"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 towards 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 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."
TWO
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 amongst 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 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 flycatchers. 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 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 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 judgement 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.
THREE
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 was 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!