That's exactly what Peltzer said. He said the book would last two
months on the shelves, three at the outside, then it would be
forgotten."

"He's probably right. Anyway, Rooney's not going to get any help from
me."

"That's not going to stop him, of course." "I know," Tammy said, "but
frankly--"

"You don't give a damn."

"Right."

There was a pause. It seemed the conversation was almost at an end.

Then, rather quietly, Maxine said: "Have you had any thoughts at allj
about going back up to the Canyon?"

There was a second pause, twice, three times the length of the first,
aft the end of which Tammy suddenly found herself saying: "Of course."

It felt more like an admission of guilt than a straight-forward reply
Amlj what was more, it wasn't something she'd consciously been
thirikinj| about. But apparently somewhere in the recesses of her
churned-up she'd actually contemplated returning to the house.

"I have too," Maxine confessed. "I know it's ridiculous. After thing
that happened up there."

"Yes ... it's ridiculous."

"But it feels like ..."

"Unfinished business," Tammy prompted.

"Yes. Precisely. Jesus, why didn't I have the wit to call you earlier?
I knew you'd understand. Unfinished business. That's exactly what it
is."

The real meat of this exchange suddenly became clear to Tammy. She
wasn't the only one who was having a bad time. So was Maxine. Of all
people, Maxine, who'd always struck Tammy as one of the most capable,
self-confident and unspookable women in America. It was profoundly
reassuring.

"The thing is," Maxine went on, "I don't particularly want to go up
there alone."

"I'm not even sure I'm ready."

"Me neither. But frankly, the longer we leave it the worse it's going to
get. And it's bad, isn't it?" "Yes ..." Tammy said, finally letting her
own despair flood into her words. "It's worse than bad. It's terrible,
Maxine. It's just ... words can't describe it."

"You sound the way I look," Maxine replied. "I'm seeing a therapist four
times a week and I'm drinking like a fish, but none of it's doing any
good."

"I'm just avoiding everybody."

"Does that help?" Maxine wanted to know.

"No. Not really."

"So we're both in a bad way. What do we do about it? I realize we're not
at all alike, Tammy. God knows I can be a bitch. Then when I met Katya--
when I saw what kind of woman I could turn into--that frightened me. I
thought: fuck, that could be me."

"You were protecting him. You know, in a way, we both were."

"I suppose that's right. The question is: have we finished, or is there
more to do?"

Tammy let out a low moan. "Do you mean what I think you mean?" she said.

"That depends what you think I mean."

"That you think he's still up there in the Canyon? Lost."

"Christ, I don't know. All I know is I can't get him out of my head."
She

 drew a deep breath, then let the whole, bitter truth out. "For some
stupid reason I think he still needs us."

"Don't say that." "Maybe it's not us," Maxine said. "Maybe it's you. He
had a lot of feeling for you, you know."

"If that's you trying to talk me into going back to the Canyon, it's not
going to work."

"So I take it you won't come?"

"I didn't say that."

"Well make up your mind one way or another," Maxine replied, exhibiting
a little of the impatience which had been happily absent from their
exchange thus far. "Do you want to come with me or not?"

The conversation was making Tammy a little weary now: She hadn't spoken
to anybody at such length for several weeks, and the chat--welcome as it
was--was taking its toll.

Did she want to go back to the Canyon or not? The question was plain
enough. But the answer was a minefield. On the one hand, she could think
of scarcely any place on earth she wanted to go less. She'd been
jubilant when she'd driven away from it with Maxine and Jerry; she'd
felt as though she'd escaped a death-sentence by a hair's-breadth. Why
in God's name would it make any sense to go back there now?

On the other hand, there was the issue she herself had raised: that of
unfinished business. If there was something up there that remained to be
done then maybe it was best to get up there and do it. She'd been hiding
away from that knowledge for the last several weeks, churning her fears
over an dover, trying to pretend it was all over. But Maxine had called
her bluff. Maybe they'd called each other's: admitted together what they
could not have confessed to apart.

"All right," she said finally.

"All right, what?"

"I'll go with you."

Maxine breathed an audible sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God for that. I

was afraid you were going to freak out on me and I was going to have to
go up there on my own."

"When were you planning to do this?"

"Is tomorrow too soon?" Maxine said. "You come to my office and we'll go
from there?"

"Are you going to ask Jerry to come with us?"

"He's gone," Maxine replied.

"Jerry's dead?"

"No, Key West. He's sold his apartment and moved, all in a week. Life's
too short, he said."

"So it's just the two of us."

"It's just the two of us. And whatever we find up there."

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

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

So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.

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

"So did I, on and off."

"It was that bad, huh?"

"I locked myself in my house. Didn't talk to anyone. Did you talk to
anybody?"

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

"Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away."

"It's certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talkf
about death: as long as it's not theirs."

Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very

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

"Is that Bette Davis?"

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

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

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

"Clever."

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

"It sounds like you admire her a bit."

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

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

"It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look
at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn't suit us too well." "I should
tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm."

"You should have called me. We could have compared notes."

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

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

"What if we get up there and don't find anything?"

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

"I don't think there's very much chance of that, somehow."

"Frankly, neither do I."

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

Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner'sf
there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had;
been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the.6
time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic
to;| reach the blaze, there'd already been five fatalities: a cameraman
and $' menage-a-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that
afternoon*; along with the male star's fluffer, had all been cremated.
There was veryj little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and
silicone lingered in the,, air for several hours.

Even if that particular stench didn't reach the Canyon, there we plenty
that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become

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

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

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

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

Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had

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

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

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

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

"It's weird," Maxine agreed.

"Maybe the ghosts did it?"

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

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

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

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

But all this was cosmetic. The ghosts had been working on the structure
too, and they'd had the supernatural strength to cause considerable^
damage. Ragged holes had been made in the ceiling, exposing the suppo:
beams, some of which--through a massive effort by the phantom demof
lition team--had been unseated and pulled through the plaster facad
jutting like vast broken bones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maxine!" she called, suddenly alarmed.

"I'm coming."

"Be careful. Don't touch the light switches."

As soon as she heard Maxine's footsteps splashing through the kitchen,
Tammy ventured to the threshold, and stepped over it. The greenery

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

"What's wrong?" Maxine wanted to know.

"That." Tammy pointed to the body, which lay face down in the middle of
a particularly fertile patch of fungi. Tammy wondered if perhaps J he'd
been trying to make a meal of them, and died in mid-swallow, poi- |
soned.

"Help me turn him over," Tammy said.

"No thanks," Maxine said. "I'm as close as I need to get."

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

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

Not only was it not a man, it was not, strictly speaking, a human being
but one of what Zeffer had called the children, the hybrid minglings of
| ghost and animal. This one had been a female: part coyote, part sex-1
goddess. It had six breasts, courtesy of its bestial side, but two of
them had *, gone to jelly. The four that remained, however, were as lush
as any starlet's/} adding a touch of surrealism to this otherwise
repulsive sight. The creature's head was a mass of wormy life,
except--for some reason--its lips, which remained large, ripe and
untouched.

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

"It's just an animal," Tammy said. "Sort of The ghosts fucked the ani-1
mals. And sometimes the animals fucked the ghosts. And these things, the
children, were the result."

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

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

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

"There's more of them down here," she called back to Maxine.

"More?"

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

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

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

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

"That still doesn't explain why they came here to die like this."

"Maybe the same power that ran through Katya and the ghosts ran through
them too," Tammy said. 'And once it was turned off--"

 "They came back to the house and died?"

"Exactly."

"And the dead?" Maxine said. 'All those people. Where did they go?"

"They didn't have anything to keep them here," Tammy said.

"So maybe they're out wandering the city?" Maxine said. "Not a very
reassuring thought."

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

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

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

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

"I used to, but ..." Maxine shrugged, empty-handed.

"Then I'm just going to make something up," Tammy said.

"I'll leave you to it then," Maxine said, turning to go.

"No," Tammy said. "Please. I want you to stay here with me until I'm
finished."

"Are you sure?"

"Please." "Okay," Maxine said.

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

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

That's all. Amen."

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

Tammy put her arm around Maxine's shoulder. "It's okay," she said.

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

"It's good to cry. Let it come." "Is it really good to cry?" Maxine
said, recovering herself slightly, and wiping her nose. "I've always
been suspicious when people say crying's good for you."

"Well it is. Trust me."

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

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

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

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

"Yeah. I guess so."

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

"What are you thinking about?" Tammy asked her.

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

"About what?"

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

"Bullshit," Tammy said.

"You don't think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his
wife?"

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

"That makes sense." "Places can't be good or bad," Tammy said. "Only
people. That's what I believe."

"Did that make you feel better, by the way? What you did out there?"
Tammy smiled. "Bit crazy, huh?"

"Not at all."

"You know, it did make me feel better. Much better. Those poor things
didn't have a hope."

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

"And if we don't find him in"--Tammy looked at her watch--"shall we say,
fifteen minutes, we give it up as a bad idea? Agreed?"

"Agreed." - '

"Where do you want to look first?" Tammy said.

"The master bedroom," Maxine replied. "Whenever things didn't go .

well, he used to go to his bedroom and lock the door."

"Funny Arnie would do the same." I

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

"There wasn't that much to tell. And there's even less now he's gone."

"Do you think he'll come back?" "I don't know," Tammy said, sounding as
though she didn't care that much. "Depends on whether his new woman puts
up with him or not."

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

"No. And if he tries to make nice, I'm going to tell him to go fuck
himself.

Excuse my French."

They stepped out into the hallway. "You want to go up there first?"
Tammy said. "He was your friend, or client, or whatever." Maxine looked
doubtful. "Go on," Tammy urged her. "You go on up and I'll try
downstairs." "Okay," Maxine said, "but stay in shouting distance."

"I will. And if I don't find anything down there I'll come straight up
and find you."

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

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

"Tammy!"

"I can hear you."

"The place is creakin' up here. Is it creakin' down there?"

"Yep."

"So let's make this short an' sweet, huh?"

"We already agreed--"

"Even shorter and sweeter."

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

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

"Todd?" she called again.

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

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

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

"Hello, Todd."

"Couldn't stay away, huh?" "Tammy's with me," she said, shifting the
blame.

"Yes, I heard her. And I expected her. No. Ha(/-expected her. But I
didn't expect you. I thought it was all over with us once I was dead.
Out of sight ..."

"It's not as simple as that."

"No, it isn't, is it? If it's any comfort, it's true in both
directions."

"You think about me?"

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

"So why are you up here?"

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

His body, she saw, looked better than it had in years. His abdominals
were perfectly cut, his pectorals not too hefty, but nicely defined. And
his |

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

"You look good," she said.

"I don't feel good," he replied.

"No?"

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

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

"Why did you bring half the back yard up here?"

"Just to play," he replied. "I don't know." "Yes you do," she said to
him.

"Okay I do. I'm dead, right. Right?"

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

"Why?"

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

"The children?"

"Yeah. And they were droppin' like flies."

"We saw. They're all around the house." "Ugly fucks," Todd said. "I know
why too."

"Why what?"

"Why they were droppin'."

"What?"

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

"What are you talking about?"

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

"Shining?"

"Shining, like it was a piece of the sun." He suddenly started to make a
concentrated effort to bury his erection, like a little boy abruptly
obsessed with some trivial ritual: two handfuls of dirt, then another
two, then another two, just to get it out of sight. It didn't work. His
cock-head continued to stick out, red and smooth. "I don't want it to
see me, Maxine," he said, very quietly. "The thing on the roof. I don't
want it to see me. Will you tell it to go away?"

She laughed.

"Don't laugh at me." "I can't help it," she said. "Look at you. Sitting
in a sackful of dirt with a hard-on talking about some light--" "I don't
even know what it is," he said. Maxine was still laughing at the
absurdity of all this. "I'll tell Tammy to do it," he said. "She'll do
it for me. I know she will." He kept staring at the crack of light
between the drapes.

"Go and get her. I want to see her."

"So I'm dismissed, am I?"

"No," he said. "You can stay if you want or you can go if you want to.

You've seen me, I'm okay."

"Except for the light."

"Except for the light. I'm not crazy, Maxine. It's here."

"I know you're not crazy," Maxine said.

He looked straight back at her for the first time. The light he'd been
staring at had got into his eyes somehow, and was now reflected out

 toward her--or was that simply the way all ghosts looked? She thought
perhaps it was. The silvery gaze that was both beautiful and inhuman.

"I suppose we both could be dreaming all this," he went on. "They don't
call these places dream palaces for nothing. I mean ... I was dead,
wasn't I? I know I was dead. That bitch killed me ..." His voice grew
heavy as he remembered the pain of his final minutes; not so much the
physical pain, perhaps, as the pain of Katya turning on him, betraying
him.

"Well, for what's it's worth," Maxine said, "I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"Oh, a thousand things. But mainly leaving you when I did. It was Tammy
who pointed it out. If I hadn't gone and left you, perhaps none of this
would have happened." "She said that to you?" Todd replied, with a
smile.

"Yep."

"She's got a mouth on her when something strikes her."

"The point is: she was right."

Todd's smile faded. "It was the worst time of my life," he said.

"And I made it worse."

"It's all right," he said. "It's over now."

"Is it really?"

"Yes. Really. It's history." "I was so tired," Maxine said.

"I know. Tired of me and tired of who you'd become, yes?"

"Yes."

"I don't blame you. This town fucks people up." He was looking at her
with that luminous gaze, but it was clear his thoughts were wandering.

"Where's Tammy, did you say?"

"She went downstairs."

"Will you please go get her for me?"

"Oh please now, is it?" she said, smiling. "You have changed."

"You know "what starts to happen if you stay here long enough?" he said,
apropos of nothing in particular.

"No, what?"

"You start to have these glimpses of the past. At least I do. I'm
sitting here and suddenly I'm dreaming I'm on a mountain."

"On a mountain?"

"Climbing, this sheer cliff."

"That can't have been a memory, Todd. Or at least it can't have been a
real mountain. You hated heights, don't you remember?"

He took his gaze off her and returned it to the crack between the
drapes. Plainly, this news made him uncomfortable, questioning as it did
the nature of his recollections.

"If it wasn't a real mountain, what was it?"

"It was a fake, built on one of the soundstages at Universal. It was for
The Big Fall."

"A movie I was in?"

"A movie. A big movie. Surely you remember?"

"Did I die in it?"

"No, you didn't die in it. Why do you want to know?"

"I was just trying to remember last night, what movies I'd made. I kept
thinking if the light has to collect me, and I have to leave, and I have
to tell it what movies I made--" He glanced at the wall beside the bed
where he'd scrawled a list--in a large, untutored scrawl--of some of the
titles of his films. It was by no means comprehensive; proof perhaps of
a mind in slow decay. Nor were the titles he had. remembered entirely
accurate. Gunner became Gunman for some reason, and The Big Fall simply
Fallen. He also added Warrior to the list, which was wishful thinking.

"How many of my pictures did I die in, then?"

"Two."

"Why only two? Quickly."

"Because you were the hero."

"Right answer. And heroes don't die. Ever, right?"

"I wouldn't say ever. Sometimes it's the perfect ending."

"For example?"

"A Tale of Two Cities."

"That's old. Anyway, don't quibble. The point is: I don't care about
what the light wants. I'm the hero."

"Oh, I get where this is headed."

"I'm not going, Maxine."

"Suppose it wants to take you somewhere better?"

"Like where?"

"I don't know ..."

"Say it. Go on. You see ... you can't even say it."

"I can say it. Heaven. The afterlife."

"Is that where you believe it wants me to go?"

"I don't know where it wants you to go, Todd."

"And I'm never going to find out because I'm not going to go. I'm the
hero. I don't have to go. Right?"

What could she say to this? He had the idea so very firmly fixed in his
head that it wasn't going to be easily dislodged.

"I suppose if you put it that way," she said, "you don't have to go
anywhere you don't want to."

He put his heel behind a small portion of dirt and pushed it off the
edge of the bed. It rattled as it rained down on the bare boards.

"It's all bullshit anyway," he said.

"What's bullshit?"

"Movies. I should have done something more useful with my life.

Donnie was right."

"Donnie?"

"Yes." He suddenly looked hard at her. "Donnie was real, wasn't he? He
was my brother. Tell me I didn't dream him."

"No, you didn't dream him."

"Oh good. He was the best soul I ever met in my life. Sorry, but he
was."

"No, he was your brother. It's good you love him."

"Hmm." A silence; a long silence. Then: "Life would be shit if I'd just
dreamed him."

EIGHT

At the bottom of the stairs Tammy discovered that the entire
substructure of the house--the floor once occupied by the Devil's
Country--was now reduced to heaps of rubble, with a few support pillars
here and there, which were presumably the only things keeping the house
from collapsing upon itself completely. Seeing the tenuous state of
things, Tammy was tempted to go straight back upstairs to warn Maxine,
but then she figured that there was probably no tearing urgency. The
house had managed to stay upright in the weeks since the ghosts had
wreaked this havoc, and wasn't likely to collapse in the next five
minutes: she would risk looking around for a little while, just to be
sure she'd understood as much of this mystery as was comprehensible
before she turned her back on it forever.

The last few steps of the stairway had been torn away by the revenants'
assault, but there was a heap of its own rubble directly beneath it, so
it wasn't much of a leap for her. Even so, she landed awkwardly, and
slid gracelessly down the side of the heap, puncturing her ankles and
calves on the corners of the shattered tiles.

She stumbled away from the bottom of the stairs and through the doorway,
the naked framework of which was still standing, surprisingly enough,
though the walls to the right and left of it were virtually demolished,
and the ceiling brought down, exposing a network of pipes and cables.
There was very little light, beyond the patch in which she stood, which
had leaked in from the turret. Otherwise, it was murky in every
direction. She strayed a little distance from the doorway, taking care
not

to hobble herself on a larger piece of masonry, and careful too not to
lose her bearings.

Every now and again something on a higher floor would creak or grind, or
somewhere in the darkness around her she'd hear a patter of dry
plaster-dust. Then the creaking would stop, the pattering would stop,
and her heart would pick up its normal rhythm again.

Of one thing she was pretty certain: there were no ghosts here. They'd
"wreaked their comprehensive havoc and gone on their melancholy way,
leaving the house to creak and settle and eventually, when it could no
longer support its own weight, collapse.

She'd seen enough. She moved back to the doorway and returned through it
to the stairs, climbing over the rubble onto the lowest step. The
staircase swayed ominously as she heaved herself onto it, and she saw
that it had become disconnected from the wall a few feet up and was
therefore "floating," a fact she had failed to grasp during her descent.
She ascended with a good deal more caution and reached the relatively
solid ground at the top of the stairs with an inwardly spoken word of
thanks.

The door to the master bedroom was open, she saw. A moment later, Maxine
emerged and beckoned her to come up.

"Todd's here and he wants to see you," she explained.

"Is he all right?" Tammy asked, fully realizing, even as she said this,
that it was a damn-fool question to ask about a man who'd been recently
murdered.

By way of reply Maxine made a strange face, as though she didn't have
the least clue what the man in the master bedroom was up to.

"You should just come up and see for yourself," she said.

As they crossed on the stairs Maxine took the opportunity to whisper: "I
hope to hell you can make more sense of him than I could."

"Hello, Tammy."

Todd was lying in the bed, with a pile of dirt covering his lower half.

There was dirt on the floor too; and on his hands.

"You're a mess," she remarked brightly.

"I've been playing in the mud."

"Can I open the drapes a little, or put on a lamp? It's really gloomy in
here."

"Put on a lamp if you really must."

She went to the table in the corner and switched on the antiquated lamp,
doing so tentatively given her problem with the electricity on the lower
floor. Then she went to look out of the narrow gap between the drapes.
Maxine had been right; the evening was coming on quickly.

Already the opposite side of the Canyon was purple-gray, and the sky
above it had lost all its warmth. There were no stars yet, but the moon
was rising in the north-eastern corner of the Canyon.

"Don't look out there," Todd said.

"Why not?"

"Just close the drapes. Please."

She obviously wasn't quite quick enough for him, because he sprang out
of bed, scattering dirt far and wide. His sudden movement startled her a
little. It wasn't that she was afraid of him exactly; but if death
emphasized people's natural propensities, as it seemed it did, then
there was a good chance he'd be wilder in death than he had been alive.
He took the drape from her hand--snatched it, almost--and pulled it
closed.

"I don't want to see what's out there," he said. 'And neither do you."

She looked down at his groin. How could she help herself? He was as hard
as any man she'd laid eyes on, his dick moving even though he was
standing still, bobbing to the rhythm of his pulse.

It would be ridiculous, she thought, not to mention it. Like his
standing there with a pig under his arm, and making no reference to
that.

"What's that in honor of?" she said, pointing down at the pulsing
length. "Me?"

"Why, would you like it?"

"It's covered in dirt."

"Yeah." He took hold of the lower four inches of his dick and began to
brush the soil off the top four, twisting his dick round (in a manner
that

looked painfiil to Tammy) so that he could fetch out the particles of
dirt in the ridges of his circumcision scar.

"I didn't think I'd see you again," he said, as he worked. He let his
dick go. It thumped against his belly before settling back into its
head-high position. "I was beginning to think this was my only friend,"
he said. He knocked his dick sideways with a little laugh.

"I'm sorry," Tammy said. "I wasn't feeling well enough to come before
now."

Todd wandered back over to the bed and sat down on the edge of the
mattress. More dirt fell onto the floor. He folded his arms, bunching
the muscles of his shoulders and chest.

"Are you mad at me?" she said.

"A little, I guess."

"Because I didn't visit?"

"Yeah."

"I wouldn't have made very good company. I thought I was going crazy."

"You did?" He was interested now. "What happened?"

"I locked myself up in my house. I wouldn't see anybody. I was just
about ready to kill myself."

"Oh shit," he said. "There's no reason to do that. All the bad times are
over, Tammy. You can go off and live your life."

"What life? I don't have a life," she sighed. "Just that stupid little
home filled with Todd Pickett memorabilia."

"You could sell it all."

"I'm going to, trust me. Maybe take a cruise around the world."

"Or better still, stay up here with me."

"I don't think--"

"I mean it. Stay here."

"Have you been downstairs?"

"Not recently. Why?"

"Because this house is going to fall down, Todd. Very soon." "No it
isn't," he said. "Did you know there are dozens of small earthquakes in
California every day? Well there are. And this place is still standing."

"It doesn't have any bottom floor left, Todd. Katya's guests dug it all
up."

He turned to the bed, and started to pull armfuls of the dirt off the
sheet.

"What are you doing?"

"Persuading you to stay," he said, still pulling at the earth. When he
had almost all the dirt removed from the bed he pulled the sheet out and
went around the other side of the bed, throwing the corners of the sheet
into the middle, and then bundling up both sheet and dirt. He pushed the
bundle off the bed, and got up onto the clean mattress, sitting with his
head against the board, and his legs crossed. His balls were tight and
shiny. His dick was hard as ever. He gave her a lascivious grin.

"Climb aboard," he said.

Here, she thought, was an invitation in a million. And there would have
been a time, no doubt, when she would have swooned at the very idea of
it.

"I think you should cover yourself up," Tammy said, keeping the tone
friendly, but firm. "Haven't you got a pair of pants you can wear?"

"You don't want this?" he said, running his fingers over the smooth head
of his cock.

"No," she said. "Thank you."

"It's because I'm dead, isn't it?"

She didn't reply to him. Instead she wandered through to the closet--
which was enormous; barely a tenth of it was filled--and started to go
through the trousers and jeans on the hangers, and found an old, much
patched pair of jeans, their condition suggesting that he was fond of,
them, because he'd had them fixed so often. ;

As she pulled them off the hanger she heard a sound on the roof, like
something scraping over the Spanish tiles.

"Did you hear that?" she called through to Todd.

There was no answer from the room next door. Bringing the jeans with!

 her, she made her way back into the bedroom. Todd was no longer on the
bed. He had snatched the dirt-stained sheet up off the floor and had
wrapped it haphazardly around his body, the result being something
between a toga and a shroud, and was now crawling around in the corner
of the room in this bizarre costume, his eyes turned up toward the roof.

He beckoned Tammy over, putting his forefinger to his lips to ensure her
silence. There were more noises on the roof; scraping sounds that
suggested the animal, whatever it was, had some considerable bulk.

"What is it?" she said. "That's not a bird."

He shook his head, still staring up at the ceiling.

"What then?"

"I can't see what it is, it's too bright."

"Oh so you have looked." "Yes of course I've looked," he said, very
softly. "Shit, this always happens.

It's like they're its chorus."

He was referring to the coyotes, which had begun a steady round of
almost panicked yelpings from the other side of the Canyon. "Whenever
the light appears, the damn coyotes start up."

He had begun to shudder. Not from the cold, Tammy thought, but from
fear. It crossed her mind that this was very far from the conventional
image of ghost-hunting. The phantom naked and afraid; her proffering a
pair of jeans to cover him up.

"It's come here for me," Todd said, very quietly. "You know that."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I can feel it. In my chest. And in my balls. The first time it
came here it actually got into the house. I was asleep, and I woke up
with this terrible ache in my balls. And that"--he pointed down between
his legs--"was so hard it hurt. I was terrified. But I yelled at it to
go away, and off it went. I think I must have startled it."

"How many times has it been back since that first time?"

"Six or seven. No, more. Nine, ten times. Sometimes it just waits in the
garden. Sometimes it sits on the roof, like it is now. And then once it
was in the pool."

"There's no water in the pool."

"No, I know. It was lying at the bottom, not moving."

"And you couldn't see any shape in it?"

"No, no shape. I mean, do angels even have shapes?"

"An angel? That's what you think it is?"

"I'm pretty sure. I mean, it came to get me. And I am dead. So that's
why it's hanging around. And it almost had me once--"

"What happened?"

"I looked at it. And my head started to fill up with all these memories.

Things I hadn't thought about for years and years, literally. Me and
Donnie as kids. Cincinnati. Nothing important. Just things you might
think of in a daydream. And it said to me--"

"Wait. It speaks? This thing speaks?"

"Yes. It speaks."

"What sex is it?"

"I don't know. Sometimes it sounds more like a guy ..." He shrugged.

"I don't know." "I'm sorry. I  you. What did it say?"

"Oh. It said: all this is waiting for you."

" All this,' meaning what?"

"All the memories, I suppose. My past. People. Places. Smells. You know
how sometimes you wake up from a dream and it's been so real, so strong,
everything in the real world seems a bit unconvincing for the first
half-hour? Well, it was like that after I saw the memories. Nothing was
quite real."

"So why the hell are you fighting it? It doesn't want to hurt you."

"I'll tell you why I'm fighting. Because it's a one-way street, Tammy. I
go with the light, there's no way back."

"And is being here so wonderful?"

"Now don't--"

"I mean it." "Don't argue with me," he said. "I've thought about this a
lot. Believe me. It's all I've thought about."

 "So what do you want to do?"

"I want you to stay right here with me until the damn thing goes away.

It won't try any tricks if you're here."

"You mean giving you the memories?"

"It's got others. Once it appeared on the lawn looking like Patricia, my
mother. I knew it wasn't really her, but it's crafty that way. You know,
she was telling me to come with her, and for just a few seconds--"

"It had you fooled?"

"Yeah. Not for long, but ... yeah."

At this juncture there was a rapping sound on the door. Todd jumped.

"It's only Maxine," Tammy said, getting up, and turning from Todd.

He caught hold of the jeans she was carrying, not because he wanted to
wear them but to stop her escaping him.

"Don't answer it," he said. "Please stay here with me. I'm begging you,
stay: please."

She held her breath for a moment, listening for the presence on the
roof.

It was no longer audible. Had the creature--whatever it was--simply
departed, or was it still squatting up there, biding its time? Or--a
third possibility, just as plausible as the other two--was she falling
for some fictional fear that Todd, in his confused, post-mortem state,
had simply created out of thin air? Was she just hearing birds on the
roof, skittering around, and letting his imagination work her up into a
frenzy about it?

"Put your jeans on," she said to him, letting go of them.

"Tammy. Listen to me--" "I am listening," she said, crossing to the door
of the bedroom. "Put your jeans on."

She heard the rapping sound again. This time she thought perhaps she'd
been wrong. It wasn't Maxine at all. It was somebody outside the house
beating on the front door.

She went to the bedroom door and cautiously opened it. She was in time
to see Maxine retreating across the hallway from the front door.

"What is it?" she whispered. Maxine looked up at her; by the expression
on her face something had unsettled her. "I heard this knocking.

Went to the door. And, Tammy, there was a light out there, shining in
through the cracks in the door."

"So he's not having delusions," Tammy said.

She headed downstairs to comfort Maxine. As she did so she reported what
she'd just heard Todd tell her. "Todd said there was something out there
waiting for him. That's his turn of phrase: waiting for him. Apparently
it sits on the roof a lot." She put her hand on Maxine's trembling
shoulder. 'Are you okay?"

"I am now. It just freaked me out."

"So you didn't open the door?"

"Well you can't open it, can you? It's cracked. But it's not much
protection."

"Stay here."

So saying, Tammy crossed the hallway, gingerly slid through the broken
door and stepped out onto the doorstep.

"Oh Jesus, be careful," Maxine murmured.

"There's nothing," she said.

"Are you sure?"

Maxine stepped out through the cracked door and they stood together on
the step.

The last light of the afternoon had by now died away; but the moon had
risen and was shedding its brightness through the trees to the right of
the front door.

"Well, at least it's a beautiful evening," Maxine remarked, staring up
at the light coming between the branches.

Tammy's thoughts were elsewhere. She stepped out of the house and onto
the pathway. Then she turned around, running her gaze back and forth
along the roof, looking for some sign, any sign whatsoever, of the
creature that had made the noise up there. As far as she could see, the
roof was completely deserted.

"Nothing," she said to herself.

She glanced back at Maxine, who was still staring up at the moon. She

 was alarmed to see that the sight of the moonlight seemed to have
brought Maxine to tears.

"What's wrong?" she said.

Maxine didn't reply. She simply stared slackly up at the tree.

A few leaves fluttered down from the branches where the moonlight was
sourced, and to Tammy's amazement the light began to slowly descend.

"Oh fuck," Tammy said very softly, realizing that this was not the moon.

Todd had been right. There was some entity here, its outer form
consisting of raw light, its core unreadable. Whatever it looked like,
it apparently had eyes, because it could see them clearly; Tammy had no
doubt of that. She felt its scrutiny upon her. Not just upon her, in
fact, in her. She was entirely transparent to it; or so she felt.

And as its study pierced her, she felt it ignite other images in her
mind's eye. The house on Monarch Street where she was born appeared in
front of her, its presence not insistent enough to blot out the world in
which she was standing, but co-existing with it, neither sight seeming
to sit uncomfortably beside the other. The door of the Monarch Street
house opened, and her Aunt Jessica, her father's sister, came out onto
the stoop. Aunt Jessica, of all people, whom she hadn't thought about in
a very long time.

Jessica the spinster aunt, smiling in the sunshine, and beckoning to her
out of the past.

Not just beckoning, speaking.

"Your papa's at the fire station," she said. "Come on in now, Tammy.

Come on in now."

She'd not liked Aunt Jessica over-much, nor had she had any great fear
of her father. The fact that Aunt Jessica was there on the stoop was
unremarkable; she used to come over for supper on every Tuesday,
Thursday and Saturday, often taking care of Tammy and her brothers when
Tammy's parents went out to see a movie or go dancing, which they'd
liked to do. Even the line about Papa being at the fire station carried
no especial weight. Papa was always at the fire station for one thing or

 another, because he wasn't just a fireman, he was the union organizer,
and a fierce advocate for better pay and conditions. So there had always
been meetings and discussions, besides his diurnal duties.

In short, the memory carried no particular measure of significance,
except for the fact that it was a memory of hers, and that somehow this
creature--angel or whatever it was--had got into her head to set it in
motion. Was its purpose that of distraction? Perhaps so; being so
perfectly commonplace. Tammy could slip into its embrace without
protest, because it evoked neither great joy nor great regret. It was
just the past, there in front of her: momentarily real.

She thought of what Todd had said, about how the angel had appeared as
his mother. Somehow the way Todd had described the process it had
sounded altogether more sinister than this: more like a trap for his
soul.

"Tammy?"

"Yes, I see it," she said to Maxine.

"What do you see?" Maxine said.

"It's just my Aunt Jessica--"

"Well if I were you I'd look away," Maxine advised. Tammy didn't see why
it was so important that she look away.

"I'm okay, just watching," she said.

But Maxine had taken hold of her arm, and was gripping it so hard that
it hurt. She wanted to turn and tell the woman to let go of her, but it
was easier said than done. The image of the clapboard house on Monarch
Street had in fact caught her up in its little loop. It was like a short
length , of film, running round and round.

The door would open, Aunt Jessica would beckon and speak her three
lines:

"Your papa's at the fire station. Come on in now, Tammy. Come on in
now."

Then she'd beckon again and turn round to step back into the house.

The door would close. The dappled sunlight, falling through the branches
of the old sycamore just to the right of number 38 Monarch Street, would
move a little as a gust of summer wind passed through its huge, heavy 1
branches. Then, after a beat, the door would open once again, and
Auntie Jessica would reappear on the stoop with exactly the same smile
on her face, exactly the same lines to speak.

"Look away," Maxine said again, this time more urgently.

The urgency got through to Tammy. Maybe I should do as she says, she
thought; maybe this little picture-show isn't as innocent as it seems.
Maybe I'm going to be stuck in this loop with the door and Jessica and
the shadows coming through the sycamore forever.

A little spasm of panic rose in her. She made a conscious effort to
avert her eyes, thinking of what Todd had said. But her mind's eye had
become glued to the scene the angel had conjured, and she couldn't shake
herself free of it. She forced herself to close her eyes but the loop
was still there behind her eyelids. Indeed it carried more force there
because it had nothing to compete with. She began to shake.

"Help me ..." she murmured to Maxine.

But there was no answer forthcoming.

"Maxine?"

There were beads of brightness in the image she could see in her mind's
eye, and they were getting stronger. In spite of her panicked state,
Tammy didn't have any difficulty figuring out what they signified. The
angel was getting closer to her. It was using the cover of the looped
memory to approach her, until she was within reach of it.

"Maxine!" she yelled. "Where the hell are you?"

In her mind's eye, the green door on Monarch Street was opening for
perhaps the eleventh or twelfth time: smiling Aunt Jessica appearing to
beckon and speak--

"Maxine?"

"Your papa's at the fire station--"

"Maxine!"

She'd gone; that was the bitter truth of it. Seeing the angel
approaching, and unable to pull Tammy out of its path, she'd done the
sensible, self-protecting thing. She'd retreated.

The light in the scene on Monarch Street was getting brighter with

 every passing moment. She could feel its corrosive energies on her
skin.

What would the angel's luminescence do to her if it touched her? Cook
her marrow in her bones? Boil away all her blood? Oh, God in Heaven.
This wasn't a game: it was life or death. She had to find something to
break the loop, before the light of the angelic projector got so hot it
cremated her.

There was to be no help from Maxine, that was clear; so she was left
with Todd. Where had he been the last time she'd seen him? Her thoughts
were now so chaotic she couldn't even remember that.

No, wait; he'd been upstairs, hadn't he? She couldn't picture him (the
loop was too demanding, the brightness too sickeningly strong: it
overwhelmed every other image in her head, real or imagined) but she
remembered that he'd been up in the master bedroom.

Oh, and he'd been naked. She remembered that too. Todd the naked ghost,
slapping his hard dick around as though it were a toy that he'd suddenly
discovered was unbreakable. For a moment the image of Jessica on the
doorstep juddered, as though the sprockets had become caught in the gate
for a moment. Her mind had found a tool to thrust into the mechanism.

Actually, Todd's tool, bobbing at his groin, giving her its slit-eyed
gaze.

Yes! She could almost see it--

Aunt Jessica's smiling image juddered a second time, then the brightness
behind the picture started to press through her eyes, burning away the
pupils, making her look momentarily demonic.

"Yoyo yoyo you-yourpapasasasasatatatatatatthethethe-the--"

The woman was jerking round like a puppet being manipulated by someone
in the early stages of a grand mal. The loop flipped back, and she was
beckoning again, with the first syllable of her speech caught on her
tongue.

Tammy ignored it. She had Todd's beautiful rod in her mind's eye, and it
was strong enough to break the angel's back.

"Go away," she told Aunt Jessica.

"Yo-yoyo-yo--" "Isaid: Go away!"

 There it was now: Todd's erection, clear as day. She made an
intellectual assessment of it, to give solidity to the memory. It was a
good eight inches long, circumcised, with a slight left-hand drift.

The light behind Aunt Jessica grew blindingly bright, burning away not
only the old lady's figure, but the stoop and the summer tree. The image
of Todd's manhood was getting stronger all the time, as though Tammy's
pulse beats were feeding it blood; fattening it, glorifying it.

The angel's brilliance still made her skin itch, but she had the better
of it now. Two, three more seconds and Monarch Street had disappeared
completely, overtaken by the image of Todd's manhood.

"Maxine!" she yelled again.

There was still no reply. She put her head down, so when she opened her
eyes she would be staring at the ground, not at the angel's light. She
half-expected to see Maxine sprawled on the ground at her feet, overcome
by the angel's power. But no. There was nothing below her but the
cracked pathway that led from the front door.

She turned on her heel and lifted her gaze a little. The front door was
open; the light the angel shed washed the entire scene before her,
taking its color out, and throwing Tammy's shadow up against the wall.

She felt a perverse imperative to glance back over her shoulder; to put
the weapon she'd summoned to the test one more time. But she turned
herself away from such nonsense, and stumbled back the way she and
Maxine had come just a little while before.

Even before she reached the steps she heard Maxine sobbing inside.

Enraged that she'd been left to face the enemy alone, but at least
grateful that Maxine was alive, she climbed the steps, pushed the
cracked front door closed as far as it would go, and went back into the
house.

Maxine was sitting on the stairs, shaking.

On the floor above, Todd had just emerged from the master bedroom.

He'd put on the jeans Tammy had fetched for him, and he was carrying a
large gun.

"It won't do you any good," Tammy said, slamming the door behind her.

 "I'm sorry," Maxine said. "I left you out there."

"So I noticed."

"I was yelling for you to come, but you wouldn't move. And that thing
was just getting closer and closer."

"It wants me. It doesn't want you two."

"Well then," Tammy said, staring at the front of Todd's straining jeans
and giving up a silent prayer to the efficacy of their contents. "We
have two options. We either give you to the angel, and let it take you
wherever the hell it intends to take you--"

"Oh God no. Please. I don't want to go with that thing. I'd rather die."

"Stop waving the gun around and listen to me, Todd. I said we had two
options."

"What's the other one?"

"We make a run for it."

 It wasn't really a choice, given their circumstances.

They had to make a run for it, and the way Tammy looked at it, the
sooner they did so the better for everybody. The angel could afford to
play a waiting game, she assumed. Did it need nourishment? Probably not.
Did it sleep or take private little moments in which to defecate? Again,
probably not. It could most likely afford to lay siege to the house for
days, weeks, even months, until its victims had no strength left to
outwit it or outmaneuver it.

Maxine had gone to the guest bathroom to wash her ashen face. She didn't
look much better when she got back. She was still pale and shaking.

But in her usual straightforward manner she demanded that everyone agree
to what was being contemplated here, in words of one or, at most, two
syllables.

"Let's all get this straight," she said. "The thing outside is
definitely an angel. That is to say, an agent of some divine power.
Yes?" "Yes," Todd said. He was sitting at the top of the stairs, only
partially visible in the light from the dining room, which was the only
light that now worked.

"And why's it here? Exactly. Just for the record."

"We know why it's here, Maxine," Tammy said.

"No, let's just be very clear about this. Because it seems to me we are
playing with fire. This thing, this light--" "It wants my soul," Todd
said. "Is that plain enough for you?"  "And you," Maxine said, glancing
at Tammy to see how she was responding to all this, "are blithely
suggesting we try to outrun it?"

"Yes."

"You're crazy."

Before Tammy could reply, Todd put in a final plea. "If we fail, we
fail.

But at least let's give it a try."

"Frankly, I realize I'm outvoted on this, but I think this is insanity,"
Maxine said. "If you really believe in your immortal soul, Todd, why the
hell aren't you letting this divine agent come and get you?"

"I'm not saying I don't believe in my soul. I do. I swear I do. But you
know me: I've never trusted agents," he said, chuckling. "Joke. Maxine,
lighten up. It was a joke." Maxine was not amused.

"Suppose it's the real thing," she said. "Suppose it's God, looking at
us.

At you."

"Maybe it is. But then again, maybe it isn't. This Canyon's always been
full of deceits and illusions."

"And you think that's what it is?"

"I don't know. I just don't trust it. I'd prefer to stick around here a
little longer than go off with it."

"Here? You want to stay in this dump? Todd, it's not going to be
standing for more than another week."

"So maybe I'll set off across America, I don't know. I just got more
living to do. Even though I'm dead."

"And suppose we're pissing off higher powers?" Maxine said. "Have you
thought about that?"

"You mean God? If God really wants me, He'll find a way to get me.

Right? He's God. But if He doesn't ... if I can slip off and enjoy
myself for a few years ..."

Maxine threw a troubled glance at Tammy. 'And you go along with all
this?"

"If Todd doesn't feel--"

"You were the one saying prayers out there."

"Let me finish. If Todd doesn't feel he's lived his full life, it's his
choice."

"The point is: you've had all the life you're going to get," Maxine said
to him. Then to Tammy, "We're talking to a dead man. Something we would
not be doing outside Coldheart Canyon." "Things are different here ..."
Todd murmured, remembering what Katya had told him.

"Damn right they are," Maxine said. "But the rules of this place end
somewhere north of Sunset. And it's only because of the power that was
once in this house that you're getting a chance to play this damn-fool
game with God." "A game with God," Tammy said, so quietly Maxine barely
heard what she'd said.

"What?"

"I was just saying: a game with God. I didn't think you'd care about
something like that. Aren't you an atheist?"

"Once, I might have--"

Todd stood up. "Hush. Hush."

The women stopped talking. Todd looked up toward the vault of the
turret, with its holes that showed the night sky.

"Stay very still," he said.

As he spoke, the light came over the top of the turret, its motion
eerily smooth and silent. Three beams of its silvery luminescence came
in through holes in the roof. They slid over the walls, like spotlights
looking for a star to illuminate. For a moment the entity seemed to
settle directly on top of the turret, and one of the beams of light went
all the way down the stairwell to scrutinize the debris at the bottom.
Then, after a moment's perusal, it began to move off again, at the same
glacial speed.

Only when it had gone completely did anybody speak again. It was Maxine
who piped up first.

"Why doesn't it just come in and get you?" she said. "That's what I
can't figure out. I mean, it's just a body of light. It can go anywhere
it chooses, I would have thought. Under the door. Down through that
hole"--she pointed up to the turret. "It's not like the house is
burglarproof."

 Tammy had been thinking about that very question. "I think maybe this
place makes it nervous," she said. "That's my theory, for what it's
worth. All the evil this house has seen."

"I don't think angels are afraid of anything," Maxine said.

"Then maybe it's just repulsed. I mean, it's like a dog, right, sniffing
out souls? Its senses are really acute. Think how this place must stink.

Especially down there." She glanced down the stairwell, where the
angel's light had lingered for a moment before moving on. "The Devil's
Country was down there. People suffered, died, horrible deaths. If I was
an angel, I'd stay out."

"If you were an angel, my love," Maxine said, "God would be in a lot of
trouble."

This won a laugh out of Tammy. 'M right, you've heard my theories--"

"I think you're both right," Todd said. "If the light wanted to come
inside the house it could. It did once, remember? But I think between my
not wanting to go and the smell of what this house has seen, it's
probably figured it'll wait. Sooner or later the house is going to start
falling down.

And then I'll come out and it'll have me."

"That's why we should surprise it," Tammy said. "Go now, while it's
least expecting anyone to leave."

"You don't know what it's expecting," Maxine put in. "It could be
listening to every damn word we say, as far as you can tell."

"Well I'm going to try for it," Todd said, pushing his gun into his
trousers, muzzle to muzzle. "If you don't want to come, that's fine.

Maybe you could just divert it somehow. Give me a chance to get to the
car." "No, we're going," Tammy said, speaking on behalf of Maxine, whose
response to this was a surrendering shrug.

"It is preposterous," she pointed out however. "Who the hell ever outran
an angel?" "How do we know?" Todd said. "Maybe people do it all the
time."

They stood together at the door and listened for twenty, twenty-five
minutes, seeing if there was some pattern to the motion of the light. In
that time it went up onto the roof twice, and made half a circuit of the
house, but then seemed to give up for no particular reason. It made no
sound.

Nor did its light at any point seem to alter in intensity. It
was--perhaps predictably--constant and patient, like a hunter sitting by
a burrow, knowing that sooner or later its occupant must show its nose.

About nine-fifteen or so, Tammy went up to the master bedroom to scan
the view across the Canyon and down toward Century City. She'd scoured
the kitchen for dried goods and tinned goods that had survived either
the ghosts' rampages or the passage of time and had found many tins had
been punctured, and the food inside was rotten; but she collected up a
few cans of edible stuff: baked beans, peaches, hot dogs in brine. And
then, after some digging around, found an opener, and made up a plate of
unlikely gastronomic bed-fellows; and took them upstairs to the balcony.

The Canyon had gone pin-drop quiet. If she hadn't already known they had
an agent of Creation's Maker in their vicinity, the spooked silence of
every cicada, coyote and night bird would have confirmed the fact. It
was eerie, standing there, watching the dark hollow of the Canyon, and
the few stars that were visible above it, and listening to the empty
dark. She could hear the click of the fork against her teeth, the noise
of her throat as it swallowed the beans and bites of hot dog.

"I used to love hot dogs," came a voice from the dark room behind her.

It was Todd. "You know, ordinary food. I never really got a taste for
the more sophisticated stuff."

"You want some of this?" she asked him, glancing round as she proffered
the plate.

"No thanks," he said. "I haven't really got an appetite anymore."

"Maybe ghosts aren't supposed to eat."

"Yeah that's what I figured," he replied, coming out onto the balcony.

Then, "Do you think they fuck? Because if they don't I'm going to have
to

find some other way to get this down." He glanced down at the lump
beneath his bath-towel.

"Cold showers."

"Yeah." He chuckled. "Everything comes full circle, doesn't it? Cold
hot dogs for you. Cold showers for me. Nothing really changes." "I don't
know," she said. "This isn't normal for me. Conversations with-- if
you'll excuse the phrase--dead movie stars in million-dollar houses ..."

"--with an angel waiting on the front doorstep--"

"Right."

She'd finished her ad hoc meal, and went back into the bedroom to set
the plate down. While she was doing so she heard Todd call her name,
very softly.

She went back out onto the balcony.

"What is it?"

"Look."

She looked, following the direction of his gaze. There was a glow of
light in the densely-forested cleft of the Canyon. It looked as though
it had settled in the fork of a tree.

"I guess Raphael must have got bored."

"Is that his name? Raphael?"

"I don't know. It's just the only angel's name I know. Angels aren't my
strong point. His real name's probably Marigold. The point is: it's
wandered off. We should go while we've got the opportunity. It may not
stay down there very long."

"Right. I'll go and find Maxine."

"Wait," Todd said, catching hold of her arm. "Just one thing before you
go."

"What's that?"

"I want your honest opinion ..."

"On what?"

"Do you think she's right? Am I screwing with my immortal soul, trying
to escape this thing?"

"You know, I was wondering about that when I was eating my hot

 dogs. My Aunt Jessica was a church-lady all her life. She used to go
and arrange the flowers on the altar three times a week. And she used to
say: God sees everything. This was when I was a little girl and she
thought I'd been naughty. God sees everything, she'd say, wagging her
finger. So you can't ever hide from Him. I think He can hear us right
now. And at least she would have believed He could."

"And you?"

"Who knows? I used to believe her. And I suppose there's a little part
of me that still thinks wherever I am, whatever I'm doing--good, bad or
indifferent--God's got His eye on me. Or Her eye."

"So ..."

"So if He doesn't want something to happen He can stop it."

"Oh, we're back to that. If God doesn't want me to get out of here,
He'll make sure I don't."

"Right."

Todd allowed a little smile to creep onto his face. He looked like a
mischievous six-year-old. "So what do we think when we see that ..." He
nodded to the light in the distance. "Isn't it like it's looking the
other way?"

Now Tammy smiled.

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe God's saying: I'll give you a chance. Just
this once."

Todd leaned forward and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "Oh I like that," he
said. "Just this once."

"It's just a theory."

"It's all I need right now."

"So you want to go?" He paused a moment and studied the light in the
Canyon below. The angel had apparently paused down there, either to
contemplate the loveliness of Creation, or to fall asleep for a while.
Whatever the reason, it was no longer moving.

"If we're going to go," Todd said, "this is the time. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

"I'll go get dressed."

They found Maxine (who had in turn found a bottle of vodka, and had
drunk a third of it on an empty stomach, which wasn't perhaps good for
her state of mind, but what the hell? It was done). Tammy explained to
her what she and Todd had seen from the balcony, and that it was time to
try to make a getaway. Pleasantly lubricated by the vodka, Maxine was
ready for an escape; in fact she was first to the door, bottle in hand,
remarking that the sooner they were all out of this fucking house the
better for everyone.

Tammy led the way, clutching Maxine's car-keys tightly in her palm, to
keep their merest tinkle from reaching the ears of the angel. The Canyon
was now completely dark. Even the few stars that had been lit overhead
earlier were now covered by cloud, as though--Tammy thought--the angel
had extinguished them. It was the kind of notion she wouldn't have given
room to on any other night but this, in any other place but this; but
who knew where the bounds of possibility lay tonight? It was ridiculous,
in a way, to imagine that an angel could blow out stars. But wasn't it
equally bizarre that there should be a dead man walking in her
footsteps, planning to outrun Heaven? Incident by incident, wonder by
wonder, her adventures in the Canyon had escalated in outlandishness; as
though in preparation for this night's excesses. First the ghosts and
their children; then the Devil's Country; now this.

They moved without mishap to the gate; paused there to be sure the coast
was clear and then moved on--again without incident--out into the
street. Nobody said a word.

If the silence of the natural world had been uncanny from the balcony,
it was ten times stranger now they were out on the road, where there
would usually be a chirping carpet laid out all around them, and
trilling songs in the darkened canopy. But here, now, nothing. It made
what was already strange enough, stranger still. It was as though every
living thing, from the most ferocious coyote to the tiniest flea, was
intimidated into silence and stillness by the scale of power in their
midst. The only things

 foolish enough to move were these three human beings, stumbling
through the darkness.

All was going well until Tammy caught her foot in a pothole and fell
sideways. Todd was there to catch her, but he wasn't quick enough to
stop the short cry of alarm that escaped her as she slipped. It was the
loudest thing that had been heard in the Canyon in a long while; its
echo coming back off the opposite wall.

She silently mouthed the word damn; then, taking a deep breath, she went
to the car, adrenaline making her a little more efficient than she might
have been otherwise, and opened the door. The car announced that there
was a door open with an irritating little ping, ping, ping. Well, hell,
it scarcely mattered now. They were committed to this. The angel was
already pricking up its ears, no doubt.

"Get in," she hissed.

Todd ducked into the back. Maxine opened the passenger door and slid in
with something less than grace. Then she slammed the door so hard it was
probably audible in Santa Barbara.

"Sorry," she slurred. "Force of habit."

Todd leaned over from the back seat and put his hand on Tammy's
shoulder.

"Give it all you've got," he said.

"I'll do what I can," she said, and slipped the key into the ignition.

Even as she was instructing her fingers to turn the key, the moon came
out above Coldheart Canyon. Except, of course, that it wasn't the moon,
it was the messenger of God, roused from its meditations, and climbing a
silent ladder into the dark air over their heads.

"Fuck and double fuck," Todd said.

It moved straight toward the house, and--perhaps because the evening was
a little damp, and the marine layer had come in off the ocean--it had
collected around it a cloak of mist. Now, instead of simply being a
light, it looked like a cloud with a white fire burning at its core;
trailing a tail like a comet.

Tammy wasn't intimidated. She turned on the car engine. It roared,
reassuringly loud.

"Handbrake!" Maxine said. "Handbrake!"

"I've got it," Tammy said. She took off the handbrake, and put the
vehicle into gear. Then she slammed her foot down, and they took off.

"Todd!" she yelled over her shoulder. "I want you to keep an eye on that
sonofabitch for me."

Todd was already doing just that, peering out of the back window. "It's
still above the house," he reported. "Maybe it thinks we're still in
there."

"I don't think it's that dumb somehow," Maxine said.

Tammy drove the car up the street, and around two wide curves, before
she found a place where it was possible to turn round. It was a
squealing, messy five- or six-point turn in the narrow street, and the
last maneuver delivered the back end of the car into the shrubbery. No
matter.

Tammy hauled the wheel round and accelerated. Todd went to the other
side of the back seat, and looked out.

"Huh," he said.

"What?"

"The damn thing still hasn't moved." "Maybe it's lost interest," Tammy
said.

It was a forlorn hope, of course, scarcely worth voicing. But every
moment the thing failed to come after them was blessed.

"By the way," she said, as she turned the first wide corner south of the
house, "I got a little taste of what that thing does to you, Todd--"

"You mean the memories?"

"Yeah."

"Did it freak you out?"

"No. It was just sort of banal, really. It has a memory of my Aunt
Jessica--"

"It's coming."

"Oh shit!"

Tammy glanced in her rearview mirror: nothing. Looked over her shoulder:
nothing.

"I don't see it!"

"It's after us."

"I don't see it!"

She caught a glimpse of Todd's face in the mirror, his eyes turned
directly upward; and she knew where it was. The next moment there was a
light on the road all around the car, as though a police helicopter had
appeared over the ridge with a spotlight, and caught them in it.

There was a turn up ahead. She took it at sixty-five miles an hour,
wheels shrieking, and for a moment the cloud overshot the road, and she
was driving in near-darkness. Losing the light so suddenly left her
utterly disoriented and she took the next curve, which came fifteen
yards after the previous one, so tightly that the left-hand side of the
car was clawed by twigs and branches. Todd whooped.

"Hell, woman! You're quite a driver! Why didn't you tell me?" "You never
asked!" Tammy said, steering the car back into the middle of the road.

"We could have gone drag-racing together. I always wanted to find a
woman I could go drag-racing with."

"Now you tell me."

Another curve came up, as tight as the one before. But this time she
took it without any problem. They were halfway down the hill by now, and
Tammy was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they were going to
reach Sunset Boulevard without their pursuer catching up with them.

"If we do get to Sunset," she said, "what happens then? Do you think the
damn thing will give up?"

She'd no sooner spoken than the light reappeared on the street ahead of
them. It was no longer hovering in the air above the street but had
descended to block the road from one side to the other.

Tammy slammed on the brakes, but as she did so a sliver of the angel's
light came through the windshield to meet her mind, its freight familiar
from their previous encounter. The road ahead of her was instantly
erased, replaced with the facade of the house on Monarch Street. She

heard Maxine, somewhere to her right, let out a yell of panic, and then
felt her reaching over to wrest control of the car from her. There was a
brief, chaotic moment when Tammy's panic overwhelmed the angel's gift of
memory, and she saw, to her horror, that the car had swerved off the
road and was speeding into the dense thicket that grew between the
trees. The image lasted for a moment only. Then it was gone, the
approaching trees, Maxine's fumbling hands, her curses: all of it
erased.

In its place, Tammy was standing at the door of her Aunt Jessica's
house, in the dappled sunlight, and Aunt Jessica was telling her that
her papa had gone down to the fire station--

The car struck a tree, and the windshield smashed, but Aunt Jessica
smiled on. They hit another tree, and another, though Tammy saw none ; %
of it. She didn't hear the splinter of wood, or the shrieks from Maxine.

Nor did she hear the din of tearing metal as a door was torn off. Her
foot was still jammed on the brakes but they didn't seem to be slowing
the vehicle's momentum. What eventually brought the car to a halt was a
||

:Vj|;i'|~

boulder, which lifted it up and threw it over onto its left side. ;|fl
At the instant of impact the angel's vision faltered again, and Tammy '
** saw the world as it really was--a blur of tumbling trees and raining
glass. <; She saw her arms in front of her, her white-knuckled hands
still seizing ; the wheel. She saw blood on her fingers, and then a
little storm of shredded leaves coming in through the broken window,
their sweetness reminding her, even in the midst of this chaos, of
quieter times. Mown lawns on a Sunday afternoon; grass in her hair when
she'd been play wrestling with Sandra Moses from next door. Pieces of
green memory, which flickered into her mind's eye between the tumbling
view through J the windshield and the last, brief appearance of Aunt
Jessica's doorstep.

She knew it was the last because this time, as the car came to a halt,
and Tammy slumped in her seat, her consciousness decided to forsake the
pain of her broken bones (of which there were many) or the sound of |
Maxine's screaming (of which there was much) and just go away into the
reassuring gloom of Aunt Jessica's house.

 "Why did you not come when I called?" Aunt Jessica demanded. Kindly
though she was, she didn't like to be disobeyed.

Tammy looked at the woman through her eleven-year-old's eyes, and
fumbled for an answer to the old lady's question. But nothing she could
say to Aunt Jessica would make any sense, now would it? Canyon, car,
angel, crash. How could she possibly understand?

Anyway, Aunt Jessica didn't really want an answer. She had her niece
inside the house where she wanted her, and that was all that was really
important. Tammy walked down the hallway, into this brown comfortable
memory, and let Aunt Jessica close the door behind her, so that the
screaming and the raining glass and the world turned upside down could
be forgotten, and she could go wash her hands before sitting down to a
plate of Aunt Jessica's special meatloaf.

 It was night in Coldheart Canyon, and though it was the wrong season
for the Santa Anas proper to be blowing, the wind that came up about a
quarter to midnight was warm for a night in early spring. It carried
away the smell of burned rubber and spilled gasoline; it even took away
the stench of the vodka-laced vomit Maxine had ejected. With the vodka
out of her system, she found she could think a little better. With
trembling fingers she unfastened her seat-belt and fell through the open
door, out of the seat in which she'd been hanging and onto the grass.

She lay there for a long time, alternately sobbing and being stern with
herself. Luckily--if this can be said to be luck--she'd had two previous
experiences with car wrecks, the second of which had been substantially
worse than this one, in that it had happened on the 101 in the middle of
the morning rush, and involved nineteen vehicles and eight fatalities
(one of them a passenger in the same stretch limo in which Maxine had
been traveling). She had suffered a hairline skull fracture, a
dislocated shoulder, and back problems that her chiropractor had
blithely announced would be with her for the rest of her life.

Unless she was very much mistaken, she was not in anything like as bad a
condition after this little fun-ride as she'd been on that occasion.
Shaken up, yes; dizzy, sick and a little hysterical, certainly. But when
she finally crawled away from the car, and got to her feet, she was
pleased to discover that she could stand up quite well, and that nothing
hurt with that piercing hurt that suggested something had been broken or
punctured.

"You must have had an angel watching over you."

She looked round at the wit who'd spoken. It was Todd. He was close to
the car, trying to wrench open the door on the driver's side.

"Is Tammy still in there?" Maxine said.

"Yeah. I'm afraid she is."

"How does she look?"

"How the hell do I know?" Todd remarked. "It's too dark to see."

Yes, it was dark. And though that wasn't good for finding out how Tammy
was doing, it did suggest the absence of their pursuer.

"It's still here," Todd said. "Just in case you were wondering."

"Where?"

He pointed up. Maxine followed his finger. The angel's light brightened
the high branches of a nearby pine. It wasn't as steady as it had been
up at the house. In fact, it was fluttering nervously, which made Maxine
picture a flock of luminous birds up there, all shaking out their
feathers after a rainstorm, and hopping from bough to bough in their
agitated state.

"Hey you!" Maxine yelled up at the light, too frustrated and angry to
care about the protocol of what she was doing. "Tammy could be bleeding
to death in there. How about a hand down here?"

"I don't think it's interested in helping anyone but me. I had to beg it
to let me get you two sorted out before it ... you know ... came and
took me."

"You mean you talked to it?"

"Yeah. While you were unconscious." "And you promised--" "I promised I'd
go with it, as soon as you two were safe. That was the deal."

"Huh. You made a deal with an angel."

"What else was I going to do? I had to do something. And it was my
stupidity that got us into this mess." He put his head through the
broken window. 'At least she's still breathing. But she's also
bleeding."

He lifted his hands and displayed his palms for Maxine. They were
blood-soaked.

"Oh God." "Oh no--" she said. "What's happening?" "It's all right," the
man said, softly.

"Auntie!" she called.

"No, honey. I'm not your auntie. It's Todd. Now spit. You've got dirt in
your mouth."

The world lurched again, only this time there was somebody's arms to
catch her, and she opened her eyes to see the face of the handsomest man
in the world looking down at her. He was smiling.

"There you are," he said. "Oh thank God. I thought I'd lost you."

As the last morsels of Aunt Jessica's peach cobbler melted away she
remembered where she was and how she'd got here. The angel on the road,
the trees, the car overturning and glass shattering.

"Where's Maxine?"

"She's fine. She went to get help. But she's been away a long time so I
had to drag you out of there myself. It took a little doing. But I did
some bandaging.

There was a first aid kit in the trunk. I got the bleeding to stop."

"I was eating peach cobbler."

"You were hallucinating is what you were doing."

"Only there was dirt in it." She spat, with as much gusto as she could
manage. It made her body hurt to do it, though. Her stomach, her head.

She winced.

"You did good," Todd said. "Maxine got out with scrapes."

"It was pure luck," she said. "I was driving too fast, and that damn
angel got in my way." She dropped her voice. "Did it leave?"

Todd shook his head, and directed her attention up at the tree where the
angelic presence still sat. It was quite composed now. It had made its
arrangements, and it was waiting.

"I'm afraid it's going to want me to go with it very soon," he said.
"I"But you might have escaped." "Ha. You know, I think I did," he said.

"I don't understand." "Oh ... not quite the way I thought I was going
to. But I escaped being a selfish fuck-up." He looked into her eyes.
"You think I would have had an angel come to fetch me before I met you?
No way. It would have been straight down to Hell for Todd Pickett."

He was making a joke of it, of course; but there was something here that
came from his heart. She could see it in his eyes, which still continued
to stare deep into hers. "I want to thank you," he said, leaning down
and kissing her cheek. "Maybe next time round it'll be our turn, eh?"

"Our turn?"

"Yeah. You and me, born next-door to one another. And we'll know."

"I want you to stop this now," she told him gently. There were tears
blurring her vision, and she didn't like that. He'd be gone soon enough,
and she wanted to have him in focus for as long as possible.

He looked up. "Uh-oh. I hear the cavalry," he said. Tammy could hear
them too. Sirens coming up from the bottom of the hill. "Sounds like I
should make my exit," Todd said. The sirens were getting louder. "Damn.

Do they have to come so quick?" There were tears in his eyes now,
dropping onto Tammy's cheek. "Shit, Tammy. I don't want to go." "Yes,
you do," she said. She fumbled for his hand, and finding it, squeezed
it. "You've had a good time. You know you have."

"Yeah. Oh yeah. I've had a great time."

"Better than most."

"True enough."

The light was descending from the tree, and for the first time--either
because the angel was close to finishing its business, or because Tammy
herself was hovering on the edge of life--she saw the contents of the
light more clearly. There was no attempt to confuse her with memories
now;"Oh no--" she said. "What's happening?"

"It's all right," the man said, softly.

"Auntie!" she called.

"No, honey. I'm not your auntie. It's Todd. Now spit. You've got dirt in
your mouth."

The world lurched again, only this time there was somebody's arms to
catch her, and she opened her eyes to see the face of the handsomest man
in the world looking down at her. He was smiling.

"There you are," he said. "Oh thank God. I thought I'd lost you."

As the last morsels of Aunt Jessica's peach cobbler melted away she
remembered where she was and how she'd got here. The angel on the road,
the trees, the car overturning and glass shattering.

"Where's Maxine?"

"She's fine. She went to get help. But she's been away a long time so I
had to drag you out of there myself. It took a little doing. But I did
some bandaging.

There was a first aid kit in the trunk. I got the bleeding to stop."

"I was eating peach cobbler."

"You were hallucinating is what you were doing."

"Only there was dirt in it." She spat, with as much gusto as she could
manage. It made her body hurt to do it, though. Her stomach, her head.

She winced.

"You did good," Todd said. "Maxine got out with scrapes." "It was pure
luck," she said. "I was driving too fast, and that damn angel got in my
way." She dropped her voice. "Did it leave?"

Todd shook his head, and directed her attention up at the tree where the
angelic presence still sat. It was quite composed now. It had made its
arrangements, and it was waiting.

"I'm afraid it's going to want me to go with it very soon," he said.
"I"Ha. You know, I think I did," he said.

"I don't understand." "Oh ... not quite the way I thought I was going
to. But I escaped being a selfish fuck-up." He looked into her eyes.
"You think I would have had an angel come to fetch me before I met you?
No way. It would have been straight down to Hell for Todd Pickett."

He was making a joke of it, of course; but there was something here that
came from his heart. She could see it in his eyes, which still continued
to stare deep into hers. "I want to thank you," he said, leaning down
and kissing her cheek. "Maybe next time round it'll be our turn, eh?"

"Our turn?"

"Yeah. You and me, born next-door to one another. And we'll know."

"I want you to stop this now," she told him gently. There were tears
blurring her vision, and she didn't like that. He'd be gone soon enough,
and she wanted to have him in focus for as long as possible.

He looked up. "Uh-oh. I hear the cavalry," he said. Tammy could hear
them too. Sirens coming up from the bottom of the hill. "Sounds like I
should make my exit," Todd said. The sirens were getting louder. "Damn.

Do they have to come so quick?" There were tears in his eyes now,
dropping onto Tammy's cheek. "Shit, Tammy. I don't want to go." "Yes,
you do," she said. She fumbled for his hand, and finding it, squeezed
it. "You've had a good time. You know you have."

"Yeah. Oh yeah. I've had a great time."

"Better than most."

"True enough."

The light was descending from the tree, and for the first time--either
because the angel was close to finishing its business, or because Tammy
herself was hovering on the edge of life--she saw the contents of the
light more clearly. There was no attempt to confuse her with memories
now;

of his, some gentle, eternal face that no camera would ever capture, nor
words would ever show.

He stroked her face with the back of his fingers, and then he stood up.

"Next time," he murmured.

"Yeah."

Then his smile, that trademark smile of his which had made Tammy weak
with infatuation when she'd first seen it, dimmed a little; its
departure not signifying sadness, only the appearance of a certain ease
in him, which his smile had concealed all these years. He didn't need to
try so hard any longer. He didn't need to charm or please.

She tried to catch his eye one last time--to have one last piece of him,
even now. But he was already looking away; looking at where he was
really headed.

She heard him speak one last time, and there was such happiness in his
voice, she began to cry like a baby.

"Dempsey?" he said. "Here, boy! Here!"

She turned her head toward the light, thinking she might glimpse him
even now, but as she did so, she heard--or thought she heard--the angel
utter a word of its own; a seamless word, like a ribbon wrapped around
everything she'd ever dreamed of knowing or being. It wasn't loud, but
it erased the sound of the sirens, for which she was grateful; then it
moved off up into the darkness of the Canyon.

Knowing she was safe in the hands of those who would take care of her,
and one, Maxine, who loved her, she followed the ribbon of the word up
the flanks of Coldheart Canyon, skimming the darkened earth.

And as the woman and the word passed over the ground together, the
creatures of the Canyon forgot their fear. They began to make music
again; cicadas in the grass, night-birds in the trees; and on the ridge,
the coyotes, yapping fit to burst. Not because they had a kill, but
because they had life.

EPILOGUE

And So, Love

 Although every medical expert who paraded by Tammy's bed in the next
many weeks--bone-specialists and skull-specialists, gastroenterologists
and just good old-fashioned nurses--invariably pronounced the opinion
that she was a "very lucky woman to be alive" there were many painful
days and nights in that time of slow, slow recovery when she did not
feel remotely lucky.

Quite the reverse. There were times, especially at night, when she
thought she was as far from unmended as she'd been when Todd had first
pulled her out of the car. Why else did she hurt so much? They gave her
painkillers of course, in mind-befuddling amounts, but even when she'd
just taken the pills or been given the injection, and the first rush of
immunity from pain was upon her, she could still feel the agony pacing
up and down just beyond the perimeter of her nerves' inured state,
waiting for a crack to appear in the wall so that it could get back in
and hurt her again.

She was in the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai for the first seventy
two hours, but as soon as she was deemed fit to be removed from the ICU,
her insurance company demanded she be taken to the LA County Hospital,
where she could be looked after at fifty percent of the price. She was
in no state to defend herself, of course, and would undoubtedly have
been transferred had Maxine not stepped in and made her presence felt.

Maxine was close friends with several of the Hospital Board, and made it
clear that she would unleash all manner of legal demons if anyone even
thought of moving Mrs. Lauper when she was in such a delicate state. The
hospital authorities responded quickly. Tammy kept her bed, complete

with a private room, at Cedars-Sinai. Maxine made it her business to be
sure that the room was filled with fresh orchids every day, and that
fresh three-layer chocolate cake from Lady Jane's on Melrose was brought
in at three every afternoon. I

"I want you well," she instructed Tammy during one of her first visits
after Tammy had been released from the ICU "I have a list of dinner
parties lined up for the two of us that will take every weekend for the
next year, at least. Shirley Maclaine called me; claimed she'd had a
vision of Todd passing over, wearing a powder-blue suit. I didn't like
to spoil the poor old biddy's illusions so I told her that was exactly
what he was wearing.

Just as a matter of interest, what was he wearing?"

"Jeans and a hard-on," Tammy replied. "He'd torn up his T-shirt for
bandages." Her voice was still weak, but some of its old music was
starting to come back, day by day.

"Well, I'll leave you to tell her that. And then there's all these
friends of Todd's who want to meet you--"

"Why?" "Because I told them about what an extraordinary woman you are,"
Maxine said. "So you'd better start to get seriously well. As soon as
you're ready to be moved I want you to come down and stay with me in
Malibu."

"That'd be too much trouble for you."

"That's exactly what I need right now," Maxine replied, without irony.

"Too much trouble. The moment I stop to think ... that's when things get
out of hand."

Luckily, Tammy didn't have that problem. In addition to the heavy doses
of painkillers she was still being given, she was getting some mild
tranquilizers. Her thoughts were dreamy, most of the time; nothing
seemed quite real.

"You're a very resilient woman," her doctor, an intense, prematurely
bald young fellow called Martin Zondel, observed one morning, while
scanning Tammy's chart. "It usually takes people twice as long as it's
taking you to bounce back from these kinds of injuries."

"Am I bouncing? I don't feel like I'm bouncing."

"Well perhaps bouncingis too strong a word, but you're doing just
fine!"

It was a period of firsts. The first trip out of bed, as far as the
window.

The first trip out of bed, as far as the door. The first trip out of bed
as far as the en suite bathroom. The first trip outside, even if it was
just to look at the construction workers on the adjacent lot, putting up
the new research block for the hospital. Maxine and Tammy ogled the men
for a while.

"I should have married a blue-collar worker," Maxine said when they got
back inside. "Hamburgers, beer and a good fuck on a Saturday night. I
always overcomplicated things."

"Arnie's blue-collar. And he was a terrible lover."

"Oh yes, Arnie. It's time we talked about Arnie."

"What about him?"

"Well for one thing, he's a louse."

"Tell me something I don't know. What's he been up to?"

"Are you ready for this? He's been selling your life-story."

"Who to?"

"Everyone. You're hot news, right now. In fact I had a call from someone
over at Fox wondering if I could sell you on the idea of having your
life turned into a Movie of the Week."

"I hope you said no." "No. I just said I'd talk to you about it.
Honestly, Tammy, there's a little window of opportunity in here when you
could make some serious money."

"Selling my life-story? I don't think so. I don't have one to sell!"

"That's not what these dodos think. Look at these."

Maxine went into her bag, brought out a sheaf of magazines and laid them
on the bed. The usual suspects: The National Enquirer and The Star plus
a couple of more up-market magazines, People and Us. Tammy was still too
stiff to lean forward and pick them up, so Maxine went through them for
her, flicking to the relevant articles. Some carried photographs of Todd
at the height of his fame; the photographs often emblazoned with
melodramatic questions: Wits Fame Too Much for the World's Greatest

Heart-throb? on one; and on another: His Secret Hideaway Became a
Canyon of Death. But these lines were positively restrained in contrast
with some of the stuff in the pages of The Globe, which had dedicated an
entire

"Pullout Special your family will treasure for generations" to the
subject of Haunted Hollywood; or, in their hyperbolic language: "The
Spooks, the Ghosts, the Satan-worshippers and the Fiends Who Have Made
Tinseltown the Devil's Fanciest Piece of Real Estate!"

There were pictures accompanying all the articles, of course: mostly of
Todd, occasionally of Maxine and Gary Eppstadt, and even--in the case of
The Enquirer and The Globe--pictures of Tammy herself. In fact she was
the subject of one of the articles, which was led off by a very
unflattering picture of her; the article claiming that

"According to her husband, Arnold, obsessive fan Tammy Jayne Lauper
probably knows more about the last hours of superstar Todd Pickett's
life than anybody else alive--but she isn't telling! Why?

Because Lauper (36) is the leader of a black magic cult, which involves
thousands of the dead star's fans worldwide, who were attempting to
psychically control their star, when their experiment went disastrously
and tragically wrong."

"I was of two minds whether to show you all this," Maxine said. 'At
least yet. I realize it probably makes your blood boil."

"How can they write such things? They're just making it up ..."

"There were worse, believe me. Not about you. But there's a piece about
me I've got my lawyers onto, and two pieces about Burrows--"

"Oh, really?"

"One of them was a very long list of his ... how shall I put this? His
'less than successful' clients."

"So Todd wasn't the first?"

"Apparently not. Burrows was just very good at buying people's silence.
I guess nobody really wants to talk about their unsuccessful ass lifts,
now do they?"

Maxine gathered all the magazines up and put them into the drawer of the
bedside table. "That's actually put some color back into your cheeks."

"It's indignation," Tammy said. "It's fine to read all that nonsense in
the supermarket line. But when it's about you, it's different."

"So shall I not bring any more of them in?"

"No, you can bring 'em in. I want to see what people are saying about
me. Where are the magazines getting my photographs from? That one of me
looking like a three-hundred-pound beet--"

Maxine laughed out loud. "You're being a little harsh on yourself. But,
you're right, it's not flattering. I guess the photographer himself gave
them the picture. And you know who that was?"

"Yes. It was Arnie. It was taken last summer."

"He's probably gone through all your family photographs. But look, don't
get stirred up. He's no better or worse than a thousand others.

Believe me, I've seen this happen over an dover. When there's a little
money to be made--a few hundred bucks even--people come up with all
these excuses to justify what they're doing with other people's privacy.
America deserves to be told the truth, and all that bullshit." "That's
not what Arnie thought," Tammy said. "He just said to himself: I deserve
to make some money for putting up with that fat bitch of a wife all
these years."

There was no laughter now; just bitterness, deep and bleak.

"I'm sorry," Maxine said. "I really shouldn't have brought them in."

"Yes, you should. And please, don't apologize. I'm not really all that
surprised. What are they saying about you ... if you don't mind me
asking?"

Maxine exhaled a ragged sigh: "She was exploitative, manipulative, never
did anything for Todd except for her own profit. That kind of stuff."

"Do you care?"

"It's funny. It used not to hurt. In fact, I used to positively wallow
in being people's worst nightmare. But that was when Todd was still
alive ..." She let the thought go unfinished. "What's the use?" she said
at last, getting up from beside the bed. "We can't control any of this
stuff. They'll write whatever they want to write, and people will
believe what they want to

believe." She leaned in and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "You take care
of yourself. Doctor Zondel--is that it, Zondel?"

"I think so."

"Sounds like a cheap white wine. Well, anyway, he thinks you're
remarkable. And I said to him: 'this we knew.'"

Tammy caught hold of her hand. "Thank you for everything."

"Nothing to thank me for," Maxine said. "We survivors have got to stick
together. I'll see you tomorrow. And by the way, now that you're compos
mentis--I warn you--there's a chance you're going to have nursing staff
coming in to ask you questions. Then selling your answers. So say
nothing. However nice people are to you, assume they're fakes."

Maxine came every day, often with more magazines to show. But on
Wednesday--three weeks and a day after Tammy had returned to
consciousness --she had something weightier to place on her bed.

"Remember our own Norman Mailer?"

"Detective Rooney?"

"Ex-Detective Martin Ray Rooney. The same. Behold, he did labor mightily
and his gutter publishers saw that it was publishable and they did a
mighty thing, and put it in print in less than three weeks."

"No!"

"Here it is. In all its shoddy glory."

It wasn't a big book--a mere two hundred and ninety-six pages--but what
it lacked in length it made up for in sheer bravura. The copy described
it as a story too horrific for Hollywood to tell. On the cover was a
photograph of the house in Coldheart Canyon, with the image of a
glowering demon superimposed on the clouds overhead.

"He says you, I and a woman called Katya Lupescu were in it together.

Like the three witches in Macbeth."

"You mean you actually read it?"

"Well, I skimmed. It's not the worst thing I've read. He spells all our
names right, most of the time, but the rest? Oh God in Heaven! I don't
know where to begin. It's a big sticky mess of Hollywood myths and

Manson references and completely asinine pieces of detective work.

Basically, he's convinced everyone is in on this massive conspiracy--"

"To do what?"

"Well ... that's the thing. He's not really sure. He claims Todd found
out about it, so he was murdered. Same with Joe. Same with Gary Epp
stadt, though of course everybody in Hollywood had a reason to murder
Gary Eppstadt."

"I didn't know books could be published so fast."

"Well it's just hack-work. It'll be off the shelves in a month. But
Rooney got a quarter of a million dollars' advance for it. Can you
believe that?"

Tammy picked up the book--which was called Hell's Canyon--and flicked
through it.

"Did he interview Arnie?"

"Well I didn't read it that closely, but I didn't see his name."

"Oh, there's pictures," Tammy said, coming to the eight-page section in
the middle of the book. To give him his due, Rooney--or somebody working
on his behalf--had done a little research. He'd turned up two
photographs from the archives of some silent-movie enthusiast. One was a
picture of Katya Lupi, dressed in a gown so sheer it looked as though it
had been painted on, the other a much more informal photograph which
showed Katya, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Ramon
Navarro and a host of other luminaries at a picnic in the shadow of the
dream palace in Coldheart Canyon. At the back of the crowd--separated
from Katya by several rows of smiling, famous faces--was Willem Zeffer.

Tammy closed the book.

"Don't want to see any more?"

"I don't think so. Not today."

"I've been thinking ... Doctor Zinfandel"--Tammy laughed at Maxine's
perfectly deliberate error--"has told me you'll be out of here in a
week, ten days at the most. I don't want you going back to Rio Linda, at
least not yet. I want you to come and stay with me at the house in
Malibu, if it doesn't have too many distressing memories."

Tammy had been worrying about how she'd cope when she was released from
the hospital; the offer made her burst with tears of relief.

"Oh Christ, I hadn't realized you hated the place that much!"

Laughter appeared through the tears. "No, no, I'd love to come."

"Good. Then I'm going to send Danielle--she's my new assistant--to
Sacramento and have her pick up some of your things, if that's okay with
you."

"That would be perfect."

Nine days later, Tammy moved out of Cedars-Sinai and Maxine ferried her
down to the beach-house. It looked much smaller by day; and somehow more
ordinary without the twinkle lights in the trees, and the cars driving
up, full of the great and the good. Perhaps it was simply that she'd
come to know Maxine so well in the past few weeks (and how strange was
that--to have become so fond of this woman she'd despised for years, and
to have her sentiments so sweetly returned?), that the house didn't seem
at all alien to her. It was very far from her taste of course (or more
correctly, far from her pocketbook) but it was modestly stylish, and the
objects on the shelves were elegant and pretty. Sitting on the patio on
the second or third evening, sipping a Virgin Mary, the wind warm off
the Pacific, she asked Maxine if she'd decorated the place herself, or
had it done professionally.

"Oh I'd love to say I chose every object in the house, but it was all
done for me. Actually Jerry selected the paintings. He's got a good eye
for art.

It's a gay thing."

Tammy spluttered into her drink.

"He's flying back to California next weekend, to see a friend in the
hospital.

So I said he should call in. That's all right, yes? If you don't feel up
to it, you don't have to see him." "I'm fine, Maxine," Tammy said.
"Believe me, I'm fine."

 As it turned out, the following Saturday, when Jerry came to visit,
Tammy was feeling anything but fine. Doctor Zondel had warned her that
there would be some days when she felt weaker than others, and this was
certainly one of those. She only had herself to blame. The previous day
she had decided to take a walk along the beach and, as the day was so
sunny, and the air so fresh, she'd completely lost track of time. What
she'd planned as a twenty-minute stroll turned into an
hour-and-a-quarter trek, which had not only exhausted her, but made her
bones and muscles ache.

She was consequently feeling frail and tender when Jerry came by the
following day, and in no mood for intensive conversation. It didn't
matter.

Jerry had plenty to talk about without need of prompting: mainly his new
and improved state of health.

"I'm trying not to be too much of a Pollyanna about it all in case
something goes horribly wrong and the tumor comes back. But I don't
think it's going to. I'm fine. And you, honey?" "I have good days and
bad days," Tammy said.

"Today's a bad day," Maxine said, chucking Tammy under the chin to get a
smile.

"Look at you, Maxine. If I didn't know better I'd say you had a gay gene
in you someplace."

Maxine gave him a supercilious smile. "Well if I did I certainly
wouldn't tell you about it."

"Are you implying I gossip?"

"It was not an implication," Maxine dead-panned. "It is a fact of life."

 "Well I'll keep my mouth closed about this, I promise," Jerry said,
with a mischievous glint. "But were you not once a married lady, Tammy?"
"I'm not getting into this," Tammy said.

"All right, I will say no more on the subject. But I see what I see. And
I think it's very charming. Men are such pigs anyway."

Maxine gave him a fierce look. And beneath her makeup, Tammy thought,
she was blushing.

"You said you had pictures to show us?" Maxine said.

"I did? Oh yes, I did."

"Pictures of what?" Tammy said, her mind only a quarter committed to the
subject at hand, distracted as she was by the exchange that had just
taken place between Maxine and Jerry. She knew exactly what Jerry was
implying, and although she couldn't remember thinking that she and
Maxine had been nesting just like a couple of lesbians, she could see
that his innuendo was not without plausibility, from the outside, at
least.

And besides, men were pigs; or at least most of the men it had been her
misfortune to become attracted to.

Jerry had brought out his pictures now, and passed them over to Maxine,
who started to look through them.

"Oh my Lord ..." she said softly. Maxine handed the photographs over to
Tammy one by one, as she'd finished looking at them.

"They were taken by my old camera, so they're not very good. But I
stayed all day, to watch the whole thing from beginning to end."

"The thing" Jerry had watched, and had photographed (rather better than
his disclaimer suggested), was the Los Angeles Public Works' demolition
of Katya Lupi's dream palace.

"I didn't even know they were going to knock it down," Maxine said.

"Well apparently there was a fierce lobby from your gang, Tammy--"

"My gang?"

"The Appreciation Society."

"Oh."

"--to keep the place as some kind of Todd Pickett shrine. You didn't
hear about that?" Tammy shook her head. "My, my, you two have had your

 heads in the sand. Well, there was a petition, saying that the house
should be left standing, but the authorities said no, it had to come
down. Apparently, it was structurally unsafe. All the foundations had
gone. Of course we know why but nobody else can figure it out. Anyway,
they sent in the bulldozers.

It was all over in six hours. The demolition part at least. Then it took
another five or six hours to put the rubble in trucks and drive it
away."

"Did anybody come to watch?" Tammy asked.

"Quite a few, coming and going. But not a crowd. Never more than twenty
at any one time. And we were kept a long way back from the demolition,
which is why the pictures are so poor."

The women had been through all the pictures now. Tammy handed them back
to Jerry, who said: "So that's another piece of Hollywood history that's
bitten the dust. It makes me sick. This is all we've got faintly
resembling a past in this city of ours, and we just take a hammer and
knock it all down. How sensible is that?"

"Personally, I'm glad it's gone," Tammy piped up. Another wave of
weakness had come over her as she looked at the pictures, and now she
felt almost ready to pass out.

"You don't look too good," Maxine said.

"I don't feel too good. Would either of you mind if I went to lie down?"

"Not at all," Jerry said.

Tammy gave him a kiss and started toward her bedroom.

"Aren't you going to tuck her in, Maxine?" Tammy heard Jerry say.

"As it happens, yes." And so saying, she followed Tammy into the
bedroom.

"You know, you mustn't let anything Jerry says bother you," Maxine said,
once Tammy was lying down. She stroked the creases from the pillow
beside Tammy's head.

"I know."

"He doesn't mean any harm."

"I know that too." She looked at Maxine, seeking out her gray eyes.

"You know ... just for the record ..."

"No, Tammy. We don't have to have this conversation. You don't have a
lesbian bone in your body."

"No, I don't."

"And if I do ... well, I haven't discovered it yet. But, as you raised
the subject, I could quite happily take care of you for as long as you'd
like. I like your company."

"And I like yours."

"Good. So let's have the world believe whatever it wants to believe."

"Fine by me."

Tammy made a weak little smile, mirrored on Maxine's face.

"Who'd have thought?" Maxine murmured.

She leaned forward and kissed Tammy very gently on the cheek. "Go to
sleep, honey. I want you well."

When she'd gone, Tammy lay beneath the coverlet, listening to the
reassuring rhythm of conversation between Maxine and Jerry from next
door, and the draw and boom of the Pacific.

Of all the people to have found such comfort with: Maxine Frizelle.

Her life had taken some very odd turns, no question about that.

But somehow it still seemed right. After the long journeys of late, the
pursuits and the revelations, the terrors that could not speak, and
those that spoke all too clearly, she felt as though Maxine was somehow
her reward; her prize for staying the terrible course.

"Who'd have thought?" she said to herself.

And with Maxine's words on her lips, she fell asleep.

"I want to go back to Rio Linda," Tammy announced two days later.

They were sitting on their favorite spot, out on the patio, and today
there was a splash of vodka mixed with the tomato juice in Tammy's
glass.

"You want to go home?" Maxine said. I

Tammy took her hand. "No, no," she said. Then, more fiercely: "God, a
no. That's not my home any longer."

"So--?"

"Well, I had this huge collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. And 1:1
want to get rid of it. Then I want to think about selling the house."



"Meaning you'll move in with me?"

"If it isn't too sudden?"

"At our age, nothing's too sudden," Maxine said. "But are you sure you
want to go through all that stuff yourself? Can't you get one of the
fans to do it?"

"I could, I suppose," Tammy said. "But I'd feel better doing it myself."

"Then we'll do it together."

"It'll be boring. There's so much stuff. And Arnie's been using the
house on and off so it'll be a pigsty."

"I don't care. When do you want to go?"

"As soon as possible. I just want to get it over and done with."

Tammy tried to find Arnie, first at the airport and then at his new
girlfriend's house, just to warn him that they were coming into town,
but she didn't get hold of him. Part of her was glad that Maxine was
accompanying her, when there were so many variables she couldn't
predict; but there was another part of her that felt a little
uncomfortable at the prospect. Maxine lived in luxury. What would she
think when she laid eyes on the scruffed, stuffed, little ranch-house
where Tammy and Arnie had lived out the charmless farce of their
marriage for fourteen-and-a-half years?

They got an early plane out of Los Angeles, and were in Sacramento by
nine-thirty in the morning. Maxine had arranged for a chauffeured sedan
to meet them at the airport. The chauffeur introduced himself as Gerald,
and said that he was at their disposal. Did they want to go straight to
the address he'd been given? Tammy gave Maxine a nearly panicked look:
the moment was upon her, and suddenly she was anxious.

"Come on," Maxine said. "We'll face the horror together. Then we'll be
out of here by the middle of the afternoon."

Arnie hadn't bothered to mow the front lawn, of course, or weed the
ground around the two rose bushes that Tammy had attempted to nurture.

The bushes were still alive, but only just. The weeds were almost as
tall as the bushes.

"Of course he may have changed the lock," Tammy said as they approached
the front door.

"Then we'll just get Gerald to shoulder it in," Marine said, ever
practical.

"It's still your house, honey. We're not doing anything illegal."

In fact, the key fitted and turned without any problem; and it was
immediately apparent from the general state of the place that Arnie
hadn't after all been a very regular visitor here in a while. But the
heating had been left turned up so it was stiflingly hot in all the
rooms; a stale, sickly heat. In the kitchen there was some food left out
and rotting: a half-eaten hamburger, a pile of fruit which had been
corrupted into plush versions of the originals, two plates of pizza
crusts. The stink was pretty offensive, but Tammy got to work quickly
clearing up the kitchen, while Maxine went around the house opening the
windows and turning down the heating.

With the rotted food bagged and set outside, and bleach put down the
sink to take away the stench, the place was a little more hospitable,
but Tammy made it very clear that she wanted to stay here for as short a
time as possible, so they set to work. Given the size of the collection
it was obviously not going to be sorted through and disposed of in a
day; all Tammy wanted to do was collect up all the stuff that was
personal, and either burn it or take it away. The rest she would let
members of the Appreciation Society come in and collect. They'd end up
fighting over the choicest items no doubt; all the more reason not to be
there when they came.

"I didn't realize you had so much stuff," Maxine said, when they'd
looked through all the rooms.

"Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was
organized."

She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered
through it till she found the file she wanted.

"What's this?" Maxine said.

"Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read."

"I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I
knew how."

"And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did."

"Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he'd have been less paranoid. Then
we wouldn't have tried to hide him away, and none of this--"

Tammy interrupted her. "Enough of that," she said. "Let's start a
bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done."

"A bonfire? For what?"

"For things like these." She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. "Things
it's nobody's business to ever see or read."

"Is there much like that?"

"There's enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I'll bring
some more stuff out?"

"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"

"Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never
finished it. We could use that."

"Done."

Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets
collecting other files that for one reason or another she didn't want
people to see. She wasn't proud of what her over-bearing tendencies had
led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up
her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove
her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a
footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these
unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the
Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast
dice and divide the lots.

When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that
Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.

"Is that all?" "No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot
more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts
were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."

Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the
flames.

"Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.

"Like how?"

"Write our own book."

"Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife1?"

"Something like that."

"It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the
stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favorite
versions."

"You think?"

"For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's
embedded. They believe what they believe."

"I'll go get some more stuff."

"Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know
that?" "Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was
spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her
hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she
went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.

Three or four trips out into the backyard and she'd done all she needed
to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her
special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how
many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much
bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room,
where--hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills--was the
holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone
owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the
other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for
the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of
costuming, but not her precious photographs.

She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her
legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay
hidden.

Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box
out into view.

The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she
would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to
see how her fire-stoker was doing.

"Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's
arm.

"No, I'm keeping this."

"Oh? Okay."

"It's just pictures of Todd."

The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the
half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire
Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct--a
kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often on these
pictures--made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated
movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the
box and toss them into the middle of the fire.

"Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.

"Yep."

The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but
Maxine could see him clearly enough.

"He was younger then."

"Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."

"Are those the negatives you're burning?"

"Don't ask."

"That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good
looking man."

The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the
third.

"Are these the last of it, then?"

"I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."

"Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."

"You want me to get you a Coke or a beer?"

"No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."

"Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and
eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already
curled up into a little black ball.

"Yes, home," Maxine said.

She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."

The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat
of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was

always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the
one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few
degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a
few seconds it would be ashes.

Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the
fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the
flames, which only encouraged them.

"Here," Maxine said and, snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand,
dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.

"You left it a bit late for a change of mind."

Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire
that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had
been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and
dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had
survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze
of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.

"You really want to keep that?"

"Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the
house where we can say hello to him once in a while."

"Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport.

Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to
go?"

"Just say the word."

Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had
left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when
she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer
young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of
a reunion in another, kinder place.

She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the
bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so, she
smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of
vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She
slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire
to burn itself; out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.

 It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.

The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing
sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.

But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are
balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet
fragrance of flowers.

They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the
Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along
the road that winds up the Canyon.

Once in a while people will still make their way up that winding road,
usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature,
abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that
marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here
in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the
sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up.
There's nothing here that gives them gooseflesh: just flowers and
dragonflies.

Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get
back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's
errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will
give them something morbid to talk about once they get back to Tulsa or
New Jersey.

When people finally ask them whether they went up to that Godforsaken
Canyon where all those Hollywood folks died, they say that

yeah, they went and had a look, but it was a waste of gas and temper,
because there was nothing to see. Not a thing.

And so, over the next few summers, as people come and look and go away
disappointed, word slowly spreads that Coldheart Canyon is a sham, a
fake; not worth the effort.

So people come less and less. And eventually the tourists don't come at
all.

There's only one kind of visitor who will still make the effort to find
the place where Katya Lupi built her dream palace, and for this sort of
sightseer, the Canyon will still put on a show.

They come, always, in expensive vehicles, designed to be driven over
rough, undomesticated land. They come with rolls of geological maps and
surveyors' equipment, and talk proprietarily about how the Canyon would
look if it had a five-star hotel, seven or eight stories high, built at
the top end, with three swimming pools and a dozen five-granda-night
bungalows, all arranged so that everybody has a little corner of the
Canyon walled off for their private spa, the contours of the land
altered so that it feels like a world within a world; an escape into
paradise, just two minutes' drive from Sunset Boulevard.

The Canyon has heard all this idle nonsense before, of course. And it
has promised itself: never again.

Hearing these men talk about the money they're going to make once
they've done their digging and their planting, the Canyon loses its
temper, and starts to show its displeasure as only dirt and rock given
something close to consciousness by the magic worked in its midst can
do.

At first it simply shakes the ground a little, just enough to send some
stones skipping down the Canyon's flanks to shatter the windshields on
every vehicle on the road. Very often, a tantrum like this is enough to
make the developers turn tail. But not always. Once in a while, there's
somebody who refuses to be so easily intimidated, and the Canyon must
escalate its assault.

It shakes its flanks until it uncovers certain horrid forms: the mummi

 fied remains of the children of the ghosts and the animals who mated
here in the dark days of the Canyon's shameful past.

The revelation is brief. Just enough to say: this is the least of it, my
friend.

Dig and you will regret what I will show you for the rest of your life.

The show works every time.

Pragmatic though these men are, they feel the cold presence of the
uncanny all around them, and suddenly they want no more of this place.

In their panic they don't even bother to clear the granulated glass off
their leather seats. They just get into their cars and drive away in
clammy haste, leaving their maps and artists' renderings to decay in the
dirt, and their ambitions to rot beside them.

So the Canyon sits in the middle of the sprawling city, inviolate.
Nobody will touch it now. All it has to do is wait; wait for a certain
summons.

There's no telling when it will come.

Perhaps it's a hundred years away, this call. On the other hand, perhaps
it will come tomorrow.

All the Canyon knows is this: that at some point in the future a whisper
will pass through its cracks and its vaults, and with one almighty
heave, the canyons and the hills and the flatlands as far as the shore
will stand up on end, and all the towers and the dams and the dream
palaces that were built here, along with their builders and their
inheritors, will drop away into the deep, dark Pacific.

The land will shake for a year or so, as it lays itself down again.
Tremors will continue to convulse it. But by degrees, things will return
to the way they were in an earlier time. The Santa Anas will blow in
their season, and they'll carry into the Canyon the seeds of the flowers
whose scents they bear, dropping them carelessly in the newly-churned
dirt.

After a few weeks of warm winter rain, the naked ground will be covered
with grass and the shoots of young flowers; even the first spears of
palm trees and bamboo. In the months to come they will flourish,
transforming the land out of all recognition.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect

 corner of the world--never called it paradise on earth, never
despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the
afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies,
and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking
for a place to sup sweetness.


