Cat Magic (37 page)

Constance stirred her cauldron with the fury of the possessed. She was old, though, and her body protested. These slack arms could not stir forever. “Amanda, listen to me! Amanda!”

Despite all of her knowledge and her understanding of a situation she had in large measure created, Constance had not expected what was happening. Something immense and strange was coming down the road, a furious, disappointed little girl who somehow lived both in the other world and in this.

Her body was gone to rot but her spirit longed to finish its uncompleted life.

The moment Constance sensed this dead child’s rage she knew she might never get Mandy back. There is no demon more angry than one who does not deserve its fate. The child had been cheated of her lifetime. Her bitterness made her want to hurt others. She had not yet understood the depth of compassion. Without life to teach her, she might never understand.

Why this demon was in Amanda’s death Constance could not imagine. It was as if there were forces outside of Amanda’s own soul commanding her to journey onward. And she was going. Constance could feet it. She stirred and groaned and sweated, but the veils between the worlds got thicker and thicker.

She felt the loneliness that came when a spirit turned away from the circle. “Amanda!”

The little girl was the key. But what had been done to her to make her as she was? Why was she still partly alive? And how could such a thing be? A child like that ought to be far, far into Summer by now.

The only explanation was that some part of her must still be in this world, by some rare process clinging to actual, physical life. Whatever it was, it kept her chained to bitter memories. The only protection from her would be to find out how to break this strange connection.

In her mind’s eye Constance could see the child, pretty enough, dressed in blue—and bearing a stump where her right hand ought to be.

So that was it, the hand.

What gave it life, though? Only devotion and attention could do that, and what warped soul would have so intense a relationship with the severed hand of a dead child?

Dimly in her vision she could see Brother Pierce approaching. Yes, it was time for him. She had foreseen that correctly, in her long nights of meditation before the
Leannan
, submitting her mind to the shattering guidance of that powerful being. The
Leannan
could have met Constance anywhere, but their meetings took place in the Mabcave on the back of Stone Mountain. Constance preferred it that way. In her agony she was sometimes noisy. A glance from the
Leannan
could shatter the ego. Many times the
Leannan
had shown her the awful details of the death she had chosen for Constance. Not knowing the future is hard, but knowing it can be excruciation.

In her male form as the King of the Cats, the
Leannan
wove on the loom of time. She wove the life of May well just as she did the journey of Amanda. But it was a rough weave. The will and effort of humankind was what would make it fine.

Now came this angular, guilt-ridden man, straggling along with a few of his followers.

Tom, who had been stalking round and round the witches’ circle, stopped and crouched to the ground. A glance at Constance told her everything: the hand was not expected. It contained a fury that did not belong to the world of the living.

It was capable of vast destruction.

A moment later flames roared to life on the far side of the cornfield. Despite them, and the screams that were uncoiling above their crackle, Constance and the Vine Coven tried to keep their circle.

“Moom moom moom moom moom moom,” went the chant, turning and flowing between the worlds, almost a thing apart from its creators. “Moom moom moom moom.”

There was the barest chance that Constance could relieve the hate of the wronged child, but only if she could understand. To her it was obvious that the hand was connected to Brother Pierce. But why had he kept it? She rowed in the cauldron with her hazel staff, looking for answers.

Shadows flickered in the steamy water, bits and edges of the little girl’s horror, her bitter runaway’s life, and the man who had taken advantage of her dreams and then denied her everything.

Constance rowed and rowed, but she was old and used up, and the world in the water wasn’t patient with her. Her muscles had been defeated ten minutes ago; only her will forced her on. Still, she got no specific vision of what had been done to the little girl to cause this rage. And where was file hand? On Brother Pierce’s person. Good God, it was in his pocket.

She felt her life as a tattered edge; she wanted to drop the hazel rod. Tom glared at her. In his eyes she saw the
Leannan’s
image.
Leannan
whipped Constance with a vision of her own dying. Blue flames raced across a ceiling of her future, yellow flames spouted through a floor. The gnarling fire turned her to a black hump. She heard the crackling hiss of her own burning skin Then there came the pain: she screamed in agony, terrifying the poor Vine Coven. “Chant,” she shouted, “chant for your fives!”

“Moom moom moom moom!”

Other witches began rushing past the Vine Coven, cloaks and flaps of canvas grabbed from harvest wagons in their hands, running to the distant screams and flames. Nearby cornstalks were already rattling with wind from the inferno.

The cauldron circle wasn’t strong enough to help the enraged child, and so there was little hope for Amanda. “Moom moom moom moom, hear our call! Moom moom moom moom.”

There must be no end to the swirling of the cauldron or Amanda would be lost forever. Black wings beat in Constance’s mind. “I’m fainting! Help me!”

Tom jumped up on her head and dug his claws into her scalp. The pain of it would have kept Rip Van Winkle awake.

“Moom moom moom moom moom—”

The waters roiled and sputtered, deep with scent of herb and shape of frond, boiling-pot of a few common herbs, window into the human soul. Black, dangerous, interesting waters.

Constance was frantic. Even Tom’s claws and his tail tickling her nose could not keep her conscious much longer.

“Moom moom moom moom!”

Black water covered Constance. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

She awoke a few seconds later to find the circle shattered, and with it Amanda’s last contact with this world.

Why in the name of all holies didn’t George Walker resuscitate her? He was supposed to have done it long before now. All of Constance’s planning to create a safe journey through the netherworld had been useless. “The only thing you are doing,” the
Leannan
had cautioned her, “is sending Bonnie Haver to a terrible end. When you die yourself, how will you explain the arrogance of what you have done? Will you take her place in hell? What will you do, Constance? Look at you, holding your head high, you arrogant creature! There is no guarantee for Amanda any more than there is for any shaman who attempts the journey. If there was a guarantee of her return, she wouldn’t really be dead. You revolt me, not seeing that. How dare you be so stupid, so willful, after all you have been taught. Amanda couldn’t enter death if she had a guarantee. She’d come back with mere hallucinations. You’re a shameful fool, Constance.”

That voice had cut more by its tone even than by its hard words. “I give myself to your mercy,”

Constance had murmured through her tears. The
Leannan
’s laughter had tinkled in the cave. Then Tom had come forth, great and roaring, a panther with teeth of steel, and driven her out.

There could be no guarantee. And, absent one, Amanda had died, finally and actually.

“Constance! There’s a man on fire!”

She could smell the awful barbecue and gasoline of the burning man, and the matted stench of his burnt hair. They all smelted it.

“Moomoomoom—moom…”

“Chant!”

“Connie, we’ve lost her. She isn’t here anymore.”

“Chant!”

Something awful happened. Tom leaped down into the cauldron, disappearing into its boiling interior with an awful howl. Then, rising from the water, came the little girl. She waved her stub of an arm, triumphant.
I am the hand, the hand that takes.

“You poor child.”

A cry from beyond the cornfield and me smoke; “Help us! Help us! This man is dying!” The lo Coven was out there.

They had been in among the corn rows gathering culls for their pigs.

When the fire began crackling in nearby cornstalks, the Vine Coven finally gave up. Between Connie’s exhaustion and Amanda’s wandering, and now this little girl, they lost all hope.

But then things changed again. Brother Pierce was running, and taking the hand with him. As he ran, the little girl disappeared in a shower of sparks, her eyes flashing toward the departing figure.

Without the demon to block it, the way to Amanda was clear.

“We’ve still got a chance!”

“Moomoomoomoomoomoom…”

But there wasn’t even a whisper of Amanda.

It really was a great blow. After Constance’s own death the Covenstead would go on, but it would be a diminished thing indeed, weak and prone to the ordinary destructions of life, Without the wisdom of death and the connection to the old traditions Amanda would have brought back, it would last a generation, perhaps two, then fade away.

The Maywell Covenstead would not be the rebirth of a fine and peaceful old way of life after all.

Mankind would continue as before, unable to stop the rape of war, the bleeding of the earth, moving helplessly toward the coming end.

“Help us,” came another call from the corn.

Joan and Joringel were carrying the burned man between them on a canvas tarp. The worst thing about him was his hands, flaking black lumps. “Take him to the house,” Constance commanded.

“It’s too far. He needs help
now
.”

Constance did not like the idea of an outsider, no matter how comatose, being in the village. Joan and Joringel went right past her, crashing through the cornfield, indifferent to the toppling stalks and the flying ears of the corn as yet unharvested.

Constance was wretched with despair over the loss of Amanda, but she had no choice. The situation demanded her presence. She broke circle and followed the others to the village.

Tom didn’t follow, though, because he wasn’t there anymore. As swift as smoke he had crossed Maywell to a certain house. He moved on soundless pads across the basement floor, coming swiftly to the Kitten Kate Room.

What a pleasure it was going to be to deal with this cat-hating maniac. George was going to die a most hideous deserved death. Tom had planned it carefully. But now was not quite the time. Not just yet. He leaped up on the table where lay Mandy and George.

The maniac was weeping softly as he caressed the body of his niece. The cat snuffled at his leg, looked long at his trembling, supine body.

Tom jumped down again and began circling the table. He was panting with rage. “Meow.” The sound penetrated George’s trance deeply enough to wake him, but not so deeply that he was conscious of the presence of a cat. “Uh? Oh, I’m—God, I passed right out!” He leaped from the table, ran over to his controls.

He felt the blood drain out of him. It had been fifteen minutes! Mandy was irretrievably dead. Fifteen minutes of such ineffable sweetness. He had lain upon her, had kissed the stillness of her lips, had felt her eyebrows tickling his cheeks, had pressed his loins against the quieted sepulcher of her body.

He cried openly, to see what he had done. This had been a last chance, and he had been hypnotized with the pleasure of caressing her dead body. He had ruined everything for himself. Now he was simply a murderer.

“Meow.”

What the hell was that? It couldn’t be a cat, not in here, not alive.

He loathed the torture cats on the walls of this room, with their probing eyes and inflammable fur. But their feline skill at causing pain fascinated him.

Something was going very wrong. What if the torture cats were—

But they were just magazine cutouts. He had made them himself, selecting over the years the best and most dramatic of all the cat pictures he had seen.

A huge black Tom rushed along the floor—and with a faint hiss transformed itself into Silverbell at the moment of her burning.

“No! It’s not you, you’re not alive!” He backed away from Silverbell’s blackened, smoking form.

Silverbell growled. She moved forward, wobbling slightly because one paw was burned off. She was between him and the door.

“Getaway!”

He told himself she wasn’t real. She was dead. Silverbell, who seemed to have forgotten mis, growled again.

“Won’t you ever forgive me? Please forgive me!”

“Forgive yourself,” snarled a tiny, extremely harsh woman’s voice.

The voice was so small he could barely hear it, but it smashed into his soul with the force of a hurricane.

Before such power only the truth was left him, and he screamed it out: “I can’t! Can’t! Can’t! Can’t!”

The cat was close now, so close that he could see its smoked oyster of a tongue pressing between carbon-blacked teeth.

He kicked the cat hard, and its crisp skin shattered. But muscles and bones, even tom asunder, immediately took up the chase, oozing across the floor. “God! Oh, God, I’ve gone nuts. I’m stark raving mad.”

He stomped on the crawling, sliding ruins of the cat, stomped and stomped until they were only wet marks on the floor. “Jesus. That was a hell of a hallucination. I’ll be needing a Thorazine drip if I keep this sort of thing up. I’ve got to get myself together. Come on, guy. You have a dead body to dispose of.”

There was another meow. Confused, George looked to the ceiling where it had come from.

It was a seething, squirming mass of living cats. George did not even have a chance to scream before they began dropping to the floor, screeching and spitting.

Next the walls came alive As he watched, a huge Persian bulged and oozed into life and leaped at his throat. It grabbed his shoulders with strong claws. Then it sank its teeth into his neck. He felt them pop through his windpipe and deflect the passage of air.