Our Lady of Darkness (11 page)

“However, all this is really by-the-by. The important consideration is that for a while de Castries seemed to have his chosen group just where he wanted them.”

DONALDUS CONTINUED.
“The high point of Thibaut de Castries’s San Francisco adventure came when with much hushhush and weedings out and secret messages and some rare private occult pomps and ceremonies, I suppose, he organized the Hermetic Order—“

“Is that the Hermetic Order that Smith, or the journal, mentions?” Franz interrupted. He had been listening with a mixture of fascination, irritation, and wry amusement, with at least half his attention clearly elsewhere, but he had grown more attentive at mention of the Grand Cipher.

“It is,” Byers nodded, “I’ll explain. In England at mat time there was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with members like the mystic poet Yeats, who talked with vegetables and bees and lakes, and Dion Fortune and George Russell—A.E.—and your beloved Arthur Machen—you know, Franz, I’ve always thought that in his
The Great God Pan
the sexually sinister
femme fatale
Helen Vaughan was based on the real-life Satanist Diana Vaughan, even though
her
memoirs—and perhaps she herself—were a hoax perpetrated by the French journalist, Gabriel Jogand…”

Franz nodded impatiently, restraining his impulse to say, “Get on with it, Donaldus!”

The other got the point. “Well, anyhow,” he continued, “in 1898 Aleister Crowley managed to join the Gilded Dayspringers (neat, eh?) and almost broke up the society by his demands for Satanistic rituals, black magic, and other real tough stuff.

“In imitation, but also as a sardonic challenge, de Castries called
his
society the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. He is said to have worn a large black ring of
pietra dura
work with a bezel of mosaicked onyx, obsidian, ebony, and black opal polished flat, depicting a predatory black bird, perhaps a raven.

“It was at this point that things began to go wrong for de Castries and that the atmosphere became, by degrees, very nasty. Unfortunately, it’s also the period for which I’ve had the most difficulty getting information that’s at all reliable—or even any information at all, for reasons which are, or will become, very obvious.

“As nearly as I can reconstruct it, this is what happened. As soon as his secret society had been constituted, Thibaut revealed to its double handful of highly select members that his Utopia was not a far-off dream, but an immediate prospect, and that it was to be achieved by violent revolution, both material and spiritual (that is, paramental) and that the chief and at first the sole instrument of that revolution was to be the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk.

“This violent revolution was to begin with acts of terrorism somewhat resembling those the Nihilists were carrying out in Russia at that time (just before the abortive Revolution of 1905), but with a lot of a new sort of black magic (his megapolisomancy) thrown in. Demoralization rather than slaughter was to be the aim, at least at first. Black-powder bombs were to be set off in public places and on the roofs of big buildings during the deserted hours of the night. Other big buildings were to be plunged into darkness by locating and throwing their main switches. Anonymous letters and phone calls would heighten the hysteria.

“But more important would be the megapolisomantic operations, which would cause ‘buildings to crumple to rubble, people to go screaming mad, until every last soul is in panic flight from San Francisco, choking the roads and foundering the ferries’—at least that’s what Klaas said de Castries confided to him many years later while in a rare communicative mood. Say, Franz, did you know that Nicola Tesla, America’s other electrical wizard, claimed in his last years to have invented or at least envisaged a device small enough to be smuggled into a building in a dispatch case and left there to shake the building to pieces at a preset time by sympathetic
vibrations? Herman Klaas told me that too. But I digress.

“These magical or pseudoscientific acts (what would you call them?) would require absolute obedience on the part of Thibaut’s assistants—which was the next demand Thibaut seems to have made on every last one of his acolytes in the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. One of them would be ordered to go to a specific address in San Francisco at a specified time and simply stand there for two hours, blanking his (or her) mind, or else trying to hold one thought. Or he’d be directed to take a bar of copper or a small box of coal or a toy balloon filled with hydrogen to a certain floor in a certain big building and simply leave it there (the balloon against the ceiling), again at a specified time. Apparently the elements were supposed to act as catalysts. Or two or three of them would be commanded to meet in a certain hotel lobby or at a certain park bench and just sit there together without speaking for half an hour. And everyone would be expected to obey every order unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, in exact detail, or else there would be (I suppose) various chilling Carbonari-style penalties and reprisals.

“Big buildings were always the main targets of his megapolisomancy—he claimed they were the chief concentration-points for city-stuff that poisoned great metropolises or weighed them down intolerably. Ten years earlier, according to one story, he had joined other Parisians in opposing the erection of the Eiffel Tower. A professor of mathematics had calculated that the structure would collapse when it reached the height of seven hundred feet, but Thibaut had simply claimed that all that naked steel looking down upon the city from the sky would drive Paris mad. (And considering subsequent events, Franz, I’ve sometimes thought that a case could be made out that it did just that. World Wars One and Two brought on like locust plagues by overly concentrated populations due to a rash or fever of high buildings—is that so fabulous?) But since he had found he couldn’ t stop the erection of such buildings, Thibaut had turned to the problem of their control. In some ways, you know, he had the mentality of an animal trainer—inherited from his Africa-traveled father, perhaps?

“Thibaut seems to have thought that there was—or that he had invented—a kind of mathematics whereby minds and big buildings (and paramental entities?) could be manipulated. Neo-Pythagorean metageometry, he called it. It was all a question of knowing the right times and
spots
(he’d quote Archimedes: ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’) and then conveying there the right person (and mind) or material object. He also seemed to have believed that a limited clairvoyance and clairaudience and prescience existed at certain
places
in mega-cities for certain people. Once he started to outline in detail to Klaas a single act of megapolisomancy—give him the formula for it, so to speak—but then he got suspicious.

“Though there is one other anecdote about the megamagic thing, I’m inclined to doubt its authenticity, but it
is
attractive. It seems that Thibaut proposed to give a warning shake to the Hobart Building, or at any rate one of those early flatiron structures on Market—whether it would actually fall down would depend on the integrity of the builder, the old boy’s supposed to have said. In this case his four volunteers or conscripts were (improbably?) Jack London, George Sterling, an octoroon ragtime singer named Olive Church, who was a protegee of that old voodoo queen, etcetera, Mammy Pleasant, and a man named Fenner.

“You know Lotta’s Fountain there on Market?—gift to the city of Lotta Crabtree, ‘the toast of the goldfields,’ who was taught dancing (and related arts?) by Lola Montez (she of the spider dance and Ludwig of Bavaria and all). Well, the four acolytes were supposed to approach the fountain by streets that would trace the four arms of a counterclockwise swastika centering on the fountain while concentrating in their mind on the four points of the compass and bearing objects representing the four elements—Olive a potted lily for earth, Fenner a magnum of
champagne for fluid, Sterling a rather large toy hydrogen-filled balloon for the gaseous, and Jack a long cigar for fire.

“They were supposed to arrive simultaneously and introduce their burdens into the fountain, George bubbling his hydrogen through its water and Jack extinguishing his cigar in the same.

“Olive and Fenner arrived first, Fenner somewhat drunk—perhaps he had been sampling his offering and we may assume that all four of them were at least somewhat ‘elevated.’ Well, apparently Fenner had been nursing a lech for Olive and she’d been turning him down, and now he wanted her to drink champagne with him and she wouldn’t and he tried to force it on her and succeeded in sloshing it over her bosom
and
the potted lily she was holding and down her dress.

“While they were struggling that way at the fountain’s edge, George came up protesting and tried to control Fenner without letting go of his balloon, with Olive shrieking and laughing at them while they were scuffling and while she still hugged the potted lily to her wet breasts.

“At this point Jack came up behind them, drunkest of all, and getting an irresistible inspiration thrust out his cigar at arm’s length and touched off the balloon with its glowing tip.

“There was quite a loud, flaming explosion. Eyebrows were singed. Fenner, who thought Sterling had shot him, fell flat on his back in the fountain, letting go the magnum, which shattered on the sidewalk. Olive dropped her pot and went into hysterics. George was livid with fury at Jack, who was laughing like a demented god—while Thibaut was doubtless cursing them blackly from the sidelines somewhere.

‘ “The next day they all discovered that almost exactly at the same time that night a small brick warehouse behind Rincon Hill had collapsed into a pile of masonry. Age and structural inadequacy were given as the causes, but of course Thibaut claimed it was his mega-magic misfiring because of their general frivolousness and Jack’s idiot prank.

“I don’t know if there’s any truth to that whole story—at best probably distorted in the telling for comedy’s sake. Still, it does give an idea, a sort of atmosphere at least.

“Well, in any case you can imagine how those prima donnas that he’d recruited reacted to Thibaut’s demands. Conceivably Jack London and George Sterling might have gone through with things like the light-switch business for a lark, if they’d been drunk enough when Thibaut asked them. And (even crotchety old Bierce might have enjoyed a little black-powder thunder, if someone else did all the work and set it off. But when he asked them to do
boring
things he wouldn’t explain, it was too much. A dashing and eccentric society lady who was a great beauty (and an acolyte) is supposed to have said, “If only he’d asked me to do something
challenging
, such as seduce President Roosevelt (she’d have meant Teddy, Franz) or appear naked in the rotunda of the City of Paris and men swim out to the Seal Rocks and chain myself to them like Andromeda. But just to stand in front of the public library with seven rather large steel ball bearings in my brassiere, thinking of the South Pole and saying nothing for an hour and twenty minutes—I
ask
you, darling!”

“When it got down to cases, you see, they must simply have refused to take him seriously—either his revolution or his new black magic. Jack London was a Marxist socialist from way back and had written his way through a violent class war in his science-fiction novel
The Iron Heel
. He could and would have poked holes in bom the theory and the practice of Thibaut’s Reign of Terror. And he’d have known that the first city to elect a Union Labor Party government was hardly the place to start a counterrevolution. He also was a Darwinian materialist and knew his science. He’d have been able to show up Thibaut’s ‘new black science’ as a pseudoscientific travesty and just another name for magic, with all the unexplained action at a distance.

“At any rate, they all refused to help him make even a test-run of his mega-magic. Or perhaps
a few of them went along with it once or twice—the Lotta’s Fountain sort of thing—and nothing happened.

“I suppose that at this point he lost his temper and began to thunder orders and invoke penalties. And they just laughed at him—and when he wouldn’t see that the game was over and kept up with it, simply walked away from him.

“Or taken more active measures. I can imagine someone like London simply picking up the furious, spluttering little man by his coat collar and the seat of his pants and pitching him out.”

Byers’s eyebrows lifted. “Which reminds me, Franz, that Lovecraft’s client De Castro knew Ambrose Bierce and claimed to have collaborated with him, but at their last meeting Bierce sped De Castro’s departure by breaking a walking stick over his head. Really quite similar to what I was hypothesizing for de Castries. Such an attractive theory—that they were the same! But no, for De Castro was at Lovecraft to rewrite his memoirs of Bierce after de Castries’s death.”

He sighed, then recovered swiftly with, “At any rate, something like mat could have completed the transformation of Thibaut de Castries from a fascinating freak whom one humored into an unpleasant old bore, troublemaker, borrower,
and blackmailer
, against whom one protected oneself by whatever measures were necessary. Yes, Franz, there’s the persistent rumor that he tried to and in some cases did blackmail his former disciples by threatening to reveal scandals he had learned about in the days when they were free with each other, or simply that they had been members of a terrorist organization—his own! Twice at this time he seems to have disappeared completely for several months, very likely because he was serving jail sentences—something several of his ex-acolytes were powerful enough to have managed easily, though I’ve never been able to track down an instance; so many records were destroyed in the quake.

“But some of the old dark glamour must have lingered about him for quite a while in the eyes of his ex-acolytes—the feeling that he was a being with sinister, paranatural powers—for when the earthquake did come very early in the morning of April eighteenth, 1906, thundering up Market in brick and concrete waves from the west and killing its hundreds, one of his lapsed acolytes, probably recalling his intimations of a magic that would topple skyscrapers, is supposed to have said, ‘He’s done it! The old devil’s done it!’