ANGEL ™: avatar

by John Passarella

  “I was successful.”

  Elliot edged past the demon, who still looked a lot like the national morning show news anchor even if his—oh, what the hell, her—hands were becoming spatulate. “Really? I mean, this won’t go on forever, will it?”

  “No, Elliot,” the demon said. “When the cycle is complete, the ritual is over. I am nearing the end. My powers are returning in full. Once more I can sense any displeasure they have with my appearance and alter it at will. When I walk among them now, I sense their desires. They look at me and see what they want to see. I become what they want me to be, and so they become my natural prey again, even though I only have substance borrowed from you. Just imagine my powers when they are undiluted, when I am re-spawned.”

  “You know, I’m still a little vague on the ‘borrowing of substance’ aspect to all this.”

  “Simply this. Before we made our pact, our bond, I was but a detached psyche, raging thoughts without form. Now, when I need to manifest on this plane,” the demon said, holding up arms that had become clay-like and dull, “I draw upon your physicality, literally borrowing substance from you.”

  “That’s when I get the headaches?” Elliot asked. “And nausea?”

  The demon nodded. “The temporary, though partial, loss of some of your essence creates a strain on your mortal body. And so, when I vanish, relinquishing your borrowed substance, you experience relief.”

  Elliot glanced down at his fingers, the ones missing fingernails. “And no permanent . . . side effects?”

  “Any discomfort or . . . iregularities you suffer will not be permanent.”

  “Okay. So you borrow substance from me, then give it back when you fade out. But what happens to the bodies you consume, absorb, whatever?”

  “With each absorption, my magical power grows more potent and I am able to retain physical form for longer periods. Once the ritual cycle is complete, I will attain new physical form on your plane. I’ll have my own body, nothing borrowed—a permanent and powerful body even more powerful than my previous one.”

  “Okay, that’s what happens when we finish the cycle. In the meantime, where do you keep all the substance you’ve absorbed? In a mystical meat locker somewhere?”

  “The mechanism of the cycle is beyond your ken, Elliot. Just know that the substance acquired from my victims is held within the bonds of my magic, preserved until the cycle reaches . . . what is the human expression? Critical mass.”

  An unaccustomed feeling of regret overcame Elliot. “That’s why you need so many victims?”

  “Humans are weak, mortal creatures. Is it any wonder I require the substance of many of your kind to construct a new vessel for myself? All twelve signs are required to complete the ritual cycle.”

  It would have been pointless to turn back, Elliot realized. The demon stared at him and Elliot wondered, not for the first time, if it could read his thoughts or simply sense his doubt.

  “To prove the ceremony is progressing, Elliot,” the demon said, “I will sense the person you desire and assume that form.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Elliot said, then thought he might have offended the demon. “Besides, what’s the point? I know it’s a sham. So thanks, but no thanks. I’ll wait for the real thing.”

  More disgusting were the demon’s sagging features, like a wax sculpture left too close to an open flame. Its eyeballs dripped like gray sludge down its cheeks, and the nose was collapsing into sagging, distorted lips. Usually by the time the demon returned to Elliot’s apartment it had already returned to its pale, waxy state, a featureless man-shaped thing that shambled more than walked, sparing Elliot the stomach-turning dissolution from human to horror. Fortunately, the demon said, “I will rest now.”

  Beauty rest. That was how Elliot thought of it. After an absorption the demon had to magically process the life matter and life force of his latest victim. Each time he returned, it was with greater physical definition. Before the first few kills, the waxy features constantly ran, lips forming, melting, and re-forming. Now it could, at least, reach a stasis point, unchanging if bland. Not a real body of its own, yet better control of the substance he borrowed from Elliot. “Pleasant dreams, big guy,” Elliot said as he returned to his computer.

  Wind swirled in the room, scattering papers on the computer desk. The demon’s form contracted, withering away with the speed of time-lapse photography until finally it winked out of existence with a loud pop.

  Elliot felt his headache begin to ease. But his room smelled of ozone and something sour, a stench he’d come to associate with the demon. Just gut it out a little while longer, he told himself. Then you’ll have everything you ever wanted. Everything the demon promised.

  Angel arrived at 2707 Flair Avenue in West Hollywood less than thirty minutes after the police and less than fifteen minutes after Detective Kate Lockley of the LAPD. Most nights this would have been a quiet, subdued residential neighborhood. Not tonight. Angel counted three patrol cars with squawking radios, lights strobing the night in alternating swaths of red and blue. An ambulance had pulled into the driveway, and a coroner’s station wagon was currently double-parked. A crime scene van had found a parking space on the opposite side of the street. In front of the crime scene van was a large news van with the mast of its microwave dish fully extended. Camera light in her face, a reporter looked as if she was ready to go live with a report.

  While a small crowd had gathered in the street, other residents stood expectantly by their front doors. Angel parked his convertible a discreet distance from the gathering of official vehicles.

  A small shingle attached to an old-fashioned streetlamp proclaimed 2707 Flair as the Coast View Apartments. If someone climbed to the roof of the three-story structure on a clear day, there was an outside chance that he might glimpse the coastline. Technically not false advertising. Still . . .

  As Angel turned up the walkway, he saw Kate talking to two paramedics, one an intense looking young black woman, the other a lanky white man who looked as if he’d been on the job a few too many years. Angel had no need of acute vampire hearing to catch Kate’s half of the conversation: “That damn body doesn’t move till I say it moves. Understood?” The paramedics nodded vigorously.

  A young patrolman intercepted Angel, catching him by the upper arm. “You live here, pal?” Angel shook his head. “Then move along.”

  Angel caught Kate’s eye. “Let him through, Tompkins. But keep the press out of the building. I don’t want them talking to anybody until we’re done.”

  As the EMTs returned to their ambulance, Kate turned to Angel. “Been monitoring police scanners?” Kate came from a cop family and compensated for her good looks, blond hair, and blue eyes with a hard no-nonsense attitude.

  “Not as a rule,” Angel replied. “And not tonight.”

  “You have no business here, Angel. This is a crime scene. So who told you about it?”

  “Let’s just say I received an anonymous tip.” From the Powers That Be.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To help.”

  “What makes you think we need your help?”

  “You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.” In his fleeting vision, Doyle had seen the discarded skin of the victim, the shingle with the apartment name on it and something with tentacles or snakes growing out of its arms and mouth. Angel leaned forward and whispered. “What kind of killer leaves behind empty human skin?”

  “How do you . . . ? We’ve never released—”

  “So this isn’t the first victim?”

  “No,” she whispered. “What else do you know?”

  “First let me see the murder scene,” Angel countered.

  “Not gonna happen.”

  Angel shrugged, turned around and walked toward his car. “Okay, then, I’ll let you figure it out.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I’ll show you. Then you tell me everything.”

  “Everything,” Angel replied. Unfortunately, he’d already
told her as much as he knew. But he’d literally placed his foot in the door. No backing out now.

  Kate led the way up the stairs to 300B. Along the stairwell, police were urging people to wait in their apartments until the detectives were ready to question them. Nearby, a beat cop stood with a young blond woman in the doorway to 300A. Across the hall, beyond the view of the interior of 300B stood an older woman in a bathrobe, face pale, hands trembling. Two policemen waited with her. “That’s Lois Laulicht,” Kate informed him. “Landlady. She found the corpse. Said the door was open. Went in to see if everything was all right. It wasn’t.” Kate nodded toward the other woman. “Neighbor. Patricia McGonigle. Heard the landlady screaming. Found her kneeling beside the body. Called 911.”

  Kate paused at the door to 300B and said, “Hands in your pockets, Angel. Look. Don’t touch. Crime scene unit is still going over the place.” Angel nodded, and she led him into the large living room of the apartment.

  One crime scene technician was dusting two wineglasses and a bottle for fingerprints, another two were using a tape measure and sketch pad to record the dimensions of the apartment, while a fourth was taking close-up photos of the sofa, making notes in a small notebook after each shot.

  Angel smelled the blood before he noticed the spray of bright red droplets across the back cushions of the sofa. He turned around and examined the wall, speckled with more drops of blood. There should be more blood, he thought. A lot more.

  Blocking his view of the corpse was a tall, gaunt man in a charcoal-gray pinstriped suit. In one hand he held a small black bag; with the other he rubbed the gray stubble on his jaw. He shook his head and walked away, revealing the body. Or rather what was left of the human body. Remains . . . Remains seemed a particularly appropriate term in this instance.

  “Our latest victim,” Kate said. “We believe it is the tenant, Greg Schauer, thirty-four, single, no roommate, valet at the Blue Fountain in Beverly Hills, supposedly acted in a beer commercial or two.”

  “Believe?”

  “Well, there’s not a whole lot left on which to base an I.D. No face, no teeth to check dental records. We should be able to lift fingerprints from the . . . skin, but unless he was arrested previously or served in the military there would be nothing on file. Of course we can compare those prints to what we find elsewhere in the apartment, eventually get a DNA match. We do know those are Mr. Schauer’s clothes, according to the landlady.”

  Angel crouched down beside the body, technically, the skin of Greg Schauer. And a lot of hair attached to the scalp. “Thirty-four?”

  Kate double-checked her notebook. “That’s what I got. Of course, we’re in L.A. Everybody lies about their age. Why?”

  “Lot of gray hair for a thirty-four-year-old.”

  “Landlady commented on that,” Kate replied. “Said it looks like his wavy brown hair, but the gray is definitely new.”

  “Of course, whatever did this to him could have made his hair turn gray.”

  “Whatever?” Kate asked. “Don’t you mean ‘whoever’?”

  “Whatever,” Angel repeated, as if conceding the point.

  Angel stared at the translucent skin poking out of the shirt and pant cuffs, out of the collar of the green shirt. And noticed something else: a fine white powder sifting down through the nubs in the carpeting. Even as people walked around the floor, tiny granules, finer than grains of sand, trickled down between the fibers. He glanced up at Kate. “What do you know about this powder?”

  She shrugged. “First we thought it was drugs. Possible motive for the killings. We’ve had the samples from other crime scenes analyzed.”

  “Not narcotics,” Angel guessed. “Human bones.”

  “We’ve kept the details from the press. Far as they know, this was just a series of unrelated murders. But sooner or later they’ll find out. And won’t that be a circus.”

  “Can we talk somewhere?”

  “Do we have something to talk about?”

  Angel nodded once.

  “I’ll be a couple hours interviewing the landlady and the tenants.”

  “After that?”

  She wrote an address on the back of one of her business cards. “Meet me here in two hours. I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

  By the time Angel left the Coast View Apartments, two more news vans had descended on the scene. Angel didn’t envy Kate her task of keeping the details of the murders from the press. Too many people had seen the victims. Somebody would talk. Not that it mattered. Nobody would believe the details. And while traditional police wisdom dictated that some details be kept from the press to separate the real culprit from the handful of disturbed individuals who would falsely confess to the crime, that wouldn’t help here. No way a human killer could have shelled a human being, leaving behind a complete, discarded skin like a candy wrapper, a skin still inside its clothes and filled with powdered bones. But if Angel hoped to pursue the case with Kate’s help, he had to give her a rational explanation, something that would make sense to her and her superiors.

  Angel sat in a rear booth at Shea’s Tavern, tapping Kate’s card on the mahogany table, an untouched glass of Killian’s Red in front of him. He’d had to order something, and Shea’s was fresh out of O negative. Not that he’d asked, but it was a reasonable assumption.

  Kate came in, looking the worse for wear, and called out a greeting to the bartender before slipping into the booth with Angel. “Lucky me,” she said. “I had to catch the first skinny murder. Next thing I’ll be winning the Irish Sweepstakes.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Guesses,” she said. “Serial killer. Gangs or cults into flaying or cannibalism. Maybe an organ-theft ring.”

  “Connections between the victims?”

  “All but one was single. We think that one was cheating on her husband. So what are your thoughts on Mr. Schauer’s demise?”

  “No forced entry,” Angel said. “Two wineglasses. Stereo on. He was entertaining.”

  “Probably. Go on.”

  “What—whoever killed him was fast.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “No sign of a struggle. Glasses undisturbed. Killed right where he sat, probably before he knew what hit him.”

  “Okay.”

  “He brought the killer into his home,” Angel said. “Willingly. So whoever it was appeared to be someone Schauer knew or someone he thought he could trust.”

  Kate nodded. “And since the victims apparently didn’t know one another, we’re still leaning toward multiple perps.”

  “There’s more you’re not telling me, isn’t there? About the killer’s appearance?”

  She pointed to his glass. “You’re not drinking this?” He shook his head, motioned her to take it. She took a sip. “Some of the killings have occurred near where the killer met the victim. Public places—bars, clubs, coffee places. We found witnesses who saw a couple of the victims leave with the killers.”

  “Plural?”

  “One victim and one perp each time. But not the same perp.” She took another sip and nodded. “Which is what led us initially to suspect possible gang or cult involvement. Multiple perps, same M.O.”

  Angel believed it was all the work of one demon, which led him to the inevitable conclusion. “The witnesses gave different descriptions of the killer.”

  “Yes,” Kate said, watching him curiously. “That’s what I said.”

  “You said one perp at each location,” Angel replied. “But the eyewitnesses at each place gave different descriptions of the same perp.”

  “Let me clue you in,” Kate said. “Eyewitnesses are generally unreliable. Stress, panic, false memory conveniently filling in the gaps.” Despite her doubts about eyewitnesses, Kate seemed unsettled by this aspect of the crimes.

  “The victims were male and female, weren’t they?”

  “That’s another guess, right?”

  “But I’m right.”

  She sighed heavily. “Yes. And the eyewitne
ss accounts are totally screwed up. Vastly different heights, hair colors, dress, even sex. Must be some kind of mass hysteria, group hypnosis, mentalism.” She shook her head, disgusted.

  “Mentalism?” Angel asked with a wry smile.

  “We’ve found no evidence of psychotropic agents, so, yes, I’m grasping at straws,” Kate confessed. “The eyewitnesses couldn’t be more confusing if they’d formed a conspiracy to obstruct the investigation . . . Hey, now, there’s an idea we haven’t pursued.”

  “Kate,” Angel began grimly, “you’re looking for a monster—”

  Kate arched an eyebrow. “A monster?”

  “A human monster,” Angel amended. “Or monsters, the likes of which you’ve never encountered before. I want to help you find him . . . o them.”

  “Again, what makes you think I need your help with this?”

  “Are you any closer to finding the killer?”

  Kate cleared her throat and glanced away briefly. That was answer enough. He continued, “I want to stop this guy as much as you do, but I have my own methods, different methods.”

  “Illegal methods?”

  “Not necessarily. My connections won’t talk to the police, but they will talk to me.”

  Kate quirked a wry grin. “After some friendly coercion?”

  “Proper motivation.”

  “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “I need the case files.”

  Kate sighed and shook her head. “No. Sorry, Angel. Not on this case.” She slid out of the booth and walked out of Shea’s without looking back.

  Angel crumpled her card in his hand. “Damn.”

  The next morning, Cordelia had two of the computer books open on her desk and was shaking her head as Doyle sat in a chair facing her. “What is it now, then?” he asked, a mildly sarcastic look on his angular features.

  “Isn’t java supposed to be coffee?”

  “Ready to abandon the Web project?”

  Cordelia frowned at him. “No way. We have a chance here to make contact with the millions of people out there who are glued to their computers.”

  “All those millions, shunning human contact,” Doyle remarked with a shake of his head. “I’ll never understand it. Call me old-fashioned, if you like, but I want to interface with a face, not a hunk of plastic and glass.”