THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  He wrote it out on lined notepaper:

  The Last Will and Testament

  of Reverend Martin Andrew Johnson.

  I leave all my worldly possessions, including my house at 34 East Second Street and the neighboring Church of the Holy Redeemer, to James Cottonwood, now in the New Ravensburg State Correctional Facility, as a result of my daughter’s false accusation of rape. I realize this cannot begin to compensate him for the years he has been falsely imprisoned.

  Reading it over, the last sentence sounded too much like an apology, so he crossed it out. The important thing was to prevent Judy or Alan from being able to contest the will.

  He signed and dated the paper, then folded it, put it into an envelope, and addressed the envelope to Bruce McGrath, the lawyer representing James Cottonwood, from whom he’d received a series of letters insisting that Reverend Johnson contact him in connection with making a deposition required by the appeals court. Reverend Johnson was pretty certain he knew the kind of questions McGrath would be asking him. Well, now he had his answer.

  He walked the letter to the mailbox at the corner of Second and Main, the farthest he’d been from the house since Judy left home. It was a gray, overcast day, and people’s lawns were starting to come back. There were even some potted daffodils in bloom on the Oxenburgs’ porch. But nothing in that familiar view cried out to him to stop, to think again, to thank the Lord for the gift of life. He knew that was the line to take with someone talking of suicide, and he’d seen how little effect it usually had. When your life is just one long punishment, what is there to say thank you for? It astonished him that he’d never thought of killing himself before. Now it seemed the logical answer to an otherwise insoluble problem.

  Running off must have seemed like that to Judy. For Reverend Johnson, who rarely considered how other people might see things differently than he did, this was a real leap of the imagination, but it did not lead to any further insights. It did help steel his nerves. If Judy could resolve to act, then so could he.

  He fetched the pills and brandy from their hiding place, in a locked cupboard drawer in the church sacristy. From another part of the drawer he took out a ceramic cup that a visiting politico had donated under the mistaken idea that the church shared communion wine at its Eucharist services like the Episcopalians. It did not, but the price tag had been left on the underside of the cup—$60—so although it had never been used, it hadn’t been thrown away either. Reverend Johnson had saved it for a suitably solemn occasion, and that occasion had finally come.

  The cup had a handmade, cumbersome look, the sort of thing you’d expect a child to bring home from school with a boast of “Look what I made!” The outer surface was a coppery brown mottled with silver flecks. The inside of the cup was a pale-yellowish gray, also flecked. Reverend Johnson couldn’t understand why it was so expensive, because it seemed ill-made.

  He filled the sixty-dollar cup to the brim from the bottle of apricot brandy. “This is my blood,” he thought, not with any sense of irony but conscious that the quotation was more than usually appropriate.

  Reverend Johnson was not an experienced drinker, but because of its fruit flavor the brandy was not as difficult to swallow as he’d feared from a previous experiment with whiskey. He put one of the little blue pills on his tongue, took the smallest sip of brandy, just enough to ease the pill on its way to the back of his throat, then forced himself to swallow. Another pill, another sip, another swallow. Six times in quick succession. Then, as the book advised, he took a break.

  On the silver-plated communion tray he carried the pills, the cup, and the brandy into the church. For all the time he’d spent here, the place did not evoke any special sensation in his soul. It was a drab, dark space, with pews and pulpit of dark wood and an oak choir stall that was supposed to match the veneer of the electric organ but didn’t. The white paint on the walls had darkened in irregular patterns. The only element of the interior that could have been thought decorative was the windows, with their alternating lavender and amber diamonds, except for the one window that had been broken by a falling tree limb five years ago and been replaced by panes of opaque white glass. He had never liked the stained-glass windows and would have had them all replaced if there’d been money in the budget for such an extravagance.

  Reverend Johnson sat down on the topmost of the three steps leading up to the pulpit and washed down another half-dozen pills. This time he was more liberal with the brandy, and when he was through, he drank some just for its sweetness.

  It occurred to him to wonder whether, if he had been a drunkard like his older brother Henry, he might not have had a happier life. Henry had wasted his in beer joints and Indian casinos and died at the age of forty-two of lung cancer. But between the two of them, wasn’t Reverend Johnson actually the worse sinner? Henry’s sins seemed piddling by comparison. There was nothing to be envied there.

  Six more pills, six sips of brandy. He was halfway through the pills but had not progressed so well with the brandy. He made himself swallow an entire cupful at one go. His eyes teared from the effort, and the tears, once started, continued to trickle down his cheeks. But they did so without any discernible emotional connection, neither sorrow nor self-pity, nothing but an agreeable numbness, a tiredness in his neck and back that prompted him to slump back until he was resting against the wood panels of the pulpit.

  He filled the cup again and lifted it to his lips. He wondered what his life, his afterlife, would be like in heaven, then remembered with a start that he was not bound for heaven. That thought, grim as it was, was bracing, like the first taste of the weather as you stepped outdoors in the depths of winter. Somewhere he’d read that hell might be a place of cold and darkness rather than fire and brimstone. That would be his sort of hell.

  He realized that he’d spilled brandy down the front of his jacket. Perhaps he was becoming drunk. Or perhaps the pills were beginning to have their effect. He poured out a handful from the bottle, lapped them up with his tongue, and sloshed them down with the brandy.

  Would there be people in hell whom he’d recognize, as one recognized old friends and family members in heaven? Would Judy be there eventually, cursing him again, kicking him when he’d fallen to the icy pavement? Somehow he was sure she would be. He remembered how she’d looked down at him the last time he’d seen her. Snarling.

  He’d lost the pills, but there was still some brandy left. He drained the bottle and felt such peace as he could not remember feeling in his entire life.

  The next Sunday morning he was still there, curled up inside the wooden shell of the pulpit. From the entrance of the church not even his shoes were visible, and in any case no one had come inside. The church was empty of parishioners, though the protesters still paraded back and forth on the sidewalk, enjoying their triumph—for the headlines of yesterday’s Brainerd newspaper had finally broken the scandal. The county prosecutor’s office had announced that DNA tests had shown that James Cottonwood could not have been the father of Judy Johnson’s child. Further scandal was promised. The paper said that the identity of the child’s true father was known to Cottonwood’s attorney and to the prosecution, and would be revealed at a suitable point in the appeals process.

  The nave of the church was large, and the spring weather unusually cool. Reverend Johnson’s corpse decayed sedately, shriveling rather than bloating. There was no great stench. Anyone who might have thought to poke his head in at the front door would have noted only that the usual mustiness had intensified. But no one did. There were no Sunday services anymore, the protesters stopped showing up, and it seemed only natural to the neighbors to suppose the Johnsons had left town.

  29

  The crows began to be a nuisance after the first delivery of corn to the newly constructed corncrib. Alan had built it himself almost from scratch (the concrete foundation was already in place), based on a design in an old textbook, 20th Century Agriculture, that Diana had found at a garage sale, and he was dis
mayed when he realized that the crows had virtually free access to the corn. However, a visit to Leech Lake Lumber provided a quick fix. The corncrib was swathed in sturdy plastic netting that kept the crows from the corn, though they continued to perch on the roof and complain.

  Diana felt like one of the original covered-wagon pioneers when Alan had finished the job and the sty and its compound were habitable. She’d done little of the work herself, only pitching in when Alan needed another pair of hands, but the idea had been hers, and she’d paid for the labor and materials out of her own pocket (with a little help from the windfall of cash she found in Judy Johnson’s valise). There is nothing so gratifying as seeing a pile of raw lumber and spools of wire and rolls of tar paper slowly shaped into real buildings and fences, declaring a human purpose in the midst of nature’s muddle.

  And Alan had been shaped up by the same process. The pudgy teen who never was far from his computer screen lost his pallor and gained an early tan, lost flab and gained muscle, and lost some of his wallflower modesty and gained a modicum of confidence. Diana dealt with him like his physical trainer, scolding his posture, praising exertion. And he was at that wonderful age when his body responded to exercise like a tomato plant to Miracle-Gro. You could almost see the muscles plumping up in slow motion.

  Carl was another matter. He was plumping up, too, but it was not his muscles that were growing. The Scarsdale diet hadn’t worked (Carl must have cheated every time he was out of the house). He’d lost a sum total of three pounds in his first two weeks of dieting, and gained twelve as soon as he started drinking after work again. Diana did not nag, and though she served high-protein meals with lots of fiber, as per the instruction sheet from the prison dietician, she also stocked the icebox with lots of Carl’s favorite snacks, cheeses and bean dips and thick yellow cylinders of liver sausage. Plus, now that he was back on the day shift, they shared drinks before dinner as they watched the news, and more drinks after Kelly had been put to bed, or what was left of the magnum of wine from the dinner table.

  Diana saw what she was doing as a traditional maternal and/or wifely task: fattening up adult males for their first coronaries and thus preparing for a comfortable widowhood. She was doing it a little faster than some of the young matrons she saw pushing their wire carts about the Shop ‘n’ Save, but it was essentially the same job.

  Of course, she had an edge over most other women in that, as a witch, she could see what she was accomplishing. She only had to adjust some internal psychic wire (it was like popping your ears to hear more clearly) and Carl, who always got his minimum daily requirement of mandrake root, would go fuzzy in front of her and then come into focus as though his destined transformation had already been accomplished. There he was across from her at the dinner table, a virtual Porky Pig, equipped with only those human attributes required to handle silverware and slouch forward in his chair, but his face already metamorphosed to pig, tusks jutting up over his upper lip, snout quivering with pleasure, ears pricking up or relaxing as they carried on their small talk.

  “What happened to Kelly?” he asked one night, snuffling down a big forkful of Goya Rice and Black Beans (a standby whenever they had ham steaks). “She’s got this big [snuffle] bandage on her shoulder.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing to worry about. She went a little too far with Ginger. Ginger doesn’t like being teased. I put some iodine on the scratch. She’ll be fine.”

  “More wine?” he asked, holding the magnum poised over her glass in his cloven hoof.

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  He filled her glass, then his, and slurped with satisfaction.

  “Anything on TV tonight?” he asked, shoveling in more rice and beans.

  “Not a thing, really. But we still have that tape we made the other night.”

  “The Belushi program? Hey, great.”

  John Belushi was Carl’s favorite comedian. Diana herself liked him well enough, for that matter. Back at school she had been thought a stickler for what was politically correct, but she was not without a sense of humor. Perhaps Belushi was a little too gross sometimes, but since she had discovered her powers as a witch, Diana was less finicking in such matters. Good taste, bad taste, what difference did it make which was which? Or good and bad, for that matter?

  So they watched the tape, zapping past the commercials with the remote. Carl got steadily more sloshed and uproarious. Diana giggled more than she guffawed, most of her mirth inspired by Carl himself in his piggish persona, not by the program, but Carl wasn’t clued in to that.

  It was delicious having all these secrets. All her life Diana had loved the feeling of knowing what others could only guess at. Knowing how her father had died. Knowing what had become of Tommy W. Knowing where Judy Johnson had gone off to. Knowing Carl to be a pig.

  She would, she decided, complete the process tonight. The moon was out, and Carl was drunk, and she felt her powers strong within her. They were like the breath that comes when one has been skating hard in February weather, the lungs seared to their depths by the cold, the fibers mapped by each inhalation.

  At the end of one of Belushi’s samurai routines, Diana paused the VCR and said, “Come outside a moment. There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Outside? Now?”

  “Mm,” she said, and led the way to the back door, where Judy Johnson was waiting to be let out.

  The moon was just past full and halfway to its zenith. A few wisps of cirrus, high up, formed fleeting counterpoints to the fixed stars, constellations with no stories.

  “Don’t you want to put shoes on?” Carl asked.

  “The grass is damp. It’s perfect weather for bare feet. Come along.”

  The trees were finally in full leaf and cast bold, black shadows slantwise across the hill before them. Off in the distance a small chorus of frogs rehearsed for the summer’s diapason.

  A breeze of voluptuous vernal mildness caressed Diana’s skin as she undid the knot of her bathrobe and let it spread open to each side. Reaching the top of the hill, she turned to face Carl, still some paces behind her, and let the bathrobe fall about her feet.

  Carl’s piggish face was a comic mask of surprise, and then, as her invitation sank in, of lickerish hunger. Unbidden, he slipped out of his own shirt and pants and advanced toward her, half pig, half man, all hers. He put his arms about her and pulled her down to the ground. There were almost no preliminaries. His thick tongue pushed its way into her mouth. His thicker cock squirmed against her crotch, seeking entry.

  “Carl,” she told him, pulling her mouth free, “you are such a pig.”

  “Yeah, you got it,” he agreed as he achieved penetration. “I am a pig.”

  “And what sound do pigs make?”

  “Oink,” he answered. “Oink-oink.” With each oink the shaft of his cock sank in a little deeper.

  “Oh, you can do better than that. Give me a Belushi oink. Put your gut into it.”

  The pig in Diana’s arms bellowed with lust and then, as the metamorphosis gelled, a second time in terror and outrage.

  Diana broke away and got to her feet.

  “You really are a pig now, Carl. Isn’t that amazing? Or perhaps it isn’t, really. In so many ways it’s what you’ve always been. I think you’ll enjoy it. Most pigs seem to. What’s the expression? Happy as a pig in mud. And there’s your surprise.” She pointed to the newly renovated sty and its fenced compound. “Your new home. Come, I’ll open the gate for you.”

  She led the way down the hill.

  Judy and Carl followed, with that complacent acceptance of the present moment and its changing weather that only animals seem to enjoy. Unless the noises that Carl made as he trotted along could be understood as a kind of grumbling. But really, what had he to grumble about? His stomach was full, he’d just shot his load, and the weather could not have been nicer.

  Diana opened the gate, and Carl entered the sty that had been built for him.

  “You mustn’t go behind this
fence. Do you understand?”

  Carl nodded.

  Diana returned to the house, unpaused the tape, and watched it to the end while she finished off the pitcher of daiquiris that had been waiting in the freezer.

  30

  Shortly before noon the next day there was a phone call from someone asking to speak to Carl. Diana told the caller that Carl was at work.

  “But he’s not,” the caller replied. “That’s why I phoned—to ask why he hasn’t shown up. This is Barney Williams, from the personnel office at New Ravensburg. Are you sure he’s not there?”

  “Let me go check.” She went into the kitchen and returned with what was left in the Mr. Coffee. “Well, he’s not sleeping late, I can tell you that,” she told the man, “but his car is still in the driveway. But that’s not unusual. He’s in a carpool, so his car is here more often than not.”

  “Can you think where he might be?”

  “Honestly, no. If he was anywhere near a phone, he’d certainly have phoned you. And if he got a ride from someone else and there was an accident, someone would have phoned here.”

  “Well, if you do hear anything…”

  “I have the number,” she assured him.

  Carl was now officially missing, but it seemed too early to report his disappearance to the police. She would call Barney Williams again in the afternoon, after the school bus brought Kelly home, and ask his advice on how to proceed.

  And what would happen then? She had no idea and had made no plans. Oh, yes, she’d had Alan prepare the sty for Carl’s arrival; in that sense her enchantment had been no mere improvisation. But she’d made no calculation of the likely long-term consequences—for Kelly, for Janet, for the running of the house without Carl’s salary. Or for Carl, for that matter. At this point, she was simply playing with her power, the way a child might play with a chemistry set. Here’s a little bottle with yellow powder, and here are little crystals: if you mix them in water, what will happen? Of course, it was not as innocent as that. It was more like a child’s first experiments on kittens and bunnies: here, Fluffy, drink this!