Charles Johnson - Faith and the Good Thing

Chilled to her bones, dumb with fright, ready (almost) to die, Faith rose slowly, averting her eyes from the Swamp Woman. Like an enormous, half-human frog the werewitch sat herself in a hathayoga position and sipped at embalming fluid from a silver goblet. Around her, rusty wands and V-shaped divining rods littered the floor. Worktables in the room were covered with slide rules, sextants, Ouija boards, jugs filled with jelling dark fluids, and bizarre, useless inventions. The walls were plastered with anatomical and cosmological charts and unfathomable trigrams of the four elements sketched on curling brown papyrus. Bookshelves held dusty volumes bound with large silver rings: The Complete Demonomancer, Domino Divination in 10 Easy Lessons and The Bedside Cartomancer. Against the western wall, sunken into thigh-deep water beneath diagrams of the Adamic, Hyperborean, Atlantean, Aryan, and Lemurian Root Races (with lacunas left for two more to come), a large machine hummed and played music, its gears powered by the frantic racing of a green Gila monster along a treadmill.

“I’m gonna patent that.” The werewitch giggled in Faith. “Everybody knows a mathematical nexus holds between the frequencies of tones in the musical scale; and any fool knows you can chart the planets in their orbits with similar calculations. Right?”

“Right,” Faith gulped. “ Right. ”

The werewitch giggled again. “Well,” she said, crafty, “not many people know the distance between the centers of the planets causes ’em to make music when they swing around the sun. Hee hee! And I’ve got the only machine in the world that figures out their frequency and tapes that music. Saturn’s a basso profundo, Jupiter’s a bass, Mars is a tenor, the earth’s a contralto, Venus is a soprano, and Mercury — since it’s got the shortest orbit — is a falsetto. Want me to turn up the machine so you can hear ’em?”

“I don’t think so. ”

Words exploded in Faith’s head. “Ya don’t believe in the Music of Spheres, do ya?”

“Yes! Yes I do !”

“No,” the Swamp Woman sighed, “like everybody else ya need some kind of demonstration — as if that proved somethin’ veritical.” The werewitch made a cat’s cradle with her fingers, and leaned toward Faith.

“What’s yer full name, girlie?”

“Faith Cross. ”

“Faith’s a good name,” the Swamp Woman said. “Did ya know Saint Augustine said faith meant believin’ in what ya can’t see? No, I guess ya didn’t know that. Never mind. Ya see that chart over yonder?”

Faith turned to a small chart just above the door. It read:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

A B C D E F G H I

J K L M N O P Q R

S T U V W X Y Z

But she couldn’t understand it. Or the Swamp Woman’s hasty computations.

“The numbers in your first name add up to twenty-six, the numbers in your last name come to twenty, which is forty-six altogether. Four plus six is ten, and one plus zero is one. That makes you a Number One, girlie.”

“Is that good?”

The werewitch sniggered. “What’s in a number? A rose by any other — well, you know all that already. Number Ones are good people, but they have to be pointed on the right path, or they’ll meet with disaster.”

Considering this for a moment, Faith said, “What’re you?”

“A thirteen.”

“And that means — what?”

Sardonically, the Swamp Woman said, “The numbers all stop at twelve. ”

Faith paused. Then pursed her lips. “Then, you’re the only Number Thirteen?”

“Don’t I know it!” the Swamp Woman screeched, leaping to her feet. “Girlie, have you got any idea what it’s like bein’ the only substance of its kind in the world? It’s like being God. Ain’t nobody to talk to but y’self. Oh, ya should see my poetry — that’d show ya how lonely and blue I get sometimes.”

“I’m sorry,” Faith said.

“It don’t matter.” The Swamp Woman waved off the subject with a sweep of her hand, and returned to flapping Faith’s dress in mists of steam rising from the cauldron. “Ya can’t be happy and smart, too.”

Still terrified, but at least past nausea now, Faith looked over her shoulder to a six-foot mirror trimmed in arabesques of gold. She realized she was naked, all flushed and protruding from her private places; she began to blush. The tinted blue glass reflected a thin girl whose hair mushroomed like a storm cloud behind her head. A few years ago she had developed, here and there, the appropriate bumps and contours, yet her figure remained soft and childlike. Smooth and the color of caramel. Inside Faith’s head the Swamp Woman laughed, and the laugh was dreadful, a deep grating sound originating in the werewitch’s round belly; by the time it reached Faith as telepathy, it scarcely sounded human.

“Now I know what ya come for,” she tittered. “Ya wants bigger tits. That’s why ya come, right? You young girls ought to know better’n to pester me for somethin’like that. I’m busy! The Lord knows if I couldn’t steal somebody’s life every now and then when I needed more time, I’d never get alla my work done.”

Fists clenched at her sides, Faith faced the Swamp Woman, her eyes narrowing to watering slits to blur the werewitch’s sickening smile.

“I only came to ask you a question — about what the good thing might be. ”

“The Good Thing ?” the Swamp Woman cackled, her lips bemused. “You sure you ain’t committin’ the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, girlie?”

Faith shook her head. “My momma told me to find it. I know there has to be one. If there wasn’t, I know Momma couldn’t have thought of it.”

“That’s a good argument,” the Swamp Woman said. “It’s off base, but I like it anyway.” The werewitch rested her head against the wall, coming as close as she could to smiling. “You’re too sweet a girl to be worryin’ about the Good Thing. Ya ought to be home afoalin’ babies or somethin’ practical.” Her yellow eye closed completely, the green one stared. “I’ve thought a lot about the Good Thing,” she said, counting off the possibilities on the twelve taloned fingers of her right hand, “and I figure it must be the right functionin’ of an organism as it participates in a form, or the fulfillment of a teleological principle inherent in all matter, or gettin’ in the right relationship with the Lord (or Lords, or y’self, dependin’ upon your persuasion), or followin’ the Hedonistic Calculus in all matters of equally appealing desires, or doin’ unto others as you’d have ’em do unto you, or a leap o’ faith, or abolishin’ private property, or maybe avoidin’ Bad Faith.” The Swamp Woman giggled obscenely as though she’d told a joke. “Take your pick, sweetheart.”

“But I want the one Good Thing,” Faith said, still standing away from the werewitch. “I want the one thing all those things have in common.”

Then Faith scrambled across the room — as far from the Swamp Woman as she could go. The old woman’s body shook until its outline was hazy, her green and yellow eyes watered a viscous material that resembled molasses, and she beat her big feet upon and, finally, through the floorboards.

Faith stood breathless.

“Spirit World come through again,” the Swamp Woman said when the seizure passed. “It’s kinda like you’ve got a switchboard in your head and alla the switches are ringin’ at once.” With her right hand she smeared the thick fluid from her face, her long nails leaving tracks that soon grew red. “The word’s out that it’ll definitely be Blazetail in the fifth race.”

“I’m not interested in that,” Faith said.

“All right, all right! ” The Swamp Woman jumped to her feet and rummaged through several wire cages stacked in a corner of the room. From one she withdrew a chicken that fought desperately to free itself from her grip. The Swamp Woman strangled it and snapped off its head.