Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness

“But mark this, Franz,” he emphasized, pouring out brandy, “despite all my previous knowledge, so much more extensive and of such longer standing than your own, I’ve never actually seen a paramental entity. You have the advantage of me there. And it seems to be quite an advantage.” And he looked at Franz with a mixture of avidity and dread.

Franz stood up. “Perhaps it is,” he said shortly, “at least in making a person stay on guard. You say you’re trying to protect yourself, but you don’t act that way. Right now—excuse me, Donaldus—you’re getting so drunk that you’d be helpless if a paramental entity—”

Byers’s eyebrows went up. “You think you could defend yourself against them, resist them, fight them, destroy them, once they’re around?” he asked incredulously, his voice strengthening. “Can you stop an atomic missile headed for San Francisco at this moment through the ionosphere? Can you command the germs of cholera? Can you abolish your Anima or your Shadow? Can you say to the poltergeist, ‘Don’t knock’? or to the Queen of the Night, ‘Stay outside?’ You can’t stand guard twenty-four hours a day for months, for years. Believe me, I know. A soldier crouched in a dugout can’t try to figure out if the next shell will be a direct hit or not. He’d go crazy if he tried. No, Franz, all you can do is to lock the doors and windows, turn on all the lights, and hope they pass you by. And try to forget them. Eat, drink and be merry. Recreate yourself. Here, have a drink.”

He came toward Franz carrying in each hand a glass half-full of brandy.

“No, thank you,” Franz said harshly, jamming the journal into his coat pocket, to Byers’s fleeting distress. Then he picked up the tinkling binoculars and jammed them in the other side pocket, thinking in a flash of the binoculars in James’s ghost story “A View from a Hill” that had been magicked to see the past by being filled with a black fluid from boiled bones that had oozed out nastily when they were broken. Could his own binoculars have been somehow doctored or gimmicked so that they saw things that weren’t there? A wildly far-fetched notion, and anyhow his own binoculars were broken, too.

“I’m sorry, Donaldus, but I’ve got to go,” he said, heading for the hall. He knew that if he stayed he would take a drink, starting the old cycle, and the idea of becoming unconscious and incapable of being roused was very repellent.

Byers hurried after him. His haste and his gyrations to keep the brandy from spilling would have been comic under other circumstances and if he hadn’t been saying in a horrified, plaintive, pleading voice, “You can’t go out, it’s dark. You can’t go out with that old devil or his paramental slipping around. Here, have a drink and stay the night. At least stay for the party. If you’re going to stand on guard, you’re going to need some rest and recreation. I’m sure you’ll find an agreeable and pleasing partner—they’ll all be swingers, but intelligent. And if you’re afraid of liquor dulling your mind, I’ve got some cocaine, the purest crystal.” He drained one glass and set it down on the hall table. “Look, Franz, I’m frightened, too—and you’ve been pale ever since I told you where the old devil’s dust is laid. Stay for the party. And have just one drink—enough to relax a little. In the end, there’s no other way, believe me. You’d just get too tired, trying to watch forever.” He swayed a little, wheedling, smiling his pleasantest.

A weight of weariness descended on Franz. He reached toward the glass, but just as he touched it he jerked his fingers away as if they’d been burned.

“Shh,” he cautioned as Byers started to speak and he warningly gripped him by the elbow.

In the silence they heard a tiny, faintly grating, sliding metallic sound ending in a soft snap, as of a key being rotated in a lock. Their eyes went to the front door. They saw the brass inner knob revolve.

“It’s Fa Lo Suee,” Byers said. “I’ll have to unbolt the door.” He moved to do so.

“Wait!” Franz whispered urgently. “Listen!”

They heard a steady scratching sound that didn’t end, as if some intelligent beast was drawing a horny claw round and round on the other side of the painted wood. There rose unbidden in Franz’s imagination the paralyzing image of a large black panther crouched close against the other side of the gold-traced white opacity, a green-eyed, gleamingly black panther that was beginning to metamorphose into something more terrible.

“Up to her tricks,” Byers muttered and drew the bolt before Franz could move to hinder him.

The door pressed halfway open, and around it came two pale gray, triangular flat feline faces that glittered at the edges and were screeching “Aiii-eee!” it sounded.

Both men recoiled, Franz flinching aside with eyes involuntarily slitted from two pale gray gleaming shapes, a taller and a slenderer one, that whirled past him as they shot menacingly at Byers, who was bent half double in his retreat, one arm thrown shieldingly across his eyes, the other across his groin, while the gleaming wineglass and the small sheet of amber fluid it had contained still sailed through the air from the point where his hand had abandoned them.

Incongruously, Franz’s mind registered the odors of brandy, burnt hemp, and a spicy perfume.

The gray shapes converged on Byers, clutching at his groin, and as he gasped and gabbled inarticulately, weakly trying to fend them off, the taller was saying in a husky contralto voice with great enjoyment, “In China, Mr. Nayland Smith, we have ways to make men talk.”

Then the brandy was on the pale green wallpaper, the unbroken wineglass on the golden-brown carpet, and the stoned, handsome Chinese woman and equally mind-blown urchin-faced girl had snatched off their gray cat-masks, though laughing wildly and continuing to grope and tickle Byers vigorously, and Franz realized they had both been screeching “Jaime,” his host’s first name, at the top of their voices.

His extreme fear had left Franz, but not its paralysis. The latter extended to his vocal cords, so that from the moment of the strange eruption of the two gray-clad females to the moment when he left the house on Beaver Street he never spoke a word but only stood beside the dark rectangle of the open door and observed the busy tableau farther down the hall with a rather cold detachment.

Fa Lo Suee had a spare, somewhat angular figure, a flat face with strong, bony structure, dark eyes that were paradoxically both bright and dull with marijuana (and whatever) and straight dull black hair. Her dark red lips were thin. She wore silver-gray stockings and gloves and a closely fitting dress (of ribbed silver-gray silk) of the Chinese sort that always looks modern. Her left hand threatened Byers in his midst, her right lay loosely low around the slender waist of her companion.

The latter was a head shorter, almost but not quite skinny, and had sexy little breasts. Her face was actually catlike: receding chin, pouty lips, a snub nose, protuberant blue eyes and low forehead, from which straight blonde hair fell to one side. She looked about seventeen, bratty and worldly-wise. She plinked a note in Franz’s memory. She wore a pale gray leotard, silver-gray gloves, and a gray cloak of some light material that now hung to one side like her hair. Both of her hands mischievously groped Byers. She had a pink ear and a vicious giggle.

The two cat-masks, cast on the hall table now, were edged with silver sequins and had a few stiff whiskers, but they retained the nasty triangular snouty appearance which had been so unnerving coming around the door.

Donaldus (or Jaime) spoke no really intelligible word himself during this period before Franz’s departure, except perhaps “Don’t!” but he gasped and squealed and babbled a lot, with breathless little laughs thrown in. He stayed bent half-double and twisting from side to side, his hands constantly but rather ineffectually fending off the clutching ones. His pale violet dressing gown, unbelted, swished as he twisted.