Conjure Wife (18 page)

“There are two sides to every woman.” It might have been a mummy dispensing elder wisdom. “One is rational, like a man. The other knows. Men are artificially isolated creatures like islands in a sea of magic, protected by their rationality and by the devices of their women. Their isolation gives them greater forcefulness in thought and action, but the women know. Women might be able to rule the world openly, but they do not want the work or the responsibility. And men might learn to excel them in the Art. Even now there may still be male sorcerers, but very few.

“Last week I suspected much that I did not tell you. But the rational side is strong in me, and I wanted to be close to you in all ways. Like many women, I was not certain, And when I destroyed my charms and guards, I became temporarily blind to sorcery. Like a person used to large doses of a drug, I was uninfluenced by small doses. Rationality was dominant. I enjoyed a few days of false security. Then rationality itself proved to me that you were the victim of sorcery. And during my journey here I learned much, partly from what He Who Walks Behind let slip.” She paused and added, with the blank innocent cunning of a child, “Shall we go back to Hempnell now?”

The phone rang. It was the night clerk, almost incoherent in his agitation, babbling threateningly about police and eviction. To pacify him, Norman had to promise to come down at once.

The old man was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

“Look here, mister,” he began, shaking a finger, “I want to know what’s going on. Just now Sissy came down from your room white as a sheet. She wouldn’t tell me anything, but she was trembling like all get-out. Sissy’s my granddaughter. I got her this job, and I’m responsible for her.

“I know what hotels are. I’ve worked in ‘em all my life. And I know the kind of people that come to them — sometimes men and women working together — and I know the kind of things they try to do to young girls.

“Now I’m not saying anything against you, mister. But it was might queer the way your wife came here. I thought when she asked me to call Sissy that she was sick or something. But if she’s sick, why haven’t you called a doctor? And what are you doing still up at four? Mrs. Thompson in the next room called to say there was talking in your room — not loud, but it scared her. I got a right to know what’s going on.”

Norman put on his best classroom manner and blandly dissected the old man’s apprehensions until they began to look very unsubstantial. Dignity told. With a last show of grumbling the old man let himself be convinced. As Norman started upstairs, he was shuffling back to the switchboard.

On the second flight, Norman heard a phone ringing. As he was walking down the hall, it stopped.

He opened the door. Tansy was standing by the bed, speaking into the phone. Its dull blackness, curving from mouth to ear, emphasized the pallor of lips and cheeks and the whiteness of the toweling.

“This is Tansy Saylor,” she was saying tonelessly. “I want my soul.” A pause. “Can’t you hear me, Evelyn? This is Tansy Saylor. I want my soul.”

He had completely forgotten the call he had made in a moment of crazy anger. He no longer had any clear idea of what he had been going to say.

A low wailing was coming from the phone. Tansy was talking against it.

“This is Tansy Saylor. I want my soul.”

He stepped forward. The wailing sound had swiftly risen to a squeal, but mixed with it was an intermittent windy whirring.

He reached out to take the phone. But at that instant Tansy jerked around and something seemed to happen to the phone.

When a lifeless object begins to act as if it had life, there is always the possibility of illusion. For instance, there is a trick of manipulating a pencil that makes it look as if it were being bent back and forth like a stick of rubber. And Tansy did have her hand to the phone and was twisting about so rapidly that it was hard to be sure of anything.

Nevertheless, to Norman it seemed that the phone suddenly became pliable and twisted about like a stumpy black worm, fastened itself tight to the skin, and dug into Tansy’s chin and into her neck just below the ear, like a double-ended black paw. And with the squeal he seemed to hear a muffled sucking.

His reaction was immediate, involuntary, and startling. He dropped to his knees and ripped the phone cord from the wall. Violet sparks spat from the torn wire. The loose end whipped back with his jerk, seeming to writhe like a wounded snake, and wrapped itself around his forearm. To Norman it seemed that it tightened spasmodically, then relaxed. He tore it away with a panicky loathing, then stood up.

The phone had fallen to the floor. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about it now. He gave it a little kick. There was a dull plunk and it slid solidly across the floor a few inches. He stooped and after hesitating a few moments, gingerly touched it. It felt as hard and rigid as it should.

He looked at Tansy. She was standing in the same place. Not an atom of fear showed in her expression. With the unconcernedness of a machine, she had lifted a hand and was slowly massaging her cheek and neck. From the corner of her mouth a few drops of blood were trickling.

Of course, she could have bashed the phone against her teeth and cut her lip that way.

But he had seen —

Still, she might have shaken the phone rapidly, so that it only seemed to become pliable and bend.

But it hadn’t looked that way. What he had seen… had been impossible.

But so many “impossible” things had been happening.

And it had been Evelyn Sawtelle at the other end of the phone. He had heard the sound of the bull-roarer coming over the phone. Nothing supernatural about that. If the recording of a bull-roarer had been played very loudly over the phone it would have sounded just like that. He couldn’t have been mistaken about it. That was a fact and he must stick to it.

It gave him the emotional cue he needed. Anger. He was almost startled by the surge of hatred that went through him at the thought of that woman with the small dull eyes. For a moment he felt like an inquisitor confronted with evidence of malicious witchcraft. Visions of the rack and the wheel and the boot flitted through his mind. Then that phantasmagoria of the Middle Ages faded, but the anger remained, settling down to a steady pulse of detestation.

Whatever had happened to Tansy, he knew that Evelyn Sawtelle and Hulda Gunnison and Flora Carr were responsible. He had too much evidence in their own actions. That was another fact that he must stick to. Whether they were working on Tansy’s mind by an incredibly subtle and diabolic campaign of suggestion, or by some unnamed means, they were responsible.

There was no way of getting at them by psychiatry or law. What had happened in the past few days was something that only he, of all the men in the world, could believe or understand. He must fight them himself, using their own weapons against them — that other unnamed means.

In every way he must act as if he believed in that other unnamed means.

Tansy stopped massaging her face. Her tongue licked the lip where the blood was drying.

“Shall we go back to Hempnell now?”

“Yes!”

The rhythmic rattle and clank of the train was a Machine Age lullaby. Norman could hear the engine snoring. The wide, heatbaked, green fields swinging past the window of the compartment drowsed in the noonday sun. The farms and cattle and horses dotting them here and there looked entranced by the heat. He would have liked to doze too, hut he knew he would not be able to. And as for — she never apparently slept.

“I want to run over some things,” he said. “Interrupt me if you hear anything that sounds wrong or you don’t understand.”

From the corner of his eye he noted the figure sitting between him and the window nod once.

It occurred to him that there was something terrible about an adaptability that could familiarize him even to — her, so that now, after only a day and a half, he was using her as a kind of thinking machine, asking for her memories and reactions in the same way that a man might direct a servant to put a certain record on the phonograph.

At the same time he knew that he was able to make this close contact endurable only by carefully directing his thoughts and actions — like the trick he had acquired of never quite looking at her directly. And he was buoyed up a little by his hope that her present condition was only temporary. But if he had once let himself start to think what it would mean to live a lifetime, to share bed and board, with that coldness, that inner blackness, that vacancy… .

Other people noticed the difference, all right. Like those crowds he had to push through in New York yesterday. Somehow people always edged away, so they wouldn’t have to touch her, and he caught more than one following glance, poised between curiosity and fear. And when that other woman started to scream — lucky they had been able to lose themselves in the crowd.

The brief stopover at New York had given him time for some vitally necessary thinking. But he had been glad last night when it was over. The Pullman compartment seemed a haven of privacy.

What was it those other people noticed? True, if you looked closely, the heavy cosmetics only provided a grotesque and garish contrast to the underlying pallor, and powder did not wholly conceal the ugly dark bruise around the mouth. But the veil helped, and you had to look very closely — the cosmetics were practically a theatrical make-up. Was it her walk that they noticed, or the way her clothes hung? Her clothes always looked a little like a scarecrow’s now, though you could not tell the reason. Or was there actually something to what the Bayport girl had said?

It occurred to him that he was letting his mind wander because he didn’t want to get on with the distasteful task he had set himself, this task that was abhorrent to him because it was so false — or because it was so true.

“Magic is a practical science,” he began quickly. He talked to the wall, as if dictating. “There is all the difference in the world between a formula in physics and a formula in magic, although they have the same name. The former describes, in terse mathematical symbols, cause-effect relationship of wide generality. But a formula in magic is a way of getting or accomplishing something. It always takes into account the motivation or desire of the person invoking the formula — be it greed, love, revenge, or what not. Whereas the experiment in physics is essentially independent of the experimenter. In short, there has been little or no pure magic, comparable to pure science.

“This distinction between physics and magic is only an accident of history. Physics started out as a kind of magic, too — witness alchemy and the mystical mathematics of Pythagoras. And modern physics is ultimately as practical as magic, but it possesses a superstructure of theory that mnagic lacks. Magic could be given such a superstructure by research in pure magic and by the investigation and correlation of the magic formulas of different peoples and times, with a view to deriving basic formulas which could be expressed in mathematical symbols and which would have a wide application. Most persons practicing magic have been too interested in immediate results to bother about theory. But just as research in pure science has ultimately led, seemingly by accident, to results of vast practical importance, so research in pure magic might be expected to yield similar results.

“The work of Rhine at Duke, indeed, has been very close to pure magic, with its piling up of evidence for clairvoyance, prophecy, and telepathy; its investigation of the direct linkage between all minds, their ability to affect each other instantaneously, even when they are on opposite sides of the earth.”

He waited a moment, then went on.

“The subject matter of magic is akin to that of physics, in that it deals with certain forces and materials, though these —”

“I believe it is more akin to psychology,” the voice interrupted.

“How so?” He still looked at the wall.

“Because it concerns the control of other beings, the summoning of them, and the constraining of them to perform certain actions.”

“Good. That is very suggestive. Fortunately, formulas may still hold good so long as their reference is clear, though we are ignorant of the precise nature of the entities to which they refer. For example, a physicist need not he able to give a visual description of an atom, even if the term visual appearance has any meaning when applied to an atom, which is doubtful. Similarly, a sorcerer need not be able to describe the appearance and nature of the entity he summons — hence the common references in the literature of magic to indescribable and nameless horrors. But the point is well taken. Many seemingly impersonal forces, when broken down sufficiently, become something very much like personality. It’s not too far-fetched to say that it would take a science resembling psychology to describe the behavior of a single electron, with all its whims and impulses, though electrons in the aggregate obey relatively simple laws, just as human beings do when considered as crowds. The same holds true of the basic entities of magic, and to a much greater degree.

“It is partly for this reason that magical processes are so unreliable and dangerous, and why their working can be so readily impeded if the intended victim is on guard against them — as your formulas have to our knowledge been nullified since Mrs. Gunnison stole your notebook.”

His words possessed for him an incredibly strange overtone. But it was only by maintaining a dry, scholarly manner that he could keep going. He knew that if he permitted himself to be casual, mental confusion would engulf him.

“There remains one all-important consideration,” he went on swiftly. “Magic appears to he a science which markedly depends on its environment — that is, the situation of the world and the general conditions of the cosmos at any particular time. For example, Euclidean geometry is useful on Earth, but out in the great depths of space a non-Euclidean geometry is more practical. The same is true of magic, hut to a more striking degree. The basic, unstated formulas of magic appear to change with the passage of time, requiring frequent restatement — though it might conceivably be possible to discover master-formulas governing that change. It has been speculated that the laws of physics show a similar evolutionary tendency — though if they do evolve, it is at a much less rapid rate than those of magic.