The Witch’s Cat

There are many things I wish I could tell you. I wish foremost that I had died many moons ago. For me, eternal life is a punishment worse than eternal hell. I waste away here, feeble but mercilessly immortal, unable to communicate with anyone in any way. I wish that I had not bound my soul to hers long ago. I hope that wherever she is now, she is experiencing hell.

I wish I could tell you why your children do not come home, and to give up hope, for they never will. But I am effectively mute, and my paws cannot write. Believe me, I have tried many times. Every day, I pace back and forth across these woods in silence. I have memorized every tree, every path, every shrub in this place. It is no use seeking death; I can never die while she still lives. Yet here I remain, because it is my duty to undo as much as I can of the black magic I worked here. No atonement shall ever rectify what I did with her. This is the greatest difference between us: where I find guilt and remorse for that, she finds power and freedom.

Sometimes, I succeed at repelling her black sorcery. Other times, I can only watch each child die, and their bones turn to dust. Many times, a child I lead away will end up dead later when I am not there or when they are more determined. I hate myself for these failures, but am not foolish enough to expect anything else. Together, our magic was stronger than any other. It was truly a spectacle.

They experimented with witchcraft for many decades before he died, long before I was around. It was their little secret. Who in the town would ever conceive that the sweet little couple that ran the apothecary were minions of hell that had bargained with the devil and paid their souls in price? They fancied themselves heroes, of course; Robin Hood characters that robbed power from the devil and gave it to the people. They believed they could take advantage of Lucifer’s deal to effect prosperity on earth, concocting magical brews that worked wonders upon illness and injury alike. Pride was the sin that led to their undoing. No one who deals with hell has ever been free from its corrupting influences. She told me these stories of their early days when she still deluded herself that she was a misunderstood, tragic figure; that she still aspired for a noble goal. I still believed her.

I was a kitten when he died. Their marriage was a rather scandalous affair in the day; he had been in a loveless marriage in which he had had three children in six years. His wife was accused of adultery with another man, and he divorced her and met my mistress. It is hard to imagine myself so young. I am a relic now, a bag of bones covered in coarse fur more gray than black, only kept alive by the powers of hell. Nor can I quite comprehend my state of consciousness, aware but not so humanly intelligent as now. I was not yet her familiar, and I could not express myself in language. I was a simple black cat—they found me wryly humorous. Despite this, I can remember some things quite well; his death, clearly. I recall the wails that followed; I remember comforting her, lying with her, understanding the stench of death on his body. In the centuries I have had alone to reflect on these times, I have decided that his death was the price the devil decided she had to pay for her magic. The devil always comes out on top. It was her love’s death that made my mistress become an agent of evil. She lost not only her husband, first and only love, but herself as well.

The last thing I remember from those times is my mistress descending to hell for three days. When she returned, she made me her familiar, and she explained many things to me through our connection. She told me that the devil had given her control of her soul but for that it would belong to him when she decided to die. He told her there was a way to bring her husband back to earth, but that he would not help her. I have realized now that such a task was never possible. The devil does not lie outright, but hidden in his words I have concluded that without his consent, my mistress, ever powerful as she is, never stood a chance. Even if she believed this, though—and maybe she has realized it, after all these years—she would not stop. She is as stubborn as the devil surely is in thwarting her.

We were driven by grief and excited hope, determined to find a spell that would return the life to his body. I find it faintly amusing nowadays that we thought we could outwit the devil. Days, weeks passed, and his body rotted. When there would be a knock at the door asking if my mistress was well, she would snap—I am fine!—and henceforth ignore the visitor completely. Still we tried every concoction and incantation we knew. We managed, at least, to conceal the odor of decay. As she toiled over his body, her own began to fail. She was nearly sixty then. She commissioned a glass coffin from the village smith. When he returned to the village, wide-eyed, bearing news that the old widow by the river was living with her husband’s decomposing corpse, sat rigidly upon a plush armchair, the other townsfolk stopped reaching out. I wonder what would have happened if they had confronted her then. Maybe she would have been stopped before it became too late.

Many seasons after he died, after we had exhausted every spell and potion we knew of or could create, she consulted the devil again, and I, her faithful familiar, followed. His face—if one could call it that—was blank, but I am sure he was pleased that his poison was settling in her veins. He told us of black magic, powerful curses that we could unlock if we would pool our magic together. Still he refused to aid us directly, or provide any insight into her ultimate goal. It didn’t matter. My mistress was convinced that we would soon succeed.

Our house was not a proper witch’s one. It was a quaint cottage with few rooms and a picturesque chimney. There was no dungeon, and the cauldron and ingredients sat haphazardly in the kitchen. Formerly, they had been concealed up in the attic but for when in use, but she had no more visitors to hide things from. The glass coffin lay in the entryway so that the door could not be opened more than halfway. When we returned from hell, we sat there together. Atop the coffin, above his dusty bones, her hand clasping my paw, we became one, a shared soul, in the way the devil had described. Our blood burned together. Her sins became my own.

I smell a child on the breeze. He is downwind and I no sooner scent him than sight him. He is a young boy, six or seven years old. I know that he has been sent dreams, visions of an ancient skeleton in an equally aged glass coffin in the woods. The children never tell their parents. We bewitched this to happen, my mistress and I. It was the final spell we cast together. Where the village was is now a large city, sprawling with affluent residential areas and stinking of automobile fumes. The boy wears a purple coat, white gloves and earmuffs. I hiss at him. Kitty, he says, and rushes at me. I leap at him, claws extended, and he shrieks and turns back the way he came. I will have to be watchful in case he should return. They are rarely so easily deterred. I told you, our magic was strong.

Our meeting in hell and our subsequent ritual had reinvigorated my mistress. No longer was she a recluse. At times she seemed almost an impostor to me, so unlike the woman I knew. She would mingle among the townsfolk, partake in daily village life. The villagers assumed she had finished grieving. I knew better. I watched as she walked among them in the day, and came home and practiced black magic with me in the night. I know now that she was conniving that whole time.

I have guests, Notte, she spoke to me while she was on her way home one day. I was curious. That was a line she had not crossed once in the years since his death. Our instruments of witchcraft were strewn everywhere across the cottage; the coffin still blocked the door. I warned her of this, and more. They will not mind, she said. The sole window facing the path to the house was grimy and brown, but through it I could make out my mistress and five children. I could sense they were bewitched.

If you have listened this long because you think I am a sympathetic figure, lower your expectations. Do not forget that our soul was marked with Lucifer’s name. As she sometimes did, my mistress had brought home a basket of bread and some champagne. We will feast, she told me. “Please excuse the mess, dears,” she said aloud. It was for her own sake rather than the children’s; her spell had rendered them dumb and she was only pretending normalcy.

They are the sons and daughters of his son and daughter, she answered my unspoken curiosity. They are of his blood. I required no further explanation. I knew as well as she the power of blood. It was the mixing of our own blood that granted us access to exceptional power, all the power of the fires of hell. My mistress had learned easily to kill with a single hex. Rats, mainly, that raided our pantry, but sometimes game animals as well. To undo was more difficult, and I remember our joy the first time she did it. She had isolated two rats from the same litter, and killed one. She then killed the other and mixed its blood into a potion which she poured over the first rat. It awoke, confused, and scampered away. We never saw it again.

My mistress was not cruel then, only selfish. Her first attempt involved having the children stand in a circle, hands held in a ring, around the coffin. Upon discovering there wasn’t enough room inside, we pushed it into the backyard before the river. It was autumn, and the river was low. We chanted some Latin spell, drank a vile concoction. My experience with tasting potions suggests it contained blood from many species. I saw the twitch of my mistress’s eye when nothing happened. But again we tried.

Sanguis sanguinem vocat; sanguis viventium sanguinem mortuorum reviviscat.

Three times in total. Then, out loud, the minds behind the children’s glazed eyes posing no threat, she said to me, “Will you get the knife, please? My favorite one.” I knew which one she meant. She had acquired it before I was born, but I heard the story many times while in her service. She liked the story as much as she liked the knife itself. A patron of her shop had had no money with which to pay. My mistress, generous as she considered herself, offered to barter for the medicine he needed so badly. She revealed to me once that even with the medicine, he died a few days later from sepsis. It was this way that she was gifted the beautiful piece of ivory, which she used as a paperweight for some years until, on her fiftieth birthday, her husband carved it into a knife and presented it to her. This is the knife which I retrieved from the house. It was quite small, perfect for careful dissections, and had a loop at the end around which I could fasten my teeth to carry it.

I delivered the knife to my mistress, who smiled gratefully. Delicately, she drew it across each child’s wrists, and set their hands upon the coffin. Sanguis viventium sanguinem mortuorum reviviscat. Once, twice, three times. They bled, and she uttered more curses, but the skeleton stirred none. I knew her well enough to know she would not accept defeat. I see now how sordidly we had lost sight of her original intentions. She had wanted to help people, she told me, save them from injury and death. Then why did she kill those children, and sacrifice their blood upon the coffin?

I would have warned you that this was not a pleasant story. I would tell you that still I stood with her, and comforted her that night, purring against her breast. Sometimes I imagine that I am in your house, upon your lap as I often was hers. A few times I padded my way to the city and attempted something like this. I walked the streets until I found an open window or a small pet door. One time I was chased out by a shaggy mutt. Another time a middle-aged woman drove me out with a broom, yelling to someone else asking who let the damn cat in. If only I could have told her how damned I am, and why. I recognized a face in a framed photograph upon her mantle. It was a red-haired girl I had watched die.

The townsfolk were upon our house the next day. By the afternoon, someone had brought a gallows. Evidently the hypnotization and kidnap of the children had not gone unnoticed. We ignored them at first, drew the curtains and stayed out of sight. But when a man’s voice rang out that she should present herself or else our house should be burnt, the witch flung open the shutters upstairs and cried to those below her, “Your children are not here!” In fact, they were not. Even once they had paled and died, my mistress continued to draw power from their blood until their bodies withered to dust. I have seen far too many children die that way now.

They continued to shout at her, unconvinced. We feared not for our lives, but for our possessions and prosperity, instruments of witchcraft that had taken decades for her to master, ingredients I had gathered over the course of years. Moreover, she was a prideful woman, outraged at the accusations, however truthful, thrust at her. So we stood together, I in her arms, eyes shut but noses together, pooling our magic together. I think the reserves of power we found in us were direct portals to hell, so potent was the sorcery we worked that day. When our eyes opened, and one became two again, we were still in our house, upstairs. But the mob was silent. That was how my mistress became a whispered legend: the “witch of the woods.” From the window, I could see at a distance of about a mile and a half the river near which our house had formerly lain, and beside it the jeering, confused mob.

When I looked back, my mistress was gone. Through our bond I could sense that she had gone again to seek the devil. I did not try to communicate with her. I could feel her rage, curiously detached from my own feelings. Though our souls were one, our minds open to the other’s, our thoughts remained separate. In her absence, I walked around the house. Everything was in place. The cauldron sat in the kitchen, a new variation of a potion still bubbling. Sanguis sanguinem vocat, she had chanted over the pot that morning. Scattered as senselessly as usual were the ingredients we had gathered. Her husband was always the organized one, she had told me fondly. I traveled our new property. Our house was well concealed by a grove of old beeches. The woods were dense but quiet. I managed to catch only one mouse. A hundred meters from our front door was an outlook from which the layout of the village looked like a painting. Thick strokes of green framed careful lines and delicate shapes. Dark specks wandered among them.

I had not been alone for so long since my kittenhood. I admit I felt betrayed. For her to have left me without a word was insulting. You see, I was a rather prideful cat myself. A day passed, then a week. I grieved for company, at first, and then I grew angry. On the tenth day, I descended to the village. It was a humanizing experience. The streets were sparsely populated, and I followed a procession of mourners to the cemetery. Upon the headstone were five names I did not recognize, but knew without doubt to whom they belonged.

When I returned to the house, she was there, waiting for me. I have learned of a most marvelous hex. We will have them come to us. I weakly objected: You think it is worth it? I did not ask what she meant to do with the spell. I did not want to know. If we give up, Notte, it will all be for nought. That line haunts me.

You know what that spell was, and you know what has become of me since I broke the familiarity between us and walked away. Some things cannot be undone. Our souls are together for all eternity, on earth and in hell. But I have chosen my own path now. It will not be a path to heaven, but perhaps one day I will find peace. I know that she will not.