Cat Magic

by Whitley Strieber

  Charlie Reilly tromped in with a map, which he proceeded to unroll against the wall. “Give me a hand, Tim, I want to tape this thing up.”

  Simon had never seen such an elaborate topographical map. It showed contour in great detail, brown lines against me various shades of background color.

  “This is the National Guard ‘63 update of the Geodetic Survey map of the Maywell Quadrant,” Reilly said. He and Tim Faulkner finished taping it to the wall.

  It brought a military look to this headquarters. Simon took pleasure in the calm and professional atmosphere. He had been trying not to think about the hand coming to life. It was almost the only thing he could think about. Either it was a miracle to proclaim or a spell from which he must protect his people.

  But which?

  “Davis is down at the County Courthouse,” Deputy Peters said, “getting me blueprints of the Collier place. Once we have those we’ll be ready to get this operation set.”

  Eddie Martin spoke up. He was wearing green army fatigues and a camouflage flak vest. “I want to develop a mission analysis with detailed operational orders. And I don’t want anybody handling weapons or gasoline who doesn’t know what they’re doing. We’re not a bunch of assholes. We’re organized, we’ve got structure, and we’re in the right. So let’s act that way.”

  Even Simon’s original men had acquired new efficiency. He had little to do but watch. The martyrdom had filled his people with the grace of God. How he loved these people, deeply, abidingly, with his whole soul. They would help themselves and the witches, too. Let the poor people suffer in this life so that they would be happy in the next. Only one person among them all would not be going to heaven. Such was his joy and his deep, inner sadness that Simon wept quietly, the tears moving coldly down his cheeks. He sat bunched at his card table, nervously touching what was in his pocket.

  The witches’ barn was crowded. In the center was a great circular table, heaped with all kinds of food.

  People stood round it or sat on the floor. When Amanda and Robin came there was an intense stir, suddenly hushed. Amanda was not surprised to see Constance a miserable shadow of herself sitting off in a comer. She would need much support and reassurance. Her fate was upon her, visible to Amanda as a sizzling, burning finger that pointed directly at the center of the old woman’s skull.

  “Connie?”

  When Constance met her eyes, Amanda knew at once that she was aware of it, too.

  After a life lived between the worlds, the old woman was afraid of death. Connie’s black ravens stood in a line along and above her.

  Amanda made her way through the silent, watching crowd of people to her benefactor. She sat down on the floor in front of her. “Connie, how can I help—”

  “I’m not afraid of death. It’s pain.” She saw Connie burning in agony, her ravens swarming, their wings dipped in blue flames.

  “Oh, Connie!”

  “Whisper!”

  “Can’t you stop it? There must be some way, surely.”

  “When my fire burns, I’ll be there. Nothing can change it.”

  Amanda saw that. The closer the future comes to the present, the more possibilities become probable.

  Then they become inevitable.

  Connie smiled, a study in sadness. “Nature must feed, Amanda.”

  “Yes, Connie. You can lean on me now. You can tell me all your fears. Nothing is hidden from me.”

  Constance seemed to sag. In her eyes there was incredible gratitude. “I need you. I’ve needed you for years.”

  She would have taken the old woman in her arms there and then, but a woman came up, offering Amanda a bowl of sweet yogurt, all but bowing and scraping. Constance looked very sad. “It takes an independent spirit to do magic. They won’t be witches long if they become your followers, young woman.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  “You certainly don’t! They’re awed of your knowledge of death, but they all have the same information hidden in their hearts. We just forget it for a little while, so don’t take advantage of your fellowman’s poor memory.”

  “I’ll try not to.” Rather than have the woman grovel there, she took the proffered bowl and ate it while the whole of the lo Coven, who managed the dairy, looked on with pride. “It is human nature to seek the confirmation of princes,” she said. “That’s why royal families are forced to spend so much time making inspections. I can teach them not to regard me as a royal person.”

  “Let them be in awe of you, but let them make their own decisions. It’ll be hard, especially when you can see farther than they can. But they must learn from their own mistakes.”

  “I know. We can’t teach people anything. They have to have their experience.”

  Constance moved her hands beneath her dress and brought out a blackened, ancient garter. “This is yours,” she said. “I’ve been keeping it for you.” And so, without ceremony, she was being offered the very garter of Maidenhood. She recognized it of old, and took it. The leather was very, very old, as black as carbon. The clasp was of bone. Dimly, as if she were an echo of a cry, Amanda remembered Moom. Moom’s laughter, Moom’s pain, Moom’s courage. She had given birth to six children and died before she was fifteen.

  Moom had owned two garters. And so had Marian.

  “Where’s my other garter, Connie?”

  Constance waved her hand. “Lost to fire during the time of Innocent VIII.” The room was stuffy, the smell of the food heavy. Two children, Ariadne and Feather, actually knelt when they brought a plate of pancakes.

  Amanda knew that she had to act, and quickly, to avoid becoming the resident Goddess-Queen. It was right for the witches to have a queen, but she must be no more than first among equals.

  She held up the garter. “I’ve been given this. It belongs to the Covenstead and it can only be worn by an initiated priestess. Am I right?”

  There were murmurs of agreement.

  “Fine. Initiate me just as you would any apprentice. And if you elect me, I will wear your garter to the best of my liability.” She thought of Moom, who would have tom any woman apart who had tried to take this garter. And Marian, to whom the sacrilege of removing it was unthinkable. She put it in her pocket and took Connie’s hand. “You want anything from the table, Connie?”

  “No.” Her voice dropped. “You know what I’m going through.”

  “Yes, Connie.”

  “I wish you could hold me.”

  “I will, Connie, when we’re alone. As long as you want me to. I’ll be with you, Connie, even at the very end.”

  “I feel so strange without the garter! So sad.”

  She took Connie’s hand, for a moment held it tightly. The moment between them seemed to deepen. But Amanda knew that she had to break the moment. As much as she wanted to comfort Connie, this time belonged to the Covenstead. “If I don’t go over to that table and serve myself, I’m going to get more of bowing and scraping.”

  “You don’t need that. Go, do your duty.”

  There were pitchers of apple cider and a little blackberry juice. No whole berries, though. Too bad.

  Amanda had seen them on the bushes, fat and delicious-looking. There were elder-blow pancakes and pumpkin pies and squash cooked in herbs and honey, huge loaves of dark bread and white goat’s milk cheese. There were pitchers of cream and milk and pots of pungent tea. Slabs of the pig Hiram’s bacon.

  Long before she had tasted it all, Amanda had managed to satisfy even her fierce appetite. Her body wanted to confirm its renewed connection to life, and it did that by eating.

  She moved through a fog of silent, fascinated stares. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning,” she said.

  “If you ever resurrect anybody else, don’t forget to feed them. You come back hungry.”

  A little nervous laughter, as lame as her attempt to relieve the tension. Connie put a gentle hand on Amanda’s arm, drew her aside. “Take a lesson from Manan. She was very clever at being queen. She knew how to ru
le without coercion, and reign without causing awe. But even when she played hide and seek with the children or raced horses with the men, nobody ever forgot she was queen. It’s a trick, Amanda, to be first and equal at the same time.” Then Connie said something that disquieted Amanda.

  “It’s an illusion, just as the peace and happiness of this moment are an illusion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go outside and look at the sky. Look with your new eyes.”

  Amanda stood up, told Robin to stay behind, and went out on her own into the quiet village. A drift of smoke rose from the sweat-lodge chimney.

  As her eyes followed the smoke into the sky, she almost fell over backward with terror and shock. She was looking up the side of a towering leg covered with gleaming black fur. It was so tremendous that it was almost beyond seeing.

  She looked up and up the rippling, muscular sweep of black fur to the vast, expanding chest perhaps a thousand feet above, and right into the grinning Cheshire face of the largest and most menacing black cat she had ever seen.

  And Tom was looking straight back at her. There was instantaneous communication between them, deeper than spoken words. Tom was at once a part of what menaced the Covenstead and what protected it. The aim of the Leannan was to test the witches. The aim of that other darkness, that which controlled Brother Pierce, was to destroy them, as it was to destroy everything that gave mankind a chance of survival and growth.

  This Samhain was indeed a season of learning and of dying.

  That which menaced the Covenstead was far larger than Tom. Indeed, it towered over him, an immense presence of hate that swept up from Maywell and across the sky, drawing its strength from the immense heart of evil, and all the smaller hearts of men and women who would kill what they do not understand, who would despise ways which are not their own. She saw it clearly, even as it shrank back from her.

  What had possessed Brother Pierce and those like him fed on fear, and hated both man and God.

  “This long central hallway suggests to me that the way to go is to jimmy the front door and work through with the gasoline sprayers until we reach the kitchen, here. Then we get the hell out. On a radio signal the fire team goes through the same way. We put a two-minute timer on the fuses. By the time the place starts burning we’re approximately ‘three hundred yards away, just at the edge of the forest.”

  “I’d rather you had three minutes,” Brother Pierce said. He did not want another Turner.

  “If we leave it go too long, they’ll smell the fumes.”

  “How many people altogether on the place?” Bill Peters asked.

  Bob Krueger answered. “There’s twenty-one commuters to Philly and New York. Plus they’re running a damn good three-hundred-acre farm using only hand tools. We can’t see they have less than seventy people working that land. Add in children and boost the total ten percent to be on the safe side, and a reasonable guess is a hundred and thirty.”

  Bill rubbed his cheek with his right hand. “Where the hell do they live?”

  “They’re out there,” Eddie Martin said. “Got to be. We’ve targeted twenty-three houses in town as witch-owned, but the estate witches ain’t living there, or we’d see ‘em move out to the farm every day.”

  Bill thumped the blueprint. “They sure as hell don’t live in this house. Not unless they’re jamming together.”

  “They might be. Anyway, I don’t think it’s a concern.”

  “It’s a concern, all right. We’ve got to know where these people are. You’re talkin’ sixteen guys in our group. We’re no match for over a hundred. If we aren’t careful, we could all end up captured or worse.

  With these people, maybe a lot worse.”

  Simon thought of the house burning and lowered his eyes, praying once again to the Lord for guidance.

  They were witches and they must be evil, but was it his place to pass sentence on them? He was tempted just to say the whole attack was canceled and that the Lord had given him a better idea.

  Unfortunately the Lord was quiet, and Simon had no better idea. “Please, Lord,” he called in his heart, “help me to do your will. Help me, O Lord.” But the Lord remained silent. The planning session went on.

  Amanda looked up at the creature above her. Its great eyes glared down. It was waiting, and she had the feeling that there was very little time. But what did it want her to do?

  She looked into the eyes. They were too knowing to be safe, but they were also very, very good. There was even humor there somewhere. In a flash he crouched down.

  Amanda backed up. She could see the huge face superimposed on the village, hear the breathing, even hear the damp sound when he blinked. She could feel he was calling to her. Despite all his awesome power, he could not succeed without her.

  “How can I help? Please tell me!”

  In his eyes she saw men running on dark streets, she saw gasoline tins and roiling orange fire, and she heard Constance screaming in agony.

  “Can’t you stop them, Tom?”

  Then in the cat’s gleaming eyes Amanda saw the whole Covenstead on fire. She was so horrified she jumped back land fell down.

  She stared into the morning sky. And sure enough, what she feared to see was there. Poised over the barn was a flaming finger exactly like the one that threatened Constance. Amanda went back to the barn and drank a long draught of cider. People gathered round her then, and began kissing her one after another. She kissed them all, soft lips of women, thin lips of men, wet lips of children. She kissed them as openly and intimately as she had Robin, and shared her breath with them all.

  Some went away shocked, all silent. None but Amanda and Constance saw the fingers, and Constance kept to her comer, from time to time jerking her head as if to get out from under the thing that hissed in the air above her.

  But that was not the way to escape. Amanda’s mind was tormented with the problem. This was why she had been returned to her people. She was here to save their, way of life.

  There seemed to be no direction in which to turn. She sensed that she might as well try to change the course of the Amazon as alter the fate that overhung the Covenstead.

  She knew the emotion that came to fill her, knew it all too well. It was absolute and unreasoning. She fought it but it would not subside. Her fear was like ice in the depths of her belly, freezing everything, freezing hope. She could see Brother Pierce as if through a vault of night, his spirit tortured, his mind made up. He personified man’s deep, visceral fear of the unknown. There was so much hate and so much ignorance. She had no power against it.

  But she had to have power. Somehow she had to save the Covenstead. She saw Simon Pierce standing alone in the center of his night. In his hand was a torch, and fire was in his eye.

  Chapter 28

  NIGHT ON THE SURFACE OF A STAR

  In hush of afternoon Amanda went alone to the ruins of the fairy village. She needed time alone to think about the Covenstead’s problem. Tom had communicated to her that there was no escape from fate.

  They had to live through whatever lay ahead, or die in it.

  She climbed a hummock until she was isolated, as Maid Marian had been so long ago, overlooking her dominion. A small black stone came to hand. It was smooth with time, a flung aged to gentleness.

  In it she could feel the record of all it had ever known, whole eons collapsed to sighs. The stone was wise, and it had a message for her.

  The stone said; you must embrace the fire. Amanda saw the whole Covenstead consumed by quick red flames.

  The leaves, the stems, rustled with a hurrying breeze.

  “Act,” it whispered, “act.”

  The secret is—

  She saw the horses kicking in the barn as their manes began to smoke and curl.

  The Fairy Queen spoke: “This is the destiny of the night: you are warned that children of the fairy danced here once, but they do not dance now. The demon has different forms in different times, but it kills the same way. It
is the hammer of witches.”

  “How do I stop it? Tell me how!”

  She saw the Leannan for a moment, standing in among a tangle of weeds. “I don’t know. If I did, my fairy would be able to reclaim this place, and they cannot.”

  “Why not? What stands against you?”

  There was no answer.

  Amanda sat a long time, her eyes closed, listening to her body work and to the breeze worrying the dry grass. The body may be heavy and slow and coarse, but it was so wonderfully real. Once tasted, the life of the flesh could never be forgotten.

  Destruction, wars, fire—

  Had Brother Pierce no epiphany?

  When she opened her eyes, she was astonished to find how long the shadows had gotten. So many hours, so little time.

  Her people had come. They formed a circle around the base of the hummock. They chanted her name.

  “Amanda, Amanda, Amanda, Amanda.”

  It was deeply moving to hear the word of the smell and taste and look of herself. Moom, also, had been thus moved, and Marian.

  You must act, the wind had said.

  But how?

  The stone educated her. Images, words, thoughts, poured through her mind. She saw the whole massive mechanism of oppression. It came not only from the sorrowful heart of Brother Pierce but from the bleak, loveless minds of fundamentalist legislators assaulting witchcraft in Congress, and their followers persecuting witches in the dark of night. It was as if some great consciousness had possessed them and perverted their desire to do good, sweeping a black hand across their eyes.

  Then the stone showed her me condition of other witches in the world, the desecrated Grove of the Unicorn in Georgia, being vandalized by fundamentalist Christians before television cameras, the act gleefully broadcast on an evening news program. She saw Oz, a witch in New Mexico, being slandered on a “Christian” television program, and more: she saw the restless, questing hatred that animated this new persecution of me Old Religion, the articulate men in their fine suits arguing in Congress, and the spreading madness of the Brother Pierces of the world, and the sadness hidden in the hearts of them all as they prayed to the Risen Lord even as their hate chained them to the service of the Dark One Leannan would not name.