After a few moments of listening; the Duke let out a stream of orders: “Lasati-i! Pe cai! Ala-i copilul!”
The two men who’d been threatening Katya and Todd sheathed their swords and returned to their mounts. The baby’s cry seemed to falter for a moment, and Todd feared it would fade completely and the swordsmen would return to their threats, but then the infant seemed to find a new seam of grief to mine, and the wail rose up again, more plaintive then ever.
The men were exchanging more urgent words; and pointing in the direction from which the sound was coming.
“Este acolol Grabiti-va!”
“In padure! Copilul este în padure!”
Katya and Todd were summarily forgotten. The horsemen were by now all re-mounted, and the Duke was already galloping away, leaving his weary company to follow in his dust.
Todd felt a curious sense of betrayal; the kind felt when a story takes an unanticipated turn. That he should have come into this half-eclipsed world and been made to bleed at the point of a sword seemed absolutely apt. That the man who’d threatened him had ridden away to pursue a crying baby did not.
“What the hell is going on?” he said as he bent to help Katya up off the ground.
“They heard Qwaftzefoni, the Devil’s child,” she said.
“Who?”
She looked back in the direction of the riders. They were already halfway to the line of densely packed trees from which the pitiful summons had seemed to come, receding into the quarter-light as though being steadily erased.
“It’s a long story,” she said. “I heard it first when I was a child … and it used to frighten me … ”
“Yes?” he said.
“Oh yes.”
“Well,” Todd said, a little impatiently, “are you going to tell me?”
“I don’t know if it’ll frighten you.”
He wiped the blood from the middle of his chest with the heel of his hand. There was a deep nick in his chest, which instantly welled with blood again.
“Tell me anyway,” he said.
TWO
Though it had been Zeffer who’d offered the explanation of what lay down in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation with a question that had been niggling at her since she’d first come into this place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she’d been eating her cherry pie, sat down and said: “What are you afraid of?”
“I told you twice, three times: I shouldn’t be in here. She’ll be angry.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. Katya’s just a woman, for God’s sake. Let her be angry!”
“You don’t know what she can be like.”
“Why don’t you try telling me? Then maybe I’ll understand.”
“Tell you,” he said flatly, as though the request was impossible. “How can I tell you what this place has seen? What I was? What she was?”
“Try.”
“I don’t know how,” he said, his voice getting weaker, syllable on syllable, until she seemed sure it would crack and break. He sat down at the table opposite her, but he said nothing.
“All right,” Tammy said. “Let me give you a hand.” She thought for a moment. Then she said: “Start with the house. Tell me why it was built. Why you’re in it. Why she’s in it.”
“Back then we did everything together.”
“Who is she?”
“I’ll tell you who she was: she was Katya Lupi, a great star. One of the greatest, some would once have said. And in its day this house was one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles. One of the great dream palaces.”
“And the rest of the Canyon is hers too?”
“Oh yes, it’s all hers. Coldheart Canyon. That’s what they called it. She had a reputation, you see, for being a chilly bitch.” He smiled, though there was more rue in the expression than humor. “It was deserved.”
“And the things out there?”
“Which things?”
“Which things?” Tammy said, a little impatiently. “The freaks. The things that attacked me.”
“Those? Those are the children of the dead.”
“You say these things so casually. The children of the dead. Believe it or not, the dead don’t have kids in Sacramento. They just rot away quietly.”