Free Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber Page B

Mariana por la noche ?”
    That much Spanish Franz understood. He smiled and nodded. If he couldn’t play chess again tomorrow night, he could always let Dorotea know.
    He slept like the dead and without any remembered dreams.
    He awoke completely refreshed, his mind clear and sharp and very calm, his thoughts measured and sure—a good sleep’s benison. All of the evening dullness and uncertainty were gone. He remembered each of yesterday’s events just as it had happened, but without the emotional overtones of excitement and fear.
    The constellation of Orion was shouldering into his window, telling him dawn was near. Its nine brightest stars made an angular, tilted hourglass, challenging the smaller, slenderer one made by the nineteen winking red lights of the TV tower.
    He made himself a small, quick cup of coffee with the very hot water from the tap, then put on slippers and robe and took up his binoculars and went very quietly to the roof. All his sensations were sharp. The black windows of the shafts and the black knobless doors of the disused closets stood out as distinctly as the doors of the occupied rooms and the old banisters, many times repainted, he touched as he climbed.
    In the room on the roof his small flashlight showed the gleaming cables, the dark, hunched electric motor, and the coldly bunched small, silent iron arms of the relays that would wake violently, and make a great sudden noise, swinging and snapping, if someone pressed an electric button below. The green dwarf and the spider.
    Outside, the night wind was bracing. Passing a shaft, he paused and on an impulse dropped a grain of gravel down it. The small sharp sound with its faint hollow overtones from the sheet-iron lining was almost three seconds, he judged, in coming back to him from the bottom. About eighty feet, that was right. There was satisfaction in thinking of how he was awake and clearheaded while so many were still dead asleep.
    He looked up at the stars studding the dark dome of night like tiny silver nails. For San Francisco with its fogs and mists, and the invasive smog from Oakland and San Jose, it was a good night for seeing. The gibbous moon had set. He studied lovingly the superconstellation of very bright stars he called the Shield, a sky-spanning hexagon with its corners marked by Capella toward the north, bright Pollux (with Castor near and these years Saturn, too), Procyon the little dogstar, Sirius brightest of all, Bluish Rigel in Orion, and (swinging north again) red-gold Aldebaran. Bringing his binoculars into play, he scanned the golden swarm of the Hyades about that last and then quite close beside the Shield, the tiny bluish-white dipper of the Pleiades.
    The sure and steady stars fitted the mood of his morning mind and reinforced it. He looked again at tilted Orion, then dropped his gaze to the red-flashing TV tower. Below it, CoronaHeights was a black hump amongst the city’s lights.
    The memory came to him (a crystal-clear drop, as memories came to him these days in the hour after waking) of how when he’d first seen the TV tower at night, he’d thought of a line from Lovecraft’s story, “The Haunter of the Dark,” where the watcher of another ill-omened hill (Federal, in Providence) sees “the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque.” When he’d first seen the tower he’d thought it worse than grotesque, but now—how strange!—it had become almost as reassuring to him as starry Orion.
    “The Haunter of the Dark!” he thought with a quiet laugh. Yesterday he had lived through a section of a story that might fittingly be called “The Lurker at the Summit.” How very strange!
    Before returning to his room he briefly surveyed the dark rectangles and skinny pyramid of the downtown skyscrapers—old Thibaut’s bugaboos!—the tallest of them with their own warning red lights.
    He made himself more coffee, this time using the hot plate and adding sugar and half-and-half.