Crane Wessleman's house was large, on a lot big enough to be called an estate without anyone's smiling; the house set a hundred yards back from the street. A Tudor house, as Sonya remarked with some pleasure—but there was too much shrubbery and it had been allowed to grow too large. Sonya thought roses would be nicer, and as she came up the long front walk she put pillar roses on the gas lantern posts Crane Wessleman's dead wife had caused to be set along it. A brass plate on the front door said:
C. WESSLEMAN
AND
KITTEE
and when Sonya saw that she knew.
If it had not been for the long walk she would have turned around right there and gone back down the path past the gas lamps; but she was tired and her legs hurt, and perhaps she would not really have gone back anyway. People like Sonya are often quite tough underneath.
She rang the bell and Kittee opened the door. Sonya knew, of course, that it was Kittee, but perhaps you or I might not. We would have said that the door was opened by a tall, naked girl who looked a good deal like Julie Newmar; a deep-chested, broad-shouldered girl with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. Sonya had forgotten about Julie Newmar; she knew that this was Kittee, and she disliked the thing, and the name Crane Wessleman had given it with the whining double e at the end. She said in a level, friendly voice, "Good evening, Kittee. My name is Sonya. Would you like to smell my fingers?" After a moment Kittee did smell her fingers, and when Sonya stepped through the door Kittee moved out of the way to let her in. Sonya closed the door herself and said, "Take me to Master, Kittee," loudly enough, she hoped, for Crane Wessleman to hear. Kittee walked away and Sonya followed her, noticing that Kittee was not really completely naked. She wore a garment like a short apron put on backward.
The house was large and dirty, although the air filtration units would not allow it to be dusty. There was an odor Sonya attributed to Kittee, and the remains of some of Crane Wessleman's meals, plates with dried smears still on them, put aside and forgotten.
Crane Wessleman had not dressed, but he had shaved and wore a clean new robe and stockings as well as slippers. He and Sonya chatted, and Sonya helped him unpack the meal he had ordered for her and put it in the microwave oven. Kittee helped her set the table, and Crane Wessleman said proudly, "She 's wonderful, isn't she." And Sonya answered, "Oh yes, and very beautiful. May I stroke her?" and ran her fingers through Kittee's soft yellow hair.
Then Crane Wessleman got out a copy of a monthly magazine called Friends, put out for people who owned them or were interested in buying, and sat beside Sonya as they ate and turned the pages for her, pointing out the ads of the best producers and reading some of the poetry put at the ends of the columns. "You don't know, really, what they were any more," Crane Wessleman said. "Even the originators hardly know." Sonya looked at the naked girl and Crane Wessleman said, "I call her Kittee, but the germ plasm may have come from a gibbon or a dog. Look here."
Sonya looked, and he showed her a picture of what seemed to be a very handsome young man with high cheekbones and an unexpressive face. "Look at that smile," Crane Wessleman said, and Sonya did and noticed that the young man's lips were indeed drawn back slightly. "Kittee does that sometimes too," Crane Wessleman said. Sonya was looking at him instead of at Kittee, noticing how the fine lines had spread across his face and the way his hands shook.
After that Sonya came about once a week for a year. She learned the way perfectly, and the bus driver grew accustomed to her, and she invented a pet of her own, an ordinary imaginary chow dog, so that she could take a certain amount of leftover meat home.
The next to last time, Crane Wessleman pointed out another very handsome young man in Friends, a young man who cost n great deal more than Sonya's income for a year, and said, "After I die I am going to see to it that my executor buys one like this for Kittee. I want her to be happy." Then, Sonya felt, he looked at her in a most significant way; but the last time she went he seemed to have forgotten all about it and only showed Sonya a photograph he had taken of himself with Kittee sitting beside him very primly, and the remote control camera he had used, and told her how he had ordered it by mail.
The next week Crane Wessleman did not call at all, and when it was two days past the usual time Sonya tried to call him, but no one answered. Sonya got her purse, and boarded the bus, and searched the area around Crane Wessleman's front door until she found a key hidden under a stone beneath some of the shrubbery.
Crane Wessleman was dead, sitting in his favorite chair. He had been dead, Sonya decided, for several days, and Kittee had eaten a portion of his left leg. Sonya said aloud, "You must have been very hungry, weren't you, Kittee, locked in here with no one to feed you."
In the kitchen she found a package of frozen mouton Sainte-Menebould, and when it was warm she unwrapped it and set it on the dining-room table, calling, "Kittee! Kittee! Kittee!" and wondering all the time whether Crane Wessleman might not have left her a small legacy after all.
The Witch's Cat
By Manly Wade Wellman
Here's a lively and little-known story by Manly Wade Wellman about a home-loving cat who finds himself forced to be a very reluctant familiar. . . .
Manly Wade Wellman sold his first fantasy story to Weird Tales in 1927, and has kept right on selling novels and stories without noticeable letup for the subsequent fifty-six years. Although Wellman has published science fiction, he has had his biggest impact within the fantasy genre, and is perceived by many critics as one of the finest modern practitioners of the "dark fantasy" or "weird fantasy" tale. As a fantasist, Wellman is probably best known for his series of stories detailing the strange adventures of "John the Minstrel" or "Silver John," scary and vividly evocative tales set against the background of a ghost-and-demon-haunted rural Appalachia that, in Wellman's hands, is as bizarre and beautiful as many another writer's entirely imaginary fantasy world. The "Silver John" stories have been collected in Who Fears the Devil?, generally perceived as Wellman's best book; it is certainly his most influential. In recent years, there have also been "Silver John" novels as well: The Old Gods Waken, After Dark, The Lost and the Lurking, and, most recently, The Hanging Stones. Wellman's other short stories have been assembled in the mammoth collection Worse Things Waiting, which won a World Fantasy Award as the Best Anthology/Collection in 1975. In 1980, Wellman won another World Fantasy Award, this one the prestigious Life Achievement Award.
Old Jael Bettiss, who lived in the hollow among the cypresses, was not a real witch.
It makes no difference that folk thought she was, and walked fearfully wide of her shadow. Nothing can be proved by the fact that she was as disgustingly ugly without as she was wicked within. It is quite irrelevant that evil was her study and profession and pleasure. She was no witch; she only pretended to be.
Jael Bettiss knew that all laws providing for the punishment of witches had been repealed, or at the least forgotten. As to being feared and hated, that was meat and drink to Jael Bettiss, living secretly alone in the hollow.
The house and the hollow belonged to a kindly old villager, who had been elected marshal and was too busy to look after his property. Because he was easy-going and perhaps a little daunted, he let Jael Bettiss live there rent-free. The house was no longer snug; the back of its roof was broken in, the eaves drooped slackly. At some time or other the place had been painted brown, before that with ivory black. Now both coats of color peeled away in huge flakes, making the clapboards seem scrofulous. The windows had been broken in every small, grubby pane, and mended with coarse brown paper, so that they were like cast and blurred eyes. Behind was the muddy, bramble-choked back yard, and behind that yawned the old quarry, now abandoned and full of black water. As for the inside—but few ever saw it.
Jael Bettiss did not like people to come into her house. She always met callers on the old cracked doorstep, draped in a cloak of shadowy black, with gray hair straggling, her nose as hooked and sharp as the beak of a buzzard, her eyes filmy an
d sore-looking, her wrinkle-bordered mouth always grinning and showing her yellow, chisel-shaped teeth.
The near-by village was an old-fashioned place, with stone flags instead of concrete for pavements, and the villagers were the simplest of men and women. From them Jael Bettiss made a fair living, by selling love philtres, or herbs to cure sickness, or charms to ward off bad luck. When she wanted extra money, she would wrap her old black cloak about her and, tramping along a country road, would stop at a cowpen and ask the farmer what he would do if his cows went dry. The farmer, worried, usually came at dawn next day to her hollow and bought a good-luck charm. Occasionally the cows would go dry anyway, by accident of nature, and their owner would pay more and more, until their milk returned to them.
Now and then, when Jael Bettiss came to the door, there came with her the gaunt black cat, Gib.
Gib was not truly black, any more than Jael Bettiss was truly a witch. He had been born with white markings at muzzle, chest and forepaws, so that he looked to be in full evening dress. Left alone, he would have grown fat and fluffy. But Jael Bettiss, who wanted a fearsome pet, kept all his white spots smeared with thick soot, and underfed him to make him look rakish and lean.
On the night of the full moon, she would drive poor Gib from her door. He would wander to the village in search of food, and would wail mournfully in the yards. Awakened householders would angrily throw boots or pans or sticks of kindling. Often Gib was hit, and his cries were sharpened by pain. When that happened, Jael Bettiss took care to be seen next morning with a bandage on head or wrist. Some of the simplest villagers thought that Gib was really the old woman, magically transformed. Her reputation grew, as did Gib's unpopularity. But Gib did not deserve mistrust—like all cats, he was a practical philosopher, who wanted to be comfortable and quiet and dignified. At bottom, he was amiable. Like all cats, too, he loved his home above all else; and the house in the hollow, be it ever so humble and often cruel, was home. It was unthinkable to him that he might live elsewhere.
In the village he had two friends—black-eyed John Frey, the storekeeper's son, who brought the mail to and from the county seat, and Ivy Hill, pretty blond daughter of the town marshal, the same town marshal who owned the hollow and let Jael Bettiss live in the old house. John Frey and Ivy Hill were so much in love with each other that they loved every thing else, even black-stained, hungry Gib. He was grateful; if he had been able, he would have loved them in return. But his little heart had room for one devotion only, and that was given to the house in the hollow.
One day, Jael Bettiss slouched darkly into old Mr. Frey's store, and up to the counter that served for postoffice. Leering, she gave John Frey a letter. It was directed to a certain little-known publisher, asking for a certain little-known book. Several days later, she appeared again, received a parcel, and bore it to her home.
In her gloomy, secret parlor, she unwrapped her purchase. It was a small, drab volume, with no title on cover or back. Sitting at the rickety table, she began to read. All evening and most of the night she read, forgetting to give Gib his supper, though he sat hungrily at her feet.
At length, an hour before dawn, she finished. Laughing loudly and briefly, she turned her beak-nose toward the kerosene lamp on the table. From the book she read aloud two words. The lamp went out, though she had not blown at it. Jael Bettiss spoke one commanding word more, and the lamp flamed alight again.
"At last!" she cried out in shrill exultation, and grinned down at Gib. Her lips drew back from her yellow chisels of teeth. "At last!" she crowed again. "Why don't you speak to me, you little brute? . . . Why don't you, indeed?"
She asked that final question as though she had been suddenly inspired. Quickly she glanced through the back part of the book, howled with laughter over something she found there, then sprang up and scuttled like a big, filthy crab into the dark, windowless cell that was her kitchen. There she mingled salt and malt in the palm of her skinny right hand. After that, she rummaged out a bundle of dried herbs, chewed them fine and spat them into the mixture. Stirring again with her forefinger, she returned to the parlor. Scanning the book to refresh her memory, she muttered a nasty little rime. Finally she dashed the mess suddenly upon Gib.
He retreated, shaking himself, outraged and startled. In a corner he sat down, and bent his head to lick the smeared fragments of the mixture away. But they revolted his tongue and palate, and he paused in the midst of this chore, so important to cats; and meanwhile Jael Bettiss yelled, "Speak!"
Gib crouched and blinked, feeling sick. His tongue came out and steadied his lips. Finally he said: "I want something to eat."
His voice was small and high, like a little child's, but entirely understandable. Jael Bettiss was so delighted that she laughed and clapped her bony knees with her hands, in self-applause.
"It worked!" she cried. "No more humbug about me, you understand? I'm a real witch at last, and not a fraud!"
Gib found himself able to understand all this, more clearly than he had ever understood human affairs before. "I want something to eat," he said again, more definitely than before. "I didn't have any supper, and it's nearly——"
"Oh, stow your gab!" snapped his mistress. "It's this book, crammed with knowledge and strength, that made me able to do it. I'll never be without it again, and it'll teach me all the things I've only guessed at and mumbled about. I'm a real witch now, I say. And if you don't think I'll make those ignorant sheep of villagers realize it——"
Once more she went off into gales of wild, cracked mirth, and threw a dish at Gib. He darted away into a corner just in time, and the missile crashed into blue-and-white china fragments against the wall. But Jael Bettiss read aloud from her book an impressive gibberish, and the dish reformed itself on the floor; the bits crept together and joined and the cracks disappeared, as trickling drops of water form into a pool. And finally, when the witch's twig-like forefinger beckoned, the dish floated upward like a leaf in a breeze and set itself gently back on the table. Gib watched warily.
"That's small to what I shall do hereafter," swore Jael Bettiss.
When next the mail was distributed at the general store, a dazzling stranger appeared.
She wore a cloak, an old-fashioned black coat, but its drapery did not conceal the tall perfection of her form. As for her face, it would have stirred interest and admiration in larger and more sophisticated gatherings than the knot of letter-seeking villagers. Its beauty was scornful but inviting, classic but warm, with something in it of Grecian sculpture and Oriental allure. If the nose was cruel, it was straight; if the lips were sullen, they were full; if the forehead was a suspicion low, it was white and smooth. Thick, thunder-black hair swept up from that forehead, and backward to a knot at the neck. The eyes glowed with strange, hot lights, and wherever they turned they pierced and captivated.
People moved away to let her have a clear, sweeping path way forward to the counter. Until this stranger had entered, Ivy Hill was the loveliest person present; now she looked only modest and fresh and blond in her starched gingham, and worried to boot. As a matter of fact, Ivy Hill's insides felt cold and topsy-turvy, because she saw how fascinated was the sudden attention of John Frey.
"Is there," asked the newcomer in a deep, creamy voice, "any mail for me?"
"Wh-what name, ma'am?" asked John Frey, his brown young cheeks turning full crimson.
"Bettiss. Jael Bettiss."
He began to fumble through the sheaf of envelopes, with hands that shook. "Are you," he asked, "any relation to the old lady of that name, the one who lives in the hollow?"
"Yes, of a sort." She smiled a slow, conquering smile. "She's my—aunt. Yes. Perhaps you see the family resemblance?" Wider and wider grew the smile with which she assaulted John Frey. "If there isn't any mail," she went on, "I would like a stamp. A one-cent stamp."
Turning to his little metal box on the shelf behind, John Frey tore a single green stamp from the sheet. His hand shook it still more as he gave it to the custom
er and received in exchange a copper cent.
There was really nothing exceptional about the appearance of that copper cent. It looked brown and a little worn, with Lincoln's head on it, and a date—1917. But John Frey felt a hidden glow in the hand that took it, a glow that shot along his arm and into his heart. He gazed at the coin as if he had never seen its like before. And he put it slowly into his pocket, a different pocket from the one in which he usually kept change, and placed another coin in the till to pay for the stamp. Poor Ivy Hill's blue eyes grew round and downright miserable. Plainly he meant to keep that copper piece as a souvenir. But John Frey gazed only at the stranger, raptly, as though he were suddenly stunned or hypnotized.
The dark, sullen beauty drew her cloak more tightly around her, and moved regally out of the store and away toward the edge of town.
As she turned up the brush-hidden trail to the hollow, a change came. Not that her step was less young and free, her figure less queenly, her eyes dimmer or her beauty short of perfect. All these were as they had been; but her expression became set and grim, her body tense and her head high and truculent. It was as though, beneath that young loveliness, lurked an old and evil heart—which was precisely what did lurk there, it does not boot to conceal. But none saw except Gib, the black cat with soot-covered white spots, who sat on the doorstep of the ugly cottage. Jael Bettiss thrust him aside with her foot and entered.
In the kitchen she filled a tin basin from a wooden bucket, and threw into the water a pinch of coarse green powder with an unpleasant smell. As she stirred it in with her hands, they seemed to grow skinny and harsh. Then she threw great palmfuls of the liquid into her face and over her head, and other changes came. . . .
MAGICATS! Page 19
