The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (3 page)

The snake had been sleeping when Lillian curled up in the grass, all coiled up only inches from her foot. Dreaming, Lillian moved a leg suddenly, kicking at a milkweed head in her dream, which, in turn,
disturbed the snake’s own drowsy nap. The bright pain from its first strike woke her, but by then it was already too late. It struck a second time, a third. She tried to rise, to call Aunt for help, but the venom stole her strength and dropped her back onto the ground, shivering and cold.

She knew she was dying, just like the little girl in the song.

The fog of pain already lay too thick for her to see the cats come out of the long grass. Some of them she would have known because they came to visit her in the morning. Others were strangers, cats no one saw, they lived so deep in the forest, but they, too, knew of the skinny, half-wild girl who fed their cousins.

The one Lillian called Big Orange—almost the size of a bobcat, with the russet fur of a fox—was in the lead. He pounced on the snake and bit off its head,
snap
, just like that. Black Nessie batted the head away with a quick swipe of her paw. Two of the kittens jumped on the snake’s thrashing body, growling and clawing and biting, but it was already in its death throes and couldn’t harm anyone else. The other cats gathered in their circle, only this time, instead of calling up cat dreams, they had a dying girl in the middle of them.

Lillian wasn’t aware of any of this. She was falling up into a bright tunnel of light, which was an odd experience, because she’d never fallen up before. She hadn’t even known it was possible.

She wasn’t scared now, or even in pain. She just wished the voices she heard would stop talking, because they were holding her back. They wouldn’t let her fall all the way up into the tunnel of light.

“We have to save her.”

“We can’t. It’s too late.”

“Unless…”

“Unless we change her into something that isn’t dying.”

“But Father said we must never again—”

“I’ll accept the weight of Father’s anger.”

“We all will.”

“We’ll make her one of our own—then he won’t mind.”

“He minded that time we gave the mice wings.”

“This is different.”

“This time we’re saving a friend.”

They turned their attention to Lillian and woke cat magic under the boughs of their old beech tree. First they swayed back and forth, in time with each other. Then their voices lifted in a strange, scratchy
harmony like a kitchen full of fiddles not quite in tune with each other, but not so out of tune as to be entirely unpleasant. A golden light rose up from their music to glow in the air around them. It hung there, pulsing to the rhythm of their song for a long moment, before it went from cat to cat in the circle, ’round and ’round.

Three times the light went around the circuit before it left them and came to rest on the dying girl in the middle of their circle. The cats lifted their heads. They could see the soul of the girl floating up through the boughs of the beech. Their scratchy song rose higher and the light rose with it, chasing after the soul like a rope of golden light. When it finally caught up, the rope of light wrapped around her, pulling Lillian’s soul back into her body.

The cats fell silent, staring at the rise and fall of Lillian’s chest, and exchanged pleased looks with one another. But then, frightened by what they had done, by what Father might do when he found out, they retreated back into the forest.

L
illian woke up and had a long, lazy stretch. What an odd dream, she thought. She lifted a paw, licked it, and had just started to clean her face when she realized what she was doing. She held the paw in front of her face. It was definitely a paw, covered in fur and minus a thumb. Where was her hand?

She looked at the rest of herself and saw only a cat’s calico body, as lean and lanky as her own, but covered in fur and certainly not the one she knew.

“What’s become of me?” she said.

“You’re a kitten,” a voice said from above.

She looked up to find a squirrel looking down at her from a branch of the beech. He seemed to be laughing at her.

“I’m not a cat, I’m a girl,” she told him.

“And I’m an old hound dog,” the squirrel replied.

Then he made a passable imitation of a hound’s mournful howl and bounded off, higher up into the tree.

“But I
am
a girl,” Lillian said.

She started to get up but she seemed to have too many legs and sprawled back onto the grass.

“Or at least I was.”

She tried to get up again, moving gingerly until she realized that this cat’s body she was in knew how to get around. Instead of worrying about how to get up and move, she had to let herself move naturally, the way she did when she was a girl.

This time when she stood she saw the body of the headless snake, and it all came back to her. She backed away, the hair rising all along her spine, her tail puffing out. It hadn’t been a dream.

She’d been snakebit. She’d been dying. And then… and then… what? She remembered a tunnel of light and voices.

Fairies, she thought. The fairies had come to rescue her.

“Squirrel!” she called up into the branches of the tree. “Did you see the fairies? Did you see them change me?”

There was no reply.

“I don’t think I want to be a cat,” she said.

Now she
really
had to find the fairies.

By the time she’d bounded all the way down to the creek, she was more comfortable in her new body, though no happier about being in it. There were no fairies about, but then there never were when she was looking for them. What was she going to do? She couldn’t go through the rest of her life as a cat.

Finding a quiet pool along the bank, she looked in. And here was the strangest thing of all: There was her own girl’s face looking back at her from the water. When she lifted what was plainly a paw, the reflection lifted a hand.

Lillian sat back on her haunches to consider this.

“They changed you,” a voice said from above. “Now you’re not quite girl, not quite cat.”

She looked up to see an old crow perched on a branch.

“Do you mean the fairies?” she asked.

“No, the cats.”

“The cats?” she said. “But why?”

“You were dying. They had no madstone to draw the poison out, nor milk to soak it in, nor hands to
do the work and hold the stone in place. So they did what they could. They changed you into something that’s not dying.”

Lillian had seen a madstone before. Harlene Welch had one. Her husband found it in the stomach of a deer he was field-dressing, a smooth, flat, grayish-looking stone about the size of a silver dollar. You had to soak it in milk and then lay it against the bite, where it would cling, only falling off when all the poison had been drawn out. It worked on bites from both snakes and rabid animals.

“Will I be like this forever?” Lillian asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” the crow said.

“What does that mean?”

“You know the stories,” he said. “What was changed once can be changed again.”

“I don’t know that story,” Lillian said. “I don’t know any stories about snakes. I only know that song about the awful, dreadful snake, and the little girl dies in it.”

The crow nodded his head. “That’s a sad song.”

“Can you tell me what to do?”

“Can’t.”

“But—”

“Not won’t,” the crow said, “but can’t. I know the stories, but the stories don’t tell how one thing is changed into another, just that it is. You have to ask someone who knows something about magic.”

“Like the cats.”

“Well, now,” the crow said, “any other day and I’d say yes to that. But that’s a big magic those cats did, and they’ll be hiding now.”

“Hiding from what?”

“You know.”

Lillian shook her head. “But I don’t. I don’t seem to know
anything
anymore.”

The crow looked one way, then another.

“Him,” he said in a soft croak. “They’ll be hiding from him. Cats are magic, but they’re not supposed to work magic. He doesn’t like that.”

Lillian gave a nervous look around herself as well, though she had no idea what she was looking for.

“Who are you talking about?” she whispered.

“The Father of Cats.”

Lillian’s eyes went wide. “There really
is
a Father of Cats?”

“Says the girl who’s always out looking for fairies.”

“How do you know that?”

The crow’s chest feathers puffed a little.

“Well, now,” he said. “There’s not much goes on in these woods that I don’t know about.”

“But you can’t help me.”

“I didn’t say that. The problem is that the Father of Cats is too big a piece of magic for the likes of you or me.”

The Father of Cats. Every time the crow said that name, Lillian felt a shiver go running up her spine. There wasn’t anybody ’round here didn’t know some story about that old black panther who was supposed to haunt these hills. They said he snatched babies right out of their cribs and crunched on their bones up in the boughs of some tall, tall tree. He plucked livestock from the barn and travelers from the road.
When he was angry, thunderstorms rumbled high in the mountains and great winds ripped at the homesteads, rattling shutters and carrying away roofs and sheds.