MAGICATS II

by Gardner Dozoi

  “What did you hear?”

  “I heard his heart leap. And then I heard it stop. Oh, of course, I did what I could do for him. But it never started again. No. Never.”

  “Never . . .”

  Was this what Mudge had done next?

  Eszterhazy thought it was.

  ###

  Later, some years later, Eszterhazy was to acquire as his personal body-servant the famous Herrekk, a Mountain Tsigane, who stayed on with him . . . and on and on . . . But that was later. This year the office was being filled (if filled was not too strong a verb) by one Turt, who had qualified by some years as a barber; and if experience folding towels well enough had not made Turt exquisite in the folding and unfolding of and other cares pertaining to Eszterhazy’s clothes . . . well . . . one could not have everything. Could one? Turt awoke him; Turt brought, first, the hot coffee, and next the hot water and the scented shaving-soap. Next Turt would bring the loose-fitting breakfast-gown and on a tray the breakfast, which—perhaps fortunately—Turt did not himself cook. Turt meant to do well, Turt clearly meant to do better than he did, and it was not Turt’s fault that he breathed so very heavily. Turt (short for Turtuscou) was a Romanou, and it was a fact of social life in the Triune Monarchy that sooner or later one’s Romanou employee would vanish away on what the English called “French leave” and return . . . by and by . . . with some fearsome story of dreadful death and incapacitating illness amongst far-away family; if/when this ever happened, Eszterhazy had determined to terminate Turt’s service. But Turt, though not bothersomely bright, was bright enough, and either saw to it that all his near of kin stayed in good health or else he simply allowed them to die without benefit of his attendance in whatever East Latin squalor pertained to them around the mouth of the Ister.

  On this morning Eszterhazy, dimly aware of great pain, was more acutely aware of Turt’s breathing more heavily than usual. Had Turt gasped? Had Turt cried out? If so, why! Eszterhazy sat bolt up in bed. “Dominů, Dominů!” exclaimed Turt.

  “What? What?”—heavily, anguished.

  For reply Turt pointed to the floor. What was on the floor? Turt’s Lord looked.

  Blood on the floor.

  Instantly the pain flared up. Instantly, Eszterhazy remembered. He had been sleeping soundly and calmly enough when something obliged him to wake up. Some dim light suffused the room. Some ungainly shape was present, visible, in the room. Something long, attenuated, overhead. Something overhead. Something barely below the ceiling. Something which turned over as a swimmer turns over in water. Something with a human face. The face of Mr. Mudge, the medium. How it glared at him, with what hate it glared down at him. Its lips writhed up, and, The ring! it said. The ring, the ring! I must have the ring! It made a swooping, scooping gesture with one long, long incredibly long lengthened arm. That was the first pain. What was it which the hand now held and showed to him? It was a heart which it held and showed to him; a human heart. And, whilst the words echoed, echoed, Ring! Ring! the fingers tightened and the fingers squeezed and that was the second pain. The third. The—

  It had been a dream, a bad, bad, dream; a nightmare dream. Only that, and nothing more. In that case, why this dreadful pain upon his heart? And why the blood upon the—

  “A nosebleed,” he heard himself say. And heard Turt say, “No, sir. No. Not.”

  “Why not?”

  Turt began making many gestures, the burden of them being that, for one thing, there was no blood upon his master’s nose and none upon his master’s sheets. That, furthermore, blood dropping from the side of the bed to the floor would have left a stain of a certain size, only. And that this stain was of a larger and a wider size. Which meant that it had fallen from a greater height. And as Turt’s hand went up and pointed to the ceiling, the hand and all the rest of Turt’s body trembled; the Romanou are of all the races of the Empire of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania the most superstitious by far, and their legends teem and pullulate with accounts of uampyri and werewolves and werebears and werebats and werecats; and of ghoulies and ghosties and things which do far worse in the night than merely go boomp.

  —then why this fearsome pain? Eszterhazy started to sit up, cried out, gestured towards the cabinet, gasped, “The small blue bottle—” The elixir of foxglove made him feel better, then (Turt supplying this next bottle unbid) the spirits of wine made him feel better yet. Then he gestured to the still red stain, directed, “Clean it up.”

  Turt, so often metaphorical and metaphysical, chose now to be literal. And simply sopped a corner of the napkin in the still-steaming coffee, stooped, wipe, wipe: ’twas done. He made the dirtied cloth vanish. Straightened up. Smoothed his sallow face. “My Dominů’s coffee,” he said. Soon afterward he brought the shaving-water and the scented soap. Eszterhazy had for a while little to do and much to think about (there was not, considering his beard, much to shave, either: the neck and the cheekbones; but Turt trimmed also).

  Eszterhazy, while his servant scraped and clipped, considered his own peril. Presumably, Mudge was anyway somewhat in fear of him, whereas he had been in no way afraid of poor Morits. Presumably, he himself was therefore . . . safe? Well . . . safer. . . .

  But for how long?

  He recalled that face, high up, hateful. To prove the cheat of the servers of the Idol of Bel at Babylon, Daniel had scattered ashes on the floor; would it now be necessary to scatter them on the ceiling?

  ###

  Eszterhazy was in bed. Bed. Boat. Boat. As he drifted by in the darkness he heard the sound of the district watchman rapping the butt of his staff on the flagstone pave at the corner. Presently he would hear it rapping on the other corner. He did not. He was not there. He was somewhere else. He knew and did not know where. It was in a great yard somewhere, an open waste of rubble and huts. The South Ward, somewhere. Behind a mouldering tenement. Between it and a riven old wall. Up there in that room, that room there, with the broken shutter banging aslant, lived an old man and an old woman, there, there in the night. Here, down here, concealed in a half-sunken pit, someone was hiding and biding time. Someone tall and sleek and grim. Someone muffled in a cloak. Was waiting. The cracked old bell began to toll in the tower of the Madhouse of Saint Vitus. Someone chuckled. It was not a nice sound. At once Eszterhazy knew who it was. I am the brother of the shadow of the slain, the vanguard of the shadow of the living. I am the medium, Mr. Mudge. As well.

  Mr. Mudge moved up out of the half-dug pit, and who knew for what gross usage the pit was to have been digged; moved forward, ahead, face intent. Nearer to the tottery old tenement, nearer to the window behind the broken slant shutter, Eszterhazy desperate to stop him, but paralyzed, unable to call out, to move. To breathe. Shutter suddenly springing open. Clap. Bang. Cough. Someone springing out and down. Someone? Something? Dark, dark, very dark. Fluid movement, there in the dark. Warn Mr. Mudge? Why? No. Mr. Mudge not there. Where? His cloak flying, floating, in the blackness night; Mr. Mudge fleeing before it as though, paws on its shoulders, it coursed him through the night. No: Something else coursed him through the blackness night. Scorn and contempt on his face giving way to concentration, concentration to effort, effort to—Run, Mudge, run!—to concern, to care, to alarm, faster, faster, faster, leap and run and climb and clamber and jump and clamber and climb and run and leap; close behind him something followed faster yet and something else for a second flashed and glinted, something else gleamed at or about the neck of . . . something . . . as sometimes one sees a glint or gleam where the fond master of an animal has fastened a metal sigil advising of its name and owner; or like some ring on a hand moving suddenly in the dim and flaring lamps—

  —screamed, Mr. Mudge; Quaere: What did Mr. Mudge scream? Responsum: Mr. Mudge screamed for help. Q.: How did Mr. Mudge scream for help and to what or whom? R.: To “Belphegor, Belzebub, Baphomet, Sathanas, à mon aide O mes princes, aidez-moi, à moi, à moi, à—” The prayer, if prayer it was, decayed into a continuous repetition of the broad a-sound as Mr. Mudg
e fled, leaping; as . . . something . . . leaping, coughing, followed after him; a great, sudden, abrupt coughing sound, a great forelimb chopping down Mr. Mudge: and all his imprecations sank powerlessly beneath even the level of derision . . .

  Eszterhazy, body spent with having followed the hazards of the chase, awoke bathed in sweat and in bed. One thing alone remained still quick within his ears, and though it seemed not to be for this night before, yet perhaps it somehow was. That she-cat has claws, an odd voice said.

  That she-cat has claws.

  ###

  Dawn.

  Mrash.

  “Your Lordship, that tiger come a-wandering again-time!”

  Eszterhazy lifted dulled, fatigued eyes. “The—? Ah . . . the leopard? You saw it running along and up the roofs?” What was it he felt, now? It was unbalanced that he felt now. He had with infinite difficulties maintained a stance against attack, assault, terror, pain, and worse. He felt this was gone now. But he was infinitely tired now. Infinitely tired. He dared be infinitely careful, lest he fall, now. What had and what was happening?

  Mrash said, “No, lordship. I seen it running down the roofs. And as I looked, so I seen. ‘Seen what’? Why, seen summat as was not the tiger nor the leopard. Look out the window there, me lordship. Look out, look up. Look up.”

  Where was bluff old Colonel Brennshnekkl, who had hunted leopard in Africa, thinking them more dangerous than lion or tiger which course the level ground along? Back in Africa, out of which, always something new. So Plautus says. Pliny?

  Mrash again gestured to the window. “My lordship, look,” he said. Added, “There cross the alley, on the roof of old Baron Johan house. On the ridge o’ the roof, by the chimbley; look, sir.”

  Eszterhazy looked; shielding with his hand against the obscuring reflection of the gaslight on the window glass, straining his eyes, wishing—not for the first time—that someone would invent a light, a quite bright light, which could (unlike the theatrical limelight) be cast up or across, across a distance. Well. Meanwhile. Meanwhile, something flapped in the wind, there on the rooftop, on the ridge by the chimney. “What, Mrashko? Some old clothes? Carried by wind—eh?”

  “Nay, my lordship,” Mrash said. “Clothes, yes. Old or new. But I doubt the wind be that strong tonight to—No matter. That be a cloak and a full suit of clothes, sir, and I be a veteran of more nor one war and I’ll tell thee what, Master: inside the suit of clothes does a dead man lie.”

  Mrash was hired to perform only the duties of a man-cook, but Mrash was no fool, he had indeed been in more than one war, nor had he spent all that time cloistered in the cook-tent; nor had his eyes been worn by much reading. His master said, “Sound the alarm.” In a moment the great iron ring rang out its clamor of ngoyng ngoyng mramha mram, ngoyng ngoyng mramha mram. In the very faint glim of the single small gaslamp at the alley’s far end men could be seen running, casting odd and oddly moving shadows. But what was on the rooftop cast no shadow. And it never moved at all.

  By and by they came with the hooks and the ladders and the bull’s-eye lanterns and the grapples and the torches. They climbed up from inside the great old house across the alley and then they climbed up the steep-pitched roof. And Eszterhazy climbed with them. (Had he made this climb before? He had . . . hadn’t he?)

  “Aye, he be dead. And have been. He’m stiff.” This from a volunteer fireman, a coal-porter by his sooty look. “See how wry his neck? He did fell and bruck it.” And:

  “Am these claw marks!” asked another. Answering himself, “Nay, not here in The Town,” meaning Bella. “I expects he somehow tore himself when he fall . . . for fall to his dread death ’tis clear he did, may the Resurrected Jesus Christ and all the Saints have mercy on him and us. Aye. Man did fell . . .”

  Dread death . . . Mercy . . .

  The very-slightly-odd lordship who lived in the smaller and lower house which faced Turkling Street the other side of the alley, he shook his head. “If so, how came he here?” was his question, almost as though asking of himself. “Here—high above the street on the peak of a house with no higher one to fall from? Dead men fall down. They don’t fall up.”

  It was so. There being no more to say to that, they brought the dead man down.

  Old Helen, Baroness Johan’s old housekeeper-cook, served them the traditional hot rum-and-water. While they were sipping it: “Sir Doctor. Pardon, sir. The police want to know who ’tis. The late deceased. Can Sir Doctor—living ’cross the lane—tell them who ‘twas and what was doing there?”

  Sir Doctor started to nod. What indeed? Had it all been a dream which he had earlier seen as he lay upon his bed? Or “a vision of the night”? Or—His mouth moved silently; then, “The deceased called himself ‘Melanchthon Mudge,’ ”he said. He took another swallow of the grog. It was very strong.

  Just as well.

  ###

  Just as well? Aye, well, add it up. That there were rings which were rings of power was a mere commonplace in the lore of legend. And what Dr. Eszterhazy knew about the lore of legend was more, even, than he knew about anything in which he had ever been granted a degree—though who would grant him a degree in it? The thumb-ring of Duke Pasquale (which Duke Pasquale? did it even matter?) was a very late entry into the lore of legend, and had come to Eszterhazy’s attention only yesterday, as it were. How had Melanchthon Mudge learned of it?—whoever “Melanchthon Mudge” really was? hunted down as though by a leopard and killed as though by a leopard and left high up aloft as though by a leopard. What had he done for the third Napoleon of France and the second Alexander of Russia and the first and last Amadeus of Spain, all men of subsequent ill-fate, that they should have given him (doubtless at his request) portions of the time-scattered Pasqualine jewels? Nothing very good, one might be sure. (Was it all adding up? Well, one would see. Get on with it. Go on. Go on.)

  Was the power of Duke Pasquale’s ring that it gave one a capacity to turn for a while into an animal, a beast, a wild beast? Well could one imagine the glee of roaming wild and free of human form—Well. And once again he marveled at what must have been the long, long restraint (if this were all true) of the self-imagined Royal couple in never having made use of the Pasqualine ring. Never? “Never” was a longer word than its own two syllables; never? Surely neither of them, old King, old Queen, would ever (never) have used it for mere glee or mere power. Only an inescapable need for defense, for self-defense, the defense of Eszterhazy and the house of Count Cruttz and perhaps of that whole great city of Bella (. . . a leopard shall watch over thy cities . . .) against the great evil thing, the vengeful and killing thing which called itself Melanchthon Mudge, could have impelled them to make use of it. If this were all true: could this all be true? all of it? any of it?—for, if it was not, what was the other explanation? If there was another explanation.

  Try as he might, as he added all this up, Eszterhazy could think of no other explanation.

  ###

  A dozen frontiers were being “rectified.” A dozen boundaries were changing shape, none of them large enough to show upon a single map in an atlas; but, as to matters of straightening here and bending there, here a square mile and there some several kilometres: a dozen frontiers and boundaries were changing shape. And for every quid a quo, with dust being blown off a thousand parchment charters. In order to assure that a certain area in the Nigois Savoy be restored to its natural outlines, it was necessary to compensate . . . to, well, compensate two municipalities, one diocese, and . . . and what was this! to compensate the heirs of the fourth marriage-bed of the august Duke Pasquale IIII, in lieu of dower-rights, rights of conquest, rights of man, rights of women . . . rights.

  What cared the historians and the cartographers? and for that matter, what cared the minor statesmen around this particular “green table,” for the right or plight of the heirs of the fourth marriage-bed, etc.? nothing. Save that if it were not taken care of, then neither could other boundaries and rights be taken care of, and a certain sand-bar in
the Gambia would remain out of bounds and no-man’s-land, to vex the palm-oil and peanut-oil trade of certain citizens of certain Powers.

  “So, you see, Doctor,” said Stowtfuss of the Foreign Office of the Triune Monarchy, “you were quite right in your suggestion and we passed it on and they passed it on; and, now, well, the King of the Single Sicily is still not really King of the Single Sicily and never will be . . . a good thing for Sicily, and a better thing for him. But now at least he can pretend his pretensions at a healthily higher standard of living. A tidy little income, that, from the old estate in the Nice-Savoy.”

  Eszterhazy nodded. “And his wife needn’t scrub the floor on her aged knees,” he said. Old woman, old wife, old she-cat with claws. And with that one ring of power which wanton Mr. Mudge had so terribly wanted. That he, too, might have claws? And, turning, changing his spots—and more than alone his spots—use such claws in the night?

  “Yes, yes,” said Stowtfuss, pityingly. “Yes, poor chaps, the poor old things. He and his old wife are cousins, you know. They are also related to . . . what’s the name? her maiden name? . . . a relation to the poet, same as the old man’s mother’s maiden name, to the poet Count Giacomo—ah yes! Leopardi! Leopardi! Count Giacomo Leopardi was their cousin. I suppose you may guess the animal in that coat of arms.”

  Table of Contents

  Kreativity for Kats

  Life Regarded as a Jigsaw Puzzle of Highly Lustrous Cats