Our Lady of Darkness (13 page)

“Rhodes turning up again!” Franz interjected. “That damn 607 Rhodes!”

“Yes,” Byers agreed. “First Tiberius, then the Hospitalers. They held the island for two hundred years and were finally driven out of it by the sultan Sulayman I in 1522. But about the Black Bird—you’ll recall what I told you of de Castries’s
pietra dura
ring of mosaicked black semiprecious stuff depicting a black bird? Klaas claimed it was the inspiration for
The Maltese Falcon
! One needn’t go that far, of course, but just the same it’s all very odd indeed, don’t you
think? De Castries and Hammett. The black magician and the tough detective.”

“Not so odd as all that when you think about it,” Franz countered, his eyes on one of their roving trips again. “Besides being one of America’s few great novelists, Hammett was a rather lonely and taciturn man himself, with an almost fabulous integrity. He elected to serve a sentence in a federal prison rather than betray a trust. And he enlisted in World War II when he didn’t have to and served it out in the cold Aleutians and finally toughed out a long last illness. No, he’d have been interested in a queer old duck like de Castries and showed a hard, unsentimental compassion toward his loneliness and bitterness and failures. Go on, Donaldus.”

“There’s really nothing more,” Donaldus said, but his eyes were flashing. “De Castries died of a coronary occlusion in 1929 after two weeks in the City Hospital. It happened in the summertime—I remember Klaas saying the old man didn’t even live to see the stock market crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression, ‘which would have been a comfort to him because it would have confirmed his theories that because of the self-abuse of mega-cities, the world was going to hell in a handbasket.’

“So that was that. De Castries was cremated, as he’d wished, which took his last cash. Ricker and Klaas split his few possessions. There were of course no relatives.”

“I’m glad of that,” Franz said. “I mean, that he was cremated. Oh, I know he died—had to be dead after all these years—but just the same, along with all the rest today, I’ve had this picture of de Castries, a very old man, but wiry and somehow very fast, still slipping around San Francisco. Hearing that he not only died in a hospital but was cremated makes his death more final.”

“In a way,” Byers agreed, giving him an odd look. “Klaas had the ashes sitting just inside his front door for a while in a cheap canister the crematory had furnished, until he and Ricker figured out what to do with them. They finally decided to follow de Castries’s wish there too, although it meant an illegal burial and doing it all secretly at night. Ricker carried a post-digger packaged in newspaper, and Klaas a small spade, similarly wrapped.

“There were two other persons in the funeral party. Dashiell Hammett—he decided a question for them, as it happened. They’d been arguing as to whether de Castries’s black ring (Klaas had it) should be buried with the ashes, so they put it up to Hammet, and he said, ‘Of course.’ “

“That figures,” Franz said, nodding. “But how very strange.”

“Yes, wasn’t it?” Byers agreed. “They bound it to the neck of the canister with heavy copper wire. The fourth person—he even carried the ashes—was Clark. I thought that would surprise you. They’d got in touch with him in Auburn and he’d come back just for that night. It shows, come to think of it, that Clark couldn’t have known about the curse—or does it? Anyhow, the little burial detail set forth from Klaas’s place just after dark. It was a clear night and the moon was gibbous, a few days before full—which was a good thing, as they had some climbing to do where there were no street lights.”

“Just the four of them, eh?” Franz prompted when Byers paused.

“Odd you should ask that,” Byers said. “After it was all over, Hammett asked Ricker, ‘Who the devil was that woman who stayed in the background?—some old flame of his? I expected her to drop out when we got to the rocks, or else join us, but she kept her distance all the way.’ It gave Ricker quite a turn—for he, as it happened, hadn’t glimpsed anyone. Nor had Klaas or Smith. But Hammett stuck to his story.”

Byers looked at Franz with a sort of relish and finished rapidly. “The burial went off without a hitch, though they needed the post-digger—the ground was hard. The only think lacking was the TV tower—that fantastic cross between a dressmaker’s dummy and a Burmese pagoda in a
feast of red lanterns—to lean down through the night and give a cryptic blessing. The spot was just below a natural rock seat that de Castries had called the Bishop’s Seat after the one in Poe’s ‘Gold Bug’ story, and just at the base of that big rock outcropping that is the summit of Corona Heights. Oh, incidentally, another of his whims they gratified—he was burned wearing a bathrobe he’d worn to tatters—a pale old brown one with a cowl.”

FRANZ’S EYES,
engaged in one of their roving all-inspections, got the command to check the glooms and shadows not only for a pale, blank, triangular face with restless snout, but also for the thin, hawkish, ghostly one, tormented and tormenting, murder-bent, of a hyperactive old man looking like something out of Dore’s illustrations of Dante’s
Inferno
. Since he’d never seen a photograph of de Castries, if any existed, that would have to do.

His mind was busy assimilating the thought that Corona Heights was literally impregnated with Thibaut de Castries. That both yesterday and today he had occupied for rather long periods of time what must almost certainly be the Bishop’s Seat of the curse, while only a few yards below in the hard ground were the essential dusts (salts?) and the black ring. How did that go in the cipher in Poe’s tale? “Take a good glass in the Bishop’s Seat…” His glasses were broken, but then he hardly heeded them for this short-range work. Which were worse—ghosts or paramentals?—or were they, conceivably, the same? When one was simply on watch for the approach of both or either, that was a rather academic question, no matter how many interesting problems it posed about different levels of reality. Somewhere, deep down, he was aware of being angry, or perhaps only argumentative.

“Turn on some lights, Donaldus,” he said in a flat voice.

“I must say you’re taking it very coolly,” his host said in slightly aggrieved, slightly awed tones.

“What do you expect me to do, panic? Run out in the street and get shot?—or crushed by falling walls? or cut by flying glass? I suppose, Donaldus, that you delayed revealing the exact location of de Castries’s grave so that it would have a greater dramatic impact, and so be truer, in line with your theory of the identity of reality and art?”

“Exactly! You
do
understand, and I
did
tell you there would be a ghost and how appropriately the astrological graffiti served as Thibaut’s epitaph, or tomb decor. But isn’t it all so very
amazing
, Franz? To think that when you first looked from your window at Corona Heights, Thibaut de Castries’s mortal remains unknown to you—“

“Turn on some lights,” Franz repeated. “What I find amazing, Donaldus, is that you’ve known about paramental entities for many years, and about the highly sinister activities of de Castries and the suggestive circumstances of his burial, and yet take no more precautions against them than you do. You’re like a soldier dancing the light fantastic in no-man’s-land. Always remembering mat I, or you, or both of us may at this moment be totally insane. Of course, you learned about the curse only just now, if I can trust you. And you did bolt the door after I came in. Turn on some lights!”

Byers complied at last. A dull gold refulgence streamed from the large globular shade suspended above them. He moved to the front hall, somewhat reluctantly, it appeared, and flicked a switch, then to the back of the living room, where he did the same and then busied himself opening another bottle of brandy. The windows became dark rectangles netted with gold. Full night had fallen. But at least the shadows inside had been banished.

All this while he was saying in a voice that had grown rather listless and dispirited now that his tale had been told, “Of course you can trust me, Franz. It was out of consideration for your own safety mat I didn’t tell you about de Castries. Until today, when it became clear you were into the business, like it or not. I don’t go babbling about it all, believe me. If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s that it’s a mercy
not
to tell anyone about the darker side of de Castries and his theories. That’s why I’ve never even
considered
publishing a monograph about the man.
What other reason could I have for that?—such a book would be brilliant. Fa Lo Suee knows all—one can’t hide anything from a serious lover—but she has a very strong mind, as I’ve suggested. In fact, after you called this morning, I suggested to her as she was going out that if she had some spare time she have another look for the bookstore where you bought the journal—she has a talent for such problems. She smiled and said that, as it happened, she’d been planning to do just that.

“Also,” he went on, “you say I take no precautions against them, but I do, I do! According to Klaas and Ricker the old man once mentioned three protections against ‘undesirable influences’:
silver
, old antidote to werewolfry (another reason I’ve encouraged Fa Lo Suee in her art),
abstract designs
, those old attention-trappers (hopefully the attention of paramentals too—hence all the mazelike arabesques you see about you), and
stars
, the primal pentagram—it was I, going there on several cold dawns, when I’d be sure of privacy, who sprayed most of those astrologic graffiti on Corona Heights!”

“Donaldus,” Franz said sharply, “you’ve been a lot deeper and more steadily into this all along than you’ve told me—and your girlfriend too, apparently.”

“Companion,” Byers corrected. “Or, if you will, lover. Yes, that’s right—it’s been one of my chief secondary concerns (primary now) for quite a few years. But what was I saying? Oh, yes, that Fa Lo Suee knows all. So did a couple of her predecessors—a famous interior decorator and a tennis star who was also an actor. Clark, Klaas and Ricker knew—they were my source—but they’re all dead. So you see I do try to shield others—and myself up to a point. I regard paramental entities as very real and present dangers, about midway in nature between the atomic bomb and the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which include several highly dangerous characters, as you know. Or between a Charles Manson or Zodiac killer and kappa phenomena as defined by Meleta Denning in
Gnostica
. Or between muggers and elementals, or hepatitis viruses and incubi. They’re all of them things any sane man is on guard against.

“But mark this, Franz,” he emphasized, pouring out brandy, “despite all my previous knowledge, so much more extensive and of such longer standing than your own, I’ve never actually
seen
a paramental entity. You have the advantage of me there. And it seems to be
quite
an advantage.” And he looked at Franz with a mixture of avidity and dread.

Franz stood up. “Perhaps it is,” he said shortly, “at least in making a person stay on guard. You say you’re trying to protect yourself, but you don’t act that way. Right now—excuse me, Donaldus—you’re getting so drunk that you’d be helpless if a paramental entity—“

Byers’s eyebrows went up. “You think you could defend yourself against them, resist them, fight them, destroy them, once they’re around?” he asked incredulously, his voice strengthening. “Can you stop an atomic missile headed for San Francisco at this moment through the ionosphere? Can you command the germs of cholera? Can you abolish your Anima or your Shadow? Can you say to the poltergeist, ‘Don’t knock’? or to the Queen of the Night, ‘Stay outside?’ You can’t stand guard twenty-four hours a day for months, for years. Believe me, I know. A soldier crouched in a dugout can’t try to figure out if the next shell will be a direct hit or not. He’d go crazy if he tried. No, Franz, all you can do is to lock the doors and windows, turn on all the lights, and hope they pass you by. And try to forget them. Eat, drink and be merry. Recreate yourself. Here, have a drink.”

He came toward Franz carrying in each hand a glass half-full of brandy.

“No, thank you,” Franz said harshly, jamming the journal into his coat pocket, to Byers’s fleeting distress. Then he picked up the tinkling binoculars and jammed them in the other side pocket, thinking in a flash of the binoculars in James’s ghost story “A View from a Hill” that had
been magicked to see the past by being filled with a black fluid from boiled bones that had oozed out nastily when they were broken. Could his own binoculars have been somehow doctored or gimmicked so that they saw things that weren’t there? A wildly farfetched notion, and anyhow his own binoculars were broken, too.

“I’m sorry, Donaldus, but I’ve got to go,” he said, heading for the hall. He knew mat if he stayed he
would
take a drink, starting the old cycle, and the idea of becoming unconscious
and incapable of being roused
was very repellent.

Byers hurried after him. His haste and his gyrations to keep the brandy from spilling would have been comic under other circumstances and if he hadn’t been saying in a horrified, plaintive, pleading voice,’ ‘You can’t go out, it’s dark. You can’t go out with that old devil or his paramental slipping around. Here, have a drink and stay the night. At least stay for the party. If you’re going to stand on guard, you’re going to need some rest and recreation. I’m sure you’ll find an agreeable and pleasing partner—they’ll all be swingers, but intelligent. And if you’re afraid of liquor dulling your mind, I’ve got some cocaine, the purest crystal.” He drained one glass and set it down on the hall table. “Look, Franz, I’m frightened, too—and you’ve been pale ever since I told you where the old devil’s dust is laid. Stay for the party. And have just one drink—enough to relax a little. In the end, there’s no other way, believe me. You’d just get too tired, trying to watch forever.” He swayed a little, wheedling, smiling his pleasantest.

A weight of weariness descended on Franz. He reached toward the glass, but just as he touched it he jerked his fingers away as if they’d been burned.

“Shh,” he cautioned as Byers started to speak and he warningly gripped him by the elbow.

In the silence they heard a tiny, faintly grating, sliding metallic sound ending in a soft snap, as of a key being rotated in a lock. Their eyes went to the front door. They saw the brass inner knob revolve.

“It’s Fa Lo Suee,” Byers said.’ ‘I’ll have to unbolt the door.” He moved to do so.

“Wait!” Franz whispered urgently. “Listen!”

They heard a steady scratching sound that didn’t end, as if some intelligent beast was drawing a horny claw round and round on the other side of the painted wood. There rose unbidden in Franz’s imagination the paralyzing image of a large black panther crouched close against the other side of the gold-traced white opacity, a green-eyed, gleamingly black panther that was beginning to metamorphose into something more terrible.

“Up to her tricks,” Byers muttered and drew the bolt before Franz could move to hinder him.

The door pressed half way open, and around it came two pale gray, triangular flat feline faces that flittered at the edges and were screeching “Aiii-eee!” it sounded.

Both men recoiled, Franz flinching aside with eyes involuntarily slitted from two pale gray gleaming shapes, a taller and a slenderer one, that whirled past him as they shot menacingly at Byers, who was bent half double in his retreat, one arm thrown shieldingly across his eyes, the other across his groin, while the gleaming wineglass and the small sheet of amber fluid it had contained still sailed through the air from the point where his hand had abandoned them.

Incongruously, Franz’s mind registered the odors of brandy, burnt hemp, and a spicy perfume.

The gray shapes converged on Byers, clutching at his groin, and as he gasped and gabbled inarticulately, weakly trying to fend them off, the taller was saying in a husky contralto voice with great enjoyment, “In China, Mr. Nayland Smith, we have ways to make men talk.”

Then the brandy was on the pale green wallpaper, the unbroken wineglass on the golden-brown carpet, and the stoned, handsome Chinese woman and equally mind-blown urchin-faced
girl had snatched off their gray cat-masks, though laughing wildly and continuing to grope and tickle Byers vigorously, and Franz realized they had both been screeching “Jaime,” his host’s first name, at the top of their voices.

His extreme fear had left Franz, but not its paralysis. The latter extended to his vocal cords, so that from the moment of the strange eruption of the two gray-clad females to the moment when he left the house on Beaver Street he never spoke a word but only stood beside the dark rectangle of the open door and observed the busy tableau farmer down the hall with a rather cold detachment.

Fa Lo Suee had a spare, somewhat angular figure, a flat face with strong, bony structure, dark eyes that were paradoxically both bright and dull with marijuana (and whatever) and straight dull black hair. Her dark red lips were thin. She wore silver-gray stockings and gloves and a closely fitting dress (of ribbed silver-gray silk) and of the Chinese sort that always looks modern. Her left hand threatened Byers in his midst, her right lay loosely low around the slender waist of her companion.

The latter was a head shorter, almost but not quite skinny, and had sexy little breasts. Her face was actually catlike: receding chin, pouty lips, a snub nose, protuberant blue eyes and low forehead, from which straight blonde hair fell to one side. She looked about seventeen, bratty and worldly wise. She plinked a note in Franz’s memory. She wore a pale gray leotard, silver-gray gloves, and a gray cloak of some light material mat now hung to one side like her hair. Both of her hands mischievously groped Byers. She had a pink ear and a vicious giggle.

The two cat-masks, cast on the hall table now, were edged with silver sequins and had a few stiff whiskers, but they retained the nasty triangular snouty appearance which had been so unnerving coming around the door.

Donaldus (or Jaime) spoke no really intelligible word himself during this period before Franz’s departure, except perhaps “Don’t!” but he gasped and squealed and babbled a lot, with breathless little laughs thrown in. He stayed bent half-double and twisting from side to side, his hands constantly but rather ineffectually fending off the clutching ones. His pale violet dressing gown, unbelted, swished as he twisted.

It was the women who did all the talking and at first only Fa Lo Suee. “We reality scared you, didn’t we?” she said rapidly. “Jaime scares easily, Shirt, especially when he’s drunk. That was my key scratching the door. Go on, Shirl, give it to him!” Then resuming her Fu Manchu voice, “What have you and Dr. Petrie there been up to? In Honan, Mr. Nayland Smith, we have an infallible Chinese test for homophilia. Or is it possible you’re AC-DC? We have the ancient wisdom of the East, all the dark lore that Mao Tse-tung’s forgotten. Combined with western science, it’s devastating. (That’s it, girl, hurt him!) Remember my thugs and dacoits, Mr. Smith, my golden scorpions and red six-inch centipedes, my black spiders with diamond eyes that wait in the dark, then leap! How would you like one of those dropped down your pants? Repeat—what have you and Dr. Petrie been doing? Be careful what you say. My assistant, Miss Shirley Soames (Keep it up, Shirl!) has a rat-trap memory. No lie will go unnoticed.”