It seemed the scene in the night-blooming jasmine had begun a chain reaction among 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 Halloween 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 among 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, among the famous dead. Was that Cary 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 or four times he did. When the answer was consistently yes, he gave up asking. As for what was actually going on, well the pictures in the Pool House had given him a good idea of how wild things could get, and now he was seeing those excesses proved in the flesh, for just about every sexual peccadillo was being indulged somewhere in the Canyon tonight. Nor did Todd discount the possibility that even more extreme configurations than those he could see were going on in the murk between the trees. Given what he'd ended up doing after only a short night here, imagine the possibilities an occupant of the Canyon might invent with an indeterminate number of nights to pass: knowing you were dead but denied a resting-place?
What new perversions would a soul invent to distract itself from the constant threat of ennui?
At last the crowd of fornicators thinned, and Katya led him—by a path he hadn't previously seen, it being so overgrown—back to the big house.
"What I am about to show you," she warned him as they went, "will change your life. Are you ready for that?"
"Is it something to do with why you're here?"
"Why I'm here, why they're here. Why the Canyon is the most sacred place in this city. Yes. All of the above."
"Then show me," he said. "I'm ready."
She took a tighter hold of his hand. "There's no way back," she warned 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 weren't there'd be no such thing as cinema." He turned and looked toward 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 among 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."