Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  play the “Ninth Sonata” with the needle. Certainly an unused needle would have done just as well. He shrugged his shoulders.

  On an afterthought, he tore out of the big dictionary a page carrying an illustrated list of knots.

  The telephone stopped him as he was going out.

  “Oh, Professor Saylor, would you mind calling Tansy to the phone?” Mrs. Carr’s voice was very amicable.

  He repeated what he had told Mrs. Sawtelle.

  “I’m glad she’s having a rest in the country,” said Mrs. Carr. “You know, Professor Saylor, I don’t think that Tansy’s been looking so well lately. I’ve been a little worried. You’re sure she’s all right?”

  At just that moment, without any warning whatever, another voice cut in.

  “What’s the idea of checking up on me? Do you think I’m a child? I know what I’m doing!”

  “Be quiet!” said Mrs. Carr, sharply. Then in her sweet voice. “I think someone must have cut in on us. Good-by, Professor Saylor.”

  The line went dead. Norman frowned. That second voice had sounded remarkably like Evelyn Sawtelle’s.

  He picked up his suitcase and walked out.

  13

  The bus driver they pointed out to Norman in Jersey City had thick shoulders and sleepy, competent-looking eyes. He was standing by the wall, smoking a cigarette.

  “Sure, she must have been with me,” he told Norman after thinking a moment. “A pretty woman, on the small side, in a gray dress, with a silver brooch like you mentioned. One suitcase. Light pigskin. I figured her out as going to see someone who was very sick or had been in an accident, maybe.”

  Norman curbed his impatience. If it had not beers for the hour-and-a-half delay outside Jersey City, his train would have been here well ahead of the bus, instead of twenty minutes behind it.

  He said, “I want, if possible, to get a line on where she went after she left your bus. The men at the desk can’t help me.”

  The driver looked at Norman. But he did not say, “Whatcha wanta know for?” — for which Norman was grateful. He seemed to decide that Norman was okay.

  He said, “I can’t be sure, mister, but there was a local bus going down the shore. I think she got on that.”

  “Would it stop at Bayport?”

  The driver nodded.

  “How long since it left?”

  “About twenty minutes.”

  “Could I get to Bayport ahead of it? If I took a cab?”

  “Just about. If you wanted to pay the bill there and back — and maybe a little extra — I think Alec could take you.” He waved casually at a man sitting in a cab just beyond the station. “Mind you, mister,

  I can’t say for certain she got on the shore bus.”

  “That’s all right. Thanks a lot.”

  In the glow of the street lamp Alec’s foxy eyes were more openly curious than the bus driver’s, but he did not make any comments.

  “I can do it,” he said cheerfully, “but we haven’t any time to waste. Jump in.”

  The shore highway led through lonely stretches of marsh and wasteland. Occasionally Norman caught the sibilant rustle of the leagues of tall stiff seagrass, and amid the chemical stenches of industry, a brakish tang from the dark inlets crossed by long low bridges. The odor of the Bay.

  Indistinctly he made out factories, oil refineries, and scattered houses.

  They passed three or four busses without Alec making any comment, He was paying close attention to the road.

  After a long while Alec said, “That should be her.”

  A constellation of red and green taillights was vanishing over the rise ahead.

  “About three miles to Bayport,” he continued. “What shall I do?”

  “Just get to Bayport a little ahead of her, and stop at the bus station.”

  “Okay.”

  They overtook the bus and swung around it. The windows were too high for Norman to see any of the occupants. Besides, the interior lights were out.

  As they drew ahead, Alec nodded confirmingly, “That’s her, all right.”

  The bus station at Bayport was also the railway depot. Vaguely Norman remembered the loosely planked platform, the packed cinders between it and the railway tracks. The depot was smaller and dingier than he recalled, though it still boasted the grotesque ornamental carpentry of the days when Bayport had been a summer resort for New York’s rich. The windows of the depot were dark but there were several ears and a lone local cab drawn up and there were some men standing around talking in low voices and a couple of soldiers, from Fort Monmouth on nearby Sandy Hook, he supposed.

  He had time to scent the salt air, with its faint and not unpleasant trace of fishiness. Then the bus pulled in.

  Several passengers stepped down, looking around to spot the people waiting for them.

  Tansy was the third. She was staring straight ahead. She was carrying the pigskin suitcase.

  “Tansy,” he said.

  She did not look at him. He noted a large black stain on her right hand, and remembered the spilled ink on his study table.

  “Tansy!” he said. “‘Tansy!”

  She walked straight past him, so close that her sleeve brushed his.

  Tansy, what’s the matter with you?”

  He had turned and hurried after her. She was headed for the local cab. He was conscious of a silence and of curious unfriendly glances. They made him angry.

  She did not slacken her pace. He grabbed her elbow and pulled her around. He heard a remonstratory murmur behind him.

  “Tansy, stop acting this way! Tansy!”

  Her face looked frozen. She stared past him without a hint of recognition in her eyes.

  That infuriated him. He did not pause to think. Accumulated tensions prodded him into an explosion. He grabbed both elbows and shook her. She still looked past him, completely aloof — a perfect picture of an aristocratic woman enduring brutality. If she had yelled and fought him, the men might not have interfered.

  He was jerked back.

  “Lay off her!”

  “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  She stood there, with maddening composure. He noticed a scrap of paper flutter out of her hand. Then her eyes met his and he seemed to see fear in them; then he felt a slight, queer shock, as if something had passed from her eyes to his; simultaneously with that and with the pricking of his scalp, there seemed to rise up behind her, but for one moment only, a shaggy black form twice her height, with hulking shoulders, outstretched massive hands, and dully glowing eyes.

  For one moment only, though. When she turned away, she was alone. Though he did fancy that her shadow to the planking was swollen out and shot up to a size that the position of the street lamp would not account for. Then they swung him around and he could no longer see her.

  In a queer sort of daze — for the kind of hallucination he had just experienced mixes badly with any other emotion — he listened to them jabber at him.

  “I ought to take a crack at you,” he finally heard someone say.

  “All right,” he replied in a fiat voice. “They’re holding my hands.”

  He heard Alec’s voice. “Say, what’s going on here?” Alec sounded cautious, but not unfriendly, as if he were thinking. “The guy’s my fare, but I don’t know anything about him.”

  One of the soldiers spoke. “Where’s the lady? She doesn’t seem to be making any complaint.”

  “Yeah, where is she?”

  “She got in Jake’s cab and drove off,” someone volunteered.

  “Maybe he had a good reason for what he did,” said the soldier.

  Norman felt the attitude of the crowd change.

  One of the men holding him retorted, “Nobody’s got a right to treat a lady that way.” But the other slackened his grip and asked Norman, “How about it? Did you have a reason for doing that?”

  “I did. But it’s my business.”

  He heard a woman’s voice, high-pitched, “A lot of fuss ov
er nothing!” and a man’s, richly sardonic, “Mix in family quarrels — !”

  Crumbling, the two men let him go.

  “But mind you,” said the more belligerent one, “if she’d stuck around and complained, I’d sure have taken a crack at you.”

  “All right,” said Norman, “in that case you would have.” His eyes were searching for the scrap of paper.

  “Can anyone tell me the address she gave the cab driver?” he asked at random.

  One or two shook their heads. The others ignored the question. Their feelings toward him had not changed enough to make them cooperative. And very likely, in the excitement, no one had heard,

  Silently the little crowd drifted apart. People waited until they got out of earshot before beginning to argue about what had happened. Most of the cars drove off. The two soldiers wandered over to the benches in front of the depot, so they could sit down while they waited for their bus or train. Norman was alone except for Alec.

  He located the scrap of paper in one of the slots between the worn planks. It had almost slipped through.

  He took it over to the cab and studied it.

  He heard Alec say, “Well, where do we go nosy?” Alec sounded dubious.

  He glanced at his watch. Ten thirty-five. Not quite an hour and a half until midnight. There were a lot of things he could do to try and find Tansy, hut he could not do more than a couple of them in that time. His thoughts moved sluggishly, almost painfully, as if that awful thing he had seemed to see behind Tansy had hurt his brain.

  He looked around at the dim buildings. The seaward halves of some of the street lamps still showed traces of black paint from the old wartime dimout. Up a side street there were signs of life. He looked at the scrap of paper.

  He thought of Tansy. He thought hard. It was all a question of what might help her most, of what his deepest loyalty to her must now direct him to do. Of course he could go chasing up and down along the shore, along the railroad tracks, though Lord knew to what point the taxi had taken her. He might be able to locate the old pier where they’d gone swimming and try waiting there, Or he could wait for the taxi she’d taken to come back. And he might go to the police, convince them if he could that his wife intended suicide, get them to help him search.

  But he also thought of other things. He thought of her confession of witchcraft, of how he had burned the last “hand,” of the sudden telephone calls from Theodore Jennings and Margaret Van Nice, of the flurry of ill-will and undesired revelations that had stuck him at the college. He thought of Jennings’ asinine attempt on his life, of the recording of a bull-roarer, the photograph of a dragon, and the stick-figure of tarot cards. He thought of the death of Totem, of the seven-branched lightning bolt, of his sudden attack of accident-proneness and suicidal fancies. He thought of the hallucination he had had, while drunk, of something gripping his shoulder and shutting off his speech. He thought of the hallucination he had had just now of something behind Tansy. He thought hard.

  He looked again at the scrap of paper.

  He came to a decision.

  “I think there’s a hotel on the main street,” he told Alec. “You can drive me there.”

  14

  “Eagle Hotel” read the black-edged gold letters on the plateglass window, behind which the narrow lobby with its halfdozen empty chairs was nakedly revealed.

  He told Alec to wait, and took a room for the night. The clerk was an old man in a shiny blue coat. Norman saw from the register that no one else had checked in recently. He carried his bag up to the room and immediately returned to the lobby.

  “I haven’t been here for ten years,” he told the clerk. “I believe there is a cemetery about five blocks down the street, away from the Bay?”

  The old man’s sleepy eyes blinked wide open.

  “Bayport Cemetery? Just three blocks, and then a block and a half to the left. But —” He made a vague questioning noise in his throat.

  “Thank you,” said Norman.

  After a moment’s thought, he paid off Alec, who took the money and with obvious relief kicked his cab into life. Norman walked down the main street, away from the Bay.

  After the first block there were no more stores. In this direction, Bayport petered out quickly. Most of the houses were dark. And after he turned left there were no more street lights.

  The gates of the cemetery were locked. He felt his way along the wall, behind the masking shrubbery, trying to make as little noise as possible, until he found a scrubby tree whose lowest branch could bear his weight. He got his hands on the top of the wall, scrambled up, and cautiously let himself down on the other side.

  Behind the wall it was very dark. There was a rustling sound, as if he had disturbed some small animal. More by feeling than sight he located a headstone. It was a thin one, worn, mossy toward the base, and tilted at an angle. Probably from the middle of last century. He dug into the earth with his hand, and filled an envelope he took from his pocket.

  He got back over the wall, making what seemed a great deal of noise in the shrubbery. But the street was empty as before.

  On his way back to the hotel he looked up at the sky, located the Pole Star, and calculated the orientation of his room.

  As he crossed the lobby, he felt the curious gaze of the old clerk boring into him.

  His room was in darkness. Chill salt air was pouring through the open window. He knocked the door, shut the window, pulled down the blind, and switched on the light — a glaring overhead which revealed the room in all its dingy severity. A cradle phone struck the sole modern note.

  He took the envelope out of his pocket and weighed it in his hand. His lips curled in a peculiarly bitter smile. Then he re-read the scrap of paper tlsat had fluttered from Tansy’s hand.

  A small quantity of graveyard dirt and wrap all in a piece of flannel, wrapping widdershins. Tell it to stop me. Tell it to bring me to you.

  Graveyard dirt. That was what he had found in Tansy’s dressing table. It had been the beginning of all this. Now he was fetching it himself.

  He looked at his watch. Eleven twenty.

  He cleared the small table and set it in the center of the room, jabbing in his penknife to mark the edge facing east. “Widdershins” meant “against the sun” — from west to east.

  He placed the necessary ingredients on the table, cutting a short strip of flannel from the hem of his bathrobe, and fitted together the four sections of Tansy’s note. The distasteful, bitter smile did not leave his lips.

  Taken together, the significant portions of the note read:

  Take four lengths of four-inch white cord and a length of gut, a bit of platinum or iridium, a piece of lodestone, a phonograph needle that has only played Seriabin’s “Ninth Sonata.” Tie the four white cords into a granny, a reel, a cat’s-paw, and a carrick bend. Tie the gut in a bowline. Add a small quantity of graveyard dirt, and wrap it all in a piece of flannel, wrapping widdershins. Tell it to stop me. Tell it to bring me to you.

  In general outline, it was similar to a hundred recipes for Negro tricken-bags he had seen or been told about. The phonograph needle, the knots, and one or two other items were obvious “white” additions.

  And it was all on the same level as the mental operations of a child or neurotic adult who religiously steps on, or avoids sidewalk cracks.

  A clock outside bonged the half-hour.

  Norman sat there looking at the stuff. ft was hard for him to begin. It would have been different, he told himself, if he were doing it for a joke or a thrill, or if he were one of those people who dope up their minds with morbid supernaturalism — who like to play around with magic because it’s medieval and because illuminated manuscripts look pretty. But to tackle it in dead seriousness, to open your mind deliberately to superstition — that was to join hands with the forces pushing the world back into the dark ages, to cancel the term “science” out of the equation.

  But, behind Tansy, he had seen that thing. Of course it had been an hallu
cination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, with a score of coincidences to back them up, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way —

  No, more than that. When you must keep faith with someone you love. He reached out for the first length of cord and tied the ends together in a granny.

  When he came to the cat’s-paw, he had to consult the page he had torn from the dictionary. After a couple of false starts he managed it.

  But on the carrick bend he was all thumbs. It was a simple knot but no matter how he went about it, he could not get it to look like the illustration. Sweat broke out on his forehead. “Very close in the room,” he told himself. “I’m still overheated from rushing about.” The skin on his fingertips felt an inch thick. The ends of the cord kept eluding them. He remembered how Tansy’s fingers had rippled through the knots.

  Eleven forty-one. The phonograph needle started to roll off the table. He dropped the cord and laid the phonograph needle against his fountain pen, so it would not roll. Then he started again on the knot.

  For a moment he thought he must have picked up the gut, the cord seemed so stiff and unresponsive. Incredible what nervousness can do to you, he told himself. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with difficulty.

  Finally, by keeping his eyes on the illustration and imitating it step for step, he managed to tie a carrick bend. All the while he felt as if there were more between his fingers than a cord, as if he were manipulating against a great inertia. Just as he finished, he felt a slight prickly chill, like the onset of fever, and the light overhead seemed to dim a trifle. Eyestrain.

  The phonograph needle was rolling in the opposite direction, spinning faster and faster. He slapped his hand down on it, missed it, slapped again, caught it at the edge of the table.

  Just like Ouija board, he told himself. You try to keep your fingers, poised on the planchette, perfectly motionless. As a result, muscular tensions accumulate. They reach the breaking point. Seemingly without any volition on your part, the planchette begins to roll and skid about on its three little legs, traveling from letter to letter. Same thing here. Nervous and muscular tensions made it difficult for him to tie knots. Obeying a universal tendency, he projected the difficulty into the cord.