Cat Magic (10 page)

Once she had dreamed of a time before the bison had left the plains of France, when winter had the name of a demon and cracked his breath like a whip… and she had been a queen reigning in a reindeer-skin tent… and making paintings in the sacred caves, the brush gliding in her fingers as if by magic, and the bison and the ibex racing across the plains of her mind.

When she woke up from that dream, she had wept to be herself, and to hear the droning of a bus in the street outside, and smell the smell of coffee on the morning air.

She had hurled herself into her work, spending four months on the little painting of Sleeping Beauty’s castle behind its wall of thorns. And in among the thorns she had hidden the old world, the running deer and the flailing mammoth, the fish snapping in the water and the men like ghosts among the protecting gnarls.

The Sleeping Beauty carried in her soul all the promise of the future; the potion that drugged her was the past.

An artist’s work is the issue of her body, and Mandy felt as if her children had been killed by Miss Collier’s crows. The Seven Ravens indeed. The Seven Monsters.

She imagined an image in the cat’s eyes; herself dead, her sea-pale skin soft against a pale sheet. We trust our souls to such frail vessels, a bit of skin, a beating heart, paint upon paper.

Suddenly she came up short. That had been a very vivid image, and it was not the first image of her own death she had experienced in the past few days. Was she somehow in danger here? There had been all sorts of rumors about the witches, but none that suggested evildoing.

“Is that what you’re telling me, old cat? Be careful of Constance?”

No, she knew what the cat was saying: Be careful of George. Yes, of course, George. He might come to her in her girlhood bed, come with pleas that became demands and the gleaming of a knife in the moonlight.

Tom preened himself. He stared at her. He could certainly capture her with those eyes. She kissed his forehead. “Who are you? Who are you really?” His cat face of secrets seemed to laugh.

Once right out under that maple tree, she had dreamed of being a mother. A vision had come, of leading children to the banks of a river and watching as they splashed at the lily pads.

Knights had come, plunging their horses into the water, and she had escaped in a silver fairy coach.

She had painted those children—who were really fairies—as Jack and Jill. Quick, passionate strokes, Mandy seventeen and flaming like a comet, the two jewels of children laughing down their hillside to eternity.

That painting had been destroyed.

“It can be a blessed thing to lose the past,” Constance Collier had said. “Sometimes what seems a treasure can really be a burden. You oughtn’t to hate my birds for giving you a chance to start fresh.

Great paintings have been made on this land. Give it a chance, and it will nourish you, too.”

The ravens had circled and circled, then alighted in a fine old maple and stared at Mandy with their blank yellow eyes.

Abruptly the cat raised its head.

“What’s the matter, Tom?”

The cat gazed long at her, then licked her hand.

“Surely you can’t be hungry?” She had remembered only one thing on the tear-blind way home from Constance Collier’s house, and that was to buy a bag of Cat Chow. Tom had eaten heartily not half an hour ago.

The cat got up and stood over her, looming, enormous, its breath coming in sharp little growls.

A patter of fear touched her heart. It was, after all, a stray. “What on earth is the matter with you?”

For more than a few seconds the cat stared. Then a shudder passed through the animal and it went to the fool of the bed, jumped down, and moved off toward the door.

“No, you don’t.” She had lived with more than one cat and she suspected she knew exactly what this was about. “I fixed up a litter box for you in the mudroom.” She got up, unlocked the door, and took the animal by the scruff. It was heavy, but she was able to drag it across the linoleum floors of the dining room and kitchen. “Litter!” She pressed its nose into the box she had set up for it. “You stay in here for a while, Tom, you’ll get the idea.” She shut the cat in the mudroom and went back to the kitchen. It was nearly eight, she had been lying in that bedroom long enough. A nice little meal would be just the thing to cheer her up. She opened the refrigerator.

Until the accident she had been intending to clean up George’s house for him, and to fill the fridge and the cabinets with food. He was not much of a bachelor. Without Kate and the kids his life had obviously lost much cohesion. Kate had left him so abruptly. One day here, the next gone.

As Mandy had not done any shopping for human food, her choices were rather limited. She touched the stiff old sausage on the top shelf. What might it contain, besides bacteria?

She was forced to settle for a very dubious sausage sandwich. By the time she had gotten the big iron skillet out of the cabinet and put the bread in the toaster she had exhausted the small reserve of psychic energy her long brood had built up.

The cat yowled. In a while it would get desperate enough to use the litter box. Probably it had its own accustomed litter outside. Maybe she shouldn’t domesticate it. Maybe she had no right. This might be as much of a country animal as the ravens.

“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 tom 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.

Without the cat the house was unpleasantly quiet. Small signs 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 thirteenth.

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 the 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.