THE cab had just hummed past Monstro Multi-Products' blindingly bright basement show windows, behind which a file of dress display robots marched in an endless figure eight with considerable realism and oodles of suede-rubber glamor, when Juno hunched forward and growled to the driver to stop. She had been silent during most of the ride, as if the whiskey had gone sour in her, and now when Phil made a move to pay she impatiently motioned him aside. He hopped out willingly enough, suddenly eager to see what the Akeley place looked like, as if his hopes and fears had started rotating again when the wheels of the cab stopped.
Juno's reference to "the temple" had half led him to expect Greek columns or an Egyptian portal. Instead he was facing an oblong of darkness, framed by the sidewalk, show windows some distance to either side, and the underpinnings of the two upper streets. He crossed the sidewalk and hesitated, as if he stood on the edge of nothingness. It was really very black, even for the bottom level. The sodium moon had set.
Then, as the after effects of the show window's glare lessened, a house took shape before him - an old, three story house, looking incredibly as if it were built of wood, with roofs slanting oddly and lights gleaming faintly through shuttered bay windows and fanciful dusty fanlights. Something gritted under his foot and he realized that between him and the house was a yard of real dirt, if not grass and weeds. This must have been the ground level of the city some hundred years ago. Now it was the windows of the third story which peered across the gap at the top-level street far above Phil's head. The gap was at one point spanned by a beam. Apparently the house was so ancient and rickety that it needed props.
But then a new illusion presented itself. Phil knew that the house was in the heart of the city, hemmed in by gigantic buildings on every side. There should have been tiers of lighted windows and, far overhead, a square of night sky. Instead there was only darkness, as if the pre-atomic house existed in a private night.
Then headlights of a turning car in the street two levels above swept across the upper third of the house, and he saw that all around the house were surfaces painted a dull, non-reflecting black. The flat black "ceiling" could hardly be a foot above the top of the house's highest spire.
"Some legal business," Juno explained, coming up beside him. "Jack wunct told me sumpin about it. Seems the original owners couldn't be rooted out, but the city seized the air-rights and built over them. Creepy place, looks as if it were about to rot apart - just right for those Akeleys." Then, more loudly, "Well, I said I was going to bust in on them, and I am. C'mon."
Phil followed her across the yard to the rickety steps leading to the porch. His hand groping for the rail touched peeling ancient paint. Halfway up a cat darted past him. For a moment he was swallowing his heart, then as the cat paused at the top he saw that it was splotched with some sort of dark and light colors - hardly Lucky. It loped around a corner of the porch. Following it, Phil and Juno found themselves facing a six-paneled door lit by a dingy globe, which Phil guessed must be an ancient tungsten-filament lamp. There was no sign of the cat, or indication of how it could have vanished, until Phil noticed a tiny and possibly swinging door cut in the bottom of the big one.
Ignoring a cat-headed knocker, green with verdigris, Juno pounded on the door in a way that made Phil hunch his shoulders and duck his head, keeping an apprehensive eye on the ceiling. But the house didn't collapse.
After a time a peephole opened above the knocker and a watery gray eye surveyed Juno.
"I want to see that no-good husband of mine," she shouted, but it didn't seem her usual self-confident roar.
"Now Juno, you're all upset," came the response in a voice Phil recognized as that of Sacheverell Akeley. "Your aura's all muddy; I can hardly see you through it."
"Listen here," Juno bellowed, "you let me in or I'll bust your lousy house down."
Phil thought that, even granting some lack of certainty in Juno, this was not a threat to be taken lightly, but it didn't faze Sacheverell. "No, Juno," he said firmly. "I can't let you in when your vibrations are like that, and when hate hormones are streaming off you. Later perhaps - then we may even be able to help you achieve inward tranquility - but not now."
"But look," Juno complained in surprisingly docile tones, "I got a friend with me that's got business with you." She stepped aside.
"What business?" Sacheverell asked skeptically.
Phil looked straight at the oysterish eye and said, "The green cat."
The door swung back and Sacheverell, now no longer in orange beret and pants, but a robe of bronze embroidered green, waved Phil in with an arm that swished emerald silk. His sunburn now seemed the exotically dark complexion of an Asian mystic. "All doors must open to him who speaks that name," he said simply. "Do you vouch for your companion's peacefulness?"
"Ah, I wouldn't touch anybody or anything here," Juno growled surlily, shouldering in after Phil. "I feel smutched enough already."
"From filth the roses spring, Juno," Sacheverell reminded her gently, "and good blooms from evil. Be happy that you are to share in the great transformation."
Phil found himself standing on the threshold of a large living room twisting with streams of gray incense and cluttered with Victorian furniture and a bric-a-brac of ornaments and objects suggesting every religion in the world. The lights here, too, were tungstens, and so few as to make many shadows. At the far end of the room was a large doorway, heavily curtained with black velvet. Through the resinous odor of incense came the dull reek of stale food, clothes and people; also a sour animal smell.
And then Phil saw that the place was simply alive with cats: black, white, topaz, silver, taupe; striped, mottled, banded, pied; short haired, Angora, Persian, Siamese and Siamese mutant. They dripped from chair tops and shelves; they peered brightly from under little tables and dully from suffocating-looking crevices between cushions; they pattered about or posed sublimely still. One stretched full length on the woven Koran in the center of a Moslem prayer rug; another lay on a tarnished silver pentacle inlaid in a dark, low table. One was battling a phylactery hanging from the wall, making the little leather box swing and jump; another was nosing a small steatopygous, multi-mammiferous figurine; yet another was lazily entangling itself in a rosary; two were lapping dirty looking milk from a silver chalice set with amethysts.
And then for a second time Phil was gulping his heart, for in the center of a mantelpiece over a real fireplace, and midway between a gilded icon and a tin Mexican devil-mask, there posed most sublimely still of all, with forelegs straight as spears... the green cat.
As Phil walked hypnotically forward, he heard Sacheverell say gently, "No, that is not his true self, but his simulacrum, his ancient Egyptian harbinger, a figure of Bast, the Lady of Life and Love."
And as Phil came closer, he saw it truly was the bronze statue of a cat, encrusted with verdigris almost exactly the hue of Lucky's coat. Coming up beside him, Sacheverell explained, "As soon ashe came, I routed out all our relics of Bast. Most of them are in there," he indicated the black velvet curtains, "around the altar. But a few are here." And he pointed out, beside the bronze statue, a small mummy case and inside it the linen-banded mummy of a cat, looking like a little sack with a blob at the top. As Sacheverell was explaining the tiny Canopic jar of preserved cat entrails beside it, a six-toed Siamese wandered up and sniffed the mummy thoughtfully.
Finally Phil found his voice. "Then you actually do have Lucky?"
Sacheverell's high curved eyebrows curved still higher. "Lucky?"
"The green cat," Phil added.
Sacheverell's face grew serenely grave. "No one has the green cat," he reproved Phil. "It would not be permitted. He has us. We are his humble worshippers, his primal hierophants."
"But I want to see him," Phil said.
"That will be permitted," Sacheverell assured Phil, "when he wakes and the world changes. Meanwhile, compose yourself, er... Phil Gish, you say? Phil... philo... love... an auspicious name."
"Why the mucking hell is this green cat so important, anyhow? What is it?"
The two men turned. Juno was still standing on the threshold. She was swayed forward a little, hugging her elbows, yet had her shoulders squared and was glaring at them surlily, like a rebellious schoolgirl.
"The green cat is love," Sacheverell told her softly. "The love that blossoms even from hate."
There was another interruption. This one took the form of a coy, girlish snicker. Phil turned to the side of the room he had not yet inspected closely, the one facing the fireplace. In it was a deep, wide bay window closely shuttered with gray jalousies, as were all the other windows in the room except for one fronting on darkness beside the fireplace. In the bay was a semicircular couch on which Mary Akeley sprawled adolescently, still in black sweater and stiff, red skirt.
"You know," she said, "I just can't get used to the idea of loving everything. Sacheverell says I've got to be nice to my little people and stop sticking hatpins in them and things, but it's hard."
For a morbid moment Phil thought she was referring to the cats. Then he saw that there were a series of narrow shelves behind her, starting at the top of the couch and going halfway up the bay and that these shelves were crowded with dolls. Moving closer, he saw they were not ordinary dolls, but extremely realistic human figures, most of them about six inches high. He had never seen dolls so perfectly formed or realistically dressed. There must have been two or three hundred. They stood behind Mary like the cross-section of a crowded three-level street in some tiny living world. In front of the couch was a low table crowded with blocks of wax, molds, micro-tools and magnifiers, several partially completed figurines and piled squares of fabrics so delicate they must have been woven specially.
"You like my little people?" he heard Mary ask him. "Most everyone does. I got started out making striptease dolls, but these that are all my own are so much more fun. Sacheverell, I think they like having pins stuck through them. I think that's the way they want to be loved."
"Perhaps, my dear," Phil heard Sacheverell say with an affectionate chuckle, "but we'll have to wait to see howhe feels about it."
And then Phil saw that the dolls represented actual individual people, were apparently perfect statuettes of them - so perfect that for a moment he found himself wondering which was the real world: the big one or this tiny one of Mary's. He recognized President Barnes, the USSR's Vanadin, square-jawed John Emmet of the Federal Bureau of Loyalty, several TV and handie stars, Sacheverell, about eight versions of Mary herself, Jack Jones in black tights, Juno in maroon ones, Dr. Romadka and - he caught his breath - Mitzie Romadka in an evening frock very much like the one he'd seen her wearing.
"Recognizing friends?" Mary asked softly, her young face which was so predominantly nose and chin poking up inquisitively toward his.
Footsteps clumped. Phil realized that Juno had finally come into the room and was standing behind him looking at the dolls. Mary looked past him with an innocent smile. "They're awfully cute, aren't they?" she remarked.
Juno said, "Ugh!"
"Try to be joyful," Sacheverell kindly admonished with a little wag of his finger. "Try hard. Soon it will be ever so much easier. I mean, whenhe wakes. I must go now and see if there has been any change. Amuse yourselves." And having lightly set them that stupendous task, he hurried from the room, his green robes whistling against the black velvet curtains.
"Sacheverell's been as efficient as can be ever sincehe came," Mary observed. "A great little manager. I've never seen him so peppy before about anything. He's gone in for other things, you know," she prattled on. "Semantic Christianity, neo-Mithraism, Bhagavad-Gita, Gospel according to St. Isherwood, Bradburian Folkism, Cretan Triple-Goddess, devil worship and Satanism - those are the two thatI like - and I don't know what all else. Every time he finds himself a new one, he gets very enthusiastic, but not like this. I've never seen him so serious. Ever since Jack handed him the green cat, all cute and curled-up and sleeping -"
"It wasn't sleeping," Phil cut in almost sharply. "It had been knocked out by a stun-gun."
"Don't be ridiculous," Mary went on. "Jack just found him sleeping. Well, as soon as Sacheverell touched him, Sacheverell told us that the world was going to change and there was going to be a new era of love and understanding, and ever since then he's been as busy as a little bee. Soon as we got home, he whirled around and got out all the Bast things. I told Sacheverell that because Bast was a lady goddess, maybe we shouldn't call himhe. But Sacheverell told me no, that was the way it was and the way it had to be. And I guess maybe he's right, because when Sacheverell carried him through here sleeping, all the little cats went for him in a big way, and the little girl cats went for him even more than the little boy cats. And anyway, I always trust Sacheverell's notions because he's so good at esping and telepathing that he makes half our living by it."
At that moment there was a strangled grunt and Phil heard the clumping begin again behind him. Mary smiled slyly and followed Juno with her eyes, but kept on babbling.
"And you know," she said, "I guess there is something to what Sacheverell says about an era of love and understanding, because these little cats used to fight all the time, but ever sincehe's been in the house they've been as peaceful as anything - a regular little cat UN without Russia and the satellites. Even I feel sweeter, which is a real test, though it's going to break my heart not to be able to hate people." She sighed. "Still, if everybody's going to have to love people, I'll just have to face it, and I better start practicing right now."
Phil, who had been leaning toward her, jerked up at that. Her face was just a bit too like a young crone, despite her inviting lips and creamy skin, but she merely reached behind her and took down the doll of Juno. "Even loveher," she said.
The footsteps changed direction and came stamping up. Juno's face was brick red from rage or outraged modesty.
"You put me down!" she demanded. "I know what you are, you're a witch. There was one on the next farm back in Pennsylvania. Only witches make wax dolls of people and stick pins in them."
For answer Mary gave the figurine an affectionate stroke. "No, Juno, I'm going to have to love you and you're going to have to get used to it." She looked up sweetly at Juno, who writhed at every touch Mary gave the figurine. "Incidentally, I really am a witch and if I had any choice, I would much rather stick needles through you."
"Put me down!" Juno bellowed, raising her arms with all the muscles standing out tautly underneath the long, tight sleeves of her dress, as if she had a big rock she was going to drop on Mary.
Mary complied without haste and took down another of the figurines. Her voice was soft as a serpent gliding. "Would you rather I practiced loving on Jack? That's what you make me do."
"Don't you touch him!" Juno's face was almost purple. "Bad enough your going all gooey over him in the flesh, but this is worse. Stop touching him that way! Aaaaah!"
Phil ducked back as, with the last screaming bellow, Juno kicked the work table to one side so that its contents scattered and all the cats went scampering under tables and chairs. "I'm going to smash every last one of those dolls," Juno announced, advancing.
Instantly Mary rose to her knees on the couch, her back to her little people, her arms outstretched protectingly to either side.
"Straight through the eyes," she hissed, her face a fury's mask, "that's whereyour needles are going. Get thee before me, Satan!"
Phil never found out whether Juno was, as she seemed, a bit cowed by the diabolical venom in Mary's voice, for just then there was a frantic padding of feet on the stairs and Jack Jones and Cookie burst into the room from the hall.
"Juno!" Jack yelled. "I told you I'd kill you if you ever came here!"
In the ensuing moment of silence Cookie could be heard to confirm primly, "He will, too."
Juno turned on Jack, assuming the stance of a bear. "Listen, you ten-timing little stinker, you're going straight home with me." She hitched up her skirt and began to roll up, or rather rip up, the long sleeves of her frock. Her furpiece had already fallen off and her hat hung by a cropped hair.
Meanwhile Jack was surveying the scene and getting a real idea of how much damage had been done.
"Juno," he said aghast, but advancing, "you've been wrecking the place, you've been wrecking the little people, you even brought the Ikeless Joe!" And in passing he gave Phil a shove that sent him up against the wall, his teeth rattling. "Don't you see what you've done, Juno?" Jack continued with poignantly aggrieved indignation, as if he must convince Juno of the enormity of her actions before liquidating her. "You've done the one thing they won't ever forgive, the one thing that'll turn 'em against even me." He was practically tearful. "Don't you realize they're the only two people in the world that mean anything to me? Don't you realize that outside of Mary and Sacheverell, I don't care a fig for anybody?"
Surprisingly to Phil, the retort to this came not from Juno, who was lifting her now bare arms menacingly, but from Cookie.
"Oh, so you don't care anything about me, either," he accused shrilly. "I've suspected it for a long time, and now you say it yourself."
"Shut up, you're just a dumb stooge," Jack told him without looking around.
"Oh, so I'm just a dumb stooge, am I? Well let me tell you, Jackie, Juno's right about one thing and I wish I'd admitted I agreed with her long ago. These Akeleys have turned your head. They've dazzled you."
At that moment Sacheverell came popping back into the room, his brilliant silk robes fairly hissing against the black velvet. "Stop, at once!" he commanded, raising his arm. "You will disturbhis awakening. Rise above hate. Do you realize I can't see anything of you but ink blobs, your auras are so black? Evenhe will be unable to reach you."
"Shut up that silly talk abouthe, "Cookie snarled. "I don't want to hear the word again or anything more about your stupid cults that I had to pretend to be interested in. You've done Jackie quite enough damage as it is. Do you know we could have gotten thousand dollars for that cat you're using for your idiotic mumbo-jumbo? Jack had just stun-gunned it and was all ready to hand it over to Moe Brimstine and collectten thousand dollars, when you have to prance in with thatugly witch of a wife of yours and make like a wizard and flatter Jackie into thinking he was starting a new religion or something and soft talk him into giving you the cat. I hate you. I want to hurt you." And he started toward Sacheverell, walking on his toes and puffing out his sweatered chest like a bright blue fighting cock.
Once again to Phil's surprise, Sacheverell's horrified and reproachful gaze was turned not on Cookie, but Jack.
"Jack," he gasped, "do you mean to tell me you shothim with a stun-gun, that you even dreamed of sellinghim for money? Judas!"
"Now see what you've done," Jack moaned, not at Cookie, but at Juno. "You've spoiled everything."
"I'll spoil you, you rancid little intelleckchul-lover," she roared and ran at him blindly like a novice. Jack's face set itself in a shrewd grimace and he stepped lightly to one side and slipped out a hand for a hold. But just then Juno's professional training seemed to come back to her and she checked herself, smoothly grabbed the wrist of the hand snaking toward her, bent, spun, and sent Jack sailing over her hip in a flying mare that landed him on the silver pentacled table. It toppled with a crash and various religious objects fell from the wall.
Meanwhile, Mary Akeley had picked up a small vise that had broken from her upset work table, and hurled it with great accuracy at Cookie's head, but then Cookie suddenly hurled himself at Sacheverell's throat and the vise passed through the space where Cookie's head had been.
While all this was going on, Phil, completely to his surprise, walked coolly over to the shelves of figurines, carefully picked up that of Mitzie, and put it in his jacket pocket.
When he turned around, Jack had selected a black glass Aztec sacrificial knife from the fallen religious objects and writhed to his knees like a cobra. Juno picked up a rather small, but very solid, brass Buddha.
Nearer the velvet curtains, Cookie had Sacheverell on his back and was choking him, while Sacheverell, though his shoulder was pinned, was industriously trying to beat Cookie on the head with the silver chalice from which the cats had been drinking.
Mary had grabbed up some hatpins and darted forward. She hesitated whom to attack, then started for Cookie - not so much, Phil fancied, to help her husband but because Cookie's "ugly" had rankled.
Never before, not even in the trenches and foxholes, had Phil Gish seen real murder in a human face.
Now he saw it in five.
And then, very suddenly, it wasn't there at all.
The room grew very still. The black glass knife and the chalice clattered from Jack's and Sacheverell's hands. Mary's hatpins struck the floor with a faint, vibrant rattle. Juno's Buddha thudded on the Moslem prayer rug. Cookie's hands unlocked themselves and writhed back, as if ashamed even before they had a message from the brain.
Expressions unlocked too. Hate furrows softened and vanished. Lips that had writhed back from teeth moistly returned. Eyes filled with painful understanding.
Jack said, in a soft, amazed voice, "Juno, you really do love me. You don't just want to own me and shame me as a man."
Juno said, "You really do care what I think, don't you, Jack? Gosh!"
Cookie said, "I didn't realize it, Sacheverell: you partly mean what you say. It isn't all faking."
Mary said, "And you actually want Jack to be happy, Cookie. It isn't simply vanity and envy."
Sacheverell said, "My God, it's happening. And I mostly thought it was a stunt I was stage managing."
As for Phil, his feelings were in that golden sea they'd swum in this afternoon. He felt as if his heart were joined by sensitive strands to those of the five persons around him. It even seemed to him that there were delicate, gossamer wires connecting him to the figurines so that he understood Romadka, Barnes, Vanadin, maybe even himself.
Then, simultaneously with the others, he turned toward the velvet curtains. A few inches above the floor, Lucky's little green head had poked through. It hung there like a large green jewel, flooding them in turn with its mellow rays. Then Lucky pushed all the way through the curtains.
Swiftly, from under tables and chairs, out from the fireplace, and from behind tiers of books, all the other cats appeared and gathered around Lucky in a circle.
"It has begun," Sacheverell whispered happily. "The world is changing."
"Saint Francis of Assisi," Mary murmured weakly, "incarnate in a cat."
Then Lucky walked slowly across the room. The other cats made way for him and then followed him, still keeping a respectful distance. He passed Mary and Cookie, passed Sacheverell, who looked just a shade disappointed, and sprang lightly into Phil's arms.
Phil had never held anything that weighed so little, or felt fur so electric. His chest seemed to him to be rather too small for his heart.
Sacheverell called softly yet ringingly, "You are the chosen one." Phil looked at him and then, with an unreasoning and almost mystical gust of apprehension, at the black window behind him.
The glass in the window was vibrating, circular gray waves were spreading in it from a central spot.
At the same instant he felt his left hand, the one cradling Lucky, go dead. Lucky leaped convulsively in the air and fell perhaps six feet away from him and was still.
The glass in the window shattered all at once and tinkled to the floor, leaving only a few jagged shards around the frame.
Lucky's cat cortege broke up and its members raced into the hall and up the stairs.
Moe Brimstine stepped in through the window, with a suppleness one would never have expected of his huge body. He stood just inside it, gripping a stun-gun in his big mitt. His jowl seemed to Phil to be smeared with the darkness behind him, and his glasses elliptical patches of it.
"There's a couple of boys with orthos out there," Moe said, stepping to one side of the window. "I know you don't want to get yourselves sliced up."
Apparently nobody did, though Phil at least hadn't any idea of what orthos might be.
"Listen carefully, everybody," Moe said. "So long as you forget about all this, so long as you act and think like it never happened, beginning with finding the cat this afternoon, then I'm going to forget all about you. That goes for you, Jack, though you're a dumber bunny than I ever thought and did yourself out of an easy ten - and for you, Juno, and Cookie, too. But if you don't forget, if I get just the littlest hint that you've remembered - well, we won't talk about that." He slowly scanned their faces. "Okay, then," he said, and shifting the gun to his left hand, stepped forward and scooped up Lucky.
"He... he..." Sacheverell mumbled despairingly. Moe looked at him and Sacheverell was quiet.
"How long did this pussy sleep after you stun-gunned it?" Moe asked Jack.
Jack wet his lips. "Almost until now," he said. "Until maybe five minutes ago." Moe backed away toward the window.
Phil felt something moving from inside, something that tortured him into movement, for he certainly didn't want to stir a muscle.
He advanced toward Moe, a shaky step, then a couple, all the while feeling the most exquisite pains racking his torso as it was sliced by imagined orthos.
"Put that cat down," he croaked.
Moe looked at him with utter boredom.
"He's just a nut," he heard Jack assure Moe in an anxious whisper. "He won't cause trouble."
"I can see he is and won't," Moe said drily, shifting the gun to the hand from which Lucky dangled.
But Phil kept on toward the towering figure. He tried to stop, but the torturer inside him wouldn't let him - and now once again the same torturer pried open his teeth and lips.
"Put him down," he repeated. "You can't have him. Nobody can." He raised his fists, but the left one wouldn't close.
Moe looked at him disgustedly. The big fist came toward Phil's jaw, very slowly. Still, there somehow wasn't enough time to get out of the way.