by Ira Bloom
After a brief rifling through the drawers of the apothecary chest, Esme came up empty-handed on every herb on her list. There was enough sage for a purification ritual, that was about it. Katy had apparently gotten there first. Even the vials and special candles and little cook pots for boiling down herbs, the mortars and pestles, the ritually purified vinegars and alcohols for certain types of distillations … Katy had cleaned her mother’s stash out.
Esme closed the roll-top desk and replaced all the drawers in the apothecary chest. She would have to start from scratch. Looked like a road trip was in order.
“Hey, Esme, it’s me,” Norman said into the phone. He was in the dining room waiting while his dad worked his magic in the kitchen.
“Hi, Norman,” Esme said.
He thought she sounded sleepy, like he’d woken her up or something. He checked his wristwatch again. It was almost ten a.m. Half the people in the country got up in the middle of the night on Black Friday and rushed to the big-box stores so they could kill each other to get a bargain on a flat-screen TV, but Esme slept in, apparently. It just made him like her even more, if that was possible. “So … ” Just a month before, Norman had felt comfortable talking to Esme. They’d talked on the phone all the time, even Skyped doing bio homework together. But all that had changed since Zack had come on the scene. “Uh, what are you up to today?”
“Whattaya mean?”
“I thought maybe uh … you know, my dad and me are going to the movies today. You told me like a hundred times you wanted to meet him, he’s here for the four-day weekend.” Why did she make him feel so nervous now? It was like their entire friendship had gone back to square one.
“Thanks, Norman,” she said, with zero enthusiasm. “But I’ve got plans.”
“Esme, are you all right?” he asked abruptly. She was trying to get off the phone, so he needed to speak his piece quickly. “You’ve been acting so weird, about Zack. Like you’re obsessed with him. It just doesn’t seem like you, you’re usually so sensible. I’m really worried about you, I think you should talk to my dad—”
“I’m fine, Norm. Listen, I have to go,” she said, and hung up.
Dr. Stein entered the dining room with a carton of eggs in his hand. “Eight eggs, or ten?”
Norm looked at his dad. For a guy who was supposed to be up for a Nobel Prize, the man sure looked silly in his frilly pink apron. “Eight, I guess,” he muttered with little enthusiasm.
“What did she say?”
“She’s not coming,” Norm said with resignation. “She’s changed. It’s so odd. She’s so suspicious when I try to talk to her. Like I’m trying to harvest her organs and sell them on the black market or something.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Dr. Stein replied. “Though you’d be surprised what they’re getting for a healthy tissue-typed kidney these days.”
Kasha accompanied Esme into the city on Saturday. It was a long drive, over three hours each way. There usually wasn’t much traffic on Saturdays, but it was Thanksgiving weekend and the shoppers were out in force. Kasha rode in the front seat, his head just above the level of the window, and kids in passing cars waved and made faces. It wasn’t every day they saw a cat riding in a car, sitting up on the front seat like a dog.
“Does my mom know you’re with me now?” Esme asked. It was a question she hadn’t raised before, but one that tugged at the parts of her mind that weren’t occupied by all things Zack.
“Yeah, about that,” he said. “Melinda probably doesn’t remember me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like loose ends.”
The hairs on Esme’s forearms stood up, like a low voltage was running through her system. “How come I don’t remember you, growing up? I must have seen you around, if you were with my mother all those years.”
“I slept with you every night, when you were little. I liked your milk breath. Melinda never did trust me, so I snuck in.”
“I almost remember,” she said, scratching her head. He’d made her forget him! Had there been some reason?
“When you got a little older, you used to steal food for me and feed me at night in your bed. I used to talk to you, until you were about four.”
“Why’d you stop then?”
“People over four are boring.”
They were driving through Tuppelow, where there was an outlet mall. Traffic was crawling. “So how did you end up a witch’s familiar?” Esme asked.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “But if you ever tell anyone, I’ll have to rip out your intestines.”
Kasha was always saying things like that, and she never put much thought into it, because it seemed like something a cat would say. But when she considered the demon angle, it was a bit disconcerting. “I’m all ears.”
Kasha examined her skeptically. “Get over yourself, those ears are pathetic.” He twitched his beautiful tufted ears a bit, showing off.
“Figure of speech,” she explained.
“Joke,” he countered. “You’re a little slow, aren’t you? Sometimes I wish I could just harvest your soul and start over with Veronica.”
The creepiest sense of foreboding made the hair at the nape of Esme’s neck prickle. Still, it was hard to be properly terrified of a creature that so loved getting his belly rubbed. “Just tell me the story.”
“It’s a great story,” Kasha said, “but you need some background for perspective. For billions of years, creation and entropy were just two forces that roiled and pulled at each other purposelessly in a cosmic give and take. Try to follow this concept, it’s important: The universe manifested matter, then planets and stars, then ecosystems and life, and finally Homo sapiens, the first life that became self-aware through complex reasoning. Until then, the universe had no way of knowing itself. There wasn’t even a way to ask a question. The energies that morphed into demons and angels always had form, but never self-awareness, until humans invented it. I formed out of the primordial muck about eighty thousand years ago. I’m not saying I was a genius or anything, because if I had been, I’d have gone with the opposable thumbs or at least a prehensile tail. But I had to have form, so I manifested as a cat.”
“Good call.”
“Right,” he said. “So as you know, form is function, function is form, and my innate form has been a cat ever since. Anyway, I spent tens of thousands of years as a saber tooth tiger, Smilodon populator, eating people and ingesting their souls—”
“You ate people?” Esme exclaimed, taking her eyes off the road for a second to stare at the cat in shock, then hitting the brakes to avoid rear-ending a sedan.
“We all did in those days,” Kasha said, unruffled. “Everything has divine vitality, even rocks and vegetables, but it’s pretty weak stuff except for people, who have free will and creativity, so we call the vitality of humans a soul. You invented intelligence and observation and curiosity about the nature of reality, and we stole it from you and made it ours. It was pretty evident to the elder demons long before I came onto the scene that humans were where all the action was. Creative buggers, humans. Destructive, too.”
“It sounds like you’re saying ‘in the beginning, man created God,’ ” Esme said.
“No, God, the universe, was always here. Intelligence was a game changer, but if you ask me, it’s just something that makes people taste better.” Kasha sat like an oracle, staring at Esme with unblinking golden eyes, testing her interest like a spider testing a web. “Anyway, about three thousand years ago, before there was much human culture or organized religion, there was a directive from hell that all the demons had to return to the netherworld. By that time I’d been on earth as a giant cat for over seventy-five thousand years. It was all I knew. And I didn’t like hell at all.”
“Is it hot?”
“It can be,” Kasha replied. “Catholic hell sure is. But mostly it’s just disconcerting.”
“So what did they want?” Esme asked. “Why did they call you down to hell?”
&nb
sp; “All the demons got called down to be sorted, assigned, rated, and ranked, like a mockery of the hierarchy of angels. Up until then, I didn’t even know I was a demon. It took some convincing. Order and chaos were squabbling over the dispensation of human souls, both sides threatening Armageddon. Souls had become the currency of the cosmos.”
“Don’t people have any say in the matter?”
“Not as much as you’d like to think,” he said.
“No. Wait,” Esme said, mind reeling. “Are you saying I’m going to hell when I die?”
“I sure hope so,” Kasha said. “I’m batting zero for two with your family so far. Anyway, things settled down when the demon lords and the angels figured out how to regulate the soul trade, through a system of tithing. But eating people and harvesting their souls was no longer allowed, because they decided humans had self-determination. The whole Armageddon thing was just a lot of saber rattling. Nobody wanted a war with heaven, there’s no profit in it. I was pretty demoralized, until I scored this sweet gig in Japan as a corpse-eating cat. I did that for about two thousand years. The soul stays with the corpse for a while, after death. I’d stalk funeral processions of evil people and jump out and grab the corpse and make off with it, then eat it, you know, in private, because I’m a fussy eater. Seriously, you can Google it: ‘Kasha, corpse-eating demon cat.’ ”
Another image that didn’t sit well with Esme.
“So I’m banking souls in medieval Japan, and just when I feel like I’m positioned to set myself up as an independent operator, I get called back to hell. Rules changed again. Now we couldn’t eat corpses, either. They said the soul was still with the corpse, so it was the same thing as eating a live person. Total bureaucratic bullshit. You want my opinion? They were trying to cut us small-time operators out of the action altogether. I’m onto them. But since I wasn’t allowed to eat corpses anymore, my boss summoned me back to hell to work in accounting.”
Esme didn’t know how much of Kasha’s story was true, or how terrified she should be, but the idea of her cat sitting at a desk with a visor in a cubicle totaling infinite columns of numbers was too ridiculous to take seriously. “How was that?”
Kasha stared at her emotionlessly. “You know Catholic hell, like in Dante’s Inferno? I used to dream about Catholic hell. I’d have vacationed there. Sisyphus would have run screaming back to his giant rock and kissed it all over, if he got to go back to that after three centuries keeping records in hell. I used to keep a little blade by my desk, and I’d drive it into my brain periodically, just so I could feel something—anything—after a century of mind-numbing boredom. To this day, I can’t look at an abacus without needing to eviscerate something. But then, just as my existence was bleakest, I got transferred into contracting. I had to kiss major demon butt to get that transfer, mind you. And I don’t mean a little peck on both cheeks. They expect you to really get in there and smooch it.”
“There’s a picture that will haunt my nightmares.”
“I hope so,” Kasha said, grooming himself. “In contracting, I plotted how to get back to this plane. After I learned the system, I wrote up an ironclad contract describing a position topside with a certain quota and tithe that was a no-brainer for my boss to rubber-stamp. I knew my boss wouldn’t read the demonic small print. That’s what he had me for. The stuff in my contract is incredibly convoluted and arcane—twenty-eight languages, some I made up myself—so he signed off on it. I ripped my leg with a claw, dipped my paw in my own blood, and slammed it down on the contract, on the signature line. ‘I’m outta here!’ I told him, throwing it in his face. And I haven’t been back since. Though I do have to make my quota, so if you don’t mind dabbling in a little black magic from time to time, you’d be doing me a solid.”
“Something tells me I’m going to be behaving myself from now on,” Esme said. As soon as you help me with my beauty potion. “Anyway, you must have been happy to get back up here.”
“I was. And I had a pretty solid plan. At the time, late sixteenth century, all the rage down in hell was about how demons were making bank in the Faust-style contracting. Humans have free will, so they can trade in their own souls. We were like door-to-door salesmen, trying to get people to sign over their souls for a bit of prosperity or the hot miller’s daughter. But by the time I got back here, people were getting clever. People were asking for immortality, how was I supposed to work with that? Or, say, you give them one wish, and they wish for three wishes. Plus, being a talking cat, people were suspicious of my motivations.”
“How inconsiderate,” Esme said.
“You got that right, baby. I was just able to eke out a living for the next century or so, always looking over my shoulder for the hellhounds waiting to drag me back for not hitting my quota. That’s when I stumbled onto this witch’s familiar gig.
“I happened upon a coven of rather bedraggled hedge witches, plying little unguents and potions and séances. There was this young witch, living off the scraps of the senior hags, sweeping and cleaning and hauling wood as an apprentice, hoping to learn enough craft to set herself up with some kind of future besides … the kind of trade young girls with no economic prospects would end up working in London in the early seventeen hundreds. So I offered myself to her as familiar, to serve until she died, in exchange for an option on her soul and certain spoils.”
Esme slowed the car to let an aggressive driver cut in front. “How did you figure you’d do better as a witch’s familiar?”
“Mainly what it provided was breathing space,” Kasha confided. “If I contract with a witch to serve for her lifetime, I have to serve. I’m an agent of hell, and hell can’t welsh on a contract. I have to get value for the contract to be valid, but then I have to serve as her familiar until she dies. Here, on Earth. Where I want to stay.”
“Oh my Goddess, you’re a genius!” Esme declared. An evil genius.
“This is what I’ve been telling you,” he said.
“So did you ever figure out how to reach your quota?”
“Yeah, sure. Gretchen—that was my first witch—soon rose to the top of the coven with my help. Her spells worked, for one thing, which was a novelty. And after a while, she got a reputation for her potions. My angle was, when I helped Gretchen make a potion or cast a spell for a client, we would work a verbal contract that the love potion or hex for the enemies or luck for the business deal or ointment for hemorrhoids could only be used for good, never to bad purpose, on forfeit of their … yada yada. I did very well for myself. I mean, who uses a hex to righteous purpose? Or a love potion, for that matter?”
“Hemorrhoid ointment?”
“You’d be surprised. Anyway, it was still catch-as-catch-can. A verbal contract isn’t as ironclad as a written one. I had to give value for it to be valid, but they paid for the potions with coin, so they had some consumer protections. But most souls are pretty much borderline, they can go either way. If a demon has any kind of claim, he can make a case. And if they used the potion or spell to break a commandment, or commit one of the seven deadly sins, I usually had them dead to rights. I did the familiar scam for about three hundred years, in Europe. I started making multi-generational contracts, trying to keep the terms ambiguous, because it gave me more options. And if a witch wasn’t generating enough soul action, I could switch to her sister or daughter. That’s why I left your mother for you: no action in the apothecary and lesbian books game. Maybe you can introduce me to some people you don’t like? Seriously, I’m way behind. Every time I turn around, I can hear those stupid hounds of hell on my tail.”
“I thought you had to serve out your contract.”
“If my contract with hell becomes invalid, my contract to your family also falls. The familiar gig gives me some protection, but try to remember what we’re dealing with: demon bureaucracy. It’s all fun and games until someone rips your head off and throws it into a pit.
“Eventually I emigrated to the United States with a nasty red-haired Irish witch nam
ed Colleen. She was third generation of a contract I’d made with her grandmother. She never trusted me not to go to her sister. She locked me in an iron cage sealed with demonic containment runes so I couldn’t escape. I’d never bothered to put a ‘no cage or collar’ clause into my contracts. You’d think being a demon would be disincentive enough, right? But she got careless. I got out of the cage and harvested her soul.”
“You can do that?” Esme asked. There it was again, that creepy sense of foreboding.
“Colleen’s case was special,” he reassured. “She was irredeemably evil. She was going to hell anyway, I just took a few liberties with some ambiguous Peloponnesian tenses in an obscure clause in the contract. Afterward, I headed to New Orleans in human form, with my quota met for a few years.”
“When was this?”
“Nineteen forties, just after the war. I did a stint as a jazz musician. Then I got myself a beret and some sunglasses and took up bongos, playing in coffee shops, bebopping around San Francisco as a beatnik. That’s where I met your great-aunt Becky. She was a live one, Becky. The times we had, when I was in human form.”
“Wait,” Esme interrupted. “I thought you always had to be a cat.”