Our Lady of Darkness (6 page)

“Somehow they managed to hush it up—I think they blamed it on an epidemic of galloping hepatitis or malignant eczema—and they’re still looking for Olga Wortly.”

“That’s about all there is to it,” he said with a shrug, relaxing, “except”—he held up a finger dramatically, and his voice went low and eerie—“except they say that on nights when there’s a lot of moonlight, just like this now, and it’s sleepy-bye time, and the L.V.N. is about to start out with her tray of night medicines in their cute little paper favor cups, you get a whiff of paraldehyde at the nurses’ station (although they
never
use that drug there now) and it travels from room to room and from bed to bed, not missing one, that unmistakable whiff does—the Invisible Nurse making her rounds!”

And with more or less appropriate oohs, ahs, and chuckles, they set out for home in a body. Bonita seemed satisfied. Dorotea said extravagantly, “Oh, I am frightened! When I wake up tonight, I think nurse coming I can’t see make me swallow that parry-alley stuff.”

“Par-al-de-hyde,” Fernando said slowly, but with surprising accuracy.

THERE WAS SO
much stuff in Saul’s room and such a variety of it, apparently unorganized (in this respect it was the antithesis of Gun’s), that you wondered why it wasn’t a mess—until you realized that nothing in it looked thrown away or tossed aside, everything looked loved: the stark and unglamorized photographs of people, mostly elderly (they turned out to be patients at the hospital, Saul pointed out Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Willis); books from Merck’s Manual to Colette,
The Family of Man
to Henry Miller, Edgar Rice to William S. Burroughs to George Borrow (
The Gypsies in Spain, Wild Wales
, and
The Zincali
); a copy of Nostig’s
The Subliminal Occult
(that really startled Franz); a lot of hippie, Indian, and American Indian beadwork; hash-smoking accessories; a beer stein filled with fresh flowers; an eyechart; a map of Asia; and a number of paintings and drawings from childish to mathematical to wild, including a striking acrylic abstraction on black cardboard that teemed with squirming shapes and jewel and insect colors and seemed to reproduce in miniature the room’s beloved confusion.

Saul indicated it, saying, “I did that the one time I took cocaine. If there is a drug (which I doubt) that adds something to the mind instead of just taking away, then it’s cocaine. If I ever went the drug route again, that’d be my choice.”

“Again?” Gun asked quizzically, indicating the pot paraphernalia.

“Pot is a plaything,” Saul averred, “a frivolity, a social lubricant to be classed with tobacoo, coffee, and the other tea. When Anslinger got Congress to classify it as—for all practical purposes—a hard drug, he really loused up the development of American society and the mobility of its classes.”

“As much as that?” Gun began skeptically.

“It’s certainly not in the same league as alcohol,” Franz agreed, “which mostly has the community’s blessing, at least the advertising half of it: Drink booze and you will be sexy, healthy, and wealthy, the ads say, especially those Black Velvet ones. You know, Saul, it was funny you should bring paraldehyde into your story. The last time I was ‘separated’ from alcohol—to use that oh-so-delicate medical expression—I got a little paraldehyde for three nights running. It really was delightful—the same effect as alcohol when I first drank it—a sensation I thought I’d never experience again, that warm, rosy glow.”

Saul nodded. “It does the same job as alcohol, without so much immediate wear and tear on the chemical systems. So the person who’s worn out with drinking ordinary booze responds to it nicely. But of course it can become addictive, too, as I’m sure you know. Say, how about more coffee? I’ve only got the freeze-dried, of course.”

As he quickly set water to boil and measured brown crystals into colorful mugs, Gun ventured, “But wouldn’t you say that alcohol is mankind’s natural drug, with thousands of years of use and expertise behind it—learning its ways, becoming seasoned to it.”

“Time enough, at any rate,” Saul commented, “for it to kill off all the Italians, Greeks, Jews, and other Mediterraneans with an extreme genetic weakness in respect to it. The American Indians and Eskimos aren’t so lucky. They’re still going through that. But hemp and peyote and the poppy and the mushroom have pretty long histories, too.”

“Yes, but there you get into the psychedelic, consciousness-distorting (I’d say, instead of -enlarging) sort of thing,” Gun protested, “while alcohol has a more straightforward effect.”

“I’ve had hallucinations from alcohol, too,” Franz volunteered in partial contradiction, “though not so extreme as those you get from acid, from what they tell me. But only during withdrawal, oddly, the first three days. In closets and dark corners and under tables—never in
very bright light—I’d see these black and sometimes red wires, about the thickness of telephone cords; vibrating, whipping around. Made me think of giant spiders’ legs and such. I’d know they were hallucinations—they were manageable, thank God. Bright light would always wipe them out.”

“Withdrawal’s a funny and sometimes touch-and-go business,” Saul observed as he poured boiling water. “That’s when drinkers get delirium tremens, not when they’re drinking—I’m sure you know that, too. But the perils and agonies of withdrawal from the hard drugs have been vastly exaggerated—it’s part of the mythos. I learned that when I was a paramedical worker in the great days of the Haight-Ashbury, before I became a nurse, running around and giving Thorazine to hippies who’d O.D.’d or thought they had.”

“Is that true?” Franz asked, accepting his coffee. “I’ve always heard that quitting heroin cold turkey was about the worst.”

“Part of the mythos,” Saul assured Franz, shaking his long-haired head as he handed Gun his coffee and began to sip his own. “The mythos that Anslinger did so much to create back in the thirties (when all the boys who’d been big in Prohibition enforcement were trying to build themselves equal narcotics jobs) when he went to Washington with a couple of veterinary doctors who knew about doping race horses and a satchel of sensational Mexican and Central American newspaper clippings about murders and rapes and such committed by peons supposedly crazed with marijuana.”

“A lot of writers jumped on that bandwagon,” Franz put in. “The hero would take one drag of a strange cigarette and instantly start having weird hallucinations, mostly along the lines of sex and bloodshed. Say, maybe I could suggest a ‘Weird Underground’ episode bringing in the Narcotics Bureau,” he added thoughtfully, more to himself than them. “It’s a thought.”

“And the agonies of cold-turkey withdrawal were part of that mythos picture,” Saul took up, “so that when the beats and hippies and such began taking drugs as a gesture of rebellion against the establishment and their parents’ generation, they started having all the dreadful hallucinations and withdrawal agonies the cop-invented mythos told them they would.” He smiled crookedly. “You know, I’ve sometimes thought it was very similar to the long-range effects of war propaganda on the Germans. In World War Two they committed all the atrocities, and more, that they were accused of, mostly falsely, in World War One. I hate to say it, but people are always trying to live up to worst expectations.”

Gun added, “The hippie-era analogue to the SS Nazis being the Manson Family.”

“At any rate,” Saul resumed, “that’s what I learned when I was rushing around the Hashbury at dead of night, giving Thorazine to flipping flower children
per anum
. I couldn’t use a hypodermic needle because I wasn’t a real nurse yet.”

Gun put in reflectively, “That’s how Saul and I met.”

“But it wasn’t to Gun I was giving the rectal Thorazine,” Saul amended. “—that would have been just too romantic—but to a friend of his, who’d O.D.’ed, then called him up, so he called us. That’s how we met.”

“My friend recovered very nicely,” Gun put in.

“How did you both meet Cal?” Franz asked.

“When she moved here,” Gun said.

“At first it was only as if a silence had descended on us,” Saul said thoughtfully. “For the previous occupant of her room had been exceptionally noisy, even for this building.”

Gun said, “And then it was as if a very quiet but musical mouse had joined the population. Because we became aware of hearing flute music, we thought it was, but so soft we couldn’t be
sure we weren’t imagining it.”

“At the same time,” Saul said, “we began to notice this attractive, uncommunicative, very polite young woman who’d get on or off at four, always alone and always opening and closing the elevator gates very gently.”

Gun said, “And then one evening we went to hear some Beethoven quartets at the Veterans Building. She was in the audience and we introduced ourselves.”

“All three of us taking the initiative,” Saul added. “By the end of the concert we were pals.”

“And the next weekend we were helping her redecorate her apartment,” Gun finished. “It was as if we’d known each other for years.”

“Or at least as if she’d known us for years,” Saul qualified. “We were a lot longer learning about her—what an incredibly overprotected life she’d led, her difficulties with her mother…”

“How hard her father’s death hit her…” Gun threw in.

“And how determined she was to make a go of things on her own and”—Saul shrugged—“and learn about life.” He looked at Franz. “We were even longer discovering just how sensitive she was under that cool and competent exterior of hers, and also about her abilities in addition to the musical.”

Franz nodded, then asked Saul, “And now are you going to tell me the story about her you’ve been saving?”

“How did you know it was going to be about her?” the other inquired.

“Because you glanced at her before you decided not to tell it at the restaurant,” Franz told him, “and because you didn’t really invite me over until you were sure she wouldn’t be coming.”

“You writers are pretty sharp,” Saul observed. “Well, this happens to be a writer’s story, in a way. Your sort of writer—the supernatural horror sort. Your Corona Heights tiling made me want to tell it. The same realm of the unknown, but a different country in it.”

Franz wanted to say, “I had rather anticipated that, too,” but he refrained.

SAUL LIT A
cigarette and settled himself back against the wall. Gun occupied the other end of the couch. Franz was in the armchair facing them.

“Early on,” Saul began, “I realized that Cal was very interested in my people at the hospital. Not that she’d ask questions, but from the way she’d hold still whenever I mentioned them. They were one more thing in the tremendous outside world she was starting to explore that she felt compelled to learn about and sympathize with or steel herself against—with her it seems to be a combination of the two.

“Well, in those days I was pretty interested in my people myself. I’d been on the evening shift for a year and pretty well in charge of it for a couple of months, and so I had a lot of ideas about changes I wanted to make and was making. One thing, the nurse who’d been running the ward ahead of me had been overdoing the sedation, I felt.” He grinned. “You see, that story I told for Bonny and Dora tonight wasn’t all invented. Anyway, I’d been cutting most of them down to the point where I could communicate and work with them and they weren’t still comatose at breakfast time. Of course, it makes for a livelier and sometimes more troublesome ward, but I was fresh and feisty and up to handling that.”

He chuckled. “I suppose that’s something almost every new person in charge does at first: cuts down on the barbiturates—-until he or she gets tired and maybe a bit frazzled and decides that peace is worth a little sedation.

“But I was getting to know my people pretty well, or thought I was, what stage of their cycles each was in, and so be able to anticipate their antics and keep the ward in hand. There was this young Mr. Sloan, for instance, who had epilepsy—the
petit mal
kind—along with extreme depression. He was well educated, had showed artistic talent. As he’d approach the climax of his cycle, he’d begin to have his
petit mal
attacks—you know, brief loss of consciousness, being ‘not there’ for a few seconds, he’d sway a little—closer and closer together, every twenty minutes or so, then even closer. You know, I’ve often thought that epilepsy is very much like the brain trying to give itself electroshock. At any rate, my young Mr. Sloan would climax with a seizure approximating or mimicking
grand mal
in which he’d fall to the floor and writhe and make a great racket and perform automatic acts and lose control of all his bodily functions—psychic epilepsy, they used to call it. Then his
petit mal
attacks would space themselves way out and he’d be better for a week, about. He seemed to time all this very exactly and put a lot of creative effort into it—I told you he had artistic talent. You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often mink. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.

“Well, as I’ve said, I knew that Cal was getting very curious about my people, she’d even been hinting that she’d like to see them, so one night when everything was going very smoothly—all my people at a quiet stage in their cycles—I had her come over. Of course by now I was bending the hospital rules quite a bit, as you’d expect. There wasn’t any moon either that night—new moon or near it—moonlight does excite people, especially the crazies—I don’t know how, but it does.”

“Hey, you never told me about this before,” Gun interjected. “I mean, about having Cal at the hospital.”

“So?” Saul said and shrugged. “Well, she arrived about an hour after the day shift left, looking somewhat pale and apprehensive but excited…and almost immediately everything in the ward started to get out of hand and go wacko. Mrs. Willis began to whine and wail about her
terrible misfortunes—she wasn’t due to do that for a week, I’d figured, it’s really heartrending to hear—and that set off Miss Craig, who’s good at screaming. Mr. Schmidt, who’d been very well behaved for over a month, managed to get his pants down and unload a pile of shit before we could stop him in front of Mr. Bugatti’s door, who’s his ‘enemy’ from time to time—and we hadn’t had
that
sort of thing happening on the ward since the previous year. Meanwhile, Mrs. Gutmayer bad overturned her dinner tray and was vomiting, and Mr. Stowacki had somehow managed to break a plate and cut himself—and Mrs. Harper was screaming at the sight of blood (there wasn’t much) and that made two of them (two screamers—not in Fay Wray’s class, but good).

“Well, naturally I had to abandon Cal to her own devices while we dealt with all this, though of course I was wondering what she must be thinking and kicking myself for having invited her over at all and for being such a megalomaniac about my ability to predict and forestall disasters.

“By the time I got back to her, Cal had gone or retreated to the recreation room with young Mr. Sloan and a couple of others, and she’d discovered our piano and was quietly trying it out—horribly out of tune, of course, it must have been, at least to her ears.

“She listened to the hurried rundown I gave her on things—excuses, I suppose—we didn’t usually have shit out in the halls, etcetera—and from time to time she’d nod, but she kept on working steadily at the piano at the same time, as if she were hunting for the keys that were least discordant (afterward she confirmed that that was exactly what she had been doing). She was paying attention to me, all right, but she was doing this piano thing, too.

“About then I became aware that the excitement was building up behind me in the ward again and that Harry’s (young Sloan’s)
petit mal
seizures were coming much closer together than they ought to, while he was pacing restlessly in a circle around the recreation room. By my count he wasn’t due to climax until the next night, but now he’d unaccountably speeded up his cycle so he’d throw his
grand mal
fit tonight for sure—in a very short time, in fact.

“I started to warn Cal about what was likely to happen, but just then she sat back and screwed up her face a little, like she sometimes does when she’s starting a concert, and then she began to play something very catchy of Mozart’s—Cherubino’s Song from
The Marriage of Figaro
, it turned out to be—but in what seemed to be the most discordant key of all on that banged-up old upright (afterward she confirmed this, too).

“Next thing, she was modulating the music into another key that was only a shade less discordant than the first, and so on and so on. Believe it or not, in her fooling around she’d worked out a succession of the keys from the most to the least discordant on that old out-of-tune loonies’ piano, and now she was playing that Mozart air in all of them in the same order, least to most harmonious—Cherubino’s Song, the words to which go something like (in English) ‘We who love’s power surely do feel—why should it ever through my heart steal?’ And then there’s something about ‘in my sorrow lingers delight.’

“Meanwhile, I could feel the tensions building up around me and I could actually see young Harry’s
petit mal
attacks coming faster and faster as he shuffled around, and I knew he was going to have his big one the next minute, and I began to wonder if I shouldn’t stop Cal by grabbing her wrists as if she were some sort of witch making black magic with music—the ward had gone crazy at her arrival, and now she was doing the same damn thing with her Mozart, which was getting louder and louder.

“But just then she modulated triumphantly into the least discordant key and by contrast it sounded like perfect pitch, incredibly right, and at that instant young. Harry launched, not into his
grand mal
attack, but into
a weirdly graceful, leaping dance
in perfect time to Cherubino’s
Song, and almost before I knew what I was doing I’d taken hold of Miss Craig (whose mouth was open to scream but she wasn’t screaming) and was waltzing her around after young Harry—and I could feel the tension in the whole ward around us vanish like smoke. Somehow Cal had
melted
mat tension, loosened and unbound it just as she had young Harry’s depression, getting him over the hump into safety without his throwing a big fit. It seemed to me at the time to be the nearest thing to magic I’ve ever seen in my life—witchcraft, all right, but white witchcraft.”

At the words “loosened and unbound,” Franz recalled Cal’s words that morning about music having “the power to release other things and make them fly and swirl.”

Gun asked, “What happened then?”

“Nothing much, really,” Saul said. “Cal kept playing the same tune over and over in the same triumphant key, and we kept on dancing and I think a couple of the others joined in, but she played it a little more softly each time, until it was like music for mice, and then she stopped it and very quietly closed the piano, and we stopped dancing and were smiling at each other, and that was that—except that all of us were in a different place from where we’d started. And a little later she went home without waiting through the shift, as though taking it for granted that what she’d done was something that couldn’t possibly be repeated. And we never talked about it much afterwards, she and I. I remember thinking: ‘Magic is a one-time thing.’ “

“Say, I like that,” Gun said. “I mean the idea of magic—and miracles, too, like those of Jesus, say—and art, too, and history of course—simply being phenomena that
cannot
be repeated. Unlike science, which is all about phenomena that can be repeated.”

Franz mused, “Tension
melted
…depression loosened and unbound…the notes fly upward like the sparks…. You know, Gun, that somehow makes me think of what your Shredbasket does that you showed me this morning.”

“Shredbasket?” Saul queried.

Franz briefly explained.

Saul said to Gun, “You never told me about that.”

“So?” Gun smiled and shrugged.

“Of course,” Franz said, almost regretfully, “the idea of music being good for lunatics and smoothing troubled souls goes way back.”

“At least as far as Pythagoras,” Gun put in, agreeing. “That’s two and a half thousand years.”

Saul shook his head decidedly. “This thing Cat did went farther than that.”

There was a sharp double knock at the door. Gun opened it.

Fernando looked around the room, bowing politely, then beamed at Franz and said, “E-chess?”