Cat Magic (5 page)

The deputy moved to leave. In an instant George was on him, spinning him around, grabbing the front of his jacket.

And staring into the barrel of his pistol.

The gun had come up swiftly. It hung between the two men, its potential silencing them both. They looked down at it. Mandy could hear them breathing, could see sweat on George’s brow.

“You take your hands off me, mister, and I’ll put my piece away.”

Mandy closed her eyes in the long moment before the two men separated. She saw the deputy to the door. He was about to say something to her, but she closed it too quickly to give him the chance.

“Useless! Utterly fucking useless! I’m telling you, Mandy, I hate this godforsaken little town. These people get someone like me, do they care? Hell, no! I’m going to immortalize this place. That lab of mine will be a museum someday. People will come here to see where the mystery of death was solved at last!And this rotten little town spits in my face.”

Mandy listened to her uncle rave. Outside the deputy’s car started up, its lights flaring briefly against the front window. Then its sound dwindled into the night. “It’s late. George. We’d better get some sleep.”

“Sleep? I’m going to the lab. I’ve got work to do.”

Her impulse was to try to stop him, but she realized that her efforts would only put him under greater pressure. She let him go.

In ten minutes his Volvo was cranking up, then rattling off down the street. She heard its tires squeal at the comer, then silence fell about her.

She returned to her bedroom. Too bad the door didn’t lock. The idea of staying alone in a house that had been entered as easily and recently as this one did not appeal to her at all. She hadn’t been in bed five minutes before she thought she heard a noise.

It was a scraping sound, and it came from the sun porch. She sat up in bed, looking into the dark and listening. The night settled close around her. The moon had set, the crickets stopped. The world had entered predawn thrall.

Again it came. Definitely from the sun porch. Carefully she pushed back the blanket and sheets and swung to the floor. Her first thought was to go to the kitchen and get a knife. But she’d have to cross the sun porch to do that. She went instead down the hallway, feeling her way in the dense shadows, until she had reached the entrance to the porch. While the stars rode and dry leaves whispered past the windows she waited. There was a feeling of sickness building in her stomach; her skin sang with the tickle of dread. She could not endure the suspense of staying here; she had to act. She would turn on the porch lights. They would surely scare away whoever was lurking beyond the door.

The switch clicked loudly. And she clapped her fist to her mouth to stifle a scream. What she saw made her back away on shaky legs. Then she realized that those glowing eyes were an animal.

Only an animal!

She laughed around her knuckles. Her heart slowed its awful pounding. The cat meowed.

“You poor cold baby,” she said, coming into the light. “Let me get you some milk.”

A stray cat at the door. What a joke. She had been terrified. As she went across the sun porch, through the dining room, and into me kitchen, she turned on more lights. She opened the huge yellow refrigerator and found it almost empty. There was a dried-up sausage of indeterminate age and make, a package of Oscar Mayer cotto salami, a loaf of Pepperidge Farm Bread, and down on the bottom shelf a pint carton of half-and-half. That the cat would love.

She filled a saucer and went back to the sun porch. When she opened the back door, cold air came in, and with it a very fast, very large cat. She spilled a good bit of the milk jerking back as the animal made its rush.

It began lapping frantically at the spills on the floor.

“You
are
hungry, you poor creature!”

She closed the door behind it and put the saucer down beside its great head. It really was the most enormous cat. Black as sin, even its nose. It had a kink in the end of its tail and a ravaged ear.

“You poor, ugly old thing.” Gingerly she touched its back, half expecting it to bolt. But this was no wild creature. It arched to her touch, then drank all the harder. A starving, grateful, and very domestic beast.“You’re so sweet!”

She felt around its neck, but there was no sign of a collar. Her every touch drew a reaction from the animal. She found herself stroking it while it lapped at the milk, just to feel the undulating muscles beneath the soft black fur.

The cat finished and raised its head. When their eyes met, Mandy was fascinated. The eyes had a slightly sinister quality, the way they gazed so steadily back at her. They were sharply intelligent. The cat nosed her hand. It was silent; she could not seem to get it to purr, almost as if it was too independent for such an abject expression of gratitude.

“Are you still hungry?”

It stiffened, looked behind and above her. With the silence and grace of an angel it leaped over her head and into the hallway that led from the bedrooms to the sun porch. It was an amazing jump. “Kitty?”

From the direction of her bedroom there came a loud meow, sharp with beckoning. Mandy stood up, feeling a twinge of fear in her confusion, and followed the animal.

Questions. How could a mere cat jump like that? And where had it come from? And what sort of cat was it?

And wasn’t it beautiful, sharp-faced and glowing, lying on the foot of her bed, beckoning her with one open eye?

Fleas?

Ringworm?

Fever?

A meow, as soft as some heavenward breeze. And she was tired. She slipped into her bed. “You be a good watchcat, now.”

Almost as if drugged, she slept. She dreamed she was Alice, falling forever down the dark well of Wonderland.

George dumped the bedroll he had brought up from his car onto the floor of the lab.

“What the hell is this? You going camping?”

“Living here is the only certain way to guard this lab. Brother Pierce has flunkies at the sheriffs office. To be safe, we have to assume he’s also got them among the campus cops.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Clark touched the bedroll with his toe. “I suppose you’re right.”

“I am right. This is Pierce’s town, not Constance’s—a fact which we ignore at our peril.”

“Constance was unhappy to hear what happened. She sends you a good wish.”

“Why not an effective spell against that cretin? I’m telling you, Clark, Connie’s got to either support me or abandon me. There’s no middle territory with this.”

Clark looked steadily at him. “I think a little equivocation is inevitable, given the personal consequences she faces if you succeed.”

George sighed. He couldn’t really blame Constance Collier. He understood why she rejected him; his work involved the transfer of power at the Covenstead. Of course it was hard for Connie. One leaf falls, another takes its place. The trees persists, but for the blazing leaf autumn is a catastrophe.

“She has to accept it. She’s getting old. God, they initiated her with a bullet to the head. She should be glad that science might take the risk out of it for Amanda.”

“Nothing will take the risk out of it. The risk is on the other side. You might ensure that the body will come alive again, but nobody can be certain that the soul will find its way back.”

“So Connie says. But at least the inheritor’s soul will have a body to return to. In the past that often wasn’t the case.”

“The problem is, they don’t always want to come back.”

“Well, that isn’t our concern. We’re only responsible for the body. Speaking of which, let’s get to work and see if this lab’s been booby-trapped or what.”

Clark moved to his station. He began testing their most important pieces of equipment, the devices that killed and restarted the intercranial electrical field. With this apparatus they were learning to turn brains on and off like electric switches. “How seriously booby-trapped?”

George went to him. “A problem?”

“Not yet. It just occurred to me that it might blow up in my face. A booby trap could be a bomb, if they’re really serious.”

“Surely even Simon Pierce isn’t a terrorist.” When he thought about it, though, George wondered if they might not be in greater danger than he had realized.

Clark obviously shared his concern. “They’ve killed more than one witch, George.”

“The Gregorys?” It was supposed to have been an accident, the Gregory fire last winter. All four members of the family had been killed in their home. Libby Gregory was high priestess of one of the town covens.

George peered into the forest of wires that led to the isolation chamber where they had killed and restarted the frog. His gaze traveled along the red leads to each electro-magnetic coil. He was looking for a new wire snaking off to God knew what. “I think it’s okay.”

“Maybe we’d better stand back, just in case. And warn Bonnie.”

“Let’s do more than that. Let’s set the switches and then hit the generator from the other room. And open all the windows.”

They went into the main control room. Beyond, in the menagerie, Bonnie could be seen cleaning cages.

“Hey, Bonnie, we’re turning on the step-up transformer. Duck and cover, dearie.”

“What’s going on?”

“Look at this. I say ‘duck and cover’ and the first thing you do is poke your nose out. What if we were under attack? Do you realize that an atomic blast can vaporize you at four thousand feet? Unless you duck and cover, in which case you burn more slowly,”

“George, you’re so weird.”

“Weird and wonderful, my little chickadee. If we live through this, let’s go to bed together.”

“Clark, thrash that man.”

“Now, Clark, don’t deny an old man his pleasures.”

“I’m not interested in Bonnie. I have other plans.”

Bonnie bristled at that. “Constance going to marry you off to some pubescent priestess, eh, so you can mind the babies while your wife spends all night lathered with ointment balling the priests?”

“You could live on the Covenstead if you would accept its rule,” Clark said gently. “It might do you a great deal of good.”

“I guess I’m too much of a rebel. Smelling all that health food when I go out there gives me an overwhelming compulsion to eat about four Big Macs. I’m best off being a town witch where I don’t have to live by a rule.”

“We don’t live by rules, Bonnie. We all agree on how we live.”

“Which means only that you’re willing to push a broom for the anointed and take orders from teenage girls.”

“No, that’s a complete misconception. There’s no fixed hierarchy on the Covenstead. Bonnie, I wish you’d just give a chance for a couple of weeks—”

“Okay, kids, let’s not get into that discussion right now when we could be sitting on Brother Pierce’s Fat Man on our way to Hiroshima. I’ve powered up the transformer. I’m going to open the lines.”

George stepped into the animal room with Bonnie and closed the door.

“George, is it really dangerous, or is your paranoia getting the better of you?”

“We’ve got to take precautions. They were in this lab, after all.”

“The other animals are fine, by the way,” Bonnie said. “Just the one frog missing.”

George shook his head. “The one frog.”

“I ran blood tests on Tess and Gort, to be sure there were no slow poisons or anything. They’re in good shape.”

“Small blessings count in this impoverished place. We can’t begin to afford new rhesus monkeys.”

“The lines are open,” Clark called. “I’m activating the cage.”

“Wait. Get out of (here.”

“I have to watch the readings. If we overpulse we’ll burn out the whole thing.”

“It might be dangerous.”

Clark set his jaw. “Constance assigned me to this lab.” He needed to explain himself no further. George understood the loyalty of the witches to their queen. As a member of a town coven, he felt it himself, although less strongly.

The lights dimmed when Clark turned on the extremely intense magnetic field that was the heart of the device. It was so powerful that electrons within it were forced to stasis. Electric motors in the field would stop, batteries cease to emit energy. And sensitive electrical systems, such as brains and nerves, would cease to function. A few seconds in this magnetic limbo sufficed to stop the animal’s nervous system and render it effectively dead, although completely undamaged. As time passed, of course, cells would begin to deteriorate. Enough time and the deterioration would become irreversible. But before then the animal could be restarted by turning off the field and shocking its heart back into action.

The system was potentially safer than anesthesia, and the suspension of critical body functions opened up undreamed-of surgical possibilities. George felt that his work was important even beyond Constance’s wish to use it in the ancient ritual of initiation. If things went right, he had a chance at immortality here. He dreamed of a Nobel, a chair at MIT, himself strolling the byways of Cambridge in a ratty tweed suit, ripe in age and honor.

The witch ritual was the most important thing right now, though. He loved the craft, its spirit and its aims. And the danger and drama of true initiation, the walk in the world of me dead: that was the greatest possible human adventure, and he was excited to be a part of it.

The ancient ritual now persisted in the West only at the Covenstead. Animists such as American Indians had stopped practicing it. Among the Apache, to become a shaman it had once been necessary to throw oneself off a cliff. Those who lived passed the initiation. Those who died, died.

George listened to the humming of the apparatus It sounded fine. “What kind of readings, Clark?”

“Looks like we’re okay. No unusual power drains, no sign of damage.”

George returned to the main lab. He put his hand on Clark’s shoulder. “That was a brave thing to do, staying in here.”

“A calculated risk. I thought perhaps they wouldn’t have the technical skill to hook a bomb into this system even if they wanted to.”

Clark powered down the field. The lights flickered again, and the cage made a faint crackling noise. A sharp stench of ozone filled the air. George pressed the floor switch that turned on the ventilators. He realized that he was shaking. He was surprised that there hadn’t been any damage to the equipment.