Cat Magic (20 page)

That completes this statement of the subject’s current physical condition.”

Now it was George’s turn. “Thank you, Mr. Jeffers. The condition of the null-electric apparatus is as follows: the coils are all at uniform resting voltage of .00012 microvolts, equal to the ambient charge of the atmosphere present in the laboratory, as measured by the Forest-Hayiard atmospheric voltmeter, calibrated to standard zero September 19, 1985, in this same setting. Since calibration no variances have occurred and no adjustments have been made. Thus I conclude that the instrument is accurate and the null-electric field is completely inactive at this time. A brief operational test confirmed by instrumentation and by subject perception that the field can be activated. That completes my statement of the condition of the instrumentation.” He paused a moment. “I think, at this point, we might have the privilege of hearing from the subject.”

“I feel more or less normal. My stomach’s slightly acidic and I must confess that I’m tense. My breathing feels normal and unrestricted. I’m cold. I guess I’m also a little scared.”, “Bonnie, are you willing to go ahead with the experiment?”

A tiny voice. Hopefully audible to the microphone. “Yes.” At the moment the motion detector in the animal room began warbling. George felt a surge of blood; Bonnie jerked and gasped; even Clark raised his eyebrows. “Visitors?”

“I’ll go,” George said. “Just stay calm. Odds are it’s a false alarm.” His lie was mostly for Bonnie’s sake.

“Remember, that motion detector was cheap.” He had not told them of the pistol he had brought from home and he did not tell them now. But he drew his windbreaker on. The gun was in the pocket.

The door to the animal room was closed. George watched the knob to see if it was being turned from the other side. He reached into his pocket and grasped the pistol. Then he put his hand on the knob and began slowly turning it himself. He was scared, but more than that he was mad. If he found any of Brother Pierce’s crazies in there, he just might start shooting.

Clark appeared beside him. “Take it easy, George. If you’re planning to use that gun, take it out of your pocket. It won’t do you any good where it is now.”

George was impressed not only that he had noticed the pistol, but that he seemed to know how to handle a situation like this. “You an auxiliary cop or something?”

“I’m a Burt Reynolds fan.”

George hefted the pistol. “Ready, Burt?”

“Ready.”

He opened the door.

And saw something so impossibly dreadful that it made him jerk back. All the anger boiling in his soul threatened to erupt. He hated, hated, and yet—

Cat of fire, burning across a summer night of youth, cat of torment—

It sat, as black as space and enormous, on the windowsill The window behind it was locked.

“Maybe it’s a stray,” Clark said. He went over and turned off the motion detector.

George managed to force words from a chalky mouth. “What’s it doing in here?”

“Maybe it’s been here all along—in a cabinet or something. Sleeping.”

George stared at it. The thing was really huge. “What is it, some kind of a throwback?”

“Probably got a little wildcat in its genetic mix.”

“Well, I’m going to get it out of here. I hate cats. They’re vermin, as far as I’m concerned.” He stuffed the pistol in his pocket and moved toward the animal, which promptly arched its back and hissed. Loud.

“Unwise move, George. That cat prefers to stay.”

“I can’t use the motion detector with that thing wandering around in here.” He held out his hand. “Kitty?”

Sssst!

“Most unwise move. Maybe if we went over to the gym and found a badminton net, we could throw it over him—”

“All right! I get your point. We’ll lock the door between the rooms and worry about it later.”

“My thoughts exactly. The experiment will only take three minutes. Nobody’s going to stop us in that short a time. They couldn’t even get the door broken down. So we’re home free, right? If we stop delaying.”

George closed and locked the door. He kept his windbreaker on, though, with the pistol close at hand.

When he brought in the motion detector, he had checked every nook and cranny in that room for stray frogs. He had looked in the cabinets, even under them. The room had been empty.

“Okay, Bonnie, we are going to start. Please report your out-of-the-ordinary sensations, if any.”

“Nothing so far.”

George flipped the seven switches that activated the coils. He began turning the rheostats. “Establishing a voltage base at .17 microvolts.”

“Oh. Ohhh. I definitely feel that. It’s a tingling.”

“Blood pressure down to 110 over 68.”

“I’m sort of—all floaty. Oh, this is weird!”

When she stopped talking, George was startled to hear the distinct growl of a cat. He frowned, tried to look over the top of his instrument panel toward the door to the animal room, Although he could only see the top half, he could tell that it was very certainly closed. God, did he ever have the jitters. Cats were loathsome creatures. They needed to be drowned, every one of them. Or to be set afire and left to run like meteors in among the old sycamores of home. How his own cruelty disgusted him.

“Microvolts to .50.”

“Blood pressure 80 over 66. Brain to alpha.”

“I’m kind of sleepy and I sort of have this tickle in the middle of my chest where my heart is. And it aches a tittle.” Her voice cracked. “All of a sudden I feel sad.”

“Microvolts to .75. Damn!” Just for an instant he had seen the eyes of a cat hanging in midair over Bonnie. Glaring down at her.

“What is it?”

“No—forget it. I thought I was getting a bad reading But it’s okay. Fine.” He tried to slow down his own thundering heart, to control the sweat tickling his top lip. “Bonnie, can you hear me?”

“Mnun?”

“She’s showing theta peaks now, George. Oscillation is only five. She’ll be unconscious in a few more seconds.”

“Microvolts to .90.”

“Blood pressure dropping. Theta dropping out. Oscillation null. Intercranial activity null.”

“But you still have some blood pressure?”

“Twenty over five. Dropping slowly.”

“Microvolts to 1.00.”

“The heart and blood have stopped. The brain has stopped. Dr. Walker, clinically Bonnie has died.”

George looked across at the still form on the bench. She was staring sightiessly at the ceiling. On her face was an expression that stunned George silent.

Had she, too, seen the eyes of the cat?

Bonnie fell out of the world. She felt her blood forget her, her heart forget her, her brain forget her, her bones forget her.

Throughout life the body holds on to the soul. Death is a forgetting, and when the body forgets, it loosens its grip, and the soul falls out.

That is the simplicity of death.

It was so dark and so hollow here. There was no noise, no smell, no
feel
. And yet its hollowness was very, very huge.

Something was chasing her.

“Why am I still awake?”

She answered her own question, and at once: because you expected to be. Death is whatever you expect. If you expect heaven, you get it, or hell, or nothing. And you are also your own judge: you give yourself what you deserve. The fundamentalist creates his own hell, the Catholic his purgatory, the agnostics wander empty plains, muttering to themselves.

As she had died, a cat had come leaping out of the ceiling, Now it was behind her, stalking her. She sensed that it was dangerous. If she refused to believe in it, maybe it would disappear. Maybe it would stop chasing her down the hall to hell.

Torquemada burns, Sartre stalks in gray oblivion, Milton ascends dismal glories, Blake leaps with his demons.

It is all the same to death.

Helpless to change her own deepest beliefs, Bonnie joined her fate to that of the human majority. This was the death she contrived for herself: the big black cat came leaping and snarling toward her. As it got closer it got bigger and bigger and bigger.

She could not scream, not even when its face was the size of the risen moon, and she saw galaxies behind its eyes.

It roared, and she looked down its throat. She did not see a black carnivorous maw, but rather a long corridor, somehow familiar. A woman was walking this way along the familiar green linoleum floor.

Bonnie opened her eyes wide, staring in disbelief at the absolute reality of the linoleum, the glossy green paint halfway up the walls, the jittering fluorescent fixtures on the ceiling.

This was Our Lady of Grace School, circa 1973. “No, please, it can’t be.”

The oncoming nun was a juggernaut of black and white, the whimple framing a face made of prunes and daggers. Bonnie wanted to hide, for she knew who this skeletal creature was.

“Mother Star of the Sea!”

“Exactly, my dear. Come with me.”

“What happened to the cat?”

“Never mind that.”

Bonnie looked at the hand held out to her, the awful hand made of weathered, gnawed bones, glowing inwardly with fire where the marrow should be. “No! Get away from me!”

“Deep in my wound. Lord, hide and shelter me!”

“I hate ‘Soul of My Saviour.’ Don’t sing it to me.”

“Why, Bonnie, I’m dismayed. Our war really ended with ‘Soul of My Saviour.’ Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t!”

“Oh, yes, Bonnie, you do.”

With a rattle of tiles and jangling of fixtures the hall swayed and re-formed itself into the seventh-grade classroom.

“I tried hard,” Mother Star of the Sea snarled. “I’ve been eagerly awaiting my chance to deal with you.

Now, watch this.”

The classroom spun into fuli existence. They were all there, Stacey and Mandy and Patty and Jenette, the whole gum-popping crowd.

Bonnie sat in the next to last desk, Stacey behind her. “Having fun, Bonnie?”

“Shut up, Stacey, Mother will hear you.”

Mother in her glory sat reading, officiating at study hall. Bonnie was enjoying herself and did not want her fun to be ruined by Stacey’s meddling. She fixed the image of Zack Miller in her mind, the image of him sweating over his mop and bucket in the girl’s bathroom just when she happened to be peeing and sort of left the door open and—

“Oh, Bonnie, you’re
doing
it.”

“Shut up! Mother might hear you!”

“She can’t hear or see.” Then Stacey’s cool, fat hand was reaching around the back of the desk, slipping under the elastic of her skirt, going down to meet her own fingers. “Where is it?” Her whisper seemed to Bonnie to carry across the study hall. Mother SS remained engrossed in her Breviary.

“No! This is a sin!”

“I can make it feel really marvie, ask Ellie and Jill how good I am. I’m the best in the class.”

“Get out of here! This isn’t even youryouryour…” But it was her business, the intimate touch.

“This is a sin!”

“Only for Catholics. I’m a Unitarian, remember. My mom and dad tell me it’s okay if we’re in private.”

“The seventh-grade classroom is private?”

“The back row. She can’t even see this far. Consider us behind a curtain.” The other girls tittered and glanced, and Jenette stared openly, cracking her gum in rhythm to the jiggling of the two desks.

Stacey was terribly good, so good that it was some time before Bonnie became aware of what all the other girls had known from the moment it began to happen.

There was a shadow cast across her desk where no shadow should be. “Mother Star of the Sea!”

The punishment was severe: you may not continue at Our Lady of Grace, no, you will be left forever to your sin and struck down in anathema for your sin. In the eternal agony to follow. God will remember how you did this
unattractive
thing in study hall.

—But it’s not a sin! This is the twentieth century!

—You go to Our Lady. Therefore it is a sin—

The worst part of the punishment was the first note home, the sheer disgust of parents, the sneering laughter of the despised younger brother.

“In view of the fact that we do not have the budget to provide a psychologist, we simply cannot allow students with these tendencies to attend Our Lady. We would suggest that Bonnie enter PS 1 as soon as possible, and that she take advantage of their counseling program.”

The expulsion lowered her in the estimation of her father, it embittered her mother. It would mean spending the balance of the year in the virtual prison that was PS 1, a girl with a history of the unspeakable, watched constantly by the human raptors who circled those bitter skies.

Bitter Bonnie did a worse thing to her tormentor: “Mother SS was in on it!”

“What’s that?”

“She—she—” Burst into tears, play it for all it’s worth. “Mother taught us how. She does it to herself.

She made me—made me—” Another burst of tears.

Her father stormed over to Our Lady, had a fiery meeting with the principal, Sister Saint Thomas. Poor Mother Star of die Sea. Once she had been principal, had been demoted on some hazy canonical basis.

Now this new cloud.

Bonnie was reinstated. Her first day back, what pleasure, she walked the halls surrounded by a surging pack of girls, while Mother Star of the Sea wept silently, standing against the wall near the chapel. The old lady could not even continue out the year, she who had loved the girls and had such hope for them—

Retirement will be a form of execution, slow but certain. Still, at this moment in time she remains a teacher, will be until the end of the week: she must teach the killing child her music:

“Oh, brother. Mother, not ‘Soul of My Saviour’ again!” ‘Twas on a cold and rainy afternoon in October, dear. You had already destroyed me, but it remained my responsibility to teach you. How I prayed for a miracle. ‘Let her confess,’ I prayed.

“All right now, girls, in the key of G, and briskly, please.” Snick, snick, snick, ruler against the edge of the desk. “Ah-one, ah-two, ah-three!”

“Stop! Who said that? Who said that horrible word! Olay, indeed! You dare to mock Our Lord’s suffering? Who was it? You? Was it you, Stacey Banks? Or you—yes, you, Bonnie, you black-souled beast! Bonnie, that was a sin’. No, don’t put out your hand, dear.” Mother Star of the Sea smiles. “Live with your sin!”