THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  What was the point in arguing? She was right. He thought to ask what it was brewed from, but Kelly came into the kitchen in her pajamas just then, and he was caught in the routine of getting her ready for school while Diana started his dinner: Thursday, broiled chicken, with the skin removed.

  But first a glass of herbal tea.

  27

  When Diana Turney hit her with a broom and told her to lie down by the refrigerator, Judy Johnson snarled, but she did what she was told. Her father had used his belt to the same effect. As a child, Judy could never be reasoned with, but she could be bullied into submission. She lay there, belly on the linoleum, still tense, still quite alert, but pretending to be interested in the birds darting back and forth about the feeder hanging outside the kitchen window. She hated Diana Turney (as she had hated her father), but the woman was in charge. How she had come to be in charge, Judy was not sure, any more than she could have said at age seven how her father came to have the belt and the right to whip her. He was bigger, and that was that. Eat your dinner! No back talk! Go to bed!

  Diana went to the back door and, as she exited, turned round and pointed at Judy. “Stay there!” she commanded.

  Judy stayed there. Not because she had to—she was free to move about just as she liked—but because she had no other compelling purpose. She would explore the Kellogs’ house in due course. She’d enjoyed poking about in other people’s houses back in her baby-sitting days. Their bathrooms and closets could be especially interesting. Once, in the old Knudsen farmhouse, which a city family had bought and fixed up as their summer cottage, she’d tried on the most gorgeous red silk dress. Or maybe it was rayon, the label didn’t say. But it felt so slinky! It was a little tight on Judy, but she didn’t force the zipper. Even so, that family never asked her back to sit for them again.

  One smell in the kitchen had primacy over all the others, a dead-mouse smell that issued from under the icebox. The mouse was not there now, but it had died there (you could still see a telltale cache of greenish D-Con pellets between the oven and the icebox), and its remains had mummified before they were found. Now its smell was wedded to the tiles of the floor like the weeds in an asphalt driveway. Not an appetizing smell, especially, but interesting in its own way.

  Diana returned with a little girl. “Kelly,” she told the girl, “here’s your surprise.”

  “But I wanted a kitten!” the girl protested. “Not an old cat!”

  “Well, they didn’t have any kittens at the pound, and Ginger isn’t an old cat. She might have kittens herself someday.”

  “She’s a lady cat?”

  “No, not this one. She’s a female but not a lady.”

  Diana chuckled, and Judy bristled with resentment, as she did whenever someone treated her as trailer trash. Her father was a fucking minister of the gospel, and that should count for something.

  “Why don’t you pet her?” Diana suggested to Kelly.

  “Okay.” The child approached Judy and squatted down beside her. She reached out to stroke her head.

  Judy reared back and snarled.

  “Ginger!” Diana pointed her finger. “None of that, or you’ll get taken back to the pound. And you know what happens there.”

  “What happens there?” Kelly asked with a grin.

  “Bad cats meet sad ends.”

  “They kill them?” Kelly asked solemnly.

  Diana nodded.

  Kelly reached out again, and this time Judy allowed her fur to be stroked.

  “I think she understood you,” Kelly said.

  “Of course she did. Cats are very smart in their own way. Now, you take her outdoors and show her around the property while I get started on dinner.”

  “Is she going to be my cat?” Kelly wanted to know.

  “Yes, if you take care of her. See that there’s always water in her bowl, and kitty litter in the box I put in the bathroom.”

  “Can she sleep in my room?”

  “No, I think it would be better if she slept under the porch. During the warm weather anyhow. There’s an old basket up in the attic that we can fix up as her bed. She’ll be comfy.”

  So out they went, with Judy leading the way and Kelly tagging behind. Judy knew, the minute they were out the back door, that there was something wrong out here, and she knew just where it was to be found—just as she’d known where the mouse had died under the icebox. Kelly seemed dimly aware of it as well, for they both headed in the opposite direction until they came to a cluster of fruit trees, where Kelly got into an old tire strung from a tree limb and tried to tempt Judy into her lap. Judy sprang up into the tree instead, and from a high branch she watched Kelly arc back and forth.

  It seemed perfectly natural to be looking down at the world from that vantage point and, at the same time, entirely weird. Judy was a cat now, and in some sense she’d always been a cat, or had possessed a catlike nature. But her transformation had come over her so suddenly and so unexpectedly that she still thought of herself as human. It’s not an uncommon attitude among cats, especially those who’ve only lived with people and not known the company of other cats. Like them her frame of reference was human and indoors. The prospect from here in the tree was feline, outdoors, and confusing, a pandemonium of smells and noises intensely interesting but profoundly mysterious. It was as though Judy had found herself all at once in the middle of a foreign country—France or China or one of those—where everything had a French or a Chinese name and all the old American names had vanished.

  “Come along, Ginger,” said Kelly, wriggling out of the O of the swing. “I think Daddy must be up now.”

  Judy climbed down out of the tree and followed the child back into the house, where a fat, potently odorous man was sitting in front of the TV eating a bowl of milk and breakfast food. The milk looked delicious.

  “Daddy,” said Kelly, “look at this. I’ve got a cat.”

  “I see.” The man gave Judy a very unfriendly look, like the guard at the entrance to the Mall of America in the Twin Cities.

  “Her name is Ginger.”

  Judy rubbed up against the cuffs of the man’s trousers, by way of marking her claim. She began to purr. When the man did not object to this, she leapt into his lap and curled herself up in the warm, spongy softness.

  “Off!” he said, trying to scoop her up with one hand. But she got purchase on his pant leg first. With his other hand he grabbed the scruff of her neck and lifted until the only contact between them was her clawhold on his pants, which, reluctantly, she released.

  “I see you’ve met Ginger,” said Diana, bringing a mug of coffee into the room and setting it down beside the man.

  “Yeah, she’s already started molesting me.”

  “Molesting!” Diana protested.

  “That, or sexual harassment. Did we need a cat?”

  “Cats make the best mousetraps. And Kelly needs a pet.”

  “Well, as long as I don’t have to open the cat food cans, okay.”

  And so it was settled. Judy became a member of the household and a presence in the house, gliding from room to room, listening from the shadows, sniffing the air. Her chief concern, as ever, was for her own comfort and convenience, and she had few complaints on that score. There was an abundance of choice scraps from the table, and if she kept a low profile in the evenings she could avoid being evicted to the basket under the porch. Doors were a nuisance, but she seldom had to sit long by the back door before someone would let her in or out. Kelly could be a brat, grabbing Judy by her flea collar and pulling her about, or dressing her up in doll clothing. But a good snarl and a flash of her claws usually put an end to those indignities.

  It would have been an entirely tolerable life if it were not for two things. One was the malign presence concentrated in the little building behind the house, a presence that had a way of becoming pervasive at odd hours of the night, like the odors arising from a landfill. Judy had a toxic reaction that resembled nothing so much as a migraine headache
, accompanied by blurred vision. The reaction would come on quite suddenly and then gradually abate, and there was nothing she could do but just hunker down and wait for it to stop.

  The other major unpleasantness she had to put up with was that her son was a regular visitor. Coming only when Carl and Kelly were out, he would either visit with Diana inside or hammer and saw away at a big wooden fence in the area of tumbledown sheds behind the hill in back of the house, the area where Judy’s migraines came from. Judy had never been one to ponder the reasons for her likings or loathings. She experienced them like the weather, and how she experienced Alan, when he would turn up, was with aversion and a barely controlled rage. Her hatred was as specific and pointed as the nails his hammer would drive into the wood of the fenceposts. Were he a mouse or a bird, she would have liked to sink her claws deep into his gut flesh and lick away the blood like ice cream as it seeped down the side of a cone. It annoyed her that he could not recognize the depth of her rage, much less its source. Indeed, she only imperfectly understood why she hated him so. That he had ruined her life she knew. She had been human once and now she was not, and he was to blame. Perhaps Diana was more directly to blame, but Judy could not—as one in thrall to Diana, and her familiar—focus her hatred there where it most was due. Even against her son she could not express her spite when he was inside the house, within the protective circle of Diana’s influence. There Judy might glare and glower, but to spit or snarl was denied her. She would listen to the two of them as they necked and petted, Diana urgent and encouraging, he shy and fumbling, and writhe inwardly at the spectacle of a courtship that amounted to nothing but endless hours of grooming. What a spineless creature to have for a son!

  There was some comfort in knowing that his intimacies with Diana could only bring harm to him. Diana had become a force like the black whirlpool labeled “Drugs” in the videocassette that the Christian Coalition for Family Values had sent for her father to show the parishioners. Anything that came within a certain distance of the black whirlpool was sucked in and disappeared.

  Diana was the same. She was evil in the same contagious way as drugs. It didn’t make any difference if you were good or bad. If you were bad, the whirlpool would get you in one big slurp, the way it had got Judy. But if you were good, it would get you, too. You might circle around for a while, like a leaf in an eddy, but each circle was a little tighter than the last until it was too late and you were pulled down to wherever whirlpools took you.

  So all Judy had to do, really, was to sit on the sidelines and watch Diana do her job. Of course, she would have preferred to have a share in the boy’s undoing, but she would take what she could get. Diana understood that, and sometimes when she and Alan were involved in one of their tepid sessions of grooming and licking and kissing, Diana’s eyes would stray to where Judy sat in the shadows, watching them, and they would share a glance of complicity.

  “You like to watch, don’t you?” Diana said once when Judy had hopped up into the bed and settled into the dent Alan had left in the pillow.

  Judy purred.

  “All in good time,” Diana assured her. “He’ll get his. Just be patient.”

  Judy rubbed her head against Diana’s bare hip and gave herself over to luxurious thoughts of her son’s soft, pale torso streaming with blood and streaked by the long lacerations of her claws.

  “Who’s my darling kitten?” Diana asked her, tickling her ear. “Who do I love?”

  28

  Reverend Martin Johnson was beside himself with rage, with righteous indignation, with sheer mortal dread, and there was no one he could take it out on, no one he could punish or shout at. For his daughter had left him and gone off with his secret (and pitifully small) emergency cash fund of $123,500—all that he had to show for a lifetime of service to the church—and he couldn’t report the theft to the police, because it was money he officially was not supposed to have so long as he received a monthly stipend from the Lutheran Pastors’ Assistance Fund. Those people were as bad as Medicare in making sure you were a complete pauper before they’d lend a helping hand, and Judy knew that. She’d witnessed his affidavit. If he reported her, she’d report him.

  Judy had taken off in April, just after the first protest outside the church, and there hadn’t been a word from her since. Her clothes were still in her closet, her mail (bills and invitations to open new charge accounts) stacked on her mirror-topped vanity table.

  Reverend Johnson’s Cutlass, which had disappeared with Judy, had finally turned up in a trailer park outside Sturgis, South Dakota, but the teenage girls who had been living in it claimed to have “found” it parked outside the Greyhound station in Brainerd, suggesting that Judy had driven it only that far and then abandoned it with the keys in the ignition, an invitation to be stolen. Such, at least, was the theory of the state policemen who’d returned the car to Reverend Johnson. The two young thieves had been returned to their families, and the police had refused to press charges. Unless he pressed charges against the original thief, his daughter. No one at the Greyhound station remembered anyone resembling Judy. She might be anywhere now.

  Before she’d gone off, Judy had said many unkind things, all true and, for that reason, unforgivable. She’d said that Reverend Johnson was “in denial” about his grandson, for Alan was in fact his son. Alan knew that now, and soon all the world would know it, too. Reverend Johnson had ordered her, in the sternest tones, to be quiet, but she’d continued to jeer at him, and when he’d struck her, she’d hit him back, with her fists, and knocked him to the floor. Then, as she’d stood over him, she’d told him that he was not a Christian, for there had never been love in his heart but only lust and greed and spite, and that if there was a hell, as she hoped, it would be his certain destination, for his sins had congealed in his soul like the plaque in his arteries, making it impossible for him to repent or ask forgiveness. She had railed at him like a preacher possessed by Pentecostal fire, and each accusation had the ring of God’s truth and His wrath. She’d told him that he was unloved and had been all his life, that his wife, Emma, had hated him for his cruelty and despised him for his weakness and failure. That only those parishioners as mean-spirited and stupid as himself remained with him, and that even they would rejoice to see him unmasked as a hypocrite and the abuser of his own daughter. She’d said that the press and TV would make him as famous as O.J. Simpson. That even little children would recognize him on the street or shopping in a store, for he was too ugly to escape unnoticed in a crowd. Finally, he had simply crawled out of the room and taken refuge in the church. When he’d returned, at nightfall, she had taken the keys to the Cutlass and the money from what he had thought was the secret compartment in his desk, leaving behind her poisonous truths.

  He’d had no dinner that night and slept in his clothes on the living room sofa, for the upstairs rooms seemed haunted by the ghosts of those who’d fled from him—Emma, the boy, and now Judy, whom he’d always counted on to be irrevocably his, united with him by a sin that could never be confessed. He would have gone without breakfast, too, but hunger had overcome his pride. He’d made oatmeal, scorching the pan and producing a kind of gluey paste that he’d managed to get down with the last of the milk and several spoonfuls of sugar.

  Reverend Johnson had never learned to cook. Indeed, he felt a doctrinal contempt for men who usurped the role of women in the domain of the kitchen. Emma or Judy had cooked his meals, and when illness or absence had made them unable to perform that task, he had simply done without or driven to the diner in Leech Lake. The diner was no longer an option. Reverend Johnson could not even bring himself to go into the Shop ‘n’ Save, and so for the next two weeks he’d lived off the diminishing resources of the cupboard and icebox. For Sunday dinner he had had a can of chicken noodle soup. Since then there had been nothing left but canned or frozen vegetables and a box of spaghetti. But even if he made the spaghetti, there was no sauce for it.

  But the Shop ‘n’ Save was an even more i
ntolerable prospect now than when this whole thing started. Perhaps he should follow Judy’s example and just vanish into the sunset. He still had the car, and two uncashed checks from the Lutheran Pastors’ Assistance Fund. But he had no confidence that he could survive on his own in the larger world beyond Leech Lake County. Somehow he was sure the police or the liberal media would track him down, and the disgrace that Judy had predicted would be visited on him.

  And so he decided to kill himself.

  Once that decision was made, he felt an immense relief. A great weight had fallen from his shoulders. He felt like himself again, capable and decisive. His anger returned, and his wonted sense of righteousness.

  He knew how to set about it, thanks to the book he’d taken from one of his parishioners, Clara Munz, a self-help manual on suicide. The book explained just which pills to ask your doctor for and how many to wash down with a bottle of brandy. Clara, who was suffering from stomach cancer, had confessed her desperate intention to her minister, and he had demanded that she give him the book and the pills and even the bottle of brandy, for Reverend Johnson insisted on a strict teetotalism from his flock. Clara’s cancer had killed her not long after her aborted suicide, and Reverend Johnson had felt a special glow of virtue when he’d officiated at her funeral, knowing that he’d saved her from the certain damnation awaiting suicides. Now those pills would do the job they’d been intended for.

  First, however, he must draft his will, something that had never seemed necessary until now. Who would his heirs have been but Judy and her boy? And they would inherit what little there was in any case. But they were now, as the special agents of his ruin, precisely the people he did not want to benefit from his death.