Coldheart Canyon - Clive Barker

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– none of these visitors dug through the overgrown ruins with any great enthusiasm; certainly none ever asked themselves what function the half-buried room might have once served. Nor, should it be said, would they have been able to guess, even the cleverest of them. The mystery of the ruined chamber had been removed to another continent, where it was presently unfolding its dubious raptures for the delectation of a new and vulnerable audience. Men and women who – like the tiles – had in many cases lately left their homelands; and in their haste to be famous left behind them such talismans as hearth and altar might have offered by way of protection against the guileful Hunt.

      PART TWO

      _________________

      THE HEART-THROB

      Chapter 1

      There’s a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, but of course the crowds were much larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight’s event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists will massage the numbers for tomorrow’s Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a crowd of four thousand people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of the star of tonight’s movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than half that.

      Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few cop cars in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.

      As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in the black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to open the doors a few ‘screamers’, paid and planted in the crowd by the studio publicity people to get a little excitement going, start to do their job, yelling even before the face of the limo’s passenger has been seen. There’s a large contingent of A-list names on tonight’s guest-list, and plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn’t here, but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the picture as the retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom our hero, played by Todd Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time comes round, or – should he refuse – be pursued by the ghosts of several generations of former incarnations of the character, to persuade him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the curse of Gallows once before, to whom Pickett’s character must go when the phantom pursuers are almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman’s is greeted by a genuine roar of approval from the fans, who are devoted to her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to be taken, but she doesn’t go near the crowd. She’s had experiences with overly-possessive fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the red carpet, where she’s out of reach of their fingers. Still they shout, ‘We love you Ripley!’, which is the character she plays in the Alien movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she dies. She waves, even when they call the name Ripley, but her eyes never focus on anybody in the crowd for more than a moment.

      The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of Gallows, Suzie Henstell, named by this month’s Vanity Fair one of the Ten Hottest Names in Hollywood. She is petite (though you’d never know it on the screen), blonde and giggly; she’s shared a little marijuana with her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to think of this woman as a full-blown star, even though they have yet to see more than a few frames of her acting ability from the trailer for Gallows. So what do they care if she looks a little out of it? Unlike Ms Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with souvenir programmes for Gallows are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy ‘gee-I-must-be-famous!’ look. The model looks back vacantly, which is the only look in his repertoire. He can give it to you vacantly with a semi hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly with his ass hanging out of his Y-fronts. Either way, it is heart-achingly beautiful; almost troublingly so.

      The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security men start to look a little worried. It was some bright publicist’s idea to build two gallows, as a kind of gateway through which the audience for the premiere will need to come. Not, it now seems, a clever notion. The gallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so they’re made of light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or worse, pick them up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light though they are, they could do some serious damage if they fell.

      Four of the ushers from inside the theatre are summoned from their duties and told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side, holding on to them as casually as possible. Security is told that the publicity people only need five more minutes. As soon as Suzie Henstell can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the building (which at present she is showing no desire to do), the director’s, Rob Neiderman’s, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and most important of the bunch, Todd Pickett.

      The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive decision is made to bring Neiderman’s limo in, and if Suzie’s screaming fans are visible waving like lunatics behind Neiderman in his press pictures, so be it. This isn’t a perfect world. It’s already 8:13p.m. At this rate the picture won’t be able to begin until half past the hour, which wouldn’t be a problem if the damn thing weren’t so long, but Neiderman’s cut came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though the studio appealed to Pickett to get him to shave the thing down to a tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked the picture pretty much as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means it’ll be past eleven before the picture’s finished, and almost midnight by the time everybody’s assembled at the party venue. It’s going to be a long night.

      Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henstell away from her fans and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the gallows, their jobs depending on the perpendicularity of their charges. The largest of the limos comes up to the kerb. Even before the door has opened, the fans – especially the women – are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.

      ‘Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!’

      The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.

      And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows, the reason why ninety-five percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of Hollywood.

      He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model again, with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though neither will say anything about the relationship than that they’re good friends.

      He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them together.Then arm in arm, through the blizzard of lights and the barrage of We love you, Todd! coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, which – having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid from those who are simply objects of the night’s wind.

      Gallows is an irredeemable piece of shit, of course, and everyone involved with it, from the executives who green-lit it (at a cost of some ninety-million dollars, before prints and advertising costs add another thirty-seven to the bill) to the humblest publicist, knows.

      It is, in the words of Corliss’s review

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