Our Lady of Darkness

case he wasn’t sure how far he wanted to commit himself. She invited him in to the breakfast she was making. Though a duplicate of his, her room looked much nicer—too good for the building—she had redecorated it completely with help from Gunnar and Saul. Only it didn’t have a view. There was a music stand by the window and an electronic piano that was mostly keyboard and black box and that had earphones for silent practicing, as well as speaker.

“I came down because I heard you blowing the Telemann,” Franz said.

“Perhaps I did it to summon you,” Cal replied offhandedly from where she was busy with the hot plates and toaster. “There’s magic in music, you know.”

“You’re thinking of The Magic Flute?” he asked. “You make a recorder sound like one.”

“There’s magic in all woodwinds,” she assured him. “Mozart’s supposed to have changed the plot of The Magic Flute midway so that it wouldn’t be too close to that of a rival opera, The Enchanted Bassoon.”

He laughed, then went on. “Musical notes do have at least one supernatural power. They can levitate, fly up through the air. Of course words can do that, too, but not as well.”

“How do you figure that?” she asked over her shoulder.

“From cartoons and comic strips,” he told her. “Words need balloons to hold them up, but notes just come flying out of the piano or whatever.”

“They have those little black wings,” she said, “at least the eighth and shorter ones. But it’s all true. Music can fly—it’s all release—and it has the power to release other things and make them fly and swirl.”

He nodded. “I wish you’d release the notes of this piano, though, and let them swirl out when you practice harpsichord,” he said, looking at the electronic instrument, “instead of keeping them shut up inside the earphones.”

“You’d be the only one who’d like it,” she informed him.

“There’s Gun and Saul,” he said.

“Their rooms aren’t on this shaft. Besides, you’d get sick of scales and arpeggios yourself.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said, then teased, “But maybe harpsichord notes are too tinkly to make magic.”

“I hate that word,” she said, “but you’re still wrong. Tinkly (ugh!) notes can make magic too. Remember Papageno’s bells—there’s more than one kind of magic music in The Flute.”

They ate toast, juice, and eggs. Franz told Cal of his decision to send the manuscript of Towers of Treason off just as it was.

He finished, “So my readers won’t find out just what a document-shredding machine sounds like when it works—what difference does that make? I actually saw that program on the tube, but when the Satanist wizard fed in the rune, they had smoke come out—which seemed stupid.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” she said sharply. “You put too much effort into rationalizing that silly program.” Her expression changed. “Still, I don’t know. It’s partly that you always try to do your best, whatever at, that makes me think of you as a professional.” She smiled.

He felt another faint twinge of guilt but fought it down easily.

While she was pouring him more coffee, he said, “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s go to Corona Heights today. I think there’d be a great view of Downtown and the Inner Bay. We could take the Muni most of the way, and there shouldn’t be too much climbing.”

“You forget I’ve got to practice for the concert tomorrow night and couldn’t risk my hands, in any case,” she said a shade reproachfully. “But don’t let that stop you,” she added with a smile that asked his pardon. “Why not ask Gun or Saul—I think they’re off today. Gun’s great on climbing. Where is Corona Heights?”

He told her, remembering that her interest in Frisco was neither as new nor as passionate as his—he had a convert’s zeal.

“That must be close to Buena Vista Park,” she said. “Now don’t go wandering in there, please. There’ve been some murders there quite recently. Drug related. The other side of Buena Vista is right up against the Haight.”

“I don’t intend to,” he said, “though maybe you’re a little too uptight about the Haight. It’s quieted down a lot the last few years. Why, I got these two books there in one of those really fabulous secondhand stores.”

“Oh, yes, you were going to show them to me,” she said.

He handed her the one that had been open, saying, “That’s just about the most fascinating book of pseudoscience I’ve ever seen—it has some genuine insights mixed with the hokum. No date, but printed about 1900, I’d judge.”

“’Megapolisomancy,’” she pronounced carefully. “Now what would that be? Telling the future from… from cities?”

“From big cities,” he said, nodding.

“Oh, yes, the mega.”

He went on. “Telling the future and all other sorts of things. And apparently making magic, too, from that knowledge. Though de Castries calls it a ‘new science,’ as if he were a second Galileo. Anyhow, this de Castries is very much concerned about the ‘vast amounts’ of steel and paper that are being accumulated in big cities. And coal oil (kerosene) and natural gas. And electricity, too, if you can believe it—he carefully figures out just how much electricity is in how many thousands of miles of wire, how many tons of illuminating gas in tanks, how much steel in the new skyscrapers, how much paper for government records and yellow journalism, and so on.”

“My-oh-my,” Cal commented. “I wonder what he’d think if he were alive today.”

“His direst predictions vindicated, no doubt. He did speculate about the growing menace of automobiles and gasoline, but especially electric cars carrying buckets of direct electricity around in batteries. He came so close to anticipating our modern concern about pollution—he even talks of ‘the vast congeries of gigantic fuming vats’ of sulphuric acid needed to manufacture steel. But what he was most agitated about was the psychological or spiritual (he calls them ‘paramental’) effects of all that stuff accumulating in big cities, its sheer liquid and solid mass.”

“A real proto-hippie,” Cal put it. “What sort of man was he? Where did he live? What else did he do?”

“There’s absolutely no indication in the book of any of those things,” Franz told her, “and I’ve never turned up another reference to him. In his book he refers to New England and eastern Canada quite a bit, and New York City, but only in a general way. He also mentioned Paris (he had it in for the Eiffel Tower) and France a few times. And Egypt.”

Cal nodded. “What’s with the other book?”

“Something quite interesting,” Franz said, passing it over. “As you can see, it’s not a regular book at all but a journal of blank rice-paper pages, as thin as onionskin but more opaque, bound in ribbed silk that was tea rose, I’d say, before it faded. The entries, in violet ink with a fine-point fountain pen, I’d guess, hardly go a quarter of the way through. The rest of the pages are blank. Now when I bought these books they were tied together with an old piece of string. They looked as if they’d been joined for decades—you can still see the marks.”

“Uh-huh,” Cal agreed. “Since 1900 or so? A very charming diary book—I’d like to have one like it.”

“Yes, isn’t it? No, just since 1928. A couple of the entries are dated, and they all seem to have been made in the space of a few weeks.”

“Was he a poet?” Cal asked. “I see groups of indented lines. Who was he, anyway? Old de Castries?”

“No, not de Castries, though someone who had read his book and knew him. But I do think he was a poet. In fact, I think I have identified the writer, though it’s not easy to prove since he nowhere signs himself. I think he was Clark Ashton Smith.”

“I’ve heard that name,” Cal said.

“Probably from me,” Franz told her. “He was another supernatural horror writer. Very rich, doomful stuff: Arabian Nights chinoiserie. A mood like Beddoes’s Death’s Jest-Book. He lived near San Francisco and knew the old artistic crew, he visited George Sterling at Carmel, and he could easily have been here in San Francisco in 1928 when he’d just begun to write his finest stories. I’ve given a photocopy of that journal to Jaime Donaldus Byers, who’s an authority on Smith and who lives here on Beaver Street (which is just by Corona Heights, by the way, the map shows it), and he showed it to de Camp (who thinks it’s Smith for sure) and to Roy Squires (who’s as sure it isn’t). Byers himself just can’t decide, says there’s no evidence for an extended San Francisco trip by Smith then, and that although the writing looks like Smith’s, it’s more agitated than any he’s ever seen. But I have reasons to think Smith would have kept the trip secret and have had cause to be supremely