Our Lady of Darkness (9 page)

AT 811 FRANZ
glanced at his mail (nothing worth opening right away) and then looked around the room. He’d left the transom open. Dorotea was right—a thin, athletic person could crawl through it. He shut it. Then he leaned out the open casement window and checked each way—to either side and up (one window like his, then the roof) and down (Cal’s two below and, three below that, the shaft’s grimy bottom, a cul-de-sac, scattered with junk fallen over the years). There was no way anyone could reach this window short of using ladders. But he noticed that his bathroom window was only a short step away from the window of the next apartment on this floor. He made sure it was locked.

Then he took off the wall the big spidery black sketch of the TV tower that was almost entirely bright fluorescent red background and securely wedged and thumbtacked it, red side out, in the open casement window, using drawing pins. There! that would show up unmistakably from Corona in the sunlight when it came.

Next he put on a light sweater under his coat (it seemed a bit chillier than yesterday) and stuck an extra pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He didn’t pause to make himself a sandwich (after all, he’d had
two
pieces of toast this morning at Cal’s). At the last minute he remembered to stuff his binoculars and map into his pocket,
and
Smith’s journal; he might want to refer to it at Byers’s. (He’d called the man up earlier and gotten a typically effusive but somewhat listless invitation to drop in any time after the middle of the afternoon and stay if he liked for the little party coming up in the evening. Some of the guests would be in costume, but costume was not mandatory.)

As a final touch he placed the 1927 city directory where his Scholar’s Mistress’s rump would be, and giving it a quick intimate caress, said flippantly, “There, my dear, I’ve made you a receiver of stolen property; but don’t worry, you’re going to give it back.”

Then without further leavetaking, or any send-off at all, he double-locked the door behind him and was away into the wind and sunlight.

At the comer there was no bus coming, so he started to walk the eight short blocks to Market, striding briskly. At Ellis he deliberately devoted a few seconds to looking at (worshiping?) his favorite tree in San Francisco: a six-story candlestick pine, guyed by some thin strong wires, waving its green fingers over a brown wooden wall trimmed with yellow between two taller buildings in a narrow lot the high-rise moguls had somehow overlooked. Inefficient bastards!

A block farther on, the bus overtook him and he got aboard—it would save a minute. Transferring to the N-Judah car at Market, he got a start (and had to sidestep swiftly) when a pallid drunk in a shapeless, dirty pale gray suit (but no shirt) came staggering diagonally from nowhere (and apparently bound for the same place). He thought, “There but for the grace of God, et cetera,” and veered off from those thoughts, as he had at Cal’s from the memories of Daisy’s mortal disease.

In fact, he banished all dark stuff so well from his mind that the creaking car seemed to mount Market and then Duboce in the bright sunlight like the victorious general’s chariot in a Roman triumph. (Should he be painted red and have a slave at his elbow reminding him continuously in a low voice that he was mortal?—a charming fancy!) He swung off at the tunnel’s mouth and climbed dizzying Duboce, breathing deeply. It seemed not quite so steep today, or else he was fresher. (And always easier to climb up than down—if you had wind enough!—the mountaincering experts said.) The neighborhood looked particularly neat and friendly.

At the top a young couple hand in hand (lovers, quite obviously) were entering the dappling shades and green glooms of Buena Vista Park. Why had the place seemed so sinister yesterday? Some other day he’d follow in their path to the park’s pleasantly wooded summit and men stroll leisurely down the other side into the festive Haight, that overrated menace! With Cal and perhaps the others—the picnic Saul’d suggested.

But today his was another voyage—he had other business. Pressing business, too. He glanced at his wristwatch and stepped along smartly, barely pausing for the fine view of the Heights jaggedy crest from the top of Park Hill. Soon he was going through the little gate in the high wire fence and across the green field back of the brown-sloped Heights with their rocky crown. To his right, two little girls were supervising a sort of dolls’ tea party on the grass. Why, they were the girls he’d seen running yesterday. And just beyond them their Saint Bernard was stretched out beside a young woman in faded blue denim, who was kneading his loose, thickly furred mane as she combed her own long blonde hair.

While to the left, two Dobermans—the same two, by God!—were stretched out and yawning beside another young couple lying close together though not embracing. As Franz smiled at them, the man smiled back and waved a casual greeting. It really was the poet’s cliche, “an idyllic scene.” Nothing at all like yesterday. Now Cal’s suggestion about the dark psionic powers of little girls seemed quite overwrought, even if charming.

He would have lingered, but time was wasting. Got to go to Taffy’s house, he thought with a chuckle. He mounted the ragged, gravelly slope—it wasn’t all mat steep!—with just one breather. Over his shoulder the TV tower stood tall, her colors bright, as fresh and gussied-up and elegant as a brand new whore (Your pardon, Goddess). He felt fey.

When he got to the corona, he noticed something he hadn’t yesterday. Several of the rock surfaces—at least on his side—had been scrawled on at past times with dark and pale and various colored paints from spray cans, most of it rather weathered now. There weren’t so many names and dates as simple figures. Lopsided five- and six-pointed stars, a sunburst, crescents, triangles and squares. And there a rather modest phallus with a sign beside it like two parentheses joined—yoni as well as lingam. He thought of—of all things!—de Castries’s Grand Cipher. Yes, he noted with a grin, there were symbols here that could be taken as astronom-and/or astrological. Those circles with crosses and arrows—Venus and Mars. While that horned disk might be Taurus.

You certainly have odd tastes in interior decoration, Taffy, he told himself. Now to check if you’re stealing my marrowbone.

Well, spray-painting signs on rocky eminences was standard practice these progressive youth-oriented days—the graffiti of the heights. Though he recalled how at the beginning of the century the black magician Aleister Crowley had spent a summer painting in huge red capitals on the Hudson Palisades DO WHAT THOU WILT IS THE ONLY COMMANDMENT and EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR to shock and instruct New Yorkers on riverboats. He perversely wondered what gay sprayed graffiti would have done to the eerie rock-crowned hills in Lovecraft’s “Whisperer in Darkness” and “Dunwich Horror” or “At the Mountains of Madness,” where the hills were Everests, or Leiber’s “A Bit of the Dark World,” for that matter.

He found his stone seat of yesterday and then made himself smoke a cigarette to give himself time to steady his nerves and breathing, and relax, although he was impatient to make sure he’d kept ahead of the sun. Actually he knew he had, though by a rather slender margin. His wristwatch assured him of that.

If anything, it was clearer and sunnier than yesterday. The strong west wind was sweeping
the air, making itself felt even in San Jose, which now had no visible pillow of smog over it. The distant little peaks beyond the East Bay cities and north in Marin County stood out quite sharply. The bridges were bright.

Even the sea of roofs itself seemed friendly and calm today. He found himself thinking of the incredible number of lives it sheltered, some seven hundred thousand, while a slightly larger number even than that were employed beneath those roofs—a measure of the vast companies of people brought into San Francisco each day from the metropolitan area by the bridges and the other freeways and by BART under the waters of the Bay.

With unaided eyes he located what he thought was the slot in which his window was—it was full of sun, at any rate—and then got out his binoculars. He didn’t bother to string them around his neck—his grip was firm today. Yes, there was the fluorescent red, all right, seeming to fill the whole window, the scarlet stood out so, but then you could tell it just occupied the lower left-hand quarter. Why, he could almost make out the drawing…no, that would be too much, those thin black lines.

So much for Gun’s (and his own) doubts as to whether he’d located the right window yesterday! It was funny, though, how the human mind would cast doubt even on itself in order to explain away unusual and unconventional things it had seen vividly and unmistakably. It left you in the middle, the human mind did.

But the seeing was certainly exceptionally fine today. How clearly pale yellow Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill, once Frisco’s tallest structure, now a trifle, stood out against the blue Bay. And the pale blue gilded globe of Columbus Tower—a perfect antique gem against the ordered window slits of the Transamerica Pyramid that were like perforations in a punchcard. And the high rounded windows of the shipshaped old Hobart Building’s stern, that was like the lofty, richly encrusted admiral’s cabin of a galleon, against the stark, vertical aluminum lines of the new Wells Fargo Building towering over it like a space-to-space interstellar freighter waiting to blast. He roved the binoculars around, effortlessly refining the focus. Why, he’d been wrong about Grace Cathedral with its darkly suggestive, richly colorful modern stained glass inside. Beside the unimaginative contemporary bulk of Cathedral Apartments you could see its slim, crocketed spire stabbing up like a saw-edged stiletto that carried on its point a small gilded cross.

He took another look into his window slot before the shadow swallowed it. Perhaps he
could
see the drawing if he ‘fined the focus….

Even as he watched, the oblong of fluorescent cardboard was jerked out of sight. From his window there thrust itself a pale brown thing that wildly waved its long, uplifted arms at him. While low between them he could see its face stretched toward him, a mask as narrow as a ferret’s, a pale brown, utterly blank triangle, two points above that might mean eyes or ears, and one ending below in a tapered chin…no, snout…no, very short trunk—
a questing mouth that looked as if it were for sucking marrow. Then the paramental entity reached through the glasses at his eyes.

IN HIS NEXT
instant of awareness, Franz heard a hollow
chunk
and a faint tinkling, and he was searching the dark sea of roofs with his naked eyes to try to locate anywhere a swift pale brown thing stalking him across them and taking advantage of every bit of cover: a chimney and its cap, a cupola, a water tank, a penthouse large or tiny, a thick standpipe, a wind scoop, a ventilator hood, hood of a garbage chute, a skylight, a roof’s low walls, the low walls of an airshaft. His heart was pounding and his breathing fast.

His frantic thoughts took another turn and he was scanning the slopes before and beside him, and the cover their rocks and dry bushes afforded. Who knew how fast a paramental traveled? as a cheetah? as sound? as light? It could well be back here on the heights already. He saw his binoculars below the rock against which he’d unintentionally hurled them when he’d thrust out his hands convulsively to keep the thing out of his eyes.

He scrambled to the top. From the green field below the little girls were gone, and their chaperone and the other couple and the three animals. But even as he was noticing that, a large dog (one of the Dobermans? or something else?) loped across it toward him and disappeared behind a clump of rocks at the base of the slope. He’d thought of running down that way, but not if that dog (and what others? and what else?) were on the prowl. There was too much cover on this side of Corona Heights.

He stepped quickly down and stood on his stone seat and made himself hold still and look out squintingly until be found the slot where his window was. It was full of darkness, so that even with his binoculars he wouldn’t have been able to see anything.

He dropped down to the path, taking advantage of handholds, and while shooting rapid looks around, picked up his broken binoculars and jammed them in his pocket, though he didn’t like the way the loose glass in them tinkled a little—or the gravel grated under his careful feet, for that matter. Such small sounds could give away a person’s whereabouts.

One instant of awareness couldn’t change your life this much, could it? But it had.

He tried to straighten out his reality, while not letting down his guard. To begin with, mere were no such things as paramental entities, they were just part of de Castries’s 1890s pseudoscience. But he had
seen
one, and as Saul had said, there was no reality except an individual’s immediate sensations—vision, hearing, pain, those were real. Deny your mind, deny your sensations, and you deny reality. Even to try to rationalize was to deny. But of course mere were false sensations, optical and other illusions…. Really, now! Try telling a tiger springing upon you he’s an illusion. Which left exactly hallucination and, to be sure, insanity. Parts of inner reality…and who was to say how far inner reality went? As Saul had also said, “Who’s going to believe a crazy if he says he’s just seen a ghost? Inner or outer reality? Who’s to tell then?” In any case, Franz told himself, he must keep firmly in mind that he might now be crazy—without letting down his guard one bit on that account either!

All the while that he was thinking these thoughts, he was moving watchfully, carefully, and yet quite rapidly down the slope, keeping a little off the gravel path so as to make less noise, ready to leap aside if something rushed him. He kept darting glances to either side and over his shoulder, noting points of concealment and the distances to them. He got the impression that something of considerable size was following him, something that was wonderfully clever in making its swift moves from one bit of cover to the next, something of which he saw (or thought he saw) only the edges. One of the dogs? Or more than one? Perhaps urged on by rapt-faced, fleet-footed little girls. Or…? He found himself picturing the dogs as spiders as furry and as
big. Once in bed, her limbs and breasts pale in the dawn’s first light, Cal had told him a dream in which two big borzois following her had changed into two equally large and elegant creamy-furred spiders.

What if there were an earthquake now (he must be ready for
anything
) and the brown ground opened in smoking cracks and swallowed his pursuers up? And himself, too?

He reached the foot of the crest and soon was circling past the Josephine Randall Junior Museum. His sense of being pursued grew less—or rather of being pursued at such close distance. It was good to be close to human habitations again, even if seemingly empty ones, and even though buildings were objects that things could hide behind. This was the place where they taught the boys and girls not to be afraid of rats and bats and giant tarantulas and other entities. Where were the children anyhow? Had some wise Pied Piper led them all away from this menaced locality? Or had they piled into the “Sidewalk Astronomer” panel truck and taken off for other stars? What with earthquakes and eruptions of large pale spiders and less wholesome entities, San Francisco was no longer very safe. Oh, you fool, watch! watch!

As he left the low building behind him and descended the hillside ramp and went past the tennis courts and finally reached the short dead-end cross street that was the boundary of Corona Heights, his nerves quieted down somewhat and his whirling thoughts, too, though he got a dreadful start when he heard from somewhere a sharp squeal of rubber on asphalt and thought for a moment that the parked car at the other end of the cross street had started for him, steered by its two little tombstone headrests.

Approaching Beaver Street by way of a narrow public stairway between two buildings, he had another quick vision of a load quake behind him and of Corona Heights convulsed but intact, and then lifting up its gnat brown shoulders and rocky head, and shaking the Josephine Randall Junior Museum off its back, preparatory to stalking down into the city.

As he descended Beaver Street, he began to encounter people at last; not many, but a few. He remembered as if from another lifetime his intention to visit Byers (he’d even phoned) and debated whether to go through with it. He’d never been here before, his previous meetings in San Francisco with the man had been at a mutual friend’s apartment in the Haight. Cal had said someone had told her it was a spooky place, but it didn’t look mat from the outside with its fresh olive-green paint and thin gold trim.

His mind was made up for him when an ambulance on Castro, which he’d just crossed, let loose with its yelping siren on approaching Beaver, and the foul nerve-twanging sound growing suddenly unendurably loud as the vehicle crossed Beaver, fairly catapulted Franz up the steps to the faintly gold-arabesqued olive door and set him pounding the bronze knocker that was in the shape of a merman.

He realized that the idea of going somewhere other than home appealed to him. Home was as dangerous as—perhaps more dangerous than—Corona Heights.

After a maddeningly long pause the polished brass knob turned, the door began to open, and a voice grandiloquent as that of Vincent Price at his fruitiest said, “Here’s a knocking indeed. Why, it’s Franz Westen. Come in, come in. But you look shaken, my dear Franz, as if that ambulance had delivered you. What have the wicked, unpredictable streets done now?”

As soon as Franz was reasonably sure that the neatly bearded, rather theatric visage was Byers’s, he pressed past him, saving, “Shut the door. I
am
shaken,” while he scanned the richly furnished entry and the large, glamorous room opening from it and the thickly carpeted stairs ahead going up to a landing mellow with light mat had come through stained glass, and the dark hall beyond the stairs.

Behind him, Byers was saying, “All in good time. There, it’s locked, and I’ve even thrown a bolt, if that makes you feel better. And now some wine? Fortified, your condition would seem to call for. But tell me at once if I should call a doctor, so we won’t have that fretting us.”

They were facing each other now. Jaime Donaldus Byers was about Franz’s age, somewhere in the mid-forties, medium tall, with the easy, proud carriage of an actor. He wore a pale green Nehru jacket faintly embroidered in gold, similar trousers, leather sandals, and a long, pale violet dressing gown, open but belted with a narrow sash. His well-combed auburn hair hung to his shoulders. His Vandyke beard and narrow moustache were neatly trimmed. His palely sallow complexion, noble brow, and large liquid eyes were Elizabethan, suggesting Edmund Spenser. And he was clearly aware of all this.

Franz, whose attention was still chiefly elsewhere, said, “No, no doctor. And no alcohol, this time, Donaldus. But if I could have some coffee, black…”

“My dear Franz, at once. Just come with me into the living room. Everything’s there. But what is it that has shaken you? What’s
chasing
you?”

“I am afraid,” Franz said curtly and then added quickly, “of paramentals.”

“Oh, is that what they’re calling the big menace these days?” Byers said lightly, but his eyes had narrowed sharply first. “I’d always thought it was the Mafia. Or the CIA? Or something from your own ‘Weird Underground,’ some novelty? And there’s always reliable Russia. I am up to date only sporadically. I live
firmly
in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one.”

And he turned and led the way into the living room, beckoning Franz to follow. As he stepped forward, Franz became aware of a melange of scents: freshly brewed coffee, wines and liqueurs, a heavy incense and some sharper perfume. He thought fleetingly of Saul’s story of the Invisible Nurse and glanced toward the stairs and back hall, now behind him.

Byers motioned Franz to select a seat, while he busied himself at a heavy table on which stood slender bottles and two small steaming silver urns. Franz recalled Peter Viereck’s poetry line, “Art, like the bartender, is never drunk,” and briefly recalled the years when bars had been places of refuge for him from the terrors and agonies of the outside world. But this time fear had come inside with him.