by Fritz Leiber
From the corner of his eye he saw one of his students. She was staring puzzledly, at him, or at something behind him. He brushed past her.
He reached the boulevard. The lights were against him. He paused on the curb. A large red truck was rumbling toward the intersection at a fair rate of speed.
And then he knew just what was going to happen, and that he would be unable to stop himself.
He was going to wait until the truck was very close and then he was going to throw himself under the wheels. End of the passageway.
That was the meaning of the fifth stick figure, the tarot diagram that had departed from tradition.
Empress — Juggler — The truck was very close. Tower — The lights had started to change but the truck was not going to stop. Hanged man —
It was only when he leaned forward, tensing his leg muscles, that the small flat voice spoke into his ear, a voice that was a monotone and yet diabolically humorous, the voice of his dreams:
“Not for two weeks, at least. Not for two more weeks.”
He regained his balance. The truck thundered by. He looked over his shoulder — first up, then around. No one but a small Negro boy and an elderly man, rather shabbily dressed, carrying a shopping bag. Neither of them near him. A shiver settled on his spine.
Hallucinations, of course, he told himself. That voice had been inside his head. Nevertheless his eyes shifted warily from side to side, probing the very air for hints of the unseen, as he crossed the street and proceeded home. As soon as he was inside, he poured himself a more than generous drink. Oddly, Tansy had set out soda and whiskey on the sideboard. He mixed the highball and gulped it down.
Mixed himself another, took a gulp, then looked at the glass doubtfully.
Just then he heard a car stop and a moment later Tansy came in, carrying a bundle. Her face was smiling and a little flushed. With a sigh of relief she set down the bundle and pushed aside the dark bangs from her forehead.
“Whew! What a muggy day. I thought you’d be wanting a drink. Here, let me finish that one for you.”
When she put down the glass there was only ice in it. “There, now we’re blood brothers or something. Mix yourself another.”
“That was my second,” he told her.
“Oh heck, I thought I was cheating you.” She sat on the edge of the table and wagged a finger in his face. “Look, mister, you need a rest. Or some excitement. I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Now here’s my plan. I make us a cold supper — sandwiches. Then, when it’s dark we get in Oscar and drive to the Hill. We haven’t done that for years. How about it, mister?”
He hesitated. Helped by the drink, his thoughts were veering. Half his mind was still agonizing over the hallucination he’d just experienced, with its unnerving suggestion of unsuspected suicidal impulses and… he wasn’t sure what. The other half was coming under the spell of Tansy’s gaiety.
She reached out and pinched his nose. “How about it?”
“All right,” he said.
“Hey, you’re supposed to act interested!” She slid off the table, started for the kitchen, then added darkly over her shoulder, “But that will come later.”
She looked provocatively pretty. He couldn’t see any difference between now and fifteen years ago. He felt he was seeing her for the hundredth first time.
Feeling halfway relaxed at last, or at least diverted, he sat down in the easy chair. But as he did, he felt something hard and angular indent his thigh. He stood up quickly, stuck his hand in his trousers pocket, and drew out Theodore Jennings’ revolver.
He stared at it frightenedly, unable to recall when he had taken it from the drawer at the office. Then, with a quick glance toward the kitchen, he hurried over to the sideboard, opened the bottom drawer, stuffed it under a pile of linen.
When the sandwiches came, he was reading the evening paper. He had just found a local-interest item at the bottom of the fifth page.
STUDENT PRANKSTERS AT WORK AGAIN
A practical joke is worth any amount of trouble and physical exertion. At least, that is the sentiment of a group of Hempnell College students, as yet unidentified. But we are wondering about the sentiments of Professor Norman Saylor, when he looked out the window this morning and saw a stone gargoyle weighing a good three hundred pounds sitting in the middle of his lawn. It had been removed from the roof of one of the college buildings. How the students managed to detach it, lower it from the roof, and transport it to Professor Saylor’s residence, is still a mystery.
When President Randolph Pollard was asked about the pranksters, he laughingly replied, “I guess our physical education program must be providing our men with exceptional reserves of strength and energy.”
When we spoke to President Pollard he was leaving to address the Lions’ Club on “The Greater Hempnell: College and Town.” (For details of his address, see Page 1.)
Just what you might expect. The usual inaccuracies. It wasn’t a gargoyle; gargoyles are ornamental rainspouts. And then no mention at all of the lightning. Probably the reporter had suppressed it because it didn’t fit into any of the convention patterns for supposedly unconventional news stories.
Newspapers were supposed to love coincidences, but God, the weird ones they missed!
Finally, the familiar touch of turning the item into an advertisement for the physical-education department. You had to admit that the Hempnell publicity office had a kind of heavy-handed efficiency.
Tansy swept the paper out of his hands.
“The world can wait,” she said. “Here, have a bite of my sandwich.”
11
It was quite dark when they started for the Hill. Norman drove carefully, taking his time at intersections. Tansy’s gaiety still did no more than hold in check the other half of his thoughts.
She was smiling mysteriously. She had changed to a white sports dress. She looked like one of his students.
“I might be a witch,” she said, “taking you to a hilltop rendezvous. Our own private Sabbat.”
Norman started. Then he quickly reminded himself that when she said things like that, she was making a courageous mockery of her previous behavior. He must on no account let her see the other half of his thoughts.
It would never do to let her realize how badly worried he was about himself.
The lights of the town dropped behind. Half a mile out, he turned off sharply onto the road that wound up the Hill. It was bumpier than he remembered from the last time — was it as much as ten years ago? And the trees were thicker, their twigs brushing the windshield.
When they emerged into the half acre of clearing on the top, the red moon, two days after full, was rising.
Tansy pointed to it and said, “Check! I timed it perfectly. But where are the others? There always used to be two or three cars up here. And on a night like this!”
He stopped the car close to the edge. “Fashions in lovers’ lanes change like anything else,” he told her. “We’re traveling a disused folkway.”
“Always the sociologist!”
“I guess so. Maybe Mrs. Carr found out about this place. And I suppose the students range farther afield nowadays.”
She rested her head on his shoulder. He switched off the headlights, and the moon cast soft shadows.
“We used to do this at Gorham,” Tansy murmured. “When I was taking your classes, and you were the serious young instructor. Until I found out you weren’t any different from the college boys — only better. Remember?”
He nodded and took her hand. He looked down at the town, made out the campus, with its prominent floodlights designed to chase couples out of dark coursers. Those garishly floodlighted Gothic buildings seemed for the moment to symbolize a whole world of barren intellectual competition and jealous traditionalism, a world which at the moment lie felt to be infinitely alien.
“I wonder if this is why they hate us so?” he asked, almost without thinking.
“Whatever are you talking about?” But the question
sounded lazy.
“I mean the rest of the faculty, or most of them. Is it because we can do things like this?”
She laughed. “So you’re actually coming alive. We don’t do things like this so very often, you know.”
He kept on with his idea. “It’s a devilishly competitive and jealous world. And competition in an institution can be nastier than any other kind, because it’s so confined. Think so?”
“I’ve lived with it for years,” said Tansy simply.
“Of course, it’s all very petty. But petty feelings can come to outweigh big ones. Their size is better suited to the human mind.”
He looked down at Hempnell and tried to visualize the amount of ill will and jealousy he had inevitably accumulated for himself. He felt a slight chill creeping on his skin. He realized where this train of thought was leading. The darker half of his mind loomed up.
“Here, philosopher,” said Tansy, “have a slug.”
She was offering him a small silver flask.
He recognized it. “I never dreamed you’d kept it all these years.”
“Uh-huh. Remember when I first offered you a drink from it? You were a trifle shocked, I believe.”
“I took the drink.”
“Uh-huh. So take this one.”
It tasted like fire and spice. There were memories in it, too, memories of those crazy prohibition years, and of Gorham and New England.
“Brandy?”
“Greek. Give me some.”
The memories flooded over the darker half of his mind. It disappeared beneath their waves. He looked at Tansy’s sleek hair and moon-glowing eyes. Of course she’s a witch, he thought lightly. She’s Lilith. Ishtar. He’d tell her so.
“Do you remember the time,” he said, “we slid down the bank to get away from the night watchman at Gorham? There would have been a magnificent scandal if he’d caught us.”
“Oh, yes, and the time —”
When they went down the hill, the moon was an hour higher. He drove slowly. No need to imitate the sillier practices of the prohibition era. A truck chugged past him. “Two more weeks.” Rot! Who’d he think he was, hearing voices? Joan of Arc?
He felt hilarious. He wanted to tell Tansy all the ridiculous things he’d been imagining the last few days, so she could laugh at them, too. It would make a swell ghost story. There was a reason he shouldn’t tell her, but now it seemed an insignificant reason — part and parcel of this cramped, warped, overcautious Hempnell life they ought to break away from more often. What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?
So when they arrived in the living room and Tansy flopped down on the sofa, he began. “You know, Tansy, about this witch stuff. I want to tell you —”
He was caught completely off guard by whatever force, real or unreal, hit him. A moment later he was sitting in the easy chair, completely sober, with the outer world an icy pressure on his senses, the inner world a whirling sphere of alien thought, and the future a dark corridor two weeks long.
It was as if a very large, horny hand had been clapped roughly over his mouth, and as if another such hand had grasped him by the shoulder, shook him, and slammed him down in the leather chair.
As if?
He looked around uneasily.
Maybe there had been hands.
Apparently Tansy had not noticed anything. Her face was a white oval in the gloom. She was still humming a snatch of song. She did not ask what he had started to say.
He got up, walked unsteadily into the dining room, and poured himself a drink from the sideboard. On the way he switched on the lights.
So he couldn’t tell Tansy or anyone else about it, even if he wanted to? That was why you never heard from real witchcraft victims, he told himself, his thoughts for the moment quite out of hand, And why they never seemed able to escape, even if the means of escape were at hand. It wasn’t weak will. They were watched. Like a gangster taken on a ride from an expensive nightclub. He must excuse himself from the loud-mouthed crowd at his table and laugh heartily, and stop to chat with friends and throw a wink at the pretty girls, because right behind him are those white-scarfed trigger boys, hands in the pockets of their velvet-collared dress overcoats. No use dying now. Better play along. There might be a chance.
But that was thriller stuff, movie stuff.
So were the horny hands.
He nodded at himself in the glass above the sideboard.
Meet Professor Saylor,” he said, “the distinguished ethnologist and firm believer in real witchcraft.”
But the face in the glass did not look so much disgusted as frightened.
He mixed himself another drink, and one for Tansy, and took them into the living room.
“Here’s to wickedness,” said Tansy. “Do you realize that you haven’t been anywhere near drunk since Christmas?”
He grinned. Getting drunk was just what the movie gangster would do, to grab a moment of forgetfulness when the Big Boy had put him on the spot. And not a bad idea.
Slowly, and at first only in a melancholy minor key, the mood of the Hill returned. They talked, played old records, told jokes that were old enough to be young again. Tansy hammered at the piano and they sang a crazy assortment of songs, folk songs, hymns, national anthems, workers’ and revolutionists’ songs, blues, Brahms, Schubert — haltingly at first, later at the top of their voices.
They remembered.
And they kept on drinking.
But always, like a shimmering sphere of crystal, the alien thoughts spun in Norman’s mind. The drink made it possible for him to regard them dispassionately, without constant revulsions in the name of common sense. With the singlemindedness of inebriation, his scholar’s mind began to assemble world-wide evidence of witchcraft.
For instance, was it not likely that all self-destructive impulses were the result of witchcraft? Those universal impulses that were a direct contradiction to the laws of self-preservation and survival. To account for them, Pee had fancifully conceived an “Imp of the Perverse,” and psychoanahysts had laboriously hypothesized a “death wish.” How much simpler to attribute them to malign forces outside the individual, working by means as yet unanalyzed and therefore classified as supernatural.
His experiences during the past days could be divided into two categories. The first included those natural misfortunes and antagonisms from which Tansy’s magic had screened him. The attack on his life by Theodore Jennings should probably be placed in this category. The chances were that Jennings was actually psychopathic. He would have made his murderous attack at an earlier date, had not Tansy’s magic kept it from getting started. As soon as her protective screen was down, as soon as Norman burned the last hand, the idea had suddenly burgeoned in Jenning’s mind like a hothouse flower. Jennings had himself admitted it. “I didn’t realize it until this minute —”
Margaret Van Nice’s accusation, Thompson’s sudden burst of interest in his extracurricular activities, and Sawtelle’s chance discovery of the Cunningham thesis probably belonged in the same category.
In the second category — active and malign witchcraft, directed against himself.
“A penny for your thoughts,” offered Tansy, looking over the rim of her glass.
“I was thinking of the party last Christmas,” he replied smoothly, though in a somewhat blurred voice, “and of how Welby crawled around playing a St. Bernard, with the bearskin rug over his shoulders and the bottle of whiskey slung under his neck. And I was wondering why the best fun always seems so trite afterward. But I’d rather be trite than respectable.” He felt a childish pride in his cunning at having avoided being trapped into admission. He simultaneously thought of Tansy as a genuine witch and as a potentially neurotic individual who had to be protected at all costs from dangerous suggestions. The liquor made his mind work by parts, and the parts had no check on each other.
Things began to happen by
fits and starts. His consciousness began to black out, though in the intervals between, his thoughts went on with an exaggerated scholarly solemnity.
They were wailing “St James Infirmary.”
He was thinking: “Why shouldn’t the women be the witches? They’re the intuitionalists, the traditionalists, the irrationalists. They’re superstitious to start with. And like Tansy, most of them are probably never quite sure whether or not their witchcraft really works.”
They had shoved back the carpet and were dancing to “Chloe.” Sometime or other Tansy had changed to her rose dressing gown.
He was thinking: “In the second category, put the Estrey dragon. Animated by a human or nonhuman soul conjured into it by Mrs. Gunnison and controlled through photographs. Put also the obsidian knife, the obedient wind, and the obdurate truck.”
They were playing a record of Ravel’s “Bolero,” and he was beating out the rhythm with his fist.
He was thinking: “Business men buy stocks on the advice of fortune-tellers, numerologists rule the careers of movie stars, half the world governs its actions by astrology, advertisements bleat constantly of magic and miracles, and most modern and all surrealist art is nothing but attempted witchcraft, borrowing its forms from the primitive witchdoctor and its ideas from the modern theosophist.”
He was watching Tansy as she sang “St. Louis Blues” in a hoarsely throbbing voice. It was true, just as Welby had always maintained, that she had a genuine theatrical flair. Make a good chanteuse.
He was thinking: “Tansy stopped the Estrey dragon with the knots. But she’ll have a hard time doing anything like that again because Mrs. Gunnison has her book of formulas and can figure out ways to circumvent her.”