"What the hell is going on?" he said as he bent to help Katya up off the ground.
"They heard Qwaftzefoni, the Devil's child," she said.
"Who?"
She looked back in the direction of the riders. They were already halfway to the line of densely packed trees from which the pitiful summons had seemed to come, receding into the quarter-light as though being steadily erased.
"It's a long story," she said. "I heard it first when I was a child ... and it used to frighten me ... "
"Yes?" he said.
"Oh yes."
"Well," Todd said, a little impatiently, "are you going to tell me?"
"I don't know if it'll frighten you."
He wiped the blood from the middle of his chest with the heel of his hand. There was a deep nick in his chest, which instantly welled with blood again.
"Tell me anyway," he said.
TWO
Though it had been Zeffer who'd offered the explanation of what lay down in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation with a question that had been niggling at her since she'd first come into this place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she'd been eating her cherry pie, sat down and said: "What are you afraid of?"
"I told you twice, three times: I shouldn't be in here. She'll be angry."
"That doesn't answer the question. Katya's just a woman, for God's sake. Let her be angry!"
"You don't know what she can be like."
"Why don't you try telling me? Then maybe I'll understand."
"Tell you," he said flatly, as though the request was impossible. "How can I tell you what this place has seen? What I was? What she was?"
"Try."
"I don't know how," he said, his voice getting weaker, syllable on syllable, until she seemed sure it would crack and break. He sat down at the table opposite her, but he said nothing.
"All right," Tammy said. "Let me give you a hand." She thought for a moment. Then she said: "Start with the house. Tell me why it was built. Why you're in it. Why she's in it."
"Back then we did everything together."
"Who is she?"
"I'll tell you who she was: she was Katya Lupi, a great star. One of the greatest, some would once have said. And in its day this house was one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles. One of the great dream palaces."
"And the rest of the Canyon is hers too?"
"Oh yes, it's all hers. Coldheart Canyon. That's what they called it. She had a reputation, you see, for being a chilly bitch." He smiled, though there was more rue in the expression than humor. "It was deserved."
"And the things out there?"
"Which things?"
"Which things?" Tammy said, a little impatiently. "The freaks. The things that attacked me."
"Those? Those are the children of the dead."
"You say these things so casually. The children of the dead. Believe it or not, the dead don't have kids in Sacramento. They just rot away quietly."
"Well it's different here."
"Willem, I don't care how different it is: the dead can't have children."
"You saw them. Believe your eyes."
Tammy shook her head. Not in disbelief, rather in frustration. How could it be that the rules of the world worked one way in one place, and so very differently in another?
"The truth is: I don't know," Zeffer said, answering her unspoken question. "Over the years the ghosts have mated with the animals, and the results are those things. Maybe the dead are closer to the condition of animals. I don't know. I only know it's real. I've seen them. You've seen them. They're hybrids. Sometimes there's a kind of beauty in them. But mostly ... ugly as sin."
"All right. So I buy the hybrids. But why here? Is it her!"
"In a roundabout way, I suppose ... " He mused for a moment, and then -- apparently with great effort, as though since they'd come into the house a lifetime of suffering had caught up with him -- he got to his feet. He went to the sink, and turned on the faucet, running the water hard. Then, cupping his hand, he took some up to his lips and drank noisily. This done, he turned off the faucet and looked over his shoulder at her.
"I know in my heart you deserve to know everything, after all you've been through. You've earned the truth." He turned fully to her. "But before I tell you, let me say I'm not sure I understand any of this much more than you do."
"Well I understand nothing," Tammy said.
He nodded. "Well, then. How do I start this? Ah. Yes. Romania." He put his hand up to his face, and wiped some water off his lower lip. "Katya was born Katya Lupescu in Romania. A tiny village called Ravbac. And in the summer of 1921, just after we'd built this house, I went back with her to her homeland, because her mother was sick and was not expected to live more than another year."
"She'd been brought up in utter poverty. Abuse and poverty. But now she was a great star, coming home, and it was extraordinary really, to see how she had transformed herself. From these beginnings to the woman she'd become.
"Anyway, there was a fortress close to the village where Katya was born, and it was run by the Order of St. Teodor, who made it their business to protect the place. When we arrived, Katya and myself had both been given a tour, but she wasn't very interested in the old fortress and priests with halitosis. Neither was I, frankly, but I wanted to leave her with her family to talk over old times, so I went back to the Goga Fortress a second day. The monk who took me round made it dear that the Order had fallen on hard times, and the brothers needed to sell off what they could. Tapestries, chairs, tables: it was all up for sale.
"Frankly, I didn't care for much of it, and I was about to leave.
"Then he said: let me show you something special, really special. And I thought: what the hell? Ten more minutes. And he took me down several flights of stairs into a room the likes of which I'd never seen before."
"What was in there?"
"It was decorated with tiles -- thousands of tiles -- and they were all painted, so when you walked into the room it was almost as though -- no; it was as though you were walking into another world." He paused, contemplating the memory of this; awed by it still, after all these years.
"What kind of a world?" Tammy asked him.
"A world that was both very real and completely invented. It had space for sky and sea and birds and rabbits. But it also had a little pinch of Hell in the mix, just to make things more interesting for the men who lived in that world."
"What men?"
"Well, one man in particular. His name was Duke Goga. And he was there in the walls, on a hunt that would last until the end of time."
"The man on the horse," Katya said, "was the Duke."
"I got that," Todd said.
"He lived a long time ago. I'm not sure of exactly when. When you're a little child you don't listen to those kind of details. It's the story you remember. And the story was this:"
"One day in autumn the Duke went out hunting, which he did all the time -- it was his favorite thing to do -- and he saw what he thought was a goat, trapped in a briar-thicket. So he got off his horse, telling his men that he wanted to kill this animal himself. He hated goats, having been attacked by one and badly hurt as a baby He still had scars on his face from that attack, and they ached in the cold weather, all of which served to keep his hatred of goats alive. Perhaps it was a petty thing, this hatred; but sometimes little things can be the unmaking of us. There's no doubt that Goga would not have pursued his goat as far as he did had he not been injured as a child. And then -- to make matters worse -- as he approached the animal history virtually repeated itself. The animal reared up, striking the Duke with its blackhoof and cracking his nose. The goat then ran off."