Our Lady of Darkness

The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey...

On every side of Corona Heights the street and house lights of San Francisco, weakest at end of night, hemmed it in apprehensively, as if it were indeed a dangerous animal. But on the hill itself there was not a single light...

And now something seemed to stir in the massed darkness there...perhaps one of the city’s wild dogs, homeless for generations, yet able to pass as tame...perhaps some wilder and more secret animal that had never submitted to man’s rule, yet lived almost unglimpsed amongst him. Perhaps a man (or woman) so sunk in savagery or psychosis that he (or she) didn’t need light. Or perhaps only the wind...

Yet the impression lingered that the hill had grown restless, having at last decided on its victim.

Our Lady of Darkness - Fritz Leiber