For her part, Katya took such reports as evidence that her defenses were working. Nobody could get into her precious Canyon. Or such was her conviction.

In fact her sense of security, like so much else in her increasingly fragile life, was an illusion.

One evening, walking in the garden, the dogs suddenly got crazy, and out of the darkness stepped Rudy Valentino. He looked entirely unchanged by death: his skin as smooth as ever, his hair as brilliantly coifed, his clothes as flawless.

He bowed deeply to her.

"My apologies," he said, "for coming here. I know I'm not welcome. But frankly, I didn't know where else to go."

There was no hint of manipulation in this; it seemed to be the unvarnished truth.

"I went home to Falcon Lair," Rudy went on, "but it's been trampled over by so many people, it doesn't feel as though it's mine any more. Please ... I beg you ... don't be afraid of me."

"I'm not afraid of you," Katya replied, quite truthfully. "There were always ghosts in my village. We used to see them all the time. My grandmother used to sing me to sleep, and she'd been dead ten years. But Rudy, let's be honest. I know why you're up here. You want to get in to see the Hunt -- "

" -- just for a little while."

"No."

"Please."

"No!" she said, waving him away, "I really don't want to hear any more of this. Why don't you just go back to Sicily?"

"Costellaneta."

"Wherever. I'm sure they'll be pleased to see the ghost of their favorite son."

She turned her back on him and walked back towards the house. She heard him following on after her, his heels light on the grass, but solid enough.

"It's true what they said about you. Cold heart."

"You say whatever you like, Rudy. Just leave me alone."

He stopped following her.

"You think I'm the only one?" he said to her.

His words brought her to a halt.

"They're all going to come up here, in time. It doesn't matter how many dogs you have, how many guards. They'll get in. Your beautiful Canyon's going to be full of ghosts."

"Stop being childish, Rudy," she said, turning back to look at him.

"Is that how you want to live, Katya? Like a prisoner, surrounded by the dead? Is that the life you had in mind for yourself?"

"I'm not a prisoner. I can leave whenever I want to."

"And still be a great star? No. To be a star you will have to be here, in Hollywood."

"So?"

"So you will have company, night and day. The dead will be here with you, night and day. We will not be ignored."

"You keep saying we, Rudy. But I only see you."

"The others will come. They'll all find their way here, sooner or later. Did you know Virginia Maple hanged herself last night? You remember Virginia? Or perhaps you don't. She was -- "

"I know Virginia. And no, I didn't know she hanged herself. Nor, frankly, do I much care."

"She couldn't take the pain."

"The pain?"

"Of being kept out of this house! Being kept away from the Devil's Country."

"It's my house. I have a perfect right to invite whoever I like into it."

"You see nothing but yourself, do you?"

"Oh please, Rudy, no lectures on narcissism. Not from you, of all people."

"I see things differently now."

"Oh I'm sure you do. I'm sure you regret every self-obsessed moment of your petty little life. But that's really not my problem, now is it?"

The color of the ghost before her suddenly changed. In a heartbeat he became a stain of yellow and gray, his fury rising in palpable waves off his face.

"I will make it your problem," he shrieked. He strode towards her. "You selfish bitch."

"And what did they call you?" she snapped back. "Powder-puff, was it?"

It was an insult she knew would strike him hard. Just the year before an anonymous journalist in the Chicago Tribune had called him 'a pink powder puff'. 'Why didn't somebody quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias Valentino, years ago?' he'd written. Rudy had challenged the man to a boxing match, to see which of them was truly the more virile. The journalist had of course never shown his face. But the insult had stuck. And hearing it repeated now threw Valentino into such a rage that he pitched himself at Katya, reaching for her throat. She had half-expected his phantom body to be so unsubstantial that his hands would fail to make any real contact. But not so. Though the flesh and blood of him had been reduced to an urn full of ashes, his spirit-form had a force of its own. She felt his fingers at her neck as though they were living tissue. They stopped her breath.

She was no passive victim. She pushed him back with the heel of one hand, raking his features from brow to mid-cheek with the other. Blood came from the wounds, stinking faintly of bad meat. A disgusted expression crossed Valentino's face, as he caught a whiff of his own excremental self. The shock of it made him loose his hold on her, and she quickly pulled away from him.

In life, she'd remembered, he'd always been overly sensitive to smells; a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that he'd been brought up in the stench of poverty. His hand went up his wounded face, and he sniffed his fingers, a look of profound revulsion on his face.

She laughed out loud at the sight. Valentino's fury had suddenly lost its bite. It was as though in that moment he suddenly understood the depths to which the Devil's Country had brought him.

And then, out of the darkness, Zeffer called: "What the hell's going on out -- "

He didn't finish his question: he'd seen Valentino.

"Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he said.

Hearing the Lord's name taken in vein, Valentino -- good Catholic boy that he was -- crossed himself, and fled into the darkness.

Valentino's vengeful prediction proved entirely accurate: in the next few weeks the haunting of Coldheart Canyon began.

At first the signs were nothing too terrible: a change in the timbre of the coyotes' yelps, the heads torn off all the roses one night; the next all the petals off the bougainvillea; the appearance on the lawn of a frightened deer, throwing its glassy gaze back towards the thicket in terror. It was Zeffer's opinion that they were somehow going to need to make peace with 'our unwanted guests', as he put it, or the consequences would surely be traumatic. These were not ethereal presences, he pointed out, wafting around in a hapless daze. If they were all like Valentino (and why should they not be?) then they posed a physical threat.

"They could murder us in our beds, Katya," he said to her.

"Valentino wouldn't -- "

"Maybe not Valentino, but there are others, plenty of others, who hated you with a vengeance. Virginia Maple for one. She was a jealous woman. Remember? And then to hang herself because of something you did to her -- "

"I did nothing to her! I just let her play in that damn room. A room which you brought into our lives."

Zeffer covered his face. "I knew it would come down to that eventually. Yes, I'm responsible. I was a fool to bring it here. I just thought it would amuse you."

She gave him a strangely ambiguous look. "Well, you know, it did. How can I deny that? It still does. I love the feeling I get when I'm in there, touching the tiles. I feel more alive." She walked over to him, and for a moment he thought she was going to grant him some physical contact: a stroke, a blow, a kiss. He didn't really mind. Anything was better than her indifference. But she simply said: "You caused this, Willem. You have to solve it."

"But how? Perhaps if I could find Father Sandru -- "

"He's not going to take the tiles back, Willem."

"I don't see why not."

"Because I won't let him! Christ, Willem! I've been in there every day since you gave me the key. It's in my blood now. If I lose the room, it'll be the death of me."