Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  Larry closed his eyes for a moment, too, but the feeling of his father was so strong that he quickly opened them again. He had sensed for a split-second that there was somebody else in the room.

  “Is somebody going to guide us to Mario Foggia?” asked his mother.

  There was silence; although Larry thought he could feel the temperature dropping a little, and a sense that the atmosphere was somehow thickening, like cold clear soup with cornmeal stirred into it. Mussolini scratched irritably underneath his cover.

  “Who’s going to help us find Mario Foggia?” Eleonora urged. “Is somebody going to help us find Mario Foggia?”

  Larry remembered to keep his palms stretched flat and to push against the cosmos. This time, he thought that he could feel the cosmos pushing back. Millions of teeming molecules, pressing against his hands. The chilly, busy substance of the night.

  He closed his eyes again. Somehow it seemed less dark inside his eyelids than it did outside. He could feel his father’s aura, for sure, but he found it difficult to picture his father’s face. Poppa, poppa. But all he see was the dark pinstripe suit and the perfect cuffs and the fresh-picked carnation in the lapel. No face. Only that suit, and the smell of tobacco, and cologne. And he remembered laughing. A breezy day, and sunlight, and clouds that fled across the Bay like frightened sheep. And his father laughing.

  “That man Lupone! Trying to act so high and mighty! And what does he say when he wants to go to the bathroom? Where is the ubacasa, Mario, that’s what he says! Where is the outhouse?”

  Why did he remember something so fleeting, something so irrelevant? He could smell cooking, he could smell spaghetti al sugo di pesce, spaghetti with fish-head sauce, which his father had always eaten for i primi on Friday evenings.

  “You will always say gabinete, Laurence. You don’t want to sound like slum-dweller.”

  He opened his eyes again. He thought he could see faint blue specks of light encircling his mother’s head, like halo of fireflies. Then the light grew brighter, and began to flicker and dance, and he was sure of it.

  Eleonora opened her eyes and looked across at Larry in triumph. “I’m beginning to get something!” she whispered. “I can hear voices! Somebody’s coming to guide us!” “For God’s sake, momma, be careful.”

  The blue-white light danced around Eleonora’s shoulders, and then suddenly branched to the palms of her hands—hesitated—and then jumped across to Larry’s hands.

  The sensation was electrifying—far stronger than the spiritual charge that Larry had felt at Wilbert Fraser’s house. The instant that he was connected to his mother, he heard the same voices that she was hearing. Crying, sobbing, somebody calling. Very far away, like the cries of people on a sinking ship.

  “They sound pretty upset,” he told his mother. “Maybe we should leave them alone.”

  “They always cry like that,” said Eleonora. “They’re grieving for their lost lives. Don’t worry, somebody will come to help us.”

  Larry was breathing slowly now to steady himself. The atmosphere in the living-room was chillier still, and deeply unpleasant. He began to feel that centipede-tickling on the palm of his hand, although he didn’t dare to turn it around and look at it in case he broke the connection of flickering blue-white light.

  “I’m still looking for somebody to help me find Mario Foggia,” his mother repeated, quite testily. “Come on, now, who can help me find Mario Foggia?”

  Eleonora sat in her chair with great composure, her thin hands raised. She looked almost beatific; and Larry thought what a brilliant mother she had always been, and how much he loved her. It was a strange feeling to look at a woman and to think that you had once lived inside her body, that you had fed inside her, warm and secure, and swum and turned and stretched and kicked, and slept and dreamed of greatness. Larry’s grandmother had always said that sons never forgave their mothers for pushing them out into the daylight. They might love them beyond all loves, but they never forgave them.

  “I need a guide,” his mother was calling. “There are so many guides, I can feel you! I can feel you! Why are you shrinking away?”

  The sensation in the palm of Larry’s hand grew sharper, like scratching fingernails. At the same time, the blue-white light began to shudder uncontrollably, and flicker from one of Larry’s fingers to the other with the crackling, fitful noise of electrical static.

  Larry began to feel that the tension in the living-room was rising; while the temperature plummeted like a stone dropped into the sea.

  “It’s cold,” he told Eleonora.

  “A sure sign of spirits,” Eleonora responded. “They’re here, they’re very close, but for some reason they’re keeping their distance.”

  Suddenly, the blue-white light died away; and the room was gloomy again, with nothing but the dim marmalade-colored lamp to illuminate it.

  Eleonora twisted around in her chair, straining her eyes in the darkness. “There’s something wrong here, something wrong,” said Eleonora. “That light is our beacon. That light draws our guides towards us. It’s benign and it’s helpful and it’s never done anything like this before.”

  Larry said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to do this tonight. Come on, let’s call it a night.”

  But Eleonora didn’t answer. She stayed stock-still, listening, listening.

  “There’s something here,” she breathed. “There’s something here.”

  “Is it poppa?” asked Larry, dry-mouthed.

  “I’m not sure. But it’s very strong. Can’t you feel it for yourself?”

  The scratching in Larry’s hand was becoming unbearable. Harsh, regular scratches, over and over again. He turned his hand around and looked down at his palm. The blotchy shadows were moving across it, the shadows of the clouds beneath which his father had once laughed. His dead father. His dead father, whom they had called for tonight.

  “Momma—” he said; but Eleonora hushed him again.

  He looked back down at his hand and the shadows were already skeining themselves together into the distinctive features of a man’s face. The man had his head partly turned away, as if he were talking to somebody behind him. Larry could see him moving his lips, and smiling, and nodding. He looked like a character in a tiny movie.

  “Momma, take a look at this,” he begged her.

  “Hush, Larry, please.” Eleonora’s voice sounded irritable and strained.

  “Momma—”

  “There’s something here,” she whispered. She turned and stared at him and all the blood seemed to have dropped from her face, leaving it white as chalk, with features chiseled out of chalk, and a mouth chiseled out of chalk.

  “Is it poppa?” asked Larry.

  Eleonora hesitated, and then quickly shook her head.

  Larry squeezed his fist tight. He could still feel the crawling sensation on his skin, but he didn’t want to look at it.

  Eleonora said, “Something’s in father’s chair.”

  Larry glanced quickly toward his father’s high-backed chair. For one heart-lurching instant, he thought he could see a sleeve protruding from the side of the chair, but then he realized that it was his mother’s discarded black coat.

  “Momma… there’s nothing,” he said.

  “Oh Blessed Mary Mother of God there’s something there.”

  Larry stood up. “Momma, relax. Calm down. There’s nothing there. I’ll show you.”

  “No!” screamed his mother; and he had never heard such terror in her voice before.

  This had to stop now. Larry circled around the chair and there lay his mother’s black coat, just as she had dropped it, sleeves hanging, collar turned up.

  He tried to smile at her. “It’s your coat, that’s all. It’s only your coat.”

  He lifted it up to show her. But still she shrank back, staring at it as if it were alive.

  “Momma—” he said, growing impatient, and walked toward her, still holding up the coat.

  “Larry! No! Take it
away! Larry!” his mother babbled at him. “Larry!”

  “Momma, calm down,” he told her. “It’s only a c—”

  But then he realized with a stroke of pure fear that the coat was more than a coat.

  It was standing on its own.

  It had bulk and weight, and its own rumbling darkness. It was filling itself with substance, it was filling itself with strength. It grew larger and taller and heavier; a massive headless creature of black fabric.

  Larry, stunned, tried to take his hand away. It was only then that he understood what was happening. Out of the palm of his hand, a thick gray-white gel was pouring. It poured swiftly and relentlessly into the open sleeve of the coat, so that the coat billowed larger with every second that passed.

  Ectoplasm, that’s what Wilbert Fraser had told him. Some spirits borrow it, some spirits steal it. Some spirits can gut you like a fish.

  The coat was taking his own spiritual substance to give itself life.

  Larry wrenched his hand away. The ectoplasm tore like gelatinous wallpaper-paste. He stumbled back, knocking over the tea-tray, colliding with a table. He stared up at the dark thunderous shape of the spirit, panting, not knowing what to do. The room felt as if it were collapsing underneath its own weight.

  “Momma…” he choked, grasping her stiffened shoulder. “Momma… get rid of it! Send the damn thing back where it came from!”

  Eleonora Foggia was trembling. “I can’t,” she said, in a dust-dry whisper. “I don’t know how.”

  “It’s not poppa, is it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is.”

  The coat showed no signs of moving. It remained where it was, only three or four feet away from them, black, headless, blind. But it gave off a penetrating chill, and all around it a soft and doleful wind seemed to blow, making the velvet drapes gently thunder as if there were somebody hiding there.

  “What do you want?” Larry asked it.

  The coat-creature appeared to ripple; but that was all.

  “What are you? What do you want?” Larry demanded.

  “You must go!” Eleonora shrilled at it. “You must go back to the other side!”

  Still the coat-creature swayed in its own cosmic wind; and still it gave no indication of what it was looking for; or what it was; or why it was here.

  “Jesus, I’m calling Wilbert,” said Larry. With hands that would barely obey him, he opened the address-book on the telephone table and found FRASER, Wilbert, and dialed the number. All he could get was a steady, harsh crackling sound, as if Wilbert had dialed somewhere remote and then left the phone off the hook.

  He hung up. As he did so, his mother said, “Larry,” in a very different tone of voice.

  He felt a low resonance, not like an earth-tremor, more like the sound of the rapid transit train rumbling eerily through the tube that lies on the bottom of San Francisco Bay. The single lamp began to dwindle and dim. Then, for a long and terrible moment, they were swallowed in complete darkness.

  “Momma?” Larry called her, reaching out with both hands.

  Eleonora Foggia didn’t answer.

  “Momma,” cautioned Larry. “Momma, don’t move.”

  The room was chilly and quiet. Only the soft, soft soughing of that impossible wind. The blackness was utterly seamless. Not even a hint of reflected light from Eleonora’s collection of mirrors.

  “Momma, you okay?” Larry asked her, reaching out cautiously into the dark.

  He heard a dragging, bumping sound. Then a reed-hollow oohhhhhhhhh like somebody sobbing in pain and desperation.

  He edged forward, until his knee made contact with the side of his mother’s chair. He reached out sideways, trying to feel her, but she didn’t seem to be there.

  “Momma, where are you? What’s happened?”

  There was a second’s long silence. Then he was suddenly dazzled by a shattering light—a light that flooded the room with flattened shadows and turned reality into blinding-white theater. The coat-creature was transformed from a creature of total darkness into a huge horned apparition of unendurable brightness.

  Larry shielded his eyes. He heard his mother shriek at the top of her voice. She was crouched on the floor at the creature’s feet, her shoulders hunched, her fists clenched, her face distorted into an expression of absolute agony.

  “Back off!” Larry yelled at the creature. He took a rash step forward, but instantly the huge bright foggy figure turned around and swept him back with a force that was chillingly physical; and yet mental, too, as if it had breathed cold breath on his naked brain.

  He heard a terrible wrenching, bone-crackling sound—a sound like sinews being stretched and skin being torn and nerves being twisted. Eleonora grasped the sides of her mouth in her hands and clawed it wide apart, choking and gasping for breath. She stamped at the floor with one high-heeled shoe in a desperate attempt to communicate her pain and her fear and her suffocation, and she began to shake all over.

  “Leave her alone!” Larry roared at the creature. “Leave her alone, or I’ll drop you!”

  He tugged out his .38 and raised it in both hands. “Leave her alone!” he repeated.

  The figure ignored him. Maybe it couldn’t really see him. Maybe it didn’t understand what a gun was. Maybe it knew what a gun was but didn’t care.

  Larry edged closer, nudging at the figure’s outline with the .38’s muzzle. “Whatever the hell you are, back off! Do you understand? Back off!”

  Still the figure ignored him. Larry was ready to fire when he suddenly thought of Wilbert Fraser’s words. “Of course, you can’t harm them, because they’re using you to give themselves shape. They’re made of you. If they get hurt, you get hurt. If they die, you die.”

  Eleonora gargled and retched in agony. Larry hesitated, desperate, still holding the gun, but much less confidently now. Supposing Wilbert Fraser had been wrong? He had seen the ectoplasm sliding out of his hand, but how could this huge figure of light and fog really be made out of him? And even if Wilbert Fraser had been right, how could he let his mother be hurt like this, just to save his own skin?

  Before he could think what to do, his mother was jerked up into a kneeling position, her back painfully arched, her mouth still stretched wide open. She tried with one half-paralyzed arm to reach out for Larry, her eyes bulging, frantic, but Larry didn’t know whether to shoot, or to run, or to wrestle this dazzling creature to the floor, or whether to stay still and watch his mother in horror and pray that it couldn’t really harm her, after all.

  “You’re not real!” he screamed at it. “You’re not real, you can’t harm anybody!”

  But whatever it was, whatever hallways of psychic darkness it had appeared from, the figure was real.

  Larry heard his mother gag. Her ribcage convulsed. Then a huge tide of blood and light and noise and flickering images came pouring out of her mouth.

  He stood frozen, unable to move, unable to speak. He had never imagined what anybody’s soul could look like—how their actual being would appear, if only you had the means to drag it out of them.

  Now he knew. It looked like a torrent of everything that his mother had ever done, or felt, or thought, or experienced. The figure had made her vomit not only everything that she had ever eaten, but her entire life.

  He saw blood, flesh, half-chewed fish, neon lights, babies, faces, rainstorms, lightning, bicycles, pillows. He heard screaming and singing; pianos and orchestras. He heard running feet, running feet, and doors slamming again and again. He heard laughter that was drowned by the ocean. He heard hundreds of clocks chattering, then chimes and chimes and chimes. He smelled home. He smelled cooking. He smelled perfumes and flowers and freshly-baked bread.

  Then, with a last effort that wrenched and twisted his mother’s diminished body like a rag-doll, he saw pints more blood, and his father’s face, plastered in blood and something else, something that he didn’t understand—another man’s face, secretly smiling, crossed by a fleeting burst of
sunlight.

  All of this chaotic tangle was dragged into the dazzling light of the figure’s form, and absorbed.

  There was a deafening shout; and a cracking noise like a mine-prop collapsing. A dried dwarf-like Eleonora fell on to her side on the rug, keening and shivering and convulsively jerking her leg.

  Larry crossed himself. In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost this is it, oh Christ protect me. He lifted his gun with both hands and aimed it at the very heart of the blinding light.

  But he didn’t have the nerve. Supposing he fired, and killed himself? Who would hunt down the Fog City Satan then? Houston Brough? Or Arne, with his endless analyses, and his computer printouts and his forensic tests?

  Besides, the tall ectoplasmic figure was dimmer now, much dimmer; and it seemed as if the soft cold wind that it had exuded was now reversed, and was being sucked back to the center of its being.

  “What are you?” he demanded, his voice harsh.

  The figure nodded its dark, huge head.

  “What are you?” Larry screamed at it. “What do you want? What have you done to my mother?”

  The figure didn’t reply, but was now so dark that it was blacker than the blackest shadows. For a second, the cold wind that blew toward its center grew fierce and freezing, then it died away altogether.

  His mother’s black coat dropped empty to the floor.

  Larry cautiously approached it, and picked it up. For the briefest of moments, he heard the music of a steam calliope, and saw a will-o’-the-wisp of brightly-colored light. He thought he heard laughter, and the sound of cheering. He thought he smelled popcorn and that distinctive aroma of cotton-candy.

  Then it was gone.

  He stood up, still shocked, but deeply emotionally moved, too. Behind him, on the floor, he heard his mother cough. He knelt down beside her and lifted her heavy trembling head and tried to comfort her. She looked the same way that Edna-Mae had looked: her scalp tufted and blotchy, as if she had eczema, her cheeks collapsed, her limbs thin as sticks. Her clothes hung around her, and her rings lay scattered on the floor where they had dropped from her skeletally thin fingers.

  “Momma… momma, it’s Larry. Listen, momma, I’m going to get you to the hospital.”