Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  Larry gave her a tight smile. “Is that all? Can we go down to headquarters now?”

  “Wait, wait, let me check out your head-line,” said Edna-Mae. “You see here? Your first finger belong to Jupiter, your second to Saturn, your third to the Sun, and your fourth finger to Mercury. Your head-line runs from Jupiter, right across your palm, to here, the mound of Mars.”

  “And what does that tell you?” asked Larry, trying to be patient. Herve the barman glanced at him, and breathed on a glass, hah! and the look on his face said that there’s one born every minute.

  “You’re going to argue with some people who are important to you,” said Edna-Mae.

  “Arne Knudsen, for starters,” put in Houston. “And probably Dan Burroughs, too.”

  “You’re going to meet somebody who will change your life, but let me warn you, my darling. You will wish more than anything else in the world that you had never met this person.”

  “Is this a man or a woman?” asked Larry. To begin with, he had felt completely skeptical about Edna-Mae’s palmistry, but she spoke with such hoarse conviction in her voice that he almost found himself believing her.

  “Who?” she said, staring at him.

  “This somebody… this person who’s going to change my life. Is this a man or a woman?”

  “It’s a—it’s—”

  Her eyes clouded. She stared down at Larry’s palm as if she couldn’t understand why she was holding it or where she was.

  “It’s—” she stuttered. “It’s—”

  “Looks like the margaritas got the better of her,” said Houston, out of the side of his mouth.

  But Edna-Mae suddenly dropped Larry’s hand—almost threw it away. Her eyes were staring and her face was rigid. Larry could see the muscles convulsing and shuddering in her cheeks. “Hey… are you okay?” he asked her.

  She nodded, dumbly, trying to swallow, trying to speak.

  “Edna-Mae, what’s wrong?”

  Houston said, worriedly, “Hey, Larry. She looks like she’s having a fit.”

  Larry said, “Hold on, hold on.”

  Edna-Mae sat up stiffly on her bar-stool and began to quiver. If Larry hadn’t known that it was impossible, he would have guessed that she was suffering an electric shock. Her face—which had already been powdered white—began to turn purplish-gray, as if she couldn’t breathe.

  “Hey, Herve, give me a glass of water, will you?” Larry asked him.

  Herve reluctantly filled up a glass in the sink and handed it over. Larry held it to Edna-Mae’s lips and said, “Come on, Edna-Mae Lickerman. Have a drink.”

  She stared at him. “Your hand,” she breathed. Her cigar dropped on to the floor, and Houston leaned over to pick it up.

  “My hand? What about it?”

  “Your hand!”

  Larry lifted his left hand, palm upwards, and stared at it.

  “Can’t you see it?” gasped Edna-Mae.

  She took hold of his fingers again, and stretched them back. As she did so, Larry began to feel an extraordinary crawling sensation in his palm, as if a large centipede were walking across it. He looked down, and with a prickly feeling of alarm, he saw dark shadows and patterns moving across his skin.

  His first reaction was to look up toward the ceiling, to see if a light was playing on his hand. But then he realized that the shadows were actually flickering and dancing on his skin. They were mottled, gray and purplish, like birthmarks.

  “Houston!” he said. “Houston, look at this!”

  Houston leaned over and stared at his palm. “That’s weird,” he remarked. “That’s truly weird.” He touched the patterns with his fingertip, but they were no more substantial than shadows. “I never saw anything like that before. Never. And they’re moving.”

  Edna-Mae said thickly, “It’s your future, don’t you see! What will happen to you tomorrow! The man who will cause you such grief! He’s coming!”

  “Come on, now,” said Larry, trying to tug his hand away from her. “This is just some kind of a stunt, right? Let’s get serious here.”

  But Edna-Mae shook her head violently, and uttered a cackling, choking noise. “He’s coming! He needs to feed!”

  Larry tried again to prise his fingers away from her, but she clung on tight. “Come on now, Edna-Mae, let’s call it a day.”

  She began to toss her head wildly from side to side. “Future! Future!” she blurted.

  Suddenly, Larry felt a deep pain in the palm of his hand, as if somebody had dug a nail into it. He looked down and saw that the shadows had formed themselves into the indistinct shape of a man’s face—eyes, nose, and mouth.

  “Look at that,” he breathed to Houston. “What the hell is that?”

  The barman Herve crossed himself twice, and gabbled in a high-pitched voice.

  “Uade retro Satana,

  Sunt mala quae libas

  Nunquam suade mihi uano

  Ipse uenena bibas.”

  It was one of those little rhymes that children learned in Jesuit schools to ward off the devil.

  The face on Larry’s hand grew darker and more distinct. The smudged eyes appeared to open, and Larry saw the image staring at him. Shadows still crossed the palm of his hand, like the shadows of smoke or passing clouds; and as they passed the man’s expression appeared to alter and shift. He seemed to smile. He seemed to turn his face. He seemed to be trapped inside the palm of Larry’s hand, like a holographic face on a credit card, yet he looked self-satisfied and calm.

  It’s an illusion, Larry quaked. He couldn’t stop himself from quaking. It has to be! An optical illusion. Or some kind of rash. Maybe I’m overtired. Maybe there’s some kind of drug in the air here… maybe Edna-Mae was smoking something.

  But he could actually feel the face crawling and flexing on his hand; he could feel the eyes opening and closing, he could feel the coldness and wetness of the mouth.

  And all the time, the middle of his hand ached as if it had been nailed to the bar.

  The eyes turned. Then the mouth breathed, “It’s feeding time, my friend.” And Larry heard it. He actually heard it speak.

  Edna-Mae screamed. Larry yelled too, and wrenched his hand away from her, and squeezed it tightly into a fist. He thought he felt the face against his skin. He thought he felt hair and teeth and lips. But then his fist was filled with a searing pain, and dazzling white light burst out between his fingers. He opened his hand again, and for a fleeting, blinding second, a bright light flared and danced on his palm, and then vanished.

  Edna-Mae tilted sideways on her barstool, and then dropped onto the floor on her hands and knees. Larry, shaking, sweating cold sweat, stood staring at his hand. His skin was reddened, as if he had burned it with scalding water, but the face and the shadows had gone.

  “He’s coming, he’s coming, oh God he’s coming,” coughed Edna-Mae. She began to crawl on all fours across the floor. “He’s coming and there’s nothing you can do. He wants to feed! He wants to feed! On us! He wants to eat us! Eat our lungs, eat our livers! He wants to eat us!”

  Houston snapped at the barman, “Dial!” and then cautiously approached Edna-Mae, as if he were trying to corner a rabid dog.

  “Si, senor,” Herve gabbled, and came around the bar. “Crux sacra sit mihi lux.”

  “Larry? Are you okay?” Houston asked him. “Come on, let me take a look at your hand.”

  Larry stared at him. His features seemed to be disconnected—eyes, nose, mouth, mustache. For a moment Larry couldn’t work out who he was.

  “Did you see it?” he said. “Did you see it?”

  Houston cautiously explored the palm of Larry’s left hand with his fingertips. “There’s nothing there, lieutenant. Nothing at all.”

  “But you saw it, too?”

  “Sure I saw it. Like a face.”

  “And you heard it speak?”

  Houston looked at him guardedly. “I didn’t hear it speak.”

  “It spoke, believe me. My own hand spoke
to me. Can you believe that?”

  “I didn’t hear it, lieutenant. I saw it, but I didn’t hear it. Maybe—”

  “Maybe what? Maybe I’ve lost my marbles?”

  “I didn’t mean that, lieutenant, but—well, you know. Maybe you heard something else and thought it was saying something. Easy mistake to make, you know, in the heat of the moment.”

  Larry kept wiping his hand against his sleeve. “I need a drink,” he said. He felt as if he had just walked away from an auto accident; as if time had stopped and then restarted. “I don’t know what the hell kind of trick that Edna-Mae was playing on me, but it felt like—Jesus, I could feel it, like a real face.” He wiped his hand again. “Jesus. That practically scared the nuts off me. What do you think, Houston, hypnosis? Or maybe she’s got some kind of hallucinatory drug on her fingers.”

  Edna-Mae was still crawling on her hands and knees across the floor. Herve kept trying to help her up, but she was far too heavy for him, and she kept pushing him away. “Leave me alone… leave me alone, you little runt! It’s feeding time! Did you hear that? It’s feeding time!”

  “Houston,” said Larry, “for Christ’s sake give the poor bastard a hand.”

  Houston and the barman tried together to lift Edna-Mae off the floor, but she went completely limp, and they had to drag her across to one of the tables. She sat there staring at nothing at all, quivering and scratching herself, and muttering “Feeding time! Do you hear me? Feeding time! Oh, yes, that’s the future! Did you see it in your hand, Mr. Clever-clogs? Nyum, nyum, nyum, feeding time!”

  Herve went to the phone and prodded out the number for the paramedics. “‘Alphonson’s Cantina’. Jes. A woman gone crazy. Jes. How should I know? No, no, juss went crazy.” He hung up, and then he came and stood next to Larry and stared at Edna-Mae. “This is the devil’s business, jes?”

  “Just give me a drink, will you?” Larry asked him. “Large whiskey, straight up.”

  Herve poured them both a Johnnie Walker, and then took a swig himself, directly from the neck of the bottle. “Devil’s business,” he repeated. “You be marking my words.”

  “You don’t say anything about this to anybody,” Larry instructed him, and passed him a $20. This time, Herve pocketed the money without a complaint.

  “Nothing to nobody. I swear.”

  Houston came over, tapping his ballpen thoughtfully against his thumbnail. “Maybe we should stake this place out. See if our boy comes in again.”

  Larry was still staring at the palm of his hand. “It was there, wasn’t it? A face.”

  “I don’t know,” said Houston. “I guess it was. But you know what they say. Things aren’t always what they seem to be.”

  Larry smeared the palm of his hand against the edge of the bar. Somehow he felt as if his hand was dirty, as if it had been soiled. And he couldn’t rid himself of a deep, persistent itch. “It must be some kind of hypnosis,” he repeated. “Like mass-suggestion. They do shows like that, don’t they? Making people see things that just aren’t there.”

  “Sure they do,” nodded Houston, trying to be reassuring. “My uncle used to see this black spotted dog all the time, two or three times a month. He saw it all his life, no matter where he went. He even saw it in Italy, during the war.”

  “No kidding,” said Larry.

  “No kidding, it was true. He used to mention it all the time. Like, ‘I saw the black dog today, over in Mill Valley.’ Then about three years ago he was driving north on business and a black dog stepped out in the road. He swerved to miss it, and hit a tree by the side of the road.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  Houston shook his head. “He didn’t die, but he broke his back. He’s in Sausalito now, in a home. Can’t walk, can’t speak. He might as well be dead. And he still sees that damned black spotted dog.”

  They heard the distant warbling of the paramedics’ siren. Uphill, downhill, temporarily muffled, then uphill again—louder, and closer. Edna-Mae raised her head and listened.

  “We called for an ambulance,” said Larry, loudly.

  She frowned at him. “You!” she said. “You’re the one with the hand!”

  Larry put down his drink and circled around the tables toward her. Immediately she stood up, noisily knocking over her bentwood chair, and backed away. “You mustn’t touch me!” she said. “Whatever you do, you mustn’t touch me!”

  “Listen,” Larry appealed. “You had a—I don’t know—you had kind of a seizure. Something like a fit. Just let the paramedics test your heartrate and your blood-pressure. We don’t want you collapsing on us, do we?”

  “Collapsing?” she shouted at him, harshly, as if he had suggested some sort of obscenity. “Collapsing?”

  Larry stepped nearer to her. He raised his hand, trying to appear comforting and reassuring, but that made her shrink even further away. “It’s you!” she kept hissing. “It’s you!”

  Larry heard the ambulance cross the intersection, clonk-rumble-clonk, and pull up outside the front of the bar. Houston said, “Hold on, I’ll tell them we’re here,” and stepped outside into the street.

  Larry turned to say, “Don’t forget the—” but as he did so, Edna-Mae Lickerman backed into the cheaply varnished door marked Senoras and slammed it behind her. Larry heard her lock it.

  “Oh, shit,” he complained, and immediately went up to the door and rapped on it with his knuckles. “Edna-Mae? Edna-Mae? Come on, Edna-Mae, you don’t have anything to worry about! That was just an illusion, that’s all! You want to see my hand now? That was just an illusion!”

  “Stay away!” Edna-Mae shouted back. “You’re the one with the hand! You stay away!”

  “For God’s sake, Edna-Mae, you’ve had a bad turn, that’s all. Come on out and we can help you!”

  “I don’t want your help! You go away!”

  There was a long silence. Larry rapped again, but Edna-Mae didn’t reply. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, or how he had managed to get himself involved in rescuing an hysterical woman from the toilet of a rundown Mexican cantina, but he suddenly felt angry and frustrated, as he always did when his life got temporarily out of control, and he bashed against the door with his fist. His mother always said that it was his Neapolitan blood; the fire of his dead father.

  Houston came across the cantina with a Chinese paramedic in tow. The paramedic’s name-tag announced that he was Bryan Ong.

  “What’s the problem here, lieutenant?” the paramedic asked him.

  “I’m not too sure,” Larry told him. “We’ve got ourselves a panicking middle-aged woman locked in a washroom. From the way she behaved, she may have had some kind of fit. Maybe it’s nothing more serious than menopausal freak-out. Or, it could be DTs. She practically lives on margaritas.”

  Bryan Ong nodded without expression. “Your sergeant here said something about your hand, too.”

  Larry lifted his hand as if he were pledging allegiance to the flag. “Nothing. My hand’s okay. Little sore, maybe, but that’s all.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Kind of a flash-burn, I guess. Static electricity, I don’t know.”

  The paramedic stared at the washroom door and cleared his throat. “Well… I guess we have to get her out of there.”

  “Herve, you got a spare key?” Larry asked him.

  The barman shook his head. “Only one key, senor.”

  Larry leaned against the washroom door and rattled the handle. “Edna-Mae, are you going to come out quietly, or what?”

  Again, there was no reply. But Larry was sure that he could hear a suppressed mewling sound, like somebody weeping into a bunched-up handkerchief.

  “Edna-Mae, are you all right?”

  “Let’s get the door down,” said the paramedic, setting his bag on one of the tables. “It sounds like she could be convulsing.”

  “Okay, then, whatever you say,” Larry agreed. He gripped the doorframe in each hand, leaned back as far as he could, and kic
ked at the lock. He didn’t manage to break it completely the first time, but then he kicked again, and the door juddered open.

  He was greeted, alarmingly, by a freezing-cold draft, and a dazzling light that flickered erratically on and off. The draft sucked at his ankles and ruffled his hair.

  Houston held his arm. “Go easy, lieutenant. Looks like the fuses have shorted out.”

  “Edna-Mae?” Larry shouted out. “Edna-Mae, can you hear me?”

  He pushed his way into the washroom. There were only two cubicles, with red-painted doors covered in graffiti.

  “Maybe she went out the back,” Houston suggested.

  “No,” said Larry. “The door’s padlocked, look; and there’s a mesh over the window.”

  “What the hell’s that light?” Houston protested, shielding his eyes with his hand.

  Bryan Ong stayed back, by the broken door. “Are you sure she’s in there?”

  “Of course she’s in here,” said Larry. “Edna-Mae?”

  He kicked open the first stall. It was empty, with a broken toilet-seat and a floor heaped with unrolled paper. He kicked open the second stall. He could hear her mewling, he was sure.

  Houston, right behind him, said, “Jesus, Larry, what the hell’s happening in here?”

  He didn’t see her at first. She was so small. God almighty, she was so small! She was crouched down in the corner behind the toilet-bowl, her hands covering her balding, tufted head. Her eyes were as wide and as dark as a Rhesus monkey’s. Her wrists were wizened and thin as sticks.

  “What’s that?” asked Houston, his voice brittle with fear.

  “It’s her,” said Larry. “I don’t know how, but it’s her.”

  “How can it be her? It’s no bigger’n a dog!”

  But there was no mistaking the purple dress. There was no mistaking the gold chains and the rabbit’s-foot which were dangling around her scrawny neck.

  Larry’s mouth was dry as glasspaper. He held back the cubicle door, and slowly approached her. The little creature that had been Edna-Mae stared up at him with both malevolence and fright.

  “Edna-Mae?” Larry whispered. “Edna-Mae, is that you?”