Our Lady of Darkness

28

Moonlight was pouring in the casement window, making a long coffin-size pool upon the carpeted floor beyond the coffee table, throwing the rest of the room into darker shadow by contrast.

He was fully clothed; his feet ached in his shoes.

He realized with enormous gratitude that he was truly awake at last, that Daisy and the vegetative horror that had destroyed her were both gone, vanished far swifter than smoke.

He found himself acutely aware of all the space around him: the cool air against his face and hands, the eight chief corners of his room, the slot outside the window shooting down six floors between this building and the next to basement level, the seventh floor and roof above, the hall on the other side of the wall beyond the head of his bed, the broom closet on the other side of the wall beside him that held Daisy’s picture and Fernando’s star, and the airshaft beyond the broom closet.

And all his other sensations and all his thoughts seemed equally vivid and pristine. He told himself he had his morning mind again, all rinsed by sleep, fresh as sea air. How wonderful! He’d slept the whole night through (Had Cal and the boys knocked softly at his door and gone smiling and shrugging away?) and now waking an hour or so before dawn, just as the long astronomical twilight began, simply because he’d gone to sleep so early. Had Byers slept as well?—he doubted that, even with his skinny-slim, decadent soporifics.

But then he realized that the moonlight still was streaming in, as it had started to do before he slept, proving that he’d only been asleep an hour or less.

His skin quivered a little, and the muscles of his legs grew tense, his whole body quickened as if in anticipation of… he didn’t know what.

He felt a paralyzing touch on the back of his neck. Then the narrow, prickly dry vines (it felt—though they were fewer now) moved with a faint rustle through his lifted hairs past his ear to his right cheek and jaw. They were growing out of the wall… no… they were not vines, they were the fingers of the narrow right hand of his Scholar’s Mistress, who had sat up naked beside him, a tall, pale shape unfeatured in the smudging gloom. She had an aristocratically small, narrow face and head (black hair?), a long neck, imperially wide shoulders, an elegant, Empire-high waist, slender hips, and long, long legs—very much the shape of the skeletal steel TV tower, a far slenderer Orion (with Rigel serving as a foot instead of knee).

The fingers on her right arm that was snaked around his neck now crept across his cheek and toward his lips, while she turned and leaned her face a little toward his. It was still featureless against the darkness, yet the question rose unbidden in his mind whether it was just such an intense look that the witch Asenath (Waite) Derby would have turned upon her husband Edward Derby when they were in bed, with old Ephraim Waite (Thibaut de Castries?) peering with her from her hypnotic eyes.

She leaned her face closer still, the fingers of her right hand crept softly yet intrusively upward toward his nostrils and eye, while out of the gloom at her left side her other hand came weaving on its serpent-slender arm toward his face. All her movements and postures were elegant and beautiful.

Shrinking away violently, he threw up his own left hand protectively and with a convulsive thrust of his right arm and of his legs against the mattress, he heaved his body across the coffee table, oversetting it and carrying all its heaped contents clattering and thudding and clashing (the glasses and bottle and binoculars) and cascading with him to the floor beyond, where (having turned over completely) he lay in the edge of the pool of moonlight, except for his head, which was in the shadow between it and the door. In turning over, his face had come close to the big ashtray as it was oversetting and to the gushing kirschwasser bottle and he had gotten whiffs of stinking tobacco tar and stinging, bitter alcohol. He felt the hard shapes of chessmen under him. He was staring back wildly at the bed he’d quitted and for the moment he saw only darkness.

Then out of the darkness there lifted up, but not very high, the long, pale shape of his Scholar’s Mistress. She seemed to look about her like a mongoose or weasel, her small head dipping this way and that on its slender neck; then with a nerve-racking dry rustling sound she came writhing and scuttling swiftly after him across the low table and all its scattered and disordered stuff, her long-fingered hands reaching out far ahead of her on their wiry pale arms. Even as he started to try to get to his feet, they closed upon his shoulder and side with a fearfully strong grip and there flashed instantaneously across his mind a remembered line of poetry—“Ghosts are we, but with skeletons of steel.”

With a surge of strength born of his terror, he tore himself free of the trapping hands. But they had prevented him from rising, with the result that he had only heaved over again through the moonlit pool and lay on his back, threshing and flailing, in its far edge, his head still in shadow.

Papers and chessmen and the ashtray’s contents scattered further and slew. A wineglass crunched as his heel hit it. The dumped phone began to beep like a furious pedantic mouse, from some near street a siren started to yelp like dogs being tortured, there was a great ripping noise as in his dream—the scattered papers churned and rose in seeming shreds a little from the floor—and through it all there sounded deep-throated, rasping screams which were Franz’s own.

His Scholar’s Mistress came twisting and hitching into the moonlight. Her face was still shadowed but he could see that her thin, wide-shouldered body was apparently formed solely of shredded and tightly compacted paper, mottled pale brown and yellowish with age, as if made up of the chewed pages of all the magazines and books that had formed her on the bed, while about and back from her shadowed face there streamed black hair. (The books’ shredded black covers?) Her wiry limbs in particular seemed to be made up entirely of very tightly twisted and braided pale brown paper as she darted toward him with terrible swiftness and threw them around him, pinioning his own arms (and her long legs scissoring about his) despite all his flailings and convulsive kickings while, utterly winded by his screaming, he gasped and mewed.

Then she twisted her head around and up, so that the moonlight struck her face. It was narrow and tapering, shaped somewhat like a fox’s or a weasel’s, formed like the rest of her of fiercely compacted paper constrictedly humped and creviced, but layered over in this area with dead white (the rice paper?) speckled or pocked everywhere with a rash of irregular small black marks. (Thibaut’s ink?) It had no eyes, although it seemed to stare into his brain and heart. It had no nose. (Was this the Noseless One?) It had no mouth—but then the long chin began to twitch and lift a little like a beast’s snout and he saw that it was open at the end.

He realized that this was what had been under the loose robes and black veils of de Castries’s Mystery Woman, who’d dogged his footsteps even to his grave, compact of intellectuality, all paperwork (Scholar’s Mistress indeed!), the Queen of the Night, the lurker at the summit, the thing that even Thibaut de Castries feared, Our Lady of Darkness.

The cables of the braided arms and legs twisted around him tighter and the face, going into shadow again, moved silently down toward his; and all that Franz could do was strain his own face back and away.

He thought in a flash of the disappearance of the gutted old pulp magazines and realized that they, crumbled and torn to bits, must have been the raw material for the pale brown figure in the casement window he’d seen twice from Corona Heights.

He saw on the black ceiling, above the dipping black-haired muzzle, a little patch of soft, harmonious ghostly colors—the pastel spectrum of moonlight, cast by one of his prisms lying in the pool on the floor.

The dry, rough, hard face pressed against his, blocking his mouth, squeezing his nostrils; the snout dug itself into his neck. He felt a crushing, incalculably great weight upon him. (The TV tower and the Transamerica! And the stars?) And filling his mouth and nose, the bone-dry, bitter dust of Thibaut de Castries.

At that instant the room was flooded with bright, white light and, as if it were an injected instant stimulant, he was able to twist his face away from the rugose horror and his shoulders halfway around.

The door to the hall was open wide, a key still in the lock. Cal was standing on the threshold, her back against the jamb, a finger of her right hand touching the light switch. She was panting, as if she’d been running hard. She was still wearing her white concert dress and over it her black velvet coat, hanging open. She was looking a little above and beyond him with an expression of incredulous horror. Then her finger dropped away from the light switch as her whole body slowly slid downward, bending only at the knees. Her back stayed very straight against the jamb, her shoulders were erect, her chin was high, her horror-filled eyes did not once blink. Then when she had gone down on her haunches, like a witch doctor, her eyes grew wider still with righteous anger, she tucked in her chin and put on her nastiest professional look, and in a harsh voice Franz had never heard her use before, she said:

“In the names of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, the names of Pythagoras, Newton, and Einstein, by Bertrand Russell, William James, and Eustace Hayden, begone! All inharmonious and disorderly shapes and forces, depart at once!”

As she was speaking, the papers all around Franz (he could see now that they were shredded) lifted up cracklingly, the grips upon his arms and legs loosened, so that he was able to inch toward Cal while violently threshing his half-freed limbs. Midway in her eccentric exorcism, the pale shreds began to churn violently and suddenly were multiplied tenfold in numbers (all restrains on him as suddenly gone) so that, at the end he was crawling toward her through a thick paper snowstorm.

The innumerable-seeming shreds sank rustlingly all around him to the floor. He laid his head in her lap where she now sat erect in the doorway, half-in, half-out, and he lay there gasping, one hand clutching her waist, the other thrown out as far as he could reach into the hallway as if to mark on the carpet the point of farthest advance. He felt Cal’s reassuring fingers on his cheek, while her other hand absently brushed scraps of paper from his coat.