Cat Magic (14 page)

Next time you’re there you make a picture of your father in your head, and imagine him among us, and make sure you see him smiling and happy.”

“Will he come then?”

“The magic you do in the circle will help him.”

The children fell in behind an older girl who carried a candle in a brass lantern. Single file the group went down the hall and out the back of the house. Soon the lantern was bobbing along on the hummocks.

Now was Mandy’s chance to warn Constance Collier about the crazy old preacher. “I was at Brother Pierce’s Tabernacle.”

She looked up sharply. “Why?”

“It has to do with some trouble my uncle is having with him. He’s a scientist, and—but that isn’t important. I was there to help my uncle. And Pierce knew all about me, what Fm doing here and all.”

“He reads the paper.”

“I think he hates you.”

Constance Collier’s expression gentled again. “But you do not. You are attracted to us. You identify with me.”

“Well, perhaps.”

“Come with me, Amanda. We’ll send those pesky ravens along to guide the children.” She went to the window and clapped her hands sharply seven times. Wings began to flutter and sleepy bird voices harped and shrieked. There followed a chorus of enthusiastic cawing and the crows burst up from the shrub beneath the window, where they had apparently been sleeping. Their cawing echoed in the sky and was soon greeted by laughter and cheering from the children. “They are good sometimes, dear, when they feel like it.”

“What are you?”

Constance Collier laughed. “An old woman who wishes to be young again. A dreamer, I suppose.”

“Excuse me, Miss Collier, but I know it isn’t that simple.”

Constance looked at her a long time. “In the end I will reveal every single secret to you. But only when I’m ready, so indulge your old benefactor.” She smelled more of minty incense than perfume. In the candlelight her skin seemed as alive as a girl’s. She touched Mandy’s face with unexpectedly warm fingers. “I could love you like a daughter.” Then, as if shocked by her own display of feeling, she rushed off. She called from the dark of the house: “Yours is the second room on the left, top of the stairs. We rise here with me dawn, which tomorrow will come shortly after six. Someone will be in to wake you.”

Mandy wasn’t convinced that such a thing would be possible at that hour.

“I have something wonderful for you to do tomorrow. Something marvelous. But you must set out just at dawn or there’s no point.”

“But Miss Collier—” There was no answer to her call, Constance Collier was gone.

Robin and Ivy began moving through the house with snuffers, putting out the candles. Mandy was too uneasy about the boy to question him, and she didn’t trust the girl at all. In the end she went upstairs. Her room was candlelit, with a basin of water and a chamber pot peeking out from under the ancient curtained bed.

Mandy undressed, putting her jeans, blouse, and underthings across the back of the blue stuffed chair that sat in front of the fireplace. She went to the writing desk and picked up the candle in its pewter ring-handled holder. Crossing back to the bed, she felt as if she had slipped into some unfamiliar space in the world.

The time of mysteries in the night.

But this was Maywell, New Jersey, in the month of October, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-seven.

It was also the time and place to climb into a wonderfully cozy curtained bed, curl up, and make sure she dreamed of peaceful voices and not strident ones, of children in candlelight and fabulous tales from long ago, and left the terrors behind.

She did not see Tom, who spent the night curled up on the canopy of her bed. And as he was not a purring cat, she didn’t hear him either.

She was steeping heavily by the time Robin came into her room. He drew close to the curtained bed, parted the drapes, and peeked inside. When he was certain that she slept, he reached down and laid his hand on her naked breast, feeling its fullness and warmth. He whispered softly to her, an ancient spell:

“I’ll come to thee in cat-time

I’ll come and make thee mine.”

And then, the necessary words uttered, he crept off to his own bed.

Tom watched him go, switched his tail a few times, then settled in for the long night’s vigil. In the bed below him, Mandy breathed as softly as a sleeping deer.

On the night that the demon-sent doctor and the beautiful young witch came, Sister Winifred had been leading what remained of the congregation in “Rock of Ages.” Brother Pierce, winded from his last exhortation, surveyed the crowd. About a third were gone. They loved the Lord, of course, but in the absence of an intense issue their faith waned. They began to worry about money or work or just getting the washing done, and they drifted away.

He loved them so much, each one of them, and longed with all his heart and soul to see them on their way to heaven.

To keep them on the road, there had to be a great question before the congregation, something with drama and importance, that would threaten them, each one, personally, their homes and their children.
That
was the kind of issue that could be used to reinflame their faith. As they sang he prayed. At once he felt a stirring within himself. When he looked up he was surprised to see the shadow of a cat in the doorway at the back of the church. Cats made him sneeze. He was about to signal the usher to shoo it off when it went of its own accord.

Simon kept the faith of Christ as best he could. Of course, Christ was a long, long time ago. It took a little imagination to believe that the cruelties he had suffered were really enough to wash away the sins of the world. Christian belief was the only thing that Simon had ever found which would hold at bay the fiery wind of guilt that roared day and night through his soul.

He was so sorry for what he had done. A few moments of pleasure, a few moments of anger—then a lifetime of remorse and eternity in hell. He refused to confess himself publicly and to ask God’s forgiveness. In part this was because he felt that he deserved hell for what he had done. There was, however, the other possibility, that the whole thing—religion—was a product of the human imagination. If that was the case, he would be confessing and going to jail for the rest of his life for nothing. He was a believer, but he preferred to cut the cards himself.

Tonight Simon felt exceptionally tired. He had been slaving over the leaves all afternoon and now he was working like a dog, trying to get that spark to come into the eyes of his congregation. It wasn’t working.

He was just losing his magic. Six months ago he’d had this whole town wound around his little finger.

Well, not all of it: the old families and the college professors who lived in the elegant houses on Albarts and streets like that weren’t interested. If they went to church at all, it was to places like Saint Marks with its dried-up Rector Williams, who looked like he’d been sucked up in a prune-making machine.

Simon got the poor, the welfare cases, the unemployed. Guys who used to work full-time over at the Peconic Quarry, which now ran maybe three shifts a month, others who once moved steel at the now abandoned Mohawk Fabricating Mill. These men had wives and children and souls and hopes, and they weren’t getting anywhere. Simon’s congregation had numbered two thousand souls at this time last year.

Now he had about fourteen hundred, a thousand workers and their families and four hundred Maywell students. His campus ministry worked surprisingly well, perhaps because the Maywell college kids were, in their own way, as much rejects as the steelworkers. These were the kids who hadn’t made Princeton by a long distance, who hadn’t even made Jersey State.

It had occurred to him to stand up and give them a little hellfire. Guilt was what made them keep coming back. Guilt, or was it hell? Sometimes their eyes really sparked when he described his ideas of hell. From some deep place in himself he knew what it was to burn. As a matter of fact, he was an expert on agony, both physical and spiritual. He could visualize burning flesh, sometimes even smell it as he preached. The trouble with his congregation was that they did not understand hell. It could be as small as a grain of sand, as large as a whole lifetime. And it did not have to be flames; it could be another kind of burning, the blue fire that consumes the spirit.

He knew all of this because he lived with it every day. His greatest secret was this: hell was with and in him. It was here, right now. He carried hell in his pocket.

He could feel it there now, dry and gnarled and unspeakably horrible. Their sins the Lord might forgive. If he could save just one from the torment he was already enduring, there was at least some small sense to his life.

But to do his work he needed their faith. He must kindle and rekindle it, and keep it burning white hot!

Instead he saw it dwindling. Those who came here came more and more out of habit, not because they couldn’t stay away. At first they had poured through those doors with eager faces. Then they had come more slowly, then out of duty. Now some of them didn’t come at all.

What worked best to keep them was controversy. Simon had first come to Maywell because of the rumors of witches there that had spread through the underground fundamentalist movement.

Such a place seemed an ideal mission for a really committed preacher. They needed Christ in Maywell; not the sweet, empty Christ of Catholics and the Presbyterians, but Simon’s Christ, a living Christ who would save you right then and there, in front of everybody, if you could feel it deeply enough.

Simon had built his church on the stones of controversy. Issues and public statements of protest had brought his people together, made them see themselves as a separate band, changed them from congregation to band of brothers.

They had collected evil books and records, stealing them from the library, buying them or shoplifting them from the Dalton’s and the Record Room. Then they had made a bonfire of them out behind the Tabernacle and burned over four thousand separate items. Chief among these offerings were copies of the works of Constance Collier.

After the burnings Simon had seen an article in the
Campus Courier
suggesting that Dr. George Walker was engaged in fantastically evil experiments of reviving the dead. To combat this man, Simon had scheduled a ten-week series and thoroughly condemned him. He had even discerned a link between Dr. Walker and Constance Collier. One of Walker’s assistants, Clark Jeffers, lived on the Collier estate.

The creation of
The Christian Faery
had been another massive project. The intention had been to replace Collier’s demon-inspired
Faery
with the purified work. Getting godless children’s books off the shelves of the library and out of the local bookstore was almost as important as book burning itself.

Constance Collier had reacted with venom.

She was a focus of pagan evil. He had heard rumors of the sinful activities on her estate, rumors having to do with odd sex and the raising of demons with magic rituals. It was impossible to be a witch and not a worshiper of demons.

Now the Courier had carried a story about Amanda Walker and her work illustrating the heathen, paganistic Grimm’s fairy tales—for none other than Constance Collier!

Dr. George Walker. Amanda Walker. A witch working for him, she working for a witch—this was a cabal, all of it, a pagan cabal right in the middle of this God-fearing Christian community!

God-fearing and clean-living… but it was no wonder that they were afflicted by pagans and demons, for they were not led by a clean man.

He touched the small bulge in his pocket that was his own personal torment. But tonight the hand was only a hard, dead little knot.

The hymn ended. Brother Pierce cleared his throat.

He didn’t know what he would say next. But he trusted in the Lord to help him. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath. His whole being seemed to stir. Out of the comer of his eye he saw the outline of a cat against the stained-glass window nearest his pulpit. It was on the outside, pressing itself against the glass.

He did not have time to be angry about it, though, for energy suddenly began pouring through him, coming from above, from below, from everywhere. His body seemed about to burst into tingling life.

Then the words appeared, rolling off his tongue as if of their own accord. “There is evil running as a shadow in these bright streets of Maywell. Yes, it even enters here, a place we have tried to make sacred! The evil doctor comes among us with his whore and makes lying accusations.” He pointed upward with his right hand, and felt to his deepest core the warm, the righteous, the sweet presence of the Saviour. By God’s grace he felt this, for he could now speak directly to beloved Jesus Christ. “I say to you, Lord, your people are innocent. Yea, even as the Lamb!”

People were suddenly back alive, their faces shining, their eyes quick with excitement. He heard whispers: “He is here, the Lord is here.”

“We can feel it,” he shouted. “O Lord, thank you and praise your holy name.” He smiled a great chasm of a smile. “O Lord, what a night!”

People began to shout. “Praise the Lord!”

But there was another reality in this church, and if he looked past his own joy and faith, he could see it.

The ones toward the back of the room were not included in the excitement. They sat, their faces fixed in pious expressions. He knew that they couldn’t feel a thing.

He was being prevented from reaching even to the last row in his own church!

He had to find a focus that would mean something to the man sitting in the otherwise empty row at the far back, who was either deep in personal prayer or asleep.

He cooled his throat with the water Winifred kept behind his pulpit in a green plastic pitcher.

His mind fumed morbidly to a vision of the Tabernacle dark and empty, a “For lease” sign on the front door.

A family of four defected from a front row. A front row family and the service not yet ended. So much for his ecstatic moment. He hadn’t even inspired the front sitters, beyond a few automatic praise-Gods.