Our Lady of Darkness (15 page)

IN THE STREET
outside the Veterans Building, Franz resumed his sidewise and backward peerings, now somewhat randomized, yet he was conscious not so much of fear as of wariness, as if he were a savage on a mission in a concrete jungle, traveling along the bottoms of perilously walled, rectilineal gorges. Having taken a deliberate plunge into danger, he felt almost cocky.

He headed over two blocks and then up Larkin, walking rapidly yet not noisily. The passersby were few. The gibbous moon was almost overhead. Up Turk a siren yelped some blocks away. He kept up his swiveling watch for the paramental of his binoculars and/or for Thibaut’s ghost—perhaps a material ghost formed of Thibaut’s floating ashy remains, or a portion of them. Such things might not be real, mere still might be a natural explanation (or he might be crazy), but until he was sure of one or the other, it was only good sense to stay on guard.

Down Ellis the slot which held his favorite tree was black, but streetside its fingered branch-ends were green in the white street lights.

A half-dozen blocks west on O’Farrell he glimpsed the modernistic bulk of St. Mary’s Cathedral, pale gray in the moonlight, and wondered uneasily about another Lady.

He turned down Geary past dark shop fronts, two lighted bars, and the wide yawning mouth of the De Soto garage, home of the blue taxicabs, and came to the dingy white awning that marked 811.

Inside the lobby there were a couple of rough-looking male types sitting on the ledge of small hexagonal marble tiles below the two rows of brass mailboxes. Probably drunk. They followed him with their dull eyes as he took the elevator.

He got off at six and closed the two elevator doors quietly (the folding latticed and the solid one) and walked softly past the black window and the black broom closet door with its gaping round hole where the knob would have been, and stopped in front of his own door.

After listening a short while and hearing nothing, he unlocked it with two twists of his key and stepped inside, feeling a burst of excitement and fear. This time he did not switch on the bright ceiling light, but only stood listening and intent, waiting for his eyes to accommodate.

The room was full of darkness. Outside the open window the night was pale (dark gray, rather) with the moon and with the indirect glow of the city’s lights. Everything was very quiet except for the faint, distant rumbles and growls of traffic and the rushing of his blood. Suddenly there came through the pipes a solid, low roaring as someone turned on water a floor or two away. It stopped as suddenly and the inside silence returned.

Adventurously, Franz shut the door and felt his way along the wall and around the tall clothes cabinet, carefully avoiding the work-laden coffee table, to the head of his bed, where he turned on the light. He ran his gaze along his Scholar’s Mistress, lying slim, dark, and inscrutably silent against the wall, and on to the open casement window.

Two yards inside it, the large oblong of fluorescent red cardboard lay on the floor. He walked over and picked it up. It was jaggedly bent down the middle and a little ragged at the corners. He shook his head, set it against the wall, and went back to the window. Two torn corners of cardboard were still tacked to the window sides. The drapes hung tidily. There were crumbles and tiny shreds of pale brownish paper on his narrow desk and the floor at his feet. He couldn’t remember whether or not he’d cleaned up those from yesterday. He noted that the neat little stack of ungutted old pulps was gone. Had he put those away somewhere? He couldn’t remember that either.

Conceivably a very strong gust of wind could have torn out the red cardboard, but wouldn’t it also have disordered the drapes and blown the paper crambs off his desk? He looked out to the red lights of the TV tower; thirteen of them small and steady, six brighter and flashing. Below them, a mile closer, the dark hump of Corona Heights was outlined by the city’s yellowish window and street lights and a few bright whites and greens in snaky curves. Again he shook his head.

He rapidly searched his place, this time not feeling foolish. In the closet and clothes cabinet he swung the hanging garments aside and glanced behind them. He noticed a pale gray raincoat of Cal’s from weeks back. He looked behind the shower curtain and under the bed.

On the table between the closet and bathroom doors lay his unopened mail. Topmost was a cancer drive letter from an organization he’d contributed to after Daisy had died. He frowned and momentarily narrowed his lips, his face compressed with pain. Beside the little pile were a small slate, some pieces of white chalk, and his prisms, with which he occasionally played with sunlight, splitting it into spectrums, and into spectrums of spectrums. He called to his Scholar’s Mistress, - ‘We’ll have you in gay clothes again, just like a rainbow, my dear, after all this is over.”

He got a city map and a ruler and went to his couch, where he fished his broken binoculars out of his pocket and set them carefully on an unpiled edge of the coffee table. It gave him a feeling of safety to think that now the snout-faced paramental couldn’t get to him without crossing broken glass, like that which they used to cement atop walls to keep out intruders—until he realized just how illogical that was.

He took out Smith’s journal too and settled himself beside his Scholar’s Mistress, spreading out the map. Then he opened the journal to de Castries’s curse, marveling again that it had so long eluded him, and reread the crucial portion:

The fulcrum (0) and the Cipher (A) shall be here, at his
beloved
607 Rhodes. I’ll be at rest in my appointed spot (1) under the Bishop’s Seat, the heaviest ashes that he ever felt. Then when the weights are on at Sutro Mount (4) and Monkey Clay (5) [(4) + (1) = (5)]
BE his Life Squeezed Away.

Now to work out, he told himself, this problem in black geometry, or would it be black physics? What had Byers said Klaas had said de Castries had called it? Oh, yes, Neo-Pythagorean metageometry.

Monkey Clay was the most incongruous item in the curse, all right. Start here. Donaldus had maundered about simian and human clay, but that led nowhere. It ought to be a
place
, like Mount Sutro—or Corona Heights (under the Bishop’s Seat). Clay was a street in San Francisco. But Monkey?

Franz’s mind took a leap from Monkey Clay to Monkey Wards. Why? He’d known a man who’d worked at Sears Roebuck’s great rival and who said he and some of his lowly coworkers called their company that.

Another leap, from Monkey Wards to the Monkey Block. Of course! The Monkey Block was the proudly derisive name of a huge old San Francisco apartment building, long torn down, where bohemians and artists had lived cheaply in the Roaring Twenties and the Depression years. Monkey—short for the street it was on—Montgomery! Another San Francisco street, and one crosswise to Clay! (There was something more than mat, but his mind hung fire and he couldn’t wait.)

He excitedly laid the ruler on the flattened map between Mount Sutro and the intersection of Clay and Montgomery Streets in the north end of the financial district. He saw that the straight line so indicated went through the middle of Corona Heights! (And also rather close by the intersection of Geary and Hyde, he noted with a little grimace.)

He took a pencil from the coffee table and marked a small “five” at the Montgomery-Clay intersection, a “four” by Mount Sutro, and a “one” in the middle of Corona Heights. He noted that the straight line became like a balance or scales then (two lever arms) with the balancing point or fulcrum somewhere between Corona Heights and Montgomery-Clay. It even balanced mathematically: four plus one equals five—just as was noted in the curse before the final injunction. That miserable fulcrum (0), wherever it was, would surely be pressed to death by those two great lever arms (“Give me a place to stand and I will stomp the world to death”—Archimedes) just as that poor little lower-case “his” was crushed between that dreadful “
BE
” and the three big capitalized words.

Yes, that unfortunate (0) would surely be suffocated, compressed to a literal nothing, especially when “the weights” were “on.” Now what—?

Suddenly it occurred to Franz that whatever had been the case in the past, the weights were certainly on
now
, with the TV tower standing three-legged on Mount Sutro and with Montgomery-Clay the location of the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco’s tallest building! (The “something else” was that the Monkey Block had been torn down to clear a site first for a parking lot, then for the Transamerica Pyramid. Closer and closer!)

That
was why the curse hadn’t got Smith. He’d died before either structure had been built. The trap hadn’t become set until
later
.

The Transamerica Pyramid and the 1,000-foot TV tower—those were crushers, all right.

But it was ridiculous to think that de Castries could have predicted the building of those structures. And in any case coincidence—lucky hits—was an adequate explanation. Pick any intersection in downtown San Francisco and there was at least a 50 percent chance of there being a high rise there, or nearby.

But why was he holding his breath then; why was there a faint roaring in his ears; why were his fingers cold and tingling?

Why had de Castries told Klaas and Ricker that prescience, or foreknowledge, was possible at certain spots in mega-cities? Why had he named his book (it lay beside Franz now, a dirty gray)
Megapolisomancy
!

Whatever the truth behind, the weights certainly were on now, no question.

Which made it all the more important to find out the real location of that baffling 607 Rhodes where the old devil had lived (dragged out the tail end of his life) and Smith had asked his questions…and where, according to the curse, the ledger containing the Grand Cipher was hidden…and where the curse would be fulfilled. Really, it was quite like a detective story. By Dashiell Hammett? “X marks the spot” where the victim was (will be?) discovered, crushed to death? They’d put up a brass plaque at Bush and Stockton near where Brigid O’Shaun-nesy had shot Miles Archer in Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
, but there were no memorials for Thibaut de Castries, a real person. Where was the elusive X, or mystic (0)? Where
was
607 Rhodes? Really, he should have asked Byers when he’d the chance. Call him up now? No, he’d severed his connection there. Beaver Street was an area he didn’t want to venture back to, even by phone. At least for now. But he left off poring over the map as futile.

His gaze fell on the 1927 San Francisco City Directory he’d ripped off that morning that formed the midsection of his Scholar’s” Mistress. Might as well finish that bit of research right
now—find the name of this building, if it ever had one, if it had, indeed, become a listed hotel. He heaved the thick volume onto his lap and turned the dingily yellowed pages to the “Hotels” section. At another time he’d have been amused by the old advertisements for patent medicines and barber parlors.

He thought of all the searching around he’d done this morning at the Civic Center. It all seemed very far off now and quite naive.

Let’s see, the best way would be to search through the addresses, not for Geary Street—there’d be a lot of hotels on Geary—but for 811. There’ d probably be only one of those if any. He began running a fingernail down the first column rather slowly, but steadily.

He was on the next to last column before he came to an 811. Yes, it was Geary too, all right. The name was…the Rhodes Hotel.

FRANZ POUND HIMSELF
standing in the hall facing his closed door. His body was trembling very slightly all over—a general fine tremor.

Then he realized why he had come out here. It was to check the number on the door, the small dark oblong on which was incised in pale gray, “607.” He wanted to see it actually and to see his room from the outside (and incidentally dissociate himself from the curse, get off the target).

He got the feeling that if he knocked just now (as Clark Smith must have knocked so many times on this same door) Thibaut de Castries would open it, his sunk-cheeked face a webwork of fine gray wrinkles as if it has been powdered with fine ashes.

If he went back in without knocking, it would be as he ‘d left it. But if he knocked, then the old spider would wake…

He felt vertigo, as if the building were beginning to lean over with him inside it, to rotate ever so slowly, at least at first. The feeling was like earthquake panic.

He had to orient himself at once, he told himself, to keep himself from falling over with 811. He went down the dark hall (the bulb inside the globe over the elevator door was still out) past the black broom closet, the black-painted window of the airshaft, the elevator itself, and softly up the stairs two flights, gripping the banister to keep his balance, and under the peaked skylight of the stairwell into the sinister black room that housed under a larger skylight the elevator’s motor and relays, the Green Dwarf and the Spider, and so out onto the tarred and graveled roof.

The stars were in the sky where they should be, though naturally dimmed somewhat by the glare of the gibbous moon, which was in the top of the sky a little to the south. Orion and Aldebaran climbed the east. Polaris was at his unchanging spot. All round about stretched the angular horizon, crenelated with high rises and skyscrapers marked rather sparsely with red warning and yellow window, lights, as if somewhat aware of the need to conserve energy. A moderate wind was from the west.

His dizziness gone at least, Franz moved toward the back of the roof, past the mouths of the air shafts that were like walled square wells, and watchful for the tow vent pipes covered with heavy wire netting that were so easy to trip over, until he stood at the roof’s west edge above his room and Cal’s. One of his hands rested on the tow wall. Off a short way behind him was the airshaft that dropped straight down by the black window he’d passed in the hall and the corresponding ones above and below it on the other floors. Opening on the same shaft, he recalled, were the bathroom windows of another set of apartments and also a vertical row of quite small windows that could only let into the disused broom closets, originally to give them some light, he supposed. He looked west at the flashing reds of the Tower and at the irregularly rounded darkness of the Heights. The wind freshened a little.

He thought at last, this is the Rhodes Hotel. I live at 607 Rhodes, the place I’ve hunted for everywhere else. There’s really no mystery at all about it. Behind me is the Transamerica Pyramid (5). (He looked over his shoulder at it where its single red light flashed bright and its lighted windows were as narrow as the holes in a business-machine card.) In front of me (he turned back) are the TV tower (4) and the crowned and hunchbacked eminence (1) where the old spider king’s ashes lie buried, as they say. And I am at the fulcrum (0) of the curse.

As he fatalistically told himself that, the stars seemed to grow dimmer still, a sickly pallor, and he felt a sickness and a heaviness within himself and all around, as if the freshening wind had blown something malignant out of the west to this dark roof, as if some universal disease or
cosmic pollution were spiraling from Corona Heights to the whole cityscape and so up to the stars, infecting even Orion and the Shield—as if with the stars’ help he’d been getting things in place and now something was refusing to stay in its appointed spot, refusing to stay buried and forgotten, like Daisy’s cancer, and interfering with the rule of number and order in the universe.

He heard a sudden scuffing and scuttling sound behind him and he spun around. Nothing there, nothing that he could see, and yet…

He moved to the nearest airshaft and looked down. Moonlight penetrated it as far as his floor, where the little window to the broom closet was open. Below that, it was very dimly lit from two of the bathroom windows—indirect light seeping from the living rooms of those apartments. He heard a sound as of an animal snuffing, or was that his own heavy breathing reflected by the echoing sheet-iron? And he fancied he saw (but it was very dim) something with rather too many limbs moving about, rapidly down and up.

He jerked his head back and then up, as if looking to the stars for help, but they seemed as lonely and uncaring as the very distant windows a lone man sees who is about to be murdered on a moor or sink into the Great Grimpen Marsh at dead of night. Panic seized him and he rushed back the way he’d come. As he passed through the black room of the elevator, the big copper switches snapped loudly and the relay arms clashed grindingly, hurrying his flight as if there were a monster Spider snapping at his heels at a Green Dwarf’s groaning commands.

He got some control of himself going down the stairs, but on his own floor as he passed the black-painted window (near the dark ceiling globe) he got the feeling there was something supremely agile crouched against the other side of it, clinging in the airshaft, something midway between a black panther and a spider monkey, but perhaps as many-limbed as a spider and perhaps with the creviced, ashen face of Thibaut de Castries, about to burst in through the wire-toughened glass. As he passed the black door of the broom closet, he remembered the small window opening from it into the shaft, that would not be too small for such a creature. And now the broom closet itself was right up against the wall that ran along the inside of his couch. How many of us in a big city, he asked himself, know anything about what lies in or just on the other side of the outer walls of our apartments—often the very wall against which we sleep?—as hidden and unreachable as our internal organs. We can’t even trust the walls that guard us.

In the hall, the broom closet door seemed suddenly to bulge. For a frantic moment he thought he’d left his keys in his room, then he found them in his pocket and located the right one on the ring and got the door open and himself inside and the door double-locked behind him against whatever might have followed him from the roof.

But could he trust his room with its open window? No matter how unreachable the latter was in theory. He searched the place again, this time finding himself impelled to view each volume of space. Even pulling the fife drawers out and peering behind the folders did not make him feel embarrassed. He searched his clothes cabinet last and so thoroughly that he discovered on its floor against the wall behind some boots an unopened bottle of kirschwasser he must have squirreled away mere over a year ago when he was still drinking.

He glanced toward the window with its crumbles of ancient paper and found himself picturing de Castries when he’d lived here. The old spider had doubtless sat before the window for long hours, viewing his grave-to-be on Corona Heights with forested Mount Sutro beyond. And had he previsioned the tower that would rise there? The old spiritualists and occultists believed that the astral remains, the odic dust, of a person lingered on in rooms where he’d lived.

What else had the old spider dreamed about there? rocking his body in the chair a little. His days of glory in pre-Earthquake Frisco? The men and women he had teased to suicide, or tucked
under various fulcrums to be crushed? His father (Afric adventurer or hayseed printer), his black panther (if he’d ever had one, let alone several) his young Polish mistress (or slim girl-Anima), his Veiled Lady?

If only there were someone to talk to and free him from these morbid thoughts! If only Cal and the others would get back from the concert. But his wristwatch indicated that it was only a few minutes past nine. Hard to believe his room searches and roof visit had taken so little time, but the second hand of his wristwatch was sweeping around steadily in almost imperceptibly tiny jerks.

The thought of the lonely hours ahead made him feel desperate and the bottle in his hand with its white promise of oblivion tempted him, but the dread of what might happen when he had made himself unarousable was still greater.

He set the cherry brandy down beside yesterday’s mail, also still unopened, and his prisms and slate. He’d thought the last was blank, but now he fancied he saw faint marks on it. He took it and the chalk and prisms lying on it over to the lamp at the head of his couch. He’d thought of switching on the 200-watt ceiling light, but somehow he didn’t like the idea of having his window stand out that glaringly bright, perhaps for a watcher on Corona Heights.

There
were
spidery chalk marks on the slate—a half dozen faint triangles mat narrowed toward the downward corner, as if someone or some force had been lightly outlining (the chalk perhaps moving like the planchette of a ouija board) the snouted face of his paramental. And now the chalk and one of the prisms
were
jumping about like planchettes, his hands holding the slate were shaking so.

His mind was almost paralyzed—almost blanked—by sudden fear, but a free corner of it was thinking how a white five-pointed star with one point directed
upward
(or outward) is supposed in witchcraft to protect a room from the entry of evil spirits as if the invading entity would be spiked on the star’s upward (or outward) point, and so he was hardly surprised when he found that he’d put down the slate on the end of his piled coffee table and was chalking such stars on the sills of his windows, the open one and the locked one in the bathroom, and above his door. He felt distantly ridiculous, but didn’t even consider not completing the stars. In fact, his imagination ran on to the possibility of even more secret passageways and hiding places in the building than the airshafts and broom closets (mere would have been a dumbwaiterand a laundry chute in the Rhodes Hotel and who knows what auxiliary doors) and he became bothered that he couldn’t inspect the back walls of the closet and clothes cabinet more clearly, and in the end he closed the doors of both and chalked a star above them—and a small star above the transom.

He was considering chalking one more star on the wall by his couch where it abutted the broom closet in the hall, when there sounded at his door a sharp
knock-knock
. He put on the chain before he opened it the two inches which that allowed.