Our Lady of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

none came.
    Nevertheless, when he shoved the binoculars back in his pocket, he had made up his mind. He’d visit Corona Heights. It was too good a day to stay indoors.
    “If you won’t come to me, then I will come to you,” he said aloud, quoting an eerie bit from a Montague Rhodes James ghost story and humorously applying it both to Corona Heights and to its lurker. The mountain came to Mohammed, he thought, but he had all those jinn.

6
    AN HOUR AFTERWARD Franz was climbing Beaver Street, taking deep breaths to avoid panting later. He had added the bit about Time clearing her throat to Weird Underground #7, sealed the manuscript in its envelope, and mailed it. When he’d started, he’d had his binoculars hanging around his neck on their strap like a storybook adventurer’s, so that Dorotea Luque, waiting in the lobby with a couple of elderly tenants for the mailman, had observed merrily, “You go to look for the e-scary thing to write e-stories about, no?” and he had replied. “ Si, Senora Luque. Espectros y fantasmas ,” in what he hoped was equally cockeyed Spanish. But then a block or so back, a bit after getting off the Muni car on Market, he’d wedged them into his pocket again, alongside the street guide he’d brought. This seemed a nice enough neighborhood, quite safe-looking really; still there was no point in displaying advertisements of affluence, and Franz judged binoculars would be that even more than a camera. Too bad big cities had become—or were thought to have become—such perilous places. He’d almost chided Cat for being uptight about muggers and nuts, and look at him now. Still, he was glad he’d come alone. Exploring places he’d first studied from his window was a natural new stage in his reality trip, but a very personal one.
    Actually there were relatively few people in the streets this morning. At the moment he couldn’t see a single one. His mind toyed briefly with the notion of a big, modern city suddenly completely deserted, like the barque Marie Celeste or the luxe resort hotel in that disquietingly brilliant film Last Year at Marienbad .
    He went by Jaime Donaldus Byers’s place, a narrow-fronted piece of carpenter Gothic now painted olive with gold trim, very Old San Francisco. Perhaps he’d chance ringing the bell coming back.
    From here he couldn’t see Corona Heights at all. Nearby stuff masked it (and the TV tower, too). Conspicuous at a distance—he’d got a fine view of its jagged crest at Market and Duboce—it had hidden itself like a pale brown tiger on his approach, so that he had to get out his street guide and spread its map to make sure he hadn’t got off the track.
    Beyond Castro the way got very steep, so mat he stopped twice to even out his breathing.
    At last he came out on a short dead-end cross street behind some new apartments. At its other end a sedan was parked with two people sitting in the front seats—men he saw mat he’d mistaken headrests for heads. They did look so like dark little tombstones!
    On the other side of the cross street were no more buildings, but green and brown terraces going up to an irregular crest against blue sky. He saw he’d finally reached Corona Heights, somewhat on the far side from his apartment.
    After a leisurely cigarette, he mounted steadily past some tennis courts and lawn and up a fenced and winding hillside ramp and emerged on another dead-end street—or road, rather. He felt very good, really, in the outdoors. Gazing back the way he’d come, he saw the TV tower looking enormous (and handsomer man ever) less man a mile away, yet somehow just the right size. After a moment he realized mat was because it was now the same size his binoculars magnified it to from his apartment.
    Strolling to the dead end of the road, he passed a long, rambling one-story brick building with generous parking space mat modestly identified itself as the Josephine Randall Junior Museum. There was a panel truck with the homely label