He spent the rest of the afternoon reading in his room, pushing through the Stoker. He wasn't in the best mood to concentrate.
Sarr and Deborah got back after four. They shouted hello and went into the house. When Deborah called Freirs for dinner, neither of them had been outside.
All six cats were on the back porch, washing themselves after their evening meal, when he walked up to the house.
'Have you seen Bwada?' asked Poroth, as Freirs pushed through the screen door, the cats filing behind him into the kitchen.
'Haven't seen her all day.'
He had done it; the lie was told. There'd be no going back now.
'Sometimes she doesn't come when I call her in for supper,' said Deborah. 'I think it's because she eats the things she kills.'
'Well,' said Sarr,' 'twill still be light after supper, and I'll go look for her.'
'Fine,' said Freirs. 'I'll help.' Perhaps, he decided, he could lead the other down toward the stream. Maybe the two of them would come upon the body. Resignedly he sat down to eat.
And then, in the middle of dinner, came a scratching at the door. Sarr got up and opened it.
In walked Bwada.
What a relief! Never thought I'd see her again – amp; certainly not in such good condition.
She was hurt badly earlier today, I know she was. That wound in her side looked fatal, amp; now it's only a hairless reddish swelling.
Luckily the Poroths didn't notice my shock; they were too busy fussing over Bwada, seeing what was wrong. 'Look, she's hurt herself,' said Deborah. 'She's bumped into something.' The animal did move quite stiffly, in fact; there was a clumsiness in the way she held herself. When Sarr put her down after examining the swelling, she slipped when she tried to walk away, like someone walking on slick ice instead of a familiar wooden floor.
The Poroths reached a conclusion similar to mine: that she'd fallen on something, a rock or a branch, amp; had badly bruised herself. They attribute her lack of coordination to shock or perhaps, as San-put it, 'a pinching of the nerves.' Sounds logical enough, I suppose. Sarr told me before I came out here for the night that if she's worse tomorrow he'll take her to the local vet, even though he'll have a hard time paying for treatment. I offered to lend him money, or even pay for the visit myself; I'd like to hear a doctor's opinion.
Maybe the wound really wasn't that deep after all; maybe that's why there was so little blood. They say animals have wonderful restorative powers in their saliva or something. Maybe she just went off into the woods amp; nursed herself back to health. Maybe the wound simply closed.
But in a few short hours?
I couldn't continue dinner amp; told the Poroths my stomach hurt, which was partly true. We all watched Bwada stumble around the kitchen floor, ignoring the food Deborah put before her as if it weren't there. Her movements were awkward, tentative, like a newborn animal still unsure how to move its muscles. When I left the house a little while ago, she was huddled in the corner staring at me. Deborah was crooning over her, but the cat was staring at me.
Killed a monster of a spider behind my suitcase tonight. That new spray really does a job. When Sarr was in here a few days ago he said the room smelled of it, but I guess my allergy's too bad for me to notice.
I enjoy watching the zoo outside my screens. Put my face close amp; stare at the bugs eye to eye. Zap the ones whose faces I don't like with my spray can.
Tried to read more of the Stoker book, but one thing keeps bothering me: the way that cat stared at me. Deborah was brushing its back, Sarr fiddling with his pipe, amp; that cat just stared at me amp; never blinked. 1 stared back, said, 'Hey, Sarr? Look at Bwada. That damned cat's not blinking.' And just as he looked up, it blinked. Heavily.
Hope we can go to the vet's tomorrow, because I want to ask him how a cat might impale itself on a rock or a stick, amp; how fast such a wound might heal.
Cold night. Sheets are damp amp; the blanket itches. Wind from the woods – ought to feel good in the summer, but it doesn't feel like summer.
That damned cat didn't blink till I mentioned it.
Almost as if it understood me.
Book Six: The Green Ceremony
And my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about in the way they did… So I did the charm over again, and touched my eyes and my lips and my hair in a peculiar manner, and said the old words… and I was so glad I could do it quite well, and I danced and danced along, and sang extraordinary songs that came into my head… songs full of words that must not be spoken or written down. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.
Machen, The White People
July Eleventh
The sky above the city is the color of dirty water, the air heavy with humidity. An occasional drizzle smears the windows of the massive grey building near Riverside Park and runs in sooty patterns down the bricks. Inside, the apartment smells of old rugs and furniture, and of an old man who only bathes when he has to.
The Old One doesn't care. As he enters the front hall carrying a brown paper bag of groceries and, on top of them, his day's mail, shakes off his umbrella in the bathroom and leaves it open in the tub to dry, then sits down on the stained lid of the toilet and carefully slips off his galoshes, he pays no attention to the place's shabbiness or smell, or to the pleasures of coining home. Repairing to the kitchen, he stocks the sparsely filled refrigerator with groceries and removes the tape and tissue paper from the bag; the mail he throws away unopened, except for two bills. Tugging out his false teeth, twin strands of saliva stretching from the ends, he deposits them in a water glass in the bathroom. He spends the next half hour at his desk, balancing his checkbook and writing out checks for the rent and electricity, delicately licking the stamps he keeps in a cigar box in the drawer and affixing them with care to the envelopes. These he leaves on the table in the hall for the next time he goes out. Then, idly scratching his nose, he walks to the bookcase in the living room and stoops before a set of drab brown Victorian volumes gathering dust on the second shelf from the bottom.
How amusing, he thinks, as he withdraws one of them – amusing that a key to dark and ancient rites should survive in such innocuous-looking form.
A young fool like Freirs would probably refuse to believe it. Like the rest of his doomed kind, he'd probably expect such lore to be found only in ancient leather-bound tomes with gothic lettering and portentously sinister tides. He'd search for it in mysterious old trunks and private vaults, in the 'restricted' sections of libraries, in intricately carved wood chests with secret compartments.
But there are no real secrets, the Old One knows. Secrets are ultimately too hard to conceal. The keys to the rites that will transform the world are neither hidden nor rare nor expensive. They are available to anyone. You can find them on the paperback racks or in any second-hand bookshop.
You just have to know where to look – and how to put the pieces together.
There are pieces in an out-of-print religious tract by one Nicholas Keize. And in a certain language textbook which, in its appendix, transcribes nursery rhymes in an obsolete Malaysian dialect surprisingly like Celtic. And in a story, supposedly fiction – but not when read at the right time – by an obscure Welsh visionary who barely suspected why he'd written it, and who regretted it in later years and died a fervent churchman. And in the pictures on a cheap pack of novelty cards based on images from unguessed-of antiquity. And in a Tuscan folk dance included in a certain staid old dance book which, along with plies and pirouettes, has the dancer make a pattern called 'the changes.'