Our Lady of Darkness

who was taught dancing (and related arts?) by Lola Montez (she of the spider dance and Ludwig of Bavaria and all). Well, the four acolytes were supposed to approach the fountain by streets that would trace the four arms of a counterclockwise swastika centering on the fountain while concentrating in their mind on the four points of the compass and bearing objects representing the four elements—Olive a potted lily for earth, Fenner a magnum of champagne for fluid, Sterling a rather large toy hydrogen-filled balloon for the gaseous, and Jack a long cigar for fire.

“They were supposed to arrive simultaneously and introduce their burdens into the fountain, George bubbling his hydrogen through its water and Jack extinguishing his cigar in the same.

“Olive and Fenner arrived first, Fenner somewhat drunk—perhaps he had been sampling his offering and we may assume that all four of them were at least somewhat ‘elevated.’ Well, apparently Fenner had been nursing a lech for Olive and she’d been turning him down, and now he wanted her to drink champagne with him and she wouldn’t and he tried to force it on her and succeeded in sloshing it over her bosom and the potted lily she was holding and down her dress.

“While they were struggling that way at the fountain’s edge, George came up protesting and tried to control Fenner without letting go of his balloon, with Olive shrieking and laughing at them while they were scuffling and while she still hugged the potted lily to her wet breasts.

“At this point Jack came up behind them, drunkest of all, and getting an irresistible inspiration thrust out his cigar at arm’s length and touched off the balloon with its glowing tip.

“There was quite a loud, flaming explosion. Eyebrows were singed. Fenner, who thought Sterling had shot him, fell flat on his back in the fountain, letting go the magnum, which shattered on the sidewalk. Olive dropped her pot and went into hysterics. George was livid with fury at Jack, who was laughing like a demented god—while Thibaut was doubtless cursing them blackly from the sidelines somewhere.

“The next day they all discovered that almost exactly at the same time that night a small brick warehouse behind Rincon Hill had collapsed into a pile of masonry. Age and structural inadequacy were given as the causes, but of course Thibaut claimed it was his mega-magic misfiring because of their general frivolousness and Jack’s idiot prank.

“I don’t know if there’s any truth to that whole story—at best probably distorted in the telling for comedy’s sake. Still, it does give an idea, a sort of atmosphere at least.

“Well, in any case you can imagine how those prima donnas that he’d recruited reacted to Thibaut’s demands. Conceivably Jack London and George Sterling might have gone through with things like the light-switch business for a lark, if they’d been drunk enough when Thibaut asked them. And even crotchety old Bierce might have enjoyed a little black-powder thunder, if someone else did all the work and set it off. But when he asked them to do boring things he wouldn’t explain, it was too much. A dashing and eccentric society lady who was a great beauty (and an acolyte) is supposed to have said, “If only he’d asked me to do something challenging, such as seduce President Roosevelt (she’d have meant Teddy, Franz) or appear naked in the rotunda of the City of Paris and then swim out to the Seal Rocks and chain myself to them like Andromeda. But just to stand in front of the public library with seven rather large steel ball bearings in my brassiere, thinking of the South Pole and saying nothing for an hour and twenty minutes—I ask you, darling!’

“When it got down to cases, you see, they must simply have refused to take him seriously—either his revolution or his new black magic. Jack London was a Marxist socialist from way back and had written his way through a violent class war in his science-fiction novel The Iron Heel. He could and would have poked holes in both the theory and the practice of Thibaut’s Reign of Terror. And he’d have known that the first city to elect a Union Labor Party government was hardly the place to start a counterrevolution. He also was a Darwinian materialist and knew his science. He’d have been able to show up Thibaut’s ‘new black science’ as a pseudoscientific travesty and just another name for magic, with all the unexplained action at a distance.

“At any rate, they all refused to help him make even a test-run of his mega-magic. Or perhaps a few of them went along with it once or twice—the Lotta’s Fountain sort of thing—and nothing happened.

“I suppose that at this point he lost his temper and began to thunder orders and invoke penalties. And they just laughed at him—and when he wouldn’t see that the game was over and kept up with it, simply walked away from him.

“Or taken more active measures. I can imagine someone like London simply picking up the furious, spluttering little man by his coat collar and the seat of his pants and pitching him out.”

Byers’s eyebrows lifted. “Which reminds me, Franz, that Lovecraft’s client De Castro knew Ambrose Bierce and claimed to have collaborated with him, but at their last meeting Bierce sped De Castro’s departure by breaking a walking stick over his head. Really quite similar to what I was hypothesizing for de Castries. Such an attractive theory—that they were the same! But no, for De Castro was at Lovecraft to rewrite his memoirs of Bierce after de Castries’s death.”

He sighed, then recovered swiftly with, “At any rate, something like that could have completed the transformation of Thibaut de Castries from a fascinating freak whom one humored into an unpleasant old bore, troublemaker, borrower, and blackmailer, against whom one protected oneself by whatever measures were necessary. Yes, Franz, there’s the persistent rumor that he tried to and in some cases did blackmail his former disciples by threatening to reveal scandals he had learned about in the days when they were free with each other, or simply that they had been members of a terrorist organization—his own! Twice at this time he seems to have disappeared completely for several months, very likely because he was serving jail sentences— something several of his ex-acolytes were powerful enough to have managed easily, though I’ve never been able to track down an instance; so many records were destroyed in the quake.

“But some of the old dark glamour must have lingered about him for quite a while in the eyes of his ex- acolytes—the feeling that he was a being with sinister, paranatural powers—for when the earthquake did come very early in the morning of April eighteenth, 1906, thundering up Market in brick and concrete waves from the west and killing its hundreds, one of his lapsed acolytes, probably recalling his intimations of a magic that would topple skyscrapers, is supposed to have said, ‘He’s done it! The old devil’s done it!’

“And there’s the suggestion that Thibaut tried to use the earthquake in his blackmailing—you know, ‘I’ve done it once. I can do it again.’ Apparently he’d use anything that occurred to him to try to frighten people. In a couple of instances he’s supposed to have threatened people with his Queen of Night, his Lady of Darkness (his old mystery lady or girl)—that if they didn’t fork up, he’d send his Black Tigress after them.

“But mostly my information for this period is very sketchy and one-sided. The people who’d known him best were all trying to forget him (suppress him, you might say), while my two chief informants, Klaas and Ricker, knew him only as an old man in the 1920s and had heard only his side (or sides!) of the story. Ricker, who was nonpolitical, thought of him as a great scholar and metaphysician, who had been promised money and support by a group of wealthy, frivolous people and then cruelly disappointed, abandoned. He never seriously believed the revolution part. Klaas did, and viewed de Castries as a failed great rebel, a modern John Brown or Sam Adams or Marat, who’d been betrayed by wealthy, pseudo-artistic, thrill-seeking backers who’d then gotten cold feet. They both indignantly rejected the blackmail stories.”

Franz interposed, “What about his mystery lady—was she still around? What did Klaas and Ricker have to say about her?”

Byers shook his head. “She was completely vanished by the 1920s—if she ever had any real existence in the first place. To Ricker and Klaas she was just one more story—one more of the endlessly fascinating stories they teased out of the old man from time to time. Or else (not so fascinating!) endured in repetition. According to them, he enjoyed no female society whatever while they knew him. Except Klaas once let slip the thought the old man occasionally hired a prostitute—refused to talk about it further when I pressed him, said it was the old man’s business, no one else’s. While Ricker said the old boy had a sentimental interest in (’a soft spot in his heart for’) little girls—all most innocent, a modern Lewis Carroll, he insisted. Both of them vehemently denied any suggestion of a kinky sex life on the old man’s part, just as they had denied the blackmail stories and the even nastier rumors that came later on: that de Castries was devoting his declining years to getting revenge on his betrayers by somehow doing them to death or suicide by black magic.”

“I know about some of those cases,” Franz said, “at least the ones I imagine you’re going to mention. What happened to Nora May French?”

“She was the first to go. In 1907, just a year after the quake. A clear case of suicide. She died most painfully