She raised her hand to silence their murmuring.
“Listen to me,” she said.
The chorus began to subside.
“I’m going to be leaving the house for a few hours,” Katya said, her voice a little tentative at the beginning, but gaining strength as she proceeded. “But when I come back I intend to make some changes. I don’t want you living in misery. That has to stop.”
She started to turn away, intending to leave the statement there. But some of her congregation didn’t want to let her go without hearing something more specific in her reply.
“What changes are you going to make?” someone demanded.
“Is that you, Roman?” Katya said, scanning the crowd.
The speaker didn’t have time to identify himself. There were more questions. Somebody wanted to know why she was leaving; somebody else demanded to know how long they would have to wait.
“Listen to me, listen to me,” she said, quieting the rising hubbub. “I understand that you all want to come into the house. But I don’t think you understand the consequences.”
“We’ll take them, whatever they are,” somebody said. There was a general murmur of agreement to this.
“If that’s what you want,” Katya replied, “I will consider it. When I get back — ”
“What if you don’t come back?”
“Trust me. I will.”
“Trust you? Oh please.” The mocking voice emerged from a bitter, painted face amongst the crowd. “You tricked us all. Why the hell should we trust you now?”
“Theda,” Katya said. “I don’t have the time to explain right now.”
“Well you hold on, honey, because we want some answers. We’ve had years of waiting to go back into that room — ”
“Then you can afford to wait a few hours more,” Katya replied, and without waiting for Theda Bara to come back with a retort she turned and headed on up the steps to the top of the flight.
There was a moment — just a quarter of a beat, there at the top of the stairs — when she thought she’d misjudged her audience, and they’d come up the stairs after her, their patience finally exhausted. But they’d stayed below. Even Theda. Perhaps somebody had caught hold of her arm, to keep her from doing something stupid.
Katya opened the back door, stepping over the threshold. Occasionally, in the last several decades, one of the assembly outside had taken it into their heads to test the power of the icons Zeffer had brought back from Romania, and had personally hammered deep into the wood. The five icons were called, Zeffer had told her, the Iron Word. It was powerful magic designed to drive off anything that did not belong beside cot or hearth. Katya had never actually witnessed what happened when one of the phantoms had tested the threshold. She’d only heard the screams, and seen the looks of terror on the faces of those who’d goaded the victim. Of the trespasser himself, nothing remained, except a rise in the humidity of the air around the threshold, as though the revenant had been exploded into vapor. Even these traces lingered for only a moment. As soon as the air cooled the witnesses retreated from the door, looks of terror still fixed on their faces.
She had no idea how the Iron Word worked. She only knew that Zeffer had paid a member of Sandru’s scattered brotherhood a small fortune to possess the secret, and then another sum to have the icons created in sufficient numbers that every door and window be guarded. It had been worth the investment: the Iron Word did its job. Katya felt like her mother, who’d always boasted that she kept a ‘clean house’. Of course Mother Lupescu’s definition of moral cleanliness had been purely her own.
You could fuck her twelve-year-old daughter for a small coin, but you could not say Christ when you were shooting your load between her tiny titties without being thrown out of the house.
And in her turn that twelve-year-old had grown up with her own particular rules of domestic cleanliness. In short: the dead did not cross the threshold.
You had to draw the line somewhere, or all hell would break loose. On that Mama Lupescu and her daughter would have agreed.