Cat With An Emerald Eye

Chapter 38

Ghoststalker

"Oh, please, no close-ups." Temple blinked into the Cyclops face of Wayne's camera under its blazing coronet of light. "I was just . . . thinking out loud."

"Through you, Houdini speaks to us," Mynah said reverently. "I pave your path with peridot."

No one else understood the reference. I don't want your miserable peridot, Temple wanted to scream . I don't want to be Houdini's conduit. I don't want to have seen what I saw, which apparently not everybody did. And, most of all, I don't want these two thousand megawatts of light in my face!

Luckily, Wayne backed off to register everyone else's surprise. Temple sighed and loosened her grip on Sophie, who cared not, and on poor William Kohler, who sat like a lump of stuffed seance potato beside her, offering her his fleshy hand to be wrung dry, which it desperately needed.

Temple gauged the people around her. They watched her with the wary awe of those who were convinced she had done something remarkable. This was the reaction Houdini had lived--

and died-- for? That Max was hooked on?

Temple hated it. She felt more like Matt. She felt like a fraud among frauds. She felt unworthy. Why had the little boy/old man made her the recipient of his undelivered message?

Why did she have to see something others didn't? She wasn't psychic, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"And now he's come in person!"

Oscar Grant could only point with his eyes, but their dark stare focused on the chimney.

Temple joined the others in looking there; glad to have the spotlight, and Wayne's camera, directed elsewhere.

She didn't feel right about what had just happened. Something was missing. Looking to the window behind Agatha, she saw that the Edwina-figure was gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

The fireplace, however, was jumping.

Inside its smoky frame again stood the bound, stooped and chained figure of last week, the intense eyes staring out at them as boldly as the panther's.

Except now it moved.

A sharp clink sounded as a massive handcuff dropped to the hearth floor. The man in chains twisted, writhed. His naked muscles knotted with terrible effort. Hollow groans filled the room, the sounds echoing in the vast distances beyond the chamber.

The sight, the sounds were truly appalling. Temple watched with a wince; her cynical debunking eye was history.

A length of chain swagged across his chest fell loose, and then the arm and chest muscles bulged again and a two-inch-wide manacle snapped open with the ease of a cigarette case.

Now the figure crouched like a caveman to worry at the ankle manacles. Misty as the figure appeared, with every loosened bond it seemed to solidify. Breaking free was causing it to materialize. Houdini, suspected of dematerialization in life, was now guilty of materialization after death.

"He's coming for us!" Agatha crooned.

And at that moment dark swelling images crashed like bats against the windows. Images of a bat-man in black, with a floppy, veiled hat and shapeless cloak, Dracula beating at the glass for old blood, Gandolph clawing for breath and vengeance. ...

Then the wall-mounted weapons began sweeping from wall to wall, and beyond. They crashed through the windows one after another, until the hand-clasps broke as one. The women lifted their arms against presumed flying glass, the men clutched the arms of their chairs as if hoping to wrest them off as weapons.

Only the battle-ax ranged through the room now, swooping as low as some demonic metal bat. The women screamed and protected their heads. Temple the cynical observer was too shocked to scream, but as unnerved as anybody. It was as if the mild phenomena of the first stance had returned, berserk and lusting for human blood.

And erratically flashing at the fringes was the headlight on Wayne Tracey's camera.

"Are you satisfied," he was shouting. I'm shooting you. I've got footage of everything, you bastard. How does it feel to be dead, huh? You can't get me."

The chandelier above them bloomed with bright light. When they looked up, afraid, blood was dripping off its crystal teardrops, falling to the center of the table.

The battle-ax swung low and suddenly impaled itself dead center in the table, amid the dewdrops of blood.

And then the table elevated, shook, rattled and rolled, as if caught in a California earthquake.

Agatha closed her eyes, started screaming and didn't stop.

Through the jagged-edged broken windows came a mad, shrill screeching sound.

Everyone looked up and outward. The Gandolph images had vanished with the window glass, but the outer dark was still there, and it was moving.

Moving inward like a screaming black whirlpool.

"Watch out!" someone shouted. "Duck under the table."

Under this eighty-pound Mexican jumping bean? Temple wondered.

Then she saw the wave of flying bats catch the light of the chandelier.

She dove under the table, looking to see Electra in mid-duck too. Shrieks and flaps and crashes and clinks reverberated all around them.

"I did it!" Wayne Tracey was shouting over the pandemonium.

Temple saw him aiming his camera at the bats like a weapon, and cringed as she heard the creatures crash into the perimeters to avoid the light.

The table had descended to its proper place and now stood stolid where it was supposed to stand. Temple poked her head over its rim, to find other heads cautiously emerging. Only Agatha in her blind trance and William Kohler, glued to his Gothic chair like a straw man, had remained seated in place.

The camera's wild light careened around the room. Wayne zoomed in close on the effigy of Edwina Mayfair and began to interview it.

"What do you say now, Gandolph the Great? Now that you've been exposed for what you are. What do you say now? What do you say to all this? Spirits are real. They've shaken this room and everybody in it with their power. You didn't have to destroy Wanda Wayne Tracey.

You fooled everybody with your disguise, but not me. Have you seen my mother there, in the Beyond? Has seeing her and seeing the Afterlife made you sorry you hurt and humiliated her?

Has she forgiven you? She would, you know. But I won't. I didn't. I made you see that the spirits are real. Come back, so I can film you and show all the people you debunked what a fraud you were, in your disguise and your purpose. I'm not afraid of you, just because you're a spirit. We'll all be spirits someday, and you'll face me again."

"Sit down." D'Arlene Hendrix had come to stand behind W T ayne Tracey as he hunched over the slumped soft sculpture form, his camera pushed against the featureless face under the veiled hat.

D'Arlene guided Wayne away, back to her empty chair, pushed him down in it.

"You don't need your camera on now. You've recorded everything," she said in a soothing voice.

When the light snapped off, everyone breathed a sigh of mutual relief. Slowly, they resumed their seats around the table, waiting.

"This young man," D'Arlene said, "has had a terrible burden of vengeance."

"He knew about Gandolph's disguise?" Temple asked.

"Apparendy, from what we just heard. Apparently Gandolph had debunked his mother. Was she a medium, Wayne?"

Wayne nodded, staring at the battle-ax embedded in the table.

"I didn't mean to kill him. I wanted to expose him, scare him. I didn't want him to escape into the Afterlife. I wanted him to face consequences, like my mother did! The articles, the TV

shows, the digs, the laughter. He went on television with hidden videotapes of her seances. He made the circuit... The Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was still doing it. Tom Snyder, on his first TV show. And after she'd been humiliated half to death, he and they went on to other victims. When she died last year, I knew I had to take action. I wanted you all to know what he was!" He looked around the table. "You can't blame me."

"I can," Crawford Buchanan put in. "You'll never work again in this town."

That seemed to stir some life in Wayne Tracey. He looked up and grinned. "Thanks. I needed that."

"What exactly did you do?" Temple asked carefully.

Wayne looked at her, but he didn't seem to recognize her. He was still walking through past emotions and present guilt. "I came in early to 'check lighting.' Nobody notices a cameraman, especially Crawford Buchanan's cameraman. The blades were already rigged to zip around on their almost-invisible lines, and I was supposed to stand on the sidelines. Once everyone was seated, I lengthened the line on the battle-ax, thinking it ought to come close enough to scare Gandolph. I didn't think it would cut him."

"It did, but it didn't kill him."

"Were you responsible for the fog?" Jeff Mangel asked. "That confused us."

Wayne shook his head.

"I--" Oscar Grant cleared his throat. "I came in hours early and rigged that. I needed effective footage for my show. I figured the murkier the better. I mean, the effects were here, why not use them?"

"And the chlorine?" Jeff Mangel sounded angry. "That made us all teary-eyed and confused."

"It was a screen." William Kohler's weak voice hit everyone like a clap of thunder, for he'd never spoken before in this room. "Mynah had me set up the projection of Houdini, and she didn't want anyone to see it too well."

"Shut up, you goddamn lump!" Mynah was not in the mood for confidences. Her face was the mask of a peeved Medusa and her silver hair fanned around that ugly expression as if it had been struck by heat lightning. "Can't you do anything right? Keep your mouth shut at least!"

"What about this latest Houdini tonight?" Temple asked William.

He suddenly grinned, his heavy face lightening. "Same photo, much better effects. I had nothing to do with it, and Mynah couldn't even thread a sewing machine to save her soul. I designed her whole setup at the house and made it work. Maybe poor old Gan-dolph had a hand in it. He was right; mediums are a bunch of lying fakes."

"Not all of them," D'Arlene Hendrix said from across the table where she held Agatha's hand on one side and kept her other hand on Wayne's forearm.

The gesture reminded Temple of something. "What about the handcuffs: Someone, or something, had to put Gandolph in irons and it had to be when he was already unconscious."

"A brilliant touch," Oscar conceded, "but not mine, alas. You were holding hands with the guy. Gal."

"True, and the cutlery flying around was distracting enough that I didn't notice Gandolph's hand slip from mine." She sighed.

Another silence.

"I thought she had just fainted," came a low, confessing voice.

"I should have known!" Temple turned on Crawford Buchanan like a watchdog. "Why did you even have the handcuffs with you? Planning a little S & M expedition after the seance, C.B.?"

"Don't excite yourself; we might have another untimely death to explain. No, they were a good prop. Television shows need visuals. I'd planned to throw 'em out on the table, so to speak, but when the old dame next to me keeled over I got the idea of cuffing her so it would look like Houdini had issued a challenge. Unfortunately she--he--was dead and it ruined the effect."

"Did you throw out the bullet Louie found too?"

Crawford shook his gel-slick black-haired head as soberly as the chief mourner at a mob funeral. " No, never thought of that. A bullet isn't big enough to show up well on camera."

"Then who contributed the bullet to the show-and-tell?" Temple asked the table at large.

No one 'fessed up to that particular red herring, and Midnight Louie certainly wasn't going to say where he found it.

Electra looked around like a lively white-haired robin. "Maybe the real Houdini was trying to take a shot at a lousy medium, and missed. So as far as phenomenon go, that only leaves the strange man we saw outside the windows unexplained."

"And the other smells," Jeff Mangel added. "The food, the wine--"

"The roses," Temple finished.

"Were you in on this?" Mynah suddenly demanded. "I always thought you were a treacherous bitch."

"No." D'Arlene answered for Temple with something very like righteous anger. "She honestly understood something the rest of us couldn't see, which makes her the only honorable medium in the room besides Agatha. You're projecting again, Mynah; you're trying to pass off your own dishonesty on someone else. It won't work anymore. Not after tonight. Word will get out. Here and Beyond. They don't call you the White Witch for nothing."

"I was going to say," Temple added, "that I've been called worse, but I don't think I have been. And it's true, I did think I saw someone outside the windows. I didn't get that word you all recognized from the likeness of Houdini, but from him, a tired old man, a kind of King Lear in a hat and cape."

"Maybe it was a prescient vision of Gandolph's spirit," Agatha said timidly. "I saw him too, and he looked much more like Gandolph than Houdini."

"So we've failed." Oscar Grant's voice was heavy. "I suppose tonight's footage was useless."

I'll take custody of that." Crawford stood and picked up Wayne's camera.

He almost dropped it again, being unaccustomed to the weight.

"What are you going to say about us, show about us on TV?" Mynah asked hysterically. "You can't believe a thing this so-called husband of mine says. Oscar is an utter fraud and Mangel's an academic fool and Agatha a neurotic and D'Arlene has pretensions of being some sort of head dorm-mother for helpless humanity--"

"You'll see. I may have something to sell to America's Most Wanted."

Crawford headed for the door, camcorder clutched like a babe to his chest.

Oscar stood up to shout at his departing back. "But nobody killed Gandolph, can't you see?

He just died. Maybe his heart was bad; maybe he was allergic to chlorine, maybe he got blood poisoning from the ax? There's no crime here."

Crawford was gone, only the pounding of his footsteps down the stairs echoing up. Temple listened hard, hoping maybe she'd hear a crash.

"Well," Electra said. "Oscar is right. I don't see what we could report to the police ... if any of us felt we ought to report to the police. But I must say that I am disappointed in many of you.

I can't help thinking that the spirit world is too, and showed its disappointment in what we saw tonight. Temple, I think we should leave. It's been a very trying seance."

Temple stood, glad that her knees still supported her. Clearly, although Gandolph had died, no one had directly killed him, or had really meant to. She had arrived at the same conclusion as the police, much later, and after much more personal turmoil.

With all she had heard, there was something she couldn't get out of her mind. She had a confession to make too, about her part in the evening's events, but this was not the audience for it. Maybe the only audience for it was, as she had said before, not truly meaning it, "out there."

She meant that now.