Ceremonies

by T E. D Klein

  It was half past ten and he was about to perform the first step in the operation. The day was hot and overcast, and as he trudged across the yard toward the farmhouse, his towel around his neck, he found himself wishing once again that he had a car at his disposal – something to take him away from the confined, landlocked atmosphere of the farm. Maybe it's ridiculous to think of spending the entire summer out here, he told himself, not for the first time. I'm clearly not cut out for it. But where, then could he stay? He couldn't just kick that couple out of his apartment; they had it, by rights, till September. And the Poroths were depending on his ninety a week.

  The two of them were singing – chanting, praying, he couldn't decide what function it actually served – while they weeded the narrow field adjoining the road. They didn't see him go by. Two of the younger cats and the older tiger-striped male, Azariah, were curled like spectators in the grass, watching them. The field itself, bare when Freirs had first arrived at the farm, was now well covered by a tangle of cucumber vines. "These are fast growers,' Poroth had told him confidently. 'I figure they'll be ripe by the end of August -just in time to put 'em in your salad.'

  Well, maybe he'd still be around then. He would see…

  He climbed the steps of the back porch and entered the kitchen. Across the room, one of the wooden chairs was propped against the bathroom door. Without thinking he moved the chair away and pulled the door open.

  There was a scrabbling sound. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a grey shape dart past his feet and across the kitchen floor. It was Bwada.

  For an instant he deliberated whether he should try to catch her -he knew how wicked those claws could be – but then, to his amazement, the cat dashed herself against the screen door, throwing it open. Moments later she had vanished outside. Jesus! he said to himself, thats a trick she didn't know yesterday.

  Sarr and Deborah were standing ankle-deep among the broad leaves of the cukes when, behind them, they heard a commotion. An orange blur was zigzagging through the grass with a silver-grey shape streaking just behind it. Suddenly Azariah came tumbling toward their feet with Bwada practically riding on his back in a frenzy of clawing. In less than a second the two had become a snarling ball of orange and grey, spitting, screaming, with an occasional glimpse of flashing claws and teeth.

  A few seconds more and Sarr was upon them, screaming with a rage as great as theirs. A brawny arm stabbed down, and Bwada was hauled twisting and struggling into the air, gripped around the neck. Sarr stalked back toward the house with her, brandishing the animal.

  'For God's sake put her down,' cried Deborah. 'You're strangling her! You'll crush her neck!'

  He looked back, eyes wild, the veins standing out in his head. Only moments before she had been pleading with him to watch out for the claws, and, moments before that, to stop the fight.

  'If I kill her,' he said between his teeth, 'God's my witness, I'll not shed a tear!'

  The animal had long since ceased struggling and now hung limp in his grasp, seemingly lifeless except for periodic hissing sounds that came from deep within her throat.

  Marching up the steps and into the kitchen, Freirs sheepishly holding the screen door for him, Sarr yanked open the bathroom door and hurled the animal inside. He slammed the door shut, propping the chair back in place before it.

  'Sorry,' said Freirs. 'I'm the one who let her out.'

  'It's all right now,' said Sarr. Wearily he sprawled onto one of the kitchen chairs, his hand and wrist a mass of lacerations. He was breathing deeply. 'It's all right.' He paused, composing himself. 'Have you already turned on the water?'

  'Uh, no, I was about to, but I-'

  Sarr shook his head. 'Don't. Put off your bathing till the end of the day. I want to leave her in there for a spell. God's my witness, I swear my mother was right. The devil's in that animal.'

  Deborah had come into the kitchen and now stood behind him, caressing his neck. 'Can you imagine?' she said to Freirs, 'she just attacked poor 'Riah for the second time today.'

  They had put her in the bathroom last night, after she'd been located among the trunks and old books of the storeroom in Freirs' building. She had been strangely tractable at the time, nestling in Sarr's arms, making no protest as he'd closed the door on her. T almost hate to do it,' he had said, 'the way she's acting now. But when I think of what she did to Mother-'He shook his head.

  This morning, when they'd come downstairs at seven, she'd been gone. Apparently she had learned to turn the knob on the bathroom door by swatting at it with her paw. She had still been in the house, though, for, in addition to the screen door, the heavy wooden kitchen door was closed. As Sarr and Deborah had descended the stairs, followed by the six cats who'd shared their bed, they had seen Bwada race up from the root cellar and pounce on Azariah.

  'And now she's gone and done it again,' said Deborah, with a shudder. 'Make sure that chair's braced tight against the door.'

  From the bathroom came a disconsolate miaow.

  'You're staying in there!' Deborah shouted angrily. 'We'll see how you like it!'

  A miaow again, but drawn out this time into a long, ugly caterwauling that sounded disconcertingly like human speech.

  The three eyed one another uneasily.

  'She's not been sounding like herself lately,' said Sarr. 'There's a kind of- hoarseness. At first I thought it was the accident. Now I'm not so sure.'

  Freirs nodded. 'Yesterday, when I found her in the storeroom, there was something funny about her.'

  'Funny?'

  'She licked her lips – you know the way an animal will do – but it looked like she had something in her mouth.'

  Sarr shrugged. 'Maybe she did. That place is full of mice.'

  Deborah laughed. 'Or maybe she's got a frog in her throat!'

  'I don't know,' said Freirs, shaking his head. 'I'm not too familiar with cats, inside or out, but I'd say she's got something in there. Something wrong. A tumor, maybe, a growth of some kind. I'd take a look at her, if I were you.'

  'I'll do that,' said Sarr, 'as soon as we let her out tonight. I'm even thinking of taking her to that vet over in Flemington. There isn't much else I can do.' He stared gloomily at his hands and fell silent. At last he looked up. 'Well, there's one thing. I wonder if you'd excuse us for a few minutes, Jeremy. I want Deborah here to join with me in prayer.'

  'Oh, yes, of course.'

  'And you know,' said Sarr, 'maybe when we're done I should give a look to her mouth. No reason to wait till tonight. Better to get to the source of the trouble right away.'

  Freirs wandered into the living room and leafed boredly through an Old Farmer's Almanack while Deborah sat down across from her husband. The two of them propped their elbows on the table and clasped their hands. Freirs looked in at them once; they were silent, their eyes tightly shut.

  He drifted back into the living room and waited, listening to the ticking of the clock.

  Was there another sound?

  Yes, he heard it now. A low, grating sound was coming from the other room.

  It came again, followed by the frantic scrape of chairs and Sarr's angry swearing. Freirs rushed into the kitchen in time to see Sarr yank open the bathroom door.

  'The window!' Deborah cried, pointing. Its screen gaped outward, crisscrossed by two wide slashes.

  The room was empty.

  She wasn't in the storeroom this time, or in any of her usual hiding places. Sarr amp; I searched the workroom in the barn amp; the chicken coop too, on a platform six feet above the floor. Plenty of dust amp; fat buzzing bluebottles, but no sign of the cat. Even took a peek into the old smokehouse, as much as the wasps there would let us. We looked for her till dinnertime, in fact, but she was gone without a trace.

  It began to rain during dinner amp; I hung around the house till it stopped. When I got back here I attempted to relax by reading Algernon Blackwood's 'Ancient Sorceries.' One of his lesser tales, perhaps, but I found it anything but relaxing. It's about a town in
habited by a band of feline witches – were-cats, I guess you'd call them – amp; it's done unpleasant things to my imagination.

  Close to midnight now, amp; despite the day's heat, the coldest night we've had so far. Think I'll have some trouble getting to sleep; tonight the whole atmosphere seems weird, worse than ever I recall. Thunder coming regularly – more rain on the way, no doubt – amp; lightning with it, obviously close by. But why, then, is there so much more thunder than lightning?

  A bright flash that time -1 felt the whole room shake, right down to the floor. Wish I were inside the farmhouse tonight. Wish I weren't sleeping alone.

  Can hear the two of them in there singing their nightly prayers now. A rather comforting sound, I must admit, even if I can't share the sentiments.

  Maybe I'll be able to fall asleep if I pretend He looked up. There'd been a rustling at the window by his bed, the one that faced the woods. He turned to look, but he was blinded by the desk lamp beside him, and the window was a great square of blackness.

  Suddenly a flash of lightning lit the sky. Freirs shouted and drew back. A humped grey shape was pressed against his screen, outlined in the light. The eyes were wide, unblinking, cold as a snake's. The mouth hung partly open. There appeared to be something crouched inside it…

  All this he saw in the flash of lightning, while the pale little face of Absolom Troet smirked down at him from the picture on the wall. An instant later the darkness returned. He heard something drop heavily from the screen and pad off into the underbrush, to the echoing rumble of thunder. The next time lightning flashed, the view held only the forest.

  July Fifteenth

  I woke up to the sound of Sarr's axe. You could probably hear it all over the farm. He was off among the trees at the edge of the property, chopping stakes for Deborah's tomatoes.

  Went out and joined him for a while. I told him about seeing Bwada last night, amp; he said that she hadn't come home. Good riddance, say I. Helped him chop some stakes while he was busy peeling off bark. Christ, that axe gets heavy fast! My arm hurt after three lousy stakes, amp; Sarr had already chopped fifteen or more. Obviously what I need is more exercise, but think I'll wait till my arm's less tired.

  I left Sarr to his business amp; went up to the house. Guess I got there a bit earlier than usual, because" Deborah was still running her bathwater, amp; just as I came up out of the cellar with a jug of milk she walked through the kitchen with nothing but a towel wrapped around her. She jumped; so did I. Don't know which of us was more surprised. I took one look at those creamy white shoulders, which I'd never actually seen before, amp; those beautiful white legs amp; thighs, and my cock gave a little leap. Like a fool I immediately averted my eyes, amp; she hurried into the bathroom, but she was laughing as she closed the door.

  I could hear her shut the water off amp; settle into the tub. Sarr's axe still rang out from time to time from over near the woods. I waited a really feel – 'You sure you don't want me to scrub your back?'

  She didn't say anything for a second; maybe she was actually considering the idea. Then she said something about Sarr's not liking it.

  'He's half a mile away,' I said, giving it the old Freirs try. I really would have loved just to see her… She laughed again, I think, amp; then – alas! – she said, 'Not today.'

  Well, so much for that dream. If she wasn't up for anything then, I'm sure she never will be. Moments like that don't come very often.

  Oddly enough, she was extremely friendly – almost affectionate, really – for the rest of the morning. After she got dressed she made me some delicious wild-blueberry pancakes (with berries she'd picked herself), amp; it seemed plain that she liked having me there while she puttered around the kitchen.

  Today, she informed me, is St Swithin's Day – whoever the hell he was – amp; she recited a little rhyme:

  7” rain on St Swithin's Day, forsooth,

  No summer drouthe,' or something like that. Apparently the day's weather is supposed to determine the weather for the next forty days. All very scientific, like that business with the groundhog. I looked out the window, but the sky was so changeable that I found it hard to decide exactly what kind of weather we were having then amp; there, much less going to have. The clouds were moving fast across the sun, with a huge grey one looming just above the horizon. So as I see it, we're in for forty days of sun, clouds, nastiness, amp; fog, with just a touch or two of rain.

  Sarr came in around lunchtime, looking troubled. Seems he'd accidentally killed some kind of thin white snake that had been crawling along one of the branches. He'd sliced it in two with his axe, amp; the thing had had babies inside.

  'It was a milk adder,' he told Deborah, as if that signified something of great importance. She asked him if there'd been much blood. 'Yes,' he said. 'But it was white.'

  He explained to me that milk adders are supposed to get their sustenance by sucking the milk out of cows' udders. Maybe this one had been on its way back from the Geisels'. They're the closest ones around here who own cows.

  I said I thought all that was only a legend.

  He nodded. 'So did I.'

  He had buried the thing immediately, before the cats saw it. The babies had gotten away.

  Later he fell to talking about some other local legends – about the Hop Ghost, that hops behind you when you walk past a churchyard at midnight, and the Magra, a sort of unwanted companion, and something known as the 'Jersey Devil,' the thirteenth offspring of a Mrs Leeds, who'd cursed being pregnant again. In the end, Sarr said, she'd given birth to a horrible half-man half-bird thing which flew up the chimney amp; disappeared.

  He also told me about dragon beetles, supposed to be as big as a man's fist, amp; screwworms, which can breed in people's nostrils, amp; hoop snakes, that swallow the end of their tails and roll along the ground behind their prey.

  I was curious about the last; it sounded like a variation of the old Uroborus myth, the dragon with its tail in its mouth. The alchemists had used it as a symbol of eternity, unity, the all-in-one, or some such blather. Maybe there was something to it after all.

  Actually, I've always had a yen to read that Eddison novel, The Worm Ouroborus, but I'm told it's impossible to get through. Waded through some poems in The Ingoldsby Legends before dinnertime, amp; that was punishment enough.

  Omelet for dinner with home-grown herbs. Damned good. The hens have been laying well lately.

  At night the wind blew from the north amp; the sky got very clear. I spent close to an hour sitting out back in the deck chair with my Astronomy Made Simple amp; a flashlight. There was no moon out, but so many stars that I. could almost read the book by their light. I picked out the Eagle, the Swan, the Plowman, amp; the Bear, amp; sat amp; watched the Dragon chase the Virgin. I'll forget all the names in a day or two amp; don't intend to learn them again, but it was nice to have done it once. Saw at least eleven shooting stars, then I lost count.

  The Park West Institute of Dance was one of the few places in the neighborhood not yet gentrified, although the old two-story building it occupied on the west side of Broadway now housed a joggers' shop and a fancy new women's boutique. Carol had been coming here for nearly six months and had begun to feel like a regular. Until this summer she had had to content herself with a single weekly dance class on Tuesday nights, but now, thanks to Rosie, she could afford to take an additional class when she was in the mood; and she was in the mood tonight. It was Friday, and her datelessness weighed more heavily upon her than usual. Tomorrow, at least, she had something to look forward to – Rosie would be taking her to an evening concert in Central Park – but tonight she knew she couldn't bear to go home immediately after work to sit alone in her apartment reading Rosie's articles, air conditioner or no air conditioner.

  As she slipped on her leotard in the noisy little locker room, she wondered how many of the women around her had husbands or boyfriends waiting for them at home. Not that many, from the look of them. They were an older, unhappier-looking bun
ch than the

  Tuesday-night crowd, women who were filling some gap in their lives or who'd suffered too many disappointments; they were taking it out here, throwing themselves into an activity where they need depend on nothing but their own bodies. She was pleased to see that, as usual, she was one of the thinnest in the room; she told herself she would look young for years and felt no envy for the woman to her left, cursed with huge breasts that were already starting to sag. There were a lot of plump thighs and soft-looking stomachs. Dance, for some women, was probably no more than a pleasant way of dieting.

  The main room stretched for half the length of the building, occupying the space above three stores. One wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors whose silver backing, here and there, had flaked away. Windows ran along the opposite wall, above a barre worn smooth by years of ballet students. Carol had not taken ballet since college. She regretted she hadn't continued with it, and didn't pretend that the modern dance classes at Park West accomplished anything more than keeping her limber.

  There were sixteen people in tonight's class, including three slim, amiable-looking young men she immediately assumed were gay. The teacher – not the one she had on Tuesday – was a wiry little woman in her late thirties with tight black curls and a drill sergeant's voice that belied her height. She, too, seemed less than happy to be here tonight.

  The first half hour of the class was given over to mat and barre work, stretching arms and shoulders, twisting necks, and raising legs in modified plies, all to the softest of calypso tunes played on the tape deck in the corner of the room. Outside the dirty windows she could see the lights of the buildings across the street, a starless black sky overhead. There was no sign of a moon.