Black Angel

by Graham Masterton

“Well, we’ll sure see about that,” said Mandrax, propping his long scuffed shoes on the dash, and leaning back. “Keep going slow, you’re doing fine.”

  “I could have the hand exorcized,” said Larry.

  Mandrax looked at him with interest. “Is that so?”

  “I know some sensitives. I could get it done.”

  “Take my advice, Larry—don’t. The only people who ever tried to get rid of it were killed.”

  “I don’t know. Wilbert Fraser mentioned a girl. The ectoplasm came out of her hand and then flared up.”

  Mandrax frowned intently for a moment, thinking— then laughed. “Oh, Shetland Piper. Sure. I remember that. Do you know what happened to her?”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “Shetland Piper’s hand never healed. She had a burn that wouldn’t close up. In the end she got gangrene, and they cut her arm off up at the elbow. But that wouldn’t heal either, because what the doctors didn’t understand was that they had cut through an open spirit-channel—straight from her head to her hand. It was like cutting a gas main in halt. They tried cutting off her whole arm and she literally exploded. You’ve heard about spontaneous combustion? That’s what happened to her. Two nurses had their faces burned off and the anthetist was melted to his gas cylinders. The operating table was said to have reached 2,020 degrees Celsius.”

  “You know a whole lot about a whole lot,” Larry remarked.

  “Sure I do,” said Mandrax, his eyes shining. “I’ve been around so long, that’s why.”

  Larry was driving through Walton Park now. Lights gleamed dim and secretive in the fog, and pedestrians moved through the grayness like ghosts. In the back, Edna-Mae let out an awful cackling bubbling noise, and Larry was sure that he could hear the greasy sliding of her skin on the vinyl seats.

  Larry said, “What’s to stop taking out my gun right now and blowing your head off?”

  Mandrax looked almost hurt. “Do you feel like taking out your gun right now and blowing my head off?”

  “It’s another one of those thoughts that’s been crossing my mind.”

  “Well… I couldn’t stop you, for sure. But I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “Oh, no?”

  “Doesn’t anything about me seem familiar?” asked Mandrax.

  Larry scrutinized him for a moment. “Not that I can see.”

  “Didn’t Wilbert Fraser tell you anything about me? That I was burned?”

  “He did mention it, yes.”

  “Well, he was right. I was burned. Me and all the rest of the Black Brotherhood. I didn’t know for years that it was Wilbert who did it, Wilbert and George Menzel. They stopped us from raising up Beli Ya’al when we were only days away from doing it. Maybe it was our own fault, we boasted about it too much. We were going to be the power, we were going to take over the whole city. Let me tell you something, pal, the gutters were going to run with blood.

  “Anyway, they burned us. Everybody died, except me. Leper was charcoal when that fire died out. Charcoal. The Fire Department tried to lift him out and his arms snapped off. I managed to smash my way out through a window, I don’t know how, but I was on fire from head to foot, and if somebody hadn’t wrapped me in a blanket I would’ve died, too. I spent six years convalescing, and even then I still looked like raw meat.”

  “You look okay now.” Larry observed, cautiously.

  “Of course I do. I found you. I had to find somebody else with the hand, somebody that I could take ectoplasm out of. And there you were! A gift! I took all that I needed, and then some, and your mother’s bird was kind enough to fly it to me. Don’t you recognize me? How about my eyes? How about my profile? This is you you’re looking at, Larry! Your ectoplasm!” He squeezed his cheeks with his fingers. “Your ectoplasm, my face! I’m still burned underneath, but thanks to you, my generous friend, I can walk around looking quite well.”

  “You mean that damn parrot stole part of me and gave it to you?”

  Mandrax grinned. “I have a way with birds, Larry. Comes of spending time with them in jail. I used to know the Birdman of Alcatraz; he taught me a whole lot. How to breed them, how to feed them, how to call them.”

  “So what happens if I shoot you?” asked Larry, unsteadily.

  “Same thing that happened to that nurse, Bizarre Killing At SFG. You fire at me, but you blow your own face off. Want to try it?”

  Larry took in a deep breath. Mother of God, what if he’d done what he originally intended to do, and fire at Mandrax as soon as he opened the warehouse door? He rubbed his own cheeks as he drove. It was hard to remember that the supernatural obeyed none of the laws of logic, none of the laws of physics. The ground had opened beneath Larry’s feet, and stayed open.

  They reached the intersection of Front and Green. Mandrax said, “Turn right into Green. There’s an entrance marked GARAGE PARKING about fifty feet along, on the right. Drive straight in, and down the ramp, and keep going.”

  Edna-Mae gave other sickening, suckling noise. The smell was beginning to grow stronger. Larry waited for the lights, then turned right. He wished that his heart would stop racing so damned fast. He saw the narrow brick entrance with a flaking green-painted sign saying GARAGE PARKING, but a battered pickup was parked halfway across it. Larry hooted his horn, and glanced at Mandrax anxiously. Although the pickup’s driver was sitting in it, smoking, he made no attempt to move.

  Larry hooted again; but still the pickup stayed where it was.

  “Guess I’ll have to get out and ask him the polite way,” said Larry.

  Mandrax’s eyes flickered. “Go ahead.”

  Larry climbed out of the car and walked across to the pickup’s open window. The driver was an unshaven bull-necked young man with a red baseball cap, greasy blond curls, and the look of somebody whose everyday attitude to life was an upraised middle finger.

  “Er, I’m trying to drive into this entrance here,” said Larry.

  The young man sniffed. “That’s okay by me.”

  “Trouble is, I have a problem,” Larry continued. “You have your vehicle parked across this entrance, making it kind of impossible for me to get in there.”

  The young man sniffed again. “Looks like you’ll have to wait, then, dudn’t it?”

  Larry thought about that for a moment. Then he said, “You want to make yourself some money?”

  The young man’s eyes focused on him for the first time. “Pends how much.”

  “In the palm of my hand is fifty dollars. I shall lay my hand on the side of your vehicle and drop it into your cab. All you have to do then is drive to the nearest payphone and call the police. Ask to speak to a guy called Houston Brough in the homicide squad. Tell him where I’m at. Tell him our boy’s here, too. That’s all you have to do.”

  The young man looked bewildered. “Whyn’t you do it yourself?”

  “Because I am in the company of a criminal who mustn’t suspect that I’m calling for backup. You see that guy in the car with me? You’ve heard of the Fog City Satan?”

  “Are you shittin me?”

  “Expensive brand of shit if I am,” said Larry, and dropped the $50 into the pickup’s open window. “Remember… speak to Houston Brough. Tell him our boy’s here, that’s all.”

  The young man started the pickup’s motor and squealed away, leaving Larry standing in the street. He returned to the car and climbed in.

  “The friendly persuader,” Mandrax complimented him.

  They entered the garage, the car bucking and dipping as they descended the ramp down to the first level. There was dim lighting at each corner of the parking bay, but the garage looked old and damp and disused, with huge encrustations of salt and minerals on the concrete walls, and glistening green algae on the pillars.

  “Next level down,” said Mandrax. “You’ll have to shift the barrier.”

  Larry climbed out of the car again, and dragged aside a rusted metal fence with a barely legible sign on it that read NO ENTRY: BUILDING
UNSAFE.

  They drove down the next ramp. Level Two was totally dark, and Larry had to switch on the car’s main beams. They illuminated a subterranean world of rusted and abandoned cars; an old ’59 Cadillac with no wheels, lying on its belly like a leprous whale. A blue ’49 Kaiser, once some family’s pride and joy, now dulled with age and damp, its windows fogged over. A bronze Hudson with its hood gaping open. There was other garbage which Larry couldn’t identify—things that looked like wet heaps of sacks or trails of slime, and strange wooden constructions, black with damp and orange-spotted with fungus. The car’s tires set up a thin wet complaint on the concrete floor.

  “Next level down,” said Mandrax.

  Larry almost missed the down-ramp. It was a tight spiral, its walls streaked with water and saltpeter. He negotiated it as carefully as he could, but his tires kept skittering and shrieking against the curb. The spiral seemed to go around and around for ever, until Larry’s arms grew tired of holding the steering-wheel in a sharp left-hand turn. At last, however, they reached the lowest level, with a splash and an echo and a slap of water.

  The third and lowest level was entirely flooded, to a depth of two or three inches. Larry drove slowly forward, with the water drumming against the floor of the car, and black glittering furrows trailing behind it. The furrows reached the far wall of the garage. slapped, and then came furrowing back again.

  “Okay, this is it,” said Mandrax. “You can kill the motor.”

  Larry switched off the engine and looked around. The parking-bay was cold and echoing. From the darkest recesses, Larry heard a never-ending chorus of loud drips. “Now what?” he asked, his throat tight.

  “Now we get out of the car.”

  “Is this where Belial’s been hiding?”

  “Larry—now we get out of the car. But watch out for eels.”

  “Eels?”

  They climbed out of the car and stepped into the oily, freezing water. Larry immediately felt it pour into the sides of his shoes. Mandrax helped Edna-Mae out of the back, and Larry heard her gabble something as she stepped into the water. They waded ankle-deep across the parking-bay, and Larry saw at once what Mandrax meant about eels. The shallow water teemed with them—thin, black, whip-like eels, that flicked and flurried at his ankles as he walked.

  They followed the path of the car’s headlights until they reached the far wall, where a heap of dilapidated furniture lay, rotting and sour and gray with mold. Mandrax heaved aside an old sodden sofa, and behind it Larry saw a low cavity in the brickwork. Mandrax groped around inside until he found what he was looking for—a flashlight.

  He forced Edna-Mae’s head down, so that she could crouch her way through the cavity. “You next,” he told Larry. “And remember what I said about the face.”

  Larry hunched himself down, and followed Edna-Mae’s heaving sheet-swathed back through a narrow tunnel hacked into the brickwork. In some places it was so tight that he scraped his hands and knocked his elbows. The water churned noisily around their feet.

  “You remember what I said about Sam Roberts bringing his cargo back from the False Cape Horn?” said Mandrax, as they shuffled forward.

  “I remember,” said Larry. The smell of mold and stagnant water and Edna-Mae was suffocating him; and all the time, the eels kept coursing over his feet.

  “He anchored off Law’s Wharf, and there he set out to do what he had to do, in order to resurrect Beli Ya’al. He carried out the seven ritual sacrifices, according to ancient Hebrew legend… the seven ritual sacrifices that would set Beli Ya’al free. He had locked his entire crew below decks, on the pretense that they would be arrested and imprisoned if US Customs officers found them there. Then, on his second night ashore, he let four or five of them out at a time, and ritually sacrificed them.

  “Human beings are Beli Ya’al’s natural enemies, you see, because they’re so beloved of God and he no longer is. Before he can be free from his chains, he has to know that his enemies have every God-given gift stripped away from them. They shan’t walk, so his sacrifices have their legs cut off. They shan’t speak, so their tongues are cut out. They shan’t fight against him, so their arms are cut off. They shan’t hear, so their ears are blocked. They shan’t see, so they get blinded. They shall be nailed down, as Jesus was nailed down, and their children shall be tortured in front of their eyes, so that they lose their love of God and their love of the life that He gave them, and voluntarily end it. That’s an important bit. Voluntarily.”

  Larry’s head knocked painfully against the ceiling. He thought about the Berrys, Joe and Nina; Caroline and Joe Berry Jr, and it hurt. “That’s six sacrifices,” he said, thickly. “What’s the seventh?”

  “Aha!” said Mandrax. “The seventh is the First Supper, the first feeding on a whole human, not just the spirit or the soul, not just the essence, but the whole human, mind and body. Let me you tell this, my friend, when Beli Ya’al eats you, he eats you in your entirety, and there’s no chance of going to heaven. You’re gone, Larry. Gone to a void where your whole soul is digested for centuries. Like, your whole being is gradually dissolved in the psychic equivalent of stomach acid. No, no heaven for the victims of Beli Ya’al, believe me. If he can’t get to heaven, then no miserable human being is going to get to heaven, either. What do you think about that? Vengeance for its own sake—nothing more.”

  *

  After seventy or eighty feet, the narrow tunnel began to open out, until they were able to stand up straight. Mandrax quickly lanced the flashlight beam left and right; and Larry was able to see that they were standing in a large chamber, with curved sides fashioned out of black dripping beams of wood. He peered up at the ceiling, and saw that was raftered with wood, too. And although the floor beneath his feet was two or three inches in water, and alive with eels, he could feel rotted planks through the ooze.

  “What’s this?” he asked Mandrax. “It looks like some kind of old wooden warehouse.”

  Mandrax waded proudly across to one of the walls, and slapped at the black encrusted beam. “Wooden, yes. But not a warehouse. You wouldn’t know what this place was, unless you’d been in one before; and these days, not too many people have. This is the lower cargo deck of a three-masted sailing ship called the Cabo Carranza.

  “This spot here, where we’re standing, at the intersection of Front and Green Streets, is a block away from the Bay. But when this ship docked here in 1850 it was Law’s Wharf. A couple of years later, all of this area was buried in landfill, and all of the old wharves went—Cunningham’s, Buckelew’s and Cowell’s. Law’s, too. But in 1850 this was Law’s Wharf and the Cabo Carranza was tied up here.”

  Edna-Mae stayed where she was, hunched in her soaking sheet. But Larry paced around, examining the dripping hulk of the ship that Sam Roberts had brought back from the False Cape Horn.

  “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” said Mandrax, his eyes glittering in the darkness. “They could really make ships in those days.”

  “What happened?” asked Larry.

  Mandrax gave a short, forced laugh. “What happened? What didn’t happen! Halfway through the rituals… when the decks were smothered in blood and stomachs and chopped-off arms… one of the Chilenos managed to force his way out of a porthole and climb down a rope to the wharf. He didn’t go to the Law & Order brigade. He went straight to the Chileno shanty-town, where Lieutenant Sam Roberts was regarded with slightly less benevolence than Satan himself.

  “Beli Ya’al was already starting to stir. There was thunder, lightning, earth tremblors! But those Chilenos swarmed on to the dock and on to the ship, and they rescued all of the crew that was left, and then they stove in the ship’s bottom so that she sank where she was anchored; and anything that was left above the waterline, they burned. Some witnesses say that they saw Sam Roberts burn, too; but others say they saw him dive in flames into the Bay. In any case, the city demolished the wharves, and filled in the Bay, and what was left of the Cabo Carranza was buried under the fill.”r />
  Larry looked around. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

  “It’s a miracle,” Mandrax repeated.

  Larry walked around him, rippling the water, his hands in his pockets to keep them warm. Mandrax followed him with the beam of his flashlight, around and around. Larry knew what he was going to have to ask next, but if he asked it, it would be an admission that he already believed it.

  Did he dare to believe it? It gave him an empty feeling in his stomach; and a huge yawning sense of his own mortality, and the shortness of his own life. He wasn’t sure he was ready to face up to that, not yet.

  “What?” demanded Mandrax, at last.

  Larry stopped walking, and the ripples died away in the darkness.

  “You’re Sam Roberts, aren’t you?” he asked.

  9

  He wasn’t sure whether Mandrax didn’t answer because he didn’t need to; or because the idea was so stunningly ridiculous. He just stared at Larry with those glittering eyes and that tight slit of a mouth, and then turned away, and said, “Come on.”

  Larry hesitated, then followed. Edna-Mae followed, too, in her winding-sheet. For some reason Larry felt relieved that Mandrax hadn’t said “yes.” It would probably have frightened him even more than he was already. If Mandrax had said “yes,” he probably wouldn’t have been able to function. His legs would have simply refused to walk any further.

  They splashed the length of the ship’s cargo-hold until they reached a further entrance. This had once been a timber doorway, but it had rotted into nothing more than a soggy, mold-encrusted cave. As they approached, Larry saw that there was a dim orange light inside it, swiveling and dipping in the subterranean draft.

  “Now you can meet some old friends of yours,” said Mandrax. He shone the torch on to an upward slope of gravel and slurry, and with relief Larry climbed awkwardly out of the eel-whipping water on to a damp uneven floor of mixed rubble.

  The sight that met his eyes was so unexpected that his first reaction was to turn around to Mandrax and ask if this was all an elaborate hoax—staged by some inventive prankster at the police department to pay him back for his “Supernatural” story in the newspaper.