“Old Mr. Boston brandy good enough for you?”
She took it and sipped. “Mmm. Just the thing to relax.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Mandy.” He stood close to her. “I’m sorry the house was such a mess when you came. I just completely forgot. We’ve been very busy over at the lab.”
“Doing good things?”
“I’m hopeful.”
She nodded, sipped again.
“It’s just that I’m so damn tired.” He snorted out a laugh. “We were very successful today. Very successful.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“Not really. Except to say that it was rather a triumph.” His eyes regarded her steadily.
If she stayed in this house, George was certain to make passes at her. She did not need that. She would have to risk giving Constance offense and request a room at the estate when they met in the morning.
She was ready to ask George some polite question about his triumph, when something unusual happened. One of her most treasured talents was the ability to have detailed visualizations on demand. But they never came like this, unbidden.
And yet, despite the fact that she was healthy and not in the least tired, she found herself in the grip of just such an uncalled vision.
She saw a haggard George, crouching in a dark room, perhaps even the awful cold room in this house’s basement. Her mother used to store coats there, in what had been billed in the brochure as a wine cellar.
It was where Mandy and Charlie Picano had gone for prolonged kissing behind the coatrack.
It was where their cat Punch had died, starved to death while the family was on vacation. Nobody had noticed that he had been shut in there.
It was where the children had whispered tales of witchcraft in Maywell, and Marcia Cummings had insisted that witches were good.
In Mandy’s vision a woman lay on a table in the room, which had been transformed from a place of mystery into a torture chamber. The woman was dead, but George was not sad.
At the moment George was smiling. Mandy recoiled at the sight of his cadaverous grin.
“Mandy?” His smile faded. He began watching her closely.
She threw back her brandy.
“You’re good at that.”
“I’ve become a city girl, remember. And I’m tired from the drive. I want to go to bed.”
“I’m sorry I forgot to make up the guest room.”
“Don’t worry about it. I can make a bed.”
When she started for the room, he followed her. As they walked together through the quiet house, she hoped against hope that it would not be—but of course it was her old room.
He paused before the door and took her shoulders in his hands. He kissed her forehead. “Good night, Mandy.”
She fought down the shaking. When he kissed her, his lips felt like two leather straps. “Good night, George.” She turned to face her past.
George and Kate had raised two kids here and not even changed the wallpaper. Mandy remembered selecting it at Chasen’s on Main, being tom between the cornflowers and these repeating rose arbors. She had chosen the roses and then planted a rose garden beneath her window. Over three years her roses had flourished, and she had secretly called herself the Rose Girl. Only Marcia knew it! told Aunt Constance,” she had whispered when they were naked beneath the covers of a soft June night.
“You told her?”
“She said to give you a message. ‘Tell the Rose Girl that I love her and watch over her.’ ”
“Me?”
Marcia had squeezed her, and they had slept in one another’s arms, two ten-year-olds so innocent that their nakedness meant only friendship to them. “She loves us all. Let me take you to meet her.”
That was strictly forbidden. Dad hated Constance Collier, hated Maywell. He was only here because Peconic made him be here in his capacity as regional manager.
How Mandy had dreamed, lying in that bed beneath the window. Sometimes she saw witch lights on Stone Mountain; sometimes she watched the red moon rising, or the stars.
There was dust in this house, dust and loneliness. And something else, too, she reflected as she closed the guest mom door. There was a place in the living room wall that had recently been patched, as if a fist had been slammed into it. Shades of Dad. “George is a violent man,” Kate had told her. And Kate had left him.
Mandy brushed her teeth and lay down on her bed in the dark. The moon made a pale shadow across the floor. A hollow autumn wind muttered in the dry leaves. Down the street a dog howled.
The old tom came out of his hiding place and proceeded across the game room, through the big eat-in kitchen, pausing in the living room. Against the perspective of the furniture the cat seemed unnaturally large.
It had a weathered, surprisingly kind face. And that kinked tail was endearing. The shredded ear, though, was almost comical, making it seem as if the whole cat was lopsided.
The tom waited on the sun porch where Mandy’s easel and canvases were installed, waited amid the smell of linseed oil and paint. It saw the skill in her brushstrokes, and drank in the energy of the young woman. Poor, confused young woman. She had no idea how dangerous this story would be to her, as it unfolded.
She had painted a haunted landscape with a fairy stealing down a moonlit path… painted it with skill and even passion, and more than a little of her own heart’s truth. But what a relentlessly sentimental notion of a fairy. It looked like a bug, with those wings. And it was far too small. The picture had the fatal defect of charm.
Settling sounds began to come from the bedrooms. The cat grew still. It closed its eyes, concentrating on every nuance of their beings. It felt as they felt, sensed as they sensed, shook its dirty old body as they tossed and turned, gazed with George as he adored the mental images of his women, Bonnie and his lost Kate, and Mandy, felt the pulsing, stifled sensation in his loins, and knew with him the dreadful weight of time.
The old tom waited until the moon was at the top of the sky to begin.
Then it moved off to commit the next act of the story.
It stole into George’s bedroom, listened a moment to his sleep. In one quick motion it leaped upon his bed. It heard his heart laboring softly and faithfully on toward its eventual breaking end, listened to his stomach digesting the day’s meals, felt his dreams, haunted dreams of frogs and death and girls and loss.
The tom walked softly up his sleeping body, until its big head hung over his throat. It looked down at the pulsing artery in George Walker’s neck. It opened its mouth, its fangs just inches from the flesh. George Walker sighed, as if inwardly aware of the death overlooking him.
The cat gagged softly and regurgitated. Something green and slimy slipped out of its mouth and onto George’s face. By the time he had taken the first shocked breath of awakening, the cat was in the enclosed porch, passing the easels and paints. By the time George was gasping and fumbling for the light, the cat was going through the back door.
It slipped beneath the back porch as lights pierced the windows of the house and Mandy’s feet pounded down the hall while George Walker screamed and screamed.
Chapter 2
One moment Mandy was asleep, the next she was running down the hall toward George’s bedroom. His screams called her deep instincts, so high they were, so like a panicked baby’s. Her first, hideous thought was of fire.
Then she saw him, crouched in the middle of the bed, his fists clutching his thin hair. Moonlight streamed over him, making him seem a dangerous shadow. She fumbled for the light switch, found it at last behind the door, turned it on.
The suffusing yellow light changed him to a crumpled old man. Something obscene and wet and green lay on the sheet before him. He was screaming at it. She went to him. Another bellow gushed out of him. His eyes were staring, oblivious to everything except the sticky mass on the bed. Each time he screamed, flecks of bloody sputum flew from his mouth.
“George!”
She grasped
his shoulders, shook him. He was as rigid as wood. His skin was cold. He shrieked again.
“George!”
There were a series of broken gasps. Then another shriek, cracking, pitched like the cry of a bird.
“Hey!” She grabbed his cheeks, leaned into his face. His nostrils flared, his lips parted for another scream. She slapped him hard across the right cheek. The scream shattered, became a sob. She turned his face and slapped him on the left cheek. “George, wake up! You’re dreaming!”
He raised his hands to ward off her blows. For a moment they remained like that, she holding his chin, he seeking sanity in her eyes. Then he sank against her, sobbing bitterly. She held his thin frame against her breast. “George, hush now, it’s all right. It’s all right.”
“The hell it is!” His voice was hoarse. “Look at that! You know what that is?”
It was green, blotched with brown, so wet that it had made an irregular damp spot on the sheet. “What?”
“A skin.” He sighed. “The skin of a frog. My frog’” Then he was crying, silently, bitterly, his shoulders shaking, the tears streaming from his eyes.
He could only be referring to the frogs he used in his lab. But what in the world would one of them be doing here? She looked at it. Lying there on his bed, in a place so wildly wrong, it made her feel all the power of the wind that soughed around the house. Her thoughts went to snapping clean sheets and sunny rooms and she shuddered.
“Why is it here, George?”
“It really isn’t very mysterious.” He cleared his throat. “I need a drink.”
“Now, you take it easy. I’ll get it. You stay put.”
“Not in here.” He got out of bed. In four spider steps he was across the room. He took his robe from the closet.
She followed him into the game room, where he had already started pouring Black Label into a highball glass.
“Cheers,” he said. “Here’s to religion!”
She had accumulated a fair number of questions in the past few minutes. But she did not press him now. He needed space to calm himself down. Although he was talking instead of screaming, she saw the wildness of his panic still in his eyes. “Come here,” she said, patting the couch beside her. He sat down. She laid her arm around his shoulders.
Soon enough, he began to explain. “This was undoubtedly the work of a religious fanatic named Pierce.
He has one of these fundamentalist churches here. Brother Simon Pierce. A Bible-thumping charlatan.”
“Yes?”
“He—they, I should say—they’ve demonstrated against my work. He preaches against it. Death is God’s business, that sort of thing.”
“The mess in your bed—”
He snorted out a bitter laugh. “You don’t understand, do you?”
“No.”
“That is the skin of a frog I killed and brought back to life this afternoon.”
So that had been the triumph he had referred to earlier. “You actually succeeded?”
“You bet I did. Well-nigh perfectly.” He uttered a sharp laugh. “Of course you know we’re already virtually canceled by the Stohlmeyer Foundation?”
He said it like it should have been general knowledge. “I didn’t know that. Why in the world would they cancel such an incredible project?”
“Precisely because it is incredible. The academic world doesn’t like breakthroughs. It doesn’t like upset and bother. It wants nice, safe confirmations of old theories. The unusual is frowned on, the extraordinary actively discouraged. So my grant money runs out in a couple of weeks. Unless, of course, I should produce a result so spectacular that it gets massive press attention. Then Stohlmeyer’d be forced to renew my funding or face embarrassment. This frog was to be my spectacular.”
“You can repeat the experiment on another frog.”
“Not in the time I have. It takes a lot of prep. To satisfy the protocols the review committee imposed on us, we have to prove the animal to be completely healthy before we use it. That takes a good week of observation and testing.” He paused, stared into his drink. “Oh, God, when I think of how close I came.”His shoulders sagged. “My problem with Brother Pierce started out so innocently. Three months ago I gave an interview to The Collegian. The very next Sunday Pierce was on my case. The seeds of ego bear bitter fruit, goddammit!”
She thought she ought to say something encouraging. She didn’t much like George, but he was suffering now. “You can keep going. I know you can.”
“The frog was just a first step. Next we were going to do a series on rhesus monkeys, then the big one. The experiment beyond the spectacular. It would have made me famous. Famous, Mandy! I would have rehabilitated my career. The Yale Sciences Board would have had to swallow their slap in the face. Maywell would have to stop treating me like dirt just because I’ve failed elsewhere. It’s rime that I got a little recognition, don’t you think?”
Beneath her hand she could feel the bones of his shoulder. He was much too obsessed with his work ever to get any exercise. He was wasting away.
He slammed his fist into his palm. “It’s breaking and entering! Malicious mischief! I’m going to call the sheriffs office.” He got to his feet.
“You’re sure it’s your frog? Maybe it’s another animal. Just symbolic.”
“That fanatic broke into my lab, killed my property, came over here, broke into my house, and assaulted me!” As he spoke, his voice rose to a pitch of renewed rage..He dialed the phone. “This is George Walker, 232 Maple. Yes, I haw a crime to report! Breaking and entering. Assault. Who’s the victim? I’m the victim! And I know who did it. I know exactly who did it!”
He listened a moment further, then slammed down me phone.
“They’re going to come by in a few minutes. Oh, hell!” He picked up the phone again. “Bonnie? Hi, hon. Sorry to disturb you in the middle of the night. Look, will you do me a massive favor? I think the lab got hit by Pierce. Yeah, by Pierce. I’m 90 percent certain. And I’ve got reason to believe he destroyed the frog.” There was silence, punctuated by a burst of language from the other end of the line. “Go over there and check. And call me as soon as you can. I’ve got to have complete confirmation before the sheriff gets here. That’s a love, Bonnie. I’ll repay in grades.” He put the receiver down. “She’s general lab assistant. Her dorm is just across the quad from Wolff. I ought to hear from her inside often minutes.”
Mandy had a strong feeling that he shouldn’t have called the sheriffs office. “George, try to calm down before the sheriff gets here.”
“Why? I’ve just been assaulted, I’ve had my experiment set back, maybe even ruined if I can’t get another extension from Stohlmeyer. Why, pray tell, should I be calm? If anything, I ought to be raving mad. And I am!”
“Just stay away from the liquor. And brush your teeth. If they smell you’ve been drinking, they’re going to ignore you.”
“Mandy, I was assaulted in my own bed!”
“Think about what happened, George. How is it going to look to a cop?”
She left him to dwell on that. Alone in her own room again, she fumbled through the closet for her robe. Deep tiredness weighed upon her. It was Just after three o’clock. The moon had dropped low, leaving the room in shadow. By me moonlight that lingered outside she could still see the bulk of Stone Mountain rising behind the house, its thick coat of evergreens punctuated by gray-glowing tumbles of rock—
Mandy pulled on her robe and opened the window so that me cold air would refresh her. It smelled of the sweet rot of autumn leaves faintly tanged by old smoke. She could see Ursa Major wheeling above the dark high ridge of the mountain.
The Great Bear. Woman’s stars. The little girls of Athens once danced beneath them, honoring Artemis the wild huntress, who prowled the autumn hills in the shape of a bear. As a child Mandy’s favorite cuddly had been a stuffed bear named Sid.
Car lights shone on the back fence as the sheriff turned into the driveway. Mandy drew her robe close around her a
nd went back to George.
He swept the front door open before the bell even rang. “Come on in.”
“You the complainant?”
“I sure am.”
The deputy was a lean man, his face all angles and lines exaggerated by the porch light. At his hip he had a big pistol, too big for the thin hand that rested on its butt. There were dark glasses in his top pocket, one chewed fret dangling out. His lips were dry and cracked. There was what appeared to be a food stain on the crown of his hat. He moved forward into the house, and Mandy smelled chili on his breath. He regarded George. “Assault?”
“That’s right.”
“You hurt?”
“Mentally I’m seriously injured.” The phone rang. George rushed to get it while Mandy stared back at the deputy, whose eyes had filmed in an unpleasantly intimate way the moment he saw her. Once she would have hated him, but too many whistles and whispers and unwanted touches had taught her indifference to men like this. As she had matured, their sexual insecurity had become obvious to her. She thought of them as frightened kids, unable to grow up, trapped on the rock of adolescence.
George’s voice rose and fell as he talked into the telephone.
“Would you like a cup of coffee. Deputy?”
“Yes, ma’am. It tastes pretty good about this time of night.”
“Come on.” She led him to the kitchen, made him a cup of instant. She was just pouring the water when George burst into the room.
“Just as I thought, the frog’s gone! That damn preacher got in there somehow and took it. And killed it. Shit!”
The deputy shot Mandy a questioning glance. “There was vandalism at Dr. Walker’s lab,” she said.
“Now, that’d be a college matter. We don’t go on the campus.”
“It started there,” George snapped, “but it ended here. Come on.” He led the deputy into his bedroom. The remains of the frog lay on the white bed sheet, drying to dull green. “There is where it ended. Brother Pierce or one of his robots came in here in the middle of the night and dropped that thing on my face!”
“Who did you say?”
“Pierce! That fundamentalist lunatic! He hates me and my work. He preaches against me! He’s even led a demonstration.”
Cat Magic Page 3