On the lower right-hand pane of the window he could distinctly see a face. Although it was no more than a breathed-on outline, there was no mistaking eyes and nose and slightly smiling mouth. The sun gilded it for a moment and then it began to fade, but Larry was convinced of one thing: it had been the same face that kept appearing on his own hand, the face that Tara Gordon had identified as being that of Lieutenant Sam Roberts, the Regulator, the Hound.
He glanced at Houston Brough, “Did you see that?” he asked him, but Houston Brough simply shrugged, as if he couldn’t understand what he was talking about. Larry turned back to Edna-Mae, and to the nurse, who was looking unsteady on her feet now, as if she were about to collapse.
“Edna-Mae you have to let that girl go,” said Larry.
“Of course,” said Edna-Mae, in a voice that was unexpectedly thick and coarse. “But not before she’s nursed me back to health.”
“Let her go now, Edna-Mae!”
But Edna-Mae suddenly stretched open her mouth and roared at him, a terrifying baleful roar that made him take two or three steps backward and raise his gun.
“It is almost time for me to feed!” she bellowed. Her blind eyes bulged with fury and greed.
Dazzling white light abruptly burst out of her eyes and ears, turning her head into a human Hallowe’en pumpkin. The blinding light of heaven, or the blinding light of hell. She opened her mouth in a hideous grin, and light streamed out of that, too, silhouetting her teeth. The nurse screamed, and tried to wrestle herself free. The curved piece of glass fell from Edna-Mae’s hand, tumbled over and over, smashed on the floor.
Both Larry and Houston raised their guns, but Edna-Mae turned in the air like an underwater swimmer, and wrapped her bony legs tightly around the nurse’s waist, so tight that neither of them could get a clear shot.
“Pull her off!” Larry yelled at Houston, and Houston vaulted the bed and tried to snatch at Edna-Mae’s back. But Edna-Mae thrust her bony hands into the nurse’s eye-sockets and screamed, “If you lay one finger on me, you whelp, I’ll throw her eyes at you!”
Houston shouted back, “Fuck you!” but Larry said, “Houston! Houston, back off!”
For a moment, the nurse and Edna-Mae were involved in an awful parody of a loving embrace. The girl stood rigidly upright, shivering as if her fingers were locked into an electric socket. Edna-Mae clung around her like an ageing and shriveled monkey clinging to a tree, all claws and bony fingers. The light from her eyes was intense, and illuminated the girl’s red hair like an angelic halo. Edna-Mae took hold of the nurse’s head and pushed it back, as far as it would go, until she was staring the girl directly in the face, almost nose-to-nose.
Larry lifted his gun again, and took aim at Edna-Mae’s head. But Edna-Mae turned to him and gave him a grin that almost blinded him, and said, “Fool! She and I are one now! If I die, she dies!”
Larry thought: do it. The girl’s going to die anyway. But nobody back at headquarters would believe him. Reluctantly, fearfully, he lowered the gun and stepped back.
“Lieutenant?” asked Houston, confused.
“Just keep away,” Larry warned him.
“What’s she doing?” asked Fay Kuhn, in a stage-whisper.
Slowly, with a fatty crackling noise, Edna-Mae stretched wide the nurse’s mouth. Then she stretched her own mouth as wide as she could, and lowered it so that it was no more than four inches over the nurse’s mouth.
For almost half a minute, nothing happened. But then the girl’s trembling grew stronger and wilder and more convulsive. Her fingers splayed and stiffened, and she rose up on to her toes, as if she were trying to lift herself into the air by sheer willpower, as if she were trying to rise to meet the wide-open mouth of the desiccated hag who clung to her shoulders.
Or as if she were trying to prevent her whole youthful existence being dragged out of her.
“Larry?” asked Houston. “What the hell do we do?”
But it was already too late. Out of the girl’s outstretched lips appeared a soft glistening shape, pinkish-gray, smeared with blood and mucus. At first Larry could still hope that it was nothing more than her tongue. But he had seen his mother come face-to-face with the same blinding light and he knew what was going to happen; and that there was nothing he could do or say to stop it.
It was her life, coming out of her mouth.
It came trembling upward, the very first day of her existence, and Edna-Mae reached out with a long curving tongue to welcome it. The moment of the nurse’s birth rose silently, silently, shining with light and unformed flesh and mucus, and Edna-Mae coaxed it into the dazzling hollow of her mouth.
None of the watchers said anything, nor moved. They stared in horrified fascination as the nurse’s existence slid upward, out of her mouth, faster and faster, and vanished into Edna-Mae’s insatiable maw. Light, color, music, tangles of flesh, faces, fingers. It looked like a long slithering umbilicus, a rope of human experience and growth and happiness. As it rushed upward, Larry heard snatches of voices, snatches of music, like a cassette-tape being wound forward too fast.
“—Mommy’s girl then—what?—that’s the way, that’s the way—no! you mustn’t!—loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah—bicycle—saw him at school—six sevens are—love you love you—inside the—sound of breaking glass—love you—call me—aahhhhhhh!!!!!”
As the nurse’s soul was dragged out of her, a grotesquely logical thing happened.
Edna-Mae’s body began to swell.
Her belly first, rising beneath her hospital gown as if she were hugely pregnant. Then her breasts bulged, and her arms and legs began to enlarge, with a high, squeaking stretching noise that reminded Larry of an over-inflating balloon. Her paper gown tore open at the back, baring white buttocks that boiled with swelling knots of cellulite. Her thighs filled like muslin bags being filled with thick cottage cheese. She wasn’t taking on her previous shape. No cleavage; no curvy curves or elegant ankles. Even her head looked like nothing more than a misshapen bag, a receptacle for holding the life and soul of another human being.
She gripped the girl tighter and tighter, squeezing out the very last of her spirit. Fall days at med school, bicycle rides. love, quarrels, singing, and the painful acceptance that some of her patients had to die, no matter what she did for them.
The nurse shrank and dwindled and collapsed in the arms of the bulging human cuckoo who had stolen everything she was; and everything she might have been. Her clothes collapsed. A hand as thin as a turkey-claw disappeared inside a falling sleeve. Her curved paper cap fell, and rolled on the floor, backwards and forwards. Her red hair had turned to gray, and showered softly down inside her collar, on to a patchy, blistered skull.
Edna-Mae let her fall, and she fell with the saddest of rustling sounds. The room was utterly silent. Larry raised his gun in both hands but he knew that it could destroy any chance of recovery that the young nurse might have, if he killed or injured the woman who had taken her spirit.
“Larry?” whispered Houston. “Larry, do we shoot, or what?”
The light in Edna-Mae’s eyes flickered and dimmed. The room suddenly seemed very much darker, as if a storm were brewing.
She was huge, Edna-Mae; threateningly huge, and her body audibly wallowed beneath the shredded remnants of her paper gown. Across her stomach, a long python-like bulge rolled and turned and then swallowed itself back into her abdomen. Her eyes were completely bloodshot, and they quivered in her face the dark crimson patches of chicken embryos quivering in eggwhite.
“Almost time to feed,” she said, her mouth sticky with mucus.
She took a heavy step forward, then another. The thick python-like bulge suddenly ran over one of her shoulders, and down her back. She hesitated, coughing, her head turning from side to side as if she couldn’t decide what to do next.
“Almost time to—”
Larry held up his gun in front of her face.
“Far enough,” he told her.
She stared at hi
m with those blood-clot eyes. “Far enough?” she asked him. “Is that what you said?”
Gradually, creaking with fat, she started to laugh. The laughs made her shapeless breasts heave, and her stomach ripple, and all the time that terrible snakelike shape poured from one side of her body to the other, as if it were frantic to escape from inside her skin.
She tore at the few fragments of paper which were still tied around her neck. Then she dragged one of the sheets off the bed, and clumsily wrapped it around herself, right over her head, around and around her body, so that she took on the appearance of a huge white nightmarish nun.
“You cannot stop me now,” she smiled at Larry. “Nothing you can do can stop me now.”
As she smiled, the inside of her lower lip brimmed with blood-swirled mucus, and overflowed into a long viscous string, which swung from side to side as she took yet another step forward, and then another.
“That’s it, Edna-Mae,” said Larry. “One more step and I shoot.”
“Well, you poor little cockroach, you know what the consequences of that will be.”
At that moment, somebody tapped Larry on the left shoulder, and he jumped with shock.
“For Christ’s sake—”
“Sorry, lieutenant. Officer Rickenbacker,” said a bull-necked man with a shaved head and rimless spectacles. He hefted a huge long-barreled Magnum.
“Just hold off,” Larry told him. “We have a special kind of problem here.”
Rickenbacker leaned sideways so that he could see past Larry’s shoulder into the room. He took one look at Edna-Mae and his mouth slowly opened and stayed open.
“See what I mean?” said Larry.
“That’s a special kind of problem, all right,” Rickenbacker agreed numbly, his eyes still wide. “What the hell’s eating her?”
“Just don’t shoot unless I say so,” Larry told him.
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”
Edna-Mae shuffled toward them, bandaged in her sheet, her breath rasping. All that Larry could see of her face was the bridge of her nose and those gelatinous eyes. She smelled strongly, too. She smelled of human insides. That sweet stuffy stench that living people exhale when bullets and knives have violently disregarded the sanctity of their all-concealing skin, and torn them open to the outside world. The nauseating richness of raw blood.
As Edna-Mae loomed nearer, the room appeared to grow darker. Maybe it was an illusion. But Larry could almost feel it. It was more of an aura than real darkness—more of a concentration of malevolent thought.
There was something extremely cold about it, something extremely cruel.
Edna-Mae reached Larry and Larry placed the flat of his hand against her. Underneath the sheet, he could feel her insides churning and rolling, and it took all of his nerve to keep his hand where it was. His left hand. His moving hand.
“That’s it, Edna-Mae. That’s as far as you go.”
“Christ almighty,” he heard one of the officers breathe, close behind him.
There was a split-second when Larry believed that he might actually have managed to stop her. She stayed quite still, and even the maelstrom inside her body seemed to calm down. Her breathing came low and thick, like the breathing of somebody with a heavy cold.
But then he looked up into her eyes and he was hit in the dead-center of his skull by a pain so hard and so cold that he dropped instantly on to his knees. He thought that she had actually smacked an axe into his head. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. He couldn’t think about anything except this devastating blow to his brain.
He didn’t even feel it when Edna-Mae shuffled past him, and out through the door, driving in front of her a crowd of nervously retreating police officers and medics.
But he did hear Houston Brough shouting, “Rickenbacker! Warn her, then fire!”
Rickenbacker bellowed, “Freeze! Do you hear me! Police officer! Freeze!”
Larry opened his mouth and yelled, “No!” but he wasn’t sure that any sound came out. He twisted himself around and. with Fay Kuhn’s help, lurched back on to his feet, just in time to see Rickenbacker fire the first shot.
There was a deafening bang inside the hospital corridor. The back of Edna-Mae’s bedsheet flapped and snapped as the bullet hit it. Larry heard a scream—but it wasn’t a scream from Edna-Mae. It was a scream from the stick-like body of the nurse, still lying sprawled on the floor.
“Jesus,” said Rickenbacker. “Hit her dead center and she’s still walking!”
Larry gasped, tried to say “No,” tried to make Rickenbacker understand him. Fay shrilled, “What? What is it?”
But then Rickenbacker lifted his Magnum two-handed and fired again, and again, and again. The back of Edna-Mae’s bedsheet tore and flew into fragments. But inside room 9009, it was the nurse’s frail remains that were blasted apart by the full force of Rickenbacker’s bullets. Her ribcage exploded, half of her shoulder was blown away, her hairless skull burst like a jug dropped from a third-floor balcony.
Houston screamed, “Stop firing! Stop firing!” But the panic was too great and the noise was too loud. For a few seconds, as Rickenbacker emptied his gun, room 9009 was a staccato blizzard of skin and bone and ripped-apart uniform. The nurse’s arm suddenly flapped up as if it were desperately trying to fend the bullets off.
Larry turned back to the corridor in dread. It was his worst nightmare—the nightmare of killing an innocent civilian. The whole floor seemed suddenly silent. No phones, no bells, no loudspeakers. Only gunsmoke, and a high persistent singing in his ears. Only nine or ten police officers and paramedics staring in disbelief as the sheeted form of Edna-Mae retreated slowly out of their sight.
“Want me to get after her, sir?” asked a young Latino officer.
Larry shook his head. “Houston, you take over here. Edna-Mae is mine.”
“Six rounds, dead center,” said Rickenbacker. still in shock. “Six rounds and she kept on walking.”
“You’d better take a look at what you did hit,” Larry told him, nodding his head toward 9009.
A pale-faced paramedic was already taking a look at what was left of the nurse. “Gunshot wounds,” he mouthed, as Rickenbacker came into the room. “Wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.”
One insouciant black paramedic said, “That some kind of new invention, officer? A gun that shoots round corners?”
“The hell it is,” breathed Rickenbacker. He dropped on to his knees on the floor.
Larry set off after Edna-Mae. Fay Kuhn came hurrying behind him, her heels tapping sharply on the polished floor.
“What are you going to do?” she panted.
“What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to follow her.”
“How far do you think she’s going to get, wrapped up in a sheet?”
“How should I know? She got past me. She got past Officer Rickenbacker. Come on, Fay, that’s not Edna-Mae Lickerman inside of that sheet. That’s just a whole tangle of human stuff that’s being dragged alone like two hundred pounds of variety meats. And where do we think it’s all being dragged to?”
“I don’t know.” gasped Fay. “Where do we think it’s all being dragged to?”
“The one who wants to feed on human experience, that’s where. Belial or Beli Ya’al or Belly Y’all or whatever he calls himself. There she is, look! She’s taken the stairs!”
They turned the corner of the corridor just in time to see the door to the emergency stairwell closing. Larry wrenched the door open again, and he and Fay went through to the ninth-floor landing. Larry paused, and listened. Up the echoing concrete stairwell came the soft swishing of sheet on concrete, and a scuffling padding noise of bare feet.
“Come on,” he told Fay, and they quickly and quietly started to follow.
“Isn’t there any way of stopping her?” asked Fay.
“If six rounds from a Magnum can’t do it, then I don’t know what can. Besides—it’s more important to find out where she’s goi
ng.”
“You really think she’s going to take us to Belial?”
He stopped on the fifth-floor landing. “Fay—will you please stop asking me questions. I don’t know any more about this than you do.”
She stared at him. “That’s the second time you’ve called me Fay.”
She was about to say something else, but Larry lifted his hand and said, “Ssh!”
They could still hear the swishing of Edna-Mae’s sheet, and the ratlike scampering of her feet on the concrete stairs. Larry peered over the stair-rail and saw the edge of her sheet flickering past the third landing.
“Come on, let’s go! If I can’t follow an overweight woman in a bedsheet on Potrero Avenue, Dan Burroughs is going to have my hide for car-seat covers.”
They ran swiftly down the remaining flights of stairs. They reached the first floor just as the door to the hospital’s side entrance was easing itself shut.
They burst out into the street. Larry looked frantically one way, then the other. “Where the hell is she?” he demanded. “We can’t have lost her!”
“There!” said Fay. “Right across the street!”
Edna-Mae was standing on the opposite curb, her torn bedsheet shining in the streelight. Sister Edna-Mae of the Unholy Transformation.
“What’s she doing?” frowned Fay. “She’s just standing there!”
“Wait, wait, hold back,” said Larry. “I don’t know whether she can see us or not. She looked almost blind back up in her room.”
They edged back against the hospital wall, so that they were partly obscured from Edna-Mae’s view by a parked car. They waited, and still Edna-Mae remained where she was, patiently standing on the curb, her white sheet flapping. Several passers-by turned around to stare at her, but San Francisco is San Francisco, and she didn’t attract any exceptional attention.
Houston appeared from around the front of the hospital.
Black Angel Page 26
