The Catswold Portal

by Shirley Rousseau Murphy

  Once the bus had crossed the bridge she was afraid of missing her stop, worried about getting lost. But the driver let her off all right; nothing was so hard if she just asked questions. She left the morning commuters behind and swung up Telegraph in the sharp, bright wind. Above her the sky tilted in explosions of light; gulls screamed, banking over her, their wheeling flight exciting her. She turned up a familiar street that climbed Russian Hill but, passing the Kitchen house, she was filled with loss. The feeling nearly undid her; she was all opposites this morning, swinging from joy to pain.

  When she reached the museum it was not yet open; the iron gates were locked. In the shadow of the wall she changed to cat and leaped up and over.

  She wandered the gardens pawing into niches and behind sculpture stands. Her paws were more sensitive than hands, picking up every subtlety of the different surfaces and textures. She examined bronze and marble cats for possible openings, and explored along the tops of the garden walls, then climbed a vine to the roof and searched among vents and into an old chimney. When the museum doors opened at ten she slipped inside, into the open ladies room.

  In a booth she changed to girl, and came out again to mingle with a busload of arriving tourists. Searching the galleries, looking into windowsills and shelves, she tried to think how Timorell would have marked the hiding place of the Amulet, with what sign to be recognized only by another Catswold.

  She searched all morning and half the afternoon but found nothing. She left the museum late in the afternoon, tired and very hungry. Discouraged, she didn’t catch the bus back across the bridge but took the Powell Mason cable car. Asking directions from the gray-haired driver, she got off at Union Square. She had a sandwich in a little cafe, then went shopping like any upperworld woman. She was back in the garden just after dark, feeling smug with her purchases, hiding her packages under Olive Cleaver’s back porch.

  Reflections of tall grasses tangled through Melissa’s hair, shattered into angles by the rebounding light. Braden worked quickly, blocking in the canvas, excited by the emerging shadows, only absently aware that the cat was winding around his bare ankles.

  She hadn’t come in until after dark, then had prowled the studio restlessly. Several times he had noticed her looking up at the walls, and for a long time she sat behind him as if watching him work. She was doing that again now. She had left his ankles and sat down behind him again, looking. Soon her scrutiny began to annoy him. He laid down his brush and turned to face her. “What the hell are you looking at? Why would a cat stare at a painting?”

  She looked so startled he laughed—the little cat looked truly shocked. And when he laughed, her eyes widened. She ducked her head and began to wash herself.

  Grinning, he picked her up and scratched behind her ears. “You’re a strange one. Pretty strange.” But it was later when he stopped to fry a hamburger that he began to worry about her.

  She came running into the kitchen at the smell of cooking meat. She hadn’t touched her cat food. He realized she hadn’t eaten since she threw up the night before.

  Maybe this brand of cat food didn’t agree with her. He cut up his hamburger to cool for her, and cooked himself another one. When hers was cool and he put it down, she wolfed it, ravenous.

  But then in a little while she threw it up again. This was the second throw up, and she looked so miserable that he phoned Morian.

  “Just on my way out, Brade. Let me run down.” In a minute she swished in, dressed to the teeth: sleek, honey-colored cocktail dress and strings of topaz and East Indian brass.

  “Bring your date in, Mor.”

  “He’s impatient—let him pace. He thinks it’s stupid to be concerned about a cat.” She knelt beside the couch stroking the calico, gently feeling down her sides, opening her mouth. She smelled the cat’s breath with a familiarity that made Braden grin. She felt the calico’s stomach, pressing carefully. Outside the glass her tall, dark-skinned date paced, glancing at his watch.

  “Are you late for something?”

  Morian shook her head. “He thinks we are.” She stroked the little cat. “I can’t see anything wrong. They’ll throw up sometimes when they’re pregnant.”

  “When they’re what?”

  “Pregnant, Brade. You know, it’s when they—”

  “Oh, Christ!”

  “It happens, Brade

  “What the hell am I going to do with a batch of kittens?”

  “If she doesn’t feel better by tomorrow, you’d better take her to the vet.” She stood up and chucked him under the chin. “They’ll be sweet, Brade. Sweet kittens.”

  He walked out with her and met her date, who stopped pacing long enough to shake hands. This was the boyfriend who worked for the Chronicle, in financial news or something; a promotion from the sports page, Morian had said. When they had gone Braden turned off the overhead studio lights and stood in the dark feeling suddenly, unreasonably encumbered. He didn’t ask for a cat. He didn’t ask for kittens. He didn’t want to admit the concern he felt for the little calico. What the hell was he going to do with kittens?

  Give a couple to Morian, he supposed, a couple to Olive. Give one to Melissa—maybe it could learn to like her.

  She slept close to him that night, curled beside the pillow, her head tucked against his cheek. He kept his arm around her protectively, and she remained cat with difficulty. Lying wakeful, she wanted to change to woman, wanted to snuggle next to him as a woman.

  In the morning she was still cat, sleeping beside him. She was proud of her control. He let her out and, on the veranda, arranged the table and chairs, preparing to paint Melissa there. She watched him from up the garden where she had climbed into a low acacia tree. When he seemed to be growing impatient she headed for Olive’s back porch, and beneath it she changed to girl. With some difficulty she put on one of the new outfits from City of Paris, wishing she had a proper place to bathe and make herself look nice. She went down the garden dressed in the new gathered turquoise skirt and green blouse, and she felt a sharp excitement in the way he looked at her.

  He posed her sitting at the veranda table, and drew her against the leafy reflections in the studio windows. She liked his absorbed excitement as he worked. In one sense he was very much with her, seemed so close to her it was as if he touched her. But in another sense he was totally removed. Strangely, the two feelings were compatible. She sat at the table thinking about her search in the Cat Museum and wondering if the Amulet could be in McCabe’s safe deposit box. At mid-morning when he stopped to make tea for her, she asked if Alice might have had any keepsakes of Timorell’s.

  He seemed puzzled by her stubborn interest in possessions, and that embarrassed her. She rose, pretending to look for the cat, and went to stand at the edge of the veranda.

  He said, “When we remodeled, Alice took some cartons and boxes up to Olive’s to store in her attic. I think we got them all, but you could look.”

  She did look, late that afternoon. While Braden worked she went up the garden to Olive’s.

  The yellow cat watched her from the railing, then followed her into the house. She and Olive searched the attic but found nothing. Olive insisted on making tea, and when they sat down, Pippin jumped onto his chair and sat intently watching her. His golden eyes searched hers deeply, and when she let him sniff her fingers, he put his paw on her hand with innocent, almost pleading confidence.

  “He likes you,” Olive said. “He’s nearly human, that cat. Much more intelligent than my own cats. He has been here constantly since Tom—since Tom turned so strange toward him. I feel sometimes as if Pippin could almost speak to me.” She passed Melissa the thinly sliced pound cake.

  “Some cats seem so perceptive. As if they have a second side to them, secret and hidden from us.”

  Melissa sat sipping her tea, not daring to look at Olive.

  Olive said, “Sometimes I wonder if that secret side could be—liberated.” She reached to the sideboard for her leatherbound notebook.

>   Alarm spilled through Melissa. She rose hastily, tipping her chair and catching it before it fell. “I—Braden is waiting. I’m afraid I’ve kept him too long.”

  Olive paid no attention. “I copied this from Chaptainne’s journal. He lived in the twelfth century, when people believed in magic. Or perhaps,” the old woman said, as if Melissa had not risen to leave at all, “magic really existed then.” And as Melissa backed toward the door, Olive began to read the slow, measured cadences of a spell.

  Chapter 50

  “Call them forth leaping,” Olive read, “bring them careening…”

  Melissa dared not run away and leave Pippin here alone to be changed. Sick and shivering, she felt her body want to change, and she blocked the spell. For while Olive could not make a spell, she was present, and the words echoed in her mind to bring the changing forces pummeling down.

  “…careening joyous from spell-fettered caverns…”

  The powers pulled at her. She stopped them, but when she looked at Pippin his tail was lashing, his eyes blazing. The expression on his face was so intense she reached out to him, stroking him, hoping to calm him, and for one instant she saw an aura around him, saw the faint, shadowed form of a man.

  The sudden ringing of the doorbell made the yellow cat leap from the chair and streak for the back of the house.

  Olive stared after him and rose to open the door, her expression unreadable. “He’s heard that bell a million times. What gets into him?” she said innocently. “That will be my grandniece—I’m kitten-sitting for her.”

  A little blond girl came in carrying a tiny reddish kitten, and clutching a paper bag and a small quilt under her elbow as if her mother had tucked them there. From the window, Melissa could see a woman waiting in a green car parked in Olive’s driveway. Olive took the bag and quilt, but the child didn’t want to give over the kitten. The pale-haired little girl held the yawning cat baby against her cheek.

  Olive knelt, hugging the child and stroking the kitten. “I’ll take good care of her, Terry. A week isn’t so very long, you’ll see.”

  The child finally managed to hand the kitten over, reaching on tiptoe to kiss its nose as the little thing snuggled deep into Olive’s hands. Melissa watched, very still. The kitten was so tiny. She wanted to hold it. She wanted to feel its soft fur, its delicate body. She wanted to lick it; she felt her tongue come out and had to bite it back. She could hardly keep from reaching out to gather the baby to her; she could smell its scent, infinitely personal and exciting. When she looked up, Olive was watching her.

  As soon as the child had left, Olive brought the kitten to Melissa and settled it in her lap. Melissa cuddled it, hardly aware of Olive. It was so very small, so vulnerable. She lifted it to her cheek, felt its warmth against her, its baby-scent powerful. She stifled the urge to press her mouth into it, to lick it, to wash that lovely fur, to wash its little face and clean those tiny delicate ears.

  She spent a long time stroking the kitten, playing with it, and holding it while it slept. Across the table, Olive seemed busy with her notebooks. The kitten purred so passionately that Melissa longed to feel a responding purr in her own throat. She longed to change to cat and snuggle it properly, let it chase her tail in the age-old hunting games. Meanwhile, Pippin stalked the room, watching her. She was sure his thoughts, as her own, still echoed with Olive’s half-spoken spell. And then quite suddenly Olive looked up from her books and began to read the changing spell loudly and deliberately, shocking Melissa so she hardly breathed. In panic she said a silent counter-spell and felt the change in herself subside. But Pippin had leaped up, his yellow eyes agleam.

  Olive’s eyes were hard on Melissa. “You who seek the form abandoned, you who seek the house deserted…”

  The change came quickly to Pippin. He yowled, was pulled straight, rearing and twisting, crying out, reaching with claws that became fingers as he was jerked tall.

  The big golden cat was gone. A man stood before them, golden haired and naked.

  He was a fine, muscular man, pale of skin, with short golden hair and the cat’s golden eyes. He looked at his arms, at his naked body and long straight legs. He held one leg out and then the other, hopping like a marionette wild with pleasure; he seemed to have forgotten the two women.

  But he stopped suddenly, regarding them with an expression of victory. “I am a—man!” The joy in his voice made Melissa laugh out loud.

  “Why do you laugh at me?”

  “A laugh of happiness. Like a purr.” She could feel Olive’s excitement. She thought, giddily, Now the cat’s out of the bag, and felt herself falling into insane laughter. Olive left the room, returning with a blanket which she handed to Pippin.

  “I am not—cold.”

  “To cover you,” Olive said.

  Obediently Pippin draped the blanket around his shoulders, covering nothing of importance. “What were those words? A—a spell. I want to know the spell.”

  Olive said it slowly. Pippin repeated it. In an instant he was cat again, his tail lashing.

  But the next minute he returned to man, smiling wickedly.

  Olive sat down at the table, regarding Melissa with composure. “I have read about this possibility. I have thought about it for a very long time.” Pippin began to roam, looking at everything in the room, touching, sniffing. When Olive began to read the spell again, Melissa said hastily, “There is terrible danger in attempting things you don’t understand.”

  “I did not attempt it, my dear. I did it. But why didn’t you change? You are the same—your hair, your eyes. The way you hunger over the kitten.” The kitten, innocent of the fuss, slept in Melissa’s circling arm.

  Melissa said, “Even with your research, it seems strange that you would believe.”

  “I believed because, when I was a young woman, I saw such a thing happen—or rather, I saw the results.

  “I worked in the city, at the main library. I worked late two nights a week, and going home one night I saw a man step into an alley, and a cat come out.

  “I thought little of that until it happened again. This time, the same cat went in and the same man came out.

  “I grew curious, and began to wait near the alley on my late nights. I thought at first it was a man walking with his cat, though I never saw them together.

  “I saw this happen three times more—the same man, the same cat, one emerging, the other disappearing into the alley.

  “I began to investigate books on the occult, but they were so warped in their view that they told me nothing. I turned to folklore and then to archaeology. That was when I began to read about the doors with cats’ faces.”

  She looked at Melissa coolly. “You are a part of whatever is happening in this garden. The gardener, Vrech, is a part of it. And Tom—I don’t know what to think about Tom. I’m not sure that boy is Tom Hollingsworth. Something has changed him greatly, something has come into this garden, something secret and pervasive and not—not of the normal world.”

  Olive poured cold tea from the pot and sipped it. They heard Pippin rummaging in the refrigerator, and he soon returned eating a fried chicken leg. He had forgotten his blanket.

  He said, munching, “When I was cat, I didn’t know…” He tried to bring up words from a language he had heard all his life but never used. “I didn’t know…”

  He gave up at last, finished the chicken leg, and laid the bone on the table. He said, slowly, “Now I am a man.” He gave Melissa a deep golden stare. “Now I want to know where Tom is. I want to know what the gardener has done with Tom. I saw him take Tom away. He put the other boy in Tom’s bed. That boy is not Tom. Where is Tom?”

  Melissa sighed. Neither lies nor evasiveness would do. “Tom is in another place.”

  “Beyond the door?”

  “Yes,” she said, surprised. “Beyond the portal. How…?”

  “I saw the gardener come from there, smelling of deep, damp caverns. I saw him take Tom there. Tell me—all of it, please. If I am to hel
p Tom I must know all of it.”

  Olive watched them intent and eager, absorbing every word, filled with a deep, excited wonder.

  “There is a land,” Melissa began, unable to do less than explain. “A land of caverns, deep down…”

  “Beyond the door,” Olive whispered.

  “Beyond the door,” Melissa said.

  It took her a long time to explain sufficiently about the Netherworld, about the weakness of the Netherworld newborn and about the political importance of a changeling. Olive knew about changelings.

  “Children stolen from our world, taken into the underworld through the cleft in a hill or through caves, another child put in their place.”

  Pippin said, “Will they hurt Tom?”

  “I don’t think so,” Melissa said. “He’s valuable to the queen. She will have put spells on him to make him forget his name, forget who he is, forget his life in the upperworld. She will do all she can to make him believe he is the prince of Affandar.” She touched Pippin’s hand. “Tom—a healthy child—is her assurance of her title to the throne. I don’t think she’ll hurt him.”

  “What will she do if he remembers who he is? If the spells do not—hold?”

  “Likely they will hold. She has great power.”

  “Spells cannot be—broken? Go wrong?”

  “They can,” she said quietly.

  “The door is the portal,” Pippin said softly. “But is it not more than that? Is there not power within the door?” His eyes shone. “Power—that has increased since you came. I think it was the power of the portal that first made me know I was different. And then you came.” His yellow eyes glowed in his strong human face. “You made me feel strange, uneasy.” He began to pace. “You must teach me all spells. You must teach me everything about the Netherworld. You must do it at once.”

  She only looked at him.

  “I must go quickly to find Tom.”

  “You can’t go there. Siddonie would destroy you.”