Our Lady of Darkness

“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 thing 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.

10

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 think. 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 had 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 the 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 that 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.”