Chapter Eight

Eight

The two of them scuttled out of the sheriff's office a few moments later, hoping not to catch the eye of anyone who might ask difficult questions like, Which one of you was doing all of that horrible demonic screaming in the sheriff's office just now? Sherry grasped Father Barry's elbow as soon as they were out the door and shepherded him a few yards down the street before it occurred to her that she didn't know where she was leading him and released him again.

"I'm going to call the bishop," Father Barry said. He looked a little pale and sweaty. "I'm underqualified for this ."

"You'd think that they'd at least teach you the basics ," Sherry said, feeling aggrieved with the Catholic Church all over again. As if there weren't enough wrong with them, they had to bogart all the anti-demon trainings. At the moment she'd give almost anything for a nice, modern, Unitarian Universalist exorcist. The Unitarian exorcist would probably be a Montessori school administrator with a master's degree in social work with a focus in cross-cultural sensitivity in evil-spirit extraction. "You don't have to be a doctor of demonology, but they could at least have given you the hour-long CPR certification course version, just in case there's an emergency."

"Demonology is actually—" Father Barry started, and then stopped, possibly quailing under the force of the look that Sherry was giving him. "I'll call the bishop," he said again. He was rubbing his hands on his thighs. "Do you think that he was really Lucifer? It sounded like he was just making that up."

"It did sound a little…improvised," Sherry said. "I'm not sure if we're better or worse off than if I'd told it I was a druid or something. It definitely got more…aggressive after it asked about The Exorcist . But maybe if I'd said that, we'd end up with some sort of prehistoric Iron Age god in Sheriff Brown's body, and the bishop wouldn't know what to do with it."

Now Father Barry was giving her a reproachful look. "God is still God," he said. "And the devil is still the devil, no matter what you call him."

"If you say so," Sherry said distractedly. "Do you think I should buy some crystals?"

" Crystals? " Father Barry asked. "What kind?"

"You know," she said. "The kinds they have in the New Age store. For the…auras and things. To protect us against the demons."

" Sherry ," he said. "I'm a priest ."

"Oh, right," she said. "You can't recommend anything that comes from the competitors."

"I'm not a vacuum cleaner salesman ," Father Barry said. "I have faith , Sherry." He paused. "Do they have ones for demons, specifically?"

"I'll ask at the shop," she said. "Would you like to come? We'll probably both want some supplies. Or can you not be seen inside?"

"There's lots of reasons to be in a New Age store," Father Barry answered after a pause. "They usually sell really reasonably priced candles."

"I wouldn't have thought of you as a candle man," Sherry said, briefly distracted from the thrust of their conversation.

He blushed. "I like to host dinner parties," he said defensively.

"Oh, really?" she asked. "Do you cook?"

"Yes," he said. "Last month I made—" He stopped. "I don't think it's the time to talk about that, do you?"

"You might as well tell me about it," she said as she started walking in the direction of Sun and Moon Boutique. "I could use the distraction." Her head was starting to ache. "And if I keep thinking about Sheriff Brown I might scream."

"All right," Father Barry said eventually, and launched into a description of an impressively elaborate-sounding Tuscan-themed meal he'd recently prepared for five guests. Sherry was intrigued enough by this new twist in Father Barry's persona—she'd envisioned him as solidly a hot dog and meat loaf kind of guy—that it really was a good distraction from what had just happened in the sheriff's office. Really, it was hard to continue feeling anything about what had happened at all: it had been so horrible and so wholly bizarre that it already felt like a nightmare that she'd long since woken up from.

The woman who owned the Sun and Moon Boutique seemed as if she'd been waiting all day for a woman with a priest to walk into her shop and ask, "What do you have for evil spirits?" because when Sherry did exactly that, she sprang into action immediately without taking even a moment or two to gloat. Sherry left laden with crystals and herbs and special candles and bags full of salt that Sherry was assured was blessed salt and not just the regular non-iodized natural hippie salt that you could buy for somewhat alarming prices at the grocery co-op in Albany. Then they parted ways, with Father Barry promising once again that he'd call his bishop to ask for help, and Sherry heading straight to the library. She needed to do some research.

The Winesap Library wasn't particularly rich in books about the occult. Sherry grabbed what they had and then ducked behind the circulation desk to check herself out while Connie was in the restroom. She tried to be as fast as she could, but Connie caught her, anyway. "Sherry, I just heard about what happened to poor Alan, I'm so—" Her eyes caught on the cover of one of the books Sherry was checking out then, and she stopped. The title, in eye-catching bright red, read: When the Dead Speak.

Sherry felt her face go warm. "Thank you," she said, and then shoved all the books into her gigantic purse and briskly trotted off. She was already well clear of the library when it occurred to Sherry that now she'd have to go back to her own demon-haunted house and spend the next however many hours completely alone.

She occupied herself for about half an hour with placing crystals in their designated spots around her house and pouring the special salt across the windows and doorways, which she immediately regretted. The salt might or might not repel demons, but either way it would get tracked all over her house and she'd have to spend an hour trying to vacuum it out of the rugs. Then she made herself a sandwich and started reading about hauntings and possessions. She'd never been extremely interested in horror stories—they gave her bad dreams—and their sudden relevance to her personal life didn't make them into more enjoyable reading. By six o'clock it was getting dark in her living room, and she was rattled enough to shut all the books, turn on all the lights, switch on the usually neglected television for company, and pour herself a generous serving from her dusty old bottle of brandy.

At some point she must have fallen asleep, because she woke up to the sound of a man's voice very close to her ear. "Woman!" the voice said. "This isn't the time for you to sleep! It's only just gone past six, woman, and I have yet to sup!"

Sherry kept her eyes closed. Whoever was speaking to her was a demon, presumably, and she didn't want to look at it. It was probably hideous and would give her nightmares if she survived this encounter, and opening her eyes wasn't very likely to improve her chances of making it out alive. She'd never been a fast sprinter or learned to do kung fu, and from her experience of reading Stephen King novels, she doubted that either of those skills would do much against an evil spirit, anyway. If she was going to die, she would die without having to look at some horrible monster's disgusting drippy face first.

"Woman!" said the voice again. It was coming from very close to her face. It was a deep voice, with a Masterpiece Theatre sort of English accent. Not a particularly frightening voice, really. Sort of…jolly. "Get up! Time is passing by apace!"

Sherry cracked one eye open. There was no demon. All she could see, a few inches from her nose, was the familiar furry little visage of her fat orange cat. He was sitting on the arm of the sofa where the fabric was already pretty well shredded.

"Lord Thomas Cromwell?" Sherry said, astonished. Then the penny dropped. "Oh, no."

"If you hadn't wanted me here," Lord Thomas Cromwell said, "then you oughtn't have given the beast my name."

"You speak awfully modern English, for a Tudor politician," Sherry said. Her heart rate was starting to slow. She couldn't feel that frightened of Lord Thomas . Once she'd had to rescue him after he'd gotten his head stuck in a soup can. "You talk like a Tudor whose dialogue is being written by a bad American screenwriter." She was starting to suspect that, whatever sort of creature was responsible for the goings-on in Winesap, it definitely watched too much television.

"You're pert above your station, woman," the cat said. Then, more mulishly: "And I want my supper."

"Are you actually the real Lord Thomas Cromwell?" Sherry asked. "What was being executed like?"

"Never you mind," the cat said. He was speaking without his mouth moving, which was a relief. She didn't want to see how the demon puppeteering her cat would attempt to adapt his lipless little mouth to accommodate human speech. "You ask questions above your station, too. Why are you talking when you could be preparing food or investigating murders?"

"You're a cat," Sherry said. She was starting to feel less worried and more as if she was enjoying herself a little. "You don't have a station . You can't operate the can opener on your own. If you want to eat, you'll have to behave yourself. Why would the tormented spirit of Lord Thomas Cromwell be interested in a murder investigation in Winesap, New York? Are you sure that you aren't just the same… individual that I was speaking to earlier, in the sheriff's office?"

The cat was silent for a moment. She couldn't glean much from his expression, because he was a cat. It was possible that he was trying to scowl at her but failing due to a lack of eyebrows. Eventually he cleared his throat, which struck her as somehow an even stranger thing for a cat to do than speak English and demand murder investigations. The sound was definitely too deep to have come from his precious weensy little throat. "It's a bit complicated," he said. Then he stood up onto all four paws and said, "And what of my supper, woman?"

"You won't get any supper if you keep calling me woman ," Sherry said. "It's Miss Pinkwhistle to you."

"Do you really see yourself as fit to make demands of me , woman?" the cat said.

"Yes," Sherry said. "Don't you test me, Lord Thomas. I might run the vacuum cleaner."

As far as a cat could be said to ever look alarmed, Lord Thomas Cromwell did. "There's no need to resort to violence!" he said. "I'm sure that we can come to some satisfaction, Miss Pinkwhistle. What do you want from me?"

"What do you want from me ?" Sherry countered. "I'm not the one possessing your cat. You can't just come into a woman's home, possess her cat, demand supper, and then demand that she issue demands. Who are you, and what are you doing here? It's complicated doesn't count as an explanation."

"Convincing you to investigate the murder," Lord Thomas said. "Why won't you just do as you're told ?"

"Because I don't want to," Sherry said. "Why do you care so much? What's going on here? Who are you? Is it some kind of—human sacrifice cult? But why do you want me to find the murderer ?" It sounded insane. It was insane. She was talking to a cat .

" I don't care about your petty human murders," said the cat. Then he lowered his voice. "This is all at the behest of her ."

" Her? " Sherry repeated. She found herself almost whispering, which would have probably felt less ridiculous if she hadn't been whispering to her cat. "Who do you mean?"

"She doesn't have a name," Lord Thomas said. "To call her her is a mere convenience. Creatures like her don't have a sex. When she takes a form, it's often that of a beautiful young woman, but sometimes it's an old man or a lost child. She's an old thing, and a cruel one. She used to steal pretty children or handsome young men and take them as her playthings. Now she has found a new dollhouse to amuse herself with."

"Winesap?"

"Winesap," the cat agreed. "And you, Miss Pinkwhistle."

Sherry resolutely didn't allow herself to shiver. "And where do you come in?"

Lord Thomas shifted uncomfortably. It was adorable. Then he said, "She has conscripted me into her service after I, through no fault of my own, unwittingly earned her ire."

Sherry raised her eyebrows. No one used that many words to say that something wasn't their fault when they were completely innocent. "What did you actually do, Sir Thomas?"

He did more shifting back and forth between his sweet little orange paws. Then he muttered, "I tried to eat her."

Sherry blinked. " What? "

"She had taken the form of a gleaming white moth," Sir Thomas said with enormous dignity. "I can't be held responsible for my actions."

"Are you usually a cat?" Sherry asked, momentarily distracted from trying to find out more about the malevolent spirit who'd taken over the town. Cats did seem as if they struggled to resist trying to eat moths, gleaming white or otherwise.

"I am Lord Thomas Cromwell ," Lord Thomas Cromwell said grandly, then lowered his voice and said, "I am more frequently a Lord of Cats."

"Oh," Sherry said. She didn't feel as if there was much else that she could say, really. The cat was looking at her expectantly, though, so she tried: "You must be very important."

"I am, yes," the cat said, and took a moment to polish his ears. Then he lowered his voice again and said, "Have you any more of that salt?"

Sherry started to say yes. The cat hissed at her. Sherry blinked. "What—"

The cat shook his head, then nodded, then, surreally, held his paw up to his lips.

"Oh!" Sherry said, then winced, put a hand over her own mouth, and scurried to her bags of New Age supplies to get the special salt. She held it out to the cat, who narrowed his eyes and pawed at the air to remind her that he didn't have hands to take it with. She blushed. He jumped off the arm of the sofa and began trotting around the coffee table counterclockwise. Around and around. She stared. He stopped, gave a disgusted yowl, then stared pointedly at the salt. "Oh, right!" she said. He started trotting in his circle again. She followed him, pouring salt as she went, and thinking sadly about how she was going to have to move the coffee table if she wanted to drag the rug outside to really shake all the salt out. Once the circle was complete, the cat jumped onto the coffee table. Sherry eyed it, then very carefully sat, hoping that the legs would hold up.

The cat cleared its throat. "Now that we have blessed this altar," he said, "we may speak more freely."

"Oh, good," said Sherry. She waited for a moment. The cat stared up at her with his lemon-lime eyes. She stared back at him. "Well?"

The cat hunkered in closer. "I would like to suggest that we strike a bargain."

Sherry frowned. "What kind of bargain?"

"She has tasked me with making sure that you play your part in her game," Lord Thomas Cromwell said. "She wants you to investigate her latest little killing."

"Not little," Sherry said.

Lord Thomas blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"Not little," Sherry said. "It was Alan . His death wasn't little ." She felt slightly sick. " None of them were little. All of them mattered. I was just—in a play. In a dream. Until it was Alan. It wasn't real until it was Alan." Shame was dripping down her throat. It should have been real to her before. It was a child's morality to only care about things that happened to her, personally. Her ex-husband had always said that she thought like a child. "Don't call it little again," she said. "None of them. None of them were little deaths."

"Very well," the cat said after a pause. "She wants you to investigate this latest murder. She has tasked me to chivy you into obeying. And what do you want?"

"For the killings to stop," Sherry said. "For her to go away." And for Alan back, but she wasn't going to say that aloud to a possibly evil talking cat. There was the chance that he could take her seriously. She shivered.

"Precisely," said the cat. "I know her, as much as a thing like her can be known. If she can be destroyed, that is a thing that isn't known. That is a secret that has been forgotten. But creatures like her can be beaten back, for a time, by creatures like you."

"Like me ?" Sherry asked, and looked down at herself, in a dreadful stupid moment of imagining that her life might have turned into enough of a piece of supernatural fiction for her to have transformed into something special as well, something young and fit and attractive, wearing lots of black leather with a weapon strapped to her thigh. No such thing had occurred. She was still just herself, just ordinary Sherry. Too old and plump and badly dressed to be a heroic demon-fighting protagonist. It was unfortunate that she was the only person around available to take on the role. There was no one in Winesap, as far as she could think, who wouldn't look very silly in leather pants. But maybe the cat saw something in her that she couldn't see in herself? That was the sort of thing that sometimes happened to protagonists.

"Yes," said the cat. "A human creature like you."

" Oh ," Sherry said, slightly embarrassed. "Human. Yes, I am…that. Absolutely. What can I do , exactly? I don't have any, you know. Special skills." She imagined herself wielding, possibly, nunchucks. The image was a dispiriting one.

"Have you heard of the creatures called vampires ?" asked the cat, in the tone of voice of a specific type of man asking a woman if she'd ever heard of a particular very obscure and sophisticated band.

"Yes," Sherry said. "I've read lots of books about them. Why?"

"Oh," said the cat, in the tone of voice of the same man who has discovered, to his great disappointment, that the woman has seen the obscure and sophisticated band perform live on several occasions. "I see. Then you know that they are said to sup upon human blood."

" Sup upon ," Sherry repeated. "Yes, I know. What does this have to do with me fighting demons?"

"The vampire," Lord Thomas said, "has great strength and the power of flight. But the human has the blood ."

Sherry frowned. "So," she said, "the human—me—I have something that she wants."

"That she needs ," he said. "Your mind. Your attention. Your belief in her."

"But I don't believe in demons, or spirits, or—whatever she is. I mean, I didn't, until the sheriff tried to spin his head around and my cat started talking to me. Should I just ignore you? How's that supposed to work?"

"You may not think that you believe in things that hide in the dark," the cat said. "You do, though. It's in the hollows of your bones. Your heart quickens when you see a shadow through the window. All human creatures believe in the older things. All human creatures were raised with their own understanding of them. It is your understanding of such spirits that has altered much of her behavior already. Fortunately for you, I am a creature well-versed in the sorts of fairy stories that you were fed upon as a whelp."

"Now you're just being rude ," Sherry said. "I don't even know what kind of animal has whelps, but I know that it isn't people. And I have no idea what you're actually trying to tell me." It had occurred to her, in a burst of misery, that this could all be nothing but some sort of weird trick or mind game—or, even worse, that she really had simply gone crazy. If that was the case, then she truly was in trouble. Everything about her life had become so strange and frightening that it was difficult to say what, exactly, was likely to be a figment of her imagination, and if she had gone so far as to imagine an entire string of murders that she had solved, then she was so utterly disconnected from reality that there was probably nothing that could be done to help her. Unless it was LSD in the water supply or ergot at the local bakery, she supposed. At this point, she could only hope for ergot.

"I am trying to offer you a deal," the cat said, clearly happily oblivious to the crisis Sherry was undergoing. "You will continue to investigate, so as to appease her. In this way you shall keep her, as the saying goes, off of my sleek, soft back . In return, I shall offer you guidance…in your greater understanding of her."

Sherry frowned. "What does that mean, exactly? What will you do, specifically?"

The cat lowered his voice to a whisper. "Don't speak so loudly! Your emotions call to her. What I will do, exactly, is advise you on how it is that she might be defeated. If you have questions to ask, it might be that I will be able to answer them."

"You know how to defeat her?" Sherry asked. "So tell me, then. Won't that solve both of our problems?"

The cat hissed at her. "Not so loud! No, I cannot simply tell you. To fight a creature like her is a matter of subtlety. The right weapon for one man might be the undoing of another. You must use your own discernment to discover which weapon calls to your hand. I may advise you, but I may not tell you the way."

Sherry had never been an avid reader of high fantasy—she preferred the sorts of stories that involved interesting things happening to ordinary people in the real world, for the slightly embarrassing reason that it made it easier for her to imagine getting to go on an adventure of her own—but she'd been around for long enough to recognize a genre convention when she was fed one by her own fat marmalade cat. "That," she said, "sounds like a very thin plot contrivance."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Prithee, sir," Sherry said, "that sounds like you just made it up."

The cat puffed up his tail at her. "Of course it's made up ," he said. "As are all things that matter. If you and I stood before a priest and asked to be married now, we would be refused, but had I the shape of a man, the priest could say a few words and bind us unto eternity in the eyes of all laws on earth and heaven. What aspect of that is not made up? My form and yours, the words, earthly law? Belief, all of it. Adherence to convention. A convention much younger than I am, woman, and laws that were made when she was already older than most rivers. She hews to more ancient laws. And so must you, Mistress Pinkwhistle, if you hope to have the best of her."

If someone had been there to ask how Sherry had felt as the cat spoke, she would have been forced to admit to how all the hairs on her arms were prickling. She tried to act unaffected. "Or what? What will happen if I just ignore you?"

"Then you shall carry on as you have been," he said. "And labor as a mummer in her little murder plays. Perhaps more of your mortal companions will be the next to die for the sake of her amusement. What is the pinch-faced astrologer's name?"

Sherry was starting to feel sick again. More murders. She might be trapped like this forever: endlessly chasing after killers at the whim of…someone. Something. Her. It rankled at her a bit to have to take the deal. The problem was that the cat held all the cards, despite his lack of thumbs. "She's a psychologist , not an astrologer. And you can quit threatening my friends. I should have named you something else, Lord Thomas. You haven't turned into a more pleasant person over the centuries. Thomas More probably would have made a nicer cat."

"That's what you say, Mistress Pinkwhistle," Lord Thomas said. "But only because you've never had to sit through a dinner with Thomas More. The only thing more unbearable than his sanctimony was his halitosis."

"You're just jealous that you never had a flattering Oscar-winning movie made about you," Sherry told him. "And your breath smells like cat food."

The cat gave a deep, old-man, "Hm!" which was almost as unnerving as when he cleared his throat. Then he said, "Do we have a deal, woman?"

" Mistress Pinkwhistle ," she reminded him. His faux-Tudor syntax was weirdly contagious. "And I suppose that we do. Though I'm only agreeing under protest."

"I'll have the stenographer enter your protestation into the record," said the cat. It was a particularly bad bit of dialogue for an English lawyer from the 1500s. Stenographers hadn't even been invented , for goodness' sake. Sherry was getting the sense that this Lord of Cats wasn't taking any of this very seriously, which she supposed was exactly what you would expect from a Lord of Cats, when she thought about it. Then, even more absurdly, Lord Thomas held out one little furry paw. "We shall swear our oath on a handshake."

Sherry shook the paw. She managed to keep herself from giggling until after she'd released it, for fear of his claws. "Deal," she managed. Then, because she couldn't help herself, she said, "Is it really a handshake, considering?"

She expected the cat to say something rude and sarcastic in return. Instead, he only hopped off the coffee table and trotted toward the kitchen with his tail held high in the air, pausing only to say, " Meow ."

Sherry blinked. Then she frowned. "Are you really just a cat again?"

Sherry's cat didn't respond to her question. In ordinary circumstances, this wouldn't have made her feel uncomfortable. She eyed him. "I'm not letting you sleep in my bedroom either way."

The cat ignored her and continued into the kitchen. A moment later she heard him start to scream for his dinner exactly like he usually did.

There was, she thought, not very much difference in the behavior of a cat and a high-handed, chauvinistic Tudor autodidact in the body of a cat. The only thing to truly set them apart was the vocabulary. She sighed. Then she got up and went to the kitchen to open a new can of horrible salmon-flavored wet food.