Grumbling, the men let him go.
"But mind you," said the more belligerent one, "if she'd stuck around
and complained, I'd 've sure taken a crack at you."
"All right," said Norman, "in that case you would have." His eyes were
searching for a scrap of paper.
"Can anyone tell me the address she gave the cab driver?" he asked at
random.
One or two shook their heads. The others ignored the question. Their
feelings toward him had not changed enough to make them co-operative.
And very likely, in the excitement, no one had heard.
Silently the little crowd drifted apart. People waited until they got
out of earshot before beginning to argue about what had happened. Most
of the cars drove off. The two soldiers wandered over to the benches in
front of the depot, so they could sit down while they waited for their
bus or train. He was alone except for Alec.
He located the scrap of paper in one of the slots between the worn
planks. It had almost slipped through.
He took it over to the cab and studied it.
He heard Alec say, "Well, where do we go now?" Alec sounded dubious.
He glanced at his watch. Ten thirty-five. Not quite an hour and a half
until midnight. There were a lot of things he could do, but he could
not do more than a couple of them in that time. His thoughts moved
sluggishly, almost painfully.
He looked around at the dim buildings. The seaward halves of some of
the street lamps were painted black. Up a side street there were signs
of life. He looked again at the scrap of paper.
Then he made a decision.
"I think there's a hotel on the main street," he told Alec. "You can
drive me there."
* * * * *
"Eagle Hotel" read the black-edged gold letters on the plate-glass
window, behind which the narrow lobby with its half-dozen empty chairs
was nakedly revealed.
He told Alec to wait, and took a room for the night. The clerk was an
old man in a shiny black coat. Norman saw from the register that no one
else had checked in recently. He carried his bag up to the room and
immediately returned to the lobby.
"I haven't been here for ten years," he told the clerk. "I believe
there is a cemetery about five blocks down the street, away from the
Bay?"
The old man's sleepy eyes blinked wide open.
"Bayport Cemetery? Just three blocks, and then a block and a half to
the left. But--" He made a vague questioning noise in his throat.
"Thank you," said Norman.
After a moment's thought, he paid off Alec, who took the money and with
obvious relief kicked his cab into life. Norman walked down the main
street, away from the Bay.
After the first block there were no more stores. In this direction,
Bayport petered out quickly. Most of the houses were dark. And after he
turned left there were no more street lights.
The gates of the cemetery were locked. He felt his way along the
wall, behind the masking shrubbery, trying to make as little noise as
possible, until he found a scrubby tree whose lowest branch could bear
his weight. He got his hands on the top of the wall, scrambled up, and
cautiously let himself down on the other side.
Behind the wall it was very dark. There was a rustling sound, as if he
had disturbed some small animal. More by feeling than sight, he located
a headstone. It was a thin one, worn, mossy toward the base, and tilted
at an angle. Probably from the middle of the last century. He dug into
the earth with his hand, and filled an envelope he took from his pocket.
He got back over the wall, making what seemed a great deal of noise in
the shrubbery. But the street was empty as ever.
On his way back to the hotel he looked up at the sky, located the Pole
Star, and calculated the orientation of his room.
As he crossed the lobby, he felt the curious eyes of the old clerk
boring into him.
His room was in darkness. Chill salt air was pouring through the open
window. He locked the door, shut the window, pulled down the blind, and
switched on the light--a glaring overhead which revealed the room in
all its dingy severity. A cradle phone struck the sole modern note.
He took the envelope out of his pocket and weighed it in his hand. His
lips curled in a peculiarly bitter smile. Then he reread the scrap of
paper that had fluttered from Tansy's hand.
Add a small quantity of graveyard dirt, and wrap all in a piece of
flannel, wrapping widdershins. Tell it to stop me. Tell it to bring
me to you.
Graveyard dirt. That was what he had found in Tansy's dressing table.
It had been the beginning of all this. Now he was fetching it himself.
He looked at his watch. Eleven twenty.
He cleared the small table and set it in the center of the room,
jabbing in his penknife to mark the edge facing east. "Widdershins"
meant "against the sun"--from west to east.
He placed the necessary ingredients on the table, cutting a short strip
of flannel from the hem of his bathrobe, and fitted together the four
sections of Tansy's note. The distasteful, bitter smile did not leave
his lips.
Taken together, the significant portions of the notes read:
Take four lengths of four-inch white cord and a length of gut, a
bit of platinum or iridium, a piece of lodestone, a phonograph
needle that has only played Scriabin's "Ninth Sonata." Tie the
four white cords into a granny, a reef, a cat's-paw, and a carrick
bend. Tie the gut in a bowline. Add a small quantity of graveyard
dirt, and wrap all in a piece of flannel, wrapping widdershins.
Tell it to stop me. Tell it to bring me to you.
In general outline, it was similar to a hundred recipes for Negro
tricken-bags he had seen or heard about. The phonograph needle, the
knots, and one or two other items, were obvious "white" additions.
And it was all on the same level as the mental operations of a child or
neurotic adult who religiously steps on, or avoids sidewalk cracks.
A clock outside bonged the half-hour.
* * * * *
Norman sat there looking at the stuff. It was hard for him to begin.
It would have been different, he told himself, if he were doing it
for a joke or a thrill, or if he were one of those people who dope up
their minds with morbid supernaturalism--who like to play around with
magic because it's medieval and aesthetic. But to tackle it in dead
seriousness, to open your mind deliberately to superstition--that was
to join hands with the forces pushing the world back into the dark
ages, to cancel the term "science" out of the equation.
But, behind Tansy, he had seen that thing. Of course, it had been an
hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities,
even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat
them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and
yours in a direct physical way--
He reached out for the first length of cord and tied the ends together
in a granny.
When he came to the cat's-paw, he had to consult the page he had torn
from the dictionary. After a couple of false starts he managed it.
But on the carrick bend he was all thumbs. It was a simple knot, but
no matter how he went about it, he could not get it to look like the
illustration. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Very close in the room,
he told himself. "I'm still overheated from rushing about." The skin on
his fingertips felt an inch thick. The ends of the cord kept eluding
them. He remembered how Tansy's fingers had rippled through the knots.
Eleven forty-one. The phonograph needle started to roll off the table.
He dropped the cord and laid the phonograph needle against his fountain
pen, so it would not roll. Then he started again on the knot.
For a moment he thought he must have picked up the gut, the cord seemed
so stiff and unresponsive. Incredible what nervousness can do to you,
he told himself. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with difficulty.
Finally, by keeping his eyes on the illustration and imitating it step
for step, he managed to tie a carrick bend. All the while he felt as
if there were more between his fingers than a cord, as if he were
manipulating against a great inertia. Just as he finished, he felt a
slight prickly chill, like the onset of fever, and the light overhead
seemed to dim a trifle. Eye-strain.
The phonograph needle was rolling in the opposite direction, spinning
faster and faster. He slapped his hand down on it, missed it, caught it
at the edge of the table.
Just like a Ouija board, he told himself. You try to keep your fingers,
poised on the planchette, perfectly motionless. As a result muscular
tensions accumulate. They reach the breaking point. Seemingly without
any volition on your part, the planchette begins to roll and skid
about on its three little legs, traveling from letter to letter. Same
thing here. Nervous and muscular tensions made it difficult for him to
tie knots. Obeying a universal tendency, he projected the difficulty
into the cord. And, by hand and knee pressure, he had been doing some
unconscious table tipping.
Between his fingers, the phonograph needle seemed to vibrate, as if it
were being pounded by infinitesimal hammers. There was a very faint
sensation of electric shock. Unbidden, the torturesome, clangorous
chords of the "Ninth Sonata" began to sound in his mind. Rot! One
well-known symptom of extreme nervousness is a tingling in the
fingers--often painfully intense. But his throat was dry and his snort
of bitter contempt sounded choked.
He pinned the needle in the flannel for greater safety.
Eleven forty-seven. Reaching for the gut, his fingers felt as shaky
and weak as if he just climbed a hundred-foot rope hand over hand.
The stuff looked normal, but it was slimy to the touch. And for
some moments he had been conscious of an acrid, almost metallic
odor replacing the salt smell of the Bay. Tactual and olfactory
hallucinations joining in with the visual and auditory, he told
himself. He could still hear the "Ninth Sonata."
He knew a bowline backwards, and it should have been easier because the
gut was not as stiff as it ought to be, but he felt there were other
forces manipulating it or other mentalities trying to give orders to
his fingers, so that the gut was trying to tie itself into a slip-knot,
a reef, a half hitch--anything but a bowline. His fingers ached, his
eyes were heavy with an abnormal fatigue. He was working against
a mounting inertia--a dangerous, crushing inertia. He remembered
Tansy telling him that first day--"There's a law of reaction in all
conjuring--like the kick of a gun--" Eleven fifty-two.
With a great effort, he canalized his mental energy, focused his
attention only on the knot. His numb fingers began to move in an odd
rhythm, a rhythm of the "Ninth Sonata," _piu vivo_. The bowline
was tied.
* * * * *
The overhead light dimmed markedly, throwing the whole room into a
sooty gloom. Hysterical blindness, he told himself in a despairing
effort to maintain the appearances of sanity and scientific law. It
was very cold now, so cold that he fancied he could see his breath.
And silent, terribly silent. Against that silence he could feel and
hear the rapid drumming of his heart, accelerating unendurably to the
thundering, swirling rhythm of the music.
Then, in one instant of diabolic paralyzing insight, he knew that
_this_ was sorcery. No mere puttering about with ridiculous
medieval implements, no effortless sleight of hand, but a straining,
back-breaking struggle to keep control of _forces summoned_,
of which the objects he manipulated were only the symbols. Outside
the walls of the room, outside the walls of his skull, outside the
impalpable energy-walls of his mind, he felt those forces gathering,
swelling up, dreadfully expectant, waiting for him to make a false move
so that they could crush him.
He could not believe it. He had to believe it.
The only question was--would he be able to stay in control?
Eleven fifty-seven. He gathered the objects together on the flannel.
The needle jumped to the lodestone and clung. It shouldn't; it wasn't
that magnetic. He took a pinch of graveyard dirt. Between finger and
thumb, each separate particle seemed to crawl, like a tiny maggot.
He sensed that something was missing. He could not remember what it
was. He fumbled for the formula. A current of air was blowing the
scraps of paper off the table. He sensed an eager, inward surge of the
forces outside, as if they knew he was failing. He clutched at the
papers, managed to pin them down. Bending close, he made out the words
"platinum or iridium." He jabbed his pen against the table, broke off
the whole nib, and added it to the other objects.
He stood at the side of the table away from the knife that marked
the east, trying to steady his shaking hands against the edge. His
teeth were chattering. The room was utterly dark now except for the
impossible bluish light that beat through the window shade.
Abruptly the strip of flannel started to curl like a strip of heated
gelatine, to roll itself up from east to west, _with_ the sun.
He jerked forward, got his hand inside the flannel before it closed,
drew it apart--in his numb hands it seemed like metal--and rolled it
against the sun, widdershins.
The silence was intensified. Even the sound of his beating heart was
cut off. He knew that something was listening with a terrible intensity
for his command, and that something was hoping with an even more
terrible avidity that he would not be able to utter that command.
Yet somewhere a clock was booming--or was it not a clock, but the
secret sound of time? Nine--ten--eleven--twelve.
His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He kept on choking
soundlessly. He could feel the walls giving way.
Then, in a dry, croaking voice, he managed: "Stop Tansy. Bring her
here."
* * * * *
The walls were shaken as if they were at the center of a whirlpool.
Darkness became absolute. There was an eruption of force from the
table. He felt himself flung across the room.
Then the forces were gone. In all things, tension gave way to limpness.
Sound and light returned. He was sprawled across the bed. On the table
was a little flannel packet, no longer of any consequence.
He felt as if he had been doped, or were waking after a debauch. There
was no inclination to do anything. Emotion was absent.
Outwardly everything was the same. Even his mind, with automatic
rationality, could still wearily take up the thankless task of
explaining his experiences on a scientific basis--weaving an elaborate
web in which psychosis, hallucination, and improbable coincidences were
the strands.
But inwardly something had changed, and would never change back.
Considerable time passed.
He heard steps mounting the stairs, then in the hall. They made a
_squish-squish_ sound, as if the shoes were soaking wet.
They stopped outside his door. There was a soft rap.