At that instant the room was flooded with bright, white light and, as if it were an injected instant stimulant, he was able to twist his face away from the rugose horror and his shoulders halfway around.
The door to the hall was open wide, a key still in the lock. Cal was standing on the threshold, her back against the jamb, a finger of her right hand touching the light switch. She was panting, as if she’d been running hard. She was still wearing her white concert dress and over it her black velvet coat, hanging open. She was looking a little above and beyond him with an expression of incredulous horror. Then her finger dropped away from the light switch as her whole body slowly slid downward, bending only at the knees. Her back stayed very straight against the jamb, her shoulders were erect, her chin was high, her horror-filled eyes did not once blink. Then when she had gone down on her haunches, like a witch doctor, her eyes grew wider still with righteous anger, she tucked in her chin and put on her nastiest professional look, and in a harsh voice Franz had never heard her use before, she said:
“In the names of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, the names of Pythagoras, Newton, and Einstein, by Bertrand Russell, William James, and Eustace Hayden, begone! All inharmonious and disorderly shapes and forces, depart at once!”
As she was speaking, the papers all around Franz (he could see now that they were shredded) lifted up cracklingly, the grips upon his arms and legs loosened, so that he was able to inch toward Cal while violently threshing his half-freed limbs. Midway in her eccentric exorcism, the pale shreds began to churn violently and suddenly were multiplied tenfold in numbers (all restrains on him as suddenly gone) so that, at the end he was crawling toward her through a thick paper snowstorm.
The innumerable-seeming shreds sank rustlingly all around him to the floor. He laid his head in her lap where she now sat erect in the doorway, half-in, half-out, and he lay there gasping, one hand clutching her waist, the other thrown out as far as he could reach into the hallway as if to mark on the carpet the point of farthest advance. He felt Cal’s reassuring fingers on his cheek, while her other hand absently brushed scraps of paper from his coat.
29
Franz heard Gun say urgently, “Cal, are you all right? Franz!” Then Saul; “What the hell’s happened to his room?” Then Gun again; “My God, it looks like his whole library’s been put to the Destroysit!” but all that Franz could see of them were shoes and legs. How odd. There was a third pair—brown denim pants, and scuffed brown shoes, rather small; of course—Fernando.
Doors opened down the hall and heads thrust out. The elevator doors opened and Dorotea and Bonita hurried out, their faces anxious and eager. But what Franz found himself looking at, because it really puzzled him, was a score or more of dusty corrugated cartons neatly piled along the wall of the hall opposite the broom closet, and with them three old suitcases and a small trunk.
Saul had knelt down beside him and was professionally touching his wrist and chest, drawing back his eyelids with a light touch to check the pupils, not saying anything. Then he nodded reassuringly to Cal.
Franz managed an inquiring look. Saul smiled at him easily and said, “You know, Franz, Cal left that concert like a bat out of hell. She took her bows with the other soloists and she waited for the conductor to take his, but then she grabbed up her coat—she’d brought it onstage during the second intermission and laid it on the bench beside her (I’d given her your message)—and she took off straight through the audience. You thought you’d offended ’em by leaving at the start. Believe me, it was nothing to the way she treated ’em! By the time we caught sight of her again, she was stopping a taxi by running out into the street in front of it. If we’d have been a bit slower, she’d have ditched us. As it was, she grudged us the time it took us to get in.”
“And then she got ahead of us again when we each thought the other would pay the cab driver and he yelled at us and we both went back,” Gun took up over his shoulder from where he stood inside the room at the edge of the great drift of shredded paper and stuff, as if hesitant to disturb it. “When we got inside she’d run up the stairs. By then the elevator had come down, so we took it, but she beat us anyway. Say, Franz,” he asked, pointing, “Who chalked that big star on your wall over the bed?”
At that question, Franz saw the small brown scuffed shoes step out decisively, kicking through the paper snow. Once again Fernando loudly rapped the wall above the bed, as if for attention, and turned and said authoritatively, “Hechiceria ocultado en muralla! ”
“Witchcraft hidden in the wall,” Franz translated, rather like a child trying to prove he’s not sick. Cal touched his lips reprovingly, he should rest.
Fernando lifted a finger, as if to announce, “I will demonstrate,” and came striding back, stepping carefully past Cal and Franz in the doorway. He went quickly down the hall past Dorotea and Bonita, and stopped in front of the broom-closet door and turned around. Gun, who had followed inquisitively behind him, stopped, too.
The dark Peruvian gestured from the shut doorway to the neatly stacked boxes twice and then took a couple of steps on his toes with knees bent. (“I moved them out. I did it quietly.”) and took a big screwdriver out of his pants pocket and thrust it into the hole where the knob had been and gave it a twist and with it drew the black door open and then with a peremptory flourish of the screwdriver stepped inside.
Gun followed and looked in, reporting back to Franz and Cal, “He’s got the whole little room cleared out. My God, it’s dusty. You know, it’s even got a little window. Now he’s kneeling by the wall that’s the other side of the one he pounded on. There’s a little shallow cupboard built into it low down. It’s got a door. Fuses? Cleaning stuff? Outlets? I don’t know. Now he’s using the screwdriver to pry it open. Well, I’ll be damned!”
He backed away to let Fernando emerge, smiling triumphantly and carrying before his chest a rather large, rather thin gray book. He knelt by Franz and held it out to him, dramatically opening it. There was a puff of dust.
The two pages randomly revealed were covered from top to bottom, Franz saw, with unbroken lines of neatly yet crabbedly inked black astronomical and astrological signs and other cryptic symbols.
Franz reached out shakily toward it, then jerked his hand sharply back, as though afraid of getting his fingers burned.
He recognized the hand that had penned the Curse.
It had to be the Fifty-Book, the Grand Cipher mentioned in Megapolisomancy and Smith’s journal (B)—the ledger that Smith had once seen and that was an essential ingredient (A) of the Curse and that had been hidden almost forty years ago by old Thibaut de Castries to do its work at the fulcrum (0) at (Franz shuddered, glancing up at the number on his door) 607 Rhodes.
30
Next day Gun incinerated the Grand Cipher at Franz’s urgent entreaty, Cal and Saul concurring, but only after microfilming it. Since then he’s fed it to his computers repeatedly and let several semanticists and linguists study it variously, without the least progress toward breaking the code, if there is one. Recently he told the others, “It almost looks like Thibaut de Castries may have created that mathematical will-o’-the-wisp—a set of completely random numbers.” There did turn out to be exactly fifty symbols. Cal pointed out that fifty was the total number of faces of all the five Pythagorean or Platonic solids. But when asked what that led to, she could only shrug.
At first Gun and Saul couldn’t help wondering whether Franz mightn’t have torn up all his books and papers in some sort of short-term psychotic seizure. But they concluded it would have been an impossible task, at least to do in so short a time. “That stuff was shredded like oakum.”