Anthology.The.Mammoth.Book.of.Angels.And.Demons.2013.Paula.Guran Read Online Free PDF Page A

if Bill the super went gibbering about what he’d seen in the apartment.
    She hovered in front of the family photographs on the wall over the living-room mantel. The light was hard to see by, odd and watery – was it day or night? – but she knew who was who by memory: Papa Sol and Mama; Auntie Lil with that crazed little dog of hers, Popcorn was its name (God, she missed Mimsy, and the others); the two Kleinfeldt cousins who had gone to California and become big shots in television production; Nana in her old-fashioned bathing suit at Coney Island; Uncle Herb; more cousins. She had completely lost track of the cousins.
    There was one picture of Fred, and several of the two cute babies who had turned into Mark and Roberta. I should have stuck to shopping and skipped the kids, she thought.
    Two pictures showed Rose herself, once amid the cousins now scattered to their separate marriages and fates, and once with two school friends, girls whose names now escaped her. As everything seemed bent on escaping her. She sat in the big wing chair and crossed her astral arms and rocked herself, whispering, “Who cares for an old woman?”
    There was no help, and no safe place. She had to hold on to the arms of her chair to keep from floating several inches off the seat. If she didn’t get some blood to drink soon, she would float up before that huge, angry face in the sky and be cast into hell on a bolt of black thunder . . .
    The door opened cautiously and a man walked into the apartment. It was her lawyer, Willard.
    “Oh, my God,” he murmured, looking straight at her. “They told me the place was haunted. Mrs Blum, is that you?”
    “Yes,” she said. “What time is it, Willard?”
    “Seven thirty,” he said, still staring. “I stayed late at the office.”
    Seven thirty on a November evening; of course he could see her. She hoped her head was on straight and that it was her own head and not Mimsy’s.
    “Oh, Willard,” she said, “I’ve been having the most terrible time.” She stopped. She had never talked to anyone like that, or at least not for a very long time.
    “No doubt, no doubt,” he said, steadying himself against the hall table and putting his briefcase down carefully on the floor. “Do you still keep Scotch in the breakfront?”
    She did, for the occasional visitor, of which scant number Willard had been one. He poured himself a drink with shaking hands and gulped it, his eyes still fixed on Rose. He poured himself another. “I think I’d better tell you,” he said in a high, creaky tone very unlike him, “this haunting business could have serious repercussions on the disposition of your estate.”
    “It’s not haunting, exactly,” Rose said, gliding toward him. She told him what it was, exactly.
    “Ha, ha, you’re kidding, Mrs Blum,” Willard said, smiling wildly and turning a peculiar shade of yellow. He staggered backward against the edge of the couch, turned, and fell headlong. His glass rolled across the carpet and clinked against the baseboard. Rose saw a pale mist drift out of the top of Willard’s head as his body thrashed briefly in the throes of what she immediately recognized as a heart attack like the one that had killed Fred.
    “Willard, wait,” she cried, seeing that his foggy spirit stuff was rapidly escaping upward into the ceiling. “Don’t leave me!”
    But he did.
    Rose knelt by the body, unable to even attempt to draw its still and cooling blood. The Angel didn’t show. Willard Carnaby must have gone directly wherever he was headed. She felt abandoned and she cried, or something like it, not for Willard, who had known, as usual, where to go and how to get there with a minimum of fuss, but for herself, Rose the vampire.
    After they took the body away nobody came for days. Rose didn’t dare to go out. She was afraid she would get lost in the uncertain light; she was afraid she would run into the outwash from some restaurant kitchen and be blasted to such smithereens