In the Blood (Sonja Blue)

by Nancy A. Collins

  “Palmer! Palmer, are you all right? Answer me, damn it!”

  Sonja was in the front seat of the rental car, shaking him by the shoulders. She actually looked scared. Palmer wondered if he should feel honored or worried.

  “Damn it, Palmer! Say something! Don’t make me come in there and get you!”

  “What happened?”

  “You’re back. Good. Where did you go?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think I was in a jungle somewhere in Central America a long, long time ago. What’s that taste in the back of my mouth?”

  “Blood,” Sonja replied as she pulled a linen handkerchief from her pocket and offered it to the dazed detective. “You had some kind of seizure. Blood started running out of your nose. I was afraid you were going to swallow your tongue. Now, what’s this about you being in Central America?”

  Palmer shook his head in disbelief as he dabbed at his upper lip. “It was weird. It wasn’t like a dream. It was more like being there, or remembering being there. I was sitting in a stone house and I could hear the birds and monkeys outside, just like in the Tarzan movies. There was a boy...” He frowned as he tried to recall more of his vision, but it was already fading.

  “Palmer, do you believe in reincarnation?”

  “I never really gave it much thought, to tell you the truth. Just like I never gave much thought to vampires and werewolves.” His smile wavered and Sonja saw the fear in his eyes. “Is it true, then?”

  “To a point. There is such a thing as reincarnation. But not every human being is reincarnated. I don’t know how it works—nobody does for sure, unless it’s the seraphim, and they’re not talking. But there are always a number of humans who are preborn. The Pretenders call them Old Souls. Most never know who—or what—they were before, and that’s as it should be. But every now and again, they receive a glimpse of their previous selves, usually when a random incident cues a buried memory. Or, as in your case, apparently, you accidentally touch the remains of a previous incarnation.”

  Upon hearing this, Palmer hunched forward, resting his forehead against the steering wheel.

  “You spoke while you were in your trance,” Sonja said gently. “Are you aware of that?”

  “What did I say?”

  “It sounded like ‘Tohil.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  Palmer closed his eyes and the sound of macaws calling to one another from jungle perches filled his ears. “Yes. It was my son’s name.”

  “So that’s Ghost Trap. The guy who built it really was crazy!” Palmer exclaimed as he peered through binoculars at the valley below. Not that he needed them to see Creighton Seward’s fevered brainchild, as the rambling mansion filled the small dell to the point of overflowing.

  “You can still make out the original house in the middle,” Sonja said, pointing to the center of the grandiose concoction of towers, turrets and flying buttresses. “It looks like a spider squatting in the middle of a web. See anything?”

  Palmer shook his head and lowered the binoculars. “Sealed up like a fuckin’ drum. All the shutters are closed. But I spotted an old stable off to one side with Morgan’s sports car in it. Our boy’s here; no doubt about it.”

  “I never thought otherwise,” Sonja muttered darkly. “I can feel him.”

  “Just looking at that house is making my head hurt.” Palmer said, massaging the bridge of his nose. “I can’t imagine anyone actually living in that monstrosity!”

  “Creatures like Morgan don’t live,” Sonja scowled. “They exist.” She glanced up at the afternoon sky, careful not to look directly at the sun. It had taken them three hours, following narrow asphalt roads that twisted through the hills like black snakes, before finally locating the isolated valley that separated Ghost Trap from the rest of the world. . There were still several hours to go before sundown, when Morgan would stir from his daily coma. Still, in a place like Ghost Trap, where daylight rarely pierced its heart, the vampire lord could very well be up and about inside its labyrinth-like belly.

  “Put a sock in it,” she muttered to the Other as it whined for the seven hundredth and fifty-second time that the sunlight was making it sick.

  Palmer looked up from his binoculars. “What did you say?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” she replied tersely. She was loath to admit it, but she agreed with the Other. She was tired and in bad need of recharging. She used to be able to function perfectly well during the day, but at that exact moment she felt like she’d just come off a weeklong drunk. It was all she could do to fight the urge to crawl inside the trunk of the car and enjoy a quick nap.

  “There’s no point in putting it off,” she sighed. “I’m going down there.”

  Palmer sucked on his lower lip. “You sure it’s safe?”

  She barked a humorless laugh. “It’s never going to be safe! But I stand a better chance going in while the sun is out. Hopefully, he won’t be expecting anything. And if Lijing’s talisman does what it’s supposed to, they won’t know I’ve breached their defenses until it’s too late to do them any good. What about you? You packing?”

  Palmer pulled a loaded .38 special out of his waistband and held it up so she could see. “Figure this’ll do the job?”

  “Honey, you shoot anything in the brain—human or not—with that damn thing, you’ll kill it!”

  He nodded and returned her smile. Sonja gave him a thumbs-up signal and began walking down the hillside toward the mansion. Palmer watched as she moved into the trees and made her way down the rugged hillside. When he could no longer see her, he focused his binoculars back on Ghost Trap. He quickly scanned the windows and turrets for signs of movement. He soon learned that if he let his eyes linger too long on any particular architectural detail it made his eyes water and his head hurt.

  Suddenly his attention was caught by a fleeting glimpse of a pale, moonlike face glowering from a fifth-floor window. His heart thumped a 4/4 beat as he fiddled with the binoculars’ field of focus for a closer view. But by the time he could refocus, the face was gone, the window once more shuttered—assuming it had been open in the first place. Perhaps it was an illusion created from staring too long at the weirdly contorted house. And if had been real, whose face was it? It certainly wasn’t Morgan’s. He contemplated trying to call Sonja on her cell phone and tell her what he’d seen, but he’d lost service at least two valley back.

  Just then he saw a shadow emerge from the tree line near the mansion’s ruined gardens and flit through the surrounding rosebushes, which had grown into a thorny tangle. He watched, awed by Sonja’s supernatural grace as she deftly avoided empty goldfish ponds and crumbling statuary and made her way to what had once been the coal cellar.

  “That’s m’girl!” he grinned as she yanked the heavy padlock off the cellar doors. A second later she was gone, swallowed by Ghost Trap. Whatever dangers lay hidden within the mansion’s sprawl, she would have to face them alone. And maybe, if he was lucky, she would never come out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sonja took a deep breath and paused to orient herself against the wave of nausea that hit her the moment she entered the confines of the house. The empty coal cellar tilted under her feet, as if the ground were made of Indian rubber. Something in her jacket twitched.

  She removed the Hand of Glory and saw that the position of the six fingers had changed. Hoping that was a good sign, she returned it to her pocket. She took a cautious step toward the stairs leading to the rest of the house, then another. The nausea was gone, although she was unable to shake the feeling of disorientation.

  The first floor was dark, the bare wooden boards furry with dust. As she walked through the series of oddly shaped interconnected rooms, it became clear to her that they had never ever been furnished. Some rooms hadn’t even been plastered and painted, the exposed wooden pining giving the smaller rooms an austere, almost monkish appearance.

  Everywhere she looked, the demented genius of Ghost Trap’s creator was on display, as her ey
es were drawn to lines that both originated and intersected beyond the field of normal vision. She doubted a normal human could withstand more than an hour’s sustained exposure to Ghost Trap’s peculiar brand of architectural design without losing consciousness or going mad. The weirdly angled doorways and out-of-kilter rooms reminded her of the starkly rendered expressionist scenery from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

  The second floor was much like the first, as was the third. The house was indeed as huge and maze-like as she’d feared. Judging from the thickness of the dust coating the floorboards and banisters, she doubted that the section of Ghost Trap she found herself in had seen any visitors—human or Pretender— since the day Creighton Seward’s body had been recovered.

  Still, she could feel Morgan’s presence, hidden somewhere within the massive sprawl of zigzagging walls and staggered staircases. However, whether the vampire lord was hiding in the attic, the basement or the room next door was impossible for her to divine. She hoped if Morgan was equally conscious of her intrusion, that he was just as helpless in pinpointing her exact location.

  As she left a sitting room with faded, green patterned wallpaper and an upside down fireplace made from Italian marble, she glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye. Turning to get a better look, she found herself staring at a little girl no more than five.

  Sonja knew the child to be dead because she could see through her. The ghost-child wore old-fashioned clothes and held a porcelain doll in her chubby arms. Both the girl and the doll had golden hair that fell to their shoulders in ringlets. The face of the china doll was marred by a hairline fracture that ran from its brow to the bridge of its nose.

  “Hello, little girl.”

  The phantom child smiled and lifted a hand still chubby with baby fat and waved a greeting in return.

  “Little girl, do you know how I can get to the nucleus of the house?”

  The ghost shook her head. Sonja wished the tiny specter would speak but knew that the dead often lost the ability to communicate coherently after a few years. The dumb show might be aggravating, but at least it was reliable.

  “Is there anyone around who does know?”

  The little girl smiled again, this time nodding. She turned and signaled for Sonja to follow her. Sonja tried not to look at the brains spilling from the back of the child’s smashed skull.

  The ghostly child flickered from room to room like a pale but playful moth while Sonja dutifully followed. Finally the phantom entered a long, narrow room paneled in darkly stained walnut with thirteen bronze satyr faces studding the walls. On closer inspection, Sonja saw old-fashioned gas jets protruding from the collection of grotesquely leering mouths.

  Suddenly there was an icy draft, as if someone had thrown open the door of a massive freezer, and the gas jets burst into flame, filling the room with the odor of perfume and blood.

  The tiny ghost child hurried over to where her mother stood revealed, dressed in a high-collared morning glory skirt. The phantom woman’s hair—the same golden hue as her daughter’s—was puffed at the sides and pulled into a knot atop her head. Even with the left side of her face reduced to pulp, the eye hanging from its stalk onto the ruined cheek, it was obvious she had been a stunningly beautiful woman in life.

  The ghost-child tugged at her mother’s skirts and pointed at Sonja. Her lips moved but all Sonja heard was a skewed, half-speed garble.

  “Mrs. Seward...

  The dead woman looked up, surprised at being recognized. The undamaged side of her face frowned.

  “Mrs. Seward, I need your help in finding my way to the nucleus of Ghost Trap,” Sonja implored, her hand outstretched.

  The phantom woman looked down at her daughter, then at Sonja. As she opened her mouth, the flames issuing from the gas jets intensified. Mrs. Seward, now looking more terrified than terrible, motioned for her child to leave. The little girl obeyed, rolling herself into a ball of witch fire and bouncing from the room. There was a distant whistling sound, as that of air being sliced by an axe, followed by a hollow booming. Whatever was creating the noise was making its way toward the room Sonja was standing in.

  The late Mrs. Seward gestured for Sonja to follow her as she moved to one of the walnut panels set into the wall. Her long, bell-like skirt left the thick dust on the floor undisturbed. She pointed to the molding where the plaster met the paneling and then passed through the wall, leaving Sonja to locate the hidden catch that opened the secret door. The booming sound was so close it rattled the secret panel as it closed behind her.

  Mrs. Seward was waiting for her, glowing in the gloom of the secret passage like a night-light. Sonja followed her spirit guide through the narrow passageway to a cramped circular staircase that pierced Ghost Trap’s various levels. Mrs. Seward motioned for her to go downstairs.

  “How many levels? One? Two?”

  The dead woman held up two transparent fingers and mimicked opening a door. Sonja nodded to show that she understood and began her downward climb. After a couple of steps she paused and looked back at the ghost-woman.

  “You’re trapped in this place, aren’t you? You and the children?”

  The ghost nodded, nearly dislodging her dangling eye.

  “How can you be freed?”

  The ghost hastily traced letters in midair. The ectoplasm hung suspended for a few seconds before wavering and losing shape, like a message left by a haphazard skywriter: Diztroe Tarappe.

  Although the dead were notoriously bad spellers, she understood what she meant. Before Sonja could ask anything else, Mrs. Seward disappeared as suddenly as she had manifested. Sonja shrugged and resumed her descent into the bowels of Ghost Trap.

  On the second level she found a narrow oak doorway at the base of the stairs. She could tell the door opened inward, but other than that had no idea where it might lead or what might be on the other side. Taking a deep breath and hoping it didn’t lead to a room full of hungry ogres, Sonja grasped the handle and yanked it open.

  She found herself faced not by tigers, but with a lady.

  The woman was seated in a tastefully upholstered easy chair, reading a paperback romance novel, her slippered feet resting on an ottoman. The room seemed very cozy, in an old-fashioned, Victorian way. Somewhere nearby a grandfather clock measured out the afternoon. A small, cheery fire crackled away in the fireplace.

  Sonja frowned and moved further into the room, allowing the secret door to silently close behind her. The petite African-American woman seated in the chair had yet to notice the intruder in her sitting room. Just as she began to wonder if she was looking at yet another ghost, albeit a bit more opaque than the last, the woman looked up from her reading and smiled at her, revealing eyes the color of claret. Sonja’s right hand instinctively closed on the switchblade in her pocket.

  “Hello,” said the woman, putting aside her book. “I’m sorry; I didn’t hear you come in. Are you one of our Father’s servants?”

  Sonja adjusted her vision, scanning to see what the vampire sitting before her truly looked like. To her surprise, she did not reveal herself to be a wizened crone or rotting corpse, but remained exactly what she appeared to be: an attractive young African-American woman in her late twenties. As she focused harder, an aura abruptly appeared about the other woman’s neatly corn-rowed head like a halo of fire. Sonja gasped aloud in shock and surprise. The last time she’d seen such a thing was in the mirror.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Sonja heard Pangloss’s voice echoing in her ears. He is plotting on revolutionizing Pretender society... Something about creating an army of silver-immune vampires...

  As she struggled to her feet, Sonja suddenly realized the vampire was pregnant.

  It worse than even Pangloss could have imagined.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Is something wrong? Should I call Dr. Howell?” The pregnant vampire asked as she reached for a cellular phone resting on the table next to an array of medication vials.

  Be
fore she had a chance to touch the phone, Sonja leapt forward, wrapping her free hand in the other woman’s abundant braids and yanking her head back, exposing her throat. She pressed her switchblade against its pulse point.

  “Who are you?” Sonja growled. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m Anise,” the pregnant vampires said, speaking loudly and slowly, as if communicating with an emotionally disturbed child. She was trying not to sound frightened as she clutched at her swollen belly. “Why are you doing this? You’re hurting me!”

  “Where is Morgan?”

  “You mean Father?”

  Sonja cranked another length of braid around her fist, pulling Anise onto her tiptoes. “He’s not my father, bitch! Answer me, damn you, or I’ll go in and take what I want to know! Who else is in this fuckin’ spook house?”

  Anise’s eyes abruptly flickered to something beyond Sonja’s shoulder. The thought that there might be two of them entered Sonja’s head the same time the fireplace poker came down on her skull.

  As the pain shot through her, she felt the Other throw itself against the bars of its cage like a tiger smelling blood. The Other wanted out, and it wanted out now. The Other wanted to twist the head off the bloat-bellied bitch and gouge the eyes out of whoever the asshole with the poker happened to be, then snatch the little unborn shit from its mother’s womb and snap its neck like a terrier worrying a rat.