Conjure Wife (12 page)

Gunnison smiled skeptically. “You’ve been working too hard, It butchers efficiency. Better ration your hours of work. Your jobs won’t go hungry if you feed them eight hours a day.

“Trustees are queer cusses,” he continued with apparent irrelevance. “And in some ways Pollard is more of a politician than an educator. But he brings in the money, and that’s what college presidents are for.”

Norman was grateful for Gunnison’s tactful commiseration on his loss of the sociology chairmanship, especially since he knew it cost Harold an effort to criticize Pollard in any way. But he felt as far removed from Gunnison as from the hordes of gayly dressed students who filled the walks and socialized in clusters. As if there were a wall of faintly clouded glass between him and them. His only aim — and even that was blurred — was to prolong his present state of fatigued reaction from last night’s events and to avoid all thoughts.

Thoughts are dangerous, he told himself, and thoughts against all science, all sanity, all civilized intelligence, are the most dangerous of all. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them.

One was more familiar than the others. It had been there last night at the height of the storm. He felt vaguely thankful that he could no longer see inside of it.

Another thought-cyst was concerned with Tansy, and why she had seemed so cheerful and forgetful this morning.

Another — a very large one — was sunk so deeply in his mind that he could only perceive a small section of its globular surface. He knew it was connected with an unfamiliar, angry, destructive emotion that he had yesterday sensed in himself more than once, and he knew that it must under no circumstances be disturbed. He could feel it pulsate slowly and rhythmically, like a monster asleep in mud.

Another had to do with hands — hands in flannel gloves.

Another — tiny but prominent — was somehow concerned with cards.

And there were more, many more.

His situation was akin to that of the legendary hero who must travel through a long and narrow corridor, without once touching the morbidly enticing, poisoned walls.

He knew he could not avoid contact with the thought-cysts indefinitely, but in the meantime they might shrink and disappear.

The day fitted his superficially dull and lethargic mood. Instead of the cool spell that should have followed the storm, there was a foretaste of summer in the air. Student absences rose sharply. Those who came to class were inattentive and exhibited other symptoms of spring fever.

Only Bronstein seemed animated. He kept drawing Norman’s other students aside by twos and threes, and whispering to them animatedly, heatedly. Norman found out that he was trying to get up a petition of protest on Sawtelle’s appointment. Norman asked him to stop it. Bronstein refused, but in any case he seemed to be failing in the job of arousing the other students.

Norman’s lectures were languid. He contented himself with transforming his notes into accurate verbal statements with a minimum of mental effort. He watched the pencils move methodically as notes were taken, or wander off into intricate doodles. Two girls were engrossed in sketching the handsome profile of the fraternity president in the second row. He watched foreheads wrinkle as they picked up the thread of his lecture, smooth out again as they dropped it.

And all the while his own mind was wandering off on side tracks too dreamlike and irrational to be called thoughts. They consisted of mere trails of words, like a psychologist’s association test.

One such trail began when he recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher’s notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either. That made him think of mimeographing.

Mimeograph, it went on. Margaret Van Nice. Theodore Jennings. Gun. Windowpane. Galileo. Scroll— (sheer away from that! Forbidden territory.)

The daydream backtracked and took a different turning. Jennings. Gunnison. Pollard. President. Emperor. Empress. Juggler. Tower. Hanged Man — (hold on! don’t go any further.).

As the long dull day wore on, the daydreams gradually assumed a uniform coloration.

Gun. Knife. Sliver. Broken glass. Nail. Tetanus.

After his last class he retreated to his office and moped and fussed around on little jobs, so preoccupied that at times he forgot what he was doing. The daydreams still wouldn’t let him alone.

War. Mangled bodies. Mayhem. Murder. Rope. Hangman. (Sheer off again!) Gas. Gun. Poison.

The coloration of blood and physical injury.

And ever more strongly he felt the slow-pulsing respiration of the monster in the depths of his mind, dreaming nightmares of carnage from which it would soon awake and heave up out of the mud. And he powerless to stop it. It was as if a crusted-over swamp, swollen with underground water, were pushing up the seemingly healthy ground by imperceptible degrees — nearing the point when it would burst through in one vast slimy eruption.

Starting home, Norman fell in with Mr. Carr.

“Good evening, Norman,” said the old gentleman, lifting his Panama hat to mop his forehead, which merged into an extensive bald area.

“Good evening, Linthicum,” said Norman. But his mind was occupied with speculating how, if a man let a thumbnail grow and then sharpened it carefully, he could cut the veins of his wrist and so bleed to death.

Mr. Carr wiped the handkerchief under his beard.

“I enjoyed the bridge thoroughly,” he said. “Perhaps the four of us could have a game when the ladies are away at the faculty wives’ meeting next Thursday? You and I could be partners and use the Culbertson slam conventions.” His voice became wistful. “I’m tired of always having to play the Blackwood.”

Norman nodded, but he was thinking of how men have learned to swallow their tongues, when the occasion came, and die of suffocation. He tried to check himself. These were speculations appropriate only to the concentration camp. Visions of death kept rising in his mind, replacing one another. He felt the pulsations of the thing below his thoughts become almost unendurably strong. Mr. Carr nodded pleasantly and turned off. Norman quickened his pace, as if the walls of the poisoned passageway were contracting on the legendary hero and, unless the end were soon reached, he would have to shove out against them wildly.

From the corner of his eye he saw one of his students. She was staring puzzledly, at him, or at something behind him. He brushed past her.

He reached the boulevard. The lights were against him. He paused on the curb. A large red truck was rumbling toward the intersection at a fair rate of speed.

And then he knew just what was going to happen, and that he would be unable to stop himself.

He was going to wait until the truck was very close and then he was going to throw himself under the wheels. End of the passageway.

That was the meaning of the fifth stick figure, the tarot diagram that had departed from tradition.

Empress — Juggler — The truck was very close. Tower — The lights had started to change but the truck was not going to stop. Hanged man —

It was only when he leaned forward, tensing his leg muscles, that the small flat voice spoke into his ear, a voice that was a monotone and yet diabolically humorous, the voice of his dreams:

“Not for two weeks, at least. Not for two more weeks.”

He regained his balance. The truck thundered by. He looked over his shoulder — first up, then around. No one but a small Negro boy and an elderly man, rather shabbily dressed, carrying a shopping bag. Neither of them near him. A shiver settled on his spine.

Hallucinations, of course, he told himself. That voice had been inside his head. Nevertheless his eyes shifted warily from side to side, probing the very air for hints of the unseen, as he crossed the street and proceeded home. As soon as he was inside, he poured himself a more than generous drink. Oddly, Tansy had set out soda and whiskey on the sideboard. He mixed the highball and gulped it down.

Mixed himself another, took a gulp, then looked at the glass doubtfully.

Just then he heard a car stop and a moment later Tansy came in, carrying a bundle. Her face was smiling and a little flushed. With a sigh of relief she set down the bundle and pushed aside the dark bangs from her forehead.

“Whew! What a muggy day. I thought you’d be wanting a drink. Here, let me finish that one for you.”

When she put down the glass there was only ice in it. “There, now we’re blood brothers or something. Mix yourself another.”

“That was my second,” he told her.

“Oh heck, I thought I was cheating you.” She sat on the edge of the table and wagged a finger in his face. “Look, mister, you need a rest. Or some excitement. I’m not sure which. Maybe both. Now here’s my plan. I make us a cold supper — sandwiches. Then, when it’s dark we get in Oscar and drive to the Hill. We haven’t done that for years. How about it, mister?”

He hesitated. Helped by the drink, his thoughts were veering. Half his mind was still agonizing over the hallucination he’d just experienced, with its unnerving suggestion of unsuspected suicidal impulses and… he wasn’t sure what. The other half was coming under the spell of Tansy’s gaiety.

She reached out and pinched his nose. “How about it?”

“All right,” he said.

“Hey, you’re supposed to act interested!” She slid off the table, started for the kitchen, then added darkly over her shoulder, “But that will come later.”

She looked provocatively pretty. He couldn’t see any difference between now and fifteen years ago. He felt he was seeing her for the hundredth first time.

Feeling halfway relaxed at last, or at least diverted, he sat down in the easy chair. But as he did, he felt something hard and angular indent his thigh. He stood up quickly, stuck his hand in his trousers pocket, and drew out Theodore Jennings’ revolver.

He stared at it frightenedly, unable to recall when he had taken it from the drawer at the office. Then, with a quick glance toward the kitchen, he hurried over to the sideboard, opened the bottom drawer, stuffed it under a pile of linen.

When the sandwiches came, he was reading the evening paper. He had just found a local-interest item at the bottom of the fifth page.

STUDENT PRANKSTERS AT WORK AGAIN

A practical joke is worth any amount of trouble and physical exertion. At least, that is the sentiment of a group of Hempnell College students, as yet unidentified. But we are wondering about the sentiments of Professor Norman Saylor, when he looked out the window this morning and saw a stone gargoyle weighing a good three hundred pounds sitting in the middle of his lawn. It had been removed from the roof of one of the college buildings. How the students managed to detach it, lower it from the roof, and transport it to Professor Saylor’s residence, is still a mystery.

When President Randolph Pollard was asked about the pranksters, he laughingly replied, “I guess our physical education program must be providing our men with exceptional reserves of strength and energy.”

When we spoke to President Pollard he was leaving to address the Lions’ Club on “The Greater Hempnell: College and Town.” (For details of his address, see Page 1.)

Just what you might expect. The usual inaccuracies. It wasn’t a gargoyle; gargoyles are ornamental rainspouts. And then no mention at all of the lightning. Probably the reporter had suppressed it because it didn’t fit into any of the convention patterns for supposedly unconventional news stories.

Newspapers were supposed to love coincidences, but God, the weird ones they missed!

Finally, the familiar touch of turning the item into an advertisement for the physical-education department. You had to admit that the Hempnell publicity office had a kind of heavy-handed efficiency.

Tansy swept the paper out of his hands.

“The world can wait,” she said. “Here, have a bite of my sandwich.”

It was quite dark when they started for the Hill. Norman drove carefully, taking his time at intersections. Tansy’s gaiety still did no more than hold in check the other half of his thoughts.

She was smiling mysteriously. She had changed to a white sports dress. She looked like one of his students.

“I might be a witch,” she said, “taking you to a hilltop rendezvous. Our own private Sabbat.”

Norman started. Then he quickly reminded himself that when she said things like that, she was making a courageous mockery of her previous behavior. He must on no account let her see the other half of his thoughts.

It would never do to let her realize how badly worried he was about himself.

The lights of the town dropped behind. Half a mile out, he turned off sharply onto the road that wound up the Hill. It was bumpier than he remembered from the last time — was it as much as ten years ago? And the trees were thicker, their twigs brushing the windshield.

When they emerged into the half acre of clearing on the top, the red moon, two days after full, was rising.

Tansy pointed to it and said, “Check! I timed it perfectly. But where are the others? There always used to be two or three cars up here. And on a night like this!”

He stopped the car close to the edge. “Fashions in lovers’ lanes change like anything else,” he told her. “We’re traveling a disused folkway.”

“Always the sociologist!”

“I guess so. Maybe Mrs. Carr found out about this place. And I suppose the students range farther afield nowadays.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. He switched off the headlights, and the moon cast soft shadows.

“We used to do this at Gorham,” Tansy murmured. “When I was taking your classes, and you were the serious young instructor. Until I found out you weren’t any different from the college boys — only better. Remember?”

He nodded and took her hand. He looked down at the town, made out the campus, with its prominent floodlights designed to chase couples out of dark coursers. Those garishly floodlighted Gothic buildings seemed for the moment to symbolize a whole world of barren intellectual competition and jealous traditionalism, a world which at the moment lie felt to be infinitely alien.