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Bella froze. Where have I heard that voice, she wondered, a million times!
“Hello,” she called.
She moved, counting the steps, and stopped.
And there was no one there.
Suddenly she was very cold. There was nowhere for the strangers to have gone to. The hill was steep and a long way down and a long way up, and they had been burdened with an upright piano, hadn’t they?
How come I know upright? she thought. I only heard. But—yes, upright! Not only that, but inside a box!
She turned slowly and as she went back up the steps, one by one, slowly, slowly, the voices began to sound again, below, as if, disturbed, they had waited for her to go away.
“What are you doing?” demanded one voice.
“I was just—” said the other.
“Give me that!” cried the first voice.
That other voice, thought Bella, I know that, too. And I know what’s going to be said next!
“Now,” said the echo far down the hill in the night, “just don’t stand there, help me!”
“Yes!” Bella closed her eyes and swallowed hard and half fell to sit on the steps, getting her breath back as black-and-white pictures flashed in her head. Suddenly it was 1929 and she was very small, in a theater with dark and light pictures looming above the first row where she sat, transfixed, and then laughing, and then transfixed and laughing again.
She opened her eyes. The two voices were still down there, a faint wrestle and echo in the night, despairing and thumping each other with their hard derby hats.
Zelda, thought Bella Winters. I’ll call Zelda. She knows everything. She’ll tell me what this is. Zelda, yes!
Inside, she dialed Z and E and L and D and A before she saw what she had done and started over. The phone rang a long while until Zelda’s voice, angry with sleep, spoke halfway across L.A.
“Zelda, this is Bella!”
“Sam just died?”
“No, no, I’m sorry—”
“You’re sorry?”
“Zelda, I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but …”
“Go ahead, be crazy.”
“Zelda, in the old days when they made films around L.A., they used lots of places, right? Like Venice, Ocean Park …”
“Chaplin did, Langdon did, Harold Lloyd, sure.”
“Laurel and Hardy?”
“What?”
“Laurel and Hardy, did they use lots of locations?”
“Palms, they used Palms lots, Culver City Main Street, Effie Street.”
“Effie Street!”
“Don’t yell, Bella.”
“Did you say Effie Street?”
“Sure, and God, it’s three in the morning!”
“Right at the top of Effie Street!?”
“Hey, yeah, the stairs. Everyone knows them. That’s where the music box chased Hardy downhill and ran over him.”
“Sure, Zelda, sure! Oh, God, Zelda, if you could see, hear, what I hear!”
Zelda was suddenly wide awake on the line. “What’s going on? You serious?”
“Oh, God, yes. On the steps just now, and last night and the night before maybe, I heard, I hear—two men hauling a—a piano up the hill.”
“Someone’s pulling your leg!”
“No, no, they’re there. I go out and there’s nothing. But the steps are haunted, Zelda! One voice says: ‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.’ You got to hear that man’s voice!”
“You’re drunk and doing this because you know I’m a nut for them.”
“No, no. Come, Zelda. Listen. Tell!”
Maybe half an hour later, Bella heard the old tin lizzie rattle up the alley behind the apartments. It was a car Zelda, in her joy at visiting silent-movie theaters, had bought to lug herself around in while she wrote about the past, always the past, and steaming into Cecil B. DeMille’s old place or circling Harold Lloyd’s nation-state, or cranking and banging around the Universal backlot, paying her respects to the Phantom’s opera stage, or sitting on Ma and Pa Kettle’s porch chewing a sandwich lunch. That was Zelda, who once wrote in a silent country in a silent time for Silver Screen.
Zelda lumbered across the front porch, a huge body with legs as big as the Bernini columns in front of St. Peter’s in Rome, and a face like a harvest moon.
On that round face now was suspicion, cynicism, skepticism, in equal pie-parts. But when she saw Bella’s pale stare she cried:
“Bella!”
“You see I’m not lying!” said Bella.
“I see!”
“Keep your voice down, Zelda. Oh, it’s scary and strange, terrible and nice. So come on.”
And the two women edged along the walk to the rim of the old hill near the old steps in old Hollywood, and suddenly as they moved they felt time take a half turn around them and it was another year, because nothing had changed, all the buildings were the way they were in 1928 and the hills beyond like they were in 1926 and the steps, just the way they were when the cement was poured in 1921.
“Listen, Zelda. There!”
And Zelda listened and at first there was only a creaking of wheels down in the dark, like crickets, and then a moan of wood and a hum of piano strings, and then One voice lamenting about this job, and the other voice claiming he had nothing to do with it, and then the thumps as two derby hats fell, and an exasperated voice announced:
“Here’s another fine mess you’ve got us in.”
Zelda, stunned, almost toppled off the hill. She held tight to Bella’s arm as tears brimmed in her eyes.
“It’s a trick. Someone’s got a tape recorder or—”
“No, I checked. Nothing but the steps, Zelda, the steps!”
Tears rolled down Zelda’s plump cheeks.
“Oh, God, that is his voice! I’m the expert, I’m the mad fanatic, Bella. That’s Ollie. And that other voice, Stan! And you’re not nuts after all!”
The voices below rose and fell and one cried: “Why don’t you do something to help me?”
Zelda moaned. “Oh, God, it’s so beautiful.”
“What does it mean?” asked Bella. “Why are they here? Are they really ghosts, and why would ghosts climb this hill every night, pushing that music box, night after night, tell me, Zelda, why?’’
Zelda peered down the hill and shut her eyes for a moment to think. “Why do any ghosts go anywhere? Retribution? Revenge? No, not those two. Love maybe’s the reason, lost loves or something. Yes?”
Bella let her heart pound once or twice and then said, “Maybe nobody told them.”
“Told them what?”
“Or maybe they were told a lot but still didn’t believe, because maybe in their old years things got bad, I mean they were sick, and sometimes when you’re sick you forget.”
“Forget what!?”
“How much we loved them.”
“They knew!”
‘‘Did they? Sure, we told each other, but maybe not enough of us ever wrote or waved when they passed and just yelled ‘Love!’ you think?”
“Hell, Bella, they’re on TV every night!”
“Yeah, but that don’t count. Has anyone, since they left us, come here to these steps and said? Maybe those voices down there, ghosts or whatever, have been here every night for years, pushing that music box, and nobody thought, or tried, to just whisper or yell all the love we had all the years. Why not?”
“Why not?” Zelda stared down into the long darkness where perhaps shadows moved and maybe a piano lurched clumsily among the shadows. “You’re right.”
“If I’m right,” said Bella, “and you say so, there’s only one thing to do—”
“You mean you and me?”
“Who else? Quiet. Come on.”
They moved down a step. In the same instant lights came on around them, in a window here, another there. A screen door opened somewhere and angry words shot out into the night:
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“Pipe down!”
“You know what time it is?”
“My God,” Bella whispered, “everyone else hears now!”
“No, no.” Zelda looked around wildly. “They’ll spoil everything!”
“I’m calling the cops!” A window slammed.
“God,” said Bella, “if the cops come—”
“What?”
“It’ll be all wrong. If anyone’s going to tell them to take it easy, pipe down, it’s gotta be us. We care, don’t we?”
“God, yes, but—”
“No buts. Grab on. Here we go.”
The two voices murmured below and the piano tuned itself with hiccups of sound as they edged down another step and another, their mouths dry, hearts hammering, and the night so dark they could see only the faint streetlight at the stair bottom, the single street illumination so far away it was sad being there all by itself, waiting for shadows to move.
More windows slammed up, more screen doors opened. At any moment there would be an avalanche of protest, incredible outcries, perhaps shots fired, and all this gone forever.
Thinking this, the women trembled and held tight, as if to pummel each other to speak against the rage.
“Say something, Zelda, quick.”
“What?”
“Anything! They’ll get hurt if we don’t—”
“They?”
“You know what I mean. Save them.”
“Okay. Jesus!” Zelda froze, clamped her eyes shut to find the words, then opened her eyes and said, “Hello.”
“Louder.”
“Hello,” Zelda called softly, then loudly.
Shapes rustled in the dark below. One of the voices rose while the other fell and the piano strummed its hidden harp strings.
“Don’t be afraid,” Zelda called.
“That’s good. Go on.”
