She realized that this odd behaviour was beginning to get her a reputation around the neighborhood. More than once she peeped out between the closed drapes and saw that people were lingering outside her house, some on the sidewalk, some in cars, pointing or staring. She’d become, she supposed, the local eccentric; the woman who’d come back from the wilds of Hollywood in a state of mental derangement.
All of this, of course, only added to her spiraling sense of anxiety, mingled with more than a touch of paranoia. If she answered the door to the delivery boy and caught sight of somebody in the street outside she naturally assumed the passer-by was spying on her. At night she heard noises on the roof and woke more than once certain that one of Katya’s los ninos had found its way to Rio Linda and was scrambling over the eaves, trying to get down to her bedroom window.
In saner moments (which became fewer and fewer), she knew all this was nonsense. But the very fact that she had saner moments implied that she was slowly giving herself up to lunacy. It was all very fine for Jerry Brahms to talk about having his cancer cured by the power of the room (and maybe he had; she didn’t discount the possibility), but she felt as though whatever she’d been given in the Devil’s Country it was affecting her mind not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. It was deconstructing her grip on reality, piece by piece. Some days when she woke the dreams remained attached to her all day like pieces of lint. She’d go through her waking hours in a half-stupefied state, coming into rooms and not knowing why she was there; leaving them again and remembering, then forgetting as she turned round. She was in a constant state of exhaustion. Her lids were like lead. Once, in the middle of the day, she found herself on her hands and knees in the bathroom, working at the tiles with her bare hands and Ajax, attempting to remove some spidery sketches of a certain country that she’d daydreamed into creation. Another time, she’d gone into the kitchen to find the faucet running, and a shape in the sink that looked like a piece of roadkill; a matted pelt, two rows of sharpened teeth set between black leathery lips. The force of the hot water slowly turned the cadaver over and showed her the broken head of something she’d seen in the Canyon, or in her dreams of the Canyon, foul beyond words.
She turned off the faucet. Steam rose from the mouth of the thing, like a last breath. Then it melted, fur and teeth and all, and was gone down the plug-hole.
“Hmm,” she said to herself, unimpressed by this ugly little show. Somehow she’d always imagined madness to be a more dramatic thing than this. Again the movies had it wrong. There was no grandeur in it; no exquisite folly. Just a pile of teeth and dirty fur in the kitchen sink.
That said, she knew that her mental decline was gathering speed. She needed to do something about it soon, or this journey she was taking was going to take her away from herself completely. She would be a blank-eyed thing sitting at the kitchen table, wiped clean by banalities.
FIVE
While Jerry was giving thanks for his new life, and Tammy was dealing with the grim illusions in her kitchen sink, Maxine was in a very different frame of mind. Her injuries were remarkably slight, given all that she’d gone through. Within a week she was physically ready to return to her offices and attempt to pick up business. But most of the calls she got in the first week weren’t business calls at all but gently inquiring conversations that rapidly gave way to interrogation. It seemed as though everyone in Hollywood wanted to know about events at the house in Coldheart Canyon.
In truth, she had no desire to tell her story to anyone, not even her closest friends. Ghosts and rooms laid with tile providing visions of another world-this was not the stuff she could have shared with any of her contemporaries without being mocked. But she had to say something, or she was going to start making even more enemies than she already had. So she concocted a version of events without supernatural elements. In the censored version, Todd had indeed been hiding away because of work done to his face (it was no use lying about that any longer: he’d admitted to the surgery at her party), and there he’d been stalked and finally-sadly-murdered by his stalker. Most of the people she talked to accepted this bowdlerized version of events, at least for the duration of the conversation. But those few loyal sources she still had around town reported something very different back to her. Everyone had their own version of what had happened in Coldheart Canyon, ranging from the ludicrous to the actionable, and they were spreading it around freely. Whatever the version of the story-and they ranged from murder mystery to ghost-stories-they had this in common: Maxine was the villain.