Cat Magic (45 page)

The son’s face clouded. Simon assumed he was remembering the truth of their private misery. That life with Turner had been miserable Simon had no doubt. Turner was a drunken, red-faced roach of a man with his hair full of grease, mean as a hog and twice as fat.

“Let Israel now say that his mercy endureth forever.”

“Brother Pierce,” the daughter asked, “do you know the whole Bible?”

Simon smiled. It was such a simple, pure question, from that darling, soft child. How could lips be so red, or eyes so blue, or hands so very smooth? He fought the ravening that he felt, and forced his face to gentleness.

The hand stirred.

He twisted and squirmed, but it remained close against him. He forced himself to answer the girl’s question, know about half. Every day I learn a new verse.

“Is there anything,” the boy asked, “that can make us proud of Dad?”

“Willy.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“There is a verse, son, from the 119th Psalm. It goes like this. ‘This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me. The proud have held me greatly in dension: yet I have not declined from thy law. I remembered thy judgments of old, O Lord, and have comforted myself.’ So we must all do the same, son.”

The boy thought about this. “Can I watch,” he asked at last, “when you burn the witch?”

“Oh, hush, now! Whoever said he was going to do such a thing?”

Simon felt himself grow cold. He had said little of his ideas, yet here they were coming out of the mouth of a child. There must be a lot of whispering going through the congregation. Sometimes he wondered who the leader was—himself or the intangible spirit of the group. “Do not admonish your son, Sister Turner, for a child might speak in the tongue of the Lord.”

When the car stopped, dusk was already far advanced. Betty Turner sank back into her seat. “I just don’t know how I’m going to get through this! I dread the burial.” She looked at Simon with stricken eyes. “There’s no way you could call him a good man. He drank. He beat us up. He was lazy and he two-timed me. He left us poor. But he was a person.” She glanced out the rear window, toward the sunlight that still clung to the cliffs of Stone Mountain. “Those witches killed him just when he was trying hardest to get himself saved. You see, that man wanted to live in the Lord. But the flesh is weak!”

She and her son and daughter, tears in their eyes, left the funeral car and walked toward the gravesite behind the coffin of the dead father.

Easily a hundred cars had come. Brother Pierce went to the grave, which had been lined with green artificial turf by Harris’s people, and provided with a sling for the coffin. Simon saw that he had the biggest graveside turnout in the history of the Tabernacle. That was wonderful, but it meant that there might be spies in among the crowd, witches and people sent by the sheriff and such.

Very well. He would not threaten anybody, nor even mention the vision he was having, of that young naked-rider witch lying in the midst of a fire, and she can’t get away, and she is burning and her screams are pealing through the night. And for just a few minutes, Simon is happy. He doesn’t even need the hand.

And it is because for these few minutes he is vanquishing the sin of that poor misguided girl.

He could only be at peace, he decided, when he was sending a soul to heaven. She had shone in the night like a goddess, had Amanda of the long flowing hair Of course it was her. He had noticed that hair when she visited the Tabernacle with her insane uncle. Oh, yes. The uncle was dead now, dead in that coffin they had taken from his house.

The deputy sheriff had said it was her in the coffin, but he was misled. She was young and perfect. No, it was him. If anybody were to dig up that coffin, they would find the old whoremaster of a scientist in it.

Simon stood in the thickening dark, among the dense crowd. The coffin was behind him, ready to be lowered into me grave. Betty Turner stood on his right, her daughter on his left, the son beside the daughter. Simon began reciting the familiar lines of Genesis 3:

“In the sweat of thy face shall thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

He paused The hand felt warm now, and heavier than it had been in years It felt alive. He glanced down, but the bulge in his pocket was the same as ever Best to put it down to nervousness and forget it The witches had him spooked.

“Everybody knows why we are here. We are here to bury one of our own. And we are here to make a statement that those witches must not forget. We know you, and we burn with hatred for the evil that is in you, sons and daughters of Satan. For there is written upon your foreheads, ‘And 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 is Abadon.” He pointed past the tall shadow of the burial mound, toward the darkening mountain.

He remained silent, pointing.

Let the spies guess what it meant. His own people knew. It meant tomorrow night and fire.

He flipped the lever that set the coffin to lowering, then thrust into his pocket to reassure himself that there was nothing genuinely wrong with the hand.

Whereupon it twined its warm, living fingers in his own—

On her way down the mountainside Amanda had become aware for the first time of the density of flesh.

Every muscle and joint was stiff. The easy shorthand of movement she had enjoyed in the other world was replaced by a weighty crawling that she found most unnatural. Physical life was an astonishing limitation. She had never understood before the real effect of flesh on the soul, to stifle it in thick dying folds.

They had to carry her the final distance to the house. She had slept deeply, without dreaming. She was awakened by the whisper of the sun’s return. She could hear its light sweeping into the room. It poured across the floor, yellowing the damask curtains of the bed. She slipped from beneath the covers and parted the curtains, letting in the golden haze.

The quality of the tight reminded her of where she had been and, above all, what she had learned. The whole secret carnival paraded in her mind’s eye. It was impossibly beautiful, a series of images acutely charged with meaning. There were the terrors, Bonnie and the demon-girt Abadon, and of course Mother Star of the Sea. There were also her two fleeting moments of heaven, and in retrospect they had far more impact on her than did her long journey through her own guilt. Her few moments in the old backyard of her childhood were suffused in memory with the richest light that could be imagined, a light that illuminated both physically and emotionally. To know that she had left this light caused her the most intense suffering. She twisted and turned in the bed, experiencing her body as a tangle of iron chains.

Then there was that short flash of Mother Star of the Sea’s real fate, her own heaven. Hidden in her had been a great and compassionate spirit, trying by sheer strength of will to save the souls of the girls she was teaching. Did she know that she had become their demon, the arbiter of their guilt?

Yes, she knew, and upon that knowledge rested the palace of her happiness. For she also knew that she provided them with a safe means of working through the sour material of conscience after death. They used their memories’ of their stem, uncompromising teacher when they died to cleanse their souls for heaven. Because they had her, their work went quickly. To give them this enormous blessing, she had sacrificed love on earth and accepted a lonely death.

She understood the silence of Lazarus. How could you make voice from the air of so dun a world as this, after heaven? And she had seen only the edges, not the whole light of it. She felt actual physical pain, as if the air were being crushed by very longing from her lungs, and her blood boiling with a need beyond addiction.

She wanted nothing so much as to tighten into a little knotted ball and wait until she could return.

A shadow bulged in the canopy above her. “Tom?”

He didn’t stir. Nor did he purr. She found him awesome now, having seen him out of disguise. She wished she could thank him, but she had no idea how. She could hardly give him, say, a catnip mouse.

She looked down at her own flushed nakedness. It might be heavy and coarse, but she could still love this body of hers. Her blood sang in her veins, her skin thrilled at the simple contact of the air. She touched her own thigh, sensing the electricity of the contact between flesh and flesh.

There was also something else, a new and more objective awareness of the world around her. She saw the Covenstead as a tiny eccentricity of life, a final refuge of magical thinking. In her own mind she could see the blue stretches of reason and the bright shapes that defined the inner realm of her magic. She had acquired access to more of her mind than she had previously known. Her attention rushed into this vast new space. In it she saw Constance, who looked up at her with hollow, awestruck eyes. Instantly she knew Constance. Her knowledge was not verbal, but it was total. The experience had a powerful emotional impact on her. Without being able to say how, she understood the hidden meaning of this tragic and enigmatic figure.

Constance stared at her, and she was shocked to realize mat this was a shared experience. They were somehow linked. Then Amanda saw Ivy, then Kate, then Robin. His love poured out of his eyes, a perfumed glow. He was coming toward this room, bringing his innocence and his helplessness. She wanted to cherish and protect him. But for Constance, none of them were aware of her careful scrutiny.

Their attentions were not strong enough to enable them to see by this other light.

Outside the bed there was a small voice. “Amanda?” She pushed back the covers and raised her head into the full light of the sun. Beside her bed stood Robin, just as she had known he would. Instantly she knew what troubled him. Her heart opened to him. “Look at me,” she said.

He raised his eyes. His sense of rejection was easy to read. After his initial jubilation at her return, he had begun to see her as unreachably strange. There was nothing she could do but show him that she valued him and needed him. “Please,” she said, “kiss me.”

A peck.

So he was not so much awed as angry. “Robin?”

“Your breakfast is ready.”

She got out of the bed and put on her robe, which she found neatly folded across the back of the big blue chair. “Robin, I love you.”

“Thank you. I love you, too. We all do.”

She felt a sharpness within her, a taste of salt. “I mean I love
you
.” She looked at him. “Holly King.” Did he know how long was their association, through how many lives they had danced together? No, not really. He had been told, but his awareness lay at the side of his mind, shrouded in dark curtains of doubt and confusion. The trouble with reason is that it is only one part of the mind. In him, as in all of them except Constance, it was a great, central bulk of a thing, condemning them to perceiving only the linear and the expected.

She saw that mankind was exactly like the dinosaurs. The reptiles had chosen physical overgrowth at the expense of all other development and so had perished. So also mankind, since the beginning of recorded history, has been crushing all parts of the mind except the reason, until this excessive mental growth threatens him with extinction.

Reason is useful for building buildings, but it cannot build a happy life, nor enable a human being to see the sacredness or the richness of the earth. It cannot allow him to feel with his own blood just how painful it is to hurt the land. We live in maya, the world of illusion. There is no need for most of what we have, not for all these transformations of material that we have accomplished—

We have built a civilization that is exactly like a poison in the earth, or a viral growth, or an exploding cancer.

Amanda saw it all so clearly, and as well that the Covenstead might be tiny—just a few people, after all—but because it stood against this terrible, fundamental human mistake, it was incredibly important.

May the idea of the Covenstead, rich and open and unchained by the hungers of the consuming society, spread through the world, freeing man from his own mind, and the terrible hypnosis that is going to extinguish the species if it is not broken soon.

“Amanda!”

Robin’s voice interrupted her. She was breathing hard, staring. “Sorry. I’m fine. I was in another world.”

Slumping in his black sweatshirt and faded jeans, his muddy working boots, he could not have looked more forlorn. “I’m sure.”

“No, I don’t mean—oh, Robin, I was preoccupied.” How could she tell him what wonders she now perceived? The mists had lifted from her vision. To her, people had been revealed as magic architectures of almost unbelievable beauty, and him especially.

She went to him, gathered his unresponsive body in her arms. “Please kiss me.” She opened her lips and waited, remembering the hungry passion of the kisses they had traded at the culmination of the Wild Hunt.

He held her stiffly.

“I’m only a person, Robin.”

“I know that. It’s just that—I saw you—”

She put her finger over his lips. “You don’t know what you saw.”

“The hell I don’t. I saw you dead!”

What could she do to bring him back to her? Nobody could be natural and at ease with a miracle.

She realized, as the strengthening sunlight set her blood to racing, that they were all going to react much the same way. “The last thing I need is worship. I’m still me, Robin. And I love you exactly as I did before. Or no, that’s a lie.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“I love you a million times more. More than you can possibly imagine!”

His expression closed. How stupid of her to say that! But the words were already out. They swarmed in the air, vibrating his whole being to a sort of brown despair. He was thinking he’d like to get this over with and get out to the fields. “I don’t want to keep you from the harvest,” she said.

“You can even read my mind. What are you, Amanda?”