Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 13

Louie's Lucky Number Is Up

Hello. Here I am again, in my old, familiar spot.

Lucky Thirteen.

Have you ever considered that thirteen is just thirty-one spelled backwards, as in October thirty-first? That is no doubt how the association of the number thirteen with ill luck began, with All Hallows' Eve, and flying witches and furred familiars like black cats.

All a filthy lie. The only witch I have ever associated with was the stuffed one in The Wizard of Oz exhibit at the MGM Grand Hotel, and she was not talking (unless they turned on her recorded message). Even she was not such a bad old egg. A nose job and a wen removal would have cheered up her outlook considerably.

But now I am surrounded by witches in peaked hats, with nasty painted-on faces that would stop an hourglass in mid-dribble, some of them only three feet high. So here it is. Near midnight, and here I am on the sandy lot outside the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead. Inside, people are shrieking in happy terror.

This is an alien notion to me, that people would go out of their way to be scared. There is enough scary about the normal world to last a lifetime, if you ask me. I cannot imagine seeking out the paranormal to add to the toll.

Of course, to some, the extraordinary is glamorous. Some might no doubt find Karma intriguing. I find her a pain in the psyche, not to mention the keister, which is generally a site unmentionable in polite circles.

Still, I am here, and she is not, and that is one of the many advantages of the purely physical state, in which I have happily disported myself for, lo, these many years. (Although some would seem to be intent on taking away my happy disportment and replacing it with the usual boredom, responsibility and male-pattern hair loss.)

Certainly Miss Temple Barr has not assured me a stress-free life by blocking my only means of slipping out to sniff the poppies now and then. I am miffed enough that I would not trouble myself to worry about what is happening to her in the programmed chaos within, were I not such a sterling fellow.

I recall my last visit to this site in relative daylight, when I was routed by a gang of do-gooders who wished to save my soul by catching me, locking me up and no doubt practicing culturally sanctioned genital mutilations upon me, all for my own good.

But I remain free and whole, and fairly invisible if I keep out of the rainbow of spotlights targeting the grotesque facade of the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead. Keeping to the black side of things, I slink around to the back and wait patiently by a low-profile door. This is the service entrance, and although this is not a hotel, I know according to Feline Foundation Rules that if I wait patiently by a service door, it will eventually open to admit or release a human being who very likely carries something and will not notice me flashing by his or her legs and inside.

In due time it happens, as it always does. An open door, a jug of wine coming or going, and I am inside the House of Hard Knocks and Spectral Raps.

As you can imagine, the inhabitants are all too busy haunting or being haunted to much notice a low-lying individual like myself. I skirt what appears to be an informal kitchen, though the scent of cooling pepperoni appeals mightily to my night-chilled nose.

But duty calls, and duty rarely appears in the guise of pepperoni.

So I hoof it up the stairs, careful to tread close to the walls so my not inconsiderable weight does not add any untoward creak-ings to the general commotion. What a strange place this is by night, lit by the special effects! It reminds me of one of those ger-bil layouts that is all interconnected tubes and erratic ups and downs. The gerbils race by in their little open cars, squealing their rodent hearts out, only they are people.

I pause to watch the fireworks beyond them, which flash on and off in the artificial night sky.

I recognize some of the ugliest pugs to grace the TV screen: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, several anonymous witches and Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street (Now there is a guy with a mental health problem; obviously he suffers from tooth-and-nail envy, or he would not be wearing those razor-sharp gloves).

I so forget myself while I am observing the human being's quaint manner of play that I am quite startled when four talons curl into my left shoulder.

"Hsssppphhht!" I say, whirling with my own shivs bared and ready for blood.

'Take it easy, boy," growls a voice I recognize in the dark. Mine papa.

'Then watch out who you surprise from behind in future, Dad-dio."

"Daddio. You kits nowadays have no respect. Where do you learn such terms?"

I am not about to give my own disrespectful daughter credit for my newly hip vocabulary, but I must say it is pleasant to pass the ignominy on. After all, the old man did not hang about the nursery to dote on me and my littermates, did he? As for our mama, she admitted that he had not stuck around long enough afterward to even smoke a cigarette, much less a cigar, when we wee ones arrived in a mewling six-pack a few weeks later.

I ignore his question and address more vital matters, such as territory.

I hope you are not going to abandon your cushy retirement home on Lake Mead to crowd my action here in Vegas. We may be related, but we are not compatible."

"How could an old fellow like me give a young tom like you any competition? Unless you are falling down on the job."

"Not at all. At the moment I am following up on my roommate, who is part of the seance set somewhere upstairs."

"You do not say? I saw the superstitious ninnies trooping upstairs in a body: a sleek shaded silver rhymes-with-witch, a fancy torn with a white blaze on his head and shoulder, a fussy dude with spectacle circles around his eyes, an aging tortie-shell Easter dye-job and a petite Abysscinnamon wrapped in some sort of wallpaper. I guess there was one of those preening little blue-cream types and a no-name all-breed toting a camera. You claim any of the above?"

"What you call an Abysscinnamon. My roommate has great ginger hair, almost a flame-point.

But I do not understand why she is wearing wallpaper. Usually she dresses with more regard for observers' sensibilities than that."

"Maybe she is in disguise so the spooks do not get her. Well, what are you waiting for?

Better trot up the stairs about your business. I cannot leave my station here, so you are on your own, son. I am obliged to show myself and scare the spittle out of these passing people every now and then."

Three O'Clock Louie shakes his big black head. "Who ever thought I would come to making personal appearances in a spook show? But my old dudes enjoy showing me off, I guess. I am the house mascot. I even have special billing on the sign outside, along with the restaurant."

I shrug and sneak up the stairs, leaving behind my old man. I can see that I will have to face the evil Karma foresees alone.

By the time I reach the room in question, it is gone, along with the pack of psychics and Miss Temple Barr in her wallpaper wrappings.

I peer over the abyss, seeing only the black of night. The stairs end in empty space.

What a conundrum. Now that I examine my situation, it is perilous in the extreme. I am perched atop a stairway to nowhere, in the middle of a roller-coaster fretwork of careening cars filled with scared-silly people, while a light show of delusions twinkle like gruesome stars all around me.

What I do not see twinkling around me is Karma's glowing astral projection, that little piece of pussycat pixiedom I call Klinker-bell.

I am not about to slink back down and confess my impasse to my papa.

I am not about to leap into the Unknown.

I am not about to connect with the incorporeal, after all.

To quote the impudent Midnight Louise, "Bummer, pops."