At the front entry, the black cat appeared out of the shrubbery and walked by his side.
Enola Bloodsworth seemed unsurprised to see Blake home from school in the middle of the day, laying her heirloom cookbook on her kitchen counter.
"I don't feel well," he told her.
She did not even blink at the lie. "You're suspended," she told him agreeably, "or possibly expelled. Your principal just called me."
The bastard was okay then. Damn. Blake had hoped Lipschitz would continue with his heart attack and be out of action awhile.
Enola added, "He says you're a dangerous young psychopath."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm not. I told him in a very literal way to go to Hell."
Blake sat down at the ashwood table. "Mom," he admitted, "I don't understand you."
"Never mind." She picked up the black book and sat down beside him with the air of a woman enjoying herself. "Show me what you read to the Orwig boy."
Because of the mystic sigils inked on most pages it was not hard to find the passage. Blake remembered: it was the one headed by three inverted crosses and a symbol that reminded him of drawings he had seen on men's room walls. His mother read the section he pointed out in thoughtful silence. "Interesting," she remarked. "You seem to have given him syphilis."
The air had suddenly turned rarefied. Blake's mouth came open and pumped.
"Secondary stage," his mother added. "Rash, lesions, swelling joints, that sort of thing. It may be years before he goes insane."
"Bu—bu—but—"
"But what, Son? Isn't hurting him what you wanted?"
It certainly was. "But I didn't expect it to work," Blake managed.
"Of course it worked. You told him yourself, you have hex-witch blood."
Blake jettisoned all thoughts of ever being a scientist, because when he looked into her eyes suddenly it all made sense, he believed her utterly and felt at peace. Her eyes were golden yellow, the exact color of her rich buttery snickerdoodles. In the black circles of the irises he seemed to see hex signs turning.
"They may cure him," she said regretfully, "if they can figure out what's wrong with him. They have penicillin these days."
"They didn't when you started?"
"They didn't when the line started. But that's all right, we get stronger generation by generation. Look what you have done without even knowing
what you were doing." She smiled at him with a mother's pride and something more, something approaching deification. "I should teach you to bake."
The feeling of unreasoning peace left him, replaced by a catfooted fear. Of what? Of her? But how could she ever hurt him except by loving him too much?
"Mother," he told her, "I do not want to spend my life baking cookies, and I do not want to spend my life alone."
"Of course not, dear."
Walking to the corner store, Blake trailed rumor like a villain's cloak: he could hex with a glance, he wandered the night as a black cat spying on people's dreams, he performed salacious acts with animals. In his garage he had set up a black altar under a black pen-tacle hex and an inverted cross. There he killed stray dogs and mutilated them and drank their blood. Strange howling noises were heard in the sky above his house at night. Some of the schoolchildren swore they had seen on him the beginnings of a poison-tipped tail. Blake Bloodsworth was a hex witch and a priest of Satan, and wasn't it a shame for that nice mother of his who baked such divine cookies, she must be heartbroken. The boy's unknown father must be the devil himself.
Within a few days every God-fearing woman in Diligence had called her minister. The men of God counseled caution and discretion and not believing everything one heard. Then as early as their busy schedules would allow they met (those of them who practiced ecumenism and were on speaking terms) over morning coffee at the Diligence Cafe in order to discuss paganism, Satanism and the possibilities of exorcism. None of them disputed these isms, but they could not agree on a rite. It was each preacher for himself.
Within a few days Enola Bloodsworth (who belonged to no church) had received phone calls from every priest and pastor in town. In a voice flavored with honeyed venom she told Blake, "I've lived here for forty years and I never knew they cared."
"So what did you tell them?"
"I invited them over for cookies."
Blake eyed her warily. "Mother, what are you up to?"
"Well, if they think you are a hex witch, it seems to me we ought not to disappoint them."
"Mother," he said, using asperity to mask his less manly feelings, "am I going to have to leave town?"
"Why, perhaps eventually, dear. Don't you want to?"
In fact, he did. If there was going to be a life for him, he knew, it was going to be outside Diligence. A life, and someone to love him and teach him the mysteries of the word that rhymed with hex. To some extent, then, she understood him. Cared what he wanted, even. His fear of her eased.
"Yes," he said in a different tone.
"Then stop worrying. Just let me arrange things, dear. We're going to have a nice time with these people. You'll see." Humming, she stood at the kitchen counter and sifted flour white as voodoo capons and angel wings.
Her sanguine attitude was what puzzled Blake and made him feel so ambivalent about her. She should have showed some anxiety about the trouble he was in, if only because he was missing so much school, yet she seemed to feel none. Instead, she smiled at him across the kitchen table with those bright tawny eyes. Ever since he had hexed Dane Orwig she had been going through her flour-clouded days in some sort of unaccountable excitement, anticipation, exaltation, beatification.
But he had long since given up trying to understand her. It was enough that she was on his side. "What kind of cookies you baking today?" he asked idly.
"Pinwheels."
* * *
Enola Bloodsworth did not own a car, but used her garage for storage. A lawnmower sat foremost, two rakes hung above it on nails, discarded furniture and a chipped plaster flamingo were pushed against the walls. Most of the floor space she kept clear so she could get to what she wanted. It was all quite innocuous, as the ministers could see when she took them in there that evening.
"Sit down," she invited. She had swept the place and set up lawn chairs, so the ambience was not unpleasant by Diligence standards. "We're going to have our refreshments here. It's too crowded in the house." No wonder, since she had invited all of them at once. She scuttled out, leaving them with Blake.
He stood with their glances crawling over him like black ants. Mr. Lipschitz had come too (despite the nervous prostration he blamed on Blake's having ill-wished him), and Mrs. Xander, and a few of the other teachers, as well as the mayor and the chief of borough police. There were not enough chairs for everyone. Blake stood near a cardtable holding a borrowed coffee urn in the cleared space near the back wall. The others crowded near the door, and he did not dare to look directly at any of them in case his mother really was trying to get things back to normal.
Was she? With that going-to-heaven glitter in her eye?
"Here we are!" She came back in carrying a huge tray of pinwheels. "Please," Enola invited, offering the chocolate-and-vanilla cookies. "Please, everyone, have some coffee and something to eat."
No one could resist Enola Bloods-worth's cookies. Even the chronic dieters took at least one. Blake had about six himself. At least they were not hex circles. The thought caused him both relief and disappointment. Nothing extraordinary was going to happen after all — A black cat appeared at the open garage door.
Dusk was darkening the sky, and a few stars had appeared, chips of broken glass left on a shadowy inverted floor. Enola Bloodsworth did not turn on the lights in the dim garage. Yet none of the guests had left. They took second helpings, seeming charmed by the occasion or by her courtesy.
The cat paused regally, surveying the scene, then with the dignity of a death angel walked in.
Enola Bloodsworth looked down into its yellow eyes and smiled.
"Hello, Grandmother," she said.
Blake looked at the pinwheel cookie in the palm of his hand, and it started to turn.
And he saw now. Of course. It was a hex sign after all, of the most potent kind, not just incised but ingrained, hex to the core, why had he not seen it so before? They all were. Swirl hexes, symbols of transformation.
He looked at the cat, at the soul-deep black slits in its golden eyes.
Grandmother?
Its eyes were hex signs that spun before him, yellow and black, then changing, all the many colors of magic circling, circling in kaleidoscope symmetry. Cat eyes had taken over his world, they were big as sky, older and more powerful than stars and stripes, and they saw through him, they imbued him with hex magic and the power of his own aspirations —
Was he in fact a hex witch? Or was he the victim of his mother's lifelong plan?
He looked at her and saw instead the Grecian girl of his dreams.
All was changed. Where the coffee urn had squatted on its cardtable stood instead a black altar with a barn-hex top on which a black book lay open. Over it hung an inverted cross made of bleached bones and decorated in the most appalling bad taste, with blood-red plastic roses. The whole place was dotted with them, like a cheap Chinese restaurant: the furniture, the besoms that hung instead of rakes on the walls, the walls themselves, now rough-hewn stone instead of white plaster. A collar of the fake flowers bobbed on the neck of a white goat which stood bleating near the altar. Mr. Lipschitz wore one in his lapel and leered at Mrs. Xander, who had a wreath of the hideous things on her head. In fact all the guests were flower-bedecked and already in an orgiastic mood. They had gathered, after all, for a most special celebration of the black mass: a witches' wedding.
The bride wore a black lace mantilla and a blood-red satin dress and carried a heart-shaped bouquet of red plastic roses in her right hand. Her left hand she held out to Blake. She looked at him. She smiled.
He knew he should have run. Yet, Christ, the invitation in that smile was . . .
She was the girl he had created in his daydreams, exactly, in every detail: those full lips, those high cheekbones, that nubile torso with — he blushed, thinking of those extra, secret breasts. Knowing someone had watched his dreams like a peep show. Yet wanting to be lucky enough to find out: were the supernumeraries there, included in the package? Was she really his dream lover in every detail?
Or in every detail but her huge dark eyes.. . . He had settled on purple, but her eyes were any color and all colors. They took him in and spun him around. They were hex eyes.
Am I changed? he wondered. Have I grown taller1? Will I come out of this a man? Glancing down, he saw that he also was dressed all in slim-fitting red, in a scarlet tuxedo and black cummerbund, with a plastic rose at his heart. All right, so his mother had wanted to decorate with the tawdry things. It was her party. He no longer minded.
The black cat leaped to the hex hub atop the altar, sat by the open book. Everything stopped whirling. Time stood still.
Will tomorrow come? If it does, will I be here or somewhere else?
The cat at the altar said in a soft, trenchant voice, "Blake Bloodsworth, approach your bride."
He should run. He should run. Maybe Diligence and a world of commonplace troubles waited outside.
Yet she was so beautiful. And he knew she cared about him in her way. And he knew he loved her. He had always loved and feared her, as long as he had been alive.
Her left hand still reached toward him. He took the necessary step, took her hand in his. It felt warm and lithe against his fingers, his palm.
The cat said, "Enola conceives and bears a son. The son marries and begets Enola. One becomes two so that two can become one again. Generation by generation I grow stronger, I who walk alone."
One becomes two so that . . .
"Step to the altar, you who are two."
Blake obeyed her command, but looked at his bride. Her smile told him that tonight he would lie with her and learn all her mysteries.
What it did not tell him, he had the brains to know: afterward, in the morning light, he would look into her eyes and see truth and maybe not like it. Though he would have preferred green or purple, already he foresaw what color her eyes would be, come daybreak: from under the masses of her black hair they would shine out at him, all too familiar. The hex-yellow color of snick-erdoodles.
But in the night he would not have to see. For as long as it lasted he would think only of the night.
There had to be a way to make night last forever. And he was small and dark and smart; maybe before dawn he could come up with it. V
STALLION
A crest curved symmetrically With mane lying heavily
Like snow upon a willow tree With mane lying heavily
Around his calla-lily ears, Around his violet eyes.
He is the stallion of a dream. He is not what he seems. Nancy Springer
WEIRD TALES TALKS WITH NANCY
SPRINGER
by Darrell Schweitzer
Weird Tales: Your work has taken several radical shifts of late, both in approach and subject matter. One fan described it rather indelicately as "Nancy Springer is sure letting it all hang out." How do you account for this?
Springer: A couple of things. I just plain got tired of the high fantasy. I felt as if the constant writing in a semi-archaic style was turning my brain to mush. I really just wanted to use all those modern words. There are a lot of neat modern words in the English language that I wasn't getting a chance to use. Of course it goes a lot further than that. About four years ago my husband got out of the Lutheran ministry. I never realized while he was in it how much that constrained me, but it must have had some effect because since then things have been quite different in my writing. At the time he got out of the ministry we moved — this is a very good idea because you don't want to remain in the same place where you have served as a pastor — and the town that we had been living in was such a wonderfully bizarre and peculiar place that it has imprinted itself on my writing ever since.
WT: The obvious effects are that you're writing more explicitly about sex and you're using certain words you didn't previously — the ones the FCC won't let you say on the air — and also that you're writing more about childhood and growing up, possibly from your perspective as a mother. How much of that — aside from modern words — could you have put into your previous fantasies, if more subtly?
Springer: The theme of coming of age, I think, has always been in my fiction. My writing, ever since Book One, has been a growth process for me, a kind of therapy for me, working out all the excess baggage left over since my 1950s childhood. It's just that now I am more conscious of it than I used to be, and I bring it out more openly, less symbolically. So I figured, "Oh, my writing is about coming of age. I might as well do that." I've been writing children's books, writing through my own childhood that way, and, yes, having children around the house does help. I eventually hope to write mainstream novels about adults, maybe even middle-aged adults like myself. You know, given time I might actually grow up. We live in hope.
WT: Some of your readers, jokingly or otherwise, might be disappointed if you grew up.
Springer: I think Ursula Le Guin said it best. An adult is not a child who died. An adult is a child who lived. So, the child will always be with us, but may now be better able to cope.
WT: The other obvious change in your work is that you are using much more modern — and largely untouched — material in such books as The Hex Witch of Seldom, rather than legendary magic from three thousand years ago. Contemporary magic, if nothing else. Why did you feel constrained from handling such material earlier?
Springer: I don't think I felt constrained. I think it's more a matter that I swore I wasn't going to write fantasy anymore. I really just got tired of it. I was writing too many hooks too fast, I guess, of the h
igh fantasy type. So what I thought I wanted to write at that time was mainstream, and writing contemporary fantasy was a compromise. I have financial responsibilities. It was something I felt I could market, which would be a step toward mainstream. But, darned if I haven't started enjoying the stuff. I think I'll go on doing it for quite a while.
WT: Were you reacting to the widely-perceived ossification of the fantasy category, by which fantasy novels—no, excuse me, fantasy trilogies — are seen as being fully as much a stereotyped product as, say, nurse novels?
Springer: I might have been, but I think it was more on a personal level, that I myself got tired of writing of them. But, yes, I think there might have also been a kind of ego thing there, that literary writers look down on fantasy writers, ergo I am going to show the world that I am a literary writer too, ergo I am going to write something else. I think I've gotten over that now.
WT: There's also the much more nasty bit of snobbishness one sometimes encounters, to the effect that generic fantasy trilogies are written by women who can't do anything else (e.g., science fiction).
Springer: Oh, gross me out. . . bleh . . . ick. I've never run into too much of that to my face. One is conscious of course of all sorts of things behind one's back, and it's not paranoia if it's true. But I've tried to get over reacting to other people in terms of what I'm going to do with my life and my writing and figure out what it is that I actually do well and actually enjoy; and by Jove I've discovered that I actually am a fantasy writer.
WT: So what about the mainstream novels you once planned?
Springer: I have a mainstream novel sitting at home in rough draft. I will go through it again and see what comes. But I will cheerfully continue to write fantasy as well. I don't think I'll ever get away from it.
WT: Ultimately we're all just writers, and the rest is marketing.
Weird Tales - Summer 1990 Page 4