Our Lady of Darkness

20

Donaldus continued. “The high point of Thibaut de Castries’s San Francisco adventure came when with much hush-hush and weedings-out and secret messages and some rare private occult pomps and ceremonies, I suppose, he organized the Hermetic Order—”

“Is that the Hermetic Order that Smith, or the journal, mentions?” Franz interrupted. He had been listening with a mixture of fascination, irritation, and wry amusement, with at least half his attention clearly elsewhere, but he had grown more attentive at mention of the Grand Cipher.

“It is,” Byers nodded, “I’ll explain. In England at that time there was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with members like the mystic poet Yeats, who talked with vegetables and bees and lakes, and Dion Fortune and George Russell—A.E.—and your beloved Arthur Machen—you know, Franz, I’ve always thought that in his The Great God Pan the sexually sinister femme fatale Helen Vaughan was based on the real-life female Satanist Diana Vaughan, even though her memoirs—and perhaps she herself—were a hoax perpetrated by the French journalist, Gabriel Jogand…”

Franz nodded impatiently, restraining his impulse to say, “Get on with it, Donaldus!”

The other got the point. “Well, anyhow,” he continued, “in 1898 Aleister Crowley managed to join the Gilded Dayspringers (neat, eh?) and almost broke up the society by his demands for Satanistic rituals, black magic, and other real tough stuff.

“In imitation, but also as a sardonic challenge, de Castries called his society the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. He is said to have worn a large black ring of pietra dura work with a bezel of mosaicked onyx, obsidian, ebony, and black opal polished flat, depicting a predatory black bird, perhaps a raven.

“It was at this point that things began to go wrong for de Castries and that the atmosphere became, by degrees, very nasty. Unfortunately, it’s also the period for which I’ve had the most difficulty getting information that’s at all reliable—or even any information at all, for reasons which are, or will become, very obvious.

“As nearly as I can reconstruct it, this is what happened. As soon as his secret society had been constituted, Thibaut revealed to its double handful of highly select members that his utopia was not a far-off dream, but an immediate prospect, and that it was to be achieved by violent revolution, both material and spiritual (that is, paramental) and that the chief and at first the sole instrument of that revolution was to be the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk.

“This violent revolution was to begin with acts of terrorism somewhat resembling those the Nihilists were carrying out in Russia at that time (just before the abortive Revolution of 1905), but with a lot of a new sort of black magic (his megapolisomancy) thrown in. Demoralization rather than slaughter was to be the aim, at least at first. Black-powder bombs were to be set off in public places and on the roofs of big buildings during the deserted hours of the night. Other big buildings were to be plunged into darkness by locating and throwing their main switches. Anonymous letters and phone calls would heighten the hysteria.

“But more important would be the megapolisomantic operations, which would cause ‘buildings to crumple to rubble, people to go screaming mad, until every last soul is in panic flight from San Francisco, choking the roads and foundering the ferries’—at least that’s what Klaas said de Castries confided to him many years later while in a rare communicative mood. Say, Franz, did you know that Nicola Tesla, America’s other electrical wizard, claimed in his last years to have invented or at least envisaged a device small enough to be smuggled into a building in a dispatch case and left there to shake the building to pieces at a preset time by sympathetic vibrations? Herman Klaas told me that too. But I digress.

“These magical or pseudoscientific acts (what would you call them?) would require absolute obedience on the part of Thibaut’s assistants—which was the next demand Thibaut seems to have made on every last one of his acolytes in the Hermetic Order of the Onyx Dusk. One of them would be ordered to go to a specific address in San Francisco at a specified time and simply stand there for two hours, blanking his (or her) mind, or else trying to hold one thought. Or he’d be directed to take a bar of copper or a small box of coal or a toy balloon filled with hydrogen to a certain floor in a certain big building and simply leave it there (the balloon against the ceiling), again at a specified time. Apparently the elements were supposed to act as catalysts. Or two or three of them would be commanded to meet in a certain hotel lobby or at a certain park bench and just sit there together without speaking for half an hour. And everyone would be expected to obey every order unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, in exact detail, or else there would be (I suppose) various chilling Carbonari-style penalties and reprisals.

“Big buildings were always the main targets of his megapolisomancy—he claimed they were the chief concentration-points for city-stuff that poisoned great metropolises or weighed them down intolerably. Ten years earlier, according to one story, he had joined other Parisians in opposing the erection of the Eiffel Tower. A professor of mathematics had calculated that the structure would collapse when it reached the height of seven hundred feet, but Thibaut had simply claimed that all that naked steel looking down upon the city from the sky would drive Paris mad. (And considering subsequent events, Franz, I’ve sometimes thought that a case could be made out that it did just that. World Wars One and Two brought on like locust plagues by overly concentrated populations due to a rash or fever of high buildings—is that so fabulous?) But since he had found he couldn’t stop the erection of such buildings, Thibaut had turned to the problem of their control. In some ways, you know, he had the mentality of an animal trainer—inherited from his Afric-traveled father, perhaps?

“Thibaut seems to have thought that there was—or that he had invented—a kind of mathematics whereby minds and big buildings (and paramental entities?) could be manipulated. Neo-Pythagorean metageometry, he called it. It was all a question of knowing the right times and spots (he’d quote Archimedes: ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the world’) and then conveying there the right person (and mind) or material object. He also seemed to have believed that a limited clairvoyance and clairaudience and prescience existed at certain places in mega-cities for certain people. Once he started to outline in detail to Klaas a single act of megapolisomancy—give him the formula for it, so to speak—but then he got suspicious.

“Though there is one other anecdote about the mega-magic thing. I’m inclined to doubt its authenticity, but it is attractive. It seems that Thibaut proposed to give a warning shake to the Hobart Building, or at any rate one of those early flatiron structures on Market—whether it would actually fall down would depend on the integrity of the builder, the old boy’s supposed to have said. In this case his four volunteers or conscripts were (improbably?) Jack London, George Sterling, an octoroon ragtime singer named Olive Church, who was a protégée of that old voodoo queen, etcetera, Mammy Pleasant, and a man named Fenner.

“You know Lotta’s Fountain there on Market?—gift to the city of Lotta Crabtree, ‘the toast of the goldfields,’ who was taught dancing (and related arts?) by Lola Montez (she of the spider dance and Ludwig of Bavaria and all). Well, the four acolytes were supposed to approach the fountain by streets that would trace the four arms of a counterclockwise swastika centering on the fountain while concentrating in their mind on the four points of the compass and bearing objects representing the four elements—Olive a potted lily for earth, Fenner a magnum of champagne for fluid, Sterling a rather large toy hydrogen-filled balloon for the gaseous, and Jack a long cigar for fire.

“They were supposed to arrive simultaneously and introduce their burdens into the fountain, George bubbling his hydrogen through its water and Jack extinguishing his cigar in the same.

“Olive and Fenner arrived first, Fenner somewhat drunk—perhaps he had been sampling his offering and we may assume that all four of them were at least somewhat ‘elevated.’ Well, apparently Fenner had been nursing a lech for Olive and she’d been turning him down, and now he wanted her to drink champagne with him and she wouldn’t and he tried to force it on her and succeeded in sloshing it over her bosom and the potted lily she was holding and down her dress.

“While they were struggling that way at the fountain’s edge, George came up protesting and tried to control Fenner without letting go of his balloon, with Olive shrieking and laughing at them while they were scuffling and while she still hugged the potted lily to her wet breasts.

“At this point Jack came up behind them, drunkest of all, and getting an irresistible inspiration thrust out his cigar at arm’s length and touched off the balloon with its glowing tip.

“There was quite a loud, flaming explosion. Eyebrows were singed. Fenner, who thought Sterling had shot him, fell flat on his back in the fountain, letting go the magnum, which shattered on the sidewalk. Olive dropped her pot and went into hysterics. George was livid with fury at Jack, who was laughing like a demented god—while Thibaut was doubtless cursing them blackly from the sidelines somewhere.

“The next day they all discovered that almost exactly at the same time that night a small brick warehouse behind Rincon Hill had collapsed into a pile of masonry. Age and structural inadequacy were given as the causes, but of course Thibaut claimed it was his mega-magic misfiring because of their general frivolousness and Jack’s idiot prank.

“I don’t know if there’s any truth to that whole story—at best probably distorted in the telling for comedy’s sake. Still, it does give an idea, a sort of atmosphere at least.

“Well, in any case you can imagine how those prima donnas that he’d recruited reacted to Thibaut’s demands. Conceivably Jack London and George Sterling might have gone through with things like the light-switch business for a lark, if they’d been drunk enough when Thibaut asked them. And even crotchety old Bierce might have enjoyed a little black-powder thunder, if someone else did all the work and set it off. But when he asked them to do boring things he wouldn’t explain, it was too much. A dashing and eccentric society lady who was a great beauty (and an acolyte) is supposed to have said, “If only he’d asked me to do something challenging, such as seduce President Roosevelt (she’d have meant Teddy, Franz) or appear naked in the rotunda of the City of Paris and then swim out to the Seal Rocks and chain myself to them like Andromeda. But just to stand in front of the public library with seven rather large steel ball bearings in my brassiere, thinking of the South Pole and saying nothing for an hour and twenty minutes—I ask you, darling!’

“When it got down to cases, you see, they must simply have refused to take him seriously—either his revolution or his new black magic. Jack London was a Marxist socialist from way back and had written his way through a violent class war in his science-fiction novel The Iron Heel. He could and would have poked holes in both the theory and the practice of Thibaut’s Reign of Terror. And he’d have known that the first city to elect a Union Labor Party government was hardly the place to start a counterrevolution. He also was a Darwinian materialist and knew his science. He’d have been able to show up Thibaut’s ‘new black science’ as a pseudoscientific travesty and just another name for magic, with all the unexplained action at a distance.

“At any rate, they all refused to help him make even a test-run of his mega-magic. Or perhaps a few of them went along with it once or twice—the Lotta’s Fountain sort of thing—and nothing happened.

“I suppose that at this point he lost his temper and began to thunder orders and invoke penalties. And they just laughed at him—and when he wouldn’t see that the game was over and kept up with it, simply walked away from him.

“Or taken more active measures. I can imagine someone like London simply picking up the furious, spluttering little man by his coat collar and the seat of his pants and pitching him out.”

Byers’s eyebrows lifted. “Which reminds me, Franz, that Lovecraft’s client De Castro knew Ambrose Bierce and claimed to have collaborated with him, but at their last meeting Bierce sped De Castro’s departure by breaking a walking stick over his head. Really quite similar to what I was hypothesizing for de Castries. Such an attractive theory—that they were the same! But no, for De Castro was at Lovecraft to rewrite his memoirs of Bierce after de Castries’s death.”

He sighed, then recovered swiftly with, “At any rate, something like that could have completed the transformation of Thibaut de Castries from a fascinating freak whom one humored into an unpleasant old bore, troublemaker, borrower, and blackmailer, against whom one protected oneself by whatever measures were necessary. Yes, Franz, there’s the persistent rumor that he tried to and in some cases did blackmail his former disciples by threatening to reveal scandals he had learned about in the days when they were free with each other, or simply that they had been members of a terrorist organization—his own! Twice at this time he seems to have disappeared completely for several months, very likely because he was serving jail sentences—something several of his ex-acolytes were powerful enough to have managed easily, though I’ve never been able to track down an instance; so many records were destroyed in the quake.

“But some of the old dark glamour must have lingered about him for quite a while in the eyes of his ex-acolytes—the feeling that he was a being with sinister, paranatural powers—for when the earthquake did come very early in the morning of April eighteenth, 1906, thundering up Market in brick and concrete waves from the west and killing its hundreds, one of his lapsed acolytes, probably recalling his intimations of a magic that would topple skyscrapers, is supposed to have said, ‘He’s done it! The old devil’s done it!’

“And there’s the suggestion that Thibaut tried to use the earthquake in his blackmailing—you know, ‘I’ve done it once. I can do it again.’ Apparently he’d use anything that occurred to him to try to frighten people. In a couple of instances he’s supposed to have threatened people with his Queen of Night, his Lady of Darkness (his old mystery lady or girl)—that if they didn’t fork up, he’d send his Black Tigress after them.

“But mostly my information for this period is very sketchy and one-sided. The people who’d known him best were all trying to forget him (suppress him, you might say), while my two chief informants, Klaas and Ricker, knew him only as an old man in the 1920s and had heard only his side (or sides!) of the story. Ricker, who was nonpolitical, thought of him as a great scholar and metaphysician, who had been promised money and support by a group of wealthy, frivolous people and then cruelly disappointed, abandoned. He never seriously believed the revolution part. Klaas did, and viewed de Castries as a failed great rebel, a modern John Brown or Sam Adams or Marat, who’d been betrayed by wealthy, pseudo-artistic, thrill-seeking backers who’d then gotten cold feet. They both indignantly rejected the blackmail stories.”

Franz interposed, “What about his mystery lady—was she still around? What did Klaas and Ricker have to say about her?”

Byers shook his head. “She was completely vanished by the 1920s—if she ever had any real existence in the first place. To Ricker and Klaas she was just one more story—one more of the endlessly fascinating stories they teased out of the old man from time to time. Or else (not so fascinating!) endured in repetition. According to them, he enjoyed no female society whatever while they knew him. Except Klaas once let slip the thought the old man occasionally hired a prostitute—refused to talk about it further when I pressed him, said it was the old man’s business, no one else’s. While Ricker said the old boy had a sentimental interest in (’a soft spot in his heart for’) little girls—all most innocent, a modern Lewis Carroll, he insisted. Both of them vehemently denied any suggestion of a kinky sex life on the old man’s part, just as they had denied the blackmail stories and the even nastier rumors that came later on: that de Castries was devoting his declining years to getting revenge on his betrayers by somehow doing them to death or suicide by black magic.”

“I know about some of those cases,” Franz said, “at least the ones I imagine you’re going to mention. What happened to Nora May French?”

“She was the first to go. In 1907, just a year after the quake. A clear case of suicide. She died most painfully by poison—very tragic.”

“And when did Sterling die?”

“November seventeenth, 1926.”

Franz said thoughtfully, though still not lost in thought, “There certainly seems to have been a suicidal drive at work, though operating over a period of twenty years. A good case can be made out that it was a death wish drove Bierce to go to Mexico when he did—a war-haunted life, so why not such a death?—and probably attach himself to Pancho Villa’s rebels as a sort of unofficial revolution-correspondent and most likely get himself shot as an uppity old gringo who wouldn’t stay silent for the devil himself. While Sterling was known to have carried a vial of cyanide in his vest pocket for years, whether he finally took it by accident (pretty far-fetched) or by intention. And then there was that time (Rogers’s daughter tells about it in her book) when Jack London disappeared on a five-day spree and then came home when Charmian and Rogers’s daughter and several other worried people were gathered, and with the mischievous, icy logic of a man who’d drunk himself sober, challenged George Sterling and Rogers not to sit up with the corpse. Though I’d think alcohol was enough villain there, without bringing in any of de Castries’s black magic, or its power of suggestion.”

“What’d London mean by that?” Byers asked, squinting as he carefully measured out for himself more brandy.

“That when they felt life losing its zest, their powers starting to fail, they take the Noseless One by the arm without waiting to be asked, and exit laughing.”

“The Noseless One?”

“Why, simply, London’s sobriquet for Death himself—the skull beneath the skin. The nose is all cartilage and so the skull—”

Byers’s eyes widened and he suddenly shot a finger toward his guest.

“Franz!” he asked excitedly. “That paramental you saw—wasn’t it noseless?”

As if he’d just received a posthypnotic command, Franz’s eyes shut tight, he jerked back his face a little, and started to throw his hands in front of it. Byers’ words had brought the pale brown, blank, triangular muzzle vividly back to his mind’s eye.

“Don’t”—he said carefully—“say things like that again without warning. Yes, it was noseless.”

“My dear Franz, I will not. Please excuse me. I did not fully realize until now what effect the sight of it must have upon a person.”

“All right, all right,” Franz said quietly. “So four acolytes died somewhat ahead of their time (except perhaps for Bierce), victims of their rampant psyches… or of something else.”

“And at least an equal number of less prominent acolytes,” Byers took up again quite smoothly. “You know, Franz, I’ve always been impressed by how in London’s last great novel, The Star Rover, mind triumphs completely over matter. By frightfully intense self-discipline, a lifer at San Quentin is enabled to escape in spirit through the thick walls of his prison house and move at will through the world and relive his past reincarnations, redie his deaths. Somehow that makes me think of old de Castries in the 1920s, living alone in downtown cheap hotels and brooding, brooding, brooding about past hopes and glories and disasters. And (dreaming meanwhile of foul, unending tortures) about the wrongs done him and about revenge (whether or not he actually worked something there) and about… who knows what else? Sending his mind upon… who knows what journeys?”