He placed the necessary ingredients on the table, cutting a short strip of flannel from the hem of his bathrobe, and fitted together the four sections of Tansy's note. The distasteful, bitter smile did not leave his lips.
Taken together, the significant portions of the notes read:
Take four lengths of four-inch white cord and a length of gut, a bit of platinum or iridium, a piece of lodestone, a phonograph needle that has only played Scriabin's "Ninth Sonata." Tie the four white cords into a granny, a reef, a cat's-paw, and a carrick bend. Tie the gut in a bowline. Add a small quantity of graveyard dirt, and wrap all in a piece of flannel, wrapping widdershins. Tell it to stop me. Tell it to bring me to you.
In general outline, it was similar to a hundred recipes for Negro tricken-bags he had seen or heard about. The phonograph needle, the knots, and one or two other items, were obvious "white" additions.
And it was all on the same level as the mental operations of a child or neurotic adult who religiously steps on, or avoids sidewalk cracks.
A clock outside bonged the half-hour.
Norman sat there looking at the stuff. It was hard for him to begin. It would have been different, he told himself, if he were doing it for a joke or a thrill, or if he were one of those people who dope up their minds with morbid supernaturalism—who like to play around with magic because it's medieval and aesthetic. But to tackle it in dead seriousness, to open your mind deliberately to superstition—that was to join hands with the forces pushing the world back into the dark ages, to cancel the term "science" out of the equation.
But, behind Tansy, he had seen that thing. Of course, it had been an hallucination. But when hallucinations start behaving like realities, even a scientist has to face the possibility that he may have to treat them like realities. And when hallucinations begin to threaten you and yours in a direct physical way—
He reached out for the first length of cord and tied the ends together in a granny.