Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

were treasures here the chances of finding them—or indeed of their being in reasonable condition when discovered—were remote. Still, the Father had brought him this far at no little inconvenience to himself; it would be discourteous to now show no interest in what the chamber contained.

'Did you have a part in moving all of this?' he asked Sandru, more out of a need to fill the silence between them than because he was genuinely curious.

'Yes, I did,' the Father replied. 'Thirty-two years ago. I was a much younger man. But it was still a back- breaking labor. They built things big here. I remember thinking that maybe the stories were right . . .'

'Stories about—'

'Oh . . . nonsenses. About this furniture having been built for the retinue of the Devil's wife.'

'The Devil's wife.'

'Lilith, or Lilitu. Sometimes called Queen of Zemargad. Don't ask me why.'

'This is the same woman Katya spoke about?'

Sandru nodded. 'That's why the locals don't have much hope for the sick if they stay here. They think Lilith's curse is on the place. As I say: nonsenses.'

Whether it was nonsense or not, the story lent some flavor to this banal adventure. 'May I look more closely?' Zeffer asked.

'That's what we're here for,' Father Sandru replied. 'I hope there's something that catches your eye, for your sake. All these stairs and doors. I'd forgotten how far down it was . . .'

'I'm sorry to have made this so burdensome,' Zeffer said, quite sincerely. 'If I'd known you were going to go to so much trouble I wouldn't have—'

'No, no,' Sandru said. 'It's not a trouble to me. I only thought there might be an item here that pleased you. But now I'm down here I doubt it. To be truthful I believe we should have taken all this trash up the mountain and thrown it in the deepest gorge we could find.'

'Why didn't you do just that?'

'It wasn't my choice. I was just a young priest at the time. I did as I was told. I moved tables and chairs and tapestries, and I kept my counsel. Our leader then was Father Nicholas, who was very clear on the best thing to be done—the safest thing for our souls—and would not be moved on the subject. So we did as we were told. Father Nicholas, by the way, had the foulest temper of any man I ever knew. We all lived in fear of him.'

Zeffer moved into the room, talking as he went: 'May I say something that I hope won't offend you?'

'I'm not easily offended, don't worry.'

'Well . . . it's just that the more I hear about your Order, the less like priests you seem to be. Father Nicholas's temper and the brothers all familiar with Theda Bara. And then the brandy.'

'Ah, the sins of the flesh,' Father Sandru said. 'We do seem to have more than our share, don't we?'

'I have offended you.'

'No. You've simply seen the truth. And how can a man of God be justly offended by that? What you've observed is no coincidence. We are all . . . how shall I put this?... men who have more than our share of flaws. Some of us were never trusted with a flock. Others, like Father Nicholas, were. But the arrangement was never deemed satisfactory.'

'His temper?'

'I believe he threw a Bible at one of the parishioners who was sleeping through the good Father's sermon.' Zeffer chuckled; but his laughter was silenced a moment later. 'It killed the man.'

'Killed—'

'An accident, but still . . .'

'—with a Bible? Surely not.'

'Well, that's how the rumor went. Father Nicholas has been dead twenty years, so there's no way to prove it or disprove it. Let's hope it isn't true, and if it is, hope he's at peace with it now. The fact is, I'm glad I was never trusted with a parish. With a flock to tend. I couldn't have done much for them.'

'Why not?' Zeffer asked, a little impatient with Sandru's melancholy now. 'Do you have difficulty finding God in a place like this?'

'To be honest, Mister Zeffer, with every week that passes—I almost want to say with every hour—I find it harder to see a sign of God anywhere. It would not be unreasonable, I think, to ask Him to show Himself in beauty. In the face of your lady-companion, perhaps . . . ?'

Katya's face as proof of God's presence? It was an unlikely piece of metaphysics, Zeffer thought.

'I apologize,' Sandru said. 'You didn't come here to hear me talk about my lack of faith.'

'I don't mind.'

'Well I do. The brandy makes me maudlin.'

'Shall I take a look then?' Zeffer suggested, 'At whatever's in here?'

'Yes, why don't we?' Sandru replied. 'I wish I could give you some kind of guidance, but . . .' He shrugged; his favorite gesture. 'Why don't you start looking, and I'll go back and get us something more to drink?'

'Nothing more for me,' Zeffer replied.

'Well then, for me,' Sandru said. 'I'll only be a moment. If you need me, just call. I'll hear you.'

Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let his thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly enough, there was something mildly chaotic about his thought processes. One minute he was talking about furniture, the next about the mad Duke and his hunter's habits, the next about the fact that they couldn't make a hospital here because the Devil's wife had cursed the place.

When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulbs were stark, of course, and their light far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer's eye. There were some finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.

And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls beyond.

The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tile. In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulbs threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer's weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.

He didn't wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through the piles of furniture toward the designs that covered the walls. They covered the floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of tile; every single inch of it decorated.

In all his years of traveling and collecting he'd never seen anything quite like this. Careless of the dirt and dust-laden webs which covered every surface, he pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to scrub away some of the filth on the tile. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swath across four or five, he realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked about ready to prance off around the room.

'It's a hunt.'

Sandru's voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly that it was as though he'd had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying toward the cleaned tile, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.

It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly out of focus. He stared at the Father's shape until his eyes corrected the problem. When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the world he'd been looking at—the painted man on his painted horse, riding past a painted tree—was more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.

'A hunt?' he asked at last. 'What kind of hunt?'

'Oh, every kind,' Sandru replied. 'Pigs, dragons, women—'

'Women?'

Sandru laughed. 'Yes, women,' he said, pointing toward a piece of the wall some yards deeper into the