Coldheart Canyon (30 page)

CLIVE BARKER

remained unwavering. Zeffer had never entirely understood what had happened between them, but he had his suspicions. Katya had shown Brahms pleasures that had marked him as hers forever. That meant, most likely, that she had taken him down to see the Hunt. Once you’d walked in the Devil’s Country, smelled its ancient air, you belonged to that place, in some unspeakable way. It owned you. He didn’t need to look any further than his own body for evidence of this. Since Katya had forbidden him to enter the house—keeping him from close proximity to the tiles—he had started to look and feel his true age. His hair had turned white, his bones and joints ached perpetually. Why was he surprised? Nobody lived forever. Not movie goddesses, nor the men who served them. And certainly not houses, however much rapture they contained. Every façade cracked, finally; and crumbled; and went away to dust. It was only a question of time.

Which thought brought him back to the newest trespasser in their sealed world: the most promising opportunity for an undoing of long-held certainties he’d seen in many years. She was a strong one, this big-boned, big-breasted woman with her unhappy eyes. She was trouble, thank God. Under the right circumstances a woman like that could do all kinds of mischief. If, of course, she was still alive. She’d been snatched away by
los niños
, the corrupt children of the Canyon, offspring of unsa-vory couplings between animals and ghosts. Zeffer had witnessed such intercourse many times over the years; vile marriages between ghost women and coyotes; ghost men and deer, or dogs; even once, a woman and a bird. Somehow, such consummations were often fruitful, though the birthings were not anything he could have imagined until he laid eyes on them. The animals who produced infants this way almost always died in the process; every now and again he would come upon one of their rotted carcasses on the hillside, and he’d know that another hybrid had been added to that unholy tribe. The revenant women who allowed such con-gress (some of them famous in their day, reduced in their frustration and madness to mating with wild animals), these women seemed to show no signs of trauma when the birth was over, their bodies being less than flesh CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 225

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and more than ether; malleable, mendable. But that was not to say their matings were without consequence. These ghosts were also the wildest, in his experience; the most prone to sudden violence. The beast had got into them in more ways than one. They were touched by a kind of rabidity, which was in distressing contrast to what remained of their elegance.

Their glossy skins were pulled tight over something feral; and their beauty could not conceal it. Women who had once been household names—paragons of elegance and sophistication—walking on all fours, their gait crabbed, their speed uncanny; baring their perfect teeth in the thicket and yelping like coyotes who’d just come upon a fresh kill.

There was reason, then, for him to believe the interloper had not survived her abduction. If they’d caught up with her,
los niños
might have toyed with her for a while, but they were stupid things, and their attention spans were short. It would not take them long to decide that there’d be more sport in hurting the woman than in teasing her, and once her blood began to run they’d become frenzied, and fall upon her, taking her limb from limb.

That was his fear.

The source of his hope? That he had not heard any death-cries in the Canyon since she’d been gone. It was a tiny reason to believe that something good might come of the woman’s arrival here, but he had to have some little measure of hope, or there was nothing. So in the absence of hearing the woman’s screams, he allowed himself to believe that there was one in the Canyon who might be the undoing of Katya Lupi.

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T W O

Tammy was indeed alive. She knew she was alive because she was hungry.

It was the only thing about her present condition which she really recognized; the rest was a kind of fever-dream, filled with blurred horrors; remote pieces of what might be real and what she hoped to God was not.

She had been carried by her abductors to the far end of the Canyon, where there was no sign of any habitation. The area was pretty much jungle: dense thickets of barbed shrubs, overshadowed by stands of immense, shaggy palms. There was no way to climb up any of these trees, to escape those who’d brought her here (though even if she’d been able to do so, she was certain they would have sniffed her out); nor was there any way to move more than a few steps through the thicket. So she was left with only one option: she had to confront her abductors.

It was her mother’s gift to her, this even-headedness. In circumstances that would have brought lesser minds to the point of collapse, Edith Huxley (Ma Edie to everyone who’d ever knew her for more than a day) had been uncannily calm. And the more panicky people around her became, the calmer she’d get. It made her an ideal nurse, which was the work she’d done all her life. She soothed the hurt, she soothed the dying, she soothed the bereft. Everything’s fine, she would say in that soft voice of hers (another of her gifts to Tammy); and by some miracle everyone would believe her. Very often, because people believed her, the panic ceased and everything
was
fine. It was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So now, sitting in the thicket, in the midst of this fever-dream, with its CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 227

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voices and its faces and its stink, she repeated Ma Edie’s mantra to herself, over and over:
Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine
, waiting for it to turn out true.

Her head still throbbed from the white light that had wiped out the world before her abduction; and her stomach was certainly in need of filling, but she still had all her limbs, for which she was grateful, and a voice in her throat. So, once she’d calmed herself down, she started to talk to whatever it was that had come after her (and was still there, in the vicinity), her volume quiet but her tone insistent enough that she would not be mistaken for somebody who was afraid.

“I’d like to get back to the house now,” she said to them, “so will one of you please escort me?” She scanned the bushes. They were watching her.

She could see the glitter of their eyes, the gleam of their teeth. What
were
they? They didn’t seem quite substantial; she had the feeling that their flesh was not as solid as hers, as
real
perhaps; yet they’d possessed enough strength to remove her from the vicinity of Zeffer’s cage to this corner of nowhere, so they weren’t to be disrespected.

“Do you understand me?” she’d said, keeping her tone even. “I need to go back to the house.”

Off to her left she saw a motion in the thicket, and one of the creatures approached her, coming close enough that for the first time she had a proper view of one of the abductors. It was a female, no doubt of that, and vaguely related to a human being. The creature’s naked body was scrawny, her ribs showing through flesh that seemed to be covered with light gray-silver hair. The front limbs were extremely delicate, and she surely had hands and fingers, not pads and claws. But the back legs were as crooked as a dog’s, and rather too large for the rest of her anatomy, so that when she was squatting, her proportions were almost frog-like.

But the head: that was the worst of her. Her mouth was nearly human, as was her nose, but then the skull curved and suddenly flattened so that her eyes, which were devoid of whites, and set to either side of the skull, like the eyes of a sheep, stuck out, black and shiny and stupid.

She turned her head and stared at Tammy with her shiny eyes. Then, CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 228

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from those human lips came the scraps of a voice. “It’s no use to beg,” she told Tammy. “We eat you.”

Tammy took this in her stride; or at least did all she could to give that impression. “I’m not begging you for anything,” she said, very calmly.

“And you’re
not
going to eat me.”

“Oh?” said another voice, this time over to her right.

Tammy moved slowly, so as not to invite anything precipitous. She looked at the second speaker, who—like the female—had come closer to her. She guessed this was a male; one of the creatures who’d snatched her away from between the cages. He had a head of ungainly size and shape, his nose flattened out like the nose of a bat, his mouth wide and lipless.

Only his eyes were human; and they were unexpectedly and exquisitely blue.

“What shall we do with you then?” he said to Tammy, the slits of his nostrils flattening as he inhaled her scent.

“Help me,” she said. The male lowered his lumpen head, and stared at her from under the weight of his brow. “I need to get back to the house,”

Tammy said.

“You know the Lady?” said the female.

“What Lady?”

“In the house?”

A third voice now; a thin, reedy voice in the darkness behind the female. “Kat. Ee. A.,” the voice said.

“Katya?” Tammy said.

“Yes,” said the male. “Katya.”

He had come closer to her, and was now sniffing around her hair. She didn’t protect herself, even though flecks of his cold phlegm were hitting her neck and face. She just kept her focus, as best she could. Perhaps these freaks, for all their bizarrity, knew something about why Todd was here. If she was going to free him she had to know what she was freeing him from.

“What do you want with Katya?” Tammy said, keeping her options open as to whether she knew the woman or not.

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At the mention of Katya’s name a series of little convulsions had taken over the female. She threw back her head, showing a throat as lovely as Garbo’s. After a moment, the convulsions subsided. Once they were governed, the woman gave Tammy her answer.

“She is the one who has the Hunt.”

There wasn’t much illumination to be had from this. But Tammy pursued the questioning, not hoping for much. “What hunt?” she asked, keeping her voice low and even.

“The Devil’s Hunt,” said the male, still close to her.

“You seen it?” the female said.

“No,” Tammy replied.

“Liar.”

“If I’d seen it I’d tell you I’d seen it. But I haven’t.”

“You been in the house?”

“No I haven’t,” Tammy said. “Why, is this hunt you’re talking about
in
the house?”

“The Hunt’s in the house.”

This part was even more puzzling than the earlier stuff. Plainly her sources were not terribly reliable. Were they referring to some sort of game that Katya played?

“Have
you
ever been in the house?” she asked them.

“No,” said the female.

“But you want to go?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I want to see how it is.”

“Well . . .” Tammy said. “Perhaps I could help you get in . . . to the house.”

The female regarded her warily, moving her head back and forth to assess Tammy with both eyes.

“It’s not possible,” she said.

“Why not?”

It was the male who answered, and the phrase he used was powerful but incomprehensible. “Death at the threshold,” he said.

There were mutters and growls from others in the undergrowth at the CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 230

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mention of the threshold. She had no doubt that for all their apparent strength these creatures were deathly afraid of the house, and, no doubt, of its mistress.

“Has this woman Katya done you some harm?” she asked the female.

The creature shook its wretched head. “Kill her one day.”

“You want to kill her?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The woman just stared, her stare containing a profound distrust. Not just of Tammy, or indeed of Katya, or of the world, but of being alive. It was as though every breathing moment was conditional; an agony. And despite the brutal foulness of the thing’s appearance, Tammy felt some measure of sympathy for it.

“Maybe I could get this Katya to come out,” Tammy suggested.

The male growled, deep in his chest. “You’d do that?”

Tammy was ready to make any promise right now, to get out of her present predicament. She nodded.

There was a long moment, in which the freaks did not reply. Then, glancing around the company of her fellows, as if to check that she would not be challenged, the female caught hold of Tammy’s wrist, and pulled her up out of the thicket.

“We’re going?” Tammy said.

“Yes! Yes!” the female replied. “Quickly, though. Quickly.”

She didn’t get any argument from Tammy, who was happy to be on her way. Whatever dangers the house held they could hardly be worse than staying out here in the open. The day was quickly passing away. It would soon be dark. And judging by the repeated glances the woman gave the sky, she too was cognizant of the failing light. After the third or fourth glance Tammy couldn’t help but ask her what she was so nervous about.

“Peacock,” she said.

A peacock? There had been peacocks here? It wasn’t so surprising, on second thought. It fitted with the extravagance of the place. But they belonged on well-clipped lawns, not in this jungle of thorns and flowers.

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And even assuming the bird could push its way through the thicket without being stripped of all its finery, what could it do if it
did
catch up with them? They had bad tempers, she remembered reading once, but they were nervous things. She’d just shoo it away.

“Nothing to be scared of,” Tammy said.

The woman gave her another disconcerting sideways look. The male, meanwhile, came up beside Tammy and stared at her breasts. Not about to be intimidated, Tammy stared back. There was something vaguely recognizable in this freak; a cast to his features which reminded her of somebody famous. Who the hell was it? Some movie star. Was it Victor Mature? Yes, it was. Victor Mature. It was uncanny.