Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  “In a statement to the police, Mrs. Nielsen said she had been warned by friendly spirits that San Francisco faced ‘a great catastrophe’ and that the murders had been simply a prelude to it. For weeks, she had seen ghostly faces in windows and mirrors and on the palms of her clients’ hands, and this was ‘a sure sign’ that ‘some terrible disaster’ was imminent. At least a thousand people would die in one day, she said.

  “As it turned out, the earthquake and the subsequent fire left only 478 officially dead. But fire chief Dennis T. Sullivan was the first man to be killed by the first chimney-pot that fell down. Actually that was one of the reasons the city was so badly damaged by fire… the fire crews had lost their leader.”

  Larry handed the book back. “What led you to connect this incident with the Fog City Satan?”

  Again Fay Kuhn rummaged in her bag. This time she produced a sheaf of glossy, acrid-smelling photostats. “I couldn’t get a copy of the original book on the Blue Letter Murders, but a member of the Mystery Writers of America sent me these, from his own private collection.”

  Larry leafed quickly through the pages. “Six ritualistic mass homicides. Okay… I see the parallel. But these happened more than eighty years ago. You’re not suggesting the same perpetrator is still alive and killing after eighty years?”

  “Of course not. But take a look at what was done in each of these cases. In the first one, a family on Hayes Street had their feet cut off. In the second, three people on Dolores Street had their throats cut. In the third, the victims had their hands severed. In the fourth, in Chinatown, a husband and wife had molten type-metal poured into their ears, hot lead and antimony. And so on.”

  Larry re-read the photostats more carefully. There was no doubt that the 1906 killings followed a similar pattern to the Fog City Satan’s attacks. In fact, they followed the only pattern that Larry had been able to discern. Each killing had included the very specific maiming of a different part of the body.

  “How long have you had this information?” asked Larry.

  “Three weeks already.”

  “Didn’t you show it to Lieutenant Knudsen? You might have convinced him that your report was worth looking into.”

  “Of course I showed him. But he simply said that it wasn’t scientific. He said that if he had never heard of any of these killings, it wasn’t very likely that the Fog City Satan had, either, so the chances of your boy being a copycat killer were—how did he put it?—about one in a grillion.”

  “That’s one more chance than none in a grillion.”

  “Oh, for sure. But try telling that to Know-it-All Knudsen.” She pronounced both “Ks”. ‘“Not scientific, I’m afraid,’” she quoted.

  “It’s scientific if you believe it.”

  “Do you believe it?” asked Fay Kuhn, cautiously.

  But at that moment, there was a casual, loose-wristed knocking at Larry’s open door, and Dan Burroughs stepped in, with a cigarette hanging from his lip. “Good morning, Ms Kuhn,” he greeted her. Then, “Larry… when you have a moment.”

  “We won’t be long,” said Fay Kuhn, without turning around. “I just have to ask Lieutenant Foggia few personal questions.”

  Dan came into the office, circled around Larry’s desk, and picked up the photostats about the Blue Letter Murders. “You’re not still harping on about this, are you, dear?” he asked Fay Kuhn.

  “I thought the lieutenant might be interested to see it, that’s all,” Fay Kuhn retorted. “After all, I gather that you assigned him to the Fog City Satan to get a different view on the case.”

  Dan Burroughs coughed, and sniffed. “I’ve already taken a look at this material, Ms Kuhn, and not to put too fine a point on it, it’s all a fairy-story. We do occasionally work by hunch and inspiration… that’s one of the reasons that Lieutenant Foggia was given this assignment. It’s a weird case, and he’s a very inspirational detective. But at the end of the day we have to come to court with proof, Ms Kuhn. And not just any old proof, either. Believable proof. The kind of proof that’s going to make it cast-iron certain that twelve good but retarded civilians are going to send the maniac who’s been committing these crimes to the gas chamber.”

  Fay Kuhn hesitated, then she reached across Larry’s desk and collected up her papers. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said. “Maybe we can finish up the personal details later.”

  “Whatever you want,” said Larry. “You know where to reach me.” He wanted to say, “I believe you. I believe you totally. Take a look at my hand.” But he was too conscious of Dan Burroughs’ hostility to Fay Kuhn; and to any suggestion that there was anything supernatural about the Fog City Satan.

  He walked Fay Kuhn to the end of the fourth-floor corridor. “You’ll have to make allowances for Deputy Chief Burroughs,” he said. “He’s very procedural.”

  “Sometimes people act very procedural in order to disguise the fact that they’re up to something highly non-procedural,” Fay Kuhn remarked.

  They stopped beside the elevators. The doors opened and two officers came out with a huge black teenager in a lurid pink track suit. “Who you calling a black faggot you white shrimp?” the teenager was protesting.

  Larry held the elevator doors. “Am I supposed to infer anything in particular from that comment?” he asked Fay Kuhn.

  “You can infer what you like. Deputy Chief Daniel Hadrian Burroughs is a man of many interests. I just think that you ought to watch your back. Not to mention your front and your sides.”

  “All right, if you think it’s wise.”

  “I think it’s wise. Particularly in this case. And there’s something else, too.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “What was Edith Nielsen trying to dig up on the corner of Front and Green?”

  “How should I know? Do you know?”

  Fay Kuhn gave him a little shrug. “I don’t have any idea. But she did say that she was trying to forestall a seventh mass killing. Now, how do you suppose she was going to do that?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Well, there we are. We’re both as ignorant as each other. I’m just suggesting that it might be worth your while to find out.”

  Fay Kuhn stepped to the back of the elevator. Larry held the door for just a moment longer, looking at her with both curiosity and appreciation. Then he let the doors go, and she disappeared from sight, still with that faint acidic little self-satisfied smile on her face.

  Larry decided as he walked back to his office that he liked her.

  7

  After a quick take-out Chinese lunch with Houston Brough, and an update meeting with detectives Jones and Glass, Larry drove to his mother’s house to collect Mussolini. He didn’t intend to keep the parrot himself; but one of the young patrolmen in the bunco squad was something of a bird-fancier, and Larry had promised to give it to him.

  The old house stood quiet in the afternoon sunshine. Larry unlocked the door with the same key that his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday. Inside, the hallway smelled of cooking and dust. The sun angled through the stained-glass skylight above the front door and cast a pattern on the wallpaper like an old monk with his face hidden by his hood. He remembered that figure from his childhood, and how much it had frightened him. So much, in fact, that he hadn’t liked to venture alone into the hallway on summer afternoons, because he knew that the faceless monk would be waiting for him.

  He opened the door of his mother’s living-room, and a score of reflected images of himself opened the door, too. He stood still, looking around. The drapes were still drawn, the table was still lying on its side, the teacups overturned. The coat, too, was still lying where it had dropped. Larry hesitated for almost a minute, listening, then walked across and picked it up.

  It was just a coat. He stroked the collar two or three times. It still smelled of his mother’s perfume; as if she were still alive. He folded it over the back of the chair, and then hunkered down and picked up the teacups and all
the scattered sugarlumps. When he was very small, his mother had given him sugar-lumps for a treat, so long as he swore on the Bible that he wouldn’t tell his father.

  Mussolini’s cage was still draped in its black cloth. He had heard the parrot’s claws scratching on its perch when he first came into the room; although it hadn’t screamed anything rude at him. At least the poor creature was still alive. Maybe a day’s dieting had done it good. Larry had always thought that his mother spoiled it. She used to give it pecans and macadamia nuts and Japanese cuttlefish bones. No wonder the Goddamned bird was so arrogant.

  He heard Mussolini scratching again, and he called out, “All right, you housebound buzzard, I’m coming!”. He picked up the last of the dried-up lemon-slices that had fallen under the couch, and dropped them into a broken tea-cup.

  He crossed the living-room and approached Mussolini’s cage. He was just about to tug the black cloth off it, when something stopped him. Some feeling. Some odd, left-field, unsettling feeling. Why hadn’t Mussolini said anything, when he first came into the room? And why was he scratching so much? Scratching, as if he were sharpening his claws.

  “Mussolini?” he called. “Is that you, Mussolini?”

  Skkrattchch, skkrattch, skkrattch, from underneath the domed black cloth.

  This is ridiculous, you can’t be scared of a bird. It’s nothing but a tattered old parrot, sitting in its cage. It’s probably half-starved and dying of dehydration, and you’re scared of it? He pulled at the cloth but the cloth snagged on the ring at the top of the cage and he couldn’t disentangle it.

  “It’s okay, Mussolini. Uncle Larry to the rescue.”

  “Time to feed,” rasped the parrot.

  “That’s right, Mussolini, time to—

  He stopped in mid-sentence, his arms upraised, still trying to pull the cloth free.

  “What did you say?” he asked, with a tight cold tangle in his stomach.

  “Time to feed,” the parrot repeated. “Time to feed. Time to devour the thousand thousand.”

  Larry backed away. He checked the palm of his hand; but it was clear. No clouds, no sunshine, no smiling face. It wasn’t his hand that was whispering to him. It was Mussolini. Or what he assumed was Mussolini, underneath that twisted black cloth. He didn’t know what to do next. Whatever it was, it was caged, and he guessed that it couldn’t get out; or it would have gotten out before. But all the same, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to see what it was. Its voice sounded quite like his mother’s, high and brittle and breathy. Maybe Mussolini’s voice had always sounded like his mother’s, without him noticing it. After all, his mother had taught it to talk. But for some reason it put the fear of God into him.

  “Mussolini?” he called again. No answer. He reached into his shoulder-holster and lifted out his gun. The simple answer would be to blow six .38 holes through the cage, and then see what was in it.

  He eased back the hammer.

  “Mussolini?” he repeated, very softly. “Is that you, Mussolini?”

  God you must look like a total wacko holding a gun on a parrot’s cage. He’s a bird, that’s all. Just because he talked about feeding, what does that mean? Your mother was always feeding him. All he knows is food and Italian insults.

  “Mussolini, you’d better be Mussolini or else it’s ventilation time.”

  “Che violino!” the parrot squawked. “Che violino!”

  Larry lowered his gun. How could he have allowed one scrawny ridiculous parrot to frighten him so much? It just showed how tightly his nerves were stretched; and how this whole assignment had undermined his confidence in what was real and what was imaginary. By the time he had caught the Fog City Satan, he would probably be ready for the basket-factory.

  He dragged the cloth from Mussolini’s cage, wound it up, and dropped it on to the floor. Mussolini had his back to him, his head lowered.

  “Come on, Mussolini, you and me are going for a ride.”

  Mussolini turned around on his perch. And it was then that Larry saw the huge white bulge that swelled out of one side of his head and neck. It had stretched the parrot’s skin so that one gray-lidded eye was blindly closed, and half of his beak was twisted. What was so heart-stopping, however, was that the bulge was a misshapen parody of the left side of Larry’s own face. It had a half-formed nose, a drooping wattle-like lip, and a dark brown eye that stared back at him with all the brightness and intelligence of his own.

  And the cage door was open. All that had prevented Mussolini from escaping up until now was the tightly swathed cloth.

  Larry stood frozen. His mind simply didn’t know how to react—and even if it had, his body probably wouldn’t have known how to obey.

  He watched the parrot scratch its ungainly way across its perch, with that one dark-brown eye still staring at him fixedly. The added weight of its grotesque disfigurement had unbalanced it, and it hobbled like a hunchback.

  “Time to feed,” it whispered, in an almost-human voice.

  “What are you?” said Larry. His throat was so tight with fear that he could hardly get the words out.

  “Everything you desire. Everything. But they promised me one thousand thousand and one thousand thousand is what I shall have.”

  “Are you—Belial?”

  “I am nobody you know.”

  “Belial, the Master of Lies. Is that who you are?”

  “I am everything you ever dreamed of. There is no angel sweeter than I.”

  The parrot sat staring at him for a long moment. Larry said, “Easy now… take it easy.”

  He took a step forward. If he could close the cage-door, then he would have this monstrosity trapped, and maybe he and Wilbert could—

  But without warning, in a terrifying burst of fluttering and scratching, the parrot-creature scrambled for the door of its cage. Larry tugged his gun back out of its holster, but he was a fraction of a second too late. The bird exploded out of the cage and flew wildly and eccentrically around the living-room, screeching and crying as it flew.

  Larry ducked again and again as the parrot flew over his head. Once it clawed at his hair, and he had to knock it away with his gun. “Feed!” it shrilled. “Feed! Feed! Feed!”

  Off-balance, he tried to shoot at the parrot. He let off one shot which almost deafened him, and brought a huge lump of plaster cornice showering down. But then he thought: supposing there’s somebody upstairs—one shot through the ceiling could kill them. And what if the parrot looks this way because it’s taken the one thing that I left behind when I left her with momma. My ectoplasm. Myself. If I kill or injure this parrot, the same thing could happen to me.

  Screeching and fluttering, the parrot flew around his head again; then perched on the chandelier, making it glitter and tinkle. Mussolini stared at him with his single brown human eye and his single gray parrot eye. His neck was swollen with the weight and the effort of carrying around half of a human face.

  “Mussolini, you hear me?” called Larry.

  “I hear nothing but humanity. Delicious humanity.”

  “Mussolini, Belial, whoever you are… listen, calm down.”

  “I want to go free,” hissed the parrot/man.

  “Is that another lie?”

  “You can think of it anything you wish, True, false— what’s it to you?”

  Now Larry knew why he recognized the parrot’s voice. It wasn’t his mother’s. It carried a similar accent, and a very similar intonation. But the difference was obvious. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, it was his own—reduced in timbre and resonance by the parrot’s small body-frame. His own voice, shrunk. He was sure now that his ectoplasm must have left his mother’s coat and concealed itself in the only living being in the room that was capable of escape. Mussolini the parrot. The only trouble was, it looked as if Mussolini hadn’t been capable of absorbing all that ectoplasm. His own face still bulged from Mussolini’s neck.

  He glanced quickly around the room. His mother’s shawl was still draped over the side of the s
ofa—the black tasseled Tuscany shawl that his father had given her, so many years ago, when life had been summery. Carefully, he sidestepped across the room and picked it up. The parrot/man watched him with odd and baleful eyes, like Edgar Allen Poe’s raven. Its claws scratched uneasily on the branches of the chandelier; and again the chandelier glittered and tinkled.

  Left-handed, Larry swung the shawl behind him. The parrot/man spat at him, “I want to go free. I shall go free.”

  Larry hesitated for one more moment, then bounded up onto the seat of the sofa, and whirled the shawl so that it fell over Mussolini’s perch and caught the creature inside. Then he snatched the bottom of the shawl and tried to twist it around so that the Mussolini would be trapped.

  The parrot/man screeched and thrashed in hysterical anger. For nearly a minute, it lobbed itself from one side of the shawl to the other, beating its wings and tearing with its claws, and it was all Larry could do to keep hold of it.

  But then it exploded out of the shawl in a burst of feathers and fury, and flew around the room, around and around, colliding with the walls and the ceiling and the chandelier. Larry went after it, swinging the shawl, but the room was too high for him to be able to throw it over Mussolini from the floor—even if Mussolini had stayed still for a couple of seconds.

  Mussolini struck the windows so violently that he began to leave splashes of blood on the glass; and it was then that Larry realized he had no alternative but to let him go. If he didn’t, Mussolini would beat himself hysterically to death—and God alone knew what would happen to his own ectoplasm if Mussolini did that.

  He dropped the shawl and backed quickly toward the living-room door, still keeping his gun raised. He opened the door wide and then stood well away.

  “All right you ugly fuck! Get the hell out of here!”