Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness

He got a city map and a ruler and went to his couch, where he fished his broken binoculars out of his pocket and set them carefully on an unpiled edge of the coffee table. It gave him a feeling of safety to think that now the snout-faced paramental couldn’t get to him without crossing broken glass, like that which they used to cement atop walls to keep out intruders—until he realized just how illogical that was.

He took out Smith’s journal too and settled himself beside his Scholar’s Mistress, spreading out the map. Then he opened the journal to de Castries’s curse, marveling again that it had so long eluded him, and reread the crucial portion:

The fulcrum (0) and the Cipher (A) shall be here, at his beloved 607 Rhodes. I’ll be at rest in my appointed spot (1) under the Bishop’s Seat, the heaviest ashes that he ever felt. Then when the weights are on at Sutro Mount (4) and Monkey Clay (5) [(4) + (1) = (5)] BE his Life Squeezed Away .

Now to work out, he told himself, this problem in black geometry, or would it be black physics? What had Byers said Klaas had said de Castries had called it? Oh, yes, Neo-Pythagorean metageometry.

Monkey Clay was the most incongruous item in the curse, all right. Start there. Donaldus had maundered about simian and human clay, but that led nowhere. It ought to be a place , like Mount Sutro—or Corona Heights (under the Bishop’s Seat). Clay was a street in San Francisco. But Monkey?

Franz’s mind took a leap from Monkey Clay to Monkey Wards. Why? He’d known a man who’d worked at Sears Roebuck’s great rival and who said he and some of his lowly coworkers called their company that.

Another leap, from Monkey Wards to the Monkey Block. Of course! The Monkey Block was the proudly derisive name of a huge old San Francisco apartment building, long torn down, where bohemians and artists had lived cheaply in the Roaring Twenties and the Depression years. Monkey—short for the street it was on—Montgomery! Another San Francisco street, and one crosswise to Clay! (There was something more than that, but his mind hung fire and he couldn’t wait.)

He excitedly laid the ruler on the flattened map between Mount Sutro and the intersection of Clay and Montgomery Streets in the north end of the financial district. He saw that the straight line so indicated went through the middle of Corona Heights! (And also rather close by the intersection of Geary and Hyde, he noted with a little grimace.)

He took a pencil from the coffee table and marked a small “five” at the Montgomery-Clay intersection, a “four” by Mount Sutro, and a “one” in the middle of Corona Heights. He noted that the straight line became like a balance or scales then (two lever arms) with the balancing point or fulcrum somewhere between Corona Heights and Montgomery-Clay. It even balanced mathematically: four plus one equals five—just as was noted in the curse before the final injunction. That miserable fulcrum (0), wherever it was, would surely be pressed to death by those two great lever arms (“Give me a place to stand and I will stomp the world to death”—Archimedes) just as that poor little lower-case “his” was crushed between that dreadful “ BE ” and the three big capitalized words.

Yes, that unfortunate (0) would surely be suffocated, compressed to a literal nothing, especially when “the weights” were “on.” Now what—?

Suddenly it occurred to Franz that whatever had been the case in the past, the weights were certainly on now , with the TV tower standing three-legged on Mount Sutro and with Montgomery-Clay the location of the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco’s tallest building! (The “something else” was that the Monkey Block had been torn down to clear a site first for a parking lot, then for the Transamerica Pyramid. Closer and closer!)

That was why the curse hadn’t got Smith. He’d died before either structure had been built. The trap hadn’t become set until later .

The Transamerica Pyramid and the 1,000-foot TV tower—those were crushers, all right.

But it was ridiculous to think that de Castries could have predicted the building of those structures. And in any case coincidence—lucky hits—was an adequate explanation. Pick any intersection in downtown San Francisco and there was at least a 50 percent chance of there being a high rise there, or nearby.

But why was he holding his breath then; why was there a faint roaring in his ears; why were his fingers cold and tingling?

Why had de Castries told Klaas and Ricker that prescience, or foreknowledge, was possible at certain spots in mega-cities? Why had he named his book (it lay beside Franz now, a dirty gray) Megapolisomancy?

Whatever the truth behind, the weights certainly were on now, no question.

Which made it all the more important to find out the real location of that baffling 607 Rhodes where the old devil had lived (dragged out the tail end of his life) and Smith had asked his questions… and where, according to the curse, the ledger containing the Grand Cipher was hidden… and where the curse would be fulfilled. Really, it was quite like a detective story. By Dashiell Hammett? “X marks the spot” where the victim was (will be?) discovered, crushed to death? They’d put up a brass plaque at Bush and Stockton near where Brigid O’Shaunnesy had shot Miles Archer in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon , but there were no memorials for Thibaut de Castries, a real person. Where was the elusive X, or mystic (0)? Where was 607 Rhodes? Really, he should have asked Byers when he’d the chance. Call him up now? No, he’d severed his connection there. Beaver Street was an area he didn’t want to venture back to, even by phone. At least for now. But he left off poring over the map as futile.

His gaze fell on the 1927 San Francisco City Directory he’d ripped off that morning that formed the midsection of his Scholar’s Mistress. Might as well finish that bit of research right now—find the name of this building, if it ever had one, if it had, indeed, become a listed hotel. He heaved the thick volume onto his lap and turned the dingily yellowed pages to the “Hotels” section. At another time he’d have been amused by the old advertisements for patent medicines and barber parlors.

He thought of all the searching around he’d done this morning at the Civic Center. It all seemed very far off now and quite naïve.

Let’s see, the best way would be to search through the addresses, not for Geary Street—there’d be a lot of hotels on Geary—but for 811. There’d probably be only one of those if any. He began running a fingernail down the first column rather slowly, but steadily.

He was on the next to last column before he came to an 811. Yes, it was Geary too, all right. The name was… the Rhodes Hotel.

Franz found himself standing in the hall facing his closed door. His body was trembling very slightly all over—a general fine tremor.

Then he realized why he had come out here. It was to check the number on the door, the small dark oblong on which was incised in pale gray, “607.” He wanted to see it actually and to see his room from the outside (and incidentally dissociate himself from the curse, get off the target).

He got the feeling that if he knocked just now (as Clark Smith must have knocked so many times on this same door) Thibaut de Castries would open it, his sunk-cheeked face a webwork of fine gray wrinkles as if it has been powdered with fine ashes.

If he went back in without knocking, it would be as he’d left it. But if he knocked, then the old spider would wake…

He felt vertigo, as if the building were beginning to lean over with him inside it, to rotate ever so slowly, at least at first. The feeling was like earthquake panic.