Cat Magic (21 page)

Bonnie can see now, she can see Mother Star of the Sea’s face, and it is the face of despair, so infiltrated by hate that it lives on even though—”You’re dead!”

“So what? So are you. We’re both as dead as doornails.”

“I’m going back! George is going to bring me back!”

“You sinned against me. You destroyed my career and my life with your accusations. I wasn’t the best teacher. God knows, not the best nun. But you
destroyed
me. Don’t you want to atone for that?”

“George has a machine, he’s taking me back.”

“You, my dear, are falling through nowhere at the rate of ten million light-years a second. No human agency has the power to get you back to your body. You are dead.”

Bonnie tumbled over and over and over through all the terrible deaths of her memory, the death of her mother with the stone weight of the cancer in her stomach starving her crazy and making her throw up at the same time, through me deaths of her own babies interrupted in their amniotic heavens by long steel, then more deaths and more: people burning, drowning, falling, the life being crushed out of them, knives hacking their guts and bullets shattering their thoughts, ruin racing through the body of me world as cheerfully as a capering clown.

Merciful God, does death mean this?

Bonnie realized with a shattering burst of passion that she
wanted
the hell toward which she was falling.

She looked at her own soul, looked closely at it, and thought she must never, ever look anywhere but at that one flickering dot because it was something, after all, something in this horrible black hollowness. Its light was so very cold. But it was not
nothing
, not like what she was falling through.

She wanted to atone. Poor Mother Star of the Sea!

“So, children, that is why C. S. Lewis described hell as tiny. The souls within it are so concentrated on themselves, to the exclusion of God and all else, that the whole of Satan’s Lair could fit in a single crumb of the coal on Father Flaherty’s cigar.”

“Yes, Mother Star of the Sea.” (Olay)

“Who said that? I’m getting awfully
bored
by your olays, Bonnie. Please, haven’t you done enough?” In the eye, a tear.

“Olay!”

“You impudent little—go stand in the hall.”

Confessional, Our Lady of Grace Parish; “Bless me. Father, for I have sinned. I—am—Mother Star of the Sea’s—
lover
, Another nail in an already sealed coffin. Just for the fun of it.”

“Whaa-a-at! Who’s this? What’d you just say?”

“Even though she’s been caught, she still won’t stop. Father, she—she—”

“Yes, my dear, pray to Our Lord for guidance.”

That was the end of Mother Star of the Sea, right then, that day. Pack your two black bags and off you go.

No more music class, no more “Soul of Our Saviour.”

“You wretched girl, you not only got me retired, I was anathematized by the Order. How I suffered! I didn’t have anything to eat!”

“You were strict. You were mean.”

“Not as mean as you! You ruined my life. All I did was make your palms sting. Because of you I did sm.

Yes, I sinned. By my own lights, I sinned. I got mad at their refusal to listen to reason, and I did break my vows. I spent the last four years of my life working in a Woolworth’s and going to the movies on Sunday. In my bitterness I denied the Church, I denied the Risen Lord, and I did it because of the cloud your accusations had spread over my life. Now I’m here, because I cannot believe that my denials weren’t sins.” Her long, thin fingers came forth, skillful narrow things that twined in Bonnie’s hair and slipped coldly behind her ears. “I’d really like a vacation. Now you’ve come, I get one.”

The cat surrounded them like a shadow, its flanks seething, its eyes everywhere, in their hearts, in the most secret places of their souls.

Mother Star of the Sea’s soul shivered and shifted, becoming a cloud of hot needles that swirled about Bonnie’s head. “I’ve got to get free,” the needles whispered and hissed. “Just for one delicious, precious second!”

“But you’re here for the long pull, aren’t you?”

“You’d deny me my respite? You don’t know what this is like!”

“I’m going to be leaving soon. Just passing through.”

“You’ve been here a million years already. The world’s gone. It ended. The sun blew up thousands of years ago!” She rasped and swirled, crazed by her passion to escape. “Hell is being condemned to time for all eternity. It never ends and it is never pleasant. Of the two of us, you committed me greater sin, and you must pay the greater price.”

Bonnie tried to back away. George had told her this would be like sleep! How arrogant of him, how absurd.

It is not what the mind thinks that creates the afterlife, but what the unconscious believes.

And the unconscious never lies.

“George, where are you? George!”

Mother Star of the Sea reappeared out of the snickering, jabbing swarm of needles. “Yes, George, I want my vacation and I want it now!”

As if behind the screen of the cat’s eyes Bonnie saw George tinkering in the lab. “Hurry, hurry.”

“Oh, yes, George, I’ve got my valise packed. Ah, what fun!” The electric wind of George’s device shattered into the nothingness, negating for a moment the whole primacy of death.

Somebody was carried back into Bonnie’s body on that wind. But it wasn’t Bonnie. No, Bonnie went down deeper, to a charming place centered by a certain gingerbread cottage with a particularly vile stove inside. Yes, indeed. Hansel and Gretel aren’t the only ones to have visited there.

It was somebody else who reinhabited her body, fitting into the glimmers and flickers between the nerves where the soul is hidden. She came to do the will of her tremendous master.

The cat had a use for her. Just for a little while, she would slip through the weave of life, doing the bidding of the gods.

It was not Bonnie who returned to that lovely body on the lab table. No, it was Mother Star of the Sea, of course. And she had not come back for fun.

George stood over her, looking down at Bonnie. As the last of her living flush faded, he touched her face.

When she was this still, he could really see her beauty. His body stirred as it had not since Kate. Kitten Kate.

“George?”

Bonnie’s hair was golden, very beautiful.

“George, she’s been down long enough.”

Bonnie, Bonnie. Pretty Bonnie. How cool her skin was becoming, how like alabaster. How perfect.

“The blood’s going to pool.”

George bent down between the gleaming black coils, drawing closer and closer to her face. He inhaled the fading sweetness of her skin, then kissed her cheek, lingering his lips against the softness. Bonnie had the nicest down on her cheek. He laid his lips on hers.

“For God’s sake, George, we’ve got to bring her back. There’s going to be irreversible brain damage in a minute.”

Bonnie was perfection.

“George! It’ll be murder, I swear!”

Clark could be a hell of a bitch. George went back to his instrument panel. “I’m going to go with a slowly ascending level rather than the quick jump we used on Tess. I think maybe we’ll get a more stable electrical response from the brain that way.”

“Just do it. Right now!”

He began raising the voltage levels in the brain.

“Am I supposed to get a reading?” Clark called from his station.

“Of course.”

“I’m not getting a thing.”

“Christ.” George glanced over at her. What on earth had made him wait so long? She had been unexpectedly beautiful dead. He had not been prepared for that. He raised the voltages to their full output levels. “Now?”

“Leave it on! Try artificial fibrillation. Maybe if the heart would restart—”

George rushed to the lab bench, pulled the fibrillator out of the wooden case on the floor. The thing wasn’t even plugged in. He had been that careless. He felt like a criminal. Shaking, fumbling, he got the piug into the socket and held the electrodes against Bonnie’s chest. “Give it a shot, Clark!”

The device snapped and jerked in George’s hands. Bonnie’s lungs expanded with a whoosh.

“No heartbeat!”

“Hit it again. Oh,
Jesus
’.”

The fibrillator snapped again. This time there was a gargling sound from Bonnie’s throat, “Clark?”

“I think I got—yeah, there’s one. There’s another! She’s starting! We have a heartbeat.”

“Bonnie! Bonnie!”

“D-d-d—”

“Bonnie, come back to us! Come back!”

“Heart rate 45. Blood pressure 55 over 30. She’s responding, George. I hope to God there’s no brain damage.”

Her eyes were fluttering, her mouth working. She coughed, gasped, jerked her head from side to side.

“Bonnie, baby, Bonnie,
baby
.”

“I’m gonna—” She tried to lift herself, failed, then made a mess all over George’s beautiful equipment. He groaned to see it.

“Bonnie?”

“Yeah?”

“Come on, honey, let’s get you out of there. Clark, give me a hand.” While Clark removed her electrodes George got some paper towels and cleaned her up as best he could. Together they sat her up. She swayed, dangling her legs over the edge of the bench.

“My feet are asleep,” she said.

Had George heard correctly? Was that Bonnie’s voice?

“My dear,” he said, “what a low voice you have.”

When she looked up at them, George was confused. In a way that was hard to define, her face was not right. Her cheeks, which had been rounded, were now drawn inward by a tension that had not been there before. Her lips were held in a prim, angry line. And her eyes—she had a predatory look.

“Oh, my God,” Clark whispered.

“Bonnie—what strange eyes you have. Do you fee) all right?”

“I’m a little woozy, but I think my circulation’s getting better.” She stepped to the floor. “There! See, I’m okay.”

Something was not right here. The voice was radically different. And her face, her eyes… he didn’t understand.

“George,” Clark said, “come in here.” He nodded toward the animal room.

“What about that cat?”

“Never mind the damn cat, just get in here!” Clark closed the door behind them. “What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Something’s terribly wrong with her.”

“I—what can I say?”

“Look, man, we’re getting in trouble here, you and me. Careers are on the line.” He paused. “The whole damn thing is videotaped.”

George saw where he was leading. “We’ve got to help her. She’s the main consideration.”

“I’m a biologist. I can’t help her. George, I’m telling you right now I’m pulling out of the project. Right out.

I don’t care what happens with my degree. I don’t care what Constance thinks. In fact, I’m reporting to her that the whole experiment is a failure and we’ve got to shut down. If you ask me, you’re going to end up in jail or sued by outraged relatives before this is all over.”

“Clark, just take it easy. It isn’t that bad.”

“That isn’t Bonnie in there, you know it as well as I do. It’s something else—something we’ve unleashed.”

“That’s an unsupported value judgment. The only thing that’s definite is that there is a change of expression.”

“A change of expression? The woman has another face, somebody else’s, voice. She sounds like an older woman. A different woman.”

“There’s no proof that these effects are related to the experiment. They might have happened anyway.”

“What a load of—you can’t seriously advocate that! The girl was fine before we did this to her. Normal in every way!”

“There was nothing in the experiment that could have caused the effect we’re apparently seeing. And I must stress that we’ve hardly had a chance to evaluate her. Probably we’re dealing with minor sequelae to the blood pressure changes. My guess is they’ll pass off—”

A scream pealed in the lab. When George threw open the door, Bonnie was reeling around the center of the room with the cat on her head. Its claws were in her hair, and it was trying to reach her throat with its teeth. “My
God
!”

George was revolted. A human being touched by a cat. And yet the suffering involved in being bitten by those teeth would be so extreme that it would be fascinating. He fought to get his hands under control enough to grab at the loathsome thing.

At last he did it, felt muscles pulsing beneath its skin, heard its hissing, smelled its breath like an electrical fire. He got the head and pulled it back away from Bonnie’s neck. Claws savaged his hands as he dragged the cat off her. It writhed furiously, screaming, its head turning and twisting, claws slashing.

Clutching the scruff of its neck, he took it into the animal room and tossed it into the empty monkey cage.

“This is crazy!”

He returned to the lab to find Clark standing at the door, staring down the hall. Bonnie was gone.

Mother Star of the Sea had to get moving. The damned cat was going berserk with impatience. There was no time to waste, not a single second. You took hell with you, even on vacation.

She did exactly what she was supposed to do—she ran. She did not know where she was going or even why she was here. That wasn’t her business. She Just had to run. It that had brought her here would direct her movements.

There was one thing, though, she wanted to do on her own, and she wanted it so desperately that she risked the wrath of the cat for it.

For all the time she had been dead, she had been longing for one simple thing that was only available in life. Her last one had been stolen by a nurse’s aide on the cancer ward at Perpetual Light Hospital. Her very last one, and she had done her terminal suffocation without even the small pleasure it would have brought.

Mother Star of the Sea fumbled in the pockets of Bonnie’s jeans for some change. Thirty cents. Good.

She crossed a two-lane highway and went down into the familiar old town, looking for the right kind of store.

Bixter’s. Of course. She went in. At the counter was a display so beautiful she almost wept to see it. With a trembling hand she picked out from among the stacks of M&Ms and Herseys and Oh Henry!’s a lovely, fat, fresh Snickers bar. She shook as she held her coins out to the girl at the register.