Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon

"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 Jet 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 feelings 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 spoke 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 scarcely think of 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 and over, 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."

SEVEN

On several occasions in the next twelve hours Tammy's resolve almost failed her and she thought about calling and telling Maxine that she wouldn't be coming to Los Angeles after all, but though her courage was weak it didn't go belly up. In fact she arrived at Maxine's office twenty minutes earlier than they'd arranged, catching Maxine in an uncharacteristic state of disarray, her hair uncombed, her face without blush or 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 talk 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, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy's eye: in it Todd was standing along side a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.

"Is that Bette Davis?"

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

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

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

"Clever."

"Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this man's city, where all the studio 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 commitment, 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 any more. 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 unseasonal one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.

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