Todd struggled with the handle from his side, but what had seemed as though it was going to be the easiest part of the procedure (opening the door) was proving the most intractable. It was almost as though the room didn’t want him to leave; as though it wanted to hold on to him for as long as possible, to exercise the greatest amount of influence over him; to addict him, second by second, sight by sight.
He glanced back over his shoulder. Katya was staring up at the sky, moving her hands down over her body, as though she was luxuriating in the curious luminosity of this enraptured world. For a moment he imagined her naked, cradled in the heavenly luminescence, but he caught himself in the midst of the fantasy. It was surely just another of the room’s tricks to keep him from departing. The damn place probably had a thousand such sleights-of-mind: sexual, philosophical, murderous.
He closed his eyes hard against the seductions of the Country and put his head against the door. The tile was clammy; like a living thing. “Tammy?” he said. “Are you still here?”
“Yes?”
“When I count three, I want you to push. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“One. Two. Three!”
She pushed. He pulled. And the door fell open, presenting Todd with one of the odder juxtapositions he’d witnessed in his life. In the hallway on the other side of the door stood a woman who looked as though she’d gone several rounds with a heavy-weight boxer. There were bloody scratches on her face, neck and arms; her hair and clothes were in disarray. In her eyes she had a distinctly panicked look.
He recognized her instantly. She was the leader of his Fan Club, a woman called Tammy Lauper. Yes! The missing Tammy Lauper! How the hell had she got up here? Never mind. She was here, thank God.
“I thought something terrible had happened to you,” Lauper said.
“Give it time,” he quipped.
Behind him, he heard the horsemen approaching. He glanced around, calling again to Katya.
“Hurry up, will you?”
When he returned his gaze to Tammy it was clear that she’d taken in, as best her disbelief would allow, the incredible sight over his shoulder. Her eyes were wide with astonishment, her jaw slack.
“So this is what it looks like.”
“Yes,” he said to her. “This is it.”
Tammy threw a look back at a stooped, older man standing on the stairs behind her. He looked almost incapacitated with fear. But unlike Tammy, whose expression was that of someone who had never seen anything like this before, it was Todd’s sense that her companion knew exactly what he was seeing, and would have liked nothing better than to have turned right there and fled.
Then Todd heard Katya calling from behind him, naming the man.
“Zeffer,” she said, the word freezing the man where he stood.
“Katya … ” he said, inclining his head.
Katya came up behind Todd, pressing him aside in order to cross over the threshold. She pointed at the trespasser as she did so.
“I told you never to come back into this house!” she yelled at Zeffer. “Didn’t I?”
He flinched at this, though it was difficult to believe she posed much physical threat to him.
She summoned him down the stairs. “Come here,” she said. “You worthless piece of shit! I said: come here!”
Before he could obey her, Tammy intervened. “It’s not his fault,” she said. “I was the one who asked him to bring me down here.”
Katya have her a look of complete contempt; as though anything she might have to contribute to the conversation was worthless.
“Whoever the hell you are,” she said, “this is none of your business.”
She pushed Tammy aside and reached out to catch hold of Zeffer. He had dutifully approached at her summons, but now avoided her grasp. She came after him anyway, striking his chest with the back of her hand, a solid blow; and another; and another. As she struck him she said: “I told you to stay outside, didn’t I?”
The blows were relatively light, but they carried strength out of all proportion to their size. They knocked the breath out of him, for one thing, and she’d come back with a second blow before he’d drawn breath from the first, which quickly weakened him. Tammy was horrified, but she didn’t want to interfere, in case she simply made the matter worse. Nor was her attention entirely devoted to the sight of Todd, or to the assault upon Zeffer. Her gaze was increasingly claimed by the sight visible through the open door. It was astonishing. Despite the fact that Zeffer had told her the place was an illusion, her eyes and her mind were wholly enamoured by what she saw: the rolling forest, the rocks with their thickets of thorn bushes, the delta and the distant sea. It all looked so real. And what was that?