Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

“Hard luck it had to come to a head now,” Gunnison continued, “when you’ve been having more than your share of troubles, with sickness and what-not.” Norman could see that Gunnison was looking with a faint shade of inquisitiveness at the strip of surgical tape close to the corner of his left eye and the other one just below his nostrils. But he attempted no explanation. Gunnison shifted about and resettled himself in his chair. “Norm,” he said, “I’ve got the feeling that something’s gone wrong. Ordinarily I’d say you could weather this blow all right — you’re one of our two-three best men — but I’ve got the feeling that something’s gone wrong all the way down the line.”

  The offer his words conveyed was obvious enough, and Norman knew it was made in good faith.

  But only for a moment did he consider telling Gunnison even a fraction of the truth. It would be like taking his troubles into the law courts, and he could imagine — with the sharp, almost hallucinatory vividness of extreme fatigue — what that would be like.

  Imagine putting Tansy in the witness box even in her earlier non-violent condition. “You say, Mrs. Saylor, that your soul was stolen from your body?” “Yes.” “You are conscious of the absence of your soul?” “No, I am not conscious, of anything.” “Not conscious? You surely don’t mean that you are unconscious?” “But I do. I can neither see nor hear.” “You mean that you can neither see nor hear me?” “That is correct.” “How then —” Bang of the judge’s gavel. “If this tittering does not cease immediately, I will clear the court!” Or Mrs. Gunnison called to the witness box and he himself bursting out with an impassioned plea to the jury. “Gentlemen, look at her eyes! Watch them closely, I implore you. My wife’s soul is there, if you would only see it!”

  “What’s the matter, Norm?” he heard Gunnison ask. The genuine sympathy of the voice tugged at him confusedly. Groggy with sudden sleepiness, he tried to rally himself to answer.

  Mrs. Gunnison walked in.

  “Hullo,” she said. “I’m glad you two finally got together.” Almost patronizingly she looked Norman over. “I don’t think you’ve slept for the last two nights,” she announced brusquely. “And what’s happened to your face? Did that cat of yours finally scratch it?”

  Gunnison laughed, as he usually did, at his wife’s frankness. “What a woman. Loves dogs. Hates cats. But she’s right about your needing sleep, Norm.”

  The sight of her and the sound of her voice stung Norman into an icy wakefulness. She looked as if she had been sleeping ten hours a night for some time. An expensive green suit set off her red hair and gave her a kind of buxom beauty. Her slip showed and the coat was buttoned in a disorderly way, but now it conveyed to Norman the effect of the privileged carelessness of some all-powerful ruler who is above ordinary standards of neatness. For once she was not carrying the bulging purse. His heart leaped.

  He did not trust himself to look into her eyes. He started to get up.

  “Don’t go yet, Norm,” Gunnison told him. “There’s a lot we should talk about.”

  “Yes, why don’t you stay?” Mrs. Gunnison seconded.

  “Sorry,” said Norman. “I’ll come around this afternoon if you can spare the time. Or tomorrow morning, at the latest.”

  “Be sure and do that,” said Gunnison seriously. “The trustees are meeting tomorrow afternoon.”

  Mrs. Gunnison sat down in the chair he had vacated.

  “My regards to Tansy,” she said. “I’ll be seeing her tonight at the Carr’s — that is, if she’s recovered sufficiently.” Norman nodded. Then he walked out rapidly and shut the door behind him.

  While his hand was still on the knob, he saw Mrs. Gunnison’s green purse lying on the table in the outer office. It was just this side of the display case of Prince Rupert drops and similar oddities. His heart jumped again.

  There was one girl in the outer office — a student employee. He went to her desk.

  “Miss Miller,” he said, “would you be so kind as to get me the grade sheets of the following students?” And he rattled off half a dozen names.

  “The sheets are in the Recorder’s Office, Professor Saylor,” she said, a little doubtfully.

  “I know. But you tell them I sent you. Dr. Gunnison and I want to look them over.”

  Obediently she took down the names.

  As the door closed behind her he pulled out the top drawer of her desk, where he knew the key for the display case would be.

  A few minutes later Mrs. Gunnison came out.

  “I thought I heard you go out,” she exclaimed sharply. Then in her usual blunt manner, “Are you waiting for me to leave, so you can talk to Harold alone?”

  He did not answer. He glanced at her nose.

  She picked up her purse. “There’s really no point in your trying to make a secret of it,” she said. “I know as much about your troubles here as he does — in fact, considerably more. And, to be honest, they’re pretty bad.” Her voice had begun to assume the arrogance of the victor. She smiled at him.

  He continued to look at her nose.

  “And you needn’t pretend you’re not worried,” she went on, her voice reacting irritably to his silence. “Because I know you are. And tomorrow Pollard will ask for your resignation.” Then, “What are you staring at?”

  “Nothing,” he answered, hastily, averting his glance.

  With an incredulous sniff, she took out her mirror, glanced at it puzzledly for a moment, then held it up for a detailed inspection of her face.

  To Norman the second hand of the wall clock seemed to stand still.

  Very softly, but swiftly, and in a most casual voice, which did not even cause Mrs. Gunnison to look around, he said, “I know you’ve stolen my wife’s soul, Mrs. Gunnison, and I know how you’ve stolen it.

  I know a bit about stealing souls myself; for instance, if you’re in a room with someone whose soul you want, and they happen to be looking into a mirror, and the mirror breaks while their reflection is still in it, then —”

  With a swift, tinkling crack, not very loud, the mirror in Mrs. Gunnison’s hand puffed into a little cloud of iridescent dust.

  Instantly it seemed to Norman that a weight added itself to his mind, a tangible darkness pressed down upon his thoughts.

  The gasp of astonishment or fear that issued from Mrs. Gunnison’s lips was cut short. What seemed a loose, stupid look flowed slowly over her face, but it was only because the muscles of her face had quite relaxed.

  Norman stepped up to Mrs. Gunnison and took her arm. For a moment she stared at him, emptily, then her body lurched, she took a slow step, then another, as he said, “Come with me. It’s your best chance.”

  He trembled, hardly able to credit his success, as she followed him into the hall. Near the stairs they met Miss Miller returning with a handful of large cards.

  “I’m very sorry to have put you to the trouble,” he told her. “But it turned out that we don’t need them. You had better return them to the Recorder’s Office.”

  The girl nodded with a polite but somewhat wry smile. “Professors!”

  As Norman steered the uncharacteristically docile Mrs. Gunnison out of the Administration Building, the queer darkness still pressed upon his thoughts. It was like nothing he had ever before experienced.

  Suddenly then the darkness parted, as storm clouds might part at sunset, letting through a narrow beam of crimson light. Only the storm clouds were inside his mind and the crimson light was impotent red rage and obscene anger. And yet it was not wholly unfamiliar.

  From it, Norman’s mind cringed. The campus ahead seemed to wobble and waver, tinged by a faint red glare.

  He thought: “If there were such a thing as split personality, and if a crack appeared in the wall between those separate consciousnesses…”

  But that was insanity.

  Abruptly another memory buffeted him — words that had issued from Tansy’s lips in the Pullman compartment: “The environment of the soul is the human brain.”

  Again: “If it
is prevented from re-entering its own body, it is irresistibly drawn to another, whether or not that other body possesses a soul. And so the captive soul is usually imprisoned in the brain of its captor.”

  just then, through the slit in the darkness, riding a wave in the pounding red anger that hurled it to the center of his mind, came an intelligible thought. The thought was simply, “Stupid man, how did you do it?” but it, like the red rage, was so utterly like Mrs. Gunnison, that he accepted (whether or not it meant he was crazy, whether or not it meant witchcraft was true) that the mind of Mrs. Gunnison was inside his skull, talking with his mind.

  For a moment he glanced at the slack-featured face of the hulking female body he was piloting across the campus.

  For a moment he quailed at the idea of touching, with his mind, naked personality.

  But only for a moment. Then (whether or not it meant he was crazy) his acceptance was complete.

  He walked across campus, talking inside his head with Mrs. Gunnison.

  The questioning thought was repeated: “How did you do it?”

  Before he realized it, his own thoughts had answered:

  “It was the Prince Rupert mirror from the display case. The warmth of your fingers shattered it. I held it lightly in the folds of my handkerchief while transferring it to your pocketbook. According to primitive belief, your reflection is your soul, or a vehicle for your soul. If a mirror breaks when your reflection is in it, your soul is trapped outside your body.” All this, without the machinery of speech to delay it, flashed in an instant.

  Instantly too, Mrs. Gunnison’s next thought came through the slit in the darkness. “Where are you taking my body?”

  “To our house.”

  “What do you want?”

  “My wife’s soul.”

  There was a long pause. The slit in the darkness closed, then opened again.

  “You cannot take it. I hold it, as you hold my soul. But my soul hides it from you. And my soul holds it.”

  “I cannot take it. But I can hold your soul until you return my wife’s soul to her body.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “Your husband is a realist. He will not believe what your body tells him. He will consult the best alienists. He will be very much grieved. But in the end he will commit your body to an asylum.”

  He could sense defeat and submission — and a kind of panic, too — in the texture of the answering thought. But defeat and submission were not yet admitted directly.

  “You will not be able to hold my soul. You hate it. It fills you with abhorrence. Your mind will not be able to endure it.”

  Then, in immediate substantiation of this statement, there came through the slit a nasty trickle growing swiftly to a spate. His chief detestations were quickly spied out and rasped upon. He began to hurry his steps, so that the mindless bulk beside him breathed hard.

  “There was Ann,” came Mrs. Gunnison’s thoughts, not in words but in the complete fullness of memory. “Ann came to work for me eight years ago. A frail-looking little blonde, but able to get through a hard day’s work for all that. She was very submissive, and a prey to fear. Do you know that it is possible to rule people through fear alone, without an atom of direct force? A sharp word, a stern look— it’s the implications that do it, not what’s said directly. Gradually I gathered about myself all the grim prestige that father, teacher, and preacher had had for Ann. I could make her cry by looking at her in a certain way. I could make her writhe with fright just by standing outside the door of her bedroom. I could make her hold hot dishes without a whimper while serving us at dinner, and make her wait while I talked to Harold. I’ve looked at her hands afterward.”

  Similarly he lived through the stories of Clara and Milly, Mary and Ermengarde. He could not shut his own mind from hers, nor could he close the slit, though it was within his power to widen it. Like some foul medusa, or some pulpy carnivorous plant, her soul infolded and clung to his, until it seemed almost that his was the prisoner.

  “And there was Trudie. Trudie worshipped me. She was a big girl, slow and a little stupid. She had come from a farm. She used to spend hours on my clothes. I encouraged her in various ways, until everything about me became sacred to Trudie. She lived f or my little signs of favor. In the end she would do anything for me, which was very amusing, because she was very easily embarrassed and never lost her painfully acute sense of shame.”

  But now he was at the door of his house, and the unclean trickle of thoughts ceased. The slit narrowed to the tiniest watchful crack.

  He shepherded Mrs. Gunnison’s body to the door of Tansy’s dressing room. He pointed at the bound form huddled on the blanket he had thrown across the floor. It lay as he had left it, eyes closed, jaw lolling, breathing heavily. The sight seemed to add a second crushing pressure to his mind, pressing on it from below, through his eye-sockets.

  “Take away what you have conjured into it,” he heard himself command.

  There was a pause. A black spider crawled off Tansy’s skirt and scuttled across the blanket. Even as there came the thought, “That is it,” he lunged out and cracked it under his heel as it escaped onto the flooring. He was aware of a half-cloaked comment, “Its soul sought the nearest body. Now faithful King will go on no more errands for me. No more will he animate human flesh or wood or stone. I will have to find another dog.”

  “Return to it what you have taken,” he commanded.

  This time there was a longer pause. The slit closed entirely.

  The bound figure stirred, as if seeking to roll over. The lips moved. The slack jaw tightened. Conscious only of the black weight against his mind, and of a sensory awareness so acute that he believed he could hear the very beating of the heart in Tansy’s body, he stooped and cut the lashings, removed the carefully arranged paddings from wrists and ankles.

  The head rolled restlessly from side to side, The lips seemed to be saying, “Norman… .” The eyelids fluttered and he felt a shiver go over the body. And then, in one sudden glorious flood, like some flower blooming miraculously in an instant, expression surged into the face, the limp hands caught at his shoulders, and from the wide-open eyes a lucid, sane, fearless human soul peered up at him.

  An instant later the repellent darkness that had been pressing against his mind, lifted.

  With one venomous, beaten glance, Mrs. Gunnison turned away. He could hear her footsteps trail off, the front door open. Then his arms were around Tansy, his mouth was against hers.

  20

  The front door closed. As if that were a signal, Tansy pushed him away while her lips were still returning his kiss.

  “We daren’t be happy, Norman,” she said. “We daren’t be happy for one single moment.”

  A disturbed and apprehensive look clouded the longing in her eyes, as if she were looking at a great wall that shut out the sunlight. When she answered his bewildered question, it was almost in a whisper, as if even to mention the name might be dangerous.

  “Mrs. Carr —”

  Her hands tightened on his arms as though to convey to him the immediacy of danger.

  “Norman, I’m frightened. I’m terribly frightened. For both of us. My soul has learned so much. Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse. And Mrs. Carr —”

  Norman’s mind felt suddenly foggy and tired. It seemed to him almost unendurable that his feeling of relief should be broken. The desire to pretend at least for a while that things were rational and ordinary, had become an almost overwhelming hunger. He stared at Tansy groggily, as if she were a figure in an opium dream.

  “You’re safe,” he told her with a kind of harshness in his voice. “I’ve fought for you, I’ve got you back, and I’m going to hold you. They can never touch you again, not one of them.”

  “Oh Norman,” she began, dropping her eyes, “I know how brave and clever you’ve been. I know the risks you’ve run, the sacrifices you’ve made for me — wrenching your whole life away from rationality in t
he bare space of a week, enduring the beastliness of that woman’s naked thoughts. And you have beaten Evelyn Sawtelle and Mrs. Gunnison fairly and at their own game. But Mrs. Carr —” Her hands transmitted her trembling to him. “Oh, Norman, she only let you beat them. She wanted to give them a fright, and she preferred to let you do it for her. But now she’ll take a hand herself.”

  “No, Tansy, no,” he said with a dull insistence, but unable to summon up any argument to support his negative.

  “You poor dear, you’re tried,” she said, becoming suddenly solicitous. “I’ll fetch you a drink.”

  It seemed to him that he did nothing but rub his eyes and blink them, and shake his head, until she came back with the bottle.

  “I want to change,” she said, looking down at her torn and creased dress. “Then we must talk.”

  He downed a stiff drink, poured himself another. But there was no stimulation. They didn’t seem to be getting rid of his opium-dream mood, instead deepened it. After a while he got up and sluggishly made his way to the bedroom.

  Tansy had put on a white wool dress, one which he had always liked very much, but which she had not worn for some time, He remembered she had told him that it had shrunk and become too small for her. But now he sensed that, in the joy of her return, she took a naive pride in her youthful body and wanted to show it to best advantage.

  “It’s like coming into a new house,” she told him, with a quick little smile that momentarily cut across her apprehensive look. “Or rather like coming home after you’ve been away for a long time. You’re very happy, but everything is a little strange. It takes you a while to get used to it.”

  Now that she mentioned it, he realized that there was a kind of uncertainty about her movements, gestures and expressions, like a person convalescent after a long sickness and just now able to get up and about.

  She had combed out her hair so that it fell to her shoulders, and she was still in her bare feet, giving her a diminutive and girlish appearance that he found attractive even in his stupidheaded, nightmarish state of mind.

  He had brought her a drink, but she merely sipped it and put it aside.