Whitley Strieber Read online

  It began lapping frantically at the spills on the floor.

  “You are hungry, you poor creature!”

  She closed the door behind it and put the saucer down beside its great head. It really was the most enormous cat. Black as sin, even its nose. It had a kink in the end of its tail and a ravaged ear.

  “You poor, ugly old thing.” Gingerly she touched its back, half expecting it to bolt. But this was no wild creature. It arched to her touch, then drank all the harder. A starving, grateful, and very domestic beast. “You're so sweet!”

  She felt around its neck, but there was no sign of a collar. Her every touch drew a reaction from the animal. She found herself stroking it while it lapped at the milk, just to feel the undulating muscles beneath the soft black fur.

  The cat finished and raised its head. When their eyes met, Mandy was fascinated. The eyes had a slightly sinister quality, the way they gazed so steadily back at her. They were sharply intelligent. The cat nosed her hand. It was silent; she could not seem to get it to purr, almost as if it was too independent for such an abject expression of gratitude.

  “Are you still hungry?”

  It stiffened, looked behind and above her. With the silence and grace of an angel it leaped over her head and into the hallway that led from the bedrooms to the sun porch. It was an amazing jump. “Kitty?”

  From the direction of her bedroom there came a loud meow, sharp with beckoning. Mandy stood up, feeling a twinge of fear in her confusion, and followed the animal.

  Questions. How could a mere cat jump like that? And where had it come from? And what sort of cat was it?

  And wasn't it beautiful, sharp-faced and glowing, lying on the foot of her bed, beckoning her with one open eye?

  Fleas?

  Ringworm?

  Fever?

  A meow, as soft as some heavenward breeze. And she was tired. She slipped into her bed. “You be a good watchcat, now.”

  Almost as if drugged, she slept. She dreamed she was Alice, falling forever down the dark well of Wonderland.

  Chapter 3

  George dumped the bedroll he had brought up from his car onto the floor of the lab.

  “What the hell is this? You going camping?”

  “Living here is the only certain way to guard this lab. Brother Pierce has flunkies at the sheriffs office. To be safe, we have to assume he's also got them among the campus cops.”

  “I hadn't thought of that.” Clark touched the bedroll with his toe. “I suppose you're right.”

  “I am right. This is Pierce's town, not Constance's—a fact which we ignore at our peril.”

  “Constance was unhappy to hear what happened. She sends you a good wish.”

  “Why not an effective spell against that cretin? I'm telling you, Clark, Connie's got to either support me or abandon me. There's no middle territory with this.”

  Clark looked steadily at him. “I think a little equivocation is inevitable, given the personal consequences she faces if you succeed.”

  George sighed. He couldn't really blame Constance Collier. He understood why she rejected him; his work involved the transfer of power at the Covenstead. Of course it was hard for Connie. One leaf falls, another takes its place. The trees persists, but for the blazing leaf autumn is a catastrophe.

  “She has to accept it. She's getting old. God, they initiated her with a bullet to the head. She should be glad that science might take the risk out of it for Amanda.”

  “Nothing will take the risk out of it. The risk is on the other side. You might ensure that the body will come alive again, but nobody can be certain that the soul will find its way back.”

  “So Connie says. But at least the inheritor's soul will have a body to return to. In the past that often wasn't the case.”

  “The problem is, they don't always want to come back.”

  “Well, that isn't our concern. We're only responsible for the body. Speaking of which, let's get to work and see if this lab's been booby-trapped or what.”

  Clark moved to his station. He began testing their most important pieces of equipment, the devices that killed and restarted the intercranial electrical field. With this apparatus they were learning to turn brains on and off like electric switches. “How seriously booby-trapped?”

  George went to him. “A problem?”

  “Not yet. It just occurred to me that it might blow up in my face. A booby trap could be a bomb, if they're really serious.”

  “Surety even Simon Pierce isn't a terrorist.” When he thought about it, though, George wondered if they might not be in greater danger than he had realized.

  Clark obviously shared his concern. “They've killed more than one witch, George.”

  “The Gregorys?” It was supposed to have been an accident, the Gregory fire last winter. Al! four members of the family had been killed in their home. Libby Gregory was high priestess of one of the town covens.

  George peered into the forest of wires that led to the isolation chamber where they had killed and restarted the frog. His gaze traveled along the red leads to each electro-magnetic coil. He was looking for a new wire snaking off to God knew what. “I think it's okay.”

  “Maybe we'd better stand back, just in case. And warn Bonnie.”

  “Let's do more than that. Let's set the switches and then hit the generator from the other room. And open all the windows.”

  They went into the main control room. Beyond, in the menagerie, Bonnie could be seen cleaning cages.

  “Hey, Bonnie, we're turning on the step-up transformer. Duck and cover, dearie.”

  “What's going on?”

  “Look at this. I say 'duck and cover' and the first thing you do is poke your nose out. What if we were under attack? Do you realize that an atomic blast can vaporize you at four thousand feet? Unless you duck and cover, in which case you burn more slowly,”

  “George, you're so weird.”

  “Weird and wonderful, my little chickadee. If we live through this, let's go to bed together.”

  “Dark, thrash that man.”

  “Now, Clark, don't deny an old man his pleasures.”

  “I'm not interested in Bonnie. I have other plans.”

  Bonnie bristled at that. “Constance going to marry you off to some pubescent pnestess, eh, so you can mind the babies while your wife spends all night lathered with ointment balling the priests?”

  “You could live on the Covenstead if you would accept its rule,” dark said gently. “It might do you a great deal of good.”

  “I guess I'm too much of a rebel. Smelling all that health food when I go out there gives me an overwhelming compulsion to eat about four Big Macs. I'm best off being a town witch where I don't have to live by a rule.”

  “We don't live by rules, Bonnie. We all agree on how we live.”

  “Which means only that you're witling to push a broom for the anointed and take orders from teenage girls.”

  “No, that's a complete misconception. There's no fixed hierarchy on the Covenstead. Bonnie, I wish you'd just give a chance for a couple of weeks—”

  “Okay, kids, let's not get into that discussion right now when we could be sitting on Brother Pierce's Fat Man on our way to Hiroshima. I've powered up the transformer. I'm going to open the lines.”

  George stepped into the animal room with Bonnie and closed the door.

  “George, is it really dangerous, or is your paranoia getting the better of you?”

  “We've got to take precautions. They were in this lab, after all.”

  “The other animals are fine, by the way,” Bonnie said. “Just the one frog missing.”

  George shook his head. “The one frog.”

  “I ran blood tests on Tess and Gort, to be sure there were no slow poisons or anything. They're in good shape.”

  “Small blessings count in this impoverished place. We can't begin to afford new rhesus monkeys.”

  “The lines are open,” dark called. “I'm activating the cage.”


  “Wait. Get out of (here.”

  “I have to watch the readings. If we overpuise we'll burn out the whole thing.”

  “It might be dangerous.”

  Dark set his jaw. “Constance assigned me to this lab.” He needed to explain himself no further. George understood the loyalty of the witches to their queen. As a member of a town coven, he felt it himself, although less strongly.

  The lights dimmed when dark turned on the extremely intense magnetic field that was the heart of the device. It was so powerful that electrons within it were forced to stasis.

  Electric motors in the field would stop, batteries cease to emit energy. And sensitive electrical systems, such as brains and nerves, would cease to function. A few seconds in this magnetic limbo sufficed to stop the animal's nervous system and render it effectively dead, although completely undamaged. As time passed, of course, cells would begin to deteriorate. Enough time and the deterioration would become irreversible. But before then the animal could be restarted by turning off the field and shocking its heart back into action.

  The system was potentially safer than anesthesia, and the suspension of critical body functions opened up undreamed-of surgical possibilities. George felt that his work was important even beyond Constance's wish to use it in the ancient ritual of initiation. If things went right, he had a chance at immortality here. He dreamed of a Nobel, a chair at MIT, himself strolling the byways of Cambridge in a ratty tweed suit, ripe in age and honor.

  The witch ritual was the most important thing right now, though. He loved the craft, its spirit and its aims. And the danger and drama of true initiation, the walk in the world of me dead: that was the greatest possible human adventure, and he was excited to be a part of it.

  The ancient ritual now persisted in the West only at the Covenstead. Animists such as American Indians had stopped practicing it. Among the Apache, to become a shaman it had once been necessary to throw oneself off a cliff. Those who lived passed the initiation. Those who died, died.

  George listened to the humming of the apparatus It sounded fine. “What kind of readings, Clark?”

  “Looks like we're okay. No unusual power drains, no sign of damage.”

  George returned to the main lab. He put his hand on dark's shoulder. “That was a brave thing to do, staying in here.”

  “A calculated risk. I thought perhaps they wouldn't have the technical skill to hook a bomb into this system even if they wanted to.”

  Dark powered down the field. The lights flickered again, and the cage made a faint crackling noise. A sharp stench of ozone rilled the air. George pressed the floor switch that turned on the ventilators. He realized that he was shaking. He was surprised that there hadn't been any damage to the equipment.

  Suddenly he was weeping. Most men would have looked away, embarrassed. True to the custom of the witches, though, dark threw his arms around George and comforted him.

  “You know,” he said softly, “no matter how hard this is, we've got to keep going. I don't want to be maudlin, but frankly, an awful lot of people will be helped by our work. We have a mission, and that can't be forgotten.”

  Bonnie came in and put her hand on his shoulder. “George, we're with you, I'm with you.”

  He wished she had been the one hugging him. But when dark let him go, she judged the moment ended and also walked into the animal room.

  This was followed by silence: it was not pleasant to know they were under siege. As it penetrated, this hard truth deepened their upset even more. “What I don't get is, Pierce takes the exact frog we were working on,” George said. “How did he known which one?”

  “The isolate terrarium,” Clark replied. “It's separate from the rest.”

  “I guess. I hope we've seen the last of him.”

  Clark stopped working. For a moment he appeared reluctant to speak. Then he seemed to gather some internal force to himself. “Frankly, George, this Brother Pierce is a lot more powerful around here even than you realize. Oh, I admit he's been having his attendance problems lately, at least if you believe the paper. But the man has more charisma in his big toe than your average fire-breathing demagogue does in his whole corpus delicti. You oughta see this campus on a Sunday morning when Brother Pierce is working some big issue. Empty. And people are not sleeping it off, they are down at the Tabernacle for the Sunday Student Worship. Even the drug scene at Bixter's is getting noticeably smaller. We're becoming a Bible college.”

  “That's what we get for admitting all these Jersey rednecks. We ought to recruit out of state.”

  “My point is, we're surrounded by the guy. He's everywhere. If a fundamentalist preacher can get something going on a modem college campus, he's all but unstoppable. And Brother Pierce owns Maywell State. Simple as that.”

  “So what's our alternative? Shut down the lab and go home?”

  “It amounts to a further impetus to work fast, in my opinion. Even beyond the funding problem. The longer we take, the more trouble he can cause us.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Damn the experimental protocols and go for the big win. I think the way to go is to move directly to the rhesus experiment.” dark's eyes were hollow. “Despite the problems we're bound to encounter.”

  “But what about the Stohlmeyer people? We'd be violating our own experimental protocols.”

  “We have an obligation.” His voice shook. “Constance tells me that time is short. She can't wait much longer.”

  “It's a hell of a risk.”

  “What if this place is bombed or burned down? The risk of that could be even greater.”

  Since the monkeys were already under health-status observation, it would take less time to work one of them up than to recast the frog experiment. In addition to proving an experimental animal's health, they had to measure the tiny voltages in its brain and adjust all of their instruments to them so that the creature wouldn't be in effect shorted out when they nullified its internal electrical field. It was a long, complex task. But they had been measuring the monkeys regularly for weeks, dark had a point. It would indeed be faster to go straight to the monkeys and forget the frogs. The risks were clear: if they failed, Stohlmeyer would cut them off. Then there was the equipment difficulty. “Monkeys are a lot bigger than frogs. How do we get money to expand the field?”

  With a rueful look dark withdrew his waliet, pulied out a VISA card. “All I have.”

  “Three thousand dollars on a credit card?”

  “One thousand, sadly enough. And you're good for another, unless I miss my guess. Or did Kate pick your bones?”

  George's bitter reply echoed through the dank, animal-scented lab. “I'm good for another thousand only if I can get a loan on my car.”

  “We could try Constance. It's just a little cash. Surely she can give us that without exposing the link between the lab and the Covenstead.”

  Bonnie called from the animal room, “You know how conservative she is, George. You'll never get it out of her.”

  “She wants speed, yet she doesn't like us to kill a few animals. And she won't give us any money! Constance either has to commit to this or forget it. You tell her that, dark. Unless she gives me the money to expand the cages, I'm throwing in the towel.”

  “No, George. No, you aren't. You know we can't risk a financial link between the Covenstead and this lab. And you need your Stohlmeyer. Otherwise, how will you gain legitimacy in the outside world? Research funded by witchcraft? Come on.”

  “Constance could find a way,” Bonnie called. “She's just tight with money.”

  Clark ignored her. “We'll manage, George, somehow. I wish I was rich, I'd kick in the whole amount. Since she's so committed, maybe Bonnie can kick in.”

  George's eyes brightened. “Hey, Bonnie, that's a wonderful idea. You'll surely invest money in your brilliant professor.”

  A loud guffaw from the animal room. George opened the door between the two rooms, letting an even more powerful burst of odor into th
e lab. Swamp water and frog piss, sour bananas and monkey shit. “It's our rice bowls, Bonnie. All three of us.”

  “I seem to recall that I'm on a scholarship. Where am I supposed to get money?”

  “You buy plenty of dope over at Bixter's, my dear girl,” dark said. “I've seen you score a quarter-k at a time.”

  “What're you, the house dick? Do they keep conduct cards on us out at the Covenstead now? Eh, Mr. Starch?”

  “You poor woman. You're a witch, and you're still not free. We know that the difference between good and evil is illusion. We also know not to confuse the two.”

  “Goody—”

  “The real truth is that you know that nobody cares at the Covenstead whether you're a bad little girl or not.”

  “Oh, no, they just get those condescending smiles on their faces—”

  “They don't care! Your bondage is your guilt. But it's yours, Bonnie. You should take a lesson from Constance. She knows what it is to be free.”

  “Bonnie's bound, Connie's free. Sounds like some kind of a spell to me.”

  “I can't get through to you. You just do not understand that the evil is the guilt.”

  Bonnie sneered. “Drop the holier-than-thou condescension, will you? It bores me. I can be a damned good witch without your help, dark.”

  Shaking his head, he went into the animal room. “Let's concentrate on the problem at hand. If we don't come up with three grand worth of coils for the rhesus field, we are out of business.”

  George followed dark. Bonnie was preparing a likely-looking frog for its physical. “If we compress the observation time to forty-eight hours, we can be on-line with this beauty by Thursday night.”

  “There's yellow gik coming out of its anus, Bonnie dear,” Clark said.

  “That's A & D ointment. I just took its temperature.”

  “Clark makes a good point, Bonnie. If we expanded the field we could go with a rhesus tomorrow morning. As soon as we get the coils.”

  “I have no money. And we couidn'l pry another purchase order out of accounting with a crowbar. So let me finish getting little frogger here measured.”

  “Bonnie, we can get two thousand dollars between the two of us. Surely you're good for another thou.”