Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story Read online

  "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 gray 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 off 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 Saint 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 Devil 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 to—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 among 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 laid 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 rose-bud 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 d
o 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 fledgling), 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 Lupescu 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 cinematographic 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 p
laces," 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 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.