should have gone ahead and stolen the book from you that evening in the Haight, as at one point I fully intended to, except that something gallant in your drunken manner touched my conscience, which is
With the ghostliest of cracklings the page came apart into two, revealing writing hidden between.
He reported, “It’s black as new—India ink, for certain—but done very lightly so as not to groove the paper in the slightest. Then a few tiny drops of gum arabic, not enough to wrinkle, and hey presto!—it’s hidden quite neatly. The obscurity of the obvious. ‘Upon their vestments is a writing no man may see…’
He resolutely averted his eyes, which had been reading while he spoke. Then he stood up and holding the journal at arm’s length came over and squatted on his hams, so close beside Franz that his brandy breath was obvious, and held the newly liberated page spread before their faces. Only the right-hand one was written upon, in very black yet spider-fine characters very neatly drawn and not remotely like Smith’s handwriting.
“Thank you,” Franz said. “This is weird. I riffled through those pages a dozen times.”
“But you did not examine each one minutely with the true bibliophile’s profound mistrust. The signatory initials indicate it was written by old Tiberius himself. And I’m sharing this with you not so much out of courtesy, as fear. Glancing at the opening, I got the feeling this was something I did not want to read all by myself. This way feels safer—at least it spreads the danger.”
Together they silently read the following:
As he finished reading it, Franz’s mind was whirling with so many names of places and things both familiar and strange that he had to prod himself to remind himself to check visually the windows and doors and corners of Byers’s gorgeous living room, now filling with shadows. That business about “when the weights are on”—he couldn’t imagine what it meant, but taken together with “heaviest ashes,” it made him think of the old man pressed to death with heavy stones on a plank on his chest for refusing to testify at the Salem witchcraft trial of 1692, as if a confession could be forced out like a last breath.
“Monkey Clay,” Byers muttered puzzledly. “Ape of clay? Poor suffering Man, molded of dust?”
Franz shook his head. And in the midst of all, he thought, that damnably puzzling 607 Rhodes! which kept turning up again and again, and had in a way touched all this off.
And to think he’d had this book for years and not spotted the secret. It made a person suspect and distrust all things closest to him, his most familiar possessions. What might not be hidden inside the lining of your clothes, or in your right-hand trousers pocket (or for a woman, in her handbag or bra), or in the cake of soap with which you washed (which might have a razor blade inside).
Also to think that he was looking at last at de Castries’s own handwriting, so neatly drawn and yet so crabbed for all that.
One detail puzzled him differently. “Donaldus,” he said, “how would de Castries ever have got hold of Smith’s journal?”
Byers let out a long alcohol-laden sigh, massaged his face with his hands (Franz clutched the journal to keep it from falling), and said, “Oh, that. Klaas and Ricker both told me that de Castries was quite worried and hurt when Clark went back to Auburn (it turned out) without warning, after visiting the old man every day for a month or so. De Castries was so bothered, they said, that he went over to Clark’s cheap rooming-house and convinced them he was Clark’s uncle, so that they gave him some things Clark had left behind when he’d checked out in a great tearing hurry. ‘I’ll keep them for little Clark,’ he told Klaas and Ricker and then later (after they’d heard from Clark) he added, ‘I’ve shipped him back his things.’ They never suspected that the old man ever entertained any hard feelings about Clark.”
Franz nodded. “But then how did the journal (now with the curse in it) get from de Castries to wherever I bought it?”
Byers said wearily, “Who knows? The curse, though, does remind me of another side of de Castries’s character that I haven’t mentioned: his fondness for rather cruel practical jokes. Despite his morbid fear of electricity, he had a chair Ricker helped rig for him to give the sitter an electric shock through the cushion that he kept for salesmen and salesladies, children, and other stray visitors. He nearly got into police trouble through that too. Some young lady looking for typing work got her bottom burned. Come to think of it, that has an S-M feeling, don’t you think?—the genuine sadomasochistic touch. Electricity—bringer of thrills and pain. Don’t writers speak of electric kisses? Ah, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men,” Byers finished sententiously and stood up, leaving the journal in Franz’s hands, and went back to his place. Franz looked at him questioningly, holding out the journal toward him a little, but his host said, pouring himself more brandy. “No, you keep it. It’s yours. After all, you were —are—the purchaser. Only for Heaven’s sake take better care of it! It’s a
“But what do you think of it, Donaldus?” Franz asked.
Donaldus shrugged as he began to sip. “A shivery document indeed,” he said, smiling at Franz as if he were very glad the latter had it. “And it really did lie in wait in stalls and lurk on shelves for many years, apparently Franz, don’t you recall
“I’ve tried and tried,” Franz said tormentedly. “The place was in the Haight, I’m fairly sure of that. Called… the In Group? The Black Spot? The Black Dog? The Grey Cockatoo? No, none of those, and I’ve tried hundreds of names. I think that ‘black’ was in it, but I believe the proprietor was a white man. And there was a little girl— maybe his daughter—helping him. Not so little, really—she was into puberty, I seem to recall, and well aware of it. Pushing herself at me—all this is very vague. I also seem to recall (I was drunk of course) being attracted to her,” he confessed somewhat ashamedly.
“My dear Franz, aren’t we all?” Byers observed. “The little darlings, barely kissed by sex, but don’t they know it! Who can resist? Do you recall what you paid for the books?”
“Something pretty high, I think. But now I’m beginning to guess and imagine.”
“You could search through the Haight, street by street, of course.”
“I suppose I could, if it’s still there and hasn’t changed its name. Why don’t you get on with your story, Donaldus?”
“Very well. There’s not much more of it. You know, Franz, there’s one indication that that… er… curse isn’t particularly efficacious. Clark lived a long and productive life, thirty-three more years. Reassuring, don’t you think?”
“He didn’t stray back to San Francisco,” Franz said shortly. “At least not very often.”
“That’s true. Well, after Clark left, de Castries remained… just a lonely and gloomy old man. He once told George Ricker at about this time a very unromantic story of his past: that he was French-Canadian and had grown up in northern Vermont, his father by turns a small-town printer and a farmer, always a failure, and he a lonely and unhappy child. It has the ring of truth, don’t you think? And it makes one wonder what the sex life of such a person would have been. No mistresses at all, I’d say, let alone intellectual, mysterious, and foreign ones. Well, anyhow, now he’d had his last fling (with Clark) at playing the omnipotent sinister sorcerer, and it had turned out as bitterly as it had the first time in
