“Perhaps, with respect, it would be better not to try,” he advised. The stillness seemed to be deepening around them, the absence of sound becoming heavier, if that were possible. She didn’t need any further encouragement from Zeffer to stay close to him. Whatever this stillness hid, she didn’t want to face it alone. “Just take it from me that Coldheart Canyon has some less-than-pretty occupants.”
Something behind the cages drew Zeffer’s attention. Tammy followed the direction of his gaze. “What were the cages for?” she asked him.
“Katya went through a phase of collecting exotic animals. We had a little zoo here. A white tiger from India, though he didn’t live very long. Later, there was a rhinoceros. That also perished.”
“Wasn’t that cruel? Keeping them here, I mean? The cages look so small.”
“Yes, of course it was cruel. She’s a cruel woman, and I was cruel for doing her bidding. I have no doubt of that. I was probably unspeakably cruel, in my casual way. But it takes the experience of living like an animal — ” he glanced back at the cage ” — to realize the misery they must have suffered.”
Tammy watched him scrutinizing the shrubbery on the far side of the cages.
“What’s out there?” she said. “Is it animals that — ”
“Come here,” Zeffer said, his voice suddenly dropping to an urgent whisper. “Quickly.”
Though she still saw nothing in the shrubbery, she did as she was told.
As she did so there was a blast of icy air down the narrow channel between the cages, and she saw several forms — human forms, but distorted, as though they were in a wind-tunnel, their mouths blown into a dark circle lined with needle teeth, their eyes squeezed into dots — come racing towards her.
“Don’t you dare!” she heard Zeffer yell at her side, and saw him raise his stick. If he landed a blow she didn’t see it. The breath was knocked from her as two of her attackers threw themselves upon her.
One of them put a hand over her face. A spasm of energy passed through her bone and brain, erupting behind her eyes. It was more than her mind could take. She saw a white light, like the light that floods a cinema screen when the film breaks.
The cold went away in the same instant: sounds and sights and all the feelings they composed, gone.
The last thing she heard, dying away, was Willem Zeffer’s voice yelling: “Damn you all!”
Then he too was gone.
In the passageway in front of Katya’s long-abandoned menagerie, Willem Zeffer watched as the forces that had broken cover carried Tammy Lauper away into their own horrid corners of the Canyon, leaving him — as he had been left so often in this godless place — helpless and bereft.
He threw the stick down on the ground, his eyes stinging with tears. Then the strength ran out of him completely, and he went down on his knees at the threshold of his hovel, cursing Katya. She wasn’t the only one to blame, of course. He had his own part to play in this tragic melodrama, as he’d admitted moments before. But he still wanted Katya damned for what she’d done, as he was damned: for the death of tigers and rhinoceros, and the murder of innocent women.