Cat Magic (52 page)

The ghostly child whispered in his ear, and after a moment he spoke again. “Let me tell you something.

Miss Witch Woman, so you understand. Get on your feet.” She stood up.

There must be some way to communicate with him. “Do you know what’s there, attached to what you carry in your pocket? Surely you do. It’s talking to you—”

He slapped her across the mouth The blow hit with a bright yellow flash. As best she could, she swallowed her anger.

She was unable to look for more than an instant into his eyes. They were sheened with hurt, not hate She could hardly bear to imagine the suffering of this man.

They reminded her of other eyes—Mother Star of the Sea’s. They were desolate buttons, the eyes of an abandoned doll, the eyes of guilt. The Led man’s voice came as a murmur of wind; “Remember that Mother Star of the Sea is part of you. Remember, she is your guilt.” The voice faded, and Amanda considered its message. If she could release herself from her own guilt, she could release this man from his. Had she the compassion to love somebody who had so hurt her, and was about to hurt her more?

Fighting him could not save her now. Only love could do that.

“You come with me, and you come fast If I don’t get back to your village inside of an hour, my men are going to set that round cow barn of yours on fire, and all the devils in the damn thing are going to burn and their children with them. So I suggest we get a move on.”

The night was growing much colder. Amanda shuddered and set off, walking quickly. Tears obscured her vision. She told herself to be calm, but it was very hard. They had not climbed long before he spoke again, his voice rough. “Stop here.”

He was walking behind her. She felt him draw close, felt his rifle between their bodies. His breath trembled down her neck.

“What do you know about spells?”

“I—”

“You are one.”

“If there is anything, any black panther or walking statue or anything at all tike that, I am going to let them burn your people. And I am going to burn you very, very slowly. Do you understand that?”

She saw Tom in the tangle of brush at the foot of Stone Mountain, saw him by his moonlit eyes. It was all she could do not to call to him.

She expected him to spring at Brother Pierce’s throat, to kill him, or at the very least to grow enormous and scare him away.

Tom’s eyes were fixed on her. He was panting.

There was a long silence. Pierce’s lips came close to her ear. “Listen, you and me, we have a problem.

My people are kind of like, they’re out for blood.”

“You burned Constance Collier to death!”

“There was a sign from the Lord.”

They were very close to Tom now. Amanda could just see his crouched form in among the rocks. Any moment he would spring.

Closer they came. Now she could see his tail switching in the moonlight. She moved forward more quickly, to give him room for his jump.

But something happened to prevent him. It was very quick and very damaging: a needle of a claw sliced out from the ghost child and narrowly missed blinding Tom. With a scream he bounded off into the darkness.

“What the hell—”

“It was just a cat. I saw it.”

“Just a cat! You people got a few cats, don’t you?” After a moment of studying the brush Pierce continued on, pushing her with the side of his gun.

Dread filled Amanda. Hate dominated love. The flower always died. Every birth ends in death. Perhaps that was the true lesson of the Sabbat that was upon them.
Samhain
is about the tragedy of the dead, not their persistence in the spirit world.

As she had on other last journeys, Amanda sought solace in the sky. The sweep of the heavens reminded her that peace, in the end, would come. Worse things than this have happened, and better things, and as does joy, sorrow has an end. Nobody will ever know all of the secrets in the stars, the worlds that have come and gone.

They were more than halfway to the Fairy Stone. No matter his reluctance she knew that she would soon be burning again, and he tending her fire. It was a cruet homecoming for them both. His guilt came along beside him and he didn’t even see her. The little murdered girl glared at him, but he was blind to her childish stare. In her form Amanda could see the flickering image of the blood-red scorpion, Abadon. It seemed an amazingly dangerous thing, this creature. Was this a denizen of some real and final hell she had not suspected before? Abadon was not an invention of Brother Pierce’s guilt. It had an independent life of its own. The way it looked at him, so steadily, so… carefully, suggested that it thought it would soon devour his soul.

The wind hit them as they reached the rocky crest. Amanda began to shiver uncontrollably. A sweatshirt was no proof against this cold.

The wind sighed in the bare trees and whistled across the stones. Listen as she might, she heard no words in it. There was only the peace of its movement, as it flowed its own secret way.

Ahead, glowing in the moonlight, she saw me Fairy Stone, and before it the gangling rowan bush.

“Get to work, sweetheart.”

“Doing what?”

“Gathering firewood! It’s as cold as the devil’s behind up here.”

He was going to make her build her own pyre. Would he also make her light it? An awful quivering started inside, in me skin and meat that would soon be dripping grease. The stake was an agony beyond the conception of those who had never endured it. Her legs resisted by growing heavy, her hands by getting clumsy. The branches and twigs she was gathering seemed to cling to her like claws.

Before, she had always defied him. Now she must attempt something new. Was there enough love in her to include this evil being? “You can be free of your guilt,” she said miserably, hopelessly. “I can help you.” She knew that he had murdered the little girl, she could see it in his eyes, marked indelibly there, that one moment repeating and repeating in their glassy reflection. “She will forgive you, Simon. She has already forgiven you.”

“How the hell do you know about that? Devil musta told you!” The butt of his rifle whistled in the wind, then she was flying against the Fairy Stone, her kindling flung about her. “Pick it up! Load it up on that rock. I want the whole country to see this fire. It’s a beacon to the people of the Lord, that they have been made free!”

She scuttled around gathering twigs. Her side hurt where he had hit her, her shoulder and arm where she had been burned earlier. So much pain.

She had to get through to him. There was no other hope. “Simon—”

“You shut your mouth and keep working!”

He feared, therefore he hated. On the surface he hated women, deeper inside he hated the woman in himself. At his core he hated life.

Mistakes, recriminations, and guilt are the central bondage of evil. Finally she had a good-sized pile of brush and kindling. “Come here, witch.”

She went to him. She looked straight into the desolation of his eyes.

I am trapped, those eyes said. And I hate you for it.

The wind scurried, hissing against the Fairy Stone.
I am the hand that takes
. The sheer power of his own guilt was opening the stiff fist in Brother Pierce’s pocket, opening it and clutching his thigh with the bony fingers. A question, dark with terror, concentrated in Pierce’s eyes. She could see die moonlight reflecting on them as on two brown glass balls.

“I can free you, Simon. I have the power to forgive sin.”

The eyes narrowed. “You’re crazy.”

“The hand is alive. I can see it moving in your pocket. Not only that, I can see what it’s attached to—a little girl you once knew.” She spoke softly, trying to calm him with her tone. Carefully she reached toward him. “Face the wrong you did her and forgiveness will come.”

“Wrong
I
did? We aren’t exactly here to talk about my guilt, are we? You’re the witch, the spellmaker, the devil worshiper.” He snorted, trying to deride her. “You’re evil incarnate.”

“I’m just a woman. What you’ve got in your pocket might well be evil incarnate.”

“You shut your mouth about that, Miss Witch!”

“For heaven’s sake, Simon, you’re carrying the hand of a murdered child. You can’t tell me what’s evil and what’s not.”

He looked at her out of eyes sharp with suspicion. “You know too damn much,” he murmured. “Maybe you’d better go over and lie down in that kindling now.”

That terrible command brought back the harshest of memories: the feel of me cage that had held Moom, the way the bars had bent but never broken; the hideous three minutes that Marian’s fire took to crawl to her through the wood, then the swooning torment when it first touched her feet.

She told herself that she was reconciled. Beyond death, this time, she knew that summer awaited. She could smell the air of it, and already hear the music.

Even so the command made her sink helplessly to the ground. Her mind might be reconciled, but her body refused to go willingly into such torture. “I’m sorry.”

He twined his fingers in her hair and dragged her to the pyre. “Put your arms over your head.” When he grasped her wrists, a shock of knowledge swept through her. She saw the guilt that lay yet in his hands.

“You murdered that little girl and cut off her hands so they couldn’t identify the body. Then you kept one of them. You did that, didn’t you?”

“I am a man of God! How dare you blaspheme me!”

“You can still find your way out of this.”

“You’re a lying witch and you’re gonna burn!”

He crossed her wrists and wound the end of a long leash around them. Then he looped wire around her ankles.

She remembered how as Marian she had watched the clouds. She would do the same with the stars.

He tightened the leash. As long as he kept it taut, she could struggle all she wanted, but she could not get away.

Even as he worked, she saw the sadness in his eyes. His surface personality might really hate her, might really be about to burn her, but his deeper essence loathed what he was doing. She got a flickering image of herself escaping across Stone Mountain. “You were going to let me go. Why have you changed your mind?”

“How come you know so much about me? Nobody in the world knows what you know.”

She remembered Connie beating at her flaming head.

Why do they burn us? They want to banish the dark.

And Moom thinks, “But I
am
the dark. I give life in the dark. What comes from me, comes from there.

Babies come from the dark!”

The voice of Grape: “I’m waiting for you, Amanda. This time you will not wander the underworld. You’re coming home.”

“Stop that heathen muttering. I warned you, no witch spells’”

She felt her soul gathering the memories it would take on its journey, pausing at the door that leads out of the body.

“Goddess,” she whispered, “open it fast once the fire starts. Please don’t let me suffer long.”

He twisted his leash tighter around her wrists. Her hands bulged from the pressure. For a time she was silent. A moan escaped on an exhaled breath. The next one became a sob. “You killed a child, Simon.

But you can atone, even for that. I can help you atone.”

“I am not guilty! Before God, praise His Name, I am not!”

He looked at her, into her eyes. “Could you really help me?”

“Of course I could. Of course!”

The torment of the leash grew less. By the Goddess he was letting her go. Then he sighed a long sigh, tightened the leash again, and laid her face-up in the dry brush and sticks.

Her disappointment made her burst into tears. Through her own suffering, though, she kept trying to understand him, to find the insight that was the key to his need. He wanted her help, she could see that.

Why wouldn’t he allow himself to accept it?

Then she saw into the nature of the hell he was inventing for himself. In the heart of his guilt he would be forever devoured. It was surprising that he could not yet see the shadow of his demon, the ghost child, for the more hatred Simon conjured in himself the more real she became. From all around them there came the scuttling of Abadon’s long, jointed legs.

He was the first human being she had encountered who had condemned himself to the eternal hell.

Tom hovered just at the horizon, huge in the mountains, his black shape like a cloud along the ridges. He gazed at her with fixed intensity.

Amanda kept on trying to reach Simon. “The child will let you atone.”

He peered down into her face. There was a distinct odor of pizza on his breath. “I’m sorry I did it. I just—all of a sudden, she touched me and it felt too good, and all of a sudden—oh. God, she was just lyin’ there dead. A kid and dead.”

He clasped his hands together and looked into Amanda’s eyes. His essence seemed to call out to her,

“Help me, don’t let me do this to myself. Help me!”

The clicking of Abadon’s pincers mingled with the windclatter of the rowan’s limbs.

Amanda’s tight-bound arms hurt so terribly that she had to force herself not to bellow. There was only one way for her to save herself: she had to save this man.

“I cut off her hands and tossed her in a river. I couldn’t have any ID. But I’m sorry, damned sorry.” Even his sorrow was ugly.

“You don’t have to endure your guilt. You can relieve it if you’ve got the courage.”

“I’m so scared,” he whispered. “I deserve eternal damnation for what I did.”

“You deserve what you choose to deserve. Your guilt can end, Simon. Untie me and we’ll talk.”

For some time he didn’t move. At least there was a struggle going on in him, or so it appeared.

She kept hoping, but when finally he met her eyes, the pity she saw filled her with despair. He would not look so sorrowful if he had decided to set her free. “You’re right to think this is hard for me. I don’t enjoy making people suffer, in fact I’d like nothing better than to let you free. But I’d be ‘doing a real sin then.

You need the suffering I’m going to give you. I’ll spare you God’s fire by burning you in mine. You see, you don’t understand that this is a good deed I’m doing. When you’re dead and in heaven you’ll thank me. Fifteen minutes of torment will save you from an eternity of spiritual fire.”