THE SUB A Study In Witchcraft

by Thomas M. Disch

She waited until both the shag rug and the fabric of the chair had caught fire, and then she sprinkled some more brandy at strategic points. The flames were knee-high when she left the room.

  She couldn’t stay longer. Someone might see the fire and report it.

  “Good-bye, Alan,” she called out from the bottom of the stairs. “I really do love you. So much! I can’t tell you.”

  59

  The tree house in which Kelly lay asleep, more profoundly asleep than ever before in her life, had been built in 1972 by her mother and two of her school friends, Sharon Ohr and Patti-Ann Witz. Janet never told anyone about it—especially not Diana. Janet was eight then, Diana fourteen, and already too heavy and too dignified to be climbing trees. Kelly had discovered it herself just last spring when she’d climbed far enough up the lower limbs of the tree to be able to see the two pieces of scrap plywood that formed the tree house’s floor. Robins sometimes inherit their parents’ nest in the same way, unaware of whose it had been or how it was built, just eager to get busy putting it back in shape.

  As Kelly slept, Jim Cottonwood learned to work the strings that moved his little puppet. It was a more delicate task than commanding the actions of a crow. At first, as when waking after an accident, he only wiggled the fingers of one hand. Then he became more venturesome. He lifted both her arms to salute the rising moon where it was visible, intermittently, through the leaves above. The little girl’s sleep was undisturbed. Indeed, it deepened, and she began to dream.

  Jim’s own state resembled dreaming in its way. He could see what was about him clearly, and move through that space confidently, but he could not be too purposeful, or the strings of the puppet might be snapped. He had to move about as one drives a familiar car along familiar roads.

  The girl climbed down from the tree house deftly, for her feet knew each limb of the descent, her hands had memorized the way. When she reached the base of the tree, she knew at once where she was, for there before her, gleaming in the moonlight, was the witch’s cottage she’d seen so often in the storybook that Aunty Di had given her on her fifth birthday, with its gingerbread siding and its frosted roof with icicles of white icing dripping from the eaves. The illustrator, Mary Clellan Hogarth, had won the Caldecott Medal for her version of Hansel and Gretel, and it was undeniably creepy. Several school libraries had removed the book from their shelves when parents complained that it had given their children nightmares, but this enhanced rather than impaired the book’s commercial success. Now, in her dream, as Jim rode her body about like a bicycle, Kelly moved through the dark woods and candlelit corridors of Mary Clellan Hogarth’s imagination, a jungle gym of Jungian archetypes, an echo chamber of Sadean whispers. (It was not generally known that Hogarth, under the pseudonym Sylvan Plath, had brought out a pricey limited edition, much abridged, of de Sade’s Justine and Juliette.) For anyone who ever looked at Hogarth’s version of the tale, no other Hansel and Gretel would ever exist.

  Jim’s actions were as little of his own volition as Kelly’s, for as Diana systematically went about Navaho House preparing its torching, Jim did the same, matching her actions with his own. As Diana was sprinkling the brandy on the carpet of the TV room, Jim doused the weathered siding and the wooden door of the smokehouse with the fire starter that was kept by the brick barbecue. (Kelly’s fingers had known just where to reach, and knew where to find the Bic beside it.)

  As Diana went about Navaho House opening and closing doors and windows, as one might adjust the vents of a woodstove, Jim poured what was left of the gasoline for the mower over the inner walls of the smokehouse.

  The place reeked of the cured flesh of the slaughtered pigs, still hanging on hooks. Within the witch’s kitchen there was a similar stench as the witch heated up the oven in preparation for roasting Hansel. Kelly loathed the smell, but like Gretel in the storybook, she made herself ignore it—and was not awakened from her dream.

  And then, as Diana left Navaho House and began to drive back to the farm, Kelly and Jim waited, huddled behind the far side of the smokehouse, whose door stood ajar, letting out the reek of the meat to mask the scent of gasoline. In Kelly’s dream, the witch, with her silvery hair and her spiky fingernails, fussed about in her shadowy kitchen, which was partly the kitchen of Navaho House and partly the one that Mary Clellan Hogarth had drawn.

  In the far corner of the kitchen Hansel was dimly visible, in the cage in which he was being fattened, the shadow of a child, any child, all children. This was the picture that was so often missing from library copies of the book, the work sometimes of distressed parents, sometimes of mesmerized children, sometimes of dealers in rare prints.

  And then, at last, there was the rattle of the Chevy as it approached the farmhouse, and the slam of the car door.

  “Kelly!” Diana called out. “Are you still out here? It’s time to come in the house.”

  “I’m here!” Jim replied. Not that loudly, but Kelly’s voice carried through the night air, and Diana heard.

  “Kelly! Into the house! Right now!”

  “I can’t!” her voice insisted, as Gretel had insisted that she could not put her head into the oven.

  “You can’t? Don’t be ridiculous? Where are you?”

  But her voice was nearer. She must have reached the top of the hill from which the smokehouse could be seen.

  “I’m in here,” Jim replied. “I can’t get out.”

  “You can’t get out?” Diana repeated with chill sarcasm. She was standing just outside the door of the smokehouse.

  “Why is this door open? I’ve told you a hundred times, the door has to stay shut for the meat to cure.”

  Jim was silent, and in her dream Kelly acted quickly. When the witch had put her own head in the oven to show how it was done, Kelly gave her a quick shove from behind.

  Jim was ready. The bent nail that was used in place of a padlock to keep the door shut slipped back in place. Within, Diana let out a cry of pain and protest.

  Jim took up the Bic and held it at arm’s length next to a small pile of gas-soaked kindling at the base of the smokehouse. Impossible to say which of them, Jim or Kelly, thumbed the lighter to life. The kindling caught at once, and Jim backed away as blue flames circled the base of the smokehouse.

  Within her pyre, Diana was not alone.

  Wes was with her again as she’d seen him last, hanging upside down, blood streaming across his face. They faced each other almost eye to eye, for she’d fallen to her knees as she entered.

  “Please,” she begged him. “Help me!”

  When he only grinned in reply, she pushed herself to her feet, dislodging one of the curing hams. The flames were within the smokehouse now, licking at her clothes, singeing the silvery hair. She battered at the door, but it did not give way.

  “None of us ever wants to die,” Wes said calmly. The flames had no effect on him. “But this time I will save you. If you do what I say.”

  “Please!” she implored him as her clothes began to burn and her skin to blacken.

  “Hug me,” he told her.

  Diana threw her arms about her father, and he wrapped her in his own, and with just a small tug of assistance she slid from her burning skin and entered a new life.

  60

  After a dutiful hour-long sit at the bedside of her son, Louise Cottonwood realized that Gordon had been right and she’d been wrong. The trip to Duluth had been a waste of time. Jim did not seem about to return to his senses anytime soon. He lay there in the hospital bed like a corpse set out for display at Good Shepherd. It was sad, but it was also aggravating to hear Gordon Pillager saying he’d told her so.

  “He’s going to be okay, I promise you,” Gordon went on when they were back in his pickup. “Right now he’s still doing his shaman thing. But he knows where to head for when that’s done. We just got to sit tight till he gets in touch.”

  “And I just have to wait till a crow comes and perches on the windowsill?”

  “Believe it,” he assured h
er.

  In fact, she did believe it, though she was not about to give Gordon Pillager the satisfaction of saying so.

  “He looks okay,” said Gordon, taking a pack of his dreadful stogies from the inside pocket of his suitcoat.

  “He looks dead,” said Louise, “and I wish you wouldn’t smoke one of those things in here. I live with a woman who never stops smoking, and the one good thing about this trip is not having to breathe her smoke.”

  “Right,” said Gordon, and tucked the pack back in his pocket. “Hey, I got an idea. How about my treating you to a restaurant dinner? That could be the second good thing. You ever been to Red Lobster?”

  “There is a houseful of women waiting for me to put them in their beds.”

  Gordon just ignored that. He knew that Louise had told her boss she might be gone the whole night. “You ever eaten lobster?”

  “Never!” Louise declared virtuously.

  She had, however, had a mad fling with Gordon Pillager thirty years ago when he’d had all his hair and most of his teeth and was the best-looking man on the rez. And that’s what this invitation was all about, and probably the reason he’d driven her to Duluth after telling her it would be a wild-goose chase.

  “I’m not saying let’s stop at a motel,” said Gordon, reading her mind. “I’m saying this is a good chance to find out about lobster. I don’t know about you, but myself, I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, well,” she agreed.

  It was obvious that Gordon had been planning this all along, since he was wearing his suit, and at the hospital he’d behaved like what he was officially supposed to be, which was Jim’s Spiritual Advisor. Anyhow, Louise never had had lobster, and she was curious to know what the fuss was about.

  When they’d been led to their own private table in the biggest restaurant Louise had ever been in, Gordon excused himself and headed for the bathroom so he could put in his teeth. While he was gone, the waiter, a blond college boy who reminded her a lot of Alan, though not quite as heavy, brought a little basket to the table and explained that inside the napkin there was garlic bread.

  Louise had made garlic bread herself, at the insistence of Mrs. Gerhardi. Mrs. Gerhardi was a nice lady, but she often complained about Louise’s cooking. Even when Louise had made her the garlic bread there was no big thank you. Now Louise understood why. This wasn’t regular bread. It didn’t come in slices, and the restaurant used real butter, and maybe something besides ordinary garlic powder. It was unbelievably delicious.

  When Gordon got back to the table, Louise apologized for eating all the garlic bread in the basket.

  “You liked it, huh?” he said with a real grin. With his teeth in he looked almost the way he had thirty years ago.

  She nodded, and looked down at the litter of crumbs on the tablecloth.

  Gordon signaled for the waiter and ordered another basket of garlic bread and the lobster special for both of them, and to top it off, a whole bottle of white white, which the waiter brought to them lickety-split in a silver bucket that stood beside the table on its own pedestal like a flowerpot. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Louise protested that she didn’t drink wine.

  “But I do,” he’d bragged.

  When it came, she wouldn’t take a sip—at first. But Gordon guzzled it with such satisfaction, and the garlic bread had made her thirsty. So against her own principles she sampled the few tablespoons the waiter had poured into her fancy glass, and when he brought the lobster, he filled the empty glass all the way to the brim.

  Gordon showed her how you had to break the shell of the lobster apart with a giant nutcracker. And then!

  The first taste reminded Louise of trout that had gone off.

  The second taste was like the garlic bread.

  Each bite after that tasted like something else again, until she understood: this was lobster, and it was like nothing else, and no wonder people made a fuss.

  At some point in the drive back to Navaho House, Louise realized that she must be drunk, because it was as though no time had gone by. She was still in love with Gordon Pillager. He was a good man, and there weren’t that many. He was still a good man. Kind and generous, and if he didn’t have much to say, neither did she.

  “You’re crying,” he said as he hung a right on the main turnoff into town.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Jim will be all right,” he assured her in his usual mumble. He’d taken his teeth out as soon as they left the restaurant and stuck them in the pocket of his suitcoat.

  “I suppose he will,” she agreed.

  And then they came to Navaho House.

  It was on fire. There were flames coming from the window of what, in a quick reckoning, she realized was Alan’s room. She was out of the pickup almost before it had come to a stop, and headed straight for the ladies she could see on the front lawn.

  “Have you called the fire department?” she yelled.

  None of them could say they had, so she figured no one had done so. Maybe one of the neighbors might have, or, this late, maybe not. So she looked for Gordon, who was there beside her, and told him to phone for the fire department on the little phone he had in his pickup, or else to wake up the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kusick, and use her phone.

  When he’d gone off, Louise went into the house herself. It was full of smoke, but she crouched low and headed for the back staircase. The smoke was thicker in that direction, but that was the way to Mrs. Turney’s room, and Mrs. Turney had not been among the ladies on the front lawn. There were flames in the TV room, but Louise got round them and up the stairs, holding her breath.

  The door to the bathroom was open, and as she glanced in, she saw Alan Johnson, stark naked and coughing, on the floor beside the tub. She hauled him to his feet and, with a sideways glance at his equipment (which was nothing like Gordon’s but better than John Cottonwood’s, her only standards of comparison), she got him to wrap himself in towels that she’d flung into the half-full tub. He seemed as feeble as any of the old ladies, so she helped him down the stairs and pointed him to the back door.

  When she tried to get up the stairs again, it was no longer possible. If Mrs. Turney was up there, it was too late.

  But there was still the main staircase at the front of the house, and Louise was sure that she hadn’t seen Mrs. Gerhardi among the ladies on the lawn. She was Louise’s favorite among all the residents despite the way she bitched about her cooking. She’d been right about the garlic bread; maybe she’d been right about other things.

  With her head wrapped in a towel doused in water from the kitchen sink, Louise got up the staircase (why wasn’t the damned sprinkler system working?), and sure enough, there in her bedroom was Mrs. Gerhardi, conked out in bed. The door had been closed (until Louise opened it) and the window open, which had kept her from asphyxiation but had also let her go on sleeping.

  Louise managed to get Mrs. Gerhardi out of bed and out of the room and down the hall to the head of the stairs, but then her luck ran out. Was it the fact that the fire had spread to the front of the house? Was it Mrs. Gerhardi’s bad back and bum right ankle? Was it the wine at dinner? Whatever it was, they didn’t make it down the stairs. Mrs. Gerhardi took a stumble at the head of the stairs, Louise tried to grab hold, and they went down together, Mrs. Gerhardi on top.

  Mrs. Gerhardi had lost almost a hundred pounds since she’d come to Navaho House and had to get by on Louise’s cooking, but she was still a large woman.

  61

  When the district attorney finally had talked to everyone concerned and sorted through the physical evidence, he decided, not without some misgivings, that there was no need for anyone to be arrested.

  This is what he figured had happened:

  Diana Turney and Merle Two Moons had begun to have an affair shortly after she’d moved into the Kellog farmhouse. She had also been having an affair with her brother-in-law, Carl (though he denied this, as one might expect). In any case, Merle, whether out of jea
lousy or acting in collusion with Diana, had abducted Carl and held him captive in the cellar of his shack in the woods, where he’d been discovered the day after the fires, and where there was evidence of his long suffering.

  There was also the medical evidence: Carl had been castrated. This fact was withheld from the media, from a sense that he should not be subjected to more needless humiliation.

  Diana Turney had seduced the Johnson boy months ago. Her motive had obviously been mercenary, for they had been married by a justice of the peace up in Brainerd without any hoopla, but just days after the wedding the lady had paid for a two-year-term joint-life with a hefty payoff.

  At about the same time, the boy’s grandfather, Martin Johnson, had committed suicide. That the man was almost certainly Alan’s father did not concern the D.A.’s office, though the newspapers and TV couldn’t leave that side of it alone. The reverend’s disgrace may have speeded up the probate of the will in which he left his entire estate to Jim Cottonwood, the prisoner who’d served so many years because of Judy Johnson’s perjury. Louise Cottonwood, shortly before her death, had sent Johnson’s will to Bruce McGrath, her son’s attorney, with a note explaining how she’d come to have it in her possession. Apparently Diana Turney had planted it among Alan’s effects in Navaho House with the intention of making it seem (a) that Alan had found and secreted the will to cheat Jim Cottonwood of his surprising bequest, and (b) that Alan might have been responsible for his mother’s death.

  Who had killed Judy Johnson, and why? From the violence done to her body, the district attorney supposed it had been Merle Two Moons, and that Merle was, in fact, a serial killer. For, under the big rock near which Merle’s body had been found, the skeletal remains of Bonnie Poupillier were also discovered. Merle’s guilt in this instance could only be supposition, for the body had decayed beyond the possibility of a meaningful autopsy. Bonnie’s next of kin was duly informed, but Louis Poupillier was not in a position to do much about it, for he was serving time in the New Ravensburg prison on charges of manslaughter. He’d got drunk one night and shot his common-law wife. The district attorney had always supposed that Louis Poupillier might also have been responsible for his daughter’s disappearance and presumed death, and who knows, perhaps he was. It did not seem worth pursuing. One way or another Poupillier was going to die in prison, and Merle Two Moons was already dead, sparing the county the expense of what would have been a very nasty trial.