Cat Magic (42 page)

—William Henry Davis, “The Cat”

The class of one sat before her teacher.

Mother Star of the Sea capered, her habit flying about her, wimple on the floor, naked wooden head bobbing, smile working as she darted in and out, pinching her student and scolding like a parrot.

Mandy was being pinched away by crumbs and bits. The worst part of it was how badly she missed herself.

“Somebody,” she wailed, “somebody!”

“Will I do?” Bonnie Haver reappeared.

“Get me out of here! Somebody, please!”

Mother Star of the Sea rattled to attention. “You vant out? Jawohl! Outenzee hellhole! Sure. You can be a ghost, you have that right. So, soul, take flight!”

Amazingly, Mandy was free! Blowing like a bit of pollen on the autumn wind, blowing through long black mountains.

Familiar mountains.

The Endless Mountains. And there was the Fairy Stone. Mandy’s heart hurt to see the witches huddling together against the wind, and her own coffin.

It was high night in the Endless Mountains. Mandy had become one with the air, guttering the candles about the coffin, whistling through sweaters and under cloaks, caressing the ones she had loved and lost.

She was here, but she was helpless. So this was what ghosts were all about.

So close to her people and yet so separated, Mandy felt a desolation of loss. She could hardly stay still enough to touch her own clean coffin, much less return to the body that lay within. She slipped and eddied about while they prayed into the hollow darkness. She came close to Robin, and the grief in his face tormented her terribly.

“I love you,” she said, and the wind of her words made Robin shake in his sweater. “I’m right here with you. Can’t you hear me?”

He huddled into his clothing and lowered his head-before the persistent gusts that were the spirit body of his lover.

She roared in anger because they could not see her, but only managed to put out all their candles. Then she quieted herself.

The night upon the mountain became as still as a bedroom. She heard their soft voices as they spoke encouragement to one another. How tired and beaten they were. Her heart suffered for them. She was so close, but so helpless.

In life we think of ghosts as rarities. We do not know that every rustle and squeak, every scratch of twig upon the screen or moan of wind along the eaves, is someone passing in the journeys of the night.

Mandy saw the first hopeful thing that had come to her since she died: Tom ran across the sky. His eyes were stars, his body the whole firmament, his tail the kink in the Milky Way.

Mandy wanted to hammer on her coffin, to dive into her body. Please! Let me go back to them!

As she flitted and blew along, she saw the
Leannan
coming across the mountain with her guards. As they crept into the rowan, Mandy had the odd thought that one could look on the fairy as a species that had developed a technology of, the spiritual world, Just as man has developed one of the physical. Using this magic, the Fairy Queen could rule here and also walk in the world of the dead. The science that supported her must be a strange and glorious thing—theories that were experienced as dreams; snatches of song that were powerful machines.

For her part, Mandy wasn’t in control even of herself. One moment she could be close to the ground, the next high in the air. Then she might be in Robin’s hair, then scudding among the stones.

Was the
Leannan
going to kiss him? She hoped so, that would help him! She began to plead on his behalf: “Please,
Leannan
—”

Then she saw puppet grins nearby. “No, not yet, don’t take me back!”

“But Mandy, this is the perfect time.”

“You said I had the right!”

“You did, but you’ve used it up.”

No sooner could she smell the candy stink of the cottage than she felt herself falling down its licorice chimney.

She was back in hell’s schoolroom.

Robin heard the wind wailing, its voice echoing through the Endless Mountains to the north, and moaning south in the gentler reaches of the Peconics.

He couldn’t even start the cone of power, so overcome he was by the
Leannan’s
kiss. Her loveliness had struck him temporarily dumb.

More than that, it had sent through him a current that seemed to have washed every cell of his flesh with new sensitivity. He looked out on the world from revised eyes, and the world was not the same. Beneath him the soil now seemed a surging flesh. Every stone was an eye, every blade of grass a nerve ending. Earth was not just alive, it was more than that: it was shockingly aware. It knew him as it knew every man, woman, and child, every tree and every animal that was resident upon its body. And it was watching them all, quietly, endlessly, like a mother dreaming over her children Wisteria began raising the cone of power, and Robin was grateful to her, to them all. Finn hands took his own. The coven was confident in their rituals; they had the balance of professionals. They raised the cone with a series of sounds, called the Chants of the Long Tones.

Wisteria started the whispery humming.

Soon other voices joined, each so familiar to Robin, each the voice of someone who was far more than a friend or even a lover. People who do real magic together become close in ways that words cannot say.

They chanted into the silence of the mountains, into the wind, into the living sky. Robin looked to the center of the circle, just above the coffin, for the shimmering red moon the coven sometimes saw when they raised the cone of power, but only the darkness there returned his glance.

At first Mandy did not understand. What were those funny little joints her demons were putting together—wooden knuckles? They were building hands, arms, a new puppet.

Then she screamed, she pushed and struggled at the straps that bound her once again to her chair. Lying on teacher’s desk was a gleaming, enameled wooden head. And on that head was a caricature of her own face.

“I couldn’t smile like that. I’ve never hated anybody enough’”

“Oh, no? We’re
your
demons, Mandy. We make whatever serves your guilt. Do you think the real Mother Star of the Sea would be in hell—not that good woman, took!”

Suddenly there appeared in Mandy’s lap a shimmering mirror, and in the mirror was an explosion of loveliness such as she had never imagined, smooth and cool and green, long hills and the perfect voice of joy, a young woman raising song. It hurt to see her, this real Mother Star of the Sea.

“She’ll never know you chose her to be your demon.” The puppet Mother snapped her jaws. “She’s a saint! I’m your sin, not hers.”

Full of snide laughter, she and Bonnie assembled their new marionette. Mandy watched, stumped in her straps.

Mother Star of the Sea approached. She was wearing a surgeon’s mask. In her hand was a hacksaw. “I’m going to take out
your
brain and put it in
this
head.” Bonnie opened the hinged top of the noggin. “Think of it, a miracle of modern science.”

Mandy looked desperately about. Bonnie was behind her now. Strong hands held her head steady.

Mother Star of the Sea laid the saw against her temple.

This is just an illusion, she thought miserably. I don’t have a body.

The first cut crunched through her hair. Then a prancing migraine—fire in her skull, nails being driven between bone and brain—made tears flow and her nose run. Her eyes rolled in agony with each rhythmic burr of the blade.

After this was done she was never, ever going to go back, she knew that She was going to become some inconceivable part of hell.

She was dimly aware of three new schoolgirls at the front of the room testing the joints of the puppet, making it snap its jaw and rattle its fingers.

Somehow, in her agony and despair, she had an idea. What was the opposite of the demon’s anger? Not love. They would jeer at that. It was compassion, rich, deep, abiding compassion. She could damp the fires of her own guilt with it.

She summoned up what strength lay at her command, she forced herself to think, to form words, lo talk:

“I forgive you,” she said. “I forgive all of you.”

The sawing stopped.

The girls playing with the puppet dropped it and stared at her, their eyes glassy.

Bonnie released her head.

“Damn,” Mother Star of the Sea said.

“I forgive you and I—I love you. I love you all no-matter what you do to me.”

There was thick silence. Then Mother Star of the Sea burst out laughing. “That old cliche! Love thy neighbor! What a load of crap!”

But she had thrown her saw to the floor.

“Unstrap me.”

Bonnie came dutifully forward. In a moment Mandy was free. She stood up, she turned.

There were tears in the eyes that watched her. These were all part of her, every one, no matter what else they had become.

“I’m sorry.” It was all she could say. To turn one’s back on guilt is not difficult. After all, the deeds had been done, the wrongs committed. She understood how she had turned away from her mother and father when she could have embraced them in their need. But the past was the past, she did not need these demons to punish her. Mother and Dad were dead. Her best had not been good enough to heal their lives. Any effort she had made on their behalf would have failed. The lesson was, she should have tried.

The lesson had been learned. It was possible to melt the heat of Mother’s anger with her own soul’s spring. Compassion, acceptance of self. I did wrong, and now I have paid. She left the demon schoolroom.

Behind her there arose a great howling and clattering of puppet joints. She walked on, though. They were tragic and she could not help them, but she would never forget those parts of herself.

As she moved through the forest, the stumps shook and swayed and seemed to beckon her closer to their rotted sides.

Death never gave up.

“I am leaving you. I can’t help you.”

Soon she came to the border of the terrible woods, heart pounded, her mind sang with her triumph.

The view before her was so vast, so extremely awesome, that she almost lost her balance.

Beyond the formless edge of the world of the dead a whole galaxy was revolving, its stars shining in colors too subtle and exquisite to be named. The light of stars is their voice; their language is the color of that light.

The earth, a small green ball, lay in a tremendous, withered palm. Evil, huge beyond imagining.

I am the hand. The hand that takes.

All about wheeled other empires of stars. Hundreds of billions of fiery beings going in the orbits of their time, carrying planets and lives and rivers and storms.

The voices of the stars were raised in vespers, for the whole universe was at evening.

I am the hand.

But not only that. Death is also rebirth. In the very act of taking life, she returns it to the land. Spring flows from winter; the rose takes root in the rotted flesh of the shrew.

She may be the hand that takes, but she is also a little girl running along a lane between lilac hedges, beneath kindly old oaks, who converse as she passes new growth of purest green.

She could not see details of the earth below her. She did not even know what she might be standing on.

She was just here, millions of miles out in space, lost.

Then she heard a familiar human sound, a vastly distant whisper of a chant.

The coven. But how could she hear them—from here the earth was no more than a pinprick in the night.

If she heard them, though, perhaps she might find them. Behind her was death, before her the whole gulf of space. She did the only thing she could: she jumped. She sailed out and down, trusting, hoping, that she would land in the right place.’

There came a familiar girlish voice in her ear: “I’m going right along with you. I’ll be there waiting for you when you land. I am death, and you will not escape me.” The girl with the missing hand shot off, leaving a blazing track in the sky.

As she had at the moment of death, Mandy felt the awful, windless falling. She tried to will herself in the direction of the chant. There lay home.

High above the witches’ circle a meteor passed in the sky, glowing across the face of the moon. They had been working for two hours, and still the cone had not appeared. Every few moments the Chant of the Long Tones was interrupted by the sound of Ivy clearing her throat. Grape was shivering. Earlier Wisteria had endured a coughing fit.

The wind pushed and challenged and demanded. Every time another frigid wave covered him Robin gasped, and for an instant forgot the chant.

But he tried, they all tried, and when it was right the chant was very, very strong, a sound that was wind and water, the grinding of the earth in the depths of a mine, the furious silence of the night-hunting bird.

Again Robin collected himself for another effort. He took a breath and closed his eyes, and expelled his tone from the bottom of his gut.

I am the hand.

The voice was not Mandy, but it was hovering just above the coffin. “Who are you?” Grape whispered.

I am the hand that takes.

It was a freezing, bitter voice. Robin chanted on, filled with dread. This morning something had come into Vine’s circle from the other world and displaced the wraith of Mandy. That other thing had been a little, maimed girl, who had jumped about the pentagram for a moment and then darted off again. Was she back?

The coveners chanted desperately, trying to keep the circle clear for Mandy.

A blizzard swarmed down the face of the mountain. Mandy’s mind, her heart, her whole being, were now concentrated on one thing: find the circle—

Wisteria huddled in on herself. Grape and Ivy leaned against one another. Even clasped hands had grown cold. The moon had long ago crossed the top of the sky. There were no more meteors to bring an instant of wonder to this freezing effort. The Chant of the Long Tones sank low, and still the spiraling cone of power did not appear.

Robin watched the sky for another sign and listened for another word.

But there was no sound, and the only lights in the sky were moon and stars.