Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  They were sharing a highball that would have burned his throat if his throat had not been numb, and he seemed to be getting most of it.

  He was thinking: “The stick figure of the man and the truck is the key to a group of related sorceries. Cards began as instruments of magic, like art. These sorceries aim at finishing me off. The bull-roarer acts as an amplifier. The invisible thing standing behind me, with the flat voice and heavy hands, is a guardian, to see to it that I do not deviate from the path appointed. Narrow corridor. Two weeks more.”

  The strange thing was that these thoughts were not altogether unpleasant. They had a wild, black, poisonous beauty of their own, a lovely, deadly shimmer. They possessed the fascination of the impossible, the incredible. They hinted at unimaginable vistas. Even while they terrorized, they did not lose that chillingly poignant beauty. They were like the visions conjured up by some forbidden drug. They had the lure of an unknown sin and an ultimate blasphemy. Norman could understand the force that compelled the practitioners of black magic to take any risk.

  His drunkenness made him feel safe. It had broken his mind down into its ultimate particles, and those particles were incapable of fear because they could not be injured. Just as the atoms in a man are not slain by the bullet that slays him.

  But now the particles were whirling crazily. Consciousness was wavering.

  He and Tansy were in each other’s arms.

  Tansy was asking eagerly, coaxingly, “All that’s mine is yours? All that’s yours is mine?”

  The question awakened a suspicion in his mind, but he could not grasp it clearly. Something made him think that the words held a trap. But what trap? His thoughts stumbled.

  She was saying — it sounded like the Bible — “And I have drunk from your cup and you have drunk from mine —”

  Her face was a blurred oval, her eyes like misty jewels.

  “Everything you have is mine? You give it to me without hindrance and of your own free choice?”

  Somewhere a trap.

  But the voice was irresistibly coaxing, like caressing fingers.

  “All you have is mine? Just say it once, Norm, just once. For me.”

  Of course he loved her. Better than anything in the world. He drew the blurred face toward him, tried to kiss the misty eyes.

  “Yes… yes… everything —” he heard himself saying.

  And then his mind toppled and plunged down into a fathomless ocean of darkness and silence and peace.

  12

  Sunlight made a bright, creamy design on the drawn blind. Filtered sunlight filled the bedroom, like a coolly glowing liquid. The birds were chirruping importantly. Norman closed his eyes again and stretched luxuriously.

  Let’s see, it was about time he got started on that article for The American Anthropologist. And there was still some work to do on the revision of his Textbook of Ethnology. Lots of time, but better get it out of the way. And he ought to have a serious talk with Bronstein about his thesis. That boy had some good ideas, but he needed a balance wheel. And then his address to the Offcampus Mothers. Might as well tell them something useful… .

  Eyes still closed, he enjoyed that most pleasant of all sensations — the tug of work a man likes to do and is able to do well, yet that needn’t be done immediately.

  For today was certainly too good a day for golf to miss. Might see what Gunnison was doing. And then he and Tansy had not made an expedition into the country this whole spring. He’d talk to her about it, at breakfast. Saturday breakfast was an event. She must be getting it ready now. He felt as if a shower would make him very hungry. Must be late.

  He opened one eye and focused the bedroom clock. Twelve thirty-five? Say, just when had he got to bed last night? What had he been doing?

  Memory of the past few days uncoiled like a spring, so swiftly that it started his heart pounding. Yet there was a difference now in his memories. From the very first moment they all seemed incredible and unreal. He had the sensation of reading the very detailed case-history of another person, a person with a lot of odd ideas about witchcraft, suicide, persecution, and what not else. His memories could not be made to fit with his present sense of well-being. What was stranger, they did not seriously disturb that sense of well-being.

  He searched his mind diligently for traces of supernatural fear, of the sense of being watched and guarded, of that monstrous self-destructive impulse. He could not discover or even suggest to himself the slightest degree of such emotions. Whatever they had been, they were now part of the past, beyond the reach of everything except intellectual memory. “Spheres of alien thought!” Why, the very notion was bizarre. And yet somehow it had all happened. Something had happened.

  His movements had automatically taken him under the shower. And now, as he soaped himself and the warm water cascaded down, he wondered if he ought not to talk it over with Holstrom of psychology or a good practicing psychiatrist. The mental contortions he’d gone through in the past few days would provide material for a whole treatise! But feeling as sound as he did this morning, it was impossible for him to entertain any ideas of serious mental derangement. No. what had happened was just one of those queer, inexplicable spasms of irrationality that can seize the sanest peopic, perhaps because they are so sane — a kind of discharge of long-inhibited morbidity. Too bad, though, that he had bothered Tansy with it, even though it was her own little witchcraft complex, now happily conquered, that had touched it off. Poor kid, she had been working hard to cheer him up last night. It ought to have been the other way around. Well, he would make it up to her.

  He shaved leisurely and with enjoyment. The razor behaved perfectly.

  As he finished dressing, a doubt struck him. Again he searched his mind, closing his eyes like a man listening for an almost inaudible sound.

  Nothing. Not the faintest trace of any morbid fears.

  He was whistling as he pushed into the kitchen.

  There was no sign of breakfast. Beside the sink were some unwashed glasses, empty bottles, and an ice tray filled with tepid water.

  “Tansy!” he called. “Tansy!”

  He walked through the house, with the vague apprehension that she might have passed out before getting to bed. They’d been drinking like fish. He went out to the garage and made sure that the car was still there. Maybe she’d walked to the grocer’s to get something for breakfast. But he began to hurry as he went back into the house.

  This time when he looked in the study he noticed the upset ink bottle, and the scrap of paper just beside it on the edge of the drying black pool. The message had come within an inch of being engulfed.

  It was a hurried scrawl — twice the pen point had gouged through the paper — and it broke off in the middle of a sentence, but it was undeniably in Tansy’s handwriting.

  For a moment it isn’t watching me. I didn’t realize it would be too strong for me. Not two weeks — two days! Don’t try to follow me. Only chance is to do exactly what I tell you. Take four four-inch white

  His eyes traced the smear going out from the black pool and ending in the indistinct print of a hand, and involuntarily his imagination created a scene. Tansy had been scribbling desperately, stealing quick glances over her shoulder. Then it had awakened to what she was doing and roughly struck the pen out of her hand, and shakers her. He recalled the grip of those huge horny hands, and winced. And then… then she had got together her things, very quietly although there was little chance of him awakening, and she had walked out of the house and down the street. And if she met anyone she knew, she had talked to them gayly, and laughed, because it was behind her, waiting for any false move, any attempt at escape.

  So she had gone.

  He wonted to run out into the street and shout her name, but the pool of ink had dried to glistening black flakes all around the margin. It must have been spilled hours ago. Where had she gone, in the night?

  Anywhere. Wherever the narrow corridor ended for her, no longer two weeks but only two days lon
g.

  In a flash of insight he understood why. If he hadn’t been drunk last night, he would have guessed.

  One of the oldest and best-established types of conjuration in the world. Transference of evils. Like the medicine man who conjures sickness into a stone, or into an enemy, or into himself — because he is better able to combat it — she had taken his curse upon herself. Shared his drink last night, shared his food. Used a thousand devices to bring them together. It was all so obvious! He racked his brain to recover those last words she had said. “Everything you have is mine? All you have is mine?”

  She had meant the doom that had been laid on him.

  And he had said, “Yes.”

  Wait a minute! ‘What the devil was he letting himself think? He raised his eyes to the shelves of soberly bound books. Why, here he was giving way to the same sort of rot he’d been weakly toying with the past few days — now when something serious was at stake. No, no, there was nothing supernatural in this — no it, no guardian except a figment of his and her neurotic nerves. What had happened was that he had suggested all this nonsense to her. He had forced upon her the products of his own morbid imagination. Undoubtedly he had babbled nonsense to her while he was drunk. All his childish fancies. And it had worked on her suggestible nature — she already believing in witchcraft — until she had got the idea of transferring his doom to herself, and had convinced herself that the transference had actually occurred, And then gone off, God knows where.

  And that was bad enough.

  He found himself looking again at the scrawled message. He automatically asked himself, ‘Now what the devil are ‘four-inch whites’?”

  There was a light chime from the front door. He extracted a letter from the mailbox, ripped it open. It was addressed with a soft pencil and the graphite had smeared. But he knew the handwriting.

  The message was so jerky and uneven that he was some time reading it. It began and ended in the middle of a sentence.

  cords — and a length of gut, a bit of platinum or iridium, a piece of lodestone, a phonograph needle that has only played Scriabin’s “Ninth Sonata” Then tie —

  “Cords.” Of course!

  That was all. A continuation of the first message, with its bizarre formula. Had she really convinced herself that there was a guardian watching her, and that she could only communicate during the infrequent moments when she imagined its attention was elsewhere? He knew the answer. When you had an obsession you could convince yourself of anything.

  He looked at the postmark. He recognized the name of a town several miles east of Hempnell. He could not think of a soul they knew there, or anything else about the town. His first impulse was to get out the car and rush over. But what could he do when he got there?

  He looked again. The phone was ringing. It was Evelyn Sawtelle.

  “Is that you, Norman? Please ask Tansy to come to the phone. I wish to speak to her.”

  “I’m sorry, but she isn’t in.”

  Evelyn Sawtelle did not sound surprised at the answer — her second question came too quickly. “Where is she then? I must get in touch with her.”

  He thought. “She’s out in the country,” he said, “visiting some friends of ours. Is there something I can tell her?”

  “No, I wish to speak to Tansy. What is your friend’s number?”

  “They don’t have a phone!” he said angrily.

  “No? Well, it’s nothing of importance.” She sounded oddly pleased, as if his anger had given her satisfaction. “I’ll call again. I must hurry now. Hervey is so busy with his new responsibilities. Good-by.”

  He replaced the phone. Now, why the devil — Suddenly an explanation occurred to him. Perhaps Tansy had been seen leaving town, and Evelyn Sawtelle had scented the possibility of some sort of scandal and had wanted to check. Perhaps Tansy had been carrying a suitcase.

  He looked in Tansy’s dressing room. The small suitcase was gone. Drawers were open. It looked as if she had packed in a hurry. But what about money? He examined his billfold. It was empty. Forty-odd dollars missing.

  You could go a long way on forty dollars. The jerky illegibility of the message suggested that it had been written on a train or bus.

  The next few hours were very miserable ones for Norman. He checked schedules and found that several busses and trains passed through the town from which Tansy’s letter had been sent. He drove to the stations and made guarded inquiries, with no success.

  He wanted to do all the things you should do when someone disappears, but he held back. What could he say? “My wife, sir, has disappeared. She is suffering from the delusion that —” And what if she should be found and questioned in her present state of mind, examined by a doctor, before he could get to her?

  No, this was something for him to handle alone. But if he did not soon get a clue to where she had gone, he would have no choice. He would have to go to the police, inventing some story to cover the facts.

  She had written, “Two days.” If she believed that she were doomed to die in two days, might not the belief be enough?

  Toward evening he drove back to the house, repressing the chimerical hope that she had returned in his absence. The special delivery man was just getting into his car. Norman pulled up alongside.

  “Anything for Saylor?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s in the box.”

  The message was longer this time, but just as difficult to read.

  At last its attention is somewhere else. If I control my emotions, it isn’t so quick to notice my thoughts. But it was hard for me to post the last letter, Norman, you must do what I tell you. The two days end Sunday midnight.

  Then the Bay. You must follow all directions. Tie the four cords into a granny, a reef, a cat’s paw, and a carrick bend. Tie the gut in a bowline. Then add —

  He looked at the postmark. The place was two hundred miles east. Not on the railroad lines, as far as he could recall. That should narrow down the possibilities considerably.

  One word from the letter was repeating itself in his mind, like a musical note struck again and again until it becomes unendurable.

  Bay. Bay. Bay. Bay.

  The memory came of a hot afternoon years ago. It was just before they were married. They were sitting on the edge of a ramshackle little pier. He remembered the salt, fishy smell and the splintery, grey old planks.

  “Funny,” she had said, looking into the green water, “but I always used to think that I’d end up down there. Not that I’m afraid of it. I’ve always swum way out. But even when I was a little girl I’d look at the Bay — maybe green, maybe blue, maybe gray, covered with whitecaps, glittering with moonbeams or shrouded by fog — and I’d think, ‘Tansy, the Bay is going to get you, but not for years and years.’ Funny isn’t it?”

  And he had laughed and put his arms around her tight, and the green water had gone on lapping at the piles trousered with seaweed.

  He had been visiting with her family, when her father was still alive, at their home near Bayport on the southern shore of New York Bay.

  The narrow corridor ended for her in the Bay, tomorrow night, midnight.

  She must be headed for the Bay.

  He made several calls — first bus lines, then railroad and air. It was impossible to get a reservation on the airlines, but tonight’s train would get him into Jersey City an hour ahead of the bus she must be traveling on, according to the deductions he made from the place and time of the postmarks.

  He knew he had ample time to pack a few things, cash a check on his way to the station.

  He spread her three notes on the table — one in pen, the two in pencil. He reread the crazy incomplete formula.

  He frowned. Would a scientist neglect the millionth-and-one possibility? Would the commander of a trapped army disdain a stratagem just because it was not in the books? This stuff looked like gibberish. Yesterday it might have meant something to him emotionally. Today it was just nonsense. But tomorrow night it might conceivably represen
t a fantastic last chance.

  But to compromise with magic?

  “Norman, you must do what I tell you.” The words stared at him.

  After all, he might need the junk to pacify her if he found her in a near-insane state.

  He went into the kitchen and got a ball of white twine.

  He rummaged in the closet for his squash racket and cut out the two center strings. That ought to do for gut.

  The fire place had not been cleaned since the stuff from Tansy’s dressing table had been burned. He poked around the edges until he found a bit of blackened rock that attracted a needle. Lodestone.

  He located the recording of Scriabin’s “Ninth Sonata” and started the phonograph, putting in a new needle. He glanced at his wrist watch and paced the room restlessly. Gradually the music took hold of him. It was not pleasant music. There was something tantalizing and exasperating about it, with its droning melody and rocking figures in the base and shakes in the treble and elaborate ornamentation that writhed up and down the piano keyboard. It rasped the nerves.

  He began to remember things he had heard about it. Hadn’t Tansy told him that Scriabin had called his “Ninth Sonata” a “Black Mass” and had developed an antipathy to playing it? Scriabin, who had conceived a color organ and tried to translate mysticism into music and died of a peculiar lip infection. An innocent-faced Russian with a huge curling mustache. Critical phrases Tansy had repeated to him floated through his mind. “The poisonous ‘Ninth Sonata’ — the most perfidious piece of music ever conceived —” Ridiculous! How could music be anything but an abstract pattern of tones?

  And yet while listening to the thing, one could think differently. Faster and faster it went. The lovely second theme became infected, was distorted into something raucous and discordant — a march of the damned — a dance of the damned — breaking off suddenly when it had reached an unendurable pitch. Then a repetition of the droning first theme, ending on a soft yet grating note low in the keyboard.

  He removed the needle, sealed it in an envelope, and packed it along with the rest of his stuff. Only then did he ask himself why, if he were gathering this junk merely to pacify Tansy, he had bothered to