Our Lady of Darkness

of the triangular pale brown muzzle and his flight down Corona Heights, and by the time he was done he was sweating and darting his glance about again.

Byers let out a sigh, then said with relish, “And so you came to me, pursued by paramentals to the very door!” And he turned in his chair to look somewhat dubiously at the blurry golden windows behind him.

“Donaldus!” Franz said angrily, “I’m telling you things that happened, not some damn weird tale I’ve made up for your entertainment. I know it all hangs on a figure I saw several times at a distance of two miles with seven- power binoculars, and so anyone’s free to talk about optical illusions and instrumental defects and the power of suggestion, but I know something about psychology and optics, and it was none of those! I went pretty deeply into the flying-saucer business, and I never once saw or heard of a single UFO that was really convincing—and I’ve seen haloed highlights on aircraft that were oval-shaped and glowed and pulsed exactly like the ones in half the saucer sightings. But I have no doubts of that sort about what I saw today and yesterday.”

But even as he was pouring that out and still uneasily checking the windows and doors and glooms himself, Franz realized that deep down inside he was beginning to doubt his memories of what he’d seen—perhaps the human mind was incapable of holding a fear like his for more than about an hour unless it were reinforced by repetition—but he was damned if he’d tell Donaldus so!

He finished icily, “Of course, it’s quite possible I’ve gone insane, temporarily or permanently, and am ‘seeing things,’ but until I’m sure of that I’m not going to behave like a reckless idiot—or a hilarious one.”

Donaldus, who had been making protesting and imploring faces at him all the while, now said injuredly and placatingly, “My dear Franz, I never for a moment doubted your seriousness or had the faintest suspicion that you were psychotic. Why, I’ve been inclined to believe in paramental entities ever since I read de Castries’s book, and especially after hearing several circumstantial, very peculiar stories about him, and now your truly shocking eyewitness narrative has swept my last doubts away. But I’ve not seen one yet—if I did, I’m sure I’d feel all the terror you do and more—but until then, and perhaps in any case, and despite the proper horror they evoke in us, they are most fascinating entities, don’t you agree? Now as for thinking your account a tale or story, my dear Franz, to be a good story is to me the highest test of the truth of anything. I make no distinction whatever between reality and fantasy, or the objective and the subjective. All life and all awareness are ultimately one, including intensest pain and death itself. Not all the play need please us, and ends are never comforting. Some things fit together harmoniously and beautifully and startlingly with thrilling discords—those are true—and some do not, and those are merely bad art. Don’t you see?”

Franz had no immediate comment. He certainly hadn’t given de Castries’s book the least credence by itself, but… He nodded thoughtfully, though hardly in answer to the question. He wished for the sharp minds of Gun and Saul… and Cal.

“And now to tell you my story,” Donaldus said, quite satisfied. “But first a touch of brandy—that seems called for. And you? Well, some hot coffee then, I’ll fetch it. And a few biscuits? Yes.”

Franz had begun to feel headachy and slightly nauseated. The plain arrowroot cookies, barely sweet, seemed to help. He poured himself coffee from the fresh pot, adding some of the cream and sugar his host had thoughtfully brought this time. It helped, too. He didn’t relax his watchfulness, but he began to feel more comfortable in it, as if the awareness of danger were becoming a way of life.

18

Donaldus lifted a finger with a ring of silver filigree on it and said, “You have to keep in mind de Castries died when I (and you) were infants. Almost all my information comes from a couple of the not-so-close and hardly well- beloved friends of de Castries’s last declining years: George Ricker, who was a locksmith and played go with him, and Herman Klaas, who ran a secondhand bookstore on Turk Street and was a sort of romantic anarchist and for a while a Technocrat. And a bit from Clark Ashton Smith. Ah, that interests you, doesn’t it? It was only a bit—Clark didn’t like to talk about de Castries. I think it was because of de Castries and his theories that Clark stayed away from big cities, even San Francisco, and became the hermit of Auburn and Pacific Grove. And I’ve got some data from old letters and clippings, but not much. People didn’t like to write down things about de Castries, and they had reasons, and in the end the man himself made secrecy a way of life. Which is odd, considering that he began his chief career by writing and publishing a sensational book. Incidentally, I got my copy from Klaas when he died, and he may have found it among de Castries’s things after de Castries died—I was never sure.

“Also,” Donaldus continued, “I’ll probably tell the story—at least in spots—in a somewhat poetic style. Don’t let that put you off. It merely helps me organize my thoughts and select the significant items. I won’t be straying in the least from the strict truth as I’ve discovered it; though there may be traces of paramentals in my story, I suppose, and certainly one ghost. I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.”

19

Donaldus took a generous sip of brandy, rolled it around on his tongue appreciatively, and settled back in his chair.

“In 1900, as the century turned,” he began dramatically, “Thibaut de Castries came to sunny, lusty San Francisco like a dark portent from realms of cold and coal smoke in the East that pulsed with Edison’s electricity and from which thrust Sullivan’s steel-framed skyscrapers. Madame Curie had just proclaimed radioactivity to the world, and Marconi radio spanning the seas. Madame Blavatsky had brought eerie theosophy from the Himalayas and passed on the occult torch to Annie Besant. The Scottish Astronomer-Royal Piazzi Smith had discovered the history of the world and its ominous future in the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. While in the law courts, Mary Baker Eddy and her chief female acolytes were hurling accusations of witchcraft and black magic at each other. Spencer preached science. Ingersoll thundered against superstition. Freud and Jung were plunging into the limitless dark of the subconscious. Wonders undreamed had been unveiled at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, for which the Eiffel tower had been built, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. New York was digging her subways. In South Africa the Boers were firing at the British Krupp’s field guns of unburstable steel. In far Cathay the Boxers raged, deeming themselves invulnerable to bullets by their magic. Count von Zeppelin was launching his first dirigible airship, while the Wright Brothers were readying for their first flight.

“De Castries brought with him only a large black Gladstone bag stuffed with copies of his ill-printed book that he could no more sell than Melville his Moby Dick, and a skull teeming with galvanic, darkly illuminating ideas, and (some insist) a large black panther on a leash of German silver links. And, according to still others, he was also accompanied or else pursued by a mysterious, tall, slender woman who always wore a black veil and loose dark dresses that were more like robes, and had a way of appearing and disappearing suddenly. In any case, de Castries was a wiry, tireless, rather small black eagle of a man, with piercing eyes and sardonic mouth, who wore his glamour like an opera cape.

“There were a dozen legends of his origins. Some said he improvised a new one each night, and some that they were all invented by others solely on the inspiration of his darkly magnetic appearance. The one that Klaas and Ricker most favored was moderately spectacular: that as a boy of thirteen during the Franco-Prussian War he had escaped from besieged Paris by hydrogen balloon along with his mortally wounded father, who was an explorer of darkest Africa; his father’s beautiful and learned young Polish mistress; and a black panther (an earlier one) which his father had originally captured in the Congo and which they had just rescued from the zoological gardens, where the starving Parisians were slaughtering the wild animals for food. (Of course, another legend had it that at that time he was a boy aide-de-camp to Garibaldi in Sicily and his father the most darkly feared of the Carbonari.)

“Rapidly travelling southeast across the Mediterranean, the balloon encountered at midnight an electrical tempest which added to its velocity but also forced it down nearer and nearer to the white-fanged waves. Picture the scene as revealed by almost continuous lightning flashes in the frail and overweighted gondola. The panther crouched back into one side, snarling and spitting, lashing his tail, his claws dug deeply into the wickerwork with a