by Неизвестный
Other witches began rushing past the Vine Coven, cloaks and flaps of canvas grabbed from harvest wagons in their hands, running to the distant screams and flames. Nearby cornstalks were already rattling with wind from the infemo.
The cauldron circle wasn't strong enough to help the enraged child, and so there was little hope for Amanda. “Moom moom moom moom, hear our call! Moom moom moom moom.”
There must be no end to the swirling of the cauldron or Amanda would be lost forever. Black wings beat in Constance's mind. “I'm fainting! Help me!”
Tom jumped up on her head and dug his claws into her scalp. The pain of it would have kept Rip Van Winkle awake.
“Moom moom moom moom moom—”
The waters roiled and sputtered, deep with scent of herb and shape of frond, boiling-pot of a few common herbs, window into the human soul. Black, dangerous, interesting waters.
Constance was frantic. Even Tom's claws and his tail tickling her nose could not keep her conscious much longer.
“Moom moom moom moom!”
Black water covered Constance. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
She awoke a few seconds later to find the circle shattered, and with it Amanda's last contact with this world.
Why in the name of all holies didn't George Walker resuscitate her? He was supposed to have done it long before now. All of Constance's planning to create a safe journey through the netherworld had been useless. “The only thing you are doing,” the Leannan had cautioned her, “is sending Bonnie Haver to a terrible end. When you die yourself, how will you explain the arrogance of what you have done? Will you take her place in hell? What will you do, Constance? Look at you, holding your head high, you arrogant creature! There is no guarantee for Amanda any more than there is for any shaman who attempts the journey. If there was a guarantee of her return, she wouldn't really be dead. You revolt me, not seeing that. How dare you be so stupid, so willful, after all you have been taught. Amanda couldn't enter death if she had a guarantee. She'd come back with mere hallucinations. You're a shameful fool, Constance.”
That voice had cut more by its tone even than by its hard words. “I give myself to your mercy,” Constance had murmured through her tears. The Leannan's laughter had tinkled in the cave. Then Tom had come forth, great and roaring, a panther with teeth of steel, and driven her out.
There could be no guarantee. And, absent one, Amanda had died, finally and actually.
“Constance! There's a man on fire!”
She could smell the awful barbecue and gasoline of the burning man, and the matted stench of his burnt hair. They all smelted it.
“Moomoomoom—moom. . .”
“Chant!”
“Connie, we've lost her. She isn't here anymore.”
“Chant!”
Something awful happened. Tom leaped down into the cauldron, disappearing into its boiling interior with an awful howl. Then, rising from the water, came the little girl. She waved her stub of an arm, triumphant. I am the hand, the hand that takes.
“You poor child.”
A cry from beyond the cornfield and me smoke; “Help us! Help us! This man is dying!” The lo Coven was out there.
They had been in among the corn rows gathering culls for their pigs.
When the fire began crackling in nearby cornstalks, the Vine Coven finally gave up. Between Connie's exhaustion and Amanda's wandering, and now this little girl, 6iey lost all hope.
But then things changed again. Brother Pierce was running, and taking the hand with him. As he ran, the little girl disappeared in a shower of sparks, her eyes flashing toward the departing figure.
Without the demon to block it, the way to Amanda was clear.
“We've still got a chance!”
“Moomoomoomoomoomoom. . .”
But there wasn't even a whisper of Amanda.
It really was a great blow. After Constance's own death the Covenstead would go on, but it would be a diminished thing indeed, weak and prone to the ordinary destructions of life, Without the wisdom of death and the connection to the old traditions Amanda would have brought back, it would last a generation, perhaps two, then fade away.
The Maywell Covenstead would not be the rebirth of a fine and peaceful old way of life after all. Mankind would continue as before, unable to stop the rape of war, the bleeding of the earth, moving helplessly toward the coming end.
“Help us,” came another call from the corn.
Joan and Joringel were carrying the burned man between them on a canvas tarp. The worst thing about him was his hands, flaking black lumps. “Take him to the house,” Constance commanded.
“It's too far. He needs help now.”
Constance did not like the idea of an outsider, no matter how comatose, being in the village. Joan and Joringel went right past her, crashing through the cornfield, indifferent to the toppling stalks and the flying ears of the corn as yet unharvested.
Constance was wretched with despair over the loss of Amanda, but she had no choice. The situation demanded her presence. She broke circle and followed the others to the village.
Tom didn't follow, though, because he wasn't there anymore. As swift as smoke he had crossed Maywell to a certain house. He moved on soundless pads across the basement floor, coming swiftly to the Kitten Kate Room.
What a pleasure it was going to be to deal with this cat-hating maniac. George was going to die a most hideous deserved death. Tom had planned it carefully. But now was not quite the time. Not just yet. He leaped up on the table where lay Mandy and George.
The maniac was weeping softly as he caressed the body of his niece. The cat snuffled at his leg, looked long at his trembling, supine body.
Tom jumped down again and began circling the table. He was panting with rage. “Meow.” The sound penetrated George's trance deeply enough to wake him, but not so deeply that he was conscious of the presence of a cat. “Uh? Oh, I'm—God, I passed right out!” He leaped from the table, ran over to his controls.
He felt the blood drain out of him. It had been fifteen minutes! Mandy was irretrievably dead. Fifteen minutes of such ineffable sweetness. He had lain upon her, had kissed the stillness of her lips, had felt her eyebrows tickling his cheeks, had pressed his loins against the quieted sepulcher of her body.
He cried openly, to see what he had done. This had been a last chance, and he had been hypnotized with the pleasure of caressing her dead body. He had ruined everything for himself. Now he was simply a murderer.
“Meow.”
What the hell was that? It couldn't be a cat, not in here, not alive.
He loathed the torture cats on the walls of this room, with their probing eyes and inflammable fur. But their feline skill at causing pain fascinated him.
Something was going very wrong. What if the torture cats were—
But they were just magazine cutouts. He had made them himself, selecting over the years the best and most dramatic of all the cat pictures he had seen.
A huge black Tom rushed along the floor—and with a faint hiss transformed itself into Silverbell at the moment of her burning.
“No! It's not you, you're not alive!” He backed away from Silverbell's blackened, smoking form.
Silverbell growled. She moved forward, wobbling slightly because one paw was burned off. She was between him and the door.
“Getaway!”
He told himself she wasn't real. She was dead. Silverbell, who seemed to have forgotten mis, growled again.
“Won't you ever forgive me? Please forgive me!”
“Forgive yourself,” snarled a tiny, extremely harsh woman's voice.
The voice was so small he could barely hear it, but it smashed into his soul with the force of a hurricane. Before such power only the truth was left him, and he screamed it out: “I can't! Can't! Can't! Can't!”
The cat was close now, so close that he could see its smoked oyster of a tongue pressing between carbo
n-blacked teeth.
He kicked the cat hard, and its crisp skin shattered. But muscles and bones, even torn asunder, immediately took up the chase, oozing across the floor. “God! Oh, God, I've gone nuts. I'm stark raving mad.”
He stomped on the crawling, sliding ruins of the cat, stomped and stomped until they were only wet marks on the floor. “Jesus. That was a hell of a hallucination. I'll be needing a Thorazine drip if I keep this sort of thing up. I've got to get myself together. Come on, guy. You have a dead body to dispose of.”
There was another meow. Confused, George looked to the ceiling where it had come from.
It was a seething, squirming mass of living cats. George did not even have a chance to scream before they began dropping to the floor, screeching and spitting.
Next the walls came alive As he watched, a huge Persian bulged and oozed into life and leaped at his throat. It grabbed his shoulders with strong claws. Then it sank its teeth into his neck. He felt them pop through his windpipe and deflect the passage of air.
Off the ceiling they came, out of the walls they came, all the cats he had ever known and feared, bitmg, scratching, squalling, killing him by their sheer suffocating numbers. When the smothering began to hurt, he threw some of them off. But more came, until he was nothing but a jerking hump in the swarm.
He was killed by the living flesh of his guilt.
The cats gobbled him, chewing and swallowing him in chunks, until at the end there was left only a belt, a pair of shoes, and three Bic pens.
The cats returned to the ceiling and the walls. The room grew quiet. Mandy lay in absolute stillness. Some time later a fly entered the Kitten Kate Room. It circled for a few moments, seeking just the right place to undertake its project.
The fly landed on Mandy's upper lip. It preened itself carefully, then turned around and began to lay its eggs.
It laid them in the cathedral of her left nostril.
Chapter 22
MOTHER STAR OF THE SEA
The thing the demons couldn't understand was that Marian hadn't died in despair any more than had Moom. She had seen visions of the Goddess from her pyre and been laid in Summer afterward, where her soul had been renewed. Knowing that another fire awaited her return did not stop Amanda from wanting to go back to the Covenstead.
“But you can't, you're dead!”
“George wilt revive me.”
“It's too late for that. He's dead, too.”
The girl in blue waved her empty wrist, and a hole opened up in the ground. “Go on, look. He's created a lovely hell for himself.”
Down the hole Amanda saw George laid out on an operating table, his whole belly opened, his pink insides exposed. She could see the froth of his screams, but thankfully was spared the sound.
Kittens were cavorting in his entrails, batting his intestines about as they might wriggling caterpillars.
She was stunned and appalled to see that she herself was his demon, standing over him with the scalpel that had opened him up. The demon image of herself looked up at her, smiled, and waved the scalpel like a child waving a treasured lollipop.
“Stop it! Please stop it!”
“How? Only he can do that, and he obviously doesn't want to.”
“But he can't have chosen such torture, and not from me. I don't hate him!”
The girl snickered. “That image down there isn't you. It's part of him—his impression of you.”
“I'm not cruel, I could never do that. Why did he—”
“Demons serve their victims. Only a demon of you can punish away his guilt for murdering you.” A brush from her stub closed the hole. “Enough of that. I can show you beautiful things, Amanda.”
“That's a lie.”
“I offer you the Land of Summer.”
“No. I'm going back.”
“Without the witches to guide you, you can't. And I destroyed their circle.” She held up her wrist. “Something of me is left in the living world. My hand is still there, and it isn't dead. So I use it to manipulate life.” She laughed aloud, a harsh and bitter cackle.
As she did so, the illusion of the little girl shifted for a slight instant, and Amanda saw what really wore that frilly blue dress. It was a hard-shelled something, dark red and many-legged and misbegotten, and it bore the name of Abadon.
It looked at her through its many-lensed eyes, and in every lens she saw the gentle, smiling face of the Leannan. “You! It's really you, it's all you!”
“No. All except you. I am not part of you.”
“You are my demon. You must be part of me.”
“Oh, the devil take you, Amanda! Why didn't you educate yourself more thoroughly? Don't you know that I'm not only Leannan, not only Tom, not only Abadon and not really any of them. See what sort of a cat I really am?” She changed again, spitting and grinning, sharp lightning sparking from the buzzing tips of her fur.
“Schrodinger's Cat!”
“That's only a concept. More than that.”
Was it against the law of the universe for anything to be only what it seemed?
“Nothing is against the law. The law is its own violation. That is the core of all events, that is SchrOdinger's Cat. Just relax. I'll take you farther than you ever could have gone yourself.” With that Abadon snapped his scorpion's tail, Tom hissed, and the conceptual cat spat, and the Leannan laughed a laugh so mean it startled Amanda.
She stepped back, stunned by the realization that the world of the dead was at least in part a great slaughterhouse for souls, and the handless child folded into all of these other forms was one of the master butchers. She was leading Amanda toward the clicking maw of something so remorseless that it was willing to devour the frail and precious immortal bits of human beings, a sort of predator of the netherworld, that ate all the best of men as men ate full-ripened fruit or the tenderest parts of animals.
Nothing any man had ever done to any man was as bad as this.
“We've got to get going,” the thing in the shape of the little girl said briskly. “Oh, Amanda, you're just going to love deep Summer. It always makes me so glad when I can take somebody there. I really feel that it makes my job worthwhile.”
Amanda did the only thing she could do: she started to run away.
In an instant Abadon shed its disguise and leaped on her, grabbing her in enormous pincers and scuttling away with her.
Amanda fought it with teeth and fists. She had expected it to be impossibly strong, so she was surprised when huge plates of its shell came off in her hands. Then she discovered mat it was no more difficult to open the pincers than it might be to push aside heavy doors.
When she freed herself, the thing slumped back, whipping its sting about and howling with rage and pain. “You're a cheater, you don't play the game!”
“I told you, I'm going back.”
“You're dead, you haven't got the right! This is just the border of hell, baby. There's terror beyond belief between here and life.”
“I'm going back, and that's that!”
“You are in violation of the law! Have you heard, ever, of anybody returning from the dead?”
“Osiris. Christ. Lazarus.”
“And little Amanda Walker from Maywell, New Jersey. Don't make me laugh. Now, come on, you're wanted elsewhere.”
Amanda strode back toward the garden gate, determined mis time to go through it, and stay gone. She opened it and stepped forth.
Before her was a forest, a most unusual forest. From here it didn't look too nice. It seemed to be made of enormous human legs, festering with sores and ooze.
Amanda reached the gate. Behind her the girl in blue waved her ragged wrist and laughed her angry laugh.
The odor of the forest was pretty bad. Gas gangrene must smell like this, Amanda imagined, clinging to your nasal surfaces as oil clings to water.
“But I don't have nasal surfaces. I am dead. All of this is an illusion.”
From far behind her there came a shout: “Give my regards to Mother
Star of the Sea.” Then theLeannan's needle-sharp laughter once again, merging with another very different sound.
This noise came from beyond the forest, and it was more welcome by far. One witch, still chanting. Robin.
“I hear you! I'm coming back!”
But the chanting did not get stronger as Amanda entered (he forest. The stumps grew taller and taller, absorbing all noises. She felt awful and alone and small. A little white bird fluttered gaily. “Come with me, me, me!”
Of course the bird was trouble. Big trouble. But; at the same time, she was out of alternatives. The only place the forest opened up to let her through was where the bird went. She began to follow. It didn't seem likely but yoih never knew. Maybe she would get through.
It stank fantastically in among the towers of rotted flesh. They were too close together to pass without touching. Soon she was covered with ooze and scrapings. The bird flew eagerly ahead, deeper and deeper into the forest.
Amanda had to fight with all her strength to retain self-control. She was almost mad with revulsion. The wounds seemed to spit at her. And there was even a sense that unseen hands were caressing her from inside the cracks in the stumps.
What ungodly creatures must make their homes in these filthy things. “Don't touch me!”
Nothing replied except the bird, which warbled furiously. “Come on, on, on!”
Amanda couldn't stand any more. She stopped walking. She stared down at the ground.
And saw that it was a seething mat of long-bodied beetles. “Oh, no! Oh, I can't bear any more of this! Why won't it stop? What have I done?”
“You didn't play the game! You won't judge yourself, not you! you! you!” The bird's eyes were silver pins of hate.
“I am not guilty, that's how I judge myself! Not guilty!” She stomped into the crunchy surface beneath her. “My name is Amanda Walker and I am not guilty. My name is Maid Marian and I am not guilty. My name is All Women and I am not guilty!”
The beetles were beginning to bore into her feet. She hopped. “I am Moom, full of blood and milk and babies!”
You, woman, are burning in the evidence of your name.
Amanda sank down into the crawling, hurrying masses of beetles. They swept over her like a wave but she just didn't care. Let the worst happen. She had gotten herself sent to a very special hell, the one hell not of the condemned's own making: the hell of those who refuse to face their own consciences.