Our Lady of Darkness

beside it the flat slate with its chalk, his prisms, and some captured chess pieces, and finally the tiny wineglasses and the square bottle of kirschwasser, still uncapped, where he’d set it down after offering it a last time to Fernando.

Gradually the whole jumbled arrangement began to seem drolly amusing to Franz, quite beyond dealing with. Although his eyes and ears were still tracking automatically (and kept on doing so) he almost giggled weakly. His evening mind invariably had its silly side, a tendency toward puns and oddly mixed cliches, and faintly psychotic epigrams—foolishness born of fatigue. He recalled how neatly the psychologist F. C. MacKnight had described the transition from waking to sleeping: the mind’s short logical daytime steps becoming longer by degrees, each mental jump a little more far-fetched and wild, until (with never a break) they were utterly unpredictable giant strides and one was dreaming.

He picked up the city map from where he’d left it spread on his bed and without folding it he laid it as if it were a coverlet atop the clutter on the coffee table.

“Go to sleep, little junk pile,” he said with humorous tenderness.

And he laid the ruler he’d been using on top of that, like a magician relinquishing his wand.

Then (his ears and eyes still doing their guard rounds) he half-turned to the wall where Fernando had chalked the star and began to put his books to bed too, as he had the mess on the coffee table, began to tuck in his Scholar’s Mistress for the night, as it were—a homely operation on familiar things that was the perfect antidote even to wildest fears.

Upon the yellowed, brown-edged pages of Megapolisomancy—the section about “electro-mephitic city-stuff”—he gently laid Smith’s journal, open at the curse.

“You’re very pale, my dear,” he observed (the rice paper), “and yet the left-hand side of your face has all those very odd black beauty marks, a whole page of them. Dream of a lovely Satanist party in full evening dress, all white and black like Marienbad, in an angelfood ballroom with creamy slim borzois stepping about like courteous giant spiders.”

He touched a shoulder that was chiefly Lovecraft’s Outsider, its large forty-year-old Winnebago Eggshell pages open at “The Thing on the Doorstep.” He murmured to his mistress, “Don’t deliquesce now, dear, like poor Asenath Waite. Remember, you’ve got no dental work (that I know of) by which you could be positively identified.” He glanced at the other shoulder: coverless, crumble-edged Wonder Stories and Weird Tales, with Smith’s “The Disinterment of Venus” spread at the top. “That’s a far better way to go,” he commented. “All rosy marble under the worms and mold.”

The chest was Ms. Lettland’s monumental book, rather appropriately open at that mysterious, provocative, and question-raising chapter, “The Mammary Mystique: Cold as…” He thought of the feminist author’s strange disappearance in Seattle. Now no one ever could know her further answers.

His fingers trailed across the rather slender, black, gray-mottled waist made of James’s ghost stories—the book had once been thoroughly rained on and then been laboriously dried out, page by forever wrinkled, discolored page—and he straightened a little the stolen city directory (representing hips), still open at the hotels section, saying quietly, “There, that’ll be more comfortable for you. You know, dear friend, you’re doubly 607 Rhodes now,” and wondered rather dully what he meant by that.

He heard the elevator stop outside and its doors open, but didn’t hear it going off again. He waited tautly, but there was no knock at his door, no footsteps in the hall that he could hear. There came from somewhere through the wall the faint jar of a stubborn door being quietly opened or closed, then nothing more of that.

He touched The Spider Glyph in Time where it was lying just below the directory. Earlier in the day his Scholar’s Mistress had been lying on her face, but now on her back. He mused a moment (What had Lettland said?) as to why the exterior female genitalia were thought of as a spider. The tendriled blot of hair? The mouth that opened vertically like a spider’s jaws instead of horizontally like the human face’s lips or the labia of the Chinagirls of sailors’ legendry? Old fever-racked Santos-Lobos suggested it involved the time to spin a web, the spider’s clock. And what a charming cranny for a cobweb.

His feather-touching fingers moved on to Knochenmadchen in Peize (Mit Peitsche) —more of the dark hairiness, now changing to soft fur (furs rather) wrapping the skeleton girls—and Ames et Fantomes de Douleur, the other thigh; de Sade (or his posthumous counterfeiter), tiring of the flesh, had really wanted to make the mind scream and the angels sob; shouldn’t The Ghosts of Pain be The Agonies of Ghosts?

That book, taken along with Masoch’s Skeleton Girls in Furs (With Whips), made him think of what a wealth of death was here under his questing hands. Lovecraft dying quite swiftly in 1937, writing determinedly until the end, taking notes on his last sensations. (Did he see paramentals then?) Smith going more slowly some quarter-century later, his brain nibbled by little strokes. Santos-Lobos burned by his fevers to a thinking cinder. And was vanished Lettland dead? Montague there (his White Tape made a knee, only its paper was getting yellow) drowning by emphysema while he still wrote footnotes upon our self- suffocating culture.

Death and the fear of death! Franz recalled how deeply Lovecraft’s “The Color Out of Space” had depressed him when he’d read it in his teens—the New England farmer and his family rotting away alive, poisoned by radioactives from the ends of the universe. Yet at the same time it had been so fascinating. What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life’s very end. But even as he thought that, he realized how tired he was. Tired, depressed, and morbid—the unpleasant aspects of his evening mind, the dark side of its coin.

And speaking of darkness, where did Our Lady of Same fit in? (Suspiria de Profundis made the other knee and De Profundis a calf. “How do you feel about Lord Alfred Douglas, my dear? Does he turn you on? I think Oscar was much too good for him.”) Was the TV tower out there in the night her statue?—it was tall enough and turreted. Was night her ‘treble veil of crape?’ and the nineteen reds, winking or steady, ‘the fierce light of a blazing misery?’ Well, he was miserable enough himself for two. Make her laugh at that. Come, sweet night, and pall me.

He finished tucking in his Scholar’s Mistress—Prof. Nostig’s The Subliminal Occult (“You disposed of Kirlian photography, doctor, but could you do as well with the paranatural?”), the copies of Gnostica (any relation to Prof. Nostig?), The Mauritzius Case (did Etzel Andergast see paramentals in Berlin? and Waramme smokier ones in Chicago?), Hecate, or the Future of Witchcraft by Yeats (“Why did you have that book destroyed, William Butler?”), and Journey to the End of the Night (“And to your toes, my dear.”)—and wearily stretched himself out beside her, still stubbornly watchful for the tiniest suspicious sounds and sights. It occurred to him how he had come home to her at night as to a real wife or woman, to be relaxed and comforted after all the tensions, trials, and dangers (Remember they were still there!) of the day.

It occurred to him that he could probably still catch the Brandenburg Fifth if he sprang up and hurried, but he was too inert even to stir—to do anything except stay awake and on guard until Cal and Gun and Saul returned.

The shaded light at the head of his bed fluctuated a little, dimming, then brightening sharply, then dimming again as if the bulb were getting very old, but he was much too weary to get up and replace it or even just turn on another light. Besides, he didn’t want his window too brightly lit for something on Corona Heights (Might still be there instead of here. Who knew?) to see.

He noted a faint, pale gray glitter around the edges of the casement window—the westering gibbous moon at last beginning to peer in from above, swing past the southern high rise into full view. He felt the impulse to get up and take a last look at the TV tower, say good night to his slender thousand-foot goddess attended by moon and stars, put her to bed, too, as it were, say his last prayers, but the same weariness prevented him. Also, he didn’t want to show himself to Corona Heights or look upon the dark blotch of that place ever again.

The light at the head of his bed shone steadily, but it did seem a shade dimmer than it had been before the fluctuation, or was that just the pall cast by his evening mind?

Forget that now. Forget it all. The world was a rotten place. This city was a mess with its gimcrack high rises and trumpery skyscrapers— Towers of Treason indeed. It had all tumbled down and burned in 1906 (at least everything around this building had) and soon enough would again, and all of the papers be fed to the document-shredding machines, with or without the help of paramentals. (And was not humped, umber Corona Heights even now stirring?) And the entire world was just as bad; it was perishing of pollution, drowning