My mistress bore in her arms a bladder, thin and shining, which crackled like dry leaves beneath the foot, yet was no leaf; which bent like water, yet spilled none. Witch-skin, I judged it. Blown thin as a soap-bubble and sealed by arts beyond my ken.
She laid it upon the great slab, the "counter," as she calleth it, though it be of stone that hath never known a chisel. The bladder sighed and settled. Something within shifted and clicked, like dice rattling in a cup.
I sat. I watched. I am patient. A cat must be.
Then she drew forth the hoard.
Forsooth, what treasures! Little coffins of bright wax, crimson and amber, each bound about with twisted silver thread. Dark tablets wrapped in gold leaf, glinting like a miser’s buried hoard. And a multitude of kernels, three-coloured, pale, golden, and white, resembling the teeth of some great grinning witch, or harvest-corn pressed into shapes most unnatural.
My mistress laughed.
“Two hundred pieces,” quoth she. “The trick-or-treaters are going to clean me out.”
I knew not what trickery she meant, nor what manner of creature might eat so much. But the kernels demanded investigation.
I struck one with my paw.
It skittered across the floor like a thing possessed. I pursued it with all the valour of my forebears, cornered it beneath a chair, and at last pinned it beneath my paw.
It yielded.
It did not bite.
I counted this a victory.
Thereafter my mistress took up one of the dark tablets, stripped away its golden wrapping, and broke it in twain.
The fragrance that escaped! Bitter at first, then rich, then dark and profound as a cathedral at midnight. I raised my head. My whiskers trembled. Some ancient instinct, older than memory, stirred within me.
Yet I did not approach. I am no fool. A thing that smells so wondrous must needs conceal a terrible enchantment, or else be meant for human consumption.
The latter seemed the more likely, for humans have ever been given to eating things that would make a sensible creature pause.
Thus have I recorded my findings.
These are not soul-cakes, though they be offered in a season when the dead walk near. They are not wards against evil, nor offerings to household spirits, though my mistress may believe otherwise. The golden wrappings are no sacred vestments, and the little coffins contain no saints.
They are some kind of potion. Of this I am certain.
I shall continue my observations from the safety of the hearth, where the floor is warm and the shadows obedient. I abide now in an age of witches, in a house with a woman who commands the light at a touch and speaks to spirits imprisoned in a pane of glass.
The world is stranger than the one I left behind.
And its sweets, I fear, are stranger still.