Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

They would wed, and come back to Europe; find a house with some real history on its bones, instead of the fake Spanish mansion her fortune had allowed her to have built in one of the Hollywood canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objets d'art he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries, the statuary. They would suffice, until they could find a chateau in the Loire, or perhaps a Georgian house in London; somewhere the cheap theatrics of Hollywood wouldn't curdle his blood.

'You like Romania?' the Father asked as he unlocked the great oak door that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

'Yes, of course,' Zeffer replied.

'Please do not feel you have to sin on my account,' Sandru said, with a sideways glance.

'Sin?'

'Lying is a sin, Mister Zeffer. Perhaps it's just a little one, but it's a sin nevertheless.'

Oh Lord, Zeffer thought; how far I've slipped from the simple proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every day, every hour. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand stupid little lies.

But he wasn't in Hollywood now. So why lie? 'You're right. I don't like this country very much at all. I'm here because Katya wanted to come. Her mother and father—I'm sorry, her stepfather—live in the village.'

'Yes. This I know. The mother is not a good woman.'

'You're her priest?'

'No. We brothers do not minister to the people. The Order of Saint Teodor exists only to keep its eyes on the Fortress.' He pushed the door open. A dank smell exuded from the darkness ahead of them.

'Excuse me for asking,' Zeffer said. 'But it was my understanding from yesterday that apart from you and your brothers, there's nobody here.'

'Yes, this is true. Nobody here, except the brothers.'

'So what are you keeping your eyes on?'

Sandru smiled thinly. 'I will show you,' he said. 'As much as you wish to see.'

He switched on a light, which illuminated ten yards of corridor. A large tapestry hung along the wall, the image upon it so gray with age and dust as to be virtually beyond interpretation.

The Father proceeded down the corridor, turning on another light as he did so. 'I was hoping I might be able to persuade you to make a purchase,' he said.

'Of what?' Zeffer said.

Zeffer wasn't encouraged by what he'd seen so far. A few of the pieces of furniture he'd spotted yesterday had a measure of rustic charm, but nothing he could imagine buying.

'I didn't realize you were selling the contents of the Fortress.'

Sandru made a little groan. 'Ah . . . I'm afraid to say we must sell in order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer that the finer things went to someone who will take care of them, such as yourself.'

Sandru walked on ahead a little way, turning on a third light and then a fourth. This level of the Fortress, Zeffer was beginning to think, was bigger than the floor above. Corridors ran off in all directions.

'But before I begin to show you,' Sandru said, 'you must tell me—are you in a buying mood?'

Zeffer smiled. 'Father, I'm an American. I'm always in a buying mood.'

Sandru had given Katya and Zeffer a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Zeffer remembered it there was much in the account that had sounded bogus. The Order of Saint Teodor, Zeffer had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; but nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought there, he claimed, nor had its keep ever held prisoners, nor its courtyard witnessed atrocity or execution. Katya, in her usual forthright manner, had said that she didn't believe this to be true.

'When I was a little girl there were all kinds of stories about this place,' she said. 'I heard horrible things were done here. That it was human blood in the mortar between the stones. The blood of children.'

'I'm sure you must have been mistaken,' the Father had said.

'Absolutely not. The Devil's wife lived in this fortress. Lilith, they called her. And she sent the Duke away on a hunt. And he never came back.'

Sandru laughed; and if it was a performance, then it was an exceptionally good one. 'Who told you these tales?' he said.

'My mother.'

'Ah.' Sandru had shaken his head. 'And I'm sure she wanted you in bed, hushed and asleep, before the Devil came to cut off your head.' Katya had made no reply to this. 'There are still such stories, told to children. Of course. Always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. The brothers would not be here if it was.'

Despite Sandru's plausibility, there'd still been something about all of this that had made Zeffer suspicious; and a little curious. Hence his return visit. If what the Father was saying was a lie (a sin, by his own definition), then what purpose was it serving? What was the man protecting? Certainly not a few rooms filled with filthy tapestries, or some crudely carved furniture. Was there something here in the Fortress that deserved a closer look? And if so, how did he get the Father to admit to it?

The best route, he'd already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to be persuaded to reveal his true treasures, it would be through the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the subject of buying and selling made the matter easier to broach.

'I do know Katya would love to have something from her homeland to take back to Hollywood,' he said. 'She's built a huge house, so we have plenty of room.'

'Oh, yes?'

'And of course, she has the money.'

This was naked, he knew, but in his experience of such things subtlety seldom played well. Which point was instantly proved.

'How much are we talking about?' the Father asked mildly.

'Katya Lupi is one of the best-paid actresses in Hollywood. And I am authorized to buy whatever I think might please her.'

'Then let me ask you: what pleases her?'

'Things that nobody else would be likely to—no, could possibly—possess, please her,' Zeffer replied. 'She likes to show off her collection, and she wants everything in it to be unique.'

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. 'Everything here is unique.'

'Father, you sound as though you're ready to sell the foundations if the price is right.'

Sandru waxed metaphysical. 'All these things are just objects in the end. Yes? Just stone and wood and thread and paint. Other things will be made in time, to replace them.'

'But surely there's some sacred value in the objects here?'

The Father gave a little shrug. 'In the Chapel, upstairs, yes. I would not want to sell you, let us say, the altar.' He made a smile, as though to say that under the right circumstances even that would have its price. 'But everything else in the Fortress was made for a secular purpose. For the pleasure of dukes and their ladies. And as nobody sees it now . . . except a few travelers such as yourselves, passing through . . . I don't see why the Order shouldn't be rid of it all. If there's sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed among the poor.'

'There are certainly plenty of people in need of help,' Zeffer said.

He had been appalled at the primitive conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than gatherings of shacks, the rocky earth the farmers tilled all but fruitless. And on all sides, the mountains—the Bucegi range to the east, to the west the Fagaras Mountains—their bare lower slopes as gray as the earth, their heights dusted with snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when even the dirt turned hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the wind whistling down from the mountain heights.

The day they'd arrived, Katya had taken Willem to the cemetery, so that she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he'd had proof aplenty of the conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It was not the resting places of the old that had moved Willem; it was the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of infants: babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that was represented by