Cat Magic Read online

  “Those birds aren't pets,” Constance Collier had said, “they just live here. I suspect the flock's ancestors inhabited this place long before the house was built.” She had paused then and regarded the birds. “Animals are in eternity,” she had added. “How long do you suppose ravens and trees have been together on this very spot? One maple giving way to another—how long? A hundred thousand years? It's been that long since the glacier receded from the Peconic Valley.”

  Mandy couldn't be too angry at someone who thought such thoughts.

  There came hissing from the mudroom. Loud hissing. “Black Tom, Black Tom run from the fire, run from the fire!” Mandy chanted as she sauntered back to see what was amiss. “What's your trouble, kitten-cat?”

  The growl that replied clapped like angry thunder. Mandy drew back.

  Then she peered through the glass panes in the door.

  The mudroom was empty.

  At last the calls of the suffering, bereft monkey had become too strong for the cat to ignore. Tom had paced the little room looking for some explainable route of escape but had found none.

  Its patience exhausted, it soared up from the house, wheeling across the evening town, just touching the top of the streetlight at the end of Maple, swishing through the crowns of trees. Birds fluttered away as it came. Dogs and cats dashed about below, panicked by its passage. A rat, falling from a wire, died before it touched the ground.

  Tom flew through the evening hush, feeling the sleepy breath of the sky, crossing streets and alleys and houses faster and faster, passing over Bixter's and through the frying-hamburger odor coming from its chimney, then over Brother Pierce's Tabernacle, from which there rose the high-pitched excitement of a man too frightened of death not to preach damnation.

  Then it reached the campus.

  It was full of righteous fury. This experiment was unlawful. Constance didn't seem to care. Why didn't she put a stop to it? Was Tom being used by Constance yet again? Despite his great powers, she had outsmarted him more than once, the cunning devil of a woman.

  Had it dared, it would have come here with a sword of fire. But it knew that it had not the right to destroy George Walker unless doing so furthered the overall plan of Constance and the Leannan. Those were always the terms of the spell by which Constance conjured the King of the Cats into a brief earthly life.

  The torn entered the lab. At least it could take pleasure in relieving the suffering of the rhesus. Far from being forbidden, this was a required stitch in the weave of the story.

  The King of the Cats swept into the laboratory where George Walker sat eating a Stouffer's pizza in his underwear, his sleeping bag arranged on the floor beside him. George did not even stop chewing as it blew past him and through the closed door into the animal room.

  The beast with the raped soul lay on its belly in the bottom of a miserable little cage, its mate crouching beside it. They had been preening one another. Now they slept.

  They did not see the air shimmer before them, roiling and flickering. First there was nothing but a fanged grin hanging there, then green eyes above.

  To make this kill quick and quiet, the cat needed the dexterity of a human shape, and a silent weapon.

  It concentrated, remembering the smelt, the shape, the heft of the human it knew best.

  The eyes shattered and re-formed, now hooded with pallid skin, and the lips became those of an old woman, proud and delicate and firm.

  Then the whole of the withered old body, quite naked, appeared suddenly in the air, dropped a few feet with a gasp, and stood poised, its fierce, kind face working with the palsy of years, a long, bright needle gleaming between the thumb and forefinger of its right hand.

  Because one of this mated pair had been so terribly wronged, both could be blessed with death at the same time. They had earned that very special joy.

  It was with the greatest pleasure that the shape of Constance Collier raised the long, sharp knitting needle and drove it deep into the eye of one of the monkeys, then through the heart of the other.

  An instant later only the weapon remained to mark her, swift passage, that and the thin streams of blood running to the floor from the bodies of Tess and Gort.

  Chapter 7

  Without the cat the house was unpleasantly quiet. Small sighs of her own past were everywhere, appearing before her like carp in turbid water, rising with their accusatory eyes. Overhead in her bedroom was the light fixture she had bought with three months' allowance, the roses she had painted on it faded to ugly smudges. On the game room wall there remained a faint streak from the crayon mural she had drawn there when she was ten and home alone, for which infraction her mother had given her the only spanking of her life.

  She had hated the path worn across the living room carpet, and she hated it now. There were still holes in the sun porch ceiling where Mother had hung her plants.

  Through her adolescence she had heard the tired acts of her parents' bedroom from this sun porch, sitting out here in the night with her legs tucked up under her, swinging in the porch swing to the creaky rhythm that shook half the house. The only reason she came out here was that not only the squeaking but the groans penetrated her own bedroom.

  She had the awful feeling that she had not lived her youth. Where were the passions, the loves? All destroyed, pecked to pieces. But those were no real loves, those paintings. Could she really love? So far she'd had only casual relationships.

  It was awful here. She ought to go down to Bixter's and see if the Pong machine was still there. Of course it wasn't, but they probably still made their famous creme de menthe soda, and there was always the magazine rack.

  She sat listening to the water drip, still trying to work the loss of her portfolio to the back of consciousness and still not having much success.

  She wished Tom would come back.

  The telephone tempted her. Maybe a good talk would help. But she had lost her most recent male friend from half-intentional neglect, and the thought of falling back on him now only made her feel trapped. She could count on him to listen, though. Richard. Tall, sweet, sloppy in love. A sexual sentimentalist, capable of waxing talkatively nostalgic about the most private moment of love.

  His love might be sticky, but it was also simple, and that she respected.

  When his phone didn't answer, she supposed it was fate and hung up.

  Didn't George ever come home from his lab? Everywhere she looked in this house she saw evidence of more deterioration. She had found newspapers from over a year ago lying beside a chair in the game room. George's sheets were slick with dirt; she doubted he had changed them since Kate left. There was a stack of Persian Society magazines on the floor of his bedroom with, oddly enough, all the pictures of the cats cut out.

  She imagined that she heard his tread, saw his gaunt, haunted figure. She remembered the hate and terror in his voice when he had found the remains of his frog.

  George had wept. Afterward, in his misery, he had stared longingly at her. He was full of tormented need. Any young, attractive woman, if she wished, could make him worship her.

  Worship. A cold, distancing word. She would rather have passion from a man. But from George, nothing. The idea of being intimate with him made her want to bathe.

  Even so, she wouldn't have minded a nice chat.

  An hour passed. Nine o'clock and the old family clock that still dominated the living room chimed eight rusty hours.

  The clock had been too massive for her parents to keep when they moved to their trailer retirement in Florida. It told die cycles of the moon on its face, the sickle, the half, the full. They rode a landscape dusted with small blue flowers. Dim within it there could be seen twelve shadowed figures dancing about a tfiirteenth.

  Nine o'clock, Friday, October 18, 1987. The silence that followed the chimes seemed invested with obscure dangers, as if it were there to prove the menace of the house. Mandy thought again of the cat.

  A search for him wouldn't hurt. She went out into t
he backyard.

  Overhead, stars cluttered the racing gaps in the clouds. A sickle moon had risen and rode the quick sky. Wind swept leaves to running like night smoke from the trees, rustling over eaves and dancing branches against windows. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Mandy drew the collar of her sweater close about her neck and went back to the house.

  She locked the porch door behind her. All the windows were locked already; she had done that earlier. The house was as tight against intrusion as she could make it.

  She found herself returning to the mudroom. The ceiling light darkened the windows and made the white walls glare. The mystery of the cat bothered her more in the dark. There was no place in here it could be hiding. Certainly not under me sink, which was the only enclosed space. Even so she checked there, finding a moldering box of Spic & Span and a pile of dirty, dried rags made from old undershirts.

  Before the sink was the trapdoor to the cellar. She had not opened it earlier—what point, the cat could not have gone down there. She did not want to be alone here, not with the shadows and the moon clock.

  Maybe the trapdoor had been ajar, falling closed as the animal passed. When she pulled the ring, the door came up with oiled ease. From below rose the familiar odor of me basement, unchanged since her girlhood. She peered down into the darkness. There was a click, followed by the faint roar of the furnace starting. Yellow, flickering tight from the firebox reflected off the walls.

  “Kitty?”

  There was no other sound.

  Mandy reached into the dark and felt for a light switch, then remembered that there was only a string at the bottom of the stairs. She began to descend the rough wooden steps in the faint shaft of light from the mudroom above.

  She reached the floor, found the string, pulled it. No light: the bulb was long since burned out.

  Once her eyes got used to it, the combination of the glowing firebox and the mudroom light made it possible for her to see a little. She glanced around, ducking beneath the fat tentacles that issued from the top of the furnace, the ducts carrying their heat to the reaches of the house. This was the way she had come on the most secret missions of pubescent love, a willowy, confident little girl, her nervous chosen boy in tow.

  Opposite the furnace was a door set in a roughly made wall of cheap pine paneling, the builder's fifty-dollar “wine cellar,” and the scene of those early experiments, one or two of which had left indelibly torrid impressions, the first, confused genital contact and the exploding pillow of pleasure that came with it. She had held his shaft in that room, too afraid and excited to move, listening with half an ear to General Hospital on the TV in the family room above.

  On the door now was a rude sign painted in red ink:

  “Kitten Kate Club. Keep Out!”

  The sight of the rough letters pierced Mandy's heart: this must have also been George's kid's secret room. More evidence of lives departed. Did those kids also remember their little room, even now whisper about it?

  It was not easy for Mandy to open the door, but she did it. When she saw what was on the other side, she could not even scream.

  She just stood, gasping, disbelieving, staring. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, were painted and scratched and clawed with images of cats. Panthers crouched, wildcats leaped, toms and pussies lounged and crawled and spat, and here and there was a photograph of a dismembered cat. Spiked to the wall were bits of cats, fur, and shattered bones, and in one comer a gape-jawed feline skull.

  There was a dirty sheet wadded on the floor. The place stank of something like rancid grease. A votive candle stood in the center of the mess.

  There was hatred here that seemed beyond the capacity of a human being. She realized that this was no children's place.

  Only an adult mind had the patience to create this. A tortured, confused mind. Profoundly insane.

  No wonder Kate had taken her children and run.

  Mandy shrank back, closed the door to the ugly secret, then returned quickly to the mudroom. Her cat wasn't in the basement. She wished she did not know what was. She dropped the trapdoor, went back to the kitchen, turned on a light. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, feeling the secret of the house like a festering, rotting sore on her own body.

  How odd the Girl's life looks—Behind this soft Eclipse—

  She whispered the words into the yellow Formica tabletop. Emily Dickinson knew secrets of women. So perfect to call me predicament a soft eclipse. Emily. . . you knew so much, wise Emily. And you hid on your little farmstead, far from life, far from the madness of men. I wish I were there with you right now.

  Behind this soft eclipse. . .

  To George, womankind, it seemed, was a cat. Kitten Kate.

  So sick. So sad. So dangerous. She must leave here at once.

  She stood up, thinking to go and gather her things. But there was movement outside. As footsteps ran up the front walk, her flesh crawled.

  “Mandy!” The voice was high, shredded like that of a desperate woman.

  “Mandy, let me in!”

  “George?”

  “Yes!” He howled out the word, rattling the knob as he did so. His voice was literally squeaking with rage: Miserably frightened, feeling trapped, Mandy unbolted the door.

  He swarmed past her, muttering, stalking as dangerously as a spider through the shadowy house. “Sonofabitch! Son of a fucking bitch!”

  He disappeared into the bedroom. At once thuds and crashes started. “George!” She found him hunting through the bottom drawer of the dresser. Scattered around him on the floor were shirts and belts and about a dozen fat bullets. “George, what are you doing?”

  “That sonofabitching Jesus freak killed my rhesus! My rhesus!” He produced a large black target pistol with a long barrel, began scrambling for the bullets.

  “George, what's got into you? Put that stupid thing down!”

  “I'm gonna blow that bastard away! I was right next door in the lab and somehow or other he got in and killed my monkeys with a knitting needle.” He stopped, every muscle in his body tensing, his eyes screwed closed, his lips twisted back from his teeth. He clutched the gun in white, trembling fingers. “He stabbed them!” A huge, terrible sob tore through him, more a bellow than a cry—

  He got up.

  “Give me the gun, George.” He laughed, started for the door. Had she thought about it, she probably wouldn't have dared to stop him. But her instincts were stronger than reason: she grabbed his elbow and spun him around. “You don't even have any proof.”

  “I don't need proof! There's nobody in the world who hates me like he hates me.”

  “His whole congregation. You said yourself he preached against you. It could have been any one of them.”

  “He may not be personally guilty, but—”

  “You aren't a court of law. You have no right to take his life. Go talk to him, threaten him, even spit on him if that makes you feel better, because, George, I am sure he is a bastard. But you give that gun to me.” She fought down her terror. He was so crazy. She couldn't let him destroy himself and another human being, too. She must not fail to get the weapon.

  He swayed, then bowed his head. “You're right, of course. I really can't afford to be put in jail.”

  “Of course not. Give it to me, George.”

  Suspicion flashed through his eyes, to be replaced by an expression too mixed to come into a sane face: it was made of cruelty and love and something that might have been laughter.

  He gave her the pistol, which she returned to its place at the back of the drawer.

  “George, I want you to try and calm yourself down. You need rest, and I think you could use a doctor, too.”

  “I need to frighten that maniac into leaving me alone. And I think I know how to do it.”

  “Now, look, George.”

  “I'll go mad if I don't confront him! I've got to do what I can for myself, don't you see that?”

  There was no way out of this. The man was going to have
his battle. “Come on, then,” she said. “If you insist on going, I suppose I can't object. At least let me drive you.”

  “You don't need to get involved.”

  “I said I'll drive you. I don't want you getting into trouble.”

  “He ruined me!”

  “You'll keep working! You'll find a way.”

  She had hoped that he would calm down riding around in the Volks. Then they would stop somewhere, have a drink, and she would take him home. When he was asleep, she woutd leave for a motel. Tomorrow she would deal with the issue of the Collier estate and the job.

  He looked all in, shivering, huddled in his seat. “My only alternative now is to go to a human test and hope the Stohlmeyer people overlook the sloppy pretesting. That's all I can do to save the project.”

  “A human test?”

  “It'll be safe enough. Hey, you took a wrong turn. The Tabernacle's at the comer of North and Willow.”

  Too bad he had noticed that. She took a right onto Taylor from Bridge Street, still trying to engage him in a diversionary conversation. “I met the great Constance Collier. If was quite an experience.”

  He couldn't have been less interested. “I'll bet.”

  Dull pain returned as she recalled her own tragedy, but she said nothing about it now. “Her estate is perfectly beautiful, And she seems rather good-hearted, actually. Despite all I've been told.”

  “Constance Collier is a great woman. She means an enormous amount to me. Since your time, Brother Pierce has become her sworn enemy. He came in 1981, after you left. Last year he and his minions tried to get Miss Collier to put her name on something called The Christian Faery, and she responded by suing them for using her characters. He claims she's a pagan.”

  “That's part of being a witch, isn't it?”

  “To some extent. At any rate, witches certainly aren't Christian. That's what's gotten him so worked up. Take a right on North Street. We're almost there.”