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 a decade before had 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 coiffed, 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 anymore. 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 toward 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 toward 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.