Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  “Shouldn’t take long.”

  They drove along Berry Street and crossed the basin at 3rd Street. Although the morning had been golden, especially on the hilltops, the fog was beginning to billow into the Bay through the Golden Gate, huge white silent banks of it, like prairie schooners carved out of cloud. By the time they reached the approaches to Pier 48, they were already enveloped in a chilly haze, and the surrounding warehouses and offices and quays had all lost their definition.

  The spice warehouse wasn’t difficult to locate. It was a three-storey building of weathered red brick, with a row of broken windows along the upper floor, and a rusty iron fire-escape slanting down one side. Larry could faintly read the lettering EAST INDIES & PACIFIC SPICE C°. He drew the car up against the curb across the debris-strewn street, and climbed out.

  “I would almost pay you to discover what we’re doing here, mon ami,” said Dogmeat, heaving himself out of the passenger-seat. “Quel miserable place.”

  Larry reached back underneath his seat and took out the extra .38 he always carried in the car with him. He had once seen a detective forced to surrender the gun from his shoulder-holster, and then shot at point-blank range while he sat like a dummy in the driving-seat of his car. If the same thing ever happened to him, he probably wouldn’t have time to reach for his second gun, but it was better to have half a chance than no chance at all.

  He tucked the gun into the back of his pants as they strolled across the foggy street. Dogmeat was walking loose-limbed with drink and kicking an empty Cesar can. “Do you want to keep it down a little?” asked Larry. “We’re supposed to be cornering a suspect here.”

  “A suspect?” asked Dogmeat, suspiciously. “What kind of suspect?”

  “A murder suspect, of course. I’m in homicide, remember, not in traffic.”

  “Shit,” said Dogmeat, and U-turned, and started walking back the way he had come.

  “Dogmeat, will you get back here?”

  “No no no no no. With murderers I do not tangle. Au revoir, hasta la vista, and bon appetit, I’m out of here.”

  “Fifty,” called Larry. Dogmeat kept on walking.

  “A hundred.” Dogmeat U-turned again and rejoined him.

  “I must be drunk,” he suggested. “I don’t usually accompany Italians on murder busts for less than the union mimi—minimum.”

  Larry grasped his arm and frogmarched him forward. “I don’t care if you’re drunk, as long as you can see. I want you to identify this guy before I blow his head off.” Dogmeat tried to focus on him. “Did I écoute that correctly? You’re going to blow his head off?”

  “That’s right,” said Larry, grimly. “You say, ‘that’s him’, and I’ll shoot. One, two, just like that. ‘That’s him!’—blamm!”

  Dogmeat seemed to like the sound of that. “That’s him, blamm! That’s him, blamm! Okay, I can live with that. Who is this guy anyway?” He stopped abruptly and stared at Larry in horror. “It must be somebody I know! Otherwise you wouldn’t ask me to identify him! I mean, if I didn’t know him, what would be the point?”

  “Come on.” Larry urged him, and prodded him up to the corner of the warehouse. He pressed his back to the brick wall, and waited, and listened.

  “Who is it?” hissed Dogmeat.

  “You’ll know him when you see him.”

  “How can I know him when I see him if I don’t know who he is?”

  “You’ll know, take my word for it.”

  They walked softly all the way around the outside of the warehouse, their feet crunching in slag and broken concrete and rusty springs and heaps of shattered glass. The main warehouse was windowless and locked; and from the condition of the bolts and padlocks, it didn’t look as if anybody had opened it for twenty years. Larry stopped and listened again, but all he could hear was that strange swallowing roar of traffic crossing the Oakland Bay Bridge, and the distant clanging of the Union Square cablecars. The fog was rolling in thick now, so thick that he could scarcely distinguish the outline of his car across the street.

  “I think I’d like to go home now,” Dogmeat announced.

  “Come on, he may be up here,” Larry coaxed him. He pushed Dogmeat toward the fire-escape, and together they cautiously climbed up it, the soles of their shoes crunching on the rusted treads. The whole structure felt highly unsafe, and rust showered down from the upper level as they reached halfway. Below them, they could see China Basin, almost completely fogbound now, and the rooftops of surrounding houses and sheds and warehouses. A damp wind blew from the Bay.

  Above them, they could see a flaking brown-painted doorway with cardboard pushed into the broken windows. And Larry saw something else. Down below, parked between two derelict corrugated-iron sheds, half-concealed in weeds and garbage, a black van, of the same type that had rescued Edna-Mae from Potrero Street.

  It was possible that it was a coincidence. San Francisco was teeming with black vans. But here—at the place where Mandrax was supposed to be hiding himself?

  Larry climbed the last few steps of the fire-escape and knocked at the door. “Don’t forget,” he told Dogmeat. ‘“That’s him!’— blamm!”

  “Okay, okay, I’ve got it,” Dogmeat assured him.

  They waited and waited, listening to the wind waffling through the fire-escape. Larry kept his gun behind his back, but he was tensed up to swing it around, lift it, and fire. No hesitation. No mistakes.

  He knew that what he was doing was both illegal and morally wrong. Even the most sadistic of killers was entitled to a trial. He knew that he would lose his job and probably spend some time in the penitentiary, too. But the Fog City Satan could never be brought successfully to trial. No jury could be expected to convict on supernatural evidence. No judge would even admit it. It was up to him to carry out the sentence, and pray to God and the Holy Virgin to forgive him for taking the law into his own hands.

  But he was calm, and he was content. Even if the supernatural side of this investigation were really nothing more than illusions, delusions and hallucinations, he would still be executing a man who had murdered six families with a degree of cruelty that beggared belief. If the supernatural side really did exist, he could also be preventing the resurrection of one of the most hideous and voracious evils that America had ever known.

  The greatest psychic disturbance in America since the Salem Witch Trials. He waited, tensely, and shivered. There was no reply from inside the warehouse; only the faint sound of something falling, and clanging. He knocked again, and this time he called out, “Anybody home?”

  No reply. He knocked again and again, but still no reply. Dogmeat, further down the fire-escape, shrugged in resignation. “Blamm! yesterday, blamm! tomorrow, but never blamm! today,” he remarked.

  “Yeah… maybe you’re right,” Larry admitted. His right arm was tensed so tightly behind his back that he had developed a cramp. He stood up straight, and shoved his gun back inside his belt again, and relaxed. “We’ll try coming back later, when it’s dark.”

  “Are you out of your arbre?” Dogmeat demanded. “This isn’t the kind of place to go wandering around at night tout seule.”

  “I won’t be tout seule. I’ll have you with me.”

  He was just about to start back down the stairs when he saw a large gray bird wheeling around the Basin; and then start fluttering toward the warehouse. He stopped, and shielded his eyes with his hand, squinting against the fog. The bird flew low overhead, and circled around the warehouse.

  “Mussolini,” Larry breathed. “That’s Mussolini! Now I know that I’m right!”

  Dogmeat swiveled his head around to follow the parrot’s progress. “That’s a pretty homely-looking seagull,” he commented.

  “It’s a parrot, you cretin,” said Larry. “It used to belong to my mother.”

  Mussolini fluttered past him and perched on the ridge of the warehouse roof. To Larry’s surprise, he looked normal again. No lump on the side of his head; no dark-brown human eye. Maybe Larry had
dreamed that Mussolini had taken his ectoplasm. Maybe he hadn’t dreamed it, and Mussolini had somehow lost it. Or had it been taken away from him.

  Larry shivered, watching Mussolini clawing the roof-tiles.

  “They’re not bad luck, are they, parrots?” asked Dogmeat.

  “This one is,” said Larry.

  “Maybe it’s time we were someplace else, then,” Dogmeat suggested.

  Larry was about to reply when the warehouse door was pushed open, without any warning. It knocked painfully against his arm and almost unbalanced him.

  Like an apparition in a stage magic show, a huge man in a black sweatshirt and black leather jeans stepped out on to the fire escape and confronted them.

  Dogmeat stared, his mouth wide open.

  He didn’t say, “That’s him!” He didn’t say anything at all. He simply retreated step by step down the fire escape, never once taking his eyes away from the man in the doorway, not until he reached the landing. Once he had reached the lower flight, he pelted down the fire-escape as fast as he could, missing three and four steps at a time. Larry could hear him running away across the street, the knobbly hobbling sound of his worn-down cowboy boots.

  Larry raised his eyes. He swallowed, but his throat was completely dry. With an extraordinary sense of detachment, he recognized in his own reactions the symptoms of intense fear. Speeding heartbeat, quickened breathing, and that dreadful overwhelming surge of adrenaline. This was it. He had been caught at a critical disadvantage by the bloodiest single killer that San Francisco had ever known.

  The man stood at least five inches taller than Larry. He was deep-chested, tense, smelling strongly of sweat and athletic rub and something like hay or herbs.

  Larry had expected his face to be terribly burned. What had Dogmeat said? Worse than Freddie. But instead he was met by a smooth, Slavic-looking face, with deep-set eyes, and a short straight nose, and a lipless slit of a mouth. Around his neck the man wore a silver chain, with a silver skull on it, with diamonds for eyes. His black-and-silver hair was brushed straight back from his forehead.

  But it wasn’t his looks that made him so frightening. It was his aura. Tara Gordon had talked to Larry about auras, and Larry hadn’t really understood. But he did now. This man had a tangible coldness about him, and a sense of condensed evil. It was almost as if the air actually fumed when it touched his skin or his clothes.

  Worse than that, Larry saw in his eyes that look he always dreaded. They were the eyes of a man who didn’t care whether he lived or died.

  In the end, you can never win against anyone who doesn’t care whether they live or die.

  There was a split-second in which Larry thought that he could possibly raise his gun and fire. But the risks were critical. The man was so close that he could have easily seized Larry’s wrist, and pushed him over the railing of the fire-escape. It was forty feet straight down, on to concrete and rusted angle-iron and broken glass.

  Apart from that, Dogmeat had fled without saying a word, which had deprived him of his only safeguard against shooting the wrong man. He could argue that this man probably was Mandrax, since Dogmeat had looked so horrified. But a look of horror wasn’t positive identification, and Dogmeat regularly ran away from a whole selection of people, from black power activists to Chileno crack-runners—anybody on whom he had grassed, which meant at least a third of San Francisco. Occasionally he even ran away from Larry.

  Supposing this man wasn’t Mandrax? After all, his face didn’t appear to be burned.

  The man stood looking at Larry and Larry looked back at the man. Out of the corner of his eye, Larry could still see Mussolini, awkwardly perched on the roof; but then a foghorn groaned, out in the Bay, and Mussolini lazily lifted himself back up into the fog.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the man said, with unexpected gentleness. His accent was indeterminate, although it had slight Southern vowel-sounds.

  Larry awkwardly wedged his gun back down into his belt, and covered it with his coat. “Expecting me?” he said. He wished his voice didn’t sound so strangled.

  “For sure. Why don’t you come along in?”

  Larry glanced quickly back down the fire-escape. If he moved now, he could be halfway down before the man had a chance to react. Yet he didn’t move. He couldn’t. The man opened the door a little wider, and Larry squeezed past him. For a split second, the man’s face was only a few inches from his, and they stared into each other’s eyes, hunter and hunted, victim and killer. But which was which?

  At one time, the top floor must have housed the spice company’s offices, because it was divided into dark and separate rooms. There was an overwhelming smell of damp and decaying brick, and that same smell that he had noticed on the man’s body… the smell of long-faded spices like cinnamon and chili and cloves.

  “Please—go ahead,” the man told him, and Larry walked hesitantly along the shadowy corridor until he saw a light flickering at one of the office doors. His feet scrunched on fallen plaster and broken glass, and he could hear rats running throughout the building, as soft and persistent as a heavy rain-shower.

  Eventually they reached the last office. It was the largest, with a glass-paneled door on which Larry could distinguish the scratched gilt lettering “…AIRMAN.”

  The room had been stocked up as a hideout. There were sacks of spices in one corner, which the man obviously used as a bed. In the opposite corner stood stacks of canned food, hot dogs and tomato soup and celery, and stacks of canned beer. Closer to the center of the room, a portable Sony television stood on an upended orange-box, next to pressure-lamp. It was all surprisingly tacky for a killer from hell. But pride of place in the whole room was given to an old hat-stand, on which had been placed a black horned mask, glossy and huge, with dull velvety eyes, like a monstrous insect, or a creature from hell, or Beli Ya’al himself, the first fallen angel, the master of lies.

  Larry walked up to the mask and stared at it, and knew that he was looking at the Fog City Satan.

  “You’re a good detective, you know that?” the man told Larry. “Nobody else has even come close.”

  “You’re Mandrax, aren’t you?” asked Larry.

  “That’s right. Lieutenant Foggia, sir—Mandrax. You have solved your case. The puzzle fits, last piece clicks. It must be a very satisfying feeling, solving a crime. Especially such a horrifying crime. They didn’t like this one at all, did they. the people of San Francisco? It made them shiver! Well, hardly surprising. People’s legs cut off, people’s hands cut off! People nailed to the floor! It must give you quite a sense of triumph, solving a crime like that.”

  Larry turned around and the expression on Mandrax’s face made him shiver in suppressed panic. This wasn’t just criminal gloating, or the haphazard ramblings of a psychopath. He could tell from Mandrax’s face that he was rational, serious, devoted to what he was doing, and pleased with himself.

  “I didn’t come here to arrest you, if that’s what you think,” said Larry.

  “Of course not, lieutenant, I know that. Belial didn’t choose me for nothing. But I admire your work, I genuinely do. Let me tell you something, Larry—you don’t mind if I call you Larry, do you? All the newspapers do, especially that Fay Kuhn in the Examiner. No doubt she’d like to call you some other names, too.”

  Larry felt: dread. He narrowed his eyes. “What do you know about Fay Kuhn?”

  “What don’t I know about anything, Larry? I’m the original inescapable man of the world.” He tapped his forehead. “Or perhaps you could call me the man of both worlds, the upper world and the under world. It’s all up here, Larry. The good and the evil. The pure and the irrevocably depraved. But who am I to boast? You did a fine job. didn’t you, Larry? You were the only detective who was prepared to believe that this case was supernatural, weren’t you? I watched every news bulletin; I read every newspaper; and I could tell that you were coming closer. What a professional you are. Larry! You looked at it from our side, instead of your own.
And you believed, didn’t you Larry? A true believer, a man of the spirit as well as the body. Just like me.”

  He shuffled a few paces closer, and Larry found himself involuntarily shuffling an equal number of paces back. God—this man was living death. His coldness and his terrible self-satisfaction made Larry breathless—as if he were starved of oxygen.

  “Can I ask you a question?” said Larry.

  Mandrax smiled. “You can ask me anything you like. I think you’ve earned it.”

  “Okay. Does Belial really exist?”

  The smile faded. The eyes darkened. “Are you mocking me, Larry?”

  “I’m not mocking you. I just want to know.”

  The smile returned. “Sure. Sure you do. I forget sometimes that a hundred and thirty extra years can make a whole lot of difference. You get more knowledgeable, know what I mean? And you kind of expect it in others. I promise you, Larry—Belial really exists.”

  He paused, and rubbed his hands together fastidiously, and then he said, “As a matter of fact. I’ll do better than promise you that Belial really exists. I’ll show you that Belial exists. You want your teeth to fly out in sheer fear? You want your spine to seize up in total terror? I’ll show you, lieutenant. I’ll show you. And if you don’t believe after you’ve seen Belial for yourself, then I’ll hold out my hands to you and let you commit me to the madhouse.”

  Larry cautiously paced around the room. The pressure-lamp threw a huge, distorted shadow of the horned mask on the wall, so that it looked almost as if it were alive. Larry thought of the engraving of Beli Ya’al on which this mask had been modeled, and felt a surge of sudden madness at the thought of meeting a beast which actually looked like this for real.

  He stopped pacing, and looked at Mandrax in a chopped-up confusion of fear, and revulsion, and burning curiosity. He still had his gun, of course—and Mandrax could never reach him if he drew it now. One good clean shot should do it. Blamm! But Mandrax had said the one thing that made it impossible now for Larry to shoot him.