Helen felt the weight of the necklace, heavier than before. She seemed to see red gleams of firelight. The walls of the room looked different ... surely the wallpaper hadn't had such garish pictures on it!
A shape stopped in front of her ... did it wear a costume with crow-like wings? She peered closely, telling herself it was only a dark cloak. She smiled, with some difficulty, and answered a trivial query about one of the statuettes of the Mother Goddess.
"Yes, this was found at Hacilar." The sound of the word made her dizzy.
Time crawled, and she felt disoriented and dreamy. Again, the room changed. The people changed. The faces changed. She closed her eyes hard.
When she opened them, she almost screamed. The walls were painted in strange patterns and colors. A fire burned on a brazier at one side, and rows of oddly clad people crouched on the floor like a flock of giant birds.
Where was the bed? The table? Now the small goddesses lay on a stone slab. An elaborate silver dagger, engraved down the blade with boats of some kind, lay near the edge.
Helen tried to turn, to look for Elissa, but she couldn't move. Something held her immobile, her head lifted, as if searching for something at the corner of the ceiling.
She opened her mouth ... perhaps if she shrieked, she could bring herself out of the grip of her gift. This had to be a result of the necklace she wore ... but she had never before had such a strong sense of reality.
Instead of a scream, her lips formed a string of words. The language was strange to her, but she knew the meaning of the chant rising in her throat.
"Mother Goddess, we offer to you life for life, flesh for flesh, fertility for fertility. One stands here as offering, waiting for your presence. The Faithful wait, the priestesses wait. Outside, the men wait, also, with the children.
"Make the soil fruitful. Send young into the bellies of the women and the animals. Send rain for our cisterns and our crops. We, who are your grateful children, await your presence."
Now she was silent. Those facing her stared, unblinking, entranced. There was a darkness near the ceiling now, descending slowly, shot with sparkles of light; tiny lightnings played in the midnight swirls. Those kneeling on the floor dropped their foreheads to the pavement beneath their knees. Only she watched the Goddess descending from her cloud.
Helen, terrified yet immobile, found herself thinking of many things. The shapes of winged angels. The robes tradition had put upon prophets and gods and priests. What she saw now was moving out of the cloud, a bright shape formed of wings of force, folds of light, a column that might be human-shaped but was most probably not.
Words entered her mind, couched again in a tongue she did not know but understood with some deep instinct. "It has been so long ... and they send me a poet! How devout these late-sprung children of men have become! Their harvest will be superlative and their children many. How pleasing to my godhead is the life of a shaper of words!"
Helen found herself laughing. Hysterically. Not one of those in the room would know or care, until entirely too late, if crops failed entirely. Certainly none of them wanted more children ... or any children at all. Almost every woman there would be appalled to find herself pregnant. The blessings of the Goddess were incomprehensible to them!
Now the winged shape was extending itself toward her, drawing her into its fiery folds. Words came into her mind, poetry of penetrating brilliance. Descriptions of places she had not seen with mortal eyes, of musics never heard by living ears.
From a great distance, she heard the sound of the necklace dropping from her dissolving neck onto the parquet floor. She heard shrieks and exclamations. She heard Maura's voice, tiny, faint, lost behind the moving cloud in which she was enveloped.
"Helen!"
But she was no longer Helen. She was dissolving, becoming a part of the living force that was the Goddess. Barely aware of the partygoers left staring at the spot where her living body had dissolved into the cloud that had absorbed it, she felt her atoms flow into the being of the goddess, her spirit become one with that infinite awareness.
They moved together, as a mist, as a brightness, through the intangible roof and into the face of the round-eyed moon. And Helen, at last, understood the most profound nature of her poetic art.
A SNAP OF THE FINGERS
"I need a bit more light, here," Sarah said, her tone rather apologetic. She felt a twinge of embarrassment again, but the salesman had assured her that she would get over that. And the company's brochure had explained in psychological terms why owners of their revolutionary furnishings initially felt foolish when speaking to tables and chairs and lamps. That was why they had invented the finger-snap code, which Sarah found eminently sensible, though she had not yet mastered it.
The lamp table shivered slightly. The bulb in the gooseneck fitting blazed into light, and the table itself waddled three and a half steps closer to the armchair where she sat.
Now Sarah could see the fine print, as she reread the contract on her new possessions. The guarantee, for all the tiny type, was iron-clad. Everything from the self-making bed to the self-setting table and the automatic kitchen set-up was solidly backed by the company. And what better arrangement could be found for a woman living alone, working hard at a demanding new job, and with a mother who tended to drop in unexpectedly to inspect her housekeeping?
She folded the contract carefully and slid it into the envelope. "Safe!" she barked, noting with satisfaction the authority in her tone.
An ornamental side table scooted forward, opening a polished door to reveal a sturdy metal panel fitted with a combination dial. "Four-oh-eight-two," Sarah commanded.
The dial spun obediently, and the second door opened. She put the contract inside beside her insurance papers, her car title, and the cash she kept for emergencies.
When the safe had returned to its place, she looked around her brand new apartment at her spanking new furniture. It all looked perfectly normal, no matter what computerized features might be inside them. Even her Holovision set was concealed behind a tapestry screen.
It was almost time for the evening news, and she glanced up at the screen. A tapestry eye was looking back at her, and as soon as it perceived that she was waiting for the set, it blinked out of sight. The tapestry rolled back, and the HV brightened to life. What a life!
All her mother's fussing and scrubbing and inspecting of feet before entering the house had been wasted, she saw. Why bother, when the Clean-U-Self carpet, the Auto-Scrub floor, and the No-Dust furnishings would do it all for you? She wondered why everyone didn't buy the stuff and throw away the stolid and unimaginative things they had been putting up with for so long.
It wasn't cheap, true, but the saving on cleaning aids alone would amortize it in just a few years. Not to mention the labor saved, particularly if you had to hire a maid. She slipped off her sandal and patted a bare foot on the deep-piled carpet, which all but purred at her touch. She shivered with a pleasure that seemed almost erotic.
The HV hummed to life, and the news moved in three dimensions before her eyes. When she winced at something gruesome or distressing, the set obediently blanked itself out until that segment was finished. Then it winked on again.
Bedtime found her wondering what came next. What new wonders would this new home reveal to her? The bed looked quite normal, the covers turned back to reveal a pleasant set of pale blue sheets and pillowcases. She removed her silken nightgown, which her mother had bought for her though she kept insisting she preferred sleeping nude. The sheets slid down to admit her, and they were cool and caressing upon her skin.
"Lights out!" she said, and the overhead fixture dimmed to nothing.
The prisms surrounding the fixture glowed. Interesting ... her eyes focused upon the spinning balls of light and she sank into sleep ... into a dream that outdid anything she had ever experienced with any man she knew. She moved sensuously, and the coverings, the bed itself conformed to her body, stimulated nerves here, soothed them ther
e. She woke full of vigor, pleased with the world.
From that day, her life became absorbing. She had never been outstanding at anything, and college had been a lot of work and study. Once her degree was in hand, she slipped quietly into her position, where she worked hard and was paid well, but in which she was only a cog in a wheel. She was what they wanted, competent and industrious and completely without ambition. She knew and always had known that she would remain in place until she retired – or died.
But now, for the first time in all her life, she felt superior. Her days at work were bolstered by her memories of the evenings at home, and now the antics of her fellow employees amused instead of irritating her. Her nights – ah, her nights had become something entirely out of the ordinary. It no longer troubled her that she had the reputation for being a loner, and few men still approached her for dates. She no longer needed men, anyway.
Her mother's visit interrupted the quiet flow of her days. She'd known Mom would come, as soon as she was able to travel after her heel-spur surgery. That was as unavoidable as taxes (though her desk had solved a lot of tax problems for her. She wished it could solve mother problems, as well).
She truly loved her mother. Though they had the usual conflicts as she grew up, she knew that she would have remained nearer her home if her job had not been here on the opposite coast. But she would not ever go back, now that she had a new and satisfying existence, and she hoped her mother would take her word for that without further explanation.
Mom entered the new apartment with her eagle eye peeled for dust or disorder. One speck of grit or fluff would have stood out as if spotlighted by her searching gaze, but Sarah had talked earnestly with the furniture the night before. Every inch was spotless, tidy, polished, scrubbed, and/or flawless. Mom sank into the armchair and stared around.
"Dearie, I have never seen a neater place. Can you afford a maid?" she asked.
"My new things do it, Mom. They are self-cleaning, self-adjusting, self-repairing. Everything does itself. I want to get you a full set for the old house ... Pop will love it, and since your surgery you don't need to work so hard. You can read or go to garden club meetings instead of cleaning."
Mom frowned. "At my age, Sarah, I need to think I'm needed, even if I'm not. So I scrub a bit too much ... it's good exercise. And your Papa would think I was sick if I didn't make him clean his shoes twice when he comes in. No, this is fine and dandy for a young person like you, with life to live and friends and suitors coming and going. Not for me. Leave me my illusions a little longer, I ask you as a favor."
She smiled, and Sarah knew she meant it. She could see her point, but her comment about friends and suitors made her uneasy. If Mom knew about this introverted and self-contained life, she'd flip her wig.
Mom stayed a week, and it took her one day to learn that Sarah's social life was nonexistent. It took her two more days to come up with Carl. She had old college chums in every city in the United States, and of course there was one in town with a son of suitable age and eligibility.
Strangely, Carl was strong, sensuous, employed, and was instantly attracted to Sarah. Suddenly, the erotic dreams, which she had thought were the most life could offer, were not enough. In fact they became distasteful, and she disconnected the mechanisms of the bed to stop its stimulation. She began sleeping in her bed and living for those hours every evening that she spent with Carl.
Sarah's mother, satisfied that the affair would run its course better without her supervision, took the bus home to Papa. She exuded confidence that she would return soon to a wedding. Sarah kissed her goodbye and turned to gaze, starry-eyed, into Carl's face.
Again strangely, Carl was old fashioned and refused to visit her alone in her apartment before they were married. "I don't trust myself," he told her. "And this is too special to risk spoiling it by getting into a hurry."
Two months after they met, Carl carried Sarah over her own threshold, while Mom and Pop and his own parents stood in the hall and threw rice. Then, being good parents, they turned on their heels and took themselves away.
"You are going to love my furniture!" Sarah smiled up at her new husband as he set her onto her feet and stood looking around the living room. "There is never any housework. You will come home to a meal all cooked and a clean house and a wife who isn't tired to death after her own day at work."
She tucked her head into his shoulder. "And I will come home to a husband! That is the best thing of all."
They kissed deeply and moved into the bedroom. Behind them, the bed stirred uneasily. The drawers of the dresser slid open and shut with little gasps. The bedside table gaped its doors, then closed them silently. The shining balls of prism under the light fixture spun madly.
"Whoa. Let's catch our breath," said Carl, coming up for air. "I need a shower. We need to put away our things. And then ... then we'll try out that luxurious-looking bed."
Sarah giggled as they stepped back. "Right," she said.
They didn't take long. And when Sarah snapped her fingers in the one-two code for lights out, the fixture dimmed with provoking slowness. The glass balls went still, and in the darkness the dresser sidled away from the wall, its cushioned feet silent on the carpet.
There came a soft bump at the door, which opened enough to admit the lamp table, trailing its unplugged cord behind it like a tail. But Sarah was unconscious of it all. Only Carl existed at that moment.
Only when he gasped, above her, and lurched away did she realize that something was wrong. "Something poked my back!" he said.
"Lights on!" snapped Sarah's fingers, but no light appeared. Something snaked around her neck, pulling her away from Carl and out of the bed.
"Urrgh!" she gurgled, struggling with loops of something that felt like electrical cord. She could hear Carl moving desperately, too, and she managed to twist her head to see.
Even in the darkness she could tell that something was crawling over her husband – something soft and wide and dark and plushy ... the carpet? That affectionate living room carpet?
She tried to scream, but the cord was too tight about her throat. Her hands were going limp, falling away as they tried to pull it free. Carl! Carl!
She struggled to turn, to see him ... and he was no longer moving.
Something hissed near her ear, a mere breath of sound. Words? Surely not!
"Traitor!"
And that was the last thing she heard.
PART TWO
HERMIONE'S JOURNAL:
THE DIARY OF A CAT FANTASTIC
A CAT'S PRIVATE DIARY
It is with great Hesitancy that I take Pen in Paw to recount this latest Incident. Indeed, I find it most difficult to criticize my Human in any way, and particularly when it involves, as does this, his seeming ineptitude at working within his own Field of Endeavor.
However, if this is to be an accurate Account of the life I led in the House of Harlow Biddington, Sorcerer and Adept. I must, I fear, neglect my finer Feelings in the interest of Truthfulness. I do not, however, allude to anything of this Nature when speaking to my Kits, as they must be trained from Infancy in Respect and Admiration for Those who are in our Charge.
As I am a Graduate of the Coven of Familiars, it is, of course, my Responsibility to oversee and to Correct any Error of Judgment or of Practice that I note in the usages of my Associate. This has never, until now, posed a Problem for me, for Harlow Biddington, with all his Faults, and even considering that he is merely a Human, has been a most skilled and devoted Practitioner of the arcane Arts. His studies have continued over the Span of many Years, and his Efforts have, more than once, been crowned with Success.
The dish from which my Kits drank their Milk was proof of this. His short Foray into Alchemy resulted in the transmutation of every metallic Object in the House. While the Result was a bit ostentations for my Taste, it was nevertheless impressive, when one considers the Many who have labored for Years without achieving any similar Effect.
His Exploratio
ns into the Nature of the Universe resulted in a Volume of great thickness and complexity, filled with Mathematical Formulae of most esoteric Nature. This Work redounded both to his Credit among Men and to Mine in my own somewhat more subtle Field. It is generally considered that the Atmosphere created by a Familiar can do Much to Stimulate the creative Processes of those involved in the Occult Sciences and I pride myself that I am not lacking in that Area.
With such a formidable Array of Matters accomplished, it would seem that my Sorcerer should be one who would be content to rest upon his Achievements, except for minor Attempts to refine his former Work. Biddington, however, had never known Contentment in all his Life.
After his Triumph over both Mathematics and Nature, he determined that he must summon up a Demon. Although I found myself most Doubtful of this Project, I lent my small Skills and Efforts to his Objective. Any who has ever experienced such a Phenomenon will understand why I do not describe the Fulfillment of his Efforts. Some things are not suitable for the Perusal of decent Beings, and I will draw a veil over That. However, he did succeed, which set him Afire to attain Further Achievements.
At this Time I remonstrated gently with him, pointing out to the Man that he had gone more Deeply into Forbidden Matters than most are ever privileged to Go. "Be happy with what you have done!" I conveyed to him, through my most seductive Purrings and Twinings about his Ankles.
He understood my Message. Of that I am certain, for he was no Fool or Dullard, no matter how Simple he might sometimes appear. He reached down to pat my Head, stroking my Fur backward, which is always most Disconcerting. I placed my Paw firmly upon his besocked Ankle and let him feel my Claws, but he did not desist from his researches.
At this Point, many of my Confreres might well have felt their Duty to be satisfied. However, I am made of sterner Stuff. I leaped into his Lap and put my Head on the edge of the Table, my Eyes being level with a large Book at which he was staring as if Mesmerized.
THE TWILIGHT DANCER Page 9