“Well it’s different here.”
“Willem, I don’t care how different it is: the dead can’t have children.”
“You saw them. Believe your eyes.”
Tammy shook her head. Not in disbelief, rather in frustration. How could it be that the rules of the world worked one way in one place, and so very differently in another?
“The truth is: I don’t know,” Zeffer said, answering her unspoken question. “Over the years the ghosts have mated with the animals, and the results are those things. Maybe the dead are closer to the condition of animals. I don’t know. I only know it’s real. I’ve seen them. You’ve seen them. They’re hybrids. Sometimes there’s a kind of beauty in them. But mostly … ugly as sin.”
“All right. So I buy the hybrids. But why here? Is it her!”
“In a roundabout way, I suppose … ” He mused for a moment, and then — apparently with great effort, as though since they’d come into the house a lifetime of suffering had caught up with him — he got to his feet. He went to the sink, and turned on the faucet, running the water hard. Then, cupping his hand, he took some up to his lips and drank noisily. This done, he turned off the faucet and looked over his shoulder at her.
“I know in my heart you deserve to know everything, after all you’ve been through. You’ve earned the truth.” He turned fully to her. “But before I tell you, let me say I’m not sure I understand any of this much more than you do.”
“Well I understand nothing,” Tammy said.
He nodded. “Well, then. How do I start this? Ah. Yes. Romania.” He put his hand up to his face, and wiped some water off his lower lip. “Katya was born Katya Lupescu in Romania. A tiny village called Ravbac. And in the summer of 1921, just after we’d built this house, I went back with her to her homeland, because her mother was sick and was not expected to live more than another year.”
“She’d been brought up in utter poverty. Abuse and poverty. But now she was a great star, coming home, and it was extraordinary really, to see how she had transformed herself. From these beginnings to the woman she’d become.
“Anyway, there was a fortress close to the village where Katya was born, and it was run by the Order of St. Teodor, who made it their business to protect the place. When we arrived, Katya and myself had both been given a tour, but she wasn’t very interested in the old fortress and priests with halitosis. Neither was I, frankly, but I wanted to leave her with her family to talk over old times, so I went back to the Goga Fortress a second day. The monk who took me round made it dear that the Order had fallen on hard times, and the brothers needed to sell off what they could. Tapestries, chairs, tables: it was all up for sale.
“Frankly, I didn’t care for much of it, and I was about to leave.
“Then he said: let me show you something special, really special. And I thought: what the hell? Ten more minutes. And he took me down several flights of stairs into a room the likes of which I’d never seen before.”
“What was in there?”
“It was decorated with tiles — thousands of tiles — and they were all painted, so when you walked into the room it was almost as though — no; it was as though you were walking into another world.” He paused, contemplating the memory of this; awed by it still, after all these years.
“What kind of a world?” Tammy asked him.
“A world that was both very real and completely invented. It had space for sky and sea and birds and rabbits. But it also had a little pinch of Hell in the mix, just to make things more interesting for the men who lived in that world.”
“What men?”
“Well, one man in particular. His name was Duke Goga. And he was there in the walls, on a hunt that would last until the end of time.”