Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  She was smiling happily, but there was still something enigmatic about the eyes, something withheld. As he was congratulating himself on carrying it off successfully, it suddenly occurred to him that two could play at the game of lying. She might be holding something back herself, with the idea of reassuring him. She might be trying to protect him from her own blacker worries. Her subtlety might undercut his own. No sane reason to suspect that, and yet — “Suppose I get us a drink,” she said, “and we decide whether or not you leave Hempnell this year, and look for greener fields.” He nodded. She started around the bend in the L-shaped room.

  — and yet, you could live with and love a person for fifteen years, and not know what was behind her eyes.

  There was the rattle of glassware from the sideboard, and the friendly sound of a full bottle set down.

  Then, timed to the thunder, but much closer, a shuddering, animal scream. It was cut off before Norman had sprung to his feet.

  As he cleared the angle of the room, he saw Tansy going through the kitchen door. She was a little ahead of him down the back steps.

  Light fanned out from the windows of the opposite house into the service yard. It revealed the sprawled body of Totem, head mashed flat against the concrete.

  He heard a little sound start and stop in Tansy’s throat. It might have been a gasp, or a sob, or a snarl.

  The light revealed a little more than the body. Norman moved so that his feet covered the two prominent scuffs in the concrete just beyond the body. They might have been caused by the impact of a brick or heavy stone, perhaps the thing that had killed Totem, but there was something so suggestive about their relative position that he did not want Tansy’s imagination to have a chance to work on them.

  She lifted her face. It didn’t show much emotion.

  “You’d better go in,” he said.

  “You’ll —”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  She stopped halfway up the stairs. “That was a rotten, rotten thing for anybody to do.”

  “Yes.”

  She left the door open. A moment later she came out and laid on the porch railing a square of heavy cloth, covered with shed hair. Then she went in again and shut the door.

  He rolled up the cat’s body and stopped at the garage for the spade. He did not spend time searching for any brick or heavy stone or other missile. Nor did he examine closer the heavy footmarks he fancied he saw in the grass beyond the service yard.

  Lightning began to flicker as his spade bit into the soft ground by the back fence. He kept his mind strictly on the task at hand. He worked steadily, but without undue haste. When he patted down the last spadeful of earth and started for the house, the lightning flashes were stronger, making the moments in between even darker. A wind started up and dragged at the leaves.

  He did not hurry. What if the lightning did indistinctly show him a large dog near the front of the house? There were several large dogs in the neighborhood. They were not savage. Totem had not been killed by a dog.

  Deliberately he replaced the spade in the garage and walked back to the house. Only when he got inside and looked back through the screen did his thoughts break loose for a moment.

  The lightning flash, brightest yet, showed the dog coming around the corner of the house. He had only a glimpse. A dog the color of concrete. It walked stiff-legged. He quickly closed the door and shot home the bolt.

  Then he remembered that the study windows were open. He must close them. Quickly.

  It might rain in.

  9

  When Norman entered the living room his face was outwardly serene. Tansy was sitting in the straight chair, leaning a little forward, an intent moody expression around her eyes. Her hands were playing absently with a bit of twine.

  He carefully lit a cigarette.

  “Do you want that drink now?” he asked, not too casually, not too sharply.

  “No, thanks. You have one.” Her hands kept on knotting and unknotting the twine.

  He sat down and picked up his book. From the easy-chair he could watch her unobtrusively.

  And now that he had no grave to dig or other mechanical task to perform, his thoughts were not to be denied. But at least he could keep them circling in a little isolated sphere inside his skull, without affecting either the expression of his face or the direction of his other thoughts, which were protectively concentrated on Tansy.

  “Sorcery is,” went the thoughts inside the sphere. “Something has been conjured down from a roof. Women are witches fighting for their men. Tansy was a witch. She was guarding you. But you made her stop.”

  “In that case,” he replied swiftly to the thoughts inside the sphere, “why isn’t Tansy aware of what’s happening? It can’t be denied that she has acted very relieved and happy.”

  “Are you sure she isn’t aware or becoming aware?” answered the thoughts inside the sphere. “Besides, in losing her instruments of magic she probably lost her sensitivity to magic. Without his instruments — say microscope or telescope — a scientist would be no better able than a savage to see the germs of typhoid or the moons of Mars. His natural sensory equipment might even be inferior to that of the savage.”

  And the imprisoned thoughts buzzed violently, like bees seeking escape from a stopped-up hive.

  “Norman,” Tansy said abruptly, without looking up at him, “you found and burned that hand in your watch charm, didn’t you?”

  He thought a moment. “Yes, I did,” he said lightly.

  “I’d really forgotten about that. There were so many.”

  He turned a page, and then another. Thunder crackled loudly and rain began to patter on the roof.

  “Norman, you burned the diary, too, didn’t you? You were right in doing, it, of course. I held it back, because it didn’t contain actual spells already laid, only the formulas for them. So in a twisted illogical way I pretended it didn’t count. But you did burn it?”

  That was harder to answer. He felt as if he were playing a guessing game and Tansy were getting perilously “warm.” The thoughts in the sphere buzzed triumphantly: “Mrs. Gunnison has the diary.

  Now she knows all of Tansy’s protective charms.”

  But he lied, “Yes, I burnt it. I’m sorry, but I thought —”

  “Of course,” Tansy cut in. “You were quite right.” Her fingers played more rapidly with the cord. She did not look down at it.

  Lightning showed flashes of pale street and trees through the window. The patter of rain became a pelting. But through it he fancied he heard the scrunch of paws on the drive. Ridiculous — rain and wind were making too much noise.

  His eyes were attracted by the pattern of the knots Tansy’s restless fingers were weaving. They were complicated, strong-looking knots which fell apart at a single cunning jerk, reminding him of how Tansy had studied assiduously the cat’s cradles of the Indians. It also recalled to his mind how knots are used by primitive people, to tie and loose the winds, to hold loved ones, to noose far-off enemies, to inhibit or free all manner of physical and physiological processes. And how the Fates weave destinies like threads. He found something very pleasing in the pattern of the knots and the rhythmic movements which produced them. They seemed to signify security. Until they fell apart.

  “Norman” — the voice was preoccupied and rapid — “what was that snapshot you asked Hulda Gunnison to show you last night?”

  He felt a brief flurry of panic. She was getting “very warm.” This was time stage of the game where you cried out “Hot!”

  And then he heard the heavy, unyielding clump-clump on the boards of the front porch. seeming to move questingly along the wall. The sphere of alien thoughts began to exert an irresistible centrifugal pressure. He felt his sanity being smothered between the assaults from within and without. Very deliberately he shaved off the ash of his cigarette against the edge of the tray.

  “It was a picture of the roof of Estrey,” he said casually. “Gunnison told me Hulda had taken a number
of pictures of that sort. I wanted to see a sample.”

  “Some sort of creature in it, wasn’t there?” Knots flickered into being and vanished with bewildering speed. It seemed to him suddenly that more than twine was being manipulated, and more than empty air tied and loosed. As if the knots were somehow creating an influence, as an electric current along a twisted wire creates a complex magnetic field.

  “No,” he said, and then made himself chuckle, “unless you count in a stray cement dragon or two.”

  He watched the rippling twine. At times it seemed to glitter, as if there were a metal strand in it.

  If ordinary cords and knots, magically employed, could control winds, what would a part-metal cord control? Lightning?

  Thunder ripped and crashed deafeningly. Lightning might have struck in the neighborhood. Tansy did not move a muscle. “That was a Lulu,” Norman started to say. Then, as the thunder crash trailed off in rumblings and there was a second’s lull in the rain, lie heard the sound of something leaping heavily down from the front perch toward the large low window, behind him.

  He got to his feet and managed to take a few steps toward the window, as if to look out at the storm. As he passed Tansy’s chair he saw that her rippling fingers were creating a strange knot resembling a flower, with seven loops for petals. She stared like a sleep walker. Then he was between her and the window, shielding her.

  The next lightning flash showed him what he knew he must see. It crouched, facing the window. The head was still blank and crude as an unfinished skull.

  In the ensuing surge of blackness, the sphere of alien thoughts expanded with instant swiftness, until it occupied his entire mind.

  He glanced behind him. Tansy’s hands were still. The strange seven-looped knot was poised between them.

  Just as he was turning back, he saw the hands jerk apart and the loops whip in like a seven-fold snare — and hold.

  And in that same moment of turning he saw the street brighten like day and a great ribbon of lightning split the tall elm opposite and fork into several streams which streaked across the street toward the window and the stony form upreared against it.

  Then — blinding light, and a tingling electrical surge through his whole body.

  But on his retina was burned the incandescent track of the lightning, whose multiple streams, racing toward the upreared stony form, had converged upon it as if drawn together by a seven-fold knot.

  The sphere of alien thoughts expanded beyond his skull at a dizzy rate, vanished.

  His gasping, uncontrollable laughter rose above the dying reverberations of the titanic thunder blast. He dragged open the window, pulled a bridge lamp up to it, jerked the cover from the lamp so its light flooded outward.

  “Look, Tansy!” he called, his words mixed with the manic laughter. “Look what those crazy students have done! Those frat men, I bet, I kidded in class. Look what they dragged down from campus and stuck in our front yard. Of all the crazy things — we’ll have to call Buildings and Grounds to take it away tomorrow.”

  Rain splattered in his face. There was a sulphurous, metallic odor. Her hand touched his shoulder. She stared out blankly, her eyes still asleep.

  It stood there, propped against the wall, solid and inert as only the inorganic can be. In some places the cement was darkened and fused.

  “And of all mad coincidences,” he gasped, “the lightning had to go and strike it.”

  On an impulse, he reached out his hand and touched it. At the feel of the rough, unyielding surface, still hot from the lightning flash, his laughter died.

  “Eppur si muove,” he murmured to himself, so low that even Tansy, standing beside him, might not have heard. ”Eppur si muove.”

  10

  Next day the appearance Norman presented to Hempnell was a close approximation of that of a soldier suffering from battlefatigue. He had had a long and heavy sleep, but he looked as if he were stupefied by weariness and nervous strain. And he was. Even Harold Gunnison remarked on it.

  “It’s nothing,” Norman replied. “I’m just lazy.”

  Gunnison smiled skeptically. “You’ve been working too hard, It butchers efficiency. Better ration your hours of work. Your jobs won’t go hungry if you feed them eight hours a day.

  “Trustees are queer cusses,” he continued with apparent irrelevance. “And in some ways Pollard is more of a politician than an educator. But he brings in the money, and that’s what college presidents are for.”

  Norman was grateful for Gunnison’s tactful commiseration on his loss of the sociology chairmanship, especially since he knew it cost Harold an effort to criticize Pollard in any way. But he felt as far removed from Gunnison as from the hordes of gayly dressed students who filled the walks and socialized in clusters. As if there were a wall of faintly clouded glass between him and them. His only aim — and even that was blurred — was to prolong his present state of fatigued reaction from last night’s events and to avoid all thoughts.

  Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.

  One was more familiar than the others. It had been there last night at the height of the storm. He felt vaguely thankful that he could no longer see inside of it.

  Another thought-cyst was concerned with Tansy, and why she had seemed so cheerful and forgetful this morning.

  Another — a very large one — was sunk so deeply in his mind that he could only perceive a small section of its globular surface. He knew it was connected with an unfamiliar, angry, destructive emotion that he had yesterday sensed in himself more than once, and he knew that it must under no circumstances be disturbed. He could feel it pulsate slowly and rhythmically, like a monster asleep in mud.

  Another had to do with hands — hands in flannel gloves.

  Another — tiny but prominent — was somehow concerned with cards.

  And there were more, many more.

  His situation was akin to that of the legendary hero who must travel through a long and narrow corridor, without once touching the morbidly enticing, poisoned walls.

  He knew he could not avoid contact with the thought-cysts indefinitely, but in the meantime they might shrink and disappear.

  The day fitted his superficially dull and lethargic mood. Instead of the cool spell that should have followed the storm, there was a foretaste of summer in the air. Student absences rose sharply. Those who came to class were inattentive and exhibited other symptoms of spring fever.

  Only Bronstein seemed animated. He kept drawing Norman’s other students aside by twos and threes, and whispering to them animatedly, heatedly. Norman found out that he was trying to get up a petition of protest on Sawtelle’s appointment. Norman asked him to stop it. Bronstein refused, but in any case he seemed to be failing in the job of arousing the other students.

  Norman’s lectures were languid. He contented himself with transforming his notes into accurate verbal statements with a minimum of mental effort. He watched the pencils move methodically as notes were taken, or wander off into intricate doodles. Two girls were engrossed in sketching the handsome profile of the fraternity president in the second row. He watched foreheads wrinkle as they picked up the thread of his lecture, smooth out again as they dropped it.

  And all the while his own mind was wandering off on side tracks too dreamlike and irrational to be called thoughts. They consisted of mere trails of words, like a psychologist’s association test.

  One such trail began when he recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher’s notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either. That made him think of mimeographing.

  Mimeograph, it went on. Margaret Van Nice. Theodore Jennings. Gun. Windowpane. Galileo. Scroll— (sheer away from t
hat! Forbidden territory.)

  The daydream backtracked and took a different turning. Jennings. Gunnison. Pollard. President. Emperor. Empress. Juggler. Tower. Hanged Man — (hold on! don’t go any further.).

  As the long dull day wore on, the daydreams gradually assumed a uniform coloration.

  Gun. Knife. Sliver. Broken glass. Nail. Tetanus.

  After his last class he retreated to his office and moped and fussed around on little jobs, so preoccupied that at times he forgot what he was doing. The daydreams still wouldn’t let him alone.

  War. Mangled bodies. Mayhem. Murder. Rope. Hangman. (Sheer off again!) Gas. Gun. Poison.

  The coloration of blood and physical injury.

  And ever more strongly he felt the slow-pulsing respiration of the monster in the depths of his mind, dreaming nightmares of carnage from which it would soon awake and heave up out of the mud. And he powerless to stop it. It was as if a crusted-over swamp, swollen with underground water, were pushing up the seemingly healthy ground by imperceptible degrees — nearing the point when it would burst through in one vast slimy eruption.

  Starting home, Norman fell in with Mr. Carr.

  “Good evening, Norman,” said the old gentleman, lifting his Panama hat to mop his forehead, which merged into an extensive bald area.

  “Good evening, Linthicum,” said Norman. But his mind was occupied with speculating how, if a man let a thumbnail grow and then sharpened it carefully, he could cut the veins of his wrist and so bleed to death.

  Mr. Carr wiped the handkerchief under his beard.

  “I enjoyed the bridge thoroughly,” he said. “Perhaps the four of us could have a game when the ladies are away at the faculty wives’ meeting next Thursday? You and I could be partners and use the Culbertson slam conventions.” His voice became wistful. “I’m tired of always having to play the Blackwood.”

  Norman nodded, but he was thinking of how men have learned to swallow their tongues, when the occasion came, and die of suffocation. He tried to check himself. These were speculations appropriate only to the concentration camp. Visions of death kept rising in his mind, replacing one another. He felt the pulsations of the thing below his thoughts become almost unendurably strong. Mr. Carr nodded pleasantly and turned off. Norman quickened his pace, as if the walls of the poisoned passageway were contracting on the legendary hero and, unless the end were soon reached, he would have to shove out against them wildly.