Ceremonies

by T E. D Klein

  Below it, one short leap away, the man sits hunched over the table, absorbed in his writing, his breathing harsh in the quiet of the room. Near his head several gnats and a tiny green moth dart round and round the lamp. The man is soft, plump, and white, like the grubs it has sacrificed in the forest this morning. But when the claws rip through his flesh, the white will turn to red.

  Kill him! he shrieks silently. Why doesn't it kill hint?

  The apartment is stifling. The shades are drawn, the windows shut, the little room locked tight. Transfigured by the deepness of his trance, the Old One lies soaking and exhausted on his bed, wet with urine, perspiration, and an amber fluid oozing from his plump half-open lips. His eyes are wide, unblinking, seeing nothing, seeing all; his body twists and twitches on the stained and wrinkled sheets; his brain throbs with rage. The White Ceremony is complete; the Green, too, is behind him, performed precisely as it had to be, precisely as the Master dictated. The necessary words have been spoken; the required signs have been made; the forces have been released. The Son is awakening…

  So why, why, won't the thing out there kill him?

  The altar was an obscenity, and larger, incredibly larger, than she'd expected. Even the dogs avoided it, after sniffing avidly at the muddy skulls, and now they stood waiting beside her in the darkness, tied to one of the great tree's upthrust roots. She heard them shift tensely among themselves, making occasional low growling sounds deep in their throats.

  Mrs Poroth gripped a heavy broken limb and squinted at the moon through the space in the trees. She was bone-weary, her arms stiff from the hours of trying to control the dogs, her palms and fingers blistered from the ropes. She dreaded the walk back in the darkness.

  She willed herself to relax and watched the sky. She let her mind go free.

  The moment came. The dogs fell silent. Raising the broken limb, she muttered a short prayer and brought it down against the swollen black shape before her. There was a crunching sound, as of breaking china, and she felt the limb sink into the crumbling mass. She brought it up again and smashed downward. Dimly she could see white shapes tumble toward her feet.

  She worked for a few minutes more, knocking away the clods of earth and mud until only an irregular low mound of earth was left to mark the spot. Taking up the limb one last time, she scattered the remainder of the tiny skulls and pounded them to dust.

  It watches without blinking, moving not a muscle. It senses that its waiting is almost at an end.

  Abruptly, below it, the man pauses in his writing. He takes a white cloth from his pocket, blows his nose, curses softly. With a jarring scrape of metal he pushes back his chair and stands. Yawning, he switches off the lamp.

  The thing on the wardrobe twitches, jerks forward a fraction of an inch. Now would be the best time: the man will be blinded by the darkness while it can see perfectly. It steels, tenses, arches itself to spring But suddenly it is confused. Something is holding it back. Something new. A hitherto unknown cautiousness – a sudden sense that, even now, it lacks the requisite strength, as if the very source of its power were now dim and uncertain. The man is soft, but he is also large; he is vulnerable, achingly vulnerable, but there is still a chance, a tiny chance, that if it tries to kill him tonight, it will fail. And even that tiny chance cannot be taken; too many things are hanging in the balance.

  It watches as the man below stumbles into bed. In a few minutes he is asleep, his breath coming sonorous and slow.

  Noiselessly it drops to the floor, leathery pads breaking the fall, four limbs yielding easily to absorb the shock. As it moves along the bedside, the man's face, stupid with sleep, is only inches from its fangs. It will be good, when the time comes, to tear that face.

  But such pleasures must wait; there are suddenly new calculations to make and further rites to perform. It will have to grow still stronger, gather its speed, hone its murderous skill. Tonight, to bring itself one step closer to the necessary strength, it will add a new trophy to its altar in the woods.

  Silently it pads across the room and pauses at the door. Slowly, with claws aching to become hands, it reaches toward the knob, grasps it, twists…

  On the bed the man stirs, turns, and sleeps on. The door opens softly on the night, where the lawn lies shining beneath a sliver of moon. Something soft and grey slips outside. Slowly the door closes, clicks shut.

  Quietly, implacably, it moves across the lawn toward the farmhouse.

  Sarr slept soundly, his right arm encircling Deborah's waist. The six cats shared the bed with them, curled by their feet or nestled in the space between their bodies. Outside the uncurtained windows, the crescent moon floated through the dark skies like a question mark.

  From downstairs came the sound of the screen door opening, followed by the inner door. Sarr slept on, but Deborah stirred sleepily in his grasp. Vaguely it came to her that Freirs must be entering the house to use the bathroom; it was understood that he was free to do so. Odd, though: he'd always gone outside, so far as she knew…

  She listened, half dreaming, for the fall of his footsteps in the kitchen below. Instead she heard a soft tapping noise – as if (and she was to remember this later) the hard plank floor down there were being touched, ever so lightly, by four tiny rakes.

  A sound. Had that been a bump on the stairs? She stirred herself awake for a moment, then lapsed back into dream. Dimly she sensed Azariah, the older orange male, wriggle out of his accustomed place by her feet to investigate.

  Silence. The dream reclaimed her. There was a warming fire encircling her, warm as Sarr's brawny right arm. But the fire grew louder, it hissed at her, and she knew that it was the breath of some great beast…

  And then skinny old 'Riah came scurrying back up the stairs and buried himself beneath the bedclothes, trembling like a frightened child. She could feel him, and she wondered what could be wrong, how could anything tremble so when there was fire all around?

  Now, from the stairs, came another sound – a low, insistent purring – and later she would remember thinking, as she listened to that sound, How could there be a purring from the stairs? Weren't all the cats in bed with her and Sarr?

  The purrs continued, steady, almost seductive, reaching from the darkness of the hall. Suddenly, as if in response – as if, for cats, the sound held a note of beckoning – she felt two soft balls of fur dislodge themselves from somewhere near her legs, drop upon the rug at the foot of the bed, and pad into the hall.

  There was an audible swish, like the sound a springy young sapling makes as it snaps back into one's face… A swish – followed by two bumps.

  And then she and Sarr were waking, sitting up confused and frightened and horrorstruck, for they were hearing a sound coming from below, a sound they'd never heard before, the sound of cats screaming.

  Before she knew what was happening, Sarr had leaped from the bed and was pounding downstairs. He reached the bottom in time to see Toby, Azariah's little orange double, give a final twitch of his limbs and, faintly in the moonlight, the slim black tail of Habakkuk disappear out the kitchen door.

  Toby was dead by the time Deborah came downstairs. Neither of them ever saw Habakkuk again.

  July Nineteenth

  Dear Carol,

  Sorry I haven't written in a while. It's easy to lose track of time out here, and I've really been pushing myself to get through that summer reading list. There's also been some trouble with one of the cats – that heavy grey female, you may remember her, the old one who originally belonged to Sarr. She's been acting very wild, and last week she ran off into the woods. We thought she was gone forever, but it seems that last night she came sneaking into the house and murdered two of the kittens, one of whose bodies she seems to have made off with.

  Toby, the little orange one, was my favorite of the bunch. (Remember how he liked to have you pet him?) The other one, Cookie, was the smallest and, I suppose, probably the easiest to carry away.

  The Poroths seem to be taking the two deaths like
the deaths of children. Sarr woke me around half an hour ago, tapping on my screen and calling gently, 'Jeremy… Jeremy… ' He was carrying his axe like a sidearm and sounded very grim – almost shell-shocked, in fact: his voice was deep, subdued, filled with grief and confusion. He informed me, in all seriousness, that in a few minutes they're going to be holding a funeral service for the two cats and they'd like me to be there.

  I tell you, Carol, this summer started off like Currier amp; Ives, but it's ending up like Edward Gorey. I don't know which is more bizarre: what that damned Bwada did last night, or the Poroths' sweetly crazy notion of holding a full-scale funeral for a couple of dead cats, or the fact that I, here just for the summer and relatively unaffected by all these goings on, am already wondering what I ought to wear to the goddamned thing.

  Anyway, I don't want to be late and hurt their feelings, so will end this and try to get it in the day's mail. Do come out again – soon. I mean it. I want you here to help keep things sane.

  XXX

  Jeremy

  He lies rigid on the bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The sheets have dried now, the sun has come up, and his limbs no longer tremble. He has lain here unblinking for almost twenty hours; for the final ten of them he has not moved a muscle, save for the nearly imperceptible rise and fall of his belly. The room around him, the street outside, the formless living mass that is the city, all these are forgotten. He is not here. He is across the river now, belly to the ground, moving through the forest on all fours.

  Contact has finally been attained.

  Contact! – a linkage of the minds, just as, so long ago, the Master promised. He sees through its eyes now, feels the roughness of the forest floor through the pads of its feet, listens with ears more acute than any human's for the rustle of small creatures in the leaves. He smells the scent of pine boughs, marsh water, putrefying flesh; he feels his muscles ripple like a tiger's. Its body moves now to his will.

  He feels the creature's fury, shares the memory of last night – the discovery of the ruined altar, scattered pebbles, shattered skulls -and shares, too, the hunger for revenge. They will pay, the race of men.

  That, too, the Master has promised.

  Stealthily he presses through the undergrowth to the forest's edge, slips through the long grass bordering the stream, and swims across with a confidence and ease no cat has ever felt. Selecting a likely maple on the other side, he lopes easily up the trunk; it is as effortless as running on the ground. Creeping out along an upper limb, he settles down to watch.

  The three of them are gathered in an empty field, their figures ungainly and stiff as they stand intoning words out of a book. Before them lies a freshly dug hole and a small blanket-wrapped form.

  For the first time in ten hours there is a flicker of movement on the Old One's wrinkled face, a nearly infinitesimal twitching at the corners of the lips.

  And that same moment, as it gazes upon the proceedings from its perch in the tree, the animal's mouth widens into an almost human smile.

  Unpleasant day.

  Cats' funeral went off well; proved, in fact, to be rather touching, even to my jaded amp; allergic eyes. It was held out beyond Deborah's garden. Sarr had dug a small hole for the body, which was wrapped in black cloth. The other body – well, God knows what Bwada's done with it.

  The Poroths, too, were dressed in black, but that's normal for them. I wore my best shirt amp; pants, the ones I'd first arrived in, amp; did my best to seem concerned: when Sarr quoted Jeremiah and asked, appropriately, 'Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?' I nodded with all the gravity I could muster. Read passages with them out of Deborah's Bible (Sarr seemed to know it all by heart, Deborah almost all), said amen when they did, knelt when they knelt, amp; tried to comfort Deborah when she cried. Asked her if cats could go to heaven, received a tearful 'Of course.' But San-added that Bwada would burn in hell…

  What concerns me, apparently a lot more than it does either of them, was how the damned thing could have gotten into the house. Deborah said, with real conviction (though I don't think she'd believed it until this incident), 'The devil taught her how to open doors.' Sarr nodded solemnly amp; added, 'She was always a smart cat.'

  He reminded me of an outlaw's mother, still somehow proud of her baby.

  Yet after lunch he amp; I looked all over the land for Bwada so that we could kill her.

  Took the same route we'd gone over twice already: barn, storeroom, beneath porches, even down among the pines that grow on the other side of the stream. He called her, pleaded with her, amp; swore to me she hadn't always been like this.

  We could hardly check every tree on the farm, unfortunately, amp; the woods must offer the perfect hiding place for animals even larger than a cat. So of course we found no trace of her. We did try, though; we searched all the way to the old garbage dump at the far end of the road.

  But for all that, we could have stayed much closer to home.

  We returned for dinner, amp; I stopped by my room to change clothes.

  My door was wide open.

  Nothing inside was damaged, everything was in its place as it should be – except the bed. The sheets were in ribbons right down to the mattress, amp; the pillow had been torn to shreds. Feathers were all over the floor.

  There were even claw marks on the blanket.

  At dinner the Poroths tried to persuade me to sleep downstairs in their living room; they said they'd lock all doors tonight so that not even a human burglar could get in. Sarr believes the thing is particularly inimical, for some reason, toward me.

  It seemed so absurd at the time. I mean, nothing but a big fat grey cat…

  But now, sitting out here, a few feathers still scattered on the floor around my bed, I wish I had taken them up on their offer. Wish I were back inside the house. I did give in to Sarr when he insisted I take his axe with me.

  But what I'd rather have right now is simply a room without windows.

  I don't think I want to go to sleep tonight. I'll just sit up all night on my new bedsheet, my back against the Poroths' extra pillow, leaning against the wall behind me, the axe beside me on the bed, this journal on my lap.

  The thing is, I'm rather tired from all the walking I did today. Not used to that much exercise. Slacking off too much lately.

  I'm pathetically aware of every sound. At least once every five minutes some snapping of a branch or rustling of leaves makes me jump. And who'd have believed that mice could make so much noise as they patter across my ceiling? They may be small, but they sound like veritable behemoths.

  How did that line go from the funeral today? From the Book of Jeremiah?

  Thou art my hope in the day of evil. At least that's what the man said.

  July Twentieth

  A dream of dragons. Woke up this morning with the journal amp; the axe cradled in my arms. What awakened me was the trouble I had breathing – nose all clogged, sneezing uncontrollably. Down the center of one of my screens, facing the woods, was a huge diagonal slash.. .

  Book Eight: The Test

  What we did was no harm at all, only a game.

  Machen, The White People

  July Twenty-first

  The dawn was grey and overcast. The sun was lurking just behind the tops of the surrounding pines, yet there seemed no end to the night. It was like one of those short, chilly winter days when darkness extends far into the morning – the sort of day when all a man's instincts rebel at getting up, and when the thought of rising as early as five thirty seems scarcely to be borne. Yet five thirty was when the sun rose; and with it rose Ham and Nettie Stoudemire.

  There was, beyond the darkness, another reason for Ham's reluctance to face the day: this year had been, for him, a year of troubles. If it wasn't a late frost that had stunted the roots of his young saplings, it was the fruit tree blight, or worms in the tomatoes, or tent caterpillars that nested in his maples just when he and Nettie had played host to the assembled Brethren.

>   And now, after splashing some cold water on his face and sipping a pre-breakfast mug of coffee with Nettie – who, as the local midwife, seemed better able to cope with getting up mornings – and after stumbling from his house into the semidarkness, now Ham discovered what appeared to be some new trouble over at the pigpen.

  The animals were gathered in one corner, snorting and pawing at something on the ground. Only one thing will disturb a pig that way, and even as he hurried toward the pen Ham imagined exactly what, in fact, he found: a garden snake, thick and black and harmless, which had somehow wandered into the pigs' territory and had been stamped to death by their hooves.

  Climbing nimbly over the fence, he gave the animals hard whacks on their sides. To them it was like a caress; they moved apart to let him pass. He took the dead, mashed body, still quivering from nervous contractions, and hurled it sidearm toward the woods, past the northern edges of the field.

  A bad omen, he thought to himself, this early in the morning. A bad omen for the day.

  Ten minutes later, as he strode out to the cornfield, a hoe upon his shoulder, he saw the next snake. It was small and slim and green, and was moving slowly down one of the planted rows. Such snakes were beneficial – they fed upon the rodents that fed upon the corn -and he let it go by, though not without a shadow of a frown. Watching as it passed timidly down the furrow, he turned to follow its course – and, turning, saw another snake, less small, less slim, and darker green.

  Briefly he recalled something he'd heard at the worship last Sunday: a chance remark, prompted by the news of Hannah Kraft's death, about this season's having seen more reptiles in the woods than any time in recent memory…

  Ignoring his growing uneasiness, he pushed between the waist-high stalks of corn into the next row. To his relief it was empty, empty except for the brown tilled earth and the green of the stalks and the yellow where the ears of corn peeped through And where the foot-long yellow corn snake slipped easily around a nearby stalk and glided up the row in search of food.