“Well, I’ll try to explain it.” said Wilbert. “It’s difficult to believe, that’s all.”
“After tonight, I think I can believe pretty well anything.”
“Well…”said Wilbert. “This all goes back a long, long way. And a lot of it is rumor, and conjecture, and downright superstition.”
“Just tell me what you know,” Larry interrupted. “We can sort out the facts from the superstition later.”
“The way I got into the occult was more or less by chance,” Wilbert explained. “Although most of the members of my family have always had a strong psychic gift, particularly on my mother’s side, I took it for granted most of my life. When I was a kid, I thought that everyone could hear voices and smell smells and see spirits walking around. It never frightened me. I knew these people that I was talking to were dead; and I knew that they couldn’t hurt me. Most of the time I felt sorry for them. I mean, some of them were deeply shocked and traumatized by dying—especially if they’d died violently, like that little girl Roberta we saw tonight.
“At one time I actually toyed with the idea of setting up a Spiritual Therapy business… counseling people’s dead relatives, helping them to adjust to the reality of being dead. I mean, people get very lonely and bewildered when they die… they miss their families and their friends, they miss the plain and simple pleasure of being alive. They miss the tastes, the feelings, the kisses, the love. One young boy described being dead as the difference between color television and black-and-white.”
Two or three hours ago, Larry would have dismissed Wilbert as a complete crazy—only one step saner than Mad Jack McMad, the Winner of the All-America Mr. Mad Contest. But now that he had seen for himself the little drowned girl in the taffeta party-dress—now that he had witnessed the ferocity of the creature that had destroyed his mother—he believed with a kind of masochistic doggedness in every word that Wilbert said. I was wrong and Wilbert was right. There are spirits and there are ghosts and there is a face that moves on the palm of my hand.
Wilbert said, “I came across the Black Brotherhood pretty much by accident. That was about 1964, 1965. In those days, I was working for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was a picture framer, although I always told people I was an artist. I was living with a friend called Almo Stemti over a beatnik coffee-bar on Valencia. You should’ve seen me. Sloppy-Joe sweater, beard, beret. Every sentence beginning with ‘like’. Like, the whole beatnik bit.”
“Sure, sure,” said Larry, testily. He was beginning to shake from the shock of his accident; and in the same way that he had seen police officers gradually become aware of having been shot, he was gradually beginning to understand that his mother was dead, that she was truly and absolutely dead, and that what had happened tonight wasn’t a masquerade, or a horror-movie. No latex, no fake blood. No Freddie.
His elegant handsome beloved mother had been physically and emotionally desiccated by a blinding white light, and then crushed in front of his eyes into a paste of plasma and hair and bone. Larry knew that before the night was over, he was going to have to confront the total horror of it; the grinding grief; and that for a while he would probably go over the edge.
Right now, though, he had an urgent job to do; and the horror and the grief would have to stay where they were—lid on, screwed down tight.
Wilbert finished his whiskey and poured himself another one. His eyes never quite caught Larry’s eyes; as if he were afraid or ashamed. “The Black Brotherhood? One day they weren’t around and then they were. It was like that song ‘First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.’ Or a Western, when the bad guys suddenly ride into town. There were four or five of them, and they always seemed to be everywhere. You’d go for a coffee and there they were, two or three of them anyway, sitting in the corner in their tiny black shades and their black shirts and all of those ankhs and crucifixes they used to wear. Except for one of them called Leper who was so thin you couldn’t look at him, they were all huge guys, physically huge, with a really threatening presence. One of them looked Latino, but the rest were definitely white. Everybody on the scene began to get real tired of them, because they were always around, and somehow they always cast like a pall over everything, do you know what I mean? Conversation died, nobody laughed.
“Anyway the word got around that they were into the black arts. And some people started hanging out with them. Just to look brave, I guess. I mean in those days cool was everything, and if you weren’t afraid to hang out with these guys, then you were cool. The girls used to find them fascinating. Edna-Mae loved them. She’d sit real close to them, even if they never spoke to her for hours, even if they totally ignored her. She sat there watching them drink, watching them smoke, watching them breathe for Christ’s sake. They had charisma, although we didn’t call it charisma, back in 1965.
“Then—in the early summer of ’66, people started to die. There were some bad murders in the Haight-Ashbury and the Mission District. In fact those murders killed the peace-and-love movement before the tourists even got here. People stopped loving, people stopped trusting. I mean you’re going to turn on and tune in with somebody who might happily saw your legs off when you’re tripping? No way, no way at all.
“Of course we didn’t connect the killings with the Black Brotherhood, not at first. But they began to boast about them, indirectly; and everything started to get weirder. Some of the girls actually slept with these guys, but I never heard of any girl sleeping with them twice. In the middle of the night the girls said they were woken up by voices that weren’t even human voices. Like, tiny gnarled kind of voices. And they’d seen faces and clouds and stuff, moving across these guys’ hands. Then—after a while—it spread. People started seeing faces on their TVs when their TVs were switched off; and faces in mirrors when there was nobody looking; and faces in wallpaper.”
Larry said, “Nobody thought to call the cops?”
“Oh, come on, lieutenant. Everybody was dropping so much acid in those days, it could have been real, it could have been one huge collective hallucination. You know, a kind of Jungian trip, involving the whole neighborhood. Besides, nobody ever called a cop in those days. Cops had an unpleasant tendency to overstay their welcome. Maybe the guy upstairs kept pissing from his sixth floor window into your fifth-floor window-box, but what would happen if you called the cops? Two fat-assed kids with badges and boils and .357 Magnums would strut around your apartment like they owned it, and then try to slide their hands into the front of your girlfriend’s bathrobe, and the next thing you knew, abracadabra, you’d be charged with obstructing a police officer in the course of fondling your girlfriend’s pussy, and possessing a lid of stale grass that the cops been carrying in their glove-box since grass was first invented.”
Larry wasn’t amused. “It sounds to me like we’re experiencing the same thing all over,” he told Wilbert. “The killings, you know. The faces.”
Wilbert nodded. “Yes, it does. I was hoping that it was something else, but it has the same ring to it. Same resonance. Flowers in the hair revisited....”
“You haven’t thought of talking to the police about it before?”
Wilbert shook his head. “I’ve had some difficult times with the police in the past, Larry. Besides, I wasn’t sure.”
Larry lifted his hand. “I’m not the only one. The faces have been seen all over the city.”
Wilbert lowered his glass. He looked deeply unhappy. “I’ve heard stories. I’ve felt the vibrations.”
Larry said, “People have been seeing them in windows. In soup, even.”
“How about your hand? Does your hand—talk to you?”
Larry self-consciously squeezed his fist tight, and nodded.
Wilbert sipped, swallowed, thought. Then he said, “I held a seance. You know, back in ’67, when the Black Brotherhood started getting out of control. A girlfriend of mine had slept with one of them. It wasn’t Leper, it was another one called Mandrax. Big, silent L
atino. Scarred skin, looked like the moon. Anyway, this girlfriend ended up with a moving hand, just like yours. She tried to get Mandrax to get rid of it, wipe it off, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t know how. You wouldn’t have called any of those guys super-intelligent. In the end she asked me to get rid of it. She used to lie awake at night and it used to talk to her. Quite understandably she was going crazy. She was neurotic enough to begin with. She used to be a friend of Natalie Owings.”
“That’s what my hand does,” said Larry. “I see clouds, and a face, and then it talks.”
Wilbert shrugged. “I don’t know exactly how it’s done. I never did figure it. But a few years ago I talked to an old medium in Berkeley, and he said that any powerful spiritual force can manifest its own image on windows or mirrors or any reflecting surface. And on hands, too, because the hand is the mirror of the human soul… even more than the eyes. That’s why palmists read palms. That’s why Red Indians lift their hands to each other and say ‘how’. Here, look at my soul, I’m not hiding anything.”
Larry asked, “What happened when you held that seance back in ’67?”
Wilbert blew out his cheeks. “Fwoof! What didn’t happen? That seance was hell let loose, hell let loose. That seance was one of the reasons I was praying that this Fog City Satan business wasn’t anything to do with the Black Brotherhood. We held it in my apartment on Belvedere, and there were seven of us there, I deliberately chose seven because that gives you plenty of psychic attraction without being as overpowering as thirteen. Thirteen can bring the roof down. Anyway, the girl with the moving hand was there. Her name was Shetland Piper. And another medium was there… George Menzel. I was much less experienced, of course, in those days… so I went through all the mumbo-jumbo, incense, chanting. But before I’d finished, Shetland started to scream, because this huge bubble of ectoplasm was swelling out of her hand.
“She held her hand, palm upward, flat on the table, and we saw a head and half of a face. It was the most frightening manifestation I’d ever seen in my life. The head looked like it was tom in half, like a photograph torn in half, and it was so bright that none of us could work out if it were human or not. There was a terrible stench, too, like sewers or rotting meat; and several of us started to barf.
“I managed to ask that manifestation just three questions. The first was who are you, and the thing spoke to me and said, The Worthiest One. The second was, what are you? and the thing said, Master of Truth. The third one was, what do you want? and the answer was Peace.
“Then a hell of a storm broke out, and everything in my apartment went flying. Ornaments, pictures, chairs, tables. One of the girls was hit by a piece of broken glass and almost lost her eye. The ectoplasm itself flared up into a hot roaring flame. Shetland burned her hand badly—and, of course, she never regained the ectoplasm that the spirit had taken out of her. When they weighed her at the hospital she was three pounds lighter.”
“But I didn’t get my ectoplasm back, either,” Larry put in.
“Then weigh yourself, and you’ll see just how much the spirit took out of you. It wouldn’t have needed pound-for-pound. An ectoplasmic manifestation is more light and energy than actual flesh. But it wouldn’t surprise me if you’d lost nine or ten pounds.”
Larry felt his arms and his thighs and his stomach. Wilbert was right. He did feel thinner. He was thinner.
“What happened after the seance?” he asked Wilbert.
Wilbert was quite drunk by now. “After the seance— after we’d taken Shetland and Suzie to the hospital—I went back to George Menzel’s home in Sausalito and we had a long talk about what had happened. George was almost seventy then, and he’d been raising spirits since before the war, in Vienna. He was in Dachau during the war, and he spent his time holding seances for the Germans; that was how he survived. He also studied all the spirits, and the demons, and God knows what else.
“He said that he was sure that the Black Brotherhood were acolytes of an ancient Old Testament beast called Belial, the King of Lies. Belial was supposed to have been one of the first angels to be cast down from Heaven, but George was a little more down-to-earth about him than that. He said that there are certain supernatural manifestations which are created out of human passions and human weaknesses. Just like we create concentrations of smog or acid rain or oil-slicks out of environmental misbehavior; we also create concentrations of cruelty and hatred and callousness. Disease, too. The demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist was not actually a demon in the sense of being a little devil with a forked tail, it was a concentration of human unhealthiness. You know how you can walk into a certain house or a particular town or even a whole city and feel immediately and instinctively that it’s a bad place. That’s when you’re aware of one of these demons, one of these concentrations, one of these so-called fallen angels.”
Larry eased himself back in his chair. “But you asked this manifestation who it was, and it said The Worthy One. And you asked it what its name was, and it said Master of Truth.”
“Of course. That was what convinced George that it really was Belial, or some kind of form of Belial. The name Belial in Hebrew mean ‘worthless’ and Belial was always known as the Master of Lies. He was created out of centuries of black lies and devious fraud and poisonous deceit. He was incapable ever of telling the truth.”
“So… you and George Menzel decided that this was Belial.”
“Yes,” said Wilbert. “And more than that, we decided that the Black Brotherhood were trying to bring him back from the other side. We weren’t sure how; but George had read someplace that Belial could only be resurrected by ritual sacrifice. We decided without any concrete evidence that the Black Brotherhood were probably responsible for all the killings in the Haight-Ashbury and Outer Mission.”
“And still you didn’t tell the police?”
“No.”
“So what did you do?”
Wilbert took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache. “George and me decided that somebody had to do something drastic. According to the Dead Sea Scrolls, Belial feeds first on your mind and then on your flesh; and he’s a voracious eater. Imagine a Great White shark as a land creature; as a man, almost; and then imagine that man let loose in a city like San Francisco. They talk about killing machines: Belial is the ultimate killing machine. He lives to kill. He has an insatiable greed for flesh and blood and human experience. He has no humanity himself, but he’s ravenous for our humanity. He wants to be king. If he can’t rule in heaven, then he’s determined that he’s going to rule on earth.”
Larry said, “You’re taking me too far, too fast. I believe what I’ve seen tonight. I believe in the other side. But I can’t say that I believe this. Belial, the fallen angel, the Master of Lies? Come on, Wilbert, let’s get serious here.”
But Wilbert wouldn’t be moved. “Larry,” he said, “I believed it back in ’67 and I believe it now. The Black Brotherhood came to San Francisco with the specific intention of resurrecting Belial.”
“But what was Belial the fallen Old Testament angel doing in San Francisco in the first place?” Larry retorted.
“I don’t know. I can’t even begin to answer that. But George and me thought that he was; and I still think that he was; and judging from what’s been happening here lately, I’d stake my life on the fact that he still is.”
“What did you do about it, Wilbert?” coaxed Larry, in the voice that he always used for suspects whom he knew would confess, so long as they were allowed to do it with dignity. College professors who had strangled their nagging wives. Frustrated executives who had shot their bosses. Beaten women, abused children, vigilantes, eccentrics.
“It was George. He burned them.”
“George burned them?”
“That’s right. We discussed it first, then we went ahead and did it. George was telekinetic. You know, he could make pieces of paper fly around, and move paperclips from across the room, and once I saw him turn eight
successive pages of Webster’s Dictionary, just by using his mind. The thing that he found easiest was starting fires. All he had to do was think about that hot-spot you get when you use a magnifying-glass to concentrate the sun’s rays… and bingo! He’d start a fire.
Larry thought about Frankie and Mikey, taking their magnifying glass to Kirby Cove. Wilbert could see that he had momentarily lost his attention, so he leaned forward with the Jack Daniel’s bottle, and asked, “Drink?”
“No… no, thanks. Just tell me what you did.”
Wilbert thought for a moment, then, flatly, he said, “The Brotherhood owned a big black Delta-88. They used to ride around in it together, but very seldom did you see all of them in it at one time. George and I waited at the intersection of 16th and Mission for nine solid days, until one morning they pulled up right in front of us, all of them. I’d never seen George start fires before, but he placed one finger on his forehead and said, There came three angels out of the east. The one brought frost, the two brought fire. Out frost; in fire. In the name of God, amen.
“And do you know what happened? That car exploded, just as it was starting to move. Exploded, and burned out. It was in all the papers, on TV, too. But nobody ever found out that it was George who did it, and nobody could ever have proved it, either.”
Larry was very solemn. “I think I remember that happening. Didn’t they have some kind of safety inquiry? Ralph Nader came to San Francisco and examined the wreckage.”
“That’s right. But there wasn’t any question about how effective it was. The faces stopped, the killings stopped. George and me wiped out the Black Brotherhood single-handed.”
“But now they’re starting again,” said Larry.
“Yes,” agreed Wilbert, despondently.
“So you think the Black Brotherhood’s back?”
“Who knows? I don’t get involved with that stuff any more. I let rich women talk to their dead husbands. I let grieving widowers talk to their dead wives. I even arranged for Mrs. Chauncey Middleberg II to walk her dead poodle.”
Black Angel Page 19
