Our Lady of Darkness

by poison—very tragic.”

“And when did Sterling die?”

“November seventeenth, 1926.”

Franz said thoughtfully, though still not lost in thought, “There certainly seems to have been a suicidal drive at work, though operating over a period of twenty years. A good case can be made out that it was a death wish drove Bierce to go to Mexico when he did—a war-haunted life, so why not such a death?—and probably attach himself to Pancho Villa’s rebels as a sort of unofficial revolution-correspondent and most likely get himself shot as an uppity old gringo who wouldn’t stay silent for the devil himself. While Sterling was known to have carried a vial of cyanide in his vest pocket for years, whether he finally took it by accident (pretty far-fetched) or by intention. And then there was that time (Rogers’s daughter tells about it in her book) when Jack London disappeared on a five-day spree and then came home when Charmian and Rogers’s daughter and several other worried people were gathered, and with the mischievous, icy logic of a man who’d drunk himself sober, challenged George Sterling and Rogers not to sit up with the corpse. Though I’d think alcohol was enough villain there, without bringing in any of de Castries’s black magic, or its power of suggestion.”

“What’d London mean by that?” Byers asked, squinting as he carefully measured out for himself more brandy.

“That when they felt life losing its zest, their powers starting to fail, they take the Noseless One by the arm without waiting to be asked, and exit laughing.”

“The Noseless One?”

“Why, simply, London’s sobriquet for Death himself—the skull beneath the skin. The nose is all cartilage and so the skull—”

Byers’s eyes widened and he suddenly shot a finger toward his guest.

“Franz!” he asked excitedly. “That paramental you saw—wasn’t it noseless?”

As if he’d just received a posthypnotic command, Franz’s eyes shut tight, he jerked back his face a little, and started to throw his hands in front of it. Byers’ words had brought the pale brown, blank, triangular muzzle vividly back to his mind’s eye.

“Don’t”—he said carefully—“say things like that again without warning. Yes, it was noseless.”

“My dear Franz, I will not. Please excuse me. I did not fully realize until now what effect the sight of it must have upon a person.”

“All right, all right,” Franz said quietly. “So four acolytes died somewhat ahead of their time (except perhaps for Bierce), victims of their rampant psyches… or of something else.”

“And at least an equal number of less prominent acolytes,” Byers took up again quite smoothly. “You know, Franz, I’ve always been impressed by how in London’s last great novel, The Star Rover, mind triumphs completely over matter. By frightfully intense self-discipline, a lifer at San Quentin is enabled to escape in spirit through the thick walls of his prison house and move at will through the world and relive his past reincarnations, redie his deaths. Somehow that makes me think of old de Castries in the 1920s, living alone in downtown cheap hotels and brooding, brooding, brooding about past hopes and glories and disasters. And (dreaming meanwhile of foul, unending tortures) about the wrongs done him and about revenge (whether or not he actually worked something there) and about… who knows what else? Sending his mind upon… who knows what journeys?”

21

“And now,” Byers said, dropping his voice, “I must tell you of Thibaut de Castries’s last acolyte and final end. Remember that during this period we must picture him as a bent old man, taciturn most of the time, always depressed, and getting paranoid. For instance, now, he had a thing about never touching metal surfaces and fixtures, because his enemies were trying to electrocute him. Sometimes he was afraid they were poisoning his tap water in the pipes. He seldom would go out, for fear a car would jump the curb and get him, and he no longer spry enough to dodge, or an enemy would shatter his skull with a brick or tile dropped from a high roof. At the same time he was frequently changing his hotel, to throw them off his trail. Now his only contacts with former associates were his dogged attempts to get back and burn all copies of his book, though there may still have been some blackmailing and plain begging. Ricker and Klaas witnessed one such book burning. Grotesque affair!—he burned two copies in his bathtub. They remembered opening the windows and fanning out the smoke. With one or two exceptions, they were his only visitors—lonely and eccentric types themselves, and already failed men like himself although they were only in their thirties at the time.

“Then Clark Ashton Smith came—the same age, but brimming with poetry and imagination and creative energy. Clark had been hard hit by George Sterling’s nasty death and had felt driven to look up such friends and acquaintances of his poetic mentor as he could find. De Castries felt old fires stir. Here was another of the brilliant, vital ones he’d always sought. He was tempted (finally yielding entirely) to exert his formidable charm for a last time, to tell his fabulous tales, to expound compellingly his eerie theories, and to weave his spells.

“And Clark Ashton, a lover of the weird and of its beauty, highly intelligent, yet in some ways still a naive small-town youth, emotionally turbulent, made a most gratifying audience. For several weeks Clark delayed his return to Auburn, fearfully reveling in the ominous, wonder-shot, strangely real world that old Tiberius, the scarecrow emperor of terror and mysteries, painted for him afresh each day—a San Francisco of spectral though rock-solid megabuildings and invisible paramental entities more real than life. It’s easy to see why the Tiberius metaphor caught Clark’s fancy. At one point he wrote—hold on for a moment, Franz, while I get that photocopy—”

“There’s no need,” Franz said, dragging the journal itself out of his side pocket. The binoculars came out with it and dropped to the thickly carpeted floor with a shivery little clash of the broken glass inside.

Byers’s eyes followed them with morbid curiosity. “So those are the glasses that (Take warning, Franz!) several times saw a paramental entity and were in the end destroyed by it.” His gaze shifted to the journal. “Franz, you sly dog! You came prepared for at least part of this discussion before you ever went to Corona Heights today!”

Franz picked up the binoculars and put them on the low table beside his overflowing ashtray, meanwhile glancing rapidly around the room and at its windows, where the gold had darkened a little. He said quietly, “It seems to me, Donaldus, you’ve been holding out, too. You take for granted now that Smith wrote the journal, but in the Haight and even in the letters we exchanged afterwards, you said you were uncertain.”

“You’ve got me,” Byers admitted with a rather odd little smile, perhaps ashamed. “But it really seemed wise, Franz, to let as few people in on it as possible. Now of course you know as much as I do, or will in a few minutes, but… The most camp of cliches is ‘There are some things man was not meant to know,’ but there are times when I believe it really applies to Thibaut de Castries and the paranatural. Might I see the journal?”

Franz flipped it across. Byers caught it as if it were made of eggshell, and with an aggrieved look at his guest carefully opened it and as carefully turned a couple of pages. “Yes, here it is. ‘Three hours today at 607 Rhodes. What a locus for genius! How prosaick!—as Howard would spell it. And yet Tiberius is Tiberius indeed, miserly doling out his dark Thrasyllus-secrets in this canyoned, cavernous Capri called San Francisco to his frightened young heir (God, no! Not I!) Caligula. And wondering how soon I, too, will go mad.’”

As he finished reading aloud, Byers began to turn the next pages, one at a time, and kept it up even when he came to the blank ones. Now and then he’d look up at Franz, but he examined each page minutely with fingers and eyes before he turned it.

He said conversationally, “Clark did think of San Francisco as a modern Rome, you know, both cities with their seven hills. From Auburn he’d seen George Sterling and the rest living as if all life were a Roman holiday. With Carmel perhaps analogous to Capri, which was simply Tiberius’s Little Rome, for the more advanced fun and games. Fishermen brought fresh-caught lobsters to the goatish old emperor; Sterling dove for giant abalone with his knife. Of course, Rhodes was the Capri of Tiberius’s early middle years. No, I can see why Clark would not have wanted to be Caligula. ‘Art, like the bartender, is never drunk’—or really schiz. Hello, what’s this?”

His fingernails were gently teasing at the edge of a page. “It’s clear you’re not a bibliophile, dear Franz. I