Cat Magic (12 page)

“You demon! You dare to bring your filth up from the pit.”

She tried to reply through a dry mouth, but her words were only whispered. “I’m a perfectly decent—”

Brother Pierce’s voice rose in an instant to a spitting, overamplified bellow. “Yea, you are a demon! For I see you as you are. Oh, yes! Yea, ‘they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abadon!’ ”

Mandy was too astonished to make a sound, even to move. Why was this man suddenly so enraged, and at her? Why was he attacking her instead of George?

“You are the pagan’s servant! You sit at the feet of the evil that we bear among us!”

Oh. He must know that she was to be working with Constance. Big deal. “Come on, George,” she managed to say despite her fluffy mouth. “These people aren’t worth our time.”

“I’ll get you, Pierce. I’ll see you behind bars!”

“George, forget it. He’s a superstitious fool.”

“I call down the Love of the Lord upon you, I lay your sins in his Light. Lord, Lord, help us to love these poor lost ones, help us to save them!”

Mandy turned away, her temper just barely under control. “We oughta come back and burn this place down,” George murmured as they went together down the aisle—

“I couldn’t agree more,” she hissed.

Back in the car they sat silently for a moment. “Maybe we can have that drink now,” Mandy said as she tried to control her shaking. ‘“Then I’ll take you home and put you to bed.”

George remained quiet until the car was in motion. “I can’t go home now,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got to prepare for the next step.”

There was no need to ask what he meant; she knew. Having delivered his threat to Brother Pierce, he was going to go back to his lab and test his process on a human being.

Should she warn his co-workers of the state he was in? No. That would be pointlessly destructive.

Maybe George kept the true depths of his madness in the basement of his mind as well as the house.

Tonight’s performance was quite understandable even in a sane man. She contented herself with an admonition.

“Be careful, George. Don’t hurt anybody.”

“Just take me back to my lab. I’ve got work to do.”

Despite its gracious old homes, its broad trees, the elegance of its brick streets, Mandy now realized that in the years since she left town, Maywell had become seriously infected. There was no glib explanation for what had sickened it. The infection was hidden; it lurked behind the glowing windows of evening, drifted like smoke in the soft laughter of the night. Five years ago people had tolerated Constance Collier.

Now, because of the coming of a single man, they were being taught to hate her.

Mandy could not return to George’s house, and now for more than personal reasons. The thought of meeting Brother Pierce’s people prowling the night made her go cold. Between them and the basement room, there was no peace for her in her old home.

After she dropped George off at his lab, Mandy drove for a time, trying to calm down. Once the town’s beauty had also been its truth, but its bleaker comers, the impoverished houses along Bartlett, the run-down trailer park near Brother Pierce’s Tabernacle, seemed its greater reality now. Had the Grimm’s project not been of such importance to her career, she would have left right now, and forever. But as she rolled past Church Row on Main Street, with the town common on one side and the three churches on the other, the white Episcopal with its elegant steeple, the Presbyterian neo-Gothic, and the ancient Friends Meeting House that predated the Revolutionary War, she could almost believe that Maywell was healthy still, and that Brother Pierce’s glaring, buzzing sign was not glowing just beyond the trees.

A black truck charged her lights. She swerved and jammed on her brakes. “Damn.” What was happening to her? She considered herself a steady and deliberate soul, and here she was drifting out of her lane.

But there was a reason, for a vivid imagining was sweeping through her. It came like the white wind that sometimes invaded her dreams, so powerfully that she just had time to stop the car before she lost all contact with Maywell.

The road in front of her disappeared, the trees lining it became a high stockade, the air grew thick with the stink of roasting meat and burning hair.

Screams of agony mixed with low merriment. She was no longer sitting in a car, but rather standing against a rough wooden stake. She felt a coarser cloth upon her skin and knew the weight of a thick, sputtering taper in her hands. Chains lashed her body to the stake. She heard the gobbling crackle of a great fire, then saw red glowing in the faggots that were stacked around her feet, almost up to her waist.

She remembered words of consolation from long ago, when someone had said to her, “If you are to be taken to the pyre, never fear. Drugs will reach you, and you will feel naught!”

When was that? Not in this life. She stared helplessly at an impossible, spectral crowd rushing at her, men and women and dirty little weasels of children, all bearing fiery torches and bunches of twigs, which they threw at her feet.

Then a long tongue of fire licked her legs, so hot it felt cold for an instant. Then it was as if somebody were whipping her furiously, as if she were being scraped to death with a red-hot file. With a hiss her hair flared up. She felt her face dissolve like a skin of milk.

Oh, they have ruined me, they have destroyed my beauty. And I was the most beautiful thing they had.

I was their witch.

As abruptly as if a projector had been turned off, Maywell reappeared around her, the lamplit brick street, the dancing shadows of the trees. She sat a moment, too stunned by the hallucination to move.

She slumped at the wheel.

That witch-burning crowd had been
real
.

She recalled that modem anthropologists now believed that witchcraft was an earlier, pre-Christian religion, nothing more. Christianity had branded them evil and turned their Horned God into the Devil because they were competition. Too reverenced to be branded a demon, their Mother Goddess had become the Blessed Virgin.

Or so said some anthropologists.

There was a deeper mystery, though. Mandy saw in her mind’s eye the rage coming into Brother Pierce’s kindly face… she heard Constance’s ravens screaming, remembered the strange, lascivious young man, Robin, his naked skin shining in the morning sun.

What was moving in among the trees? A great, broad-shouldered shape, gliding swiftly closer.

With frantic hands she restarted the car. She had to reassert the Mandy she knew and trusted. She thought of herself as a woman of strength and effectiveness. She had an excellent imagination, but she did
not
hallucinate like this, not out in a public street.

Nobody was going to burn anybody to death. No matter how neurotic this little town might have become, this was still the twentieth century. Maywell was no isolated medieval village; it was a modem town, linked to the rest of the world in thousands of different ways.

She remembered more the tone of Brother Pierce’s voice than the words, that tone, and the hurt behind the hating glare in his eyes. They really were the saddest eyes she had ever seen.

Somewhere in her mind the hallucination was still proceeding, asserting its presence just at the edge of awareness. As dreams sometimes do, it had doubled back on itself. She had not yet been burned. She stood before a trembling, excited bishop to receive her sentence.

He put the red taper between her small white hands.

Quiet, you! That part of her, the wild image-maker, must not be allowed to surface at times like this.

Where the devil was her self-discipline?

Be quiet, I order you, Amanda of the heart!

There now. With a conscious effort of will she directed her attention away from the flaming maiden within her to the cute old ice-cream shop she was passing. It was Bixter’s, and she’d never seen a place that looked more like home, or safer. She’d spent an awful lot of good time at Bixter’s. Right out there, in the alley where they parked the delivery truck, she’d smoked her first and last cigarette, a Parliament that had been given to her by Joanie Waldron, who had married the Kominski kid when they were in their late teens.

Beyond the front window she could see the wonderful old marble soda fountain, its spigots gleaming chrome and brass. There were the same wrought-iron chairs and charming little tables, and large numbers of students from the college. How she and her friends had enjoyed being mistaken for college girls by the occasional out-of-towner. How they had trembled when the college boys were attracted to them, cool, distant Bradley Hughes and men like Gerald Coyne and Martin Hiscott.

Mandy could not face Bixter’s, not the Bixter’s of this sadly changed Maywell. Home might have been hell, but Bixter’s was a place a kid could relax.

She turned onto the Morris Stage Road and began heading back toward Route 80.

She could go back to New York easily enough. Her loft was waiting. Her friends were waiting.

Or she could turn up ahead on Albarts Street and drive over to the Collier estate. If she dared.

But of course she dared. She was going to illustrate the new Collier Grimm’s! She herself, Amanda Walker. It was a book as great, potentially, as the Hobbes-illustrated
Faery
.

A poem came to mind. “For too long you have gathered flowers, and leaned against the bamboo.” Nan Parton had sent her that, and those lines applied right now, on this junction between New York and the estate. A poem of Wu Tsao. “One smile from you when we meet, and I become speechless and forget every word.” Romantic, intense Nan, so angry within that her canvases seemed to have been scourged.

She could hear Nan now: go to the estate, it’s even more important than it seems. Don’t retreat now. If you do, you might never have another chance.

“For too long you have gathered flowers…”

Brave Nan,
you
would go.

Albarts Street came up on the left, marked by a flashing yellow light strung across the center of the Morris Stage Road.

God, Nan, I wish you were here to help me. The icons from the East Village: Robert when I’m lonely, Nan when I need courage. I loved her. “My dear,” went the end of Nan’s poem, “let me buy a red-painted boat and carry you away.” In the night, in the heavy gloom of her Bowery loft, she had come back to find Nan there weeping, her brave Nan. She was crouched naked on the futon Mandy used for a bed, clutching the sheets to her face, kissing them. Mandy had crept out, shocked and embarrassed.

When she had come back. Nan was gone.

Dry with fear, she guided the car between the stately homes, beneath the ordered arch of trees, toward the Collier estate.

The thought of walking up to the house through that forest at night gave her pause. She could turn a comer, but she couldn't possibly do that.

But cars must go there all the time, so somewhere in Maywell there must be another entrance to the estate, one that a car could take. Dimly, she remembered a way in behind the old town graveyard.

Hadn’t some of the kids once gone in that way on Halloween… and ended up at a wonderful celebration where they’d been given hard cider, among other things.

She turned onto Bridge Street and drove along the wall, past the high gate with its motto and the trees beyond, so great and so at peace that they seemed not to be plants at all, but the bodies of gods.

She stopped beneath the streetlight at the comer of Bartlett and rummaged in her glove compartment for the map of Maywell she had bought at the EXXON station on the way into town.

Yes, there was that road. It became a dotted line on estate property just beyond the graveyard. She went back to the end of Bridge and turned onto Mound Road. Soon she was passing directly through the public graveyard. The Indian mound that gave the road its name rose abruptly beyond the edge of the graveyard. Maywell had been burying its European-descended dead here for three hundred years. The Iroquois used to expose theirs atop the mound. Before them, the Mound Builders had buried theirs within.

How long had burials taken place here? Thousands of years, probably.

By the usual standards of the United States this was a very, very old place. Once outside the graveyard the road turned abruptly west, toward the bulk of Stone Mountain, becoming strewn with leaves and narrowing to a car-width strip of asphalt.

She passed a “Do Not Enter” sign attached to a tree. As soon as she did, the road deteriorated, losing its asphalt and becoming a clay track planked here and there by rotting boards.

This was a desolate spot… the sort of place she might encounter—she did not quite know who, unless it was Brother Pierce with his terrible eyes and his spitting rage.

He seemed so familiar to her, as if, in some circle between the worlds, she and he had always been enemies.

Her firelit screams shattered the night.

Image of an owl alighting on the top of a charred stake, soft dangerous thing of darkness…

She was jarred back to reality when her head banged against the roof of the car.

You stupid dreamer, where the
hell
have you been? There wasn’t even a road anymore. She was driving across naked heath. The Volks was struggling, bottoming and slurrying about in the soil.

The Volks began to skid. Mandy downshifted to second, then to first. The tires caught again and the car lurched forward—only to get stuck even more.

She got out of the car and walked around to the back. The tires had tom through the thin covering of grass to the boggy earth beneath. For all she knew she might have driven this Volkswagen back to the Middle Ages. Maybe Brother Pierce was on his way in his bishop’s robes, trembling with eagerness to burn her.

She gathered dry grass and stuffed it down under the tires. Then she tried again to get out of the mud.

The car shuddered, the tires whined, then she lurched forward with a roar from the engine—and promptly sank again.