Cat Magic (6 page)

Suddenly he was weeping. Most men would have looked away, embarrassed. True to the custom of the witches, though, Clark threw his arms around George and comforted him.

“You know,” he said softly, “no matter how hard this is, we’ve got to keep going. I don’t want to be maudlin, but frankly, an awful lot of people will be helped by our work. We have a mission, and that can’t be forgotten.”

Bonnie came in and put her hand on his shoulder. “George, we’re with you, I’m with you.”

He wished she had been the one hugging him. But when Clark let him go, she judged the moment ended and also walked into the animal room.

This was followed by silence: it was not pleasant to know they were under siege. As it penetrated, this hard truth deepened their upset even more. “What I don’t get is, Pierce takes the exact frog we were working on,” George said. “How did he known which one?”

“The isolate terrarium,” Clark replied. “It’s separate from the rest.”

“I guess. I hope we’ve seen the last of him.”

Clark stopped working. For a moment he appeared reluctant to speak. Then he seemed to gather some internal force to himself. “Frankly, George, this Brother Pierce is a lot more powerful around here even than you realize. Oh, I admit he’s been having his attendance problems lately, at least if you believe the paper. But the man has more charisma in his big toe than your average fire-breathing demagogue does in his whole
corpus delicti
. You oughta see this campus on a Sunday morning when Brother Pierce is working some big issue. Empty. And people are not sleeping it off, they are down at the Tabernacle for the Sunday Student Worship. Even the drug scene at Bixter’s is getting noticeably smaller. We’re becoming a Bible college.”

“That’s what we get for admitting all these Jersey rednecks. We ought to recruit out of state.”

“My point is, we’re surrounded by the guy. He’s everywhere. If a fundamentalist preacher can get something going on a modem college campus, he’s all but unstoppable. And Brother Pierce owns Maywell State. Simple as that.”

“So what’s our alternative? Shut down the lab and go home?”

“It amounts to a further impetus to work fast, in my opinion. Even beyond the funding problem. The longer we take, the more trouble he can cause us.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Damn the experimental protocols and go for the big win. I think the way to go is to move directly to the rhesus experiment.” Clark’s eyes were hollow. “Despite the problems we’re bound to encounter.”

“But what about the Stohlmeyer people? We’d be violating our own experimental protocols.”

“We have an obligation.” His voice shook. “Constance tells me that time is short. She can’t wait much longer.”

“It’s a hell of a risk.”

“What if this place is bombed or burned down? The risk of that could be even greater.”

Since the monkeys were already under health-status observation, it would take less time to work one of them up than to recast the frog experiment. In addition to proving an experimental animal’s health, they had to measure the tiny voltages in its brain and adjust all of their instruments to them so that the creature wouldn’t be in effect shorted out when they nullified its internal electrical field. It was a long, complex task. But they had been measuring the monkeys regularly for weeks, Clark had a point. It would indeed be faster to go straight to the monkeys and forget the frogs. The risks were clear: if they failed, Stohlmeyer would cut them off. Then there was the equipment difficulty. “Monkeys are a lot bigger than frogs. How do we get money to expand the field?”

With a rueful look Clark withdrew his wallet, pulled out a VISA card. “All I have.”

“Three thousand dollars on a credit card?”

“One thousand, sadly enough. And you’re good for another, unless I miss my guess. Or did Kate pick your bones?”

George’s bitter reply echoed through the dank, animal-scented lab. “I’m good for another thousand only if I can get a loan on my car.”

“We could try Constance. It’s just a little cash. Surely she can give us that without exposing the link between the lab and the Covenstead.”

Bonnie called from the animal room, “You know how conservative she is, George. You’ll never get it out of her.”

“She wants speed, yet she doesn’t like us to kill a few animals. And she won’t give us any money!Constance either has to commit to this or forget it. You tell her that, Clark. Unless she gives me the money to expand the cages, I’m throwing in the towel.”

“No, George. No, you aren’t. You know we can’t risk a financial link between the Covenstead and this lab. And you need your Stohlmeyer. Otherwise, how will you gain legitimacy in the outside world?

Research funded by witchcraft? Come on.”

“Constance could find a way,” Bonnie called. “She’s just tight with money.”

Clark ignored her. “We’ll manage, George, somehow. I wish I was rich, I’d kick in the whole amount.

Since she’s so committed, maybe Bonnie can kick in.”

George’s eyes brightened. “Hey, Bonnie, that’s a wonderful idea. You’ll surely invest money in your brilliant professor.”

A loud guffaw from the animal room. George opened the door between the two rooms, letting an even more powerful burst of odor into the lab. Swamp water and frog piss, sour bananas and monkey shit.

“It’s our rice bowls, Bonnie. All three of us.”

“I seem to recall that I’m on a scholarship. Where am I supposed to get money?”

“You buy plenty of dope over at Bixter’s, my dear girl,” Clark said. “I’ve seen you score a quarter-k at a time.”

“What’re you, the house dick? Do they keep conduct cards on us out at the Covenstead now? Eh, Mr.Starch?”

“You poor woman. You’re a witch, and you’re still not free. We know that the difference between good and evil is illusion. We also know not to confuse the two.”

“Goody.”

“The real truth is that you know that nobody cares at the Covenstead whether you’re a bad little girl or not.”

“Oh, no, they just get those condescending smiles on their faces—”

“They don’t care! Your bondage is your guilt. But it’s yours, Bonnie. You should take a lesson from Constance. She knows what it is to be free.”

“Bonnie’s bound, Connie’s free. Sounds like some kind of a spell to me.”

“I can’t get through to you. You just do not understand that the evil
is
the guilt.”

Bonnie sneered. “Drop the holier-than-thou condescension, will you? It bores me. I can be a damned good witch without your help, Clark.”

Shaking his head, he went into the animal room. “Let’s concentrate on the problem at hand. If we don’t come up with three grand worth of coils for the rhesus field, we are out of business.”

George followed Clark. Bonnie was preparing a likely-looking frog for its physical. “If we compress the observation time to forty-eight hours, we can be on-line with this beauty by Thursday night.”

“There’s yellow gik coming out of its anus, Bonnie dear,” Clark said.

“That’s A & D ointment. I just took its temperature.”

“Clark makes a good point, Bonnie. If we expanded the field we could go with a rhesus tomorrow morning. As soon as we get the coils.”

“I have no money. And we couldn’t pry another purchase order out of accounting with a crowbar. So let me finish getting little frogger here measured.”

“Bonnie, we can get two thousand dollars between the two of us. Surely you’re good for another thou.”

“Wrong.”

George went close to her. There were two ways to characterize this little witch: one, she was delicious and delightful; two, she was one stubborn lady. At night she swam through his senses. But only in fantasy. She wouldn’t take her old professor seriously. “Even in the animal room you smell like an angel.” She smiled. “Bonnie, you know what this means to me. I’m past fifty, darling.”

“I’m well aware of that.”

“Aside from making me as sexually interesting to you as it so obviously does, it means that I will die a sad old man if I don’t succeed with this experiment. You’re young, you have your life ahead of you. This is my last throw, honey. After this, sunset and bye-bye.”

She put the frog back into its terrarium. “George Walker, you are a hypocrite, a charmer, and a bastard. If I gave you a thousand, it would be out of other people’s money. Their happiness money. And they would be so mad if they couldn’t get high. Mad at me.”

“What do I have to do, go down on bended knee?” Even as he spoke, his eyes went to the two rhesus monkeys in their big cage. They stared back at him, sullen and bored. He could sense their hatred.

“It might be fun to watch but it wouldn’t help.”

George went over to the rhesus cage. He was tempted to make a face back at the ugly beasts. “How much smaller is Tess than Gort?”

“Tess is eighteen pounds. Gort’s twenty-two.”

“I mean in body mass?”

“Tess is 56.75 cubic centimeters of monkey. She’s approximately 77 percent of Gort’s mass. What are you getting at?”

“Tess might fit into a three-foot field. That’s only nine more coils. You wouldn’t have to give any money.”

“Good. My customers would kill me very, very slowly if I stole their money. And that’s what it would amount to. I’ve got about sixty dollars of my own.”

George put his hands on her trim hips. She did not move away and she did not respond. She simply became very still. Such plans he had for this slip of a girl! If the rhesus phase succeeded, she was next. Dear little Bonnie was going to be the first person to die and live to tell about it. Assuming he could convince her. Assuming the mere suggestion didn’t send her running for the nearest bus depot. But the problem of convincing her didn’t need to be faced just yet.

George wrote out a purchase order for the coils. When they were delivered, Tess, poor dear, would have a most extraordinary experience. Oblivious to her future, she sat in her cage delousing her mate and rolling her lips back. If George worked at it, he could probably get Techtronics to deliver before noon today. They had trucks up to the college all the time.

Dear little Tess. Not a big rhesus, not a scared rhesus. Not yet.

Mandy didn’t need a map to find her way to the Collier estate.

It took up the whole southwestern comer of the Maywell township and went beyond. The lands of the original grant included Stone and Storm mountains and the valley between them, an area of eighty thousand acres in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mandy drove down Bridge Street toward the entrance to the estate.

A stillness filled the morning air. Red and yellow and orange trees overhung the old brick street. Here and there children dawdled past on their way to school. Beside Bridge Street and sometimes beneath it Maywell Brook shimmered in the sunlight. Autumn was the slow season for water, and the brook sighed along its gouged, muddy bed. It was all so familiar, so peaceful, as if she had left only a few hours ago. But the years had changed the familiarity of Maywell. Once this place had been, simply, life. Now it hurt to be here.

Mandy glanced at her watch. 9:20. She was due to meet the great lady in ten minutes. The great and dangerous lady. As a child Mandy had been cautioned never to speak to Constance Collier—not that she ever had. Except for her occasional forbidden intrusions onto the estate with other kids to watch witch rituals, she had only once or twice glimpsed the legendary figure sitting regally in the back of her enormous old Cadillac limousine, driven to some local function by one of her earnest acolytes.

On one memorable occasion she and Constance had locked gazes, as the old lady was driven slowly down Maple in her big black car. That was when life at the Walker house was entering the deepest level of hell. A quart bottle of gin went into the garbage every two days, and the arguments made
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
sound like a Marx Brothers film.

High up in her maple, Mandy had observed the car. It was moving very slowly. As it drew near she realized that the old woman was watching her carefully.

Sometimes she dreamed of that car, coming unlit down the night street, and sometimes of the old lady drifting out of it like mist which would slip across the lawn, beneath the shadow of the maple tree… and then she would see the tall, severe shadow in the hall, or feel a bony hand on her forehead…

Once she heard her father screaming in the basement, and there was a low, sharp voice between the screams, and little Mandy had thought. She’s in the house. Constance Collier is in the house.

In the morning she had decided that it had to have been a dream.

In those days Constance had seemed frightening. Now the fact that she was a witch was a matter of indifference to Mandy. What she was interested in was this illustration assignment. There was no reason Amanda Walker couldn’t become the next Michael Hague or even the next Arthur Rackham. Beyond that, though, illustrating a Grimm’s offered her a chance to express her craft to the fullest.

Mandy was convinced that her visions of the fairy tales were original and powerful and new. Surely they would stun die art world if they were ever painted.

All that stood between her and success was this final interview. It promised to be hard. How had Will described Constance Collier? Quixotic. Rude. Imperious. And you were never late to an appointment with her.
Not ever
was the way he had put it. From her own past, Mandy could easily imagine Miss Collier to be even harder to deal with than Will had said.

Soon the forbidding brick wall that marked the townside edge of the estate appeared out the right window of the Volks. It was vine-covered but in excellent repair. Iron spikes jutted up from it, hooked out at their tops. Perhaps the incursions from the town had grown more aggressive in recent years. There was no scaling that wall now and dropping over, sweaty and breathless, knees skinned and heart pounding.

The main gate, which Mandy had never before entered, was securely closed. Mandy pulled up and got out of her car. The gate was simple, almost stark, made of wrought-iron bars topped by more spikes. It might as well have enclosed a prison. Along the top of it were the familiar brass letters, “This Land of Dark,” from a line of Constance Collier’s great poem.
Faery
: “Entered she this land of dark, borne by the mist’s own hand.”