Cat Magic

by Whitley Strieber

Clark: “Pearl, come here, sit down. Henrietta, bring her some coffee.” Bustle at the courtesy counter, gray Henrietta, Snow Queen of Frosh Bio, darting over with a Styrofoam cup.

  Clark grabbed George’s arm, grabbed it hard: “It’s her, buddy.”

  Clark’s rusting Datsun slipped and slid along, past the snowy playing fields and the track house, out the gates to the blue flashing lights of the Highway Patrol and the red shuddering ones of the Sheriff’s Department. There was a scar in the road, maroon, mix of blood and rubber. The driver had tried hard to stop. “This goddamn comer!”

  “Clark, we don’t know!”

  “The hell. She was crazy. She wandered into the street.”

  “We do not know.”

  He slammed on the brakes, clutched George’s shoulders, his red, sweated face plunging into George’s own, screaming, “You fucking asshole! We know! It was her and we killed her. You and I in our arrogance killed her! Jesus, to do an experiment like that on a human being without so much as a single successful animal test, without any safeguards—we ought to be horsewhipped, both of us. Connie is going to ask us, where was your conscience?” He made a sound like shaking leaves.

  “Now, hold it. Calm down. We’ve got to think this thing through. We’ve got to be rational. Assume it is Bonnie. There’s no way this can be attributed to us. It was an auto accident. Happens all the time. We’re in the clear.”

  “My conscience is far from clear. I might end up spending the rest of my life in atonement.”

  “You speak of Connie. She pushed us.”

  “She never asked us to be careless.”

  “She pushed us! If anybody should atone, it’s Constance Collier.”

  Clark did not reply. When George finally looked at him, he was laughing, but in total silence, his shoulders shaking, his face expressionless. “George,” he whispered, “if you don’t get out of my car right now, I am going to kick your head through that window.”

  “Please, Clark—”

  “George. I’m warning you.”

  “We’ve got to work together.”

  “Go.” He swiveled in his seat, raised his legs to his chin. His feet were inches from George’s head. “I’ll kill you, you self-serving bastard, I swear I will.” Then the man cried, bitterly and long, heaving, his eyes staring, and George knew who it was that quiet Clark had loved, and that he had given his beloved to the demands of his craft.

  They were two lost men, George Walker and Clark Jeffers, Clark’s tears, though, told George that they were lost in different forests. The depth of his own sorrow was so great, he could not bear these tears. If he cared, he knew, he would go into his basement and light his candle, and die there.

  George got out into an autumn evening brisked by the crackle of police radios, rendered urgent by the guttering of motors and the low voices of uniformed men with measuring tapes. Stone Mountain had a halo of deep orange. The mountainside itself was black, Clark did not drive away. He was watching George from inside the car, and George knew what he had to do. He walked up to an officer who was taking up a flare. “Excuse me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d like some information. Was—”

  “Look, I don’t have authorization to talk to reporters. Anyway, next of kin haven’t been notified yet.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m Dr. George Walker from the college. The girl—I’m afraid—”

  “She was a student, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I know that. But you must, if she was identified, you must—was her name Bonnie Haver?”

  “You knew her, then. I’m sorry. She didn’t suffer. It was instantaneous I’m sorry.”

  George couldn’t move. He wanted to somehow show grief, but there was only this awful, dead coldness within him.

  He walked One foot before the other, across the rest of MSR and the pedestrian island, across the last hundred feet of Meecham where it angled into MSR, then down North Street.

  He knew Clark was watching him go. He could feel his own end as the fall of an angel, wings dissolving in the thin moonlight.

  May well was soft in the evening, so soft it seemed to want to seduce. As soft as a caress. Wind stirred from the north, rustling down the valley, drawing whorls of snow from the lawns that lined the street.

  A cat appeared down the street, a huge black thing every bit as ugly as the one that had menaced him in the lab. He stomped. “Move!” The animal darted toward a house.

  “Bonnie, Bonnie belle beauty, Bonnie belle, gone to hell. Bonnie belle beauty-o. Oh, shi-i-t!”

  He had to laugh, really. What an absurd career his had been, not even big enough to be a cosmic joke. It was just a dreary reality, the smell of Lysol on the tab floor, the deaths of frogs and monkeys.

  She walked in beauty, died in God knows what kind of horror. “Oh, Constance, why did you want it?

  What was it for!”

  In his mind’s eye he saw the old woman, serene, regal, standing before him in the formal drawing room of that tumbledown old house of hers. “George, I must challenge death. I must be able to kill, and then return to life, a human being, and to do it no later than December of 1987, Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Constance, the research is just in its infancy. There isn’t all that much money.”

  “I can’t give you money. There must be no traceable connection. Please, George, it’s vital to the future of the Covenstead.”

  He could not say that it was impossible. Tears filled his eyes again. Soon he would have to go to Connie and tell her everything. How could he ever ask forgiveness?

  He passed Brother Pierce’s Tabernacle, heard him roaring within. Cars were arriving, people were hurrying up to the doors. Here and there a pickup stood with rifles racked in the rear window. Honkies.

  Rednecks. Slime.

  “Slime! Hey, Brother Slime!” He gathered a snowball and hurled it up at the massive sign. God is Love, indeed. God is a sphere with no circumference and no center. God is nowhere. And God doesn’t give a damn.

  People had paused in the parking lot, big people with ugly little faces punched into the fronts of their fat heads. “Hiya, boys. Praise the Lord!”

  “Amen, brother.”

  George continued more briskly, passing Stone and then Dodge. Going home. All of a sudden, he couldn’t breathe. Going home? His house was dark and cold. “Kate? Please, Katie.”

  Kitten Kate and the kids. The gone.

  She had cried and he had laughed. But he cried now, on his way down Bridge Street, past Elm with its shadowed houses and onto Maple. He struggled to his own shadowed house, to the front door, then the cold, dark living room.

  What the hell are you crying about? Remember Saul Jones:

  “She’s moved out? Good You’ll go for an uncontested. She gets me kids and you get the house.” That was not a completely undesirable outcome. The other way around would have been disastrous. Truth be told, he could get along without his caterwauling, whining, wheedling, disappointed kids. The disappointed generation. Let them all live on the Covenstead. They even had their own school out there, fully licensed and accredited.

  “You are leaving me, baby,” he had said. “And unless you give me the house and the car I’ll put up a fight for the kids.” That worried her enough to stop trouble before it started.

  “They’re already gone. They left last night. It was their idea in the first place.”

  “You seduced them!”

  “You get psychiatric help and we’ll come back.”

  “I’ll get a girlfriend.”

  “How about a cat instead!”

  “You bitch.”

  “You’re crazy, George. I’m going to tell Constance. She’ll assign you a counselor and make you go.”

  Constance did nothing of the kind. She was too practical. She needed George’s work too much to risk his rebellion.

  “Why, Constance? Why!” He had never been told the reason his research was so important to her. Now he wanted to k
now. It might help to dampen this fire in him. He could feel the red gargoyle of his anger turning on him, and it scared him. “Why! You tell me, you have to!” Constance stood before him, her smile sad and enigmatic. “Your grief is your chance to grow, George. I never said it was easy.”

  Miserable at the memory, he jammed his fists into his eyes until he saw green stars. He sank to the middle of his dusty living-room floor bellowing as hard as Clark had. Long sobs wracked him. He poured his misery and grief and defeat out into the indifferent house.

  Oh, Kitten Kate, I need you now. I was so glad the day you left. That wonderful morning when I slept until noon and watched the Miami game and drank eleven Buds. Lord, what a day! I was a laughing angel boy again, my mamma’s genius. No longer was I your husband, the accused failure.

  But we were young together, Kate, and we shared some tilings. Remember that line, Kate—”Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” Oh, baby, something amazing, all right. I loved you and I threw you away, and I fell, baby, right out of the sky. Okay, I confess. I fell right out of the sky. “Something amazing… a delicate ship passing by saw something amazing…” He could never remember all of her favorite poem. “A delicate ship passing by saw something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky.” Just that one line.

  The house smelted faintly of linseed oil from the box of paints Mandy had left on the sun porch. He liked that odor; it reminded him of the six weeks of the summer of 1968 he had spent in Florence. There had been college students from all over the world there, art students, working on the restoration of the Uffizi masterpieces which had been damaged in the flood of the year before.

  He had met Irish magical Roisin, with whom he had cohabitated for weeks, before he had found, jammed into her suitcase, the terrible rubble of a dead owl.

  He had run terrified from her. Roisin, lost in the dangerous clutter of time.

  Upon the dead waters, the last leaf finally sinks.

  This sniveling had gone on long enough. It was time for the scum to be punished. He owed Kate, he owed the kids, he owed Constance, and now he owed Bonnie, too. He went to the mudroom.

  He opened the trapdoor.

  He descended to Kitten Kate.

  Here he sometimes slept, with the cat eyes he had pasted on the wall staring at him, with the cat faces glaring at him, with the marching, running, jumping cats all around him, the long cats and the slinky cats, the cats of death and hell. He had burned one once, he and his dear childhood friend Kevin. They had burned a cat named Silverbell, a huge black cat with a loping walk and a kinked tail. Cat of Claire Jonas.

  They had massaged Sterno into its fur and touched a match to it.

  He slammed his head against the back wall, the one that had cinder blocks behind the thickness of cutout cats and drawn cats and pasted cat parts, the tufts of fur, the crisp bits of skin. This was the painful wall.

  “Jenny went in there today, George. I told you what’d happen if you didn’t tear it down and the kids saw it.” Kate’s foot went slam against the floor.

  “Look, I’ll get help.”

  “How many times have you said that? Fifty? I want a divorce, George. I cannot stay here any longer—I do not want the kids exposed to whatever the hell’s going wrong with you.”

  “I told you, I’ll go to a shrink. Constance will know somebody.”

  “You’ll never do it. Anyway, you probably need an exorcist more than a shrink. That room is evil! Evil, George, and horrible and completely crazy and your daughter has seen it. You know what she said?

  ‘Gee,’ she said, ‘is this why Daddy hits me so hard?’ ”

  “I always knew it. Somehow or another cats would destroy me.”

  He looked around his room. This room was a cat. It was in a sense all cats.

  It was Tink Tink reeeoooowww! across the green lawn a streak of popping blue fire, reeaaaaooooo poppop crackle rrreeeeeaaaaooooo!

  What the hell, it was funny, she goes to the door, Claire opens it, and there’s this burning cat ali wound up on itself, rolling around on the porch.

  They took her to the vet, and George couldn’t forget it even now: one yellow eye staring, the other burned away.

  Put to sleep. Lullabye and okay, close your goddamn eyes, Bonnie! Golden slumbers fill your—oh, crap, I am missing my chance, somehow or other. Come on, honey, wind of the western sea, blow, blow—

  Oh. Go to sleep, Jenny, please go to sleep.

  Not for you, Daddy!

  George undressed. He knelt. He lit the candle. He arched over it, bending low, feeling the warmth rise to heat, to small pain. His chest was marked by a dozen round, red scars, the aftereffects of similar torments.

  In the Kitten Kate Room, before the marching, the jumping, the yellow-eyed and creeping cats of the world, George knelt and forced his shaking, jerking body into the crackle-hungry flames, until a spot just below his left nipple, a fresh spot, sputtered and oozed red.

  “God.” He pitched back from the flame, clawing at the agony of the wound, rolling, rubbing his filthy basement sheet into the crisped skin. Bacon chest. Is that funny-haha or funny-weird?

  Very fine. Shirt back on, tuck it in nice and neat, do a good job, oops, no oozing through allowed. There was a stack of old newspapers back behind the door. Let’s see. September 14, 1983, The Collegian. Picture of Dot Chambers, Sorority Mavin, “Hazing Rituals to Be Reviewed.”

  The SAOs had to cut out their Long March, and the Phi Zetas their paddling.

  There is so much anger in this world. He plastered Dot Chambers down on his leaking flesh, then winked out the candle between thumb and forefinger and climbed back up the ladder to the mudroom.

  A little torment could cure so much anger, so much grief. Bonnie was a volunteer. She took a risk in a noble cause and lost. The witches would give her body back to the earth. He would be forgiven. The experiment would be forgotten. Whyever Constance had needed it, this would be changed. The world would roll out and the Covenstead would live on, without anybody ever having returned from the dead.

  He got a beer and went prowling about, wondering after little Mandy dear. Doing illustrations for Constance, was she? She’d be a witch soon, that was for sure.

  Witch. Bitch. Kate gave good head once, back before the beginning of the end of time. Bobbing Kate—head down there giving head. You could make a lifetime of memories of Kate, had ye the inclination.

  When he sighed, Dot crinkled. Okay, all right, you win. He threw back the Bud and went to the kitchen for another.

  No?

  All done. The refrigerator light filled the gloomy kitchen with an even gloomier glow. Gloom and glow, gloom and glow, Edelweiss, Edelweiss… remember The Sound of Music and Kate a girl then, the old Chevy II, back in the days of Martin Luther King and Bull Conners and the Yippies and oh what a fine ringing, singing time.

  Bang.

  One brief shining moment. Shamalot. A-a-a-y! I was gonna be a great scientist. Man, I won the science fair. I won a Westinghouse scholarship. (Almost.) I won tenure. (Almost.) Bang.

  “So in the very moment of defeat he says to himself, wait a second. The experiment has been troubled by external conditions. There is as yet no definitive reason for shutting it down.”

  Once the death was connected with his lab, everything would be impounded, his records and his equipment both.

  George put on his jacket, zipped it, went out through the mudroom to the garage. All right. He was entitled to take his own property off the campus. They were his goddamn coils.

  He didn’t need the monitoring equipment, not really. Just the video camera. He’d take his own VCR down from the game room. Dear me, reduced to home experimenting. Down among the cats, where the air smells like burned beef jerky.

  All right, okay, home experimentation isn’t totally invalid. Here’s some precedent: synthetic rubber was discovered on a wood stove. Penicillin was an accident.

  As he guided the car down the driveway, he looked back at his house and thought, one day thi
s place will be a museum. And that basement window there, the one between the rosebushes, people will point to it and say, that is where subject X took the ultimate journey, right behind that window. And in the end Constance will thank me. Yes, she will thank me for what I am going to do.

  The streets were dark and surprisingly empty. He thumbed the knob that lit his watch. 12:47 A.M. A hell of a lot of time had passed unnoticed. He must have been in Kitten Kate for considerably longer than it had seemed.

  Well, good. He needed time there. Good. It meant he had suffered longer, and therefore put himself back together for more time. The longer he suffered in the Kitten Kate room, the more chance he had for a happy life. He was filled with strength. Power. The power of pain. Dear little Dot, plastered to my breast, who will it be?

  Must be a she, of course, because only a she will fit my seven-coil array. Mandy was not enormous, and sooner or later, she would come back here.

  Mandy, dear, you’re five-nine if you’re an inch. You’ll fit. Just barely, but you’ll fit.

  Wasn’t there a song somewhere about Amanda? “Farewell, Amanda… de de dan… sweet Amanda.” He smiled. “Farewell, Amanda—remember me when you’re stepping on the stars above.” That was it. You’ll step on the stars, Amanda.

  I think.

  He turned onto Ames, crossed the little bridge there, and saw glaring in his car lights a most unusual sight.

  A huge black horse, a nude woman astride it bareback, the two of them surrounded by a flock of dark, darting birds. Hoofs clattered and crows cawed and the woman let out such a shriek that George screamed, too, involuntarily, screamed until his throat would break.

  Hazing ritual? Too late in the season for that. Streaker prank? Fad was over.

  George followed in his car, bearing down on the whole apparition, horse and woman and birds. The horse was not three feet in front of the Volvo when it leaped high into the air, across the sidewalk, and into the middle of a lawn. It continued on, snow clouds rising from its hoofs, around the house and into the backyard. George sat there, staring after it. He was sobered. Again he heard the woman scream.

  Engines were roaring, lights rushing past. Pickup trucks, shotguns, guys with beer cans and cigars. Must be college revels, however improbable.