"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. Not just the walls. The ceiling, too. And the floor. Every inch of the place 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.
"But it had been an accident—an honest error on the Duke's part—and 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, Portuguese, 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.
"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."
"And nobody was suspicious?"
"I'm sure a lot of people were suspicious. But Lilith—or whoever she was—now occupied the Fortress. She had money, and apparently she was quite liberal with it. Local merchants got rich, local dignitaries were rather charmed by her, if the reports are to be believed—"
"Where did you find all these reports?"
"I bought most of the paperwork relating to the Fortress from the Fathers. They didn't want it. I doubt they even knew what most of it was. And to tell the truth a lot of it was rather dull. The price of pigs' carcasses; the cost of having a roof made rain-proof . . . the usual domestic business."
"So Lilith was quite the little homemaker?"
"I think she was. Indeed I believe she intended to have the Fortress as a place she could call her own. Somewhere her husband wouldn't come;
couldn't come, perhaps. I found a draft of a letter which I believe she wrote, to him—"
"To the Devil?" Tammy replied, scarcely believing she was giving the idea the least credence.
"To her husband," Zeffer replied obliquely, "whoever he was." He tapped his pocket. "I have it, here. You want to hear it?"
"Is it in English?"
"No. In Latin." He reached into his jacket and took out a
piece of much-folded paper. It was mottled with age. "Take a look for yourself," he said.
"I don't read Latin."
"Look anyway. Just to say you once held a letter written by the Devil's wife. Go on, take it. It won't bite."
Tammy reached out and took the paper from Zeffer's hand. None of this was proof, of course. But it was more than a simple fabrication, that much was clear. And hadn't she seen enough in her time in the Canyon to be certain that whatever was at work here was nothing she could explain by the rules she'd been taught in school?
She opened the letter. The hand it had been written in was exquisite; the ink, though it had faded somewhat, still kept an uncanny luster, as though there were motes of mother-of-pearl in it. She scanned it, all the way down to the immaculate and elaborate Lilith that decorated the bottom portion of the page.
"So," she said, handing it back, her fingers trembling slightly. "What does it say?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Yes."
Zeffer began translating it without looking at the words. Plainly he had the contents by heart.
"Husband, she writes, I am finding myself at ease in the Fortress Goga, and I believe will remain here until our son is found—"
"So she didn't tell him?"
"Apparently not." Zeffer scanned the page briefly. "She talks a little about the work she's doing on the Fortress . . . it's all very matter-of-fact... then she says: Do not come, husband, for you will find no welcome in my bed. If there is some peace to be made between us I cannot imagine it being soon, given your violations of your oath. I do not believe you have loved me in many years, and would prefer you did not insult me by pretending otherwise."
"Huh."
Whatever the source of the letter, its sentiments were easily understood. Tammy herself might have penned such a letter—in a simpler style, perhaps; and a little more viciously—on more than one occasion. God knows, Arnie had violated his own vows to her several times, shamelessly.
Zeffer folded the letter up. "So, you can make what you want of all this. Personally I think it's the real thing. I believe this woman was Lilith, and that she stayed in the Fortress to work on her revenge, where neither God nor her husband would come and bother her. Certainly somebody created that room, and it was somebody who had powers that go far beyond anything we understand."
"What happened when she was finished?" Tammy asked.
"She packed up and disappeared. Got bored perhaps. Went back to her husband. Or found a lover of her own. The point is, she left the Fortress with the room still intact. And with Goga and his men still in it."
"And that's what you bought?"
"That's what I bought. Of course it took a little time to realize it, but I purchased a little piece of Hell's own handiwork. And let me tell you—to make light of all this for a moment—it was Hell to move. There were thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles. They all had to be removed, cleaned, numbered, packed away, shipped and then put up again in exactly the same order that they'd been assembled in. I timed it so that the work could be done while Katya was off on a world tour, publicizing one of her pictures."
"It must have driven you half crazy . . ."
"I kept thinking about how much pleasure Katya would derive from the room when it was finished. I was oblivious to the human cost. I just wanted Katya to be astonished; and then, to look at me—who'd given her this gift—with new eyes. I wanted her to be so grateful, so happy, she'd fling herself into my arms and say I'll marry you. That's what I wanted."
"But that's not the way it turned out?"
"No, of course not."
"What happened? Did she dislike the room?"
"No, she understood the room from the beginning, and the room understood her. She started to take people down there, to show the place off. Her special friends. The ones who were obsessed with her. And there were plenty of those. Men and women both. They'd disappear down there for a few hours—"
"These were people she was having sex with?"
"Yes."
"You said both men and women?"
"Preferably together. That's what she liked best. A little of both."
"And did everybody know?"
"About her tastes? Of course. Nobody cared. It was rather chic at the time. For women anyway. The nancy-boys like Navarro and Valentino, they had to cover it up. But Katya didn't care what people thought. Especially once she had the room."
"It changed her?"
"It changed everyone who went into it, myself included. It changed our flesh. It changed our spirits."
"How?"
"All you have to do is look at me to see how I changed. I was born in 1893. But I don't look it. That's because of the room. It has energies, you see, painted into the tiles. I believe it's Lilith's magic in the tiles. She used her infernal skills to lock the Duke and his men and all those animals into the illusion: that's strong magic. The monks knew that. But they had the good sense to keep their distance from the place."
"So did everyone who went down there stay young?"
"Oh no. By no means. It affected everyone a little differently. Some people simply couldn't take it. They went in for a minute, and they were out again in a heartbeat."
"Why?"
"It's the Devil's Country, Tammy. Believe me, it is."
Tammy shook her head, not knowing what to believe. "So some people left, because they thought the Devil was in there?"
"That's right. But most people felt some extra burst of energy when they went in the room. Maybe they felt a little younger, a little stronger, a little more beautiful."
"And what was the price of it all?"
"Good question," he said. "The fact is, everyone's paid a different price. Some people went crazy because of what they saw in there. A few committed suicide. Most. . . went on living, feeling a little better about themselves. For a while at least. Then the effect would wear off, and they'd need to come back for another fix . . .
"I knew a number of opium addicts in my life. One of them was a Russian designer, Anatole Vasilinsky. Ever heard of him?" Tammy shook her head. "No real reason why you should. He worked for the Ballets Russes, under Diaghilev. A brilliant man. But completely enslaved to 'The Poppy' as he used to call it. He came to the house only once, and of course Katya showed him the room. I remember the expression on his face when he came out. He looked like a man who'd just seen his own death. He was stricken; clammy-white, shaking. 'I must never come here again,' he said. 'I don't have enough room in my life for two addictions. It would be the death of me.'
"That's what the room was, of course: an addiction. It addicted the flesh, by making you feel stronger, sleeker. It addicted the spirit, by giving you visions so vivid they were more real than real. And it addicted the soul, because you didn't want any other kind of comfort, once you'd been in the room. Prayer was no use to you, laughter was no use to you, friends, ideals, ambitions . . . they all seemed inconsequential in that perpetual twilight. When you were here, you thought all the time about being there."
Again Tammy shook her head. There was so much here to try to make sense of. Her mind was reeling.
"Do you see now why you must leave, and forget about Todd? He's seen the room. That's where she took him."
"Are you sure?"
"He's down there right now," Zeffer said. "I guarantee it. Where else would she take him?"
Tammy got up from the table. The food had done her good. Though she still felt a little light-headed, she was considerably stronger.
"There's nothing heroic about sacrificing yourself for him," Zeffer pointed out. "He wouldn't do it for you."
"I know that."
Zeffer followed her to the kitchen door. "So don't. Leave, while you can. Tammy, I beg you. Leave. I'll lead you out of the Canyon and you can go home."
"Home," Tammy said. The word, the idea, seemed hollow, valueless. There was no home for her after this. Or if there was, it wasn't the one she'd had. Arnie, the little house in Sacrame
nto. How could she even think of going back to that?
"I have to find Todd," she said. "That's what I came here to do."
Without waiting for Zeffer to lead her or escort her, she left the kitchen and went to the top of the stairs. He called after her. Another attempt at persuasion, no doubt; or some more fancy storytelling. But she ignored him this time, and started down the stairs.
THREE
Katya had a little more of her story still to tell.
" 'My life is worth nothing,' the Duke had told the Devil's wife. He who had led armies and triumphed in his crusades against the infidel now found his life was at an end. And why? Because he had chased and killed what he took to be a goat?
" 'It was an accident!' he said, his fury at the injustice of this suddenly getting the better of him. 'I demand to be seen by some higher judge than you.'
" 'There is only one higher,' Lilith replied. And that's my husband.'
"The Duke met her cold gaze, the profundity of his terror paradoxically making him brave.
" 'There is a God in Heaven,' he said.
" 'Is there now?' said Lilith. Are you certain? I saw Him only once, the day He made me. Since then He has never shown His face. This is the Devil's Country, Goga. My Lord Lucifer rules here. Or in his absence, me. I doubt your God will stretch out His hand to save your soul.'
" 'Then I shall ride out of here,' the Duke replied.
"'You saw what happened to your comrade. I'll do the same to you, before you reach your horse. I'll have you wailing like a baby at my feet.'
"Goga wasn't a stupid man. He knew there was no use in contradicting the woman. He'd already seen one of his men horribly slaughtered by her. He would surely follow if he attempted to escape. All he could do was throw himself upon Lilith's mercy.
"He went down on his knees, and composing himself as best he could, he addressed her:
" 'Please, gentle lady, listen to me.'
" 'I'm listening.'
" 'I have lost children of my own, all six of them dead by the plague. And my wife the same way. I know the pain you are suffering, and I'm sick that I was its cause. But what's done is done. I made a mistake that I bitterly regret. But how can I take it back? Had I known I was on your husband's land I would not even have hunted here.'