Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness

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Fritz Leiber
Our Lady of Darkness
Flyleaf:
Sometime during a three-year drunk in San Francisco, Franz Westen, a pulp author, bought two strange books. One was
Megapolisomancy—a "science of cities"—by the black magician and socialite Thibaut de Castries; the other an early journal of
Clark Ashton Smith, a writer of horror stories. As Westen tries to piece his life together, these books draw him to the ashes of a
wealthy, brilliant and degenerate bohemian cult, and to a grotesque living world of technological curses.
One morning, while examining the city through binoculars, Franz glimpses a priest-like dancing figure on a desolate hill.
Fascinated and vaguely horrified, he investigates. The hill is deserted but now he sees the faceless spectre across the city, in his
own apartment! Paranoia creeps over Franz; he knows intuitively that he has been selected by this entity. Somehow he must
break its hold over him. His two eerie books have the answers.
In Megapolisomancy Franz discovers an occult science of vicious demons—"paramental entities"—who are intimately
related to urban design and engineering. And in the diary of Smith, a disciple of Thibaut de Castries, Franz sees the personalities of
the sorcerer and his circle. He goes back to the San Francisco of the 1900s and the Dionysian members of the Bohemian
Club—Jack London, the poets George Sterling and Nora May French, Earl Rogers, Gertrude Atherton, Ambrose Bierce. For a brief,
heady time, de Castries used these people in his paramental experiments.
Hounded through the city by ravenous ghosts and at the end of his wits, Franz finally confronts his curse, the embodiment
of the paramental force: Our Lady of Darkness.
Fritz Leiber has written a subtle and elegant book. His realm is the arcane point where technology and mystery, science and
horror, meet. Our Lady of Darkness is a terrifying and ethereal work of science fiction.
An elder statesman of the literature of science fiction and fantasy, Fritz Leiber began publishing his works in the 30s and
became famous for his stories in Unknown and Astounding. He is the author of the classic novels Gather Darkness, Conjure Wife,
The Wanderer, and The Big Time and winner of several Hugo awards.
But the third Sister, who is also the youngest—! Hush! whisper whilst we talk of her! Her
kingdom is not large, or else no flesh should live; but within that kingdom all power is hers.
Her head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of sight. She droops
not; and her eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. But, being what they are, they
cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears the fierce light of a
blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for
ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She
also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her
power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. For she can approach only those in whom a
profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and
the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within.
Madonna moves with uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic grace. Our Lady of
Sighs creeps timidly and stealthily. But this youngest Sister moves with incalculable
motions, bounding, and with tiger's leaps. She carries no key; for, though coming rarely
amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is permitted to enter at all. And her name is
Mater Tenebrarum—our Lady of Darkness.
—Thomas De Quincey, "Levana and Our Three Ladies of Sorrow", Suspiria de
Profundis
1
The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the
heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright
lights of downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its
territory in patient search of prey.
The waxing gibbous moon had set, and the stars at the top of the black heavens were
still diamond-sharp. To the west lay a low bank of fog. But to the east, beyond the city's
business center and the fog-surfaced Bay, the narrow ghostly ribbon of the dawn's earliest
light lay along the tops of the low hills behind Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda, and still
more distant Devil's Mountain—Mount Diablo.
On every side of Corona Heights the street and house lights of San Francisco, weakest
at end of night, hemmed it in apprehensively, as if it were indeed a dangerous animal. But
on the hill itself there was not a single light. An observer below would have found it almost
impossible to make out its jagged spine and the weird crags crowning its top (which even
the gulls avoided); and breaking out here and there from its raw, barren sides, which
although sometimes touched by fog, had not known the pelting of rain for months.
Someday the hill might be bulldozed down, when greed had grown even greater than it
is today and awe of primeval nature even less, but now it could still awaken panic terror.
Too savage and cantankerous for a park, it was inadequately designated as a
playground. True, there were some tennis courts and limited fields of grass and low
buildings and little stands of thick pine around its base; but above those it rose rough,
naked, and contemptuously aloof.
And now something seemed to stir in the massed darkness there. (Hard to tell what.)
Perhaps one or more of the city's wild dogs, homeless for generations, yet able to pass as
tame. (In a big city, if you see a dog going about his business, menacing no one, fawning on
no one, fussing at no one—in fact, behaving like a good citizen with work to do and no time
for nonsense—and if that dog lacks tag or collar, then you may be sure he hasn't a neglectful
owner, but is wild—and well adjusted.) Perhaps some wilder and more secret animal that
had never submitted to man's rule, yet lived almost unglimpsed amongst him. Perhaps,
conceivably, a man (or woman) so sunk in savagery or psychosis that he (or she) didn't
need light. Or perhaps only the wind.
And now the eastern ribbon grew dark red, the whole sky lightened from the east toward
the west, the stars were fading, and Corona Heights began to show its raw, dry, pale brown
surface.
Yet the impression lingered that the hill had grown restless, having at last decided on its
victim.
2
Two hours later, Franz Westen looked out of his open casement window at the
1,000-foot TV tower rising bright red and white in the morning sunlight out of the snowy fog
that still masked Sutro Crest and Twin Peaks three miles away and against which Corona
Heights stood out, humped and pale brown. The TV tower—San Francisco's Eiffel, you
could call it—was broad-shouldered, slender-waisted, and long-legged like a beautiful and
stylish woman—or demigoddess. It mediated between Franz and the universe these days,
just as man is supposed to mediate between the atoms and the stars. Looking at it,
admiring, almost reverencing it, was his regular morning greeting to the universe, his
affirmation that they were in touch, before making coffee and settling back into bed with
clipboard and pad for the day's work of writing supernatural horror stories and especially
(his bread and butter) novelizing the TV program "Weird Underground," so that the mob of
viewers could also read, if they wanted to, something like the mélange of witchcraft,
Watergate, and puppy love they watched on the tube. A year or so ago he would have been
focusing inward on his miseries at this hour and worrying about the day's first
drink—whether he still had it or had drunk up everything last night—but that was in the past,
another matter.
Faint, dismal foghorns cautioned each other in the distance. Franz's mind darted briefly
two miles behind him to where more fog would be blanketing San Francisco Bay except for
the four tops thrusting from it of the first span of the bridge to Oakland. Under that
frosty-looking surface there would be the ribbons of impatient, fuming cars, the talking ships,
and coming from far below the water and the mucky bottom, but heard by fishermen in little
boats, the eerie roar of the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) trains rocketing through the tube
as they carried the main body of commuters to their jobs.
Dancing up the sea air into his room there came the gay, sweet notes of a Telemann
minuet blown by Cal from her recorder two floors below. She meant them for him, he told
himself, even though he was twenty years older. He looked at the oil portrait of his dead wife
Daisy over the studio bed, beside a drawing of the TV tower in spidery black lines on a
large oblong of fluorescent red cardboard, and felt no guilt. Three years of drunken grief—a
record wake!—had worked that all away, ending almost exactly a year ago.
His gaze dropped to the studio bed, still half-unmade. On the undisturbed half, nearest
the wall, there stretched out a long, colorful scatter of magazines, science-fiction
paperbacks, a few hardcover detective novels still in their wrappers, a few bright napkins
taken home from restaurants, and a half-dozen of those shiny little Golden Guides and
Knowledge Through Color books—his recreational reading as opposed to his working
materials and references arranged on the coffee table beside the bed. They'd been his
chief—almost his sole—companions during the three years he'd laid sodden there stupidly
goggling at the TV across the room; but always fingering them and stupefiedly studying their
bright, easy pages from time to time. Only a month ago it had suddenly occurred to him that
their gay casual scatter added up to a slender, carefree woman lying beside him on top of
the covers—that was why he never put them on the floor; why he contented himself with half
the bed; why he unconsciously arranged them in a female form with long, long legs. They
were a "scholar's mistress," he decided, on the analogy of "Dutch wife," that long, slender
bolster sleepers clutch to soak up sweat in tropical countries—a very secret playmate, a
dashing but studious call girl, a slim, incestuous sister, eternal comrade of his writing work.
With an affectionate glance toward his oil-painted dead wife and a keen, warm thought
toward Cal still sending up pirouetting notes on the air, he said softly with a conspiratorial
smile to the slender cubist form occupying all the inside of the bed, "Don't worry, dear, you'll
always be my best girl, though we'll have to keep it a deep secret from the others," and
turned back to the window.
It was the TV tower standing way out there so modern-tall on Sutro Crest, its three long
legs still deep in fog, that had first gotten him hooked on reality again after his long escape
in drunken dream. At the beginning the tower had seemed unbelievably cheap and garish to
him, an intrusion worse than the high rises in what had been the most romantic of cities, an
obscene embodiment of the blatant world of sales and advertising—even, with its great red
and white limbs against blue sky (as now, above the fog), an emblazonment of the American
flag in its worst aspects: barberpole stripes; fat, flashy, regimented stars. But then it had
begun to impress him against his will with its winking red lights at night—so many of them!
he had counted nineteen: thirteen steadies and six winkers—and then it had subtly led his
interest to the other distances in the cityscape and also in the real stars so far beyond, and
on lucky nights the moon, until he had got passionately interested in all real things again, no
matter what. And the process had never stopped; it still kept on. Until Saul had said to him,
only the other day, "I don't know about welcoming in every new reality. You could run into a
bad customer."
"That's fine talk, coming from a nurse in a psychiatric ward," Gunnar had said, while
Franz had responded instantly, "Taken for granted. Concentration camps. Germs of
plague."
"I don't mean things like those exactly," Saul had said. "I guess I mean the sort of things
some of my guys run into at the hospital."
"But those would be hallucinations, projections, archetypes, and so on, wouldn't they?"
Franz had observed, a little wonderingly. "Parts of inner reality, of course."
"Sometimes I'm not so sure," Saul had said slowly. "Who's going to know what's what if
a crazy says he's just seen a ghost? Inner or outer reality? Who's to tell then? What do you
say, Gunnar, when one of your computers starts giving readouts it shouldn't?"
"That it's got overheated," Gun had answered with conviction. "Remember, my
computers are normal people to start out with, not weirdos and psychotics like your guys."
"Normal—what's that?" Saul had countered.
Franz had smiled at his two friends who occupied two apartments on the floor between
his and Cal's. Cal had smiled, too, though not so much.
Now he looked out the window again. Just outside it, the six-story drop went down past
Cal's window—a narrow shaft between this building and the next, the flat roof of which was
about level with his floor. Just beyond that, framing his view to either side, were the
bone-white, rain-stained back walls—mostly windowless—of two high rises that went up and
up.
It was a rather narrow slot between them, but through it he could see all of reality he
needed to keep in touch. And if he wanted more he could always go up two stories to the
roof, which he often did these days and nights.
From this building low on Nob Hill the sea of roofs went down and down, then up and up
again, tinying with distance, to the bank of fog now masking the dark green slope of Sutro
Crest and the bottom of the tripod TV tower. But in the middle distance a shape like a
crouching beast, pale brown in the morning sunlight, rose from the sea of roofs. The map
called it just Corona Heights. It had been teasing Franz's curiosity for several weeks. Now
he focused his small seven-power Nikon binoculars on its bare earth slopes and humped
spine, which stood out sharply against the white fog. He wondered why it hadn't been built
up. Big cities certainly had some strange intrusions in them. This one was like a raw
remnant of upthrust from the earthquake of 1906, he told himself, smiling at the unscientific
fancy. Could it be called Corona Heights from the crown of irregularly clumped big rocks on
its top, he asked himself, as he rotated the knurled knob a little more, and they came out
momentarily sharp and clear against the fog.
A rather thin, pale brown rock detached itself from the others and waved at him. Damn
the way these glasses jiggled with his heartbeat! A person who expected to see neat,
steady pictures through them just hadn't used binoculars. Or could it be a floater in his vision,
a microscopic speck in the eye's fluid? No, there he had it again! Just as he'd thought, it
was some tall person in a long raincoat or drab robe moving about almost as if dancing. You
couldn't see human figures in any detail at two miles even with sevenfold magnification; you
just got a general impression of movements and attitude. They were simplified. This skinny
figure on Corona Heights was moving around rather rapidly, all right, maybe dancing with
arms waving high, but that was the most you could tell.
As he lowered the binoculars he smiled broadly at the thought of some hippie type
greeting the morning sun with ritual prancings on a mid-city hilltop newly emerged from fog.
And with chantings too, no doubt, if one could hear—unpleasant wailing ululations like the
yelping siren he heard now in the distance, the sort that was frantic-making when heard too
close. Someone from the Haight-Ashbury, likely, it was out that way. A stoned priest of a
modern sun god dancing around an accidental high-set Stonehenge. The thing had given
him a start, at first, but now he found it very amusing.
A sudden wind blew in. Should he shut the window? No, for now the air was quiet again.
It had just been a freakish gust.
He set down the binoculars on his desk beside two thin old books. The topmost, bound
in dirty gray, was open at its title page, which read in a utilitarian typeface and layout
marking it as last century's—a grimy job by a grimy printer with no thought of artistry:
Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities, by Thibaut de Castries. Now that was a funny
coincidence! He wondered if a drug-crazed priest in earthen robes—or a dancing rock, for
that matter!—would have been recognized by that strange old crackpot Thibaut as one of
the "secret occurrences" he had predicted for big cities in the solemnly straight-faced book
he'd written back in the 1890s. Franz told himself that he must read some more in it, and in
the other book, too.
But not right now, he told himself suddenly, looking back at the coffee table where there
reposed, on top of a large and heavy manila envelope already stamped and addressed to
his New York agent, the typed manuscript of his newest novelization—Weird Underground
#7: Towers of Treason—all ready to go except for one final descriptive touch he'd hankered
to check on and put in; he liked to give his readers their money's worth, even though this
series was the flimsiest of escape reading, secondary creativity on his part at best.
But this time, he told himself, he'd send the novelization off without the final touch and
declare today a holiday—he was beginning to get an idea of what he wanted to do with it.
With only a flicker of guilt at the thought of cheating his readers of a trifle, he got dressed
and made himself a cup of coffee to carry down to Cal's, and as afterthoughts the two thin
old books under his arm (he wanted to show them to Cal) and the binoculars in his jacket
pocket—just in case he was tempted to check up again on Corona Heights and its freaky
rock god.
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 très 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 'ficción 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!
4
The hall outside Cal's door duplicated all the features of the one on Franz's floor:
black-painted airshaft window, knobless door to disused broom closet, drab golden elevator
door, and low-set, snap-capped vacuum outlet—a relic of the days when the motor for a
building's vacuum system was in the basement and the maid handled only a long hose and
brush. But before Franz, starting down the hall, had passed any of these, he heard from
ahead an intimate, giggly laugh that made him remember the one he'd imagined for the
imaginary maids. Then some words he couldn't catch in a man's voice: low, rapid, and
jocular. Saul's?—it did seem to come from above. Then the feminine or girlish laughter
again, louder and a little explosive, almost as if someone were being tickled. Then a rush of
light footsteps coming down the stairs.
He reached them just in time to get a glimpse, down and across the stairwell, of a
shadowy slender figure disappearing around the last visible angle—just the suggestion of
black hair and clothing and slim white wrists and ankles, all in swift movement. He moved to
the well and looked down it, struck by how the successive floors below were like the series
of reflections you saw when you stood between two mirrors. The rapid footsteps continued
their spiraling descent all the way down, but whoever was making them was keeping to the
wall and away from the rail lining the well, as if driven by centrifugal force, so he got no
further glimpses.
As he peered down that long, narrow tube dimly lit from the skylight above, still thinking
of the black-clad limbs and the laughter, a murky memory rose in his mind and for a few
moments possessed him utterly. Although it refused to come wholly clear, it gripped him with
the authority of a very unpleasant dream or bad drunk. He was standing upright in a dark,
claustrophobically narrow, crowded, musty space. Through the fabric of his trousers he felt a
small hand laid on his genitals and he heard a low, wicked laugh. He looked down in his
memory and saw the foreshortened, ghostly, featureless oval of a small face and the laugh
was repeated, mockingly. Somehow it seemed there were black tendrils all around him. He
felt a weight of sick excitement and guilt and, almost, fear.
The murky memory lifted as Franz realized the figure on the stairs had to have been that
of Bonita Luque wearing the black pajamas and robe and feathered black mules she'd been
handed down from her mother and already outgrown, but sometimes still wore as she darted
around the building on her mother's early-morning errands. He smiled disparagingly at the
thought that he was almost sorry (not really!) he was no longer drunk and so able to nurse
various kinky excitements.
He started up the stairs, but stopped almost at once when he heard Gun's and Saul's
voices from the floor above. He did not want to see either of them now, at first simply from a
reluctance to share today's mood and plans with anyone but Cal, but as he listened to the
clear and sharpening voices his motive became more complicated.
Gun asked, "What was that all about?"
Saul answered, "Her mother sent the kid up to check if either of us had lost a cassette
player-recorder. She thinks her kleptomaniac on the second floor has one that doesn't
belong to her."
Gun remarked, "That's a big word for Mrs. Luque."
摘要：

[Version5.0—proofreadandformattedbybraven]FritzLeiberOurLadyofDarknessFlyleaf:Sometimeduringathree-yeardrunkinSanFrancisco,FranzWesten,apulpauthor,boughttwostrangebooks.OnewasMegapolisomancy—a"scienceofcities"—bytheblackmagicianandsocialiteThibautdeCastries;theotheranearlyjournalofClarkAshtonSmith,a...

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