Our Lady of Darkness

they say; consider Marlene Dietrich or Arletty, or that doyenne of them all—Cleopatra. There was always the disguising black veil, you see, though sometimes it carried an array of black polka dots, like ranked beauty marks, ‘or as if she’d had the black smallpox,’ one lady is said to have said nastily.

“All the women, for that matter, uniformly loathed her.

“Of course, all this is probably somewhat distorted by my getting it mostly as filtered through Klaas and Ricker. Ricker, making a lot of the references to Egyptian wisdom and learnedness, thought the mystery lady was still the Polish mistress, gone mad through love, and he was somewhat critical of de Castries for his treatment of her.

“And of course all this left the way open for endless speculations about de Castries’s sex life. Some said he was a homosexual. Even in those days ‘the cool, gray city of love,’ as Sterling epitomized it, had its homophiles —’cool, gay city?’ Others, that he was very kinky in an S-M way—bondage and discipline of the direst sort. (Quite a few chaps have accidentally strangled themselves that way, you know.) Almost in one breath it was said he was a pederast, a pervert, a fetishist, utterly asexual, or else that only slim little girls could satisfy his Tiberian lusts—I’m sorry if I offend you, Franz, but truly all the left-hand paths and their typical guides or conductresses were mentioned.

“However, all this is really by-the-by. The important consideration is that for a while de Castries seemed to have his chosen group just where he wanted them.”

20

Donaldus continued. “The high point of Thibaut de Castries’s San Francisco adventure came when with much hush-hush and weedings-out and secret messages and some rare private occult pomps and ceremonies, I suppose, he organized the Hermetic Order—”

“Is that the Hermetic Order that Smith, or the journal, mentions?” Franz interrupted. He had been listening with a mixture of fascination, irritation, and wry amusement, with at least half his attention clearly elsewhere, but he had grown more attentive at mention of the Grand Cipher.

“It is,” Byers nodded, “I’ll explain. In England at that time there was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with members like the mystic poet Yeats, who talked with vegetables and bees and lakes, and Dion Fortune and George Russell—A.E.—and your beloved Arthur Machen—you know, Franz, I’ve always thought that in his The Great God Pan the sexually sinister femme fatale Helen Vaughan was based on the real-life female Satanist Diana Vaughan, even though her memoirs—and perhaps she herself—were a hoax perpetrated by the French journalist, Gabriel Jogand…”

Franz nodded impatiently, restraining his impulse to say, “Get on with it, Donaldus!”

The other got the point. “Well, anyhow,” he continued, “in 1898 Aleister Crowley managed to join the Gilded Dayspringers (neat, eh?) and almost broke up the society by his demands for Satanistic rituals, black magic, and other real tough stuff.

“In imitation, but also as a sardonic challenge, de Castries called his society the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. He is said to have worn a large black ring of pietra dura work with a bezel of mosaicked onyx, obsidian, ebony, and black opal polished flat, depicting a predatory black bird, perhaps a raven.

“It was at this point that things began to go wrong for de Castries and that the atmosphere became, by degrees, very nasty. Unfortunately, it’s also the period for which I’ve had the most difficulty getting information that’s at all reliable—or even any information at all, for reasons which are, or will become, very obvious.

“As nearly as I can reconstruct it, this is what happened. As soon as his secret society had been constituted, Thibaut revealed to its double handful of highly select members that his utopia was not a far-off dream, but an immediate prospect, and that it was to be achieved by violent revolution, both material and spiritual (that is, paramental) and that the chief and at first the sole instrument of that revolution was to be the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk.

“This violent revolution was to begin with acts of terrorism somewhat resembling those the Nihilists were carrying out in Russia at that time (just before the abortive Revolution of 1905), but with a lot of a new sort of black magic (his megapolisomancy) thrown in. Demoralization rather than slaughter was to be the aim, at least at first. Black-powder bombs were to be set off in public places and on the roofs of big buildings during the deserted hours of the night. Other big buildings were to be plunged into darkness by locating and throwing their main switches. Anonymous letters and phone calls would heighten the hysteria.

“But more important would be the megapolisomantic operations, which would cause ‘buildings to crumple to rubble, people to go screaming mad, until every last soul is in panic flight from San Francisco, choking the roads and foundering the ferries’—at least that’s what Klaas said de Castries confided to him many years later while in a rare communicative mood. Say, Franz, did you know that Nicola Tesla, America’s other electrical wizard, claimed in his last years to have invented or at least envisaged a device small enough to be smuggled into a building in a dispatch case and left there to shake the building to pieces at a preset time by sympathetic vibrations? Herman Klaas told me that too. But I digress.

“These magical or pseudoscientific acts (what would you call them?) would require absolute obedience on the part of Thibaut’s assistants—which was the next demand Thibaut seems to have made on every last one of his acolytes in the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. One of them would be ordered to go to a specific address in San Francisco at a specified time and simply stand there for two hours, blanking his (or her) mind, or else trying to hold one thought. Or he’d be directed to take a bar of copper or a small box of coal or a toy balloon filled with hydrogen to a certain floor in a certain big building and simply leave it there (the balloon against the ceiling), again at a specified time. Apparently the elements were supposed to act as catalysts. Or two or three of them would be commanded to meet in a certain hotel lobby or at a certain park bench and just sit there together without speaking for half an hour. And everyone would be expected to obey every order unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, in exact detail, or else there would be (I suppose) various chilling Carbonari-style penalties and reprisals.

“Big buildings were always the main targets of his megapolisomancy—he claimed they were the chief concentration-points for city-stuff that poisoned great metropolises or weighed them down intolerably. Ten years earlier, according to one story, he had joined other Parisians in opposing the erection of the Eiffel Tower. A professor of mathematics had calculated that the structure would collapse when it reached the height of seven hundred feet, but Thibaut had simply claimed that all that naked steel looking down upon the city from the sky would drive Paris mad. (And considering subsequent events, Franz, I’ve sometimes thought that a case could be made out that it did just that. World Wars One and Two brought on like locust plagues by overly concentrated populations due to a rash or fever of high buildings—is that so fabulous?) But since he had found he couldn’t stop the erection of such buildings, Thibaut had turned to the problem of their control. In some ways, you know, he had the mentality of an animal trainer—inherited from his Afric-traveled father, perhaps?

“Thibaut seems to have thought that there was—or that he had invented—a kind of mathematics whereby minds and big buildings (and paramental entities?) could be manipulated. Neo-Pythagorean metageometry, he called it. It was all a question of knowing the right times and spots (he’d quote Archimedes: ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’) and then conveying there the right person (and mind) or material object. He also seemed to have believed that a limited clairvoyance and clairaudience and prescience existed at certain places in mega-cities for certain people. Once he started to outline in detail to Klaas a single act of megapolisomancy—give him the formula for it, so to speak—but then he got suspicious.

“Though there is one other anecdote about the mega-magic thing. I’m inclined to doubt its authenticity, but it is attractive. It seems that Thibaut proposed to give a warning shake to the Hobart Building, or at any rate one of those early flatiron structures on Market—whether it would actually fall down would depend on the integrity of the builder, the old boy’s supposed to have said. In this case his four volunteers or conscripts were (improbably?) Jack London, George Sterling, an octoroon ragtime singer named Olive Church, who was a protegee of that old voodoo queen, etcetera, Mammy Pleasant, and a man named Fenner.

“You know Lotta’s Fountain there on Market?—gift to the city of Lotta Crabtree, ‘the toast of the goldfields,’