Outside, the spirits of the dead waited and listened. They had heard the door that led into the Chamber of the Hunt opened; they knew some lucky fool was about to step into the Devil's Country. If they could have stormed the house and slipped through the door ahead of him, they would gladly have done so, at any price. But Katya had been too clever.
She had put up defenses against such a siege: five icons beaten into the threshold of each of the doors that would drive a dead soul to oblivion if it attempted to cross. They had no choice, therefore, but to keep a respectful distance, hoping that someday the icons would lose their terrible potency; or that Katya would simply declare an amnesty upon her guests and tear the icons out of the thresholds, allowing her sometime lovers and friends back inside.
Meanwhile, they waited, and listened, and remembered what it had been like for them in the old days, when they'd been able to go back and forth into the house at will. It had been bliss, back then: all you had to do was step into the Devil's Country and you could shed your old skin like a snake. They'd come back to the chamber over and over, so as to restore their failing glamour, and it had dutifully soothed away their imperfections; made their limbs sleek and their eyes gleam.
All this was kept secret from the studio bosses, of course, and when on occasion a Goldwyn or a Thalberg did find out, Katya made sure he was intimidated into silence. Nobody talked about what went on in Coldheart Canyon, even to others that they might have seen there. The stars went on about their public lives while in secret they took themselves up to Coldheart Canyon every weekend, and having smoked a little marijuana or opium, went to look at the Hunt, knowing that they would emerge rejuvenated.
There was a brief Golden Age, when the royalty of America lived a life of near-perfection; sitting in their palaces dreaming of immortality. And why not? It seemed they had found the means to renew their beauty whenever it grew a little tired. So what if they had to dabble in the supernatural for their fix of perfection; it was worth the risk.
Then—but inexorably—the Golden Age began to take its tolclass="underline" the lines they'd driven off their faces began to creep back again, deeper than ever; their eyesight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil's Country, desperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.
Terrible stories started to circulate among the lords of Tinseltown; nightmare stories. Somebody had woken up blind in the middle of the night, it was said; somebody else had withered before her lover's appalled eyes. Fear gripped the Golden People; and anger too. They blamed Katya for introducing them to this ungodly panacea, and demanded that she give them constant access to the house and the Hunt. She, of course, refused. This quickly led to some ugly scenes: people started appearing at the house in the Canyon in desperate states of need, beating at the door to be let in.
Katya hardened her cold heart against them, however. Realizing she would soon be under siege, she hired men to guard the house night and day. For several months, through the spring and summer of 1926, she and Zeffer lived in near-isolation, ignoring the entreaties of her friends who came (often with magnificent gifts) begging for an audience with her; and for a chance to see the Devil's Country. She refused all but a very few.
In fact nobody truly understood what was happening in the bowels of the house. Why should they? They were dealing in mysteries even old Father Sandru, who had sold Zeffer the piece, did not understand. But their eager flesh had discovered what the dry intellect of metaphysicians had not. Like opium addicts denied their fix they went blindly after the thing that would heal their pain, without needing to understand the pharmacology that had driven them to such desperation.
For a time they had been happy in the Canyon, they remembered; happy in Katya's house, happy looking at the pictures of the Hunt on the tiled walls, which had moved so curiously before their astonished eyes. So it followed—didn't it?—that if they kept returning to the Canyon, and into that strange country of tile and illusion, they would be happy and healthy again. But Katya wouldn't let them; she was leaving them to suffer, denied the only thing they wanted.
Of course Katya was no more knowledgeable about the alchemy at work in her dream palace than those in her doomed circle. She knew that the gift of healing and the fever of need that followed was all brought about by being in the Devil's Country, but how it worked, or how long it would operate before its engines were exhausted, she had no idea. She only knew that she felt possessive of the room. It was hers to give and take away, as her will desired.
Needless to say, the more tearful visitors she had at her gates, the more letters she received (and the more chaotic the tone of those letters), the less inclined she was to invite in those who'd written them, partly because she was afraid of the depth of addiction she had unleashed in these people, partly because she was anxious that the power of the Devil's Country might not be limitless, and she was not about to be profligate with a power that she needed as much as they.
There might come a time, she supposed, when she would need the healing effects of the house purely for herself, and when that time came she'd be covetous of every wasted jot of it. This wasn't something she could afford to be generous with; not any longer. It was her life she was playing with here; her life everlasting. She needed to preserve the power she had locked away below ground, for fear one day its sum would be the difference between life and death.
And then—as though things were not terrible enough—they had suddenly got worse.
It began on Monday, the 23rd of August, 1926, with the sudden death of Rudy Valentino.
Only three weeks before he had managed to get past the guards in Coldheart Canyon (like one of the heroes he'd so often played, scaling walls to get to his beloved) and had pleaded with Katya to let him stay with her. He didn't feel good, he told her; he needed to stay here in the Canyon, where he'd spent so many happy times, and recuperate. She told him no. He became aggressive; told her—half in Italian, half in English— that she was a selfish bitch. Wasn't it time she remembered where she came from? he said. She was just a peasant at heart, like him. Just because she acted like a queen didn't make her one; to which she'd snappily replied that the same could not be said for him. He'd slapped her for that remark. She'd slapped him back, twice as hard.
Always prone to sudden emotional swings, Valentino had promptly started to bawl like a baby, interspersing his sobs with demands that she please God have mercy on him.
"I'm dying!" he said, thumping his gut with his fist. "I feel it in here!"
She let him weep until the carpet was damp. Then she had him removed from the house by two of her hired heavies, and tossed into the street.
It had seemed like typical Rudy melodrama at the time: I'm dying, I'm dying. But this time he'd known his own body better than she'd given him credit for. He was the first to pay the ultimate price for visiting the Devil's Country. Three weeks after that tearful conversation he was dead.
The hoopla over Valentino's sudden demise hid from view a series of smaller incidents that were nevertheless all part of the same escalating tragedy. A minor starlet called Miriam Acker died two days after Rudy, of what was reported to be pneumonia. She had been a visitor to the Canyon on several occasions, usually in the company of Ramon Navarro. Pola Negri—another visitor to the Canyon—fell gravely ill a week later, and for several days hovered on the brink of death. Her frailty was attributed to grief at the passing of Valentino, with whom she claimed to have had a passionate affair; but the truth was far less glamorous. She too had fallen under the spell of the Hunt; and now, though she denied it, was sickening.