Summer Of Fear by Lois Duncan Page B

who can channel this mind force outward and create happenings instead of just know about them?”
    “And such people are witches?”
    “Some of them call themselves that.”
    “Have you ever really known one?” It was crazy, of course, but I was fascinated despite myself.
    “I’m not sure, but I think so,” Dr. Jarvis said seriously. “Back when I was first teaching at the University I had a student who came from a particularly secluded area of the Ozarks. Her name was Ruth, and she had been raised in an atmosphere of witchcraft, for her mother and aunts all claimed to be practicing witches. Whether this girl was one or not, she had been taught a number of charms which she used quite freely. She used to talk with me about it, knowing my interest in the subject.
    “I remember one time in particular—” He smiled at the memory. “Ruth was in love with a young man who was a member of the basketball team. He was an extremely good looking boy and very popular. He dated one of the cheerleaders and as soon as they graduated they planned to be married. Well, Ruth decided to do something to offset that plan. She attended an after-game party in the cheerleader’s dorm room, and while she was there she went into the bathroom and got a couple of hairs out of her rival’s brush. She took these back to her room and made a little statue out of beeswax and stuck the hairs in it. Then she lit a match and began melting the wax figure. She let a couple of drops of wax fall, and then she blew out the match and went back to the party.
    “Well, it just so happened that while Ruth was in her room performing this little ceremony, the cheerleader had become suddenly ill with stomach pains. The party broke up, and the basketball playing boyfriend was leaving just as Ruth reached the door. They stood in the hall and chatted a few minutes, and then Ruth suggested in a friendly way that they go back to her own room where she had a hot plate and could make some coffee. So they did, and she brewed the coffee and put something in it—I think she referred to the ingredient as ‘milfoil,’ but I believe it was actually a part of a plant called Achillea millefolium. From that night on, as far as I know, Ruth and the basketball player were a steady twosome, and he never looked at the poor little cheerleader again.’”
    “What a story!” I exclaimed. “You don’t really believe it, do you?”
    “Well, I received it secondhand,” Professor Jarvis said. “So I cannot be absolutely certain. What I do know is that Ruth herself believed it. As far as she was concerned it had a happy ending. She and her ballplayer married and moved to California where he played professionally for many years and finally retired to open his own sporting goods store. I still receive a Christmas card from them every year. They seem to be very happy.”
    “A wax doll,” I said slowly. “She melted a wax doll.”
    “That’s correct.”
    “Professor Jarvis—” I hesitated, hardly knowing how to ask the next question. “Was there anything about Ruth—about her looks—that made her different from other people? Was she especially beautiful?”
    “No,” the professor said. “In fact, she was quite ordinary looking. Very nondescript features, a short dumpy little figure. Nothing anyone would ever notice, except for her eyes.”
    “Her eyes?”
    “She had strange eyes,” Professor Jarvis said. “Sometimes they seemed opaque, closed over. Other times you would look into them and it would seem they were so deep they had no bottom. I think that if Ruth did indeed have powers of the kind she attributed to herself, her eyes were a focal point for them.
    “And another odd thing—though she most certainly was not beautiful in any accepted sense of the word, there were those who swore that she was. The people who were closest to her, the ones on whom she concentrated her attention, seemed to see her with different eyes from the rest of us. They found her very