Our Lady of Darkness

hechiceria,” he said vehemently, with a great air of making himself clear, ” Hechiceria ocultado en murallas.” He crouched a little, looking up. “Murallas muy altas.”

Everyone nodded pleasantly as if they understood.

Franz asked Cal in a low voice, “What’s that hechi?”

She whispered, “Witchcraft, I think. Witchcraft hidden in the walls. Very high walls.” She shrugged.

Franz murmured, “Where in the walls, I wonder? Like Mr. Edwards’s pain-ray projector?”

Gun said, “There’s one thing, though, Franz, I do wonder about—whether you really identified your own window correctly from Corona. You said the roofs were like a sea on edge. It reminds me of difficulties I’ve run into in identifying localities in photographs of stars, or pictures of the earth taken from satellites. The sort of trouble every amateur astronomer runs into—the pros, too. So many times you come across two or more localities that are almost identical.”

“I’ve thought of that myself,” Franz said. “I’ll check it out.”

Leaning back, Saul said, “Say, here’s a good idea, let’s all of us some day soon go for a picnic to Corona Heights. You and I, Gun, could bring our ladies—they’d like it. How does that grab you, Bonny?”

“Oh, yes,” Bonita replied eagerly.

On that note they broke up.

Dorotea said, “We thank you for the wine. But remember, double-lock doors and close transoms when go out.”

Cal said, “Now with any luck I’ll sleep twelve hours. Franz, I’ll give you your key some other time.” Saul glanced at her.

Franz smiled and asked Fernando if he cared to play chess later that evening. The Peruvian smiled agreeably.

Bela Szlawik, sweating from his labors, himself made change as they paid their checks, while Rose fluttered about and held the door for them.

As they collected on the sidewalk outside, Saul looked toward Franz and Cal and said, “How about drifting back with Gun to my room before you play chess? I’d sort of like to tell you that story.”

Franz nodded. Cal said, “Not me. Straight off to bed.” Saul nodded that he understood her.

Bonita had heard. “You’re going to tell him the story of the Invisible Nurse,” she said accusingly. “I want to hear that, too.”

“No, it is time for bed,” her mother asserted, not too commandingly or confidently. “See, Cal goes bed.”

“I don’t care,” Bonita said, pushing up against Saul closely, invading his space. “Please? Please?” she coaxed insistently.

Saul grabbed her suddenly, hugged her tight, and blew down her neck with a great raspberry sound. She squealed loudly and happily. Franz, glancing almost automatically toward Gun, saw him start to wince, then control it, but his lips were thin. Dorotea smiled almost as happily as if it were her own neck being blown down. Fernando frowned slightly and held himself with a somewhat military dignity.

As suddenly Saul held the girl away from him and said to her matter-of-factly, “Now look here, Bonny, this is another story I want to tell Franz—a very dull one of interest only to writers. There is no Story of the Invisible Nurse. I just made that up because I needed something to illustrate my point.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bonita said, looking him straight in the eye.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said abruptly, dropping his hands away from her and standing back. “There is a Story of the Invisible Nurse Who Terrorized the Locked Ward at St. Luke’s, and the reason I didn’t tell it was not that it’s too long—it’s quite short—but simply too horrible. But now you’ve brought it down upon yourself and all these other good people. So gather round, all of you.”

As he stood in the dark street with the light of the gibbous moon shining on his flashing eyes, sallow face, and elf-locked, long dark hair, he looked very much like a gypsy, Franz thought.

“Her name was Wortly,” Saul began, dropping his voice. “Olga Wortly, R.N.—(Registered Nurse). That’s not her real name—this became a police case and they’re still looking for her—but it has the flavor of the real one. Well, Olga Wortly, R.N., was in charge of the swing shift (the four to midnight) in the locked ward at St. Luke’s. And there was no terror then. In fact, she ran what was in a way the happiest and certainly the quietest swing shift ever, because she was very generous with her sleeping potions, so that the graveyard shift never had any trouble with wakeful patients and the day shift sometimes had difficulty getting some of them waked up for lunch, let alone breakfast.

“She didn’t trust her L.V.N. (Licensed Vocational Nurse) to dispense her goodies. And she favored mixtures, whenever she could shade or stretch the doctor’s orders to allow them, because she thought two drugs were always surer than one—Librium with the Thorazine (she doted on Tuinal because it’s two barbiturates: red Seconal with blue Arnytal), chloral hydrate with the phenobarbital, paraldehyde with the yellow Nembutal—in fact, you could always tell when she was coming (our fairy snooze mother, our dark goddess of slumber) because the paralyzing stench of the paraldehyde always preceded her; she always managed to have at least one patient on paraldehyde. It’s a superaromatic superalcohol, you know, that tickles the top of your sinuses, and it smells like God-knows-what—super banana oil; some nurses call it gasoline—and you give it with fruit juice for a chaser and you dispense it in a glass shot-glass because it’ll melt a plastic one, and its molecules travel through the air ahead of it faster than light!”

Saul had his audience well in hand, Franz noted. Dorotea was listening with as rapt delight as Bonita; Cal and Gun were smiling indulgently; even Fernando had caught the spirit and was grinning at the long drug names. For the moment the sidewalk in front of the German Cook’s was a moonlit gypsy encampment, lacking only the dancing flames of an open fire.

“Every night, two hours after supper, Olga would make her druggy-wug rounds. Sometimes she’d have the L.V.N. or an aide carry the tray, sometimes she’d carry it herself.

“ ‘Sleepy-bye time, Mrs. Binks,’ she’d say. ‘Here’s your pass to dreamland. That’s a good little girl. And now this lovely yellow one. Good evening, Miss Cheeseley, I’ve got your trip to Hawaii for you—blue for the deep blue ocean, red for the sunset skies. And now a sip of the bitter to wash it down—think of the dark salt waves. Hold out your tongue, Mr. Finelli, I’ve something to make you wise. Whoever’d think, Mr. Wong, they could put nine hours and maybe ten of good, good darkness into such a tiny time-capsule, a gelatin spaceship bound for the stars. You smelled us coming, didn’t you, Mr. Auerbach? Grape juice chaser tonight!’ And so on and so on.

“And so Olga Wortly, R.N., our mistress of oblivion, our queen of dreams, kept the locked ward happy,” Saul continued, “and even won high praise—for everyone likes a quiet ward—until one night she went just a little too far and the next morning every last patient had O.D.’ed (overdosed) and was D.O.A. (that’s Dead on Arrival, Bonny) with a beatific smile on his or her face. And Olga Wortly was gone, never to be seen again.

“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.

9

There was so much stuff in Saul’s room and such a variety of it, apparently unorganized (in this respect it