The Catswold Portal

She lingered before a hardware store, then stood looking into a dress shop. A sign reading “tool rental” meant nothing to her. But she remembered the art store.

Where the street dead-ended and a cross street cut through, she recognized the Greyhound station. She remembered riding the Greyhound to the city across a huge bridge. As she stood looking, a big black dog came around the corner and stopped, staring at her, his head lowered. She watched him warily. He sniffed her scent, and his lips drew back in a snarl. She backed away. He crouched to chase her and she fled through a shop door, slamming it in his face.

She was in a tea room. The tables had white cloths. It was half full of people eating small, leisurely meals. The smell of hot pastries stirred her hunger. She longed for a cup of tea and something delicious and sweet. She watched a man pay for his meal and she knew suddenly that she had no upperworld money.

She realized, shocked, that she was remembering not one world, but two.

Confused, light-headed, she left the tea room quickly, pushing out onto the street.

There was not one world, but two.

When she was able to look around her again, she saw that the dog was gone. Watching for him, she wandered the village—trying to jar her memory, trying to put pieces together. Certainly, whatever that other world was, it was far different from this world.

She looked at herself in a shop window, her figure an indistinct smear among shattered light and reflections. She touched the cloth of her dress and she remembered a loom. She fingered her jeweled bracelet and was aware of caves, and of a metal pick in her hand. Slowly she was able to reach back to that world, to glimpse stone ridges and stone sky and dark, cavernous wastes. Slowly, the Netherworld returned to her. Then suddenly and vividly she saw Mag’s cottage, then Affandar Palace. She saw Efil’s chambers; she saw the black bedposts carved into four leering Hell Beasts.

It was in that chamber that she had been changed into a cat.

She was Catswold. Half woman, half cat.

And she was still hungry.

She examined her bracelet again, and then turned back up the street, to the jewelry shop she had passed. She went in boldly, removing a small diamond bob from among the bangles.

The bland-faced, pudgy jeweler was reluctant to accept a jewel she had removed so casually. He looked at it in his glass, then asked to examine the whole bracelet. She gave it over, explaining patiently that she needed money. He looked for a long time at the individual jewels. When finally he made an offer, the amount had no meaning for her. She folded the paper bills into her pocket under his puzzled, uneasy gaze, and headed for the tea shop.

In the art store Braden bought half a dozen tubes of paint and some linseed oil, then he stopped at the Greyhound station for a paper to see the reviews of last night’s opening at the de Young, then went across to Anthea’s for breakfast. He ordered from Betty Jane, hiding a grin because her hair was the same too-red tangle that had always amused Alice. He asked how Betty Jane’s mother was doing in the nursing home, then settled back to read the art page to see what Mettleson had said about his award in the annual. One thing about Rye, he got work around to the shows without Braden having to bother with it. This was one of the Coloma paintings, one of the semi-abstracts of ferns growing inside the roofless brick ruins of an old gold rush bank building. Rye had borrowed it from a collector for the show. Mettleson said it was “…reality blown apart and reassembled into lyric tapestry without seeming to have been rearranged, so discerning is West’s eye for the essence of pure abstract poetry that exists in the everyday world.”

Sure, Mettleson. Poetry. But the review pleased him. He was finishing his eggs and ham when his attention was caught by a girl just coming into the tea shop. She started in but suddenly she turned back, returning to the sidewalk and standing at the curb with her back to the window. The one glimpse he had of her was striking: a tangle of brown hair framing a cleanly sculptured face, gorgeous eyes fringed by thick, dark lashes. Now she stood looking up the street as if she were waiting for someone. Watching her, he began to see a painting—the girl’s figure framed by the red awning, the white letters of the awning making abstract shapes against her hair, and these patterns blending into the blue building across the street. The whole scene was contorted by light warping across the glass. He made a sketch on his napkin, a quick memory-jogging study.