Our Lady of Darkness

Our Lady of Darkness Page 3

In the hall, Franz passed the black knobless door of the disused broom closet and the smaller padlocked one of an old laundry chute or dumbwaiter (no one remembered which) and the big gilded one of the elevator with the strange black window beside it, and he descended the red-carpeted stairs, which between each floor went in right-angling flights of six and three and six steps around the oblong stair well beneath the dingy skylight two stories up from his floor. He didn't stop at Gun's and Saul's floor - the next, the fifth - though he glanced at both their doors, which were diagonally opposite each other near the stairs, but kept on to the fourth.

At each landing he glimpsed more of the strange black windows that couldn't be opened and a few more black doors without knobs in the empty red-carpeted halls. It was odd how old buildings had secret spaces in them that weren't really hidden but were never noticed; like this one's five airshafts, the windows to which had been painted black at some time to hide their dinginess, and the disused broom closets, which had lost their function with the passing of cheap maid service, and in the baseboard the tightly snap-capped round openings of a vacuum system which surely hadn't been used for decades. He doubted anyone in the building ever consciously saw them, except himself, newly aroused to reality by the tower and all. Today they made him think for a moment of the old times when this building had probably been a small hotel with monkey-faced bellboys and maids whom his fancy pictured as French with short skirts and naughty low laughs (dour slatterns more likely, reason commented). He knocked at 407.

It was one of those times when Cal looked like a serious schoolgirl of seventeen, lightly wrapped in dreams, and not ten years older, her actual age. Long, dark hair, blue eyes, a quiet smile. They'd been to bed together twice, but didn't kiss now - it might have seemed presumptuous on his part, she didn't quite offer to, and in any case he wasn't sure how far he wanted to commit himself. She invited him in to the breakfast she was making. Though a duplicate of his, her room looked much nicer - too good for the building - she had redecorated it completely with help from Gunnar and Saul. Only it didn't have a view. There was a music stand by the window and an electronic piano that was mostly keyboard and black box and that had earphones for silent practicing, as well as speaker.

"I came down because I heard you blowing the Telemann," Franz said.

"Perhaps I did it to summon you," Cal replied offhandedly from where she was busy with the hot plates and toaster. "There's magic in music, you know."

"You're thinking of The Magic Flute?" he asked. "You make a recorder sound like one."

"There's magic in all woodwinds," she assured him. "Mozart's supposed to have changed the plot of The Magic Flute midway so that it wouldn't be too close to that of a rival opera, The Enchanted Bassoon."

He laughed, then went on. "Musical notes do have at least one supernatural power. They can levitate, fly up through the air. Of course words can do that, too, but not as well."

"How do you figure that?" she asked over her shoulder.

"From cartoons and comic strips," he told her. "Words need balloons to hold them up, but notes just come flying out of the piano or whatever."

"They have those little black wings," she said, "at least the eighth and shorter ones. But it's all true. Music can fly - it's all release - and it has the power to release other things and make them fly and swirl."

He nodded. "I wish you'd release the notes of this piano, though, and let them swirl out when you practice harpsichord," he said, looking at the electronic instrument, "instead of keeping them shut up inside the earphones."

"You'd be the only one who'd like it," she informed him.

"There's Gun and Saul," he said.

"Their rooms aren't on this shaft. Besides, you'd get sick of scales and arpeggios yourself."

"I'm not so sure," he said, then teased, "But maybe harpsichord notes are too tinkly to make magic."

"I hate that word," she said, "but you're still wrong. Tinkly (ugh!) notes can make magic too. Remember Papageno's bells - there's more than one kind of magic music in The Flute."

They ate toast, juice, and eggs. Franz told Cal of his decision to send the manuscript of Towers of Treason off just as it was.

He finished, "So my readers won't find out just what a document-shredding machine sounds like when it works - what difference does that make? I actually saw that program on the tube, but when the Satanist wizard fed in the rune, they had smoke come out - which seemed stupid."

"I'm glad to hear you say that," she said sharply. "You put too much effort into rationalizing that silly program." Her expression changed. "Still, I don't know. It's partly that you always try to do your best, whatever at, that makes me think of you as a professional." She smiled.

He felt another faint twinge of guilt but fought it down easily.

While she was pouring him more coffee, he said, "I've got a great idea. Let's go to Corona Heights today. I think there'd be a great view of Downtown and the Inner Bay. We could take the Muni most of the way, and there shouldn't be too much climbing."

"You forget I've got to practice for the concert tomorrow night and couldn't risk my hands, in any case," she said a shade reproachfully. "But don't let that stop you," she added with a smile that asked his pardon. "Why not ask Gun or Saul - I think they're off today. Gun's great on climbing. Where is Corona Heights?"

He told her, remembering that her interest in Frisco was neither as new nor as passionate as his - he had a convert's zeal.

"That must be close to Buena Vista Park," she said. "Now don't go wandering in there, please. There've been some murders there quite recently. Drug related. The other side of Buena Vista is right up against the Haight."

"I don't intend to," he said, "though maybe you're a little too uptight about the Haight. It's quieted down a lot the last few years. Why, I got these two books there in one of those really fabulous secondhand stores."

"Oh, yes, you were going to show them to me," she said.

He handed her the one that had been open, saying, "That's just about the most fascinating book of pseudoscience I've ever seen - it has some genuine insights mixed with the hokum. No date, but printed about 1900, I'd judge."

"'Megapolisomancy,'" she pronounced carefully. "Now what would that be? Telling the future from... from cities?"

"From big cities," he said, nodding.

"Oh, yes, the mega."

He went on. "Telling the future and all other sorts of things. And apparently making magic, too, from that knowledge. Though de Castries calls it a 'new science,' as if he were a second Galileo. Anyhow, this de Castries is very much concerned about the 'vast amounts' of steel and paper that are being accumulated in big cities. And coal oil (kerosene) and natural gas. And electricity, too, if you can believe it - he carefully figures out just how much electricity is in how many thousands of miles of wire, how many tons of illuminating gas in tanks, how much steel in the new skyscrapers, how much paper for government records and yellow journalism, and so on."

"My-oh-my," Cal commented. "I wonder what he'd think if he were alive today."

"His direst predictions vindicated, no doubt. He did speculate about the growing menace of automobiles and gasoline, but especially electric cars carrying buckets of direct electricity around in batteries. He came so close to anticipating our modern concern about pollution - he even talks of 'the vast congeries of gigantic fuming vats' of sulphuric acid needed to manufacture steel. But what he was most agitated about was the psychological or spiritual (he calls them 'paramental') effects of all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass."

"A real proto-hippie," Cal put it. "What sort of man was he? Where did he live? What else did he do?"

"There's absolutely no indication in the book of any of those things," Franz told her, "and I've never turned up another reference to him. In his book he refers to New England and eastern Canada quite a bit, and New York City, but only in a general way. He also mentioned Paris (he had it in for the Eiffel Tower) and France a few times. And Egypt."

Cal nodded. "What's with the other book?"

"Something quite interesting," Franz said, passing it over. "As you can see, it's not a regular book at all but a journal of blank rice-paper pages, as thin as onionskin but more opaque, bound in ribbed silk that was tea rose, I'd say, before it faded. The entries, in violet ink with a fine-point fountain pen, I'd guess, hardly go a quarter of the way through. The rest of the pages are blank. Now when I bought these books they were tied together with an old piece of string. They looked as if they'd been joined for decades - you can still see the marks."

"Uh-huh," Cal agreed. "Since 1900 or so? A very charming diary book - I'd like to have one like it."

"Yes, isn't it? No, just since 1928. A couple of the entries are dated, and they all seem to have been made in the space of a few weeks."

"Was he a poet?" Cal asked. "I see groups of indented lines. Who was he, anyway? Old de Castries?"

"No, not de Castries, though someone who had read his book and knew him. But I do think he was a poet. In fact, I think I have identified the writer, though it's not easy to prove since he nowhere signs himself. I think he was Clark Ashton Smith."

"I've heard that name," Cal said.

"Probably from me," Franz told her. "He was another supernatural horror writer. Very rich, doomful stuff: Arabian Nights chinoiserie. A mood like Beddoes's Death's Jest-Book. He lived near San Francisco and knew the old artistic crew, he visited George Sterling at Carmel, and he could easily have been here in San Francisco in 1928 when he'd just begun to write his finest stories. I've given a photocopy of that journal to Jaime Donaldus Byers, who's an authority on Smith and who lives here on Beaver Street (which is just by Corona Heights, by the way, the map shows it), and he showed it to de Camp (who thinks it's Smith for sure) and to Roy Squires (who's as sure it isn't). Byers himself just can't decide, says there's no evidence for an extended San Francisco trip by Smith then, and that although the writing looks like Smith's, it's more agitated than any he's ever seen. But I have reasons to think Smith would have kept the trip secret and have had cause to be supremely agitated."

"Oh, my," Cal said. "You've gone to a lot of trouble and thought about it. But I can see why. It's tres romantique, just the feel of this ribbed silk and rice paper."

"I had a special reason," Franz said, unconsciously dropping his voice a little. "I bought the books four years ago, you see, before I moved here, and I read a lot in the journal. The violet-ink person (whoever, I think Smith) keeps writing about 'visiting Tiberius at 607 Rhodes.' In fact, the journal is entirely - or chiefly - an account of a series of such interviews. That '607 Rhodes' stuck in my mind, so that when I went hunting a cheaper place to live and was shown the room here - "

"Of course, it's your apartment number, 607," Cal interrupted.

Franz nodded. "I got the idea it was predestined, or prearranged in some mysterious way. As if I'd had to look for the '607 Rhodes' and had found it. I had a lot of mysterious drunken ideas in those days and didn't always know what I was doing or where I was - for instance, I've forgotten exactly where the fabulous store was where I bought these books, and its name, if it had one. In fact, I was pretty drunk most of the time - period."

"You certainly were," Cal agreed, "though in a quiet way. Saul and Gun and I wondered about you and we pumped Dorotea Luque and Bonita," she added, referring to the Peruvian apartment manager and her thirteen-year-old daughter. "Even then you didn't seem an ordinary lush. Dorotea said you wrote 'ficcion to scare, about espectros y fantasmas de los muertos y las muertas,' but that she thought you were a gentleman."

Franz laughed. "Specters and phantoms of dead men and dead ladies. How very Spanish! Still, I'll bet you never thought - " he began and stopped.

"That I'd some day get into bed with you?" Cal finished for him. "Don't be too sure. I've always had erotic fantasies about older men. But tell me - how did your weird then-brain fit in the Rhodes part?"

"It never did," Franz confessed. "Though I still think the violet-ink person had some definite place in mind, besides the obvious reference to Tiberius's exile by Augustus to the island of Rhodes, where the Roman emperor-to-be studied oratory along with sexual perversion and a spot of witchcraft. The violet-ink person doesn't always say Tiberius, incidentally. It's sometimes Theobald and sometimes Tybalt, and once it's Thrasyllus, who was Tiberius's personal fortuneteller and sorcerer. But always there's that '607 Rhodes.' And once it's Theudebaldo and once Dietbold, but three times Thibaut, which is what makes me sure, besides all the other things, it must have been de Castries that Smith was visiting almost every day and writing about."

"Franz," Cal said, "all this is perfectly fascinating, but I've just got to start practicing. Working up harpsichord on a dinky electronic piano is hard enough, and tomorrow night's not just anything, it's the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto."

"I know, I'm sorry I forgot about it. It was inconsiderate of me, a male chauvinist - " Franz began, getting to his feet.

"Now, don't get tragic," Cal said briskly. "I enjoyed every minute, really, but now I've got to work. Here, take your cup - and for heaven's sake, these books - or I'll be peeking into them when I should be practicing. Cheer up - at least you're not a male chauvinist pig, you only ate one piece of toast.

"And - Franz," she called. He turned with his things at the door. "Do be careful up there around Beaver and Buena Vista. Take Gun or Saul. And remember - " Instead of saying what, she kissed two fingers and held them out toward him for a moment, looking quite solemnly into his eyes.

He smiled, nodded twice, and went out feeling happy and excited. But as he closed the door behind him he decided that whether or not he went to Corona Heights, he wouldn't ask either of the two men on the next floor up to go with him - it was a question of courage, or at least independence. No, today would be his own adventure. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!