"Leiber,.Fritz.-.Conjure.Wife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

He caught up with her in the living room. She was headed for the front door. When he realized she wasn't going to turn or stop, he threw his arms around her. And then, at last, she did react. She struggled like an animal, but with her face turned sharply away and her arms flat against her sides, as if tied there.
Through taut mouth-slit, in a very low voice, but spittingly, she said, "Don't touch me."
Norman strained and braced his feet. There was something horrible about the way she threw herself from side to side, trying to break his embrace. There flickered in his mind the thought of a woman in a straitjacket.
She kept repeating "Don't touch me" in the same tones, and he kept imploring, "But Tansy --"
Suddenly she stopped struggling. He dropped his arms and stepped back.
She didn't relax. She just stood there rigidly, her face twisted to one side -- and from what he could see of it, the eyes were winced shut and the lips bitten together. Some kindred tightness, inside him, hurt his heart.
"Darling!" he said. "I'm ashamed of what I did. No matter what it led to, it was a cheap, underhanded, unworthy action. But --"
"It's not that!"
He hesitated. "You mean, you're acting this way because you're, well, ashamed of what I found out?"
No reply.
"Please, Tansy, we've got to talk about it."
Still no reply. He unhappily fingered the air. "But I'm sure everything will be all right. If you'll just tell me . . ." .
"Tansy, please . . ."
Her posture didn't alter, but her lips arched and the words were spat out: "Why don't you strap me and stick pins in me? They used to do that."
"Darling, I'd do anything rather than hurt you! But this is something that just has to be talked about."
"I can't. If you say another word about it, I'll scream!"
"Darling, if I possibly could, I'd stop. But this is one of those things. We've just got to talk it over."
"I'd rather die."
"But you've got to tell me. You've got to!"
He was shouting.
For a moment he thought she was going to faint. He reached forward to catch her. But it was only that her body had abruptly gone slack. She walked over to the nearest chair, dropped her hat on a small table beside it, sat down listlessly.
"All right," she said. "Let's talk about it."
_6:37 P.M.:_ The last rays of sunlight sliced the bookcase, touched the red teeth of the left-hand devil mask. Tansy was sitting on one end of the davenport, while Norman was at the other, turned sideways with one knee on the cushion, watching her.
Tansy switched around, flirting her head irritably, as if there were in the air a smoke of words which had grown unendurably thick. "All right, have it your own way then! I was seriously trying to use conjure magic. I was doing everything a civilized woman shouldn't. I was trying to put spells on people and things. I was trying to change the future. I was . . . oh, the whole works!"
Norman gave a small jerky nod. It was the same sort of nod he gave at student conferences, when after seeming hours of muddled discussion, some blank-faced young hopeful would begin to get a glimmering of what they were really talking about. He leaned towards her.
"But why?"
"To protect you and your career." She was looking at her lap. "But knowing all you did about the background of superstition, how did you ever come to believe -- ?" His voice wasn't loud now. It was cool, almost a lawyer's.
She twisted. "I don't know. When you put it that way . . . of course. But when you desperately want things to happen, or not to happen, to someone you love . . . I was only doing what millions of others have done. And then, you see, Norm, the things I did . . . well, they seemed to work . . . at least most of the time."
"But don't you see," he continued smoothly, "that those very exceptions prove that the things you were doing _didn't_ work? That the successes were just coincidences?"
Her voice rose a trifle. "I don't know about that. There might have been counter-influences at work --" She turned toward him impulsively. "Oh, I don't know what I believe! I've never really been sure that my charms worked. There was no way of telling. Don't you see, once I'd started, I didn't dare stop?"
"And you've been doing it all these years?"
She nodded unhappily. "Ever since we came to Hempnell."
He looked at her, trying to comprehend it. It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realization that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analyzed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to him, an area plunged in darkness, acrouch with fear, blown by giant winds. He tried to picture Tansy muttering charms, stitching up flannel hands by candlelight, visiting graveyards and God knows what other places, in search of ingredients. His imagination almost failed. And yet it had all been happening right under his nose.
The only faintly suspicious aspect of Tansy's behavior that he could recall, was her whim for taking "little walks" by herself. If he had ever wondered about Tansy and superstitions at all, it had only been to decide, with a touch of self-congratulation, that for a woman she was almost oddly free from irrationality.
"Oh Norm, I'm so confused and miserable," she broke in. "I don't know what to say or how to start."
He had an answer for that, a scholar's answer.
"Tell me how it all happened, right from the beginning."
_7:54:_ They were still sitting on the davenport. The room was almost dark. The devil masks were irregular ovals of gloom. Tansy's face was a pale smudge. Norman couldn't study its expression, but judging from her voice, it had become animated.
"Hold on a minute," he interrupted. "Let's get some things straight. You say you were very much afraid when we first came to Hempnell to arrange about my job, before I went south on the Hazelton Fellowship?"
"Oh yes, Norm. Hempnell terrified me. Everyone was so obviously antagonistic and so deadly respectable. I knew I'd be a flop as a professor's wife -- I was practically told so to my face. I don't know which was worse, Hulda Gunnison looking me up and down and grunting contemptuously, 'I guess you'll do,' when I made the mistake of confiding in her, or old Mrs. Carr petting my arm and saying, 'I know you and your husband will be very happy here at Hempnell. You're young, but Hempnell loves nice young folk!' Against those women I felt completely unprotected. And your career too."
"Right. So when I took you south and plunged you into the midst of the most superstition-swayed area in the whole country, exposed you to the stuff night and day, you were ripe for its promise of magical security."
Tansy laughed half-heartedly. "I don't know about the ripe part, but it certainly impressed me. I drank in all I could. At the back of my mind, I suppose, was the feeling: Some day I may need this. And when we went back to Hempnell in the fall, I felt more confident."
Norman nodded. That fitted. Come to think of it, there had been something unnatural about the intense, silent enthusiasm with which Tansy had plunged into boring secretarial work right after their marriage.
"But you didn't actually try any conjure magic," he continued, "until I got pneumonia that first winter?"
"That's right. Until then, it was just a cloud of vaguely reassuring ideas -- scraps of things I'd find myself saying over when I woke in the middle of the night, things I'd unconsciously avoid doing because they were unlucky, like sweeping the steps after dark or crossing knives and forks. And then when you got pneumonia, well, when the person you love is near death, you'll try anything."
For a moment Norman's voice was sympathetic. "Of course." Then the Classroom tone came back. "But I gather that it wasn't until I had that brush with Pollard over sex education and came off decently, and especially until my book came out in 1931 and got such, well, pretty favorable reviews, that you really began to believe that your magic was working?"
"That's right."
Norman sat back. "Oh Lord," he said.
"What's the matter, dear? You don't feel I'm trying to take any credit away from you for the book's success?"
Norman half laughed, half snorted. "Good Lord, no. But --" He stopped himself. "Well, that takes us to 1930. Go on from there."