The Witching Hour Read online

  Matt took out his billfold and peered into it. Slowly he extracted one traveler’s check for five hundred dollars and then another. It left him only three hundred dollars for the rest of the summer. Matt sighed and countersigned the checks. “Try to keep it under this,” he said heavily. “If you can.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the saleswoman and hesitated, smiling. “Your fianc≥e?”

  “Good God, no!” Matt said, startled. “I mean — she’s my niece. It’s her birthday.”

  He walked over to Abbie, breathing heavily. “Go with this woman, Abbie. Do what she tells you.”

  “Yes, Mr. Wright,” Abbie said, but her expression didn’t change. She walked away as if she were entering into fairyland.

  Matt turned, chewing on the inside of his lip. He felt slightly sick.

  Time passed interminably. Matt browsed along the aisles, glanced through a poor selection of books, all current, and on impulse went into the lingerie department. He regretted it almost immediately. Once he had seen a woman come into a pool hall; he must, he thought, wear the same sheepish, out-of-place expression.

  He swallowed his qualms — they were a hard lump in his throat — and walked up to the counter.

  “Yes, sir,” said the young woman brightly, “what can I do for you?”

  Matt avoided looking at her. “I’d like to buy a n≥glig≥e,” he said in a low voice.

  “What size?”

  Matt began to motion with his hands and then dropped them hastily at his sides. “About five feet tall. Slim.”

  The woman led him along the counter. “Any particular color?”

  “Uh — black,” Matt said hoarsely.

  The clerk brought out a garment that was very black, very lacy, very sheer. “This is ninety-nine ninety-eight.”

  Matt stared at it. “That’s awfully — black,” he said.

  “We have some others,” the clerk began, folding the n≥glig≥e.

  “Never mind,” Matt said quickly. “Wrap it up.” Furtively he slipped the money over the counter.

  When he came out, the package under his arm, he was sweating freely.

  One hour. Matt went out, put the package in the back seat of the car and put another nickel in the parking meter. He browsed along the aisles some more and bought a carton of cigarettes.

  Two hours. He fed the parking meter again. He sat down in a chair upholstered in red leather and tried to look as if he were trying it out for size and comfort.

  Three hours. He fed the parking meter and began to feel hungry. He went back to the chair. From it he could keep an eye on the stairs.

  Women went up and came down. None of them was Abbie. He wondered, with a flash of fear, if she had been caught trying to make off with something else.

  Matt tried not watching the stairs on the theory that a watched pot never boils. Never again, he vowed, would he go shopping with a woman. Where the devil was Abbie?

  “Mr. Wright.” The voice was tremulous and low.

  Matt looked up and leaped out of his chair. The girl standing beside him was blonde and breathtaking. The hair was short and fluffed out at the ends; it framed a beautiful face. A soft, simple black dress with a low neckline clung to a small but womanly figure. Slim, long legs in sheer stockings and small black shoes with towering heels.

  “Good God! Abbie! What have they done to you?”

  “Don’t you like it?” Abbie asked. The lovely face clouded up.

  “It’s — it’s marvelous,” Matt spluttered. “But they bleached your hair!”

  Abbie beamed. “The woman who worked on it called it a ‘rinse.’ She said it was natural, but I should wash it every few days. Not with laundry soap, either.” She sighed. “I didn’t know there was so much a girl could do to her face. I’ve got so much to learn. Why, she — ”

  Abbie rattled on happily while Matt stared at her, incredulous. Had he been sleeping in the same small cabin with this girl? Had she been cooking his meals and darning the holes in his pockets? Had he really kissed her and held her in his arms and heard her say, “I reckon I wouldn’t be unwillin’ whatever you wanted to do”?

  He wondered if he would act the same again.

  Matt had expected a difference but not such a startling one. She wore her clothes with a becoming sureness. She walked on the high heels as if she had worn them all her life. She carried herself as if she were born to beauty. But then, things always worked well for Abbie.

  Abbie opened a small black purse and took out five dollars and twenty-one cents. “The woman said I should give this back to you.”

  Matt took it and looked at it in his hand and back at Abbie. He shrugged and smiled. “The power of money. Have you got everything?”

  Under her arm she carried a large package that contained, no doubt, the clothes and shoes she had worn. Matt took it from her. She refused to give up the package that held the frying pan.

  “I couldn’t wear this,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled out something black and filmy. She held it up by one strap. “It was uncomfortable.”

  Matt shot nervous glances to the right and left. “Put it away.” He crammed it back into the purse and snapped the purse shut. “Are you hungry?”

  “I could eat a hog,” Abbie said.

  Coming from the beautiful blonde creature, the incongruity set Matt to laughing. Abbie stared with wide eyes. “Did I say something wrong?” she asked plaintively.

  “Nothing,” Matt got out. He led her toward the door.

  “You got to tell me,” Abbie said appealingly. “There’s so much I don’t know.”

  Matt located the most expensive restaurant in town. It was a romantic place, with soft lights and soft recorded music and a soft-spoken waiter, but Matt had chosen it because it specialized in seafood. He wanted to be sure that Abbie had things to eat she had never tasted before.

  Matt ordered for both of them: shrimp cocktail, assorted relishes, chef’s salad with Roquefort dressing, broiled lobster tails with drawn butter, French-fried potatoes, broccoli with a cheese sauce, frozen ≥clair, coffee. The food was good, and Abbie ate everything with great wonderment, as if it were about to disappear into the mysterious place from which it had come.

  She stared at the room and the decorations and the other diners and the waiter, and seemed oblivious of the fact that other men were staring admiringly at her. The waiter puzzled her. “Is this all he does?” she asked timidly. Matt nodded. “He’s very good at it,” Abbie conceded.

  “Try to move the coffee cup,” Matt said when they finished.

  Abbie stared at it for a moment. “I can’t,” she said softly. “I tried awful — very hard, but I can’t. I’d do anything you wanted, Mr. Wright, but I can’t do that.”

  Matt smiled. “That’s all right. I just wanted to see if you could.”

  Matt found a place they could dance. It was a cocktail lounge and had no orchestra, of course, but a jukebox played mellowly in a corner. Matt ordered a couple of drinks. Abbie sipped hers once, made a face and wouldn’t touch it again.

  She danced lightly and gracefully in her high-heeled shoes. They brought the top of her head level with his lips. She rested her head blissfully against his shoulder and pressed herself very close. For a moment Matt relaxed and let himself enjoy the pleasures of the aftermath of a good meal and a beautiful girl in his arms. But Abbie seemed to be in a private Eden of her own, as if she had found her way by mistake into paradise and was afraid to speak for fear that the spell would break.

  During the long drive home, she spoke only once. “Do people live like that all the time?”

  “No,” Matt said. “Not always. Not unless they have a lot of money.”

  Abbie nodded. “That’s the way it should be,” she said softly. “It should happen only a long ways apart.”

  When they arrived at the cabin, Matt reached into the back seat for the package he had bought.

  “What’s that?” Abbie asked.

  “Open it,” Matt said.

/>   She held it up a little, lacy and black in the moonlight. Then she turned to look at Matt, her face transparent, her eyes shining. “Wait out here a minute, will you?” she asked breathlessly.

  “All right.” Matt lit a cigarette and stood on the porch, looking out over the valley, hating himself.

  After a few minutes, he heard a little whisper. “Come in, Mr. Wright.”

  He opened the door and went in and stopped, stunned. One kerosene lamp lit the room dimly. The new clothes were draped carefully over the edge of a chair. Abbie was wearing the n≥glig≥e. That was all. Through its lacy blackness she gleamed pink and white, a lovely vision of seductiveness. She stood by the table, staring at the floor. When she looked up, her cheeks were flushed.

  Suddenly she ran lightly across the floor and threw her arms around Matt’s neck and kissed him hard on the lips. Her lips moved. She drew back a little, looking up at him.

  “There’s only one way a girl like me can thank a man for a day as wonderful as this,” she whispered. “For the clothes and the trip and the dinner and the dancing. And for being so nice. I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me. I don’t mind. I guess it isn’t bad when you really like someone. I like you awful — very well. I’m glad they made me pretty. If I can make you happy — just for a moment — ”

  Gently, feeling sick, Matt took her hands from around his neck. “You don’t understand,” he said coldly. “I’ve done a terrible thing. I don’t know how you can forgive me. Somehow you misunderstood. Those clothes, the négligée — they’re for another girl, the girl I’m going to marry — my fiancée. You’re about her size and I thought — I don’t know how I could have misled … “

  He stopped. It was enough. Abbie had crumpled. Slowly, as he spoke, the life had drained out of her, the glow had fled from her face, and she seemed to shrink in upon herself, cold and broken. She was a little girl, as she felt her greatest moment of joy, slapped across the face by the one she trusted most.

  “That’s all right,” she said faintly. “Thanks for letting me think they was mine — that it was for me — for a little while. I’ll never forget.”

  She turned and went to the bunk and let the blanket fall around her.

  It was the sobbing that kept Matt from going to sleep that night. Or maybe it was because the sobs were so soft and muffled that he had to strain to hear them.

  Breakfast was a miserable meal. There was something wrong with the food, although Matt couldn’t quite pin down what it was. Everything was cooked just the same, but the flavor was gone. Matt cut and chewed mechanically and tried to avoid looking at Abbie. It wasn’t difficult; she seemed very small today, and she kept her eyes on the floor.

  She was dressed in the shapeless blue gingham once more. She moved her food around on her plate with her fork. Her face was scrubbed free of makeup, and everything about her was dull. Even her newly blonde hair had faded.

  Several times Matt opened his mouth to apologize again and shut it without saying anything. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Where’s your new frying pan?”

  She looked up for the first time. Her blue eyes were cloudy. “I put it away,” she said lifelessly. “Do you want it back?”

  “No, no,” Matt said hurriedly. “I was just asking.”

  Silence fell again, like a sodden blanket. Matt sat and chain-smoked while Abbie cleaned up the table and washed the dishes.

  When she finished, she turned around with her back to the dishpan. “Do you want me to move things for you? I can do it real good today.”

  Matt saw the little pile of packages in the corner and noticed for the first time that the new clothes were gone. He steeled himself. “How do you know?”

  “I got a feeling.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t mind anything.” She came forward and sat down in the chair. “Look!”

  The table between them lifted, twisted, tilted on one leg and crashed on its side to the floor.

  “How did you feel?” Matt said excitedly. “Can you control the power? Was the movement directional or accidental?”

  “It felt like it was kind of a part of me,” Abbie said. “Like my hand. But I didn’t know exactly what it was going to do.”

  “Lift it,” Matt said. “Set it on its feet.”

  The table jerked upward hesitantly. “Easy. Just a little.” The table straightened, moved more steadily. “Hold it there.” The table hovered motionless in the air. “Let it down now, easy. Slow.” The table settled gently to the floor, like a drifting feather. It rested between them again.

  “Remember the feeling you had,” Matt said. “In your mind and your body. Now, lift the table just this far … “

  They practiced with the table for an hour. At the end of that time, Abbie had it under perfect control. She could raise it a fraction of an inch or rocket it to the ceiling, where it would remain, legs pointing stiffly toward the floor, until she lowered it. She balanced it on one leg and set it spinning like a top.

  Distance did not seem to diminish Abbie’s control or power. She could make the table perform equally well from any point in the room, from outside the cabin, or from a point to which she shuffled dispiritedly several hundred yards down the road.

  “How do you know where it is and what it’s doing?” Matt asked, frowning.

  Abbie shrugged listlessly. “I just feel it.”

  “With what?” Matt asked. “Do you see it? Feel it? Sense it? If we could isolate the sense — ”

  “It’s all of those,” Abbie said, “and something more. If you don’t mind now, Mr. Wright, I got a headache. I’d like to lie down.”

  She lay in her bunk, not moving, her face turned to the wall, but Matt knew that she wasn’t asleep. When she didn’t get up to fix lunch, Matt opened a can of soup and tried to get her to eat some of it.

  “No, thanks, Mr. Wright,” Abbie said. “I ain’t hungry.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Matt corrected.

  Abbie didn’t respond. In the evening she got slowly out of her bunk to fix supper, but she didn’t eat more than a few mouthfuls. After she washed the dishes, she went back into her bunk and pulled the blanket around it.

  Her appetite wasn’t any better in the morning. She looked tired, too, as if she hadn’t slept. Matt stared at her for a moment thoughtfully. He shrugged and put her to work.

  In a few minutes, Abbie could duplicate her feats with the table of the day before with a control that was, if anything, even finer. Matt experimented.

  “Let’s isolate the source,” he said. “Relax. Try to do it with the mind alone. Will the table to move.”

  Matt jotted down notes. At the end of half an hour he had the following results:

  Mind alone — negative.

  Body alone — negative.

  Emotions alone — negative.

  It was crude and uncertain. It would take days or months of practice to be able to use the mind without a sympathetic tension of the body, or to stop thinking or to wall off an emotion. But Matt was fairly sure that the telekinetic ability was a complex of all three and perhaps some others that he had no way of knowing about, which Abbie couldn’t describe. But if any of the primary three were inhibited, consciously or unconsciously, Abbie could not move a crumb of bread.

  Two of them could be controlled. The third was a product of environment and circumstances. Abbie had to be unhappy.

  A muscle twitched in Matt’s jaw, and he told Abbie to try moving more than one object. He saw a cup of coffee rise in the air, turn a double somersault without spilling a drop and sit down gently in the saucer that climbed to meet it. Matt stood up, picked the cup out of the air, drank the coffee and put the cup back. The saucer did not wobble.

  There were limits to Abbie’s ability. The number of dissimilar objects she could manipulate seemed to be three, regardless of size; she could handle five similar objects with ease, and she had made six balls of bread do an intricate dance in the air. I
t was possible, of course, that she might improve with practice.

  “My God!” Matt exclaimed. “You could make a fortune as a magician.”

  “Could I?” Abbie said without interest. She pleaded another headache and went to bed. Matt said nothing. They had worked for an hour and a half.

  Matt lit a cigarette. The latent telekinetic power could explain a lot of things, poltergeist phenomena, for instance, and in a more conscious form, levitation and the Indian rope trick and the whole gamut of Oriental mysticism.

  He spent the rest of the day making careful notes of everything Abbie did, the date and time, the object and its approximate weight and its movements. When he finished, he would have a complete case history — complete except for the vital parts which he did not dare put down on paper.

  Several times he turned to stare at Abbie’s still, small form. He was only beginning to realize the tremendous potentialities locked up within her. His awareness had an edge of fear. What role had he chosen for himself? He had been fairy godmother, but that no longer. Pygmalion? He felt a little like Pandora must have felt before she opened the box. Or, perhaps, he thought ruefully, more like Doctor Frankenstein.

  Abbie did not get up at all that day, and she refused to eat anything Matt fixed. Next morning when she climbed slowly from her bunk, Matt’s apprehension sharpened.

  Abbie had been thin before. Now she was gaunt, and her face had a middle-aged, haggard look. Her blonde hair was dull and lifeless and snarled. Matt had already cooked breakfast, but she only went through the motions of eating. Matt urged her, but she put her fork down tiredly.

  “It don’t matter,” she said.

  “Maybe you’re sick,” Matt fretted. “We’ll take you to a doctor.”

  Abbie looked at Matt and shook her head. “What’s wrong with me a doctor won’t fix.”

  That was the morning Matt saw a can of baking powder pass through his chest. Abbie had been tossing it to Matt at various speeds, gauging the strength of the push necessary. Matt would either catch it or Abbie would stop it short and bring it back to her. But this time it came too fast, bullet-like. Involuntarily, Matt looked down, tensing his body for the impact.