Clive Barker - Coldheart Canyon

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Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Scanned from an Advanced Readers Edition

For David Emilian Armstrong

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are a lot of people to thank for helping me bring this one home.

It was a devil of a book to write, for a host of reasons. For one thing, I

began writing it the week before my father passed away, and inevitably the

long shadow of that event dimmed the joy of writing, at least for the first

six months or so, slowing it to a crawl.

Paradoxically, even as my production of useable text diminished, I could

feel the scale of the story I wanted to tell getting bigger. What had

originally begun life as an idea for a short, satiric stab at Hollywood began

to blossom into something larger, lusher and stranger: a fantasia on Hollywood

both in its not-so-innocent youth and in its present, wholly commercialized

phase, linked by a sizeable cast and a mythology which I would need to create

and explain in very considerable detail.

I don't doubt that this second incarnation of the book will be much more

satisfying a read than the firstówhich I had written almost in its entirety

before changing directionóbut Lord, it was a son of a bitch to get down onto

the page.

Forgive me, then, if the list of people I'm thanking is longer than

usual. And believe me when I tell you every one of them deserves this nod of

recognition, because each has helped get Coldheart Canyon out of my head and

into print.

Let me begin with the dedicatee of this book, David Emilian Armstrong,

my husband and in every sense of the word my partner: the one who was with me

when one of our five dogs, Charlie, passed away (Charlie's loving presence,

and the sadness and frustration of losing him, is recorded in this novel).

David always has faith in my capacity to go one step further: to make the tale

I'm telling a little richer, the picture I'm painting a little brighter, the

photograph I'm taking a little sexier.

My thanks to Craig Green and Don MacKay, to whom I first gave the

handwritten pages to be typed; and most especially to David John Doddsómy

oldest and dearest friendówho worked through much of the Christmas period

(with the Seraphim offices deserted around us) polishing the text, then

polishing the polishes, so that the immense manuscript would be ready to be

dispatched to my publishers before I went to recuperate in Kauai.

To Bob Pescovitz, my researcher, and Angela Calin, my translator, my

thanks.

To Michael Hadley, Joe Daley and Renee Rosen, who run all the various

aspects of my creative life outside writing and painting (films, television,

theme park mazes and toy-lines, web-sites, photographs-and the endless

business of promoting the above), my gratitude. In the last year and a half, I

have often been an absentee boss, because I've been in the wilds of Coldheart

Canyon. During that period, they have worked together to make our businesses

prosper. Let me not forget Ana Osgood and Denny McLain, to whom fall the very

considerable responsibilities of organizing and archiving my visual work,

especially the many enormous paintings for my next books, The Abarat Quartet.

Then there are the two peopleóToya Castillo and Alex Rosasówho make the

homes in which we work run smoothly. Who feed David and myself, and wash our

clothes; who make sure there's shampoo in our shower and our dogs smell sweet.

Again, I have been something of a phantom of myself for much of the last year,

passing through the house on my way to write or paint with a distracted look.

They kindly indulge my craziness, and my endless calls for cups of hot sweet

tea.

I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Dr Alex del Rosario, and his

assistant Judy Azar. I recently described Alex as the perfect 'artist's

doctor'. He has guided me through some lengthy periods of sickness in the last

couple of years, understanding as no other physician in my history has the

fierce and sometimes self-wounding passion that makes artists attempt to do

the impossible: to paint another world into being, while writing a two hundred

thousand word novel while producing a couple of movies, for instance. For me,

this is my natural, albeit obsessive, behavior. But my body isn't that of a

thirty-year-old any longer (or even that of a forty-year-old!). It complains

now when I drive it hard; as I do daily. It has taken a massive contribution

of sympathetic counsel, medication and alternative therapies to keep body and

spirit together since my father's death and I owe Alex a huge debt of thanks

for my present good health.

Finally, the powers that be. First, my love and thanks to Ben Smith, my

Hollywood agent, who has been a true visionary in a job that is often maligned

(in this book, for instance) as being for cold, artistically disinterested men

and women. My thanks and great admiration go to the lawyer who has helped

shape my business life in the last two years, David Golden. The Abarat deal

with the Disney Company was the largest literary deal made in Hollywood last

year, and it covers every possible shape and permutation that my invented

world might take, in the hands of Disney's imagineers. To give you a taste of

what kind of wordage David Golden has minutely analyzed on my behalf: the

Disney contract had three pages alone devoted to listing its contents!

On the literary side, my dear Anne Sibbald, who has surely the tenderest

heart of any agent who ever represented an unreformed maker of monsters like

myself, has been a constant source of encouragement, and a fearless champion

whenóon occasionóthe machinations of the corporate world proved painful and

incomprehensible.

And lastóbut oh, you both know, never leastómy editors.

In New York, Robert Jones (who's had his own wars to fight of late, and

has still always been there with a witty word of support; or some wonderfully

dry remark at the expense of the many idiocies of the publishing world.)

And finally we come to Jane Johnson. My Jane, I insist, the Editor of

Editors, who is never far from my mind when I set pen to paper. Increasingly,

Jane, I think I write to entertain you, to please you. We have survived for

many years together on a raft of shared beliefs about the necessity of dreams,

tossed around in the tumultuous seas of modern publishing. In that time, Jane

has lost countless colleagues to exhaustion, frustration and despair, and yet

she manages to be a mistress of beautiful prose as well as an editor of a

stable of authors, who, like me, could not imagine their literary lives

continuing without her.

I would have given up the increasingly problematic ambition of having a

broad audience for my work, and fled into the minor, the hermetic and the

oblique, without her tireless encouragement.

My love to you, my Jane; and, as always, my heartfelt thanks.

Here's another tale for you, saved from the flood.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE THE CANYON

PART ONE THE PRICE OF THE HUNT

PART TWO THE HEART-THROB

PART THREE A DARKER TIME

PART FOUR LIFE AFTER FAME

PART FIVE DESIRE

PART SIX THE DEVIL'S COUNTRY

PART SEVEN THE A-LIST

PART EIGHT THE WIND AT THE DOOR

PART NINE THE QUEEN OF HELL

PART TEN AND THE DEAD CAME IN

PART ELEVEN THE LAST CHASE

EPILOGUE AND SO, LOVE

PROLOGUE

THE CANYON

It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind comes off the desert.

The Santa Anas, they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave,

bringing malaise, and the threat of fire. Some say they are named after Saint

Anne, the mother of Mary, others that they are named after one General Santa

Ana, of the Mexican cavalry, a great creator of dusts; others still that the

name is derived from santanta, which means Devil Wind.

Whatever the truth of the matter, this much is certain: the Santa Anas

are always baking hot, and often so heavily laden with perfume that it's as

though they've picked up the scent of every blossom they've shaken on their

way here. Every wild lilac and wild rose, every white sage and rank

jimsonweed, every heliotrope and creosote bush: gathered them all up in their

hot embrace and borne them into the hidden channel of Coldheart Canyon.

There's no lack of blossoms here, of course. Indeed, the Canyon is

almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants here were brought in from the

world outside by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; others were

dropped in the feces of the wild animals who wander throughóthe deer and

coyote and raccoon; some spread from the gardens of the great dream palace

that lays solitary claim to this corner of Hollywood. Alien blooms, this last

kindóorchids and lotus flowersónurtured by gardeners who have long since left

off their pruning and their watering, and departed, allowing the bowers which

they once treasured to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blooms

here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these days by

the presence of sightseers who have come to see Tinseltown, do not linger in

the Canyon for very long. Though the deer venture along the ridge and down the

steep slopes of the Canyon, and curiosity, especially amongst the younger

animals, often leads them over the rotted fences and toppled walls into the

secret enclaves of the gardens, they seldom choose to stay there for very

long.

Perhaps it isn't just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps

there are too many whisperings in the air around the ruined gazebos, and the

animals are unnerved by what they hear. Perhaps there are too many presences

brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the clotted pathways.

Perhaps, as they graze the overgrown lawns, they lookup and mistake a statue

for a pale fragment of life, and are startled by their error, and take flight.

Perhaps, sometimes, they are not mistaken.

Perhaps.

The Canyon is familiar with perhaps; with what may or may not be. And

never more so than on such a night as this, when the winds come sighing off

the desert, heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the Canyon hosts

express their longing for something they dreamed they had, or dreamed that

they dreamed, their voices so tenuous tonight that they're inaudible to the

human ear, even if there were someone to hear them, which there never is.

That's not entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough

to find their way into this vale of luxury and tears; a tourist, perhaps even

a family of tourists, foolishly determined to discover what lies off the

prescribed route; looking for some famous heart-throb's love-nest, or a

glimpse of the idol himself, caught unawares as he walks with his dog. There

are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way here

intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure accounts of

Old Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these few. Indeed there is often

something close to reverence in the way they enter Coldheart Canyon. But

however these visitors arrive, they always leave the same way: hurriedly, with

many a nervous backward glance. Even the crassest of themóeven the ones who'd

claim they don't have a psychic bone in their bodiesóare discomfited by

something they sniff here. Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far

more acute than they had thought. Only when they have outrun the all-too-eager

shadows of the Canyon and they are back in the glare of the billboards on

Sunset Boulevard, do they wipe their clammy palms, and wonder to themselves

how it was that in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.

PART ONE

THE PRICE OF THE HUNT

ONE

"Your wife did not want to look around the Fortress any further, Mister

Zeffer?" Father Sandru said, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man

with the handsome, sad face had come alone.

"The lady is not my wife," Zeffer explained.

"Ah..." the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice

indicating that he was far from indifferent to Katya's charms. "A pity for

you, yes?"

"Yes," Zeffer admitted, with some discomfort.

"She's a very beautiful woman."

The monk studied Zeffer's face as he spoke, but having said what he'd

said, Zeffer was unwilling to play the confessee any further.

"I'm her manager," he explained. "That's all there is between us."

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet.

ìAfter the two of you departed yesterday," he said, his English colored by his

native Romanian, "one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely

women he had ever seen..." he hesitated before committing to the rest of the

sentence "...in the flesh."

"Her name's Katya, by the way," Zeffer said.

"Yes, yes, I know," said the Father, his fingers combing the knotted

gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Zeffer.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced and rotund in

his dusty brown habit, Zeffer slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

"She is a movie-star, yes?"

"You saw one of her films?"

Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly-kept array of teeth. "No, no," he

said. "I do not see these things. At least not often. But there is a little

cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite

regularly. They are great fans of Chaplin, of course. And there's

a...vamp...is that the word?"

"Yes," Zeffer replied, somewhat amused by this conversation. "Vamp's the

word."

"Called Theda Bara."

"Oh, yes. We know Theda."

In that yearówhich was 1920óeverybody knew Theda Bara. She had one of

the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were

famous; their fame tinged with a delicious hint of decadence.

"I must go with one of the brothers when they next go to see her,"

Father Sandru said.

"I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Bara

portrays?" Zeffer replied.

Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow. "I am not born yesterday, Mister

Zeffer. The Bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They're whores,

yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?"

Zeffer laughed at the directness of Sandru's description. "I suppose

that's about right," he said.

"And in real life?" Sandru said.

"In real life Theda Bara's name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in

Ohio."

"But is she a destroyer of men?"

"In real life? No, I doubt it. I'm sure she harms a few egos now and

again, but that's about the worst of it."

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. "I shall tell the brothers

what you told me," he said. "They'll be very interested. Well then...shall I

take you inside?"

Matthias Zeffer was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London

and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and had promised himself that

he would leave Los Angelesówhere there was neither art nor the ambition to

make artóas soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of

rejecting his offer of marriage. They would wed, and come back to Europe; find

a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish

mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood

canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d'art

he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the

statuary. They would suffice, until they could find a chateau in the Loire, or

perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood

wouldn't curdle his blood.

"You like Romania?" the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door

that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

"Yes, of course," Zeffer replied.

"Please do not feel you have to sin on my account," Sandru said, with a

sideways glance.

"Sin?"

"Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it's just a little one, but it's

a sin nevertheless."

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I've slipped from the simple

proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day,

every hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little

lies.

But he wasn't in Hollywood now. So why lie? "You're right. I don't like

this country very much at all. I'm here because Katya wanted to come. Her

mother and fatheróI'm sorry, her stepfatherólive in the village."

"Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman."

"You're her priest?"

"No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of St. Teodor

exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress." He pushed the door open. A dank

smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

"Excuse me for asking," Zeffer said. "But it was my understanding from

yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there's nobody here."

"Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers."

"So what are you keeping your eyes on?"

Sandru smiled thinly. "I will show you," he said. "As much as you wish

to see."

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large

tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so grey with age and dust as

to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he

did so. "I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase," he

said.

"Of what?" Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn't encouraged by what he'd seen so far. A few of the pieces

of furniture he'd spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing

he could imagine buying.

"I didn't realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress." Sandru

made a little groan. ìAh...I'm afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And

that being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who

will take care of them, such as yourself."

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a

fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger

than the floor above. Corridors ran of in all directions.

"But before I begin to show you," Sandru said, "you must tell meóare you

in a buying mood?"

Zeffer smiled. "Father, I'm an American. I'm always in a buying mood."

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous

day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had

sounded bogus. The Order of St. Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to

hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but

nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he

claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed

atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that

she didn't believe this to be true.

"When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this

place," she said. "I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human

blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children."

"I'm sure you must have been mistaken," the Father had said.

ìAbsolutely not. The Devil's wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they

called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back."

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an

exceptionally good one. "Who told you these tales?" he said.

"My mother."

ìAh," Sandru had shaken his head. ìAnd I'm sure she wanted you in bed,

hushed and asleep, before the Devils came to cut off your head." Katya had

made no reply to this. "There are still such stories, told to children. Of

course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an

unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was."

Despite Sandru's plausibility, there'd still been something about all of

this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return

visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition),

then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting? Certainly not a

few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was

there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so,

how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he'd already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be

persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard

cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying

and selling made the matter easier to broach.

"I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take

back to Hollywood," he said. "She's built a huge house, so we have plenty of

room."

"Oh, yes?"

'And of course, she has the money."

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety

seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

"How much are we talking about?" the Father asked mildly.

"Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am

authorized to buy whatever I think might please her."

"Then let me ask you: what pleases her!"

"Things that nobody else would be likelyóno, could possiblyópossess,

please her," Zeffer replied. "She likes to show off her collection, and she

wants everything in it to be unique."

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. "Everything here is unique."

"Father, you sound as though you're ready to sell the foundations if the

price is right."

Sandru waxed metaphysical. "All these things are just objects in the

end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made

in time, to replace them."

"But surely there's some sacred value in the objects here?" The Father

gave a little shrug. "In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell

you, let us say, the altar." He made a smile, as though to say that under the

right circumstances even that would have its price. "But everything else in

the Fortress was made for a secular purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and

their ladies. And as nobody sees it now...except a few travelers such as

yourselves, passing through...I don't see why the Order shouldn't be rid of it

all. If there's sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed amongst the

poor."

"There are certainly plenty of people in need of help," Zeffer said. He

had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in

the locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks,

the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the

mountainsóthe Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Fagaras

Mountainsótheir bare lower slopes as gray as the earth, their heights dusted

with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when even the

dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the

shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.

The day they'd arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that

she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he'd had proof

aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not

the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows

of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia,

malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was represented by these

hundreds of graves had moved him deeply: the pain of mothers, the unshed tears

of fathers and grandfathers. It was nothing he had remotely expected, and it

had made him sick with sorrow.

For her part, Katya had seemed untouched by the sight, talking only of

her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was

the world in which she'd been raised; it wasn't so surprising, perhaps, that

she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn't she once told him she'd had

fourteen brothers and sisters, and only six of them were left living? Perhaps

the other eight had been lain to rest in the very cemetery where they'd walked

together. And certainly it would not be uncommon for Katya to look coldly on

the business of the heart. It was what made her so strong; and it was her

strengthóvisible in her eyes and in her every movementóthat endeared her to

her audiences, particularly the women.

Zeffer understood that coldness better now that he'd spent time here

with her. Seeing the house where she'd been born and brought up, the streets

she'd trudged as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her

appearance in their midst as something close to a miracle: this perfect

rosebud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her utterly apart from any

other child in the village. In fact, Katya's mother had put such beauty to

profitful work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to

town to dance in the streets, andóat least according to Katyaóoffer her favors

to men who'd pay to have such tender flesh in their bed for the night. She had

quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what she'd had to do for her

family's sake she had no choice but to do for herself. By the age of fifteen

(when Zeffer had met her, singing for her supper on the streets of Bucharest)

Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all

who witnessed it. For three nights he'd come to the square where she sang,

there to join the group of admirers who were gathered around to watch this

child-enchantress. It hadn't taken him long to conceive of the notion that he

should bring her back with him to America. Though he'd had at that time no

experience in the world of the cinema (few people did; the year was 1916, and

film was a fledging), his instincts told him there was something special in

the face and bearing of this creature. He had influential friends on the West

Coastómostly men who'd grown tired of Broadway's petty disloyalties and

piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and

their investmentsówho reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier,

and that talent scouts on the West Coast were looking for faces that the

camera, and the public, would love. Did this child-woman not have such a face,

he'd thought? Would the camera not grow stupid with infatuation to look into

those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be

far behind?

He'd inquired as to the girl's name. She was one Katya Lubescu from the

village of Ravbac. He approached her; spoke to her; told her, over a meal of

cabbage rolls and cheese, what he was thinking. She was curiously sanguine

about his whole proposal; practically indifferent. Yes, she conceded, it

sounded interesting, but she wasn't sure if she would ever want to leave

Romania. If she went too far from home, she would miss her family.

A year or two later, when her career had begun to take off in

Americaóshe no longer Katya Lupescu by then but Katya Lupi, and Willem her

manageróthey'd revisited this very conversation, and Zeffer had reminded her

how uninterested she'd seemed in his grand plan. Her coolness had all been an

illusion, she'd confessed; a way in part to keep herself from seeming too

gauche in his eyes, and in part a way to prevent her hopes getting too high.

But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which

the indifference she'd demonstrated that first day they'd met (andómore

recentlyóin the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; bred into her,

perhaps, by a bloodline that had suffered so much loss and anguish over the

generations that nothing was allowed to impress itself too severely: neither

great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a creature who

held her extremes in reserve, providing glimpses only for public consumption.

It was these glimpses that the audience in the square had come to witness

night after night. And it was this same power she would unleash when she

appeared before the cinematrographic camera.

Interestingly, Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the

previous day.

In fact, it was almost as though she'd been playing a part: the role of

a rather bland God-fearing girl in the presence of a beloved priest. Her gaze

had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than usual,

her vocabularyówhich often tended to the saltyósweet and compliant.

Zeffer had found the performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated;

but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point

he'd put his hand under Katya's chin to raise her face, telling her there was

no reason to be shy.

Shy! Zeffer had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so-called shy

woman was capable of! The parties she'd master-minded up in her Canyonóthe

place gossip-columnists had dubbed Coldheart Canyon; the excesses she'd

choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was

capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask she'd been wearing

had slipped for a heartbeat, and the poor, deluded Father Sandru had glimpsed

the facts of the matter, he would have locked himself in a cell and sealed the

door with prayers and holy water to keep her out.

But Katya was too good an actress to let him see the truth.

Perhaps in one sense, Katya Lupi's whole life had now become a

performance. When she appeared on screen she played the role of simpering,

abused orphans half her age, and large portions of the audience seemed to

believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of sight of

the people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw the sort of parties

for the other idols of Hollywoodóthe vamps and the clowns and the

adventurersówhich would have horrified her fans had they known what was going

on. Which Katya Lupi was the real one? The weeping child who was the idol of

millions, or the Scarlet Woman who was the Mistress of Coldheart Canyon? The

orphan of the storm or the dope-fiend in her lair? Neither? Both?

Zeffer turned these thoughts over as Sandru took him from room to room,

showing him tables and chairs, carpets and paintings; even mantelpieces.

"Does anything catch your eye?" Sandru asked him eventually. "Not

really, Father," Zeffer replied, quite honestly. "I can get carpets as fine as

these in America. I don't need to come out into the wilds of Romania to find

work like this."

Sandru nodded. "Yes, of course," he said. He looked a little defeated.

Zeffer took the opportunity to glance at his watch. "Perhaps I should be

getting back to Katya," he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to the

village and sitting in the little house where Katya had been born, there to be

plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while Katya's relatives

came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief) their American visitors,

did not enthrall him at all. But this visit with Father Sandru was becoming

increasingly futile, and now that the Father had made his mercenary ambitions

so plain, not a little embarrassing. There wasn't anything here that Zeffer

could imagine transporting back to Los Angeles.

He reached into his coat to take out his wallet, intending to give the

Father a hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce the

note, the Father's expression changed to one of profound seriousness.

"Wait," he said. "Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe we

understand one another. You are looking to buy something you could find in no

other place. Something that's one of a kind, yes? And I am looking to make a

sale."

"So is there something here you haven't shown me?" Zeffer said.

"Something special?"

Sandru nodded. "There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared

with you," he said. "And with good reason, let me say. You see there are

people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand you

now, Mister Zeffer. You are a man of the world."

"You make it all sound very mysterious," Zeffer said.

"I don't know if it's mysterious," the priest said. "It is sad, I think,

and human. You see, Duke Goga the man who built this Fortressówas not a good

soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a childó"

"Were true?"

"In a manner of speaking. Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always

limit his quarry to animals."

"Good God. So she was right to be afraid."

"The truth is, we are all a little afraid of what happened here," Sandru

replied, "Because we are none of us certain of the truth. All we can do, young

and old, is say our prayers, and put our souls into God's care when we're in

this place."

Zeffer was intrigued now.

"Tell me then," he said to Sandru. "I want to know what went on in this

place."

"Believe me please when I tell you I would not know where to begin," the

good man replied. "I do not have the words."

"Truly?"

"Truly."

Zeffer studied him with new eyes; with a kind of envy. Surely it was a

blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain

deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with

it. He found his curiosity similarly muted. It seemed distastefulónot to

mention pointlessóto press the man to say more than he expressed himself

capable of saying.

"Let's change the subject. Show me something utterly out of the

ordinary," Zeffer said. "Then I'll be satisfied."

Sandru put on a smile, but it wasn't convincing. "It isn't much," he

said.

"Oh sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places," Zeffer said, and

as he spoke the little face of Katya Lupescu came into his mind's eye; pale in

a blue twilight.

TWO

Sandru led the way down the passageway to another door, this one rather

smaller than the oak door they'd come through to get to this level. Out came

his keys. He unlocked the door, and to Zeffer's surprise he and the priest

were presented with another flight of steps, taking them yet deeper into the

Fortress.

"Are you ready?" the Father asked.

"Absolutely," Zeffer said.

Down they went. The stairs were steep, the air becoming noticeably more

frigid as they descended. Father Sandru said nothing as they went; he glanced

back over his shoulder two or three times, to be sure that he still had Zeffer

on his heels, but the expression on his face was far from happy, as though he

rather regretted making the decision to bring Zeffer here, and would have

turned on his heel and headed back up to the relative comfort of the floor

above at the least invitation.

At the bottom of the stairs he stopped, and rubbed his hands together

vigorously.

"I think before we proceed any further we should take a glass of

something to warm us," he said. "What do you say?"

"I wouldn't say no," Zeffer said.

The Father went to a small cubby-hole in the wall a few yards from the

bottom of the stairs, from which he brought a bottle of spirits and two

glasses. Zeffer didn't remark on the liquor's proximity; nor could he blame

the brothers for needing a glass of brandy to fortify them when they came down

here. Though the lower level was supplied with electricity (there were 19

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ColdheartCanyon:AHollywoodGhostStoryCopyright2001byCliveBarkerScannedfromanAdvancedReadersEditionForDavidEmilianArmstrongACKNOWLEDGMENTSTherearealotofpeopletothankforhelpingmebringthisonehome.Itwasadevilofabooktowrite,forahostofreasons.Foronething,Ibeganwritingittheweekbeforemyfatherpassedaway,andin...

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