She laughed out loud at the sight. Valentino's fury had suddenly lost its bite. It was as though in that moment he suddenly understood the depths to which the Devil's Country had brought him.
And then, out of the darkness, Zeffer called: "What the hell's going on out—"
He didn't finish his question: he'd seen Valentino.
"Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.
Hearing the Lord's name taken in vain, Valentino—good Catholic boy that he was—crossed himself, and fled into the darkness.
Valentino's vengeful prediction proved entirely accurate: in the next few weeks the haunting of Coldheart Canyon began.
At first the signs were nothing too terrible: a change in the timbre of the coyotes' yelps; the heads torn off all the roses one night; the next all the petals off the bougainvillea; the appearance on the lawn of a frightened deer, throwing its glassy gaze back toward the thicket in terror. It was Zeffer's opinion that they were somehow going to need to make peace with "our unwanted guests," as he put it, or the consequences would surely be traumatic. These were not ethereal presences, he pointed out, wafting around in a hapless daze. If they were all like Valentino (and why should they not be?), then they posed a physical threat.
"They could murder us in our beds, Katya," he said to her.
"Valentino wouldn't—"
"Maybe not Valentino, but there are others, plenty of others, who hated you with a vengeance. Virginia Maple for one. She was a jealous woman. Remember? And then to hang herself because of something you did to her—"
"I did nothing to her! I just let her play in that damn room. A room which you brought into our lives."
Zeffer covered his face. "I knew it would come down to that eventually. Yes, I'm responsible. I was a fool to bring it here. I just thought it would amuse you."
She gave him a strangely ambiguous look. "Well, you know, it did. How can I deny that? It still does. I love the feeling I get when I'm in there, touching the tiles. I feel more alive." She walked over to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to grant him some physical contact: a stroke, a blow, a kiss. He didn't really mind. Anything was better than her indifference. But she simply said: "You caused this, Willem. You have to solve it."
"But how? Perhaps if I could find Father Sandru—"
"He's not going to take the tiles back, Willem."
"I don't see why not."
"Because I won't let him! Christ, Willem! I've been in there every day since you gave me the key. It's in my blood now. If I lose the room, it'll be the death of me."
"So we'll move and we'll take the room with us. It's been moved before. We'll leave the ghosts behind."
"Wherever the Hunt goes, they'll follow. And sooner or later they'll get so impatient, they'll hurt us."
Zeffer nodded. There was truth in all of this, bitter though it was.
"What in God's name have we done?" he said.
"Nothing we can't mend," Katya replied. "You should go back to Romania, and find Sandru. Maybe there's some defense we can put up against the ghosts."
"Where will you stay while I'm gone?"
"I'll stay here. I'm not afraid of Rudy Valentino, dead or alive. Nor that idiotic bitch Virginia Maple. If I don't stay, they'll find their way in."
"Would that be such a bad thing? Why not let them share the place? We could make a pile of them on the lawn and—"
"No. That room is mine. All of it. Every damn tile."
The quiet ferocity with which she spoke silenced him. He just stared at her for perhaps a minute, while she lit a cigarette, her fingers trembling. Finally, he summoned up enough courage to say: "You are afraid."
She stared out of the window, almost as though she hadn't heard him. When she spoke again her voice was as soft as it had been strident a minute ago.
"I'm not afraid of the dead, Willem. But I am afraid of what will happen to me if I lose the room." She looked at the palm of her hand, as though she might find her future written there. But it wasn't the lines of her hand she was admiring, it was its smoothness. "Being in the Devil's Country has made me feel younger, Willem. It did that to everybody. Younger. Sexier. But as soon as it's taken away . . ."
". . . yes. You'll get sick."
"I'm never going to get sick." She allowed herself the time for a smile. "Perhaps I'm never going to die."
"Don't be foolish."
"I mean it."
"So do I. Don't be foolish. Whatever you think the room can do, it won't make you immortal."
The wisp of a smile remained on her face. "Wouldn't you like that, Willem?"
"No."
"Just a little bit?"
"I said no." He shook his head, his voice dropping. "Not anymore."
"Meaning what?"
"What do you think I mean? This life of ours . . . isn't worth living." There was a silence between them. It lasted two, three, four minutes. Rain began to hit the window; fat spots of it bursting against the glass.
"I'll find Sandru for you," Willem said finally. "Or if not him, somebody who knows how to deal with these things. I'll find a solution."
"Do that," she said. "And if you can't, don't bother to come back."
PART SIX
The Devil's Country
ONE
Todd knew the mechanics of illusion passably well. He'd always enjoyed watching the special effects guys at work, or the stuntmen with their rigs; and now there was a new generation of illusionists who worked with tools that the old matte painters and model-makers of an earlier time could not even have imagined. He'd been in a couple of pictures in which he'd played entire scenes against blank green screens, which were later replaced with landscapes which only existed in the ticking minds of computers.
But the illusions at work in this room of Katya's were of another order entirely. There was a force at work here that was both incredibly powerful and old; even venerable. It did not require electricity to fuel it, nor equations to encode it. The walls held it, with possessive caution, beguiling him by increments.
At first he could make virtually no sense of the images. It simply seemed that the walls were heavily stained. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to reading the surface, he realized he was looking at tiles, and that what he'd taken to be stains were in fact pictures, painted and baked into the ceramic. He was standing in a representation of an immense landscape, which looked more realistic the longer he studied it. There were vast expanses of dense forests; there were stretches of sun-drenched rock; there were steep cliff-walls, their crannies nested by fearless birds; there were rivulets that became streams, in turn converging into glittering rivers, which wound their way toward the horizon, dividing into silver-fringed deltas before they finally found the sea. Such was the elaboration of the painting that it would take many hours of study, perhaps even days, to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And that would only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which, as he was now astonished to see, was not the case.
There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket; one of those fearless birds wheeled away from the cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through the undergrowth, noses to the ground.
"Katya . . . ?" Todd said.
There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she'd last been standing); so he looked back. She wasn't there. Nor was the door through which he'd stepped to come into this new world. There was just more landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.