THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  The first time he’d taken flight as a shaman had also been the first time he’d tripped on acid, and he’d supposed, afterward, that the experience had been no more than a particularly vivid hallucination. But how, then, could he account for the fact that the tidbits of information he picked up during flight time always proved accurate afterward? The cabin by the lake that always stood empty and unlocked in the early afternoons, the car keys hung in the darkest corner of a garage? No, the magic was real enough. The catch was, you couldn’t force it. Not every crow would give him a ride. Not every night-visiting voice would tell the truth. Not every dream came true.

  The dreams, indeed, were trickiest. The deceit seemed to be built in, the way it is in some women, the ones who fall in love only with people they’ll wind up hating. They never told an outright lie. They told you the lies they told themselves, sometimes with passionate conviction. And there was always some part of the dream, or the woman’s lie, that turned out to be true.

  The crows’ circle broke up soon after Merle joined, and the whole convocation of them started heading north in a ragtag bomber formation. Over the swamps, over meadowlands no longer mowed, over an abandoned cabin that local teens used as a motel, across the shallow waters of Fishhook Lake, sweeping close to its shore in the hope of dead fish, then along County Road B with an eye peeled for roadkill. His wings worked now with the same easy rhythm as his fellows’, as thoughtless as a typist’s fingers.

  As the tower of the New Ravensburg prison came in sight they hit the first thermals and rode them, corkscrewing upward on extended wings until the air no longer buoyed them, then the long glide to the next thermal.

  And that is how Merle found himself clutching the strand of razor wire mounted along the periphery of the prison rooftop and exercise yard, not five feet from the staring eyes of Jim Cottonwood. Merle stared back, knowing that Jim wanted what he had, the crow’s body and time aloft.

  Merle was not about to give him that opportunity, even if he were able. He’d never encountered anyone else with shaman powers when he was in that mode himself. But he acted as if, which was the only way to go when the juice is flowing. As if Jim would understand him, he said, “Sorry, buddy. This car’s already rented.”

  The staring eyes blinked once, and you could see they were a crow’s eyes in just the way that Merle’s were. Then, without moving his lips, the guy said, “Do I know you?”

  “No, but I think we got a friend in common. You’re Jim Cottonwood, the guy that’s been in the papers—right?”

  Jim nodded his head.

  “I’m surprised you’re still in the joint. I thought they were supposed to let you out a while ago.”

  “You’ll have to ask my lawyer about that. But I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “Crow will do. Old Crow. I wasn’t planning to come here. But sometimes it’s like you dial the phone and when they pick up at the other end it’s someone other than who you thought you dialed. But you know them anyhow. It’s like that.”

  “So, how is it you know me?”

  “We have a ladyfriend in common. Judy Johnson. Remember her?”

  “I heard Judy disappeared.”

  “Well, she’s changed a lot. But I saw her not that long ago. And she was worried about her boy. Alan. You know him.”

  Jim nodded.

  “That’s it. That’s all I know. But I don’t suppose it’s any accident I flew this way. I figure that was something I was supposed to tell you. A warning.”

  “While I’m in here, there’s not much I can do for that boy. They don’t even let him visit anymore. Are you in contact with him?”

  “I’ve seen him once or twice. But only, you know, on the fly.” Merle unloosed a self-appreciative caw.

  “Find out more if you can,” Jim Cottonwood said. “And let me know.”

  “How? You got visiting hours?”

  “You’ll know when. We seem to be tuned to the same wavelength.”

  “I’m not your friend, you know.”

  “I didn’t think you were. But I’ve got a feeling you’ll be back.”

  Merle felt perplexed, and then, the way you can be deadlocked in an arm-wrestling contest for the longest while and suddenly your opponent has this surge of power and the back of your hand is on the table, Jim took possession of the crow, and Merle found himself back on the rock with a monster headache, staring straight into the sun.

  37

  The conversation at dinner was strained. Just before they were ready to say grace there had been a phone call from Janet, who’d spent most of her time talking to Kelly, and then just a couple minutes with Diana. But that had been long enough to put Diana into a temper. Her end of the conversation had been too tight-lipped and monosyllabic for Alan to be able to figure out the nature of the disagreement, but he figured it probably had to do with Kelly and the pigs. On their visit to Mankato Kelly had complained bitterly to her mother about having to slop Hamlet every day, and Janet had seemed sympathetic. So was Alan, for that matter, especially now there were four pigs, though he’d never said anything to Diana, from a sense that he had no business interfering in how Diana laid down the law for Kelly.

  Not much was said while they ate. It was canned lentil soup, corn muffins from a mix, and carrot salad. Kelly became a little whiny, not for the first time, on the subject of Ginger, who had been missing now for three weeks. Had she got lost in the woods? What would she live on there—birds and mice and chipmunks? What if she’d been hit by a car? Kelly never saw a roadkill these days without insisting that the car slow down until she was sure the victim had not been Ginger. Diana was unusually brusque in dealing with her questions, but Kelly persisted—not so much from a concern for the cat (it seemed to Alan) but because she knew her questions rubbed Diana the wrong way.

  After a perfunctory dessert of Mott’s applesauce sprinkled with cinnamon, Diana told Kelly to go up to her room and play with her Trolls. There’d be no television tonight. Kelly pointed out that she hadn’t taken the scraps out to the pigsty.

  “You won’t have to do that anymore,” Diana told her. “Your mother thinks you’re too young for that much responsibility.”

  “But won’t the pigs be hungry?”

  “Perhaps they will. But their hunger won’t be your concern any longer.”

  “I’ll take out the scraps,” Alan offered. “It’s no big deal.”

  “There, you see,” said Diana, “the pigs will be fine. Now, up to your room. I’ll come up before bedtime and read you a story.”

  Kelly left the table with an air of conscious victory. Her whining had won the day for once.

  “Come into the living room,” Diana said to Alan as he started collecting dishes from the table. “I’ve got something important I have to ask you.”

  When he was about to sit where he usually did on the couch, Diana shook her head and patted the recliner’s headrest. “No, you take Papa Bear’s chair tonight.” When he was seated, she scrunched down on her knees beside him.

  “I’ve got a proposition,” she told him.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Let’s get married.”

  He looked at her dumbfounded, and then laughed.

  “You think I’m too old,” she said.

  “No, of course not. It’s the last Winner’qus fortune I had playing Taipei. It said, ‘Accept the next proposition you hear.’”

  “Well, there—you see! You’ve got God’s own green light.”

  “Oh, it’s just a computer game, you know that. But as soon as you said, ‘Let’s get married,’ I couldn’t help thinking of it. I can’t believe you’re serious. I mean, after all the problems I’ve been having.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t have those problems if we were properly married. But that’s not the reason I asked.”

  “Why did you, then? I mean, I love you, you know that. But… I’m only eighteen, and I’ve got no job, no education. I don’t really think of myself as a grown-up. You must know all kinds of guys
back in the Twin Cities who’d make a better husband than me. And God knows you’re not marrying me for my money.”

  “And what about love, Alan? Shouldn’t that have something to do with it?”

  “Of course. But. I’m just so amazed. Like, I never dared even imagine you’d want to marry me. Why?”

  “I thought I just answered that question.”

  Alan went on for some time protesting his incredulity while Diana just repeated the one argument against which he had no answer, love.

  “Tell me this, then,” she said at last. “Do you want to marry me? Forget about should and shouldn’t or what people will think or where we’ll live when Janet gets back.”

  “Damn, I hadn’t even thought of that! Where will we live?”

  “How about the church?”

  “The church!”

  “Unless you want to get ordained somewhere and open it up for business again. Does the furnace work?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And it’s got plumbing?”

  “There’s a whole big kitchen in the basement. It hasn’t been used for a while, but it works. And two toilets.”

  “So, it wouldn’t be a whole lot of work to convert it into our own home sweet home. We can make a sleeping loft where the altar is. It’s a perfect place for kids, and—”

  “Kids?”

  “You want kids, don’t you?”

  Alan marveled at the notion and the careless way she put it forward: marriage, children, a home.

  “I guess it’s what I’d like most of all. That is, besides you.” He looked down at her hand, which was resting on his knee. He lifted it and kissed it with exaggerated reverence like a priest kissing the relic of a famous saint. “I’ll have to get a ring.”

  “Well, there’s a jewelry store in Brainerd. We can stop there tomorrow before we see the justice of the peace.”

  “Tomorrow!” He was amazed all over again.

  “Why wait longer? It’s not as though we have to hire a hall and a caterer. But I guess we should get some film for the camera. I’ll wear that white dress with the yellow flowers, and you’ve got your blue suit. We’ll look respectable. Would you like Kelly to come along? That way we’ll have a bridesmaid at least. But I don’t want my mother there. We’ll bring back a nice big bakery cake and share it with Mom and the old ladies at Navaho House. But Mom will just be a nag if we tell her beforehand.”

  “She’d be against the idea, I guess.”

  “She’s against any idea that isn’t hers originally. I expect your mother would have been against it, too, if she were still around to run your life. I am almost exactly twice your age. In fact, I must be a year or two older than her.”

  Alan shook his head with a woeful look. “It’s not much of a family you’re marrying into, is it?”

  “Well, I don’t foresee any problems with them. Do you? Somehow I don’t expect your mother to turn up again anytime soon. Which is something of a nuisance from a legal point of view. You can’t sell any of the property without her approval, but you can rent it—the lawyer was clear about that. We’ll live in the church and rent the house.”

  “You’ve thought the whole thing out. It’s amazing.”

  Diana smiled, and patted Alan’s knee, and got to her feet. She had thought it all out, and he didn’t know the half of it.

  38

  What Alan chiefly did not know, and what even Diana could not easily have put into words, was that they were not the same people they’d been when they’d first met. In his case there was simply a loss of innocence, something one is always bound to lose once one ventures forth into the open seas of love, but for him there had been no attendant gain. Sex was simply a new way to fail. Gone was the charm of his guilelessness, gone the sunny, skittish temperament that makes even the crustiest grown-ups smile at the antics of puppies and kittens. The careless youth who’d had no thought for the future had become a worrywart, still without a map or plan but aware now of that lack. When he looked in a mirror, he was dismayed by the face he saw there, and looked away. His only comfort was that somehow Diana seemed to see a different person than he did, and he was grateful for her least smile, the touch of her hand, any kind of attention.

  Diana had changed, too, but in the opposite direction. Her crimes had given her an unexpected, tardy bloom. In the midsummer of her life she’d spread her petals and released an aroma as potent as the most drop-dead perfume. And the petals did not wilt as the summer wore on, but continued to bloom, like the white, waxy flowers of some desert shrub. Evil, in those who have consciously made that choice, imparts a real strength and a charisma that those, like Alan, who lack such self-awareness and definition find mesmerizing. They swarm to it, like ants to sugar. How else explain Hitler, the matinee idol of evil?

  Charismatic evil is much less common in women than in men, for women are rarely dedicated to an evil purpose. They tend, more often, to slip into their wicked ways without knowing it, all the while protesting their essential virtue as mothers, or as victims of a patriarchal society, or simply as being unlucky in love. Rarely do they revel in their crimes like some mad emperor or marauding warlord. Diana even now maintained a womanly habit of self-extenuation. In her relations with Alan she thought herself a paragon of romantic passion and self-sacrifice, heroically rising above mere animal desire, a source of love and nurturing despite his impotence. As to those men who’d tasted her enchantments in a less benign way, well, they were pigs, weren’t they? Their transformation was the confirmation of their essential nature as male chauvinists; they’d got what they deserved, and were still getting it, and would get more. In that resolve Diana was remorseless—the staunch champion of all women, a darker shade of Joan of Arc. In this sense of herself as a vengeful Fury, she did begin to approach evil in some larger and more heroic way. She was Woman: goddess, witch, nymph, all female archetypes, indeed, but mother—and that was a role she had no wish to be cast in. Whatever maternal fulfillment she might need had been sufficiently provided by her career as a teacher. From that job she had learned one essential lesson: all grown-ups are fossil children, with the same flaws and failings, the same ingrained stupidities, the same piggish anthem of Me, Me, Me, all the way home.

  Grown-ups are children, and children are animals. Indeed, dogs and cats and pigs and all their mammalian tribe are brighter than toddlers. Just how much brighter was on record in thousands of psychometric studies. People take a longer time learning to be people than animals take learning to be animals. In their nests and dens, baby animals are a simple Pavlovian stew of appetites and impulses that grasp and crawl, gurgle and crow—alive in the Eternal Now, nearer to God but further from the complex machineries of capable knowledge.

  That’s why, when we imagine gods, they so often take the form of infants or of animals, the two Others nearest us in nature. And that was the root of Diana’s power, of her witchcraft. She could lay hold of that primal connection between what is human and what is animal. To turn men into animals she only had to make infants of them again.

  She had outside help, of course. No witch can work without some mediating power. Diana had Wes assisting her. As his power had grown, hers had grown in proportion, which in turn swelled his—a resonance phenomenon that had gradually favored Diana, so that now, in a practical sense, her strength was greater. Yet his power still underlay hers with a dumb brute force, the way the sea buoys up a swimmer. He amplified her strength but did not direct her acts. He had no animus against Alan Johnson, was aware of him only as a sometimes irksome presence among the swine within the sty, of whom Wes had a much keener awareness. He could sense their doom, for in some ways it resembled his own. And he hungered for it. He wanted their blood to soak the ground, as his had. Ghosts notoriously thirst for such libations.

  Wes was not the only unquiet spirit in the Kellog household. Another had come to dwell there, his presence unknown to Diana, though she had brought him there. It was not Tommy W., though his death had stained her hands. Tommy’s
spirit, never strong, had ceased to exist soon after he’d been killed, his soul evaporating like a shallow pool of rainwater in the summer heat. It was the Reverend Martin Johnson who had come to live with Diana now, in his devolved, posthumous form as a spider of the genus Erigone.

  The Erigones are spiders who build small webs in the grass and among dead leaves, where they live unnoticed and almost unnoticeable (so small are they) except in the months of October and November, the season of “gossamer summer,” at which time they become airborne, lifted by long threads extruded from their abdomens. They rise to great heights in this manner until at last the threads tangle together and they plunge to earth like a billion Icaruses.

  Reverend Johnson was an exception among the generality of arachnid reincarnates in that he maintained some tiny remnant of human consciousness and purpose: that his only son should die, as he had, in despair and bitterness of spirit. This dream was like one of those filaments the Erigones release to the wind in gossamer summer—infinitesimally thin but as strong as iron chains and sufficient to bear his entire weight. His hatred sustained him even in the meager circumstances he had come to inhabit, as nuns of especial holiness have been rumored to live on no other nutriment but communion wafers.

  Now Reverend Johnson’s purpose was becoming Diana’s as well, as her soul began to resonate with his. It was she, all unawares, who had brought him home with her, as she might have brought home the virus of a cold. For the evil, when they die, remain for a time contagious, and she had had the misfortune to be exposed to the contagion when she had found the letter Reverend Johnson had tried to send to Bruce McGrath. A postal clerk had judged there to be insufficient postage on the envelope, and it had been returned to Reverend Johnson’s home. There Diana had found it in the little mound of unrecovered mail under the letter slot of the front door.