Our Lady of Darkness (12 page)

“And there’s the suggestion that Thibaut tried to use the earthquake in his blackmailing—you know, ‘I’ve done it once. I can do it again.’ Apparently he’d use anything that occurred to him to try to frighten people. In a couple of instances he’s supposed to have threatened people with his Queen of Night, his Lady of Darkness (his old mystery lady or girl)—that if they didn’t fork up, he’d send his Black Tigress after them.

“But mostly my information for this period is very sketchy and one-sided. The people who’d known him best were all trying to forget him (suppress him, you might say), while my two chief informants, Klaas and Ricker, knew him only as an old man in the 1920s and had heard only his side (or sides!) of the story. Ricker, who was nonpolitical, thought of him as a great scholar and metaphysician, who had been promised money and support by a group of wealthy, frivolous people and then cruelly disappointed, abandoned. He never seriously believed the revolution part. Klaas did, and viewed de Castries as a failed great rebel, a modern John Brown or Sam Adams or Marat, who’d been betrayed by wealthy, pseudoartistic, thrill-seeking backers who’d then gotten cold feet. They both indignantly rejected the blackmail stories.”

Franz interposed, “What about his mystery lady—was she still around? What did Klaas and Ricker have to say about her?”

Byers shook his head. “She was completely vanished by the 1920s—if she ever had any real existence in the first place. To Ricker and Klaas she was just one more story—one more of the
endlessly fascinating stories they teased out of the old man from time to time. Or else (not so fascinating!) endured in repetition. According to them, he enjoyed no female society whatever while they knew him. Except Klaas once let slip the thought the old man occasionally hired a prostitute—refused to talk about it further when I pressed him, said it was the old man’s business, no one else’s. While Ricker said the old boy had a sentimental interest in (‘a soft spot in his heart for’) little girls—all most innocent, a modern Lewis Carroll, he insisted. Both of them vehemently denied any suggestion of a kinky sex life on the old man’s part, just as they had denied the blackmail stories and the even nastier rumors that came later on: that de Castries was devoting his declining years to getting revenge on his betrayers by somehow doing them to death or suicide by black magic.”

“I know about some of those cases,” Franz said, “at least the ones I imagine you’re going to mention. What happened to Nora May French?”

“She was the first to go. In 1907, just a year after the quake. A clear case of suicide. She died most painfully by poison—very tragic.”

“And when did Sterling die?”

“November seventeenth, 1926.”

Franz said thoughtfully, though still not lost in thought, “There certainly seems to have been a suicidal drive at work, though operating over a period of twenty years. A good case can be made out that it was a death wish drove Bierce to go to Mexico when he did—a war-haunted life, so why not such a death?—and probably attach himself to Pancho Villa’s rebels as a sort of unofficial revolution-correspondent and most likely get himself shot as an uppity old gringo who wouldn’t stay silent for the devil himself. While Sterling was known to have earned a vial of cyanide in his vest pocket for years, whether he finally took it by accident (pretty far-fetched) or by intention. And then there was that time (Rogers’s daughter tells about it in her book) when Jack London disappeared on a five-day spree and then came home when Charmian and Rogers’s daughter and several other worried people were gathered, and with the mischievous, icy logic of a man who’d drunk himself sober, challenged George Sterling and Rogers
not to sit up with the corpse
. Though I’d think alcohol was enough villain there, without bringing in any of de Castries’s black magic, or its power of suggestion.”

“What’d London mean by that?” Byers asked, squinting as he carefully measured out for himself more brandy.

“That when they felt life losing its zest, their powers starting to fail, they take the Noseless One by the arm without waiting to be asked, and exit laughing.”

“The Noseless One?”

“Why, simply, London’s sobriquet for Death himself—the skull beneath the skin. The nose is all cartilage and so the skull—“

Byers’s eyes widened and he suddenly shot a finger toward his guest.

“Franz!” he asked excitedly. “That paramental you saw—wasn’t it noseless?”

As if he’d just received a posthypnotic command, Franz’s eyes shut tight, he jerked back his face a little, and started to throw his hands in front of it. Byers’ words had brought the pale brown, blank, triangular muzzle vividly back to his mind’s eye.

“Don’t”—he said carefully—“say things like mat again without warning. Yes, it was noseless.”

“My dear Franz, I will not. Please excuse me. I did not fully realize until now what effect the sight of it must have upon a person.”

“All right, all right,” Franz said quietly. “So four acolytes died somewhat ahead of their time
(except perhaps for Bierce), victims of their rampant psyches…or of something else.”

“And at least an equal number of less prominent acolytes,” Byers took up again quite smoothly. “You know, Franz, I’ve always been impressed by how in London’s last great novel,
The Star Rover
, mind triumphs completely over matter. By frightfully intense self-discipline, a lifer at San Quentin is enabled to escape in spirit through the thick walls of his prison house and move at will through the world and relive his past reincarnations, redie his deaths. Somehow mat makes me think of old de Castries in the 1920s, living alone in downtown cheap hotels and brooding, brooding, brooding about past hopes and glories and disasters. And (dreaming meanwhile of foul, unending tortures) about the wrongs done him and about revenge (whether or not he actually worked something there) and about…who knows what else? Sending his mind upon…who knows what journeys?”

“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 was 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 modem 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 mat 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 spread 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 mat 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, mat 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 bidden 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 bade 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 roominghouse 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 mat 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 mink?—the genuine sadomasochistic touch. Electricity—bringer of thrills and pain. Don’t writers speak of electric kisses? Ah, the evil mat 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 mat 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—“