Our Lady of Darkness

"And now," Byers said, dropping his voice, "I must tell you of Thibaut de Castries's last acolyte and final end. Remember that during this period we must picture him as a bent old man, taciturn most of the time, always depressed, and getting paranoid. For instance, now, he had a thing about never touching metal surfaces and fixtures, because his enemies were trying to electrocute him. Sometimes he was afraid they were poisoning his tap water in the pipes. He seldom would go out, for fear a car would jump the curb and get him, and he no longer spry enough to dodge, or an enemy would shatter his skull with a brick or tile dropped from a high roof. At the same time he was frequently changing his hotel, to throw them off his trail. Now his only contacts with former associates were his dogged attempts to get back and burn all copies of his book, though there may still have been some blackmailing and plain begging. Ricker and Klaas witnessed one such book burning. Grotesque affair! - he burned two copies in his bathtub. They remembered opening the windows and fanning out the smoke. With one or two exceptions, they were his only visitors - lonely and eccentric types themselves, and already failed men like himself although they were only in their thirties at the time.

"Then Clark Ashton Smith came - the same age, but brimming with poetry and imagination and creative energy. Clark had been hard hit by George Sterling's nasty death and had felt driven to look up such friends and acquaintances of his poetic mentor as he could find. De Castries felt old fires stir. Here was another of the brilliant, vital ones he'd always sought. He was tempted (finally yielding entirely) to exert his formidable charm for a last time, to tell his fabulous tales, to expound compellingly his eerie theories, and to weave his spells.

"And Clark Ashton, a lover of the weird and of its beauty, highly intelligent, yet in some ways still a naive small-town youth, emotionally turbulent, made a most gratifying audience. For several weeks Clark delayed his return to Auburn, fearfully reveling in the ominous, wonder-shot, strangely real world that old Tiberius, the scarecrow emperor of terror and mysteries, painted for him afresh each day - a San Francisco of spectral though rock-solid megabuildings and invisible paramental entities more real than life. It's easy to see why the Tiberius metaphor caught Clark's fancy. At one point he wrote - hold on for a moment, Franz, while I get that photocopy - "

"There's no need," Franz said, dragging the journal itself out of his side pocket. The binoculars came out with it and dropped to the thickly carpeted floor with a shivery little clash of the broken glass inside.

Byers's eyes followed them with morbid curiosity. "So those are the glasses that (Take warning, Franz!) several times saw a paramental entity and were in the end destroyed by it." His gaze shifted to the journal. "Franz, you sly dog! You came prepared for at least part of this discussion before you ever went to Corona Heights today!"

Franz picked up the binoculars and put them on the low table beside his overflowing ashtray, meanwhile glancing rapidly around the room and at its windows, where the gold had darkened a little. He said quietly, "It seems to me, Donaldus, you've been holding out, too. You take for granted now that Smith wrote the journal, but in the Haight and even in the letters we exchanged afterwards, you said you were uncertain."

"You've got me," Byers admitted with a rather odd little smile, perhaps ashamed. "But it really seemed wise, Franz, to let as few people in on it as possible. Now of course you know as much as I do, or will in a few minutes, but... The most camp of cliches is 'There are some things man was not meant to know,' but there are times when I believe it really applies to Thibaut de Castries and the paranatural. Might I see the journal?"

Franz flipped it across. Byers caught it as if it were made of eggshell, and with an aggrieved look at his guest carefully opened it and as carefully turned a couple of pages. "Yes, here it is. 'Three hours today at 607 Rhodes. What a locus for genius! How prosaick! - as Howard would spell it. And yet Tiberius is Tiberius indeed, miserly doling out his dark Thrasyllus-secrets in this canyoned, cavernous Capri called San Francisco to his frightened young heir (God, no! Not I!) Caligula. And wondering how soon I, too, will go mad.'"

As he finished reading aloud, Byers began to turn the next pages, one at a time, and kept it up even when he came to the blank ones. Now and then he'd look up at Franz, but he examined each page minutely with fingers and eyes before he turned it.

He said conversationally, "Clark did think of San Francisco as a modern Rome, you know, both cities with their seven hills. From Auburn he'd seen George Sterling and the rest living as if all life were a Roman holiday. With Carmel perhaps analogous to Capri, which was simply Tiberius's Little Rome, for the more advanced fun and games. Fishermen brought fresh-caught lobsters to the goatish old emperor; Sterling dove for giant abalone with his knife. Of course, Rhodes was the Capri of Tiberius's early middle years. No, I can see why Clark would not have wanted to be Caligula. 'Art, like the bartender, is never drunk' - or really schiz. Hello, what's this?"

His fingernails were gently teasing at the edge of a page. "It's clear you're not a bibliophile, dear Franz. I should have gone ahead and stolen the book from you that evening in the Haight, as at one point I fully intended to, except that something gallant in your drunken manner touched my conscience, which is never a good guide to follow. There!"

With the ghostliest of cracklings the page came apart into two, revealing writing hidden between.

He reported, "It's black as new - India ink, for certain - but done very lightly so as not to groove the paper in the slightest. Then a few tiny drops of gum arabic, not enough to wrinkle, and hey presto! - it's hidden quite neatly. The obscurity of the obvious. 'Upon their vestments is a writing no man may see...' Oh dear me, no!"

He resolutely averted his eyes, which had been reading while he spoke. Then he stood up and holding the journal at arm's length came over and squatted on his hams, so close beside Franz that his brandy breath was obvious, and held the newly liberated page spread before their faces. Only the right-hand one was written upon, in very black yet spider-fine characters very neatly drawn and not remotely like Smith's handwriting.

"Thank you," Franz said. "This is weird. I riffled through those pages a dozen times."

"But you did not examine each one minutely with the true bibliophile's profound mistrust. The signatory initials indicate it was written by old Tiberius himself. And I'm sharing this with you not so much out of courtesy, as fear. Glancing at the opening, I got the feeling this was something I did not want to read all by myself. This way feels safer - at least it spreads the danger."

Together they silently read the following:

A CURSE upon Master Clark Ashton Smith and all his heirs, who thought to pick my brain and slip away, false fleeting agent of my old enemies. Upon him the Long Death, the paramental agony! when he strays back as all men do. 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. Committed to Cipher in my 50-Book (A). Go out, my little book (B) into the world, and lie in wait in stalls and lurk on shelves for the unwary purchaser. Go out, my little book, and break some necks!
TdC

As he finished reading it, Franz's mind was whirling with so many names of places and things both familiar and strange that he had to prod himself to remind himself to check visually the windows and doors and corners of Byers's gorgeous living room, now filling with shadows. That business about "when the weights are on" - he couldn't imagine what it meant, but taken together with "heaviest ashes," it made him think of the old man pressed to death with heavy stones on a plank on his chest for refusing to testify at the Salem witchcraft trial of 1692, as if a confession could be forced out like a last breath.

"Monkey Clay," Byers muttered puzzledly. "Ape of clay? Poor suffering Man, molded of dust?"

Franz shook his head. And in the midst of all, he thought, that damnably puzzling 607 Rhodes! which kept turning up again and again, and had in a way touched all this off.

And to think he'd had this book for years and not spotted the secret. It made a person suspect and distrust all things closest to him, his most familiar possessions. What might not be hidden inside the lining of your clothes, or in your right-hand trousers pocket (or for a woman, in her handbag or bra), or in the cake of soap with which you washed (which might have a razor blade inside).

Also to think that he was looking at last at de Castries's own handwriting, so neatly drawn and yet so crabbed for all that.

One detail puzzled him differently. "Donaldus," he said, "how would de Castries ever have got hold of Smith's journal?"

Byers let out a long alcohol-laden sigh, massaged his face with his hands (Franz clutched the journal to keep it from falling), and said, "Oh, that. Klaas and Ricker both told me that de Castries was quite worried and hurt when Clark went back to Auburn (it turned out) without warning, after visiting the old man every day for a month or so. De Castries was so bothered, they said, that he went over to Clark's cheap rooming-house and convinced them he was Clark's uncle, so that they gave him some things Clark had left behind when he'd checked out in a great tearing hurry. 'I'll keep them for little Clark,' he told Klaas and Ricker and then later (after they'd heard from Clark) he added, 'I've shipped him back his things.' They never suspected that the old man ever entertained any hard feelings about Clark."

Franz nodded. "But then how did the journal (now with the curse in it) get from de Castries to wherever I bought it?"

Byers said wearily, "Who knows? The curse, though, does remind me of another side of de Castries's character that I haven't mentioned: his fondness for rather cruel practical jokes. Despite his morbid fear of electricity, he had a chair Ricker helped rig for him to give the sitter an electric shock through the cushion that he kept for salesmen and salesladies, children, and other stray visitors. He nearly got into police trouble through that too. Some young lady looking for typing work got her bottom burned. Come to think of it, that has an S-M feeling, don't you think? - the genuine sadomasochistic touch. Electricity - bringer of thrills and pain. Don't writers speak of electric kisses? Ah, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men," Byers finished sententiously and stood up, leaving the journal in Franz's hands, and went back to his place. Franz looked at him questioningly, holding out the journal toward him a little, but his host said, pouring himself more brandy. "No, you keep it. It's yours. After all, you were - are - the purchaser. Only for Heaven's sake take better care of it! It's a very rare item."

"But what do you think of it, Donaldus?" Franz asked.

Donaldus shrugged as he began to sip. "A shivery document indeed," he said, smiling at Franz as if he were very glad the latter had it. "And it really did lie in wait in stalls and lurk on shelves for many years, apparently Franz, don't you recall anything about where you bought it?"

"I've tried and tried," Franz said tormentedly. "The place was in the Haight, I'm fairly sure of that. Called... the In Group? The Black Spot? The Black Dog? The Grey Cockatoo? No, none of those, and I've tried hundreds of names. I think that 'black' was in it, but I believe the proprietor was a white man. And there was a little girl - maybe his daughter - helping him. Not so little, really - she was into puberty, I seem to recall, and well aware of it. Pushing herself at me - all this is very vague. I also seem to recall (I was drunk of course) being attracted to her," he confessed somewhat ashamedly.

"My dear Franz, aren't we all?" Byers observed. "The little darlings, barely kissed by sex, but don't they know it! Who can resist? Do you recall what you paid for the books?"

"Something pretty high, I think. But now I'm beginning to guess and imagine."

"You could search through the Haight, street by street, of course."

"I suppose I could, if it's still there and hasn't changed its name. Why don't you get on with your story, Donaldus?"

"Very well. There's not much more of it. You know, Franz, there's one indication that that... er... curse isn't particularly efficacious. Clark lived a long and productive life, thirty-three more years. Reassuring, don't you think?"

"He didn't stray back to San Francisco," Franz said shortly. "At least not very often."

"That's true. Well, after Clark left, de Castries remained... just a lonely and gloomy old man. He once told George Ricker at about this time a very unromantic story of his past: that he was French-Canadian and had grown up in northern Vermont, his father by turns a small-town printer and a farmer, always a failure, and he a lonely and unhappy child. It has the ring of truth, don't you think? And it makes one wonder what the sex life of such a person would have been. No mistresses at all, I'd say, let alone intellectual, mysterious, and foreign ones. Well, anyhow, now he'd had his last fling (with Clark) at playing the omnipotent sinister sorcerer, and it had turned out as bitterly as it had the first time in fin de siecle San Francisco (if that was the first). Gloomy and lonely. He had only one other literary acquaintance at that time - or friend of any sort, for that matter. Klaas and Ricker both vouch for it. Dashiell Hammett, who was living in San Francisco in an apartment at Post and Hyde, and writing The Maltese Falcon. Those bookstore names you were trying out reminded me of it - the Black Dog and a cockatoo. You see, the fabulously jeweled gold falcon enameled black (and finally proven a fake) is sometimes called the Black Bird in Hammett's detective story. He and de Castries talked a lot about black treasures, Klaas and Ricker told me. And about the historical background of Hammett's book - the Knights Hospitalers (later of Malta) who created the falcon and how they'd once been the Knights of Rhodes - "

"Rhodes turning up again!" Franz interjected. "That damn 607 Rhodes!"

"Yes," Byers agreed. "First Tiberius, then the Hospitalers. They held the island for two hundred years and were finally driven out of it by the sultan Mohammed II in 1522. But about the Black Bird - you'll recall what I told you of de Castries's pietra dura ring of mosaicked black semiprecious stuff depicting a black bird? Klaas claimed it was the inspiration for The Maltese Falcon! One needn't go that far, of course, but just the same it's all very odd indeed, don't you think? De Castries and Hammett. The black magician and the tough detective."

"Not so odd as all that when you think about it," Franz countered, his eyes on one of their roving trips again. "Besides being one of America's few great novelists, Hammett was a rather lonely and taciturn man himself, with an almost fabulous integrity. He elected to serve a sentence in a federal prison rather than betray a trust. And he enlisted in World War I when he didn't have to and served it out in the cold Aleutians and finally toughed out a long last illness. No, he'd have been interested in a queer old duck like de Castries and showed a hard, unsentimental compassion toward his loneliness and bitterness and failures. Go on, Donaldus."

"There's really nothing more," Donaldus said, but his eyes were flashing. "De Castries died of a coronary occlusion in 1929 after two weeks in the City Hospital. It happened in the summertime - I remember Klaas saying the old man didn't even live to see the stock market crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression, 'which would have been a comfort to him because it would have confirmed his theories that because of the self-abuse of mega-cities, the world was going to hell in a handbasket.'

"So that was that. De Castries was cremated, as he'd wished, which took his last cash. Ricker and Klaas split his few possessions. There were of course no relatives."

"I'm glad of that," Franz said. "I mean, that he was cremated. Oh, I know he died - had to be dead after all these years - but just the same, along with all the rest today, I've had this picture of de Castries, a very old man, but wiry and somehow very fast, still slipping around San Francisco. Hearing that he not only died in a hospital but was cremated makes his death more final."

"In a way," Byers agreed, giving him an odd look. "Klaas had the ashes sitting just inside his front door for a while in a cheap canister the crematory had furnished, until he and Ricker figured out what to do with them. They finally decided to follow de Castries's wish there too, although it meant an illegal burial and doing it all secretly at night. Ricker carried a post-digger packaged in newspaper, and Klaas a small spade, similarly wrapped.

"There were two other persons in the funeral party. Dashiell Hammett - he decided a question for them, as it happened. They'd been arguing as to whether de Castries's black ring (Klaas had it) should be buried with the ashes, so they put it up to Hammett, and he said, 'Of course.' "

"That figures," Franz said, nodding. "But how very strange."

"Yes, wasn't it?" Byers agreed. "They bound it to the neck of the canister with heavy copper wire. The fourth person - he even carried the ashes - was Clark. I thought that would surprise you. They'd got in touch with him in Auburn and he'd come back just for that night. It shows, come to think of it, that Clark couldn't have known about the curse - or does it? Anyhow, the little burial detail set forth from Klaas's place just after dark. It was a clear night and the moon was gibbous, a few days before full - which was a good thing, as they had some climbing to do where there were no street lights."

"Just the four of them, eh?" Franz prompted when Byers paused.

"Odd you should ask that," Byers said. "After it was all over, Hammett asked Ricker, 'Who the devil was that woman who stayed in the background? - some old flame of his? I expected her to drop out when we got to the rocks, or else join us, but she kept her distance all the way.' It gave Ricker quite a turn - for he, as it happened, hadn't glimpsed anyone. Nor had Klaas or Smith. But Hammett stuck to his story."

Byers looked at Franz with a sort of relish and finished rapidly. "The burial went off without a hitch, though they needed the post-digger - the ground was hard. The only thing lacking was the TV tower - that fantastic cross between a dressmaker's dummy and a Burmese pagoda in a feast of red lanterns - to lean down through the night and give a cryptic blessing. The spot was just below a natural rock seat that de Castries had called the Bishop's Seat after the one in Poe's 'Gold Bug' story, and just at the base of that big rock outcropping that is the summit of Corona Heights. Oh, incidentally, another of his whims they gratified - he was burned wearing a bathrobe he'd worn to tatters - a pale old brown one with a cowl."