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 mantlepiece 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 as _he_ 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.