Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  Norman had no excuse ready, so he accompanied the Sawtelles to the rooms of the speech department at the other end of Morton, wondering how the speech department ever found any use for someone with as nasal and affected a voice as Evelyn Sawtelle, even if she did happen to be a professor’s wife and a thwarted tragedienne.

  The sound booth was dim and quiet, a solid box with soundresistant walls and double windows.

  Mrs. Sawtelle took a disk from the cabinet, put it on one of the three turntables, and adjusted a couple of dials. Norman jerked. For an instant he thought that a truck was roaring toward the sound booth and would momentarily crash through the insulating walls. Then the abominable noise pouring from the amplifier changed to a strangely pulsing wail or whir, as of wind prying at a house. It struck a less usual chord, though, in Norman’s agitated memory.

  Mrs. Sawtelle darted back and swiveled the dials.

  “I made a mistake,” she said. “That’s some modernistic music or other. Hervey, switch on the light. Here’s the record I wanted.” She put it on one of the other turntables.

  “It sounded awful, whatever it was,” her husband observed.

  Norman had identified his memory. It was of an Australian bull-roarer a colleague had once demonstrated for him. The curved slat of wood, whirled at the end of a cord, made exactly the same sound. The aborigines used it in their rain magic.

  “… but if, in these times of misunderstanding and strife, we willfully or carelessly forget that every word and thought must refer to something in the real world, if we allow references to the unreal and the nonexistent to creep into our minds

  Again Norman started. For now it was his own voice that was coming out of the amplifier and he had an odd sense of jerking back in time.

  “Surprised?” Evelyn Sawtelle questioned coyly. “It’s that talk on semantics you gave the students last week. We had a mike spotted by the speaker’s rostrum — I suppose you thought it was for amplification

  — and we made a sneak recording, as we call it. We cut it down here.”

  She indicated the heavier, cement-based turntable for making recordings. Her hands fluttered around the dials.

  “We can do all sorts of things down here,” she babbled on. “Mix all sorts of sounds. Music against voices. And —”

  “Words can hurt us, you know. And oddly enough, it’s the words that refer to things that aren’t, that can hurt us most. Why…”

  It was hard for Norman to appear even slightly pleased. He knew his reasons were no more sensible than those of a savage afraid someone will learn his secret name, yet all the same he disliked the idea of Evelyn Sawtelle monkeying around with his voice. Like her dully malicious, small-socketed eyes, it suggested a prying for hidden weaknesses.

  And then Norman moved involuntarily for a third time. For suddenly out of the amplifier, but now mixed with his voice, came the sound of the bull-roarer that still had that devilish hint of an onrushing truck.

  “Oh there I’ve done it again,” said Evelyn Sawtelle rapidly, snatching at the dials. “Messing up your beautiful voice with that terrible music.” She grimaced. “But then, as you just said, Professor Saylor, sounds can’t hurt us.”

  Norman did not correct her typical misquoting. He looked at her curiously for a moment. She stood facing him, her hands behind her. Her husband, his nose twitching, had idled over to the still moving turntables and was gingerly poking a finger at one of them.

  “No,” said Norman slowly, “they can’t.” And then he excused himself with a brusque. “Well, thanks for the demonstration.”

  “We’ll see you tonight,” Evelyn called after him. Somehow it sounded like, “You won’t get rid of me.”

  How I detest that woman, thought Norman, as he hurried up the dark stair and down the corridor.

  Back at his office, he put in a good hour’s work on his notes. Then getting up to switch on the light, his glance happened to fall on the window.

  After a few moments, he jerked away and darted to the closet to get his field glasses.

  Someone must have a very obscure sense of humor to perpetrate such a complicated practical joke.

  Intently he searched the cement at the juncture of roof ridge and clawed feet, looking for the telltale cracks. He could not spot any, but that would not have been easy in the failing yellow light.

  The cement dragon now stood at the edge of the gutter, as if about to walk over to Morton along the architrave of the big gateway.

  He lifted his glasses to the creature’s head — blank and crude as an unfinished skull. Then on an impulse he dropped down to the row of sculptured heads, focused on Galileo, and read the little inscription he had not been able to make out before.

  “Eppur si muove.”

  The words Galileo was supposed to have muttered after recanting before the Inquisition his belief in the revolution of the earth around the sun.

  “Nevertheless, it moves.”

  A board creaked behind him, and he spun around.

  By his desk stood a young man, waxen pale, with thick red hair. His eyes stood out like milky marbles. One white, tendon-ridged hand gripped a .22 target pistol.

  Norman walked toward him, bearing slightly to the right.

  The skimpy barrel of the gun came up.

  “Hullo, Jennings,” said Norman. “You’ve been reinstated. Your grades have been changed to straight A’s.”

  The gun barrel slowed for an instant.

  Norman lunged in.

  The gun went off under his left arm, pinking the window.

  The gun clunked on the floor. Jenning’s skinny form went limp. As Norman sat him down on the chair, he began to sob, convulsively.

  Norman picked up the gun by the barrel, laid it in a drawer, locked the drawer, pocketed the key. Then he lifted the phone and asked for an on-campus number. The connection was made quickly. “Gunnison?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh, just caught me as I was leaving.”

  “Theodore Jennings’ parents live right near the college, don’t they? You know, the chap who flunked out last semester.”

  “Of course they do. What’s the matter?”

  “Better get them over here quick. And have them bring his doctor. He just tried to shoot me. Yes, his doctor. No, neither of us is hurt. But quickly.”

  Norman put down the phone. Jennings continued to sob agonizingly. Norman looked at him with disgust for a moment, then patted his shoulder.

  An hour later Gunnison sat down in the same chair, and let off a sigh of relief.

  “I’m sure glad they agreed about asking for his commitment to the asylum,” he said. “It was awfully good of you, Norman, not to insist on the police. Things like that give a college a bad name.”

  Norman smiled wearily. “Almost anything gives a college a bad name. But that kid was obviously as crazy as a loon. And of course I understand how much the Jennings, with their political connections and influence, mean to Pollard.”

  Gunnison nodded. They lit up and smoked for a while in silence. Norman thought how different real life was from a detective story, where an attempted murder was generally considered a most serious thing, an occasion for much turmoil and telephoning and the gathering of flocks of official and unofficial detectives. Whereas here, because it occurred in an area of life governed by respectability rather than sensation, it was easily hushed up and forgotten.

  Gunnison looked at his watch. “I’ll have to hustle. It’s almost seven, and we’re due at your place at eight.”

  But he lingered, ambling over to the window to inspect the bullet hole.

  “I wonder if you’d mind not mentioning this to Tansy?” Norman asked. “I don’t want to worry her.”

  Gunnison nodded. “Good thing if we kept it to ourselves.” Then he pointed out the window. “That’s one of my wife’s pets,” he remarked in a jocular tone.

  Norman saw that his finger was trained on the cement dragon, now coldly revealed by the upward glare from the street lights.

  “
I mean,” Gunnison went on, “she must have a dozen photographs of it. Hempnell’s her specialty. I believe she’s got a photograph of every architectural oddity on campus. That one is her favorite.” He chuckled. “Usually it’s the husband who keeps ducking down into the darkroom, but not in our family. And me a chemist, at that.”

  Norman’s taut mind had unaccountably jumped to the thought of a bull-roarer. Abruptly he realized the analogy between the recording of a bull-roarer and the photograph of a dragon.

  He clamped a lid on the fantastic questions he wanted to ask Gunnison.

  “Come on!” he said. “We’d better get along.”

  Gunnison started a little at the harshness of his voice.

  “Can you drop me off?” asked Norman in quieter tones. “My car’s at home.”

  “Sure thing,” said Gunnison.

  After he had switched out the lights, Norman paused for a moment, staring at the window. The words came back.

  “Eppur si muove.”

  6

  They had hardly cleared away the remains of a hasty supper, when there came the first clang from the front-door chimes. To Norman’s relief, Tansy had accepted without questioning his rather clumsy explanation of why he had gotten home so late. There was something puzzling, though, about her serenity these last two days. She was usually much sharper and more curious. But of course he had been careful to hide disturbing events from her, and he ought only to’ be glad her nerves were in such good shape.

  “Dearest! It’s been ages since we’ve seen you!” Mrs. Carr embraced Tansy cuddlingly. “How are you? How are you?” The question sounded peculiarly eager and incisive. Norman put it down to typical Hempnell gush. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve got a cinder in my eye,” Mrs. Carr continued. “The wind’s getting quite fierce.”

  “Gusty,” said Professor Carr of the mathematics department, showing harmless delight at finding the right word. He was a little man with red cheeks and a white Vandyke, as innocent and absent-minded as college professors are supposed to be. He gave the impression of residing permanently in a special paradise of transcendental and transfinite numbers and of the hieroglyphs of symbolic logic, for whose manipulations he had a nationally recognized fame among mathematicians. Russell and Whitehead may have invented those hieroglyphs, but when it came to handling, cherishing, arid coaxing the exasperating, riddlesome things, Carr was the champion prestidigitator.

  “It seems to have gone away now,” said Mrs. Carr, waving aside Tansy’s handkerchief and experimentally blinking her eyes, which looked unpleasantly naked until she replaced her thick glasses. “Oh, that must be the others,” she added, as the chimes sounded. “Isn’t it marvelous that everyone at Hempnell is so punctual?”

  As Norman started for the front door he imagined for one crazy moment that someone must be whirling a bull-roarer outside, until he realized it could only be the rising wind living up to Professor Carr’s description of it.

  He was confronted by Evelyn Sawtelle’s angular form, wind whipping her black coat against her legs. Her equally angular face, with its shoe-button eyes, was thrust toward his own.

  “Let us in, or it’ll blow us in,” she said. Like most of her attempts at coy or facetious humor, it did not come off, perhaps because she made it sound so stupidly grim.

  She entered, with Hervey in tow, and made for Tansy.

  “My dear, how are you? Whatever have you been doing with yourself?” Again Norman was struck by the eager and meaningful tone of the question. For a moment he wondered whether the woman had somehow gotten an inkling of Tansy’s eccentricity and the recent crisis. But Mrs. Sawtelle was so voiceconscious that she was always emphasizing things the wrong way.

  There was a noisy flurry of greetings. Totem squeaked and darted out of the way of the crowd of human beings. Mrs. Carr’s voice rose above the rest, shrilling girlishly.

  “Oh, Professor Sawtelle, I want to tell you how much we appreciated your talk on city planning. It was truly significant!” Sawtelle writhed.

  Norman thought: “So now he’s the favorite for the chairmanship.”

  Professor Carr had made a beeline for the bridge tables and was wistfully fingering the cards.

  “I’ve been studying the mathematics of the shuffle,” he began with a brighteyed air, as soon as Norman drifted into range. “The shuffle is supposed to make it a matter of chance what hands are dealt. But that is not true at all.” He broke open a new pack of cards and spread the deck. “The manufacturers arrange these by suits — thirteen spades, thirteen hearts, and so on. Now suppose I make a perfect shuffle — divide the pack into equal parts and interleaf the cards one by one.”

  He tried to demonstrate, but the cards got away from him.

  “It’s really not as hard as it looks,” he continued amiably. “Some players can do it every time, quick as a wink. But that’s not the point. Suppose I make two perfect shuffles with a new pack. Then, no matter how the cards are cut, each player will get thirteen of a suit — an event that, if you went purely by the laws of chance, would happen only once in about one hundred and fifty-eight billion times as regards a single hand, let alone all four.”

  Norman nodded and Carr smiled delightedly.

  “That’s only one example. It comes to this: What is loosely termed chance is really the resultant of several perfectly definite factors — chiefly the play of cards on each hand, and the shufflehabits of the players.” He made it sound as important as the Theory of Relativity. “Some evenings the hands are very ordinary. Other evenings they keep getting wilder and wilder — long suits, voids and so on. Sometimes the cards persistently run north and south. Other times, east and west. Luck? Chance? Not at all! It’s the result of known causes. Some expert players actually make use of this principle to determine the probable location of key cards. They remember how the cards were played on the last hand, how the packets were put together, how the shufflehabits of the maker have disarranged the cards. Then they interpret that information according to the bids and opening leads the next time the cards are used. Why, it’s really quite simple — or would be for a blindfold chess expert. And of course any really good bridge player should —”

  Norman’s mind went off at a tangent. Suppose you applied this principle outside bridge? Suppose that coincidence and other chance happenings weren’t really as chancy as they looked? Suppose there were individuals with a special aptitude for calling the turns, making the breaks? But that was a pretty obvious idea — nothing to give a person the shiver it had given him.

  “I wonder what’s holding up the Gunnisons?” Professor Carr was saying. “We might start one table now. Perhaps we can get in an extra rubber,” he added hopefully.

  A peal from the chimes settled the question.

  Gunnison looked as if he had eaten his dinner too fast and Hulda seemed rather surly.

  “We had to rush so,” she muttered curtly to Norman as he held open the door.

  Like the other two women, she almost ignored him and concentrated her greetings on Tansy. It gave him a vaguely uneasy feeling as when they had first come to Hempnell and faculty visits had been a nerveracking chore. Tansy seemed at a disadvantage, unprotected, in contrast to the aggressive air animating the other three.

  But what of it? — he told himself. That was normal for Hempnell faculty wives. They acted as if they lay awake nights plotting to poison the people between their husband and the president’s chair.

  Whereas Tansy — But that was like what Tansy had been doing or rather what Tansy had said they were doing. She hadn’t been doing it. She had only been — His thoughts started to gyrate confusingly and he switched them off.

  They cut for partners.

  The cards seemed determined to provide an illustration for the theory Carr had explained. The hands were uniformly commonplace — abnormally average. No long suits. Nothing but 4-4-3-2 and 4-33-8 distribution. Bid one; make two. Bid two; down one.

  After the second round, Norman applied his private remedy fo
r boredom — the game of “Spot the Primitive.” You played it by yourself, secretly. It was just an exercise for an ethnologist’s imagination. You pretended that the people around you were members of a savage race, and you tried to figure out how their personalities would manifest themselves in such an environment.

  Tonight it worked almost too well.

  Nothing unusual about the men. Gunnison, of course, would be a prosperous tribal chieftain; perhaps a little fatter, and tended by maidens, but with a jealous and vindictive wife waiting to pounce. Carr might figure as the basket maker of the village — a spry old man, grinning like a little monkey, weaving the basket fibers into intricate mathematical matrices. Sawtelle, of course, would be the tribal scapegoat, butt of endless painful practical jokes.

  But the women!

  Take Mrs. Gunnison, now his partner. Give her a brown skin. Leave the red hair, but twist some copper ornaments in it. She’d be heftier if anything, a real mountain of a woman, stronger than most of the men in the tribe, able to wield a spear or club. The same brutish eyes, but the lower lip would jut out in a more openly sullen and domineering way. It was only too easy to imagine what she’d do to the unlucky maidens in whom her husband showed too much interest. Or how she would pound tribal policy into his head when they retired to their hut. Or how her voice would thunder out the death chants the women sang to aid the men away at war.

  Then Mrs. Sawtelle and Mrs. Carr, who had progressed to the top table along with himself and Mrs. Gunnison. Mrs. Sawtelle first. Make her skinnier. Scarify the fiat cheeks with ornamental ridges. Tattoo the spine. Witch woman. Bitter as quinine bark because her husband was ineffectual. Think of her prancing before a spike-studded fetish. Think of her screeching incantations and ripping off a chicken’s head…

  “Norman, you are playing out of turn,” said Mrs. Gunnison.

  “Sorry.”

  And Mrs. Carr. Shrivel her a bit. Leave only a few wisps of hair on the parchment skull. Take away the glasses, so her eyes would be gummy. She’d blink and peer short-sightedly, and leer toothiessly, and flutter her bony claws. A nice harmless old squaw, who’d gather the tribe’s children around her (always that hunger for youth!) and tell them legends. But her jaw would still be able to snap like a steel trap, and her clawlike hands would be deft at applying arrow poison, and she wouldn’t really need her eyes because she’d have other ways of seeing things, and oven the bravest warrior would grow nervous if she looked too long in his direction.