Hellcats: Anthology

by Kate Pickford

  Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

  So much fun. He was a bit of a lush. A ladies’ man who liked to bat for both teams, if you take my meaning. I’d go back there in a heartbeat. Hecate, too. It had the grit and sawdust that makes for a good life, even when you have less than nothing to rub together to make your way in the world.

  But what you gain in one life you lose in the next, nay?

  The 1700s were dismal. Wouldn’t do that again if you paid me.

  And…

  Oh…

  I just realized something.

  Cats have nine lives.

  There’s nothing written about humans.

  Has Hecate been losing herself each time she returns to Earth? Have I been breathing her back into herself only to lose some of her essence to that timeline?

  Could that be the thing?

  I pace. I sigh. I listen to the rabbits scraping at the inside of the moon. We’re close. Whether that’s close to disaster or triumph I cannot tell.

  This is my eighth incarnation I’m about to embark on.

  I’m running against the clock.

  I have to get it right.

  For good or ill I’m drawn again to the place where I first took Hecate from her mortal frame. There’s something there for me to learn.

  This time I turn my back on the wormhole and fall.

  Diving hasn’t done me any good. Might as well try something new.

  PLAIN OLD 1963, EARTH

  No. Not right. Not right at all.

  France.

  Me.

  Scientists.

  Dismal year. No wonder I had wiped it from my memory.

  I don’t want to repeat this one. Let’s just get it over with.

  They call me Félicette. In this life, I am the first cat to be launched into space. They put electrodes in my brain and shoot me into the stars. Well, not actually the stars because they’re very far away, but that’s what it feels like; like dancing in the celestial night. I make it back to Earth. They call me Felix after that. I suppose it’s too hard to remember a girl-cat’s name.

  I don’t meet Hecate during that incarnation, but I do experience space.

  And find the wormhole.

  And understand that the dogs and cats and rats and rabbits and roaches and fleas and flies who’ve been flung into the firmament “for science” remain there. In their essential forms. Eternally.

  The humans sent animals into space before it was deemed safe enough for their precious bodies to venture forth. But whether our physical bodies returned to Earth or were abandoned up here (so sorry, sweet Laika), or “were lost on reentry” we elected to stay.

  First man on the moon? Pffft. Eat your heart out, Neil. We were here waaaaaaaaay before you.

  If you don’t understand that matter/not matter divide, I’m not the one to convince you that it exists. That’s between you and your brain.

  Suffice it to say I understand that I am not merely the vehicle in which I travel. I am whole, separate, my Self, eternal.

  And while my body returned to France as Félicette/Felix, I Grimalkin, returned to the moon.

  To recoup and regroup.

  But if the rabbits scratching inside the moon are to be believed, it’s time.

  To leave.

  Go back.

  To Earth.

  To have our revenge.

  PRESENT DAY, MOON

  How unpleasant was that? Falling back to the one lifetime I regret.

  And yet.

  How can I truly say that life was wasted?

  If the French Space Program hadn’t launched me off-world I wouldn’t have found the wormhole and I wouldn’t know how to get back to Hecate. I’d just be a sad cat with nine lives and no mission.

  I may have unearthed a clue during my musings and slips into the past. Hecate was not made for time travel. She was created like me in the first gap; before time, and matter. Before anything. An Eternal. To be human and human and human and human again with no knowledge of who she was in any essential sense, stripped her of her Self.

  And that’s the thing I have to collect. That last remnant of her Self.

  For if I am right, if she had a piece of her Self during each incarnation, and part of that Self remained on Earth after her death, there’s one remaining that I have not gathered.

  That fragment of herself that went with her in the fire.

  That has to be it.

  Hecate gave me everything she could manage to part with but in order to return, she had to hold on to a miniscule fraction of what She had been.

  And it’s buried.

  With her.

  Under the pyre.

  In Port Meadow, where we were burned at the stake.

  I can see the rolling grass and wooded copses in my mind’s eye. The place is hallowed. Protected. Port Meadow, that is. Not just by the freemen and women of Oxford who are allowed to let their horses roam and graze freely, but who have collectively agreed not to till the land, but by some ancient fracking lockdown magik that has to do with burial mounds, mountains of treasure, and humans-not-having-laid-eyes-on-what-lies-beneath for a thousand years. Give or take.

  So, that’s where I have to go and what I have to do.

  The time doesn’t matter.

  Hecate being alive doesn’t matter.

  Me finding her bones is all that counts.

  Do not fail me now, wormhole. Now that I know. Am sure. Have a plan.

  Do not fail me.

  PRESENT DAY, EARTH

  The Thames is the Thames except when it runs through Oxford. Then it’s The Isis. Don’t ask me why. I’m a cat. The things that interest me, interest me. The rest I bat off the edge of the planet.

  But, this is good news indeed. The Thames. You know what that means.

  I’ve made it to my chosen destination.

  I am in Port Meadow.

  There are cows afoot. And horses. Untethered. Going about their business as animals were always supposed to.

  There’s a scent about the place that tickles the back of my nose. I know it.

  It’s not the soot from the fire that took her from me.

  Nor the mad pomade the countess wore to mask the rot within.

  No. This smell is of the place entire. It speaks of peace and earth undisturbed and wildflowers much loved.

  I have returned to this place, unbeknownst to myself, many a time.

  She will have been happy here for all these years, my Hecate.

  The day is un-English, which is to say, sunny. With un-English fluffy clouds and un-English people lounging about the grass on blankets and towels, squinting into the light while they chow on their cucumber sandwiches and onion bhajis.

  It is close to my time then. The food says so. These English have not been bold with their culinary choices for long.

  In front of me, without warning or fanfare, is a rabbit. “Oh, my ears and whiskers…” he says.

  We’re in Lewis Carroll land and no mistake. The well which Alice wished upon is across the river and down a lane beside a crooked church which lingers in the shade.

  There is nothing to do but follow the rabbit.

  They have, after all, followed us through space and time.

  “I’m late,” says the rabbit.

  “You’re good,” I say. “Just lead the way.”

  There will be a Mad Hatter, no doubt. And a Queen. Unless they are on their own paths, seeking redemption. I must keep my head about me. Literally.

  The rabbit scurries down a burrow. I follow, though the ceiling is low and the roots scratching at my back. We scurry for an hour or more, him muttering to himself, me trying not to curse him. If I’m following a normal rabbit I’ll have words to say about it.

  Come to think of it, he wasn’t wearing a waistcoat or carrying a watch.

  There’s a good chance he’s just a rabbit.

  Then what am I going to do?

  Go above ground? Find another magical rabbit? Start over?

  We come t
o a fork in the tunnel.

  “I must go this way and you that,” he says.

  He does not bid me farewell or look back, but hops along his merry way as if the fate of the Earth and all who call her home were not hanging in the balance.

  I crawl on my belly like a soldier in a foxhole.

  I am a warrior; of that there can be no doubt.

  And I have a mission.

  A sacred mission.

  My hair stands upright along my back. My tail straightens itself. If I were a dog I’d be a hound, so twitchery is my snout.

  I am close.

  Once I latch onto the decomposing bones, the song begins.

  ::music::

  If you believe…

  ::/music::

  I am the cat in the moon. I have been all these years. I have drawn to me the lost and lonely, the tested, tried, and troubled.

  Those who’ve had electrodes in their brains know who I am. As do the ones with rouge in their eyes. And disease in their veins. And all manner of materials plastered about their person to make the days of man more easy.

  There is a toe bone. Here. In front of me. It banishes my self-important thoughts.

  Now there’s a shin.

  A calf.

  A knee.

  It is her.

  My Hecate.

  I would dig were it not for the fact that she’s in a subterranean room latticed overhead with woven roots.

  Her flesh adheres to her bones, like the flesh of the uncorrupted saints.

  Though she breathes not, there’s some of her yet here.

  I have the rest.

  “I am returned, my love.”

  I wait.

  She cannot answer. Not yet. I know that. But the moment is so full and so pregnant that I barely dare draw up what must be drawn and given to her.

  “I promised you I would return upon the next moon, but I was wrong.” I nudge her with my head. “I did not know that you had to remain as one. I thought you could die and reincarnate, like me. If I had known you had to simply stay alive, I would have left you there in the fire and we would have returned, together, to each of your previous lives to collect whatever you’d left behind.”

  She’ll understand.

  And know what to do.

  I gather the parts of her I have held close and let them fall from my mouth into hers. All of them. Every life I’ve shared with her. Hecate as a scientist. As a courtesan. As a madwoman. I return them to the body of the witch.

  It begins with a puffing of her chest.

  Her ribs fight as her lungs find their place in the world again.

  If I stay in here it will be my last life. She’s going to fill this space.

  I scamper down the corridors, jogging this way and that. I’m happy for the bunny berries I didn’t see Mr. Rabbit leaving the last time I came this way. They’re like a clew, in the original sense. See? Got me a bit of learning while I was traveling through time.

  I burst into the open to find the sun has set and the moon has risen, which means the good people of Oxford have forsaken the Meadow for their pubs and clubs and homes.

  I sniff at the ground, hoping I will be there to greet her when she cracks her grave from side to side and rises, victorious.

  I wish you understood cat.

  I wish you could slip inside my brain and see what I saw and feel what I felt.

  To have been with this woman when she was only a shadow of herself only to find her again is a happiness that brooks no understanding.

  Hecate claws her way out of the ground, full of life and song and poetry and plans.

  She scoops me up, strides towards the wormhole, and shoots us all the way to the moon, smothering me in kisses all the while.

  “I knew you would find me,” she said. “I never doubted you.”

  The rabbits have dug craters all over the moon and are lolloping about the place as if to break it into pieces and fling it at the Earth.

  I know what they know.

  They know what I know.

  Hecate only understands half the problem. She’s never been here. The moon was my place, not hers. She was busy being part-human, with her Essential self scattered through time. She has a lot of catching up to do.

  I explain. About the scientists. The experiments. The animals fleeing to the moon once they have shucked their mortal coil. The anger. The resentment. The need for revenge.

  “What if…?” she says.

  We wait. We who have been the playthings of the people of planet Earth. We wait to see what the greatest witch who ever was has to say.

  “What if we were to liberate them?”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  The rabbits are listening.

  And behind them the rats.

  And beyond them, cowering in the distance, the roaches.

  “I, Hecate, was divided from myself and did not know it. It made me mad and sad and cruel and bad.” She strokes me, gently. She does not want me to think it was my fault. “You did it out of love, Grimalkin. Took part of me, but not all. You wished that I might live again. You did not know.”

  I nod. I did it out of love. She’s right.

  “Imagine those who have been separated from themselves by violence or malice. What must their torment be?”

  A rabbit hops close. He looks a lot like the rabbit I followed across Port Meadow.

  “Will they change?” he asks. “Or will they keep sending us to the moon?”

  It has become a metaphor, I realize. I’m in a living metaphor.

  Hecate crouches down and scritches the rabbit’s ears. “If they don’t, Sir Rabbit. You may do with them as you will.”

  Mine. She’s mine. And she will mete out justice or vengeance as befits the crime.

  Because she is Hecate, the greatest witch who ever lived.

  And I am Grimalkin, her familiar.

  And together we fall into the wormhole.

  Perhaps this time we get pointy shoes.

  Ginger Rinkenberger has been a filmmaker, editor, illustrator, and globetrotter. She is also a writer and aspiring metalsmith. She’s a night owl but alas, deathly allergic to cats. This story is her socially distanced love letter to all the cats who have sought her out and offered her fealty.

  Kate Pickford is a displaced Briton who writes for an American audience. Her post-apocalyptic works have sold tens of thousands of copies, but she now returns–under her own name–to her first love: science fiction.

  Find out more at katepickford.com.

  44

  The Eye of Ra and the Cats from Hell or A Retelling of the Book of the Heavenly Cow

  by Tom Fruman

  Hathor, Egyptian mother goddess and Heavenly-Cow, nurtures mankind as she craves their love and adoration. But when their attention turns to hate and war, she becomes something new. Beware Beset, the Cat-goddess from Hell.

  On the edge of the lush green, stretching out from the Nile, the dry dirt of the desert began to drift, then twirl, coming together into a small whirlwind, getting thicker and taller until a dark oval became its center and a figure stepped out of it. She was tall with deep-bronze skin covered by a sheer, light robe of shimmering white, and obsidian-black hair fell straight to her shoulders below a floating set of horns above the crown of her head that splayed outward and glowed with a radiance of light. She stepped onto the grassy land at the edge of a village. As people saw her approach they fell to their knees and buried their faces in the dirt.

  “Praise to you. Praise to you,” came the voices of the people. Over and over they called to her as she walked among them. They hugged the ground before her and she raised her hands waist high as she passed and from her hands there was a radiance from her to each person, like in a ray of sunlight seen by the dust floating in it, but here the dust sparkled like the stars of the night. As the radiance washed each person, they would raise up their upper body, still sitting on their haunches, and raise their arms to the sky, calling out, “We are blessed by Hathor, the
Heavenly Cow, the Mother of Prosperity.”

  They repeated the phrase until it softened and seemed to echo from one to the next, “Heavenly Cow, Heavenly Cow.” She absorbed their adoration and her eyes became languid, half-lidded, as her body swelled in size and began to glow. The energy, the life-flow, she absorbed from their adoration, she directed it to the horns and out into the ether to the other gods, so that they could also grow and delight in the people’s worship. The soft chanting continued, the glowing and floating set of horns above her head grew brighter, as bright as the mid-day sun, and as painful to look at. As she funneled the life-flow of energy to the others, she thought, there should be more. Where are all the men of this village?

  She easily dismissed the thought as she had work to do here. The tall bronze woman approached one hut of dried reeds and thatch. She stood before the hut and was twice as tall as the opening, but as she pulled aside the cloth door her size diminished, the horns disappeared, until she barely bent her head to enter.

  “You came! Oh, praise you Hathor, daughter of Ra, wife of Horus, mistress of the sky and stars, the Golden One…aah!” The woman lay on the floor, her head resting on a wooden spool that cradled her neck, her knees up and her belly swollen. She was wet with sweat and panting hard, her cheeks puffed, her mouth in an ‘O’.

  Hathor said in a voice like wind through the trees, “Shush, now, my precious. Today you can be the mother of a new creation.”

  The woman on the floor whispered, “You came,” trailing off as her eyes rolled up and her head lolled to the side. The bronze woman knelt by the woman on the floor and put her hands to the woman’s belly and face. Hathor glowed and shimmered, then the shimmering moved down her arms as Hathor guided the life-flow to the woman lying on the floor.

  Outside, villagers slowly moved around the hut, jostling for position as heads bent for a chance to see what was happening inside. Then a baby’s cry was heard and everyone began cheering and hugging one another. The young woman stepped from the hut holding her baby, both healthy and upright. A man moved to embrace her lightly and smile down at the baby in her arms, as the bronze woman emerged and surveyed the people. They began chanting, “Hathor, be praised, the Heavenly Cow and Goddess Mother who nurtures all the lands and people.”