In the Blood (19 page)

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stingray barb piercing his lower lip and the ritual scars on his cheeks. His gaze

dropped to his borrowed body's exposed genitals. He knew he should be alarmed by the

sight of a second stingray barb skewering his penis, but Palmer felt strangely

disconnected from the mutilations done to his flesh.

The child looked up at Palmer from his place on the stoop and smiled. The baby spider

monkey squatted on the boy's shoulder, chattering to itself as it searched its master's

hair for vermin. Suddenly William Palmer, never married and an avowed enemy of

small children, knew how it felt to be a husband and a father.

Somewhere in the jungle, a jaguar screamed.

"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!"

"Sonja?"

"You're back. Good. I don't like dream-walking under these circumstances. What
happened?"

"I don't know-one minute I was here in the car with you, the next I was in a jungle
in Central America. What's that awful taste in my mouth?"

"Blood." Sonja pulled a linen handkerchief from her pants pocket and offered it to
the dazed detective. "You had some kind of seizure. Blood started running out of
your nose. You also probably bit the side of your mouth, if not your tongue. Now,
what's this about you being in Central America?"

Palmer shook his head in disbelief as he dabbed at the corner of his mouth. "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..." Palmer 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. "It's 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 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 get a glimpse
of their previous incarnations. Various random incidents can cue a buried memory.

Or, as in your case, you can accidentally make contact with the physical remains of
your previous self."

Palmer hunched forward, resting his forehead against the steering wheel. "Holy-!"

"You spoke while you were-away. Are you aware of that?"

"No. What did I say?"

"You said the word 'Tohil.' Does that mean anything to you?"

He closed his eyes and the sound of macaws calling to one another from jungle
perches filled his ears. "Yes. Yes, it does. It was my son's name."

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"So that's Ghost Trap. The guy who built it really
was
crazy!"

Palmer was perched atop a nearby hill overlooking the infamous manor house,
squinting through binoculars at the valley below. Not that he needed them to see
Creighton Seward's fevered brainchild-the rambling mansion filled the small dell to
overflowing.

Sonja pointed to the center of the grandiose concoction of towers, turrets and flying
buttresses. "You can still make out the original house in the middle. 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. I spotted what looks like an old stable off to one side-Morgan's sports car's in it. Our boy's here. No doubt about it."

"I never thought he wasn't. I can feel him."

"Looking at that house is making my head hurt." Palmer massaged the bridge of his
nose. "I can't imagine anyone actually living in that monstrosity!"

Sonja scowled down at Ghost Trap. Morgan could be anywhere inside its labyrinth-like belly. 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 surrounding the Sonoma Valley like black snakes, before they
located the isolated area that separated Ghost Trap from the rest of the world.

There were still several hours to go before it got dark and Morgan would stir from
his daily coma.

Still, in a place like Ghost Trap, where daylight rarely pierced its heart, Morgan
might possibly be up and about. She was loath to mention it to Palmer, but she was
in bad need of recharging. It kind of scared her. She used to be able to function
perfectly well during the day, but right now she felt like she'd just come off a week-long drunk. The temptation to crawl in the trunk of the car and enjoy a quick nap
was strong.

"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.

"Huh?" Palmer looked up from his binoculars.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Whatever you say."

"I'm going down there."

"When?"

"Now."

Palmer sucked on his lower lip. "You figure it's safe?"

She barked a humorless laugh. "It's never going to be safe! Still, I think I stand a
better chance during the day. Hopefully, he won't be expecting anything. And if
Lijing's talisman does what it's supposed to"-she hefted the Hand of Glory before
stuffing it into her leather jacket-"he won't know I've breached his defense until it's
too late to do him 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

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kill it!" He nodded and returned her smile. Sonja gave him a thumbs-up signal and
began walking. 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, having already
learned that if he let his eyes linger too long on any particular architectural detail it
made his eyes water and his head hurt.

His attention was caught by a fleeting glimpse of a pale, moonlike face glowering
from a fifth-floor window. Swearing as he fiddled with the binoculars' field of focus
for a closer view, Palmer's heart thumped a 4/4 beat. But by the time he could
refocus, the face was gone, the window once more shuttered. Or had it ever been
open in the first place? Perhaps it had been an illusion created from staring too long
at the weird house. And if not, whose face had he seen at the window? It sure wasn't
Morgan's. He contemplated hurrying after Sonja and telling her what he'd seen.

Before he could get to his feet, he saw a shadow emerge from the tree line just
beyond the east side of the mansion's ruined gardens and flit through the tangled
rosebushes. He watched, awed by the woman'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.

He smiled when he saw her yank the heavy-duty padlock off the cellar doors. He
whispered under his breath, "That's m'girl!"

Then 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.

12

Sonja took a deep breath and paused to orient herself. The moment she entered the
confines of the mansion she'd been hit with a surge of nausea. 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 Li Lijing had given her. The six-fingered hand was
now clenched into a fist. 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 obvious that
they had never been furnished. Some had never even been plastered and painted,
the wooden slats giving the smaller rooms an austere, almost monkish flavor.

Sonja was impressed by the demented genius of Ghost Trap's creator. Even to her
mutated senses, the building was disturbing. She found her eyes drawn to lines that
both originated and intersected beyond the field of normal vision. She doubted an
unprepared 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

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

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 was recovered, sixty
years ago.

As she left a sitting room with faded, green patterned wallpaper and an upside-down fireplace made from Italian marble, she glimpsed something pale out of the
corner of her eye. Turning to confront the apparition, she stared at a little girl no
more than five or six.

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
hello in return.

"Little girl, do you know how I can get to the middle 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 with the living 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 followed. Finally the phantom entered a long, narrow room paneled in darkly
stained walnut with bronze satyr faces studding the walls. On closer inspection,
Sonja saw old-fashioned gas jets protruding from the grotesquely leering mouths.

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

The tiny ghost child hurried over to where her mother stood revealed, dressed in a
high-collared morning glory skirt. Her hair-the same golden hue as her daughter-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 once been a stunningly beautiful woman.