Coldheart Canyon (5 page)

“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 chamber. “Go look,” he said. “You’ll find the whole thing is filled with obscenities. The men who painted this place CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 29

COLDHEART CANYON

29

must have had some strange
dreams
, let me tell you, if this is what they saw.”

Zeffer pushed aside a small table, and then pressed himself between the wall and a much larger piece of furniture, which looked like a wooden catafalque, too large to move. Obliged to slide along the wall, his jacket did the job his handkerchief had done moments before. Dust rose up in his face.

“Where now?” he asked the Father when he’d got to the other side of the catafalque.

“A little further,” Sandru replied, uncorking the brandy and shamelessly taking a swig from the bottle.

“I need some more light back here,” Zeffer said.

Reluctantly, Sandru went to pick up the lamp. It was hot now. He rummaged in one of the nearby boxes to find something to protect his palm, found a length of cloth and wrapped it around the base of the lamp. Then he tugged on the light-cord, to give himself some more play, and made his way through the confusion of stuff in the room, to where Zeffer was standing.

The closer Sandru came with the light the more Zeffer could make out of the painting on the tiles. There was a vast panorama spread to left and right of him; and up above his head; and down to the ground, spreading beneath his feet. Though the walls were so filthy that in places the design was entirely obliterated, and in other places there were large cracks in the tiles, the image had an extraordinary reality all of its own.

“
Closer
,” Zeffer said to Sandru, sacrificing the arm of his fur coat to clean a great portion of tiled wall in front of him. Each tile was about six inches square, perhaps a little smaller, and set close to one another with a minimum of grouting, so as to preserve the continuity of the picture.

Despite the sickly light off the bulb, its luminescence still showed that the color of the image had not been diminished by time. The beauty of the renderings was perfectly evident. There were a dozen kinds of green in the trees, and more, sweeter hues in the growth between them. Beneath the canopy there were burnt umbers and siennas and sepias in the trunks CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 30

30

CLIVE BARKER

and branches, skillfully highlighted to lend the impression that light was falling through the foliage and catching the bark. Not all the tiles were rendered with the same expertise, he saw.

Some of the tiles were the work of highly sophisticated artists; some the work of journeymen; some—especially those that were devoted to areas of pure foliage—the handiwork of apprentices, working on their craft by filling in areas that their masters had neither the time nor perhaps the interest to address.

But none of this spoiled the power of the overall vision. In fact the dis-continuity of styles created a splendid energy in the piece. Portions of the world were in focus, other parts were barely coherent; the abstract and the representational sitting side by side on the wall, all part of one enormous story.

And what
was
that story? Plainly, given the kind of quarry Sandru had listed, this was more than simply a hunt: it smacked of something far more ambitious. But what? He peered at the tiles, his nose a few inches from the wall, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

“I looked at the whole room, before we put all the furniture in here,”

Sandru said. “It’s a view, from the Fortress Tower.”

“But not realistic?”

“It depends what you mean by
realistic
,” Sandru said. “If you look over the other side”—he pointed across the room—“you can see the delta of the Danube.” Zeffer could just make out the body of water, glittering in the gloom: and closer by, a mass of swampy land, with dozens of inlets winding through it, on their way to the sea. “And there!” Sandru went on, “to the left”—again, Zeffer followed Sandru’s finger—“at the corner of the room, that rock—”

“I see it.”

The rock was tall, rising out of the ocean of trees like a tower, shrubs springing from its flank.

“That’s called the May Rock,” Sandru said. “The villagers dance there, on the first six nights of May. Couples would stay there overnight, and try CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 31

COLDHEART CANYON

31

to make children. It’s said the women always became pregnant if they stayed with their men on May Rock.”

“So it exists? In the world, I mean. Out there.”

“Yes, it’s right outside the Fortress.”

“And so all those other details? The delta—”

“Is nine miles away, in
that
direction.” Sandru pointed at the wall upon which the Danube’s delta was painted.

Zeffer smiled as he grasped what the artists had achieved here. Down in the depths of the Fortress, at its
lowest
point, they had re-created in tile and paint what could be seen from its pinnacle.

And with that realization came sense of the inscription he’d read on the threshold.

Though we are in the bowels of Hell, we shall have the eyes of Angels
.

This room was the bowels of Hell. But the tile-makers and their artist masters, wherever they’d been, had created an experience that gave the occupants of this dungeon the eyes of angels. A paradoxical ambition, when all you had to do was climb the stairs and see all this from the top of the tower. But artists were often driven by such ambition; a need, perhaps, to prove that it could even be done.

“Somebody worked very hard to create all this,” Zeffer said.

“Oh indeed. It’s an impressive achievement.”

“But you hide it away,” Zeffer said, not comprehending the way the room had been treated. “You fill the place with old furniture and let it get filthy.”

“Whom could we show it to?” the Father replied. “It’s too
disgusting
. . . ”

“I see nothing—” He was about to say
disgusting
, when his eye alighted on a part of the tile-work that he’d cleaned with his arm but had not closely studied. In a large grove a round stadium had been set up, with seating made of wood. The perspective was off (and the solution to the perspective changed subtly from tile to tile, as various hands had contributed their piece of the puzzle. There were perhaps twenty tiles that had some portion of the stadium represented upon them; the work of CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 32

32

CLIVE BARKER

perhaps five artists). The steep benches were filled with people, their bus-tle evoked with quick, contentious strokes. Some people seemed to be standing; some sitting. Two more groups of spectators were approaching the stadium from the outside, though there was no room for them inside.

But what drew Zeffer’s eye, and made him realize that the Father had been right to wonder aloud whom he might show this masterwork to, was the event these spectators had assembled to witness. It was an arena of sexual sport. Several performances were going on at the same time, all unapologetically obscene. In one section of the arena a naked woman was being held down while a creature twice her size, his body bestial, his erection monstrous, was being roped back by four men who appeared to be controlling his approach to the woman. In another quarter, a man had been stripped of his skin by three naked women. A fourth straddled him as he lay on the ground in his own blood. The other three wore pieces of his skin. One had on his whole face and shoulders, her breasts sticking out from beneath the ragged hood. Another sat on the ground, wearing his arms and pulling on the skin of his legs like waders. The third, the queen of this quartet, was wearing what was presumably the
pièce de résistance
, the flesh which the unhappy owner had worn from mid-breast-bone to mid-thigh. She was cavorting in this garish costume like a dancer and, by some magic known only to the maker of the mystery, the usurped skin still boasted a full erection.

“Good God . . .” Zeffer said.

“I told you,” Sandru said, just a little smugly. “And that’s the least of it, believe me.”

“The least of it?”

“The more you look, the more you see.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Go over to the Wild Wood. Look among the trees.”

Zeffer moved along the wall, studying the tiles as he went. At first he couldn’t make out anything controversial, but Sandru had some useful advice.

“Step away a foot or so.”

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 33

COLDHEART CANYON

33

In his fascination with the details of the stadium, Zeffer had come too close to the wall to see the wood for the trees. Now he stepped back and to his astonishment saw that the thicket around the arena was alive with figures, all of which were in some form or other monstrous; and all unequivocally sexual. Erections were thrust between the trees like plum-headed branches, women dangled from overhead with their legs spread (a flock of birds, thirty or more, swooped out of the sex of one; another was menstruating light, which was splashing on the ground below the tree.

Snakes came out of the scarlet pool, in bright profusion).

“Is it like this all over?” Zeffer said, his astonishment unfeigned.

“All over. There are thirty-three thousand, two hundred and sixty-eight tiles, and there is obscene matter on two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-eight of them.”

“You’ve obviously made a study,” Zeffer observed.

“Not I. An Englishman who worked with Father Nicholas did the counting. For some reason the numbers remained in my head. I think it’s old age. Things you want to remember, you can’t. And things that don’t mean anything stick in your head like a knife.”

“That’s not a pretty image, with respect.”

“With respect, there’s nothing pretty about the way I feel,” Sandru replied. “I feel old to my marrow. On a good day I can barely get up in the morning. On a bad day, I just wish I were dead.”

“Lord.”

Sandru shrugged. “That’s what living in this place does to you after a while. Everything drains out of you somehow.”

Zeffer was only half-listening. He was exhilarated by what he saw, and he had no patience with Sandru’s melancholy; his thoughts were with the walls, and the pictures on the walls.

“Are there records documenting how this was created? It
is
a masterpiece, in its way.”

“One of a kind,” Sandru said.

“Absolutely one of a kind.”

“To answer your question, no, there are no records. It’s assumed that it CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 34

34

CLIVE BARKER

was funded by Duke Goga, who had lately returned from the Crusades with a large amount of booty, claimed from the infidel in the name of Christ.”

“But to build a room like this with money you’d made on the Crusades!” Zeffer said incredulously.

“I agree. It seems like an unlikely thing to do in the name of God. Of course none of this is proved. There are some people who will tell you that Goga went missing on one of his hunts, and it wasn’t he who built this place at all.”

“Who then?”

“Lilith, the Devil’s wife,” the Father said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Which would make this the Devil’s Country, no?”

“Has anybody tried to
analyze
the work?”

“Oh yes. The Englishman I spoke of, George Soames, claimed he had discovered evidence of twenty-two different styles among the designs.

But that was just the painters. Then there were the men who actually
made
the tiles. Fired them. Sorted out the good from the bad. Prepared the paint. Cleaned the brushes. And there must have been some system to align everything.”

“The rows of tiles?”

“I was thinking more of the alignment of interior with the exterior.”

“Perhaps they built the room first.”

“No. The Fortress is two-and-a-half centuries older than this room.”

“My God, so to get the alignment so perfect—?”

“Is quite miraculous. Soames found fifty-nine geographical markers—certain stones, trees, the spire of the old abbey in Darscus—which are visible from the tower and are also painted on the wall. He calculated that all fifty-nine were correctly aligned, within half a degree of accuracy.”

“Somebody was obsessive.”

“Or else, divinely inspired.”

“You believe that?”

“Why not?”

Zeffer glanced back at the arena on the wall behind him, with all its CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 35

COLDHEART CANYON

35

libidinous excesses. “Does that look like the kind of work that somebody would do in the name of God?”

“As I said,” Sandru replied, “I no longer know where God is and where He isn’t.”

There was a long silence, during which Zeffer continued to survey the walls. Finally he said: “How much do you want for it?”

“How much do I want for what?”

“For the room?”

Sandru barked out a laugh.

“I mean it,” Zeffer said. “How much do you want for it?”

“It’s a
room
, Mister Zeffer,” Sandru said. “You can’t buy a room.”

“Then it’s not for sale?”

“That’s not my point—”

“Just tell me: is it for sale or not?”

Again, laughter. But this time there was less humor; more bemusement. “I don’t see that it’s worth talking about,” Sandru said, putting the brandy bottle to his lips and drinking.

“Let’s say a hundred thousand dollars. What would that be in lei?

What’s the lei worth right now? A hundred and thirty-two-and-a-half to the dollar?”

“If you say so.”

“So that’s what? Thirteen million, two hundred and fifty thousand lei.”

“You jest.”

“No.”

“Where would you find such money?” A pause followed. “If I may ask?”

“Over the years, I’ve made some very lucrative investments on behalf of Katya. We own large parts of Los Angeles. Half a mile of Sunset Boulevard is in her name. Another half mile in mine.”