One and Wonder (39 page)

He thumbed the starter button, and the motor growled, but it didn't catch. Matt let it whine to a stop and pressed again. The motor moaned futilely. Matt checked the ignition. It was on. Again and again he pushed in the button. The moans got weaker. He tried to roll the car—but the brakes locked.

He glanced suspiciously at Abigail.
But that's absurd,
he thought. Since he had met Abbie, his thoughts had taken a definite paranoid tinge. It was foolish to blame everything that went wrong on the girl.

But the car wouldn't move. He gave up.

“All right,” he sighed. “I can't put you out this far from home. You can sleep here tonight.”

Silently, she followed him into the cabin. She helped him tack blankets to the upper bunks on each side of the cabin. They made an effective curtain around the lower beds. As they worked, Matt discovered that he was unusually sensitive to her nearness. There was a sweet, womanly smell to
her, and when she brushed against him the spot that was touched came to life—tingling awareness.

When they finished, Abbie reached down and grasped the hem of her dress to pull it off over her head.

“No, no,” Matt said hurriedly. “Don't you have any modesty? Why do you think we tacked up those blankets?” He gestured to the bunk on the left-hand wall. “Dress and undress in there.”

She let the hem of her dress fall, nodded meekly, and climbed into the bunk.

Matt stared after her for a moment and released his breath. He turned and climbed into his own bunk, undressed, and slipped under the blanket. Then he remembered that he had forgotten to turn out the lamps.

He rose on one elbow and heard a soft padding on the floor. The lamps went out, one by one, and the padding faded to the other side of the room. Rustling sounds. Darkness and silence.

“Good night, Mr. Wright.” It was a little child's voice in the night.

“Good night, Abbie,” he said softly. And then after a moment, firmly, “But don't forget—back you go first thing in the morning.”

Before the silence wove a pattern of sleep, Matt heard a little sound from the other bunk. He couldn't quite identify it.

A sob? A snore? Or a muffled titter?

The odor of frying bacon and boiling coffee crept into Mart's nightmare of a terrifying pursuit by an implacable and invisible enemy. Matt opened his eyes. The bunk was bright with diffused sunlight; the dream faded. Matt sniffed hungrily and pushed aside the blanket to look out.

All the supplies from the car had been unloaded and neatly stowed away. On a little corner table by the window were his typewriter and precious manila folders, and a stack of blank white paper.

Matt dressed hurriedly in his cramped quarters. When he emerged from his cocoon, Abbie was humming happily as she set breakfast on the table. She wore a different dress this morning—a brown calico that did horrible things for her hair and coloring, but fitted better than the blue gingham.

The dress revealed a slim but unsuspectedly mature figure.

How would she look, he wondered briefly, in good clothes and nylons, shoes, and make-up?

The thought crumbled before a fresh onslaught to his senses of the odor and sight of breakfast. The eggs were cooked just right, sunny side up, the white firm but not hard. It was strange how Abbie anticipated his preferences. At first he thought that she had overestimated his appetite, but he stowed away three eggs while Abbie ate two, heartily.

He pushed back his plate with a sigh. “Well,” he began. She got very
quiet and stared at the floor. His heart melted. He felt too contented; a few hours more wouldn't make any difference. Tonight would be time enough for her to go back. “Well,” he repeated, “I guess I'd better get to work.”

Abbie sprang to clear the table. Matt walked to the corner where the typewriter was waiting. He sat down in the chair and rolled in a sheet of paper. The table was well arranged for light; it was the right height. Everything considered, it was just about perfect for working.

He stared at die blank sheet of paper. He leafed through his notes. He resisted an impulse to get up and walk around. He rested his fingers lightly on the keys and after a moment lifted them, crossed one leg over the other knee, put his right elbow on the raised leg, and began to finger his chin.

There was only one thing wrong: he didn't feel like working.

Finally he typed in the middle of the page:

THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF WITCHCRAFT

With Special Reference to the

Salem Trials of 1692

He double-spaced and stopped.

It wasn't that Abbie was noisy; she was too quiet, with a kind of purposeful restraint that is worse than chaos. With one ear Matt listened to the sounds of dishwashing and stacking. And then silence.

Matt stood it as long as he could and turned. Abbie was seated at the table. She was sewing up a hole in the pocket of his other pair of pants. He could almost see the aura of bliss that surrounded her.

Like a child,
Matt thought,
playing at domesticity.
But there was something mature about it, too; a mature and basic fulfillment.
If we could all be happy with so little. It's a pity, with so small an ambition, to have the real thing so elusive.

As
if she felt him looking at her, Abbie glanced around and beamed. Matt turned back to his typewriter. It still wouldn't come.

Witchcraft,
he began hesitantly,
is the attempt of the primitive mind to bring order out of chaos. It is significant, therefore, that belief in witchcraft fades as an understanding of the natural workings of the physical universe grows more prevalent.

He let his hands drop. It was all wrong, like an image seen in a distorted mirror. He swung around. “Who wrecked your father's house?”

“Libby,” she said.

“Libby?” Matt echoed. “Who's Libby?”

‘The other me,” Abbie said calmly. “Mostly I keep her bottled up inside, but when I feel sad and unhappy I can't keep her in. Then she gets loose and just goes wild. I can't control her.”

Good God!
Matt thought,
Schizophrenia!
“Where did you get an idea like that?” he asked cautiously.

“When I was born,” Abbie said, “I had a twin sister, only she died real quick. Maw said I was stronger and just crowded the life right out of her. When I was bad, Maw used to shake her head and say Libby’d never have been mean or cross or naughty. So when something happened, I started saying Libby done it. It didn't stop a licking, but it made me feel better.”

What a thing to tell a child!
Matt thought.

“Purty soon I got to believing it, that Libby done the bad things that I got licked for, that Libby was part of me that I had to push deep down so she couldn't get out and get me in trouble. After I”—she blushed—“got older and funny things started happening, Libby come in real handy.”

“Can you see her?” Matt ventured.

“Course not,” Abbie said reproachfully. “She ain't real.”

“Isn't.”

“Isn't real,” Abbie said. “Things happen when I feel bad. I can't do anything about it. But you got to explain it somehow . . . I use Libby.”

Matt sighed. Abbie wasn't so crazy—or stupid either. “You can't control it—ever?

“Well, maybe a little. Like when I felt kind of mean about that liquor you gave Paw, and I thought how nice it would be if Paw had something wet on the outside for a change.”

“How about a tire and a hub cap full of nuts?”

She laughed. Again that tinkling of little silver bells. “You did look funny.”

Matt frowned. But slowly his expression cleared and he began to chuckle. “I guess I did.”

He swung back to the typewriter before he realized that he was accepting the events of the last eighteen hours as physical facts and Abbie's explanation as theoretically possible. Did he actually believe that Abbie could—how was he going to express it?—move objects with some mysterious, intangible force? By wishing? Of course he didn't. He stared at the typewriter. Or did he?

He called up a picture of a pint bottle hanging unsupported in midair, emptying its contents over Jenkins’ head. He remembered a dish that jumped from a shelf to shatter on the floor. He thought of a hub cap that dumped its contents into the dirt when his foot was two inches away. And he saw a tire straighten up and begin to roll down a level road.

You can't just dismiss things,
he thought.
In any comprehensive scheme of the universe, you must include all valid phenomena. If the accepted scheme of things cannot find a place for it, then the scheme must change.

Matt shivered. It was a disturbing thought.

The primitive mind believed that inanimate objects had spirits that must be propitiated. With a little sophistication came mythology and its
personification—nymphs and sprites, Poseidon and Aeolus—and folklore, with its kobolds and poltergeists.

Sir James Frazer said something about the relationship between science and magic. Man, he said, associates ideas by similarity and by contiguity in space or time. If the association is legitimate, it is science; if illegitimate, it is magic, science's bastard sister.

But if the associations of magic are legitimate, then those of science must be illegitimate, and the two reverse their roles and the modern world is standing on its head.

Matt felt a little dizzy.

Suppose the primitive mind is wiser than we are. Suppose you can insure good luck by the proper ritual or kill your enemy by sticking a pin in a wax doll. Suppose you can prove it.

You had to have some kind of explanation of unnatural events, the square pegs that do not fit into any of science's round holes. Even Abbie recognized that.

Matt knew what the scientific explanation would be: illusion, delusion, hypnosis, anything which demanded the least possible rearrangement of accepted theory, anything which, in effect, denied the existence of the phenomenon.

But how could you really explain it? How could you explain Abbie? Did you believe in the spirits of inanimate objects, directed by Abbie when she was in the proper mood? Did you believe in poltergeists which Abbie ordered about? Did you believe in Libby, the intangible projectable, manipulative external soul?

You had to explain Abbie or your cosmology was worthless.

That man at Duke—Rhine, the parapsychologist—he had a word for it. Telekinesis. That was one attempt to incorporate psychic phenomena into the body of science, or, perhaps, to alter the theoretical universe in order to fit those phenomena into it.

But it didn't explain anything.

Then Matt thought of electricity.
You don't have to explain something in order to use it. You don't have to understand it in order to control it. It helps, but it isn't essential. Understanding is a psychological necessity, not a physical one.

Matt stared at the words he had written. The seventeenth century. Why was he wasting his time? Here was something immediate. He had stumbled on something that would set the whole world on its ear, or perhaps stand it on its feet again. It would not molder away, as the thesis would in a university library.

Matt turned around. Abbie was sitting at the table, her mending finished, staring placidly out the open doorway. Matt stood up and walked toward her. She turned her head to look at him, smiling slowly. Matt turned
his head, searching the room.

“Kin I get you something?” Abbie asked anxiously.

Matt looked down at her. “Here!” he said. He plucked the needle from the spool of darning thread. He forced it lightly into the rough top of the table so that the needle stood upright. “Now,” he said defiantly, “make it move.”

Abbie stared at him. “Why?”

“I want to see you do it,” Matt said firmly. “Isn't that enough?”

“But I don't want to,” Abbie objected. “I never wanted to do it. It just happened.”

“Try!”

“No, Mr. Wright,” Abbie said firmly. “It never brung me nothing but misery. It scared away all my fellers and all Paw's friends. Folks don't like people who can do things like that. I don't ever want it to happen again.”

“If you want to stay here,” Matt said flatly, “you'll do as I say.”

“Please, Mr. Wright,” she begged. “Don't make me do it. It'll spoil everything. It's bad enough when you can't help it, but it's worse when you do it a-purpose—something terrible will come of it.”

Matt glowered at her. Her pleading eyes dropped. She bit her lip. She stared at the needle. Her smooth, young forehead tightened.

Nothing happened. The needle remained upright.

Abbie took a deep breath. “I cain't, Mr. Wright,” she wailed. “I just cain't do it.”

“Why not?” Matt demanded fiercely. “Why can't you do it?”

“I don't know,” Abbie said. Automatically her hands began to smooth the pants laid across her lap. She looked down and blushed. “I guess it's ‘cause I'm happy.”

After a morning of experimentation, Matt’s only half-conscious need was still unsatisfied. He had offered Abbie an innumerable assortment of objects: a spool of thread, a fountain pen cap, a dime, a typewriter eraser, a three-by-five note card, a piece of folded paper, a bottle . . . The last Matt considered a stroke of genius. But tip it as he would, the bottle, like all the rest of the objects, remained stolidly unaffected.

He even got the spare tire out of the trunk and leaned it against the side of the car. Fifteen minutes later, it was still leaning there.

Finally, frowning darkly, Matt took a cup from the shelf and put it down on the table. “Here,” he said. “You're so good at smashing dishes, smash this.”

Abbie stared at the cup hopelessly. Her face seemed old and haggard. After a moment, her body seemed to collapse all at once. “I cain't,” she moaned. “I cain’t.”

“Can't,” Matt shouted. “Can't! Are you so stupid you can't say that? Not ‘cain’t’ —can’t!”

Her large blue eyes lifted to Matt’s in mute appeal. They began to fill with tears. “I can't,” she said. A sob broke from her throat. She put her head down on her arms. Her thin shoulders began to quiver.

Moodily, Matt stared at her back. Was everything that he had seen merely an illusion? Or did this phenomenon only evidence itself under very rigid conditions? Did she have to be unhappy?