Our Lady of Darkness (17 page)

With a cold plunge of feelings, the suspicion came to him that she was dead. The touching fingers moved reassuringly. There seemed to be almost too many of them. No, Daisy was not dead, but she was very sick. She was alive, but in the vegetable stage, mercifully tranquilized by her malignancy. Horrible, yet it was still a comfort to lie beside her. Like Cal, she was so young, even in this half-death. Her fingers were so very slim and silken dry, so very strong and many, all starting to grip tightly—they were not fingers but wiry black vines rooted inside her skull, growing in profusion out of her cavernous orbits, gushing luxuriantly out of the triangular hole between the nasal and the vomer bones, twining in tendrils from under her upper teeth so white, pushing insidiously and insistently, like grass from sidewalk crack, out of her pale brown cranium, bursting apart the squamous, sagittal, and
coronal
sutures.

Franz sat up with a convulsive start, gagging on his feelings, his heart pounding, cold sweat breaking from his forehead.

MOONLIGHT WAS POURING
in the casement window, making a long coffin-size pool upon the carpeted floor beyond the coffee table, throwing the rest of the room into darker shadow by contrast.

He was fully clothed; his feet ached in his shoes.

He realized with enormous gratitude that he was truly awake at last, that Daisy and the vegetative horror that had destroyed her were both gone, vanished far swifter than smoke.

He found himself acutely aware of all the space around him: the cool air against his face and hands, the eight chief corners of his room, the slot outside the window shooting down six floors between this building and the next to basement level, the seventh floor and roof above, the hall on the other side of the wall beyond the head of his bed, the broom closet on the other side of the wall beside him that held Daisy’s picture and Fernando’s star, and the airshaft beyond the broom closet.

And all his other sensations and all his thoughts seemed equally vivid and pristine. He told himself he had his morning mind again, all rinsed by sleep, fresh as sea air. How wonderful! He’d slept the whole night through (Had Cal and the boys knocked softly at his door and gone smiling and shrugging away?) and now waking an hour or so before dawn, just as the long astronomical twilight began, simply because he’d gone to sleep so early. Had Byers slept as well?—he doubted that, even with his skinny-slim, decadent soporifics.

But then he realized that the moonlight still was streaming in, as it had started to do before he slept, proving that he’d only been asleep an hour or less.

His skin quivered a little, and the muscles of his legs grew tense, his whole body quickened as if in anticipation of…he didn’t know what.

He felt a paralyzing touch on the back of his neck. Then the narrow, prickly dry vines (it felt—though they were fewer now) moved with a faint rustle through his lifted hairs past his ear to his right cheek and jaw. They were growing out of the wall…no…they were not vines, they were the fingers of the narrow right hand of his Scholar’s Mistress, who had sat up naked beside him, a tall, pale shape unfeatured in the smudging gloom. She had an aristocratically small, narrow face and head (black hair?), a long neck, imperially wide shoulders, an elegant, Empire-high waist, slender hips, and long, long legs—very much the shape of the skeletal steel TV tower, a far slenderer Orion (with Rigel serving as a foot instead of knee).

The fingers on her right arm that was snaked around his neck now crept across his cheek and toward his lips, while she turned and leaned her face a little toward his. It was still featureless against the darkness, yet the question rose unbidden in his mind whether it was just such an intense look that the witch Asenath (Waite) Derby would have turned upon her husband Edward Derby when they were in bed, with old Ephraim Waite (Thibaut de Castries?) peering with her from her hypnotic eyes.

She leaned her face closer still, the fingers of her right hand crept softly yet intrusively upward toward his nostrils and eye, while out of the gloom at her left side her other hand came weaving on its serpent-slender arm toward his face. All her movements and postures were elegant and beautiful.

Shrinking away violently, he threw up his own left hand protectively and with a convulsive thrust of his right arm and of his legs against the mattress, he heaved his body across the coffee table, oversetting it and carrying all its heaped contents clattering and thudding and clashing (the glasses and bottle and binoculars) and cascading with him to the floor beyond, where (having
turned over completely) he lay in the edge of the pool of moonlight, except for his head, which was in the shadow between it and the door. In turning over, his face had come close to the big ashtray as it was oversetting and to the gushing kirschwasser bottle and he had gotten whiffs of stinking tobacco tar and stinging, bitter alcohol. He felt the hard shapes of chessmen under him. He was staring back wildly at the bed he’d quitted and for the moment he saw only darkness.

Then out of the darkness there lifted up, but not very high, the long, pale shape of his Scholar’s Mistress. She seemed to look about her like a mongoose or weasel, her small head dipping this way and that on its slender neck; then with a nerve-racking dry rustling sound she came writhing and scuttling swiftly after him across the low table and all its scattered and disordered stuff, her long-fingered hands reaching out far ahead of her on their wiry pale arms. Even as he started to try to get to his feet, they closed upon his shoulder and side with a fearfully strong grip and there flashed instantaneously across his mind a remembered line of poetry—“Ghosts are we, but with skeletons of steel.”

With a surge of strength born of his terror, he tore himself free of the trapping hands. But they had prevented him from rising, with the result that he had only heaved over again through the moonlit pool and lay on his back, threshing and flailing, in its far edge, his head still in shadow.

Papers and chessmen and the ashtray’s contents scattered further and flew. A wineglass crunched as his heel hit it. The dumped phone began to beep like a furious pedantic mouse, from some near street a siren started to yelp like dogs being tortured, there was a great ripping noise as in his dream—the scattered papers churned and rose in seeming shreds a little from the floor—and through it all there sounded deep-throated, rasping screams which were Franz’s own.

His Scholar’s Mistress came twisting and hitching into the moonlight. Her face was still shadowed but he could see that
her thin, wide-shouldered body was apparently formed solely of shredded and tightly compacted paper
, mottled pale brown and yellowish with age, as if made up of the chewed pages of all the magazines and books that had formed her on the bed, while about and back from her shadowed face ‘mere streamed black hair. (The books’shredded black covers?) Her wiry limbs in particular seemed to be made up entirely of very tightly twisted and braided pale brown paper as she darted toward him with terrible swiftness and threw them around him, pinioning his own arms (and her long legs scissoring about his) despite all his flailings and convulsive kickings while, utterly winded by his screaming, he gasped and mewed.

Then she twisted her head around and up, so that the moonlight struck her face. It was narrow and tapering, shaped somewhat like a fox’s or a weasel’s, formed like the rest of her of fiercely compacted paper constrictedly humped and creviced, but layered over in this area with dead white (the rice paper?) speckled or pocked everywhere with a rash of irregular small black marks. (Thibaut’s ink?) It had no eyes, although it seemed to stare into his brain and heart. It had no nose. (Was
this
the Noseless One?) It had no mouth—but then the long chin began to twitch and lift a little like a beast’s snout and he saw that it was open at the end.

He realized that
this
was what had been under the loose robes and black veils of de Castries’s Mystery Woman, who’d dogged his footsteps even to his grave, compact of intellectuality, all paper work (Scholar’s Mistress indeed!), the Queen of the Night, the lurker at the summit, the thing that even Thibaut de Castries feared, Our Lady of Darkness.

The cables of the braided arms and legs twisted around him tighter and the face, going into shadow again, moved silently down toward his; and all that Franz could do was strain his own face back and away.

He thought in a flash of the disappearance of the gutted old pulp magazines and realized that
they, crumbled and torn to bits, must have been the raw material for the pale brown figure in the casement window he’d seen twice from Corona Heights.

He saw on the black ceiling, above the dipping black-haired muzzle, a little patch of soft, harmonious ghostly colors—the pastel spectrum of moonlight, cast by one of his prisms lying in the pool on the floor.

The dry, rough, hard face pressed against his, blocking his mouth, squeezing his nostrils; the snout dug itself into his neck. He felt a crushing, incalculably great weight upon him. (The TV tower and the Transamerica! And the stars?) And filling his mouth and nose, the bone-dry, bitter dust of Thibaut de Castries.

At that instant the room was flooded with bright, white light and, as if it were an injected instant stimulant, he was able to twist his face away from the rugose horror and his shoulders halfway around.

The door to the hall was open wide, a key still in the lock, Cal was standing on the threshold, her back against the jamb, a finger of her right hand touching the light switch. She was panting, as if she’d been running hard. She was still wearing her white concert dress and over it her black velvet coat, hanging open. She was looking a little above and beyond him with an expression of incredulous horror. Then her finger dropped away from the light switch as her whole body slowly slid downward, bending only at the knees. Her back stayed very straight against the jamb, her shoulders were erect, her chin was high, her horror-filled eyes did not once blink. Then when she had gone down on her haunches, like a witch doctor, her eyes grew wider still with righteous anger, she tucked in her chin and put on her nastiest professional look, and in a harsh voice Franz had never heard her use before, she said:

“In the names of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, the names of Pythagoras, Newton, and Einstein, by Bertrand Russell, William James, and Eustace Hayden, begone! All inharmonious and disorderly shapes and forces, depart at once!”

As she was speaking, the papers all around Franz (he could see now that they
were
shredded) lifted up cracklingly, the grips upon his arms and legs loosened, so that he was able to inch toward Cal while violently threshing his half-freed limbs. Midway in her eccentric exorcism, the pale shreds began to churn violently and suddenly were multiplied tenfold in numbers (all restrains on him as suddenly gone) so that, at the end he was crawling toward her through a thick paper snowstorm.

The innumerable-seeming shreds sank rustlingly all around him to the floor. He laid his head in her lap where she now sat erect in the doorway, half-in, half-out, and he lay there gasping, one hand clutching her waist, the other thrown out as far as he could reach into the hallway as if to mark on the carpet the point of farthest advance. He felt Cal’s reassuring fingers on his cheek, while her other hand absently brushed scraps of paper from his coat.

FRANZ HEARD GUN
say urgently, “Cal, are you all right? Franz!” Then Saul; “What the hell’s happened to his room?” Then Gun again; “My God, it looks like his whole library’s been put to the Destroysit!” but all that Franz could see of them were shoes and legs. How odd. There was a third pair—brown denim pants, and scuffed brown shoes, rather small; of course—Fernando.

Doors opened down the hall and heads thrust out. The elevator doors opened and Dorotea and Bonita hurried out, their faces anxious and eager. But what Franz found himself looking at, because it really puzzled him, was a score or more of dusty corrugated cartons neatly piled along the wall of the hall opposite the broom closet, and with them three old suitcases and a small trunk.

Saul had knelt down beside him and was professionally touching his wrist and chest, drawing back his eyelids with a light touch to check the pupils, not saying anything. Then he nodded reassuringly to Cal.

Franz managed an inquiring look. Saul smiled at him easily and said, “You know, Franz, Cal left mat conceit like a bat our of hell. She took her bows with the other soloists and she waited for the conductor to take his, but then she grabbed up her coat—she’d brought it onstage during the second intermission and laid it on the bench beside her (I’d given her your message)—and she took off straight through the audience. You thought
you’d
offended ‘em by leaving at the start. Believe me, it was nothing to the way she treated ‘em! By the time we caught sight of her again, she was stopping a taxi by running out into the street in front of it. If we’d have been a bit slower, she’d have ditched us. As it was, she grudged us the time it took us to get in.”

“And then she got ahead of us again when we each thought the other would pay the cab driver and he yelled at us and we both went back,” Gun took up over his shoulder from where he stood inside the room at the edge of the great drift of shredded paper and stuff, as if hesitant to disturb it.’ ‘When we got inside she’d run up the stairs. By then the elevator had come down, so we took it, but she beat us anyway. Say, Franz,” he asked, pointing, “Who chalked that big star on your wall over the bed?”

At that question, Franz saw the small brown scuffed shoes step out decisively, kicking through the paper snow. Once again Fernando loudly rapped the wall above the bed, as if for attention, and turned and said authoritatively, “
Hechiceria ocultado en muralla
!”

“Witchcraft hidden in the wall,” Franz translated, rather like a child trying to prove he’s not sick. Cal touched his lips reprovingly, he should rest.

Fernando lifted a finger, as if to announce, “I will demonstrate,” and came striding back, stepping carefully past Cal and Franz in the doorway. He went quickly down the hall past Dorotea and Bonita, and stopped in front of the broom closet door and turned around. Gun, who had followed inquisitively behind him, stopped, too.

The dark Peruvian gestured from the shut doorway to the neatly stacked boxes twice and then took a couple of steps on his toes with knees bent. (“I moved them out. I did it quietly.”) and took a big screwdriver out of his pants pocket and thrust it into the hole where the knob had been and gave it a twist and with it drew the black door open and then with a peremptory flourish of the screwdriver stepped inside.

Gun followed and looked in, reporting back to Franz and Cal, “He’s got the whole little room cleared out. My God, it’s dusty. You know, it’s even got a little window. Now he’s kneeling by the wall that’s the other side of the one he pounded on. There’s a little shallow cupboard built into
it low down. It’s got a door. Fuses? Cleaning stuff? Outlets? I don’t know. Now he’s using the screwdriver to pry it open. Well, I’ll be damned!”

He backed away to let Fernando emerge, smiling triumphantly and carrying before his chest a rather large, rather thin gray book. He knelt by Franz and held it out to him, dramatically opening it. There was a puff of dust.

The two pages randomly revealed were covered from top to bottom, Franz saw, with unbroken lines of neatly yet crabbedly inked black astronomical and astrological signs and other cryptic symbols.

Franz reached out shakily toward it, then jerked his hand sharply back, as though afraid of getting his fingers burned.

He recognized the hand that had penned the Curse.

It had to be the Fifty-Book, the Grand Cipher mentioned in
Megapolisomancy
and Smith’s journal (B)—the ledger that Smith had once seen and that was an essential ingredient (A) of the Curse and that had been hidden almost forty years ago by old Thibaut de Castries to do its work at the fulcrum (0) at (Franz shuddered, glancing up at the number on his door) 607 Rhodes.