Our Lady of Darkness

Chapter 15

 

  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 leave-taking, or any send-off at all, he double-locked the door behind him and was away into the wind and sunlight.

  At the corner 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 mountaineering 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 then 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 Height's 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 that 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 this 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 -logical. 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, b
ut 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 Colt 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 punch-card. 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.