Paint It Black (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  Chapter Seven

  It was cold. So very, very cold.

  Sonja sat huddled in the far corner of the meat locker, her knees drawn up to her chest. Her breath drifted from her mouth and nostrils in wispy plumes before condensing and turning to frost on her face.

  How long? How many days had she been here? Three? Four? Twenty? A hundred? There was no way of telling. She no longer slept. The Other’s screams and curses kept her awake.

  Let me out! Let me out of this hell-hole! I’ve got to feed! I’m starving!

  “Good.”

  You stupid cunt! If I starve to death, you go with me! I’m not a damned tapeworm!

  “Couldn’t prove it by me.”

  I’m getting out of here! I don’t care what you say!

  Sonja did not fight The Other as it asserted its ascendancy over her body, forcing her stiffened limbs to bend, levering her onto her feet. Her joints cracked like rotten timber as she moved. She staggered in the direction of the door. In her weakened condition, she had difficulty seeing in the pitch black of the meat locker. She had abandoned the sunglasses some time ago, but as her condition worsened, so did her night-vision.

  Her groping hands closed on the door’s inside handle. There was a sharp crackle and a flash of blue light as The Other was thrown halfway across the locker. She screamed and writhed like a cat hit by a car, holding her blistered and smoking hands away from her body. This was the twentieth time she’d tried to open the door, and most of her fingers were on the verge of gangrene.

  “You’re not going anywhere. Not now. Not ever!” She shouted at The Other.

  Fuck you! Fuck you! I’ll get you for this, you human-loving cow!

  “What? Are you going to kill me?”

  Sonja crawled back to her place in the corner. The effort started her coughing again, bringing up black, clotted blood. She wiped at her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket, nearly dislocating her jaw in the process.

  You’re falling apart. You’re too weak to regenerate properly...

  “You’re the one who pounded your head against the fuckin’ wall trying to get out in the first place,” she reminded her unseen passenger.

  Yeah, but you’re the one that got us locked up in here! Don’t blame me!

  “I am blaming you. But not for that.”

  It’s that stupid fucking human again! You think you can punish me for that? I didn’t do anything that you hadn’t already fantasized about!

  “You raped him, damn you! You almost killed him!”

  I didn’t, though. I could have. But I didn’t.

  I love him!” Sonja’s voice cracked and became a sob.

  You don’t love him. You love being mistaken for human. That’s what you’re angry about; not that I molested your precious lover boy, but that I ruined your little game of Let’s Pretend!

  “Shut up.”

  Make me.

  Judd checked the street number of the abandoned warehouse against the address that Mal had given him. This was the place. It was one of the few remaining buildings in the Central Business District that had not been turned into trendy yuppie condo-apartments. There was a small, hand-printed sign posted on the front door that read ‘Indigo Imports’, but nothing else. A heavy chain and double padlock secured the entrance and all the ground floor windows had burglar bars. There had to be some way of getting in and out.

  He rounded the side of the building and spotted the loading dock. After several minutes of determined tugging, he succeeded in wrenching one of the sliding metal doors open wide enough for him to crawl under. The interior was lit by mid-afternoon sunlight slanting through the barred windows, and the place smelled of dust and rat piss.

  The meat locker was on the ground floor, just where Mal said it would be. Its metal walls and door were covered in swirls of spray painted graffiti. What looked like a huge pile of salt marked the locker’s threshold. Judd grabbed the door’s handle and yanked it open. There was a faint crackling sound and a rush of cold, foul air. He squinted into the darkness, breathing through his mouth to mask the stench.

  “Sonja?”

  Something moved in the deepest shadows of the freezer. “J-Judd? Is that you?” It was Sonja’s voice, but far weaker than he had ever heard it.

  “It’s me, baby. I’ve come to get you out of here.”

  “Go away. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  He stepped into the locker, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. He could see her now, crouching in the far corner with her knees drawn up against her chest, her face turned to the wall.

  “No, you’re wrong, Sonja. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  “I let her hurt you, Judd. I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. I let her—let her—” Her voice grew tight, and her shoulders began to shake. She smelled like a side of beef gone bad. Her hands were covered with blisters and oozing sores. Some of the fingers jutted at odd angles as if she’d broken them and they had healed without being correctly set. “Go away, Judd. Go away before I hurt you again.” As he knelt beside her, she pulled away at his touch, pressing herself against the wall as if she could somehow squeeze between the cracks. “Don’t look at me.”

  “Sonja, you don’t understand. I love you. I know what you are, what you’re capable of—and I love you anyway.’“

  “Even if I hurt you?”

  “Especially when you hurt me.”

  She turned to look at him. Her face appeared as if it had been smashed with a hammer then reassembled by a well-meaning, but inept, plastic surgeon that only had a blurry photograph to go by. Her eyes glowed like those of an animal pinned in the headlights of an on-coming car.

  “What did you say?” She whispered.

  Judd leaned closer, his eyes reflecting a hunger she knew all too well. “At first I was scared. Then, after awhile, I realized I wasn’t frightened anymore. I was actually getting into it. It was like the barriers between pain and pleasure, animal and human, ecstasy and horror, had been removed! I’ve never known anything like it before! It was incredible! I love you, Sonja! All of you!”

  She reached out and caressed his face with one of her charred hands. “I love you too, Judd. Kiss me.”

  Sonja sat behind the wheel of the car for a long time, staring out into the darkness beyond the windshield. She pressed her fingertips against her right cheek, and this time it held. Her fingers were healed and straight again. She readjusted her shades and opened the car door, sliding out from behind the wheel of the used Cadillac she’d bought off the lot, cash-in-hand.

  Judd was in the trunk, divvied up into six garbage bags, just like Brittany. At least it had bee fast. Her hunger was so intense she drained him within seconds. He hadn’t tried to fight when she buried her fangs in his throat, even though she didn’t have the strength to trance him. Maybe part of him knew she was doing him a favor.

  She dragged the bags out of the trunk and headed in the direction of the alligator calls. She’d have to leave New Orleans, perhaps for good this time. Brittany might not have been missed, but Judd was another story. Arlo was sure to mention his friend’s weirdo new girlfriend to the authorities.

  It was time to blow town and pay Palmer a visit. She’d forgotten about him during all this. Of all her human companions, he was the one she’d come the closest to loving. Before Judd, that is.

  Sonja hurled the sacks containing her lover’s remains into the water and returned to the vehicle. She tried not to hear the noise the gators made as they fought amongst themselves.

  She climbed back into the car and plugged her iPod into the sound system. The Dead Kennedys California Über Alles thundered through the speakers, causing the steering wheel to vibrate under her hands.

  She wondered when the emptiness would go away—or at least be replaced by pain. Anything would be preferable to the nothing she felt inside her.

  I don’t see why you had to go and kill him like that. We could have used another Renfield. They do come in handy, now and then. Besides, he w
as kind of cute...

  “Shut up and drive,” she snarled to herself.

  Chapter Eight

  It was late afternoon, sliding toward evening, and Palmer was out in the courtyard, hammering together a shipping crate for a collection of the hand-painted Day of the Dead masks. The masks—made of papier-mâché and painted in primary colors so bright he could still see them when he closed his eyes—were piled in a small heap nearby, grimacing blindly at the failing sun.

  Palmer dropped his hammer and straightened up, massaging his lower back. He pulled a bandanna from his pocket and mopped his brow. God, he hated this part of the business. Building the crates for shipping was a relatively minor hassle, but it was loading up the Land Rover and going into the city that was the real ball-buster. Still, the pay was pretty good, and money went a lot further in Yucatan than it did back in the US.

  Looking down, his gaze fell across the masks in their nest of excelsior. He’d bought them as part of a larger job lot from a family of artisans who had been producing carnival decorations for over four generations. Until now, he hadn’t paid that much attention to them. He shifted through the group, studying the workmanship. Most of the masks were small, designed to cover the face of a child.

  All of the traditional carnival personae were represented: skeletons, their teeth bared in aggressive, lipless grins; jaguars with broom-straw whiskers bristling from snarling muzzles; blood-red devils with grease-pencil mustaches, shoe-polish goatees and licorice-black horns jutting from their foreheads; and grinning clowns with hooked noses and jutting chins, like the ancient Punch puppets of Europe. Less typical false faces were also included: a sheep’s head with wool cunningly made from balls of cotton; a wolf, fangs bared in a predatory snarl; a rooster caught in mid-crow, its beak open and throat sac extended. Palmer chuckled to himself as he sifted through the empty masks, remembering Halloweens spent dressed as a pirate, a cowboy, a spaceman, and other exotic professions.

  Then he found the black mask.

  It was at the very bottom of the pile. He frowned as he picked it up, turning it over in his hands. Like the others, it was papier-mâché. Unlike the others, it was adult-sized. And, except for the eyeholes, it was without features of any kind. There were no over-exaggerated human or animal characteristics, merely an oval painted black and coated with several layers of varnish so that it shone like a scarab’s carapace. There was something oddly compelling about the mask that made him set it aside from the others as he loaded them into their crate.

  It was dusk by the time he finished driving the last nail into place. He tossed the hammer back into the toolbox and stepped back to judge his handiwork. He heard a boot heel scraped behind him. He instantly froze. Whoever it was could not be human, or else he would have heard their thoughts long before they reached the front door.

  As he prepared to launch a psychic strike against the invader, he heard a familiar laugh.

  “Hello, Bill. Did you miss me?’

  Sonja stood there looking tired, her leather jacket powdered with road dust, her mirrored shades equally grimy. In one hand she held a battered black nylon duffel bag, in the other a neatly wrapped present bound with colored twine. She smiled tightly, as if the corners of her mouth were being pulled by fishhooks. Her head was surrounded by a blackish-red halo that pulsated like a lava lamp, indicating that The Other was far more active than usual. Palmer tried not to let his dismay taint his own aura.

  He hugged her, and for a moment her shoulders quivered as if struggling to shrug off an invisible burden.

  “Auntie Blue!” Lethe bounded onto the patio, grinning broadly. Dressed in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle T-shirt and a pair of bright yellow stirrup pants, she could have passed for a typical child— save for her golden, pupil-less eyes. Shambling in her wake was Fido.

  The seraph hesitated at the sight of Sonja. Although Palmer seldom could read the seraph’s aura, he knew that it, too, was disturbed by the Other’s activity.

  Sonja smiled at the sight of her godchild, the stress draining from her face, and dropped down on one knee, opening her arms wide. “C’mere and give me a hug, sweetie!”

  Lethe shot into Sonja’s arms like an arrow, clinging to her tightly. “Are you staying this time, Auntie Blue? Are you staying for good?’

  “Maybe not for good, but at least for a while,” Sonja replied. “Here, let me have a look at you. You’ve grown, child!”

  “Eighteen inches in the last six months,” Palmer confirmed with a mixture of pride and concern.

  “Did you bring me something, Auntie Blue?” Lethe asked expectantly.

  Sonja laughed and ruffled the child’s dark hair. “Here you go, darling. I just hope you haven’t gotten too big for dolls.”

  “I’ll never be too big for dolls!” Lethe assured her. “They’re my babies!”

  Palmer stepped forward, gently nudging Lethe in the direction of the house. “Honey, why don’t you and Fido go play with your new doll? Auntie Blue and I have some things to talk about. And tell her thank you for the gift.”

  “Okay, Daddy! Thank you, Auntie!’

  Sonja watched as Lethe skipped away, Fido lumbering after her like a demented pull-toy. “She’s tall, Bill. Way too tall for thirty months.”

  “You’re telling me? That’s why I’ve been trying to get you to come home. We need to figure out what to do with her.”

  It was several hours before they could be alone. First Palmer prepared dinner for Lethe and himself, and then it was time for baths and bedtime stories. It was well after ten o’clock before he finally joined Sonja on the front porch. He found her curled up in the hammock, watching the night sky. She was still wearing her sunglasses.

  “I brought some refreshments,” he said, holding up a spliff the size of a cigar. “Any room there for me?’

  “Of course,’ Sonja smiled, moving over so he could join her.

  Palmer fired up the joint and inhaled deeply, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. As he exhaled, he lifted his arm and Sonja flowed into its hollow like a shadow, one cheek pressed against his breastbone. They lay there for a long moment, Palmer idly stroking her hair. After a long moment, he finally spoke.

  “Things are getting weird.”

  Sonja lifted her head and gave him a quizzical look. “I thought everything had been weird for some time now?”

  “This stuff with Lethe is starting to creep me out. I don’t know what to expect from her one day to the next! A year ago she looked like she was ready for kindergarten, now she looks like she should be ready for middle school!’

  “Is she giving you problems?”

  “No, she’s a good kid. A little rambunctious at times, but she’s no real trouble. But she’s starting to want to go with me to the city. She’s becoming curious about the outside world. We can’t keep her hidden away forever, Sonja.”

  “We can’t risk Morgan finding out about her,” Sonja replied firmly. “I promised her parents I’d never let Lethe fall into that bastard’s hands. There’s no telling what he’d do if Morgan knew she was alive.”

  “I understand that, Sonja. It’s just that, well, it’s not natural for a kid to be alone like she is. All she has in the way of playmates are me and Fido, and occasionally you. That’s hardly what I’d call a well-rounded atmosphere.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” Sonja asked, shrugging her shoulders. “I know about as much about what Lethe really is as you do. Hell, you’re the one who actually takes care of her on a day-to-day basis. As far as I can tell, Lethe’s a healthy little girl who just happens to be somewhat...advanced for her age. There’s nothing either of us can do except try and take care of her and wait to see what will happen. And as for her having playmates... well, Fido will have to do for the time being. At least she isn’t being raised by a lousy TV set!”

  Palmer took another hit, offering the joint to Sonja, who shook her head. “So, how was New Orleans?”

  Her body tensed, like a cat preparing to jump. “Fine; why do
you ask?”

  “Just curious, that’s all. That’s where we first met, after all. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.’

  “Hey, what’s wrong? You’re really tense. It feels like I’m cuddling an ironing board!’

  “Sorry,” Sonja muttered, pulling away from him. “I guess I’m not ready to relax yet. It’s just that I...” She let the sentence trail off.

  “Did something happen in New Orleans?”

  Sonja turned her mirrored gaze away from him. “I had some trouble with the Other. Bad stuff.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  Sonja frowned and shook her head.

  Palmer stubbed out his joint as he prepared to climb free of the hammock. “I better go check on Lethe...”

  Sonja touched his arm. “No, I’ll do it. You stay here.”

  Palmer shrugged and settled back. “Bring me back a beer, okay?”

  “Sure thing.” As she got up, she turned to fix Palmer with her unreadable gaze. “Do you love me?”

  Palmer looked up at her, somewhat taken aback by the question. She rarely spoke the word ‘love’ with her mouth. “Of course!” he replied with a surprised laugh.

  “Why?”

  Palmer blinked, his smile slowly falling away. “I just do.”

  She paused for a moment, as if weighing his answer. “I’ll be back with your beer in a few minutes.”

  Palmer sat in the hammock under the starlit sky, listening to the calls of the night birds, and wondered exactly what the hell had gone down in New Orleans.

  The door to Lethe’s bedroom was slightly ajar, allowing light from the hall to filter in, so she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and be alone in the dark. Sonja was uncertain whether Lethe was actually scared of the dark or not, but it seemed the proper thing to do.

  Sonja stuck her head inside the door, her eyes automatically adjusting to the dim light. Lethe lay on her side, her back to the door, surrounded by a small village of dolls and stuffed toys, her bedclothes kicked onto the floor. Sonja stepped inside, quiet as a shadow, and stooped to retrieve the discarded covers. As she straightened up, she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye.