Conjure Wife (23 page)

Suddenly then the darkness parted, as storm clouds might part at sunset, letting through a narrow beam of crimson light. Only the storm clouds were inside his mind and the crimson light was impotent red rage and obscene anger. And yet it was not wholly unfamiliar.

From it, Norman’s mind cringed. The campus ahead seemed to wobble and waver, tinged by a faint red glare.

He thought: “If there were such a thing as split personality, and if a crack appeared in the wall between those separate consciousnesses…”

But that was insanity.

Abruptly another memory buffeted him — words that had issued from Tansy’s lips in the Pullman compartment: “The environment of the soul is the human brain.”

Again: “If it is prevented from re-entering its own body, it is irresistibly drawn to another, whether or not that other body possesses a soul. And so the captive soul is usually imprisoned in the brain of its captor.”

just then, through the slit in the darkness, riding a wave in the pounding red anger that hurled it to the center of his mind, came an intelligible thought. The thought was simply, “Stupid man, how did you do it?” but it, like the red rage, was so utterly like Mrs. Gunnison, that he accepted (whether or not it meant he was crazy, whether or not it meant witchcraft was true) that the mind of Mrs. Gunnison was inside his skull, talking with his mind.

For a moment he glanced at the slack-featured face of the hulking female body he was piloting across the campus.

For a moment he quailed at the idea of touching, with his mind, naked personality.

But only for a moment. Then (whether or not it meant he was crazy) his acceptance was complete.

He walked across campus, talking inside his head with Mrs. Gunnison.

The questioning thought was repeated: “How did you do it?”

Before he realized it, his own thoughts had answered:

“It was the Prince Rupert mirror from the display case. The warmth of your fingers shattered it. I held it lightly in the folds of my handkerchief while transferring it to your pocketbook. According to primitive belief, your reflection is your soul, or a vehicle for your soul. If a mirror breaks when your reflection is in it, your soul is trapped outside your body.” All this, without the machinery of speech to delay it, flashed in an instant.

Instantly too, Mrs. Gunnison’s next thought came through the slit in the darkness. “Where are you taking my body?”

“To our house.”

“What do you want?”

“My wife’s soul.”

There was a long pause. The slit in the darkness closed, then opened again.

“You cannot take it. I hold it, as you hold my soul. But my soul hides it from you. And my soul holds it.”

“I cannot take it. But I can hold your soul until you return my wife’s soul to her body.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Your husband is a realist. He will not believe what your body tells him. He will consult the best alienists. He will be very much grieved. But in the end he will commit your body to an asylum.”

He could sense defeat and submission — and a kind of panic, too — in the texture of the answering thought. But defeat and submission were not yet admitted directly.

“You will not be able to hold my soul. You hate it. It fills you with abhorrence. Your mind will not be able to endure it.”

Then, in immediate substantiation of this statement, there came through the slit a nasty trickle growing swiftly to a spate. His chief detestations were quickly spied out and rasped upon. He began to hurry his steps, so that the mindless bulk beside him breathed hard.

“There was Ann,” came Mrs. Gunnison’s thoughts, not in words but in the complete fullness of memory. “Ann came to work for me eight years ago. A frail-looking little blonde, but able to get through a hard day’s work for all that. She was very submissive, and a prey to fear. Do you know that it is possible to rule people through fear alone, without an atom of direct force? A sharp word, a stern look— it’s the implications that do it, not what’s said directly. Gradually I gathered about myself all the grim prestige that father, teacher, and preacher had had for Ann. I could make her cry by looking at her in a certain way. I could make her writhe with fright just by standing outside the door of her bedroom. I could make her hold hot dishes without a whimper while serving us at dinner, and make her wait while I talked to Harold. I’ve looked at her hands afterward.”

Similarly he lived through the stories of Clara and Milly, Mary and Ermengarde. He could not shut his own mind from hers, nor could he close the slit, though it was within his power to widen it. Like some foul medusa, or some pulpy carnivorous plant, her soul infolded and clung to his, until it seemed almost that his was the prisoner.

“And there was Trudie. Trudie worshipped me. She was a big girl, slow and a little stupid. She had come from a farm. She used to spend hours on my clothes. I encouraged her in various ways, until everything about me became sacred to Trudie. She lived f or my little signs of favor. In the end she would do anything for me, which was very amusing, because she was very easily embarrassed and never lost her painfully acute sense of shame.”

But now he was at the door of his house, and the unclean trickle of thoughts ceased. The slit narrowed to the tiniest watchful crack.

He shepherded Mrs. Gunnison’s body to the door of Tansy’s dressing room. He pointed at the bound form huddled on the blanket he had thrown across the floor. It lay as he had left it, eyes closed, jaw lolling, breathing heavily. The sight seemed to add a second crushing pressure to his mind, pressing on it from below, through his eye-sockets.

“Take away what you have conjured into it,” he heard himself command.

There was a pause. A black spider crawled off Tansy’s skirt and scuttled across the blanket. Even as there came the thought, “That is it,” he lunged out and cracked it under his heel as it escaped onto the flooring. He was aware of a half-cloaked comment, “Its soul sought the nearest body. Now faithful King will go on no more errands for me. No more will he animate human flesh or wood or stone. I will have to find another dog.”

“Return to it what you have taken,” he commanded.

This time there was a longer pause. The slit closed entirely.

The bound figure stirred, as if seeking to roll over. The lips moved. The slack jaw tightened. Conscious only of the black weight against his mind, and of a sensory awareness so acute that he believed he could hear the very beating of the heart in Tansy’s body, he stooped and cut the lashings, removed the carefully arranged paddings from wrists and ankles.

The head rolled restlessly from side to side, The lips seemed to be saying, “Norman… .” The eyelids fluttered and he felt a shiver go over the body. And then, in one sudden glorious flood, like some flower blooming miraculously in an instant, expression surged into the face, the limp hands caught at his shoulders, and from the wide-open eyes a lucid, sane, fearless human soul peered up at him.

An instant later the repellent darkness that had been pressing against his mind, lifted.

With one venomous, beaten glance, Mrs. Gunnison turned away. He could hear her footsteps trail off, the front door open. Then his arms were around Tansy, his mouth was against hers.

The front door closed. As if that were a signal, Tansy pushed him away while her lips were still returning his kiss.

“We daren’t be happy, Norman,” she said. “We daren’t be happy for one single moment.”

A disturbed and apprehensive look clouded the longing in her eyes, as if she were looking at a great wall that shut out the sunlight. When she answered his bewildered question, it was almost in a whisper, as if even to mention the name might be dangerous.

“Mrs. Carr —”

Her hands tightened on his arms as though to convey to him the immediacy of danger.

“Norman, I’m frightened. I’m
terribly
frightened. For both of us. My soul has learned so much. Things are different from what I thought. They’re much worse. And Mrs. Carr —”

Norman’s mind felt suddenly foggy and tired. It seemed to him almost unendurable that his feeling of relief should be broken. The desire to pretend at least for a while that things were rational and ordinary, had become an almost overwhelming hunger. He stared at Tansy groggily, as if she were a figure in an opium dream.

“You’re safe,” he told her with a kind of harshness in his voice. “I’ve fought for you, I’ve got you back, and I’m going to hold you. They can never touch you again, not one of them.”

“Oh Norman,” she began, dropping her eyes, “I know how brave and clever you’ve been. I know the risks you’ve run, the sacrifices you’ve made for me — wrenching your whole life away from rationality in the bare space of a week, enduring the beastliness of that woman’s naked thoughts. And you have beaten Evelyn Sawtelle and Mrs. Gunnison fairly and at their own game. But Mrs. Carr —” Her hands transmitted her trembling to him. “Oh, Norman, she only let you beat them. She wanted to give them a fright, and she preferred to let you do it for her. But now she’ll take a hand herself.”

“No, Tansy, no,” he said with a dull insistence, but unable to summon up any argument to support his negative.

“You poor dear, you’re tried,” she said, becoming suddenly solicitous. “I’ll fetch you a drink.”

It seemed to him that he did nothing but rub his eyes and blink them, and shake his head, until she came back with the bottle.

“I want to change,” she said, looking down at her torn and creased dress. “Then we must talk.”

He downed a stiff drink, poured himself another. But there was no stimulation. They didn’t seem to be getting rid of his opium-dream mood, instead deepened it. After a while he got up and sluggishly made his way to the bedroom.

Tansy had put on a white wool dress, one which he had always liked very much, but which she had not worn for some time, He remembered she had told him that it had shrunk and become too small for her. But now he sensed that, in the joy of her return, she took a naive pride in her youthful body and wanted to show it to best advantage.

“It’s like coming into a new house,” she told him, with a quick little smile that momentarily cut across her apprehensive look. “Or rather like coming home after you’ve been away for a long time. You’re very happy, but everything is a little strange. It takes you a while to get used to it.”

Now that she mentioned it, he realized that there was a kind of uncertainty about her movements, gestures and expressions, like a person convalescent after a long sickness and just now able to get up and about.

She had combed out her hair so that it fell to her shoulders, and she was still in her bare feet, giving her a diminutive and girlish appearance that he found attractive even in his stupidheaded, nightmarish state of mind.

He had brought her a drink, but she merely sipped it and put it aside.

“No, Norman,” she said, “we must talk. There is a great deal I have to tell you, and there may not be much time.”

He looked around the bedroom. For a while his glance rested on the creamy door of Tansy’s dressing-room. Then he nodded heavily and sat down on the bed. The opium-dream feeling was stronger than ever and Tansy’s oddly brisk voice and brittle manner seemed part of it.

“Back of everything, is Mrs. Carr,” she began. “It was she who brought Mrs. Gunnison and Evelyn Sawtelle together, and that one act speaks volumes. Women are invariably secret about their magic.

They work alone. A little knowledge is passed from the elder to the younger ones, especially from mother to daughter, but even that is done grudgingly and with suspicion. This is the only case Mrs. Gunnison knew of — I learned most of this from watching her soul — in which three women actually cooperated. It is an event of revolutionary importance, betokening heaven knows what for the future. Even now, I have only an inkling of Mrs. Carr’s ambitions, but they involve vast augmentations of her present powers. For almost three quarters of a century she has been weaving her plans.”

Norman torpidly absorbed these grotesque statements. He took a swallow of his second drink.

“She seems an innocent and rather foolish old lady, straitlaced yet ineffectual, girlish but prudish,” she continued. Norman started for he fancied he caught in her voice a note of secret glee. It was so jarringly incongruous that he decided it must be his imagination. When she resumed, it was gone. “But that’s only part of a disguise, along with her sweet voice and jolly manners. She’s the cleverest actress imaginable. Underneath she’s hard as nails — cold where Mrs. Gunnison would be hot, ascetic where Mrs. Gunnison would be a slave to appetites. But she has her own deeply hidden hungers, nevertheless. She is a great admirer of Puritan Massachusetts. Sometimes I have the queerest feeling that she is planning by some unimaginable means, to re-establish that witch-ridden, so-called theocratic community in this present day and age.

“She rules the other two by fear. In a way they are little more than her apprentices. You know something of Mrs. Gunnison, so you will understand what it means when I say that I have seen Mrs. Gunnison’s thoughts go weak with terror because she was afraid that she had slightly offended Mrs. Carr.”

Norman finished his drink. His mind was slipping away from this new menace, instead of grasping it firmly. He must whip himself awake, he told himself unwillingly. Tansy pushed her drink over toward him.

“And Mrs. Gunnison’s fear is justified, for Mrs. Carr has powers so deadly that she has never had to use them except as a threat. Her eyes are the worst. Those thick glasses of hers — she possesses that most feared of supernatural weapons, against which half the protective charms in recorded magic are intended. That weapon whose name is so well known throughout the whole world that it has become the laughing-stock of skeptics. The evil eye. With it, she can blight and wither. With it, she can seize control of another’s soul at a single glance.

“So far she has held back, because she wanted the other two punished for certain trifling disobediences, and put into a position where they would have to beg her help. But now she will act quickly. She recognizes in you and your work a danger to herself.” Tansy’s voice had become so breathlessly rapid that Norman realized she must be talking against time. “Besides that, she has another motive buried in the darkness of her mind. I hardly dare mention it, but sometimes I have caught her studying my every movement and expression with the strangest avidity —”