Cat Magic

by Whitley Strieber

  George would manage, he was a survivor. And the poor frog!

  In any case, her gesture would probably be futile. Such a deep violation of the laws of life was making the cat awfully mad. Constance’s interference wouldn’t even be noticed.

  The black tom began his progress across Maywell, intent only on one goal; Animal Room Two, Terrarium D-22, Wolff Biology Building. He hurried down the sidewalk on the right side of Bartlett Street, past the tall homes that had housed the same Maywell families for generations, the Haspells and the Lohses and the Coxons, families whose ancestors had seen the Revolution from those leaded-glass windows, who had leaped in the springtime fields and left mandrakes for the fairy.

  The tom passed a red Mustang convertible beneath which an elderly and very arthritic tabby hid.

  The tom heard its wheezing breath, saw the pain in its eyes. Frightened of the enormous spirit it saw stalking down the walk, the tabby yowled miserably.

  The tom stopped. He lowered his head, concentrated on the neglected, dying animal before him. A sensitive paw reached out and touched the cowering tabby. I give you the gift of death, old cat. You have earned it. Instantly the tabby’s body slumped. The tom watched its soul leap up like smoke into the starry sky.

  None of the tabby’s fleas crossed to the tom. They chose rather to risk the cold autumn ground.

  The tom continued on its way, and everything sensitive to it took notice as they might the transit of a wendigo. As it passed the Coxon house, it brought a vision to the innocently open mind of little Kim, the eleven-month-old baby. She began to wail in her crib. She didn’t know words, but in a painful, true flash from the enormous mind that was passing, she had seen her own end, far from now in a sleek blue thing she did not yet know was called a car, in the bellowing water of a flooded river, on another autumn night.

  And in the prime of youth.

  Hearing the desolation in her cries, Kim’s mother came into the nursery, picked her up, and clucked and sang and patted. “Oh, had a burp,” her mother said. “Such a big burp!” When the wailing passed, she put Kim down.

  The frog found fat, lovely flies skimming along the surface of the water. It caught them, aiming with its keen eyes, darting its tongue.

  Something the frog might have called a goddess, had if known of such things, marched the water, raining desire down on the feeding bull, making it forget its feeding and follow.

  “Monitor the blood flow in die extremities. We’ll wait until it stops completely before we bring our baby back.”

  The frog was jumping and leaping for the green goddess, wanting to show that it was the greatest bull, the bull of bulls, huge and strong and thunder-voiced. It dove deep, shot to the surface, dove again.

  “That’s the last of it, George. No more blood flow.”

  “So we can confirm one absolutely dead Rana catesbeiana?”

  “By any definition. Even the Stohlmeyer Foundation’s.”

  “This time. Doctor, they’ll accept our protocols. For sure.”

  “Thanks, Bonnie.” George Walker kissed her straw-sweet twenty-year-old hair. He stood to his full height, six feet of slim but fiftyish male. God, he thought, the beauty of her youth! “I have ninety seconds of null readings, Doctor.”

  “Good, Clark. I think we’ll convince ‘em this time.”

  “For sure,” Bonnie repeated.

  And if we don’t, George thought, you kids are going to be’ out of Maywell State College on your tight little asses just like me. No Stohlmeyer grant means no professorship—and no assistantships either. But then again, what would Clark care—he had the Covenstead to return to. Bonnie was too wild to live in Constance Collier’s witch village. As for George, he kept his house in town. He had his reasons for staying away from the estate, chief among them his career. It was one thing for people to commute into New York from the Covenstead, another for them to try and work in the town.

  Any professor foolish enough to have open contact with the witches could forget things like tenure.

  If the Stohlmeyer grant ended, Constance might find George some money for his work, but the grant was the validation that the college trustees needed to allow him to continue it here. Loss of the grant meant loss of career. George could not bear that thought: he had worked so hard, and been so misunderstood.

  “Let’s earn some gold, kiddies, and bring this little sucker back to life.”

  The frog heard, thrumming in the whole air, a rush as of bird wings. It was low and large, too large even to be a bird. Was it wind?

  The frog saw scud on the surface of the waters, saw the lilies tearing, saw the leaves of cypress and willow lift into the black sky, heard the thrumming rise to a scream. It waited no longer, but rather leaped for the dark, safe deeps.

  A shimmering, golden goddess of a frog swam there. The bull’s heart was captured and he went deeper and deeper after her, his loins tingling, his muscles singing in the quiet. She lured him farther and farther, deeper than any frog should go. Come, she said with her quickness. Swim, she said with her grace.

  Swim! Swim!

  The wind was seething behind him, roaring through the lilies, ripping the green and quiet waters, the holy pond.

  Swim, little one, the goddess called, swim with all your soul!

  The black tom began to run. He rounded a comer onto, Meecham Street. The neighborhood changed from houses to a row of neat little shops. Bixter’s Ice Cream was open, its video games clattering and buzzing. Beside it the B. Dalton bookstore was just closing up. Joan Kominski locked her register and turned out her lights. The passing tom, unnoticed by her, shot her a vision of her own future: she was in a hospital room dragging breaths that would not fill her lungs. The hallucination was so detailed that she could smell the oxygen, see a picture of a clown on the wall, hazy beyond the plastic oxygen tent, taste her own drowning fluids. And feel Mike’s hand in hers and hear him calling “Doctor, Doctor!”

  She paused, stunned. With shaking hands she lit a cigarette. She stood in her darkened bookshop, smoking, calming herself down.

  The tom trotted quickly down Main and crossed the Morris Stage Road. Mike Kominski was roaring home full of Amtrak martinis, late as usual from his job in New York, and it would not do to be caught in front of that particular Lincoln.

  The wind was just behind the frog now and he knew it was dry and he knew it was hot. He swam and swam in the roiling, dirtying, darkening waters. Ahead the maiden frog, the goddess, glimmered, urging him to rush on and on, deep to her, deep to her!

  “We’re getting an electrical field!”

  The wind touched his back and it was hot and ugly and hard. It must be deathwind, for it smelled of the man-place.

  He must not surrender to it! Ahead she flashed her gold beauty. He swam as he had never swum before, the water hissing past his nose and eyes, his whole body surging with the effort of it. Her eyes shone and her skin gleamed.

  The wind touched him again.

  “Heartbeat!”

  No!

  The wind surrounded him.

  “It’s coming to rhythm.”

  The wind sucked at him—

  “It’s getting steady.”

  His whole heaven collapsed. But she did not abandon him. Alone of all that beauty, the most beautiful part remained. When she saw him being dragged back, she turned and came, too, swimming fearlessly into the dry agony that had captured him. She ceased to animate his determination and concentrated on giving him courage. She went deep, deep into him, into the secret place where glowed the strength of his spirit.

  Then he hurt all over and he was hungry and he was hot and it was white and there were no fly smells and it was bleak again.

  “It’s alive, George!”

  “Damn right it is.” George Walker could hardly restrain himself. He stood up from the bank of instruments, he clapped his hands. And Bonnie leaped, a blond streak of joy, into his arms. He kissed her moist lips.

  He enjoyed the deliciousness of the girl while y
oung Clark looked on, glasses steaming. Relax, Clark, let an old man get a little. What does it matter, you get all you need on the Covenstead.

  George did not have that privilege. His relationship to Constance was too deep a secret; he could not go on the Covenstead except by dark of night, and then only in those rare instances when he was called.

  And as for living among the witches—well, if his work here was ever done, maybe. He had never told Constance his dream of retiring to the hidden witch village.

  He was afraid to. If she said to him what he feared, that it was not his fate to find peace in this life, he did not think he could stand it.

  Sometimes the loneliness of his position was very hard to bear.

  “We’ve got to get it out of the halter,” Clark said, his voice full of testy eagerness. “It’ll dehydrate. We really don’t need a damaged specimen, do we, folks.”

  Bonnie broke away from George’s hovering presence. “I’ll bag it and return it to the terrarium.”

  “The isolate,” George said. “And band it with the date and time. Under no circumstances do we mix this little piece of gold up with the other beasties.”

  The frog was soon in the awful, waterless pond with the magic walls. It knew what it had to do here. Sit. A hop meant a hurt on the nose. The magic wall could not be seen, but it was as hard as the skin of a floating log.

  So the frog sat. Remembering its heaven was almost enough to make it turn itself inside out with agony. It begged the golden frog to help.

  I cannot!

  Take me back, please.

  I cannot!

  Dried, dead flies scattered down, sticking to its nose. The frog’s tongue did not go to get them.

  Please, please.

  I cannot!

  The frog felt a cleaving that in higher things is called love, for the lost green water. All it could do, though, was sit, inert and mute, silent.

  Frogs are not made for anguish. Nor to have their deaths stolen from them. Nor to be dragged back from their humble paradise.

  Frogs are made for joy.

  The Wolff Building crouched dark and ugly ahead. Nobody saw the incredible way the tom entered the building, nor saw it slip down the corridor to just the right door.

  But the instant the cat went through that door the frog knew.

  The frog saw dangerous eyes on the other side of the magic wall. Once it would have hopped away from such terrible eyes, but now it only sat, apathetic. In its brain there repeated the image of the deep water and the golden lover it had lost.

  Even when the huge black head of the tom came oozing right through the magic wall, the frog did not hop. Had it understood the miracle involved in a cat pushing its head through solid glass without breaking it, the frog might have jumped. But it did not understand the magic wall. As far as it knew, the only purpose of glass was to disappoint frogs.

  The cat nudged the frog with its muzzle, then opened its mouth. The sharp frog eyes saw the tongue, the white fangs, the gently pulsating throat. And it saw more.

  Instead of terror, the frog felt eagerness. For down in the cat’s throat it saw its lost beauty, her skin touched by sunlight. She lay in a crystal pond, tadpoles swimming about her flanks.

  Heaven was in the belly of the cat. The frog laid his head in the tom’s mouth.

  This was one death it did not have to suffer. The tom snapped its jaws down so fast the frog felt nothing.

  But then it had already died once and that was quite enough. It saw a fierce flash of light and heard a sound like tearing leaves, and was gone.

  The cat tasted the cold, sour flesh of the frog, gobbled, drank down the cool blood, felt the eyes sticky against its tongue, the skin slick and bland, the muscles salty. It swallowed the frog.

  When it returned to the night, the moon had risen red in the east, its light diffused by haze from the Peconic Valley Power Company’s plant twenty miles away in Willowbrook, Pennsylvania. The tom proceeded along North Street toward Maywell’s one and only housing development, “The Lanes,” built by Willowbrook Resources in 1960. The development’s sameness had over the years been camouflaged by trees. Each of the streets had been named after a familiar variety. The birches planted on Birch were tall and blue in the moonlight, the spruce on Spruce dark green. On Elm there were oak saplings and one or two still-struggling Dutch elm victims.

  The cat passed down Maple Lane until it reached the Walker house, a substantial raised ranch with pale yellow aluminum siding and a ‘79 Volvo in the driveway. Beside it was Amanda’s ancient VW Beetle.

  The tom went between the two cars, through the closed garage door, and into the game room beyond. It was indifferent to the fact that the lights were on; it knew that the room was empty. It slipped behind the sofa just as Amanda, nervous and hollow-eyed, entered. It cocked its ears toward her, and heard much more than her breathing, her movements. It heard the voice of her mind, the thready whisper of her soul.

  She looked around, shaking her head. Here she was again, back in this awful house. She knew that this was a triumphal return to Maywell, but having to stay in this place cast a brown shadow on her victory. Too bad she couldn’t afford the Maywell Motor Inn. But she was lucky to have managed to get enough gas for the Volks, given the present state of her finances.

  This house… this town… the only thing about any of it that brought even a flicker of a fond memory was the thought of Constance Collier herself, with her wild colony of witches out on the estate, and her flamboyant seasonal rituals, the fires burning on the hillsides and the wild rides through the town.

  It all seemed so peaceful now. As she had gotten older, Constance must have mellowed.

  Sneaking out to the Collier estate to see the witches dancing naked in their April fields had been desperately exciting, one of the few thrills of being a child in this staid community.

  Always, though, there had been this house waiting at me end of a happy day. She had come home to the resentments and the sorrows: this was a place of unspoken anger, where people wept at night.

  She looked around her. Everything was brown and sad. Since George had bought it from his brother, it had—if possible—gotten even worse. There was an open chill on it now, as if hate was glaring into every room, from the walls, the doors, the very air. There was no more hypocrisy here, at least. The body of the house now reflected its soul.

  Standing in the family room, Amanda felt the weight of the place. She remembered one awful night when she had come in from watching—almost participating in—the Halloween ritual on the Collier estate. Her father had slammed her up against that very wall. “Never, never get near that place!” His voice had been desolate with sorrow.

  What would he think now? In a few days she was going to be working with Constance Collier.

  She wouldn’t participate in witchcraft. She had no time for such fantasies. Of course, it would be interesting to learn more about what went on at the estate.

  She dropped down onto the old couch, the same one that had been here in her childhood. She was twenty and living on her own when she discovered that it was not necessary to be sad. Life could be rich and fulfilling. There was an aesthetic to living that had to be carefully learned, though, or there was the danger of falling down the same pit that had swallowed her parents, the pit of spiritual bankruptcy and moral indifference.

  Through the dirty glass sliding doors she could see the backyard. The old maple where she had spent so many summer hours was still here, and her throat tightened a little to see it. Ten years ago she might have been in that maple on an afternoon like this, sitting in the palace of leaves.

  Ten years. The silences were growing longer. Her relationships with her parents continued, dragging themselves out in her mind. If she had to stay here, memories that were now no more than haunting would soon become unbearable.

  She hoped that Constance Collier would have some space for her out on the estate. Then this hard journey would become much easier.

  The only thing that
would ever have brought her back to Maywell was Constance Collier. Now she was here, chosen to paint the illustrations for the renowned writer’s new translation of Grimm’s. It was the biggest and best commission she had ever had.

  Mandy had come a long way for a twenty-three-year-old woman. A long, hard way. Of course the Caldecott Award for her Rose and Dragon illustrations had helped. She believed that the work itself, though, was what had attracted the secretive and distant Constance Collier’s attention to an anonymous former townie.

  She could create whole, complete worlds in her imagination, and paint them down to the last strand of golden hair.

  Hands dropped onto her shoulders. “Oh!”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Uncle George.”

  She could only feel kindness toward him, since he had been so willing to let her stay here. As soon as she came in, she had understood the reason for his eagerness: without Kate and the kids, this place was more grim than it had ever been before.

  “You’re looking lovely, Amanda.”

  “Why not? I’ve escaped Manhattan, and tomorrow I meet Constance Collier.”

  As he looked at her, his eyes brimmed with what she suspected might even be desire. Had she been a damn fool to stay with him? Perhaps she should have gone straight to the estate. But Miss Collier hadn’t offered her accommodation. All of her old town habits came back. She dared not be forward with Maywell’s leading citizen. Her agent had agreed. “Don’t jeopardize the project by making demands right at first,” Will T. Turner had advised.

  “Have you got anything to drink?” Amanda asked. George padded off in his big sheepskin slippers, across the chipped linoleum of the game-room floor.