Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  Now that he was here, all Palmer had to do was catch up with them. Spying an open ground-floor window, he checked to make sure his Luger was securely holstered before climbing over the sill.

  Three steps into the Ghost Trap, he realized he’d made a big mistake. If he’d found the exterior of the mansion disorienting, it was nothing compared to the interior. He remembered how, as a child, he’d pestered his parents into allowing him to enter the House of Horrors at the state fair. He’d promised them that it wouldn’t give him nightmares, that he was too old to be scared. Finally, they’d weakened and allowed him to go inside. His previous self-assurance instantly vanished the minute the wooden double doors of the attraction swung shut behind him, cutting off all contact with the world where light, parents, and rational thought ruled. Surrounded by dry-ice mist, black lights and prerecorded screams and rattling chains, he’d shrieked at the sight of a department store mannequin dressed to look like Frankenstein. He’d been so scared he wet himself and had to be escorted outside by a pimply-faced teenager dressed in a hunchback costume. His father promptly called him a sissy, and they’d been forced to leave the fair early because of his “accident.” Now, thirty years later, the same paralyzing terror he’d experienced in the House of Horrors was close to claiming him again. His scalp prickled and his bladder ached as if full of ground glass.

  He trudged through the oddly designed rooms; barely noticing in his disoriented confusion such oddities as doorways set three feet off the ground, windows that opened onto blank walls and fireplaces that served as staircases. With every room, he found it harder and harder to think straight. Why was he here? Why had he entered this horrible place? He knew he must have had a good reason to do so. Now if he could only remember what it was...

  Palmer staggered as the floor abruptly dropped out from under him, the walls seeming to bow inwards as if made from rubber. He retched while leaning against a sharply canted doorway, the acid burning his throat. His dad was really going to yell at him now. He shouldn’t have eaten all those corndogs before riding the Tilt-A-Whirl. Now they were going to have to leave. But going home, at that moment, didn’t sound like such a bad idea. He had already been too long at the fair. Now if he could only remember where… the car was... parked…

  He collapsed onto his hands and knees as dry heaves shook his body. His forebrain throbbed like a jazz drummer. I’m gonna die in here. The thought bubbled up suddenly from the murky confusion that filled his head. I’m gonna wander around lost inside this hellhole until it kills me. Just like it killed the man who built it...

  He lifted his head and found himself staring at a small boy. The child looked to be no more than three years old and was dressed in an old-fashioned sailor’s suit, the type that was popular for children to wear at the turn of the last century. The child held a teddy bear in his left arm because his right one ended in a knob of bone and bloodless flesh protruding from his mangled shoulder. Although the child’s face was still round with baby fat, his eyes were solemn. It took Palmer a long moment to also realize that the child was transparent.

  “Little boy...”

  The child did not waver or disappear.

  “Little boy... I need... help...”

  A young girl clutching a china doll joined the boy, both of them watching Palmer with interest. The girl leaned toward her brother and muttered something that Palmer could not make out. Moving together, the children grasped Palmer by his arms and pulled him back onto his feet. He gasped and felt a strong chill run through his body at the touch of their tiny fingers on his flesh.

  The children were in front of him now, motioning for him to follow. Shaken and weak, Palmer lurched after them. He had no way of knowing if these creatures were friend or foe, but anything was better than crawling around in circles in his own vomit.

  Suddenly the children froze like fawns scenting the approach of a hunter. The boy and his sister disembodied, transforming themselves into fist-sized globs of light. The change was so abrupt it looked to Palmer as if the children had rolled up like window shades. Palmer pressed his hands to his eyes, even more disoriented than before. What had happened to his tiny spirit guides? Or had he imagined the whole thing? In any case, what was it that had frightened them away?

  The scream ripped through him like a bullet, only to end abruptly, cut off in mid-shriek. The echo was so distorted it was impossible to tell if it had been a male or female voice.

  Palmer weaved his wave in the general direction of the scream. His brain churned and stretched inside his head, pressing against the plates of his skull. Sonja. He had to find Sonja. That’s why he’d come into the House of Horrors. Once he found Sonja she’d make the pounding in his head go away and help him escape this terrible place.

  Palmer stared at the thing with the ax for a long moment before realizing he’d discovered the source of the scream. The creature was shaped like a man, only taller, and carried a large, cruel-looking ax, which it was using to dismember what was left of a man in a dark suit. Palmer was not sure if the creature standing before him was flesh and blood or composed of ectoplasm, but it was evident the ax, at least, was solid enough to do its job.

  The thing made weird tittering noises as it hacked away at its prey. The victim’s head had been cracked open from the top of his skull to his upper palate. As the thing halted in mid-swing and turned to look at the new intruder, Palmer’s bladder let go, just as it had in the House of Horrors, all those years ago. Only this time he knew there was no way he would be escorted to safety by a sympathetic teenager tricked out in monster drag.

  The thing that stood before him had two heads. The head on the left was the larger of the pair, boasting a bat-like snout, a mouthful of jagged teeth, and pupil-less eyes the color of fresh blood. The head on the right was that of a man in his mid-thirties, the eyes brimming with a grief that extended beyond anything Palmer had ever seen. With a start, he recognized the face as that of Creighton Seward, Ghost Trap’s master architect.

  The two-headed monster stepped forward, hoisting the ax that grew out of its left wrist in place of a hand. Palmer wanted to turn and flee the abomination before him, but he remained frozen, unable to move. He could see that Seward’s lips were moving; whether he was praying or arguing with its grotesque twin, was impossible to tell. As if in reply, the monster’s head sneered and emitted a string of high-pitched titters.

  To Palmer’s surprise, Seward’s head suddenly turned and bit its neighbor on the cheek, ripping free a wad of flesh. The monster’s head gave a high-frequency wail that made Palmer’s nose bleed, and returned the attack in kind, scissoring off the ear nearest its mouth. Cowed, Seward’s head did not attempt any further interference.

  The monster-head leered at Palmer and lifted its ax-hand on high, until it almost seemed to brush the ceiling. Palmer stared at the fiend advancing on him like a steer awaiting the butcher’s knife. Just as the ax was about to fall, a bright light appeared between Palmer and his would-be murderer. The monster balked, uncertainty crossing its hideous. Seward’s head suddenly seemed to rally and plunged the fingers of its right hand into the creature’s eyes. The thing shrieked even louder than before and Palmer felt blood begin to seep from his ears.

  Suddenly the two-headed thing was gone, and in its place stood a woman dressed in clothing better suited to an Ibsen play.

  “Oh, thank God! Lady? Lady, I need your help-”

  The woman in the long skirt and high-collared blouse turned to face Palmer, her left eye swinging loose from its socket.

  Palmer jumped to his feet and ran, screaming at the top of his lungs. He had to find his way out of the House of Horrors. He’d been too long at the fair. It was time to go home.

  He bolted from the death-room and down a corridor lined with doors of varying shapes and sizes. Suddenly one of the doors opened outward and he heard something cut the air with a wicked slicing sound.

  The last thing Palmer saw before the darkness claimed him was the word DUNLOP.

&
nbsp; Chapter Twenty

  “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” Sonja muttered as they stepped from the secret passage into the suite of rooms Fell had once called home.

  “I never knew this doorway existed,” he marveled aloud. “I don’t think Morgan or the Renfields did, either.”

  “It looks like it was created by the carpenters who worked on the house. It’s not on any of the blueprints. The building’s probably lousy with them.”

  Fell picked up a paperback from its resting place on the table next to Anise’s old easy chair. He fanned the pages and put it back down. “It’s hard for me to believe that she’s really gone. I can still smell her…” He walked over to the fireplace and stared at the room’s reflection in the mirror that hung over the mantelpiece, as if trying to catch a glimpse of the past in its depths. “Do you know what the last thing she said to me was?” he asked, nodding at the room in the looking glass. “She told me this was a cage. A prison. She was right, of course. I can see the bars now. But for a while, this was the happiest place on earth. I...” He shook his head, dropping his gaze to the floor. “Damn you, Sonja! Why did you have to come into our lives? Why did you force this knowledge on us?”

  “I wish I could say I did it because truth is freedom, and living in ignorance is no different than living in slavery,” she admitted. “But that would be a lie. I did it because I wanted to hurt Morgan him where he’d feel it most. And because I wanted you for myself.”

  Fell frowned. “Me?”

  “You, Anise, the baby. I’ve been hungry for the company of my own kind for a long, long time. But I’m sterile, a mule; I can’t Make others like myself, like Morgan and the others can. Sometimes loneliness makes you do things that are selfish. I hope you can understand and can come to forgive me.”

  “It doesn’t matter if your motives were selfish,” Fell replied. “What you said about living in ignorance and slavery is still the truth. It’s just that surrendering the dream isn’t easy, but now I know I don’t have to do it alone.”

  “I know coming back here is painful for you, but we’ve got to dispatch Morgan as soon as possible. He’s here, somewhere in the house. I can feel him,” Sonja said, looking around the room warily.

  Fell’s mouth pulled into a grimace. “I can feel him, too, like a phantom limb.”

  She was here. He sensed her presence in his lair the way a spider monitors the strands of its web. How could he have slept, unaware, when first she walked these halls? How could he have remained insensate to anything so exquisitely deadly entering his domain?

  At first he’d refused to believe the woman called Sonja could have been one of his by-blows. But now there was no denying it. His was the hand that had sown this dragon’s tooth. In a perverse way, he was proud of her. Even from such far remove, there was no mistaking her lethality. She was a thing of fatal beauty, to be feared and admired, like an unsheathed samurai sword. To know that he had created such a fearsome creature was flattering. Such a pity she must be destroyed.

  The rogue’s signature was so powerful it took him a moment to realize that she had the breeder, Fell, was with her. Interesting. There also seemed to be something different to male dhampire’s psychic echo. A trace of free will, perhaps? Most interesting. If the breeders and their potential gets harbored potential similar to the rogue’s, then Howell’s sabotage had, in the end, had him a favor. What was the advantage to siring a new race of vampires to serve as his army, only to have them overthrow him?

  Morgan rose from the chair in his study and opened an antique wardrobe with the blacked-out mirror. He wanted to look his best when he formally confronted his long-lost daughter and his errant son.

  “Who are you? Are you one of Morgan’s lickspittle servants? Answer me! I didn’t hit you with the golf club that hard!”

  Palmer opened his right eye, and then tried to open the left, only to find it swollen shut. He seemed to be lying on rough wooden floorboards.

  “Wh-where am I?” he moaned as he struggled to sit up.

  “Never mind where you are! Answer my question?” A balding man dressed in a grimy lab technician’s coat, a stethoscope looped around his neck like a pet boa constrictor, thrust a florid Palmer’s field of vision. His forehead bulged slightly, as if his forebrain was slightly too large for his skull, and his eyes, amplified by Coke-bottle thick glasses, regarded Palmer with a detached, almost reptilian interest. Despite his odd appearance, there was something familiar about the stranger Palmer could not quite place.

  “I’m not a Renfield, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, cradling his bleeding head.

  The moon-faced stranger grunted in distaste and swiftly shoved his hand inside Palmer’s trench coat, removing his wallet and scanning the identification inside. His eyebrows raised themselves upon the sight of the Private Investigator’s license.

  “Hey! Whattaya think you’re doing?” Palmer reached for his Luger, only to find the holster empty.

  “Looking for this?” The moon-faced man extracted Palmer’s gun from the pocket of his lab coat. “I might not be a private detective, Mr. William Calumet Palmer, but I know enough to disarm a potential enemy once I’ve knocked him unconscious.” He snorted and tossed the wallet into Palmer’s lap.

  “I’d rather you not include the ‘Calumet’ part, whoever you are,” Palmer groaned as he looked around the room, which was cramped and filled with metal tables littered with glass beakers and Bunsen burners. “I told you who I am, now return the favor. And why did you smack me in the head with a golf club?”

  “I am Dr. Brainerd Howell, late of his diabolical majesty Lord Morgan’s service.” The scientist said, bowing at the waist with the heel-clicking propriety of a Prussian nobleman. “Forgive me for introducing myself in such a fashion, but I had no way of knowing you weren’t one of Morgan’s minions.”

  Suddenly Palmer realized where he’d seen Howell’s face before. “You’re the one I saw looking out the window the when I was surveying the house!”

  “Not impossible, I grant you. But why are you here, Mr. Palmer? This is hardly a place for sightseeing.”

  “I’m trying to find someone.”

  “Indeed.” Howell’s smile widened as his eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t happen to be searching for the young woman who entered the house earlier? The one with the sunglasses?”

  “How did you know about her?”

  “There’s precious little that goes on in Ghost Trap that I don’t know about,” Howell sniffed. “I daresay I have a better understanding of its secrets than its supposed master.”

  Palmer groaned as he got to his feet. Howell watched him cautiously but did not try to stop him or threaten him with the gun. As the private investigator straightened up, he spotted a ten-gallon jar full of a clear liquid, in which was suspended a monster-fetus identical to the one Anise had given birth to, its umbilical cord attached to a pulpy yolk sac.

  “Holy Christ!”

  “Ah! I see you’ve noticed my little friend. How do you like him, hmmm?” Howell leaned forward, eyeing the monstrosity in the glass jar with something resembling affection. “It was the prototype for a parasite-clone I succeeded in implanting in his precious broodmare’s unhallowed womb.” Howell removed a syringe from one of his pockets and tapped the side of the jar. The fetus opened its eyes, revealing the cold, needful stare of an insect. The sight of Howell’s face, distorted by the glass and the synthetic amniotic fluids that sustained it, caused the fetus to extend its hideous tube-like mouth. Howell chuckled indulgently. “How cute! It thinks it’s feeding time!”

  “You’re responsible for that... that thing Anise gave birth to?” Palmer asked, unable to hide the revulsion in his voice.

  Howell gave Palmer a sharp glance. “You saw it?”

  “You could say that,” Palmer grimaced, rubbing his calf.

  “Yes, I created it. I bioengineered the creature from the breeders’ own sperm and ovum, so there would be little chance of rejection, then implanted i
t in Anise during a prenatal exam. I performed the operation under Morgan’s very nose! He may be wise in the ways of the supernatural world, but when it comes to science, he might as well be a potato-munching peasant, fearful of the shaman’s magic!” Howell said with a rueful sneer. “The parasite was supposed to devour the original fetus and take its place. It was the best I could do to try and make amends for betraying mankind. However, during Anise’s last prenatal checkup, I detected two heartbeats.” He leaned forward, eyeing Palmer intently. “You were there at the birth. The child is dead, is it not?”

  “Yes,” Palmer lied.

  Howell smiled grimly. “Good! The extinction of the human race has been averted—for now. Morgan—the preening fool—had no idea of what he was unleashing on his world, as well as ours.”

  “How so?”

  “Morgan’s breeders can only reproduce with others of their kind, which are— mercifully—rare. But the child—the child would possess the ability to mate with humans and still breed true.”

  “And your changeling was an improvement?”

  “The creature you saw was designed so that it would have no means of eliminating waste products, once severed from the umbilical cord. The pathetic little monster was destined to die of uremia within a day or so of its birth.”

  As he listened to Dr. Howell rattle on, Palmer shook his head in an attempt to clear the ringing in his ears. The scientist clucked his tongue in reproach. “I wouldn’t bother trying to get a better grip on your senses if I were you. It won’t do you any good. This room—my ‘secret laboratory’ if you will—is located in Ghost Trap’s attic, at an intersection of several architectural impossibilities. The barriers separating the space-time continuum are very thin here, weighting the probability factors for my experiments in my favor. Morgan and his loathsome Renfields shun the outer house, but I find it helps me think. This is where I do all my plotting against Morgan.”