Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber Read Free Book Online Page A

close the transom, too, when you go out,” she pronounced. “All of you, you hear me? Is thin people can get through transoms, you better believe. Well, I am glad you weren’t ripped off. Gracias ,” she added, nodding to Cal as she sipped her wine.
    Cal smiled and said to Saul and Gun, “Why shouldn’t a modern city have its special ghosts, like castles and graveyards and big old manor houses once had?”
    Saul said, “My Mrs. Willis thinks the skyscrapers are out to get her. At night they make themselves still skinnier, she says, and come sneaking down the streets after her.”
    Gun said, “I once heard lightning whistle over Chicago. There was a thunderstorm over the Loop, and I was on the South Side at the university, right near the site of file first atomic pile. There’d be a flash on the northern horizon and then, seven seconds later, not thunder, but this high-pitched moaning scream. I had the idea mat all the elevated tracks were audio-resonating a radio component of the flash.”
    Cal said eagerly, “Why mightn’t the sheer mass of all that steel—? Franz, tell them about the book.”
    He repeated what he’d told her this morning about Megapolisomancy and a little besides.
    Gun broke in. “And he says our modern cities are our Egyptian pyramids? That’s beautiful. Just imagine how, when we’ve all been killed off by pollution (nuclear, chemical, smothered in unbiodegradable plastic, red tides of dying microlife, the nasty climax of our climax culture), an archaeological expedition arrives by spaceship from another solar system and starts to explore us like a bunch of goddam Egyptologists! They’d use roving robot probes to spy through our utterly empty cities, which would be too dangerously radioactive for anything else, as dead and deadly as our poisoned seas. What would they make of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Empire State Building? Or the Sears Building in Chicago? Or even the Transamerica Pyramid here? Or that space-launch assembly building at Canaveral that’s so big you can fly light planes around inside? They’d probably decide they were all built for religious and occult purposes, like Stonehenge. They’d never imagine people lived and worked there. No question, our cities will be the eeriest ruins ever. Franz, this de Castries had a sound idea—the sheer amount of stuff there is in cities. That’s heavy, heavy.”
    Saul put in, “Mrs. Willis says the skyscrapers get very heavy at night when they—excuse me—screw her.”
    Dorotea Luque’s eyes grew large, then she exploded in giggles. “Oh, that’s naughty,” she reproved him merrily, wagging a finger.
    Saul’s eyes got a faraway look like a mad poet’s, and he embroidered his remark with, “Can’t you imagine their tall gray skinny forms sneaking sideways down the streets, one flying buttress erected for a stony phallus?” and there was more sputtery laughter from Mrs. Luque. Gun got her more wine and himself another bottle of ale.

8
    CAL SAID, “Franz, I’ve been thinking on and off all day, in the corner of my mind that wasn’t Brandenburging, about that ‘607 Rhodes’ that drew you to move here. Was it a definite place? And if so, where?”
    “607 Rhodes—what’s that all about?” Saul asked.
    Franz explained again about the rice-paper journal and the violet-ink person who might have been Clark Ashton Smith and his possible interviews with de Castries. Then he said, “The 607 can’t be a street address—like 811 Geary here, say. There’s no such street as Rhodes in ‘Frisco. I’ve checked. The nearest to it is a Rhode Island Street, but that’s way over in the Potrero, and it’s clear from the entries that the 607 place is here downtown, within easy walking distance of Union Square. And once the journal-keeper describes looking out the window at Corona Heights and Mount Sutro—of course, there wasn’t any TV tower then—“
    “Hell, in 1928 there weren’t even the Bay and Golden