Cat Magic

by Whitley Strieber

The bear was easy for Amanda to follow because it wore bells, and when it capered they jangled gaily.

  Summer airs danced about Amanda’s head, and she went laughing behind the great black beast, through the alleyways and yards of her own early childhood.

  They were going toward a certain gate, a very important one.

  The little girl leading the bear stopped beside Dad’s precious flowering plum tree, the one in Metuchen, in those fine days before they had come to Maywell.

  She was sweet of face, her dress blue lace, her right hand always held behind her back, a charming pose.

  She beckoned with her left, and Amanda could not resist running toward the old back gate mat led into their yard.

  The old back gate, the old yard: here it was always a warm June day in about 1969, a year of highest happiness, long before the troubles started in Amanda’s family.

  She opened the gate and stepped through. Even the air smelled good! She was almost shaking with joy.

  Just around the comer of the house she could hear herself laughing, her own six-year-old voice, bell-high and full of joy. Her impulse was to hurry forward, but she hesitated. This was the wrong direction. She had to find the cauldron again, to get back into contact with the witches. Why had she followed the bear?

  Had she been hypnotized?

  She turned around to go back. Instantly everything changed. There was a great screaming and clanking, walls arose, a raftered ceiling slammed down, and the next thing she knew she was upended and tied to a board in an echoing lumber mill. Logs thundered past on a flume. Down her belly there came a great ringing roar and she saw the blurry gleam of a saw and knew that it was going to chew her in half. She jerked, she writhed, she bellowed. At a far window she saw Tom, arching his back and spitting, then pacing behind the glass, his eyes terrible.

  The little girl’s right hand, detached from her body, appeared in the air and pulled a lever. The blare of the saw grew even more shrill and the board began to vibrate. Amanda soon felt wind tickling the bottoms of her feet, then sharp heat as the saw drew close.

  Then it was between her legs, the spinning steel skinning her ankles and the sides of her knees.

  She suddenly remembered herself when she was ten, reading The Mad Monk under the sheets, reading by flashlight the forbidden gore.

  He had sawed a woman in half. He had done it slow.

  And she, in her summer bed, had imagined not the hard screaming agony of being split asunder, but the softer terror of the breeze in intimate pans that signaled the approach of the whirling tool.

  She felt that little wind now, right up at the top of her thighs. Hot sawdust was spewing up, then shifting down and tickling her belly. Soon the sound would deepen from the efficient pitch of steel cuffing wood to a more liquid choffling.

  The girl leaned her gentle face over Amanda and looked at her. Her eyes were no longer blue. They were the red of apple skin.

  “Don’t try to go back. You keep making that mistake We don’t want to hurt you, Amanda. We don’t even dislike you. Far from it, we want to make you one of us.” And her eyes turned dead-water green.

  Amanda was disgusted with herself She had been deceived so easily. How stupid to follow a cheap carnival trick of a talking bear. But she would not relent, not even now. She was, after all, dead. The saw and the body it was about to cut were both illusions.

  But when the blade touched her and she felt the searing horror of its teeth in her secret skin, what resolve she had developed dissolved. “I promise I won’t go back!”

  “I don’t believe you.” The sound of the blade changed. Amanda felt as if she were being ruthlessly pinched, her skin being compressed to ridges and then tom off.

  “I’ll never go back! I’ll obey you! I swear!”

  “By what?”

  “Oh, stop the saw. Stop it’”

  “By what do you swear?”

  “By—by—”

  “By your own immortal soul?”

  “By my soul! Oh, yes, by my soul!” Could a demon hear a lie? Amanda hoped not.

  “Very well, I give you back your summer day.”

  Instantly they were in the old yard again, Amanda and this strange little creature. As the girl walked along ahead of her, Amanda noticed that she had a stump at the end of the arm she usually kept hidden.

  The girl didn’t mention it and Amanda didn’t dare, so they went on in silence. There was washing on the line, including Amanda’s own very favorite pink flap-bottom pj’s. “Is childhood heaven?”

  “Or hell. Whichever you prefer. Many a child has its own dead self as a silent observer of its life.”

  “But time—the past—how—”

  The little girl shrugged, “It’s not important.” She squatted down in the grass, motioned with her stub for Amanda to sit beside her. “You made the right decision coming with me and Ursa. The witches call this place the Land of Summer. Christians know it as Heaven. And your old backyard is just the beginning.

  There are winged palaces the other side of the highway, and the pleasure of the sight of God just behind the drive-in bank.”

  This wasn’t heaven at all, and Amanda knew it. She looked sadly back toward the gate. Tom was gone.

  Beyond it was the long gray plain where her Journey through death had begun. Ever so faintly she could hear the hoarse chanting of the witches.

  “They need me. Without me they’ll give up.”

  “You don’t have to go back there, Amanda. You’ve done your share for the witches.”

  “But I’ve never been needed before, not like this. It’s not because I’ll feel guilty if I don’t help them. I know I’ve already done a great deal in past lives, I’ve seen Moom. But I love them.”

  For an instant the girl’s eyes became as bright as bloody suns. “Ursa,” she called, “I need you.”

  The bear came up, its bells jangling in a way that should have been merry. It leaned closer to Amanda. Its breath seemed sweet, or did it? When she smelled that thick, hot odor, she thought of night-blooming flowers, or perhaps of rotted ones.

  “So Leannan and Constance succeeded in relieving your guilt, and yet you still want to go back. Strong girl.”

  “I told you, I love my witches.”

  “You love torture—because that’s what you’ll get if you go back.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll get.”

  The girl smiled. “We’re so much alike, you and I. You’re a good magician, Amanda, and I’m a bad one.”

  She laughed a little. “I was a monster by the age of eight, and dead from murder before I was thirteen.”

  Amanda looked into the eyes. They were totally without depth. They seemed painted. She saw nothing, no wisdom, no help, not even any hate. Demons might sometimes look like people, and sometimes like nightmares, but they seemed, essentially, to be machines.

  “Since you’re so stubborn, Amanda, I’m going to show you a past very like the future you’ll be facing if you go back.”

  “You mean I have a choice? I can go back?”

  “We serve you, Amanda. Your demons are part of you.”

  “I’m going to go back.”

  “I will show you the worst terror you can know.”

  “No matter what, you won’t stop me.”

  “I will show you death by fire.”

  “I’ve got to go—now’” Amanda leaped up.

  “Ursa,” the girl said lazily, “stop her, please.” The bear’s claws came around her face like bars. Its immense force pulled her back to the soft grass.

  “I said I would show you what will happen to you. You tittle fool, it’s happened before. Just look!”

  The voice was far bigger than the girl—even than the bear. It was as if the whole place, the grass, the trees, the sick yellow sky, had bellowed out the words. And the claws one by one popped through Amanda’s skin and into her skull and sank coldly into her brain.

  And brought with them visions.

  She saw the earth as it was when th
e green muck first oozed upon it, a foaming cauldron of a planet, swept by bitter winds and howling in the agony of its birth, the sun blue and furious, comets and meteors swarming in unsettled splendor, the electric distempered sky striking life again and again into the ooze.

  Ursa sent her forward through the cries and tinkling of five billion years, to a dripping afternoon on a hill overlooking a dark medieval town. There was a newly built manor nearby, with ugly little slits of windows and snapping red flags.

  She no longer felt like a ghost. But also, she was not her familiar old self, Amanda of the careful artist’s fingers and the dreams. Her name here was Marian, and she despised that manor. It belonged to the Bishop of Lincoln, and she hated him even more than she did his house.

  She sat upon her hill cursing the palace below her. She was the Lady of the Forest, the Queen of the Witches. The garters she wore were not so different from Moom’s, but they were not on dirty naked legs. These garters reposed against skin as pale as cream.

  She was the great ruler of the countryside. Her beauty melted the most violent hearts, and in this time there were many such. Her mother had reigned openly, but because of the Christians Marian was almost a fugitive, coming to her Ceremonial hill only on the greatest occasions. The rest of the time she hid in Sherwood Forest, defended by Robin Goodfellow and his fairymen.

  This special morning, though, she sat upon her stool and received her subjects. Last night had been Mayeve, and Robin as Godfather had drawn the moon down upon her. She had felt it come into her womb and shine there through the festivals of the dark. How the women had shrieked in the greenwood last night, while the pipes wailed and the drums mumbled low. Robin in his antlers had pranced and danced until his great stone of a devil’s tail had stood straight up before him, and he and Marian had joined the common rapture.

  The bishop, she knew, was in a fury about the rutting festival.

  He had gotten a decree from Rome, he said, that proved she and hers were demons incarnate. She had not replied to him, that Sunday after Candlemas when he had challenged her from the steps of his miserable cathedral. She was Maid of England, after all. It was not for her to speak to a mere bishop; even the King knelt to her, did he not, in secret?

  Even Edward kissed her garters in Mab’s cave, during the Mysteries.

  So she sat upon Mabhill and let the wind flounce her hair, and handfasted those who had made merry in the night, and pretended not to notice the arrival of the bishop and” his chain-mailed soldiery.

  A youth saw him and raised a hand against him, saying, “Kneel thou to the Maid of England.” In response the Bishop of Lincoln raised his eyes to the Silent God of the Catholics. The youth, who was of fairy blood and wide and short and strong, reached up and pushed the white miter from the bishop’s head.

  He was bald but for his tonsure, and the long brown curls of it waggled in the wind. Goodfolk laughed, and when they did, one of the soldiers goosed the fairy with a dagger. The fairy staggered as blood spurted from the wound the point had made in his buttocks.

  The bishop and his men had the laugh this time, and at the fairy’s expense. Soon they left the hill and returned into the town, closing the gates behind them.

  “The bishop has blooded a fairy,” people whispered. In the following days this terrifying news ran through the whole county, and soon all the churches, most of them so new their stones were yet white, became empty.

  In the subsequent months the bishop fell into want and had to let many of his men at arms go.

  Of those who remained, not a night passed that the fairy did not poison one with their tiny arrows. At Midsummer’s Eve the bishop came and knelt to Marian and kissed the garters of the Maid of England.

  Midsummer’s Eve was a great joy that year of 1129, with all the handfasted couples from Mayeve leaping the fire, and the bishop and his priests dancing for the Goddess along with the goodfolk of the county.

  But mat bishop was a sly one. Never for a moment did he despair of the Silent God, nor forget his pope in the storied kingdom of Rome. There came a black ship into the harbor at Grimsby, sent up, it was said, from the great Catholic fortress of Canterbury. Upon this ship were seventy tall knights and seventy knaves, and horses for all. They took march across the Lincoln Wolds and climbed the Heights.

  “My lady,” a fairy messenger said at last, “they have crossed the Trent upon boats made from the sacred tree’s that grow on the bank.”

  She only nodded, and let him withdraw before recommencing her weeping. None but she knew how she had prayed and spelled against these knights. And all for naught. That they were across the Trent meant only one thing; her hour was upon her. The Goddess was calling her Maid back to the red moon.

  But her people needed her. Without her their faith would wither and die. They would become godless, or worse. Catholic. Alone in her palace, deep in Sherwood Forest, she waited and prayed. Her prayer took the form of a vision quest to the Cauldron of the Crone. She peered long into the bubbling stew of her own past.

  Always before, this sort of quest had been rewarded with wisdom.

  But not this time. No, her lang syne—the memory of her past lives—was closed to her.

  And what of this fine palace of timber and wattle made, and her Robin? She sighed to think of the beams falling down, and becoming food for the termites and the fungi, and her marvelous dancing Robin stopped in his dance forever.

  After the knights had crossed the Trent there came a week of slowly rising tension. They dared not enter the Maid’s woodland domain, for even their hard armor would not be protection enough here, where her flames could kill them as they slept or poison their food supplies.

  But the knights did not need to come into the forest. They knew the cold truth: if they waited long enough, the Maid would be obliged to come to them.

  The days grew shorter, and the deep wind of the north came back to Sherwood Forest. Robin made ceaseless forays into the camp of me black knights, but their defenses were strong and always defeated him. Worse, the knight’s sheet-metal armor was proof against even the most cunning fairy archers. Their straw-thin poisoned arrows could penetrate chain mail, but they bounced harmlessly off the sheet.

  Hallows’ drew nigh, and with it the timeless custom of the Maid’s Progress. Never in remembered history had a Maid failed to carry out this ritual. To remain in hiding now would be to say that the Old Religion was powerless, or that its ceremonies did not matter more than the mere life of a Maid.

  She could only hope that the Bishop of Lincoln would in the end hesitate to kill her, for fear that the country people would rise against him.

  But he was such a clever man. To simple eyes it would seem that he had no part of these knights. The sheriff of Nottingham was his knave in the matter and commanded the troop. Few of the country folk knew the truth of who was really behind the expedition.

  The red moon rose on Hallows’ Eve and the fairy came with the silver carriage. It had been fashioned long ages ago by a fairy metalsmith. The carnage was a buttercup of silver, with silver wheels. It was drawn by eight fairy horses, small fellows but stronger even than their masters.

  They traveled along the lower paths of the forest, where the trees were so tremendous that the ways between were barely wide enough for the fanciful vehicle.

  She never reached Mabhill this Hallows’ Eve. Just as they left the forest, the sheriff of Nottingham shouted from behind a long fence, “Hallo, be ye the Queen of the Witches?”

  She said nothing.

  “If ye be or not, you cannot pass. I am seeking the Maid of England, to kiss her garters and make merry with her. Be ye she?”

  She could not refuse his request; to do so would be heresy, “I am the Maid, good sir,” she said, and raised her skirts for him.

  But he did not come to her. Instead knights jumped out of holes and bowers and laid steel hands on her.

  The fairy fought with their little swords, but they could not match lances. Two of the knights fell to poi
son by lucky shots against the cracks in their armor, but most of the arrows loosed from the protection of the woods fell harmlessly. “Look how they fight us with twigs, the picts,” laughed the powerful Catholic soldiers.

  The Silent God was not so weak as Manan had hoped.

  They put her into a cage made of rushes and earned her all the night, arriving the next morning in Lincoln Town. The Maid had never actually been in a town before, and she was astonished to see the chickens and pigs swarming about right in the offal of the citizens. No wonder the people of the towns were sickly folk and given to riotings. Smoke hung low in the streets, and trolls wandered about snarling for farthings.

  Bread was stacked in great quantities in the houses, and bladders of wine lay by the doors. There were many barrels full of apples and cider. The sick lay about in comers, and filthy children ran back and forth with bits of garbage in their black little hands. She was most amazed, staring at the wonders and horrors of this place from her cramped cage.

  At last the Bishop of Lincoln came down the way. He was preceded by blaring crumhorns and soldiers in white armor, riding upon a horse with his own chest gleaming gold and his helmet of burnished brass.

  He might look grand, but Marian was the Maid of England, the Goddess Earth, and she met his eyes directly, even from the cage. He said naught, for he was proud in this place, and imagined that he had dominion over earth. But how was that? Would he build a prison around the greenwood or trap the sky?

  How did he intend to capture her?

  They took her in procession, with dancing, up the muddy street and through the tall wooden gate of the bishop’s palace. Upon that gate she saw a terrible sight, one that made her freeze inside. There were many spikes fitted to it, and on each spike was the head of a fairy. Some were black with rot and some gone to white bone, and others still dripped blood.

  How dared this man kill fairy? They would set pox on him and all that was his. They would poison him.

  But they had not managed it, for he rode fair and high, did he not?

  No matter what, she would never pray to the Silent God, Her life belonged to the Goddess; indeed she was the Goddess. In the Mysteries it was revealed that every woman is the Goddess. She is water as well as thirsty throat; she is the quenching, too. And the Homed God, the Godfather whom the Catholics call the Devil, is Death her consort, both taker and giver of life.