THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Dinner’s ready!” Diana called out from the dining room.

  Janet plunked down on the big chair that was losing its stuffing and had been moved out to the porch. She folded her arms over her chest. “Make up any kind of excuse you want,” she told Alan. “I’m not going back in there. The whole place stinks of that roast. It makes me sick.”

  “Okay,” said Alan, taking Kelly by the hand, and tugged. “Back to the table, Kelly.”

  “But Grandma said—”

  “She can do without her cigarettes for five minutes.”

  So they went back to the dining room and took their places at the table. Every plate had a big slice of the pork with a glob of mashed potatoes beside it and thick brown gravy over the whole thing and a slice of black, burned-up onion for decoration.

  “So where’s the Homecoming Queen?” Diana asked.

  “She’s not feeling very well,” said Alan. “She asked to be excused.”

  “She said the smell of the pork roast makes her sick,” Kelly volunteered, knowing she shouldn’t but unable to resist passing along the snub. “It makes me sick, too.”

  “So, suddenly we’re all vegetarians here, are we?” Diana said, with a significant glance at Alan’s plate.

  “Now, Diana,” said Mrs. Turney, “it wasn’t all that long ago you wouldn’t touch so much as a bite of potato salad if there was any bacon in it.”

  “Hey, if people aren’t hungry, they don’t have to eat. Right?” Merle sliced into his slab of pork, sloshed it around in gravy, and held it up for the table’s admiration. “Me, I’m famished.”

  Everyone watched as though he were performing a trick as he started chewing on the pork. It seemed to take an unusual amount of chewing. “Mm,” he commented, nodding his head. “Mm.”

  Then, with no warning, he vomited into his heirloom dinner plate.

  Kelly was the first to burst into laughter, then Alan and Mrs. Turney, and finally even Merle joined in, partly to be a good sport and partly because the thing had tipped over the edge from awful to ridiculous. Only Diana, scowling at the gray gruel of vomitus spread like a second gravy over Merle’s pork, did not join in the general, dismayed merriment.

  47

  The sweet odor of the burnt sacrifices had penetrated even to the space between the windowpanes inhabited by the little Erigones spider that had been Reverend Martin Johnson, who believed with his diminished but still tenacious faith that these sacrifices were made on his behalf. His hunger was aroused to the degree that he left the stillness of his retreat, skittering up the rope within the window sash to stand in a beam of sunlight. The heat excited his silk gland, and his spinnerets began to extrude a long thread that floated in the faint updraft by the air conditioner. “Oh,” he thought, “he’s near! He’s near! He’s mine again! Come closer, my boy.” It was as though he were a spider of the female sex, scenting a male presence, eager to kill. In fact, it was his son’s proximity that Reverend Johnson sensed just behind the bedroom door. Alan entered the room, to plunk down heavily on the bed beside the woman who was (the spider noticed now) already in the room.

  Alan and the woman talked in earnest, hushed tones, but Reverend Johnson took no interest in their conversation. Trembling with desire, he let himself be lifted by the thread of gossamer and sail through the room, unseen by the couple on the bed, a mote among a swarm of other motes and molecules of smoke, the incinerated remains of the savory sacrifice. He alit on Alan’s shoulder, broke loose from the thread that had borne him there as an aviator sheds his parachute, and made his way quickly across the fabric of Alan’s jacket and the collar of his shirt to lodge in the shadowy hollow of his ear, where Alan experienced his presence as a brief annoying tickle. But too late now and too deep inside his ear to be got at by the thrust of his little finger.

  “What shall we do?” Janet’s voice boomed as though in an echo chamber. “I can’t stay here!”

  “Why not?” Alan’s voice resounded like the membrane of a drum, and the words, amplified in this way, made a kind of emotional sense to Reverend Johnson, a fear that agreeably mingled with the smoke of the burnt offering. “It’s your house, isn’t it? You could just tell her to leave.”

  “I’d rather leave myself. With you and Kelly. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t feel safe here.”

  “You’re being irrational.”

  There was a knock on the bedroom door.

  “Diana, would you please just leave me the hell alone?” Janet shouted at the door.

  “It isn’t Diana, darling. It’s your mother, and I have to talk to Alan. I know he’s in there.”

  “Can’t it wait a moment, Mrs. Turney? Things are a little hairy right now.”

  “I don’t think it can wait, Alan. It’s the police again. Louise just called to say the police had phoned, asking for you. She told them she didn’t know where you were. They wouldn’t say what they wanted. But maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea to go back to Navaho House right now. That’s what Diana says.”

  “What does Diana have to do with it?” Janet fumed.

  “Well, she was right there beside me when I talked with Louise. And she actually had an idea of what might be the best thing for you to do, Alan. Merle says you can stay at his place. He says the police might come round here looking for you, but they wouldn’t think to connect you with him. Does that make sense?”

  “Merle and I are not exactly good buddies, Mrs. Turney.”

  “Well, we find out who our friends are when we’re in trouble. And I don’t know what else to suggest. Unless you want to go to the police.”

  “What do you think, Janet?” Alan asked.

  “The last thing I would do is go to the police,” said Janet.

  “Merle, then?” He was asking himself more than Janet.

  “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” said Mrs. Turney, still on the other side of the closed bedroom door.

  Alan sighed his submission, and the eavesdropper inside his ear stridulated with instinctive eagerness, like the spider’s bride as she feels the bridegroom’s first tentative plucking at her web.

  48

  “Did you torture your pets when you were a kid?” Merle asked Diana as he watched her scrunched over in a half lotus trimming her toenails.

  “I wouldn’t say I tortured them,” she answered. “Teased them perhaps.”

  “Did you tease them to where they’d bite and claw?”

  She looked up with a grin. “Why? Is that what you think I’m doing? Taking my claws out?”

  “That hadn’t occurred to me. No, I was just wondering how some people are like the name of that movie, natural-born killers. I always figured, even when I was a kid, that someday, somehow, I’d kill people when I was older. The way some kids know they’ll be dads and moms. And when one of these kids takes a machine gun to school and lets loose on his classmates, I always think: hey, there but for the grace of God.”

  Diana laughed. “You’re one to talk about the grace of God!”

  “I know,” he said with a lazy smile, leaning back against the headboard and reaching for the lit cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. “But I’ve always been a big believer. In our situation, when you’ve actually got some connection to the power that’s out there, you can’t really help being a believer. The difference is, we have to figure out what to believe for ourselves. ‘Cause the regular theories people get taught at Sunday schools and catechism classes, if you grow up Catholic like I did, don’t hold water. The Indian stuff fits the facts better.”

  “You mean Native American,” she corrected schoolmarmishly. “Not Hindu.”

  He afforded her pedantry a derisive snort, then reconsidered. “They got a handle on something, too, those Hindus. That tantric yoga, I read a couple books on that shit.”

  Diana finished with her toenails and folded up the clippers. She flipped her head back, as though to get her hair out of her eyes. She still had all the little habits that went with longer hair. “I guess there is a
connection between sex and the power we’ve got, whatever you call it.”

  “How about witchcraft?”

  “Witchcraft,” she agreed. “If the connection weren’t there, I suspect Alan would be hanging from a hook in the smokehouse with the rest of them. It was always such a temptation to zap him. I’m sure at some point I would have given in. I tried a couple times. ‘Alan,’ I told him, in this very bed, ‘you are such a little pig.’ And I’d tickle him, and stroke him, and say it again—in an affectionate way, really. Pigs can be darlings. I loved that movie Babe. And I had flashes when I could see him with his little snout. But the magic never was there. I realized finally it was because he was a virgin. It was the one crucial wire that wasn’t connected.”

  “It’d work now,” said Merle with a knowing smile.

  Diana’s eyes widened. “You mean that he and…?”

  “Your sister, yeah. I thought you knew. It seemed pretty obvious to me. I thought that’s why you were so pissed off with her when they got here. You could smell it on him. And he had that little smile guys get when they’ve just lost their cherry.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I did notice that. But I’m just so used to the old Alan, it didn’t occur to me. With Janet!” She shook her head ruefully.

  “It’s a pisser, ain’t it? You do all the work, and she reaps the reward.”

  Diana forced a laugh, grateful for the balm of his sarcasm. She had every reason to be jealous. Alan was her husband, and Janet her younger sister. A classic betrayal in both directions. “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “Oh, he’s safe as money in the bank,” Merle answered. “He’s down in my root cellar. On this big workbench with bolts in it, and him chained to the bolts. He can thrash around with his legs, but it won’t do him any good. Or bang his head.”

  “Was there a struggle? You never said anything but ‘Well, that’s taken care of.’”

  “Uh-huh. I was wondering when you’d ask. There was a brief struggle. But it was more like I sucker-punched him. He wasn’t expecting to get attacked, not right after we went in the back door. I was behind him and had the bottle ready, and once he’d swallowed just a bit of it, he didn’t have much fight left.”

  “You’ve done that to other visitors?” she asked.

  He nodded. “A couple times. Your boy was the easiest. The other times they were more cautious, I had to be sneakier. But it’s always fun. More fun than duck hunting, that’s for sure. You can freeze your ass off waiting for something to happen in a duck blind.”

  “I’ve never been duck hunting, but I’ve done more ice fishing than I care to remember.”

  “Yeah, you’re more the big-game type, I guess.” He leaned forward in the bed until he was able to cup his hand round the back of her neck and pull her closer. She got up on her knees accommodatingly and gave him a questioning look. But he wasn’t after sex just yet. He only wanted to talk about killing. That was his foreplay.

  “You know that lady in Canada, in the book you was reading about all the different women on Death Row?”

  “Mm,” she said. “I think I know the one you mean. Karla Homolka—who drugged her sister, and then she and her husband together raped her and tortured her to death. But that was another book, not the one about Death Row. They don’t have capital punishment in Canada. They’re too civilized.”

  “Well, we might consider doing the same stuff with your sister.”

  Diana shook her head. “No way, Merle. And you wouldn’t get off on it either, any more than you did with that girl you buried under that rock of yours.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Merle agreed. “Just daydreaming.” He considered the smoke curling up from his cigarette for a while. Then: “Hey, speaking of capital punishment: you know that song? ‘Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?’ When they come for us, we should head for the border.”

  “Except that we don’t have the death penalty here in Minnesota either.”

  “But did you ever think about that? What you’ll do when your number’s up and the cops are closing in?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ll say I was sexually abused. It’s quite true, you know. My father abused me all the time.”

  “You say that so sincerely. But you can’t bullshit me, sweetheart. You’re forgetting: I’m your evil twin.”

  “Well, that’s what Karla Homolka said, and she was able to plea-bargain a minimal sentence. She’ll be released in just a few more years.”

  “You going to tell them I corrupted you?”

  “Who else can I blame? It worked for her. I’ll say you compelled me. I was the helpless victim of your insatiable lust. But this is all so hypothetical. We haven’t even done anything yet.”

  “Well, we’ve abducted your husband, and your sister’s conked out in the next room.”

  “She asked for a sedative, I gave her one.”

  “So, what I want to know is: what are we going to do with them? Will it be quick? Or slow? You want to repeat what you did with your brother-in-law and those other pigs?”

  “I don’t think I could, not with Alan anyhow. You know how if you strike a match two, three times, after that it just won’t ever light? Alan may not be a virgin anymore, but it’s like he’s been vaccinated. Do you have any bright ideas?”

  He nodded. “Uh-huh. You know that guy they’re looking for in Serbia or whatever the fuck they call that area now? The guy with the unpronounceable name?”

  “The guy who ran the concentration camps there?”

  “Yeah, that one. I’d like to do what he did.”

  “A pig farm I can handle, Merle. A concentration camp would be beyond our limited resources.”

  “I just mean I’d like to starve him to death. I think that could be really interesting. No physical torture. Just keep him chained in the basement like they did in the Middle Ages. For as long as it takes.”

  “That could be months. And I think eventually you’d start feeling sorry for him. Or I would.”

  “Well, if that happened, we could just finish him off quick, like at a vet’s. Anyhow, that’s my idea.”

  “Well, he’s yours to do with as you like. Only at the end we have to make it look like a suicide. I want them to find the body.”

  “So you can be the grieving widow—and inherit. Right. What about your sister and her kid?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t want to harm Kelly. Would you?”

  “Not especially. Maybe if she were like two years old and really whiny. I’ve wanted to swat kids that age. But it’s not like I’ve got this urge to put as many notches in my gun as I can. No one’s keeping score. Killing people should be a pastime, not a job.”

  Their eyes met, and there was a further brief discussion conducted only by glances. It didn’t take any deep intuition to know what he wanted as he lay there with a hard-on. A nod from him, and she got started. With Merle sex was always as quick and straightforward as a Big Mac. No need for preliminaries, no pretense at tenderness. But she did wonder, when he came, what he was thinking about. Was it Alan, or Janet, or even Kelly? It wouldn’t have been herself, she was pretty sure of that. Usually you can tell if someone is thinking of you when you have sex with them.

  49

  Carl was not that old, in human years, but even so, when he’d last seen his human face reflected in a mirror, he’d been aware that he’d grown thicker and coarser. He was prematurely middle-aged, just like Janet. Not that either of them had been any great prize to begin with. By thirty-four, the boy who’d played right wing on his high school hockey team, the Gordie Howe of north-central Minnesota, had just about disappeared, like the kids on milk cartons. Yet there were moments, even during his recent battle of the bulge, when the two faces had merged, the old face of back when and the older face of here and now.

  And so it was again: he would lower his snout to drink from the water of the bog and see, in the dark water, a flicker of his human face. There was no joy to be had in such moments, no glimmer of some redemption up ahead, for he had no hope of becomi
ng human again. He was like those poor sods who get sent to the joint for life without parole and know they’ll rot there. It would be easier to be just an animal, as he had been in the sty. Or like the deer he would encounter in the woods and swamplands, with no other thoughts than the endless, anxious quest for the next bite to eat.

  That, of course, was Carl’s quest, too. What could he eat, where would he find it? The deer, at least, had some clue to these questions. Carl had none. Most of the grasses and weeds he rooted up and chewed and swallowed served only as emetics. He stumbled through the woods and boglands, leaving a spoor of vomit and watery, ocherous shit. The only thing that seemed to offer real nourishment was the roots of the water lilies that grew at the edge of the swampland, but to get at them he had to risk being swallowed alive in the mire, and now the one area where they grew in any abundance had been exhausted and he had had to forage farther afield. Perhaps if he’d known more about edible weeds and mushrooms and such stuff, he might have fared better, or perhaps not. The North Woods were not a natural habitat for wild boars. He would probably meet the same fate as the prisoners who’d made it out of New Ravensburg back before it was escape-proof. They’d been able to hide in the woods, but not to survive there, and they were eventually recaptured once they resurfaced in civilization, breaking into someone’s pantry or a convenience store.

  Carl had come close to making the same classic mistake when he’d returned to the farmhouse where he’d lived as a man and been penned as a pig. The door to the sty had been left open, and a plastic pail had been set beside it filled with prime leavings from the dinner table. He had been strongly tempted, until he got close enough to see what was on the menu and realized it was the charred remains of his recent companions at the trough. Not that he had any compunction on that score, for he was very hungry, but it reminded him of the larger situation. He was sure that this offering was a kind of bait and that there must be a hook inside. The food might be drugged or poisoned, and sure enough, when he refused the bait, Merle appeared out of nowhere and took aim at Carl with a shotgun. Carl’s own shotgun, he figured at a later, calmer moment. He took three pellets in the butt and counted himself lucky.