Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Published:

2009

Rating:

★★★

Tags:

Horror, Fiction, General, Fiction - Horror, Horror - General, Fantasy, Ghost, Hollywood (Los Angeles; Calif.), Barker; Clive - Prose Criticism, English Horror Fiction, Surgery; Plastic, Recluses, Actors
Horrorttt Fictionttt Generalttt Fiction - Horrorttt Horror - Generalttt Fantasyttt Ghostttt Hollywood (Los Angeles; Calif.)ttt Barker; Clive - Prose Criticismttt English Horror Fictionttt Surgery; Plasticttt Reclusesttt Actorsttt

SUMMARY:
Film's most popular action hero needs a place to heal after his surgery has gone terribly wrong. His fiercely loyal agent finds him just such a place in a luxurious forgotten mansion high in the Hollywood Hills. But the original owner of the mansion was a beautiful woman devoted to pleasure at any cost, and the terrible legacy of her deeds has not yet died. There are ghosts and monsters haunting Coldheart Canyon, where nothing is forbidden . . . Clive Barker's Coldheart Canyon showcases the boldly innovative New York Times bestselling master at the very top of his formidable and frightening skills. Clive Barker is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books for adults and children. He is also a widely acclaimed artist, film producer, screenwriter, and director. He lives in Beverly Hills, California.

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 useable 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 sizeable 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 son of a bitch 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 Calin, 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 Dr 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 tenderest 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 amongst 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 lookup 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 their 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 crassest 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.

PART ONE

THE PRICE OF THE HUNT

ONE

"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 women 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?"

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 St. 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 grey 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 of 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 St. Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in 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 Devils 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—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 amongst 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 place: 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 lain 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 rosebud 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 profitful 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 fledging), 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 Lubescu 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 cinematrographic 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 in 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.

TWO

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 blame 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 19 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 was 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 be 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 chilly air 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 slight 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 in fundis 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 Mr. 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 lights 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 towards 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 swathe 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 towards 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 towards 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 right 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 journeyman; 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 neither had 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 recreated 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," Zeffer said, not comprehending the way the room had been treated. "You fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy."

"Who 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 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 who he might show this master-work 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 amongst 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 close 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 him 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 amongst 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, Mr. 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?"

"Mr. 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 as there was down here in the cold; nor prospect of any.

THREE

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) shat 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 day-star.

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 amongst 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 pools 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 enquiry, 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. Lassoes 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 hearth-side; the weasel-kings 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 packed, 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 the 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 tiles 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 amongst 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 they had in the old days.

"Our path is perfectly dear!" 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 past, 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.

FOUR

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. 'This world is Hell. Just look around. What do you see?'”

"I told him what I saw. Fire, smoke, block 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 interrupted me and said: 'Look at him. Look at his face. It's flawless. Look at his body. It's perfect. And there—between his legs—'”

"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 was 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 was 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 St. 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 they 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 it. 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 of 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, perhaps, 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 have once 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.

PART TWO

THE HEART-THROB

ONE

There's a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, 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 our hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time 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 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 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 her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to 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 Gallows. So what do they care if she looks a little out of it? Unlike Ms. Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with souvenir programs for Gallows are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy 'gee-I-must-be-famous!' look. The model looks back vacantly, which is 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 to build 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 gallows 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 theatre 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 8:13pm. 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 why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (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 Cincinnati 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 of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship than that they're good friends.

He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together. Then arm in arm, through the blizzard of rights and the barrage of We love you, Todd coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which—having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night's wind.

Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety-million 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 the savvy, John Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor, is playing his scenes as though he's Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in Denmark. From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose.’

Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very 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 seemed 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: "Mr. Pickett is plenty old enough to know better. Thirty-something-year-olds don't act the way Mr. 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 Mr. 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, beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast smarts of a young Katherine 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 DC 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 of 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 on the screen. All he could remember about the scene that was playing was how damn uncomfortable 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 puke down his own tuxedo. Up came the scotches he'd had in the limo as 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 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 didn't fall down and his outstretched hand knocked over a cardboard cut-out of Tom Cruise, which toppled backwards and hit a cardboard Titanic, which in turn crashed against a cardboard Mighty Joe 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 dean 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 side of the building until he found a patch of street-light where he could assess himself. He was lucky. His suit was unspattered. There was a spot of vomit on his shoes, 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 little 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 goin' to make a quick getaway," Todd said, glancing towards 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 hit. 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 theatre 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 out, 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 importantly, 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 closed 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."

TWO

Todd Picket 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 Mid-Western 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 agents 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, control-ring 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 photographers. Her only concern were 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 battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction of clichés pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movies of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects, and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all ‘round. The studios would be fools not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.

He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost 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 performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course, were 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. He'd always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in 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 club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of 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 illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.

He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He's 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 it, Todd felt a cold 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 low-life. 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 son of a bitch 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 big. Big explosion. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don't care about any of that any more. You need to be part of what's coming up, not what happened 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 believed 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 he's going put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to art, you can make nice with the son of a bitch for an hour."

THREE

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 maybe!

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 the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings, 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 January. That's a hit. And you know what? There's nobody in the picture. Just a couple 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 tranquility. And they take Jews. Actually, I've seen more Jews there than at my 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 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 indifference.

"Perfectly ready, if that's what Todd wants. I'm not going to stand in 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 was 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 and over and over.

"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 of life. At a certain age it's harder to get the lovehandles to melt. You get laugh-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 fold 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 didn't want the decision process muddied by her opinion. This was something he wanted to think through for himself.

Though he didn't remember having heard of Burrows before, he was perfectly aware he was riving in the cosmetic surgery capitol 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. Just about any piece of the anatomy which gave its owner ego problems could be improved, sometimes out of all recognition. Traditionally of course, it had been women who were the eager and grateful recipients of such handiwork, but that had changed. One of the eighties muscle-men, who'd made a fortune parading a body of superhuman proportions some years 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 pectorals—even his sculpted calf muscles-surgically implanted. The healing had taken a little while, given the extensiveness of the remodeling. 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 questions which he hoped would not arouse suspicion. The word came back that the procedures were far from painless. Even legendary tough guys had ended up wishing they'd never invited the doctors to mess with them, the process had been so agonizing. And of course once you began, if you didn't like what you saw you had to let Burrows make some more fixes; 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, playing as it did both into his machismo side and a deep, unexplored vein of masochism.

Besides, was there any pain on God's green earth as agonizing as reading Daily Variety and finding that once again you weren't in its pages? That other actors—names sometimes you'd never heard of—were getting the scripts, the parts and the deals that would once have dropped into your lap as 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 pay-back 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 skills extended no further than knowing where his Winnebago was parked.

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

Well fuck ‘em. He'd knock them off their stolen pedestals, the sons of bitches. He'd have the limelight back in a heartbeat—all that glory, all that love—and they'd be back on the casting couch in a week with their fannies in the air.

So what if it cost him a few weeks of discomfort? It would be worth it just to see the expressions on their pretty little faces when they realized 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.

FOUR

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 morning; he'd got up to go out into the back yard for his morning piss and he'd stumbled, as though one of his legs was numb. Todd went down to 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 was 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'll 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 just before he'd started to shoot Gunner. As a consequence the dog's first real experience of life beyond his mother's teat was being carried around a movie studio by his owner and adored; all of which he thereafter took as his God-given right. Dempsey had been with Todd on every set since; the two were inseparable. Todd and Dempsey; Dempsey and Todd. Thanks to those early experiences of universal affection he was a confident dog; afraid of nobody, and—unless somebody was afraid of him—predisposed to be friendly.

The vet's name was Doctor Spenser; an ebullient black woman who'd been looking after Dempsey since puppyhood. She did a few tests and told Todd that yes, there were definitive signs that Dempsey was having cognitive 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 him 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'll have that analyzed. You want the container back? Just kidding. Don't look 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 antibiotics and he'll be good as new."

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

Dempsey had raised his head, knowing full well he was being talked about, 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 disorientated, 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 pm till six in the morning, but the chances of—"

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

Despite 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 checkup, 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'd recommend going to the twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Sepulveda. 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 irritated with the casual way Dempsey's case was being treated.

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

Dempsey didn't eat. He just looked at the bowl of food Marco had prepared 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 mumblings and eruptions. He switched on the bedroom light to find Dempsey at the bottom of his bed, standing in a pool of bright yellow puke. He looked 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 onto Dempsey, who was wrapped in his favorite comforter, a quilt Todd's grandmother had made for her grandson. The dog lay sprawled over Todd's knee, all one hundred pounds of him, while Marco drove through the almost empty streets to Sepulveda.

It was five minutes after five in the morning when they arrived at the animal hospital, and there were just two people waiting with their pets to be helped. Even so it took twenty-five minutes before a doctor could be freed up to see Dempsey, during which time it seemed to Todd that Dempsey's condition worsened. His shaking became more violent than ever, and in the midst of one of his spasms, he convulsively shat brown gruel, 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 table—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 Mr. 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 over-compensating 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 drip, because he's obviously lost a lot of fluids in the last twelve to twenty-four hours. That should make him feel a whole lot happier. Meanwhile, you said Dr. Spencer 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 brain-stem."

"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, Mr. Pickett..."

"Yes. Yes, give it to him."

The injection did indeed subdue Dempsey's little fit. They wheeled 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 trouble 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 it 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 paycheck 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."

FIVE

Again, there was no news. Dempsey had been hooked up to a saline drip, 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 go home, we'll keep Dempsey here and see what we can do to get him well?"

"I want to stay."

"Well that's going to be very uncomfortable for you, Mr. Pickett. 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 with our hospital in Santa Monica, so she won't even be in to look at Dempsey until eleven at the earliest."

"I still want to stay. You've got a bench out there. You're not going to 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 and the day-doctor, Doctor Otis, will be taking over Dempsey's case. I will of course bring him up to speed with everything we've done so far and if she 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, I sincerely 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 they were engaged in conversation (often tearful, sometimes accusatory, always intense), with one of the nurses; the next they'd gone, or they were on their 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 him, 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 a broken down bench. They had a rat with an abscess, a cat that had had six kittens but had got the seventh stuck, a guinea pig in a shoe box that was dead when the box was opened; a poodle that kept biting itself; a problem with fleas, a problem with mange, two canaries that hated one another, and so on and so forth.

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

He went to the front desk and asked, not for the first time, to see the day-doctor. This time, he got lucky. Doctor Otis, a pale and slight young woman who looked no more than eighteen, and refused to look Todd in the face (though this, he realized was her general practice: she was the same with Marco and with the nurses, eyes constantly averted), appeared and said that there was nothing to report except that Dempsey would be going for x-rays in about half an hour, and they would be available for viewing tomorrow. At this point, Todd lost his temper. It happened rarely, but when it did it was an impressive spectacle. His neck became blotchy-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 waiting here—sitting on that bench—that bench right there, you see it? Do you see that bench?"

"Yes, I—"

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

"It's been a crazy morning, Mr—?"

"Pickett is my name."

"Well, Mr. Pickett, I'm afraid I can't—"

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

At this moment an older woman, obviously the hospital manager, stepped into view and took Todd's hand, shaking it. "Mr. Pickett. My name's Cordelia Simpson. It's all right, Andrea, I'll take care of Mr. 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, Mr. 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 gentler 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 I'll 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 been nursing it while he waited. No wonder people had kept their distance.

"Yes."

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

"Thank you."

Cordelia picked up the quilt. “And my apologies, Mr. Pickett, for any difficulties you may have had. Our doctors are horribly overworked. And, I'm afraid to say, often people who are wonderful with animals aren't always terribly good with human beings."

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

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

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

There was a sudden rally in Dempsey's energies about four o'clock, which was when he was usually fed, so Todd had Marco prepare a sick-bed version of his usual meal, with chicken instead of the chopped horse-flesh or whatever the hell it was in the cans, and some good gravy. Dempsey ate it all, though he had to be held up to do so, since his legs were unreliable. 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 onto 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 France, apparently. Maxine wants to know if you'd like to do a piece about Dempsey's health crisis for one of the woman'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 Dreamworks 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.

"Mr. 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 news 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 he 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 discovered it. These motor and perception problems he's having are all part of the same thing. The tumor's spreading into his skull, and pushing on 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 was 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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...Mr. 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, Mr. 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 lifting 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, die 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 unavailability 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 die 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 eight, painted in what was intended to be a soothing green. On one wall was a Monet reproduction and on another a piece of poetry that Todd couldn't read through his assembling tears.

"I'll just give you two some time," Doctor Otis said. "I'll be back in a 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, probably because he'd heard the sound of Todd crying, which had always 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 the first note of sadness crept into his voice Dempsey would be there, his paws 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 me 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't 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'd been Dempsey—there was nothing.

"I'm very sorry, Mr. 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 him."

Todd sniffed hard, and reached over to pluck a clump of paper handkerchiefs 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, who wrote Treasure Island?"

"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.'"

SIX

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 a healthy sleep thereafter. He kept half-waking, and staring down at the 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 called Rosalie from the Pet Cremation Service. She was pleasant in her no-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 thing; more like a badly bruised lookalike. Things like this didn't happen to the real Todd Pickett. He had a way with life that always made it show the bright side.

He went back to sleep until noon then got up and ate some lunch, his body aching as though he was catching a heavy dose of the flu. His food unfinished he sat in the breakfast nook, staring blankly at the potted plants 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 into Maxine? She's called nine times 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 honour Dempsey and get another dog."

"That wouldn't be honouring 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 me?" 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 and Brad Pitt: 'Tell me, Brad, when your dog died did you wail like a girl for 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 a lot of wash-clothes. I swear she drinks I'm going to give her something."

"Fleas?"

"Yeah. Fleas. You know, as a last act of rebellion on behalf of Dempsey 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 be cured, by being included in the nature of things.

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

"What's going on?"

"Nothing."

"Yes there is."

She was inevitably right; she could predict with startling accuracy the times she needed to call her famous son and the times when she should keep her distance. Sometimes he could lie to her, and get away with it. But 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 this 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. Mutt's 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 is 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 Merrick Pickett known to her son. The rumors had reached Todd, of course. 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 a 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 safe with me.”

“Don't even tell the neighbours.”

“Fine! I won't."

“Bye, Mom."

“I'm sorry about Brewster."

“Dempsey."

“Whatever."

It was true; when Todd gave the subject some serious thought: Merrick Pickett had indeed lost his looks with startling speed. One day he'd been 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 was 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 of piece 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 schoolyard 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 into the palm of his hand. What part of this grey 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 snout and the tail, but a dog's ashes and a man's ashes. All reducible, with the addition of a little flame, to this mottled dust? He put his lips to it, once, to kiss him goodbye. In his head he could hear his mother telling him that it was a gross, unhealthy thing to do, so he kissed them again, just to spite her. Then he stood up and cast Dempsey's ashes around, like a farmer sewing seeds. There was no wind. The ash fell where he threw it, evenly distributed over the mutt's dominion.

"See you, dog," he said, and went back into the house to get himself a large bourbon.

PART THREE

A DARKER TIME

ONE

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 intended 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 the 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 me, Christ, look at me.

To this day, the image of McFarlane's nakedness remained with Todd in 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 hung 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, and he'd discovered that his feelings were shared, especially by the male members of the nursing staff. The female nurses seemed to have more compassion, perhaps; or were simply indifferent to the facts of creeping senility. But the other men on the staff—there were four of them besides Todd—were afterwards constantly remarking on the foulness of their charges. One of the quartet—a black guy from New Orleans called Austin Harper—was particularly eloquent on the subject.

"I ain't endin' up like any o' these ol' fucks," he remarked on more than one occasion, "I'd blow my fuckin' brains out 'fore I'd sink that fuckin' low."

"It won't happen," Todd had said.

"How'd you reckon that, white boy?" Austin had said. He'd patted Todd on his backside; which he took every possible opportunity to do.

"When we're as old as these folks there'll be ways to fix it," Todd 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 what gives us wrinkles, and they'll have a way to smooth them out."

"Will they now? So you's goin' 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, and 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 to 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, looking down at his own nakedness and saying, over and over: 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'. 'And 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."

TWO

"Kiddo?"

Todd was floating in a blind black place, his body untethered. He couldn't even feel it.

"Kiddo? Can you hear me?"

Despite the darkness all around, it was a comfortable place to be in. There were no predators here in this no-man's-land. There were no sharks circling, wanting ten-percent of his flesh. Todd felt pleasantly removed 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 world where once he'd lived and breathed and been unhappy. But he didn't want to go. It was too brittle that place; brittle and bright. He wanted to stay where he was, here in the darkness, floating and floating.

"Kiddo...it's Donnie."

Donnie?

Wait, that couldn't be right. His older brother, Donnie? They hadn't talked in months. Why would he be here, trying to seduce him out of his comfortable hideaway? But then, if not Donnie, then who? Nobody else ever called him Kiddo.

Todd felt a dim murmur of anxiety. Donnie lived in Texas, for God's sake. What was he doing here?

"Talk to me, Kiddo."

Very reluctantly, Todd forced himself to reply to the summons, though when he finally coaxed his lips to shape it the sound he made was as remote 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. Please. 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 backwards from ten. Burrows had been smiling reassuringly at him, and as Todd counted-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."

"I'll 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 consciousness 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 lush darkness didn't seem quite as comforting as it had a few moments before. He started to panic, scrambling to keep hold of the world, at least until he 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 couldn't 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 again. "Just kidding."

"Yeah...yeah..." Todd said. As he spoke a spasm of pain ran from the bridge of his nose and spread across his face in both directions. He was suddenly in excruciating agony. "Jesus," he gasped. "Jesus. Make it stop!"

He felt Donnie's reassuring hand go from his arm; heard his brother crossing to the door again, yelling as he went, his voice suddenly shrill with fear: "Will somebody get in here. Right now! Christ!"

Todd's panic, momentarily soothed by his brother's voice, started to rise up in him again. He raised his hand to his face. The bandages were tight and smooth, like a visor over his head, searing him in. He started to hyperventilate. He was going to die in here, if he didn't get this smothering stuff off his face. He began to claw at the bandages. He needed air. Right now!

Air, for Christ's sake, air—

"Mr. Pickett, don't do that! Please!"

The nurse caught hold of Todd's hands, but the panic and the pain made him strong and she couldn't prevent him from digging his fingers beneath the bandages and pulling.

There were flashes of light in his head, but he knew it wasn't the light of 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 was 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 down. 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 Mr. 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' 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 when you've slept, we'll talk properly."

"No..." Todd said.

"Your brother Don's here with you."

"I'm here, Todd."

"I want to talk now." Todd said, "Not later. Now. Donnie! Make him stay."

"It's okay, Kiddo," Donnie said with just the right edge of threat, "Doctor B.'s not goin' anywhere. Answer his question, Doc."

"Well, first things first," Burrows said. "There's absolutely nothing wrong with your eyes, if that's what you're worried about. We just have 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 go quite as we planned. But every operation is a little different, as you'll 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 about Burrows that had irritated him. One of them was that voice of his: that fake basso profundo that was a practiced attempt to conceal his queeniness, and to match his voice to the heroic proportions of his body. An artificial body, of course. The man was a walking advertisement for his craft. He was fifty-five at least, but he had the skin of a baby, the arms and the chest of a body-builder and the wasp-waist of a showgirl.

"Just tell me the truth," Todd said to him. "Did something go wrong? I'm a big boy. I can take it."

There was a pin-drop silence. Todd waited. Finally, Burrows said: "We had a few minor complications with your procedure, that's all. I've explained it all to your brother Donald. There's nothing—absolutely nothing—for you to be concerned about. It's just going to take a little 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 going 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' 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 Mr. 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 Cedar Sinai."

"I really resent the implication—" Burrows began.

"Will you just shut the fuck 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 step out for a few minutes and let me have a private word with my brother?"

Burrows didn't attempt any further self-justification, and Todd knew why. He could imagine Donnie's expression in perfect detail: both brothers got colour 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 anymore than I trust these sons of 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 your life, but this whole deal is the stupidest idea I ever heard. Getting yourself 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 morning. Linda's tryin' to take away my weekends with Donnie Junior, and if I'm not in court her 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 they fuck!" 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 face-lift."

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 and 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 it costs to live. Houses and taxes." He stopped his defense; took a different track. “Anyhow, I don't hear you complaining—"

"Wait—" Donnie said, knowing what was coming. But Todd wasn't 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 paid your last legal bills, Donnie? And the mortgage on the house so you could start over with Linda, for the third time or fourth time or whatever it was? Who paid for that mistake?"

He let the question hang there, unanswered. Eventually, very quietly, 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 did you? All these years, when have you ever come out here and spent time with me?"

"I was never welcome."

"You were always welcome. You just never came because you were too 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 out 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.

THREE

Maxine turned up a little after seven, and after a few perfunctory expressions of relief that Todd was "back from the dead', as she indelicately put 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 from the editor of the Enquirer this afternoon, asking if it was true that you'd been admitted to a private hospital. I told him absolutely not; this was a lie, garbage etc. etc. And I said that if he published that you were in hospital or anything vaguely resembling that, we'd sue him and his wretched rag. Ten seconds later I've got Peter Bart calling from Variety, asking the same damn question. And while I'm on with Peter, trying not to tell him an out-and-out lie 'cause he has a nose for bullshit, I have a call from People on the other line, asking the same question. Coincidence? I 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 stay here."

"That was before I got the calls. Now it's just a matter of time before some photographer finds his way in here."

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

"That would make a nice little picture, wouldn't it?" Maxine said, just in case Todd hadn't already got a snap-shot in his mind's eye. "You lying in 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 'til 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."

“All 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 me 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 the 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 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 semi-recumbent 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 hum 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 place was gently teased away from his face. It felt as though a layer of his skin was 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 close by him. "Well?" he 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 ointments 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?"

"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, cleaning his gummed lashes. The stink of cleaning fluid was sharp in his nostrils, his sinuses ran, and his eyes, when he finally opened them, were awash.

"Welcome back," Maxine said, unknitting her fingers from his, as though a little embarrassed by the intimacy. It took a couple of minutes for Todd's sight to clear, and another two for his eyes to become accustomed to the dimmed light in the room. But part by part, face by face, the world came back to him. The large, half-blinded window, and the rain-lashed deck beyond it. The expensive ease of the room; the Indian rug, the leather furniture, the Calder mobile, in yellow, red and black, which hung below the sky-light. Burrows' knitted brow, and fixed, nervous smile. The nurse, a pretty blonde woman. And finally Maxine, her face ashen. Burrows moved away, like a portrait painter stepping back from a canvas 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 puffy, 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 lay his hand against the cold glass and began to weep.

FOUR

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 man 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 to him. In fact, it had become second-nature to him over the years to put all other considerations out of sight: to care only about Todd Pickett, and (on occasion) Dempsey Not to have done so would have meant a diminution of his power in the world. After all, he'd been playing a game which only the truly self-obsessed had a chance of victory. All others were bound to fall by the wayside. Now, when it would have been healthier to direct his attention elsewhere, he'd simply lost the knack. And he had no dog by 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, as she had now dubbed it, with some good news. The house in the hills was 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'd want to use. I'll have Marco choose some furniture from the Bel Air house and move it over. Get you comfortable. But really it's ideal for what we need right now. By the way, Ms. Bosch has been calling my office. She got quite pushy with Sawyer. She's absolutely certain you're in Hawaii screwing 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 door-handles, 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."

FIVE

Jerry Brahms had been a child-actor in the late thirties, but his career hadn't lasted into puberty. He'd been at his 'most picturesque', as he like to put it, at the age of nine or ten, after which it had all been downhill. Todd had always thought of Brahms as being slightly ridiculous: with his overly-coifed silver hair, his mock-English diction, and his unforgiving bitchiness about the profession to which he'd once aspired.

But Jerry knew his Hollywood, there was no doubt of that. He lived and breathed the place: its scandals, its triumphs. He was most informed about the Golden Age of Tinseltown, which coincided, naturally enough, with the years of his employment. In matters relating to this period his knowledge was encyclopedic, as he'd proved three years before, when Todd had been looking for a new house. Jerry had volunteered his services as a location scout, and after a week or two had taken Todd and Maxine on a grand tour of properties he thought might be suitable. Todd had not wanted to go; he found Jerry's chatter grating. But Maxine had insisted. "He'll be heartbroken if you don't go," she'd said, "You know 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. Jerry had organized the tour as though he was entertaining royalty (which perhaps, as far as he was concerned, he was). He'd hired a stretch, supplied a champagne-and-caviar hamper from Greenblatt's in case they 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 in 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 Valentino 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 Coleman, Hearst's widow, 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. It didn't matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether 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 the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which left Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu House, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the pain-killers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny's specials—not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn't be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he'd heard of people who'd had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon's knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he'd done something completely irreversible. But there was no use in regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrow's insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he'd have his face 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 all.

In the early evening Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him 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, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again."

"Weird," Todd said.

"There are no street signs up there."

"No?"

"There aren't many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbours. 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.

SIX

"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 said he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all."

Maxine hadn't taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining so hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house appeared much larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of the term ‘dream 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 higher than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillea grew everywhere in lunatic abundance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble ferns, planted in 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, the roof a washed-out red. There was a great deal of elaborate tilework at the front steps, and around the windows, the tiles themselves still bright blue 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 keep 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 l'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 canyon 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 needed to get out of the Bel Air house for a while until the police had 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—"

"We've had this conversation once—"

"Hear me out, will you? If we make him feel like he's part of the conspiracy, he'll stay quiet, just because he wants to please you. He'll only get 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."

"I sent Marco out to get some supplies."

"But 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 any more."

“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 fox-gloves, 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 B de Mille 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 have seen sparkling blue water in the pool instead of the few inches of bottle green rain-water that were there at the bottom.

He turned and looked back towards 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 one of the guest-house that Maxine had mentioned. Altogether, it really was an impressive parcel of land, with or without the buildings. Had Jerry shown it to him as part of the grand tour Todd might well have been tempted to invest. The fact that Jerry hadn't done so probably meant that it had not belonged to anyone of significance, though that seemed odd. This wasn't just any Hollywood show-place: it was the crème de la crème, a glorious confection of a residence designed to show off all the wealth, power and taste of a great star.

By the time he'd made his way back inside, Marco had turned up from Greenblatt's with a carload of supplies. He welcomed his boss with his 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 plainly still mildly irritated by their earlier exchange, though for Todd it was past history, soothed away by his wanderings in the wilderness.

"I never really felt comfortable in Bel Air," he said. "That house has 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 into his glass. "Dempsey would have liked it," he said.

SEVEN

On Thursday, 18th of March, Maxine got a call that she knew was coming. The caller was a woman called Tammy Lauper, who ran the International Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, which despite its high falutin' 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 club. 'I'm not an 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 flow 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 was like a terrier with a rat. Every time Maxine thought she'd satisfied the woman's curiosity, back she'd come with another enquiry.

"Something's wrong," she kept saying. "Todd's not been seen by anyone. Usually when he goes away, members of the Society spot him, and 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 to maintain her equilibrium. "Todd's tired and he needs a break, so he went 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, "I had six reports of sightings." (This was a reference to the event which had caused Maxine more publicity problems than any other in Todd's life: his short-lived marriage to the exquisitely emaciated model Avril Fox, which had been strewn with potentially image-besmirching scenes: adulteries, a couple of ménage-à-trois involving Avril's sister, Lucy, and a spot of domestic violence).

"Sometimes," Maxine said, a trace of condescension creeping into her 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's nothing wrong with him..."

Maxine hesitated, wondering how best to calm the suspicions she was clearly arousing. She couldn't just make an excuse and jump off the phone; 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 was 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 herself a little before she ended up saying something she regretted. "Look, Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd's privacy, as I'm sure you understand. He needs a little time away from the pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when he's finished I'm sure you'll be one of the first to hear about it. Now really, I've 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 it called?"

Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the hell not give the damn woman a title? She'd lied herself into a hole as it was, one more shovelful wouldn't hurt. She pictured Todd in an image now indelibly inscribed in her mind's eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to start cutting 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 this whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. "Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I."

Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento, in a one-story ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramento International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years as a baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this side of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm count. Tammy didn't mind much. Just because God had given her breasts the size of watermelons didn't mean she was born for motherhood. And of course the absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all the 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 an Appreciation 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 he 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 had once boasted, they need look no further than her front room. Once, she'd attempted to enumerate the items she owned. It was something in the region of seventeen thousand three hundred, not including those pieces of which she had more than one copy.

It was to this shrine that Tammy had come after her frustrating exchange with Maxine Frizelle. She closed and locked the door (though Arnie would not be back from work and his after-hours carousing for several hours), and sat down to think. After a few minutes, turning over the conversation she'd just had, she went to the very back of the room, and took from its place amongst the treasure-trove a box of photographs. These were her special pride and joy: pictures of Todd (fourteen of them in all) which she'd managed to buy from somebody who'd known the still photographer on Todd's fourth picture, Life Lessons. This was Todd's coming-of-age picture: the one in which he'd changed from being a Boy to being a Man. Of course, his smile would always be a boy's smile, that was part of its magic, but after Life Lessons he went on to play tougher roles: a homecoming soldier, a firelighter, a man wrongfully accused of his own wife's murder. Here then, caught in the moment before his cinematic adulthood, was the boy-man of Tammy's dreams. She had even purchased the negatives from which the series of pictures had been printed, and along with them the assurance from the person she'd got them from that they had been 'lost' in the production offices before they were ever seen by the director, the producer or by Todd himself. In short, she had the only copies.

Their rarity wasn't the reason she valued them so highly however. What made them her special treasure—the quality that made her return to them over and over, when Arnie was out at work, and she knew she had time for reverie—was the fact that the photographer had caught his subject unawares. Well, shirtless and unawares. Todd was sleek and pale, his body not heavy at all, not all muscle and veins popping out, just a nice, ordinary body; the body of the boy next door if the boy next door happened to be perfect. She had never seen a body she thought so beautiful. Then there was his face. Oh that face! She'd seen literally thousands of photographs of Todd in the last eleven years—and to her adoring eyes he was 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 have 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 Sherry Lansing's assistant, were there any meetings on the books, either with Todd or any of his production team. It was all very strange, and it made Tammy afraid for her man. Suppose they were covering something up? Suppose there'd been an accident, or an assault, and Todd had been hurt? Suppose he was in a hospital bed somewhere on life-support, his life slipping away, while all the sons of bitches who'd made fortunes off his talent were lying to themselves and anyone who'd listen, pretending it was going to be okay? Things like that happened all the time; especially in Hollywood. Everyone lied there; it was a way of life.

Her thoughts circled on these terrible images for an hour or more, while she sat amongst her treasures. At last, she came to a momentous decision. She could do nothing to solve this mystery sitting here in Sacramento. She needed to go out to California, and confront some of these people. It was easy to tell somebody a lie on the telephone. It was harder to do when you were face to face with someone; when you were looking into their eyes.

She took one last look through the sequence of photographs, lingering on the last of the fourteen, the one in which Todd's gaze was closest to making contact with the camera. Another shot, and he would have been looking directly at her. Their eyes, as it were, would have met. She smiled at him, kissed his picture, then put the photographs away, tucked the box out of sight and went through to the kitchen to call Arnie at the airport, and tell him what she planned to do. He was in the middle of his shift, and couldn't come to the phone. She left a message for him to call her; then she made a reservation on Southwest for the flight to Los Angeles, and booked a room in a little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which she'd stayed in once before when she'd come into LA for a Todd Pickett convention.

The flight was scheduled at 3:10 that afternoon, and was to get into Los Angeles at 4:15, but the departure was delayed for almost two hours, and then they circled over LAX for almost three quarters of an hour before they could land, so it wasn't until half-past seven that she stepped out of the airport into the warm, sweet-smog air of her beloved's city.

She didn't know what she was going to do, now she was here; how or where she was going to begin. But at least she wasn't sitting at home brooding. She was closer to him, here, whatever Maxine Frizelle had said about him being off in some faraway place. That was a lie; Tammy knew it in her bones. He was here. And if he was any 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.

EIGHT

Todd and Marco had settled into life at the Hideaway in the Canyon quite easily. Todd occupied the enormous master bedroom which had (as Maxine had boasted) an extraordinary view down the canyon. On clear days, of which there were many in that early March, Todd could sit at his window and watch the ocean, glittering beyond the towers of Century City. On exceptional days, he could even make out the misty shape of Catalina Island.

Marco had taken a much smaller bedroom on the floor below, with an adjacent silting room, and did much as he had in the Bel Air home: that is, served with uncanny prescience the needs of his boss, and having provided such services as were required, then retreated into near-invisibility.

The area was much quieter than Bel Air. There seemed to be no through traffic on the single road that wound up through the Canyon, so apart from the occasional sound of a police helicopter passing over, or a siren drifting up from Sunset, Todd heard nothing from the city that lay such a short distance below. What he did hear, at night, were coyotes, who seemed to haunt the slopes of the canyon in significant numbers. On some nights, standing on one of the many balconies of his new mansion nursing a drink and a cigarette, he would hear a lone animal begin its urgent yapping on the opposite slope of the canyon, only to hear its call answered from another spot, then another, the din rising into a whooping chorus from the darkness all around him, so that it seemed the entire canyon was alive with them. They'd had coyotes up in Bel Air too, of course. Their proximity to the house would always send Dempsey into a 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 the top of the hill, to see what the view was like when you got to the end of the road.

Burrows and Nurse Karyn came every other day to change the dressings and assess the condition of his face. Though Burrows claimed that the healing process was going well, Burrows claimed, his manner remained subdued and cautious: it was clear that the whole sorry business had taken a toll upon his confidence. His sun-bed tan could not conceal a certain sickliness in his pallor; and the skin around his eyes and mouth, taut from a series of tucks and tightenings, had an unnatural rigidity to it, like a teak mask under which another, more fragile man, was trapped. Superficially, he remained unfailingly optimistic about Todd's prognosis; he was certain there would be no permanent scarring. Indeed he was even willing to chance the opinion that things were going to work out 'as planned', and that Todd was 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 a 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 in?" he asked. "The doctor's not been reading the trash in his waiting-room recently."

Marco left the room and reappeared with five magazines, dropping them on the table beside Burrows. The top one had a blurred, black and white photograph of a burial procession, obviously taken with an extremely long-distance lens. The headline read: Superstar Todd Pickett Buried in Secret Ceremony. The magazine beneath had an unsmiling picture of Todd's ex-girlfriend, Wilhemina Bosch, and announced, as though from her grieving lips: "I never even had a chance to tell him good-bye." And underneath, a third magazine boasted that it contained Todd Pickett's Last Words. "I saw Christ standing at his death-bed, claims nurse." Burrows didn't 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 what?" 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."

NINE

Tammy knew only a very few people in Los Angeles, all of them members of the Appreciation Society, but she decided not to alert anybody to the fact that she'd come into town. They'd all want to help her with her investigations, and this was something she preferred to do alone, at least at the outset.

She checked herself into the little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, within a few hundred yards of the Westwood Memorial Park, where a host of stars and almost-stars were buried or interred. She'd made her rounds of the famous who rested there on her last visit. Donna Reed and Natalie Wood were amongst them, so was Darryl F. Zanuck and Oscar Levant. But the Park's real claim to fame—the presence that brought sightseers from all over the world—was Marilyn Monroe, who was laid to rest in a bland concrete crypt distinguished only by the number of floral tributes it attracted. The crypt beside it was still empty, kept—so it was said—for the mortal remains of Hugh Heffner.

Tammy had not much enjoyed her visit to the Park. In fact it had depressed her a little. She certainly had no intention of going back this time. It was the living she was concerned with on this visit, not the dead.

When she was settled in she called Arnie, gave him her room number in case of emergency, and told him she'd be back in a couple of days at most. She heard him pop a can of beer while she was talking—not, to judge by his slightly slurred speech, his first of the night. He'd be fine 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 enquiry 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 ensuite 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. Of course, 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 upcoming 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 Lost Rites, 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 him 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 only gone to that because Tom Hanks was in it, and he seemed such a likable man. She skimmed the articles rather than reading them, hoping maybe there'd be some reassuring mention of Todd. But there was nothing.

Breakfast finished, she walked back to the hotel, left a message for Arnie at the airport, just to say all was fine, and then picked up a map at the front desk in case her sense of direction failed her. Thus prepared, she set off for Todd's home.

It took twenty-five minutes driving through the heavy morning traffic to get up into the narrow, winding streets of Bel Air. There wasn't much to see; most of the mansions were hidden behind high walls, bristling with spikes and video cameras. But there was no doubting the fact that she was in a very select neighborhood. The cars parked on the narrow thoroughfares were all expensive (in one spot she maneuvered past a coffee-and-cream Rolls Royce on the left and a red Porsche on the right). On another street she encountered some glamorously-hooded superstar out running, a black limo following close behind, presumably carrying the bottled water and the granola bars.

What must it be like, she wondered as she drove, to be so pampered and cosseted? To know that if there was no toilet paper in the house, no ice cream in the freezer, then it was somebody else's damn job to go and get it. Never to have to worry about taxes or mortgage payments. Never to wake up at three in the morning and think: Who am I? I'm nobody. If I died tomorrow nobody would ready notice, nobody would really care.

Of course she knew there were plenty of responsibilities that came along with all this wealth and comfort. And they took their toll on some folks: it drove them to drink and drugs and adultery. It was hard to be idolized and scrutinized. But she'd never had much sympathy for the complainers. So, people paid you millions to see you smile, and it made you feel inadequate. Tough shit.

She found Todd's house readily enough. There was no number, but she 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 towards the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as any two hundred and three-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 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 halfhearted 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 under these dubious circumstances.

Before he could look up and see her she backed off into the thicket of blackberry bushes that grew unchecked on the other side of the street. She kept her eyes on him at all times; he was too busy with his present labors to notice her, thank God; and now, hidden in the bushes, she had the perfect vantage point from which to observe him as he went back and forth between the house and the car. He was loading his vehicle up with an odd assortment of things: including several awards she knew belonged to Todd. He was also removing some other items: a variety of fancy ornaments, a marijuana plant in a pot, some framed photographs. All this, plus nine or ten sealed cardboard boxes, carefully placed in the trunk or on the back seat of his car. There was no sign of Todd through the process; nor did she hear any exchange from inside the house. If Todd was here, he was not engaged in conversation with Marco. But her instincts told her he was not here.

For fully a quarter of an hour she watched him work and finally—putting all the evidence together—she came to the conclusion that she was witnessing an act of theft. Of course, her dislike of the thief factored into her assessment, but there was no doubt that Caputo looked furtive as he went about his labors. Every now and then he'd glance up as if he was afraid he was being watched (perhaps he sensed that he was); and when he did she saw that his face was ill-shaven, and his eyes heavy. Sleep wasn't coming too easily of late.

She had already decided what she was going to do well before he'd finished with his felony. She'd follow him when he departed and find out where he was dropping off all his booty. Then she'd call the police and have him arrested. Hopefully that would improve Maxine's low opinion of her. She might even find herself trusted enough to be invited into the charmed circle around Todd. Well, perhaps that was a little too much to hope for. 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, and headed back to the house, presumably to lock up. Once he'd gone Tammy disentangled herself from the blackberry bushes and hurried back to her own car. It was getting warm. She felt sweat running from beneath her 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 branches to form a leafy vault overhead. In one spot, where a number of tall palm trees grew close to the road, fallen fronds lay in a brittle carpet on the pot-holed tarmac.

She began to get just a little anxious. Although she reassured herself that she was just a couple of minutes' drive away from Sunset, this felt like a very different world; a backwater, where who knew what went on? That very fact, of course, supported her shadier suspicions. This was a perfect place for an illegal transaction: there didn't appear to be anybody here to witness Caputo's dealing. Except, of course, herself.

The black Lexus had been out of sight for quite a while when, as she turned a corner, she came upon it parked so badly that she might have ploughed into the back of it had she not acted quickly to avert the collision. She swung wide of it, glancing back to see Caputo manually opening a pair of immense gates. The thief started to look round at her, but she put her foot on the accelerator and was out of sight before he could fix his 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 conspicuous retreat past the gates, so that he was certain she'd gone; or to hope that the urgency of his mission would make him careless about her 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 turn 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 hush 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 in the middle of a city. But here the only sound was the music of birds, and insects in the grass. She was careful not to slam the door. Leaving the key in the car, and the door just slightly ajar in case she needed to make a fast getaway, she headed back down the street to the gate.

There were no cameras mounted along the perimeter this time, which surprised her; but then perhaps she was walking into a nest of infamous felons, and everyone in the vicinity knew to keep their distance. If so—if the people Marco was doing business with were real villains—then she was in trouble. She was alone up here; and nobody knew where she'd 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 and over): the image of her idol, appearing before her, and her with so much to say she wouldn't know where to begin.

TEN

She scanned the area around the gates (the bars of which were exquisitely interwoven with both wrought iron vines and the living variety), in search of the inevitable security cameras, but to her surprise found none. They were either extremely well concealed, or else the owners of this house were so certain that their Canyon was safe from visitors that they didn't feel the need of them. More surprisingly still, the gates had no locks; she was able to push one of them open wide enough for her to slip through.

She could see some of the house from where she stood, though it was mostly hidden by the great riot of shrubs and trees that lined the curving driveway. Caputo's car was parked close to the front door. The trunk was open, and he was now unloading his loot. She wished she'd brought a camera; then she could have simply photographed him in the middle of his illicit transaction, and left with her evidence. But as it was, she felt obliged to get a little closer, and find out who he was dealing with. If she didn't have some further evidence, it was going to end up being his word against hers; and she, after all, was the trespasser here. Her accusations weren't going to carry much weight unless she could be very specific about what she had witnessed.

She waited until Caputo had gone into the house, and then crept towards the front door, covering perhaps half the distance between door and gate before the thief strode out of the house again, and returned to the car. She ducked for cover behind a Bird of Paradise, its sickly sap gummy beneath her heels. From there she watched while Caputo hauled 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 his 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 any noise she might make.

"You're so fucking clumsy."

"Some of the stuff slipped off the back seat, that's all. No big deal. It 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 there. Tammy watched while Caputo stood on the step, staring into the house, muttering something under his breath. Whatever it was, it wasn't for Todd's ears; he was just quietly letting off steam. He leaned on the car, lit a cigarette and soothed himself with a smoke.

Tammy didn't dare move. Even though Caputo wasn't looking directly at her, there was a better than even chance that he'd catch sight of her if she broke cover. All she could do was stay where she was, her mind filled with feverish explanations for what she'd just seen.

Obviously something horrible had happened to Todd, but what? Her first thought was that one of his ex-girlfriends had tried to harm him (he'd always had poor judgment when it came to women). Either that or there'd been some kind of accident (was that what his remark about "too many accidents" had meant?). Whatever it was, he was in terrible pain, or else why would he be acting the way he just had? Her heart went out to him. And to be stuck up here in this God-forsaken place with only that cretin Caputo for company: it would drive anybody crazy.

Finally, Caputo dropped his cigarette, ground it out, and went back to his work. Tammy waited until he'd disappeared inside the house and stepped out of her hiding place. What now? Back to the gate, up the street to her car, and away? Clearly that was the most sensible thing to do. But that would mean leaving without finding what was wrong with her poor Todd. She couldn't do that. It was as simple as that. She couldn't do it. She was going to have to find a way into the house, and then discover some 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 only be 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 peel those stifling bandages off his face. She didn't care what he looked like underneath; it was still her Todd, wasn't it? Still the man she idolized. For once the fact that her breasts were too big would be a Godsend. They'd be a comfortable place for him to lay his hurt head. She could rock him and keep him there, safe and sound.

From the corner of her eye, she saw something move in the foliage. The blissful imaginings fled. Very slowly, she looked towards the shrubs where she'd seen the motion. The sun was bright, the shadows dark and solid. The leaves shook in the light breeze. Was that what she'd seen? The leaves shaking? Apparently so, for there was nothing else visible.

She returned her gaze to the house, looking for the best way for her to get in. There were no open windows on the garden level—at least none that she could see—and the doors all looked to be securely locked. She pushed her way through a line of shrubs so as to see if the house was any more vulnerable elsewhere, but the foliage grew thicker around her as she proceeded, and then she somehow managed to become disorientated, because when she turned back to try another way she found that she'd lost sight of both the lawn and the house. She felt like Alice, suddenly shrinking away; the flowers around her were huge, like sunflowers, only purple and scarlet, and the scent they gave off was achingly sweet. They grew so tall, however, and in such preternatural numbers, that she could not see the house at all—not a chimney pot, not a balcony. Her only hope was to make a guess at the direction in which the house lay, which she did, plunging on through the enormous blooms. But her guesswork was hopelessly amiss. The shrubbery simply thickened, the sunflowers giving way to bushes whose branches carried bell-shaped yellow blossoms, almost the size of her head. She couldn't yell for help, of course; that would bring Caputo running. She had no choice but to head on in the same hopeless fashion, until at last the thicket cleared somewhat, and she had sight of the sky again.

Emerging from the shrubbery she was instantly on her guard, in case she'd come to a place where she could be spotted. But she needn't have 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 their hiding place. There was more than one creature in the vicinity, she guessed; it was 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 her into a place where the shrubbery cleared a little, presenting her with a most unexpected sight. There were perhaps seven or eight cages, arranged on either side of a wide, flagged walkway. They varied in size. The largest might have housed two horses and left some room for maneuver, the smallest was perhaps half that size. Vines had wrapped themselves around the bars and fell here and there, in tattered green curtains, as though to conceal what lay inside the cages. In fact, there was nothing to conceal. The occupants of this menagerie had long since disappeared.

She moved down the walkway cautiously, increasingly certain that her stalkers were matching her motion step by step on the other side of the cages. Some of the cages had high wooden bars, which suggested they'd housed small monkeys. Others were built more robustly, their bars twice or three times the thickness. What kind of animal had been held in a cage like this? It was too small to comfortably accommodate a rhinoceros, or even a bear or tiger. And in a day rife with unanswered questions, here was another one: what had happened to the occupants of this tawdry private zoo? Was there a graveyard somewhere in the thicket where the animals had been laid to rest? Or had their owner set them free to roam the Canyon?

She was almost at the end of the walkway now. The final cage on her right was in a much better state than the others. Foliage had been interwoven with the bars so cunningly that there was practically nothing of the interior visible. Its gate, which was similarly covered, stood a little ajar. Tammy peered in. The air inside smelled of some subtle perfume, its source the candles which were set in a little cluster at the far end of the cage. There was a small cot set against the wall to her right, somewhat incongruously made up with two oversized red silk pillows and a dirty yellow comforter. There was a chair and a tiny table on the other side of the cage, and on the table paper and pen. Beside the cot there was an upended wooden box, which also functioned as a table. Books were piled high upon it. But her attention didn't linger on the books. It was drawn to the cluster of candles at the far end of the cage. There was a kind of altar there, roughly made; set on a few pieces of wood raised up on rocks. In the middle of the altar was what Tammy first thought was a piece of sculpture, representing the face of a beautiful young woman. When she got 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 been—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 towards 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. One of them fell irregularly upon his face, catching both his eyes, and part of 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 illuminated them, gray, cold and weary, his hair, what was left of it, grown out to shoulder length and quite white. He was gaunt, but the lack of flesh on his skull flattered him; he looked, she thought, like a saint in her grandmother's old Bible, which had been illustrated with pictures by the 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. Then, with a kind of old-fashioned style, he flicked open his lighter, lit the cigarette 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 the cigarette again. The tobacco smelled more pungent than any cigarette 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. The cigarette smoke was blue as it rose through the slivers of sun. "So you're with Mr. 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 gaze, though insistent, oddly polite. "What are you to our Mr. Pickett?" he 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 the need to be honest with this sad, grey 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 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 dear 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 movies this woman had been in.

"Was she very famous?"

"Very. She's up there with Pickford and Swanson and Theda Bara. Or she was."

"She's dead?"

"No, no. Just forgotten. At least that's my impression. I don't get out into the world any more, but I sense that the name Katya Lupi doesn't mean very much."

"You'd be right."

"Well, she's lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon."

"Coldheart?"

"That's what they called the place. She was such a heart-breaker, you see. She took so many lovers—especially in the early years—and when she 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 to 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 who loved her took her rejection badly. Three committed suicide with bullets. A number of others with alcohol. Some of them stayed here, where they could be close to her. Including me. It's foolish really, because there's no way back into her affection."

"Why would you want to be...back, I mean?" Tammy said. "She must be very old by now."

"Oh time hasn't staled her infinite variety, as the Bard has it. She's still beautiful."

Tammy didn't want to challenge the man, given that he was plainly besotted with this Lupi woman, but the idol of his heart must be approaching a hundred years of age by now. It was hard to imagine how 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 out of the cage onto the walkway. It was so quiet she could hear her stomach 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 hid, 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 a little zoo here. A white tiger from India, though he didn't live very long. Later, there was a rhinoceros. That also perished."

"Wasn't that cruel? Keeping them here, I mean? The cages look so small."

"Yes, of course it was cruel. She's a cruel woman, and I was cruel for doing her bidding. I have no doubt of that. I was probably unspeakably cruel, in my casual way. But it takes the experience of living like an animal—" he glanced back at the cage "—to realize the misery they must have suffered."

Tammy watched him scrutinizing the shrubbery on the far side of the cages.

"What's out there?" she said. "Is it animals that—"

"Come here," Zeffer said, his voice suddenly dropping to an urgent whisper. "Quickly."

Though she still saw nothing in the shrubbery, she did as she was told.

As she did so there was a blast of icy air down the narrow channel between the cages, and she saw several forms—human forms, but distorted, as though they were in a wind-tunnel, their mouths blown into a dark circle lined with needle teeth, their eyes squeezed into dots—come racing towards her.

"Don't you dare!" she heard Zeffer yell at her side, and saw him raise his stick. If he landed a blow she didn't see it. The breath was knocked from her as two of her attackers threw themselves upon her.

One of them put a hand over her face. A spasm of energy passed through her bone and brain, erupting behind her eyes. It was more than her mind could take. She saw a white light, like the light that floods a cinema screen when the film breaks.

The cold went away in the same instant: sounds and sights and all the feelings they composed, gone.

The last thing she heard, dying away, was Willem Zeffer's voice yelling: "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.

PART FOUR

LIVE AFTER FAME

ONE

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 curtsey 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 one 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 into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the shrill laughter, the sweaty glances. Then, once everyone was inside, the circus itself. The lame jokes, the gushing speeches, the tears, the ego. There was always a minute or two of choreographed mawkishness, when the Academy carted out some antiquated star and gave them a last chance to flicker. Occasionally, when the taste level plummeted further than usual, the Academy chose some poor soul who'd already been stricken by a stroke or was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. There'd be a selection of clips from the poor victim's great pictures, then, fumbling and bewildered, he or she would be led out to stand alone on the stage while the audience rose to applaud them, and you could see in their eyes that this was some kind of Hell: to have their finest moments thrown up on a screen—their faces strong and shining—and then have the spotlight show the world what age and disease 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 bedroom window tonight, staring down the length of the Canyon towards the city, feeling so damn sorry for himself? Why had he started drinking, and drinking hard, at noon, and by two-thirty—when he knew the first limousines were beginning to roll up to the Pavilion—was he in the depths of despair?

Why, he asked himself, would he want to keep company with those hollow, sour people? He'd fought the battle to get to the top of the Hollywood Hill long ago, and he'd won it. He'd had his face plastered up on ten thousand billboards across America, across the world. He'd been called the Handsomest Man in the World, and believed it. He'd walked into rooms the size of football fields and known that every eye was turned in his direction, and every heart beat a little faster because he'd appeared. Just how much more adulation did a man need?

The truth?

Another hundred rooms, filled with people stupefied by worship would not be enough to satisfy the hunger in him; nor another hundred hundred. He needed his face plastered on every wall he passed, his movies lauded to 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 for 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 towards 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 towards 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 binge 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 unpacked. But that was all.

He was about to go back to the kitchen, assuming the voice he'd heard alcohol-induced, when he heard his name called a second time. He looked back into the dining room. Was he going crazy? "Marco?" he yelled.

There was a long empty moment. Somewhere in the darkness of the Canyon a solitary coyote was yelping. Then came the sound of a door 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 with 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. But I heard somebody. I swear."

Marco, who'd emerged from his bedroom in his boxers, headed back upstairs to get dressed. Todd went back to the kitchen, feeling a little stupid. There wasn't going to be anybody here, inside the house or out. Every stalker, every voyeur, every obsessive was canvassing the crowds around the Pavilion, looking for a way to slide past the security guards, under the velvet rope, and into the company of their idols. They weren't wasting their time stumbling around in the darkness hoping for a glance of Todd Pickett, all fucked up. Nobody even knew he was here, for Christ's sake. Worse; nobody cared.

As he returned to the business of making his drink, he heard Marco coming down back the stairs, and was half tempted to tell him to forget it. But he decided against it. No harm in letting one of them feel useful tonight. He dropped a handful of ice-cubes into his glass, and filled it up with Scotch. Took a mouthful. Topped it up. Took another mouthful—And the voice came again.

If there had been some doubt in his head as to whether he'd actually heard the call or simply imagined it, there was now none. Somebody was here in the house, calling to him.

It seemed to be coming from the other side of the hallway. He set his drink down on the counter and quietly crossed the kitchen. The turret was 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 on the other end of the room. But he still couldn't make out a figure; the darkness beyond the pool of light was too impenetrable.

"Why don't you step out where I can see you?" he said 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 one of gentle amusement. It would have annoyed Todd if there hadn't also been a certain sweetness there. He was curious to see what she looked like. But the more he pressed her, he thought, the more she'd resist. So he kept the conversation off the subject, and casually wandered across the immaculately 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 was a 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 you, did he?"

"No."

"You see. Oh yes, and he's dying. I suppose he didn't mention that either."

"No he didn't."

"Well he is. He has cancer. Inoperable."

"He never said a thing," Todd said, thinking not only of Jerry but of 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, only 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 the time."

"You have? Where?"

"Oh, I mostly stay in the guest-house."

She spoke so confidently, he almost believed her. But then surely if she were 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 now 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 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 brightness was enhanced by the darkness of her eyeshadow, and the thickness of her lashes. Neither her nose nor her mouth were delicate; her lips were full, her chin robust, her cheekbones high; almost Slavic. Her hair was black, and fell straight down, framing her face. She wore plenty of jewelry, and it was all exquisite. One necklace lay tightly in the valley of her throat, another—much, much looser—fell between her breasts. Her earrings were gold; her bracelets—several on each wrist—all elaborately wrought. Yet she carried all this effortlessly, as though she'd been wearing a queen's ransom in jewelry all her life.

"I'm sure you could find plenty of company besides me," Todd replied.

"I'm sure I could," she replied. "But I don't want plenty of company. I want you."

Todd was totally bewildered now. No part of this puzzle fitted with any other. The woman looked so poised, so exquisite, but she spoke nonsense. She didn't know him. She hadn't chosen him. He'd come up here of his own free will, to hide himself away. Yet she seemed to insinuate that he was here at her behest, and that somehow she intended to make him stay. It was all pure invention.

Still she didn't look crazy; anything but. She looked, in fact, as though she'd just stepped out of her limo at the Pavilion and was about to walk down the red carpet to a roar of adulation from the crowd. He wouldn't have minded being beside her, either, if she had been taking that walk. 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 some of 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 people spying on me."

"I wasn't spying," she said, her tone going from pleasing to fierce in a heartbeat.

"Well what would you call it?"

"I'd call it being a good hostess. Making sure your guest is comfortable.

"I don't understand."

"No," she said, more softly now, "you 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."

“All 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. "I'll 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 exactly 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 I'm just being me, I guess."

"That's a performance," Katya said. "People think it's easy. But it's not. Being yourself...that's hard."

It was strange to hear it put that way, but she was right. It wasn't easy, playing yourself. If you let your attention drop for a moment, there was nothing there for the camera to look at. Nothing behind the eyes. He'd seen it, in his own performances and in those of others: moments when the concentration lapsed for a few seconds and the unforgiving lens 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're all ignoramuses at the Academy, voting for their friends. What do you want from them? But you're not really convinced. In your heart you want their worthless little statues. You want them to tell you they know how much you work to be perfect."

He was astonished at this. She had articulated what he'd felt on a decade of Oscar Nights; an absurd mixture of contempt and envy. It was as though she was reading his mind. "How did you figure all that out?"

"Because I've felt the same things. You want them to love you, but you 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-Mr.-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 with this. I mean, why couldn't I be happy the way I was?"

"Because nobody is. We're always looking for something we haven't got. If we weren't, we wouldn't be human."

"Is that why you came spying on me?" he said, matching her mischief 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 as much right to your privacy as I have to mine. And it's hard to protect yourself sometimes. You don't know who's a friend and who's not. That can make you crazy." Her eyes flashed, and the playfulness was back. "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 intimate experience."

"Care to give me an example?"

"You don't want to know. Really you don't. Some of the things I've done in this very room..."

"Tell me."

"I wouldn't know where to begin."

Her gaze flitted off around the room, as though she was looking for some cue for her memories. If it was an act, it was a very good one. In fact 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 of a slut." She was smiling as she spoke, lapping up his disbelief. She began to walk towards 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 was 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 amongst 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 fuck? Because I loved it! It gave me pleasure." She leaned closer to him, still stroking his cheek. He could smell her throat on the breath she exhaled. The air, for all its invisibility, was somehow enriched by its transport into her and out again. He envied the men who'd taken similar liberties. In and out; in and out. Wonderful.

"I love to have a man's weight bearing down on me," she went on. "To be pinned, like a butterfly. Open. And then, when he thinks he's got you completely under his thumb, roll him over and ride him." She laughed. "I wish I could see the expression on your face."

"It's not pretty under there." He paused, a chilling thought on his lips.

"The answer's no," she said.

"The answer to what?"

"Have I spied on you while your bandages were being changed? No I haven't."

"Good." He took a deep breath, wanting to direct the conversation away from talk of what was behind his mask. "Go back to the game," he said.

"Where was I?"

"Riding the lucky sonofabitch."

"Horses. Dogs. Monkeys. Men make good animals. Women too sometimes."

"Women got to play?"

"Not in here. I'm very old-fashioned about things like that. In Romania 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 had 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 this 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 amongst 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 and took a long, silver-handled switch from its hiding place. She tested it on the air, and it whined like a vengeful mosquito. "This is the Teroarea. I had 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, to make fools suffer.' I regret having that written there, really."

"Why?"

"Because a man who takes pleasure in being given pain is not a fool. 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 head, puzzled.

"You talk about it a lot."

"Twice I've mentioned it," she said. "But it's been in my mind a little 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 could not imagine having that thing, her Terror, give him pleasure, however 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 have a man's sex in my palm, here." He got an instant, and uncannily sharp picture of what she had in mind. Her victim on all fours, and that scooping motion of hers; the taking up of his cock and balls, ready for her. Completely vulnerable; completely humiliated. He'd never let a woman do anything like that to him, however much she promised it was to give him pleasure.

"I can see you're not convinced," she said, "even when I don't have your face to look at. So you'll just have to take it on trust. I could touch 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?"

"I'll 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 less 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 the Canyon isn't going to touch." She started to walk back towards him. "But don't be too certain. It takes the pleasure out of things. Maybe you should let a woman take charge for a while."

“Are we talking about sex?"

"Valentino 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 squeezed it, catching the nipple in the groove between her thumb and forefinger, as though to proffer it for Todd to suckle.

He knew it wasn't smart to show too much emotion to the woman. If there was some genuine streak of derangement in her, it would only empower her more. But he couldn't help himself. He took half a step backwards, aware that the trenches of his mouth were suddenly running with spit at the thought of her nipple in his mouth.

"You shouldn't let your mind get between you and what your body wants," she said. She took her hand from her breast. The nipple stood hard beneath the light fabric.

"I know what my body wants."

"Really?" she said, sounding genuinely surprised at the claim. "You know what it wants deep down? All the way down to the very darkest place?"

He didn't reply.

She reached out and took gentle hold of his hand. Her fingers were 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 want." He let her draw him closer to her; let her hands move up over his chest towards his face.

"You're a big man," she murmured.

Her fingers were at his neck now. Whatever she was promising about discovering 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, flickered 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 nobody had wanted to admit to him; not even himself. He was spoiled. Perhaps just a little, but a little was all it would take to shake him from his high perch. His precious face, his golden face, the beauty that had made him the idol of millions, had been irreparably damaged.

"I know," Katya said, "you're thinking your life won't be worth living. "But that's just not true."

"How the hell do you know?" he said, smarting from the truth, angered by her honesty.

"Because I knew all the great stars, in the silent days. And believe me, the smart ones—when they weren't making the money any longer—just 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 getting 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 he couldn't have something, and he didn't like it. He took hold of her wrists and pulled her hands away from his face. A quick fury had risen in him. He 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 again. "Some nights I'm so crazy I'm ready to hang myself. But I don't. You know why? I made this hell for myself, so it's up to me to live in it, isn't it?"

He didn't respond to her; he was still in a filthy rage about what she'd said.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I think I've had it with your advice for the night," he said, "so why 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 towards the door, half expecting to see Marco already standing 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 dick 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 the hill to oust the trespasser—but Marco was bending down to gingerly pick 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 remembered 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 I came down here..."

"The door was open?"

"No, no," Todd said. He closed the door with a solid slam. "I just tried it and it was unlocked."

"It needs a new lock then," Marco said, his tone uncertain, as though 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 with these?"

"What do you think?" Todd said, getting back into the normal rhythm of their exchanges now. The door was closed. The woman and the path and the nodding shrubs were out of sight. Whatever she'd said, he could forget, at least for tonight. "Burn them. Where's that drink? I'm going to 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 laid her body, imagining her there. "It's my face."

TWO

Maxine came up to the house the following afternoon to tell Todd about the Oscar festivities, reporting it all—the ceremony itself, then the parties—with a fine disregard for his tenderness. Several times he almost stopped her and told her he didn't want to hear any more, but the dregs of curiosity silenced him. He still wanted to know who'd won and who'd lost.

There'd been the usual upsets, of course, the usual grateful tears from the usual surprised ingenues, all but swooning away with gratitude. This year, there'd even been fisticuffs: an argument had developed in the parking lot at Spago's between Quincy Martinaro, a young, fast-talking filmmaker who'd made two movies, been lionized, and turned into a legendary ego all in the space of fifteen months, and Vincent Dinny, a vicious writer for Vanity Fair who'd recently profiled Martinaro most unflatteringly. Not that Dinny was a paragon himself. He was a waspish, embittered man in his late sixties, who—having failed in his ascent of the Hollywood aristocracy—had turned to writing about the town's underbelly. Nobody could have given a toss for his pieces had they not carried a certain sting of truth. The piece on Martinaro, for instance, had mentioned a certain taste for heroin; which was indeed the man's vice of choice.

"So who won?" Todd wanted to know.

"Quincy broke two fingers when he fell against his car, and Dinny got a bloody nose. So I don't know who won. It's all so ridiculous. Acting like children."

"Did you actually see them fighting?"

"No, but I saw Dinny afterwards. 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, their immensity blocking his view of the opposite hill. But it didn't take much

of an effort of imagination to bring the Canyon into his mind's eye. The palm-trees that lined the opposite ridge; the pathways and the secret groves; the empty swimming pool, the empty koi pond; the statues, standing in the long grass. He was suddenly seized by an overwhelming desire to be out there in the warm sunshine, away from Maxine and her 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 working 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 expression of utter incomprehension on his face, as though she'd just spoken to him in a foreign language. Then, after perhaps ten seconds, he returned his gaze to the Birds of Paradise.

"You don't know how wearying it gets," Maxine went on. "Waking up thinking about whether everything's okay with Todd, and going to sleep thinking the same damn thing. Not having a minute in a day when I'm not worrying about you. I just can't do it anymore. It's simple as that. It's 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 observe.

“And I've taken care of you. It's been a very successful partnership. You 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 me 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. "I'll 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 out for everyone to see, then do it. I guarantee you'll come out looking worse than I will. I've covered for you so many times, Todd."

"And you signed a confidentiality agreement. If you break it, I'll sue you for breaking that, too."

"Who cares? Nobody gives a rat's ass about me. I'm just a professional parasite. You're the movie star. You're the all-American boy. The one with the reputation to lose." She paused. Then murmured, almost ruminatively: "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 hundred times. I know everyone says I'm a cunt. That's what they say right? 'How can you work with that fucking cunt?' If I have to hear it in a courtroom one more time, I can take that, as long as when it's all over I don't have to hear your whining and complaining any more."

"Okay," Todd said. "If that's the way you want to play it."

Maxine headed for the door. "For your information," she said, "I could go down to LAX right now, and I could fill a limo with kids who have ten times your talent. They're all coming here, looking to be the next Tom Cruise, the next Leonardo DiCaprio, the next Todd Pickett. Pretty boys with tight asses and nice abs who'll end up, most of'em, selling their tight asses on Santa Monica Boulevard. The lucky ones'll end up waiters.”

"If I wanted to, I could make any one of them a moviestar. Maybe not a star like you. But then again maybe bigger. Right face, right time, right movie. Some of it's luck, some of it's salesmanship. The point is, I sold you, Todd. I told people you were going to be huge, and I said it so often that it became the truth. And you were so sweet back then. So...natural. 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 every 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 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 towards 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, he realized the path had divided at some earlier point, and that he'd taken the wrong turning. The mistake took him on a picturesque tour of the gardens' 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 disrepair, and then into a garden within a garden, bounded by an unkempt privet hedge. Here there were roses, or rather the remains of last year's blooms, the bushes fighting for space, and strangling each other in the process. There was no way through the thorny tangle to pick up the path on the other side, so he was obliged to try and get around the garden from the outside, staying close to the hedge. It was difficult to do. Though the plants he was striding through didn't have thorns, they were still unruly and wild; twigs and dead flowers scraped at his face, his shirt was quickly soiled, his sneakers filled with stony dirt. By the time he got to the other side of the garden, and took to the path again, he was short of breath and patience; and had two dozen little nicks and scratches to call his own.

His wanderings had brought him to a spot that offered a spectacular view. He could see the big house below him surrounded by palms and Birds of Paradise; he could see the baroque weathervane on the top of the gazebo he'd passed on his way here, and the orchid house, which he had come upon on one of his earlier trips around the garden. All this, bathed in clear warm California light; the crystalline light which had brought filmmakers here almost a century before. Not for the first time since coming to the house he had a pleasurable sense of history; and a measure of curiosity as to the people who might once have walked here, talked here. What ambitions had they plotted, as they ambled through these gardens? Had they been sophisticates, or simpletons? What little he knew about Old Hollywood he'd heard from Jerry Brahms, which meant he'd only ever really been half-listening. But he knew enough to be certain those times had been good, at least for a man like himself. Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, the Barrymore clan, and all the rest had been like royalty, lording it over their new dominion in the West. A bean-counting prick like Eppstadt—with his demographics and his endless corporate maneuvering—would have had no power in the world this canyon still preserved.

Having caught his breath, he now continued his ascent. The shrubbery became denser the closer he got to the guest-house. He would have needed 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 amongst 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 guest-house now in view he pressed towards 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.

THREE

There was no reply from within, nor any sound of movement in response to his knocking. He knocked a second time, and then-after a short pause-a third. Still there was no response, so he tried the latch. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, and stepped out of the sunlight into the cool interior of the house.

At first glance he assumed that he'd misunderstood what Katya had told him, and the house was not occupied after all; merely used as a storage space of some kind. The room before him, which was large and high-ceilinged, was little more than a junk-room, filled with furniture and bric-a-brac. But as his eyes became more accustomed to the murky light, after the blaze of sun outside, he began to make sense of what he was seeing. Yes, the place was over-filled, but the contents of the room were far from junk. On the wall to the left hung an enormous tapestry depicting a scene of medieval revelry; on the wall opposite was a series of white marble bas-reliefs that looked to have been filched from a Roman temple. In the far corner, close to a great oak door, were more slabs of stone, these carved with hieroglyphics. There was an elegant chaise longue in front of the massive fireplace; and a table, its legs elaborately carved with baroque grotesqueries, stood in the middle of the room. All of this had presumably been removed from the big house at some point, but that hardly explained the strange confusion of periods and styles.

Moving deeper into the room, Todd called out again to announce his presence. Again, there was no reply. He didn't linger now to study the furniture or the antiquities, but crossed the room to the large oak door. Here 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 facewound 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 Valentino. 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 bas-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 and 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 self. He wondered if perhaps he shouldn't turn back; he was in no condition to present himself to Katya. Even as he was thinking about this the door to the left of the mirror creaked a little, and-caught by the wind-opened a couple of inches. Forsaking his sorry reflection, he went to the door and peered into the room beyond.

The sight before him put all thought of retreat from his mind. Inside was an enormous four-poster bed, its columns decorated in the same lushly erotic style as the gilded frame of the mirror. A swathe of dark purple velvet hung in ripe folds like a half-raised curtain. The red pillows heaped on the bed were just as excessive, creamy silk fringed with lace. The sheet, which 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 and deep that her face was almost concealed, but he could still see the high curve of her cheek, the tender pink of her ear. Was she awake behind her pale lids, he wondered, her nakedness a deliberate provocation? He suspected not. There was something too artless about the way her legs were splayed, too childlike about the way her hands were tucked up against her breasts. And the final proof? She was snoring. If this was indeed a performance then that was a touch of genius. The perfectly human thing which made all the rest so believable.

His eyes went to the cleft of her buttocks; to the gloss of the hair that showed between her legs. He was suddenly stupid with lust.

He took a step towards the bed. The floor creaked under his weight, but thankfully the noise wasn't loud enough to stir her. He continued his approach, his gaze fixed upon her face, looking for the merest flutter of a lash. But there was none. She was deeply asleep; and dreaming. He was close enough now to see that her eyes were in motion behind her lids, watching something happening in another place.

At the bedside, he dropped down onto his haunches, his left knee popping loudly. There was a faint dusting of goose-flesh on her limbs, he saw. He 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 was 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 towards the bed.

She had pulled the sheet a little way up, to partially cover her nakedness. Her eyes were open, and the tears her dreams had induced were now 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 were talking in your sleep."

"Well it's nice to have somebody listening," she said. "It's a long time since anyone was with me when I slept." She wiped the tears from her 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 from his acting coach what such glances indicated: a lie. She knew exactly what she'd been dreaming about; she just didn't want to tell him. Well, that was her business. God knows everybody was allowed their share of secrets.

"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 Todd as 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 favour in 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 her 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 face, and headed out into the light again, climbing the slope towards 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 his way through the rooms of fake relics.

The sound of running water came from the room adjacent to the bedroom. Apparently, Katya was still running her bath.

He paused and looked around the bedroom. There were several enormous posters on the wall, which he had not noticed until now. Framed posters: one-sheets for movies, many decades old to judge by the stylized graphics, and the yellowing of the paper they were printed on. The same image dominated all seven posters: that of a woman's face. She was represented in two of them as a waif, a child-woman lost in a predatory world. But in the others she'd matured beyond the orphan, and these were the images that reminded him of the woman he'd met last night-an exquisite femme fatale glowering from the frames as she planned her next act of anarchy. There was, of course, no question who the woman was. Her name was on the posters, big and bold. The Sorrows of Frederick, starring Katya Lupi. The Devil's Bride, starring Katya Lupi. She is Destruction, starring Katya Lupi.

What the hell was he to make of this new piece of evidence? Of course it was possible that Katya had paid to have seven posters representing fictitious films printed on aged paper and framed to look like objects of antiquity, but it wasn't very likely. Was it possible this Katya Lupi-who bore such a resemblance to the Katya he knew-was hardly the same woman at all but a granddaughter, with an uncanny resemblance to her older relative? It was a more plausible solution than any other he could think of. Certainly the flawless woman he'd seen naked minutes before, her face without so much as a wrinkle upon it, could not be the woman who'd starred in these movies. There had to be some other explanation.

He was about to call out and announce his presence when he heard a soft intake of breath echoing off the bathroom walls. He went quietly to the door, and glanced in. In a large, old-fashioned ceramic bath, half-filled with water, lay Katya, her legs spread, her hips lifted clear of the water so 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. But 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, while 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 gritted teeth. He took it to mean yes, and went to work again, until the sweat was running from his face, and down his back, his breath was rough with exertion. But she would not let him stop. Her gaze, her sneer, her offered body spoke the same demand, and he dutifully answered it, over and over and over 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 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.

She let out a cry that sounded more like something a bird would utter 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 water.

He dropped the switch and retreated to the door, in a kind of childish terror at what he'd done; and at how much it had aroused him. Katya's eyes had closed. The expression on her face was one of childish contentment; an infant sleeping in the arms of innocence.

He slid down the door-frame into a squatting position, and there- exhausted by the intensity of the previous minutes, he must have briefly fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes again the water was still moving, but Katya had vacated the tub. Vacated the bathroom too, in fact. 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 contentment had not left her face; but now there was a little smile on her 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 tip 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 pressing him towards her body. "Look inside me," she said. "Don't be afraid. You did it. See what you did?"

He could see without opening her up. Her whole pubic region was puffy and inflamed.

"Go on, look," she said. "Enjoy what you did."

He gently parted her labia, which were sticky beneath his fingertips. Not blood, not sweat. Just the natural juices of an aroused body.

"You see?" she said, pressing his fingers deeper into her. She was like a furnace in there. "You've got thoughts going round in your head you never imagined having. Am I right?"

He replied by gently scooping her juices out on his fingers and putting 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 her tongue.

"You're right," she said, when they'd finished kissing. "We've got all the time in the world."

She stood up. He stayed where he was, at her feet, still not quite believing they'd come so far so fast.

"It isn't a dream," she said, reading his doubts as she'd read so many other thoughts of his in the last twenty-four hours. "Sometimes it seems that way, but that's just the Canyon."

He held onto 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."

PART FIVE

DESIRE

ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was his fear.

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

TWO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"In the house?"

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

"Katya?" Tammy said.

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

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

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

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

"She is the one who has the Hunt."

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

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

"You seen it?" the female said.

"No," Tammy replied.

"Liar."

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

"You been in the house?"

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

"The Hunt's in the house."

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

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

"No," said the female.

"But you want to go?"

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

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

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

"It's not possible," she said.

"Why not?”

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

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

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

"Kill her one day."

"You want to kill her?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

"We're going?" Tammy said.

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

"Nothing to be scared of," Tammy said.

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

The lookalike, meanwhile, leaned forward, hooked a long cold finger through a hole in Tammy's blouse and before she could do a damn thing about it, tore the light cotton blouse away from her skin.

"You keep away from me," she told the offender.

He bared his teeth at her. "Pretty boobies," he said.

"What?"

The forbidding grimace had transformed into a weird version of a smile. "Titties," he said.

He reached out and touched the side of her breast with his open palm, stroking it. "Jugs. Knockers-"

"Baby feeders," Tammy added, figuring it was better to play along with the joke, however witless.

"Fun bags," he grinned, almost moronically.

She wondered just for a moment if that was the answer to this mystery: that these pitiful remnants of humanity were cretins, mongols, retards; the children of Hollywood parents who could not bear the idea that they'd produced such freaks, and given them over to somebody who'd simply dumped them in the empty Canyon. No, that was ridiculous. Atrocities like that didn't happen in this day and age; it was unthinkably callous. But it did go some way to explaining the curious passages of starry flesh and bone she kept seeing: Garbo's throat on the woman, Victor Mature in this breast-obsessed male.

"Udders," he said.

"Jigglies," she countered. "Chi-chis. Kazooms-"

Oh, she had a million. So presumably did every woman with larger than average breasts in America. It had started when she was twelve, when thanks to an unfortunate hormonal trick she was walking around with a bosom that would have looked just fine on a big-boned twenty-two-year-old. Suddenly men were looking at her, and the dirty words just came tumbling out of their mouths. She went through a phase when she thought every man in Sacramento had Tourette's Syndrome. Never mind that the girl with the hooters was twelve; men got diarrhea of the mouth at the sight of large breasts. She had them called everything: 'the twins', 'skin-pillows', her 'rack', her 'set', her 'mounds', her 'missiles', her 'melons', her 'milk-makers'. At first it upset her to be the object of fun, but after a while she learned not to listen to it anymore, unless some unusual name came along to swell the lexicon, like 'global superstars', or 'bodacious ta-tas', both of which had brought a despairing smile to her face. Of course in two years time all her girlfriends had got bosoms of their own-

"Wait."

The female had halted, its body suddenly besieged by nervous tics.

"What's wrong?" Tammy said.

The woman governed her little spasms and stood still, listening. Then pointed, off to her right, and having pointed she quickly bounded away, dragging Tammy after her.

As they fled-and that's what it was suddenly, fleeing-Tammy glanced back over her shoulder. They were not taking this journey unaccompanied. There was a contingent of freaks coming after them, though they were keeping their distance. But it was not the freaks, however, that the female was so afraid of; it was something else.

"What?" Tammy gasped. "What?"

"Peacock," the woman replied. She didn't speak again. She simply let go of Tammy's arm and threw herself into the cover of the thicket. Tammy turned, and turned again, looking for the creature that had caused this unalloyed panic. For a moment, she saw nothing; and all she heard was the sound of the female racing off though the thicket.

Then, almost total silence. Nothing moved, in any direction. And all she could hear was a jet, high, high above her.

She looked up. Yes, there it was, crawling across the pristine blue, leaving a trail of vapor tinted amber by the setting sun. She was momentarily enchanted; removed from her hunger and her aching bones.

"Beautiful," she murmured to herself.

The next moment something broke cover not more than ten yards from her.

This time Tammy didn't stand there mesmerized, as she had at the cages. She threw herself out of the path of the shape that was barreling towards her. It was the bizarrest of the all the freaks she'd encountered. Like all its kin it had some of her own species in its genes but the animal it was crossed with-yes, a peacock-was so utterly unlike a human being that the resulting form defied her comprehension. It had the torso of a man, and the stick-thin back legs, scaly though they were, also belonged to a human being. But its neck was serpentine and its head no larger than a fist. Its eyes were tiny black beads, and between them was a beak that looked as though it could do some serious damage. Having missed her on the first assault it now turned around and came at her again, loosing a guttural shriek as it did so. She stumbled backwards, intending to turn and run, but as she did so it raised its body up and she saw to her disgust that it underbelly was made exactly like that of a man, and that it was in a state of considerable arousal. The moment of distraction cost her dearly. She fell back against a blooming rhododendron bush, and lost her footing in a midst of pink-purple blossom. She cursed loudly and coarsely, grabbing onto whatever she could-blossom, twig, root-to haul herself up. As she attempted to do so she saw the creature slowly lower its sleek turquoise head, and one, of its scaly forelimbs-withered remnants of arms and hands-went to its chin, where it idly scratched at a flea.

Then, while she struggled like an idiot to get back on her feet, the creature lifted up its backside and spread its glorious tail. By some quirk of genetics, it had inherited its father's glory intact. The tail opened like God's own fan, compensating for every other grotesque thing about the beast. It was beautiful, and the creature knew it. Tammy stopped struggling for a moment, thinking perhaps she could talk some sense into this thing.

"Look at you," she said.

Was there brain enough in that little skull to understand that it was being flattered? She frankly doubted it. But the creature was watching her now, its head cocked to one side. She kept talking, telling it how fine it looked, while tentatively reaching around to find a branch large enough to carry her weight, so that she could pull herself to her feet. The creature shook its tail, the feathers hissing as they rubbed against one another. The iridescent eyes in their turquoise setting shimmered.

And then, without warning, it was on her. It moved so suddenly she didn't have a chance to clamber out of its way. She fell back into the blossoms for a second time, and before she could raise her arms to ward it off, the peacock came down against her body, trapping her.

She felt its erection against her body, and its wizened hands clawing at her breasts. Its beak snapped above her face, threatening her eyes.

For a moment she lay still, afraid of what it would do to her if she resisted it. But then it began to thrust its hips against her, and a spasm of revulsion overcame her better judgment. She reached up and caught hold of the thing's neck, just below the head, her fingers digging deep into its blotchy, corrugated flesh. Even so, it continued to grind its body against her. She raised her other hand to join the first, and started to strangle the thing. Still it pumped on, as though so stupefied with lust it was indifferent to its own jeopardy. She pressed hard on its throat, dosing off its windpipe. Its grindings continued unabated. She pressed harder, and harder still. Then it seemed to reach a point of no return, and a series of shudders passed through its body. She felt something wet spurting on her belly, where its rhythms had pushed up the rags of her blouse.

"Oh God.," she said, "You filthy, dirty-"

Its climax over, it belatedly seemed to realize that it couldn't breathe and started to thrash about. Its claws raked her breasts, which stung like fury, but she refused to let go of its scrawny throat. If she gave it an inch it would surely kill her. Her only hope was to dig deep and hold on until the thing lost consciousness.

But it was easier said than done. The bird's orgasm hadn't exhausted its energies. It thrashed maniacally, beating its stunted wings against the blossoms, so that a blizzard of pink petals came down upon them like confetti. Tammy kept her teeth and her hands locked together, while the would-be rapist's panic became a frenzy. It was making ghastly, guttural noises now, its mottled tongue sticking straight out of its mouth. Spittle fell on her upturned face, stinging her eyes. She closed them, and kept on clutching, while the peacock clawed and flapped and thrashed.

The struggle had already gone on for three or four minutes, and her strength was giving out. The pain from her scratched breasts was excruciating, and her hands were numb. But by degrees the bird's rallies lessened. She didn't relax her grip on it however, suspicious that if she did so, it would recover itself somehow and renew its attack. She held on to its silken throat while its wings slowed their moronic flapping. She opened her eyes. The expression on the creature's face suggested that it was close to death. It's tongue lolled against its lower beak. Its gaze was unfocused. Most telling of all, its glorious tail had drooped to the dirt.

Still she held on, pressing her thumbs hard against its windpipe until every last twitch had gone out of it. Only then did she let go; not with both hands, but with one, and started to pull herself up from beneath the body of the creature. She felt its semen cold on her belly, and her own blood hot on her breasts. A fresh wave of repugnance passed through her. But she had survived; that was the point. This creature had done its worst, and she'd overcome it. Grabbing hold of a branch she pulled herself to her feet. The peacock hung from her hand, its body sprawled on a bed of fallen blossoms. A spasmodic rattle passed through its gleaming tail feathers, but that was the last of it.

She let it go. It dropped to the ground, its head resembling some absurd little sock puppet that its owner had abandoned in the grass; the rest of its body a grotesque amalgam of forms.

"I killed you..." Tammy said softly. "You sonofabitch." She lifted her gaze and surveyed the bushes around her. All this had been witnessed, she knew; the creatures that shared this beast's grotesque tribe were all out there in the twilight, watching their battle. She could not see those who were scrutinizing her, not even the gleam of a tooth or eye, but she knew they must be thinking twice about attacking her. On the other hand, she was seriously weakened. If they were to launch such an assault she would be lost; her energies were all but spent.

She looked down at her bosom. Her blouse was in rags and her skin had been deeply scored by the freak's claws. She touched the wounds. They stung, but the blood would soon start to clot. She wasn't a bleeder, luckily. But she was going to need something to clean the wounds if they weren't to become infected-God knows what kind of shit and dirt the creature had had beneath its claws-which meant finding her way, as quickly as possible, back to the house: to clean running water and fresh dressings.

But there was one other matter to deal with before she moved from this place: a bit of cleaning up that couldn't wait until she had water. She picked up a fistful of grass, and wiped her belly, removing as best she could the remnants of the creature's semen. It took more than one fistful to do the job; but when she had cleaned herself (and then cleaned her hands with a third portion of grass) she left the body where it lay, and went on her way. She listened, as she went, for the sound of pursuit: the rustle of leaves, the snapping of twigs. But she heard nothing. Either the rest of the freakish clan had decided she was too dangerous to pursue, given that she'd just slaughtered one of their more fearsome members, or else the game of pursuit no longer amused them and they'd gone back to whatever crimes they committed in the stinking darkness. Tammy didn't much care.

As long as they left her alone, she thought, they could do what the hell they liked.

THREE

"Tell me about all the stuff in the guest-house," Todd asked Katya as they walked. "Where does it all come from?"

"The large tapestry in the living room was made for The Sorrows of Frederick, which was a terrible picture, but the designs were magnificent. The castle they made for the banquet scene! You never saw anything so grand in your life. And all the Egyptian stuff was from Nefertiti."

"You played Nefertiti?"

"No, Theda Bara played Nefertiti, because the front office said she was a bigger star than I was. I played her handmaiden. I didn't mind that much because in my mind it was a better role. Theda just vamped her way through her part. Oh Lord, she was bad! But I got a little chance to act. In the end Nefertiti had my lover killed because he was in love with me not her, so I threw myself off a boat into the Nile."

“And drowned?"

"I suppose so. Either that or I was eaten by crocodiles." She laughed. "I don't know. Anyway, I got some of my best reviews for Nefertiti. Somebody said I could have stepped right out of history..."

The evening was beginning to draw on as they walked, taking the simple and relatively direct path which Todd had failed to find on his way up. It was the first night in a long time that Todd hadn't sat at his bedroom window, drinking, brooding and popping pills.

"What about the bed?" Todd said. "Where did that come from?"

"That was from The Devil's Bride."

"A horror movie?"

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

"What happened in the end?"

"The Devil gets what he wants."

"You?"

"Me."

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

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

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

“And it frustrates you."

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm not afraid," he said.

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

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

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

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

"For being here."

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

"I didn't say that."

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

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

"The rest?"

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

"To hell with them?"

"To hell with them!"

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

"Where now?" he said.

"Down to the pool?" she replied.

"You know the way?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I want to see it."

It was a larger building than it had appeared from the front, and uncannily bright. There were several skylights in the ceiling, which ushered in the brightness of moon and stars, their light bouncing off" the silky marble floor. In the centre stood a cocktail bar with mirrors of marbled glass behind the glass shelves. After all these years there were dozens of bottles on the shelves-brandies, whiskies and liqueurs. "You used the pool a lot?" Todd said. "We had the best pool-parties in Hollywood." Their voices echoed off the glacial walls as they spoke, coming back to meet them. “And the people who came here, knew..." Katya said. "They knew." Letting the thought go unfinished, she moved past him to the bar.

"What did they know?" he said.

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

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

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

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

"What's in there?" he said.

"We used to have a book-"

"We?"

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

“A book of what?"

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

"You're kidding!"

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

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

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

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

“Ah, voilá!" said Katya, reaching into the depths of the safe.

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

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

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

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

"A history of what?"

"Of better times."

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

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

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

“Animal hunts?"

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

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

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

"Little girls?"

"He liked them young."

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

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

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

"Literally none?"

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

"What?"

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

"Oh Jesus Christ."

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

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

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

"Oh that was a competition we had."

"You had all these men?"

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

"So you let people do what they wanted?"

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

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

"He liked to be burned?"

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

“Ah! So you did make a judgment."

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean that? Spiritually."

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

Todd looked confused.

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

"So she gave up making movies?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I just want to take a peek."

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

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

"It is."

"He was always the Good Guy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where did she end up?"

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

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

"That's one for the family album."

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

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

"Christ. What's that?"

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

"She liked to get stung?"

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

"Fuck."

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

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

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

“Are you in any of these?"

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

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

“All that was true."

"Just how far did you go?"

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

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

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

FOUR

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

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

"Who to?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Ghosts."

"Yes. Of course. Ghosts."

"Oh, Jesus."

"The Canyon's full of ghosts."

"I don't believe in ghosts."

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

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

"Why can I see you and I'm only now seeing them?" he asked. "Because I'm not dead, Todd. And if you're very good, in a little while I'll show you why. You're going to like it too. My special room-"

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

"Calm down, calm down," she said.

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

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

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

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

"Pretty people."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The girl looked up.

"This is Todd," Katya said.

"Hello, Todd."

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

"Fucking a ghost?"

"If you want to put it that way."

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

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

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

"Katya?"

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

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

Katya glanced round at Todd.

"Do you mind?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All the way," she insisted.

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

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

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

"Yes. I like it a lot."

"Good."

"But go slowly. Please."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man laughed.

"You like that?" he said.

"I like that."

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

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

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

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

FIVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Jesus." Marco said.

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

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

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

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

"Sonofabitch," Marco said.

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

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

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

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

"Let me in," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light had already gone from beside the pool.

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

SIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tammy?"

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

"It's Willem," he said.

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

“I’m heavy," she warned him.

"I'm strong," he said.

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

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

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

SEVEN

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

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

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

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

"You say the word."

"Lift her legs higher."

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

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

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

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

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

"No," said another voice.

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

"Gotta go," he said to the girl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT

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

"You really want to find Todd," Zeffer said. "Admit it."

"No, I don't care." She stopped herself in mid-lie. "Well, maybe a little," she said. "I just want to check that he's all right."

"I can tell you the answer to that. He's not all right. He's with her. Frankly, that means you may as well forget about him. When Katya wants a man Katya gets him."

"Were you married to her?"

"I was married when I met Katya, but I never became her husband. She never wanted me. I was just there to serve her, right from the start. To make her life easier. Todd's a different story. She's going to suck him dry."

"Like a vampire, you mean?" Tammy said. After all she'd seen the idea didn't seem so preposterous.

"She's not the kind who takes your blood. She's the kind who takes your soul."

"But she hasn't got Todd yet, has she?" Tammy said. "I mean, he could still leave if he wanted to."

"I suppose he could," Zeffer said, his voice laced with doubt. "But, Tammy, I have to ask you: why do you care about this man so much? What's he ever done for you?"

It took Tammy a few moments to muster a reply. "I suppose if you look at it that way, he hasn't done anything...tangible. He's a movie star, and I'm one of his fans. But I swear, Willem, if he hadn't been around over the last few years I would have had nothing to live for."

"You would have had your own life. Your marriage. You're clearly a sensible woman-"

"I never wanted to be sensible. I never really wanted to be a wife. I mean, I loved Arnie, I still do I suppose, but it's not a grand passion or anything. It was more a convenience thing. It made things easy when tax-time came around."

"So what did you really want for yourself!"

"For myself? You won't laugh? I wanted to be the kind of woman who comes into a room and instantly everybody's got something to say about her. That's what I wanted."

"So you wanted to be famous?"

"I guess that was part of it."

"You should ask Katya about fame. She's always said it was overrated."

"How did we get off the subject of Todd?"

"Because it's impossible to help him."

"Let me just go into the house and talk to him for a while. And maybe get something to eat while I'm there."

"Haven't you seen enough of this place to be afraid of it yet?" Zeffer said.

"I'm almost past being afraid," Tammy replied. It was the truth. She'd seen her share of horrors, but she'd lived to tell the tale.

They were twenty yards from one of the several staircases that ran up from the garden into the house.

"Please," she said to Zeffer. "I just want to go inside and warn him. If that doesn't work, I'll leave and I'll never look back, I swear."

Zeffer seemed to sense the power of her will on the subject. He put up no further protest but simply said: "You realize if you get in Katya's way, I can't step in to help you? I have my own allegiances, however foolish you may think they are."

"Then I'll make sure I don't get in her way," Tammy said.

"I'm not even supposed to go into the house, believe it or not."

"Not allowed on the furniture, either?"

"If you're saying I'm little better than her dog, you're right. But it's my life. I made my choices just as you made yours." He sighed. "There are some days when I think hard about killing myself. Just to be free of her. But it might not work. I might slit my throat and wake up back where I started, her dead dog instead of her living one."

Tammy's gaze slid past him to study the luminous people playing between the trees. The sight should have astonished her; but she'd seen too much in the last little while for this to impress her much. The scene before her was just another piece of the Canyon's mystery.

“Are they all dead?" she asked, in the same matter-of-fact way she'd sustained through much of their exchange.

“All dead. You want to go look?" He studied her hesitation. "You do but you don't want to admit to it. It's all right. There's a little voyeur in everybody. If there wasn't there'd be no such thing as cinema." He turned and looked towards the flickering figures weaving between the trees. "She used to have orgies all the time in the Golden Age, and I liked nothing better than to pick my way amongst the configurations and watch."

"But not now?"

"No. There's only so much human intercourse anyone can watch."

"Do they look horrible?"

"Oh no. They look the way they looked at the height of their beauty, because that's the way they want to remember themselves. Perfect, forever. Or at least for as long as God allows this place to last."

Tammy caught the apocalyptic undertone in this. "What do you mean?" she said.

"That sooner or later there'll be an end to this endless indulgence. A Day of Judgment, if you will. And I think-" he dropped his voice to a whisper, though there was no one nearby "-you may be its Deliverer."

"Me?" She also dropped her voice, "Why me?"

"It's just a hunch. A piece of wishful thinking if you like. They've had their time. And I think some of them know it. They're a little more desperate than they used to be. A little more shrill."

"Why don't they just leave!"

“Ah. We had to come to that at last. The reason's very complex, and to tell you the truth I would not really know where to begin. Let me put it this way. They are afraid that if they leave this Canyon they may break the spell that keeps them in their strange state of perfection."

“And do you believe that?"

"Yes, I believe it. They're prisoners here. Beautiful prisoners."

A few minutes after Katya and Todd had left the party out on the night-lawn, a whisper went amongst the revenants, and one by one they gave up their pleasures, whatever they'd been, and turned their hollow gazes towards the house.

There are only so many times you can play out the old flesh games without losing interest in them. Yes, you could add piquancy if you introduced a whip, or some rope; you could mate with somebody of your own sex (or, if that was what you'd done in your lifetime, with somebody of the opposite gender). But all of it grew wearying with repetition. No feast can ever be so tempting that finally the act of eating doesn't lose its appeal. Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.

It was the same for the ghosts. They'd been here in the presence of their own perfection for decades; and now it meant nothing to them. They'd seen that beauty denied and debauched, they'd seen it locked in every configuration lust could devise, and there was nothing left to surprise them. The presence of living flesh, in the form of Todd Pickett, might momentarily re-ignite some old flames, but the conflagration quickly died away once he was removed from their company.

Now their eyes went to the house, and though they said nothing, the same thought went through all their melancholy heads.

Maybe tonight, something would change. Maybe tonight, with this man in her company, the Queen of Sorrows would make a mistake...

A few of them began to move in the general direction of the house, attempting to seem casual, but fixing their silvery eyes on their destination.

A bank of cloud had come in off the Pacific and covered both moon and stars. On the ridge of the opposite side of the Canyon some of the grotesque offspring of these weary beauties began a wordless howling in the darkness. The sound was loud enough to carry down the hill to Sunset and the Beverly Hill flats. Several valets parking cars for a private party on Rexford Drive paused to comment on the weird din from up in the hills; a couple of patients, close to death at Cedars-Sinai, called for their priests; a man who lived next door to the house on Van Nuys where Lyle and Eric Menendez had murdered their mother and father, decided-hearing the sound-to give up screenwriting and move back to Wisconsin.

Todd heard it too, of course.

"What in God's name is that?"

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

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

"Ready for what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm ready," he said.

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

"Why?"

"Because nobody can be ready for this."

Then she pushed open the door.

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

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

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

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

"What do you want?"

"Something sweet. Then I'm done."

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

"What?" she said.

"Listen."

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

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

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

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

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

"What are they doing there?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All this was kept secret from the studio bosses, of course, and when on occasion a Goldwyn or a Thalberg did find out Katya made sure they 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 eye-sight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil's Country, desperate for its hearing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bowed deeply to her.

"My apologies," he said, "for coming here. I know I'm not welcome.

But frankly, I didn't know where else to go."

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

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

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

"-just for a little while."

"No."

"Please."

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

"Costellaneta."

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

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

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

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

He stopped following her.

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

His words brought her to a halt.

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

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

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

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

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

"So?"

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

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

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

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

"She couldn't take the pain."

"The pain?"

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

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

"You see nothing but yourself, do you?"

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

"I see things differently now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.

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

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

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

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

"Valentino wouldn't-"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't see why not."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't be foolish."

"I mean it."

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

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

"No."

"Just a little bit?"

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

"Meaning what?"

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

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

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

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

PART SIX

THE DEVIL’S COUNTRY

ONE

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 looked at 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 towards 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 days, to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And that would only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which, as he was now astonished to see, was not the case.

There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket; one of those fearless birds wheeled away from the cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through the undergrowth, noses to the ground. "Katya...?" Todd said.

There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she'd last been standing); so he looked back. She wasn't there. Nor was the door through which he'd stepped to come into this new world. There was just more landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.

The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were ripples on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea, being hurried along by the same wind that filled the sails of the ships that moved below. There were men, too, all around. Riders, moving through the forest; some solitary, some in groups of three or four; one procession of five horses mounted by richly attired men, parading solemnly between the trees. And fishermen on the banks of the streams; and on little boats, bobbing around the sandbars at the delta; and in one place, inexplicably, two men laid out naked on a rock, and in another, far more explicable, another pair hanging from a tree, while their lynchers sat in the shade of the old tree they'd put to such guilty use, and looked out at the rest of the world as they shared a flagon of beer.

Again he looked around for Katya, but she wasn't to be seen. But she'd said she'd be close by, even if-as now-he couldn't see her. The room, he began to understand, had control of his eyes. He found his gaze repeatedly led away from where she might be, led skyward, to gawk at some passing birds (there were tiles on the vaulted roof, he saw; he could hear the squeak of the bird's wings as they passed overhead); led into the forest, where animals he could not name moved as if in some secret ceremony, and others fought; and others lay dead; and still others were being 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 him 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 witnessing burned him up, and made an end to him, that was fine too; perfectly fine, to die here, watching this shining world. It would hear no complaint from him.

"You like it?"

Ah, there was Katya. Off to his right, a little distance, staring up at the glamorous sky.

He followed her gaze, and saw something he'd missed until now: the sun was three-quarters eclipsed by the moon. That was why the light was so peculiar here; it was the light of a world in permanent semi-darkness; a murk which had inspired everything that lived here to catch its own particular fire. To snatch every last gleam of light out of the air and magnify it; to be its own exquisite advertisement.

"Yes," he said to her, hearing something very close to tears in his voice. "I like it very much."

"Not everybody does, of course," she said, glancing over at him. "Some I brought here were so afraid that they ran. And of course, that's not a very smart thing to do here."

"Why not?"

She wandered over to him, assessing him as she did so, as though to see if he was telling the truth, and that he really liked what he saw. Apparently satisfied, she laid a light kiss on his cheek: it almost felt as though she was congratulating him. Coming here had been a test, he realized; and he'd 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 these 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 their feet.

Again, she laughed. This new-found fire in him seemed to entertain her. She lifted up her dress, so that he could have sight of her. She was naked.

"Lie down," he told her.

She did so without a second instruction, lifting and parting her legs as she lay at his feet, so that he should have full disclosure of her. She ran her hand over herself. Into the groove, and out again, wet, to touch her anus. He could hear the rhythm of the hunters' horses in the ground underfoot. Duke Goga and his party were getting closer. Todd glanced up towards the trees. He could no longer see the men: the forest had become too deep. But they were nearby.

No matter. He could watch the hunters another day. Right now he had sport of his own. He unbuttoned his pants and let his dick spring out. 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, and there was an appetite for it in her eyes, the likes of which he'd never seen on a woman's face before. She started to pull on his cock, not to pleasure him, simply to bring him down to her; into her.

He went down on his knees between her legs. Such was the lightness of her dress that it could be lifted up almost to her neck, to expose her belly and breasts. He put his face down against her flat stomach, licking her navel then going up to her breasts. It had always been a fantasy of his to wash a woman with his tongue, every inch of her, from the corners of her eyes, to the cleft of her buttocks, simply to be her servant, bathing her with his tongue. This was the woman he would realize that fantasy with, he knew. This was the woman he would realize every fantasy with, and hers was the body with which he could play freely, doing anything his heart desired; anything.

That was the only word of this sexual delirium that escaped him: "...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 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. I've been patient, because I knew you'd come."

She pressed her hips up towards him, sheathing him completely. Then, still holding onto 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 smothering it again, down to the root.

There was a heavy reverberation in the ground. Todd could feel it through his palms.

"The hunters..." he said.

"Yes," she said, as though this was of little consequence. "Goga's 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 yet, but the noise was getting louder nevertheless. The reverberations made the little shards of rock around her head, decorated with tiny fragments of fossil, dance.

Finally, they came into view, rising over the crest of a hill some twenty-five or thirty yards from where they lay, locked together.

There were five of them in the Duke's party, and they looked as though they'd been riding for a very long time. Their horses shone with sweat, and the men-all of whom were dressed in tattered tunics-showed signs of extreme fatigue. But even their exhaustion had a kind of livid beauty to it. Their skin was as bright, or brighter, than the bone that it concealed; their eyes, which were sunk deep in their sockets, had a fevered brilliance in them. Todd wasn't surprised they looked so harried, given the orders of beast he'd glimpsed here. Yes, there were wild pigs and stags, but there were other kinds of creature, far less easily categorized; things that looked as though the Devil had had a hand in their design. Lethal quarry, no doubt. Indeed there were signs that the party had been recently attacked. One of the horses had a number of deep gashes on its rump, and its rider had dearly suffered in the encounter. His left arm hung limply, and a large dark bloodstain had spread from a place under his arm across a third of his upper body. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in pain, his eyelids drooping.

Even if Katya hadn't named the leader, it would have been clear to Todd that he was of a higher social standing than his companions, his horse a more finely bred animal than those the others rode, its mane and tail braided. As for the man himself, he was almost as beautifully coifed 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 looked 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 constant state of fear, to judge by their expressions. One of the Duke's four followers, the oldest and the most scarred, mumbled a prayer to himself as he rode, and in his hand he clutched a plain wooden cross, which more than once he kissed, for comfort's sake.

Todd was somewhere between ecstasy and panic. He didn't dare move, even if he'd wanted to. Katya, meanwhile was free to play havoc with his nerve-endings. He didn't move his hips; he didn't need to. She had all the moves. Her internal manipulations were becoming more elaborate all the time, driving him closer and closer to losing control.

Todd had always been a noisy lover; sometimes embarrassingly so. (A memorable night with a girlfriend in a suite at the Chateau Marmont had been brought to a premature halt when the manager had called up his room to regretfully report that the guests in an adjacent suite couldn't sleep for all his moans.) Now the best he could do was bite his lip until he 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 to look at them. But he could just see them from the corner of his eye. The Duke gave an order, in Romanian: "Stai! N-auzi ceva?" The men brought their horses to a halt, the Duke no more than four yards from where Todd and Katya lay on the ground. Had it not been for the fact that the eclipse rendered the light here so deceptive, the pair would surely have been seen, and dispatched: a single blade skewering them both in an instant. But as far as Todd's limited vision could tell, the men were looking further afield for their quarry, scanning the distant landscape rather than the ground yards from their horses' hooves.

There was another exclamation from the Duke, and this time a response from one of his men. Todd had the impression that they were listening for something. He listened along with them. What could he hear? Nothing out of the ordinary. The cry of birds, wheeling overhead; the coarse breathing and snorting of the horses; the slap of the reins against their massive necks. And closer by, the breathing of the woman beneath him; and-a smaller sound still-the rhythmical click of a beetle as it made its clockwork way over the small stones close to his hand. In his mind's eye all of this around the tender place where their bodies met: the bird and the horse and the stones and the beetle, orbiting his pleasure.

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 towards them, unleashing his sword.

The Duke spoke again:

"Cine sunt acesti 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 face: part amusement, part suspicion.

"I don't know if you can understand me," Todd said to him. "But we meant no harm."

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." She spoke now in the language of the lord. "Doamne, eu si prietenul meu suntem vizitatori prin locurile astea. N-am sttut ca este proprietatea domniei tale."

Todd looked and listened, wondering what the hell she was saying. But her explanation, whatever it was, didn't seem to be making any great change in their circumstances. The sword was still at her throat, while the second horseman was now within two or three yards of Todd, waving his own blade around in a highly menacing fashion.

Todd glanced up at the Duke again. The trace of amusement Todd had thought he'd seen there had gone. There was only suspicion now. It crossed Todd's mind that perhaps it had been an error for Katya to speak in the man's tongue; that perhaps she'd only deepened his belief that these lovers were more than over-heated trespassers.

He felt a prick in the middle of his chest. The cold point of the sword was pressed into his skin. A small pool of blood was already coming from the spot, spreading through the weave of his shirt.

Katya had stopped talking for a moment-Todd thought perhaps she realized she was doing more harm than good-but now she began again, 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 exactly what she did.

There was a sound on the wind; and it instantly had all of the nobleman's attention. Somewhere not so far away a baby was crying: a mournful wail of a sound, that-though it was surely human-reminded Todd of the noise the coyotes would make some nights in the Canyon.

After a few moments of listening; the Duke let out a stream of orders: "Lasati-i! Pe cai! Ala-i copilul!"

The two men who'd been threatening Katya and Todd sheathed their swords and returned to their mounts. The baby's cry seemed to falter for a moment, and Todd feared it would fade completely and the swordsmen 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 then ever.

The men were exchanging more urgent words; and pointing in the direction from which the sound was coming.

"Este acolol Grabiti-va!"

"In padure! Copilul este în 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 Qwaftzefoni, 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 hand. There was a deep nick in his chest, which instantly welled with blood again.

"Tell me anyway," he said.

TWO

Though it had been Zeffer who'd offered the explanation of what lay down in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation with a question that had been niggling at her since she'd first come into this place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she'd been eating her 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 angry."

"That doesn't answer the question. Katya's just a woman, for God's 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 was impossible. "How 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 syllable, until she seemed sure it would crack and break. He sat down at the table opposite her, but he said nothing.

“All right," Tammy said. "Let me give you a hand." She thought for a moment. Then she said: "Start with the house. Tell me why it was built. Why you're in it. Why she's in it."

"Back then we did everything together."

"Who is she?"

"I'll tell you who she was: she was Katya Lupi, a great star. One of the greatest, some would once have said. And in its day this house was one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles. One of the great dream palaces."

“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." He put his hand up to his face, and wiped some water off his lower lip. "Katya was born Katya Lupescu in Romania. A tiny village called Ravbac. And in the summer of 1921, just after we'd built this house, I went back with her to her homeland, because her mother was sick and was not expected to live more than another year.”

"She'd been brought up in utter poverty. Abuse and poverty. But now she was a great star, coming home, and it was extraordinary really, to see how she had transformed herself. From these beginnings to the woman she'd become.

“Anyway, there was a fortress close to the village where Katya was born, and it was run by the Order of St. Teodor, who made it their business to protect the place. When we arrived, Katya and myself had both been given a tour, but she wasn't very interested in the old fortress and priests with halitosis. Neither was I, frankly, but I wanted to leave her with her family to talk over old times, so I went back to the Goga Fortress a second day. The monk who took me round made it dear that the Order had fallen on hard times, and the brothers needed to sell off 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. And I thought: what the hell? Ten more minutes. And he took me down several flights of stairs into a room the likes of which I'd never seen before."

"What was in there?"

"It was decorated with tiles-thousands of tiles-and they were all painted, so when you walked into the room it was almost as though-no; it was as though you were walking into another world." He paused, contemplating 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 space for sky and sea and birds and rabbits. But it also had a little pinch of Hell 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 of exactly when. When you're a little child you don't listen to those kind 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 blackhoof 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 it 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 had struck him. He wanted revenge on the thing. He wanted to stick his sword through it, and cut out its heart and eat it raw. That was the kind of rage he was in.

"So he kept riding. And his men, out of loyalty, kept following, further and further from the Fortress and the paths they knew, into the depths of the forest. Steadily even the Duke began to realize that what his men were whispering was right: there were creatures here, lurking about, the likes of which God had not made. He could see things between the trees that didn't belong in any of the bestiaries he had in the Fortress. Strange, ungodly creatures."

As Katya told her story, Todd glanced at the dark mass of trees into which Goga and his men had just ridden. Was that the Deep Wood she had just described? Surely it was. The same horsemen. The same trees. In other words, he was standing in the middle of Katya's story.

"So...the Duke kept riding, and riding, driving his poor horse as he followed the leaping goat deeper and deeper into the forest, until they were in a place where there were certain no human being had ever ventured before. By now, all the men, even the most loyal, the bravest of them, were begging the Duke to let them turn back. The air was bitter and sulfurous, and in the ground beneath the horses' hooves the men could hear the sound of people sobbing, as though living souls had been buried alive in the black, smoking dirt.

"But the Duke would not be moved from his ambition. 'What kind of hunters do you call yourselves?' he said to his men, 'If you won't go after a goat? Where's your faith in God? There's no danger to us here, if our hearts are pure.'”

"So on they went, the men quietly offering up prayers for the safety of their souls as they rode.

"And eventually, after a long chase, their quarry came in sight again. The goat was standing in a grove of trees so old they had been planted before the Flood, in the tangled roots of which grew mushrooms that gave off the smell of dead flesh. The Duke got off his horse, drew his sword and approached the goat.

"'Whatever thing you are,' he said to the animal, 'breathe your 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.

"T?tal Nostru care ne e?ti in Ceruri, sfin_easca-se numele T?u. Fie Imp?r?tia Ta, fac?-se voia Ta, precum în cer a?a si pe p?m?nt."

Todd listened to the unfamiliar words, knowing in the cadence that what Katya was reciting was not just any prayer; it was the Lord's Prayer.

"Pâinea noastr? cea de toate zilele d?ne-o nou? azi si ne iart? nou? greselile noa?tre."

He scanned the landscape as he heard the prayer repeated; nothing had changed since he'd first set eyes on the place. The light of the eclipse held everything in suspension: the trees, the ships, the lynchers at their tree.

The rush of pleasure he'd experienced when he first arrived had diminished somewhere in the midst of Katya's tale-telling. In its place there was now a profound unease. He wanted to stop her telling her story, but what reason could he give that didn't sound cowardly?

So she continued.

"The Duke retreated, leaving his sword stuck deep in the body of the goat-boy. He intended to climb back onto his horse and ride away, but his steed had already bolted in terror. He called to one of his men to dismount, so that he might have the man's horse, but before the fellow could obey the rock beneath their feet began to shake violently, and a great chasm opened up in the ground in front of them.”

"The men knew what they were witnessing. This was the very mouth of Hell, gaping in the earth beneath their feet. It was thirty, forty feet wide, and the roots of those ancient trees lined it like the veins of a skinned body. Smoke rose up out of the maw, stinking of every foul thing imaginable, and a good deal that was not. It was such a bitter stench that the Duke and his men began to weep like children.”

"Half-blinded by his own tears, and without a horse, Goga had no choice but to stay where he was, on the lip of the Hell's Mouth, close to where his victim lay. He tore his gloves from his hands and did his best to clear the tears from his eyes.”

“As he did so he saw somebody coming up out of the earth. It was a woman, he saw; with hair so long it trailed the ground fully six feet behind her. She was naked, except for a necklace of white fleas with eyes that burned like fires in their tiny heads. Thousands of them, moving back and 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 towards 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 shreddings, dead.”

"Overhead carrion birds circled, ready to gorge themselves as soon as the body was abandoned.”

"'This man is the lucky one amongst 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 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 pretending 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 soul. I fear my life is worth nothing.'"

"So," said Zeffer, "Goga's Hunt was painted on every wall of this room.

Not just the walls. The ceiling, too. And the floor. Every inch of the place 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 not all that's on the walls down there. Her influence invaded the minds of 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 hand."

"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 house-maker?"

"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." He 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," he 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 to be certain that whatever was at work here was nothing she could explain 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 the way down to the immaculate and elaborate Lilith that decorated the bottom 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the illusion: that's strong magic. The monks knew that. But they had the 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 people 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 Ballet 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 look 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 and 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 story-telling. But she ignored him this time, and started down the stairs.

THREE

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 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 you 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 semens-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 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 of 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 to be punished for it."

Todd's gaze went again to the trees where the Duke and his men had disappeared, picturing the look of hope that had appeared on the men's 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 find the boy, and earn their release from the Devil's Country.

A wave of claustrophobia came up over Todd. This was not the limitless 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 of the vistas in all directions, and the height of heavens above him, he might 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 shrug. "Calm down. There's no harm going to come to us. I've been down here 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 towards the trees. The Duke and his men were riding towards 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 l'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, or was it fourth? step along the wall his extended hand found the door-jamb. He breathed out a little sigh of relief. The door-jamb 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 was 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 was 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 have turned right there and fled.

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 have 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 enamoured 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 and black, scuttled into view, and out again.

It halted, seeming to look back through the door at her: a beast that belonged in some book of medieval monsters than in such proximity 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 saw 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, then 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 go to 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 approaching 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 towards 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 towards the horsemen. They had turned the corner in the road, and were now coming directly towards 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 was watching a piece of film for the first time, not knowing how the mechanism worked upon her. She felt Todd throw her a sideways 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 towards 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 the 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 see 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. "What?"

"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 towards 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't you 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 door-jamb. 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 something coming close on his heels. He caught hold of the doorhandle, and started to pull the door closed, but as he did so Katya came back into 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 of the murk, still riding towards the door.

The leader-the Duke, Tammy thought, this is the Duke-pulled hard on the reins to slow his mount. The animal made a din, as though its primitive gaze was failing to make sense of what it was ahead of it. Rather than advance any further it came to a panicked halt, throwing up clods of dirt as it did so. Goga jumped from the saddle, shouting a number of incomprehensible orders back at his men, who had also brought their animals to a stop. They proceeded to dismount. There were whispers of superstitious doubt between the men: plainly whatever they were witnessing (the door, the passageway) they could make little or no sense of it. That fact didn't slow their advance, however. They dutifully followed their leader towards the door, swords drawn.

By now Tammy had recovered sufficiently to grab hold of Todd's arm and pull him back from the threshold.

"Come away," she urged him.

He looked round at her. She was probably more familiar with his face, and with his limited palette of expressions, than she was with her own. 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 blood-shot 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 than 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 towards the door.

For an instant, he lifted his eyes, and his eyes met Tammy's. They had a moment only to look at one another. Then Duke Goga came at Zeffer again and drove his sword through the middle of his back.

There was a terrible cracking sound, as the blade cracked Zeffer's breastbone and then the point emerged from the middle of his chest.

Zeffer threw back his head, and caught hold of the edge of the door with his unmaimed hand. He had his eyes fixed on Tammy as he did so, as though he was drawing the power to do whatever he was planning to do from her. There was a long moment when in fact he did nothing; only teetered on the threshold, his eyelids growing lazy. Then-summoning one last Herculean effort of will-he gave Tammy a tiny smile and closed the door in her face.

It was like being woken from a dream. One moment Tammy had been staring into Zeffer's stricken face, while the men closed in on him from behind, and the sky seethed overhead. The next the door had shut this terrible vision out, and she was back in the little hallway with Todd at her side.

The sight of Zeffer's execution had momentarily distracted Katya from 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 nauseous. 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.

"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 simply studied the stairs as they climbed, which under the circumstances was 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 was of any 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 asking much, now is it? Just one more time. I can't bear it. Please. Todd...I...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 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 of 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 lost cause.

She crossed swiftly to the front door, and opened it. The first tug was a little difficult. Then the door swung open easily, majestically. There were no ghosts on the threshold, only the refreshing night air, sweetened by the scent of night-blooming jasmine.

Behind her, in the house, Katya was finishing her argument. "The fact 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 towards 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 entire 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 now three days since she'd left it, and there was no guarantee it would still be sitting there. And the keys; what about the keys? Had she left them in the ignition? She thought she had; but she was by no means certain. So much had happened to her in the intervening time; she had no clear memory of 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 house. Leaving him to stare, Tammy set off up the road to where she'd left the car. There was neither moon nor stars in the sky; just a blanket of amber-tinted cloud. She soon lost sight of Todd as she headed up the benighted road. Memories of her night-journey through the place, with all its attendant miseries and hallucinations, rose up before her, but she told herself to put them out of her head. She was going to be out of this damn Canyon in a few minutes, long before it got back into her mind again, and started its tricks.

The car, when she reached it, was unlocked. She opened the door and slipped into the driver's seat, fumbling for the ignition. Yes! The keys were there. "Thank you, God," she said, with a late show of piety.

She turned on the engine, and switched on the headlights. They lit up the whole street ahead. She put the car into gear and brought the car roaring around the corner. Todd had wandered out into the middle of the road, and she could have ploughed into him (which would have made an ignominious end to the night's adventures) had he not stepped out of her way. 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 fuck 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.

PART SEVEN

THE A-LIST

ONE

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 one day 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) were 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 himself 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 were few that he cared to say anything of any 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, "'til the fat lady sings."

Well, somewhere deep in his soul, he knew that the fat woman still had an aria up her sleeve.

So he kept on living, which was often a wearisome business, all the while waiting for whatever it was that 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 pain-killers 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 furniture. 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 into 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 grey-green bodies extended from their shells as they moved over Katya's skin; their horns extending tentatively as they advanced, then retracting as they encountered an obstacle-a nipple, an 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 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 sub-conscious? 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, who was a plump, amicable man who'd been in Christopher Street the 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 relationship 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?"

"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 (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 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, she'd heard him 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.

TWO

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 amongst 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 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 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 take 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 his 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 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?" Tammy 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 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 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 when we've got 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 somebody I idolized."

"With a heavy emphasis on the used to be," Todd said, opening one eye and looking at her.

"Don't be so sensitive."

"No. I get the message. It was the same when I met Paul Newman, in the flesh," He closed his eye again. "I always used to think he was the 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 Mr. Heart-throb, or take the floor.

She closed her eyes.

She was exhausted: sleep came in a matter of moments. There were no dreams.

THREE

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 film-makers shot wherever a room could be found and the actors assembled. Some would go onto 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 dramas that would be played out today. This was a city that made its profit by 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 dreamers, having been here a few months (sometimes a few years) realized that 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 have to wait another lifetime for their slice of fame; or the lifetime after that, or the lifetime after that. And for some, it wasn't news they could bear to take home with them. Better to buy a gun (as Ryan Tyler, real name Norman Miles, did that morning) and go back to your one room apartment 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. Two years ago Justin Thaw 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 man 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 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 sound stage, and badly damaging two adjacent sound stages. 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's Christmas offering Dark Justice. With an elaborate post-production schedule for the picture that required the main shoot to be over in a month's time, things looked bad. There had been a great deal of 'creative debate' about the script, which had no less than fourteen writers presently attached to it. Arbitration by the Writer's Guild would thin those numbers, but nothing would make the calculation look any better if the picture missed its Christmas release date, which it now looked likely to do. 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 were 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.

FOUR

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 reason been piled against one end of the room, including the frame of the bed 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 figure 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, it seemed, of troubled dreams.

What she would have given, once upon a time, for a moment like this: a chance to lean over and kiss him awake. But she'd lost faith in such fairy-stories. She'd seen too much of their dark side, and she never wanted to go there again, even for the kissing of princes. Better to let them wake of their own accord, dragon-breath and all.

She glanced at the cheap digital clock on the bedside table. It was five-twenty-one in the afternoon. Surely that couldn't be right? That they slept for almost eleven hours? And Todd still sleeping?

Well, the latter she could believe. She knew from her years with Arnie how some men loved to sleep. In Arnie's case he'd loved it more than anything else. More than eating, more than drinking, certainly more than sex.

She left Todd to it, went into the tiny bathroom and switched on the light. God, she looked terrible! How had he ever consented to get into the same bed as her? She started her clean-up by vigorously scrubbing her teeth, then ran the shower very hot, the way she liked it even when 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?"

"Just food. Nothing fancy."

"I shouldn't think there's much danger of that."

She waited until she'd heard the door click closed, then she pulled the shower curtain back and finished off 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 Pickett 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 dean 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 looked about eleven, went out every night 'dressed like a cheap little slut.'

"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 who matters..." His voice trailed away. The daughter on the screen, who had the seeds of whoredom in her pre-pubescent features, was telling the 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'd 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 topped 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 it 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 her 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 a 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 as 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 set up-"

"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."

FIVE

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 devotions 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 apparent 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 bounds of the Canyon; and though she'd had plenty of clues as to the way things had changed, from those who'd come here after their decease, it would still be an intimidating experience for her to venture out there, even on a mission of love.

But what other choice did she have? Without him, her hopes were in ruins. She had to go and find him, it was as simple as that. And on the way back, once they were together again maybe she'd have the strength of heart to visit some of the places she'd known and loved in her youth; just to see how time had altered them. But then again perhaps that wouldn't be such a good idea. It troubled her enough to look out of the window and see the stretches of land that had been dust roads and shacks and orange groves in her time now completely transformed into towers of steel and glass. What if she were to discover that some precious place she'd loved had been desecrated; rendered unrecognizable? Though she liked to think she was 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 strength, wasn't it?

Venturing beyond the perimeters of her Canyon, beyond the reach of 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, a beneath this veneer of youth she was a Methuselah. How long could she afford to be out in the raptureless 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 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 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 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 wade into the living mass of baby eels and feel them against her naked flesh.

On another day they might to a place she knew where there was a beast that spoke prophetic riddles; which had twice engaged her in conversation 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 tiddler, with 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 to it a year ago, with some jewelry she had worn in Nefertiti.

"Is it real, the gift you give me?" the creature, whose name was Yiacaxis, had asked her.

"No," she had admitted. "I am an actress. These baubles are what I wore when I was an actress."

"Then make them real for me," Yiacaxis had said, clicking his old grey tongue against his cracked beak. "Play me the scene in which you wore 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 played the scene from Nefertiti in which she discovers that her lover is dead by the 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 colour. Thousands of locks of hair, in wings that spread perhaps twenty feet from tip to tip. Without 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 looter 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 tinder 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 cradled 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 perform acts of horrible violation upon women, and sometimes upon men and even children. But having viewed several of these spectacles herself, she could not deny that they were perversely arousing. Some had the rigor of ceremonies, others seemed to be simple arenas of cruelty, where anything might be viewed if it was paid for.

The point was that she'd seen so little, and that there was so much for her to see; a private wonderland where she and Todd could go adventuring whenever they tired of the Canyon. They could explore it to its very limits; and when they were weary and needed to sleep, they could simply step through the door and lock it, and retire to bed like any loving pair, and sleep peacefully in one another's arms.

But first she had to find him; and to find him she needed a chauffeur. Only one man fitted that bill: Jerry Brahms. They had known one another for so many years. That was why she'd sent out the dream-summons to him. He was loyal; he would come without fail. It was only a matter of time before he turned up at the house, ready to do her bidding. He was 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 assume 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 blind-folded.

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 was amongst their number some who would gladly have seen her dead, blaming her for the fact that their afterlife in 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 different? 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 they could intimidate her, or somehow wrest a little power from her. Love might have made her step a little lighter, but she was still the Queen of Coldheart Canyon, and if they pushed her she would respond with her 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, where the revenants were standing, watching her. Even after all these years she could still be discomfited by a sight like this; by the fact that the dead were around her in such numbers.

Enough, she thought to herself, and turning on her heel hurried towards the stairs that led back up to the house.

As she did so she heard the swish of grass against swiftly running limbs. 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 thought there'd been 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 wanted but herself-was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. If she was going to come back with Todd and live here, they couldn't live 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. "I understand that you all want to come into the house. But I don't think you understand the consequences."

"We'll take them, whatever they are," somebody said. There was a general murmur of agreement to this.

"If that's what you want," Katya replied, "I will consider it. When I get back-"

"What if you don't come back?"

"Trust me. I will."

"Trust you? Oh please." The mocking voice emerged from a bitter, painted face amongst 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 had years of waiting to go back into that room-"

"Then you can afford to wait a few hours more," Katya replied, and without waiting for Theda Bara to come back with a retort she turned and 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 the stairs-when she thought she'd misjudged her audience, and they'd come up the stairs after her, their patience finally exhausted. But they'd stayed below. Even Theda. Perhaps somebody had caught hold of her arm, to keep her from doing something stupid.

Katya opened the back door, stepping over the threshold. Occasionally, in the last several decades, one of the assembly outside had taken it into their heads to test the power of the icons Zeffer had brought back from Romania, and had personally hammered deep into the wood. The five icons were called, Zeffer had told her, the Iron Word. It was powerful 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 his face, seeing her step beyond the bounds of her little dominion for the first time.

"Are we actually going somewhere?" he asked her.

"I certainly hope so," she said, playing it off lightly. She could not completely conceal her unease, however. It was there in her eyes. But there was also something else in her glance, besides the unease: something far more remarkable. A kind of sweetness, even innocence. She looked like a girl out on her first Prom Night, tip-toeing to the edge of womanhood.

Amazing, Jerry thought. Knowing all that he knew about Katya-all that she'd done and caused to have done-to be able to find that look in her memory banks, and put it up there on her face, so that it looked as real as 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 somebody."

"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, Jerry. So you're the match-maker. And thank you. From both of us, thank you. It's been quite a remarkable time for me, Jerry. I never thought I'd ever fall in love again. And with an actor." She laughed. "You'd think I'd have 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 in 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."

SIX

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 honour 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 door, 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 hurriedly.

"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-a-ling!"

"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-a-ling."

"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 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 wonder 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 at 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, Mr. 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 goin'," 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 way-"

It took Tammy a moment to realize that Ron was talking to her.

"It's always good to meet a new friend of Mr. Pickett's." There didn't seem to be any irony in this: it was a genuine expression of feeling.

"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 guardhouse 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 burdensome 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 impersonation 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 in the swimming pool' sort of way."

SEVEN

There came a point, as Jerry's car was carrying Katya out of 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 Mr. 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 wickedness?"

"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?"

"Oh it is. And I had a lot to inspire me."

"Inspire you?"

"As a child, I saw wickedness with my own eyes. I had it's 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 just 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 me. Jesus, please come and take me away from this wicked woman. Take me to heaven. But he never came. I had to run away. Three times I ran away and my brothers found me and dragged me back. Once she let them have me, 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 tome."

"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 were more than he was ready to see. I won't make that mistake again. And then he had some woman with him, Tammy Somebody-or-Other, who was 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 from the police in Sacramento. She went missing."

"And they called you. Why?"

"Because I know Todd. Apparently, this Tammy woman runs his fan-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."

EIGHT

This was Tammy's Cinderella moment: her dream come true. All right, perhaps all the details weren't perfect. She could have looked a little more glamorous, and she would have liked to have lost another twenty-five pounds. And they could have been coming in through the front door instead of slipping in at the side to avoid the photographers. But she was happy to 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 with laughter, famous power-brokers telling tales of how they'd made a million in a minute, and the less famous wives of these power-brokers listening with their lids half-closed because if they had a buck for every time 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 on Todd's arm) were younger men and women who watched their companions with the kind of eyes Tammy was reserving for the hors d'oeuvres. There was appetite in those eyes. One day, those gazes seem to say, I will have all that you have. I will own cars and yachts and palaces and houses. I will have a small vineyard in Tuscany and a large ranch in Big Sky Country. There will be no door that will be closed to me; no ear that will not attend to my concerns. When I drop my purse, somebody will pick it up for me. When my car is empty of gas, it will be miraculously filled (and 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 every mouthful is 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 uncanny."

"Where's Maxine?"

"I haven't seen her yet. She's probably out back. She likes to sit and hold 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'll have one of those," she said, tapping the waiter on the shoulder, "if you don't ask in this place," she explained, as she took three, "you don't 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 room-which, despite the fact that it was packed with guests-was almost as hushed as a library. A few people looked round at Todd-a few even attempted tentative smiles-but nobody made any move to break off their whispered exchanges and approach him, for which Tammy was grateful. The density of famous faces was much the same in here as it had been next door. This really was the crème de la crème: the people who could get a studio to spend several million dollars developing a script by simply hinting that they might be in it when it was finished; the names above the tide that audiences knew so well they only used an actor's given name when they were talking about the show: Bruce and Demi and Brad and Tom and all the rest. Next year, some portion of the crowd would have slipped onto the B-list, after a dud or two. But tonight they were at the top of their game; famous amongst the famous. Tonight there wasn't an agency in the city that wouldn't have signed them on the spot; or a late-night talk-show that wouldn't have bumped Einstein, Van Gogh and the Pope to have them on. They were American royalty, the way that Pickford and Fairbanks had been royalty in the early years. Yes, there were more 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 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 woozy 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 stare they were getting from the patio.

"She's seen you," Tammy said.

She smiled in Maxine's direction. The woman was getting up off her chair, her expression more bemused than angry. She leaned over and whispered 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 towards Tammy and Todd.

Tammy grabbed hold of Todd's hand again. "You know what?" she said.

"What?"

"I was wrong. We're going to do this together."

NINE

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 with him?"

"Tammy Lauper? Yes she is."

"I want you to separate them."

"Just like that."

"Yes," she said, deadly serious. "Do whatever you have to do. I just 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 her?"

"No. Amongst his friends."

"He can't," she said. "He won't want to, when he sees me. He'll just come. You'll see."

Her confidence was beguiling, whether it was fake or not. She took his arm, and they headed into the house. If Jerry had been expecting some grotesque echo of Sunset Boulevard he was pleasantly disappointed. Katya 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 his hand at the threshold and like a ship that suddenly finds the wind again, and rhruggedch occa severahe wasould he same s. T the throu to sys toicatcould havs mes. On tw, h say occaet go ching hisnegWJernnie, on theand likT?" T everythof theting theof he to a-oubt:Tard mt rid he thrque echo of fan and obs away.t my lityrt, nocomelf gallant, her e my f, perhapug his -She's t them wony, and w

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