Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  And, by elbow and knee pressure, he had been doing some unconscious table tipping.

  Between his fingers, the phonograph needle seemed to vibrate, as if it were a tiny part of a great machine. There was a very faint suggestion of electric shock. Unbidden, the torturesome, clangorous chords of the “Ninth Sonata” began to sound in his mind. Rot! One well-known symptom of extreme nervousness is a tingling in the fingers, often painfully intense. But his throat was dry and his snort of bitter contempt sounded choked.

  He pinned the needle in the flannel for greater safety.

  Eleven forty-seven. Reaching for the gut, his fingers felt as shaky and weak as if he just climbed a hundred-foot rope hand over hand. The stuff looked normal, but it was slimy to the touch, as if it had just been dragged from the beast’s belly and twisted into shape. And for some moments he had been conscious of an acrid, almost metallic odor replacing the salt smell of the Bay. Tactual and olfactory hallucinations joining in with the visual and auditory, he told himself, He could still hear the “Ninth Sonata.”

  He knew how to tie a bowline backwards, and it should have been easier since the gut was not as stiff as it ought to be, but he felt there were other forces manipulating it or other mentalities trying to give orders to Isis fingers, so that the gut was trying to tie itself into a slipknot, a reef, a half hitch — anything but a bowline. His fingers ached, his eyes were heavy with an abnormal fatigue. He was working against a mounting inertia, a crushing inertia. He remembered Tansy telling him that night when she had confessed her witchcraft to him: “There’s a law of reaction in all conjuring — like the kick of a gun —” Eleven fifty-two.

  With a great effort, he canalized his mental energy, focused his attention only on the knot. His numb fingers began to move in an odd rhythm, a rhythm of the “Ninth Sonata,” piu vivo. The bowline was tied.

  The overhead light dimmed markedly, throwing the whole room into sooty gloom. Hysterical blindness, he told himself — and small town power systems are always going on the blink. It was very cold now, so cold that he fancied he could see his breath. And silent, terribly silent. Against that silence he could feel and hear the rapid drumming of his heart, accelerating unendurably to the thundering, swirling rhythm of the music.

  Then, in one instant of diabolic, paralyzing insight, he knew that this was sorcery. No mere puttering about with ridiculous medieval implements, no effortless sleight of hand, but a straining, back-breaking struggle to keep control of forces summoned, of which the objects he manipulated were only the symbols. Outside the walls of the room, outside the walls of his skull, outside the impalpable energy-walls of his mind, he felt those forces gathering, swelling up, dreadfully expectant, waiting for him to make a false move so that they could crush him.

  He could not believe it. He did not believe it. Yet somehow he had to believe it.

  The only question was — would he be able to stay in control?

  Eleven fifty-seven. He started to gather the objects together on the flannel. The needle jumped to the lodestone, dragging the flannel with it, and clung. It shouldn’t have; it had been a foot away. He took a pinch of graveyard dirt. Between finger and thumb, each separate particle seemed to crawl, like a tiny maggot. He sensed that something was missing. He could not remember what it was. He fumbled for the formula. A current of air was blowing the scraps of paper off the table. He sensed an eager, inward surge of the forces outside, as if they knew he was failing. He clutched at the papers, managed to pin them down. Bending close, he made out the words “platinum or iridium.” He jabbed his fountain pen against the table, broke off the nib, and added it to the other objects.

  He stood at the side of the table away from the knife that marked the east, trying to steady his shaking hands against the edge. His teeth were chattering. The room was utterly dark now except for the impossible bluish light that beat through the window shade. Surely the street light wasn’t that mercury-vapor hue.

  Abruptly the strip of flannel started to curl like a strip of heated gelatine, to roll itself up from east to west, with the sun.

  He jerked forward, got his hand inside the flannel before it closed, drew it apart — in his numb hands it seemed like metal — and rolled it up against the sun, widdershins.

  The silence was intensified. Even the sound of his beating heart was cut off. He knew that something was listening with a terrible intentness for his command, and that something was hoping with an even more terrible avidity that he would not be able to utter that command.

  Somewhere a clock was booming — or was it not a clock, but the secret sound of time? Nine — ten

  — eleven — twelve.

  His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept on choking soundlessly. It seemed to him that the walls of the room were closer to him than they had been a minute before.

  Then, in a dry, croaking voice he managed: “Stop Tansy. Bring her here.”

  Norman felt the room shake, the floor buckle and lift under his feet, as if an earthquake had visited New Jersey. Darkness became absolute. The table, or some force erupting from the table seemed to rise and strike him. He felt himself flung back onto something soft.

  Then the forces were gone. In all things, tension gave way to limpness. Sound and light returned. He was sprawled across the bed. On the table was a little flannel packet, no longer of any consequence.

  He felt as if he had been doped, or were waking after a debauch. There was no inclination to do anything. Emotion was absent.

  Outwardly everything was the same. Even his mind, with automatic rationality, could wearily take up the thankless task of explaining his experiences on a scientific basis — weaving an elaborate web in which psychosis, hallucination, and improbable coincidences were the strands.

  But inwardly something had changed, and would never change back.

  Considerable time passed.

  He heard steps mounting the stairs, then in the hall. They made a squish-squish sound, as if the shoes were soaking wet.

  They stopped outside his door.

  He crossed the room, turned the key in the lock, opened the door.

  A strand of seaweed was caught in the silver brooch. The grey suit was dark now and heavy with water, except for one spot which had started to dry and was faintly dusted with salt. The odor of the Bay was intimate and close. There was another strand of seaweed clinging to one ankle against the wrinkled stockings. Around the stained shoes, a little pool of water was forming.

  His eyes traced the wet footprints down the hall. At the head of the stairs the old clerk was standing, one foot still on the last step. He was carrying a small pigskin suitcase, waterstained.

  “What’s this all about?” he quavered, when he saw that Norman was looking at him. “You didn’t tell me you were expecting your wife. She looks like she’d thrown herself in the Bay. We don’t want anything queer happening in this hotel — anything wrong.”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Norman, prolonging the moment before he would have to look in her face. “I’m sorry I forgot to tell you. May I have the bag?”

  “— only last year we had a suicide” — the old clerk did not seem to realize he was speaking his thoughts aloud — “bad for the hotel.” His voice trailed off. He looked at Norman, gathered himself together, and came hesitatingly down the hall. When he was a few steps away, he stopped, reached out and put down the suitcase, turned, and walked rapidly away.

  Unwillingly, Norman raised his eyes until they were on a level with hers.

  The face was pale, very pale, and without expression. The lips were tinged with blue. Wet hair was plastered against the cheeks. A thick lock crossed one eye socket, like a curtain, and curled down toward the throat. One dull eye stared at him, without recognition. And no hand moved to brush the lock of hair away from the other.

  From the hem of the skirt, water was dripping.

  The lips parted. The voice had the monotonous murmur of water.

  “You were too late,” the voic
e said. “You were a minute too late.”

  15

  For a third time they had come back to the same question. Norman had the maddening sensation of following a robot that was walking in a huge endless circle and always treading on precisely the same blades of grass as it retraced its path.

  With the hopeless conviction that he would not get any further this time, he asked the question again: “But how can you lack consciousness, and at the same time know that you lack consciousness? If your mind is blank, you cannot at the same time be aware that your mind is blank.”

  The hands of his watch were creeping toward three in the morning. The chill and sickliness of night’s lowest ebb pervaded the dingy hotel room. Tansy sat stiffly, wearing Norman’s bathrobe and fleece-lined slippers, with a blanket over her knees and a bath towel wrapped around her head. They should have made her look childlike and perhaps even artlessly attractive. They did not. If you were to unwind the towel you would find the top of the skull sawed off and the brains removed, an empty bowl — that was the illusion Norman experienced every time he made the mistake of looking into her eyes.

  The pale lips parted. “I know nothing. I only speak. They have taken away my soul. But my voice is a function of my body.”

  You could not even say the voice was patiently explanatory. It was too empty and colorless even for that. The words, clearly enunciated and evenly spaced, all sounded alike. They were like the noise of a machine.

  The last thing he wanted to do was hammer questions at this stiff pitiful figure, but he felt that at all costs he must awaken some spark of feeling in the masklike face; he must find some intelligible starting point before his own mind could begin to work effectually.

  “But Tansy, if you can talk about the present situation, you must be aware of it. You’re here in this room with me!”

  The toweled head shook once, like that of a mechanical doll.

  “Nothing is here with you but a body. ‘I’ is not here.”

  His mind automatically corrected “is” to “am” before he realized that there had been no grammatical error. He trembled.

  “You mean,” he asked, “that you can see or hear nothing? That there is just a blackness?”

  Again that simple mechanical headshake, which carried more absolute conviction than the most heated protestations.

  “My body sees and hears perfectly. It has suffered no injury. It can function in all particulars. But there is nothing inside. There is not even a blackness.”

  His tired, fumbling mind jumped to the subject of behavioristic psychology and its fundamental assertion that human reactions can be explained completely and satisfactorily without once referring to consciousness — that it need not even be assumed that consciousness exists. Here was the perfect proof. And yet not so perfect, for the behavior of this body lacked every one of those little mannerisms whose sum is personality. The way Tansy used to squint when thinking through a difficult question. The familiar quirk at the corners of her mouth when she felt flattered or slyly amused. All gone. Even the quick triple headshake he knew so well, with the slight rabbity wrinkling of the nose, had become a robot’s “No.”

  Her sensory organs still responded to stimuli. They sent impulses to the brain, where they traveled about and gave rise to impulses which activated glands and muscles, including the motor organs of speech. But that was all. None of those intangible flurries we call consciousness hovered around the webwork of nervous activity in the cortex. What had imparted style — Tansy’s style, like no one else’s — to every movement and utterance of the body, was gone. There was left only a physiological organism, without sign or indication of personality. Not even a mad or an idiot soul — yes! why not use that old term now that it had an obvious specific meaning? — peered from the gray-green eyes which winked at intervals with machinelike regularity, but only to lubricate the cornea, nothing more.

  He felt a grim sort of relief go through him, now that he had been able to picture Tansy’s condition in definite terms. But the picture itself — his mind veered to the memory of a newspaper story about an old man who had kept locked in his bedroom for years the body of a young woman whom he loved and who had died of an incurable disease. He had maintained the body in an astonishing state of preservation by wax and other means, they said, had talked to it every night and morning, had been convinced that he would some day reanimate it completely — until they found out and took it away from him and buried it.

  He suddenly grimaced. Damn it all, he commented inwardly, why did he let his mind go off on these wild fancies, when it was obvious that Tansy was suffering from an unusual nervous condition, a strange self-delusion?

  Obvious?

  Wild fancies?

  “Tansy,” he asked, “when your soul went, why didn’t you die?”

  “Usually the soul lingers to the end, unable to escape, and vanishes or dies when the body dies,” the voice answered, its words as evenly spaced as if timed to a metronome. “But He Who Walks Behind was tearing at mine. There was the weight of green water against my face. I knew it was midnight. I knew you had failed. In that moment of despair, He Who Walks Behind was able to draw forth my soul. In the same moment Your Agent’s arms were about me, lifting me toward the air. My soul was close enough to know what had happened, yet not close enough to return. Its doubled anguish was the last memory it imprinted on my brain. Your Agent and He Who Walks Behind concluded that each had obtained the thing he had been sent for, so there was no struggle between them.”

  The picture created in Norman’s mind was so shockingly vivid that it seemed incredible that it could have been produced by the words of a mere physiological machine. And yet only a physiological machine could have told the story with such total restraint.

  “Is there nothing that touches you?” he asked abruptly in a loud voice, gripped by an intolerable spasm of anguish at the emptiness of her eyes. “Haven’t you a single emotion heft?”

  “Yes. One.” This time it was not a robot’s headshake, but a robot’s nod. For the first time there was a stir of feeling, a hint of motivation. The tip of a pallid tongue licked hungrily around the pale lips. “I want my soul.”

  He caught his breath. Now that he had succeeded in awakening a feeling in her, he hated it. There was something so animal about it, so like some light-sensitive worm greedily wriggling toward the sunlight.

  “I want my soul,” the voice repeated mechanically, tearing at his emotions more than any plaintive or whining accents could have done. “At the last moment, although it could not return, my soul implanted that one emotion in me. It knew what awaited it. It knew there are things that can be done to a soul. It was very much afraid.”

  He ground out the words between his teeth. “Where do you think your soul is?”

  “She has it. The woman with the small dull eyes.”

  He looked at her. Something began to pound inside him. He knew that it was rage, and for the moment he didn’t care whether it was sane rage or not.

  “Evelyn Sawtelle?” he asked huskily.

  “Yes. But it is not wise to speak of her by name.”

  His hand shot out for the phone. He had to do something definite, or lose control of himself completely.

  After a time he roused the night clerk and got the local operator.

  “Yes, sir,” came the singsong voice. “Hempnell 1284. You wish to make a person-to-person call to Evelyn Sawtelle — E-V-E-L-Y-N S-A-W-T-E-L-L-E, sir? … Will you please hang up and wait? It will take considerable time to make a connection.”

  “I want my soul. I want to go to that woman. I want to go to Hempnell.” Now that he had touched off the blind hunger in the creature facing him, it persisted. He was reminded of a phonograph needle caught in the same groove, or a mechanical toy turned on to a new track by a little push.

  “We’ll go there all right.” It was still hard for him to control his breathing. “We’ll get it back.”

  “But I must start for Hempnell soon. My clothes are
ruined by the water. I must have the maid clean and press them.”

  With a slow, even movement she got to her feet and started toward the phone.

  “But, Tansy,” he objected involuntarily, “It’s three in the morning. You can’t get a maid now.”

  “But my clothes must be cleaned and pressed. I must start for Hempnell soon.”

  The words might have been those of an obstinate woman, sulky and selfish. But they had less tone than a sleepwalker’s.

  She kept on toward the phone. Although he did not anticipate that he would do it, he shrank out of her way, pressing close against the side of the bed.

  “But even if there is a maid,” he said, “she won’t come at this hour.”

  The pallid face turned toward him incuriously. “The maid will be a woman. She will come when she hears me.”

  Then she was talking to the night clerk. “Is there a maid in the hotel? … Send her to my room… . Then ring her… . I cannot wait until morning… . I need her at once… . I cannot tell you the reason… . Thank you.”

  There was a lomig wait, while he heard faintly the repeated ringing at the other end of the line. He could imagine the sleepy, surly voice that finally answered.

  “Is this the maid? … Come at once to Room 37.” He could almost catch the indignant answer. Then

  — “Can’t you hear my voice? Don’t you realize my condition? … Yes… . Come at once.” And she replaced the phone in its cradle.

  “Tansy —” he began. His eyes were on her still and once again he found himself making a halting preamble, although he had not intended to. “You are able to hear and answer my questions?”

  “I can answer questions. I have been answering questions for three hours.”