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 toward 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 it roaring around the corner. Todd had wandered out into the middle of the road, and she could have plowed 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 lip-less 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 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) was 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 weren't many that he cared to say anything of 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.