Coldheart Canyon (42 page)

“But the Duke would not be moved from his ambition. ‘
What kind of
hunters do you call yourselves,
’ he said to his men, ‘
if you won’t go after a goat?

Where’s your faith in God? There’s no danger to us here, if our hearts are pure.
’

“So on they went, the men quietly offering up prayers for the safety of their souls as they rode.

“And eventually, after a long chase, their quarry came in sight again.

The goat was standing in a grove of trees so old they had been planted before the Flood, in the tangled roots of which grew mushrooms that CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 313

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gave off the smell of dead flesh. The Duke got off his horse, drew his sword and approached the goat.

“
‘Whatever thing you are
,’ he said to the animal, ‘
breathe your last.
’ ”

“Nice line,” Todd remarked.

“The animal reared up, as though it was going to strike the Duke with its hoof a third time, but Goga didn’t give it the opportunity. He quickly drove his sword up into the belly of the animal.

“As soon as it felt the sword entering its flesh the goat opened its mouth and let out a pitiful wail . . .”

Katya paused here, watching Todd, waiting for him to put the pieces together.

“Oh Christ,” he said. “Like a baby?”

“Exactly like a baby. And hearing this pitiful human sound escaping the animal, Goga pulled his sword from the goat’s body, because he knew something unholy was in the air. Have you ever seen an animal slaughtered?”

“No.”

“Well there’s a lot of blood. A lot more than you think there’s going to be.”

“It was like that now?”

“Yes. The goat was thrashing around in a pool of red, its back legs kicking up the wet dirt, so that it spattered Goga and his men. And as it did so, it started to
change
.”

“Into what?”

Katya smiled the smile of a storyteller who had her audience hooked by some unexpected change of direction.

“Into a little child,” she said. “A boy, a naked little boy, with a nub of a tail and yellow eyes and goat’s ears. So now the Duke is looking down at this goat-boy, twitching in the mud made of dirt and blood, and the superstitious terror which his men had felt finally seizes hold of him too. He starts to speak a prayer.

“Tatal Nostru care ne esti în Ceruri, sfinteasca-se numele Tau. Fie Imparatia
Ta, faca-se voia Ta, precum în cer asa si pe pamânt.”

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Todd listened to the unfamiliar words, knowing in the cadence that what Katya was reciting was not just
any
prayer; it was the Lord’s Prayer.

“Pâinea noastra cea de toate zilele dane-o noua azi si ne iarta noua greselile
noastre.”

He scanned the landscape as he heard the prayer repeated; nothing had changed since he’d first set eyes on the place. The light of the eclipse held everything in suspension: the trees, the ships, the lynchers at their tree.

The rush of pleasure he’d experienced when he first arrived had diminished somewhere in the midst of Katya’s tale-telling. In its place there was now a profound unease. He wanted to stop her telling her story, but what reason could he give that didn’t sound cowardly?

So she continued.

“The Duke retreated, leaving his sword stuck deep in the body of the goat-boy. He intended to climb back onto his horse and ride away, but his steed had already bolted in terror. He called to one of his men to dismount, so that he might have the man’s horse, but before the fellow could obey the rock beneath their feet began to shake violently, and a great chasm opened up in the ground in front of them.

“The men knew what they were witnessing. This was the very mouth of Hell, gaping in the earth beneath their feet. It was thirty, forty feet wide, and the roots of those ancient trees lined it like the veins of a skinned body. Smoke rose up out of the maw, stinking of every foul thing imaginable, and a good deal that was not. It was such a bitter stench that the Duke and his men began to weep like children.

“Half-blinded by his own tears, and without a horse, Goga had no choice but to stay where he was, on the lip of the Hell’s Mouth, close to where his victim lay. He tore his gloves from his hands and did his best to clear the tears from his eyes.

“As he did so he saw somebody coming up out of the earth. It was a woman, he saw; with hair so long it trailed the ground fully six feet behind her. She was naked, except for a necklace of white fleas with eyes that burned like fires in their tiny heads. Thousands of them, moving back and CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 315

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forth around the woman’s neck and up over her face, busy about the business of prettifying her.

“She was not looking at the Duke. Her black-red eyes, which had neither lashes nor brows, were on the goat-boy. In the time it had taken for the mouth of Hell to open, the last of the boy’s life had poured out of him. Now the child’s corpse lay still in the wet dirt.

“ ‘You killed my child,’ the woman said as she emerged from the infernal mouth. ‘My beautiful Qwaftzefoni. Look at him. Barely a boy. He was perfect. He was my joy. How could you do such a heartless thing?’

“At that moment one of the horsemen behind the Duke attempted to make an escape, spurring his horse. But the goat-boy’s mother raised her hand and at her instruction a gust of wind came up out of the depths of Hell, so strong that it drew her hair around her and forward, like a thousand filament fingers pointing toward the escaping man. He didn’t get very far. The wind she’d summoned was filled with barbs; like the vicious seedlings of ten thousand flowers. They spiraled as they flew, and they caught the Duke’s man in a whirling of tiny hooks. Blinded by the assault, the man toppled from his horse, and attempted to outrun the barbs. But they were fastened onto him, and their motion continued, circling his body, so that the man’s flesh was unraveled like a ball of red twine. He screamed as the first circling took off his skin, and redoubled his shrieks when a second cloud of barbs caught his naked muscle, and repeated the terrible cycle. Having drawn off a length of the man’s tissue, they described a descending spiral around him, leaving the victim clear for a third and fourth assault. His bone was showing now; his screams had ceased. He dropped to his knees and fell forward in his own shred-dings, dead.

“Overhead, carrion birds circled, ready to gorge themselves as soon as the body was abandoned.

“ ‘This man is the lucky one among you,’ the woman said to the Duke.

‘He has escaped lightly. The rest of you will suffer long and hard for what you have done today.’

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“She looked down at the goat-boy’s corpse, her hair crawling around her heels to fondly touch the body of the child.

“The Duke fell to his knees, knotting his hands together to make his plea. ‘Lady,’ he said to her, in his native tongue. ‘This was an accident. I believed the boy to be an animal. He was running from me in the form of a goat.’

“ ‘That is his father’s chosen form, on certain nights,’ the woman replied. Goga knew, of course, what was signified by this. Only the Devil himself took the form of a goat. The woman was telling him that she was Lilith, the Devil’s wife, and that the child he had killed was the Devil’s own offspring. To say this was not good news was an understatement.

The Duke concealed his terror as best he could, but it was terror he felt.

To be standing on the lip of Hell, accused of the crime before him, was a terrifying prospect. His soul would be forfeit, he feared. All he could do was repeat what he’d said: ‘I took the boy to be a goat. This was a grievous error on my part, and I regret it with all my heart—’

“The woman raised her hand to silence him.

“ ‘My husband has seventy-seven children by me. Qwaftzefoni was his favorite. What am I supposed to tell him when he calls for his beloved boy, and the child does not come as he used to?’

“The Duke had barely any spittle in his throat. But he used what little he had to reply. ‘I don’t know what you will say.’

“ ‘You know who my husband is, don’t you? And don’t insult me by pretending innocence.’

“ ‘I think he is the Devil, ma’am,’ the Duke Goga replied.

“ ‘That he is,’ the woman said. ‘And I am Lilith, his first wife. So now, what do you think your life is worth?’

“Goga mused on this for a moment. Then he said: ‘Christ save my soul.

I fear my life is worth nothing.’ ”

“So,” said Zeffer, “Goga’s Hunt was painted on every wall of this room.

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was covered with the genius of painter and tile-maker. It was astonishing.

And I thought—”

“You’d give this astonishing thing to the woman you idolized.”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I thought. After all, it was utterly unique.

Something strange and wonderful. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to buy it, now I look back. The place had a power over me. I felt stronger when I was in that room. I felt more alive. It was a trick, of course. The room wanted me to liberate it—”

“How can a room want anything?” Tammy said. “It’s just four walls.”

“Believe me, this was no ordinary room,” Zeffer said. He lowered his voice, as though the house itself might be listening to him. “It was commissioned, I believe, by a woman known as the Lady Lilith. The Devil’s wife.”

This was a different order of information entirely, and it left Tammy speechless. In her experience so far, she’d found the Canyon a repository of grotesqueries, no doubt; but they’d all been derived from the human, however muddied the route. But the Devil? That was another story; deeper than anything she’d encountered so far. And yet perhaps his presence, or the echo of his presence, was not so inappropriate. Wasn’t he sometimes called the Father of Lies? If he and his works belonged anywhere, Hollywood was probably as good a place as any.

“Did you have any idea what you were buying?” she said to Zeffer.

“I had a very vague notion, but I didn’t really believe it. Father Sandru had talked about a woman who’d occupied the Fortress for several years while the room was made.”

“And you think this woman was Lilith?”

“I believe it was,” Zeffer said. “She made a place to trap the Duke in, you see.”

“No, I
don’t
see.”

“The Duke had killed her beloved child. She wanted revenge, and she wanted it to be a long, agonizing revenge.

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she knew the law would not allow her to take the soul of a man who killed her child.”

“Why would she care about the law?”

“It wasn’t our
human
law she cared about. It was God’s law, which governs Earth, Heaven and Hell. She knew that if she was going to make the Duke and his men suffer as she wished to make them suffer, she would have to find some secret place, where God would not think to look. A world within a world, where the Duke would have to hunt forever, and never be allowed to rest . . .”

Now Tammy began to understand.

“The room,” she murmured.

“Was her solution. And if you think about it, it’s a piece of genius. She moved into the Fortress, claiming that she was a distant cousin of the missing Duke—”

“And where was he?”

“Anybody’s guess. Maybe she held him in his own dungeons, until the hunting grounds were ready for him.

“Then she brought tile-makers from all over Europe—Dutch, Portu-guese, Belgians, even a few Englishmen—and painters, again from every place of excellence—and they worked for six months, night and day, to create what awaits you downstairs. It would look like the Duke’s hunting grounds—at least superficially. There would be forests and rivers and, somewhere at the horizon, there’d be the sea. But she would play God in this world. She’d put creatures into it that she had conjured up from her own personal menagerie: monsters that the painters in her employ would render with meticulous care. And then she’d take the souls of the Duke and his men—still living, so that she remained within the law—and she’d put them into the work, so that it would be a prison for them. There they would ride under a permanent eclipse, in a constant state of terror, barely daring to sleep for fear one of her terrible beasts would take them. Of course that’s not all that’s on the walls down there. Her influence invaded the minds of the men who worked for her, and every filthy, forbidden thing they’d ever dreamed of setting down they were given the freedom to create.

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“Nothing was taboo. They took their own little revenges as they painted: particularly on women. Some of the things they painted still shock me after all these years.”

“Are you certain all of this is true?”

“No. It’s mostly theory. I pieced it together from what I researched.

Certainly Duke Goga and several of his men went missing during an eclipse on April 19th, 1681. The body of one of them was found stripped of its skin. That’s also documented. The rest of the party were never found. The Duke had lost his wife and children to the plague, so there was no natural successor. He had three brothers, however, and—again, this is a matter of documented history—they gathered the following September, almost six months to the day after the Duke’s disappearance, to divide their elder brother’s spoils. It was a mistake to do so. That was the night the Lady Lilith took occupancy of the Goga Fortress.”

“She killed them?”

“No. They all left of their own free will, saying they wanted no part of owning the Fortress or the land, but were giving it over to this mysterious cousin, in their brother’s name. They signed a document to that effect, and left. All three were dead within a year, by their own hands.”