Conjure Wife (11 page)

“Yes.”

“But I have the feeling that what you’re worrying about goes much deeper than that. Yesterday and today I’ve even felt that you wanted to turn to me for help, and didn’t dare.”

He paused, as if thinking exactly how to phrase his answer. But he was studying her face, trying to read the exact meaning of each familiar quirk of expression around the mouth and eyes. She looked very contained, but that was only a mask, he thought. Actually, in spite of everything she said, she must still be poised close to the brink of her obsession. One little push, such as a few careless words on his part — How the devil had he ever let himself get so enmeshed in his own worries and those ridiculous projections of his cranky imagination? Here a few inches away from him was the only thing that mattered — the mind behind this smooth forehead and these clear, gray-green eyes; to steer that mind away from any such ridiculous notions as those he had been indulging in, the last few days.

“To tell the truth,” he said, “I have been worried about you. I thought it would hurt your selfconfidence if I let you know. Maybe I was unwise — you seem to have sensed it, anyway — but that’s what I thought. The way you feel now, of course, it can’t possibly hurt you to know.”

It occurred to him that it was almost frighteningly easy to lie convincingly, to someone you loved.

She did not give in at once. “Are you sure?” she asked. “I still have the feeling there’s more to it.”

Suddenly she smiled and yielded to the pressure of his arms. “It must be the MacKnight in me — my Scotch ancestry,” she said, laughing. “Awfully stubborn, you know. Monomaniacs, When we’re crazy on a thing, we’re completely crazy, but when we drop it, we drop it all at once. Like my great-uncle Peter. You know, the one who left the Presbyterian ministry and gave up Christianity on the very same day he proved to his satisfaction there was no God. Remember, at the age of seventy-two?” There was a long and grumbling roll of thunder.

The storm was coining back.

“Well, I’m very glad you’re only worried about me,” she continued. “It’s complimentary, and I like it.”

She was smiling happily, but there was still something enigmatic about the eyes, something withheld. As he was congratulating himself on carrying it off successfully, it suddenly occurred to him that two could play at the game of lying. She might be holding something back herself, with the idea of reassuring him. She might be trying to protect him from her own blacker worries. Her subtlety might undercut his own. No sane reason to suspect that, and yet — “Suppose I get us a drink,” she said, “and we decide whether or not you leave Hempnell this year, and look for greener fields.” He nodded. She started around the bend in the L-shaped room.

— and yet, you could live with and love a person for fifteen years, and not know what was behind her eyes.

There was the rattle of glassware from the sideboard, and the friendly sound of a full bottle set down.

Then, timed to the thunder, but much closer, a shuddering, animal scream. It was cut off before Norman had sprung to his feet.

As he cleared the angle of the room, he saw Tansy going through the kitchen door. She was a little ahead of him down the back steps.

Light fanned out from the windows of the opposite house into the service yard. It revealed the sprawled body of Totem, head mashed flat against the concrete.

He heard a little sound start and stop in Tansy’s throat. It might have been a gasp, or a sob, or a snarl.

The light revealed a little more than the body. Norman moved so that his feet covered the two prominent scuffs in the concrete just beyond the body. They might have been caused by the impact of a brick or heavy stone, perhaps the thing that had killed Totem, but there was something so suggestive about their relative position that he did not want Tansy’s imagination to have a chance to work on them.

She lifted her face. It didn’t show much emotion.

“You’d better go in,” he said.

“You’ll —”

He nodded. “Yes.”

She stopped halfway up the stairs. “That was a rotten, rotten thing for anybody to do.”

“Yes.”

She left the door open. A moment later she came out and laid on the porch railing a square of heavy cloth, covered with shed hair. Then she went in again and shut the door.

He rolled up the cat’s body and stopped at the garage for the spade. He did not spend time searching for any brick or heavy stone or other missile. Nor did he examine closer the heavy footmarks he fancied he saw in the grass beyond the service yard.

Lightning began to flicker as his spade bit into the soft ground by the back fence. He kept his mind strictly on the task at hand. He worked steadily, but without undue haste. When he patted down the last spadeful of earth and started for the house, the lightning flashes were stronger, making the moments in between even darker. A wind started up and dragged at the leaves.

He did not hurry. What if the lightning did indistinctly show him a large dog near the front of the house? There were several large dogs in the neighborhood. They were not savage. Totem had not been killed by a dog.

Deliberately he replaced the spade in the garage and walked back to the house. Only when he got inside and looked back through the screen did his thoughts break loose for a moment.

The lightning flash, brightest yet, showed the dog coming around the corner of the house. He had only a glimpse. A dog the color of concrete. It walked stiff-legged. He quickly closed the door and shot home the bolt.

Then he remembered that the study windows were open. He must close them. Quickly.

It might rain in.

When Norman entered the living room his face was outwardly serene. Tansy was sitting in the straight chair, leaning a little forward, an intent moody expression around her eyes. Her hands were playing absently with a bit of twine.

He carefully lit a cigarette.

“Do you want that drink now?” he asked, not too casually, not too sharply.

“No, thanks. You have one.” Her hands kept on knotting and unknotting the twine.

He sat down and picked up his book. From the easy-chair he could watch her unobtrusively.

And now that he had no grave to dig or other mechanical task to perform, his thoughts were not to be denied. But at least he could keep them circling in a little isolated sphere inside his skull, without affecting either the expression of his face or the direction of his other thoughts, which were protectively concentrated on Tansy.

“Sorcery is,” went the thoughts inside the sphere. “Something has been conjured down from a roof. Women are witches fighting for their men. Tansy was a witch. She was guarding you. But you made her stop.”

“In that case,” he replied swiftly to the thoughts inside the sphere, “why isn’t Tansy aware of what’s happening? It can’t be denied that she has acted very relieved and happy.”

“Are you sure she isn’t aware or becoming aware?” answered the thoughts inside the sphere. “Besides, in losing her instruments of magic she probably lost her sensitivity to magic. Without his instruments — say microscope or telescope — a scientist would be no better able than a savage to see the germs of typhoid or the moons of Mars. His natural sensory equipment might even be inferior to that of the savage.”

And the imprisoned thoughts buzzed violently, like bees seeking escape from a stopped-up hive.

“Norman,” Tansy said abruptly, without looking up at him, “you found and burned that hand in your watch charm, didn’t you?”

He thought a moment. “Yes, I did,” he said lightly.

“I’d really forgotten about that. There were so many.”

He turned a page, and then another. Thunder crackled loudly and rain began to patter on the roof.

“Norman, you burned the diary, too, didn’t you? You were right in doing, it, of course. I held it back, because it didn’t contain actual spells already laid, only the formulas for them. So in a twisted illogical way I pretended it didn’t count. But you did burn it?”

That was harder to answer. He felt as if he were playing a guessing game and Tansy were getting perilously “warm.” The thoughts in the sphere buzzed triumphantly: “Mrs. Gunnison has the diary.

Now she knows all of Tansy’s protective charms.”

But he lied, “Yes, I burnt it. I’m sorry, but I thought —”

“Of course,” Tansy cut in. “You were quite right.” Her fingers played more rapidly with the cord. She did not look down at it.

Lightning showed flashes of pale street and trees through the window. The patter of rain became a pelting. But through it he fancied he heard the scrunch of paws on the drive. Ridiculous — rain and wind were making too much noise.

His eyes were attracted by the pattern of the knots Tansy’s restless fingers were weaving. They were complicated, strong-looking knots which fell apart at a single cunning jerk, reminding him of how Tansy had studied assiduously the cat’s cradles of the Indians. It also recalled to his mind how knots are used by primitive people, to tie and loose the winds, to hold loved ones, to noose far-off enemies, to inhibit or free all manner of physical and physiological processes. And how the Fates weave destinies like threads. He found something very pleasing in the pattern of the knots and the rhythmic movements which produced them. They seemed to signify security. Until they fell apart.

“Norman” — the voice was preoccupied and rapid — “what was that snapshot you asked Hulda Gunnison to show you last night?”

He felt a brief flurry of panic. She was getting “very warm.” This was time stage of the game where you cried out “Hot!”

And then he heard the heavy, unyielding clump-clump on the boards of the front porch. seeming to move questingly along the wall. The sphere of alien thoughts began to exert an irresistible centrifugal pressure. He felt his sanity being smothered between the assaults from within and without. Very deliberately he shaved off the ash of his cigarette against the edge of the tray.

“It was a picture of the roof of Estrey,” he said casually. “Gunnison told me Hulda had taken a number of pictures of that sort. I wanted to see a sample.”

“Some sort of creature in it, wasn’t there?” Knots flickered into being and vanished with bewildering speed. It seemed to him suddenly that more than twine was being manipulated, and more than empty air tied and loosed. As if the knots were somehow creating an influence, as an electric current along a twisted wire creates a complex magnetic field.

“No,” he said, and then made himself chuckle, “unless you count in a stray cement dragon or two.”

He watched the rippling twine. At times it seemed to glitter, as if there were a metal strand in it.

If ordinary cords and knots, magically employed, could control winds, what would a part-metal cord control? Lightning?

Thunder ripped and crashed deafeningly. Lightning might have struck in the neighborhood. Tansy did not move a muscle. “That was a Lulu,” Norman started to say. Then, as the thunder crash trailed off in rumblings and there was a second’s lull in the rain, lie heard the sound of something leaping heavily down from the front perch toward the large low window, behind him.

He got to his feet and managed to take a few steps toward the window, as if to look out at the storm. As he passed Tansy’s chair he saw that her rippling fingers were creating a strange knot resembling a flower, with seven loops for petals. She stared like a sleep walker. Then he was between her and the window, shielding her.

The next lightning flash showed him what he knew he must see. It crouched, facing the window. The head was still blank and crude as an unfinished skull.

In the ensuing surge of blackness, the sphere of alien thoughts expanded with instant swiftness, until it occupied his entire mind.

He glanced behind him. Tansy’s hands were still. The strange seven-looped knot was poised between them.

Just as he was turning back, he saw the hands jerk apart and the loops whip in like a seven-fold snare — and hold.

And in that same moment of turning he saw the street brighten like day and a great ribbon of lightning split the tall elm opposite and fork into several streams which streaked across the street toward the window and the stony form upreared against it.

Then — blinding light, and a tingling electrical surge through his whole body.

But on his retina was burned the incandescent track of the lightning, whose multiple streams, racing toward the upreared stony form, had converged upon it as if drawn together by a seven-fold knot.

The sphere of alien thoughts expanded beyond his skull at a dizzy rate, vanished.

His gasping, uncontrollable laughter rose above the dying reverberations of the titanic thunder blast. He dragged open the window, pulled a bridge lamp up to it, jerked the cover from the lamp so its light flooded outward.

“Look, Tansy!” he called, his words mixed with the manic laughter. “Look what those crazy students have done! Those frat men, I bet, I kidded in class. Look what they dragged down from campus and stuck in our front yard. Of all the crazy things — we’ll have to call Buildings and Grounds to take it away tomorrow.”

Rain splattered in his face. There was a sulphurous, metallic odor. Her hand touched his shoulder. She stared out blankly, her eyes still asleep.

It stood there, propped against the wall, solid and inert as only the inorganic can be. In some places the cement was darkened and fused.

“And of all mad coincidences,” he gasped, “the lightning had to go and strike it.”

On an impulse, he reached out his hand and touched it. At the feel of the rough, unyielding surface, still hot from the lightning flash, his laughter died.

“Eppur si muove,”
he murmured to himself, so low that even Tansy, standing beside him, might not have heard.
”Eppur si muove.”

Next day the appearance Norman presented to Hempnell was a close approximation of that of a soldier suffering from battlefatigue. He had had a long and heavy sleep, but he looked as if he were stupefied by weariness and nervous strain. And he was. Even Harold Gunnison remarked on it.

“It’s nothing,” Norman replied. “I’m just lazy.”