Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  But — logic prompted wearily — if she can remember what has been happening these last three hours, then surely — And yet, what is memory but a track worn in the nervous system? In order to explain memory you don’t need to bring in consciousness.

  Quit banging your head against that stone wall, you fool! — came another inward prompting. You’ve looked in her eyes. haven’t you? Well, then, get on with it!

  “Tansy,” he asked, “When you say that Evelyn Sawtelle has your soul, what do you mean?”

  “Just that.”

  “Don’t you mean that she, and Mrs. Carr and Mrs. Gunnison too, have some sort of psychological power over you, that they hold you in a kind of emotional bondage?”

  “No.”

  “But your soul —”

  “— is my soul.”

  “Tansy.” He hated to bring up this subject, but he felt he must. “Do you believe that Evelyn Sawtelle is a witch, that she is going through the motions of practicing witchcraft, just as you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mrs. Carr and Mrs. Gunnison?”

  “They too.”

  “You mean you believe they’re doing the same things that you did — laying spells and making charms, making use of their husbands’ special knowledge, trying to protect their husbands and advance their careers?”

  “They go further.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They use black magic as well as white. They don’t care if they hurt or torment or kill.”

  “Why are they different in that way?”

  “Witches are like people. There are the sanctimonious, self-worshipping, self-deceiving ones, the ones who believe their ends justify any means.”

  “Do you believe that all three of them are working together against you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they hate me.”

  “Why?”

  “Partly they hate me because of you and what your advancement might do to their husbands and themselves. But more than that, they hate me because they sense that my inmost standards are different from theirs. They sense that, though I conform on the surface, I do not really worship respectability. Witches, you see, are apt to have the same gods as people. They fear me because I do not bow down to Hempnell. Though Mrs. Carr, I think, has an additional reason.”

  “Tansy,” he began and hesitated. “Tansy, how do you think it happens that these three women are witches?”

  “It happens.”

  There was a silence in the room then, as Norman’s thoughts dully revolved around the topic of paranoia. Then, “But Tansy,” he said with an effort, “don’t you see what that implies? The idea that all women are witches.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how can you ever —”

  “Ssh.” There was no more expression to the sound than an escape of steam from a radiator, but it shut up Norman. “She is coming.”

  “Who?”

  “The maid. Hide, and I will show you something.”

  “Hide?”

  “Yes.” She came toward him and he involuntarily backed away from her. His hand touched a door. “The closet?” he asked, wetting his lips.

  “Yes. Hide there, and I will prove something to you.”

  Norman heard footsteps in the hall. He hesitated a moment, frowning, then did as she asked him.

  “I’ll leave the door a little ajar,” he said. “See, like this.”

  The robot nod was his only answer.

  There was a tapping at the door, Tansy’s footsteps, the sound of the door opening.

  “Y’ast for me, ma’am?” Contrary to his expectations, the voice was young. It sounded as if she had swallowed as she spoke.

  “Yes, I want you to clean and press some things of mine. They’ve been in salt water. They’re hanging on the edge of the bathtub. Go and get them.”

  The maid came into his line of vision. She would be fat in a few years, he thought, but she was handsome now, though puffed with sleep. She had pulled on a dress, but her feet were in slippers and her hair was snarly.

  “Be careful with the suit. It’s wool,” came Tansy’s voice, sounding just as toneless as when it had been directed at him. “And I want them promptly at nine o’clock.”

  Norman half expected to hear an objection to this unreasonable request, but there was none. The girl said, “All rightie, ma’am,” and walked rapidly out of the bathroom, the damp clothes hurriedly slung over one arm, as if her one object were to get away before she was spoken to again.

  “Wait a moment, girl. I want to ask you a question.” The voice was somewhat louder this time. That was the only change, but it had a startling effect of command.

  The girl hesitated, then swung around unwillingly, and Norman got a good look at her face. He could not see Tansy — the closet door just cut her off — but he could see the fear come to the surface of the girl’s sleep-creased face.

  “Yes, ma’am?” she managed.

  There was a considerable pause. He could tell from the way the girl shrank, hugging the damp clothes tight to her body, that Tansy had lifted her eyes and was looking at her.

  Finally: “You know The Easy Way to Do Things? The Ways to Get and Guard?”

  Norman could have sworn that the girl gave a start at the second phrase. But she only shook her head quickly, and mumbled, “No, Ma’am, I… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You mean you never learned How to Make Wishes Work? You don’t conjure, or spell, or hex? You don’t know the Art?”

  This time the “No” was almost inaudible. The girl was trying to look away and failing.

  “I think you are lying.”

  The girl twisted, hands tightly clutching her overlapping arms. She looked so frightened that Norman wanted to go out and stop it. but curiosity held him rigid.

  The girl’s resistance broke. “Please, ma’am, we’re not supposed to tell.”

  “You may tell me. What Procedures do you use?”

  The girl’s perplexity at the new word looked real.

  “I don’t know anything about that, ma’am. I don’t do much. Like when my boyfriend was in the army, I did things to keep him from getting shot or hurt, and I’ve spelled him so that he’ll keep away from other women. And I kin annernt with erl for sickness. Honest, I don’t do much, ma’am. And it don’t always work. And lots of things I can’t get that way.” Her words had begun to run away with her.

  “Very well. Where did you learn to do this?”

  “Some I learned from Ma when I was a kid. And some from Mrs. Neidel — she got spells against bullets from her grandmother who had a family in some European war way back. But most women won’t tell you anything. And some spells I kind of figure out myself, and try different ways until they work. You won’t tell on me, ma’am?”

  “No. Look at me now. What has happened to me?”

  “Honest, Ma’am, I don’t know. Please, don’t make me say it.” The girl’s terror and reluctance were so obviously genuine that Norman felt a surge of anger at Tansy. Then he remembered that the thing beyond the door was incapable of either cruelty or kindness.

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “I don’t know how to say it, ma’am. But you’re… you’re dead.” Suddenly she threw herself at Tansy’s feet. “Oh, please, please, don’t take my soul! Please!”

  “I would not take your soul. You would get much the best of that bargain. You may go away now.”

  “Oh, thank you, thank you.” The girl hastily gathered up the scattered clothes. “I’ll have them all ready for you at nine o’clock. Really I will.” And she hurried out.

  Only when he moved, did Norman realize that his muscles were stiff and aching from those few taut minutes of peering. The robed and toweled figure was sitting in exactly the same position as when he had last seen it, hands loosely folded, eyes still directed toward where the girl had been standing.

  “If you knew all this,” he asked simply,
his mind in a kind of trance from what he had witnessed, “why were you willing to stop last week when I asked you?”

  “There are two sides to every woman.” It might have been a mummy dispensing elder wisdom. “One is rational, like a man. The other knows. Men are artificially isolated creatures like islands in a sea of magic, protected by their rationality and by the devices of their women. Their isolation gives them greater forcefulness in thought and action, but the women know. Women might be able to rule the world openly, but they do not want the work or the responsibility. And men might learn to excel them in the Art. Even now there may still be male sorcerers, but very few.

  “Last week I suspected much that I did not tell you. But the rational side is strong in me, and I wanted to be close to you in all ways. Like many women, I was not certain, And when I destroyed my charms and guards, I became temporarily blind to sorcery. Like a person used to large doses of a drug, I was uninfluenced by small doses. Rationality was dominant. I enjoyed a few days of false security. Then rationality itself proved to me that you were the victim of sorcery. And during my journey here I learned much, partly from what He Who Walks Behind let slip.” She paused and added, with the blank innocent cunning of a child, “Shall we go back to Hempnell now?”

  The phone rang. It was the night clerk, almost incoherent in his agitation, babbling threateningly about police and eviction. To pacify him, Norman had to promise to come down at once.

  The old man was waiting at the foot of the stairs.

  “Look here, mister,” he began, shaking a finger, “I want to know what’s going on. Just now Sissy came down from your room white as a sheet. She wouldn’t tell me anything, but she was trembling like all get-out. Sissy’s my granddaughter. I got her this job, and I’m responsible for her.

  “I know what hotels are. I’ve worked in ‘em all my life. And I know the kind of people that come to them — sometimes men and women working together — and I know the kind of things they try to do to young girls.

  “Now I’m not saying anything against you, mister. But it was might queer the way your wife came here. I thought when she asked me to call Sissy that she was sick or something. But if she’s sick, why haven’t you called a doctor? And what are you doing still up at four? Mrs. Thompson in the next room called to say there was talking in your room — not loud, but it scared her. I got a right to know what’s going on.”

  Norman put on his best classroom manner and blandly dissected the old man’s apprehensions until they began to look very unsubstantial. Dignity told. With a last show of grumbling the old man let himself be convinced. As Norman started upstairs, he was shuffling back to the switchboard.

  On the second flight, Norman heard a phone ringing. As he was walking down the hall, it stopped.

  He opened the door. Tansy was standing by the bed, speaking into the phone. Its dull blackness, curving from mouth to ear, emphasized the pallor of lips and cheeks and the whiteness of the toweling.

  “This is Tansy Saylor,” she was saying tonelessly. “I want my soul.” A pause. “Can’t you hear me, Evelyn? This is Tansy Saylor. I want my soul.”

  He had completely forgotten the call he had made in a moment of crazy anger. He no longer had any clear idea of what he had been going to say.

  A low wailing was coming from the phone. Tansy was talking against it.

  “This is Tansy Saylor. I want my soul.”

  He stepped forward. The wailing sound had swiftly risen to a squeal, but mixed with it was an intermittent windy whirring.

  He reached out to take the phone. But at that instant Tansy jerked around and something seemed to happen to the phone.

  When a lifeless object begins to act as if it had life, there is always the possibility of illusion. For instance, there is a trick of manipulating a pencil that makes it look as if it were being bent back and forth like a stick of rubber. And Tansy did have her hand to the phone and was twisting about so rapidly that it was hard to be sure of anything.

  Nevertheless, to Norman it seemed that the phone suddenly became pliable and twisted about like a stumpy black worm, fastened itself tight to the skin, and dug into Tansy’s chin and into her neck just below the ear, like a double-ended black paw. And with the squeal he seemed to hear a muffled sucking.

  His reaction was immediate, involuntary, and startling. He dropped to his knees and ripped the phone cord from the wall. Violet sparks spat from the torn wire. The loose end whipped back with his jerk, seeming to writhe like a wounded snake, and wrapped itself around his forearm. To Norman it seemed that it tightened spasmodically, then relaxed. He tore it away with a panicky loathing, then stood up.

  The phone had fallen to the floor. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about it now. He gave it a little kick. There was a dull plunk and it slid solidly across the floor a few inches. He stooped and after hesitating a few moments, gingerly touched it. It felt as hard and rigid as it should.

  He looked at Tansy. She was standing in the same place. Not an atom of fear showed in her expression. With the unconcernedness of a machine, she had lifted a hand and was slowly massaging her cheek and neck. From the corner of her mouth a few drops of blood were trickling.

  Of course, she could have bashed the phone against her teeth and cut her lip that way.

  But he had seen —

  Still, she might have shaken the phone rapidly, so that it only seemed to become pliable and bend.

  But it hadn’t looked that way. What he had seen… had been impossible.

  But so many “impossible” things had been happening.

  And it had been Evelyn Sawtelle at the other end of the phone. He had heard the sound of the bull-roarer coming over the phone. Nothing supernatural about that. If the recording of a bull-roarer had been played very loudly over the phone it would have sounded just like that. He couldn’t have been mistaken about it. That was a fact and he must stick to it.

  It gave him the emotional cue he needed. Anger. He was almost startled by the surge of hatred that went through him at the thought of that woman with the small dull eyes. For a moment he felt like an inquisitor confronted with evidence of malicious witchcraft. Visions of the rack and the wheel and the boot flitted through his mind. Then that phantasmagoria of the Middle Ages faded, but the anger remained, settling down to a steady pulse of detestation.

  Whatever had happened to Tansy, he knew that Evelyn Sawtelle and Hulda Gunnison and Flora Carr were responsible. He had too much evidence in their own actions. That was another fact that he must stick to. Whether they were working on Tansy’s mind by an incredibly subtle and diabolic campaign of suggestion, or by some unnamed means, they were responsible.

  There was no way of getting at them by psychiatry or law. What had happened in the past few days was something that only he, of all the men in the world, could believe or understand. He must fight them himself, using their own weapons against them — that other unnamed means.

  In every way he must act as if he believed in that other unnamed means.

  Tansy stopped massaging her face. Her tongue licked the lip where the blood was drying.

  “Shall we go back to Hempnell now?”

  “Yes!”

  16

  The rhythmic rattle and clank of the train was a Machine Age lullaby. Norman could hear the engine snoring. The wide, heatbaked, green fields swinging past the window of the compartment drowsed in the noonday sun. The farms and cattle and horses dotting them here and there looked entranced by the heat. He would have liked to doze too, hut he knew he would not be able to. And as for — she never apparently slept.

  “I want to run over some things,” he said. “Interrupt me if you hear anything that sounds wrong or you don’t understand.”

  From the corner of his eye he noted the figure sitting between him and the window nod once.

  It occurred to him that there was something terrible about an adaptability that could familiarize him even to — her, so that now, after only a day and a half, he was
using her as a kind of thinking machine, asking for her memories and reactions in the same way that a man might direct a servant to put a certain record on the phonograph.

  At the same time he knew that he was able to make this close contact endurable only by carefully directing his thoughts and actions — like the trick he had acquired of never quite looking at her directly. And he was buoyed up a little by his hope that her present condition was only temporary. But if he had once let himself start to think what it would mean to live a lifetime, to share bed and board, with that coldness, that inner blackness, that vacancy… .

  Other people noticed the difference, all right. Like those crowds he had to push through in New York yesterday. Somehow people always edged away, so they wouldn’t have to touch her, and he caught more than one following glance, poised between curiosity and fear. And when that other woman started to scream — lucky they had been able to lose themselves in the crowd.

  The brief stopover at New York had given him time for some vitally necessary thinking. But he had been glad last night when it was over. The Pullman compartment seemed a haven of privacy.

  What was it those other people noticed? True, if you looked closely, the heavy cosmetics only provided a grotesque and garish contrast to the underlying pallor, and powder did not wholly conceal the ugly dark bruise around the mouth. But the veil helped, and you had to look very closely — the cosmetics were practically a theatrical make-up. Was it her walk that they noticed, or the way her clothes hung? Her clothes always looked a little like a scarecrow’s now, though you could not tell the reason. Or was there actually something to what the Bayport girl had said?

  It occurred to him that he was letting his mind wander because he didn’t want to get on with the distasteful task he had set himself, this task that was abhorrent to him because it was so false — or because it was so true.

  “Magic is a practical science,” he began quickly. He talked to the wall, as if dictating. “There is all the difference in the world between a formula in physics and a formula in magic, although they have the same name. The former describes, in terse mathematical symbols, cause-effect relationship of wide generality. But a formula in magic is a way of getting or accomplishing something. It always takes into account the motivation or desire of the person invoking the formula — be it greed, love, revenge, or what not. Whereas the experiment in physics is essentially independent of the experimenter. In short, there has been little or no pure magic, comparable to pure science.