The Valley of Shadows

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Blackwind Isao
 
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Location: Satan's Armpit

The Valley of Shadows

Unread postby Blackwind Isao » Sun Jan 04, 2004 10:18 am

The Valley Of Shadows

Part I: The Valley

It is night in the Valley of Shadows, and the wind comes off the desert.

The Santa Anas the humans call them. They blow off the wastelands bringing malaise, and the threat of fire. Some say they are named after Saint Anne, the mother of Mary in one of countless human religions, others that they are named after one general Santa Ana of a long forgotten cavalry, a great creator of dusts; still others that the name is derived from santanta, which means Devil Wind.

Whatever the truth of the matter may be, this much is certain: the Santa Anas are always baking hot, and often so laden with perfume that it is as if they have picked up the scent of every blossom they have shaken on their way here.

There is no lack of blossoms here, of course. Indeed the Valley is almost uncannily verdant. Some of the plants here were brought from the outside world by these same burning winds, these Santa Anas; others were dropped here in the feces of the wild animals who wander through - the deer and coyote and raccoon; still others spread from the forgotten city that lays sole claim to this corner of Hollywood. Alien blooms this last kind - orchids and lotus flowers - nurtured by gardeners who have long since left off their watering and pruning, and departed allowing their once treasured bowers to run riot.

But for some reason there is always a certain bitterness in the blossoms here. Even the hungry deer, driven from their traditional trails these days by the ever-increasing amounts of adventurers, do not linger here for very long. Though the deer venture along the ridge and down the steep slopes of the Valley, and curiosity, especially in the younger animals often leads them over the rotted fences and toppled walls into the secret enclaves of the gardens, seldom do they choose to stay for long.

Perhaps it isn't just that the leaves and petals are bitter. Perhaps there are too many whisperings in the air around the ruined gazebos, and the animals are unnerved by what they hear. Perhaps there are too many prescences brushing against their trembling flanks as they explore the clotted pathways. Perhaps as the graze the overgrown lawns, they look up and mistake a statue for a pale fragment of life, and so, startled by their error take flight.

Perhaps sometimes they are not mistaken.

Perhaps.

The Valley is familiar with perhaps; with what may or may not be. And never more so then on a night such as this, when the winds come sighing off the desert, heavy with their perfume, and such souls as the Valley hosts express their longing for something they dreamed they once had, their voices so tenuous tonight that they are inaudible to the ears of mortals, even if there were someone to hear them, which there never is.

That isn't entirely true. On occasion somebody will be tenacious enough to find their way to this forgotten vale of luxury and tears; an adventurer, perhaps even a whole group of them, adamantly determined to discover what lies off the beaten path; looking for lost treasure or hints of it. There are even a few trespassers over the years who have found their way here intentionally, guided to this place by hints dropped in obscure accounts of ancient Hollywood. They venture cautiously, these last few. Indeed there is almost something of a reverence in the way they enter the Valley of Shadows. But however these visitors arrive, they all leave the same way: hurriedly, with many a nervous backward glance. Even the crassest of them - even the ones who'd claim not to have a psychic bone in their bodies - are discomforted by something they sniff in the air here. Their sixth sense, they have discovered, is far more acute than they had thought. Only when they have outrun the all too eager shadows of the Valley and are back in the relative comfort of their inn do they wipe their clammy palms and wonder to themselves how it was that in such a harmless spot they could have been so very afraid.


Part II: Tiles of the Damned

"Your wife did not wish to look around the Fortress any further, Mister Black?" Father Sandru asked, seeing that on the second day the middle-aged man with the sad face had come alone.

"The lady is not my wife," Black explained.

"Ah..." the monk replied, the tone of commiseration in his voice indicating he was far from indifferent to Katya's charms. "A pity for you, yes?"

"Yes," Black admitted, with some discomfort.

"She is a very beautiful woman."

The monk studied Black's face as he spoke, but having said what he'd said, Black was unwilling to play the confessee any longer.

"I'm her manager," he explained. "That's all there is between us."

Father Sandru, however, was not willing to let the issue go just yet. "After the two of you departed yesterday," he said, his English colored by his native Romanian, "one of the brothers remarked that she was the most lovely woman he had ever seen..." he hesitated before completing the rest of his sentence "... in the flesh."

"Her name is Katya by the way."

"Yes, yes, I know," Father Sandru said, his fingers combing the knotted gray-white of his beard as he stood assessing Black.

The two men were a study in contrasts. Sandru ruddy-faced in his dusty brown habit, Black slimly elegant in his pale linen suit.

"She is a star of movies, yes?"

"You saw one of her films?"

Sandru grimaced, displaying a poorly kept array of teeth. "No, no," he said. "I do not see these things. At least not that often. But there is a little cinema in Ravbac, and some of the younger brothers go down there quite regularly. They are great fans of Chaplain, of course. And there's a... vamp... is that the word?"

"Yes," Black replied, somewhat amused by this turn in the conversation. "Vamp's the word."

"Called Theda Gara."

"Oh yes. We know Theda."

In that year - which was 1920 - everybody knew Theda Gara. She had one of the most famous faces in the world. As, of course, did Katya. Both were famous; their fame tingled with a delicious hint of decadence.

"I must with one of the brothers when they next go to see her," Father Sandru said.

"I wonder if you entirely understand what kind of woman Theda Gara portraits?" Black asked.
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Sandru raised a thicketed eyebrow in response. "I am not born yesterday Mr. Black. The bible has its share of these women, these vamps. They're whores, yes; women of Babylon? Men are drawn to them only to be destroyed by them?"

Black had no choice but to laugh at the directness of Sandru's description. "I suppose that's about right."

"And in real life?"

"In real life Theda Gara's real name is Theodesia Goodman. She was born in Ohio."

"But is she a destroyer of men?"

"In real life? No, I doubt it. I'm sure she harms a few egos now and again, but that's the worst of it."

Father Sandru looked mildly disappointed. "I shall tell the brothers what you have told me," he said. "They'll be very interested. Well then... shall I take you inside?"

Jesiah Mathias Black was a cultured man. He had lived in Paris, Rome, London and briefly in Cairo in his forty-three years; and he had promised himself that he would leave Los Angeles - where there was neither art nor the ambition to create art - as soon as the public tired of lionizing Katya, and she tired of rejecting his offer of marriage. 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 build in one of Hollywood's canyons.

Until then, he would have to find aesthetic comfort in the objects 'd art he purchased on their trips abroad: the furniture, the tapestries and 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?" Father Sandru asked as he unlocked the great set of oak doors that lay at the bottom of the stairs.

"Yes, of course," Black replied.

"Please do not feel you have to sin on my account Mr. Black," Sandru said with a sidelong glance.

"Sin?"

"Lying is a sin Mr. Black. Perhaps it is just a little one, but it is a sin nevertheless."

Oh Lord, Black thought: how far I've slipped from the simple proprieties! Back in Los Angeles he sinned as a matter of course; every hour of every day. The life he and Katya lived was built on a thousand such 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 Theodor exists only to keep its eyes in the Fortress." He pushed open the door and a dank smell exuded from the darkness before them.

"Excuse me for asking," Black said. "But it was my understanding from yesterday that apart from you and your brothers there is nobody here."

"Yes, this is true. No one here except us brothers."

"So what exactly 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 hallway, 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?" Black asked.

Black 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 there was nothing he would imagine buying.

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

Sandru made a little groan. "Ah... I am sorry to say that we must sell in order to eat. And that being the case, I would prefer some of the finer things went to someone who would 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, Black 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?"

Black smiled. "Father, I'm American. I'm always in a buying mood."

Sandru had given Katya and Black a history of the Fortress the previous day; though as Black remembered it there was much to the story that had sounded bogus. The Order of Saint Theodor, Black had decided, had something to hide. Sandru had talked about the Fortress as a place steeped in secrets; though there was nothing particularly bloody. There had been no battles fought here he had claimed, nor had its keep ever held any prisoners nor its courtyard witnessed any atrocity or executions. Katya in her normal forthright manner had stated she did not believe this to be true.

“When I was a little girl there were all sorts of stories about this place,” she had said. “I heard horrible things were done here. I heard that it was human blood in the mortar. The blood of children.”

“I’m sure you must have been mistaken,” Father Sandru had countered.

“Absolutely not. The Devil’s wife herself lived in this very Fortress. Lillith, they called her. She sent the Duke away on a hunt and he never came back.”

Sandru had laughed at that; if it was a performance, it was an extremely good one. “Who told you these tales?”

“My mother.”

"Ah,” Sandru had said with a shake of his head. “And I am 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 the children. Of course they are always stories. People invent tales. But believe me, this is not an unholy place. We brothers would not live here if it was."

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

The best route, he had already decided, was fiscal. If Sandru was to reveal his real treasures, it would be with the scent of hard cash in his nostrils. The fact that Sandru had raised the topic of buying and selling made it that much easier of a topic to broach.

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

“Oh yes?”
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“And of course she has the money.”

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

“How much are we talking about?” Sandru asked mildly.

“Katya is one of the best paid actresses in all of Hollywood. I am authorized to buy her whatever I think might please her.”

“Then let me ask you: What pleases her?”

“Things that no one else would be likely to – no, could possibly – possess, please her,” Black replied. “She likes to show off her collection, and she wants every piece to be unique.”

Sandru spread his arms and his smile. “Everything here is unique.”

“Father, you sound as if you are willing to sell the foundations if the price is right.”

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

“But surely there is some scared value in the things here?”

The father had made 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 if to say that under the correct circumstance 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 no one sees it now, save a few travelers such as yourself, passing through, I don’t see why the Order shouldn’t just be rid of it all. If there is sufficient profit to be made it can be distributed among the poor.”

“There are certainly plenty of people in need of the help,” Black had commented.

He had been appalled at the primitive living conditions in which many of the people in the locality lived. The villages were little more than collections 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 barren lower slopes as gray as the earth, their heights covered with a dusting of snow. God knew what the winters were like in this place: when the ground turned as hard as stone, and the little river froze, and the walls of the shacks could not keep out the winds that came whistling down from the mountain heights.

The day he had arrived, Katya had taken Jessie to the cemetery, so that she could show him where her grandparents were buried. There he’d had proof aplenty of the harsh living conditions in which her relatives lived and died. It had not been the resting places of the old that had moved Jessie; it had been the endless rows of tiny crosses that marked the graves of children; babies lost to pneumonia, malnutrition and simple frailty. The grief that had was represented by those rows of crosses had moved him deeply; the pain of mothers, the unshed tears of fathers and grandfathers. It had been nothing he had remotely expected and it had moved him to tears.

For her part, Katya had seemed unaffected by the spectacle, talking only of her memories of her grandparents and their eccentricities. But then this was the world in which she had been raised; it wasn’t so surprising, perhaps, that she took all this suffering for granted. Hadn’t she once told him she had had fourteen brothers and sisters and only six were still alive? Perhaps the other eight had been laid to rest in that same cemetery where they had walked together. It certainly would not be out of character for Katya to look coldly on matters of the heart. It was what made her so strong- visible in her eyes, in her heart, and in her every movement- that endeared her to audiences, particularly the women.

Black understood that coldness better now that he’d spent time with her. Seeing the house where she had been born and brought up, the streets she had trudged in as a child; meeting the mother who must have viewed her appearance as something of a miracle: this perfect rose-bud child whose dark eyes and bright smile set her apart from any other child in the village. In fact, Katya’s mother had put such beauty to profitable work at the age of twelve, when the girl had been taken from town to town to dance in the streets and- at least according to Katya – offer her favors to any men that would pay to have such tender flesh in their beds for the night. She had quickly fled such servitude, only to find that what she’d had to do for her family’s sake she had no choice but to do for herself. By the age of fifteen (when Black had found her, singing for her supper in the streets of Bucharest) Katya had been a woman in all but years, her flowering an astonishment to all who viewed it. For three nights he had come to the square where she had sang, there to join the group of admirers who gathered around to watch this child-enchantress. It hadn’t taken him long to conceive of the notion of taking her back with him to America. Though at the time he’d had no experience in the world of cinema (few people had; the year was 1916, and film was a fledgling) his instincts had told him that there was something special in the face and manner of this creature. He had influential friends on the West Coast- mostly men who’d grown out of Broadway’s petty disloyalties and piddling profits, and were looking for a new place to put their talents and their investments to good use- who had reported to him that cinema was a grand new frontier. Talent scouts on the West Coast, they had told him, were looking for faces that the camera and the public would love. Did not this child-woman have such a face, he had thought? Would not the camera grow stupid with infatuation to look into those guileful yet lovely eyes? And if the camera fell, could the public be far behind?

He had inquired as to the girl’s name. She was one Katya Lupesci of the village of Ravbac. He had approached her; told her over a meal of cabbage rolls and cheese what he had been thinking. She was curiously sanguine about his proposal; seemingly indifferent. Yes, she had conceded, his proposal had sounded interesting, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave Romania. If she went to far away, she would miss her family.

A year later, when her career had taken off in America – she was no longer Katya Lupesci, she was Katya Lupe, and Jessie was her manager- they’d revisited this very conversation and Black had reminded her how uninterested she had seemed in his grand scheme. Her coolness had all been an illusion, she had confessed; a way in part for her to keep from seeming to gauche in his eyes and a in part a way for her to prevent her hopes from getting to high.

But that was only part of the answer. There was also a sense in which that indifference she had demonstrated on that first day in which they had met (and more recently demonstrated in the cemetery) was a real part of her nature; something that had been bred into her, perhaps, be a bloodline that had suffered so much anguish and loss that nothing was allowed to impress itself to severely upon: neither great happiness nor great sadness. She was, by her own design, a creature who held her extremes in reserve, providing only glimpses for public consumption. It was these glimpses that the audience, gathered in the square had come to witness night after night. It was this same power she had unleashed when she appeared before the cinematographic camera.

Interestingly Katya had shown none of this quality to Father Sandru the previous day.

In fact it was almost as if she had been playing a part: the role of a rather bland God-fearing girl in the prescience of a beloved priest. Her gaze had been respectfully downcast much of the time, her voice softer than normal and her vocabulary- which often bordered into salty- sweet and compliant.

Black had found the entire performance almost comical, it was so exaggerated; but the Father had apparently been completely taken in by it. At one point he had taken his hand under her chin to raise it telling her there was no reason to be shy.

Shy! Black had thought. If only Sandru knew what this so called shy woman was capable of! The parties she has masterminded at her Canyon; the excesses she had choreographed behind the walls of her compound; the sheer filth she was capable of inventing when the mood took her. If the mask she had been wearing had slipped for even an instant, and the poor, deluded father Sandru had glimpsed the facts of the matter, he would have locked himself in a cell and sealed the doors and windows with prayers and holy water to keep her out.

But Katya was far to good of an actress to let him see the truth.

Perhaps in one sense, Katya’s entire life had now become a performance. When she appeared on the screen playing the role of simpering, abused orphans half her age and large portions of the audience seemed to believe that this was reality. Meanwhile, every weekend or so, out of the sight of people who thought she was moral perfection, she threw parties for the other idols of Hollywood – the vamps and the clowns and the adventurers- the sort that would have horrified her fans had they known what was going on. Which Katya was the real one? The weeping child who was the idol of millions or the scarlet woman? The orphan of the storm or the dope fiend in her lair? Neither? Both?

Black turned these thoughts over in his mind as Sandru took him room to room, showing him tables and chairs, carpets and tapestries; even mantelpieces.

“Does anything catch your eye?” Sandru asked him eventually.

“Nothing in particular, father,” Black replied quite honestly. “I can get carpets as fine as these in America. I don’t need to come out into the wilds of Romania to find work as fine as this.”

Sandru nodded. “Yes, of course,” he said. He looked a bit defeated.

Black took the opportunity to look at his watch. “Perhaps I should be getting back to Katya,” he said. In fact, the prospect of returning to the village and sitting in the little shack where Katya had been born, there to be plied with thick coffee and sickeningly sweet cake, while Katya’s relatives came by to stare at (and touch, as if in disbelief) their American visitor did not enthrall him at all. But this visit Father Sandru was becoming increasingly futile, and now that the Father had made his mercenary ambitions so plain, not a little embarrassing. There wasn’t anything here that Black could imagine transporting to Los Angeles. Black reached for his wallet, intending to give the Father a few hundred dollars for his troubles. But before he could produce the notes the Father’s expression changed to one of profound seriousness.

“Wait,” he said. “Before you dismiss me let me say this: I believe me understand one another. You are looking to buy something that you could find in no other place. Something that is one of a kind, yes? And I am looking to make a sale.”

“So is there something here that you haven’t shown me?” Black asked. “Something special?”

Sandru nodded. “There are some parts of the Fortress I have not shared with you,” he said. “And with good reason let me say. You see there are people who should not see what I have to show. But I think I understand you now Mister Black. You are a man of the world.”

“You make it all seem very mysterious,” Black replied.

“I do not know that it is mysterious,” Sandru responded. “It is sad, I think, and human. You see Duke Goga, the man who built this Fortress, was not a good soul. The stories your Katya said she had been told as a child-“

“They were true?”
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"In a manner of speaking. Duke Goga was a great hunter. But he did not always limit his quarry to the animals.”

“Good God! So she was right to be afraid.”

“The truth is we are all a little afraid or what happened here,” Sandru replied. “Because we are none of us certain of the truth of what happened here. All we can do, young or old, is to say our prayers and put or soul in God’s hands when we are in this place.”

Black was now intrigued.

“Tell me then,” he said. “I want to know what went on in this place.”

“Believe me please when I tell you I would not know where to begin,” Sandru said. “I have not the words.”

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

Black studied him with new eyes; almost with a kind of envy. Surely it was a blessed state, to be unable to find words for the terribleness of certain deeds. To be mute when it came to atrocity, instead of gabbily familiar with it. He found his own curiosity similarly muted by it. It seemed distasteful – not to mention pointless – to press the man to say more than he expressed himself capable of saying.

“Let’s change the subject. Show me something completely out of the ordinary,” Black said. “Then I’ll be satisfied.”

Sandru put on an unconvincing smile. “It isn’t much.”

“Sometimes you find beauty in the strangest places,” Black responded, as he spoke the face of Katya Lupesci came into his mind’s eye; pale in the blue twilight.
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Let me know what you think of it thus far.

- Blackwind


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