Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  “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, nailing 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 glowing 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.

  However, even if you were a living legend, the heir to a foreign throne, or the richest person in the world, at some point you still had to hit the can. And that’s where Mavis came in. It was her job to keep the ‘ladies lounge’, as her employers preferred to call it, as clean as an operating room, stock the stalls with the plushest toilet paper, and replenish the basket of complimentary toiletry and cosmetics between turning the taps of the lavatory sink on and off for ‘visitors’ and providing them with a clean linen towel to dry their hands. And if anyone from TMZ had ever thought to ask, Mavis would have told them that the ultra-rich and super-famous treat public lavatories just like the hoi polloi. You’d be surprised how many couldn’t be bothered to flush—or leave a tip.

  Still, tending the jakes of the over-privileged had its perks, such as the times she found a pair of mink-lined gloves left next to the sink, and the hundred dollar bill lying on the floor in one of the stalls. The visitors to Mavis’ bailiwick were so well off they never seemed to miss the things they left behind, or, if they did, assumed they’d dropped it while getting in or out
of a limo, not while popping a squat in a public restroom.

  Mavis was going over the inventory list for the toiletry basket in her head as she carried a bundle of fresh hand towels into the ladies lounge. Trop Cher would be opening in a few minutes, and she needed to have her station stocked and ready to go by the time the manager unlocked the front door. Although the management didn’t like to advertise the fact, one of the primary reasons they kept an attendant in the ladies lounge was to deter shoplifters, such as the senator’s wife Mavis caught trying to stuff a five thousand dollar cocktail dress into her purse.

  As she pushed open the door, she was surprised to hear what sounded like a baby crying. But that was impossible. The store wasn’t open to the public yet. How could someone with a child already be in the ladies room? And she could tell by the timbre and volume of the wails that it had to be a very small infant. She set down the hand towels on the shelf next to her chair inside the door and automatically glanced at the floor beneath the three partitioned stalls, expecting to see a pair legs. Instead, what she saw was a newborn baby swaddled in a discarded newspaper like an order of fish and chips.

  Mavis jerked open the door of the stall and snatched up the tiny bundle. The baby stopped crying the moment she picked it up and peered at Mavis with eyes the color of marigolds.

  “You poor little thing!” Mavis gasped. She placed the child on the lavatory stand and peeled away the newspaper. He was a boy and apparently healthy, judging from his lungs and the waving of his tiny hands. His dark hair was still damp from birth fluids, and there were a few inches of umbilical cord dangling from his belly button. Whoever the mother was, she must have given birth in one of the stalls…but how was that even possible? The floor of the ladies lounge was spotless, and the store had been closed since eight o’clock the previous night.

  “There-there,” she said soothingly as she dampened one of the hand towels and began to clean the waxy layer of vernix from his tiny body. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”