“Oh no,” I groaned.
The bag surged slightly and settled again. “Well, yes; but I was hungry, and Rose handed me a little dish of colored candies, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d popped some into my mouth.
“Well, my own powers were roused up to protect me at once, of course, but the best I could manage under the circumstances was to switch forms, and at that only into some creature analogous to the sort of human being I appeared to be. So—stray old street-woman into stray old alley cat, I’m afraid.”
I said, “You mean there’s no cat, really—this is you?”
“For the time being,” she said. “Very awkward, too. There I was in Kali’s Kitchen and I couldn’t get out because this little cat-brain was so crazed with fear that it was impossible to direct! I kept having this irresistible urge to hide when I should have been escaping. While I’m in cat form, to some extent I’m stuck with cat limitations, and they are considerable.”
I said, “But you got away.”
The voice said, “By luck. It was lucky for me, lovie, that you ignored my instructions! In her eagerness to get her hands on you, Ushah left the side door open, so I was able to slip out and make my way up here in search of you; and that’s been an adventure, I can tell you. But I won’t, not at the moment.”
This is embarrassing to admit, but I was crying with relief. I sort of blubbered and gulped while I talked. “Oh, Gran, listen—he’s taking them tonight, all the captive souls, and Mom, too!”
And I told her all.
The bag lay still, mounded in a neat, small-cat shape and pointed over the ears.
Gran said, “So, it’s as I thought; he’s built your mother into his scheme. He’s using her to fuel a very grand structure of evil magic indeed! But that gives him a weakness, as well as a strength.
“Using her powers, perhaps he’s overreached himself, lovie. He might not be able to make it all work on his own. If we can win her back from him, the whole structure may come apart. So we do have a chance. Though it’s not a very good one, to tell the truth, and if we fail—”
“If we fail, what?” I said.
Gran said slowly, “He’ll try to take us as well, you and me, Val—to capture the rest of our family talent for his own uses. We mustn’t let that happen! We must break his spell. Somehow.”
She sighed a sigh that turned into a cat-yawn that lifted the bag and sucked in the cloth a little.
“Easier said than done,” she went on briskly. “Never mind, we must do what we can.
“To start with, lovie, you can take me upstairs with you just as I am, here in this bag. If I get away from you again, I don’t know that I’ll be able to make my way back, being so subject to cat-fears while I’m cat-formed.”
“But why don’t you just change back into your own shape?” I said. A horrible explanation occurred to me. “You’re not—not stuck like this, are you?”
“No, not now that you’ve touched me with the silver glove,” came Gran’s voice. “It’s a great unlocker and tugger-loose, is the silver glove. But transformations are exhausting. I’ll need everything I’ve got and then some before this night is out. Besides, I do have a use for this shape still. I think I’ll keep it for a bit, limitations and all.”
“I wish you’d, you know, come back, Gran,” I moaned.
“Don’t cry, lovie. We’ve done rather well, between us. Thanks to you, I slipped right out of his clutches, didn’t I? Ushah is in for it if he finds out.”
“It’s true,” I said, feeling more cheerful. “He has no idea where you are. Or, um, what you are, either.”
“Good thing Brightner himself wasn’t supervising things at the restaurant,” Gran said with satisfaction. “That’s the weakness of bad guys, have you noticed? Overreaching. Greediness. He does have all those other collection points to attend to, after all—like the ‘clinic’ in Buffalo. No wonder he needs an assistant! He’s such a busy fellow, with shadows to gather here and in Buffalo and perhaps other places as well. Not to mention the time he’s taken off romancing your poor silly mother!”
Gloom invaded me. “You know all about that?”
“Indeed I do,” the cat said. “You did your best to protect her. No use blaming yourself, lovie.”
“Well, I won’t,” I said. “If we can get Mom back.”
“Her, and the others, poor things,” said Gran’s voice. The neck of the hag twitched slightly as the cat pawed delicately at it from inside. “We must stop the necromancer if we can.”
“If!” I said. “But you studied in Sorcery Hall, and he’s just a—a renegade. He can’t have more power than you do!”
“I am old, lovie. I don’t know how this will come out. We will try, though, won’t we? We must. And we have a deadline.”
My heart began to pound. Brightner had mentioned a deadline.
“Closing time,” I said. “At Kali’s Kitchen, I guess. Closing time tonight. He was telling the truth about that, wasn’t he—not just trying to scare me?”
“Oh yes,” Gran-the-cat said. “He told you his intentions, and you’d be a fool not to be scared.”
Well, I wasn’t a fool and I sure was scared. I stood up and paced around, glaring at the quiet machines. “But even if we miss the deadline, you could find out where he took her. We could go after her and get her back!”
“Not likely, lovie,” Gran said after a moment, shifting uneasily inside the cotton bag. “The longer she’s with him, the more like poor Ushah she’ll become—obedient, I mean. To him.”
“Poor Ushah, nothing!” I growled. “She tried to get me!”
“Yes, poor Ushah!” Gran said firmly. “Being under Brightner’s influence has made her into her own worst self. Remember, like all powerful people gone bad he uses fear and lies to corrupt and control others. He’s made Ushah afraid of her own strength and afraid of being without him. That’s his magic hold on her. Believing his lies, she’s become his creature and lost herself.
“He’ll do the same with your mother, and I’m afraid she’s not very well prepared to resist him. You might follow her only to find her unwilling to leave him.”
The idea of my mom, who had pulled herself together after her divorce and made herself a new career and everything, who was an important person to a whole bunch of writers and editors, becoming a willing captive of Brightner was absolutely crazy-making. I didn’t know whether to cry or scream.
“What are we going to do?” I said. “Gran, just tell me. I’ll try anything!”
“I would start,” said the cat mildly, “by getting the laundry out of the machines.”
14
The Witch’s Daughter
WHEN I GOT BACK WITH THE LAUNDRY and the cat, I found Mom sitting on the fire stairs between our landing and the one below, brushing her hair with languid strokes. She was still in her bathrobe and carpet slippers.
And she looked—well, at first sight she looked like a nightmare. She had obviously been busy in front of her dressing table mirror putting on makeup now and then while I’d been down in the basement.
And what makeup! There was makeup on top of makeup: crusted mascara sticking her eyelashes together, flaking layers of liquid foundation and powder, lipstick caked all over her mouth and smeared on her front teeth. She was a parody of what Barb had made of me to help me escape from Ushah and The Claw.
When I asked her what she was doing there, she said, “It’s late.” For a second there I was electrified by the hope that somehow she had recovered, escaped Brightner on her own, and was her old self again, checking up on her errant daughter.
No such luck. The next second she frowned vaguely and added, “We’re supposed to leave soon.”
My hope went flat and left me feeling more tired and discouraged than before.
I got her and the laundry into the apartment. Gran instructed me to leave the white laundry bag, open, on my bed, so that she could venture out when her cat-nerves recovered.
Meanwhile I cooked Mom some soup an
d toast and nagged her into eating it (I don’t think she’d had a meal all day). Then I made her clean up. She let me scrub her face for her with the washrag, as if she were a little kid. It was horrible.
Gran-the-cat watched, huge-eyed and trembling, from the doorway of the bedroom. That was as close to us as she could bring herself, since her cat-nerves certainly hadn’t been helped by the ride upstairs in the noisy old elevator. But she could talk to me from the hall, and she did.
Gran’s theory was that when Brightner took off tonight, of all his victims Mom was the only one whose actual present body would be fetched rather than discarded and left behind (translation: left mysteriously dead). In Mom’s case, Brightner wanted the whole package, body and soul. And he would send Mom’s reflection to fetch it.
Since we had to be at Kali’s Kitchen around closing time to confront him, we couldn’t stick around the apartment to try to hold Mom back. But Gran said there was a small chance that knocking Mom out a little with sleeping pills might at least slow down her responsiveness to being fetched, even if it couldn’t stop her completely.
Any unexpected turn of events, like a delay, could work for us and against Brightner. He was the one with the plans. We were more or less improvising, which left us more flexible than he was.
We hoped.
Not that I hoped much. I mean, think of it—a kid and an old alley cat, against Brightner, Ushah the Foul, and The Claw!
We were probably crazy, but I didn’t feel the awful hopelessness I had before, maybe because I had Gran back, sort of. Or maybe what kept me going was rage about this parody of my mom that Brightner had palmed off on me.
Which is how I came to be sitting with my mom that evening, coaxing her to drink down a glass of warm milk with a sleeping pill dissolved in it.
Too bad I couldn’t take a pill myself. Prospects of a totally terrifying night stretched ahead.
“Swallow,” I told Mom. “Come on, drink some more.”
In the doorway, Gran muttered, “Oh, damn,” and whirled around and bit at her haunch.
I stared, fascinated.
Gran looked wearily up at me again. Her voice came out slightly hoarse. “You have no idea—these little beasties have such a limited number of actions open to them! When something presses my buttons, like an itch that might be a fleabite, the whole organism responds willy-nilly. And I think I’ve got a bad case of worms.”
In a way, I think I preferred having the cat talk to me from the bag. The way its lips twisted to make the consonants was weird—a kind of insane-looking snarling, something like bad animation in a cartoon. A pity Barb, with her cartoon art mania, wasn’t here to see this!
“But you don’t have Alzheimer’s, right?” I said. “In spite of what the doctors say. Cats can’t get that, can they?”
“I don’t know,” Gran said.
“Though actually, if anybody around here is acting like they’ve lost their mind it’s Mom, not you!”
If you think a cat talking to you is rough, try a cat laughing. It was positively grotesque.
Mom drank most of the doped milk with me holding both her hands curled around the warm glass. Then she pushed me away, sat up, and craned her neck, looking around for something.
“Hairbrush,” she said. “Where did I leave it? I can’t go looking like this.”
I pushed her back against the pillows, not very gently. “For Pete’s sake,” I shouted, “if you do any more brushing you’ll brush yourself bald! You want to be bald?”
She let me feed her a few more swallows of spiked milk before she turned her face away and burrowed down under the covers like an overtired kid.
Gran-the-cat said from the doorway, “All right, lovie, I think she’ll stay put now. Pour the rest of the milk out in a saucer and put it on the floor for me, would you?”
“This stuff is doped,” I reminded her. “I’ll get you some fresh milk.”
“No,” she said. “That’s the milk I want. We have to wait now, till closing time, and my poor little cat-body needs some rest after so much excitement. Also, I’ll have to be very quiet and docile while you sneak me past Ushah tonight, and maybe past Brightner himself.”
“Great,” I said, “but suppose that milk knocks you out cold? How can I wake you when the time comes?”
“You won’t have to,” Gran said. “Don’t worry.”
Fine.
But my real worry about the sleeping pills went much deeper. Not knowing how much of the dissolved stuff was left in the remaining milk, let alone how much of it was safe to feed to a cat—if any!—worried me a lot. “But, Gran—”
“Good heavens, I thought you young people were as easy as your corner pharmacist with all sorts of ‘substances,’ as they call such things now! This is not the time to get fussy about drugs.”
I felt my cheeks heat up. I mean, I’ve tried a few things, but it would have been embarrassing to admit just how ignorant and inexperienced I really was about stuff that some kids could synthesize with a chem set.
I stayed with the heart of the problem.
“But you could—I mean, a cat could die of sleeping pills, couldn’t it?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Gran said with weary impatience, “this rackety little puss-heart can only take so much more excitement as it is, child! In my opinion, we’re better off with the risk of overdosing.”
I stood there gripping the warm glass. “Change back,” I begged. “Please, Gran!”
“Not till I have to, I’ve told you.” Gran-the-cat’s eyelids drooped shut. Her scratchy cat-voice murmured, “There will only be one chance, and it has to be exactly right. I’m sorry, lovie. It’s a hard choice. But think of what we stand to lose . . .”
“I hate this!” I moaned to myself. “I hate it!”
But I did it.
Some milk splashed on the kitchen floor because my hands were shaking when I poured. I put the saucer down and went out in the hall to wait, so I wouldn’t make the cat more nervous by hanging over it. After a long time, I heard tiny lapping sounds.
Then silence; and then a small thud. I bounded back into the kitchen, my insides clenched in expectation of the worst.
The cat lay on its side. Its knobby little body was slack and still, and kneeling for a closer look I saw a sliver of pale eyeball between partly closed eyelids. But the scrawny flanks rose and fell and one forepaw twitched slightly. I groaned with relief.
Then I went back to Mom’s bedroom. I turned the TV on—some cop show with the sound way down. I just wanted the comfort of the flashing pictures while I waited.
The phone rang. I almost fell off the bed, grabbing for it fast so the noise wouldn’t rouse Mom. A girl from my history class wanted to check the assignment for tomorrow. I went into my own room and looked it up for her, thinking, when was the last time I did any homework? If I survived Brightner, would I be able to survive my teachers at school?
When I’d finished giving the information and hung up, I found Mom lying on her side and looking at me.
“Mom?” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
“Hi, darling,” she said and yawned. “What time is it?”
“Late,” I said, tucking her in all over again. What was I going to do if she didn’t go back to sleep, give her more pills? I didn’t dare.
“Never too late,” she murmured, smiling. “Some day my prince will come.” She began humming the song from the Walt Disney cartoon movie.
My Mom thought she was Snow White going under an enchanted sleep. Only it was the Demon Shrink, not the handsome prince, who meant to wake her. And there wouldn’t be any happily-ever-after, not with his string of wives and his awful recruiting “contracts,” not to mention Ushah the Ghastly.
“Go to sleep,” I said.
She hummed, ignoring me.
I had an inspiration. I snuggled down next to her on the bedspread. “Mom,” I said, “I can’t sleep. Tell me a story.”
She had often dozed off while telling me bedtime stories when
I was little. Now she sighed and was still for a little. I thought maybe her mind was wandering so widely that she hadn’t even heard me.
Then she said softly, “Once there was a witch, and she had a daughter.”
She started to tell me about a witch from Scotland who married a baker in New York, and their daughter; in other words, about Gran, and about her childhood self. She frowned woozily and her fingers pulled and plucked at the tufted knots on her bedspread as she told me all about it in a rambling, in-and-out-of-focus tone.
“You can’t imagine what it was like. This witch would be visited in the back of the bakery by the damnedest people—faith healers, spies, stockbrokers, heaven knows what. You’d be amazed at the kinds of people who’ll consult a witch if they can find a real one! And this one was real, all right. Sometimes at night her daughter would sneak downstairs and there, in the midst of the good bread-smells and the baking that went on all night, the witch would be talking with—with things from somewhere else, not of this world at all.
“There was one morning when the daughter found the witch-mother emptying all the ovens. Out of every one came a loaf in the shape of a person, burnt solid black and charred—so horrible, horrible . . .
“And the witch was crying,” Mom added, wide-eyed with memory.
I patted her shoulder, “It’s all right, Mom,” I said, “I can sleep fine now. You don’t have to tell any more.”
But on she went. “The witch’s eyelashes and eyebrows had been scorched right off and it took her months to grow them back again. I wasn’t supposed to notice, but I did! The daughter, I mean. Poor kid. She noticed, and she had nightmares afterward. She cried herself to sleep for a week, she was so scared.
“Not that it did any good. The witch-mother went right on with her ‘works.’ The house rocked with it sometimes. Spells and chants got into the daughter’s sleep. It took me years to forget them. Took her years, I mean. The witch even got herself enrolled in some kind of magicians’ school, of all things. She actually studied the stuff. She loved it.
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