Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

  Almost immediately, Mussolini stopped his suicidal fluttering, and clawed and jangled back onto the chandelier. It sat there, swaying slightly, its wing-feathers matted with blood, and the sloping, inhuman expression on its face made Larry feel as if he were right on the brink of losing control.

  “Go on!” he yelled at it, harshly. “Get the hell out of here!”

  But the parrot stayed where it was; still swaying.

  “C’mon,” Larry urged him. “Shoo!” But then he realized that the front door was still closed, and that the parrot wouldn’t fly out of the room until he was sure that he had a clear route of escape.

  “All right, you shit,” Larry growled at it. He could stand a deformed bird. He could even stand the idea that its deformity had been caused by stealing part of him. But what he couldn’t stand was his own eye, staring at him with such malevolent curiosity, as if the parrot were wondering what it was really like to be whole and human, instead of some half-formed monstrosity from somebody else’s nightmare.

  Larry went to the front door. The blue monk was still shining on the wall, but it had become elongated now, because of the setting of the sun. It looked even more alarming and attenuated than ever—a monk who could stretch to impossible heights. A monk who could come in the dark, and stand over you, when your sleep was at its most disturbed.

  He opened the door. Outside, sunlight, and Belvedere Street, and sparkling airplanes circling around to SFX. He turned, and at that instant the parrot creature screeched past him with a lashing of wings and feathers, and rose into the sunshine, and angled away. Mussolini had gone, and taken part of Larry with him.

  Larry tried to see which direction the parrot had taken, but the air was too hazy, and the city skyline was too complicated; and when he saw a flying shadow it was nothing but a sheet of newspaper, tumbling in the breeze.

  He felt bereft. Something had been stolen from him. Some look, some memory, some essence; but he didn’t understand what. All he knew was that he felt diminished—less of the Larry that he used to be.

  He returned to his mother’s living-room. He walked around it, staring into one mirror after the other. Who are you now? What have you lost?

  He couldn’t tell. He picked up a silver-framed photograph of his father and looked at it for a very long time. Somehow he felt no affection for his father any more—almost as if he didn’t belong to him. Almost as if they weren’t related. He replaced the photograph on the table and thought: something seriously bad is about to happen. I wish hell I knew what it was.

  *

  Wilbert Fraser had been shopping at the Victoria Pastry Company on Stockton Street which was the only patisserie that made meringues exactly the way he liked them, and the Nature Stop on Grant Avenue, which was the only health-food store that stocked the dried seaweed that helped his psychic energy. He cramped the tires of his ageing black Lincoln Continental against the curb outside his house, and balanced the large white cardboard box of meringues up the steps.

  “Nice day, sunny for a change!” called Mrs. Wente, who was leaning out of the next-door window, tending the geraniums in her window-boxes. Wilbert gave her a nod and a wave. He hated her. He particularly hated her cats, which always came over the fence and scratched up his garden.

  He unlocked the door and went into the house. He hesitated for a moment. He thought he could sense something. Maybe something psychic. Maybe no more than the faintest of smells, tobacco, aftershave, sweat, as if an intruder had entered the house. Wilbert was highly sensitive to smells.

  He called out, “Hello?” and waited, and listened, but there was no answer. No sound at all. He walked cautiously through to the pine-furnished kitchen, and put down his groceries, still listening. He was sure that there was somebody here. Somebody whose psychic aura was extraordinarily powerful; and unpleasant, too. Sour was the word that Wilbert would have used.

  Still listening, still alert, he opened his old-fashioned dome-topped Westinghouse icebox, and put away his meringues. Just as he was closing the icebox door, he thought he heard a soft, suppressed creak, like somebody heavy treading on a floorboard and trying to suppress it.

  “I know there’s somebody here!” Wilbert called, starkly.

  Silence. Nothing at all. Then suddenly the bang of Mrs. Wente’s sash-window coming down, which started Wilbert’s heart racing.

  As quietly as he could, he tiptoed to the kitchen door. I know there’s somebody here, he mouthed to himself. He stood listening so long his knees began to creak. On the opposite side of the corridor, a steel engraving of St Sebastian stared at him, naked and baleful, his torso pierced with thirty-five arrows (Wilbert had counted them), his penis generously swollen by an artist whose interest had obviously been more homoerotic than religious.

  “Somebody’s here! I know it!” shouted Wilbert again, and this time it was almost a scream.

  He stepped into the corridor, and balanced his way along to the living-room like a steward balancing his way along the tilting companionway of an ocean-liner. In the living-room, the heavy brown furniture stood heavy, brown and silent. In fact the furniture was almost sullen, because Wilbert had been out for most of the day, shopping. Houses, like people, could resent being left alone. Wilbert had once been called to exorcize a house on Vallejo because it used to vandalize itself to the point of total destruction whenever its owners went on long vacations. Most of the time, people attributed wanton and inexplicable damage to poltergeists. But most of the time, it was the house itself that was behaving resentfully.

  Yet… Wilbert could sense something more than a sulky house. There was somebody else here. Somebody dangerous, and strong, too. He balanced his way from room to room, listening, pausing, occasionally calling out. Who’s there? Who are you? What do you want?

  Then, breathing.

  Thick, coarse, irregular breathing. Not far away, either. Not in the kitchen, surely! He’d just left the kitchen. What about the bathroom? Trembling, jittery, he pushed open the bathroom door, but there was nobody there. Just Arabs, staring lasciviously at naked boys; and little baskets of perfumed soap; and dried flowers; and tissues. Where are you going and what do you wish the old moon asked the three. We have come to fish for the herring fish that sail in this beautiful sea.

  What what what what.

  “Where are you?” shrilled Wilbert.

  But all he could hear was breathing. Breathing, and the sweaty smell of somebody near.

  He stepped out of the bathroom and into the corridor and the man was standing right in front of him. Tall, heavy, huge, with a massive black nodding helmet which completely covered his head. His bare chest was glistening and smeared with red. He wore tight black leather jeans, hung around with chains and belts and silver skulls and studs. He stank strongly of sweat and engine-oil and something herbal, like burning fennel-sticks.

  Wilbert stood speechless. The man took one step toward him, and grasped him by the shoulder of his pale green seersucker shirt.

  “Well, my friend, you haven’t been behaving too sensible, have you?”

  Wilbert swallowed, and desperately asked, “What?”

  “You’ve been talking to people you shouldn’t have been talking to. Naming names you should have kept to yourself.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course you know what I’m talking about. Lieutenant Larry Foggia, that’s what I’m talking about. Didn’t you learn your lesson back in ’67? Surely you remember what happened to Sean Thomson and Danny Rowano?”

  “Listen,” Wilbert stammered, “I haven’t told anybody anything.”

  “You talked to Lieutenant Foggia.”

  “Of course I talked to Lieutenant Foggia. His mother was a friend of mine. She died this week in a traffic accident. How could I not talk to him?”

  “It wasn’t the fact that you talked to him,” said the man in the mask, his voice muffled. “It was what you said.”

  “I didn’t say anything. I just said, I’m sorry ab
out your mother. That’s all.”

  “So you didn’t mention the Black Brotherhood, or Leper, or Mandrax, or any of the others?”

  “Of course not! Why should I?”

  The huge man gripped Wilbert’s shoulder so tightly that Wilbert heard the sinews crackle. “You didn’ say anything about Beli Ya’al… the great Beli Ya’al, whose day has now come at last?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Liar!” the huge man screamed at him. “You told Foggia everything!”

  “For God’s sake!” cried Wilbert. He tried to twist his shoulder away but the huge man slammed him up against the corridor wall and winded him.

  “Not for God’s sake, not for your sake, not for anybody’s sake,” the huge man hissed. “You kept your peace for twenty-three years, but now you’ve opened your mouth and now you’re going to be punished.”

  Wilbert gasped, “Let me go, let me go. I swear, I swear to you I didn’t tell him anything. Nothing at all.”

  “Ah…”said the huge man, much more softly this time. “But I know for a fact that you did.”

  “You’re crazy, let me go.”

  “Crazy? You think I’m crazy? That’s not nice. That’s not nice at all.”

  “Just let me go, please. I’ve got cash in the study, you can have it all.”

  “I intend to have it anyway.”

  Wilbert took a deep breath and screamed out, “Help! Somebody help me! Help!”

  Without hesitation, the huge man punched him in the face and broke his nose. Blood gushed down Wilbert’s shirt and spattered on the floor. His nose hurt so much that he let out a mournful bubbling whoop like a peacock.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” the huge man asked him. “You have to be punished. Surely you accept the fact that you have to be punished.”

  “Help!” Wilbert gargled, spitting out blood. “Somebody help me!”

  The huge man punched him in the nose again, and this time Wilbert felt bone crush and cartilage crack.

  “I said, ‘Surely you accept the fact that you have to be punished,’” the huge man repeated, like a patient parent talking to a wilful child.

  Wilbert choked, coughed, and tried to nod. He had never felt so frightened and helpless in his life. The huge man gripped his arm and dragged him along the corridor to the kitchen. There, he swept Wilbert’s newspaper and coffee-mug off the large deal table on to the floor, and forced Wilbert backward, so that he lost his balance and had to lie flat on his back on the table-top.

  Wilbert felt blood flowing thick and warm down the back of his throat. It tasted disgusting, and almost suffocated him. He retched, and tried to spit some of it out.

  “What are you going to do?” he coughed. “Please— please don’t hurt me too much. I can’t stand pain. I never could stand pain. Not even the dentist.”

  “Oh, you’ll like this,” the huge man said, his black horned helmet nodding. “This will hurt you so much, you won’t even feel it. This will be beyond pain.”

  Without any hesitation, he banged a huge triangular kitchen knife clean through Wilbert’s right shoulder, just above the collar bone, and pinned him to the table. Wilbert screamed, and tried to snatch at the knife-handle, but the huge man pushed him down and banged another knife through the left side. Then, with two smaller paring-knives, he pinned his wrists to the table.

  Wilbert tried to struggle, but the pain was intolerable. He could bear it more easily if he lay quite still, shivering, his face smashed, praying praying praying that this maniac wasn’t going to kill him.

  “You want to pray?” the huge man asked him. “You really want to pray? Then pray for Beli Ya’al, because Beli Ya’al is coming to feed, and soon he’s going to feed on you.”

  “Please let me go,” Wilbert whispered.

  “Oh, don’t you fret,” the huge man told him. “You’re going to like this. This is just your scene.”

  With another huge Sabatier knife, he cut the leather belt of Wilbert’s pants. Then he sliced open the waistband of the pants themselves, and tugged them off, with one harsh jerk after another. Wilbert whimpered with pain with every jerk. He felt as if he were dying. How much blood was he losing? He was swallowing pints of it, and he could feel it soaking the shoulders of his shirt. I’m dying, I’m being murdered. Oh God don’t let him hurt me.

  “Cute shorts,” the huge man remarked. “I always liked candy-stripe.” He cut the elastic of Wilbert’s shorts, and pulled them off.

  Oh God don’t let him castrate me.

  The huge man leaned over him and all that Wilbert could see was the black glossy enormity of his mask.

  “You should have kept your secrets to yourself, my friend. You should have remembered what happened to all those guys in the old days. Now it’s going to happen to you.”

  Wilbert said, between grinding teeth, “I know you.”

  “Oh, you know me? Well, good for you.”

  “I know you, you cheap pathetic démodé hoodlum.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  Wilbert took a deep quivering breath and said, “Mandrax! That’s who you are! Mandrax!”

  Without a word, the huge man took hold of Wilbert’s penis and pulled it upward as if it were a scrawny young chicken that had dropped out of its nest. He squeezed it hard, so that the purple glans bulged out of the top of his fist.

  Wilbert closed his eyes. He was sure now that he was going to die. He didn’t move, he didn’t breathe. All he did was swallow from time to time to prevent himself from choking on the blood that was still sliding down the back of his throat. Please make it quick.

  “Beli Ya’al is almost with us,” the huge man said, almost singing the words in the muffled confines of his mask. “Praise be to Beli Ya’al. And pain and punishment to all of those who try to confound him. All those who betray his holy secrets must die; even as those who give him life must die.”

  “Please,” said Wilbert, in a thick voice.

  Very slowly, the huge man sliced into Wilbert’s penis with his carving-knife, just behind the corona, so that he was cutting off the entire glans, like a plum. Wilbert felt agonizing coldness. The glans was so rich in nerve-endings that the slightest movement of the knife-edge was painful beyond anything that Wilbert could have believed possible. He went blind with pain. All he could see was scarlet, then black. He didn’t even feel it when the huge man had sliced all the way through, and the top of his penis was off, leaving the headless shaft pumping out blood, pump, pump, pump, dark and red with every heartbeat.

  The huge man bent close to his ear. “You see? The finest pain you’ll ever feel. And now you’ll die. Because nothing can stop that blood pumping. And I can take this little piece of you back to the master, as a souvenir. What do you call it? A trophy. So, good day to you, friend. It’s been fun.”

  Wilbert, lying spreadeagled on the table, his thighs splattered with blood, thought: he’s killed me. The bastard’s killed me. The feeling of terror and helplessness was enormous. Already he felt colder, already he felt the darkness drawing in. But at the same time he was acutely conscious of the knives that had been driven through his upper chest, and through his wrists; and of the warm, repetitive hosing of blood which came from his mutilated penis. Pump, pump, pump.

  He saw the black mask bobbing and dipping out of sight. He heard the door close. He thought: He’s gone. He’s left me to die by myself. He’s left me to die without even an enemy to curse.

  The blood ran noisily off the kitchen table, and ran on to the Mexican-tiled floor; and he still he pumped out more. The pumping was unstoppable, not that Wilbert wanted it to stop. He preferred to die than to live with a mutilated penis. He preferred the coldness, and the encroaching darkness, and a strange other-worldly feeling that began to envelop him, as if he weren’t really here at all.

  “Can somebody guide me?” he asked. “I’m dying. Can somebody guide me?”

  Nothing. No response. The spirit world was strangely quiet, like a bar when a hostile stranger walks in.
<
br />   “I’m Wilbert Fraser, I’m dying,” he repeated. “Can’t somebody help me?”

  He thought he saw a faint blue light flickering, but he wasn’t aware that he had managed to summon any of the spirits. It was only when he opened his eyes and saw a young girl’s face smiling down at him that he realized that his call had been answered. It was Roberta Snow, the same girl that had appeared at his last seance, looking pale, blurred, but comforting, too. Wilbert felt that if she had already died, and could be helpful and happy; then he could be helpful and happy, too.

  “I’m bleeding to death,” he told her. His voice sounded remote, like a radio in an upstairs apartment. “I’m dying.”

  Roberta came close to him and held his hand. She appeared not to mind that his penis was exposed, jetting out thick warm gouts of blood. Once you’d died—once you’d met so many others who had died—maybe your physical manifestation wasn’t very interesting any more. Maybe blood and maiming and crushing and flesh were all irrelevant; so long as the spirit survived.

  “It’s all right, Wilbert,” she consoled him, and each word resonated like a bell on a summer’s afternoon. “You have friends here, so many friends.”

  “I don’t want to die. Can’t you help me?”

  She smiled, as if she thought he was teasing. “When you have to die, you have to die. You don’t have any choice. Do you think I wanted to drown? My father was drunk, I couldn’t get out of the car. I saw somebody’s face, outside the window, he must have dived in to save me. But the doors were locked and he couldn’t break the window. We stared at each other through the glass. I screamed and then I breathed in water. I looked at the man and the man looked at me. I pressed my hand against the glass and he pressed his hand over mine. Then he touched his hand to his lips and he blew me a kiss. That was all he could do. I loved him for that.”

  Wilbert was beginning to feel icy and distant. “Roberta… promise me something.”

  “What?” she asked him. “Anything.”

  “Tell Larry Foggia what’s happened to me… please.”

  Roberta frowned. “I don’t know whether I can do that. I’m dead, and he’s still alive.”