The Witching Hour Read online

  Since Matt’s speech, she hadn’t said a word. Suddenly Matt felt very sorry for her and ashamed, as if he had hit a child. The poor little thing! he thought. Then he caught himself. He shook his head. Don’t be a fool!

  He thumbed the starter button. The motor growled, but it didn’t catch. Matt let it whine to a stop and pressed again. The motor moaned futilely. Matt checked the ignition. Again and again he pushed the button. The moans got weaker.

  He glanced suspiciously at Abigail. But that’s absurd, he thought. She hadn’t been out of the house since he drove up. Since he had met Abbie, his thoughts had taken on a definite paranoid tinge. It was absurd to blame everything that went wrong on a little hill girl.

  Before the battery wore out completely, he gave up.

  “All right. I can’t put you out this far from home. You’ll have to sleep here tonight.”

  Silently she followed him into the cabin. Without a word, she helped him tack blankets to the upper bunks on each side of the cabin. They made an effective curtain around the lower beds. As they worked closely, Matt found himself uncomfortably aware of her. She had a sweet, womanly smell. He began to enjoy the accidental brushes of their bodies.

  When they finished, Abbie reached down and grasped the hem of her dress to pull it over her head.

  “No, no,” Matt said. “Why do you think we tacked up those blankets?” He gestured to the bunk on the left-hand wall. “Dress and undress in there.”

  She let the hem of her dress fall, nodded meekly and climbed into the bunk.

  Matt stared after her for a moment and released his breath. He turned and climbed into his own bunk, undressed and slipped under the blanket. He stared at the slats in the bunk above him. He had forgotten to turn out the lamps.

  He rose on one elbow and heard a soft padding on the floor. The lamps went out, one by one. The padding faded to the other side of the room. Rustling sounds. Darkness and silence.

  “Good night, Mr. Wright.” It was a little child’s voice in the night.

  “Good night, Abbie,” he said softly. And then after a moment, firmly, “But don’t forget — back you go first thing in the morning.”

  Before the silence wove a pattern of sleep, Matt heard a little sound from the other bunk. He couldn’t quite identify it. Was it a sob? A snore? Or a muffled titter?

  The odor of frying bacon and eggs and boiling coffee crept into Matt’s nightmare that he was fleeing, terrified, pursued by an implacable and invisible enemy. Matt opened his eyes. The bunk was bright with diffused sunlight; the dream faded. Matt sniffed hungrily and pushed aside the blanket to look out.

  All the supplies from the car had been unloaded and neatly stowed away. On a little corner table by the window was his typewriter and precious manila folders and a stack of blank white paper.

  Matt dressed hurriedly in his cramped quarters. When he emerged from his cocoon, Abbie was humming happily as she set breakfast on the table. She wore a different dress this morning, a brown calico that did horrible things for her hair and coloring, but fitted better than the blue gingham. The dress revealed a slim but unsuspectedly mature figure.

  How would she look, he wondered idly, in good clothes and nylons and shoes and makeup?

  The thought crumbled before a fresh onslaught to his senses — the odor and sight of breakfast. The eggs were cooked perfectly, sunny-side up, the white firm but not hard. Abbie had anticipated his preferences with strange precision. At first glance, he thought that she had overestimated his appetite, but he stowed away three eggs. Abbie ate two heartily.

  He pushed back his plate with a sigh and lit a cigarette. “Well,” he began. She got very quiet and stared at the floor. He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. He felt too contented; a few hours more wouldn’t make any difference. Tonight would be time enough for her to go back. “Well,” he repeated, “I guess I’d better get to work.”

  Abbie sprang to clear the table. Matt walked to the corner where the typewriter was waiting. He sat down in the chair and rolled in a sheet of paper. The table was well arranged for light; it was just about the right height. Everything considered, it was just about perfect for working.

  He stared at the blank sheet of paper. He leafed through his notes. He resisted an impulse to get up and walk around. He rested his fingers lightly on the keys and after a moment lifted them, crossed one leg over the other knee, put his right elbow on the raised leg and began to finger his chin.

  There was only one thing wrong: he didn’t feel like working.

  Finally he typed in the middle of the page:

  POLTERGEIST PHENOMENA

  and below that:

  The Psychological Truth About Those Traditional “Uproarious Spirits”

  He double-spaced and stopped.

  It wasn’t that Abbie was noisy; she was too quiet, with a kind of purposeful restraint that is worse than chaos. With one ear Matt listened to her hushed little sounds of dishwashing and stacking. And then silence.

  Matt stood it as long as he could and turned. Abbie was seated at the rough table. She was sewing up a hole in the pocket of his other pair of work pants. Matt could almost see the aura of bliss that surrounded her.

  Like a child, Matt thought, playing at domesticity. You be the papa, and I’ll be the mama. And they lived happily ever after. But there was something mature about it, too, a mature and basic fulfillment. If we could all be happy with so little, Matt thought. And, It’s a pity, with so small an ambition, to find its realization so elusive.

  As if she felt him looking at her, Abbie glanced around and beamed. Matt turned back to his typewriter. It still wouldn’t come.

  Belief in the supernatural, he began hesitantly, is the attempt of the primitive mind to bring order out of chaos. It is significant, therefore, that superstition fades as an understanding of the natural workings of the physical universe grows more prevalent.

  He let his hands drop. It was all wrong, like an image seen in a distorted mirror. He swung around: “Who wrecked your father’s house?”

  “Libby,” she said.

  “Libby?” Matt echoed. “Who’s Libby?”

  “The other me,” Abbie said. “Mostly I keep her bottled up inside, but when I feel sad and unhappy, I cain’t keep her in. Then she gets loose and just goes wild. I cain’t control her.”

  Good God! Matt thought. Schizophrenia! “Where did you get an idea like that?” he asked cautiously.

  “When I was born,” Abbie said, “I had a twin sister, but she was born dead. Maw said I was stronger and just crowded the life right out of her. When I was bad, Maw used to shake her head and say Libby’d never have been mean or cross or naughty. So when something happened, I started sayin’ Libby done it. It didn’t stop a lickin’, but it made me feel better.”

  What a thing to tell a child! Matt thought.

  “Purty soon I got to believin’ it, that Libby done the bad things that I got licked for, that Libby was part of me that I had to push deep down so she couldn’t get out and get me in trouble. After I” — she blushed — “got older and funny things started happening, Libby come in real handy.”

  “Can you see her?” Matt ventured.

  “‘Course not,” Abbie said. “She ain’t real.”

  “Isn’t,” Matt corrected automatically.

  “Isn’t real,” Abbie said. “Things happen when I feel bad. I cain’t do anything about it. But you got to explain it somehow … I use Libby.”

  Matt sighed. Abbie wasn’t so crazy — or stupid either. “You can’t control it — ever?”

  “Well,” Abbie reflected, “maybe a little. Like when I felt kind of mean about that liquor you gave Paw, and I thought how nice it would be if Paw had somethin’ wet on the outside for a change.”

  “How about a tire and a hubcap full of nuts?” Matt suggested.

  She laughed. It was like a tinkling of little silver bells. “You did look funny.”

  Matt frowned. But slowly his expression cleared and he beg
an to chuckle. “I guess I did.”

  He swung back to the typewriter before he realized that he was accepting the events of the last eighteen hours as physical facts and Abbie’s explanation as theoretically possible. Did he actually believe that Abbie could — how to express it? — move objects with some mysterious, intangible force? By wishing? Of course, he didn’t. He stared at the typewriter. Or did he?

  He called up a picture of a pint bottle hanging unsupported in midair, emptying its contents over Jenkins’s head. He remembered a dish that jumped from a shelf to shatter on the floor. He thought of a hubcap that dumped its contents into the dirt when his foot was two inches away. And he saw a tire straighten up and begin to roll down a level road.

  You can’t just dismiss things, he thought. In any comprehensive scheme of the universe, you must include all valid phenomena. If the accepted scheme of things cannot find a place for it, then the scheme must change.

  Matt shivered. It was a disturbing thought.

  The primitive mind believed that inanimate objects had spirits that must be propitiated, that could be influenced: trees and rocks, rivers and winds and rain. With a little sophistication came mythology and its personifications — nymphs and sprites, Poseidon and Aeolus; and folklore with its kobolds and poltergeists.

  Sir James Frazer said something about the relationship between science and magic. Man, he said, associates ideas by similarity and by contiguity in space or time. If the association is legitimate, it is science; if illegitimate, it is magic, science’s bastard sister. But if the associations of magic are legitimate, then those of science must be illegitimate, and the two reverse their roles and the modern world is standing on its head.

  Matt felt a little dizzy.

  Suppose the primitive mind is wiser than we are. Suppose you can insure good luck by the proper ritual or kill your enemy by sticking a pin in a wax doll. Suppose you can prove it.

  You had to have some kind of explanation of unnatural events, the square pegs that do not fit into any of science’s round holes. Even Abbie recognized that. Matt knew what the scientific explanation would be: illusion, delusion, hypnosis, anything that demanded the least possible rearrangement of accepted theory, anything that, in effect, denied the existence of the phenomenon. Matt thought about Charles Fort and his Book of the Damned, that strange and wonderful book that lists and documents the phenomena that science cannot explain in its own terms and which it therefore relegates to the inferno of the unacceptable.

  How could you explain it? How could you explain Abbie? Did you believe in the spirits of inanimate objects that Abbie could direct when she was in the proper mood? Did you believe in poltergeists that Abbie ordered about? Did you believe in Libby, the intangible, projectable, manipulative external soul?

  There had to be room for Abbie in your universe. You had to explain Abbie or your cosmology was worthless.

  That man at Duke — Rhine, the parapsychologist — he had a word for it. Telekinesis. An attempt to incorporate psychic phenomena into the body of science. Perhaps — better — an attempt to alter the theoretical universe in order to fit that phenomena into it.

  But it didn’t explain anything.

  Then Matt thought of electricity. You don’t have to explain something in order to use it. You don’t have to understand it in order to control it. It helps, but it isn’t essential. Understanding is a psychological necessity, not a physical one.

  Matt stared at the words he had written. Poltergeists. Why was he wasting his time? He was supposed to be a scientist, a psychologist. And he was writing a book about a phenomenon he had never seen, as if he knew something about it. He had a chance to find out the truth for himself. More important, he had stumbled on something that might set the whole world on its ear, or perhaps stand it on its feet again.

  Matt turned. Abbie was sitting at the table, her mending finished, staring placidly out the open doorway into the summer sky. Matt stood up and walked toward her. She turned her head to look at him, smiling slowly. Matt turned his head, searching the room.

  “Kin I get you something?” Abbie asked.

  Matt looked down at her. “Here!” he said. He plucked the needle from the spool of darning thread. He forced it lightly into the rough top of the table so that the needle stood upright. “Now,” he said defiantly, “make it move.”

  Abbie stared at him. “Why?”

  “I want to see you do it,” Matt said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “But I don’t want to. I never wanted to do it. It just happened.”

  “Try!”

  “No, Mr. Wright,” Abbie said firmly. “It never brung me nothing but misery. It scared away all my fellers and all Paw’s friends. Folks don’t like people who can do things like that. I don’t ever want it to happen again.”

  “If you want to stay here,” Matt said flatly, “you’ll do as I say.”

  “Please, Mr. Wright,” she begged. “Don’t make me do it. It’ll spoil everythin’. It’s bad enough when a person cain’t help it. But it’s sinnin’ when you do it a-purpose — somethin’ terrible will come of it.”

  Matt just looked at her. Her pleading eyes dropped. She bit her lip. She stared at the needle. Her smooth, young forehead tightened.

  Nothing happened. The needle remained upright.

  Abbie took a deep breath. “I cain’t, Mr. Wright,” she wailed. “I just cain’t do it.”

  “Why not?” Matt demanded. “Why can’t you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Abbie said. Automatically her hands began to smooth the pants laid across her lap. She looked down and blushed. “I guess it’s ‘cause I’m happy.”

  After a morning of experimentation, Matt’s only half-conscious need was still unsatisfied. He had offered Abbie an assortment of objects: a spool of thread, a fountain-pen cap, a dime, a typewriter eraser, a three-by-five note card, a piece of folded paper, a bottle. The last Matt considered a stroke of genius. But tip it as he would, the bottle, like all the rest of the objects, remained stolidly unaffected.

  He even got the spare tire out of the trunk and leaned it against the side of the car. Fifteen minutes later it was still leaning there.

  Finally, frowning darkly, Matt took a cup from the shelf and put it down on the table. “Here,” he said. “You’re so good at smashing dishes, smash this.”

  Abbie stared at the cup hopelessly. Her face seemed old and haggard. After a moment, she seemed to collapse all at once. “I cain’t,” she moaned. “I cain’t.”

  “Can’t!” Matt shouted. “Can’t! Are you so stupid you can’t say that? Not ‘cain’t’ — ‘can’t’!”

  Her large blue eyes lifted to Matt’s dark ones in mute appeal. They began to fill with tears. “I can’t,” she said. A sob came from her throat. She put her head down on her arms. Her thin shoulders began to quiver.

  Moodily Matt stared at her back. Was everything that he had seen merely an illusion? Or did this phenomenon only evidence itself under certain, very rigid conditions? Did she have to be unhappy?

  It was not without a certain logic. Neurotic children had played a large if undefinable part in the history of witchcraft. In one of the English trials, children had reportedly fallen into fits and vomited crooked pins. They could not pronounce such holy names as “Lord,” “Jesus,” or “Christ,” but they could readily speak the names “Satan” or “Devil.” Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, one hundred thousand persons had been put to death for witchcraft. How many had come to the rack or the stake or the drowning pool through the accusations of children? A child saw a hag at her door. The next moment she saw a hare run by and the woman had disappeared. On no more convincing evidence than that, the woman was accused of turning herself into a hare by witchcraft.

  Why had the children done it? Suggestibility? A desire for attention? Whatever the reason, it was tainted with abnormality.

  In the field of psychic phenomena as well. The investigations of the Society of Ps
ychical Research, on which his book was to be based, were full of instances in which neurotic children or neurotic young women played a distinct if unexplainable role — especially in cases of poltergeist phenomena.

  Did Abbie have to be unhappy? Matt’s lips twisted. If it was true, it was hard on Abbie.

  “Get your things together,” Matt said harshly. “You’re going home to your father.”

  Abbie stiffened and looked up, her face tear-streaked but her eyes hot. “I ain’t.”

  “You are not,” Matt corrected.

  “I are not,” Abbie said fiercely. “I are not. I are not.”

  Suddenly the cup was sailing toward Matt’s head. Instinctively Matt put out his right hand. The cup hit it and stuck. Matt looked at it dazedly and back at Abbie. Her hands were still in her lap. They had not moved.

  “You did it!” Matt shouted. “It’s true!”

  Abbie looked pleased. “Do I have to go back to Paw?”

  Matt thought a moment. “Not if you’ll help me.”

  Abbie’s lips tightened. “Ain’t — isn’t once enough, Mr. Wright? You know I can do it. Won’t you leave it alone now? It’s unlucky.

  Something awful will happen. I got a feeling.” She looked up at his implacable face. “But I’ll do it, if you want.”

  “It’s important,” Matt said gently. “Now. What did you feel just before the cup moved toward me?”

  “Mad.”

  “No, no. I mean what did you feel physically or mentally, not emotionally.”

  Abbie’s eyebrows were thick. When she concentrated, they made a straight line across the top of her nose. “Gosh, Mr. Wright, I cain’t — ” She looked at him quickly. “I can’t find the words to tell about it. It’s like I wanted to pick up the nearest thing and throw it at you, and then it was like I had thrown it. Kind of a push from all of me, instead of just my hand.”