Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness

At that question, Franz saw the small brown scuffed shoes step out decisively, kicking through the paper snow. Once again Fernando loudly rapped the wall above the bed, as if for attention, and turned and said authoritatively, “ Hechiceria ocultado en muralla! ”

“Witchcraft hidden in the wall,” Franz translated, rather like a child trying to prove he’s not sick. Cal touched his lips reprovingly, he should rest.

Fernando lifted a finger, as if to announce, “I will demonstrate,” and came striding back, stepping carefully past Cal and Franz in the doorway. He went quickly down the hall past Dorotea and Bonita, and stopped in front of the broom-closet door and turned around. Gun, who had followed inquisitively behind him, stopped, too.

The dark Peruvian gestured from the shut doorway to the neatly stacked boxes twice and then took a couple of steps on his toes with knees bent. (“I moved them out. I did it quietly.”) and took a big screwdriver out of his pants pocket and thrust it into the hole where the knob had been and gave it a twist and with it drew the black door open and then with a peremptory flourish of the screwdriver stepped inside.

Gun followed and looked in, reporting back to Franz and Cal, “He’s got the whole little room cleared out. My God, it’s dusty. You know, it’s even got a little window. Now he’s kneeling by the wall that’s the other side of the one he pounded on. There’s a little shallow cupboard built into it low down. It’s got a door. Fuses? Cleaning stuff? Outlets? I don’t know. Now he’s using the screwdriver to pry it open. Well, I’ll be damned!”

He backed away to let Fernando emerge, smiling triumphantly and carrying before his chest a rather large, rather thin gray book. He knelt by Franz and held it out to him, dramatically opening it. There was a puff of dust.

The two pages randomly revealed were covered from top to bottom, Franz saw, with unbroken lines of neatly yet crabbedly inked black astronomical and astrological signs and other cryptic symbols.

Franz reached out shakily toward it, then jerked his hand sharply back, as though afraid of getting his fingers burned.

He recognized the hand that had penned the Curse.

It had to be the Fifty-Book, the Grand Cipher mentioned in Megapolisomancy and Smith’s journal (B)—the ledger that Smith had once seen and that was an essential ingredient (A) of the Curse and that had been hidden almost forty years ago by old Thibaut de Castries to do its work at the fulcrum (0) at (Franz shuddered, glancing up at the number on his door) 607 Rhodes.

Next day Gun incinerated the Grand Cipher at Franz’s urgent entreaty, Cal and Saul concurring, but only after microfilming it. Since then he’s fed it to his computers repeatedly and let several semanticists and linguists study it variously, without the least progress toward breaking the code, if there is one. Recently he told the others, “It almost looks like Thibaut de Castries may have created that mathematical will-o’-the-wisp—a set of completely random numbers.” There did turn out to be exactly fifty symbols. Cal pointed out that fifty was the total number of faces of all the five Pythagorean or Platonic solids. But when asked what that led to, she could only shrug.

At first Gun and Saul couldn’t help wondering whether Franz mightn’t have torn up all his books and papers in some sort of short-term psychotic seizure. But they concluded it would have been an impossible task, at least to do in so short a time. “That stuff was shredded like oakum.”

Gun kept some samples of the strange confetti—“irregular scraps, average width three millimeters”—nothing like the refuse of a document-shredding machine, however advanced. (Which seemed to dispose of the suspicion that Gun’s Shredbasket, or some other supersubtle Italianate machinery, had somehow played a part in the affair.)

Gun also took apart Franz’s binoculars (calling in his optical friend, who among other things had investigated and thoroughly debunked the famous Crystal Skull) but they found no trace of any gimmicking. The only noteworthy circumstance was the thoroughness with which the lenses and prisms had been smashed. “More oakum picking?”

Gun found one flaw in the detailed account Franz gave when he was up to it. “You simply can’t see spectral colors in moonlight. The cones of the retina aren’t that sensitive.”

Franz replied somewhat sharply, “Most people can never see the green flash of the setting sun. Yet it’s sometimes there.”

Saul’s comment was, “You’ve got to believe there’s some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.” “Crazies?” “All of us.”

He and Gun still live at 811 Geary. They’ve encountered no further paramental phenomena—at least as yet.

The Luques are still there, too. Dorotea is keeping the existence of the broom closets a secret, especially from the owner of 811. “He’d make me e-try to rent them if he knew.”

Fernando’s story, as finally interpreted by her and Cal, was simply that he’d once noticed the little, low, very shallow cupboard in the broom closet while rearranging the boxes there to make space for additional ones and that it had stuck in his mind (“ Misterioso! ”) so that when “ Meestair Juestón ” had become haunted, he had remembered it and played a hunch. The cupboard, by the stains on its bottom, had once held polishes for furniture, brass, and shoes, but then for almost forty years only the Fifty-Book.

The three Luques and the others (nine in all with Gun’s and Saul’s ladies—just the right number for a classic Roman party, Franz observed) did eventually go for a picnic on Corona Heights. Gunnar’s Ingrid was tall and blonde as he, and worked in the Environmental Protection Agency, and pretended to be greatly impressed by the Junior Museum. While Saul’s Joey was a red-haired little dietitian deep into community theater. The Heights seemed quite different now that the winter’s rains had turned it green. Yet there were surprising reminders of a grimmer period: they encountered the two little girls with the Saint Bernard. Franz went a shade pale at that, but rallied quickly. Bonita played with them a while, nicely pretending it was fun. All in all, they had an enjoyable time, but no one sat in the Bishop’s Seat or hunted beneath it for signs of an old interment. Franz remarked afterward, “I sometimes think the injunction not to move old bones is at the root of all the para… supernatural.”

He tried to get in touch with Jaime Byers again, but phone calls and even letters went unanswered. Later he learned that the affluent poet and essayist, accompanied by Fa Lo Suee (and Shirl Soames too, apparently), had gone for an extended trip around the world.

“Somebody always does that at the end of a supernatural horror story,” he commented sourly, with slightly forced humor. “ The Hound of the Baskervilles , etcetera. I’d really like to know who his sources were besides Klaas and Ricker. But perhaps it’s just as well I don’t get into that.”

He and Cal now share an apartment a little farther up Nob Hill. Though they haven’t married, Franz swears he’ll never live alone again. He never slept another night in Room 607.

As to what Cal heard and saw (and did) at the end, she says, “When I got to the third floor I heard Franz start to scream. I had his key out. There were all those bits of paper swirling around him like a whirlpool. But at its center they hugged him and made a sort of tough, skinny pillar with a nasty top. So I said ( pace my father) the first things that came into my mind. The pillar flew apart like a Mexican piñata and became part of the paper storm, which settled down very quickly, like snowflakes on the moon. You know, it was inches deep. As soon as I had got Franz’s message from Saul, I’d known I must get to him as quickly as I could, but only after we’d played the Brandenburg.”