But at once his sense told him that nobody could have set this up as a hoax. He had at last come face to face with the consequences of believing in the supernatural.
This further room was a wooden-walled chamber; probably a messdeck. Part of the wall had rotted and collapsed, allowing the landfill to slide through and cover the floor. At the far side of the chamber lay a massive metal box, beaten out of lead or some dull grayish alloy. It was twice the size of a normal human coffin, yet there was no doubt at all that it was a coffin. On the lid, it bore the embossed likeness of a man with the head of an antlered beast; and its sides were embossed with cuneiform writing that looked more Sumerian than Hebrew.
Beside the coffin, an oil-lamp stood on an upended orange-box, so that shadows continually danced over its lid, and made the antlered head look as if it were alive. For a moment, Larry was convinced that he saw its chest rise and fall; but it was only the shadows.
At the foot of the coffin, kneeling naked in the rubble, thin and ribby and miserable, bulgy-eyed and short-sighted without his glasses, was Dogmeat. His back was marked with red stripes, as if he had been whipped. His chin was encrusted with blood.
“Dogmeat, for Christ’s sake!” said Larry.
Dogmeat said nothing, but coughed blood.
“You can’t do this,” Larry told Mandrax. “This is where I draw the line. Enough.”
Mandrax walked up to Dogmeat and seized hold of his hair, stretching his head back. Dogmeat cried out, but Mandrax ignored him, and looked across at Larry with a wolfish challenge on his face. “This is where you draw the line, is it? A pretty elastic kind of line, Larry—that’s what I’d say. This trash has been selling me down the river for years. And tonight he had the nerve to finger me. He always knew the Black Brotherhood would get their revenge. Well, tonight that’s going to happen. A thin skinny runt of a feed for Beli Ya’al.”
“How the hell did you catch him?” asked Larry. “How the hell did you get him here?”
“Because he isn’t alone,” said a pricklingly familiar voice, out of the shadows. “Because he has loyal friends, who make sure that anybody who betrays him is brought to justice.”
Out of the darkness where he had been concealing himself, in his green rustling raincoat, stepped Arne Knudsen. He stood in the dancing lamplight, smiling at Larry with the same self-satisfied smile as Mandrax.
“Arne?” asked Larry, in astonishment. He felt as if his whole life were collapsing on top of him, like a wave.
“Hallo, Larry!” said Arne. “So, you solved it at last! Quite a roundabout way of detecting you have. Rushing here, rushing there. Talking to mediums, drumming up spirits!” He tapped his forehead. “You should have solved it the way I solved it, by logic and analysis.”
“You solved it? You found this maniac even before I was assigned to the case?”
Arne nodded. “You shouldn’t be so surprised. The Fog City Satan was obviously performing some kind of serial ritual, and all I had to do was to find out which one. If you had taken the trouble to look through Sacrifical Offerings & Primitive Rituals at the public library, you would have saved yourself a great deal of legwork. It’s all there. Belial, the Master of Lies, the First Fallen Angel. His body was found in Ur when the Babylonians were building their great ziggurats. It was sealed into this coffin and entombed in a hillside cave until Richard Wasey the British archeologist discovered it in 1837.
“It was supposed to have been lost in the Bay of Biscay, while Wasey was shipping it back to England. But, very obviously, it wasn’t—although how it came to be shipwrecked eleven years later on the False Cape Horn, nobody knows.
“Anyway, it’s real; and everything that Mr. Mandrax has been telling you about it is true. I was down at the warehouse this evening, when you arrived. Poor Dogmeat ran straight into my outspread arms, didn’t you, Dogmeat?”
Larry slowly, slowly shook his head. “You solved this case? You found Mandrax and you kept it to yourself?”
“I’m afraid so, Larry. I had my first suspicions about it after the McGuire killing. Then the Ramirez massacre convinced me. Somebody was trying to raise Belial. I wrote a new computer model on occult practises in San Francisco, and checked back on every similar kind of killing; and it didn’t take long to go through records and find Mr. Mandrax.”
“You located him before the Berrys got killed?”
Arne looked embarrassed. “I was very sorry that it was the Berrys, believe me.”
“You were sorry! Jesus, Arne, you could have saved their lives!”
Arne walked around the coffin and looked down at the antlered beast. “I have to say, Larry, that once in a while something comes along that makes other people’s lives look very unimportant by comparison. Maybe it’s a war, yes? Maybe a revolution. But the whole of mankind doesn’t get ahead unless some of us are offered in sacrifice.”
“You let this crazy loose on the Berrys?” Larry screamed at him. “He nailed them to the fucking floor, Arne! He set fire to their children! Do you have any idea how much they must have suffered?”
“Yes,” said Arne, with terrible simplicity.
“And you can still live with yourself?”
“Yes,” said Arne. “Because of this. Because of Belial.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing. Those files you gave me… that was only half the story, right? You pulled out anything that would’ve helped me to track down Mandrax sooner.”
“Of course I did. I didn’t want you to find Belial too quickly, now did I? We still had life-substance to collect, to build up Belial’s strength. Edna-Mae’s; your mother’s; more than a hundred in all. Most of their bodies are down here.”
Larry approached the coffin. It had a terrible aura around it; even colder than the man-made catacombs in which it rested. He felt his skin tingle and his teeth set on edge.
“Can you feel it?” Arne whispered. “That’s power for you, Larry. That’s a whole new life.”
“What’s it all for, Arne?” Larry asked him.
Arne smiled, still admiring the metallic beast. “It’s to have the kind of life that guys like you and me can only fantasize about, Larry. Real wealth, real influence. Think of the women! Belial wants a thousand thousand lives; that’s all. A million miserable lives. Half of San Francisco is already dying of AIDS or crack or God knows what else. What’s a million lives?”
Larry looked over at Mandrax. Down by the foot of the coffin, Dogmeat was starting to tremble and shake; and his teeth began to chatter.
“What else has Mr. Belial promised you, besides power and wealth and more women than you can shake a stick at?”
Mandrax said nothing, but smiled tightly.
“A long life, for instance?” he asked Arne, although he didn’t take his eyes off Mandrax. “A very, very, very long life?”
“Nobody wants to die, Larry,” said Arne, obviously trying to sound reasonable.
“How about those million people you intend to toss to the monster? How about Joe and Nina Berry? Do you think they wanted to die? Do you think their kids wanted to die?”
“Come on, Larry. It’s a question of attitude.”
Larry rubbed the side of his neck. “So you found Mandrax and you found Belial and you quit the case?”
Arne shook his head. “No, no. I didn’t quit. I just tried to give Dan Burroughs the impression that I was being agonizingly slow and meticulous. In fact, so agonizingly slow and meticulous that he’d get impatient, and kick me off the case altogether. I’d started to notice that Dan Burroughs seemed to know more about the Fog City Satan than he let on. He kept asking me time and time again if I’d found out anything yet. Before I located Mandrax, I thought that he was just being obnoxious. Now I know that he was absolutely desperate to find Belial before the Fog City Satan could bring him back to life. Dan wanted the power. Dan wanted the wealth. And all I can say is, I’m going to have his share, so tough shit.”
“And what about me?”
“Oh, Dan thinks yo
u’re brilliant. He knew you’d crack it, and he knew you’d crack it quick. He knows you haven’t given it up, either. He knew you wouldn’t, even when he took your badge. But he couldn’t afford to come out publicly and say that he believed in the supernatural. Bad for his career. Bad karma all around.”
“So why are you telling me this?” asked Larry. “If you think I’m such an upright cop, why are you showing me where Belial is, and admitting your guilt—you and Mandrax, both? Do you know what I’m going to say to you? You’re under arrest for homicide in the first degree, for assault with a deadly weapon, for conspiracy, for kidnap, for you name it, you’re under arrest for it.”
Almost as soon as he had spoken, a deep shudder went through the structure of the building, and the timbers of the Cabo Carranza creaked and lurched.
“Tremblor,” smiled Mandrax. “They’ll get stronger, as the time comes closer.”
Arne was smiling, too. “Don’t start worrying yourself about arrests, Larry. There was another good reason why Dan Burroughs chose you for this case. You’re Mario Foggia’s son. You’re one of them, Mario’s little Ghost. You’ve been marked with the moving hand, and that means you’re bound to Belial already. Your old man bound you, what can you do? Dan Burroughs knew that he could count on you to find Belial and to understand what it was all about when you did.”
Larry looked down at the effigy of the beast on the coffin. There was no question about it—he could feel a hugely powerful influence from beneath that sculptured lid: an influence that felt much more exciting than evil. It was like the rush of skiing too fast on a dangerous slope; the rush of driving too fast on a rainslick road. If you could have the power of the angels on your side… You could be anything you wanted. You could have anything you wanted.
There was only one terrible price. Others would have to die. Others had already died. Belial’s impending resurrection had been won only at the price of unimaginable suffering and pain.
His father may have sold himself to Belial in return for solvency; but in the end his father had gone to Dan Burroughs and said no. If his father had stood up to Belial and his acolytes, then Larry could stand up to them, too. After all, he loved Linda, he loved the boys, he mostly enjoyed his work… what could an angel give him that he didn’t have already?
It was then, however, that something flickered in his mind. An image, bright but only half-realized. A girl in a scarlet dress, dancing. He couldn’t see her face: only that whirling, floating scarlet dress, and that night-black, softly curled hair.
Marietta, from high school. Marietta—his first real love. He could almost touch her, almost feel her. But then she flickered and faded and all he could see was the beast, embossed on the coffin.
It knows me. he thought, with a bone-marrow chill. It knows who I am, it knows what I want. It’s not offering me money; it’s not offering me promotion. It knows that I love my family.
It’s offering me—
As clear and as bright as she had always been, he saw his momma. White-haired, elegant, smiling.
“Why don’t you come to see me so often? What are you trying to do, break a mother’s heart?”
Involuntarily, raised his hand. Momma? But you’re dead. I saw the shadow take your whole substance. I saw the truck run over you.
“Why don’t you come to see me so often, Larry? You were my little frittata, yes?”
“Momma,” he whispered. Even though she wasn’t really there. “Momma, I can hear you momma.”
“There’s somebody else here, Larry. Somebody else you want to see.”
Larry steadied himself, pressed his fingers against his forehead, tried to concentrate. But his mother was as bright in his mind’s eye as a ballet-dancer in a spotlight, and she wouldn’t go away.
And she was right. There was somebody else there. Somebody standing in the darkness on the very fringe of his consciousness. Somebody who loomed huge and influential in Larry’s life.
He scarcely dared to imagine that it could be true. He began to shiver—and, as he shivered, he made a quick panting sound. He couldn’t stop himself—no matter how cowardly it might seem to Arne and Mandrax. He knew without any doubt at all who that dark somebody was, but he couldn’t bring his mind to accept it.
Could Belial, the fallen angel, really offer him this? His momma, alive again—just the same as she had been on that foggy day when he had visited her to talk about the World Beyond. And not just his momma but this dark somebody who stood motionless in the shadows, in his vicuna coat and his homburg hat, his face as pale as death, his mustache bedraggled, but his eyes as knowing as ever. His eyes smiling, even.
But the ropes that had bound him to three 200-lb blocks of solid salt still hung around his ankles, and the cold water of San Francisco Bay still ceaselessly poured from out of his nostrils, and out of his thick, hand-tailored clothes.
POPPA.
The somebody nodded.
“Poppa?” Larry whispered, his heart breaking.
“You’re a good boy, Larry. I never figured you for good, but you proved me wrong.”
“Poppa, is that really you?”
“You don’t recognize your old man?”
“And I could have you back?”
“Do you want me back, after all of this?”
“Poppa, I—”
“Do you want me back, Larry? You could have me back. Me and your mother, all of us back together again, the way things were. I could see the boys, Larry. Take them on outings, tell them stories. We could have ourselves some beer and some consum and spend the whole evening making friends.”
“Poppa, this is crazy. Poppa, this isn’t even real.”
The shadowy figure of his father ebbed and flowed. He turned to look at his mother, but when he turned it wasn’t his mother at all, but Arne.
Arne was smiling at him and nodding. “You get the picture?”
“Yes,” he said, in the thinnest of voices. He was still shivering; still not totally stable. “I get the picture.”
Belial had taken his father and his mother and now he was pretending to offer them back. He must have sensed that Larry wouldn’t be vulnerable to cars or women or career opportunities. Larry was a family man: and so Belial had tempted him with nothing more nor less than the family that he had lost. Larry felt such disgust that his stomach tightened and he almost vomited. It was lies, all lies. A trick of the light, a trick of the mind. But at the same time, he still felt a keen and desperate longing to see his father and mother again—to take both of them hand-in-hand, and walk down to the Bay, and tell them he had loved them, yes, so very much; because between them they had created the life that was his, and Frankie and Mikey’s life, too.
But even if Belial could bring his parents back, what was it all worth? Was his own selfish sense of family worth a million lives? Joe Berry, Nina Berry—Edna-Mae Lickerman, and thousands more?
Something else occurred to him, too. Belial was the Master of Lies, the King of Deception. Everything he said was a lie. Everything. If he had wanted Larry to believe him, he should have promised him nothing at all: no miracles, no resurrections, no family reunions. Then perhaps Larry might have been able to believe that he was going to get what he really wanted.
The strange part about it, however, was that he could now understand why Mandrax and Arne both believed Belial, although they knew what a liar he was. They believed him because they needed to believe him— because, when it came down to what they desperately wanted—their judgement became hopelessly distorted, and they were able to convince themselves that, this time, in their particular case, Belial was telling the truth.
Larry had seen so many defrauded widows; so many abandoned women whose assets had been systematically stripped; so many victims of so many stings. The lies that they had been told were almost always implausible—more often than not, absurd. An insurance executive from Burlingame had given over a million dollars to a man who claimed he had discovered the Lost Dutchman Mine in Santa Cruz—it had been sh
ifted bodily from Arizona—a distance of nearly a thousand miles—by “earth disturbances”. A woman in Mill Valley had consented to sex with a strange man because he had told her that he was the last surviving Martian, and her pregnancy would guarantee the survival of the Martian race.
Most of the time, lies were only believable because their victims wanted them to be believable. Larry had found himself right on the brink of believing that Belial would give him his parents back. He had ached for it. But he knew that it could never happen. He hoped that it could never happen. He prayed that he was right.
Mandrax stepped up to the coffin. “It’s time,” he said, and grasped the lid. Arne took hold of the lid on the other side.
“You’re not going to open it?” asked Larry anxiously, taking a step back.
“You’ll be pleasantly surprised,” said Mandrax. The temperature in the wooden chamber began to drop like a stone. “The beast face is simply a disguise, to hide the reality. The beast face was invented by Aaron, during the Exodus, so that only those who truly worship the fallen gods can see how beautiful they are.”
Together, with a heavy grinding noise, he and Arne heaved the lid aside, and lowered it on to the rubble. Instantly, like a flood, the chamber was filled with light—pure, intense light—so bright that Larry had to cover his face with both hands.
He heard a sound like no other sound that he had ever heard before. It was high and thin, and human, like a scream, yet it went on and on, unceasingly, in a way that no human voice could ever physically manage. It was like the scream of somebody falling for ever. It had a fear and desperation in it which Larry could hardly tolerate, and he looked from Mandrax to Arne and back again in consternation.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Mandrax. “He’s still dreaming. Still falling. He didn’t just jump out of a 747, he was thrown down from heaven, and that’s about as far as that—” (he demonstrated an inch, between finger and thumb) “—and as near as the furthest known star. Heaven’s inside of your head, and that’s how far he’s falling.”
Black Angel Page 33