Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  “But if wasn’t on account of me, you wouldn’t be wrapped up in this mess. You’d be—”

  “Stuck in the State Pen, getting my teeth knocked out and my asshole stretched, with no hope of parole,” he pointed out. “Believe me, as weird and as dangerous as this shit is, I could be a lot worse off right now.”

  He walked over to where she stood and put his thumb under her chin, tilting it up so that she was looking into his face. He didn’t know why he did it; it just seemed like the thing to do—just like it seemed natural to pull her into his arms. He felt himself growing hard and that, too, seemed like a good thing. After all, it had been months since he’d last had sex…

  He tried to shut the thought of Lola her from his mind, but it wouldn’t go away. He remembered how everything had seemed right and natural then, too, like some kind of beautiful, happy accident. He used to think he was too cynical to fall in love. But, as it turned out, at the heart of every cynic is a naïve romantic. And Lola played him for the fool every step of the way, manipulating him like a puppet on a string until he was no longer his own man. It had been a trap from the beginning, baited with honey and hot meat. And he’d never suspected a thing until he’d faced the butcher on the killing floor.

  He pushed Sonja away, staring at her with horror-stricken eyes. “You’re doing this! You’re making this happen, not me!”

  Sonja’s face abruptly crumpled, and for a heartbeat it looked as if she might cry. Then her features grew harden and the corner of her mouth curled into a humorless sneer.

  “You fuckin’ idiot!” She snarled, her voice sounding as if her lungs were full of ice and razor blades. “You don’t even know what you really want, do you? You think you’re being made to do this? Okay, I’ll make you!”

  Palmer cried out as her will poured into him, seizing his brain in an invisible fist, only to have it choke off into a groan. His whole body felt numb, as if he’d been given a massive dose of Novocain. Although he was not in any discomfort, the total lack of sensation was worse than any actual pain.

  “Are you scared stiff yet?” she leered. “No? Then I’ll have to see about that.”

  Palmer was vaguely aware of his penis moving, but it felt like it was a hundred miles away. The numbness began to withdraw, to be replaced by excruciating pain. He gasped and struggled to keep his eyes from bugging out of their orbits as his member began to swell like an overinflated balloon.

  “I could keep you like this for hours, you know,” she said casually. “Days, if I so choose. Of course, your bladder would rupture and you’d be rendered impotent for the rest of your life. ” She tilted her head to one side, as if studying an unusual insect. “I don’t understand what she sees in you. She must have a real weakness for fuck-ups with a taste for destructive relationships.” As she laughed, her features began to shift, her lips swelling, her chin becoming baby-doll round, while her hair turned the color of raw honey and tripled in length.

  “Hi, baby!” Lola grinned, her eyes screened by twin reflective mirrors. “Did you miss me?”

  Palmer screamed and covered his eyes, suddenly free of the paralysis. When he lowered his hands, he found himself alone in his room. The connecting door between his hotel room and Sonja’s was standing ajar. Shivering like a half-drowned cat, he peered through the doorway and saw Sonja standing in the far corner of the darkened room, wearing here own face. Her arms were wrapped around her stomach, as if she was struggling to keep something escaping her body as she banged the back of her head against the wall.

  “Get out!” she growled. Palmer couldn’t tell if she was pleading with or threatening him. “Get out of here before I hurt you, damn it!”

  Palmer slammed the door shut and locked it behind him with trembling hands. Then he heard her talking to someone—or thing—and what sounded like someone answering in a harsh, almost bestial voice. Then he heard furniture being trashed.

  He retreated to the bathroom. He needed to take a shower. He wanted the hot water to turn his flesh the same boiled-lobster red as that of the burning man guarding Morgan’s nest. Maybe if he could scrub off a layer or two of skin, he’d feel clean again.

  He sat on the toilet, smoking a cigarette with shaking hands, and watched the steam turn the mirror opaque, almost obscuring the tobacco demon squatting on his shoulder.

  Ghost Trap

  A savage place! As holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted.

  —Samuel Coleridge, Kubla Khan

  Chapter Ten

  She found him drinking espresso in a dark, smoky coffee bar across the street from the hotel. The sun was going down and she had her shades on. He glanced up from his drink, shrugged, and motioned for her to take a seat.

  He expected her to say she was sorry or try to explain herself in some way. Instead, she touched the top of his right hand with the index finger of her left hand. Palmer gasped as her mind flowed into his. It was as unlike the brutal intrusion of the night before as a lover’s caress from a rapist’s groping.

  There were no words offered, only emotion, creating a sense of intimacy which was both thrilling and intimidating. The temptation to let go, to lose himself in telepathic rapport, was strong. But so was his sense of self. Recognizing his fear of being subsumed, she voluntarily broke contact. Palmer coughed into his fist and took another sip of espresso to steady himself.

  “We’re still good,” he with a nod of his head.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the paperback book at his elbow.

  “I decided to do a little research while you were getting your beauty sleep.”

  She picked up the book, turning it so she could read the cover. “The Architect’s Guide to Haunted Houses?”

  “I found it at City Lights Bookstore. Check out page 113.”

  Sonja opened the book and began to read:

  Northern California has long demonstrated an allure for the eccentric, the artistic and the wealthy. One of the strangest transplanted Californians to combine these elements was the architect-millionaire Creighton Seward (1870- 1939). Although brilliant and highly acclaimed in his lifetime, Seward has been lost in the shadow cast by his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright. The fact that all but a handful of his buildings have been destroyed in the decades since his death has also helped condemn him to obscurity. Yet none who have glimpsed his ultimate creation can deny that Seward’s genius was as real as the tragedy that ultimately consumed him.

  In 1907, after spending a decade designing competent but otherwise uninspired skyscrapers and homes for the upper class of the Great Lakes, Seward traveled to the Mediterranean with his young family, renting a villa on the island of Cythera. What truly happened there will never be known, save that Seward was found roaming its rugged hills, wearing nothing but the blood of his wife and children.

  According to the Greek authorities who investigated the incident, a disgruntled former servant murdered the entire household with an ax while they slept. The only reason Seward survived was that he’d been awakened by the killer hacking his wife apart in the bed next to him and succeeded in overpowering him, smashing his attacker’s skull open with the very same weapon used to dispatch his hapless family.

  However, there were rumors that the ax-murderer was actually Seward himself, although no one could provide motivation for him committing such a heinous act. That Seward later spent three years in a private asylum following his return from Greece did nothing to stop the gossip.

  It wasn’t until 1910 that Seward resumed his work as an architect. And it soon became obvious that whatever he had endured that night on Cythera had changed him forever. His new work was so removed from his previous output that it seems impossible the same brain was involved in their design.

  Seward took only three commissions in the five years between his return to public life and his subsequent self-imposed exile, and each was a masterwork, evoking Gaudi and foreshadowing H.R. Giger. Unfortunately, none of these structures remain standing,
due to the so-called “Seward Curse. “

  While each of these buildings (two private homes in Minnesota and the old Zorn Publications skyscraper in New York) were incredible works of art and widely praised by the intelligentsia of the time, they proved to be uninhabitable. Those who tried to live or work within these edifices soon found themselves stricken with terrible vertigo and a nameless dread that led them to flee the building in terror. On the few occasions Seward would speak of his later work, he stated that he had discovered, through the use of non-Euclidian geometry and quantum physics, a means of creating lines and angles that would pierce the space-time continuum. Whether this was so, or simply the ravings of a brilliant but sadly unhinged mind, will never be verified. However, it is believed that the newspaper reports of these incidences later provided the fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft with the inspiration for his short story “The Dreams in the Witch-House.”

  In 1916, shortly before the Zorn Building—with its magnificent chromium gargoyles and eye-twisting zeppelin mooring spire—was scheduled for demolition, Creighton Seward disappeared from the public eye and would not be heard of again until his suicide in 1930.

  It was later discovered that Seward—the heir to an industrial fortune—retired to the Sonoma Valley of Northern California, where he set about creating a personal testament to guilt and madness: the infamous Ghost Trap Manor. Utilizing a previously-existing three-story mansion as what could best be called a nucleus, Seward commissioned a team of carpenters to construct a twisting maze of weirdly shaped and cunningly designed rooms and corridors that would, by the time of his death, cover acres of land and tower over six stories high. Ghost Trap Manor was finally completed in 1925, with Seward paying the workmen to keep the location—and exact nature—of his final masterpiece secret from the world.

  It is uncertain whether Seward spent the last five years of his life in complete isolation, or if he shared the house with servants. All that is known is that there were no signs of a house staff when his nephew and heir, Pierce Seward-Burroughs, had the rambling house searched for signs of his uncle in 1930. It took three days to locate the body, as many of those who entered the house suffered attacks of vertigo and experienced bouts of anxiety and dread.

  The exact manner of Seward’s demise is unknown, although he is believed to have starved to death. Notes found among the architect’s personal effects revealed the behind creating such an unconventional home. Apparently Seward believed the ghosts of his slain family were haunting him. Consumed by guilt and fear, he devised a labyrinth that would effectively “confuse” the pursuing spirits and keep them from finding him, thus explaining Ghost Trap’s bewildering number of blind staircases, doorways that open onto brick walls and windows set into ceilings.

  Seward himself lived in the original “nucleus rooms” at the center of the sprawling mansion. Why the architect would decide to wander into the maze of “ghost rooms” without provisions or a map is unknown. For lack of a better explanation, the coroner listed his death as a suicide.

  For over seventy years Ghost Trap remained shuttered and sealed against the elements as part of the Seward estate. Then, in 2002, it was sold to an unnamed party. Ghost Trap remains closed to the public, although whether anyone currently walks its halls is unknown.

  On the page opposite the text was a partial schematic of the house’s floor plan. Sonja stared at it for a moment before realizing what she was looking at.

  “I’ll be damned!” she exclaimed, pointing at the diagram. “Can you see it?”

  Palmer frowned at the jumble of lines and curves. “It looks like a kid went crazy with a Spirograph.”

  “You’re seeing it with human eyes,” she said disparagingly. “Look harder.”

  Palmer returned his gaze to the blueprint, doing his best to focus his attention on it. To his surprise, the lines writhed as if suddenly taking on life.

  “Holy shit!” he yelped, dropping the book. “What was that?”

  “A Pretender glyph,” she explained. “What you’d call a magic sign, but built in three, possibly four dimensions.”

  “So this Seward guy was a vampire or something?”

  “Very likely,” she nodded. “Although I doubt he was aware of his heritage. There are plenty of half-bloods and changelings out there, living as humans, ignorant of their true nature and powers until something comes along to trigger it. They can be as dangerous as a full-blooded Pretender, though. Take Catherine Wheele, for example.”

  Palmer tried to keep his jaw from dropping. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

  Sonja’s manner abruptly stiffened. “I’d rather not discuss it. As I was saying, Seward didn’t just design a trap for unwanted ghosts—he created a psychic jamming station! This entire house is a protective charm! No wonder Morgan is using it as his lair! It’s probably the only place on earth he can relax without fear of being attacked on a psychic level. No wonder Malfeis didn’t have any information on Morgan—he’s practically invisible when he’s in there!”

  “Is this a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “It’s clearly working to Morgan’s advantage right now. We’re going to need a powerful countercharm just to get inside the door.”

  “So how do we go about getting one of those things? Open a box of breakfast cereal?”

  “It won’t be that hard. Before we left New Orleans, I checked with Malfeis to find out about reliable dealers in the San Francisco area.”

  “You mean they’re not listed in the Triple-A Guide? Color me surprised. So where do we have to go to find this wizard-for-hire?”

  “Chinatown.”

  Palmer knew they were in for trouble the moment Sonja ducked into the alleyway. Actually, it was less an alley than an over-large space between two restaurants. Since he had no choice, he followed her down its dark, narrow confines. He knew his gut instinct was correct upon hearing scrape of a boot on concrete.

  Three men emerged from the shadows to block their way, emerging from the shadows. Palmer was pained by how young they were. The oldest of the group couldn’t be more than eighteen. The youths wore their hair short and choppy, and Palmer could literally see the aggression rolling off them in crackling waves.

  The tallest of the trio, stainless steel shuriken decorating his leather jacket, stepped forward, his eyes fixed on Palmer. “This is Black Dragon territory. No dogs or whites allowed.”

  Palmer looked to Sonja, who shook her head. She turned to the gang leader and said something to him in Cantonese.

  The youth scowled, as his challenge had been aimed at Palmer. “Why are you looking for Li Lijing?” he replied asked in English.

  “Maybe her geezer boyfriend needs a fix of powdered rhino horn from your uncle so he can get it up, Loo!” one of the gang members chuckled.

  “All we want is to speak with the huli jing,” Sonja said, her voice deceptively calm.

  “Huli jing? You’re talking crazy, white girl!” the gang leader sneered. “There are no foxes in Chinatown.”

  “Loo! Hong! Kenny! Is this how you greet people looking for my shop? No wonder my business has been so poor!”

  The youths jumped at the sound of the old man’s voice, looking more like children surprised at a naughty deed than dangerous street toughs. An elderly Chinese gentleman, leaning on an ornately carved cane, stood at the top of a set of stairs leading to a basement shop.

  “Go play hoodlum somewhere else! I will not have you harassing paying customers! Have I made myself clear?” The old man exclaimed, poking Loo in the ribs with the end of his cane. The boy looked embarrassed but did not protest.

  “Yes, Uncle,” he muttered obediently.

  “Go now before I change my mind about paying you for the work you did straightening up my stock room!” The old man watched the leather-jacketed youths retreat, shaking his head in dismay. “The young today! No respect! You must forgive Loo, my friends. He works for me, opening and sorting boxes of herbs from the old country. He is a good boy, but his brain
is too often filled with foolish Western nonsense—no offense.”

  “None taken,” Sonja replied with a smile. “I presume I am speaking to the honorable Li Lijing?”

  The old man nodded, smiling cryptically. “And you are the one they call the Blue Woman. Malfeis told me I might expect a visit from you. That is why I was eavesdropping. Loo is a silly boy, but I have a fondness for him. It would pain me to dig a grave for one so young. Ah! It is rude of me to keep you chattering on my doorstep! Please, come inside and make yourself comfortable.”

  The apothecary’s basement shop was dark and close, the ceiling barely a foot above Palmer’s head. Various herbs hung from the low rafters, filling the space with the thick aroma of sandalwood and ginseng. Palmer noticed a stuffed Chinese crocodile hanging suspended in the corner and a bewildering collection of subhuman skulls in an open cupboard—one of which boasted a cyclopean eye socket and a large horn growing from its forehead.

  “You and I certainly do not need it, my dear, but your companion would no doubt appreciate some additional illumination,”Li Lijing said as he lit up a pair of silk lanterns. He then turned to face Palmer, a sharp smile on his long, narrow black velvet snout. “Is that not so?”

  Palmer let out a startled yelp and stepped back from the humanoid fox standing before him. “You didn’t say anything about him being a werewolf!”

  Li Lijing shook his pointed ears in disgust, a pained look on his vulpine face. “I am huli jing, not vargr! Would you compare a panda to a grizzly bear? A stallion to a mule? A samurai to a priest?”

  “Forgive my companion, Li Lijing,” Sonja apologized. He is new to the Real World and has yet to meet a huli jing, much less a vargr. He meant no offense.”

  The huli jing snorted as he hobbled through the shop, using his cane to balance himself on his crooked legs. “I have come to expect such ignorance from humans. Still, it is a sore spot with me. But I cannot find it in myself to dislike their species. I have lived long among humankind. Why, I even took a couple as wives!” He made a barking sound that Palmer assumed was laughter. “I will tell you a secret! Loo is not my nephew, but actually my great-grandson! Not that he knows this. As far as he is concerned, I am merely a good friend of the family who arranged for his father to escape the Mainland. He calls me Uncle out of respect, but is ignorant of his blood. I favor the boy, as he reminds me of my son—his grandfather—who was lost to me during the invasion of Manchuria. Ah, but I must be old and foolish to succumb to such sentimentality, yes?”