by Неизвестный
Rape must be on his mind. Just the right size, she thought bitterly. Indeed. She might put up more of a fight than he expected.
He moved so suddenly, though, that he dragged her right off her feet. “We're going to the basement now. Oh, you idiot, don't struggle so! Everything's going to be just fine. You don't have a thing to worry about.”
“You bastard! You try to rape me and I'll kick your balls off.” She would, too.
“Rape? I'd never do that. I've got too much respect for women.”
“Look, George, you're—slop pulling at me! Where are you trying to take me?”
“Basement, dear. My equipment's down there.”
She writhed, remembering the room full of cat pictures. The lair of Hades.
God, this was contrived. He was Hades, and he had surprised her despite her caution, just as in the old myth. He was dragging her down into the netherworld.
“Come on, quit that kicking. You're not going to get away from me.”
“Let me go, George, I'm warning you!” She couldn't quite get into position to hurt him. If he got her down there, she had failed the test.
“It's a gift I'm giving you. You'll know what it is to die and come back to life Think of it, you'll know. You'll be famous, Amanda.”
It took a few seconds for her to understand what he was planning. When she did, panic overwhelmed her and she screamed. He was about to kill her in his machine! Kill her! This was no game. Constance had literally sent her to her death.
“It's not tested! You might murder me!”
“It works perfectly. It's safe.”
“Then why is it in the basement and not in your lab? George, please listen to me. You've got to get yourself together.”
She was babbling and she knew it. Her body, her bones, her young blood, were panic-stricken. She exploded with effort. Twisting, contorting herself, she managed to dig her nails into his cheek. As he reared back she kicked behind her, jamming her heel again and again into his shin, tearing and pulling and twisting.
And suddenly falling free.
She stumbled to her feet and rushed to the kitchen door He was not three feet away, snarling, a flap of bloody skin dangling from his nose, plunging toward her.
Then she was through the door, running as fast as she could around the back of his Volvo, slipping in the wet grass, falling down.
He leaped on her so hard her breath whistled out of her mouth. Even so she wriggled free of him and managed to stagger to her car. She got in, fumbling frantically with her key. Just as she jammed it into the starter his arm came snaking in the window and his fingers twined her hair.
“Immortality, you tittle beauty! You're happy about it! Happy!”
It hurt so much when he yanked her hair that she saw flashes. But she started the car. With her last bit of strength she engaged reverse and let out the clutch.
Something pncked her shoulder. When she looked he was withdrawing a syringe. She bellowed, grabbed at her arm. “It'sjust scopolamme, Amanda,” he said, his voice full of apology. “It won't hurt you.”
She stared in horror at the shoulder. It was as if a warm tropic wave washed over her. In the distance she heard the car ticking over. Quick! You're too slow!
She pressed the gas pedal. From far, far away there came kindly laughter. “I've got the key, dear I took it out. You can't drive the car, the engine isn't even running.”
What happened to the engine?
“Let's go back in the house now.”
“No-o-o. . . no thank you. . .” Was that her voice? So empty, so distant.
“Come on. Right now.”
He opened the door. Then his hand was under her elbow.
“Let's go, Amanda. We have a lot of work to do ”
She rose up out of the car even though she didn't want to. There just didn't seem to be any way to resist As he took her into the house she cast a sorrowful look back. Then he closed the door and began nudging her down the long hall toward the mudroom.
“Tom?”
“What's that?”
He was in the game room, lying like a long black python along the back of the couch, his kinked tail switching, his eyes gleaming.
“Tom, help me! Tom!”
George looked around. “There's nobody here but us, dear.” For some reason he could not see the cat.
Tom kneaded the couch and yawned.
“Please, Tom, please!”
“Be careful, honey,” George said, “you have to climb down a ladder.”
“Oh, a ladder. Please. . .”
“That's it. All the way down, now. Right. You stand there. Stand still.”
She couldn't move if she wanted to. His voice was the only command she could respond to.
“Oops, you were swaying. Did you realize that? I had to give you quite a dose of scope, honey. You'll be out like a light within the minute. Come on, now, hurry along.”
The Kitten Kate Room again. She didn't like the Kitten Kate Room. On the ceiling was a picture of a galaxy spiraling through eternity. Superimposed on it was a lean black cat. Black and dangerous and lovely. “Tom, help me!”
“Cross your wrists in front of you, please. Sorry I don't have any straps, I know they'd be more comfortable. But I can't risk you moving in your sleep and wrecking the coils. Also, when you wake up you're going to be a tad upset, I think, so it's better this way. Isn't it better, dear?”
Dimly, distantly, she felt her wrists and ankles being bound, felt rope swinging round and round her body, felt the world swinging away.
She dreamed long, vague dreams of the beautiful lady of the mountain, and the Holly King and Raven, and all that new world.
And Tom. . . yawning while George killed her.
The first thing she saw when she was conscious again was the terrible face of the panther in the ceiling.
“Hello, Amanda. How do you feel?”
“I've got a headache.” She tried to move, realized she was still tied. Her confusion was complete. She was bound down tight, surrounded by shining brown ceramic devices of some kind. She tried again to move, but the ropes held fast.
“I was killed! You killed me, didn't you?”
He put his hand on her face. “We're going to begin the experiment now, dear. I had to let the drug wear off first. You've been asleep all day.”
The blackest despair covered the little sprig of hope that had started to grow in her. “No! No!”
“Not so loud, dear. These houses are close together.”
“Help! Help me!”
“Hush, now!”
She heard a buzz, felt the table sway. A terrible tickling swarmed in her chest, centered on her heart.
“See you in a few minutes. Toodle-oo!”
The dark took her.
Chapter 18
RED MOON
moom moom
hear my call
moom moom
speak to me
—Anselm Holto, “Troll Chanting”
No wind passed her and she impacted nothing, but she knew she was falling. She heaved and twisted. It was excruciating to anticipate a splattering end that never came.
She screamed, but there was no sound. She called out, “Don't kill me! George, please, please.” Her voice was dead.
So this is what it was like This—this billowing emptiness. Her body was not a body anymore. It seemed more smoke than flesh, thick and cold. But aware, and conscious and very scared. George had succeeded in killing her Of course he'd never bring her back. If he could, he would still have a lab and official approval. She had come into the cave of Godfather Death and gotten herself killed. The final test was over, and she would never inherit the Covenstead.
She began to cringe in her falling, waiting for the shattering crunch, her ribs jamming full force into her shoulders. If terror was a creature, she was dropping down its throat.“
But she had no ribs, and there would be no impact. She was falling into nowhere, and she herself was becoming nothing.
&nbs
p; There mumbled in her mind the ragged thought: I'm dissolving.
She didn't think she could bear it, not falling and falling and never hitting, in absolute silence and absolute dark.
“Please, I can't die. I've got to get back.”
A terrible, thin face flickered nearby, as if in response to her cry. She batted at it, a starved husk of a face with white worms for eyes. But it had delicate eyebrows and a familiar pale shape. Amanda rejected it with all the force of her soul.
“Daughter,” it said, “welcome to hell.”
“Mother! My God, what happened to you?”
The face shifted and congealed, wrinkling and collapsing on itself. “I lived,” it gargled, “I lived wrong. . .” And then was gone.
“No, Mamma, no.” How horrible, how hideous, what a tragedy. She said she had lived wrong—but how wrong? What had she done?
“Mamma!”
The face reappeared, dissolving, just inches before Amanda's eyes. The skin was sloughing off the bones, and the hair was growing long and ragged. Decay that must have taken a year in Mother's coffin was being re-created in seconds. Amanda screamed and hit, and her blows went right through the apparition.
“Mamma, why?”
“I need this. I chose it, I must atone for my life.”
“What?”
“From the time you were six I hated you.”
“You didn't hate me. Mamma! You—” But it was true, wasn't it? Remember the hot sorrowing nights when she would not come, remember how she scorned your art, remember how she sat, as still and rigid as a wooden mother, that time Dad beat you up? “Mamma, I forgive! I forgive you!” Worms, get out of her eyes' Skin, come back! Hair, stop growing!
“We judge ourselves when we die, honey, and we are never wrong.”
“I forgive you.”
“I have to forgive myself, and that's going to take some time.”
“You don't deserve to suffer like this!”
“I told Mother Star of the Sea to discourage your interest in art,”
“Mamma, I know that. And she ignored you.”
“You got into the Pratt Institute. And I threw out the letter of acceptance.”
“Since then I've taught at Pratt two semesters. I'm beyond caring about Pratt.”
“I wanted to destroy you. I wanted to hurt you.” The face glowed as it spoke, as if with fire from inside.
“Mamma, I forgive.”
“I was jealous! You were beautiful and talented and I was—me.” Something was moving behind her, something complicated.
“I forgive you!”
“I can't forgive myself.”
Amanda saw it more clearly now, a huge black hulk of a thing with piercing green eyes.
When it opened its mouth, a great mewing scream filled the still air. Mamma recoiled, her rotted flesh fluttering from her brown bones, as the cat came closer. He was tremendous, but his face was familiar: there was that shredded ear—
Amanda was stunned to see him. Tom must be death or the devil or something. But he had been so cute, lapping milk and cuddling in her bed.
There came a crackling sound as he took a chunk out of Mamma's skull. Amanda could see the brain within, as crunchy as a sponge that has been dipped in Clorox and let dry. When Tom's long pink tongue scooped it out, Mamma made a sort of babbling sound. Then her eyes became blank.
While Amanda shrieked, her stomach twisting, her throat burning, her skin tickling with dread, Tom ate. At last there remained not even a tuft of Mother's rough hair.
Then Amanda saw that Tom was staring at her.
There was a new sensation involved in facing those eyes. She could actually feel his stare driving like wild snow into her soul, seeking every hidden crack and cranny of her being.
Was this the Last Judgment? Did a cat—no, it couldn't be Tom, not sitting in judgment over her.
“Please—”
The eyes grew bright and fierce.
“No. No! Keep away from me!”
The mouth opened.
Down Tom's gullet Amanda saw fires dancing, and a vast legion of tragedies, each as immense and personal as her own.
Hell was inside him.
“Who are you? Why are you after me?”
There was no answer but the oily gush of his breath and the burnt-hair stink of the cooking dead.
He was getting larger and larger, so large that she could walk into his gaping jaws if she wished. But she didn't wish! “I'm not guilty of anything! I got murdered and I'm not going in there! I've got to get back because my life isn't over and they need me!”
At once the jaws snapped shut. Then she landed, as lightly as a feather, upon a gray and silent field. Her body felt substantial, solid. Or rather, almost solid. When she looked down she could see herself, but she had the feeling that she could have walked through a wall. She peered around her at the storm-turned line of the horizon. This was empty country. Tom curled about her legs. He looked up at her out of his little cat's eyes and seemed ready to wink.
After what she had seen, she was afraid of those eyes. Maybe they would become big and menacing once again, and those jaws would open—
He carried everlasting tragedy in his belly.
And yet he was the only other thing here, so in a way she was glad for his presence. Without looking at him she bent down and stroked him. His fur was full of electricity. “I wish you could talk. I wish you could tell me what's going on.”
He didn't speak, but a gentle force turned her head. She was stunned at what she saw: the quietest, most perfect landscape of trees and green hills, blue sky flecked with white clouds, and in the shadows of the sky something wonderful that had no definite shape. It was, rather, the presence of a condition—an emotional color—as if goodness filled that air. Amanda's first love, a boy who had died in a fire, came walking toward her. “I remember you,” he said, and there was something eternal in his voice. “I've been waiting for you.” He opened his arms, and what flowed from him was as a fine old song.
Other voices soon joined the song, then overwhelmed it. They were soft and yet solid, chanting: “Moom moom hear our call. Moom moom hear our call. . .” The chant went on and on, splitting and filling the soft air of summer that caressed her.
She recognized those voices—it was Ivy and Robin and Constance and the others. “I can hear you'”
Her heart almost broke: before her lay heaven, behind her life. The name the witches were calling evoked in Amanda powerful, hitherto hidden feelings. Moom! So familiar. How Moom had loved her life.
“I've got to go back. The witches need me.”
Her old friend laughed very gently. “Tom guards the line between here and life, Amanda. You can't make it past him. And nobody who goes down his throat ever comes out again.”
The chant went on.
“Hey! I hear you!” It tore her sou!. Despite what her dead friend had said, she turned back from heaven.
The air around her shivered and began to fade. And she knew it was doing that because she had just made a firm and unshakable decision: she was going back to life, somehow, if she could.
A cold wind sprang up. Ugly gray clouds swarmed across the sky. Her first love became a black, dancing skeleton in a bombed landscape, and replacing the song of heaven there arose a great multitude of sorrowful cries. They echoed out of the clouds like high thunder, and Amanda saw that the gray hid monstrous flying things.
Terror began to grow in her. The things in the clouds had wings and black scales and long red nails. She knew that they were demons.
Above their banshee cries there remained the chant: “Moom moom moom moom,” on and on and on.
She wanted to somehow open the sky, to part those dreary gray clouds, to get through to the chanters.
Tom had returned, sullen and slinking, mewing loudly. “Tom, they're calling me back, I can hear them! Please, Tom, tell me how to get to them! They need me! Oh, God, I can feel how bad they need me!”
She ran, she jumped, she cla
wed the air. When she scrambled up the gnarled remnant of a tree, she could hear the sucking eagerness of the demons in the clouds.
How absurd, she thought, to have chosen this. Nobody ever came back from the dead, not with all of hell barring the way. The dark once entered. . .
Guardian: a great maroon scorpion with the blue-eyed face of a little girl.
Guardian: a white bird that warbled lies.
Guardian: something that once had been a nun. Mother Star of the Sea.
Amanda hadn't thought of her since sixth grade.
Tom spoke, a fierce, rasping voice in her head. “They are death's soldiers, the demons.”
“Then death is evil.”
“Death is death, neither good nor bad. It's just there.”
She ran. It was brutal, simple instinct, the reaction of the monkey to the slinking panther. The ground beneath her was spongy and had the slickness of skin. Maybe it was skin. This hideous place could easily be on the back of some inconceivable monster. She slipped and slid in the soft, glittering folds of it, and smelted the sweet stink of it.
The cat ran along beside her for a while. Then she saw it prancing in front.
Then the clouds spit a drop of hot, sticky rain.
The drop tickled her face. She raised her shadows of hands and touched the ooze. It was full of hair-fine worms. The tickle on her face changed to an itch, then at once to a dull ache. She reached up again and pulled away a great gout of skin. It was seething with the threadlike creatures. She threw it down in disgust and wiped her hands on the rubbery ground.
The sensation in her face was awful, an ache and a salty cut and the itching of a scab. She raised her eyes to the sky, which was tossing and bulging down at her, as if great fingers punched behind the clouds. “Let me go home' I don't belong here and you're not going to keep me!” She would have thrown something but she had nothing to throw.
Somebody whispered in her ear, and she knew it was a demon; “You've got a lot to learn, baby.”
“Don't you dare call me that! I'm Amanda Walker and I'm not your baby.”
The clouds twisted and stormed, became a great, dark skull filled with lightning, and began to draw closer to her. The grinning jaws bellowed thunder so loud she held her ears and screamed, but her own voice was lost.