“What?” she said.
“Listen.”
Tammy listened. She heard nothing, so she shook her head.
“Listen,” he said again, and this time she heard what he was drawing her attention to. The windows were shaking. So were the doors. The cutlery on the sink was rattling; as were the plates in the cupboards.
She let the slice of pie drop from her fingers, her appetite suddenly vanished.
“What’s going on?” she wanted to know.
“They’re downstairs,” Zeffer said, his voice tinged with superstitious awe. “Todd and Katya. They’ve gone downstairs.”
“What are they doing there?”
“You don’t want to know,” Zeffer said hurriedly. “Please. I beg you. Let’s just go.”
The windows were shaking with mounting violence; the boards creaked beneath their feet. It was as though the entire structure of the house was protesting about whatever was happening in its midst.
Tammy went to the kitchen sink, ran some cold water, and washed the food from around her mouth. Then she skirted around Zeffer and headed to the door that led to the turret and the staircase.
“Wrong direction,” Zeffer said. He pointed to the other door. “That’s the safest way out.”
“If Todd’s down there, then that’s the way I want to go,” Tammy said.
As she spoke she felt a blast of chilly air coming up from below. It smelled nothing like the rest of the house, nor of the gardens outside. Something about it made the small hairs at her nape prickle.
She looked back down at Zeffer, with a question on her face.
“I think I need to tell you what’s down there before you take one more step,” he said.
Outside, the spirits of the dead waited and listened. They had heard the door that led into the Chamber of the Hunt opened; they knew some lucky fool was about to step into the Devil’s Country. If they could have stormed the house and slipped through the door ahead of him, they would have gladly done so, at any price. But Katya had been too clever. She had put up defenses against such a siege: five icons beaten into the threshold of each of the doors that would drive a dead soul to oblivion if they attempted to cross. They had no choice, therefore, but to keep a respectful distance, hoping that some day the icons would lose their terrible potency; or that Katya would simply declare an amnesty upon her guests and tear the icons out of the thresholds, allowing her sometime lovers and friends back inside.
Meanwhile, they waited, and listened, and remembered what it had been like for them in the old days, when they’d been able to go back and forth into the house at will. It had been bliss, back then: all you had to do was step into the Devil’s Country and you could shed your old skin like a snake. They’d come back to the chamber over and over, so as to restore their failing glamour, and it had dutifully soothed away their imperfections; made their limbs sleek and their eyes gleam.
All this was kept secret from the studio bosses, of course, and when on occasion a Goldwyn or a Thalberg did find out Katya made sure they were intimidated into silence. Nobody talked about what went on in Coldheart Canyon, even to others that they might have seen there. The stars went on about their public lives while in secret they took themselves up to Coldheart Canyon every weekend, and having smoked a little marijuana or opium, went to look at the Hunt, knowing that they would emerge rejuvenated.
There was a brief Golden Age, when the royalty of America lived a life of near-perfection; sitting in their palaces dreaming of immortality. And why not? It seemed they had found the means to renew their beauty whenever it grew a little tired. So what if they had to dabble in the supernatural for their fix of perfection; it was worth the risk.
Then — but inexorably — the Golden Age began to take its toll: the lines they’d driven off their faces began to creep back again, deeper than ever; their eye-sight started to fail. Back they went into the Devil’s Country, desperate for its healing power, but the claim of time could not be arrested.