Cat Magic

Stone Mountain is the only truly rough peak in the Peconics. Its gray, cracked ridges stretch for about three miles in that otherwise benign chain. They are so loose and treacherous that even the most obsessive rock climbers avoid them as offering too unsubtle a doom. The Appalachian Trail, deferring to the fact that old Stone has been known to slice a good pair of Beans to shreds, skirts the mountain and passes through the orchard-choked exurbia of the little town of Maywell, which huddles beneath the mountain like an Israelite at the feet of Pharaoh.

From the grand and crumbling Collier estate at one end of town to the dark Victorian buildings of Maywell College at the other, the ridges look down on the whole of Maywell. This is not an area of superhighways and roaring commuter buses; Maywell has been bypassed by the roads and the developers. Once again, old Stone is to blame. No highway construction company would bid on a road to cross that miserable expanse of cracked granite, so Maywell remains much as it was a century ago, a town as pretty as it can be, alone, and largely content with its own gentle self.

Maywell prospers in a quiet way, on the orchards and the farms whose produce is trucked off to Philadelphia and New York, and on the maintenance of Maywell College, an institution small in both size and reputation, but more than adequate to provide the town its full share of raucous students and middle culture.

Maywell does not really like the modern world. It has a tendency to look to sorter eras with well-dressed, genteel longing. It is peaceful, moral, and respectable.

It is, in short, just the sort of place where peculiar things happen.

These things may be grim and awful, as was the raising by Brother Simon Pierce of his Resurrection Tabernacle, or pretty much the opposite of grim, such as the witchy goings-on out at the Collier estate.

They may be odd, as in the case of poor Dr. Walker. He was a brilliant biologist whose abrasive personality and dogged obsession with his own bizarre theories made him tiresome to his peers at Yale.

Eventually, when he raved to the newspapers about bringing frogs back to life, he was hurled out. So now he continues his career in this forgotten comer of the academy, teaching freshmen the intricacies of the zygote and plotting the breakthroughs that will vindicate his genius.

Besides its beauty and isolation and its smattering of eccentrics, Maywell has something else odd about it.

This is a bit more serious. This is quite terrible and quite wonderful—if such words have any clear meaning.
Terrible
conjures images of huge, gaping beasts or sulking psychopaths;
wonderful
brings a silken princess and a thornless rose.

Both words might conjure a cat.

Certainly either suggests the great King of the Cats, a creature known almost exclusively to students of obscure Celtic mythology, and holding sway, according to Robert Graves, “upon a chair of old silver” whence he gave “vituperative answers to inquirers who tried to deceive him.” No doubt he/she accounts in part for the androgynous nature of Puss In Boots and was the progenitor of the first Cinderella story,

“The Cat-Cinderella,” which is itself a folk memory of the very ancient legend of the cat as friend of Ishtar, the fierce old mother goddess who once swayed over Sumeria.

Among the fragments of the old mystery religion of the Greeks is the identification of the goddess Diana with a cat. From deep time, the female witch has identified a male cat as her familiar. And, of course, there were the Egyptian cats, most of whom were mummified and persist to this day stacked in the basements of museums.

The extraordinary creature that inhabited the ridges of Stone Mountain, though, was no candidate for a museum. Indeed, at the moment it was very intensely alive, and not out on the windy ridges, but wandering far more delightful realms.

All was not perfect: long ago it had been touched by one of Constance Collier’s spells, and something was tied to its ear.

This was an invisible thread, which led from the delightful realms all the way into Maywell, where it joined the other invisible threads being woven on the loom of the town’s life.

The other threads turned and twisted constantly, crossing as the druggist married the grocer’s daughter, slipping apart when he died, becoming knotted when she also passed on, and so on, the cloth never finished, its invisible patterns ceaselessly shimmering and changing.

Only one of the townspeople, Constance Collier, had both the wisdom and inclination to sit occasionally at the sacred loom and maneuver the threads around a bit, perhaps granting some indigent follower of hers a little good fortune or causing the business affairs of one of her adversaries to come unraveled.

She never touched the thread connected to the mythical cat’s imaginary ear, and hadn’t since she had first tied it, a deed she had done on a soft spring day when she was still full of hope. Many long years had passed since then, while Constance had plotted and spelled and hexed and waited. But she had never needed to call the cat. She had gone from being a beautiful young woman to a wise old one, and had become patient with her lifetime of waiting.

If the thread was pulled, it would bring the cat back to Stone Mountain, and down into innocent, unsuspecting Maywell. There was, however, only one reason to do this appalling thing.

Of late Constance had known renewed hope. There was a chance, after all, that the final chapter in a very old story would at last be written.

Constance, Dr. Walker, Brother Pierce—three of the main characters are in place. There remains only one more, and she is already approaching the town, chugging along in her ancient Volkswagen Beetle.

Even more promising, it is jammed with luggage and easels.

An observer of the invisible could see that the particular thread that is tied to the cat’s ear has wafted down and fallen across Morris Stage Road. The old Volks wheezes, its gears grind, and it moves closer.

Hidden breezes blow the thread about, entangling it in the lower limbs of an autumn-fired birch. Now the thread is tight.

Closer and closer the car comes, its blond young driver peering out. There are no exit markers here. She has been told to take the third right after the big crossroads. She is counting and staring as the car sweeps into the thread. She experiences nothing more than a trickle and a sneeze, but off in the cat’s realm things are quite different. The cat is dragged, howling with pain and anger, all the way to the dreary, windswept ridges of old Stone.

For a moment nothing more happens, but that is only because the cat’s eyes are shut tight.

As the shock wears off, it blinks, then begins to gaze.

Huge, golden cat eyes appear, hanging above an otherwise empty expanse of rock.

The cat glares down into the weave of Maywell’s life, to see what fool has dared this conjuring.

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

    The desert sighs in the bed,

And a crack in the tea-cup opens

    A lane to the land of the dead.

—
W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”

The frog wanted desperately to hop. But it couldn’t hop. It jerked, then jerked again. It stayed where it was, clamped down tight. It flexed, tightened, jerked. The hot, dry hurting kept on. The frog worked its tongue. Pain. It tried to move its head. Pain. Things were piercing it. Again and again it tried to hop. But it stayed right where it was, in this hard white place with no leaves and no whirring wings and no sharp delicious bugs to wrestle from the air.

It tried to hop.

Still, it did not move.

It tried. Tried. Tried.

It hurt, it had to move, it had to
hop
.

“There we go—no—hell. Bonnie, the animal is still too slick.”

Painful, tormenting, scraping all over its back, hot and dry. It hopped hopped hopped.

“Thanks. Now… yeah!”

“That did it, George. The probe’s well seated. I haw a good signal.”