He did not expect Mrs. Gunnison to believe the lie, still he ought to be consistent.
She accepted the story without comment, offered her sympathies and went on to say, “But be sure and get in touch with Harold. I believe it has to do with that meeting of the trustees you’ve been asked to attend. You know, Harold thinks a great deal of you. Good-by.”
He watched her puzzledly as she tramped off. Odd, but at the last moment he fancied he caught a note of genuine friendliness in her manner, as if for a moment something that was not Mrs. Gunnison had appealed to him out of her eyes.
But there was work to do. Off campus, he hurried down a side street to where his car was parked. With hardly a sidewise glance at the motionless figure in the front seat, he stepped in and drove to Sawtelle’s.
The house was bigger than they needed, and the front lawn was very formal. But the grass was yellow in patches, and the soldierlike rows of flowers looked neglected.
“Wait here,” he said. “Don’t get out of the car under any circumstances.”
To his surprise, Hervey met him at the door. There were circles under Hervey’s always-worried eyes, and his fidgetiness was more than usually apparent.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” he said, pulling Norman inside. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all these departmental responsibilities on my shoulders. Classes having to be dismissed. Stop-gap instructors to be obtained. And the deadline on next year’s catalogue tomorrow! Here, come into my study.” And he pushed Norman through a huge living room, expensively but stiffly furnished, into a dingy, book-lined cubby-hole with one small window.
“I’m almost going out of my mind. I haven’t dared stir out of the house since Evelyn was attacked Saturday night.”
“What!”
“Haven’t you heard?” He stopped and looked at Norman in surprise. Even here he had heen trying to pace up and down, although there was not room enough. “Why, it was in the papers. I wondered why you didn’t come over or call up. I kept trying to get you at your home and the office, but no one could locate you. Evelyn’s been in bed since Sunday, and she gets hysterical if I even speak of going out of the house. Just now she’s asleep, thank heavens.”
Hastily Norman related his trumped-up excuse. He wanted to get back to what had happened Saturday night. As he glibly mouthed his lie about food poisoning, his mind jumped to Bayport and the telephone call to Evelyn Sawtelle that had occurred late on that same Saturday night. Only then Evelyn had seemed to be attacking, not attacked. He had come here to confront her. But now —
“Just my luck!” Sawtelle exclaimed tragically when Norman had finished. “The whole department falling apart the very first week I’m in charge of it — not that it’s your fault of course. And young Stackpoole laid up with the flu.’”
“We’ll manage,” said Norman. “Sit down and tell me about Evelyn.”
Unwillingly, Sawtelle cleared a space so he could perch on the cluttered desk. He groaned when his eyes chanced to light on papers presumably concerned with urgent business.
“It happened about four o’clock Sunday morning,” he began, aimlessly fiddling with the papers. “I was awakened by a terrible scream. Evelyn’s bed was empty. It was pitch dark out in the hall. But I could hear some sort of struggle going on downstairs. A bumping and threshing around —”
Suddenly he jerked up his head. “What was that? I thought I heard footsteps out in the front hall.” Before Norman could say anything he went on, “Oh, it’s just my nerves. They’ve been acting up ever since.”
“Well, I picked up something — a vase — and went downstairs. About that time the sounds stopped. I switched on the lights and went through all the rooms. In the sewing room I found Evelyn stretched unconscious on the floor with some ghastly bruises beginning to show around her neck and mouth. Beside her lay the phone — we have it there because Evelyn has so many occasions to use it. I nearly went frantic. I called a doctor and the police. When Evelyn regained consciousness, she was able to tell us about it, although she was terribly shaken up. It seems the phone had rung. She went downstairs in the dark without waking me. Just as she was picking up the phone, a man jumped out of the corner and attacked her. She fought him off — oh, it drives me mad to think of it! — but he overpowered her and choked her unconscious.”
In his excitement Sawtelle crumpled a paper he was holding, saw what he had done, and hastily smoothed it out.
“Thank heavens I came downstairs when I did! That must have been what frightened him off. The doctor found that, except for bruises. there weren’t any other injuries. Even the doctor was shocked at those bruises, though. He said he had never seen any quite like them.”
“The police think that after the man got in the house he called Central and asked them to ring this phone — pretending he thought the bell was out of order or something — in order to lure someone downstairs. They were puzzled as to how he got inside, though. for all the windows and doors were shut fast, Probably I forgot to lock the front door when we went to bed — one of my pieces of unforgiveable carelessness!
“The police think he was a burglar or sex offender, but I believe he must have been a real madman besides. Because there was a silver plate on the floor, and two of our silver forks jammed together strangely, and other odds and ends. And he must have been playing the phonograph in the sewing room, because it was open and the turntable was going and on the floor was one of Evelyn’s speech records, smashed to bits.”
Norman stared at his jittery departmental superior, but behind the stupidity of his gaze, his thoughts were working wildly. The first idea that stayed with him was that here was physical confirmation that he had heard a bull-roarer over the Bayport phone — what else could the smashed record mean? — and that Evelyn Sawtelle was going through the motions of practicing magic as much as Tansy ever had — else what was the significance of silver plate and forks and “other odds and ends”? Also, Evelyn must have been expecting a call and been prepared for it, else why would she have had the things ready?
But then his thoughts scurried on to what Sawtelle had said about his wife’s injuries — those bruises that sounded identical with the ones Tansy had inflicted on herself with, or somehow received from, a phone. The same bruises, the same possible instruments, suggested a shadow world in which black magic, thwarted, returned on its sender, or in which schemes to frighten by the pretense of black magic struck back at the guilty and psychotic mind of their originator.
“It’s all my fault,” Sawtelle was repeating mournfully, tugging at his necktie. Norman remembered that Sawtelle always assumed that he was guilty whenever anything hurt or merely upset Evelyn. “I should have awakened! I should have been the one to go down to the phone. When I think of that delicate creature feeling her way through the dark, and lurking just ahead of her that — Oh, and the department! I tell you I am going out of my mind. Poor Evelyn has been in such a pitifully frightened state ever since, you wouldn’t believe it!” And he tugged at his necktie so strongly that it started to choke him and he had to undo it quickly.
“I tell you, I haven’t slept a wink,” he continued when he got his breath. “If Mrs. Gunnison hadn’t been kind enough to spend a couple of hours with Evelyn yesterday morning, I don’t know how I’d have managed. Even then she was too frightened to let me stir… . My God! … Evelyn!”
But Norman couldn’t identify the agonized scream, and he seriously doubted whether Sawtelle could, except that it had come from the upper part of the house. Crying out, “I knew I heard footsteps! He’s come back!” Sawtelle ran full tilt out of the study. Norman was just behind him. suddenly conscious of a very different fear. It was confirmed by a glance through the livingroom window at his empty ear.
He beat Sawtelle op the stairs and was the first to reach the bedroom door. He stopped. Sawtelle, almost gibbering with anxiety and guilt, ran into him.
It was not at all what Norman expected.
The pink silk coverlet clutched around her, Evelyn Sawtelle had retreated to the side of the bed nearest the wall. Her teeth were chattering, her face was a dirty white.
Beside the bed stood Tansy. For a moment Norman felt a great, sudden hope. Then he saw her eyes, and the hope shot away with sickening swiftness. She was not wearing the veil. In that heavy make-up with those rouged cheeks and thickly carmined lips, she looked like some indecently daubed statue, impossibly grotesque against a background of ridiculous pink silk hangings. But a hungry statue.
Sawtelle scrambled past him, shouting, “What’s happened? What’s happened?” He saw Tansy. “I didn’t know you were here. When did you come in?” Then, “You frightened her!”
The statue spoke, and its quiet accents hushed him.
“Oh no, I didn’t frighten her. Did I, Evelyn?”
Evelyn Sawtelle was staring at Tansy in abject, wide-eyed terror, and her jaw was still working. But when she spoke, it was to say, “No, Tansy didn’t… frighten me. We were talking together… and then. .
. I… I thought I heard a noise.”
“Just a noise, dear?” Sawtelle said.
“Yes… like footsteps… very quiet footsteps in the hail.” She did not take her eyes off Tansy, who nodded once when she had finished.
Norman accompanied Sawtelle on a futile but highly melodramatic search of the top floor. When they came back, Evelyn was alone.
“Tansy’s gone out to the car,” she told Norman weakly. “I’m sure I just imagined those footsteps.”
But her eyes were still full of fear when he left her and she seemed quite unaware of her husband, although he was fussing about straightening the coverlet and shaking out the pillows.
Tansy was sitting in the car, staring ahead. Norman could see that the body was still dominated by its one emotion. He had to ask a question.
“She does not have my soul,” was the answer. “I questioned her at length. As a final and certain test I embraced her. That was when she screamed. She is very much afraid of the dead.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She said that someone came and took my soul from her. Someone who did not trust her very much. Someone who desired my soul, to keep as a hostage and for other reasons. Mrs. Gunnison.”
The knuckles of Norman’s hands were white on the steering wheel. He was thinking of that puzzling look of appeal that Mrs. Gunnison had given him.
Professor Carr’s office seemed an attempt to reduce the lusty material world to the virginal purity of geometry. The narrow walls displayed three framed prints of conic sections. Atop the bookcase filled with slim, gold-stamped mathematical books, were two models of complex curved surfaces, executed in german silver and fine wire. The half-furled umbrella in the corner might have been such another model. And the surface of the small desk between Carr himself and Norman was bare except for five sheets of paper covered with symbols. Carr’s thin, pale finger touched the top sheet.
“Yes,” he said, “these are allowable equations in symbolic logic.”
Norman had been pretty sure they were, but he was glad to hear a mathematician say so. The hurried reference he had made to
Principia Mathematica
had not altogether satisfied him.
“The capitals stand for classes of entities, the lower ease letter for relationships,” he said helpfully.
“Ah yes.” Carr tugged at the slack skin of his chin beneath the white Vandyke. “But what sort of entities and relationship are they?”
“You could perform operations on the equations, couldn’t you, without knowing the reference of the individual symbols?” Norman countered.
“Most certainly. And the results of the operations would be valid whether the entities referred to were apples, battleships, poetic ideas, or signs of the zodiac. Always providing, of course, that the original references between entity and symbol had been made correctly.”
“Then here’s my problem,” Norman went on hastily. “There are seventeen equations on that first sheet. As they stand, they seem to differ a great deal. Now I’m wondering if one simple, underlying equation doesn’t appear in each of the seventeen, jumbled up with a lot of nonessential terms and procedures. Each of the other sheets presents a similar problem.”
“Hm-m-m —” Professor Carr began to finger a pencil, and his eyes started to go back to the first sheet, but he checked the movement. “I must confess I’m rather curious about the entities referred to,” he said, and added innocently, “I wasn’t aware that there had been attempts to apply symbolic logic to sociology.”
Norman was prepared for this. “I’ll be frank with you, Linthicum,” he said. “I have a pretty wild, off-trail theory, and I’ve promised myself I won’t discuss it until I have a better idea of whether or not there’s anything to it.”
Carr’s face broke into a reminiscent smile. “I think I understand your sentiments,” he said. “I can still recall the disastrous consequences of my announcement that I had trisected the angle.
“Of course, I was only in seventh grade at the time,” he added hastily.
“Though I did give my teacher a bad half-hour,” he finished with a touch of pride.
When he next spoke, it was with a return to his mood of boyishly sly curiosity. “Nevertheless, I’m very much piqued by those symbols. As it stands they might refer to… hm-m-m… anything.”
“I’m sorry,” said Norman. “I know I’m asking a lot of you.”
“Not at all. Not at all.” Twiddling the pencil Carr glanced again at the sheet. Something caught his eye. “Hm-m-m… this is very interesting,” he said. “I hadn’t noticed this before.” And his pencil began to fly about the sheet, deftly striking out terms, neatly inscribing new equations. The single vertical furrow between his gray eyebrows deepened. In a moment he was wholly absorbed.
With an unbreathed sigh of relief, Norman leaned back. He felt dog-tired, and his eyes hurt. Those five sheets represented twenty hours of uninterrupted work. Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, part of Wednesday afternoon. Even at that he couldn’t have done it without Tansy to take notes from his dictation. He had come to trust absolutely her present mindless, machinelike accuracy.
Half hypnotized, he watched the agile old fingers half fill a fresh sheet of paper with derived equations. Their swift, orderly movements intensified the serene, monastic quiet of the small office.