The Witching Hour Read online

  The Witching Hour

  James Gunn

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Reluctant Witch

  The Beautiful Brew

  The Magicians

  About the Author

  To Kit and Kevin, who would like to believe in witches and such.

  Introduction

  Fantasy is far older than science fiction. In fact, fantasy may be as old as fiction itself. Science fiction could not exist until technological and scientific change became a recognized part of human existence and authors began to speculate about the direction of change and the kinds of change, and the impact of these changes on people. Fantasy began as soon as story-tellers began to spin tall tales for the entertainment of their listeners. This may have happened very soon after humans developed speech.

  If fantasy is fiction in which situations arise and events happen contrary to everyday experience, then science fiction can be considered a special case of fantasy, a variety in which the situations and events, though contrary to everyday experience, can be traced to everyday experience. In another context (“The World View of Science Fiction”) I have defined fantasy as the literature of difference, and science fiction as the literature of change. Fantasy is the literature of the supernatural, science fiction, the literature of the natural extended in time or space.

  I never was much interested in writing fantasy, maybe because I was too fascinated by the fantastic possibilities of science and technology, but I loved reading it: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels captivated me not long after I began to read, and his John Carter Mars novels and Jason Gridley’s Pellucidar novels were even more entrancing; and I fell in love with A. Merritt’s romantic fantasies as soon as I discovered them in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1939. But I wanted to write science fiction.

  All that changed when John Campbell created Unknown, as a companion fantasy magazine to Astounding, in 1939. Campbell’s Unknown offered fantasy with a difference. It was fantasy written like science fiction, what has sometimes been called “rationalized fantasy.” Campbell told his science-fiction writers, “Grant your gadgets and get on with your story.” In Unknown the gadgets were supernatural. Assume there is magic, say — how would it really work? If there are leprechauns, how would they exist? what would they want? what could they do? If there are ghosts, what would be their limitations? If one acquires magical powers, what is their psychological or economic cost?

  Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds) lasted only five years, from 1939-1943. It was killed by wartime paper shortages. During its too-short lifetime, it published some classics: Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier, L. Rob Hubbard’s Fear, Typewriter in the Sky, and Slaves of Sleep, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s Harold Shea novels of magical misadventures, de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall and several of the stories collected inThe Wheels of If, Jack Williamson’s Darker Than You Think, Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Devil Makes the Law (Magic, Inc.), and dozens of short stories such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “It” and “Shottle Bop.”

  I was only 16 in 1939 and never had a chance to write for Unknown, but fantasy magazines had a re-birth in the 1950s when I was freelancing full time. The best of these was Beyond, created by Horace Gold as a companion fantasy magazine to Galaxy, which he had created three years before. Beyond Fantasy Fiction aimed at the same rationalized fantasy niche that Unknown had established and to which Gold had contributed stories. I saw it as an opportunity to broaden my range and indulge myself in a different kind of narrative imperative.

  The first story in this collection might have been published in Beyond but was published in Galaxy under the title of “Wherever You May Be.” I had given up a position as junior editor with Western Printing & Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin (which at that time produced the Dell line of paperbacks) on the strength of four stories that I had sold. Fred Pohl, my agent, told me about them when I attended my first science-fiction convention, the World SF Convention of 1952, in Chicago. One of them was to Astounding, one to Galaxy. I decided to make a trip to New York to talk to editors.

  Horace Gold offered me a job as assistant editor of Galaxy, but I know my wife wouldn’t want to live in New York, with our three-year-old son. John Campbell gave me an idea for a story. He gave the same idea to a lot of authors (he often said that he could give the same idea to a dozen writers and get a dozen different stories). The British Psychical Society, he said, had investigated poltergeist phenomena and discovered that it almost always happened in the neighborhood of a disturbed adolescent. I thought about it on the way home: what would happen, I asked myself, if someone — a psychologist, say — should find such an adolescent and make her (it should be a “her”) more disturbed until she gains control of her psychic powers.

  I sat down and wrote that story in a few weeks. It was a short novel and it rolled out of my typewriter without conscious effort (unlike most stories, which are work). I called it “Happy Is the Bride” and sent it off to Fred Pohl, asking him to send it to John Campbell. But Gold was desperate for a lead short novel for an upcoming edition of Galaxy, and Pohl sent it over to him. A. J. Budrys, who became the assistant editor to Galaxy, told me later that Gold would rather have used it in Beyond, but Galaxy’s need was greater. Gold asked Budrys to add some five thousand words of explanation to “Happy Is the Bride” to make it suitable for Galaxy, but I’ve never been able to identify them. Maybe Budrys did it too well. Gold published the short novel in the May 1953 Galaxy, but changed my title (he was fond of changing titles; moreover, he said that my title gave away the ending). I never liked “Wherever You May Be” (too many indefinite verbs and a preposition to be memorable) and changed it, in this collection, to “The Reluctant Witch.”

  “The Beautiful Brew” emerged from a cartoon by Virgil Partch, a wonderfully off-beat cartoonist who signed his cartoons “VIP,” that showed a couple of bar patrons admiring the work of a bartender drawing a mug of beer. The beer was foaming up into the bust and head of an attractive young woman. The caption said something like, “When he puts a head on a beer, he really puts on a head.” I did a little research in Frazer’s The Golden Bough about the spirit of the grain, spent the afternoon at the local Blatz brewery watching beer being made, and wrote “The Beautiful Brew.” Gold bought it for Beyond without any hesitation, and it was published in the September 1954 issue. This time he didn’t change my title.

  “Sine of the Magus” had a more adventurous history. The idea came from a lobby bulletin board at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. If magicians had a convention, I thought, they would meet just like every other professional group, and their meetings would be announced on the lobby meeting board spelled out in those detachable white letters. And there would be something misspelled. There always is something misspelled. The magicians would behave just like every other professional group, with name tags (often with corny requests) and printed programs and dull presentations. Only these would be real magicians. I did some research on magic in Frazer and other authorities and then did some speculations of my own. Maybe, I thought, the reason spells didn’t work consistently was because they weren’t mathematically derived, and calculus, I learned, was invented for just this kind of task — to provide limits. What if someone had invented a calculus of magic!

  I wanted to make a romantic comedy out of all this, like “The Reluctant Witch” and “The Beautiful Brew” and the fantasy novels of Thorne Smith that I had always enjoyed, likeThe Night Life of the Gods. So I wrote what I called “Beauty Is a Witch” (from a quotation, Shakespeare, I think: “Beauty is a witch against whose charms faith melteth into blood”) and sent it to Gold — and he promptly rejected it. Fred Pohl sent it to Fletcher Pratt, who was l
aunching a new fantasy magazine but one that would pay only one cent a word rather than three. Pratt liked the short novel but wanted a bit of rewriting in one of the opening scenes; before I could start on that, however, Gold asked to have the story returned. He was in dire need of a lead short novel, this time for Beyond. It was published in the May 1954 issue. Gold changed the title to “Sine of the Magus.” Donald W. Lawler in Tymn and Ashley’s reference book Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines commented that the story “stands out as one of the best of Beyond,” and it was listed as a classic by the Encyclopedia of Fantasy. I retitled it “The Magicians” for this book, and later expanded it into a novel for Scribner’s under the same title. By that time The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby had become best-sellers, and I included in the novel a satire of those novels. Nobody noticed.

  James Gunn

  The Reluctant Witch

  Matt refused to believe it. Incredulity paralyzed him as he stared after the fleeing, bounding tire. Then, with a sudden release, he sprinted after it.

  “Stop!” he yelled futilely. “Stop, damn it!”

  With what seemed like sadistic glee, the tire bounced high in the air and came down going faster than ever. Matt pounded dustily down the hot road for a hundred yards before he pulled even with it. He knocked it over on its side. The tire lay there, spinning and frustrating, like a turtle on its back. Matt glared at it suspiciously. Sweat trickled down his neck.

  A tinkling of little silver bells. Laughter? Matt looked up quickly, angrily. The woods were thin along the top of this Ozark ridge. Descending to the lake, sparkling blue, tantalizingly cool far below, they grew thicker, but here the only person near was the young girl shuffling through the dust several hundred yards beyond the crippled car. And her head was bent down to study her feet.

  Matt shrugged and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. A late June afternoon in southern Missouri was too hot for this kind of work, for any kind of work. Matt wondered if it had been a mistake.

  Heat waves shimmered and a haze of red dust settled slowly as he righted the tire and began to roll it back toward the old green Ford with one bare wheel drum pointing upward at a slight angle. The tire rolled easily, as if it repented its brief dash for freedom, but it was a dirty job and Matt’s hands and clothes were soiled red when he reached the car.

  With one hand clutching the tire, Matt studied the road. Surely he had stopped on one of the few level stretches in these hills, but the tire had straightened up from the side of the car anyway and had started rolling as if the car were parked on a steep incline.

  Matt reflected bitterly on the luck that had turned a slow leak into a flat only twenty-five miles from the cabin. It couldn’t have happened on the highway, ten miles back, where he could have pulled into a service station. It had to wait until he was committed to this rutted cow track. The tire’s escapade had been only the most recent of a series of annoyances and irritations to which bruised shins and scraped knuckles bore mute, painful witness.

  He sighed. After all, he had wanted isolation. Guy’s offer of a hunting cabin in which to write his book had seemed ideal at the time; now Matt wasn’t so certain. If this was a fair sample, Matt was beginning to realize that much of his time might be wasted on the elementary problems of existence.

  Cautiously Matt rolled the tire to the rear of the car, laid it carefully on its side, and completed pulling the spare from the trunk. Warily he maneuvered the spare to the left rear wheel, knelt, lifted it, fitted it over the bolts and stepped back. He sighed again, but this time it was with relief.

  Kling-ng! Klang! Rattle!

  Matt looked down. His foot was at least two inches from the hubcap, but it was rocking now, empty. Matt saw the last nut roll under the car.

  Matt’s swearing was vigorous, systematic, and exhaustive. It concerned itself chiefly with the latent perversity of inanimate objects.

  There was something about machines and the things they made that was basically alien to the human spirit. For a time they might disguise themselves as willing slaves, but eventually, inevitably, they turned against their masters. At the psychological moment, they rebelled.

  Or perhaps it was the difference in people. For some people things always went wrong: their cakes fell, their boards split, their golf balls sliced into the woods. Others established a mysterious sympathy with their tools. Luck? Skill? Coordination? Experience? It was, he felt, something more conscious and more malign.

  Matt remembered a near-disastrous brush with chemistry; he had barely passed qualitative analysis. For him the tests had been worse than useless. Faithfully he had gone through every step of the endless ritual: precipitate, filter, dissolve, precipitate. And then he had taken his painfully secured, neatly written results to — what was his name — Wadsworth, and the little chemistry professor had looked at his analysis and looked up, frowning.

  “Didn’t you find any whatyoumaycallit oxide?” he had asked.

  “Whatyoumaycallit oxide?” Startled. “Oh, there wasn’t any whatyoumaycallit oxide.”

  And Wadsworth had made a simple test, and, sure enough, there was the whatyoumaycallit oxide.

  There had been the inexplicably misshapen gear be had made on the milling machine, the drafting pen that would not draw a smooth line no matter how much he sanded the point. It had convinced Matt that his hands were too clumsy to belong to an engineer. He had transferred his ambitions to a field where tools were less tangible. Now he wondered.

  Kobolds? Accident prones?

  Sometime he would have to write it up. It would make a good paper for the Journal of…

  Laughter! This time there was no possible doubt. It came from right behind him.

  Matt whirled. The girl stood there, hugging her ribs to keep the laughter in. She was a little thing, not much over five feet tall, in a shapeless, faded blue dress. Her feet were small and bare and dirty. Her hair, in long braids, was mouse-colored. Her pale face was saved from plainness only by her large blue eyes. She was about thirteen, Matt estimated.

  Matt flushed. “What the devil are you laughing at?”

  “You!” she gasped. “Why’n’t you get a horse?”

  “Did that remark just reach these parts?”

  He swallowed his irritation, turned and got down on his hands and knees to peer under the car. One by one he gathered up the nuts, but the last one, inevitably, was out of reach. Sweating, he crawled into the dust under the car.

  When he came out, the girl was still there. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asked bitingly.

  “Nothin’.” But she stood with her feet planted firmly in the red dust.

  Kibitzers annoyed Matt, but he couldn’t think of anything to do about it. He twirled the nuts onto the bolts and tightened them, his neck itching. It might have been the effect of sweat and dust, but he was not going to give the girl the satisfaction of seeing him rub it. That annoyed him even more. He tapped the hubcap into place and stood up.

  “Why don’t you go home?” he asked sourly.

  “Cain’t,” she said.

  He went to the rear of the car and released the jack. “Why not?”

  “I run away.” Her voice was quietly tragic. Matt turned to look at her. Her blue eyes were large and moist. As he watched, a single tear gathered and traced a muddy path down her cheek.

  Matt hardened his heart. He picked up the flat and stuffed it into the trunk and slammed the lid. The sun was getting lower, and on this forgotten lane to nowhere it might take him the better part of an hour to drive the twenty-five miles.

  He slid into the driver’s seat and punched the starter button. After one last look at the forlorn little figure in the middle of the road, he shook his head savagely and let in the clutch.

  “Mister! Hey, mister!”

  He slammed on the brakes and stuck his head out the window. “Now what do you want?”

  “Nothin’,” she said mournfully. “Only you forgot your jack.”

 
Matt jammed the gear shift into reverse and backed up rapidly. Silently he got out, picked up the jack, opened the trunk, tossed in the jack, slammed the lid. But as he brushed past her again, he hesitated. “Where are you going?”

  “No place,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘no place’? Don’t you have any relatives?” She shook her head sadly. “Friends?” he asked hopefully. She shook her head again. “All right, then, go home where you belong!”

  He slid into the car and slammed the door. She was not his concern. The car jerked into motion. No doubt she would go home when she got hungry enough. He shifted into second, grinding the gears. Even if she didn’t, someone would take her in. After all, he was no welfare agency.

  He slammed on the brakes. He backed up and skidded to a stop beside the girl.

  “Get in,” he said.

  Trying to keep the car out of the ruts was trouble enough, but the girl jumped up and down on the seat beside him, squealing happily.

  “Careful of those notes,” he said, indicating the bulging manila folders on the seat between them. “There’s over a year’s work in those.”

  Her eyes were wide as she watched him place the folders in the back seat on top of the portable typewriter that rested between the twenty-pound sack of flour and the case of eggs.

  “A year’s work?” she echoed.

  “Notes. For a book I’m going to write.”

  “You write stories?”

  “A book. About an aspect of psychology. About poltergeist phenomena, to be precise.”

  “Pol-ter-geist?”

  “An old German word. ‘Polter’ means ‘uproar’ and ‘geist’ means ‘spirit.’ Uproarious spirits.”

  “Oh,” she said wisely. “Spirits.” As if she knew all about spirits.

  “It’s just a superstition,” Matt said impatiently. “Before people could find natural explanations for unusual events, they blamed these things on spirits. There aren’t any ghosts or spirits who knock on tables or throw things or make noises. When these things happen, someone or something is responsible. That’s what my book is going to prove. But you probably aren’t interested in books.”