Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

TWO

Though it had been Zeffer who'd offered the explanation of what lay down in the guts of the house, Tammy opened the conversation with a question that had been niggling at her since she'd first come into this place. She returned to the kitchen table, where she'd been eating her cherry pie, sat down and said: "What are you afraid of?"

"I told you twice, three times: I shouldn't be in here. She'll be angry."

"That doesn't answer the question. Katya's just a woman, for God's sake. Let her be angry!"

"You don't know what she can be like."

"Why don't you try telling me? Then maybe I'll understand."

"Tell you," he said flatly, as though the request were impossible. "How can I tell you what this place has seen? What I was? What she was?"

"Try."

"I don't know how," he said, his voice getting weaker, syllable on syllable, until she seemed sure it would crack and break. He sat down at the table opposite her, but he said nothing.

"All right," Tammy said. "Let me give you a hand." She thought for a moment. Then she said: "Start with the house. Tell me why it was built. Why you're in it. Why she's in it."

"Back then we did everything together."

"Who is she?"

"I'll tell you who she was: she was Katya Lupi, a great star. One of the greatest, some would once have said. And in its day this house was one of the most famous houses in Los Angeles. One of the great dream palaces."

"And the rest of the Canyon is hers too?"

"Oh yes, it's all hers. Coldheart Canyon. That's what they called it. She had a reputation, you see, for being a chilly bitch." He smiled, though there was more rue in the expression than humor. "It was deserved."

"And the things out there?"

"Which things?"

"Which things?" Tammy said, a little impatiently. "The freaks. The things that attacked me."

"Those? Those are the children of the dead."

"You say these things so casually. The children of the dead. Believe it or not, the dead don't have kids in Sacramento. They just rot away quietly."

"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. In 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 Saint 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 the 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 clear 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."

"The man on the horse," Katya said, "was the Duke."

"I got that," Todd said.

"He lived a long time ago. I'm not sure exactly when. When you're a little child you don't listen to those kinds of details. It's the story you remember. And the story was this:

"One day in autumn the Duke went out hunting, which he did all the time—it was his favorite thing to do—and he saw what he thought was a goat, trapped in a briar-thicket. So he got off his horse, telling his men that he wanted to kill this animal himself. He hated goats, having been attacked by one and badly hurt as a baby. He still had scars on his face from that attack, and they ached in the cold weather, all of which served to keep his hatred of goats alive. Perhaps it was a petty thing, this hatred; but sometimes little things can be the unmaking of us. There's no doubt that Goga would not have pursued his goat as far as he did had he not been injured as a child. And then—to make matters worse—as he approached the animal, history virtually repeated itself. The animal reared up, striking the Duke with its black hoof and cracking his nose. The goat then ran off.

"Goga was furious, beside himself with fury! To have been mistreated by a goat twice! He got straight back on his horse, blood pouring from his broken nose, and went after the animal, riding hard through the forest to catch up with it. His entourage went with him, because they were bound to follow the Duke wherever he went. But they were beginning to suspect that there was something strange about where they were headed and that it would be better for them all if they just turned round and rode back to the Fortress."

"But Goga wouldn't do that?"

"Of course not. He was determined to chase down the animal that had struck him. He wanted revenge on the thing. He wanted to stick his sword through it, and cut out its heart and eat it raw. That was the kind of rage he was in.

"So he kept riding. And his men, out of loyalty, kept following, further and further from the Fortress and the paths they knew, into the depths of the forest. Steadily even the Duke began to realize that what his men were whispering was right: there were creatures here, lurking about, the likes of which God had not made. He could see things between the trees that didn't belong in any of the bestiaries he had in the Fortress. Strange, ungodly creatures."

As Katya told her story, Todd glanced at the dark mass of trees into which Goga and his men had just ridden. Was that the Deep Wood she had just described? Surely it was. The same horsemen. The same trees. In other words, he was standing in the middle of Katya's story.

"So . . . the Duke kept riding, and riding, driving his poor horse as he followed the leaping goat deeper and deeper into the forest, until they were in a place where they were certain no human being had ever ventured before. By now, all the men, even the most loyal, the bravest of them, were begging the Duke to let them turn back. The air was bitter and sulfurous, and in the ground beneath the horses' hooves the men could hear the sound of people sobbing, as though living souls had been buried alive in the black, smoking dirt.

"But the Duke would not be moved from his ambition. 'What kind of hunters do you call yourselves,' he said to his men, 'if you won't go after a goat? Where's your faith in God? There's no danger to us here, if our hearts are pure.'

"So on they went, the men quietly offering up prayers for the safety of their souls as they rode.

"And eventually, after a long chase, their quarry came in sight again. The goat was standing in a grove of trees so old they had been planted before the Flood, in the tangled roots of which grew mushrooms that gave off the smell of dead flesh. The Duke got off his horse, drew his sword and approached the goat.

"' Whatever thing you are,' he said to the animal, 'breathe your last.'"

"Nice line," Todd remarked.

"The animal reared up, as though it was going to strike the Duke with its hoof a third time, but Goga didn't give it the opportunity. He quickly drove his sword up into the belly of the animal.

"As soon as it felt the sword entering its flesh the goat opened its mouth and let out a pitiful wail . . ."

Katya paused here, watching Todd, waiting for him to put the pieces together.

"Oh Christ," he said. "Like a baby?"

"Exactly like a baby. And hearing this pitiful human sound escaping the animal, Goga pulled his sword from the goat's body, because he knew something unholy was in the air. Have you ever seen an animal slaughtered?"

"No."

"Well there's a lot of blood. A lot more than you think there's going to be."

"It was like that now?"

"Yes. The goat was thrashing around in a pool of red, its back legs kicking up the wet dirt, so that it spattered Goga and his men. And as it did so, it started to change."

"Into what?"

Katya smiled the smile of a storyteller who had her audience hooked by some unexpected change of direction.

"Into a little child," she said. "A boy, a naked little boy, with a nub of a tail and yellow eyes and goat's ears. So now the Duke is looking down at this goat-boy, twitching in the mud made of dirt and blood, and the superstitious terror which his men had felt finally seizes hold of him too. He starts to speak a prayer.

"Tătal Nostru care ne ești in Ceruri, sfinpeasca-se numele Tău. Fie Impărătia Ta, facă-se voia Ta, precum in cer așa si pe pămant."

Todd listened to the unfamiliar words, knowing in the cadence that what Katya was reciting was not just any prayer; it was the Lord's Prayer.

"Pâinea noastră cea de toate zilele dăne-o nouă azi si ne iartă nouă greselile noaștre."

He scanned the landscape as he heard the prayer repeated; nothing had changed since he'd first set eyes on the place. The light of the eclipse held everything in suspension: the trees, the ships, the lynchers at their tree.

The rush of pleasure he'd experienced when he first arrived had diminished somewhere in the midst of Katya's tale-telling. In its place there was now a profound unease. He wanted to stop her telling her story, but what reason could he give that didn't sound cowardly?

So she continued.

"The Duke retreated, leaving his sword stuck deep in the body of the goat-boy. He intended to climb back onto his horse and ride away, but his steed had already bolted in terror. He called to one of his men to dismount, so that he might have the man's horse, but before the fellow could obey the rock beneath their feet began to shake violently, and a great chasm opened up in the ground in front of them.

"The men knew what they were witnessing. This was the very mouth of Hell, gaping in the earth beneath their feet. It was thirty, forty feet wide, and the roots of those ancient trees lined it like the veins of a skinned body. Smoke rose up out of the maw, stinking of every foul thing imaginable, and a good deal that was not. It was such a bitter stench that the Duke and his men began to weep like children.

"Half-blinded by his own tears, and without a horse, Goga had no choice but to stay where he was, on the lip of the Hell's Mouth, close to where his victim lay. He tore his gloves from his hands and did his best to clear the tears from his eyes.

"As he did so he saw somebody coming up out of the earth. It was a woman, he saw; with hair so long it trailed the ground fully six feet behind her. She was naked, except for a necklace of white fleas with eyes that burned like fires in their tiny heads. Thousands of them, moving back and forth around the woman's neck and up over her face, busy about the business of prettifying her.

"She was not looking at the Duke. Her black-red eyes, which had neither lashes nor brows, were on the goat-boy. In the time it had taken for the mouth of Hell to open, the last of the boy's life had poured out of him. Now the child's corpse lay still in the wet dirt.

" 'You killed my child,' the woman said as she emerged from the infernal mouth. 'My beautiful Qwaftzefoni. Look at him. Barely a boy. He was perfect. He was my joy. How could you do such a heartless thing?'

"At that moment one of the horsemen behind the Duke attempted to make an escape, spurring his horse. But the goat-boy's mother raised her hand and at her instruction a gust of wind came up out of the depths of Hell, so strong that it drew her hair around her and forward, like a thousand filament fingers pointing toward the escaping man. He didn't get very far. The wind she'd summoned was filled with barbs; like the vicious seedlings of ten thousand flowers. They spiraled as they flew, and they caught the Duke's man in a whirling of tiny hooks. Blinded by the assault, the man toppled from his horse, and attempted to outrun the barbs. But they were fastened onto him, and their motion continued, circling his body, so that the man's flesh was unraveled like a ball of red twine. He screamed as the first circling took off his skin, and redoubled his shrieks when a second cloud of barbs caught his naked muscle, and repeated the terrible cycle. Having drawn off a length of the man's tissue, they described a descending spiral around him, leaving the victim clear for a third and fourth assault. His bone was showing now; his screams had ceased. He dropped to his knees and fell forward in his own shred-dings, dead.

"Overhead, carrion birds circled, ready to gorge themselves as soon as the body was abandoned.

" 'This man is the lucky one among you,' the woman said to the Duke. 'He has escaped lightly. The rest of you will suffer long and hard for what you have done today.'

"She looked down at the goat-boy's corpse, her hair crawling around her heels to fondly touch the body of the child.

"The Duke fell to his knees, knotting his hands together to make his plea. 'Lady,' he said to her, in his native tongue. 'This was an accident. I believed the boy to be an animal. He was running from me in the form of a goat.'

"'That is his father's chosen form, on certain nights,' the woman replied. Goga knew, of course, what was signified by this. Only the Devil himself took the form of a goat. The woman was telling him that she was Lilith, the Devil's wife, and that the child he had killed was the Devil's own offspring. To say this was not good news was an understatement. The Duke concealed his terror as best he could, but it was terror he felt. To be standing on the lip of Hell, accused of the crime before him, was a terrifying prospect. His soul would be forfeit, he feared. All he could do was repeat what he'd said: 'I took the boy to be a goat. This was a grievous error on my part, and I regret it with all my heart—'

"The woman raised her hand to silence him.

" 'My husband has seventy-seven children by me. Qwaftzefoni was his favorite. What am I supposed to tell him when he calls for his beloved boy, and the child does not come as he used to?'

"The Duke had barely any spittle in his throat. But he used what little he had to reply. 'I don't know what you will say.'

" 'You know who my husband is, don't you? And don't insult me by pretending innocence.'

" 'I think he is the Devil, ma'am,' the Duke Goga replied.

" 'That he is,' the woman said. 'And I am Lilith, his first wife. So now, what do you think your life is worth?'

"Goga mused on this for a moment. Then he said: 'Christ save my soul. I fear my life is worth nothing.'"

"So," said Zeffer, "Goga's Hunt was painted on every wall of this room. Not just the walls. The ceiling, too. And the floor. Every inch of the place was covered with the genius of painter and tile-maker. It was astonishing. And I thought—"

"You'd give this astonishing thing to the woman you idolized."

"Yes. That's exactly what I thought. After all, it was utterly unique. Something strange and wonderful. But that wasn't the only reason I wanted to buy it, now I look back. The place had a power over me. I felt stronger when I was in that room. I felt more alive. It was a trick, of course. The room wanted me to liberate it—"

"How can a room want anything?" Tammy said. "It's just four walls."

"Believe me, this was no ordinary room," Zeffer said. He lowered his voice, as though the house itself might be listening to him. "It was commissioned, I believe, by a woman known as the Lady Lilith. The Devil's wife."

This was a different order of information entirely, and it left Tammy speechless. In her experience so far, she'd found the Canyon a repository of grotesqueries, no doubt; but they'd all been derived from the human, however muddied the route. But the Devil? That was another story; deeper than anything she'd encountered so far. And yet perhaps his presence, or the echo of his presence, was not so inappropriate. Wasn't he sometimes called the Father of Lies? If he and his works belonged anywhere, Hollywood was probably as good a place as any.

"Did you have any idea what you were buying?" she said to Zeffer.

"I had a very vague notion, but I didn't really believe it. Father Sandru had talked about a woman who'd occupied the Fortress for several years while the room was made."

"And you think this woman was Lilith?"

"I believe it was," Zeffer said. "She made a place to trap the Duke in, you see."

"No, I don't see."

"The Duke had killed her beloved child. She wanted revenge, and she wanted it to be a long, agonizing revenge.

"But it had been an accident—an honest error on the Duke's part—and she knew the law would not allow her to take the soul of a man who killed her child."

"Why would she care about the law?"

"It wasn't our human law she cared about. It was God's law, which governs Earth, Heaven and Hell. She knew that if she was going to make the Duke and his men suffer as she wished to make them suffer, she would have to find some secret place, where God would not think to look. A world within a world, where the Duke would have to hunt forever, and never be allowed to rest . . ."

Now Tammy began to understand.

"The room," she murmured.

"Was her solution. And if you think about it, it's a piece of genius. She moved into the Fortress, claiming that she was a distant cousin of the missing Duke—"

"And where was he?"

"Anybody's guess. Maybe she held him in his own dungeons, until the hunting grounds were ready for him.

"Then she brought tile-makers from all over Europe—Dutch, Portuguese, Belgians, even a few Englishmen—and painters, again from every place of excellence—and they worked for six months, night and day, to create what awaits you downstairs. It would look like the Duke's hunting grounds—at least superficially. There would be forests and rivers and, somewhere at the horizon, there'd be the sea. But she would play God in this world. She'd put creatures into it that she had conjured up from her own personal menagerie: monsters that the painters in her employ would render with meticulous care. And then she'd take the souls of the Duke and his men—still living, so that she remained within the law—and she'd put them into the work, so that it would be a prison for them. There they would ride under a permanent eclipse, in a constant state of terror, barely daring to sleep for fear one of her terrible beasts would take them. Of course that's not all that's on the walls down there. Her influence invaded the minds of the men who worked for her, and every filthy, forbidden thing they'd ever dreamed of setting down they were given the freedom to create.

"Nothing was taboo. They took their own little revenges as they painted: particularly on women. Some of the things they painted still shock me after all these years."

"Are you certain all of this is true?"

"No. It's mostly theory. I pieced it together from what I researched. Certainly Duke Goga and several of his men went missing during an eclipse on April 19th, 1681. The body of one of them was found stripped of its skin. That's also documented. The rest of the party were never found. The Duke had lost his wife and children to the plague, so there was no natural successor. He had three brothers, however, and—again, this is a matter of documented history—they gathered the following September, almost six months to the day after the Duke's disappearance, to divide their elder brother's spoils. It was a mistake to do so. That was the night the Lady Lilith took occupancy of the Goga Fortress."

"She killed them?"

"No. They all left of their own free will, saying they wanted no part of owning the Fortress or the land, but were giving it over to this mysterious cousin, in their brother's name. They signed a document to that effect, and left. All three were dead within a year, by their own hands."

"And nobody was suspicious?"

"I'm sure a lot of people were suspicious. But Lilith—or whoever she was—now occupied the Fortress. She had money, and apparently she was quite liberal with it. Local merchants got rich, local dignitaries were rather charmed by her, if the reports are to be believed—"

"Where did you find all these reports?"

"I bought most of the paperwork relating to the Fortress from the Fathers. They didn't want it. I doubt they even knew what most of it was. And to tell the truth a lot of it was rather dull. The price of pigs' carcasses; the cost of having a roof made rain-proof . . . the usual domestic business."

"So Lilith was quite the little homemaker?"

"I think she was. Indeed I believe she intended to have the Fortress as a place she could call her own. Somewhere her husband wouldn't come;

couldn't come, perhaps. I found a draft of a letter which I believe she wrote, to him—"

"To the Devil?" Tammy replied, scarcely believing she was giving the idea the least credence.

"To her husband," Zeffer replied obliquely, "whoever he was." He tapped his pocket. "I have it, here. You want to hear it?"

"Is it in English?"

"No. In Latin." He reached into his jacket and took out a piece of much-folded paper. It was mottled with age. "Take a look for yourself," he said.

"I don't read Latin."

"Look anyway. Just to say you once held a letter written by the Devil's wife. Go on, take it. It won't bite."

Tammy reached out and took the paper from Zeffer's hand. None of this was proof, of course. But it was more than a simple fabrication, that much was clear. And hadn't she seen enough in her time in the Canyon to be certain that whatever was at work here was nothing she could explain by the rules she'd been taught in school?

She opened the letter. The hand it had been written in was exquisite; the ink, though it had faded somewhat, still kept an uncanny luster, as though there were motes of mother-of-pearl in it. She scanned it, all the way down to the immaculate and elaborate Lilith that decorated the bottom portion of the page.

"So," she said, handing it back, her fingers trembling slightly. "What does it say?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

Zeffer began translating it without looking at the words. Plainly he had the contents by heart.

"Husband, she writes, I am finding myself at ease in the Fortress Goga, and I believe will remain here until our son is found—"

"So she didn't tell him?"

"Apparently not." Zeffer scanned the page briefly. "She talks a little about the work she's doing on the Fortress . . . it's all very matter-of-fact... then she says: Do not come, husband, for you will find no welcome in my bed. If there is some peace to be made between us I cannot imagine it being soon, given your violations of your oath. I do not believe you have loved me in many years, and would prefer you did not insult me by pretending otherwise."

"Huh."

Whatever the source of the letter, its sentiments were easily understood. Tammy herself might have penned such a letter—in a simpler style, perhaps; and a little more viciously—on more than one occasion. God knows, Arnie had violated his own vows to her several times, shamelessly.

Zeffer folded the letter up. "So, you can make what you want of all this. Personally I think it's the real thing. I believe this woman was Lilith, and that she stayed in the Fortress to work on her revenge, where neither God nor her husband would come and bother her. Certainly somebody created that room, and it was somebody who had powers that go far beyond anything we understand."

"What happened when she was finished?" Tammy asked.

"She packed up and disappeared. Got bored perhaps. Went back to her husband. Or found a lover of her own. The point is, she left the Fortress with the room still intact. And with Goga and his men still in it."

"And that's what you bought?"

"That's what I bought. Of course it took a little time to realize it, but I purchased a little piece of Hell's own handiwork. And let me tell you—to make light of all this for a moment—it was Hell to move. There were thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles. They all had to be removed, cleaned, numbered, packed away, shipped and then put up again in exactly the same order that they'd been assembled in. I timed it so that the work could be done while Katya was off on a world tour, publicizing one of her pictures."

"It must have driven you half crazy . . ."

"I kept thinking about how much pleasure Katya would derive from the room when it was finished. I was oblivious to the human cost. I just wanted Katya to be astonished; and then, to look at me—who'd given her this gift—with new eyes. I wanted her to be so grateful, so happy, she'd fling herself into my arms and say I'll marry you. That's what I wanted."

"But that's not the way it turned out?"

"No, of course not."

"What happened? Did she dislike the room?"

"No, she understood the room from the beginning, and the room understood her. She started to take people down there, to show the place off. Her special friends. The ones who were obsessed with her. And there were plenty of those. Men and women both. They'd disappear down there for a few hours—"

"These were people she was having sex with?"

"Yes."

"You said both men and women?"

"Preferably together. That's what she liked best. A little of both."

"And did everybody know?"

"About her tastes? Of course. Nobody cared. It was rather chic at the time. For women anyway. The nancy-boys like Navarro and Valentino, they had to cover it up. But Katya didn't care what people thought. Especially once she had the room."

"It changed her?"

"It changed everyone who went into it, myself included. It changed our flesh. It changed our spirits."

"How?"

"All you have to do is look at me to see how I changed. I was born in 1893. But I don't look it. That's because of the room. It has energies, you see, painted into the tiles. I believe it's Lilith's magic in the tiles. She used her infernal skills to lock the Duke and his men and all those animals into the illusion: that's strong magic. The monks knew that. But they had the good sense to keep their distance from the place."

"So did everyone who went down there stay young?"

"Oh no. By no means. It affected everyone a little differently. Some people simply couldn't take it. They went in for a minute, and they were out again in a heartbeat."

"Why?"

"It's the Devil's Country, Tammy. Believe me, it is."

Tammy shook her head, not knowing what to believe. "So some people left, because they thought the Devil was in there?"

"That's right. But most people felt some extra burst of energy when they went in the room. Maybe they felt a little younger, a little stronger, a little more beautiful."

"And what was the price of it all?"

"Good question," he said. "The fact is, everyone's paid a different price. Some people went crazy because of what they saw in there. A few committed suicide. Most. . . went on living, feeling a little better about themselves. For a while at least. Then the effect would wear off, and they'd need to come back for another fix . . .

"I knew a number of opium addicts in my life. One of them was a Russian designer, Anatole Vasilinsky. Ever heard of him?" Tammy shook her head. "No real reason why you should. He worked for the Ballets Russes, under Diaghilev. A brilliant man. But completely enslaved to 'The Poppy' as he used to call it. He came to the house only once, and of course Katya showed him the room. I remember the expression on his face when he came out. He looked like a man who'd just seen his own death. He was stricken; clammy-white, shaking. 'I must never come here again,' he said. 'I don't have enough room in my life for two addictions. It would be the death of me.'

"That's what the room was, of course: an addiction. It addicted the flesh, by making you feel stronger, sleeker. It addicted the spirit, by giving you visions so vivid they were more real than real. And it addicted the soul, because you didn't want any other kind of comfort, once you'd been in the room. Prayer was no use to you, laughter was no use to you, friends, ideals, ambitions . . . they all seemed inconsequential in that perpetual twilight. When you were here, you thought all the time about being there."

Again Tammy shook her head. There was so much here to try to make sense of. Her mind was reeling.

"Do you see now why you must leave, and forget about Todd? He's seen the room. That's where she took him."

"Are you sure?"

"He's down there right now," Zeffer said. "I guarantee it. Where else would she take him?"

Tammy got up from the table. The food had done her good. Though she still felt a little light-headed, she was considerably stronger.

"There's nothing heroic about sacrificing yourself for him," Zeffer pointed out. "He wouldn't do it for you."

"I know that."

Zeffer followed her to the kitchen door. "So don't. Leave, while you can. Tammy, I beg you. Leave. I'll lead you out of the Canyon and you can go home."

"Home," Tammy said. The word, the idea, seemed hollow, valueless. There was no home for her after this. Or if there was, it wasn't the one she'd had. Arnie, the little house in Sacramento. How could she even think of going back to that?

"I have to find Todd," she said. "That's what I came here to do."

Without waiting for Zeffer to lead her or escort her, she left the kitchen and went to the top of the stairs. He called after her. Another attempt at persuasion, no doubt; or some more fancy storytelling. But she ignored him this time, and started down the stairs.