The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (3 page)

Unwillingly Rose recalled instances from the Old Testament of God’s grouchiness. Actually there had been no Bible in her parents’ house. She had read instead a book of bible stories slipped to her one birthday by Nana and kept hidden from Papa Sol. Even watered down for kids, the stories had been frightening. Rose trembled.

“I was brought up an atheist,” she said faintly.

The Angel answered, “What about the time you and Mary Hogan were going to run away and enter a convent together?”

“We were kids, we didn’t know anything,” Rose objected. “Let me stay here. I’m not ready.”

“You can’t stay,” the Angel said. Its blank eyes contrasted oddly with its earnest tone of voice. “Your soul without its body is light, and as memories of the body’s life fade, the spirit grows lighter, until you’ll just naturally rise and drift. “Drift? Drift where?” Rose asked.

“Up,” the Angel said. Rose followed the languid gesture of one slender hand and saw what might to living eyes seem just a cloud bank. She knew it was nothing of the kind. It was a vast, angry, looming presence of unmistakable portent.

She scuttled around trying to put the Angel between herself and the towering form. At least the face of cloud was not looking at her. For the moment. Luckily there was lots else to look down disapprovingly at in New York City, most of it a good deal more entertaining than Rose Blum.

She whispered urgently to the Angel, “I changed my mind, I want to go back. I can see now, there are worse things than having your cats die and your kids plan to put you away someplace for your own good. Let them, I’ll go, they can have my money, I don’t care.”

“I’m sorry,” the Angel said, and Rose suddenly saw herself from above, not her spirit self but her body, lying down there in the big white tub. The leaky old faucets still dribbled in a desultory way, she noted with an exasperated sigh. Her “luxury” building had high ceilings and the rooms were sizable, but the plumbing was ancient.

Her pale form lay half submerged in what looked like rust-stained water. Funny, she had forgotten entirely that after the pills she had taken the further step of cutting her wrists in the bath. The blue nightgown was an illusion of habit.

Not a bad body for her age, she reflected, though it was essentially an Old World model, chunky flesh on a short-boned frame. The next generation grew tall and sleek, a different species made for playing tennis and wearing the clothes the models in the magazines wore. Though her granddaughter Stephanie, now that she thought of it, was little, like Rose herself; petite, but not so wide-hipped, an improved version of the original import with a flavor of central Europe and probably an inclination to run to fat if allowed.

Good heavens, somebody was in there, also looking at her – two men, Bill the super and Mr Lum the day concierge! Rose recoiled, burning with shame. Her vacated body couldn’t even make the gestures of modesty.

They were talking, the two of them. She had given them generous holiday tips for years to repay them for helping her organize a life that had never required her to leave her apartment after Fred’s death and the consequent money squabbles in the family.

Bill said, “Two mil at least, maybe more on account of the terrace.”

Mr Lum nodded. “Forgot the terrace,” he said.

She wished she hadn’t tipped them at all. She wished her body didn’t look so – well – dead. Definitively dead.

“Okay, I can’t go back,” she admitted to the Angel, relieved to find herself alone with it on the roof again. “But there must be something I can do besides go – you know.” She shuddered, thinking of the monstrous shape lowering above her – a wrathful, a terrible, a vengeful God. She needed time to get used to the idea, after Papa Sol and a lifetime of living in the world had convinced her otherwise. Why hadn’t somebody told her?

Well, somebody besides Mary Hogan, who had been a Catholic, for crying out loud.

“Well,” the Angel said, “you can postpone.”

“Postpone,” Rose repeated eagerly. “That’s right, that’s exactly what I had in mind. How do I postpone?”

The Angel said, “You make yourself a body out of astral material: this.” Its slim hand waved and a blur of pale filaments gathered at the tapered fingertips.

“Where did that stuff come from?” Rose said nervously. Was the Angel going to change form or disintegrate or do something nasty like something in a horror movie?

“It’s all around everybody all the time,” the Angel said, “because the physical world and the non-physical world and everything in between interpenetrate and occupy the same space and time interminably.”

“I don’t understand physics,” Rose said.

“You don’t need to,” the Angel said. “Astral sculpting is easy, you’ll get the hang of it. With a body made of this, you can approach living people and ask them to help you stay. At night, anyway – that’s when they’ll be able to see you.”

Rose thought of Bill and Mr Lum standing there talking about the value of her apartment. Then she thought of her kids whom she hadn’t liked for quite a while and who didn’t seem to like her either. Not much use asking them for anything. Maybe Frank, the elevator man? He had always struck her as decent.

“Help, how?” she asked.

“By letting you drink their blood,” said the Angel.

Appalled, Rose said nothing for a moment. Down below, a taxi pulled in at the awning and disgorged a comically foreshortened figure. Rose watched this person waddle into the building. “Drink their blood,” she said finally. “I’m supposed to go around drinking blood, like Dracula?”

The Angel said, “You need the blood to keep you connected with the physical world. But you can’t take it against a person’s will, you have to ask. That’s the meaning of the business about having to be invited into the donor’s house. The house is a metaphor for the physical shell—”

“I’m a vampire?” Rose cried, visions of Christopher Lee and Vampirella and the rest from late-night TV flashing through her stunned mind.

“You are if you want to put off going up,” the Angel said with a significant glance skyward. “Most suicides do.”

Rose didn’t dare look up and see if the mighty cheek of cloud had turned her way.

“That’s why suicides were buried at crossroads,” the Angel went on, “to prevent their return as vampires.”

“Nobody gets buried at a crossroad!”

“Not now,” the Angel agreed, “and cremation is so common; but ashes don’t count. It’s no wonder there’s a vampire craze in books and movies. People sense their presence in large numbers in the modern world.”

“This is ridiculous,” Rose burst out. “I want to see somebody senior to you, I want to talk to the person in—”

She stopped. The Person in charge was not likely to be sympathetic.

The Angel said, “I’m just trying to acquaint you with the rules.”

“I’m dead,” Rose wailed. “I shouldn’t have rules!”

“It’s not all bad,” the Angel said hastily. “You can make your astral body as young as you like, for instance. But sunlight is a problem. Living people have trouble seeing astral material in sunlight.”

For the first time in years she wished Fred were around, that con man. He could have found a way out of this for her if he’d felt like showing off.

“It’s not fair!” Rose said. “My G—Listen, what about crosses? Am I supposed to be afraid of crosses?”

“Well,” the Angel said, “in itself the cross is just a cross, but there’s the weight of the dominant culture to consider, and all its symbols. When Western people see a cross, what are they most likely to think of, whether they’re personally Christians or not?”

Rose caught herself in time to avoid glancing upward at the shadow giant in the sky. Little charges of terror ran through her so that she felt herself ripple like a shower curtain in a draft. No poor scared dead person would be able to hold her astral self together under that kind of stress.

The Angel began to move away from her, pacing solemnly on the air over the street where a cab trapped by a double-parked delivery truck was honking dementedly.

“Wait, wait,” Rose cried, ransacking her memory of
Dracula
, which she and her sister had read to each other at night by flashlight one winter. “What about crossing water? Is it true that a vampire can’t cross water?”

“Running water can disorient you very severely,” the Angel said over its exquisite shoulder. “You could find yourself visiting places you never meant to go to instead of the ones you did.”

Water flows downhill, Rose thought. Down. Hell was down, according to Mary Hogan, anyway. She made a shaky mental note: Don’t cross running water.

“How am I supposed to remember all this?” she wailed.

The Angel rose straight into the air without any movement of the translucent wings she now saw spreading from its back. “Just think of the movies,” it said. “Film is the record of the secret knowledge of the cultural unconscious.”

“You sound like Dr Simkin, that terrible shrink my daughter sent me to,” Rose accused the floating figure.

“I was Harry Simkin,” the Angel replied. “That’s why I’m doing your intake work.” It folded its aristocratic hands and receded rapidly toward the high, rolling clouds.

“My God, you were a young man,” Rose called after it. “Nobody told me you died.”

The door onto the roof burst open with a crash and two boys lugging heavily weighted plastic bags tumbled out, shouting. Ignoring Rose, they rushed to the parapet. Each one took a spoiled grapefruit out of one of the bags and leaned out into space, giggling and pointing, choosing a passing car roof to aim for.

Rose sidled up to the smaller one and cleared her throat. As loudly as she could she said, “Young man, how would you like to meet a real vampire?”

He lobbed a grapefruit and ducked behind the parapet, howling in triumph at the meaty sound of impact from below but apparently deaf to Rose’s voice. Revolting child. Rose bent over and tried to bite his neck. He didn’t seem to notice. But she couldn’t unwrap the scarf he wore, her fingers slipped through the fabric. So she aimed for a very small patch of exposed skin, but she had no fangs that she could discover and made no impression on his grimy neck.

The whole thing was a ludicrous failure. Worse, she couldn’t imagine how it could work, which did not augur well for her future as a vampire. Maybe the Angel had lied. Maybe it was really a devil in disguise. She had never trusted that Simkin anyway.

Worst of all, she was continually aware of the looming, ever-darkening presence, distant but palpable to her spirit, of Him whom Papa Sol had scoffed at with good socialist scorn. It was all so unfair! Since He was up there after all, why didn’t He do something about these horrible boys instead of harassing a poor dead old woman?

Rose didn’t want Him witnessing her ineptitude, which might inspire Him to drag her up there to face Him right now. She gave up on the grapefruit-hurling boys and drifted back down to 14C.

It gave her some satisfaction to sift under the sealed apartment door in the form of an astral mist. She floated around admiring the handsomely appointed rooms; she had always had excellent taste.

In the bathroom the tub was empty and reeked of pine-scented disinfectant. Someone had already made off with her silver-backed hairbrush, she noted. But what did that matter, given that her strides were unusually long and slightly bounding, as if she were an astronaut walking on the moon?This could only mean that she was lightening up, just as the Angel had warned.

Frantically she clawed astral material out of the air and patted it into place as best she could, praying that in the absence of blood this astral gunk itself might help to hold her down until somebody came and consented to be a – donor. Her children would come, if only to calculate the considerable value of her things. She was determined to greet them as herself, or as near to that as she could get, to cushion the shock of her request for their donations.

She couldn’t see herself in the mirror to check the likeness or to inspect her mouth for fangs. Astral material had a number of limitations, it seemed, among them inability to cast a reflection. She couldn’t even turn on the television; her astral fingers wouldn’t grip the switch. She couldn’t pick up things, the Chinese figurines and fine French clocks that she had brought back from travel and had converted into lamps. Very nice lamps, too. Fred had done his import deals or whatever had been really going on – half the time she had thought him a secret arms trader – but Rose was the one who had had the eye.

My God, she’d been a shopper!

How light she was, how near to drifting – up. No wonder vampires were so urgent about their hunger. By the time Bill the super showed up with two yuppies in tow, Rose felt that for the first time she understood what her daughter Roberta used to mean by that awful phrase “strung out”.

Bill was saying, “—first refusal on the lease, that’s the law, but if nobody in the old lady’s family wants to take it up, then—”

He saw her – the windowpanes, Rose noted, were now dark – and turned red. “I don’t know how you got in here, lady, but you’ll have to leave.”

He didn’t seem to recognize her. Of course he wasn’t expecting her. Maybe she hadn’t done such a hot job with the astral stuff?

She said firmly, “Bill, I have every right to be here, and if these are prospective new tenants you’ve sneaked in for bribe money, they ought to know that I’m staying.”

The young woman said, “Excuse me, but who is this?”

The color drained from Bill’s face. He said hoarsely, “What are you doing here, Mrs Blum? You were dead in the tub, I found you.” He waved his arms. “You can’t stay here!”

“Let’s cut the crap, all right?” the young man said. He thrust money at Rose. Several fifties and three of his fingers went through her forearm.

“Ted, she’s a ghost,” the woman said, clutching at his coat. “She must be the ghost of the woman who died here.”

“Well,” Ted said, letting his extended hand float slowly back down to his side. “Tiffany, honey, I think you’re right. So, uh, what would you think about living in a haunted, I mean, co-occupying with, um? I’m sure we could work something out, a sort of timeshare arrangement? I mean, look at the height of these ceilings.”