THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  “If I leave, it will be to get away from you.”

  “Perhaps that isn’t possible. We are like magnets, the two of us. If there is a hell, I’m sure we’ll be there side by side. But perhaps hell was all a false alarm.”

  “Don’t count on it, Daddy.”

  The spider smiled and wriggled its hairy palpi. “Even now,” it confided, “you excite me. I would like to spread my sperm across your eggs and watch all the little creatures that would hatch.”

  Judy hissed at her father with deep-felt loathing, and he took that opportunity to leap forward and sink his clawed mandibles into the pink tip of her nose. She shrieked, and the spider laughed and skittered off to a safe distance.

  She awoke then. It was twilight, and a waning moon hung above the western horizon. She understood what she must do. She must follow the moon where it beckoned, as she’d first intended when she’d taken her father’s money. She’d been a fool to drive to the Kellog farm to have a final talk with Alan. That last flickering of maternal feeling had been her undoing.

  She had always been a stray, whether as a human or a cat. She should have gone west long ago. To California. Or Nevada. And she would have, except for her father. But that bond was broken now, and there was nothing left of it but an annoying itch on the tip of her nose.

  33

  Merle Two Moons was not a believer in anything that had to be believed in for it to work. He was sure as hell not a Christian. He’d seen from a variety of directions how that didn’t work any better than bingo for most things that mattered, even when the belief was bone-deep. The best it could do for you was to make you think your miseries had some higher purpose. Thanks, but no thanks. On the other hand, though he had some of the powers of a shaman, he was no believer in tribal bullshit, most of which was just superstition and fairy tales. You couldn’t control those powers any more than you could depend on the currents of a wide river. You could ride them while you were lucky, but then watch out. Life is a crapshoot, simple as that, and while there are times the dice will obey you like a dog, there are other times when they will turn on you like a wolf. Finally, as the Bible says in its more candid moments, there is nothing certain but the sun rising and setting. And there was a kind of evenhanded justice in that: you could have luck, you could have brains and good looks (and Merle had his share of both), but in the long run fate will find its way to fuck you over and even make you feel responsible for your own bad luck.

  And yet, weirdness happens. For instance, here, buckled round his wrist, was this leather collar that had come off a cat’s neck. He could remember trying to reason with the cat while he was taking off the collar. “You want to be a free cat, do ya, Ginger? Want to live in the wind? Here, hey, hold still. There you go.”

  That much had to have been an accurate enough memory, because here was the collar on his wrist. But after that he must have slid into a dream while he was lying atop the rock with the cat curled up across the crotch of his jeans. He’d been well lubricated, and the moon unusually eloquent, so it had seemed in no way strange when they struck up a conversation, Merle and the cat. Like a pickup at a bar, the kind when you know you’re just exercising your tongue. At that point his companion was no longer a cat, or not entirely. Her name was Judy Johnson, and she was the daughter of the minister he’d read about in the papers, and she was running away from home.

  It’s often the way with cats in the country that they will run off and we never find out what becomes of them. The same holds true for lots of teenage girls from the same background. But can we call them feral simply because we’ve lost touch? In their own ongoing lives they are wives or hookers or welfare workers, the same as the rest of the women around them. Except that their family life has been radically simplified. They have no past, the way Eve has no navel. Anyhow, that was the attitude Merle tried to encourage while they’d talked, as best he could remember.

  He’d drift back into the dream or into the floaty space around it, and when he’d wake again, the cat would still be there, warming his crotch, and the moon would be sailing along through wispy clouds, and he would take a sip from his pint of Old Crow, and as the liquor radiated through him he’d be back in the bar with the whining Judy Johnson. She was complaining about her old man and saying the rumors going round were true, he’d knocked her up way back when, and then got her to blame it on a boy from the rez, Jim Cottonwood. All that was black-and-white fact, and some of the young bloods were pretty heated up about it, since Cottonwood was still serving time on account of what this Johnson girl had testified to in court back when. Merle was too young to have known the guy who’d been put away, but his older sister had gone to grade school with him, and she’d sworn even back then that he was being railroaded.

  Merle had no reason to suppose she was wrong on that score, but he was not someone to get swept up in righteous causes. Jim Cottonwood was not the first red man to have been swallowed up by New Ravensburg, and he would not be the last. You could figure that every two years on average the prison would claim one life off the rez just the way Leech Lake did. You had to believe there was some justice before you could complain about the lack of it, and that was another belief Merle lacked.

  So why this dream that was all blinking red lights and alarm sirens? Why did this cat’s collar buckled on his wrist fill him with such a panicky dread? If this was a shaman dream (and he had to suppose it was, since the rock here had its own dark force in that direction), what was it trying to tell him?

  Finally he asked her, “Judy, why are you telling me all this?”

  “Well,” she said, holding her cigarette up to take a light from the tip of his, “I’m worried about my boy. Alan. He’s involved with this woman who is… evil. You’re probably thinking the pot is calling the kettle black, and I’ll admit I’ve got a lot to answer for.”

  “The Cottonwood guy.”

  She nodded her head and released two little spumes of smoke from her tiny nostrils. “But I didn’t do that to be mean. I did it to save my skin. Whereas the woman Alan is involved with is mean. She thinks she’s in love with him, but that won’t make a difference in the long run.”

  “I know the type,” Merle assured her. “I just don’t see what you want me to do about the situation.”

  “Well, what I was hoping was that you might kill her.”

  Merle huffed a one-syllable laugh of incredulity.

  “Seriously. And not for Alan’s sake. Because it isn’t just Alan. She’s going to be your problem, too. And it’s not as though you’ve never done it before, is it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to trick you into a confession, Merle. But I do have a nose. And so do the crows who are always circling that rock. It’s pretty obvious that someone is planted there. Was she a friend, or just a pickup like me? Did you even know her name?”

  “Tit for tat, honey. You tell me all about you and your old man, and I’ll tell you about my career as a serial killer. Deal?”

  Judy crinkled her nose. “Oh, you are such a crude asshole. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. That woman is dangerous, even for someone like you. Maybe especially for someone like you.” She jumped down from the vinyl seat of the chair and padded off across the linoleum floor of the bar, a cat again entirely.

  And when he woke, the dawn had gone beyond a glimmer, and four crows were circling in the little funnel of leafless space high above the rock. There couldn’t have been that much of an odor left at this point. He’d planted Bonnie here after the first good thaw, back in April. The rock must have turned her to instant hamburger when he lowered it back down on her body, after which nature would have taken its course. By now she’d be a bony, sodden hulk.

  The bottle was empty, but he still had one cigarette left. With the first drag, the dream had disintegrated into a single image of the ginger-colored cat darting off under the tables at the bar.

  He remembered that there’d been a warning—some woma
n he should be worried about. But whether that woman was alive and still ahead of him or dead and buried under this rock, he wasn’t sure. The only thing he knew with complete certainty was that he had a hard-on like a fucking piston.

  That cat was lucky it had taken his advice and run off, because at a moment like this Merle wasn’t answerable.

  34

  When the stylist had finished, Diana felt transfigured. Her hair had never been ash blond, or so short, or, simply, so chic. “Feathery” was the word. To be the woman with this hair, she would need an entire new wardrobe. Even in this outfit, which she’d found in Janet’s closet, where it had lived for years with the sales tag still attached, she looked like someone from another lifestyle. The rayon blouse was the female equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt, and the skirt a slithery, iridescent second skin. By her own standards of a year ago she was positively garish, a tramp, a floozy. Oh, if her friends could see her now!

  But that wasn’t likely to happen at an out-of-the-way mini mall in Bloomington. It had been many months since Diana had been in touch with her colleagues at the Perpich school, none of whom were likely to turn up where she was headed to later tonight, the Frequent Flyers Club, a singles bar near the airport. And even if she did run into someone she knew, it wasn’t as though she were committing a crime. None that they’d ever know about, anyhow. A man might disappear, but that wasn’t news. Men disappear all the time without making headlines, if they’re young and single. It was a male prerogative.

  Feeling extravagant, and flush with the cash she’d found in Judy Johnson’s valise, she agreed to the stylist’s suggestion that she have her nails done. It was fun being pampered. The final reckoning, after she’d tipped the stylist ten and the manicurist five, came to seventy dollars, the most she’d ever spent at a beauty parlor. Then, in her new pagan glory, crested and taloned, she paraded down the arcade to the bookshop at the far end of the mall, where she browsed for a while, first among cookbooks (she skimmed, but didn’t buy, a neat little do-it-yourself guide to making home-cured hams) and then in the true-crime section, where from a ceiling-high bookcase of black-spined paperbacks she selected Christie Cahn’s The 39 Ladies, a collection of bios of all thirty-nine American women currently awaiting execution on death row. Ever since Janet had been sent off to Mankato, Diana had taken a morbid interest in anything to do with prisons, so this seemed a promising accompaniment to dinner at Lemongrass, her favorite Thai restaurant, which was only a few miles away.

  Some ten minutes later, she was there. When the hostess who led the way to a table seemed not to recognize her, Diana smirked inwardly. Despite the fuss she made to have her usual seat alongside the aquarium, where the light was best for reading, not a glimmer. Diana had been a regular customer at one time. She really was a different person now.

  She ordered a shot of Stolichnaya on the rocks, and once the waiter had gone round to the other side of the aquarium, she added, from the flask in her purse, a tincture of home-brewed mandrake spiked with oil of peppermint. She winced at the first sip. What to call such a cocktail? Eye of newt? Toe of frog? Or simply hellbroth? This was the downside of witchcraft, but a necessary evil. It was like using a tuning fork to tune a violin. To use the mandrake on anyone else, she had discovered that she had to have it in her own system.

  While the concoction simmered in her innards, Diana concentrated on The 39 Ladies (ignoring, as best she could, the blood-red talons clasping the paperback’s pages). The ladies’ stories were arranged in the chronological order of their homicides, starting with Pamela Lynn Perillo, who, stoned on angel dust, strangled a man who picked her up when she was hitchhiking with two girlfriends. She was bad, but the schizophrenic Priscilla Ford was a lot worse. Priscilla had crashed her Lincoln Continental into a sidewalk full of people watching a Thanksgiving Day parade in Reno, a deed in which she took great satisfaction. Several of the ladies had done in their spouses and boyfriends (it was hard to see why that was reckoned a capital offense rather than a simple crime of passion), and as many more had been in Diana’s mother’s situation, caregivers at hospitals and nursing homes, where they acted as angels of death. It was dispiriting reading. So few of the women had committed crimes of any imagination or daring. And once they got to death row, they all went into denial, except for feisty old Priscilla Ford. Even the lady who’d injected drain cleaner into the veins of the teenager she and her husband had abducted got all weepy in her interview with the author: “I’m innocent, God damn it! Yeah, all right, the drain cleaner. But it was Sweetheart who shot her before that, and raped her, and did all the rest. And he’s only serving life. Is that justice? It was me who led the cops to the body in the canyon. I should get some credit! I love Jesus. He is my Redeemer. I have been born again right here in the joint. Praise Jesus! And fuck Alabama. (Don’t print that last part.)”

  When the appetizer came, a plate of six barbecued ribs, Diana set aside the book and enjoyed the bliss of yielding. Eating under the influence of the mandrake was like bulimia without the vomiting. There was the same conscious cannibal carnality. Only a really committed vegetarian can appreciate spareribs in their essential nature. Already the mandrake was kicking in, and she could see the diners at the adjacent tables in their essential nature as well. The jowly lady of a certain age whose breasts were veritable udders. The man across from her with sad, brown, basset eyes. The three pigs in suits and ties toasting one another with bottles of Heineken. It was Old MacDonald’s farm, with a moo-moo here and an oink-oink there.

  The thought of that song, which she had sung along with so many toddlers, mooing and oinking and clucking, put Diana in mind of Kelly, who would be spending this evening with her mother in Mankato, thanks to the ever-pliant Alan Johnson, who’d volunteered to act as chauffeur. Kelly had not adapted well to her father’s disappearance (his seeming disappearance), and Diana hoped that the visit to her mother’s prison would put the apples back in her cheeks. In the long run Kelly would be better off without her pig of a father, but right now, even with Alan around, it was hard for her. And Diana, truth to tell, had not been an ideal foster parent. It was not a role that gibed well with the practice of witchcraft. She could not resist teasing the child, and from time to time she would yield to impulses of petty cruelty—usually in the guise of “discipline,” but Diana knew what she was doing and so did Kelly, probably. It was good to be away from the brat for a little while.

  The main course arrived in a covered bowl. Diana lifted the stainless-steel cover and savored the aroma of the butterfly shrimp. Each shrimp was wrapped in a strip of bacon before broiling. Scrumptious. She had the waiter bring a glass of white wine and dug in. That she could indulge her appetite this lavishly without any fear of piling on the pounds appeared to be one of the special perks of being a witch. Her metabolism seemed to have been running at a higher rpm ever since her night with Tommy W. She always felt slightly feverish nowadays and couldn’t bear any bedclothes but a single sheet, and no matter what she ate she didn’t put on weight, for which blessing, whatever its source, she had to be truly thankful. The freedom to eat should be on the Bill of Rights.

  Again and again she would sip at her doctored vodka, revise the flavor with a swallow of wine, then bite into one of the celery-crisp shrimps, while the fish in the aquarium beside her performed their underwater ballet. One of them—a black, eely thing with a dorsal fin like a feather boa—was especially sinuous and snaky and seemed to move in sync with the easy-listening harp recital on the PA system.

  It was at just this moment of lushest pleasure, halfway through the bowl of butterfly shrimp, that John Klepfennig smiled at her through the aquarium walls. The little hairline mustache below his snout became a precise horizontal underscore as he lifted his glass in a toast that also asked the question, “May I join you?”

  “John,” she said amiably. “Of all people.”

  “Diana Turney. I didn’t recognize you at first. I saw you and thought to myself, Who is that glamorous woman? What is she doin
g here? Why isn’t she in Hollywood? And then I realized I knew that glamorous woman. You are looking mah-velous!”

  His delivery was a good approximation of Billy Crystal’s. People who didn’t know him always supposed John Klepfennig was gay, but from what Diana had heard, his effeminacies were a kind of protective coloration, a Stealth persona that allowed him to slip through most women’s radar. Plump and cuddly and endearing as a teddy bear, John could slip into anyone’s bed almost without their noticing. He would probably never return, being a classic Casanova in that respect, but then one probably wouldn’t want him to. Unmarried, childless, feckless, and jobless for as long as Diana herself (he substituted for sophomore and junior English classes), John seemed an ideal candidate for Diana’s sty.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Diana assured him. “Here—you’re an expert in these things.” She raised the tinkling tumbler of hellbroth so that it almost touched his lips. “See if you can tell what’s in this.”

  “An expert, am I?” He bowed his lips and sipped. “Bleh!”

  “Seriously, John. What is it?”

  “Peppermint schnapps and… motor oil? It’s vile.”

  “It has a strange aftertaste. Try it again.”

  He rolled his eyes, but took a second, polite sip. He shook his head, a perfectly porcine head now. “This is a popular drink in Thailand? God help the Third World!”

  “No. This is my own home brew. And it’s an aphrodisiac. Can’t you tell?”

  The pig across the table gawked. “You are not the same Diana Turney.”

  “No, I’m not. But I hope you’re the same John Klepfennig. You have a reputation, you know.”

  “Amazing.”

  “Here.” She pushed what was left of the butterfly shrimp across the table. “Polish it off. Then let’s split.”