Coldheart Canyon (68 page)

But now that he had this nonsense in his grasp, he wasn’t ready to let it go just yet. Ever the negotiator, he stepped forward and put out his hand, to prevent the Duke passing over the child.

“I don’t suggest you do that just yet,” he said, not sure whether the man understood him or not, though the gesture was clear enough. “The moment you hand over the brat, you’re dead. You understand?”

“Don’t do this, Eppstadt,” Todd advised.

“Why the hell not? It’s just a dream—”

“It’s not a dream,” Jerry said. “It’s real. Everything down here is as—”

“Oh Christ, Brahms,
shut up
. You know what I’m going to do when I’m finished sorting this out? I’m going to kick your faggot ass.” He grinned, obviously hugely satisfied to be so politically incorrect.

“You’re going to regret this,” Todd said. “Jerry’s right.”

“How
can
he be right?” Eppstadt said, his voice dripping contempt.

“Look at this place! How can any of this fucking idiocy be
real
? It’s all going on in my head! And I bet you thought I had the dull little mind of a business school executive!”

“Eppstadt,” Todd said. “This is
not
going on in your mind.”

Eppstadt made the donkey-bray buzz that accompanied the wrong answer on a quiz show. He was riding high on his newfound comprehension of his situation. “Wrong, baby. Fuck! So very, very wrong. Can I say something, while we’ve got this moment, and it’s my dream so I’ll fucking say it anyway? You are a terrible actor. I mean, we would get the dailies in at Paramount and we would
howl
, I mean we would
fucking
howl, at some of the takes. Tears pouring down our faces while you attempted to
emote
.”

“You are such a cunt.”

“That I am. And you’re a millionaire many times over because I persuaded a bunch of losers who wouldn’t know a crass commercial decision from a hole in their asses to pay you an obscene amount of money to parade your God-given attributes.” He turned to Lilith, who had been CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 513

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watching this outburst as though amused by the cavorting of an antic dog.

“Sorry. There I go mentioning the G-word. Probably doesn’t sit well with you?”

“God?” Lilith said. “No.
God sits perfectly well with me
.”

Eppstadt was clearly about to make some boorish reply to this but Lilith ignored him.

She let out a rhythmical whistle, and up from the dark throat of the earth came two women, bald and bare-breasted. At the sight of either faces or breasts, perhaps both, the goat-boy in the crate started to get voluble again, wailing and chattering.

“This is the end, then,” Lilith said to the Duke. “I’m taking him. Do you have any final words?”

The Duke shook his head, and raised his sword—jabbing it in Eppstadt’s direction in order to persuade him to stay out of these proceedings.

Eppstadt stood his ground, until the point of the Duke’s sword pierced his mud-caked shirt. Then he yelped and duly stepped back to prevent worse coming his way.

“Hurt, did it?” Jerry said.

“Shut the fuck up,” Eppstadt snapped.

He made no further attempt to agent the exchange between Lilith and the Duke, however. The crate was unbolted, and Lilith reached in, grabbing her one-handed offspring by his dick and balls.

“Take him, ladies,” she said to the women, and in a most unmotherly fashion she threw him into the arms of her maidservants, who seized him between them and carried him off down the slope and into the darkness.

“So it finishes,” Lilith said to the Duke.

She turned on her heel, catching hold of her insanely embroidered garment, and lifting it up to clear her step. Then she glanced back. “Did you have children?” she asked the Duke.

He shook his head.

“Then you’ll lie with those who went before you but not with any that came after. That’s good. It would be mournful to meet your children in CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 514

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the grave tonight.” She inclined her head. “Farewell then, my lord. It seems to me you’ve earned your rest.”

She had said all she intended to say, and again made to depart, but Eppstadt wasn’t quite done.

“You’re good,” he said. “I mean, real
gravitas
. I don’t see that a lot. And you’re beautiful. You know, it’s usually one or the other. Tits or brains.

But you’ve got both. I almost wish I wasn’t dreaming.”

Lilith gave him a stare which would have sent wiser men running. But Eppstadt, still believing himself the master of his own dream, was not going to be cowed by any of its cast.

“Have I met you somewhere before?” he said. “I have, haven’t I? I’m conjuring you up from a memory.”

“Oh don’t do this,” Todd murmured.

“Don’t what?” Eppstadt snapped.

“Play. Not here. Not now.”

“It’s my sand-box. I’ll play if I want to. But the rest of you can get the fuck out! That means you, faggot, and her—” He pointed at Tammy. “And you, Pickett. Out! Go on! I want you out!”

For some reason, Todd looked to Lilith for permission to depart. She nodded, first at Todd, then at Tammy, finally at Jerry.

“Are you sure you don’t want to make a graceful exit?” Todd said to Eppstadt.

“Fuck you.”

Jerry had already turned his back on the Hell’s Mouth, and was heading back toward the threshold. Tammy had also turned, but had halted, caught by the sight of the Duke and his two men, who were lying on the ground at the edge of the trees. How they had got there—what instinct had driven them to lie down like this—she didn’t know.

Their bodies were already in advanced states of corruption, even though they were still alive and they were gazing up at the slowly-changing sky, their faces cleansed of any expression of resentment or need or pain.

They seemed perfectly resigned to their decease, as though after all these years trapped in a circle they could not break, they were simply grateful to CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 515

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be leaving it. So there they lay, maggots at their nostrils, beetles at their ears, their sight drowning in pools of rot.

She didn’t watch to the end. She wasn’t that brave. Instead she turned away and followed Jerry to the door.

As she came to his side he said: “Look.”

“I saw.”

“No, not there,” Jerry said. “That’s too sad for words. Look up. It’s almost over.”

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T W O

So it was.

The sun was now over halfway uncovered, and with every passing moment the landscape it had lit with so miserly a light for the better part of four hundred years was growing brighter. The thinnest clouds—those most susceptible to heat—had already evaporated. Now the cumulus were in retreat, showing a bank of blue through which clusters of falling stars came blazing down, as though to celebrate the passing of the Hunt.

Some of the braver beasts in this extraordinary landscape—creatures that had lived contentedly in the perpetual twilight but were curious to see what change the sun would bring—were venturing out of their dens and caves and squinting up at the spectacle overhead. A lion blessed with wings strong enough to carry it aloft rose from its imperial seat among the branches of a Noahic oak, as though to challenge the sun itself. It was instantly overcome by the incandescence that filled the heavens, and tumbled back to earth, shedding feathers the size of swords.

Jerry saw the lesson clearly enough. “It’s all going to change very quickly now,” he said.

There was indeed a general sense of panic in the landscape. Every species that had learned to prosper in the silver-dim light was in a sudden terror, fearful that whatever the sun was shedding—light, heat or both—it would be their undoing. In every corner of this painted world, creatures were scuttling and scampering, fighting over the merest sliver of shadow.

It was not just the lion that had been brought down. Several flocks of birds, confounded by the sudden blaze, panicked in mid-flight, and CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 517

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descended in squawking confusion. On the roads, wild dogs went noon-day crazy, and set on one another’s throats in bursts of overheated rage; the air was suddenly populated with myriad tiny gnats and dragonflies, which rose from the grass in such swarming abundance they could only have been born that moment, their eggs cracked by the abrupt rise in temperature. And where there were flies, of course, there were fly-
catchers
.

Rodents leapt up out of the grass to feed on the sudden bounty. Lizards and snakes swarmed underfoot.

It was an astonishing transformation. In the four or five minutes since the child had been passed back to his mother and the Duke’s curse had been lifted, the landscape through which Goga and his men (their flesh and bones now indistinguishable from the swampy earth in which they’d lain down to die) had ridden had undergone a sea-change: falling stars and falling lions, the air filled with the flutter of a million dragonflies and the howling of a thousand sun-blinded dogs; trees coming into sudden blossom, their buds so fat and fruitful they exploded like little bombs, so that a blizzard of petals drenched the air with perfume.

And in the same moment as the dragonflies rose up, and the trees blossomed, Death caught a million throats, and with howls and shrieks and crazed cavorting, the Reaper claimed both the common dog and the fanciful beasts Lilith had hatched to make the Hunt more purgatorial for her victims. The chicken that had laid eggs filled with serpents was devoured by its brood in its dotage. A lizard with a dragonfly still fluttering in its jaws was taken by a beast only Lilith could have conjured: its back a shameless homage to the cunt, from its glorious labial head to the enormous golden eye buried in its depths like an opulent egg.

A thousand thousand witnesses could not have catalogued what happened to the Devil’s Country in those minutes. An army of chroniclers could not have caught a quarter of the stories here; they came and went too fast: birth, death and the madness between filling the senses to overflowing.

At the door, Tammy had time to wonder if perhaps Eden had been like this. Not the calm hand of a placid creator moving over the dappled grass CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 518

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of paradise and leaving the lion, the lamb and all that lived in between where it passed, but rather this: the sun turned up as though by an impatient cook, frying life into being, in one frenzied, blazing carnival, its most exquisite beasts no more likely to survive the heat than its basest creations. Beauty of no importance, in the heat of the moment; nor poetry; nor intelligence. Just things rising and falling without judgment or consideration; the loveliest of beings dying before they had time to speak, while veils of flies descended to pump their eggs into the bed of their quickened rot.

No wonder Lilith had said, so knowingly, that God sat perfectly well with her. Hadn’t she been his first female creation; the bride for Adam which Yahweh had rejected? Hers the first womb, hers the first egg, hers the first blood shed in pain because a man had made it so.

Tammy looked to see if she could catch a glimpse of the woman one last time, with this new notion in her head.

But the air between where she stood and where the Queen of Hell had been standing was a maze of petals, flies, birds, seeds, scales and flakes of cooked corruption. Lilith was out of sight, and Tammy knew that if she was lucky she would never have occasion to look into the woman’s eyes again.

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Upstairs, in the great bed in the master bedroom, Katya had woken from one of the most restorative slumbers she’d enjoyed in years. No nightmares; not even dreams. Just a deep sense of well-being, knowing that she had finally found the man with whom to share the years in the privacy of the Canyon.

A moment later, the comforts of her waking-state were dashed. The bed beside her was cold and empty and she heard voices; strangers in her house. That there might be people in the kitchen or the dining room would have been bad enough, but she knew instinctively where the voices were coming from. They were way downstairs, in
that
room, and given that Todd was not beside her, he was probably down there with them.

The thought did not comfort her.

She understood all too well the claim that place had. Nor did it play favorites. It beguiled, with equal eloquence, the genius and the dullard, the intellectual and the sensualist. She’d seen it happen over and over again. Lord knows, she’d had fixes enough from it herself over the years.

It had kept her beautiful, kept her strong. But for her, being in the room was merely a function of cosmetics: it wiped away the years. Though perhaps it truly was the Devil’s Country, she attached no great metaphysical significance to the place. It was her beauty parlor, nothing more. And if there were people in there now, using up her dwindling sum of perfection, then she wanted them out!
Out!

She got up and started to dress, going over the events of the previous evening as she did so. There was only one person she knew who might have seduced Todd away from her side: Tammy, the bitch who’d taken CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 520

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him away last time. For some reason Todd felt some sentimental attachment to Tammy. There was nothing wrong with that, in principle. It proved he had a heart. But the woman had no place in the scheme of things from this point on. She’d served her minor purpose; it was time she was removed.

Dressed now, Katya went to the mirror. The sleep had done her good.

There was a luminosity in her eyes that had not been there for many years. She could even bring herself to turn on a smile.

It was unfortunate, she thought as she stepped out onto the landing, but there were bound to be these little challenges at the outset. Nothing, however, was going to get between her and her paradise. Zeffer had tried, and Zeffer was dead. This woman would probably try too, but she’d end up the same way he had. And, if things really went well, the killing blow would come from Todd. That would make things perfect: if he found the weapon and struck her down. It was essential to make him understand that anyone who endangered their little paradise would have to be killed.