Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 37

Ghost-talker

Wayward papers still blew across the empty lot surrounding the haunted house, but the sign was gone and the exterior spotlights were turned off.

That made the scene look truly deserted.

The gate leading to the parking lot was chained shut, so Temple left the Storm on a graveled patch off the side street, fender to fender with a provocative sprinkle of vehicles.

One of them was a jet-black Viper.

"Oooh, you'd think that owner would be afraid to leave its black beauty out here all alone in the dark," Electra said. "One of the boys isn't coming unannounced?"

"No Fontanas, just the original cast of the first supernatural farce."

"I wonder who drives the red Miata."

"Let me guess." Temple had an ugly thought. "A short, dark, dangerous man named Crawford Buchanan."

"Oh, that's right! And his cameraman will have to be here too."

"I'll bet he owns the lime-green VW bug. Photographers make almost as little money as freelance PR people."

"And the Astro van?"

"Must be.. . D'Arlene Hendrix. She's so suburban you can practically see 'Car Pool' tattooed on her forehead."

"This is fun. We'll have to watch when everybody leaves if they get into the vehicles we guessed. And the older Oldsmobile?"

"Must be Agatha Welk; that car looks elderly enough to have belonged to Lawrence."

"Lawrence?"

"The late Lawrence Welk. A joke, Electra."

"I don't know how you can joke at a time like this."

"Another obvious owner." Temple pointed to a white Camaro convertible.

Electra nodded. "Mynah Sigmund. If white's her thing, why is her first name so dark? Mynah birds are black."

"Perhaps a not-too-subtle hint that she's a whited sepulcher."

"Just because she's a self-dramatizing man-eater doesn't mean she's a murderer."

"No, but it would be so satisfying if she were, not to mention how well it would play on a TV

Movie of the Week. Tons of actresses would kill for a role like that."

"You do have murder on your mind. I hope you're wrong in thinking that death could make a return engagement tonight."

"Death always makes return engagements, just like taxes."

"What about the professor?"

"He makes return engagements?"

"I don't know about that, but what brought him here?"

"I'd bet the rent-a-car Sentra."

"Well, your little aqua Storm is the cutest."

"Please, cut out the 'cute.' The car's getting a little old in the wheel wells, I suppose, but I don't need a psychic to tell me a new one's not in my future."

"You never know," Electra answered mysteriously.

"When it comes to major purchases, I sure do know. By the time you pay off a car loan, you're yearning for a new one, which is exactly the trap they want you to fall into, so you can sign up for debt again. Not me. That car's a lot cuter now than it was new, because it's paid for."

"I meant, one's fortunes or circumstances can take a sudden turn."

"Maybe. But rarely for the better."

"My, we are pessimistic lately."

"No, just realistic." Temple stopped to gaze up at the former Hello-ween Haunted Homestead's dark exterior. "Funny, you're more scared of what might happen inside a carnival ride, and I'm more worried what is happening in the real world outside."

"When you get to my age, the immaterial seems a lot closer."

"Just what is your age?"

"Ladies of my generation are always coy about that; I think I'll keep up the tradition. Senior solidarity, you know."

"Then you're at least sixty-five, no?"

"Not necessarily. You can join the American Association of Retired Persons at age fifty. So I could be only fifty and still a senior citizen."

"Fifty! That's in ... twenty years. In twenty years I could be officially old?"

"What an outmoded attitude. You're not old until you think so nowadays."

"Then why hide your age?"

Electra thought about it. "Maybe I go for younger men."

"Like Eightball O'Rourke."

"Nonsense."

"You said the same thing when I asked if you kept a cat. I'm beginning to think you have something to hide on every front."

"Makes a woman fascinating, my dear, at any age. And a man, for that matter. If we can't have a few secrets after living all this while, what are we early-middle-aged folks to do?"

"Attend seances and try to find out other people's secrets."

"Good idea." Electra grinned. "Let's go."

They approached the forbidding facade, which was actually spookier unlit.

Temple was thinking about the fact that most of the seance attendees had driven themselves to Las Vegas. Mobility always made murder more feasible. Someone with a car could have easily come out here ahead of time to rig the special effects, including the murder. Max had certainly come and gone at will. And that brought a truly unwelcome thought: Max could have done the murder. Wasn't that exactly what Molina suspected him of? Murder? Just who was she feeding pizzas and disks anyway?

But in general terms, if Max were right, and she had no reason to think he wasn't, even

"genuine" mediums were well aware of the traditional ways to fake manifestations. Where was Max now? Temple wondered more fondly than she would have liked. Also more nervously.

Sleeping, she hoped, as he well deserved after his marathon computer sleuthing session. She had read some printouts before coming. They were virtual tip sheets on how to rig seances, so she was a far more critical participant now than she had ever been. And Max was right.

Gandolph's book was certainly publish-able, especially when tied into his spectacular deception and death. Especially if that death were foul play. Nothing sold books like misfortune and murder.

The world was mean, and man uncouth, but at least there was always an honest buck in it.

"Do we knock?" Electra stared at the huge, snarling gargoyle-face knocker.

"I don't know how Oscar Grant arranged this, or who owns the place, but... let's see if it's open first."

Temple nudged the fake distressed wood, pushing just below an artistically crude imprint of a bloody hand.

The big door swung inward, without the interminable prerecorded creaking noise of Halloween night.

Bare bulbs lit the long narrow hall ahead of them. Torn spray-on cobwebs fluttered like ragged fish fins as Temple and Electra passed. The lurking monsters' empty niches showcased lurid painted backgrounds: cracked stone blocks, Day-Glo paint and fake grouting.

Once Temple and Electra reached the main open part, the layout had lost its earlier eeriness. Now it was simply a vast Hollywood soundstage-size space into which someone had pretzeled a not particularly spectacular roller coaster. Dodging a forest of support structures, they angled for the isolated island of the seance room atop its stalagmite of motorized scaffolding.

"This is weirder than the actual event," Electra commented, echoing Temple's mental evaluation. "We were really sitting up there in the middle of all those circling tracks? I hate to say it, but we were fish in a bowl. It wouldn't be easy for anything to get in there or out of there without being seen by somebody on the ride or in the haunted house proper. It had to be one of us who killed Gandolph. But how, when we were all holding hands?"

"Oldest trick in the business. Fake hand."

"Fake hand?"

Temple nodded. "It worked in the old days, before the Hollywood techmeisters dreamed up stunning artificial limbs. Someone connected to a television show like Dead Zones --"

"Someone like Oscar Grant!"

"--could probably get a state-of-the-art moving hand with warm flesh and everything."

"Ick! That is gross, Temple. Professor Mangel was on my right. Such a firm, warm grip. I'm sure it was his."

"Who was on your left?"

"William Kohler. I think."

"Exactly. You think. Even Gandolph could have been up to something when the lights dimmed. The old-time mediums were busy as one-man or -woman bands when their audiences were in the dark. They used knees, feet, toes, chests, heads, anything to make tambourines chatter and trumpets speak and tables dance. And Gandolph asked especially to sit next to me, remember? Maybe he thought he could fool a greenhorn with a faux limb, especially a gloved one. Now I remember someone patting my knee, after all our hands were linked! I certainly can't swear that I was squeezing pinkies with a real hand. Too much else was going on for me to pay strict attention to assumed stimuli, which is the idea behind seance phenomena."

"And all this is in Mr. Gandolph's book?"

Temple nodded. "Mr. Randolph's. That was his real last name."

"Say, should be a best-seller."

"Yeah." Temple smiled. "Maybe it'll solve its ghostwriter's financial problems."

"Gandolph had a ghostwriter?"

"He does now. Look! Movement up yonder. Shall we climb the stairs for our appointment with the Handcuff King?"

"Sounds like something kinky on cable TV, dear." That did not appear to faze Electra, but something else did. "Those stairs don't look OSHA-approved."

The complicated structure ahead had effectively distracted Elec-tra from speculating on the identity of Gandolph's ghostwriter, which is what Temple had wanted. Not only fraudulent mediums had the ability to mislead.

The pair climbed the rickety wooden stairs, which creaked quite authentically. Spotlights placed here and there high above glared down on them like a constellation formed entirely of blazing, fixed pole stars.

"I just realized something." Electra stopped halfway up the stairs.

"What?"

"The seance isn't supposed to start until midnight, and we're plenty early, yet everybody else's vehicle is here already."

"Yeah, I noticed that. I wonder who arrived when, because the early birds could certainly have tampered with the worm."

"Indeed!"

"Luckily, I arranged for some even earlier birds to stake out the premises."

"You arranged? Who? Watts and Sacker?"

"I could hardly bother the police about something as borderline flaky as a second stance held to find a killer even the police aren't looking for. No, it's just Eightball O'Rourke and Wild Blue Pike and some other Glory Hole Gang guys. They know the layout, and they know spook attractions, so I figured we've got expert -witnesses waiting in the wings."

Electra examined those three-story wings rather apprehensively. "Why didn't you tell me?"

She patted her quiet, pewter-colored hair. "I would have dressed for company."

"Does it matter in the dark?" Temple nodded to the shadowy reaches of everywhere.

"My dear, at my age it especially matters in the dark."

They resumed their climb, Temple holding herself to Electra's pace, although after a couple flights she was glad to have an excuse to slow down. This was much more taxing than entering the portable room when it was parked on the first or second floor. But Electra was right, how could anyone manipulate outside effects in-side a mobile chamber?

"At least," Temple said, "I don't have Crawford Buchanan and his nosy camera on my backside all the way up the stairs. Perhaps that will make seeing him at the top of the stairs more palatable."

Electra stopped. "You know, he could have done it."

"Crawford? Much as I like to think he's capable of anything, what would he have against Gandolph?"

"Nothing against him, but he did sit next to Gandolph, and you did say Mr. Buchanan was ambitious, and this Hot Head show must be his big chance."

"It's Hot Heads, plural. You mean, Crawford could have killed someone to up the ratings on his segment?"

Electra shrugged persuasively.

"Oh, great. Everyone up there's a potential murderer, except that the police can't make a case because the bottom line is that Gandolph died from natural causes, according to the newspaper."

"Are there any natural causes at a seance?" Electra asked cryptically. "I still think the spirit world punished him for disbelief."

"Then spirits are nothing more than jealous, paranoid small-minded gods, like the Greek pantheon. Why would anyone want to contact such closed-minded tyrants?"

"Nobody's perfect. I'm only saying that even spirits can get tired of being snubbed. Oof,"

Electra took the last step and stopped. "You open the door, dear; I'm too tired to lift a pinkie."

Temple, resisting an urge to knock, turned the cold brass knob. A screamingly theatrical screech announced their entrance.

She was startled to see the bloodied battle-ax (now wiped clean) hanging in place near the window dead ahead. The other pikes, maces and whatalls were still installed, and the broken sconce light and shade had been replaced.

Everyone sat in his or her designated seat in customary guise: Oscar in black, Mynah on his left in white, Jeff Mangel in academic black and blue (for jeans), a space for Electra, then the charcoal-black figure of William Kohler, a space for Temple, and another space ...

Not another empty place! An occupied space for Edwina Mayfair/Gandolph.

Temple turned to Electra. "Who--?"

"It's ... Sophie! One of my soft-sculpture people from the wedding chapel. She does look a lot like Edwina, down to the veiled hat and gloves."

"How?"

Electra shrugged. "An out-of-body experience? Don't ask me. Maybe one of the Glory Hole boys thought we needed a stand-in. Whew. I bet she gave everybody a start when they came in."

"I imagine that was the idea." Temple ignored her pounding heartbeat to cross the threshold, where she suspected that ordinary expectations would not hold for long.

Crawford, in the seat next to the ersatz Edwina (who had, in fact, been ersatz from first to last) turned to watch their entrance. On his left was D'Arlene Hendrix and beyond her the ashen, frail features of Agatha Weik.

Nobody looked particularly perky, Temple noticed as she took her seat and nodded politely all round, even at the ersatz Edwina.

"Did you resuscitate the transvestite, T.B.?" Crawford asked. "I remember you putting those stuffed cats in the ABA booth after the real ones were kidnapped. This was a pretty dirty trick."

"I didn't do it. Was it here when everyone arrived?"

Nods and no comment.

"Who arrived first?"

They exchanged looks. "Not I." "You were here when I came." "I wasn't first."

Temple saw that this was not going to be a cooperative evening. Then why had they agreed to meet again?

"Whose idea was this, anyway?"

"Mine," said a surprising voice.

She turned back to Crawford. "And why was that, C.B.?"

He pointed to the cameraman leaning against one of the few solid shafts of wall "Good media op. Nice follow-up piece. Actually, I suppose with this lump of old pantyhose in place we can call this a Recreation.' If everybody mortal is here, we might as well begin. Grab a stuffed mitt, T.B., and hold on. If we have any luck, this is going to be a bumpy evening."

Temple stared at Crawford, struck by his paraphrasing the same line from the same old Bette Davis movie that had crossed her mind at the previous seance. Was Bette out there urging them on? When her mind and Crawford's showed signs of parallel thought, even al-most a week apart, she began to fear for her sanity, not to mention her integrity.

Temple sat and reached for Sophie's stuffed hand in its vintage fifties opera-length satin glove. The gesture felt a bit macabre and even disrespectful. She knew more of Gandolph the Great now than she had when he had so effacingly died beside her. And the fact that he had been Max's friend... she almost couldn't do it, couldn't connect with this obscene substitution for the living person. An awful thought came, surprising only because she wasn't a spiritualist, she didn't believe in ghosts, she didn't expect contact.

Gandolph was a spirit now. Like Houdini he was an unbeliever who had crossed over.

(Exactly what he had crossed over, Temple was not sure. Perhaps it was the river Styx, perhaps the river Jordan, or the Las Vegas Strip, or even perhaps the fine line between Beyond and bullfeathers.)

Gandolph, presumably, could return, now that he was dead. Ooh! And he had a reason to return here, where he had died, where a murderer might sit who had not only killed him, but had gotten away with it. Temple held her breath. (I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in ghosts, I don't even believe in Tinkerbell. . . .) But the psychics weren't so far out in their objective of the evening. If any spirit was liable to manifest itself here and now, it was Gandolph the Great.

"We begin," Mynah announced coldly.

Behind them a light flashed on. The camera was ready.

Temple glanced at William Kohler. Despite the chill touching the vast, unoccupied space, sweat sheened his face, the betraying protest of an overweight frame. Or a guilty mind.

Oscar held hands with Mynah and Agatha, but kept nervously jerking his head to shake back his dramatically silver forelock of hair, which had fallen against his face like an English judge's wig.

Agatha's eyes were closed; no way to see spirits, and D'Arlene glanced from one to the other participant as if hunting for the thoughts of the maybe-murderer among them. Electra looked determined, focusing on Agatha directly across the table, her hand in the professor's warm grip, which looked more desperate than firm to Temple. Jeff Mangel caught her eye and bit his bottom lip.

Only Crawford and William Kohler seemed unmoved.

"We begin," Mynah went on, "where we have always begun, with the spirit and will of Harry Houdini, who died before times. He was not a friend to mediums, but only mediums remember him well enough to meet and call for his return year after year, Halloween after Halloween for seventy years. Now a man like him has died: an unbeliever. A skeptic. A medium-hunter. Has Gandolph the Great, too, learned the Afterlife's reality? Has he repented? Does he wish to come back to us in his new ephemeral form? Does he wish to tell us something? That he and Houdini occupy the same Beyond? That the notion of an Afterlife is humbug? Come, Houdini. Come, Gandolph, only you can manifest the truth, and you, can do that only by showing yourselves.

Show yourselves, I command you! Show yourselves, I beseech you! For all of those who have believed in you, show us the conviction that lies beyond death. Now! It is now or never."

During Mynah's declamation, the surrounding lights had almost imperceptibly dimmed.

Temple noticed, because she was watching for it. Not only the in-room sconces had dimmed, but the spotlights high above. Who ran the lightboard, she wondered cynically, Gandolph or Houdini? Or maybe Mrs. Houdini, Bess his wife, who'd always played the page girl in his act.

Temple recalled playing the page girl in Max's kitchen performance last night and found herself momentarily distracted.

In that moment, the mist had begun rising, for it was suddenly seeping in everywhere again in hissing serpent-fingers of cloud.

"The temperature," Agatha Welk said hoarsely, never opening her eyes.

And it had plunged. Temple felt icy air wafting up from under the table, slithering down the back of her neck. This was a new effect. Effect, this was an effect, not an act of nature, but an effect.

Hands tightened on each other around the table, in reaction to cold, to fear.

A muffled sound came from the chimney, and all eyes flashed there.

Something dark filled the empty, fire-scorched interior of the hearth. A screaming, snarling yowl announced it: a black cat. No gate-crashing Midnight Louie alleycat, but a long, sinuous feline force. The panther wore a collar studded with nickel-size ruby-red stones, the even larger emeralds of its light-refracting eyes shone like the coals of a perverse icy green hell in its powerful face.

Temple tried to mistake it for Midnight Louie, somehow blown up large. But she couldn't.

Midnight Louie (sorry, fella) was not only not the size of a mastiff, but he was nowhere near this svelte, muscular and carnivorous, not even during his fiercest temper tantrum with a delinquent rubber band.

The Big Cat leaped forward. Hands along the table drew back and almost broke their grip.

The panther's mouth opened to showcase an entire Himalaya range of ice-sharp white teeth. Another wildcat cry pierced the fog as the animal's thin, sleek tail lashed like a possessed bullwhip.

Then ... it was gone, all that feral energy, and behind it came a vacuum, a loss, a little death.

They breathed again, but tightened fingers didn't loosen on each other. Poor Sophie!

Between Temple and Crawford's unconscious tug-of-war, her arms had been twisted... to the breaking point had they been flesh and bone instead of cotton and fiberfill.

"The panther is Houdini," Mynah's husky seance voice decided. "Wiry, muscular energy.

Supreme ego and showmanship. A devouring obsessiveness."

They waited, watching the fireplace's inky mouth as they might a black stage curtain, anticipating the next act, the next appearance.

"Oh."

Agatha Welk's quaver roused them from their own obsession.

Her eyes were still shut, the lids quivering. "Who is that?"

"Where?" Temple asked.

Agatha's head dreamily nodded across the room from herself. They looked in the direction she indicated, the people on Temple's side of the table having to twist in their Gothic chairs.

They saw only the dark outer vastness at the heart of the empty building. Temple, tired of craning her neck, caught a reflection in the window opposite her, behind Agatha Welk.

"Someone is out there," she said.

"Oh, really, T.B.," Crawford objected. " Someone is out there.' It's 'the truth is out there,' if you're trying to use that X-Files catch-phrase. Tired stuff, T.B., derivative and--"

"Shut up, Crawford, and look for yourself. Is that 'someone out there' or not? Then tell me I'm seeing things. At least it isn't you."

"I see some sort of black blob in a bit of light. Of course you re-alize anything out there would be suspended in sheer space."

"The panther," Oscar suggested.

"It's a seated person," Jeff Mangel interjected. "All in black. Can't you all see the big floppy hat, the slope of the shoulders, the long cloak to the ground?"

Temple nodded. He saw what she saw.

"That's Edwina, then!" Mynah sounded truly excited.

"Gandolph," Oscar reminded her.

"Do we all see it?" Electra wanted to know.

"I see it," Agatha said, still facing in the opposite direction, still with her eyes closed.

"William?" Mynah demanded, seeking a second.

"I see something," he mumbled.

"Well, I don't," complained a voice until now silent, which Temple recognized. "I gotta move and focus in. Can you all just settle down for a bit?"

They had forgotten him. Wayne the cameraman. So they waited silently while he stomped to the other side of the room and aimed his light into the glass.

"Damn hard to shoot," he muttered. "All reflection."

"What do you think it is?" D'Arlene asked abruptly.

"Got me, lady. A lump of dark coal. Maybe a hat, maybe a shadow. Maybe nothing."

When he drew back, the image was still there, still vague, still fairly shapeless.

"So?" Crawford demanded. "What is this? I could point to clouds that look more like a person. I could say I have seen Nixon's nose in a Nevada sunset. This is it? This is all that's gonna show itself after all we've gone through? Come on, people, get with it."

"Mediums are sensitive instruments," Oscar said pompously. "They don't perform on command, only as the spirits move them."

Temple considered it notable that a guy with a gang tattoo had learned to be pompous in the intervening years.

"Well, these spirits better get on the move, or we're outta here and there goes your slot on Hot Heads."

"The spirits do not manifest in the face of crassness," Agatha said, never opening her eyes to regard the face of crassness, which was clearly Crawford.

Temple had to admire her technique.

Still, she squinted her eyes at the lonely figure visible yet through--or on--the window. Yes, it reminded her of Gandolph as Edwina Mayfair, and he was dead, so it was logical to presume that his spirit haunted the outer darkness and would be visible to all. Indivisible to all.

But Temple remembered the last seance, and the boy/man/elder she had seen, along with Agatha. The others seemed to have seen him less clearly and had dismissed him as a holographic effect programmed by the haunted-house operators. But hologram or hoodoo, in his last form he had worn the brigand's swashbuckling hat and cape. So although this vision might be Gandolph/Edwina, it might also be this other man, who had appeared before Gandolph had died. A projection of the dead magician's spirit? Or ...

No! Temple would not consider that eventuality. It was too far-out. Too "out there." Yet goosebumps lifted on her arms as she re-called the neighbors who had heard "voices" at Gandolph's house on Halloween night, at the very hour that first seance was taking place.

Goosebumps remained as she remembered the three stages of man she had glimpsed in the ambiguous dark mirrors of the seance room windows. She remembered the frantic old man, mouthing syllables into the dark behind Gandolph's hatted head, the mouth moving, moving even as its owner vanished, until, like the Cheshire cat's grin, it was the very last thing seen, pantomiming a word, a word Temple could visualize, could imagine her own mouth making and could almost put a name to

"That smell!" Electra was taken aback. "It's not like before, not food or wine."

"Not chlorine," pronounced the professor.

"Roses," Agatha said with a smile in her voice. "The most delicious scent of roses. A kind spirit comes."

Roses, yes. Temple shut her eyes like Agatha, the better to let that heavenly scent roll over her, as tangible as the mist that clung to the room's square corners. Sweet beyond description, that perfume. Piped in probably, she reminded herself, but by a true romantic. It was to swoon for ... and then, awash in scent, it came to her, the word, the key word to the entire business ...

the name of the rose, which was ... Rose.

"Rose," she said aloud as a charm against the overwhelming tide of scent.

That is what the lips in her vision had striven to say. She saw the lips now, behind their barrier of beard, as if she had her fingers on them and read them like one deaf, and blind. Rose.

But there was a second syllable.

"Rose ... Rosa ... Rose-beh--"

"Oh, my God!" Professor Mangel sounded like he'd gone to the moon and back in the past three seconds. "Temple is picking it up. The key to Houdini's code that he left to his wife Bess.

She can't have known it; she knew nothing about Houdini when this began."

"Yes!" Mynah sounded transported.

"R-R-Rose ... Rosa ... beh--" Temple almost had it, but not quite. The word. The one word to unbind them all.

Agatha Welk could not wait.

"Rosabelle!"

"We all know it," Mynah said. "Every devotee of Houdini for seventy years has hoped to hear it spoken genuinely at a Halloween seance. We all thought we would never hear it: the title of the song Houdini's wife sang in Vaudeville with her sister when Houdini met her. It was engraved inside Bess's wedding ring; it was in the safety-deposit box in which Houdini left the code verifying his return, an acrostic beginning with the letters R-OS-A-B-E-L-L-E; the key to his cipher that would identify his return. If this ... amateur has received it, then Houdini has sent it.

We have broken through at last!"

Agatha's eyes had finally opened. They were filled with tears. She stared directly at Temple.

"After seventy years of silence, Houdini speaks. Through her!"