“Jesus,” Todd said, coming across a picture of scatology. “Who’s the pooper?” Katya turned the picture round to get a dearer view of the woman’s face. “That was Edith Vine. At least that was her real name. I can’t remember what they called her. She had a seven year contract with RKO, but they never made a star out of her.”
“Maybe they were afraid one of these would leak out and they’d lose their investment.”
“No, she just kept getting pregnant. She was one of those women who just had to look at a man and bam, she was eating anchovies and ice cream. So she kept getting abortions. Two, three a year. And her body went to hell.”
“Where did she end up?”
“Oh she’s here,” Katya said. “We don’t just take the famous up here in the Canyon. We take the failures, too.”
Without fully understanding what he’d just been told — perhaps not entirely wanting to — Todd moved on to another picture. A man who’d played cowboys most of his life was the centre of attention, all laced up in a girdle that made his waist as narrow as any showgirl’s.
“That’s one for the family album.”
“He liked to be called Martha when he was dressed like that. It was his mother’s name. In fact, I think it was his mother’s corset.”
Todd laughed, though he wasn’t sure where the laughter was coming from. Perhaps it was simply that the parade of perversions was so excessive there was nothing to do, in the end, but laugh.
“Christ. What’s that?”
“A jar of bees, and Claudette’s breast.”
“She liked to get stung?”
“She would scream like her lungs were going to give out. But then she’d have somebody pick the stings out with their teeth.”
“Fuck.”
“And she’d be so wet you could fill a shot-glass from what came out of her.”
It was too much. He put the photographs down. Bees, piss, corsets. And they were only the pictures he could make sense of. There were plenty more that defied easy comprehension; arrangements of limbs and faces and artifacts which he had no appetite to interpret.
Before he left them where they lay there was one question remaining that he simply had to ask.
“Are you in any of these?”
“Well I’m in the book aren’t I?”
“So all that stuff you were telling me in the Gaming Room, about offering yourself to the winner? All that was true?”
“All that was true.”
“Just how far did you go?”
She turned the photographs over, putting their excesses out of sight.
“As far as you want,” she said, smiling. “Then just a little further.”
She unnerved him, and she knew it. She took hold of his hand. “Come on,” she said, “Let’s go outside. We’re missing the dusk.”
FOUR
They were too late. It had been twilight when they’d entered the Pool House. Now it was night. But that wasn’t the only change that had taken place in the time they’d lingered there. The air Todd breathed when he stepped outside again was something more than a little colder, a little darker, than it had been. Though there was no wind (at least the trees weren’t moving) still he felt movement around and against him; a delicate touch on his arm, on his shoulder, something touching the back of his head. He looked at Katya. There was precious little light out here, but he could see her face with curious clarity, almost as though it were lit from within. Her expression was one of considerable pleasure.
“Say hello, Todd … ” she told him.
“Who to?”
“Oh come on. Stop pretending to yourself. You know they’re here.”
There was something brushing his cheek, lightly. He flicked it away, as though it might be a moth, though he knew it wasn’t.
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” he said, his words a kind of plea. He’d thought earlier that he could do without answers; that having her here was enough. Now he was discomfited again; he wanted some explanations for these mysteries, which multiplied every time he turned round. First Katya and her stories of the Gaming Room, then the guesthouse and the life-masks and the posters, then the bath, and the Terror. Now this: the Pool House and its history of debaucheries, locked away for posterity; and as if all that weren’t enough, they’d stepped out into these moth-wing touches against his cheek, his arm, his groin. He wanted to know what it all meant; but he was afraid of the answer. No, that wasn’t it. He was afraid he already knew the answer.