Cat Magic (9 page)

“Handling does that to them sometimes. But it’ll only last a few minutes.”

Long-hands put Tess in a cage so small that she couldn’t even turn around. Certainly she couldn’t run it.

All she could do was lie down and feel the hard bumpers push on her stomach and her knees and her hands and her head. But this was Long-hands’ will, and Tess was not strong enough to break it.

“Okay, Clark, she’s in the damn thing.”

“I’m getting a good reading. Nice and strong. It’s a pleasure to work with something that has a decent microvolt level. Those frogs are almost below the threshold of observability.”

Tess soon realized that the little cage didn’t smell like Long-hands. So that meant he had freed Tess. But Tess couldn’t move, not unless she pulled and kicked.

“Hurry up! She’s getting crazy again!”

“Ready on the countdown.”

“Forget the countdown! Just do it! Go!”

“Okay, power’s up. I’m activating the field—now!”

The whole world collapsed on Tess. She lost everything, her strength, her voice, her smells, her sounds.

She screamed and screamed and screamed but there was no noise, there was no calling to Gort or even Long-hands to help Tess out of this awful nothingness. And falling! Falling and she couldn’t find branches, she couldn’t clutch leaves!

To the ground, the leopards, the hyenas, the stinking monkey-eating monsters that slip as shadows in darkness!

Terror slammed her like a great hand, she saw bared teeth and heard snarling death-growls, and she clutched and climbed and kicked—emptiness.

Then she smelled the most beautiful scent she had ever known, the best and most beloved of all scents, from when she lived in the forest where they ate green pellets sweet off the trees and danced between branches. She smelled the milky-soft breast scent of her mother.

Mother, it’s me!

She clutched soft mother fur and warm skin. And mother took her between her legs where it was so, so safe, and began preening her.

Around them there arose the whole old forest again, the same trees, the same delicious green water, the same thunder-cold-joyful waterfall, the sweet, fresh smells of monkeys everywhere.

Mother again. Forest again. And all around in the trees the gib-gabber chatter of the Roaring-water-nearby troupe, the Clown, the Great Gray, the Little Browns, all the girl squealers.

Her mother preened down behind her ears where the mites got itchy and thick.

“Beautiful! Bring her up.”

The voice that had resounded across the sky left a smoking yellow rip where it had passed.

Mother hissed danger and Tess grabbed fur and they were off! They swung with the troupe through the bending, sighing trees.

A white wind was following them. White, dead! It was crushing the whole forest, the tall trees falling before it like sticks. It gasped and wheezed, sounding like something enormous marching through the wood.

Mother swept along, faster and faster, raging as she went, screaming back at the huge monster that had come through the tear in the sky. Its feet stomped and thundered the ground, its breath washed over them.

Tess screamed when she smelled it, for it was the odor of Long-hands and Little Yellow and their awful place-without-monkeys where Tess never, ever wanted to go again!

Do not take me from my forest, do not take me from my troupe!

The giant came closer and closer. Mother was screaming, carrying her Tess now low to the ground, now high in the branches, darting and turning as only a mother could, rushing along beneath low shrubs and among the rocks, uncaring of her own cuts, then grabbing a branch and sweeping up higher and higher to the very top of the forest and leaping as if she had wings.

There was a great thud.

The forest evaporated.

Mother fell screaming away into nowhere.

Tess felt the hard little cage poking her from all sides. Agony exploded in her.

“Good Christ, Bonnie, tranq her down, tranq her down!”

“I’ll get the gun. I can’t do it by hand, she’s too wild!”

“Oh, Christ, look at that—open the cage—Clark, give me a hand. She’s going to crack the ceramics.”

Tess leaped up into the hateful stinking ugly place, her heart breaking for mother and forest and all the joys just tasted. She jumped to the floor and ran, crashing into walls, screaming so loud she heard Gort screaming back from the other room.

Not that hateful place again, not that poor old Gort when she could have mother and forest and the troupe! No no no no no!

Monkeys cannot beg for mercy. They can only make the gesture of submission. She made it. She made it to the walls, to the ceiling, to the floor, seeking the terrible giant who had dragged her back here, trying to somehow say, I submit; I, Tess, submit to your power.

So let me go home.

The monkey stopped moving. Bonnie went up and checked its eyes. “She’s unconscious.”

“I was afraid she’d break those coils.” Bonnie gathered the creature up in her arms and returned her to her cage. She reconnected the electrocardiographic leads to the sockets in the animal room so that Clark could continue his monitoring.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” George said. He stared down at the sleeping rhesus.

“I have to admit it, George. Yes, it is. A higher animal.”

“Clark, are you okay on the readings?”

“She looks normal from here, George. Looks good.”

“Bonnie, I told you this job would be an adventure.”

“It’s certainly that.”

George reached in and touched the fur of the comatose rhesus. “She hates my guts, you know that? She nearly bit through those handling gloves.”

“You show her you’re afraid of her. She tries to dominate you.”

George drew close to Bonnie. “I wonder what she experienced.”

“Nothing too pleasant, judging from the way she acted when we brought her back.”

“I think we can be sure that was a side effect related to the reestablishment of the brain’s electrical field. I suspect she’ll be fine when she wakes up.”

“You might be right.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I’m convinced. I’ll be even more convinced when she wakes up normal.”

“Let’s go look over Clark’s shoulder. The EEG ought to tell us a lot.”

Clark was standing before the electroencephalograph watching the readout. His face was sharp with concentration.

“How’s it look?”

“Still normal in every way.” He smiled. “The Stohlmeyer Foundation is going to like this.”

“What must that monkey know?” Bonnie asked. “I wonder if death is like a dream or just black?Probably a sort of descent into zero.”

George was watching her closely. He realized that this was the moment to broach the subject of Bonnie’s taking the journey herself. “It’s going to be the greatest adventure in human history to find that out.”

“Nobel Prize time, George,” Clark said.

“Assuming we proceed to a human trial,” George added. There. He had said it. All three of them knew that two more coils would make the cage large enough for Bonnie’s body mass. And they could get two more the same way they got the others. No money, just some more lies and another hot purchase order.

All that stood in their way was Bonnie herself.

“Somebody’s going to get the answer to a hell of a secret,” she muttered.

“Somebody’s going to become very famous. A heroine.”

Her eyes snapped to meet his. She had caught the gender. “I know I’m the obvious choice. But the cage isn’t big enough for me.”

“If Tess wakes up all right, that’ll be the deciding factor. I can get two more coils with no problem.”

Realizing for the first time what George was driving at, Clark went gray. “Constance isn’t going to be comfortable with this. We haven’t done the testing we said we would do. She might forbid us.”

“Hell, don’t tell Constance! Don’t tell her a thing! Just do your job, Clark.”

“My job is to report to her, you know that.”

George could picture Connie’s reaction to his precipitate scheme: “Oh, no, don’t let him do that. He’s so impatient.” Then, next day: “Clark, you must tell George to hurry. Time is very short.” George had to convince Clark not to report to her. “Now, Clark, you and I both know what Constance will say. She’ll say that time is short.”

“You’ll never convince her to go to a human trial so soon.”

“It isn’t her business! I make the scientific decisions. You go to her if you want to, but I won’t be here when you come back. I just can’t work with the Stohlmeyer people looking Over one shoulder and Constance looking over the other!”

“I have to inform her.”

“Do it and the project is over. Canceled.” Clark squirmed. Good, he was afraid to take responsibility for that. George pressed his argument. “Tess is alive.”

“You’re a witch, Clark,” Bonnie said. “Be faithful to the needs of the witches. If Constance dies before her successor is initiated, what will become of the Covenstead?”

Good for Bonnie! There was a game girl’. “So make your choice, Clark. Report to Constance and I quit.

Or do your job right here and now and we all succeed together.”

Bonnie put her hand to her throat. “I wish we could smoke in here. I’d really like a cigarette.” She laughed. “I’ve decided to do it,” she said. There was wonder in her voice, fear in her eyes. Now she whispered. “I want to know… to be the first.” Her tongue moved along her lips. Once again George saw how very beautiful she was, the delicate lines of her face, the casual sensuality of her mouth, the frankness of her eyes. She was precious to him, and he ached to kiss her, and feel that mouth open to him. Her cheeks were flushed.

“You’ll be an adventurer. Afterward someone as beautiful as you—the press’ll make you a star.”

“Constance will never allow press,” Clark put in.

“Constance will have no choice,” George snapped. “If Bonnie wants press, by the gods she gets press!”

Bonnie went over to the apparatus on the lab bench. She touched the gleaming black coils of the electromagnets. “I could sit in it as is if you could make it a little higher.”

“No. I want you lying down. Safety.” He did not add that, as a dead body, she would slump over from a sitting position and simply fall to the floor, taking the whole apparatus with her. She walked around the bench, looking at the array of devices. “You know,” she said at last, “I am going to know once I do this. I mean, you guys, I am going to
know
.” She smiled, and when she did, George thought her as soft as a newly opened rose. “I’m a second-rate witch, but I’ll bet I’d be a first-rate media sensation.” She smiled her brightest smile. “I wonder if I can act. Maybe I could parlay it into a film career.”

“Not if you can act.” Clark muttered.

Privately George doubted that she would be all that famous outside of scientific circles. What she was going to bring back, after all, was the news that death was death. Nothing. Blackness. Not much newspaper copy in that. “You’ll be like an astronaut,” he said.

She came to him and kissed his cheek. The two of them drew closer together, the explorers.

In her cage Tess screamed once, her anguish surfacing even through the drug-induced sleep. Then she subsided, and slept on.

It had been hours since she left the Collier estate, and Mandy’s rage and despair had not subsided in the least. She had driven around town until she was no longer too mad to cry. Then she had taken to the privacy of her uncle’s house and locked herself in her bedroom.

Now even the tears were exhausted. She lay on her bed listening to the evening sounds of the neighborhood. A leaf blower roared, a child called again and again a name she could not quite understand.

She certainly wasn’t interested in the banalities of a small-town evening. Her mind still orbited her loss: that portfolio had contained images from her soul. Without it she felt herself more alone than she could ever remember being, the center of a very private circle of pain.

The big black cat appeared. She stared, confused. Where had it come from? The bedroom door was locked.

It leaped onto the bed and rubbed against her thigh. Its fur felt silky and nice beneath her hand. As she stroked it the cat stretched. She seemed to remember from her childhood that Uncle George disliked cats, but until he came home and demanded it be put out, this magnificent beast was staying here. The cat moved suddenly to the far side of the bed. “Here, kitty,” she said, and patted the place beside her. Her words sounded silly: you didn’t say “kitty” to a near panther like this. It lay down and commenced staring at her. She found herself gazing back into its eyes. “You’re such a nice old tom,” she murmured. It really was very beautiful, with its night-black fur and green eyes. She listened for purring, but there was none.

One could look very deeply into this cat’s eyes. If ail cats were like this one, gypsies would tell fortunes by gazing into their eyes. But cats generally look away.

In his eyes she could see her own face. How did she appear to him? Was she lovely, ugly, or what? Did he think of her as a goddess or a child? She touched his shredded ear and got a throaty growl in response. “Sorry.” In apology she stroked his back. His muscles shuddered beneath her hand, as would a man she was stroking to arousal.

As would a man. But she had no man. And she had no work. Some of those paintings had consumed months.

Constance Collier had been furious with her crows and most apologetic, but nothing could alter the loss of the portfolio. Given that Mandy was twenty-three, unmarried, childless, and most essentially alone those paintings and sketches had been her family, her center, the reason and sense of her life.

The tears came back, stinging her eyes. Furiously trying to quell them, she told herself that the pictures were not everything. Of course not
everything
, but they were her best. Among them were her treasures: her portrait of Godfather Death, which in some miraculous way had captured the laughter as well as the menace of Old Nick.

How could she ever do that again?

Or Rapunzel shaking out her hair, all that blond glory bursting in strands of morning sun—painted strand by delicate strand. Will T. Turner had made her laugh by comparing her technique with the masterful Van Eyck brothers of fifteenth-century Holland. But there was something in it: she had spent a great deal of time studying their work. Detail. Care. Richness of vision. Not the ideals of twentieth-century art perhaps, but she thought of herself as being from long, long ago. She was lost in this quick age. Her art belonged to the perfect grace of the past—even the very distant past.