Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber

Then he settled himself in bed, determined to use his morning mind to clarify matters that had grown cloudy last evening. Thibaut’s drab book and the washed-out tea-rose journal already made the head of his colorful Scholar’s Mistress lying beside him on the inside. To them he added the thick black rectangles of Lovecraft’s The Outsider and the Collected Ghost Stories of Montague Rhodes James, and also several yellowed old copies of Weird Tales (some puritan had torn their lurid covers off) containing stories by Clark Ashton Smith, shifting some bright magazines to the floor to make room, and the colorful napkins with them.
    “You’re fading, dear,” he told her gaily in his thoughts, “putting on somber hues. Are you getting dressed for a funeral?”
    Then for a space he read more systematically in Megapolisomancy . My God, the old boy certainly could do a sort of scholarly-flamboyant thing quite well. Consider:
     
    At any particular time of history there have always been one or two cities of the monstrous sort— viz. , Babel or Babylon, Ur-Lhassa, Nineveh, Syracuse, Rome, Samarkand, Tenochtitlan, Peking—but we live in the Megapolitan (or Necropolitan) Age, when such disastrous blights are manifold and threaten to conjoin and enshroud the world with funebral yet multipotent city-stuff. We need a Black Pythagoras to spy out the evil lay of our monstrous cities and their foul shrieking songs, even as the White Pythagoras spied out the lay of the heavenly spheres and their crystalline symphonies, two and a half millennia ago.
     
    Or, adding thereto more of his own brand of the occult:
     
    Since we modern city-men already dwell in tombs, inured after a fashion to mortality, the possibility arises of the indefinite prolongation of this life-in-death. Yet, although quite practicable, it would be a most morbid and dejected existence, without vitality or even thought; but only paramentation, our chief companions paramental entities of azoic origin more vicious than spiders or weasels.
     
    Now what would paramentation be like? Franz wondered. Trance? Opium dreams? Dark, writhing phantoms born of sensory deprivation? Or something entirely different?
     
    Or:
    The electro-mephitic city-stuff whereof I speak has potencies for achieving vast effects atdistant times and localities, even in the far future and on other orbs, but of the manipulations required for the production and control of such I do not intend to discourse in these pages.
     
    As the overworked yet vigorous current exclamation had it, wow ! Franz picked up one of the old crumble-edged pulps and was tempted to read Smith’s marvelous fantasy, “The City of the Singing Flame, “in which great looming metropolises move about and give battle to each other, but he resolutely set it aside for the journal.
    Smith (he was sure it was he) had certainly been greatly impressed by de Castries (must be he also), as well he might have been almost fifty years ago. And he had clearly read Megapolisomancy , too. It occurred to Franz that this copy was most likely Smith’s. Here was a typical passage in the journal:
     
    Three hours today at 607 Rhodes with the furious Tybalt. All I could take. Half the time railing at his fallen-off acolytes, the other half contemptuously tossing me scraps of paranatural truth. But what scraps! That bit about the significance of diagonal streets! How mat old devil sees into cities and their invisible sicknesses—a new Pasteur, but of the dead-alive.
    He says his book is kindergarten stuff, but the new thing—the core and why of it and how to work it—he keeps only in his mind and in the Grand Cipher he’s so sly about. He sometimes calls it (the Cipher) his Fifty-Book, mat is, if I’m right and they are the same. Why fifty?
    I should write Howard about it, he’d be astounded and—yes!—transfigured, it so agrees with and illuminates the decadent and putrescent horror he finds in New York City and Boston and even Providence (not