Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon

Even if that particular stench didn't reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a 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 their 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 exception 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 cobs 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 shattered. Food had been pulled out of the fridge and deep-freeze, both of which stood open-rotted fruit and uncooked steaks scattered around, broken bottles of beer and cartons of spoiled milk. Everything that could be destroyed had been destroyed. The tops of the faucets had been twisted off, and water still gurgled from the open pipes, filling up the clogged sink until it overflowed, soaking the floor.

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

Tammy waded through the filthy water to the second door, and opened it. A scummy tide had proceeded 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 smelt pungent back here; she was reminded of those dark, swampy parts of the Canyon where she'd almost lost her life during her night journey. The swamp had crept closer to the house it seemed; there were mushrooms and fungi growing out of the wall, and the Mexican pavers were slick with green algae underfoot.

"What's wrong?" Maxine wanted to know.

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

"Help me turn him over," Tammy said.

"No thanks," Maxine said. "I'm as close as I need to get."

Undaunted, Tammy went down on her haunches beside the body, pressing her fingers into the damp, sticky groove between the body and the tiles upon which it lay. The corpse was cold. She lifted it up an inch or two, peering down to see if she could get a better glimpse of the dead man. But she couldn't make out his features. She would have to turn the cadaver over. She pushed harder, and hoisted the body onto its side. Rivulets of pale maggots poured from its rot-bloated underbelly. She let it fall all the way over, lolling on the ground.

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