Paint It Black (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  It was well past midnight by the time she returned to the ranch-house. She climbed in through the bedroom window, expecting to find Palmer sprawled across the bed. But the bed was empty, and so was the rest of the house. She stepped outside and cast her mind into the darkness, searching for the familiar hum and buzz of his thoughts, but she picked up nothing. Frowning, she intensified her scan until she was able to pick up a tracery of internal monologue she recognized as his, but even that was incredibly vague. Palmer was once more using his telepathic ability to stay off her ‘radar’. But why?

  She followed the faint psychic echo to a path at the bottom of the hacienda’s property, leading into the jungle. She recognized it as the one that led to a nearby Mayan ruin. She’d only been there once or twice, but she knew Palmer visited it quite often. She followed the trail to the top of a hill, where a vine-covered jumble of stone that had once been an ancient observatory sat lumped against the night sky. Palmer was seated on a mammoth block of limestone carved to resemble a snarling jaguar. He was not alone.

  The woman with him was from one of the native tribes, with long black hair that hung down between her shoulders like a curtain. They sat side by side, turned towards one another. Palmer held her hand in his and they spoke in a language Sonja did not recognize. Not that she needed to understand the words to know they spoke as lovers.

  As she watched, Palmer lowered his head as he prepared to kiss the other woman. Sonja could imagine the heat of his breath on her cheek, the smell of him filling her senses, the taste of his lips…

  See? The Other’s voice was sharp, sweet, and nasty, like honeyed razor blades jammed in her inner ear. This is what happens when you let your Renfields run free. It happened with Chaz, and now Palmer. In the end, they betray you. They’ll always betray you.

  Sonja clenched her fists as the anger inside her bubbled like boiling wax. Her head buzzed as if then was a horde of angry wasps loose within her skull, stinging her brain.

  You have to put them on a short leash, the Other continued, its voice suddenly louder and more authoritative than before. That’s how Pangloss, Morgan and all the others keep their Renfields in line. You’ve got to scrape away every vestige of Free Will and hollow them out like jack-o’-lanterns. And not only do they deserve it, they even come to like it. Just ask Judd. Oh. That’s right. You can’t.

  “Shut up,” Sonja growled to herself.

  She emerged from the darkness like blood from a wound. She paused, leaning against the pockmarked limestone of the ruin like a tough lounging under a street lamp, the jungle moonlight reflecting off her leather jacket.

  “How cozy.”

  Palmer jumped up, automatically putting himself between Sonja and the woman he was with, who gasped and crossed herself.

  “So, this is your back-door woman, huh” She jerked her head at the cowering girl. “Does she know you’re fresh from my bed?” she snarled. “Can she smell me on you, like I can smell her?”

  Palmer’s woman cried out at the sight of Sonja’s fangs and grabbed his arm as if to drag him away.

  “Leave Concha out of this,” Palmer said sternly. “If you’ve got to take it out on someone, punish me.”

  “You love her,” Sonja said flatly. It wasn’t a question.

  Palmer glanced down into Concha’s dark brown eyes, now bright with fear and nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “I could kill her, you know,” Sonja said, her voice frighteningly still. “I could murder her and make it so you wouldn’t even know she existed. It would be as simple as wiping a chalkboard clean. Easier, in fact.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he replied stonily.

  “Do you, really?”She sneered.

  It would be so easy to just reach into his head and flip the switch and return the memories of Lethe she had taken from him. She wanted to see the look on his girlfriend’s face as the past washed over him like a tidal wave, smashing his ego into kindling. Now that would be fun. She could do it over and over again: wiping away his memories of Lethe, only to restore them without warning, so every time he experienced the pain of her loss it would as though it had never happened before. Perhaps she would do that with his girlfriend’s murder, as well. Make him forget Concha, then force him to relive her death over and over again, whenever the mood suited her…

  She turned her attention to the woman cowering at his side, who was staring at her like a sparrow entranced by a snake. “Why this one? What’s so special about her?”

  “Concha found me wandering in the jungle, miles from here. I don’t know how or why I got there, but she helped me and brought me home. She was there for me.”

  “How can you love her?” Sonja said with a dismissive shake of her head. “She’s not like you at all.”

  “She’s human. Just like me.”

  “But she’s not a sensitive,” she replied tartly. “You can never commune with her on the same plane as you do with me. It might as well be bestiality.”

  “But we don’t commune anymore,” Palmer retorted. “You’ve been shut off from me ever since you returned from New Orleans. I tried to understand whatever it was you were going through, but it’s no use. You won’t be satisfied unless I’m as crazy as you are!”

  Sonja hissed, swaying like a drunkard brought up short, and moved toward the terrified Concha. Palmer took another stepped forward, lowering his brow in anticipation of psychic battle. “Don’t make me kill you,” he warned.

  Her laughter was as hollow as old bone. “You can try. But you’re no match for me, Palmer.” “I know that,” he replied solemnly. “But I’m still not going to let you hurt her.”

  “Don’t make me do this to me, Bill,” Sonja whispered. “I need you.”

  “Like hell you do,” he replied. “You don’t need anyone. You never have and you never will.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Is it?” he asked. “Sonja, if I stay with you, I’m going to end up just another Renfield. Is that what you want?”

  The Other spoke again, this time in a cajoling voice. It was the friendliest Sonja had ever heard it. Don’t bother answering the jerk, just go ahead and shut his will off at the faucet. Believe me, he won’t miss it. By the way, I liked the bit about killing his girlfriend and making him forget her, then relive her death whenever you feel like a chuckle. Not bad. You’re getting the hang of it.

  Sonja balled her fists and looked down at her boots. “No,” she said grudgingly, causing the Other to spit obscenities no one else could hear.

  “Then give me my freedom,” Palmer demanded.

  “You’ve always had it!” she retorted, moonlight flaring across the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses.

  “Have I?” he challenged.

  Sonja did not answer, but, instead, turned her back to him. It felt as if a piano-wire garrote had been slipped around her throat, strangling the words she wanted to say. In the end, all she could say was: “Go.”

  Palmer grabbed Concha by the hand and hurried from the ruins into the surrounding jungle. Just before he disappeared into the tangled shadows, he turned and called out to her, mind-to-mind, one last time.

  I did love you.

  And then he was gone.

  Sonja shrieked like a cornered jaguar as she kicked and pummeled the ancient limestone ruins, obliterating friezes carved a thousand years ago. Roaring like a bull ape, she bashed her shoulder against the remaining wall until it collapsed. Once the rage left her, she stood there trembling like a winded stallion, surrounded by her handiwork, her face and clothes limned with the dust of centuries.

  I loved you too, she thought in return.

  But there was no longer anyone there to hear.

  She wandered the halls of the empty ranch-house, too numb to even feel sorry for herself. Within the span of just a few days, the nest she’d built for her ‘family’ had become a tomb. She had already sealed Lethe’s room, to keep Palmer from stumbling across any trace of her existence. Now she did the same to his bedroom, nail
ing a piece of plywood over the door. Once she was finished, she drifted into the kitchen.

  A black papier-mâché mask rested atop a pile of mail heaped on the kitchen table, serving as an ersatz paper weight. As she picked it up, an envelope fell onto the floor. It was addressed to Sonja Blue and bore the same Cooper Union postmark as the previous letter she’d received. Inside the envelope were several clippings from the New York Times, Post, and Daily News, the oldest dated six months back and the most recent from the current month. Most of the articles were brief, taciturn reports of bodies being found in the Triborough area. All of the dead had been women, most of them prostitutes. As she placed the clippings side-by-side on the table, she noticed another thing they all had in common. Each body had been found dressed in a black leather jacket and wearing mirrored sunglasses.

  It came to her then, like a dark epiphany: there was no need to despair simply because Palmer and Lethe were no longer around to give her life meaning.

  After all, she still had Morgan.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Heilongjiang Province, the People’s Republic of China:

  The madman’s name was Wang Zuocai, and he had spent the last forty years locked away in a sanitarium in Mohe, the northernmost town in China. There were many such sanitariums scattered throughout the People’s Republic, where dissidents who had offended the party leaders had been banished. What made this particular mental hospital different from all the others was that Wang Zuocai was its only inmate. Not one of the six staff members assigned to watch over him knew why the old man had to be kept in isolated confinement and dosed with the most potent psychoactive drugs, but they still did it, without question.

  Wang Zuocai was thin to the point of emaciation; his arms and legs withered from decades of either being strapped into a straitjacket or manacled to his bed, and had a long beard and mustache the color of fresh snow. With a piercing gaze that seemed to gaze beyond both time and space, he looked more like a wizard from the Beijing opera than a senile mental patient. This was not far from the truth, for, at one time, Wang Zuocai had served as the mystic adviser to Chairman Mao.

  He was born in 1917, back in Zhejiang Province, near the city of Hangzhow. His father had been a wealthy man, owner of a large tea plantation and a factory that produced silk fans and umbrellas, and his mother a descendant of the sorcerers and soothsayers who had advised the emperor since the Ch’in Dynasty.

  He could not remember a time in his life when he did not have the ability to see things others were blind to. Sometimes he saw demons hiding behind the smiling faces of his fellow man, and sometimes he saw gods. But mostly what he could see was what other liked to call The Future. His parents hoped that he would become a member of General Chiang Kai-shek’s retinue, but Wang Zuocai’s second sight told him that the future lay with Mao Zedong. So, at the age of sixteen, he joined the Communist Party of China and soon found himself on the Long March.

  During those hard, torturous months, on the run from both the Nationalists and the occupying Japanese, Wang Zuocai came to be one of Mao’s most trusted private advisers. The Chairman relied on his talents a great deal, but made sure none, but a handful of his closest confidantes knew the exact nature of his ability. Mao knew that if the Soviets got wind of what Wang Zuocai could do, they would try to steal the soothsayer for themselves. Mao also did not want to have his comrades know he consulted a fortune-teller, a habit largely associated with the decadent, Imperial dynasties. This is how Wang Zuocai became the most influential member of the CPC that no one had ever heard of.

  Then, in 1957, the Chairman called his fortune-teller to him and told him of his plans to abolish private farms and create communes to increase China’s agricultural output, as well as establish backyard furnaces in every commune and urban neighborhood in an attempt to turn scrap metal into steel and catapult his country into the Industrial Age. He then asked what great future Wang Zuocai saw for China.

  What Wang Zuocai foretold was crop failure and widespread famine, the starvation of tens of millions of his fellow countrymen, wide-spread violence, and even cannibalism. The Chairman, who had grown accustomed to being worshiped as the wisest of men, took exception to such prophecy and denounced him as a reactionary. Wang Zuocai was arrested and taken to a re-education camp in Jiangxi Province.

  He spent most of his imprisonment kept in solitary confinement, forced to listen to endless tape loops of Madame Mao quoting the wisdom of the Chairman, day and night. The only time he saw other human beings was when he was dragged out and forced to work the fields, but was forbidden to speak to anyone but his guards.

  However, even though he was malnourished and forced to sleep on lice-ridden straw, and denied anything to read except the Little Red Book, Wang Zuocai’s ability to see into the future remained undimmed.

  One day, while the guards were delivering one of their regular beatings, he looked into the face of one of the men kicking him and said: “Your wife is being untrue behind your back. She takes the village Party official into her bed the moment you leave the house. He is with her now.”

  The guard called him a liar and struck him in the face with his rifle, breaking the oracle’s jaw. Two days later, the guard caught his wife in bed with the village Party official and shot them both, then turned the same rifle he’d used against Wang Zuocai on himself. Of course, Wang Zuocai had seen that as well, which is why he told the guard about his wife’s infidelity in the first place.

  Five years passed, during which time thirty million had starved to death throughout the country. Not only that, but the Soviets had withdrawn their technical support, leaving the CPC to clean up its own mess. In 1962, Mao ordered his old adviser’s release and had him brought back to the Forbidden City. But the Chairman soon discovered that the returning Wang Zuocai was far different from the one he had sent away. Although the fortune-teller was still in his mid-forties, his ordeal at the re-education camp had left him old beyond his years, with white hair and toothless gums. But what Mao found most disturbing were Wang Zuocai’s eyes, which now burned with a greater intensity than before, and every so often he grimaced or shook his head as if reacting to only something he could see.

  After offering his former confidante some rice wine, Mao asked Wang Zuocai what it was he saw. Wang Zuocai replied that he was watching the assassination of the American president. He then went on to foretell the fall of Saigon, men walking on the moon, and Nixon standing on the Great Wall.

  Mao was uncertain whether or not his secret oracle was, indeed, seeing the future or had simply gone mad. However, when Wang Zuocai began to talk about non-human races dwelling unseen amongst humanity, and accusing Mao’s own wife, Jiang Qing, of having the head of a fox, Mao decided on the latter.

  As much as it saddened him to realize his pride had helped destroy Wang Zuocai’s s mind, Mao heaved a sigh of relief. That bit about Nixon and the Great Wall really had him going for a moment.

  Still, crazy or not, Wang Zuocai was still too great a liability—and potentially still useful—to simply toss into a Beijing sanitarium. So Mao ordered him bundled off to the arctic frontier of Heilongjiang Province, to be tended by nurses and doctors better suited to the treating of farm animals, for the rest of his natural life. This, as it turned out, proved considerably longer than that of the Great Leader’s.

  In the decades since his commitment, he’d only had two visitors. The first was in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping asked the straitjacketed Wang Zuocai two questions, and then never returned. The second visitor arrived thirty-five years later, pouring herself through his solitary window, her skin glowing like a glass of plum wine held before a candle flame.

  Wang Zuocai silently watched as she moved to where he lay shackled on his bed, her feet skimming the tile floor. Although he had not set foot on them in years, he knew the tiles had to be cold because everything in Mohe was cold. For someone such as himself, born and bred in the warmer southern climes, it was never warm enough. But all that was about to change. The glowi
ng woman smiled down at him, radiating a heat that sank through his wrinkled skin and into his ancient bones. How long had it been since he’d last known a woman? As it was, it was half a century since he’d last been able to touch himself.

  The woman gestured with her hands and the canvas straitjacket that was Wang Zuocai’s only article of clothing disintegrated as if made from tissue paper. Freed at last, his member rose to greet its demurely smiling liberator, undaunted by age.

  Wang Zuocai had foreseen this strange night encounter the day he spoke to Mao about Madame Mao having the head of a fox. He knew that the Chairman would dismiss him as mad and have him locked away, but that was the only way he could ensure his survival during the coming years of turmoil, with its Cultural Revolution, Gang of Four, Tiananmen Square and Tangshan and Sichuan earthquakes. He had to make sure he lived to see the arrival of a beautiful glowing woman, who would make him the father of a new and wondrous race.

  Once his celestial lover was through with him, Wang Zuocai felt something in his chest fold in on itself. After all the planning, all the waiting, everything was happening so fast. And as his seed quickened, Wang Zuocai’s long, unhappy life finally came to its end.

  Just as he knew it would, fifty years ago.

  Los Angeles, California:

  Mavis Bannister was the ladies room attendant at Trop Cher, an exclusive boutique store along Beverly Hills’ famed Rodeo Drive. In fact, it was so exclusive you had to pass a credit check just to window shop. Their clientele was composed entirely of movie stars, rock stars, hedgefund managers and traveling royalty opposed to the idea of shopping alongside those of lesser importance and social standing than themselves.