Our Lady of Darkness

1

The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.

The waxing gibbous moon had set, and the stars at the top of the black heavens were still diamond-sharp. To the west lay a low bank of fog. But to the east, beyond the city’s business center and the fog-surfaced Bay, the narrow ghostly ribbon of the dawn’s earliest light lay along the tops of the low hills behind Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda, and still more distant Devil’s Mountain—Mount Diablo.

On every side of Corona Heights the street and house lights of San Francisco, weakest at end of night, hemmed it in apprehensively, as if it were indeed a dangerous animal. But on the hill itself there was not a single light. An observer below would have found it almost impossible to make out its jagged spine and the weird crags crowning its top (which even the gulls avoided); and breaking out here and there from its raw, barren sides, which although sometimes touched by fog, had not known the pelting of rain for months.

Someday the hill might be bulldozed down, when greed had grown even greater than it is today and awe of primeval nature even less, but now it could still awaken panic terror.

Too savage and cantankerous for a park, it was inadequately designated as a playground. True, there were some tennis courts and limited fields of grass and low buildings and little stands of thick pine around its base; but above those it rose rough, naked, and contemptuously aloof.

And now something seemed to stir in the massed darkness there. (Hard to tell what.) Perhaps one or more of the city’s wild dogs, homeless for generations, yet able to pass as tame. (In a big city, if you see a dog going about his business, menacing no one, fawning on no one, fussing at no one—in fact, behaving like a good citizen with work to do and no time for nonsense—and if that dog lacks tag or collar, then you may be sure he hasn’t a neglectful owner, but is wild—and well adjusted.) Perhaps some wilder and more secret animal that had never submitted to man’s rule, yet lived almost unglimpsed amongst him. Perhaps, conceivably, a man (or woman) so sunk in savagery or psychosis that he (or she) didn’t need light. Or perhaps only the wind.

And now the eastern ribbon grew dark red, the whole sky lightened from the east toward the west, the stars were fading, and Corona Heights began to show its raw, dry, pale brown surface.

Yet the impression lingered that the hill had grown restless, having at last decided on its victim.