“Mr. Chairman, sir, I can’t—”
“No, no. Don’t feel that you haven’t earned it. You’ve narrowed it down to those missing four hours. Now, as you say, they’re our problem. I’m afraid we’ll have to call in a rather strange specialist; but then, Dr. Shima has also taught us that strange problems require strange solutions.”
4
CCC summoned Salem Burne, the professional Warlock, which is to say, witchmaster. Mr. Burne always insisted that he was neither a necromancer nor a psychiatrist; he was a combination of both and called himself a psychomancer. He made the most penetrating analyses of disturbed people through his remarkable perception of somatic language and his acute interpretation of that silent tongue. The witchcraft he pretended to practice was merely a device to awe and disarm his patients.
Mr. Burne entered Blaise Shima’s immaculate laboratory with a winning smile. Dr. Shima let out a howl of anguish.
“I told you to sterilize before you came!”
“But I did, doctor. Faithfully.”
“You did not. You reek of anise, ylang-ylang, and methyl anthranilate. You’ve polluted my day. Why?”
“But Dr. Shima, I assure you that I—” Suddenly Mr. Burne stopped. “Oh. My. God,” he groaned. “You’re right. Unclean! Unclean! I used my wife’s towel this morning.”
Shima laughed and turned the ventilators up to full exhaust. “I understand. A natural mistake and no hard feelings, but let’s get your wife out of here. I’ve got an office a safe mile down the hall. We can talk there.”
They sat down in the office and inspected each other. Shima saw a careful, controlled man approaching fifty, slender and smooth-skinned, moving and speaking with guarded polish, and yet always with light humor.
Mr. Burne saw a pleasant, youngish man, compact and muscular, with the balance of a middleweight boxer or, more likely, a karate champion. Cropped black hair, small expressive ears, high cheekbones, slitty eyes that would need careful watching, and a generous mouth and graceful hands that would be dead giveaways.
“Now, Mr. Burne, how can I help you? Mills Copeland, our chairman, said he’d be most obliged for the favor and I’m delighted to oblige him,” Shima said while his hands asked, “Why in hell have you come pestering me, you damned quack?”
“Dr. Shima, I’m a colleague, in a sense. As I told you, I’m a psychomancer, a necromancer of psychiatry, so to speak. One crucial part of my diagnostic technique is the ceremonial burning of incense, but the scents are all rather conventional. I was hoping that your expertise might suggest something unusual for the ritual, which quite honestly is merely window-dressing.”
Shima was charmed by Burne’s frankness. “I see. Interesting. You’ve been using stacte, onycha, galbanum… that sort of thing?”
“If that’s their names. I’m no chemist. But they’re all quite conventional, and my patients become unimpressed after too many exposures.”
“Most interesting. Yes. I could, of course, make a few suggestions for something different, even unusual, such as—” Here Shima broke off abruptly and stared into space.
After a long pause, the psychomancer asked, “Is anything wrong, Dr. Shima?”
“Look here,” Shima burst out. “You’re on the wrong track.”
“Am I? How?”
“It’s the burning of incense that’s conventional, and trying different odors won’t help. Why not experiment with an entirely novel approach?”
“And what might that be?”
“The Odophone principle.”
“Odophone?”
“It’s a bastard term from Greek and Latin roots. (I wish I could get rid of my education.) There’s a scale that exists among scents, similar to the scale in music. Sharp smells correspond to high notes, and heavy smells to low notes. For instance, ambergris is in the treble while violet is in the bass. I could draw up a scent scale for you, running a couple of octaves, and then it would be up to you to compose the ritual music and figure out how to play it.”
“Dr. Shima! This is positively brilliant!”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Shima grinned. “But in all honesty I must point out that we’re equal partners in brilliance. I could never have come up with the idea if you hadn’t presented a most original and fascinating challenge.”
They made contact on this generous note and talked shop enthusiastically. They lunched together (raw vegetables and distilled water for Shima) and told each other a little about themselves and their odd professions. They even made plans for the incense experiment in which Shima volunteered to participate despite the fact that he ridiculed diabolism and devil lore.
“And yet the irony lies in the fact that he is indeed devil-ridden,” Salem Burne reported.
The chairman considered this, rather like a sleepy saurian, but could make nothing of it.
“Psychiatry and diabolism use different terms for the same phenomena, Mr. Copeland,” Burne said, taking the sting out of his lecture with a light tone, “so perhaps I’d better translate. Those missing four hours are fugues.”
The chairman was not enlightened. “Do you mean the musical expression, Mr. Burne?”
Burne shook his fair head. “No, Mr. Copeland. A fugue is also the psychiatric term used for an advanced form of somnambulism.”
“What? Blaise Shima walks in his sleep?”
“It’s more complicated than that, sir. The sleepwalker is a comparatively simple case. He is never in touch with his surroundings. You can speak to him, shout his name at him, even fire a cannon over his head, and he remains totally oblivious.”
“Yes. And the fugue?”
“In the fugue, the subject is in touch with his surroundings, but always within his fugue, and only within the fugue. He can hear you and converse with you while he is inside his fugue. He has awareness of and memory for events that take place within the fugue, but nothing outside it. When he’s outside his fugue, he has no knowledge of anything that took place within it.”
“I’m beginning to understand. He’s two different people?”
“Exactly, and neither knows nor remembers anything about the other.”
“So when he’s himself he can tell us nothing of what transpires during his lapses?”
“Nothing.”
“Nor why he suffers them?”
“No.”
“Can you?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. There’s a limit to my powers. All I can say is that he’s driven by something. A sorcerer might say that he’s possessed by the Devil, but that’s merely the cant of witchcraft. A physician might say that he’s suffering from obsessions or drives, but that’s merely the cant of psychiatry. The terminology is unimportant. The basic fact is that something is compelling Dr. Shima to go out into the Guff, nights, to do—What? I don’t know. All I do know is that this compulsion is the most probable cause of his creative block.”
“Then what would you suggest that we do to solve the problem, Mr. Burne?”
“Since you’ve told me the constraints that make the situation delicate, Mr. Copeland, all I can suggest is that you pray.”
“Pray? Good heavens!”
“To heaven, if you like, or to hell. Pray to anything you choose, sir. Perhaps best would be to pray for a miracle. Your problem is so unusual that you’ll need a miracle to solve it.”
“Surely you’re not serious, Mr. Burne.”
“I most certainly am, sir. Why? Don’t you believe in miracles?”
“I’ll believe in them when I see them.”
“How odd, when we have a professional miracle-worker practicing in the Gulf today… Gretchen Nunn.”
“Gretchen Nunn? Never heard of her.”
“A most distinguished colleague, Mr. Copeland, although I’ve not yet had the honor of meeting her. I call myself a psychomancer because I work on the subliminal level. Ms. Nunn’s skill is psychodynamics on the architechtonic level. She perceives designs and constructs in what seems to be utter confusion and devises miraculous solutions. She’s a psytech. I suggest that you summon Gretchen Nunn and pray to her.”