by Неизвестный
Her mount's hoofs clattered on the brick streets, echoing in the stillness. She was acutely aware of her nakedness.
Then a car gunned its motor and shot forward. She was impaled by the lights; she heard a powerful engine crying out the rage of the driver as the lights bore down. She dug her knees into her horse's thighs and pulled his mane sharply right. He burst into a gallop, climbing a steep lawn. The car followed, engine growling and tires screaming, then whining as it came to a stop at the curb.
She shrieked as her horse leaped back fences, stormed through porches, and jumped empty swimming pools. Then they were in an alley, then through it to the next street. Perhaps there had been a cordon arranged for them, but they were out of it now. She was glad, she felt the wildness again, the freedom, the sheer mad, sweating, gasping thunder of the ride.
And she knew she was closer to the Holly King. By long habit she wanted men, and waited for them. Never before had she allowed herself the feeling of just taking what she wanted.
They went past Church Row and across the town common beyond. “Find him,” she whispered to her mount. “Find him for me!”
Behind them other cars were muttering and growling, their lights prowling the streets that surrounded the common.
Then she saw the blazing sign of Brother Pierce's Tabernacle. People were running in and out, cars were coming and going—the place was like a wasp nest disturbed by a stick. She knew, at the same moment, that he was close by.
Her horse stopped. “Come on.” She pressed with her knees. He turned his head and looked at her. “So this is the place,” she murmured.
She dismounted, stood a moment on shaky legs, getting used to the ground again. Snow crunched beneath her feet. The salve was not so strong now; she felt how icy cold this night really was. Half a block from the Tabernacle there was another candlelit house. More witches. But he was not in that house. No, he was outside. They were to meet in the night.
He was a clever boy, to go so close to Brother Pierce's Tabernacle. Clever boy. But she wasn't afraid of anything anymore, not even this.
She would have ridden right down the aisle of the Tabernacle if necessary. Maybe it was the ride or the salve or being naked in the streets, but she was very excited. She had never wanted anyone like she wanted the Holly King.
Her horse turned its head, pricked its ears toward a sound behind them.
And did not even have a chance to scream when the blast of a shotgun shattered its brains. The great body shuddered and collapsed. “Okay, whore, put your hands up!”
She started to run.
“Stop!”
The hell with that. She had darkness on her side at least. She ran. A shot thundered behind her and something hissed past her right shoulder. Buckshot. Keep going.
“I got the damn horse!”
My horse, my horse, my beautiful magic friend of a horse!
“She's headin' toward North Street!”
“Get her, man!”
She flew, forcing herself not to shriek the cry that came to her throat. There would be time for rage later.
My horse!
In their thirty minutes together she and that stallion had become friends in passion, fellow celebrants of gender.
A flash of white ahead of her, a stifled cry, and she realized she had flushed the Holly King! Her beautiful horse had been taking her right to his hiding place.
When he sprinted across North Street, she saw him clear in the streetlight, his skin pale, his long legs pumping, his holly on his head.
Others saw him, too. Car lights flared and engines roared from both ends of the street. By the time Mandy was crossing there were only seconds to spare. Then brakes squealed and furious voices were all shouting together, “It's the witch, it's the witch!”
Behind her she heard clumsy crashing in the shrubs. She knew she was back on estate land, beyond the far limit of Maywell. North Street, where the estate's wall ended, was also the border of the town. Here were the ruins of Willowbrook, an unfinished housing development that had been started and died after Mandy had left Maywell.
She stopped on an overgrown street to listen for the Holly King. The crashing behind her got closer only slowly, accompanied by a steady smoke of curses. Then, just as she was certain she had lost him, a shrub moved almost at her feet.
Instantly she pounced—and connected with his hot skin and pricking crown. She ripped it from his head and tossed it high in the air. He gasped, started to run again, but she grabbed his wrist and screamed out her triumph with all her victorious soul, uncaring of the people behind her, even of the flashlight beams that were probing for her position.
He pushed at her, he tried to break her grip. Her blood was so high that she raised her fist and slammed it across his face. He made a long, rattling groan and sank down.
“Oh, God, I killed him!”
But no, he was crawling. It was another trick! She leaped at him, grabbed him around the waist, straddled him, sat on him, pinned him to the ground.
And felt, to her infinite delight, his bursting rigid essence jamming up between her legs.
A flashlight beam skimmed her head and there was a brutal shout of triumph.
She could not move for the spear of pleasure he had thrust into her. “We've got to run,” she whispered, but she simply sat there, staring down at his blood-running face, feeling him in her, and knowing joy so extreme that it almost made her lose her senses.
Then she heard ravens. And yells, frantic yells. The flashlight beams began to flail about in the sky to a great roar of the most fierce cawing Mandy had ever heard. The cacophony retreated rapidly toward the Tabernacle.
When the Holly King was spent beneath her, she got up, put his crown on her own head, and found herself surrounded by other witches, all gasping from their long run. They were wearing ordinary clothing, caps, jackets, hiking boots. Apparently only the principals in the rituals were expected to go naked in the town.
Without a word they clustered about her, tied her cloak around her, and gave her a sweet, delicious dnnk of hot wine and honey.
She walked with them all the way around the western edge of the town and beneath the cliffs of Stone Mountain, back to the estate. Gentle hands carried her lover.
She sat in the center of the circle. They laid him, quite asleep, before her.
Her people then indulged in the revels of the night. There was so little she understood of their rituals, except that the bodies flashing about her in the circle meant ecstasy.
There were twelve of them, six men and six women, dancing about the inner circle of which she and the Holly King were the center. They moved to the right, dancing and clapping, chanting a single word:
Moom, Moom, Moom, Moom.
They shouted, they whispered, they danced until the chant merged and changed and grew into another word, which she at first could not quite understand:
Moomamaamannamuaman adamoom amandoom.
Then she heard it—her own name. Amanda. She listened to it weaving about in the chant, and watched the sweat-slick nakedness of the people dancing in her honor, and wondered. Whom do they take me for? Who am I?
Chapter 15
For George, Bonnie's death was a great, black boulder, crushing him as a foot might crush an ant.
Clark had called him mad and disowned the project, then had gone back to the Covenstead to tell Constance all that had happened.
They had been together in the faculty commons when they got the news.
“There's been a student killed out on MSR,” Pearl Davenport had shouted, her head popping in the door.
Clark went a dull shade of gray.
The long call of the sirens swept up and down the room.
“George, where the hell did Bonnie go?”
“Oh, Christ, oh, Christ.”
“Pearl, who—”
“Clark, it was a girl. She got hit. I was coming across the damn road, there was an awful crunch, and this—oh, Jesus—this little rag goes flying halfwa
y to heaven.”
“It was a girl! Who, Pearl, honey?”
“Blond. Petite. I didn't see her clearly. I think she had on a college sweatshirt, Spacy-looking, that's all. Then she's in the road and oh, I don't want to think about it.”
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.”
Dark'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 kifl 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, dark'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 cned, 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, dark 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 dark 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 womed 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 know. 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 dark 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.