Cat Magic (7 page)

How very quiet this place was, and how old. The trees soared huge and silent. The only sound was that of an occasional leaf whispering to the ground.

Beyond the gate was a narrow dirt road, curving off into a thick forest the kids had always avoided, preferring to go the long way around, by the fields.

Mandy pulled and pushed at the gate until her feet scraped on the brick paving. The hinges didn’t even creak.

She looked left and right—and saw a small gateman’s house with its iron door hanging open. Inside was a disused telephone on a frayed cord. She picked it up, put it to her ear. “Hello?” Dead. “Great.” It was now 9:30 exactly. “Marvelous.” She was getting off to a wonderful start. She would be fired before she even met her employer.

But she mustn’t be fired. This just had to work, it had to. Her alternatives were bleak: illustrating the covers of paperbacks or maybe getting into advertising. To Mandy there was no thought more horrifying than that of being forced to abandon her vision and just use her skill. She had seen such people, had even interviewed in a few ad agencies. It had chilled her to walk down the long rows of trendy offices, each with its light box and drafting table, and see the gray people huddling there in frayed designer jeans and Yves Saint Laurent shirts.

She deliberated climbing the gate.

Then she saw that there was another door in the back of the gateman’s house, one that led into the estate. It opened easily. As she pushed it, paper rattled. There was a note taped to the back, where it couldn’t be seen from the street. “Please be sure this locks behind you, Miss Walker.”

Obviously this was the way she had been intended to come. Nice of Will T. Turner to tell her. He really was a very marginal person.

Once inside the estate she went around to the back of the main gate and looked for some sort of a handle. There was nothing.

Furious that none of these procedures had been explained to her, she hurried back to her car and parked it as far off the road as possible, then dragged her precious portfolio out of the back seat and reentered the estate on foot. All of her most important work was in this worn black case, everything she had ever drawn or painted relating to Grimm’s fairy tales.

The portfolio was heavy. Mandy couldn’t be too mad at Will. He tried hard. If she had been planning intelligently, she would have called Miss Collier last night to reconfirm, and found out about this hike.

A few moments after she started off she found herself slowing her pace, despite her lateness. Finally she stopped altogether. She simply could not help it. She was in a wonderful cathedral of trees, their black trunks stretching to crowns of brilliant autumn color. Leaves littered the dirt road, marking the dust with bright splotches.

This was awesome. Too many months in Manhattan had made her forget the passionate silence of the woods. She began to walk again, now also noticing the rich scent of the air, cleansed by autumn rot.

This place was not only beautiful and dark and huge, it was also something else she could not quite name. The very slightest of shivers coursed through her body and she began to walk a little faster. It was as if the woods itself was not entirety unconscious.

She had no idea how long this road might be. In any case it was longer than necessary to make her thoroughly late. She marched along lugging the portfolio, trying to hum and not succeeding.

Her imagination was really too vivid for this. “You know I’m here, don’t you,” she whispered. Leaves stirred down. The trees filtered the bright morning sun to golden haze.

The colors here were magnificent: these must be very robust trees. Plants die gaily because they are sure of their own resurrection. Not so higher creatures. All things that share the terror of final death are brothers, from the microbe to the man.

The road curved upward, finally cresting a hundred yards ahead. Long before she was close to the top, Mandy was breathing hard. Even so the chill of morning had vitalized her. She felt physically wonderful, her whole body singing.

What, she wondered, was the origin of the legend of the watcher in the woods? This place was so alive, but not in a human sort of a way. Trees were enigmatic beings. She knew that man had once acknowledged this alienness by considering them the temples of his most mysterious gods, me forest spirits. Now those gods were cast low. Who once had been worshiped in the woods was today captured in fairy tales and called a troll.

Grimm’s was the net, after all, in which the Christian world had captured the old gods, diminishing their power (or so it thought) by making them the stuff of children’s stories.

Just this side of the crest she came to a darker place in the forest, where the trunks of the trees seemed more enormous, the carpet of leaves thicker.

She saw a small face, very still, peering at her from a hole at the base of one of the trees. Her imagination, of course.

She bent close, and watched with horror as it took on the absolutely solid appearance of something quite real. She started away from it, giving a little, involuntary cry. The sound was rendered tiny by the immensity of the place. And the face was quite terrible.

It just didn’t seem possible that something so small, so strikingly inhuman, could be there—but she could still see it in outline even from ten feet away. As she watched it, an awful coldness seemed to slide up out of the ground and possess her whole body. She dragged her portfolio around to the front, a fragile shield.

She backed to the far edge of the road. She was suddenly freezing cold, almost sick, fighting the impulse to panic flight.

Her mind worked frantically, seeking some way of explaining the impossible presence. A dwarf? No.

Perhaps a statuette. Yes, that must be it.

But she could see the moisture gleaming on its eyeballs.

She decided to get out of here. She would phone Constance Collier from the safety of some coffee shop in town.

Her watch told her it was 9:45. By the time she got back to the car and drove into town it would be 10:15 at least. Over the phone Miss Collier could so easily tell her to forget the whole thing.

There really was no choice. Reason said that she was not facing some supernatural creature, not a troll, not one of Constance Collier’s faeries. Such things were not real, not anymore.

But a mad dwarf from some nearby mental institution could be very real. And wasn’t there a Peconic Valley Institute for the Criminally Insane?

Either she walked past it or she gave up this job.

Shaking, her hands clutching the portfolio, she started off for the crest of the hill. More than anything, she expected to find that the apparition in the hole was gone, a figment of her vivid imagination. But it was still there—staring out of blank stone eyes.

She stooped to look more closely at what was now quite clearly a little statue. It was a sneering, evil tittle elf, a creature of the cracks and holes of the world. Perhaps a mandrake, or a little fee guarding the lands of Faery.

A woods of fabulous spells,
   Old sticks and roots and holes,
   Leannan’s grand dominion…

When she remembered those lines from
Faery
, the menace of the woods evaporated like a rotten mist. As with new eyes she looked around her. What had been hostile was now suffused with wonderment. The little face was not sneering, it was grimacing to frighten any who might threaten its queen. One of her doughty fairy soldiers.

Mandy was delighted. These were the actual woods of the poem. Here a twenty-year-old Constance Collier had written the dream of
Leannan
, the Fairy Queen…

With a newly confident tread, full of gladness and awe, Mandy marched to the top of the rise.

Spreading before her was a magnificent vista indeed. The road had been carefully planned to take advantage of it. It meandered down across the rolling green fields to a long lake dusted with lilies and swans, and thence across the wide pasture that led to the house. How typical of Will T. Turner to describe this place simply as “crumbling.” Had he been forced to leave his car at the gate and come on fool also? Probably trudged this very road, thinking that the gate was rusted closed, the leaves not raked, that there were rather too many lilies in the pond, and the green was high with cockle-burs and dandelions.

And he never noticed that he was in the Land of Dark, where lived the Faery of Constance Collier’s extraordinary creation. Poor Will T. Turner.

Emerging from the woods, Mandy set out across the fields, filling her nostrils with the dry, sharp scent of autumn brush, her mind flashing image after image of paintings that must be painted here.

Late or not, Constance Collier had an illustrator. Amanda Walker had decided that she would not be driven off, not even at the point of a gun.

I’ll do Hansel and Gretel in the woods, of course. And Briar-Rose’s castle from this vista, with the thornbushes choking the ramparts in just this light.

Everywhere she looked there were more glories, wonderful wooden fences all tumbling down, a shattered hayrick, a great rusting contraption of scythes that must once have mowed the lawns.

How exactly right Constance Collier was to let it go to its natural state. If ever there had been happy land, this was it.

Oh, Pollyanna, smite on. You are heading toward a rough meeting with a very difficult old lady. Constance Collier eats illustrators for breakfast. She had quite literally fired the great Hammond Morris by burning the pictures he had done for
Voyage to Dawn
. When she heard that story, Mandy had felt contempt for Constance Collier. But she hadn’t been offered this job then.

As she approached the house, she began to see that it was indeed in serious disrepair. The architecture was Palladian and very elegant, red brick and white columns, a lovely curved side porch, tall empty windows. Leaves were everywhere, choking the gutters, matting the walks, blowing about on the porch.

There wasn’t a sound. Despite the cool air, the bright morning sun was making Mandy sweat. Her portfolio had grown heavier, and she was glad to lean it against the wall when she finally reached the house. She went up between the tall, peeling columns and hunted for a doorbell. She settled for knocking.

Her blows echoed back from within. There wasn’t an answering sound, not the clatter of feet, not a call.

When she knocked again, though, there was a startling flutter of wings at the edge of the porch. Six or seven huge crows wheeled about in the front yard, then settled into an oak and commenced to caw at one another.

“Hello!”

The sound of her voice caused the crows to rise again. They rushed back and forth across the weedy yard, their wings snapping with every turn.

When she knocked, the door rattled. It was obviously unlocked. Telling herself that old people are hard of hearing, Mandy turned the blackened brass knob and pushed the door open.

Inside was a shadowy central hallway with rooms to the left and right. The hall runner was old but fine, the lighting fixtures elegantly fluted. When Mandy pushed the buttons on die switchplate, none of them turned on. She looked at them; bits of wax revealed that they were now used for candles. Halfway down the hall a brand-new Panasonic vacuum cleaner could be seen in an open broom closet. At least there was some electricity still in the house. This touch of modem technology gave her hope, until she saw that the machine was not only new but not even completely unpacked. Its body was still in a plastic bag; as a matter of fact, all the packing material was visible beyond the end of the hall, in die kitchen. Somebody had been wrapping it up, perhaps to send it back.

As she proceeded into the house, the crows crowded onto the front porch, cawing and bickering among themselves, their voices echoing in the silence. But also, there were softer voices, and they were nearby. “You’ve got to be more careful,” said a man. An older man, whispering. An elderly woman: “I
must
keep on. By the Goddess, I’m so close!”

“Miss Collier?”

A gasp at the top of the stairs, then silence. Mandy sensed that she had interrupted a very private conversation. She would have returned to the front door, but by this time she was closer to the kitchen, so she hurried toward the back.

In the center of the kitchen was a heavy oaken table, its legs elaborately carved with gargoyles and grapevines. On it there was a toasting frame, of the kind meant to be held over an open fire, and a partially cut loaf of homemade raisin bread.

As Mandy crossed the floor, she noticed that there were candles in the lighting fixture that hung down from the ceiling.

And then she saw something really amazing: an ancient iron hand pump at the sink in place of the usual faucet. Attached to the wall behind it was a small hot water geyser such as Mandy had seen in the cheap hotels she had stayed in during her European days.

The stove, to the right of the sink, was a huge woodburning iron monster with eight burners across its massive top. “Royal Dawn” was embossed in the ironwork on the oven doors. The witch could have cooked Gretel in such an oven and had room left over for a couple of nice casseroles.

A thrill of childhood fear touched her. She’d never seen this place, but Jimmy Murphy and Bonnie Haver had sneaked in and seen a beautiful young woman cooking at this very stove. “She was pretty but her face was glowing in the firelight,” Jimmy had said. “She was so scary I thought I was going to pee in my pants.”

That had happened ten years ago, half a lifetime for Mandy. If Constance remembered, it probably seemed like yesterday.

From beyond the kitchen window there came the first loud sound Mandy had heard at this house, and it more or less astonished her. It was a splash, followed immediately by the distinct
boing
of a diving board.

Could Constance Collier possibly be in swimming—a woman past eighty, and in autumn? Mandy hurried out the back door and down an overgrown brick walk, which curved around a tangle of cedars. She came now upon another surprise. The walk ended in some brick steps, which led into a formal garden—overgrown, of course—surrounding a swimming pool inlaid with elaborate mosaics which shimmered beneath the agitated water.