THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  Once he was gone, she continued with the jug wine. And she ate. Because once she got going, once the hunger took control, it was a greased slide, there was no stopping. Only this time it wasn’t Sara Lee and Häagen-Dazs. It was meat. She phoned Domino’s Pizza and had them deliver an entire garbage pizza—pepperoni, meatballs, anchovies, whatever.

  She ate the whole thing and threw it up—as much as she hadn’t actually digested. Then, after gargling with the last of the Gallo, she phoned Gum Joy to have them deliver an order of pork lo mein and sweet-and-sour pork. While she waited for the delivery to arrive, she sat in front of the blank TV crying, utterly wretched and ravenous with hunger.

  The phone rang. It was her mother.

  Her mother never called unless there was a reason. But even so she felt a throb of gratitude. “Mom,” she said. “Hey, it’s been ages. What’s happening?”

  “I’ve got someone who wants to talk to you. Here, honey, take the phone.”

  “Guess what?” It was Kelly’s voice. A tremulous baby alto that connected like an electric wire to everything that was still sweet and wholesome. It was as if Diana had wiped the fog from a pair of steamed eyeglasses and was able to see the world clean.

  “Kelly, is that you?”

  “Aunty Di?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Guess what?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. What?”

  “You’re coming here for Christmas!”

  “Oh, sweetheart, I wish I could.”

  “Mommy’s going away.”

  “I know that, honey.”

  “But she says you’ll be my mommy while she’s away.”

  Why hadn’t she seen it coming? Why had she even picked up the phone?

  “Oh, Kelly, that would be wonderful. If I could, but…”

  “Diana?” Her mother had repossessed the phone.

  “Mother, it’s impossible,” she protested.

  But even as she said it, she realized it wasn’t so. Now, with no job, it was possible. An internal calculating machine started the figures. If she left the apartment she was in in Willowville, where she was having problems with the neighbors upstairs and with the landlord… And if she was still entitled to unemployment… And Kelly was such a sweetie.

  On the other hand, Carl was unbearable.

  “Diana,” her mother said, in that tone she had, when she knew she’d already won an argument before a word had been said. “Your sister’s here. She just wants to have a few words. Don’t get on your high horse with her. This was all my idea, you can blame me. Maybe it isn’t possible. I know you’ve got your job. Although by the sound of it, what we see on TV, it doesn’t sound like a nice place to be, that school of yours. But that’s none of my business. Here’s Janet.”

  “Hello?” said Janet.

  “I can’t do what you’re asking,” said Diana. “It’s completely out of line. You know I can’t be in the room five minutes with Carl without an argument. I’m sorry you’re going to jail, and I don’t blame you one bit for what you did. He’s a lousy bastard, but you married him, not me.”

  “Hey,” said Janet, in the grown-up version of Kelly’s voice, “all I said was hello.”

  The doorbell rang. It was the deliveryman from Gum Joy.

  Even through the closed door, Diana could smell the pork.

  “Janet,” she said, “there’s someone at the door. I’ll call you later.”

  8

  On the day after Christmas Kelly was feeling the letdown that follows any holiday with too many promises attached. It wasn’t that Santa hadn’t been good to her. He’d brought the three things she’d most wanted: a tricycle, a dollhouse, and, to live in the dollhouse, two new Trolls, for her ever-growing Troll family. One of them, with pink hair, had been christened Aunty Pinky and had immediately taken charge of all the younger Trolls, including the other new family member, a boy by the name of Orangey, who had shown himself to be a great troublemaker right from the start.

  She’d also got a lot of presents besides the ones she’d asked for from Santa, most of them not that exciting, like the snowsuit with matching pink mittens. Some presents she even wished she hadn’t got, like the shoes from Grandma Turney that were made of leather and hurt her feet. Her Aunty Di had given her a golden necklace with red jewels, and a book about forest animals that Aunty Di promised to read to Kelly a little at a time, which meant having to sit still and just listen. Her Aunty Di was a schoolteacher, so you had to expect to get books from her.

  The really big present that Santa had left beside the Christmas tree had been for the whole family—a video camera that let you make your own television programs. They’d already made one tape, and Kelly had seen herself on TV singing “Jingle Bells” with her grandma and another where she was riding piggyback on her father’s shoulders. Her mom said she didn’t want to have anyone make another TV program of her, she’d had enough of that already, but then they decided they’d go sledding on the hill in back of the house. So her mom got on the sled with Kelly, and her dad aimed the camera, but there wasn’t enough snow for the sled to go down the hill, so it turned out to be a kind of funny TV show, because the sled just sat there with the two of them on it. Even when her mom got off the sled to make it lighter it wouldn’t move, so there was a TV show of Kelly sitting on the sled in her new pink snowsuit and mittens, waving at the camera, and her dad laughing, though you couldn’t see him on the TV, just his shadow in the snow. Her grandma said they should send the tape to America’s Funniest Home Videos, and her mom said, “Yeah, and we’ll send them another of the car parked in the driveway.” Everyone laughed at that, even Kelly, though she didn’t know why it was funny. But it was nice when everyone laughed together.

  Today her dad was at work, and after breakfast her mom had had to drive Grandma Turney back to Navaho House, so Kelly was left alone with Aunty Di, who spent a lot of time talking on the phone while Kelly played with her Trolls or rode her new tricycle in the basement—around the washer and dryer and over to the furnace and then, ducking her head, under the Ping-Pong table and back to the washer and dryer.

  After that there was nothing to do, so she asked to watch TV, but Aunty Di looked at the TV Guide and decided there was nothing suitable.

  “Why don’t we go outside!” Aunty Di suggested.

  Kelly would rather have stayed indoors, because it had got a lot colder today, but she knew if they were outdoors Aunty Di would have to pay more attention to her than if they were in the house. So she said, “Okay, let’s!”

  “Almost everything’s the same,” said Aunty Di, after they’d got bundled up and were climbing the hill in back of the house on the path up to the woodshed. “It’s amazing. I feel like the princess in the fairy tale who’s been asleep for a hundred years and wakes up and finds nothing has changed. I mean, even the old chicken house is still there, and it must be twenty years or more since there were any chickens in it. Your grandma didn’t like looking after chickens.”

  “Mom says we may have chickens again, when I’m older and I can look after them myself.”

  “And what will you do with all the eggs?”

  Kelly looked up, puzzled. “We’ll eat them. Won’t we?”

  Aunty Di laughed in her peculiar, quiet way, puckering her lips and snorting softly through her nose. “Just a few chickens will lay more eggs than one family can eat by themselves, even if you each ate an egg for breakfast every day. Which is not a good thing to do, as we’ve come to learn.”

  “Mom says we’ll sell the eggs to grandma. For the old ladies in Navaho House. They eat lots of eggs there.”

  “Well, they’re old enough, it probably doesn’t make any difference how many eggs they eat.”

  “You didn’t eat any of the turkey,” Kelly pointed out.

  Kelly waited for her to explain all over again how she was a vegetarian, but Aunty Di just nodded.

  They’d come to the top of the hill and could see the outbuildings on the other side, whi
ch weren’t visible from the house or from the road.

  “It’s like a little village, isn’t it?” Aunty Di commented. “A little village in its own little valley that’s been abandoned but hasn’t yet fallen into ruin. I’d forgotten how much Grandpa Iverson, who was my mother’s father, liked to build. He built all these things—the buildings, the stone walls, the wooden fences—and then when they were all built, poor old Grandma Iverson, who was Grandma Turney’s mom, she had to look after the animals, because Grandpa Iverson was killed in Germany during the war.”

  “What kind of animals?” Kelly said, who was interested only in that part of the story, not in all the dead grown-ups she couldn’t sort out.

  “Well, the chickens were in the chicken house. And there were turkeys, too. My mom, your Grandma Turney, says she can remember there was a horse and cows here when she was growing up. They lived in the barn, which is gone now, and what Grandpa Iverson built where it used to be is that building over there, beside the willow tree. The barn was much bigger, of course. Pigs don’t need the same kind of space that cows do.”

  “There were pigs in there?” Kelly marveled.

  “Yes, a great many. Even when I was a girl, we had pigs. And they had to be slopped every day. They’d eat all our leftovers, and buckets and buckets of mash besides. With pigs you don’t have to bother with compost heaps.”

  “What are compost heaps?”

  “That’s where you put your garbage.”

  “We put the garbage in the garbage can,” Kelly said.

  Aunty Di produced another pucker-and-snort. “Well, some things don’t change, and some things do.”

  She turned to the right, following the path along the top of the hill to where there were more trees. Kelly followed along as far as to the first apple tree. There she stopped short. Aunty Di didn’t notice at first. Then she turned around and said, “Kelly?”

  “Are you going to the smokehouse?” Kelly demanded.

  “Yes, I was curious to see if it’s still there.”

  “It’s there. And I don’t like it.”

  “Oh?” Aunty Di said, interested. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s get the sled, huh?”

  “There’s not enough snow on the ground for sledding. You know that from yesterday. Why don’t you like the smokehouse? Have you ever been inside the smokehouse?”

  “No!”

  “The way you say that, Kelly… My goodness. You sound as though you were afraid of it. If you’re afraid of it, you can hold my hand.” Aunty Di stretched out her hand.

  Kelly shook her head. She could see her aunt’s eyes narrow and get a stubborn look. “There’s a snake there,” Kelly explained. It wasn’t the real reason, but it wasn’t a lie either. There was a snake.

  “Snakes are all asleep during the winter,” Aunty Di said in her schoolteacher, book-reading voice. “So you don’t have to worry about the snake. Come along.” She wiggled the gloved fingers of her extended hand.

  Kelly surrendered. She let Aunty Di take her hand, and they walked a zigzag path between the trunks of the trees on the frozen grass and the dead leaves, which made a crackling sound at each footstep. Ahead of them the smokehouse became visible, its paint all flaky, shreds of white on old gray boards. A tall, thin house without windows.

  “Someone has repaired the roof,” said Aunty Di. “When I was your age, or a little older, the roof had lost most of its shingles, and there were just the old rotted rafters. But it looks like it’s been fixed. Did your daddy fix it?”

  “Yes,” said Kelly. Then, reconsidering, “I don’t know.”

  When they came to the sagging barbed-wire fence, Aunty Di insisted on lifting Kelly up and setting her down on the other side of the rusty wires. Then she pushed down the wires with her gloved hand and stepped over them herself. They walked around to the far side, where the door was.

  “And look at this. The door’s back on its hinges, and there’s a padlock on it. I wonder why that is.”

  “Let’s go back home,” said Kelly. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re just saying that. Why don’t you like the smokehouse, Kelly? Have you ever been inside it?”

  “No, never. But mom was. She told me.”

  “Oh?” Aunty Di’s voice changed the way it did when she was interested in what you might say. “She did? What did she tell you?”

  “She said when she was a little girl, you put her inside of it. To scare her.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, I wouldn’t have done anything like that.”

  “She said you did. She said you would take a flashlight and shine it on your face to look scary. She showed me how you did it. You put it under your chin.”

  “Well, I may have done that. I don’t remember it, but I suppose it’s possible. Maybe she confused the two things. If anyone put her in the smokehouse, it would have been her daddy, but I doubt that. She was just a little girl, no older than you, when he had his heart attack.”

  “Did he put you in the smokehouse?” Kelly asked, with a sudden, shrewd intuition.

  “Yes. Yes, he did. When I’d done something wrong, and he wanted to punish me.”

  “Because he knew you were afraid of it?”

  “That must have been the reason.”

  “Why were you afraid?”

  “I don’t know. People are sometimes afraid of things for no good reason.”

  “Did you ever see anyone here?”

  “See anyone?”

  “A man?”

  Aunty Di shook her head, but Kelly didn’t believe her. She knew that her aunt had seen the same thing she had, and that that’s why she was afraid of the smokehouse, and why she wanted to look at it now, with Kelly with her. Because (Kelly knew) the man wouldn’t be there if you had someone else with you.

  “What kind of man?” Aunty Di wanted to know. “A man like… your daddy?”

  The man Kelly had seen, and she still recalled him very clearly, didn’t have any clothes on. You could see everything, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He was sitting on the big stone beside the door, and when he saw Kelly staring at him, at the big cut along his leg, and the blood coming out of it, he just looked up and smiled and winked one eye and then he wasn’t there. The stone he’d been sitting on was still there, and maybe the blood was, too, but Kelly wasn’t going to tell Aunty Di anything about him. She’d never told anyone, not her mom, not her dad, not even the Trolls.

  “I don’t know,” said Kelly. “Some man. Maybe he was your dad.”

  Aunty Di didn’t say a thing. She just gave Kelly a funny look and then agreed to take her back to the house so she could go to the bathroom.

  9

  Carl had sized her up at Christmas dinner and decided that his sister-in-law was a pig. She wasn’t that fat, though he bet she must spend a lot of her time dieting. No, the piggish thing about her was her basic assumption that whatever she wanted belonged to her. The way she tucked into her dinner without waiting for Janet to finish cutting up Kelly’s drumstick. Carl had always been amazed at the bad manners of all three Turney women, his wife included. His own family, though they hadn’t been any better off, came off as aristocrats by comparison. Somehow bad manners are more noticeable in women. Janet was a confirmed nose-picker, the kind who takes an interest in the result, and her mother was an encyclopedia of bad habits and negative personal hygiene, including B.O.

  Di wasn’t piggy in those ways. Being a schoolteacher, she had to be more aware of appearances. But once she sat down in front of a plate of food, it was trough time. Carl had been brought up to believe you didn’t start eating till your host gave the signal, but she had the manners of someone brought up in a cafeteria, or the joint.

  On the other hand, he’d been relieved to see her bolt down the turkey and stuffing the way she did, because on her few earlier visits Di had made a fuss about being a strict vegetarian. That had been one of the main reasons, aside from plain gut-level disliking her
, for his having been against the idea of her moving in while Janet served her time. As it turned out, Di’s vegetarianism was the relaxed kind that allowed poultry and fish. She was even willing to cook dinners involving beef and lamb, but pork, for some reason, she wouldn’t deal with at all. Which suited Carl just fine. He wasn’t that crazy about pork himself. Too greasy.

  One of the brighter cons in the joint, Jim Cottonwood, had a theory about the kinds of things people would and wouldn’t eat. Cottonwood was an Indian, and he claimed that every Indian has his own totem, which isn’t the same as a tribe. It’s a group of people who all identify in some way with a particular animal, and if you belong to the totem of that animal, you never eat its meat, except, sometimes, on a ritual occasion. So it made sense that Diana, being a pig, wouldn’t touch pork. He would have to remember to tell Cottonwood about this proof of his totem theory.

  Tonight, their first night together since Janet had finally been hauled away, Carl had put Kelly to bed at her regular bedtime, just before nine, and when he came downstairs he discovered that Di had commandeered his recliner and tuned the TV to a show on channel 13 with Luciano Pavarotti singing his favorite arias.

  “Hey,” he pointed out, trying to sound amiable, “you’re in Papa Bear’s chair. Do you mind?”

  “Excuse me?” Di said, looking up, but not otherwise stirring a limb. Her thighs had got really big. She was going to be one of those old ladies who spread out from the waist down and grow a big butt and thick legs.

  “I said you’re sitting in my chair.”

  “Oh, I thought I was just sitting in a chair. I didn’t realize it was one of the prerogatives of home ownership.”

  Carl had learned, from working at the joint, that it was bad strategy to snap back at someone when they wised off or wanted to pick a quarrel. Usually a significant silence is the most effective way to dampen the urge to aggression. The aggressor realizes he’s going to have to do all the work. So Carl just stood there to one side of the recliner and waited for Di to vacate.