Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  “Please, find a way. He has to know.”

  “But I’m dead and he’s alive. He won’t hear me, unless he’s like you.”

  “Try your best. Find some way to tell him what happened. Tell him it was Mandrax.”

  Roberta leaned over Wilbert as he bled to death and kissed his icy-cold lips with lips that were icy-cold. Wilbert didn’t want to rise from the table. He preferred to die where he was. Peace, perfect peace. And to die like this, in the arms of a girl who was already dead; that was more than he could have asked for. He had been familiar with the spirits since he was little. Now, as an adult, they were bearing him away.

  “You are kindness itself,” he told Roberta. Her hair waved in the water in which she had drowned, her eyes were pale green. Daddy daddy I can’t get out. Daddy I can’t get out.

  Wilbert died of loss of blood at 5:27 that afternoon. The little girl in the taffeta party dress stood watching him, as the blood wrinkled and congealed on the kitchen floor. She was barely visible to the naked eye. Some people wouldn’t have been able to see her at all. Others would have seen two dark smudges that were eyes, and the ghostly outline of a white party frock, and the kitchen units beyond.

  In fact, nobody saw her, because she faded, like a photograph exposed to sunlight, and then there was nothing in the kitchen but Wilbert’s body, pinned to the table by triangular knives, his thighs blackened by congealed blood. And then his wall-clock chimed half after five, and it was all over.

  *

  Larry walked into the Waxing Moon and he was surprised how high-tech it all was. He had been expecting one of those gloomy occult stores that you always see in movies, with ancient leather-bound books containing the hidden secret that everybody has been looking for since Reel One, and hideous demonic sculptures, and crucifixes, and paperback copies of the Cultes des Goules by the Comte d’Erlette, and De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn “and many other tomes hoary with age, having to do with thaumaturgy, demonology, cabalistics, and the like.”

  Instead, he found himself in a sparse, air-conditioned designer store, with brightly-illuminated display-cases of silver jewelry, and artistically arranged shelves of new occult books. The walls were lined in black felt; the floor black-carpeted; the railings up the stairs were chromium-plated and shiny. A hidden stereo played vaguely Indian music that Larry would have categorized as Ravi Shankar On His Day Off. In the far corner, a young girl in a pre-Raphaelite beret was sorting boxes of incense.

  He picked up a weighty silver bust of a devil’s head, on a polished onyx plinth. Almost at once, he was approached by a tall white-skinned woman with long brown perfectly cut hair. She was wearing a short black V-necked velvet dress, which exposed the globes of two white breasts, with a silver ankh jostling in between them; and black pantyhose; and stacked black shoes. She looked like Roger Corman’s idea of an Egyptian princess.

  “What you’re looking for, you won’t find here,” she announced. She had a hoarse, distinctive accent. Southern, but not lazy deep-down dirty Southern. More like Kansas City, Missourah.

  Larry carefully replaced the devil’s head on the polished glass shelf. “I’m looking for Tara Gordon,” he said.

  “And what else?”

  “Why should you think that I’m looking for anything else?”

  “Because anybody who’s looking for Tara Gordon isn’t just looking for Tara Gordon. They’re looking for help, or enlightenment, or any one of those million things that can’t be bought for money.”

  “Is that right?” Larry asked her. She had the most extraordinary eyes—hooded, slanted, with irises the color of Virginia dayflowers. Her breasts were so white that he could see the tracery of pale blue veins. He found her disturbing; almost intimidating.

  “You’re having trouble with your mother-in-law,” she said. “Maybe you’re looking for a fetish doll, to stick pins in.”

  Larry shook his head. “If I stuck pins in my mother-in-law, she wouldn’t feel a thing. She wears a girdle that makes a vest look like a paper sack.”

  “You’re a cop,” she said. “There’s been a weird crime, a very weird crime, and you think it’s something to do with black magic.”

  He stared at her.

  “Admit it,” she said. “You’re a cop.”

  He took out his badge, flopped it open. “All right. I’ll come clean. My name’s Foggia. I’m a cop. How did you know?”

  “Only cops call a bullet-proof vest nothing but a vest. Everybody else in the world calls it a bullet-proof vest. How do you do, Lieutenant Foggia. My name’s Tara Gordon.”

  Larry shook her hand, slowly. “You’re very acute,” he told her.

  “Not acute,” she corrected him. “Sensitive. I’m a sensitive.”

  He looked around. “I’m impressed with your store. I expected one of those dusty junkheaps they show you in the movies… you know, when Harry Erskine goes looking for the Manitou, that kind of thing.”

  “For goodness’ sake, lieutenant, the occult is big business these days. We sell more copies of the Necronomicon than we can stock. And most of our tail of newt and eye of bat is gone way ahead of the best-before date.”

  Larry said, “Is there someplace private we can talk?”

  Tara Gordon looked around. “I guess. Natasha! Would you mind the store for a while?”

  Without hesitation, she led Larry across the thick black carpet to a small office stacked with books and mail-order envelopes and catalogs. On the wall hung a large poster for the World Fantasy Convention 1988, and a photograph of Stephen King without his glasses. She cleared away a stack of horror magazines and offered Larry a black leather-and-chromium chair.

  “You were recommended by Wilbert Fraser,” said Larry.

  “I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted,” said Tara Gordon.

  Larry gave her a dry smile. “Wilbert said that you were highly au fait with the world beyond, and its practitioners.”

  “Very complimentary of Wilbert, for a change.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “He’s the biggest bitch in the business.”

  “That’s dangerous talk for this city.”

  Tara Gordon laughed. “It takes a bitch to know one.”

  She went to a small black shiny icebox at the back of the office and knelt down to open it. Larry found himself looking at the glossy black curve of her inside thigh, and the way that her white breast was pressed in a swelling crescent against her upraised knee. She produced a bottle of Polish buffalo-grass vodka and two chilled glasses. Without asking Larry if he wanted any, she poured them each a generous measure and said, “Prost!”

  Larry shrugged, and said, “Prost!” and swallowed. His head ached so much from yesterday’s drinking that he was glad of a hair of the dog.

  “I suppose this is something to do with the Fog City Satan,” Tara Gordon remarked, sitting in her office chair and ostentatiously crossing her long legs.

  “How did you guess?”

  “What else would bring a police lieutenant into a place like this?”

  Larry thought about it, and then said, “I guess you’re right. Yes, come to think of it, you’re right. I could use an analytical mind like yours on the squad.”

  “Well… it wasn’t entirely analysis,” said Tara Gordon. She raised her hand, her palm flat towards him, and circled it in the air, as if softly polishing a window so that she could see out of it. “You carried something in with you. Something strange. Something quite strong. Something very unpolicemanlike.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not quite sure. But your aura is quite disturbed. Actually, most people’s auras are quite disturbed these days, and policemen’s auras are usually more disturbed than most… but yours especially. It reminds me of something… something violent; something dark. That’s why I guessed you wanted to ask me about the Fog City Satan.”

  “Do you have any theories about it?” Larry asked her.

  “I’ve been following the news.
But then, who hasn’t?”

  “Listen,” Larry told her, “I’ve been going out on something of a limb with this one. I’ve been following up the occult side of the case as well as the more conventional aspects. That’s why I went to see Wilbert.”

  “And what did the lovely Wilbert have to say about it?”

  Larry swallowed more vodka. It was peculiarly aromatic, like drinking wet hay, but he had to admit that he liked it. “Wilbert came up with the theory that one of the Black Brotherhood might have survived; and is trying to stir up the same kind of trouble that they did in the ’60s.”

  Tara Gordon stared at him. “The Black Brotherhood?” she repeated.

  “You have heard of them?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of them. Everybody in this business has heard of them. But nobody goes around talking about them. Nobody even mentions their name.”

  “Really? What are they so scared of?”

  “Probably nothing, these days. Although if one of them had really managed to survive—well, that would be different.”

  “Have you heard any rumors? Seen anybody who sticks out of the crowd? This guy is physically gigantic, anything up to six-four, and built like a reinforced concrete outhouse. What’s more, Dogmeat Jones reckons he knows an artist who’s seen him, and his face and head may be badly burned.”

  Tara Gordon smiled, and shook her head. “I think I would have remembered anybody like that, don’t you?”

  Larry reached into his pocket and unfolded the engraving of Beli Ya’al that Dogmeat had given him. “Did you ever see this before?”

  Tara Gordon examined it closely, then nodded. “Yes, I have. It’s one of the illustrations from the Pan Demonium by Vadlek Nascu. In fact...”

  Sharply, she put down her vodka, opened the office door, and walked across the black-carpeted store to an are marked Reference Section. Larry stood in the open office doorway watching her as she leafed through a large leather-bound book. Eventually she came stalking back, carrying both book and engraving.

  “This engraving was tom out of my book!” she declared. “Look—the edges match perfectly! I’m furious! This book is worth more than six hundred dollars!”

  Larry examined the torn page and the damaged spine of the book. “Hm…”he said, handing them back.

  “That’s all you’re going to say? A two-hundred-year-old book has been vandalized and all you’re going to say is ‘hm’?”

  “Do you have any recollection of anybody taking this book out to read?”

  Tara Gordon angrily banged the book on to her desk. “I wish! I’d scalp him!”

  “If it’s the guy I think it is, you wouldn’t have to.”

  “I don’t remember anybody in particular,” said Tara Gordon. “Nobody like the man you mentioned. Any of our customers is welcome to come browse. Mind you—they’re certainly not welcome to come rip out pictures.”

  “Well… think about it over the next few days,” Larry suggested. “Sometimes it’s amazing what you can remember if you just give yourself some time.”

  Tara Gordon held the engraving of Beli Ya’al up between finger and thumb, as if it were soaked in something unpleasant. “Beli Ya’al,” she repeated. “Who on earth would want to steal an engraving of Beli Ya’al? That’s worse than stealing a picture of Hitler.”

  “It was probably used as reference to make a mask of Beli Ya’al,” Larry explained.

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “It is ominous. The guy wore the mask when he was carrying out most or all of his ritual killings.”

  “Well…”said Tara Gordon. “I wish I could help you, lieutenant, but I don’t really think that I can. I haven’t seen anybody fitting that description, and I certainly would have known if any of the Black Brotherhood had reared their ugly heads. I’ll keep my eyes peeled, but the Black Brotherhood were always very secretive, from what I hear, and they meted out pretty damned unpleasant punishments to people who betrayed them.”

  “So I gather,” said Larry. “I guess I’ll just have to keep on looking. Shall I give your regards to Wilbert?”

  “You can give him a limp-wristed wave, if you like. You’re not using him as your adviser or anything, are you?”

  “Any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Not really. But there are better sensitives than him.”

  “Like who?”

  “Like me, for example.”

  “Well, good. I’ll remember that, if I have urgent need of a better sensitive. Right now, I could use some solid, non-supernatural clues.”

  He finished the last of his vodka, shivered with the coldness of it, and stood up. “It’s been a pleasure,” said Tara Gordon. “If you weren’t a cop and you weren’t married and you were five years younger and you weren’t Italian and your eyes were a different color and you didn’t have that habit of rubbing the side of your neck whenever you ask a difficult question, I could quite like you.”

  She opened the office door again, and Larry laid his hand on her shoulder to usher her through. Instantly, she cried out, “Ah!” and jumped away from him. A wisp of grayish smoke rose from her black velvet dress, and a small patch of bare skin was reddened, as if she had burned it.

  She stared at Larry in horror. “My dress! Jesus! You’ve burned my dress!”

  Larry helplessly held out his hand. “I don’t even know what—”

  At once, Tara Gordon took hold of his wrist, opened his fingers, and stared into his palm. She touched it lightly here and there with her fingertip, and each time she did so, there was a tiny crack of static discharge, and a small wisp of smoke.

  “Your hand—” she said. “I thought I sensed something like this.”

  Larry took it away, almost primly and closed his fingers. “Wilbert said it was called the moving hand. It’s something to do with the Black Brotherhood and Beli Ya’al. I don’t know how I got it, but Wilbert’s going to try to exorcize it for me. I tried scrubbing it, nothing happened.”

  “You’ve had a face on it, too?”

  Larry nodded.

  “And have you heard about people in the city seeing faces in strange places?”

  He nodded again.

  Tara Gordon looked closely into his eyes. “You’re a believer, aren’t you?”

  “A believer?” said Larry, sardonically. “I can’t help it. I’ve seen too much evidence not to be. I’ve seen my own mother shrunk down to the size of a child. I’ve seen an overcoat walking on its own and a drowned girl who could talk and a parrot with my own damned head on it.”

  Tara Gordon reached up and brushed Larry’s hair back from his forehead, an extraordinarily intimate gesture from somebody he had only just met. It was as if she were accepting him, and agreeing to take care of him.

  “You’re a rare man, lieutenant. When it comes to the occult, most people refuse to accept the evidence of their own eyes.”

  She turned back to her desk and picked up the leather-bound book. “You ought to read the chapters on Beli Ya’al. He was the first angel to be thrown down from heaven because he lied so much. Even when God gave him an opportunity to admit to his sins, he lied.”

  Larry said, “Wilbert thinks that Beli Ya’al may be here in San Francisco. He doesn’t know why, or how. But it’s looking more and more likely that the Black Brotherhood are back, and that they’re trying to resurrect him, wherever he is.”

  Tara Gordon tentatively touched Larry’s hand again. “If you must know, the whole occult community has been afraid of something like that for months—ever since the first of the ritual killings. The faces are the giveaway. According to this book, and according to legend, Beli Ya’al uses the images of people on whose lives he has fed to search for yet more lives to feed on. He’s a trencherman of human lives. He likes long lives—lives with plenty of passion and variety and sex and violence.

  “The images of these people can appear almost anywhere. In mirrors, on shiny tables—any one of those surfaces which normally act as windows for transient spir
its. But of course the most potent window for the spirit is the palm of the hand. Has it ever occurred to you why people press the palms of their hands together when they pray? It comes from the days when they were afraid that their spirits would be so attracted by the nearness of God, that they would leave their bodies through the palms of their hands, and they would die.”

  Larry said, “I filmed it.”

  Tara Gordon put down her glass. “I’m sorry?”

  “Last night… I filmed the image in my hand, with my video camera.”

  “You filmed it?” she asked, her eyes bright. “Did it register?”

  “Sure. I’ve only looked at it briefly. I was taking the cassette down to the Hall of Justice to have our technical experts go over it.”

  “Can we see it now? I have a video-recorder in the back of the store.”

  “Do you think it could help?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but it’s possible.”

  Larry went out to the car and took the video-cassette out of the glovebox. The evening was warm and golden, one of those evenings when San Francisco is bathed in marmalades and yellows and terracottas, and Larry could genuinely feel that it was the city at the end of the rainbow. He was locking his car when he was sure that he heard somebody faintly whisper, “Larry,” close to his ear. There was something else too—the slightest of distortions in the air, and a feeling that the back of his hand had been lightly scratched by the softest of netting.

  He hesitated on the sidewalk, until a large woman in a maroon fringed Mama Cass-style dress said, “Pardon me, friend, a body wants to get through here,” and he had to step out of the way.

  Tara Gordon had already switched on the television when he returned to the store. He handed her the cassette, and she pressed play on her remote control. The first image that came into view was Frankie and Mikey, pulling faces at each other, and giggling. They must have appropriated the video-camera when Larry was out.

  “Pretty scary, hunh?” Tara Gordon remarked.

  “My boys,” said Larry, in pride and embarrassment. “That’s Frankie with his eyes crossed; that’s Mikey with his fingers up his nose.”