Cat Magic (29 page)

Those words seemed to explode in Mandy’s brain like a white slash of lightning. She cringed, such was the power of this fiery internal bolt of recognition.

Constance continued. “You’re terrified of your own history. That’s part of what makes you such a passenger in your life. You will drift until you begin to do what you were born to do.”

“You say the
Leannan
is in control. She’s like a ghost. We hardly see her, let alone talk to her. Most of them have never seen her.”

“She’s not fifty feet away from this spot. She’s even played her harp for you. Haven’t you heard?”

“The music was very nice.”

Constance snorted. “It was designed to evoke conscience, and it did. You learned from it. Now, listen, you must act. You must begin now, immediately. Show yourself in the town. The town covens need a boost of morale.”

“Who’s my armed guard?”

“You can’t use a guard.”

“How about Raven?
He
could have used one.”

“Let’s go up to the house. Your car’s there and you’re due at your uncle’s within the hour.”

“At my—since when? I don’t want to go to my uncle’s. Has that ever occurred to you?”

“You’ve got canvases and frames and paints there. Clothes. Books. You need to pick them up.”

“I don’t want to leave here. If I’m so important, I must be able to make a few decisions. And my decision is, I’m staying right here on the Covenstead.”

“The prospect of Maidenhood is making you imperious, Amanda. I’m not sure I like you imperious.”

“Then don’t come in here and order me around. I’ve had more than my share of terrifying and difficult experiences orchestrated by you, and I have no intention of having any more.”

“What possible terror could your uncle hold for you?”

“I just don’t want to deal with him. He’s disturbed, and he’s not going to become my problem.”

“After what happened to Raven last night, and the business of the young woman, I just want you to give the town covens a morale boost.”

“Why don’t you go?”

“You’re the one they’re excited about.”

“How can you be sure of that? My impression is that I’m quite the outsider.”

Constance looked a long time at her. “You were born to your role.”

“You hardly know me.”

“You say that! You’re naked in your work, dear girl. I know you from your painting. And I
know
that your visual skill is more than ordinary, or even extraordinary. It’s almost unique.”

“I’m not that good.”

“As a painter, no. There is something inherently banal about fantasies of elves and such, I’ll grant you that.

But the detail with which you render them, the depth of vision, suggests an imagination of great power. I know, I’ve spent time over your work.”

“So have I.”

“The
Leannan
says you have the birthright and I say you have the power. If you can visualize, you can do magic, which is a matter of making the real world run parallel to the inner one of images and dreams. You have the strength to visit the House of the Godfather and come back. I did it, and I am less than you.”

Visit the House of the Godfather?

In the story Constance had told the children the other night, the Godfather was death.

The visit to me town suddenly seemed even more dangerous.

She wished she could just be left alone to wander around and learn more about the Covenstead, maybe even do a little painting. Some portraits of the witches, sketches of Ravens before the memory grew too static.

Constance looked straight into her eyes. “That, my dear, is not your fate. The days of painting and dreaming are behind you. You have a great work to do.”

What could Mandy say? Constance had just read her mind. “What are you, Constance?”

“You’ve asked me that before.”

“What are you?”

“The best friend you ever had!” Her voice rang through the cottage. In the silence that followed the harp started again. This time the tune turned Mandy’s heart, for she had not heard it since she was very small.

The harp notes were from a small instrument, plucked by fingers able to touch the strings with great precision. Behind the gravity of Constance’s expression was hidden a smile. “The Leannan wants you to go, Amanda.”

The music, Constance’s loving expression, Mandy’s memories, all combined to create a moment of great beauty. Mandy found that she had not the heart to refuse them what they asked.

“Your uncle needs you now. Help him. He is your father’s brother, after all.”

Her father’s brother. Maybe in another age that would have meant a lot.

The harp whispered, the harp sang.

Mandy dressed in the clothes. Constance embraced her and kissed her, and wished her well. “Blessed be,” Constance whispered.

Mandy started on her journey.

High morning was relentlessly bright, with water and melting snow sparkling off every twig and tuft of grass. Amanda guided her little Volks along, aware of the expensive crinkle of her suit and the creamy scent of her perfume.

She understood that she was entering the world of death and that there was great and ancient precedent for her journey. In the passage of the seasons Persephone moves through the netherworld to return to life in the spring. She is the corn seed hiding in the winter field, springing up alive again in the summer, giving humankind nourishment and prosperity.

Amanda was to make Persephone’s passage, and she was to do it now, dressed as if for a sacrifice.

Constance had obviously walked death’s edge herself when Hobbes shot her. Among ancient cultures everywhere: the Indians, many African tribes, the peoples of Siberia—wherever the old religion persisted—it was necessary to make this journey in order to become a guide for others.

The Volks hummed on. Nice of them to pull it out of the mud for her. Nice of them to tell her how to leave the estate by car. She was supposed to follow an almost hidden track through the hummocks and northward into the farm.

It was eerie in among the sharp little hills, especially considering how old they were and what they were said to contain. What must the fairy city have been? Were there silver towers, or painted gates, or pearl-white roofs sweltering under the prehistoric sky? Or had the fairy come from some far place, from the stars, even recently?

Did their ancient cities exist only in the minds of their human followers? Somehow she thought they lived in structures very much like the round meeting hall of the witches. Theirs was a whole civilization of magic, based on the simplest of goods. Their glories were those of thought unbound.

To them the mind of man was easy to control. Thus the
Leannan
could seem to change her shape or even become invisible.

The fairy would never emerge, though, into this world, not as it was, a place of illusions. They would do no more than watch from their far hills and their flights in the sky.

The goal of the witches was to create a world where even fairy could be understood, which meant one where men no longer thought of the earth as something separate from themselves, but viewed humanity as one organ in the living body of the planet, and could see the universe all in its truth, without the self-deception that the human species was separate from the deeper continuity of the planet to which it belonged.

The
Leannan
was without question the loveliest form Amanda had ever seen or imagined. She almost wept to remember the music of that tiny, perfect harp, to imagine those fingers working the golden whiskers.

Just in time she downshifted to compensate for a length of muddy sand, and found herself out of the valley of the hummocks and on the witch farm.

Riding through it last night, she had known that it was fertile, but by day the fecundity of the place was startling.

There were no tractors rattling here, and the air smelled of the sweat of the plants, not the sharp odors of fertilizer and insecticide.

The scent was an intoxication, pouring in her open windows as she drove along the narrow road between rows of corn. It was mixed of wet hay and cut stems and the rot of the season. Among the fallen stalks and the brown vines the farming covens worked. Amanda came to a group of women laboring with scythes in wheat. They moved along the roadside, their tools whistling in the air, the stalks falling with a hiss and a swish, and the rattle of the wheat berries dropping onto canvas. They chanted as they worked:

The chant was whispered, as if to the stalks themselves. Rapture moved in the faces of the reapers as the wheat fell. Nearby a group of children rolled and laughed in the stalks, and three men bundled hay.

Never before had Amanda had such an impression of how very old some human things have become.

Mankind has been fanning for a long time now. She did not sense the presence of actual deities in these fields, but the mystery and the energy of the old gods seemed very real indeed. Demeter was the Goddess Earth, also called Gaia, known among Catholics as the Blessed Virgin Mary. Out of her rich belly her daughter Persephone emerged, escaping from Hades. Among the Romans Persephone’s name was Proserpina, and she was the goddess of health and well-being, as well as death.

Amanda had to learn what Proserpina knew. That knowledge was to be found in the world of the dead.

With it she could bring prosperity to the Covenstead.

There were chants going among many of the teams, the round voices of the workers harmonizing with the roar of insects and the bright calling of the children. As Amanda drove carefully along, she became conscious of how rich life in fields really was. How was it that such magic had been forgotten?

Where is mankind going, that we would choose to leave farms such as this behind? Too much of the joy of working with the earth has been sacrificed. No prayer is needed to assist the fertilized plantings of Iowa and Kansas and California, but without prayer we are less human than we were, and our farms are less alive, our food less true to the needs of our flesh.

And yet, our flight from the magical and the prayerful was not without sense: there was terror somewhere here, beneath the swelling light of the sun.

“Hello, Amanda!” A tall woman held a huge pumpkin aloft, her figure tiny in the sweep of the land.

Amanda waved from her window and tooted her horn. The woman, though, had put down the pumpkin and was running across the field. Amanda was stunned to recognize Kate, George’s former wife. She stopped the car and got out.

“Amanda, look at you, “Now you’ve grown!”

She embraced Kate, whose hair had gone gray, but whose face was radiant, flushed with sunshine and work. She wore a loose homespun dress tied by a black cord. On her feet were thong sandals wrapped to her ankles. In her hair was a silver pin of the quarter moon.

“Kate, I didn’t realize that you’d come here.”

“We all did. George became impossible.”

Amanda nodded.

“Constance has told us many times about the coming of the Maiden, but I had no idea that it was you.

When I heard your name I thought, is it possible? Then I saw you. Our Amanda. I just can’t believe it.”

Silence fell. There was obviously something else on Kate’s mind. She was still smiling, but there was pain in the smile.

“I spent a night at your house,” Amanda said. “I’m going there now to pick up my things.”

“You’ve seen him? Constance won’t let him on the estate anymore. Is he well? Or is that the right question?”

George was certainly not well. “You’re forbidden to see him?”

“God, no. Connie doesn’t do that sort of thing. Afraid to see him. Amanda, something happened to him, something dark that has to do with Constance. Don’t think she’s all sweetness and light. She isn’t! She drew him into an involvement with death. She saw things about him that made him become obsessed. It was like death entered the house. We were in one of the Kominski covens. We were so happy. It was new and it was fun. Then George started these sessions up at the estate with Constance. The next thing I knew, he had started that series of experiments, trying to kill things and bring them back to life.”

Suddenly she stopped, looked around. “Let’s continue this in the car.” Amanda followed her in. They rolled up the windows. “I think Constance did something to his mind. He changed. All of a sudden he wanted a ritual chamber in the basement.”

“The Kitten Kate Room?”

“God, yes! It was so crazy. What in the world do cats have to do with it? He went in there and performed acts of self-abuse. He injured himself with candles. I trusted Constance and I sent him to her, and he got even worse! His work came to dominate his life. He’d spend literally days in that lab with that awful girl, Bonnie Haver, a tramp and a drug addict.”

“Bonnie Haver? You mean the one from Our Lady?”

“Yeah, you must have been in the same class, or close to it.”

“I remember her. She was involved in a horrible scandal. More than one horrible scandal.”

“She’s no better now than she was then! She had a terrible effect on George. The more he saw of her, the more time he spent in that hideous, demented room. My God, Amanda, I could smell the burning skin. It was hideous, hideous!” She slammed her hand against the dashboard. She was crying too hard to go on.

There was certainly a dark side to Constance. Dark and subtle.

The words of what had once been a favorite poem of hers came to mind.

For a moment she could see him, huge and dark, straddling the fields with his great scythe like a fiery ray of sun. I am the Godfather Damon.

“He was such a brilliant man. Now he’s crazy.” Known in all the meadows—

Snick. Snick. Snick. Down go the stalks. To his cool cave descending… All the meadows he has mown. “Why did you come here?”