Our Lady of Darkness Read Online Free PDF

“Sidewalk Astronomer.” He recalled hearing of it from Dorotea Luque’s daughter Bonita as the place where children could bring pet tame squirrels and snakes and brindled Japanese rats (and bats?) when for some reason theycould no longer keep them. He also realized he’d seen its low roofs from his window.
    From the dead end, a short path led him to the foot of the crest, and there on the other side was all the eastern half of San Francisco and the Bay beyond and both the bridges spread out before him.
    Resolutely resisting the urge to scan in detail, he set himself to mounting the ridge by the hard gravelly path near its crest. This soon became rather tiresome. He had to pause more than once for breath and set his feet carefully to keep from slipping.
    When he’d about reached the spot where he’d first seen the hikers, he suddenly realized that he’d grown rather childishly apprehensive. He almost wished he had brought Gun and Saul, or run into other climbers of the solid, respectable sort, no matter how colorfully clad or otherwise loud and noisy. At the moment he wouldn’t even object to a transistor radio blatting. He was pausing now not so much for breath as to scan very carefully each rock clump before circling by it, for if he thrust his head too trustingly around one, what face or no-face might he not see?
    This really was too childish of him, he told himself. Didn’t he want to meet the character on the summit and find out just what sort of an oddball he was? A gentle soul, most likely, from his simple garb and timidity and love of solitude. Though of course he most likely had departed by now.
    Nevertheless Franz kept using his eyes systematically as he mounted the last of the slope, gentler now, to its top.
    The ultimate outcropping of rocks (the Corona? the crown?) was more extensive and higher than the others. After holding back a bit (to spy out the best route, he told himself), he mounted by three ledges, each of which required a leg-stretching step, to the very top, where he at last stood up (though rather carefully, bracing his feet wide—there was a lot of wind from the Pacific up here) with all of Corona Heights beneath him.
    He slowly turned around in a full circle, tracing the horizon bat scanning very thoroughly all the dumps of rock and all the brown and green slopes immediately below him, familiarizing himself with his new surroundings and incidentally ascertaining that there wasn’t another being besides himself anywhere on Corona Heights.
    Then he went down a couple of ledges and settled himself comfortably in a natural rock seat facing east, completely out of the wind. He felt very much at ease and remarkably secure in this eyrie, especially with the sense of the mighty TV tower rising behind him like a protective goddess. While smoking another leisurely cigarette, he surveyed with unaided eyes the great spread of the city and Bay with its great ships tinier than toys, from the faintly greenish thin pillow of smog over San Jose in the south to the dim tittle pyramid of Mount Diablo beyond Berkeley and on to the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in the north with Mount Tamalpais beyond them. It was interesting how landmarks shifted with this new vantage point. Compared with his view from the roof, some of the downtown buildings had shot up, while others seemed trying to hide behind their neighbors.
    After another cigarette he got out his binoculars and put their strap around his neck and began to study this and that. They were quite steady now, not like this morning. He chucklingly spelled out a few big billboards south of Market on the Embarcadero in the Mission, mostly ads for cigarettes and beer and vodka—that Black Velvet theme!—and a couple of the larger topless spots for the tourists.
    After a survey of the steely, gleaming inner waters and following the Bay Bridge all the way to Oakland, he set in seriously on the downtown buildings and soon discovered to his embarrassment