Free Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber Page A

she were some sort of witch making black magic with music—the ward had gone crazy at her arrival, and now she was doing the same damn thing with her Mozart, which was getting louder and louder.
    “But just then she modulated triumphantly into the least discordant key and by contrast it sounded like perfect pitch, incredibly right, and at that instant young. Harry launched, not into his grand mal attack, but into a weirdly graceful, leaping dance in perfect time to Cherubino’sSong, and almost before I knew what I was doing I’d taken hold of Miss Craig (whose mouth was open to scream but she wasn’t screaming) and was waltzing her around after young Harry—and I could feel the tension in the whole ward around us vanish like smoke. Somehow Cal had melted mat tension, loosened and unbound it just as she had young Harry’s depression, getting him over the hump into safety without his throwing a big fit. It seemed to me at the time to be the nearest thing to magic I’ve ever seen in my life—witchcraft, all right, but white witchcraft.”
    At the words “loosened and unbound,” Franz recalled Cal’s words that morning about music having “the power to release other things and make them fly and swirl.”
    Gun asked, “What happened then?”
    “Nothing much, really,” Saul said. “Cal kept playing the same tune over and over in the same triumphant key, and we kept on dancing and I think a couple of the others joined in, but she played it a little more softly each time, until it was like music for mice, and then she stopped it and very quietly closed the piano, and we stopped dancing and were smiling at each other, and that was that—except that all of us were in a different place from where we’d started. And a little later she went home without waiting through the shift, as though taking it for granted that what she’d done was something that couldn’t possibly be repeated. And we never talked about it much afterwards, she and I. I remember thinking: ‘Magic is a one-time thing.’ “
    “Say, I like that,” Gun said. “I mean the idea of magic—and miracles, too, like those of Jesus, say—and art, too, and history of course—simply being phenomena that cannot be repeated. Unlike science, which is all about phenomena that can be repeated.”
    Franz mused, “Tension melted …depression loosened and unbound…the notes fly upward like the sparks…. You know, Gun, that somehow makes me think of what your Shredbasket does that you showed me this morning.”
    “Shredbasket?” Saul queried.
    Franz briefly explained.
    Saul said to Gun, “You never told me about that.”
    “So?” Gun smiled and shrugged.
    “Of course,” Franz said, almost regretfully, “the idea of music being good for lunatics and smoothing troubled souls goes way back.”
    “At least as far as Pythagoras,” Gun put in, agreeing. “That’s two and a half thousand years.”
    Saul shook his head decidedly. “This thing Cat did went farther than that.”
    There was a sharp double knock at the door. Gun opened it.
    Fernando looked around the room, bowing politely, then beamed at Franz and said, “E-chess?”

11
    FERNANDO WAS A strong player. In Lima he’d had an expert’s rating. In Franz’s room they divided two rather long, hard-fought games, which were just the thing to occupy fully Franz’s dulled evening mind, and during them he became aware of how physically tired his climbing had left him.
    From time to time he mused fleetingly about Cal’s “white witchcraft” (if it could be called anything tike that) and the black sort (even less likely) he’d intruded on at Corona Heights. He wished he’d discussed both incidents at greater length with Saul and Gun, yet doubted they’d have got any further. Oh, well, he’d see them both at the concert tomorrow night—their last words had been of that, asking him to hold seats for them if he came early.
    As Fernando departed, the Peruvian pointed at the board and asked, “