Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

react as Mrs. Carr’s hands touched her shoulders. She was still looking at Norman, now with an expression of agonized embarrassment and entreaty.
    “That’s all right,” Norman said softly, “Nothing to worry about,” and he smiled at her sympathetically.
    The girl’s expression changed completely. She suddenly shook loose from Mrs. Carr and sprang up facing Norman. “Oh, I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you!”
    Gunnison followed him out of the office. He yawned, shook his head, and remarked, “Glad that’s over. Incidentally, Gardner says nothing could possibly have happened to her.”
    “Never a dull moment,” Norman responded, absently.
    “Oh, by the way,” Gunnison said, dragging a stiff white envelope out of his inside pocket, “here’s a note for Mrs. Saylor. Hulda asked me to give it to you. I forgot about it before.”
    “I met Hulda coming out of your office this morning,” Norman said, his thoughts still elsewhere.
    Somewhat later, back at Morton, Norman tried to come to grips with those thoughts, but found them remarkably slippery. The dragon on the roof ridge of Estrey Hall lured away his attention. Funny about little things like that. You never even noticed them for years, and then they suddenly popped into focus. How many people could give you one single definite fact about the architectural ornaments of buildings in which they worked? Not one in ten, probably. Why, if you had asked him yesterday about that dragon, he couldn’t for his life have been able to tell you even if there was one or not.
    He leaned on the window sill, looking at the lizardlike yet grotesquely anthropoid form, bathed in the yellow sunset glow, which, his wandering mind remembered, was supposed to symbolize the souls of the dead passing into and out of the underworld. Below the dragon, jutting from under the cornice, was a sculptured head, one of a series of famous scientists and mathematicians decorating the entablature. He made out the name “Galileo,” along with a brief inscription of some sort.
    When he turned back to answer the phone, it suddenly seemed very dark in the office.
    “Saylor? I just want to tell you that I’m going to give you until tomorrow —”
    “Listen, Jennings,” Norman cut in sharply, “I hung up on you last night because you kept shouting into the phone. This threatening line won’t do you any good.”
    The voice continued where it had broken off, growing dangerously high. “— until tomorrow to withdraw your charges and have me reinstated at Hempnell.”
    Then the voice broke into a screaming obscene torrent of abuse, so loud that Norman could still hear it very plainly as he placed the receiver back in the cradle.
    Paranoid — that was the way it sounded.
    Then he suddenly sat very still.
    At twenty past one last night he had burned a charm supposedly designed to ward off evil influence from him. The last of Tansy’s “hands.”
    At about the same time Margaret Van Nice had decided to avow’ her fanciful passion for him, and Theodore Jennings had decided to make him responsible for an imaginary plot.
    Next morning sanctimonious Trustee Fenner had called up Thompson about the Utell party, and Hervey Sawtelle, poking around in the stacks, had found —
    Rubbish!
    With an angry snort of laughter at his own credulity, he picked up his hat and headed for home.

5
    Tansy was in a radiant mood, prettier than she had seemed in months. Twice he caught her smiling to herself, when he glanced up from his supper.
    He gave her the note from Mrs. Gunnison. “Mrs. Carr asked after you, too. Gushed all over me — in a ladylike way, of course. Then, later on —” He caught himself as he started to tell about the cigarette and Mrs. Carr cutting him and the whole Margaret Van Nice business. No use worrying Tansy right now with things that might be considered bad luck. No telling what further consfruction she might put upon them.
    She glanced through the note and handed it back to