Cat Magic (11 page)

Before the sink was the trapdoor to the cellar. She had not opened it earlier—what point, the cat could not have gone down there. She did not want to be alone here, not with the shadows and the moon clock.

Maybe the trapdoor had been ajar, falling closed as the animal passed. When she pulled the ring, the door came up with oiled ease. From below rose the familiar odor of me basement, unchanged since her girlhood. She peered down into the darkness. There was a click, followed by the faint roar of the furnace starting. Yellow, flickering tight from the firebox reflected off the walls.

“Kitty?”

There was no other sound.

Mandy reached into the dark and felt for a light switch, then remembered that there was only a string at the bottom of the stairs. She began to descend the rough wooden steps in the faint shaft of light from the mudroom above.

She reached the floor, found the string, pulled it. No light: the bulb was long since burned out.

Once her eyes got used to it, the combination of the glowing firebox and the mudroom light made it possible for her to see a little. She glanced around, ducking beneath the fat tentacles that issued from the top of the furnace, the ducts carrying their heat to the reaches of the house. This was the way she had come on the most secret missions of pubescent love, a willowy, confident little girl, her nervous chosen boy in tow.

Opposite the furnace was a door set in a roughly made wall of cheap pine paneling, the builder’s fifty-dollar “wine cellar,” and the scene of those early experiments, one or two of which had left indelibly torrid impressions, the first, confused genital contact and the exploding pillow of pleasure that came with it. She had held his shaft in that room, too afraid and excited to move, listening with half an ear to
General Hospital
on the TV in the family room above.

On the door now was a rude sign painted in red ink:

“Kitten Kate Club. Keep Out!”

The sight of the rough letters pierced Mandy’s heart: this must have also been George’s kid’s secret room.

More evidence of lives departed. Did those kids also remember their little room, even now whisper about it?

It was not easy for Mandy to open the door, but she did it. When she saw what was on the other side, she could not even scream.

She just stood, gasping, disbelieving, staring. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, were painted and scratched and clawed with images of cats. Panthers crouched, wildcats leaped, toms and pussies lounged and crawled and spat, and here and there was a photograph of a dismembered cat. Spiked to the wall were bits of cats, fur, and shattered bones, and in one comer a gape-jawed feline skull.

There was a dirty sheet wadded on the floor. The place stank of something like rancid grease. A votive candle stood in the center of the mess.

There was hatred here that seemed beyond the capacity of a human being. She realized that this was no children’s place.

Only an adult mind had the patience to create this. A tortured, confused mind. Profoundly insane.

No wonder Kate had taken her children and run.

Mandy shrank back, closed the door to the ugly secret, then returned quickly to the mudroom. Her cat wasn’t in the basement. She wished she did not know what was. She dropped the trapdoor, went back to the kitchen, turned on a light. She sat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, feeling the secret of the house like a festering, rotting sore on her own body.

   How odd the Girl’s life looks—

   Behind this soft Eclipse—

She whispered the words into the yellow Formica tabletop. Emily Dickinson knew secrets of women. So perfect to call me predicament a soft eclipse. Emily… you knew so much, wise Emily. And you hid on your little farmstead, far from life, far from the madness of men. I wish I were there with you right now.

Behind this soft eclipse…

To George, womankind, it seemed, was a cat. Kitten Kate.

So sick. So sad. So dangerous. She must leave here at once.

She stood up, thinking to go and gather her things. But there was movement outside. As footsteps ran up the front walk, her flesh crawled.

“Mandy!” The voice was high, shredded like that of a desperate woman.

“Mandy, let me in!”

“George?”

“Yes!” He howled out the word, rattling the knob as he did so. His voice was literally squeaking with rage: Miserably frightened, feeling trapped, Mandy unbolted the door.

He swarmed past her, muttering, stalking as dangerously as a spider through the shadowy house.

“Sonofabitch! Son of a fucking bitch!”

He disappeared into the bedroom. At once thuds and crashes started. “George!” She found him hunting through the bottom drawer of the dresser. Scattered around him on the floor were shirts and belts and about a dozen fat bullets. “George, what are you doing?”

“That sonofabitching Jesus freak killed my rhesus! My
rhesus
!” He produced a large black target pistol with a long barrel, began scrambling for the bullets.

“George, what’s got into you? Put that stupid thing down!”

“I’m gonna blow that bastard away! I was right next door in the lab and somehow or other he got in and killed my monkeys with a knitting needle.” He stopped, every muscle in his body tensing, his eyes screwed closed, his lips twisted back from his teeth. He clutched the gun in white, trembling fingers. “He stabbed them!” A huge, terrible sob tore through him, more a bellow than a cry—

He got up.

“Give me the gun, George.” He laughed, started for the door. Had she thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have dared to stop him. But her instincts were stronger than reason: she grabbed his elbow and spun him around. “You don’t even have any proof.”

“I don’t need proof! There’s nobody in the world who hates me like he hates me.”

“His whole congregation. You said yourself he preached against you. It could have been any one of them.”

“He may not be
personally
guilty, but—”

“You aren’t a court of law. You have no right to take his life. Go talk to him, threaten him, even spit on him if that makes you feel better, because, George, I am sure he is a bastard. But you give that gun to me.” She fought down her terror. He was so crazy. She couldn’t let him destroy himself and another human being, too. She must not fail to get the weapon.

He swayed, then bowed his head. “You’re right, of course. I really can’t afford to be put in jail.”

“Of course not. Give it to me, George.”

Suspicion flashed through his eyes, to be replaced by an expression too mixed to come into a sane face: it was made of cruelty and love and something that might have been laughter.

He gave her the pistol, which she returned to its place at the back of the drawer.

“George, I want you to try and calm yourself down. You need rest, and I think you could use a doctor, too.”

“I need to frighten that maniac into leaving me alone. And I think I know how to do it.”

“Now, look, George.”

“I’ll go mad if I don’t confront him! I’ve got to do what I can for myself, don’t you see that?”

There was no way out of this. The man was going to have his battle. “Come on, then,” she said. “If you insist on going, I suppose I can’t object. At least let me drive you.”

“You don’t need to get involved.”

“I said I’ll drive you. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”

“He ruined me!”

“You’ll keep working! You’ll find a way.”

She had hoped that he would calm down riding around in the Volks. Then they would stop somewhere, have a drink, and she would take him home. When he was asleep, she would leave for a motel.

Tomorrow she would deal with the issue of the Collier estate and the job.

He looked all in, shivering, huddled in his seat. “My only alternative now is to go to a human test and hope the Stohlmeyer people overlook the sloppy pretesting. That’s all I can do to save the project.”

“A human test?”

“It’ll be safe enough. Hey, you took a wrong turn. The Tabernacle’s at the comer of North and Willow.”

Too bad he had noticed that. She took a right onto Taylor from Bridge Street, still trying to engage him in a diversionary conversation. “I met the great Constance Collier. If was quite an experience.”

He couldn’t have been less interested. “I’ll bet.”

Dull pain returned as she recalled her own tragedy, but she said nothing about it now. “Her estate is perfectly beautiful, And she seems rather good-hearted, actually. Despite all I’ve been told.”

“Constance Collier is a great woman. She means an enormous amount to me. Since your time, Brother Pierce has become her sworn enemy. He came in 1981, after you left. Last year he and his minions tried to get Miss Collier to put her name on something called
The Christian Faery
, and she responded by suing them for using her characters. He claims she’s a pagan.”

“That’s part of being a witch, isn’t it?”

“To some extent. At any rate, witches certainly aren’t Christian. That’s what’s gotten him so worked up.

Take a right on North Street. We’re almost there.”

The Tabernacle was a low building, obviously a cheaply converted warehouse. Cars were parked helter-skelter in the dusty lot that surrounded it. Light shone from within through windows that had been covered by “stained glass” Con-Tact paper. A wide sign, clean and bright and professionally painted, loomed twenty feet above the roof of the building. I AM THE LIGHT, proclaimed the black letters against the white background. Enormous carbon-arc floods crackled at the four corners of the sign, blasting it with preternatural brightness. From behind the stained-glass windows came a powerful roar of song: “O God, our help in ages past…”

Mandy could tell by the cars that Brother Pierce’s followers were working people, most no doubt unemployed and desperate in this steel and coal country, clinging to his simple answers for support in a hard time. Despite herself she was moved by the power and resolution in their voices.

“I didn’t expect a service,” George snapped. “But I guess the guy’s always got a service going on here nowadays. The whole damn township worships at his alligator-shod feet. The ones who don’t follow Constance, that is.”

“Why don’t we go have a drink? Come back after it’s over.”

George ignored her. Before Mandy could stop him he was through the door. She followed.

The church was not filled to capacity, but there was a very respectable crowd. Mandy had thought that the fundamentalist movement was on the wane—but easily three hundred people were here, and on a weeknight. There were many young people, no doubt students from the college.

“Welcome, brother and sister!” A puffy, sweating usher rolled toward them from his station near the door. He continued over the last bars of the hymn. “I believe you’re new, aren’t you? Praise the Lord who has brought you into his Light.”

“I want to see Brother Pierce!”

The usher’s voice dropped to a whisper as the hymn stopped. “Well, now, he’s the one with the white hair, the tall man right up at the front.” He smiled. “That is Brother Pierce. If you’re here to offer repentance, you’re not too late. He hasn’t called the sinners forth yet.”

“I want to see Brother Pierce!”

“George, keep it down!”

“Brother Pierce! I’m Dr. George Walker of the Biology Department!”

Faces turned, some expressions quizzical, some darkening at his tone. At the front of the church the bright blue eyes framed by the white mane of hair flickered to intense life. It occurred to Mandy that both of these men might be psychotic. And yet there was something very different about them: where George seemed cruel, there was about Brother Pierce something of the terrible kindness of the ignorant—the sort of kindness that used to burn witches to make sure they would go to heaven.

“I want to know why you killed my laboratory animals, Brother Pierce. Why you destroyed my experiment! Was it because it would free people from the fear of death, which is what you use to enslave them?” His voice cracked and trembled, but did not die away.

Now accompanied by three much younger men, the usher rushed up the aisle behind George. Mandy came after them, her mind spinning. George enraged was a human fireball. It took courage to challenge a fanatic in the middle of a crowd of his followers.

“I said I am Dr. George Walker—”

“
I know who you are!
” Brother Pierce’s right arm came up, his finger pointed. “And I know you cannot help being here. The demon brought you, for you are but his instrument. But I love you in Christ, George, we all do.” He raised his arms, nodded.

The entire congregation responded: “We love you in Christ.” The joy among them, the warmth, was at once overpowering and affecting. Mandy was not sure she would have recoiled had one of them taken her hand.

“You shut up,” George roared, “all of you! You killed my animals and I want restitution. I demand restitution!”

“Good people, we have never done violence to this man, much less to the poor creatures he sees fit to torment in his heathen experiments.”

“You killed my frog, you killed both of my rhesus monkeys!”

“We did nothing of the kind. Satan has closed your eyes to the good of the world. I urge you to kneel and pray with us for the deliverance of your soul.” He turned and knelt to the cross that hung against the back wall.

“You lying bastard!”

“O Lord, we beg you to open your heart to this lost one, that he may be delivered from the spell of the Deceiver!”

“Shut up, you old shit! You
shit
!”

Two of the young men took George’s shoulders. He shrugged them off, took a menacing step toward Brother Pierce.

Mandy had to act. If she didn’t, these people were going to throw off the patina of loving-kindness and give George the beating of his life. “Leave him alone!” She pushed past the ushers. “I’ll take him home.”

She put her arm around his waist. “Come on, George.”

“Go with her,” Brother Pierce said sweetly. “Go with that unholy harlot!” His blue eyes were glaring at her, lit to shimmering coals by the fire in him. “You pagan.”

George was most definitely not the only madman here. She must have given some sign of her thoughts, because Brother Pierce instantly sensed her dismay and raised his accusing finger. He pointed it directly at her.