“I wonder if this is why they hate us so?” he asked, almost without thinking.
“Whatever are you talking about?” But the question sounded lazy.
“I mean the rest of the faculty, or most of them. Is it because we can do things like this?”
She laughed. “So you’re actually coming alive. We don’t do things like this so very often, you know.”
He kept on with his idea. “It’s a devilishly competitive and jealous world. And competition in an institution can be nastier than any other kind, because it’s so confined. Think so?”
“I’ve lived with it for years,” said Tansy simply.
“Of course, it’s all very petty. But petty feelings can come to outweigh big ones. Their size is better suited to the human mind.”
He looked down at Hempnell and tried to visualize the amount of ill will and jealousy he had inevitably accumulated for himself. He felt a slight chill creeping on his skin. He realized where this train of thought was leading. The darker half of his mind loomed up.
“Here, philosopher,” said Tansy, “have a slug.”
She was offering him a small silver flask.
He recognized it. “I never dreamed you’d kept it all these years.”
“Uh-huh. Remember when I first offered you a drink from it? You were a trifle shocked, I believe.”
“I took the drink.”
“Uh-huh. So take this one.”
It tasted like fire and spice. There were memories in it, too, memories of those crazy prohibition years, and of Gorham and New England.
“Brandy?”
“Greek. Give me some.”
The memories flooded over the darker half of his mind. It disappeared beneath their waves. He looked at Tansy’s sleek hair and moon-glowing eyes. Of course she’s a witch, he thought lightly. She’s Lilith. Ishtar. He’d tell her so.
“Do you remember the time,” he said, “we slid down the bank to get away from the night watchman at Gorham? There would have been a magnificent scandal if he’d caught us.”
“Oh, yes, and the time —”
When they went down the hill, the moon was an hour higher. He drove slowly. No need to imitate the sillier practices of the prohibition era. A truck chugged past him. “Two more weeks.” Rot! Who’d he think he was, hearing voices? Joan of Arc?
He felt hilarious. He wanted to tell Tansy all the ridiculous things he’d been imagining the last few days, so she could laugh at them, too. It would make a swell ghost story. There was a reason he shouldn’t tell her, but now it seemed an insignificant reason — part and parcel of this cramped, warped, overcautious Hempnell life they ought to break away from more often. What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?
So when they arrived in the living room and Tansy flopped down on the sofa, he began. “You know, Tansy, about this witch stuff. I want to tell you —”
He was caught completely off guard by whatever force, real or unreal, hit him. A moment later he was sitting in the easy chair, completely sober, with the outer world an icy pressure on his senses, the inner world a whirling sphere of alien thought, and the future a dark corridor two weeks long.
It was as if a very large, horny hand had been clapped roughly over his mouth, and as if another such hand had grasped him by the shoulder, shook him, and slammed him down in the leather chair.
As if?
He looked around uneasily.
Maybe there had been hands.
Apparently Tansy had not noticed anything. Her face was a white oval in the gloom. She was still humming a snatch of song. She did not ask what he had started to say.
He got up, walked unsteadily into the dining room, and poured himself a drink from the sideboard. On the way he switched on the lights.
So he couldn’t tell Tansy or anyone else about it, even if he wanted to? That was why you never heard from real witchcraft victims, he told himself, his thoughts for the moment quite out of hand, And why they never seemed able to escape, even if the means of escape were at hand. It wasn’t weak will. They were watched. Like a gangster taken on a ride from an expensive nightclub. He must excuse himself from the loud-mouthed crowd at his table and laugh heartily, and stop to chat with friends and throw a wink at the pretty girls, because right behind him are those white-scarfed trigger boys, hands in the pockets of their velvet-collared dress overcoats. No use dying now. Better play along. There might be a chance.
But that was thriller stuff, movie stuff.
So were the horny hands.
He nodded at himself in the glass above the sideboard.
Meet Professor Saylor,” he said, “the distinguished ethnologist and firm believer in real witchcraft.”
But the face in the glass did not look so much disgusted as frightened.
He mixed himself another drink, and one for Tansy, and took them into the living room.
“Here’s to wickedness,” said Tansy. “Do you realize that you haven’t been anywhere near drunk since Christmas?”
He grinned. Getting drunk was just what the movie gangster would do, to grab a moment of forgetfulness when the Big Boy had put him on the spot. And not a bad idea.
Slowly, and at first only in a melancholy minor key, the mood of the Hill returned. They talked, played old records, told jokes that were old enough to be young again. Tansy hammered at the piano and they sang a crazy assortment of songs, folk songs, hymns, national anthems, workers’ and revolutionists’ songs, blues, Brahms, Schubert — haltingly at first, later at the top of their voices.
They remembered.
And they kept on drinking.
But always, like a shimmering sphere of crystal, the alien thoughts spun in Norman’s mind. The drink made it possible for him to regard them dispassionately, without constant revulsions in the name of common sense. With the singlemindedness of inebriation, his scholar’s mind began to assemble world-wide evidence of witchcraft.
For instance, was it not likely that all self-destructive impulses were the result of witchcraft? Those universal impulses that were a direct contradiction to the laws of self-preservation and survival. To account for them, Pee had fancifully conceived an “Imp of the Perverse,” and psychoanahysts had laboriously hypothesized a “death wish.” How much simpler to attribute them to malign forces outside the individual, working by means as yet unanalyzed and therefore classified as supernatural.
His experiences during the past days could be divided into two categories. The first included those natural misfortunes and antagonisms from which Tansy’s magic had screened him. The attack on his life by Theodore Jennings should probably be placed in this category. The chances were that Jennings was actually psychopathic. He would have made his murderous attack at an earlier date, had not Tansy’s magic kept it from getting started. As soon as her protective screen was down, as soon as Norman burned the last hand, the idea had suddenly burgeoned in Jenning’s mind like a hothouse flower. Jennings had himself admitted it. “I didn’t realize it until this minute —”
Margaret Van Nice’s accusation, Thompson’s sudden burst of interest in his extracurricular activities, and Sawtelle’s chance discovery of the Cunningham thesis probably belonged in the same category.
In the second category — active and malign witchcraft, directed against himself.
“A penny for your thoughts,” offered Tansy, looking over the rim of her glass.
“I was thinking of the party last Christmas,” he replied smoothly, though in a somewhat blurred voice, “and of how Welby crawled around playing a St. Bernard, with the bearskin rug over his shoulders and the bottle of whiskey slung under his neck. And I was wondering why the best fun always seems so trite afterward. But I’d rather be trite than respectable.” He felt a childish pride in his cunning at having avoided being trapped into admission. He simultaneously thought of Tansy as a genuine witch and as a potentially neurotic individual who had to be protected at all costs from dangerous suggestions. The liquor made his mind work by parts, and the parts had no check on each other.
Things began to happen by fits and starts. His consciousness began to black out, though in the intervals between, his thoughts went on with an exaggerated scholarly solemnity.
They were wailing “St James Infirmary.”
He was thinking: “Why shouldn’t the women be the witches? They’re the intuitionalists, the traditionalists, the irrationalists. They’re superstitious to start with. And like Tansy, most of them are probably never quite sure whether or not their witchcraft really works.”
They had shoved back the carpet and were dancing to “Chloe.” Sometime or other Tansy had changed to her rose dressing gown.
He was thinking: “In the second category, put the Estrey dragon. Animated by a human or nonhuman soul conjured into it by Mrs. Gunnison and controlled through photographs. Put also the obsidian knife, the obedient wind, and the obdurate truck.”
They were playing a record of Ravel’s “Bolero,” and he was beating out the rhythm with his fist.
He was thinking: “Business men buy stocks on the advice of fortune-tellers, numerologists rule the careers of movie stars, half the world governs its actions by astrology, advertisements bleat constantly of magic and miracles, and most modern and all surrealist art is nothing but attempted witchcraft, borrowing its forms from the primitive witchdoctor and its ideas from the modern theosophist.”
He was watching Tansy as she sang “St. Louis Blues” in a hoarsely throbbing voice. It was true, just as Welby had always maintained, that she had a genuine theatrical flair. Make a good chanteuse.
He was thinking: “Tansy stopped the Estrey dragon with the knots. But she’ll have a hard time doing anything like that again because Mrs. Gunnison has her book of formulas and can figure out ways to circumvent her.”
They were sharing a highball that would have burned his throat if his throat had not been numb, and he seemed to be getting most of it.
He was thinking: “The stick figure of the man and the truck is the key to a group of related sorceries. Cards began as instruments of magic, like art. These sorceries aim at finishing me off. The bull-roarer acts as an amplifier. The invisible thing standing behind me, with the flat voice and heavy hands, is a guardian, to see to it that I do not deviate from the path appointed. Narrow corridor. Two weeks more.”
The strange thing was that these thoughts were not altogether unpleasant. They had a wild, black, poisonous beauty of their own, a lovely, deadly shimmer. They possessed the fascination of the impossible, the incredible. They hinted at unimaginable vistas. Even while they terrorized, they did not lose that chillingly poignant beauty. They were like the visions conjured up by some forbidden drug. They had the lure of an unknown sin and an ultimate blasphemy. Norman could understand the force that compelled the practitioners of black magic to take any risk.
His drunkenness made him feel safe. It had broken his mind down into its ultimate particles, and those particles were incapable of fear because they could not be injured. Just as the atoms in a man are not slain by the bullet that slays him.
But now the particles were whirling crazily. Consciousness was wavering.
He and Tansy were in each other’s arms.
Tansy was asking eagerly, coaxingly, “All that’s mine is yours? All that’s yours is mine?”
The question awakened a suspicion in his mind, but he could not grasp it clearly. Something made him think that the words held a trap. But what trap? His thoughts stumbled.
She was saying — it sounded like the Bible — “And I have drunk from your cup and you have drunk from mine —”
Her face was a blurred oval, her eyes like misty jewels.
“Everything you have is mine? You give it to me without hindrance and of your own free choice?”
Somewhere a trap.
But the voice was irresistibly coaxing, like caressing fingers.
“All you have is mine? Just say it once, Norm, just once. For me.”
Of course he loved her. Better than anything in the world. He drew the blurred face toward him, tried to kiss the misty eyes.
“Yes… yes… everything —” he heard himself saying.
And then his mind toppled and plunged down into a fathomless ocean of darkness and silence and peace.
Sunlight made a bright, creamy design on the drawn blind. Filtered sunlight filled the bedroom, like a coolly glowing liquid. The birds were chirruping importantly. Norman closed his eyes again and stretched luxuriously.
Let’s see, it was about time he got started on that article for
The American Anthropologist
. And there was still some work to do on the revision of his
Textbook of Ethnology
. Lots of time, but better get it out of the way. And he ought to have a serious talk with Bronstein about his thesis. That boy had some good ideas, but he needed a balance wheel. And then his address to the Offcampus Mothers. Might as well tell them something useful… .
Eyes still closed, he enjoyed that most pleasant of all sensations — the tug of work a man likes to do and is able to do well, yet that needn’t be done immediately.
For today was certainly too good a day for golf to miss. Might see what Gunnison was doing. And then he and Tansy had not made an expedition into the country this whole spring. He’d talk to her about it, at breakfast. Saturday breakfast was an event. She must be getting it ready now. He felt as if a shower would make him very hungry. Must be late.
He opened one eye and focused the bedroom clock. Twelve thirty-five? Say, just when had he got to bed last night? What had he been doing?
Memory of the past few days uncoiled like a spring, so swiftly that it started his heart pounding. Yet there was a difference now in his memories. From the very first moment they all seemed incredible and unreal. He had the sensation of reading the very detailed case-history of another person, a person with a lot of odd ideas about witchcraft, suicide, persecution, and what not else. His memories could not be made to fit with his present sense of well-being. What was stranger, they did not seriously disturb that sense of well-being.
He searched his mind diligently for traces of supernatural fear, of the sense of being watched and guarded, of that monstrous self-destructive impulse. He could not discover or even suggest to himself the slightest degree of such emotions. Whatever they had been, they were now part of the past, beyond the reach of everything except intellectual memory. “Spheres of alien thought!” Why, the very notion was bizarre. And yet somehow it had all happened. Something had happened.