"Uh-huh. Remember when I first offered you a drink from it? You were a
trifle shocked, I believe. Though you carried a flask, too."
"I took the drink."
"Uh-huh. So take this one."
It tasted like fire and spice. There were memories with it, memories of
those crazy prohibition years, and of Gorham and New England.
"Brandy?"
"Greek style. Give me some."
Before that flood of memories, the darker half of his mind receded, was
washed under. He looked at Tansy's sleek hair and moon-shadowed 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 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 it was an insignificant reason--part and parcel of this
cramped, warped, overcautious Hempnell life they ought to break away
from more often.
So when they arrived in the living room, Tansy flopping 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--subjective or
objective--hit him. When it was over, he was sitting in the easy-chair,
completely sober, with the outer world once more an icy pressure on his
senses, and 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. 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 night club. 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, top-hatted trigger boys, hands in
the pockets of their velvety dress overcoats. No use dying now. Better
play along. There might be a chance.
But that was storybook stuff, movie stuff.
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 you haven't been
anywhere near drunk since Christmas?"
He grinned. That 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 new again. Tansy hammered the piano, and they sang
a crazy assortment of songs--folk songs, hymns, national anthems,
revolution 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 his mind. The drink made it possible for him to regard them
dispassionately, without constant revulsions in the name of common
sense. He began to see world-wide evidence for the operation of
witchcraft.
For instance, was it not likely that all self-destructive impulses were
the result of witchcraft, more or less efficiently screened off by
protective magic, or not screened off at all? Those universal impulses
that were a direct contradiction to the laws of self-preservation and
survival. Poe had fancifully referred them to an "Imp of the Perverse,"
and psychoanalysts had laboriously hypothesized a "death instinct"
to account for them. 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
distinct 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 protective magic kept it from getting started. As soon as the
screen was down, as soon as Norman burned the last hand, the idea had
suddenly burgeoned in Jennings' mind like a hothouse flower. Jennings
had himself admitted it! "I didn't realize 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 also probably belonged in the same category.
In the second category--active and malign witchcraft.
* * * * *
"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, "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."
He felt a childish pride in his cunning at having avoided being trapped
into an 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.
His consciousness began to black out for indeterminate intervals.
Things began to happen by fits and starts.