“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.”