Our Lady of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

that they were quite hard to identify from here. Distance and perspective hadsubtly altered their hues and arrangement. And then contemporary skyscrapers were so very anonymous—no signs or names, no pinnacle statues or weathercocks or crosses, no distinctive facades and cornices, no architectural ornament at all: just huge blank slabs of featureless stone, or concrete or glass that was either sleekly bright with sun or dark with shadow. Really, they might well be the “gargantuan tombs or monstrous vertical coffins of living humanity, a breeding ground for the worst of paramental entities” that old de Castries had kept ranting about in his book.
    After another stretch of telescopic study in which he managed to identify a couple of the shifty skyscrapers, at last, he let his binoculars hang and got out from his other pocket the meat sandwich he’d made himself. As he unwrapped and slowly ate it, he thought of what a fortunate person he really was. A year ago he’d been a mess, but now—
    He heard a scrutch of gravel, then another. He looked around but didn’t see anything. He couldn’t decide from what direction the faint sounds had come. The sandwich was dry in his mouth.
    With an effort he swallowed and continued eating, and recaptured his train of thought. Yes, now he had friends like Gun and Saul…and Cal…and his health was a damn sight better, and best of all, his work was going well, his precious stories (well, precious to him) and even that terrible Weird Underground stuff—
    Another scrutch , louder, and with it an odd little high-pitched laugh. He tensed himself and looked around quickly, sandwich and thoughts forgotten.
    There came the laugh again, mounting toward a shrill shriek, and from behind the rocks there came dashing, along the path just below, two little girls in dark blue playclothes. The one caught the other and they spun around, squealing happily, in a whirl of sun-browned limbs and fair hair.
    Franz had barely time to think what a refutation this was of Cal’s (and his own) worries about this area, and for the afterthought that still it didn’t seem right for parents to let such small, attractive girls (they couldn’t be more man seven or eight) ramble in such a lonely place, when mere came loping from behind the rocks a shaggy Saint Bernard, whom the girls at once pulled into their whirling game. But after only a little more of that, they ran on along the path by which Franz had come up, their large protector close behind. They’d either not seen Franz at all or else, after the way of little girls, they’d pretended not to notice him. He smiled at how the incident had demonstrated his unsuspected residual nervousness. His sandwich no longer tasted dry.
    He crumpled the wax paper into a ball and stuck it in his pocket. The sun was already westering and striking the distant tall walls confronting him. His trip and climb had taken longer than he’d realized, and he’d been sitting here longer too. What was that epitaph Dorothy Sayers had seen on an old tombstone and thought the acme of all grue? Oh, yes: “It is later than you think.” They’d made a popular song of that just before World War Two; “Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later man you think.” There was shivery irony for you. But he had tots of time.
    He got busy with his binoculars again, studying the medieval greenish brown cap of the Mark Hopkins Hotel housing the restaurant-bar Top of the Mark. Grace Cathedral atop Nob Hill was masked by the high rises there, but the modernistic cylinder of St. Mary’s Cathedral stood out plainly on newly named Cathedral Hill. An obviously pleasant task occurred to him: to spot his own seven-story apartment house. From his window he could see Corona Heights. Ergo, from Corona Heights he could see his window. It would be in a narrow slot between two high rises, he reminded himself, but the sun would be striking into that slot by now, giving good illumination.
    To his chagrin,