She’d several times attempted to stop them and punish their voyeurism; but every time Zeffer plugged up the holes more appeared, and finally she’d given up the game as fruitless. If they wanted to watch her while she slept, then let them go ahead. Indeed until Todd had come into her life the idea of having somebody to watch over her — even if their motives were as hard to calculate as those of her voyeurs — was close to comforting.
Needless to say there was also a measure of danger in the proximity of these revenants. Katya didn’t doubt that there was amongst their number some who would gladly have seen her dead, blaming her for the fact that their afterlife in was a pitiful thing. Of course she didn’t blame herself. If her guests hadn’t been so hungry to taste the pleasures of the Devil’s Country then they wouldn’t be so obsessively drawn to it. But as long as they kept a respectful distance (why would they not, when she controlled the very thing they wanted for themselves?) then she would not persecute them.
They had their journey, she had hers.
She had reached the unkempt lawn, and paused there to take in the spectacle of the house. The wind-chimes rang on four or five balconies, lending their beauty to the grand facade. As she listened to their music she heard sounds from the thicket on the other side of the lawn.
She glanced back. There was still sufficient light in the evening sky to see the motion in the blossom-laden branches. There were several creatures following her, she guessed.
She watched the bushes for half a minute, until the motion died down. It wasn’t unusual for creatures to follow her when she went out walking, but there was something different about this. Or was it that she was different? That tonight she was alive as she’d not been alive in many years, her heart quickened by love; and that they sensed a new vulnerability in her?
She didn’t like that. The last thing she wanted was for them to imagine they could intimidate her, or somehow wrest a little power from her. Love might have made her step a little lighter, but she was still the Queen of Coldheart Canyon, and if they pushed her she would respond with her old severity.
As she watched the thicket, the last of the light went from the sky, and the darkness revealed several bright points of light in the bushes, where the revenants were standing, watching her. Even after all these years she could still be discomfited by a sight like this; by the fact that the dead were around her in such numbers.
Enough, she thought to herself, and turning on her heel hurried towards the stairs that led back up to the house.
As she did so she heard the swish of grass against swiftly running limbs. They were coming across the lawn in pursuit of her.
She picked up her pace, until she reached the relative safety of the stairs.
Behind her, a soft voice, sounding as though it came from a palate full of pulp and disease, said: “Let us in.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then another said. “We just want to come back into the house.”
“We won’t do any harm.” said a third.
“Please, let us in … ”
She’d been wrong about the numbers of revenants assembled here, she slowly realized. She thought there’d been perhaps ten, but there were two or three times that number out there in the darkness. Whatever the decayed and corrupted condition of their palates, they all attempted to say the same thing:
“Let us in. Let us in. Let us in.”
She would have ignored them, once upon a time: turned her back on their pleas and climbed the stairs. But she was changing. Katya the heart-breaker — the woman who’d never given a damn for what anybody wanted but herself — was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. If she was going to come back with Todd and live here, they couldn’t live the idyllic life she had in mind while these hungry souls waited outside. Even with the five iron icons hammered into the threshold of each of the doors, and in the sills of even the smallest windows, their presence preventing the dead from ever setting foot in the house, the occupants were in a state of siege. It was no place to have a honeymoon.