Coldheart Canyon (40 page)

“Yes.”

“Then you also see the horsemen coming through the trees?”

“They’re the reason we shouldn’t run?”

“They are.”

“Why?”

“They’re hunters. The Duke Goga, who leads them, counts all these lands as his own.”

“They’re getting closer.”

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 299

COLDHEART CANYON

299

“Yes they are.”

“How is that possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean: how is it possible that they’re getting closer to us? They’re in the walls.”

“Is that what you think?” she said, coming closer to him. “Is that what you
really
believe?”

He stood still for a moment, and listened to his heart. What did his heart tell him? The wind gusted, cold against his face. It was not a Californian wind. Overhead, the sun remained eclipsed, though he knew there was no possible way to see the sky from this deep a place in the house.

“I’m in another world.”

“Good,” she said.

“And it’s real.”

“Again, good. And does it trouble you, to be in the middle of such a mystery?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t know why and I’m not sure I care.”

She put her arms around him, holding him tighter than she’d held until now, and looked deep into his eyes, looking deeper than she’d ever looked. “It doesn’t matter, my love. Whether it’s in my head, or your head, or the head of God—”

“—or the Devil?”

“—or the Devil. It doesn’t matter. Not to us.” She spoke the last three words as a near-whisper, close to his ear. He kissed her. He realized now how cannily she’d led him—teasing him with outlandish visions—ghosts and ungodly pleasures, slowly deconstructing his beliefs about what was real and what was not. All in preparation for this wonder of wonders.

“Nothing matters to us, huh?” he said between kisses.

“We’re above it all,” she said. As she spoke she put her hand down between his legs. He was like a rock.

“You want to make love to me?”

“Of course I do.”

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 300

300

CLIVE BARKER

“You want to go back up to bed?”

“No. I want to do it right here.” He pointed to the hard ground at their feet.

Again, she laughed. This new-found fire in him seemed to entertain her.

She lifted up her dress, so that he could have sight of her. She was naked.

“Lie down,” he told her.

She did so without a second instruction, lifting and parting her legs as she lay at his feet, so that he should have full disclosure of her. She ran her hand over herself. Into the groove, and out again, wet, to touch her anus.

He could hear the rhythm of the hunters’ horses in the ground underfoot. Duke Goga and his party were getting closer. Todd glanced up toward the trees. He could no longer see the men: the forest had become too deep. But they were nearby.

No matter. He could watch the hunters another day. Right now he had sport of his own. He unbuttoned his pants and let his dick spring out.

Katya sat up instantly and took it in her hand, rubbing it.

“So big.”

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. He liked the fact that she said it, and there was an appetite for it in her eyes, the likes of which he’d never seen on a woman’s face before. She started to pull on his cock, not to pleasure him, simply to bring him down to her;
into
her.

He went down on his knees between her legs. Such was the lightness of her dress that it could be lifted up almost to her neck, to expose her belly and breasts. He put his face down against her flat stomach, licking her navel then going up to her breasts. It had always been a fantasy of his to wash a woman with his tongue, every inch of her, from the corners of her eyes, to the cleft of her buttocks, simply to be her servant, bathing her with his tongue. This was the woman he would realize that fantasy with, he knew. This was the woman he would realize
every
fantasy with, and hers was the body with which he could play freely, doing anything his heart desired; anything.

That was the only word of this sexual delirium that escaped him:

“. . . anything.”

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 301

COLDHEART CANYON

301

But she seemed to know what it meant because she raised his face from her breasts, and smiled at him. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Anything you want. And for me—”

“Anything
you
want.”

“Yes.”

She took hold of the collar of his shirt, and drew his face closer to hers.

They kissed, while she moved beneath him, seeming not to care about the hard dirt against her naked buttocks, her naked back. He had his hands either side of her, to support himself. But that was all he needed to do. She was perfectly capable of doing the rest. She lifted her hips a little and caught the head of his cock between her labia, then, sighing, she delivered herself up and upon it in one sweet motion.

Now she put her arms around his neck, and let out a most extraordinary sigh: a sound of complete abandonment.

Todd looked down at her face with something that began to feel like helpless adoration. The polishers who’d put a shine on everything in this strange world must have saved their best labors for her. The down on her cheek, the dark curve of her lashes, the fabulous hierarchy of lilacs and blues and turquoise in her eyes, all were perfect. She was almost unbearably beautiful: his eyes stung at the sight of her.

“I love you,” he said.

The words came out with such ease that they were said before he had a chance to spoil them by making a performance out of them.

Of course he’d said it before, plenty of times (too many times, in truth) but never like this. It sounded, for the first time, simple. Simple and true.

She raised her head from the ground, until her lips were almost touching his.

“I love you too,” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“You know I do. You’re the one I’ve waited for, Todd. All these years.

I’ve been patient, because I knew you’d come.”

She pressed her hips up toward him, sheathing him completely. Then, still holding on to him, she began to pull herself off him a little way, just CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 302

302

CLIVE BARKER

until the head of his dick was about to find the air, then smothering it again, down to the root.

There was a heavy reverberation in the ground. Todd could feel it through his palms.

“The hunters . . .” he said.

“Yes,” she said, as though this were of little consequence. “Goga’s close. We should stay very still until he’s passed by.”

She drew Todd down on top of her. He couldn’t see the huntsmen yet, but the noise was getting louder nevertheless. The reverberations made the little shards of rock around her head, decorated with tiny fragments of fossil, dance.

Finally, they came into view, rising over the crest of a hill some twenty-five or thirty yards from where they lay, locked together.

There were five of them in the Duke’s party, and they looked as though they’d been riding for a very long time. Their horses shone with sweat, and the men—all of whom were dressed in tattered tunics—showed signs of extreme fatigue. But even their exhaustion had a kind of livid beauty to it. Their skin was as bright as, or brighter than, the bone that it concealed; their eyes, which were sunk deep in their sockets, had a fevered brilliance in them. Todd wasn’t surprised they looked so harried, given the orders of beast he’d glimpsed here. Yes, there were wild pigs and stags, but there were other kinds of creature, far less easily categorized; things that looked as though the Devil had had a hand in their design. Lethal quarry, no doubt. Indeed there were signs that the party had been recently attacked.

One of the horses had a number of deep gashes on its rump, and its rider had clearly suffered in the encounter. His left arm hung limply, and a large dark bloodstain had spread from a place under his arm across a third of his upper body. His lips were drawn back from his teeth in pain, his eyelids drooping.

Even if Katya hadn’t named the leader, it would have been clear to Todd that he was of a higher social standing than his companions, his horse a more finely-bred animal than those the others rode, its mane and tail braided. As for the man himself, he was almost as beautifully coiffed CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 303

COLDHEART CANYON

303

as his mount, his full, dark beard well-shaped, his long hair a good deal cleaner than that of his companions. But these cosmetic polishes aside, he was in no better shape than his fellow riders. His eyes were sunk deep into his skull and his body, for all the upright position he held in his saddle, was full of little tics, as though he were uncomfortable in his own skin. In his left hand he held the reins of his horse. His right rested on the golden pommel of his sword, ready to unsheathe the blade in a heartbeat.

Todd had never played in a medieval movie—his face was far too contemporary, and his acting skills too rudimentary for an audience to believe him as anything but a modern man. But he’d seen his share of epics: the kind Heston had made in the fifties and early sixties: all rhetoric and pose-striking. The men approaching them looked nothing like the well-fed heroes of those epics. Their bodies were wizened, their looks so intense they seemed more like escaped lunatics than hunters.

Goga raised his right hand (which was missing two fingers) and with a silent gesture slowed the advance of the party. The men—sensing their leader’s apprehension—proceeded to scan the landscape around them, looking for some sign of their enemy, whoever, or whatever, it was.

Todd stayed very still, just as Katya had instructed. Had these men been gun-slingers, he would have described them as trigger-happy. Plainly they were nervous and exhausted; not men to meddle with.

But even as he lay there, barely daring to breathe, he felt Katya reach down between his legs and proceed to stroke his balls. He gave her an astonished look, which she returned with a mischievous little smile. She stroked him back to full erection, and then subtly maneuvered her body so that he was once again fully sheathed by her. The sensation felt even more extraordinary than it had a few minutes before. Without seeming to move her hips she contrived to make waves of motion move up and down her channel, massaging him.

All the while, the horsemen approached, and the closer they came the more desperate they looked. These were men who apparently lived in a constant state of fear, to judge by their expressions. One of the Duke’s four followers, the oldest and the most scarred, mumbled a prayer to him-

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 304

304

CLIVE BARKER

self as he rode, and in his hand he clutched a plain wooden cross, which more than once he kissed, for comfort’s sake.

Todd was somewhere between ecstasy and panic. He didn’t dare move, even if he’d wanted to. Katya, meanwhile, was free to play havoc with his nerve-endings. He didn’t move his hips; he didn’t need to. She had all the moves. Her internal manipulations were becoming more elaborate all the time, driving him closer and closer to losing control.

Todd had always been a noisy lover; sometimes embarrassingly so. (A memorable night with a girlfriend in a suite at the Chateau Marmont had been brought to a premature halt when the manager had called up his room to regretfully report that the guests in an adjacent suite couldn’t sleep for all his moans.) Now the best he could do was bite his lip until he tasted blood, and will himself not to let a sound escape him.

The horsemen were so close now that he did not dare move his head to look at them. But he could just see them from the corner of his eye.

The Duke gave an order, in Romanian: “
Stai! N-auzi ceva?
”

The men brought their horses to a halt, the Duke no more than four yards from where Todd and Katya lay on the ground. Had it not been for the fact that the eclipse rendered the light here so deceptive, the pair would surely have been seen, and dispatched: a single blade skewering them both in an instant. But as far as Todd’s limited vision could tell, the men were looking further afield for their quarry, scanning the distant landscape rather than the ground yards from their horses’ hooves.

There was another exclamation from the Duke, and this time a response from one of his men. Todd had the impression that they were listening for something. He listened along with them. What could he hear?

Nothing out of the ordinary. The cry of birds, wheeling overhead; the coarse breathing and snorting of the horses; the slap of the reins against their massive necks. And closer by, the breathing of the woman beneath him; and—a smaller sound still—the rhythmical click of a beetle as it made its clockwork way over the small stones close to his hand. In his mind’s eye all of this around the tender place where their bodies met: the bird and the horse and the stones and the beetle, orbiting his pleasure.

CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 305

COLDHEART CANYON

305

He saw her smile beneath him, and with the tiniest contraction of her vulva she brought him to the point of no return. There was a flash of brightness in his head, which momentarily washed everything out. She came back out of the fog to meet him with her eyes half-closed, her pupils so full beneath them that they seemed to edge out the whites. Then her lids fluttered closed completely and he started to spurt into her. He could not have stopped crying out if his life had depended on it. No; it did. And still he let out a sob of relief—

There was a shout. The Duke was issuing an order. It made no sense to Todd, but he looked up anyway, as his body continued its spastic motion, emptying itself into her. The man who’d dismounted was now striding toward them, unleashing his sword.

The Duke spoke again:

“Cine sunt acesti oameni?”

He obviously wanted to know who the hell these people were, because by way of reply there were shrugs from the other men. The last spasm passed through Todd’s body, and with it went the idiot sense of his own inviolability. The bliss was gone. He was empty, and mortal again.