by Неизвестный
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-1 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. Bonme 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 this 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.
It grew much colder.
George drove onto the campus, went to the lab, and began loading the coils into cardboard boxes. Four trips back and forth and his car was full. There remained only one thing to get: the tranquilizer gun. There was enough scopolamine in one of those cartridges to close a human being down for a good hour.
He pocketed it. His pistol was nowhere to be found, dark, no doubt, making sure the doctor didn't do himself in.
No, not yet. The good doctor had been in a tailspin, yessir. But the good doctor was now flying again.
He had a fine plan. He was going to become the spider of the house. Do a little web sitting.
Sooner or later, dear little Mandy would be bound to return, if only to get her things.
When she did, he was going to kill her.
Farewell, Amanda.
And bring her back to a normal life.
Hello, again. (Applause.)
Together they would share their triumph with the world—
Cliapter 16
Mandy awoke to the sound of dripping water. She opened her eyes and found herself looking across a dirt floor. Her shoulders ached, her thighs ached, and greasy male flesh wrapped her body. Robin, in the truth of the morning, needed a bath.
As she became fully conscious, she was struck by powerful, pounding emotions. There was sorrow over the horse that had been killed, but at the same time something new moved in her, a sense of tautness, as if a little steel had impregnated her bones, and her muscles had been filled with the energy of a coiled spring. Robin was not a large, distant model of her father, but somehow smaller, and she knew that she could share power with a man, or even take it from him if she wished.
Beyond these newly discovered feelings and powers, though, there was something much greater. Over the past twenty-four hours it had emerged as the new center of her understanding, revising everything. It was her memory of the Leannan Sidhe, the Fairy Queen. To lie back in the straw and know she had seen the Leannan and that the fairy were real gave her the most exquisite possible joy. For her the meaning of the world had deepened and grown much richer. The joy that filled her extended itself beyond love of the Leannan to include Robin and Constance and the whole Covenstead. She had reached, she thought, the center of the world's beauty.
She indulged in an elaborate stretch, feeling every muscle, every limb.
The water was gurgling, tinkling, pinging all around the outside of the wattled building. Here and there a drip came through the thatch. The unseasonable snow was melting.
Around her people sighed and snored. She was the only person awake, but the animals were snuffling about in their stalls. Across a tossed expanse of sleeping humanity a soft-eyed goat was munching hay.
Besides her enormous sense of personal wetl-being, there was a physical reality she could not ignore. She felt sticky and clammy, dirtier than she had been since the days of tattered sneakers and sand piles. She could not recall wanting a shower quite as much as she wanted one now. The dripping sounds made her long to feel a warm stream sluicing across her skin, to smell the gentle billows of Ivory as they washed away the battles of the night.
She stared back at the eerie lozenges floating in the goat's eyes. Somehow it did not seem entirely innocent, this goaf. Who knows what is in the mind of the animal—the simple emptiness that seems to be there or a silent, motionless intelligence? Its ears pricked forward. Her staring had made it cunous.
There came the memory of thunder in the dark. The hard flash of the shotgun, the quivering of her devastated horse.
Her horse? She hardly knew his name.
But for a little while that horse had been part of her. He was the shaded man she had touched once or twice inside herself. In every woman, she thought, there lives a father and a bandit of a man, who is somehow reached through mat mad love of horses that affects many an adolescent woman. Mandy could remember owning pictures of horses and going to the county fair to see the trotters.
You do not just kill a magnificent horse.
Robin's hand dangled across her thigh. She took it to her lips and kissed it. How unfamiliar it was. She decided that she did not actually love him. She felt passion for him. For her, this was a very rare experience. Her relationships with men were nol straightforward. There had been too much anger between her and her father for her to ever trust herself to a man—
Idly she ran her fingers in his hair, touched his sleeping face. Would she love him, this man who had been given to her, or did the gift preclude that desperate, clinging thing?
Through the smoke hole far above came a blast of light. Outside chickens were cackling, and a rooster set up a lusty crowing. A cow kicked her stall and something made a chortling sound.
Something else moved in the far shadows, disturbing the dark near the wall. When Mandy raised her head to look more closely, the movement stopped.
She was not deceived, though. Even her brief experience with raw nature had already changed her perceptions. Animal cunning did not fool her so easily. She knew something was there.
Stillness settled, and as it did, the shadows began to move again. Something slid along, changing the curve of a leg, the thickness of a thigh, the length of an arm, as it moved among the sleepers.
Mandy understood all at once what she was seeing, and when she did she jammed her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming. It moved steadily across the room, its head held just above the floor, its tongue darting, its eyes polished knobs.
Mandy watched it come into the center of the circle. Midway down its length was a lump about the size of a rat. It was at least six feet long, a great red and yellow creature, fairly glowing witfi reptilian health. It was on its way home after its predawn hunt.
The snake was no fool. It did not attempt to go near the animal stalls, but rather headed toward the door, crossing sleeping people with impunity, staying strictly away from the hoofed things. As it slid across a child's bottom, she giggled in her steep.
Not ten seconds after it had disappeared into a crack in the wattling beside the door, the great gong boomed. Somebody coughed. The child awoke laughing. Other shadows began rising in the half light. Cloaks and jackets and shirts were found. Mandy chose to watch the activity out of half-closed eyes. She didn't want to miss any chance, however small, to learn more about these people. She was now able to accept that she was important to them, and thus it bothered her all the more that they were such strangers to her. She had already learned that direct questions didn't help much. Ask them their names and they would say Flame or Wild Aster or Garnet or some such thing. But never a legal identification.
As if he existed half in her imagination and half in reality, she saw Tom clinging in the rafters, a vividness fading. He had done terrible things, that cat. You could hear his fury in tfie way he breathed.
The general shuffle in the room awoke Robin. He shifted, stretched, then groaned.
“Hi,” she said.
“I must be alive. I ache all over.”
“You aren't alone. I'm hungry as well as sore.”
He laughed. “You're lucky you don't have to eat and run. I've got to commute ail the way to New York.”
Surely he was joking. The Holly King couldn't possibly be a commuter.
“Don't look so amazed. You make me feel like I've got two heads or something. I go to the Pratt Institute. I'm studying design. It's no big deal. A lot of us commute. The Covenstead has to exist in the real world, after all. And it's out there, believe me, belching smoke and vomiting a continuous stream of Big Macs and VCRs.”
He stood up and took a couple of halting steps. “Damn. I might be cutting class this morning. Look at my feet.”
She touched the cuts, the swellings, the bruises. He had run barefoot as well as naked last night. Considering which, his feet were actually in fairly good condition.
Now that she was fully awake she recalled the Wild Hunt in exact detail. And she wondered about the morality of
such an escapade. She and Robin had abused their bodies. Above all, there was the death of the horse and the terrible chase that could so easily have ended in their murder. One of the things the Wild Hunt had given her was the willingness to ask hard questions. She did not know it, but she was beginning to take the first, hesitant steps toward rule. “Why did you go into the town?”
“The Wild Hunt would hardly be wild if there was no danger. And the town covens would have been bitterly disappointed.”
“You could have found danger in the woods.”
“Safer danger? Come on. Our enemy lives in Maywell.”
“I lost my horse.”
“Raven was a great creature.”
“I loved him.”
“He was part of you last night, wasn't he?”
“More than you realize.”
“Then he still is, Amanda. Now and always. And you should thank Brother Pierce for that. He gave you Raven.”
“That's ridiculous!”
“No air is sweeter than that we breathe after we have escaped our enemy.” Robin touched her face. “Come on,” he said, “let's find us some breakfast.”
She found herself willing to accept his touch and the consolation in his voice. The Wild Hunt was over. Nobody needed to tell her that she had passed that test as well. From the new power and assurance she felt within, she knew it.
They went out into a mild morning. The ground was sodden, everything wet with runoff. The temperature was easily fifty. The air smelled of hot bread and wood fires, with a colder breath coming off the mountain. Robin inhaled, looked around. “If the snow had come a week earlier or stayed a day longer, it would have destroyed our crops.”
“You're lucky.”
“Some people around here think the Leannan can control the weather. All the covens cast spells for a thaw, though. Maybe that's what did it.”
“Show me some spells ”
“Soon.”
“Oh, come on. I'm sick of being kept in suspense by you people. I want to know now!”
“Look—quick!” He pointed toward a tangle at the base of the mountain.