Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness

As he peered down that long, narrow tube dimly lit from the skylight above, still thinking of the black-clad limbs and the laughter, a murky memory rose in his mind and for a few moments possessed him utterly. Although it refused to come wholly clear, it gripped him with the authority of a very unpleasant dream or bad drunk. He was standing upright in a dark, claustrophobically narrow, crowded, musty space. Through the fabric of his trousers he felt a small hand laid on his genitals and he heard a low, wicked laugh. He looked down in his memory and saw the foreshortened, ghostly, featureless oval of a small face and the laugh was repeated, mockingly. Somehow it seemed there were black tendrils all around him. He felt a weight of sick excitement and guilt and, almost, fear.

The murky memory lifted as Franz realized the figure on the stairs had to have been that of Bonita Luque wearing the black pajamas and robe and feathered black mules she’d been handed down from her mother and already outgrown, but sometimes still wore as she darted around the building on her mother’s early-morning errands. He smiled disparagingly at the thought that he was almost sorry (not really!) he was no longer drunk and so able to nurse various kinky excitements.

He started up the stairs, but stopped almost at once when he heard Gun’s and Saul’s voices from the floor above. He did not want to see either of them now, at first simply from a reluctance to share today’s mood and plans with anyone but Cal, but as he listened to the clear and sharpening voices his motive became more complicated.

Gun asked, “What was that all about?”

Saul answered, “Her mother sent the kid up to check if either of us had lost a cassette player-recorder. She thinks her kleptomaniac on the second floor has one that doesn’t belong to her.”

Gun remarked, “That’s a big word for Mrs. Luque.”

Saul said, “Oh, I suppose she said ‘e-stealer.’ I told the kid that no, I still had mine.”

Gun asked, “Why didn’t Bonita check with me?”

Saul answered, “Because I told her you didn’t have a cassette player to start with. What’s the matter? Feeling left out?”

“No!”

During this interchange Gun’s voice had grown increasingly nagging, Saul’s progressively cooler yet also teasing. Franz had listened to mild speculation about the degree of homosexuality in Gun’s and Saul’s friendship, but this was the first time he found himself really wondering about it. No, he definitely didn’t want to barge in now.

Saul persisted, “Then what’s the matter? Hell, Gun, you know I always horse around with Bonny.”

Gun’s voice as almost waspish as he said, “I know I’m a puritanized North European, but I’d like to know just how far liberation from Anglo-Saxon body-contact taboos is supposed to go.”

And Saul’s voice was almost taunting as he replied, “Why, just as far as you both think proper, I suppose.”

There was the sound of a door closing very deliberately. It was repeated. Then silence. Franz breathed his relief, continued softly up—and as he emerged into the fifth-floor hall found himself almost face to face with Gun, who was standing in front of the shut door to his room, glaring across at Saul’s. Set on the floor beside him was a knee-high rectangular object with a chrome carrying handle protruding from its gray fabric cover.

Gunnar Nordgren was a tall, slim man, ashen blond, a fined-down Viking. Right now he had shifted his gaze and was looking at Franz with a growing embarrassment that matched Franz’s own feelings. Abruptly Gun’s usual amiability flooded back into his face, and he said, “Say, I’m glad you came by. A couple of nights ago you were wondering about document-shredding machines. Here’s one I had here from the office overnight.”

He whipped off the cover, revealing a tall blue and silvery box with a foot-wide maw on top and a red button. The maw fed down into a deep basket which Franz, coming closer, could see was one-quarter filled with a dirty snow of paper diamonds less than a quarter inch across.

The uncomfortable feelings of a moment before were gone. Looking up, Franz said, “I know you’re going to work and all, but could I hear it in operation once?”

“Of course.” Gun unlocked the door behind him and led Franz into a neat, rather sparely furnished room, the first features of which to strike the eye were large astronomical photographs in color and skiing equipment. As Gun unrolled the electric cord and plugged it in, he said lightheartedly, “This is a Shredbasket put out by Destroysit. Properly dire names, eh? Costs only five hundred dollars or so. Larger models go up to two thousand. A set of circular knives cuts the paper to ribbons; then another set cuts the ribbons across. Believe it or not, these machines were developed from ones for making confetti. I like that—it suggests that mankind first thinks of making frivolous things and only later puts them to serious use—if you can call this serious. Games before guilt.”

The words poured out of him in such an excess of excitement or relief that Franz forgot his wonder as to why Gun should have brought such a machine home—what he’d been destroying. Gun continued, “The ingenious Italians—what was it Shakespeare said? Supersubtle Venetians?—lead the world, you know, in inventing machines for food and fun. Ice-cream makers, pasta extruders, espresso coffee machines, set-piece fireworks, hurdy-gurdies… and confetti. Well, here goes.”

Franz had taken out a small notebook and ballpoint pen. As Gun’s finger moved toward the red button, he leaned close, rather cautiously, expecting some rather loud sound.

Instead, there came a faint, breathy buzzing, as if Time were clearing her throat.

Delightedly Franz jotted down just that.

Gun fed in a pastel sheet. Pale blue snow showered down upon the dirty white. The sound barely thickened a little.

Franz thanked Gun and left him coiling up the cord. Mounting past his own floor and the seventh toward the roof, he felt pleased. Getting that scrap of observed fact had been just the bit of luck he’d needed to start the day perfectly.

The cubical room housing the elevator’s hoist was like a wizard’s den atop a tower: skylight thickly filmed with dust, electric motor like a broad-shouldered dwarf in greasy green armor, and old-fashioned relays in the form of eight black cast-iron arms that writhed when in use like those of a chained-down giant spider—and with big copper switches that clashed loudly as they opened and closed whenever a button was pushed below, like such a spider’s jaws.

Franz stepped out into sunlight on the flat, low-walled roof. Tar-embedded gravel gritted faintly under his shoes. The cool breeze was welcome.

To the east and north bulked the huge downtown buildings and whatever secret spaces they contained, blocking off the Bay. How old Thibaut would have scowled at the Transamerica Pyramid and the purple-brown Bank of America monster! Even at the new Hilton and St. Francis towers. The words came into his head, “The ancient Egyptians only buried people in their pyramids. We are living in ours.” Now where had he read that? Why, in Megapolisomancy , of course. How apt! And did the modern pyramids have in them secret markings foretelling the future and crypts for sorcery?

He walked past the low-walled rectangular openings of the narrow airshafts lined with gray sheet-iron, to the back of the roof and looked up between the nearby high rises (modest compared with those downtown) at the TV tower and Corona Heights. The fog was gone, but the pale irregular hump of the latter still stood out sharply in the morning sunlight. He looked through his binoculars, not very hopefully, but—yes, by God!—there was that crazy, drably robed worshiper, or what-not, still busy with his ritual, or whatever. If these glasses would just settle down! Now the fellow had run to a slightly lower clump of rocks and seemed to be peering furtively over it. Franz followed the apparent direction of his gaze down the crest and almost immediately came to its probable object: two hikers trudging up. Because of their colorful shorts and shirts, it was easier to make them out. Yet despite their flamboyant garb they somehow struck Franz as more respectable characters than the lurker at the summit. He wondered what would happen when they met at the top. Would the robed hierophant try to convert them? Or solemnly warn them off? Or stop them like the Ancient Mariner and tell them an eerie story with a moral? Franz looked back, but now the fellow (or could it have been a woman?) was gone. A shy type, evidently. He searched the rocks, trying to spot him hiding, and even followed the plodding hikers until they reached the top and disappeared on the other side, hoping for a surprise encounter, but none came.