She'd lost weight; shed perhaps fifteen pounds courtesy of the Canyon. So had Tammy. Every cloud had a silver lining.
"You look better than you sounded," Maxine said. "When we first started talking I thought you were dying."
"So did I, on and off."
"It was that bad, huh?"
"I locked myself in my house. Didn't talk to anyone. Did you talk to anybody?"
"I tried. But all people wanted to know about was the morbid stuff. I tell you, there's a lot of people who I thought were friends of mine who showed their true colors over this. People I thought cared about Todd, who were about as crass as you can get. 'Was there a lot of blood?' That kind of thing."
"Maybe I did the right thing, locking myself away."
"It's certainly given me a new perspective on people. They like to talk about death: as long as it's not theirs."
Tammy took a look around the office while they chatted. It was very dark, very masculine: antique European furniture, Persian rugs. On the walls, photographs of Maxine in the company of the powerful and the famous: Maxine with Todd at the opening of several of his movies, Maxine with Clinton and Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, when the President-elect still had color in his hair, and a reputation to lose; Maxine with a number of A-list stars, some of whom had fallen from the firmament since the pictures had been taken: Cruise, Van Damme, Costner, Demi Moore, Michael Douglas (looking very morose for some reason), Mel Gibson, Anjelica Huston, Denzel Washington and Bette Midler. And on the sideboard, in Art Nouveau silver frames, a collection of pictures which Maxine obviously valued more highly than the rest. One in particular caught Tammy's eye: in it Todd was standing alongside a very sour, very old woman who was ostentatiously smoking a cigarette.
"Is that Bette Davis?"
"Five months before she died. My first boss, Lew Wasserman, used to represent her."
"Was she ever up in the Canyon, do you think?"
"No, I don't think Bette's ghost is up there. She had her own circle. All the great divas did. And they were more or less mutually exclusive. At a guess a lot of Katya's friends had an interest in the occult. I know Valentino did. That's what took them up there at the beginning. She probably introduced them to it all very slowly. Maybe tarot cards or a Ouija board. Checking out which ones were in it for the cheap thrills and which ones would go the distance with it."
"Clever."
"Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this man's city, where all the studios had men at the top, she had her own little dominion, and God knows how many people wrapped around her little finger."
"It sounds like you admire her a bit."
"Well I do. I mean she'd broken every Commandment, and she didn't give a shit. She knew what she had. Something to make people feel stronger, sexier. No wonder they wanted to keep it to themselves."
"But in the end it drove some of them crazy. Even the ones who thought they could take it."
"It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn't suit us too well."
"I should tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm."
"You should have called me. We could have compared notes."
"My mind was just going round and round. Nothing made sense anymore. I was ready to do myself in."
"I don't want to hear that kind of talk," Maxine said. "The fact is: you're here. You survived. We both did. Now we have to do this one last thing."
"What if we get up there and don't find anything?"
"Then we just leave and get on with our lives. We forget we ever heard of Coldheart Canyon."
"I don't think there's very much chance of that, somehow."
"Frankly, neither do I."
It was hot. In the Valley, the temperature at noon stood at an unseasonable one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.
Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner's, there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic to reach the blaze, there'd already been five fatalities: a cameraman and a ménage-a-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that afternoon, along with the male star's fluffer, had all been cremated. There was very little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and silicone lingered in the air for several hours.
Even if that particular stench didn't reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a repository for all manner of sickening stenches in the weeks since its sudden notoriety, as though the rot at its heart was drawing to it the smell of every horror in the heat-sickened city. Every unemptied Dumpster that concealed something for forensics to come look at; every condemned apartment or lock-up garage where somebody had died (either accidentally or by their own hand) and had not yet been discovered; every pile of once-bright flowers collected from the fresh graves of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, and were now piled high in the corner, along with their tags carrying messages of sympathy and expressions of loss, rotting together; all of it found its way into the cleft of the Canyon, and clung to the once-healthy plants, weighing them down like a curse laid on the air itself.
"It's so damn quiet," Tammy said as she got out of Maxine's car in front of what had once been Katya Lupi's dream palace.
There were a few birds singing in the trees, but there wasn't much enthusiasm in their trilling. It was too hot for music-making. The birds themselves sat in what little shade they could find beneath the leaves, and stayed still. The only exceptions to this were the falcons, which rode the rising tides of heat off the Canyon, their wings motionless, and the ravens, who dipped and banked as they chased one another overhead, landing in argumentative rows on the high walls around the house.
The dream palace itself was in a shocking state, the damage the ghosts had done to the vast chamber on which the house sat throwing the whole structure into an accelerated state of decay. The once-magnificent façade, with its highlights of Moroccan tile, had not only cracked from end to end but had now fallen forward, exposing the lath-and-timber below. The massive door—which Tammy had imagined belonging to an Errol Flynn epic—had split in three places. The metal lock, which had been as vast and medieval as the rest of the thing, had been removed, sawn away by a thief with an electric saw. He'd made an attempt to take the antique hinges too, but the size of the job had apparently defeated him.
Tammy and Maxine squeezed through the mass of debris which had gathered behind it. The turret into which they stepped was still intact, all the way up to its vault, with its painted images of once-famous faces peering down. But the plaster on which the fresco had been made was now laced with cracks, and heaps of the design had fallen away, so that the vault looked like a partially-finished jigsaw. Underfoot, the missing pieces: fragments of Mary Pickford's shoulder and Lon Chaney Sr.'s crooked smile.
"Is this earthquake damage?" Maxine said, looking up at the turret. There were places where the entire structure of the turret, not just the inner, painted layer, but the tiles too, had dropped out of place, so that the Californian sky was visible.
"I don't see why the house would survive all these years of earthquakes without being substantially damaged, and then practically come apart in a 6.9."