Sukie’s fresh drink arrived. Pete drained it himself, and Sukie glanced at her watch and then at the clock on the wall, and she asked for two more.
For a full minute neither of them spoke.
Pete was feeling the bourbon hit his fragile alertness like static muddying up an AM radio signal. “And of course it would have something to do with bar-time,” he said finally. “Ghosts are…if there are ghosts, they’re certainly a very derailed crowd, in terms of time.”
“Of course. And the electrical problems. We always have electrical problems, and she still not only doesn’t fire us, but pays us way too much.”
“We don’t always have electrical problems,” Pete said irritably. Then he made himself think about what Sukie had said. “Now you’re saying it has to be us? Specifically Pete and Sukie?”
“She acts like it, doesn’t she? Has she ever once hired anyone else? Those props, those watches and things, those were lures; but for some reason she needs us to make her able to hook ’em. Did you keep on looking at her watch?”
“Not after the first business,” he said glumly. Of course Sukie would have, once he’d told her about it.
“When we finally got started filming, the hour hand was pointing straight to the section of wall she took her straw to, every time, and it wasn’t north anymore.”
Pete grinned weakly. “Compass needles point to ghosts?
“Evidence of the old glazzies, droogie,” she said, quoting the movie A Clockwork Orange. Glazzies, he recalled, meant eyes. “Let’s get some menus,” she went on. “I may as well eat while I drink, and she’ll want her precious twins all peppy and full of vitamins tomorrow.”
HER PRECIOUS twins, Pete thought now as he finished his sardine sandwich and drank off the last of the Coors, alone in the booth on this sunny but cold morning eight years later.
The twins had continued working for deLarava, for precisely another two years, after that Christmas Eve; and Pete had eventually come to believe that Sukie was right about what deLarava had been doing at their shooting locations.
Neither of them, though, had seriously considered quitting. What the hell, Sukie had remarked more than once when she’d been drunk; it’s just exorcism, right? I mean, she inhales the ghosts and then they’re gone—obviously, since she never goes back and does a shoot at the same place twice. We’re exorcists, like that priest in that movie. And we didn’t take no vows of poverty.
No indeed, thought Sullivan now. DeLarava paid us damn well. And if she hadn’t tried to get us
car-bo-lic faithless, poi-so-nously pregnant
to do that muscle beach feature in Venice, on
bone-dry king of angels
Christmas Eve in 1986,
won’t go until we got one, so dredge him out now
we’d probably be working for her still, to this day.
He frowned intently at the check, tossed thirteen dollars onto the Formica table and walked quickly out of the restaurant into the chilly October breeze.
IT HAD been early in 1986 when they had hidden the mask in the ruins up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Just a dried thumb and two plaster hands, but Sukie always referred to the set as “the mask.”
Sullivan steered the van back onto Hollywood Boulevard, heading west again; there was still only the one more turn ahead. On the south side of the street stood a new McDonald’s restaurant that looked like an incongruously space-age Grecian temple, but at least the Chinese Theater was still there in all its battered black and red byzantine splendor at Highland.
The boulevard narrowed after that, as it flowed west between big old apartment buildings and broad lawns, and around Fairfax the pavement of the eastbound lane was entirely ripped up for repairs, but the sun hung still a little short of noon in the empty blue sky when Sullivan reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard and turned right, up the hill.
The curling road had only one lane each way, and no shoulder at all between the pavement and the greenery hanging over bowed chain-link fencing, and he had to drive a good quarter of a mile past the place before he found a wider spot where the van could plausibly be parked without getting clipped by a passing car. And then the walk back down the hill was a series of lateral hops from the asphalt into the tall curbside grass every time a car came looming at him from around a corner ahead. Already he was sweating.
Even after six years he recognized the section of chainlink fence he was looking for, and when he stopped and hooked his fingers through it and peered up the wooded slope beyond, he saw that the ruins had not been cleared away. Nearly hidden under shaggy palm trees and oaks, the broad stone stairway swept up to the terrace at the top of the hill, and even from out here on the street he could see many of the broken pillars and sagging brick walls.
He was breathing deeply, and wondering almost resentfully why no one had planed this off and put up condos or something. The real estate must be worth a fortune. At last he unhooked his fingers and stepped back.
Several NO TRESPASSING signs were hung on the fence, but it was widely split at one point, and among the tall weeds beyond he could see empty twelve-pack beer cartons and a couple of blankets and even a sort of little tent made from an upended shopping cart. Sullivan glanced up and down the road, and at a moment when no cars were in sight he ducked through the gap and sprinted to the shade of the nearest palm tree. He picked his way through a dense hedge of blue-flowered vinca, and after a few seconds noticed that he wasn’t walking on dirt anymore—the soles of his black leather shoes were brushing dust and drifts of leaves off of paving stones that had been laid in the 1920s.
The stairs were broad between the low corniced walls, but were thickly littered with bricks and chunks of masonry and the brown palm fronds that had been falling untended for five decades; and sycamore branches hung so low in places that he practically had to crawl from step to step. When he had scrambled up to the second landing he paused to catch his breath. The air was still and silent and fragrant with eucalyptus, as if Laurel Canyon Boulevard and all of Hollywood were very far away. He couldn’t even hear any birds or insects.
A row of once-white marble pillars supporting nothing anymore ran along the top of a wall across the stairs from him, and below the wall a dead stone fountain poked up from a bank of dried leaves; the ruined architecture all looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and it occurred to him that time didn’t seem to pass here—or, rather, seemed already to have passed and left this place behind. Probably that’s why they don’t tear it all down, he thought. It’s too late.
HE WAS now three-quarters of the way up the dusty, overgrown slope. To his right was a little stone bridge over a dry streambed, and though both of the wide cement railings still arched over the gully, the middle six feet of the bridge’s floor had long ago fallen away. A weathered two-by-six beam spanned the gap, and he remembered that in 1986, at least, the beam had been sturdy enough to bear his weight.
He discovered that it still was, though it was springy and he had to stretch his arms out to the sides to keep his balance. On the far side he paused to wipe the dusty sweat off his face; he thought about lighting a cigarette, but looked around at all the dry brush and glumly decided he’d better not.