Coldheart Canyon (71 page)

Some instinct made her go back to the middle icon, thinking that she might get lucky. But it was a waste of time. The damn thing was as immovable as it had been previously. She went on to the right of it, and dug around the second of the remaining pair. The wood was just as vulnerable as it had been on the other side, but her numbed muscles were nowhere near as strong now as they’d been a minute ago. She took both hands to the blade, but she wasn’t as smart with her left hand as she was with her right, and it added little by way of leverage. Her breath was coming in short gasps, her frustration mounting.

She glanced up at the ghosts, as though the fierceness of their need to be inside would lend her some strength. To her surprise she found that one of CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 535

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them had come forward and crouched down to examine one of the icons.

It apparently carried no power now that it was out of its place in line, like a letter lifted from a curse-word, and rendered harmless. The man was so close to her she could have touched him if she’d raised her hand.

Very quietly, the dead man spoke.

“The bitch is coming,” he said.

Tammy glanced over her shoulder. There was nobody in the passageway behind her,
yet
; nor was there any sound from the kitchen. Still she didn’t doubt that what the man had said was true.

She willed her hands to grasp the knife a little harder, and they seemed to oblige her, just a little. She pushed the blade deeper into the wood and the icon shifted. She twisted and felt what was by now a familiar jolt of power from the metalwork. This time it passed through both hands. The icon was spat from the wood, and fell, spinning, on the tiles.

But she had no reason to celebrate. Her hand was now so weak that the knife fell from her grip and clattered on the floor between her knees.

There was no feeling remaining in her right hand; and her left was not going to be much use to her on the remaining icon.

Still, what choice did she have? She picked the knife up in her left hand anyway, and using the numbed wrist of her right, guided it to the hole she’d dug around the central icon. Perhaps if she just wriggled the point of the blade around for long enough, she’d locate a weak spot. She leaned forward, to put the weight of her body into the calculation.

“Come on,” she murmured to it, “you sonofabitch . . . move for Momma.”

There was a sound behind her. A soft sound. A groan.

She looked back, fearing the worst, and the worst it was.

Todd had swung around the doorjamb coming from the kitchen, his hand clutching his lower belly. There was blood running between his fingers; and blood on his trousers, a lot of it.

“She stabbed me,” he said, his tone one of near-disbelief. He kept his eyes fixed on Tammy, as though he couldn’t bear to inspect the damage.

“Oh Jesus, she stabbed me.”

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He leaned forward, and for a moment Tammy thought he was simply going to fall over. But he reached out and caught hold of the lips of one of the four alcoves carved into the walls of the passageway.

“You have to get out of here,” he said to Tammy.

She got to her feet, ready to help him, but he waved her away.

“Just go! Before she—”

Comes
, he would have said. But it was academic. Katya was there already, coming round the corner, the knife in her hand, his blood on it.

Todd turned back to look at her.

She was moving at her old, leisurely pace, as though they had all the time in the world to play out the last reel of this tragedy.

Todd reached into the alcove and found an antique pitcher there. His body blocked what he was doing from Katya’s view, but even if she’d seen what he was up to, Tammy thought, she would still have kept coming.

She had the knife, after all. And more than that, she had the certainty that Todd had nowhere else to go; nowhere to fall, finally, except into her arms; into her knife. That was what the pace of her approach announced: that she expected him to die in her embrace.

Todd grasped the pitcher and swung it round. It caught Katya’s shoulder, and shattered, shards of ceramic flying up into her face.

The impact was sufficient to throw her back against the wall, and the knife dropped from her hand, but the effort had used up a significant part of what was left of Todd’s energies. He stumbled across the passageway, his arms outstretched, and fell against the opposite wall.

His face was ashen, his teeth clenched—his eyelids lazy with pain.

“Let them in,” he murmured to Tammy. “What are you waiting for?

Let
.
Them
.
In!
”

At the other end of the passageway, Tammy felt Katya’s gaze fix on her.

A ceramic chip had nicked the skin beneath her eye; a single drop of blood ran down over her flawless cheek. She didn’t trouble herself to wipe it away. She simply dropped to her haunches and casually picked up the knife.

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on Tammy. Two women, each with a knife. And dying between them, the man they’d both loved; or imagined they had.

As Tammy’s mother had been fond of saying, when the subject of love had come up in conversation, as it would from time to time:
it’ll all end in
tears
.

Well, so it had. And more to come, no doubt. Plenty more to come.

She tore her gaze from Katya, picked up the knife with her left hand and guided it with her right back to the assaulted wood around the middle icon.

Again, she leaned into the task, put every pound to work. She twisted the knife to the left. A few small splinters came away. She twisted again, this time to the right, wanting nothing in the world as much as she wanted that sickening jolt through her bones. She could see more of the icon’s depth now, embedded in the wood. It went far deeper than the others, she saw. That was why it refused to budge. It wasn’t just wider, it was longer.

She glanced up at the ghosts. They’d missed nothing of what was going on in the passageway. Eyes like slits, they’d all come a little closer to the threshold, daring its consequences.

Behind her, Todd said: “Tammy?”

He was sliding down the wall, his gaze fixed on her. Katya had apparently used the knife on him again, but hadn’t lingered to finish him off.

She was moving past him, her eyes on Tammy.

“
It’ll all end in tears
. . .” Tammy murmured to herself, and then turned one more time to the challenge of the central icon.

For the last time, she threw her weight down upon it, using her weakened left hand and her benumbed right to twist the knife-blade in the groove beneath the metal ridge.

Another two or three small splinters came away.

“
Come on
,” she begged. “
Please, God
.
Move
.”

Katya was right behind her now. She could feel her presence at her back. And of course Tammy was a perfect target, right now, but there wasn’t a thing in Hell she could do about that, not if she wanted to keep going, keep pushing, keep hoping the damn thing would—

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It moved!

She looked down at the icon, and yes, God love it, the thing had lifted out of the wood a little. Scarcely at all, in truth, but movement was movement.

She twisted again, using what little strength her left hand had. And suddenly the jolt came up out of the icon with such force that it threw her backward, so that she landed in front of Katya, deposited before her like a sacrificial lamb.

The pain in her hands and her arms was so severe this time that she had difficulty staying conscious.

The image of Katya loomed above her, knife in hand. Blotches of darkness invaded it from the corners of her sight. But she held on by force of will, determined not to lie there passively while Katya leaned over and slit her throat.

“You interfering bitch,” Katya said, raising the knife. She took hold of Tammy’s hair, pulling back her head to expose her throat.

But before she could deliver the cut, something else drew her attention. It seemed she had not realized until this moment that all her defenses had been breached.

“Jesus Christ,” she said.

Weak as she was, Tammy was still capable of feeling a little satisfaction as she saw the look on Katya’s face go from murderous intent to puzzlement, and then—very suddenly—to fear.

“What have you done?” she murmured.

Tammy didn’t have the energy or the wit for a pithy reply. But she didn’t really need one. Events would speak for themselves now.

The door was open and the threshold cleared.

After years of frustration and exile, Katya’s long-neglected guests were coming back to reacquaint themselves with the mysteries of the Devil’s Country.

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Came In

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O N E

They came almost silently at first, and cautiously, as though even now they suspected Katya had laid some trap to catch them once they were inside the house. But as soon as four or five of them were safely over the threshold, and it became obvious that there were no traps, their silence erupted into a horrid din of triumph, and their caution turned into an ungainly torrent of desperate spirits, all struggling to get through the door at the same time.

Though Tammy’s consciousness was still slippery, she had enough strength left to protect her face from the feet of those coming through, rolling herself into a semi-fetal position to avoid the worst.

There were so many revenants, and the door through which they were attempting to pass was so narrow, that impatience soon ignited among the crowd. Arguments became physical assaults, as the stronger pushed the weaker aside so they could be the first down the stairs, the first through the door that would take them into the Devil’s Country. Tammy had her hands over her face, but between her fingers she saw Katya put up a vain protest against this invasion. She shouted something, but it was lost in the din of triumph and argument. A moment later, she too was lost, as the wave of exiles threw themselves against her and carried her away. This time Tammy
did
hear her, though it was not a word she uttered but a scream, a furious scream.

They were in her dream palace
—

These
things
, which had once been her friends, her beautiful friends, the virile and the beautiful deities of a lost Golden Age, reduced by CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 542

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hunger and despair to the filleted, smeared, wasted dregs of humanity, now bore her away.

The noises they made as they came—
and came, and came
—were some of the most distressing sounds Tammy had ever heard.

Slaughterhouse shrieks and plague-pit moans, chattering and curses that were more like the din out of a padded cell than anything that should have come from an assembly of once-sophisticated souls.

Finally, however, the noise and the kicking of her body by passing feet, slowed and ceased.

The procession of the dead had passed over the threshold, along the corridor and into the house. It had taken perhaps five minutes to get the entire assembly inside. Now they were gone. The passageway was deserted, except for Tammy and Todd.

Tammy waited another minute or two before gathering the strength to unknot her weary limbs and roll herself over. She gave thanks, as she did so, to her mother, of all people, who had been an unpleasant piece of work (especially in her latter years) but had possessed the constitution of a horse, which Tammy had inherited. Most of the women Tammy knew would not have survived the brutal physical assaults and violations that had punctuated the adventures of her last few days. Thanks to Momma, Tammy had.

She fixed her gaze on Todd, who had apparently also survived both Katya’s attack and the revenants’ tide.

He was half-sitting, half-slumped, against the wall further down the passageway, staring at the alcove from which he’d grabbed the antique pitcher. His breathing was ragged, but at least he was still alive. It was a short drive to Cedars-Sinai from here, if she could get help to carry him to the car.

She crawled over to him. He was doing nothing to stanch the wounds (Katya had stabbed him at least twice, possibly three times); the blood was pulsing out of him. He saw her coming from the corner of his eye. Very slowly, he turned his head toward her. “You let them in,” he said.

“Yes. I let them in.”

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“You . . . had it planned all along then?”

“Not really. It was Zeffer’s idea.”

He made a long, soft moan, as he saw the neatness of this. Zeffer, the first exile from the dream palace; Zeffer, who’d been the bitch-goddess’s dog, finally become her undoer. And Tammy, his agent.

“So you were in this together,” he said.

“I’ll tell you about it later. Right now we should get out of here.”

He made a very small, very weary shake of his head. “I don’t think . . .

I’ll be going anywhere anytime soon. She meant to kill me. And I’m afraid . . . she has. She knew in the end I’d sided with you. And that meant I’d betrayed her.”

“You didn’t—”

“
Yes, I did
. I knew the last thing she wanted was that the ghosts get in.”

He shook his head, his eyes sliding closed. “But I had to. It was the right thing.” He opened his eyes again, and looked down at the blood. “And her killing me, that was right, too.”

“Christ, no . . .”

“It’s all . . . ended up . . . the way it should.”

“Don’t say that,” Tammy murmured. “It’s not over yet.” She pushed herself up onto her knees, then grabbed hold of the edge of one of the alcoves, and hauled herself to her feet. The numbness was passing from her hands. Now they simply tingled, as though they’d been trapped under her while she slept.