The Witching Hour Page 9

  The blue insect poison had failed and the knife and the gas.

  He felt a great wave of despair. It was no use. There was no way out.

  He walked back to the living room, brushed the sweater off the davenport and sat down. The last hope — beyond which there is no hope — was gone. And yet, in a way, he was glad that his tricks had not worked. Not because he was still alive but because it had been the coward’s way. All along he had been trying to dodge the only solution that had faced him at every turn. He had refused to recognize it, but now there was no other choice.

  It was the hard way, the bitter way. The way that was not a quick death but a slow one. But he owed it to the world to sacrifice himself on the altar he had raised, under the knife he had honed, wielded by the arm he had given strength and skill and consciousness.

  He looked up. “All right, Abbie.” He sighed. “I’ll marry you.”

  The words hung in the air. Matt waited, filled with a fear that was half hope. Was it too late for anything but vengeance?

  But Abbie filled his arms, cuddled against him in homely blue gingham, scarcely bigger than a child but with the warmth and softness of a woman. She was more beautiful than Matt had remembered. Her arms crept around his neck.

  “Will you, Mr. Wright?” she whispered. “Will you?”

  A vision built itself up in his mind. The omniscient, omnipotent wife, fearsome when her powers were unsheathed, terrible in anger or disappointment. No man, he thought, was ever called upon for greater sacrifice. But he was the appointed lamb.

  He sighed. “God help me,” he said, “I will.”

  He kissed her. Her lips were sweet and passionate.

  Matthew Wright was lucky, of course, far luckier than he deserved to be, than any man deserves to be.

  The bride was beautiful. But more important and much more significant —

  The bride was happy.

  AFTERWORD

  Parapsychology was legitimized as science fiction by John Campbell. After World War II, deluged by stories about atomic war and post-nuclear dystopias, Campbell announced that atomic bombs and space flight had been used up as topics, and writers needed to turn to something new. He suggested the kind of parapsychology experiments into telekinesis (and telepathy and teleportation) that Prof. J. B. Rhine had been working on at Duke University. A lot of writers, including me, obediently responded, and for some years Astounding and the other magazines, including Galaxy, were flooded with parapsychology stories. Some of them, which used these concepts to explore the human condition, were good; some, which used them in a formulaic fashion, were bad. But telekinesis, telepathy, and teleportation still were the stuff of fantasy.

  Galaxy had an arrangement with NBC. Each week NBC dramatized a story from the magazine in a half-hour radio show called “X Minus One.” The show had some great script writers, particularly Ernest Kinoy. Four of my Galaxy stories were dramatized on “X Minus One,” and of these my favorite was “Wherever You May Be.” Kinoy condensed the short novel into half an hour without missing a beat.

  In 1959, a local company that specialized in making industrial films decided to venture into commercial film making. The company was Centron, and the energy behind the project was director Herk Harvey, who had combined forces with writer John Clifford and some local backers to make a modest horror film called “Carnival of Souls.” A distributor took over the film and then went bankrupt, so the backers got nothing, but the film later became a cult classic and still is shown on late-night television, particularly around Halloween. Now, however, Harvey had persuaded Centron itself to get into the business, and he asked me if I had a story that would make a good film. I played the “X Minus One” record of “Wherever You May Be” to the Centron management, and they agreed that this would work. I wrote a screenplay and Centron got ready to film it — until the Centron employee who was going to play Matthew Wright decided he should be paid like an actor and not as an employee. The project stopped dead.

  A few years later a Kansas City film maker got some backing for a film and a K.U. professor of radio-television-film introduced him to me. He decided to take over “The Reluctant Witch” script, hired some actors (including Angela Cartwright and Christopher George, who had been “the Immortal” in the TV movie and series adapted from my novel The Immortals), and was about to start shooting in Kansas City when the financier from Los Angeles who was supposed to show up with the money never showed up. A few years later the same K.U. professor proposed that the K.U. Endowment Association put up some money to allow him to film “The Reluctant Witch,” but that did-n’t work either.

  For a while I thought that more traditional film makers had been turned off by the old-fashioned look of the screenplay I had written. I had copied the form Centron used for its industrial films. In the 1990s I rewrote it with the aid of a screenplay computer program and sent it to my Hollywood agent. A couple of years later a Hollywood screenwriter inquired about the availability of the film rights and took an option on it. As a screenwriter, however, he was interested in writing his own screenplay. But he was involved in another film and by the time it was over, so was his option and his interest.

  But I still think it would make a great movie.

  The Beautiful Brew

  The head on the schooner of beer was a beauty. The rest was even lovelier.

  Doris passed Jerry Blitz with the empty tray; she was small, dark and plain. Jerry put a hand on her arm.

  “Have you heard from Dion?” he whispered.

  She shook her head, glanced around the long, dark, mirrorlike table to see that each of them had an unlabeled bottle at his elbow and left the room.

  Jerry sighed and looked back at the schooner in front of him.

  It was the essence of beer captured in a glass. The hucksters, for once, couldn’t oversell it. The clear, pale yellow had a sparkling brilliance; tiny bubbles streamed delicately to the top. On the sweating glass the moisture collected in beads and trickled down the sides in rivulets.

  Jerry could see it on color television. The one word “BLITZ” would be above it. Below: “FIRST FOR THIRST.” The letters would be hollow like neon tubing; the tubing would be filled with the gently bubbling beer.

  Jerry shuddered. It would be a sensation. But how many viewers would want to drink?

  Something had piled the foam high in the center of the schooner and sculptured it into the shape of a girl. She began at the waist, a perfect three-inch replica, her arms raised, her hands smoothing long foam-hair. Jerry thought it was the most graceful thing a girl could do.

  The girl preened herself for Jerry. He looked at the unchanged faces around the table. Couldn’t the others see it? Gently he rotated the glass. Slowly the girl floated around to face Jerry.

  But they had seen it. Baldwin was an old man; he made a dry noise swallowing. His face was a mask. He had many of them; he must have spent a lifetime perfecting them. Mask: Interested Audience. Mask: Solid Businessman. Mask: Staunch Friend. This time the mask was: Hard-headed Materialist.

  Where was the real Arthur Baldwin? Where was the man who roared with laughter and moaned with passion and cried real tears? Had he been lost somewhere among the masks? Would a want ad help: “LOST — one real person; last seen wearing mask: Earnest Young Executive; answers to name of Art”?

  There was no art left; it was all artifice. Jerry looked slowly around the table: Reeves, Williford, Woodbury, Alberg. Of them all, only Bill Alberg acted as if he had noticed the foam-girl on the schooner; he was taking great pains not to look at her. But he was young; he had a lot to learn.

  It was a typical board meeting. Reeves was taking notes; Baldwin was talking. There was a tacit conspiracy not to mention the girl. They spoke about the “unusual head” or the “foam action.” They denied that there was anything wonderful in the room with them.

  What had happened to them? They had no capacity left for wonder. All was reason; all was motive. Nothing in their lives was done just for fun.

&n
bsp; And yet Baldwin wouldn’t ignore it entirely. The girl would hand him the brewery, and Baldwin would condescend to take it. There was nothing Jerry could do.

  What business did they have here? They should be directors of a railroad, not a brewery. A brewery is a place of tradition, of magic. It is a fantastic kitchen, mixing, cooking, aging. The essential ingredients were beyond absolute control. There was no use asking for precision.

  A board meeting is a machine to grind out dollars. It is as stylized as a minuet. It has as much relationship to brewing as a guided tour through the brewery …

  The fifth floor. The mill room. Stacked burlap bags of the slim, gray-husked malted barley and the fine, light-yellow gravel that is corn grits. (Odor: a grain elevator or a hay loft.) “Let us follow the ingredients as gravity takes them from floor to floor, from process to process. The malt is ground in this mill into a coarse flour and measured in these bins. We use about sixty percent malt to forty percent corn grits.” How can you impart the mystery that molting is, the germinating of the grain that develops the vital enzymes?

  “If this is a characteristic,” Baldwin was saying in his dry, measured voice, “as it seems to be, the question is: How much of this beer do we have?”

  “Thirty tanks in the finishing cellar,” Jerry said. “That’s nineteen thousand eight hundred barrels.” Dion! Dion! Where are you?

  “My! This is more serious than I thought,” Baldwin exclaimed.

  Serious. Brewing is always serious. Exactly how much malt? How much adjunct? How much water? At what temperature shall I dough-in the mash? How hot shall I keep it for how long? The catalytic enzymes must have a chance to do their jobs. They must work on the starch, bring it into solution, change it into sugar.”On the fourth floor we have the adjunct cooker — that’s where the corn grits are gelatinized — and the mash tub where it is joined with the malt. The heating is done with steam — the double-boiler principle, you know.” Tell them. Tell them that beer is ninety-one percent water, that much of the difference in beers is due to the presence of minute amounts of hardening chemicals. See if they understand.

  “Catalysts,” Jerry said. Baldwin stopped talking and frowned at Jerry. “Sorry,” Jerry said. “I was thinking.”

  “I’m asking,” Baldwin said frigidly, “for a vote of disapproval on management — ”

  “Wait a minute,” Jerry said. “You can’t judge a beer by just looking at it. The taste is — ”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Baldwin said, glancing quickly at the glass in front of Jerry and away. “I — er — don’t drink beer. And the appearance alone convinces me that the brew is unsalable.”

  Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Jerry thought. “This is once you’ll have to compromise your principles,” he said. “You can’t expect to direct a brewery without knowing something about its product. Beside each of you is an open bottle and a glass. If you pour it carefully, no head will be formed.”

  Reluctantly, cautiously, Baldwin tilted a little into a glistening goblet. He lifted it, sniffed at it, his long nose trying to draw away, and let a few drops pass under a curling upper lip. His eyes opened. He sipped again, poured the rest of the bottle into the glass, and poured it from the glass down his throat. A beatific expression spread over his tanned, old face. He licked his lips and put down the empty glass. “This is beer?” he asked.

  “This,” Alberg said excitedly, “is beer only in the sense that champagne is wine. This is it. This is what brewers have dreamed about for centuries — ever since the first Babylonian baker fermented his first accidental brew. No, this isn’t beer; this is nectar.”

  Jerry sat back, surprised. He hadn’t expected help from Bill. But he was promotion manager; maybe he couldn’t help himself.

  Something flickered across Baldwin’s face. It was gone before Jerry could identify it. It couldn’t, he knew, be anything as straightforward and uncomplicated as greed.

  “What a shame,” Baldwin said ruefully, “that the quality of the head should keep it from the market.”

  One man’s misfortune is another man’s fortune. Jerry knew what Baldwin meant. For the first time in a hundred years, the brewery would be without a Blitz.

  “Many a flaw,” Jerry insisted, “has been turned into a virtue. We can look on this characteristic not as a drawback but as a distinction. Let’s make the most of it.”

  It was good advice, but they weren’t buying any. It set them off again, but it was all for the minutes. They had to consider it; someday these words might echo in court. But they weren’t going to let him slip away, not while he was ready to be racked.

  Every business has a language of its own. The language of brewing is German: lauter, sparge, pfaff, wort. The filtered mash as it comes from the lauter tub through the pfaff is called the “wort.” Hot water is sparged through the deep bed of husks and spent grains to wash out any extractives remaining. The wort is boiled in the gleaming copper brew kettle, steam vented through the roof by the curving copper chimney. Jerry loved to stand by the lauter tub and look down over the railing at the brew kettle: sometimes he would see the wort boil through the sliding doors onto the concrete floor.

  “Fantastic!” Baldwin was protesting. “Impossible!”

  “Advertising can work miracles,” Jerry said doggedly. “It can make women wear sacks or sweaters. It can make men prefer blondes or beagles. It can put a nation on wheels and make the amount and shape of chromium around the wheels more important than food. It can put this over. It can make people demand this kind of beer. Picture the campaign: ‘BLITZ — THE BEER WITH THE BEAUTIFUL HEAD!’”

  “By God!” Alberg exclaimed. “I think it could be done.”

  Baldwin snorted. “To put this beer on the market is to take dangerous risks with the firm name.”

  Risks. No, Baldwin didn’t like them; he wasn’t the man for them. He had what he wanted; why should he let it get away? The puzzle was what he wanted with a brewery. Brewing is always a risk.

  How much hops? When should the green and white flower be added? Guess! Experiment! Put a couple of pounds in the brew kettle now to help clarify the wort. Half an hour later, add three pounds more to get the bitter hop flavor. Just before the boiling ends, put in a final three pounds for the delicate and elusive hop aroma. And hope. Chance played a big part. The wort might even spoil, although modern cooling methods had helped. It streamed like a foaming waterfall over ammonia-cooled pipes and was pumped up to the fermentation room.

  “Alberg!” Baldwin said. Bill straightened attentively. “I’ll leave it to you. How is the beer-drinking public going to react to this — er — unusual formation of foam?”

  “Well,” Bill said hopefully, “it would be a novelty.”

  “A novelty,” Baldwin said scornfully. “Novelties are for children. I’ve known companies to depend on them; when the newness wore off, the public stopped buying the product. But the public doesn’t want novelties in its food and drink. They won’t touch this beer with a ten-foot straw. Eh, Alberg?”

  “You’re — probably right,” Bill said in a low voice.

  “We could include instructions,” Jerry suggested desperately. “You know, pour gently! Save the sparkle! For the true flavor of the beer, avoid a head — ”

  “You have delusions of grandeur,” Baldwin cut in sharply. “We aren’t Schlitz or Budweiser or Pabst. We can’t afford a campaign of reeducation. Washing-machine manufacturers have struggled for years to promote sudsless detergents.”

  Dion! Dion! What was the reason for it, Dion? The water? The malt? The hops? Was it the yeast? Had the mystery happened on the third floor in the chilled fermenting room? Two hundred twenty pounds of yeast, and all it took was one wild cell. Even though the strain was controlled by the laboratory, cultured from a single cell, it was a catalyst, changing the fermentable maltose sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, and you could never really be sure of catalysts.

  Jerry imagined a new st
rain of yeast working in the giant metal-bound cypress tubs, fermenting a beer whose foam would be a naked girl. He looked back at the schooner. The foam had withered; the girl was sagging. Jerry glanced around the table at the busy faces and tipped a little beer from his bottle into the glass. When he looked at the schooner again, the girl was straight and proud.

  She was a beautiful thing — viewed abstractly. The lines of the face were clean and young, the lips, full and a little sensual, the arms, slender and firm, the breasts, high.

  “Just suppose,” Baldwin said sepulchrally, “that someone should accidentally get a head on his Blitz. Immediately: notoriety. Reporters would swarm around us like buzzards around carrion, picking us to pieces with their questions: ‘This head now; how do you explain it? Do you attribute it to design, accident, or — ?’”

  “The first maxim of promotion,” Alberg said, “is to get the product mentioned — ”

  “Some products can afford that kind of promotion,” Baldwin said with distaste. “We can’t. No food or drink can. There are three things it must be: pure, palatable, and healthful. It must not be notorious.” He turned back toward Jerry. “Well, if the reporters came, could you answer their questions?”

  “No,” Jerry said. “No — ”

  Dion! Why aren’t you here? Why didn’t you tell me this would happen and why? It couldn’t have happened in the Ruh cellar where the green beer was aged. Maybe it was the finishing cellar; maybe it was one of the last few ingredients: lupulin, salt, mellow malt, gum arabic.Gum arabic — a foam binder. That could be important. And the carbon dioxide returned to the beer in the carbonation tanks from the last stages of fermentation.

  “Excuse me,” Jerry said suddenly. “I’ll be right back.”

  Outside the paneled room, he leaned against the door and closed his eyes, a slender young man with a sensitive, dark face. His father would never have left his enemies alone to scheme behind his back, but he was not his father. Every moment was making that more apparent.