Neither of them moved.
The castle loomed above Kobra, dwarfing him. Through the huge, open doorway he could smell the guts of the place—dry, cold, maybe as old as time itself. At the threshold he paused to look back at his friends, and a voice like a cool wind wafted through his brain—COME TO ME. As he stepped into the darkness, he heard Viking shout from a world away, “KOBRA!”
He stood in a womb of darkness, a place without ceiling or walls or floor. There was a distant noise like water dripping onto concrete, or muffled footsteps. When he started walking again, feeling his way, his boots clattered like a toss of bones across the floor of rough stone. Echoes converged and passed each other like riptides with Kobra at the center. His eyes were getting used to the blackness now, and he could see smooth stone walls around him, a geometric pattern of rough-hewn rafters perhaps twenty feet overhead. An old, rusted metal chandelier hung crookedly from that ceiling, still holding two light bulbs that looked like teardrops. From the depths of the place, a candle flame flickered, far away; Kobra followed its light, his fingertips grazing the wall. He was in a long, high corridor that seemed to go on forever, like the trick done with mirrors in the carnival funhouses. Half of him cowered in fear like a mongrel dog; the other half lurched with drunken glee, and it was this half that kept his legs moving. I’m in a haunted house at the New Orleans fairgrounds, he told himself; I’m walking through the Madman’s Maze. Going to feel cobwebs in my hair in a minute, going to see a dummy dressed up in an ape mask.
He reached the candle. It sat in a gleaming brass holder on a long table of dark, shining wood. He couldn’t see beyond the range of the light, but he had a feeling the room was as large as a cavern, maybe with stone stairs that wound around and around and out of sight. He could hear the wind whistling through broken windows very high above him.
Off to his left he saw another candle, moving in midair, carried by a ghost. But then he saw the quick flicker of pale light on the face of a girl. She had a long sweep of ebony hair, sensual pouting lips, a face as beautiful as the moon. There was another candle now, on his other side. This one was held by a young man in a Kiss T-shirt. He had a lean, sharp-boned face and predatory eyes. Then a third candle, behind Kobra. A tall, smiling girl, her red hair cascading in disarray around her shoulders. Then the others: Kobra saw a couple of Chicano girls, a black dude wearing a headband, a middle-aged man and woman who looked at him lovingly, as if he might be their long lost son. Candles burned in a silent circle around him.
And then a hand as cold and hard as a chunk of ice touched Kobra’s shoulder. He whirled, ready to go for his Mauser. But the hand moved in a white streak and caught his wrist, not hurting him but only holding him where he was. In the golden candlelight Kobra could see the face of someone who looked at once very young and very old.
There were no lines on the white face, but the eyes seemed ancient and wise, ablaze with powerful secrets. Where the hand touched him, Kobra tingled with electricity; the feeling slowly spread until he thought he must be plugged in to the same socket that supplied power to the universe. He felt like he was going to explode with fear and exhilaration, that he should kneel down there on that cold stone floor and kiss the wintry hand of Death.
Death smiled—a boyish smile—through an old man’s eyes. “Welcome,” he said.
For a long time Viking and Dicko waited outside, but Kobra didn’t come back. The first tentative rays of gray light were creeping across the eastern horizon. After they had called him a few times, unsuccessfully, Viking unsheathed a hooked hunting blade from a leather holder at his side. “Somethin’s happened to Kobra,” he said to Dicko. “I’m gonna find out what. You comin’?”
Dicko paused, then reached to the small of his back and took out the .45 from its black holster. “Yeah,” he replied. “I’m in.”
They moved into the castle and were swallowed up by darkness.
The sun gradually strengthened its hold on the horizon, chasing shadows in its path. Sometime before dawn the door swung closed, and a bolt was thrown.
FOUR
Sunday morning dawned bright and warm. Bells chimed from a hundred church steeples across L.A. The God of Light was worshipped in as many different ways, from formal services to the simple act of prayer on Malibu Beach by the Pacific Ocean Church. Incense cones were burned by the Holy Order of the Sun, Catholic masses were being said. Buddhists bowed before their altars. The city seemed quiet, at rest, the planet spinning in an ordered universe.
From his Laurel Canyon terrace Mitch Gideon watched a flock of birds moving gracefully across the sky as if in slow-motion. He stood in a warm splash of sunlight, smoking a cigar and thinking about the dream of coffins on a conveyor belt. He’d had it again last night and had sat up in bed so violently Estelle almost had a heart attack. That dream had been peculiar at first, something to laugh about. Now it was terrifying, the details gradually becoming clearer and clearer. Last night he’d been able to see the faces of some of his co-workers. They’d looked like grinning dead men, and the cold whiteness of their flesh had been so real, so close, that Gideon had just fought his way out of the dream as if up from the bottom of a deep, green pond. He was playing golf this afternoon in a foursome at the Wilshire Country Club, and he hoped hacking at a Slazenger would take his mind off a dream that was really turning shitty.
Andy and Jo Palatazin sat in their usual places at the Hungarian Reformed Church on Melrose Avenue, just a few blocks from their house. She gripped his hand and squeezed it, sensing his preoccupation. He smiled and pretended to be paying attention, but his mind was seesawing back and forth between two dark concerns: the Roach, whose presence in the city now seemed as intangible as a ghost’s; and whatever had ripped through the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery. The artist’s composite of the man who had tried to lure Amy Hulsett had been printed up by the dozens for detectives and uniformed officers to use in their conversations with street people. Of course, the man might not have been the Roach after all, just a guy out to buy a good time, but it was an angle that had to be pursued. All that Brasher’s hard work had turned up was one suspect who owned a dark blue Volkswagen, and the man was almost the total physical opposite of the young prostitute’s description. Palatazin had put an officer on surveillance to be certain.
The second concern made him more uneasy. He’d driven past Hollywood Memorial on the way to church; everything had looked okay, and Palatazin had caught a quick glimpse of the watchman, Kelsen, unlocking the front gates for the Sunday morning visitors. Had it only been mindless vandalism after all? He was hoping it was. The other answer—the one that lurked deep in the back of his mind—might drive him mad.
And in a huge circular bed in his Bel Air home, Wes Richer stirred, reaching across to touch Solange’s cool brown flesh. His fingers gripped the edge of the sheet where she should have been lying. He opened his eyes and winced; the light was buffered by thick beige curtains, but it was still bright enough to make his optic nerves sputter like severed live wires. He turned over on his back, his palms pressed against his eyes, and waited for the first wave of the crashing headache to pass. “Solange?” he called out, the sound of his voice making his eardrums throb. There was no answer, and finally Wes sat up on the edge of the bed. “Solange,” he called again irritably. Damn! Where is she? he thought. His sinuses were clogged with the mingled odors of marijuana and jasmine incense with a cold dash of cocaine in there for good measure. How was the show? he wondered suddenly. Was I good? “Sheer Luck” strikes again. Alimentary, Dr. Batson. Wes stood up and struggled into his Fruit of the Looms.
When he walked into the living room and looked around, he swore loudly. He saw the ruined wall-to-wall carpet, a mahogany coffee table scarred like a K-Mart reject, a shattered piece of Inca pottery that he’d been too high to notice the night before, the empty hospitality bowls that had been brimming at least five times last night, the silver cocaine trays snorted clean, the bits of glass that glittered in the carpet between all the stain
s and crushed butts, the heel marks—heel marks, for Chrissake?—atop the grand piano, the…oh, to hell with it! he thought. The wreckage was consummate.
And sitting there in the middle of it was Solange, wearing her long white robe cut low to show the soft dark swelling of her breasts. She was sitting on the sofa, her arms crossed tightly as if she were chilly. She was staring at the Ouija board.
“Morning,” Wes said and plopped himself down in a chair. An instant later he stood up to remove the filled ashtray he’d sat down on. There was a ring of ashes on his ass. “Christ!” he said softly, surveying the damage. “If the guys at the Domino Club could only see me now. As they say.” He saw she was not paying attention; her eyes were fixed on a spot at the center of the board. “I didn’t feel you get out of bed. What time were you up?”
She blinked and glanced up at him as if just now aware that he’d walked into the room. “Wes,” she said. “I…I’ve been up for a long time. I couldn’t sleep after the sun rose.” She looked at him for a long time and then smiled appreciatively. “You look like someone hit you with a nganga.”
“A nuhwhat? What’s that?”
“An evil spell. A big one.” Solange frowned slightly and turned back to the board. She picked up the planchette and examined the bottom of it with a fingertip.
“Better watch out for that bastard,” Wes said. “It might bite you. I’m going to kick Martin Blue’s ass the next time I see him. He could’ve put my eye out!”
She replaced the planchette. “What are you saying, Wes? That Martin was in control of what happened here last night?”
“Sure he was! I saw his hands! He skidded that thing right off the board!” When Solange didn’t reply, he walked over to the picture window and looked down at the swimming pool. A bright yellow-and-green striped lawn chair was floating in it; there were some Coors cans at the deep end. “All right,” he said finally. “I know that silence. What are you thinking?”
“Martin didn’t do it,” she said. “He had no control over it, and neither did I. Something very violent and very strong was here…”
“Oh, come on! Listen, I can take that mumbo stuff when we’re at a party, but when we’re alone, I wish you’d forget the spirit world!”
“You don’t believe?” she asked coolly.
“Nope.”
“Do you pray to God?”
He turned from the window to face her. “Yes, but that’s different.”
“Is it? Think back. You were playing high-stakes poker in a room at the Las Vegas Hilton nine months ago. You were playing against some very influential and wealthy men.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember the final hand? You closed your eyes for a second before you picked up that last card. To which spirit were you praying?”
“To…I was wishing for an ace from Lady Luck. That’s not a spirit.”
She smiled faintly, her nostrils flaring. “I say it is. All deities are spirits, and all beliefs can become deities. Oh yes, Wes, you believe.” She regarded the board again. “You saw. You spelled out the words.”
“What words? It was gibberish!”
“It was a message,” Solange said quietly. She shivered and lifted her gaze to him. “The spirits are troubled, Wes. There’s a great, terrible nganga in the air. If you had Bantu blood in your veins, you could feel its vibrations, or smell it like the reek of old vinegar. The spirits know every mystery; they see the future and try to protect us from harm, if we will only listen to what they say.” Wes smiled slightly, and Solange’s eyes snapped with anger. “I’ve never felt a power before like the thing that was here last night! It simply silenced the beneficent voices; it brushed their spirits away with as much effort as it takes to flick a fly away! That was the thing that spelled out the final message, the thing that took the planchette into its power and…”
“Stop it,” Wes said abruptly.
Solange’s face tightened. She stared at him for a few seconds with what Wes sometimes referred to as her “molten ink” eyes, and then she rose gracefully. “I didn’t mean to upset you…”
“I’m not upset!”
“…but I wanted you to know the truth…”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“…about what happened last night. I have told you the truth.”
“And the truth shall set us free.” His grin spread. “Seems like I’ve heard that before.”
“Wes!” Tension was stretched tight in her voice now. “You can stand on your stage and make your little jokes for other people; you can contort your face and voice and make the people think you live for their laughter, but don’t think for an instant that you can put on your disguise in front of me! Sometime the jokes will have to end; the laughter will die. And you’ll have to face the world on its own terms without falsehood.”
“What world are we talking about, dear? The spirit domain, I assume?”
Solange had already turned away. She crossed the living room, her white gown swirling behind her, and disappeared into the far hallway. He heard the faint sound of a door closing. Her problem is, she can’t take a joke, he thought.
He rose to his feet and went through the living room and the short, connecting hallway to the kitchen, where copper cooking utensils hung from an overhead rack and African woodcuts decorated the walls. He found a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator and took a variety of plastic bottles from the vitamin cupboard. As he downed his breakfast, he was aware that his pulse was kicking hard. He’d been thinking of that planchette coming for his face like a runaway Nike missile, and he knew that there was no damned way Martin Blue could’ve done it. The bastard had been scared witless. So what, then? Spirits, like Solange said? No, that was bullshit! When Solange got started, she could really lay it on thick, stuff with crazy names like Santeria, brujeria, nkisi, makuto. Once he’d peeked inside the ornately carved wooden box she kept under the bed. There was a strange collection of peacock feathers, seashells, black and red candles, corn husks, white coral, and some kind of weird iron nails wrapped up with string inside. Wes tolerated her beliefs, but he had drawn the line several months ago when she’d wanted to put a twig tied with a red ribbon behind every door in the house.
He’d never known her last name; the man who’d lost her to him in the Vegas poker game hadn’t known it either. She told Wes she was born in Chicago, the daughter of a woman who’d been a classical actress in Japan and an African man who was a practicing santero, a good magician. She was born, she said, on the seventh day of the seventh month at exactly seven o’clock in the evening. On the day before her birth, her father had dreamed of her sitting on an ivory throne with seven stars moving about her head like a glittering tiara. Which seemed to be a damned good omen, the way Solange had explained it. It was supposed to mean that she had inherited her father’s powers of white magic, that she was to be considered a living talisman. Solange didn’t talk about the things she’d learned from her father in her formative years, but Wes figured she must’ve been pretty important. Solange recalled that people always came to their door, wanting to touch her, or ask her about problems they were having with love or money.
When she was ten years old, walking home from school with the snow falling softly, a car had pulled up to the curb, and two black men had stuffed a rag into her mouth and thrown her onto the backseat. She was blindfolded—she could vividly recall the coarseness of the cloth against her face—and the car traveled all night. They went fast, over all kinds of roads. When the blindfold was taken off, she was at a big house with snow-filled woods all around. For several days she was locked in a beautifully furnished bedroom with windows that looked down on an ice-glazed lake and fed by a black man in a white suit who brought her food on a silver tray. On the third day she was taken to a glass room full of jungle vines and blooming red flowers, where a large-bellied black man who wore a gray-striped suit and smoked a cigar waited. He was very nice to her, very friendly, and offered her a lace handkerchief to wipe her ey
es when he told her that she wouldn’t be going home again because this was her home now. His name was Fontaine, and he said there were some things Solange was going to have to do for him. She was going to have to give him good fortune and protect him from evil. Or something might happen to her mother and father.
It was only gradually, she’d told Wes, that she learned he was a bad man, a gangster who controlled most of the Harlem rackets. His power was slipping, and he’d heard about her through some of his people in South Chicago. In a period of four years, during which Solange did very little but read the lines in his hand and touch photographs of different men to feel their weaknesses, Fontaine never came to her bedroom, never laid a hand on her. He left her alone, first because he was beginning to fear her all too accurate predictions of the future and the incantations that caused his enemies to suddenly wither from health to sickness; also, his brain was steadily being gnawed away by syphilis. Many nights she could hear Fontaine roaming the long hallways of the mansion, howling like an animal in mad rage. In the end it was the syphilis, not his enemies, that crept up on him with a deadly hand, and none of Solange’s incantations or poultices could halt its advance. Fontaine was locked away behind a massive oak door, and soon after that a couple of well-dressed white men came to the house, paid Fontaine’s business manager a great deal of money, and took Solange with them to the west.
Her new owner was an elderly Mafia capo who wanted her around for good luck; he’d heard of what she’d been doing for Fontaine and knew that Fontaine’s business had shown an eighty-percent increase while she’d been with him. He never touched her either, but a couple of his hired men did come to her room one night. They said if she ever dared to tell what they did, they’d cut her throat. That went on for a long time, until Solange fashioned corn husk dolls of them and set them on fire. They died when their Lincoln Continental slammed into the rear of a Sunoco gas truck on the San Diego Freeway.