THE WITCH DOCTOR
Christopher Stasheff
Chapter One
What can you say about a friend who leaves town without telling you?
I mean, I left Matt sitting there in the coffee shop trying to translate that gobbledygook parchment of his, and when I came back after class, he was gone. I asked if anybody'd seen him go, but nobody had-just that, when they'd looked up, he'd been gone.
That was no big deal, of courser didn't own Matt, and he was a big boy. If he wanted to go take a hike, that was his business. But he'd left that damn parchment behind, and ever since he'd found it, he'd handled it as if it were the crown jewels-so he sure as hell wouldn't have just left it on the table in a busy coffee shop. Somebody could have thrown it in the wastebasket without looking. He was just lucky it was still there when I got back. So I picked it up and put it in my notebook. "Tell him I've got his parchment," I told Alice. She nodded without looking up from the coffee she was pouring.
"Sure thing, Saul. If you see him first, tell him he forgot to pay his bill this morning."
"Saul" is me. Matt claimed I'd been enlightened, so he called me "Paul." I went along - it was okay as an in-joke, and it was funny the first time. After that, I suffered through it-from Matt. Not from anyone else. "Saul" is me. I just keep a wary eye for teenagers with slingshots who also play harp.
"Will do," I said, and went out the door-but it nagged at me especially since I had never known Matt to forget to pay Alice before.
Forget to put on his socks, maybe, but not to pay his tab. When I got back to my apartment, I took out his mystical manuscript and looked at it. Matt thought it was parchment, but I didn't think he was any judge of sheepskins. He certainly hadn't gotten his.
Well, okay, he had two of them, but they hadn't given him the third degree yet-and wouldn't, the way he was hung up on that untranslatable bit of doggerel. Oh, sure, maybe he was right, maybe it was a long-lost document that would establish his reputation as a scholar and shoot him up to full professor overnight-but maybe the moon is made of calcified green cheese, too.
Me, I was working on my second M.A.-anything to justify staying around campus. Matt had gone on for his doctorate, but I couldn't stay interested in any one subject that long. They all began to seem kind of silly, the way the professors were so fanatical about the smallest details.
By that standard, Matt was a born professor, all right. He just spun his wheels, trying to translate a parchment that he thought was six hundred years old but was written in a language nobody had ever heard of. I looked it over, shook my head, and put it back in the notebook. He'd show up looking for it sooner or later. But he didn't. He didn't show up at all.
After a couple of days, I developed a gnawing uncertainty about his having left town - maybe he had just disappeared. I know, I know, I was letting my imagination run away with me, but I couldn't squelch the thought.
So what do you do when a friend disappears?
You have to find out whether or not to worry.
The first day, I was only a little concerned, especially after I went back to the coffee shop, and they said he hadn't been in looking for his damn parchment. The second day, I started getting worried - it was midnight and he hadn't shown up at the coffeehouse. Then I began to think maybe he'd forgotten to eat again and blacked out - so I went around to his apartment to tell him off.
He lived in one of those old one - family houses that had been converted into five apartments, if you want to call them that - a nine-by-twelve living room with a kitchenette wall, and a cubbyhole for a bedroom. I knocked, but he didn't answer. I knocked again, Then I waited a good long time before I knocked a third time. Still no answer. At three A.M when the neighbor came out and yelled at me to stop knocking so hard, I really got worried-and the next day, when nobody answered, I figured, Okay, third time's the charm-so I went outside, glanced around to make sure nobody was looking, and quietly crawled in the back window. Matt really ought to lock up at night; I've always told him so.
I had to crawl across the table-Matt liked to eat and write by natural light-and stepped into a mess.
Look, I've got a pretty strong stomach, and Matt was never big on housekeeping. A high stack of dishes with mold on them, I could have understood-but wall-to-wall spiderwebs? No way. How could he live like that? I mean, it wasn't just spiderwebs in the corners - it was spiderwebs choking the furniture! I couldn't have sat down without getting caught in dusty silk! And the proprietors were still there, too-little brown ones, medium-sized gray ones, and a huge malecater with a body the size of a quarter and red markings like a big wide grin on the underside of its abdomen, sitting in the middle of a web six feet wide that was stretched across the archway to the bed nook. Then the sun came out from behind a , loud, its light struck through the window for about half a minute-and I stood spellbound. Lit from the back and side like that, the huge web seemed to glow, every tendril bright. It was beautiful.
Then the sun went in, the light went away, and it was just a dusty piece of vermin-laden debris.
Speaking of vermin, what had attracted all these eight-legged wonders? It must have been a bumper year for flies. Or maybe, just maybe, they'd decided to declare war on the army of cockroaches that infested the place. If so, more power to them. I decided not to go spider hunting, after all. Besides, I didn't have time-I had to find Matt.
The strange thing was, I'd been in that apartment just three days before, and there hadn't been a single strand of spider silk in sight. Okay, so they're hard to see-but three days just isn't time enough for that much decoration.
I stepped up to the archway, nerving myself to sweep that web aside and swat its builder-but the sun came out again, and the golden cartwheel was so damned beautiful I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Besides, I didn't really need to - I could look through it, and the bedroom sure didn't have any place that was out of sight. Room enough for a bed, a dresser, a tin wardrobe, and scarcely an inch more. The bed was rumpled, but Matt wasn't in it. I turned around, frowning, and scanned the place again. I wouldn't say there was no sign of Matt - as I told you, he wasn't big on house keeping, and there were stacks of books everywhere, nicely webbed at the moment-but the pile of dirty dishes was no higher than it had been, and he himself sure wasn't there.
I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me, chewing it over. No matter how I sliced it, it came out the same - Matt had left town.
Why so suddenly?
Death in the family. Or close to it. What else could it be?
So I went back to my apartment and started research. One of the handy things about having some training in scholarship, is that you know how to find information. I knew what town Matt came from Separ City, New Jersey - and I knew how to call long-distance information.
"Mantrell," I told the operator.
"There are three, Sir. Which one did you want?" I racked my brains. Had Matt ever said anything about his parents' names? Then I remembered, once, that there had been a "junior" attached to him. "Matthew."
"We have a Mateo."
"Yeah, that's it." It was a good guess, anyway.
"One moment, please."
The vocodered voice gave me the number. I wrote it down, hung up, picked up, and punched in. Six rings, and I found myself hoping nobody would answer.
"'Alio?"
I hadn't known his parents were immigrants. His mother sounded nice.
"I'm calling for Matthew Mantrell," I said. "Junior." Mateo? Ees not 'ere."
"Just went out for a minute?" I was surprised at the surge of relief I felt.
"No, no! Ees away-college!"
My spirits took the express elevator down. "Okay. I'll try him there. Thanks, Mrs. Mantrell."