At last a door opened before them, more heard (thanks to a built-in creak) than seen, so they dutifully trooped into the dark, following Kohler's harsh whisper.
"Step right this way, folks." He led them into a dim room with darkened walls. The^e was just enough ambient light to show his face, perspiration-sheened by the trek up three flights of stairs.
"All right. Mr. Cameraman at the end of the line, dowse that spotlight before you get to the door. Thanks. We want you folks to get set and seated first, then we crank up the lights as if you just appeared here. So follow along, end of table's fine," he told Oscar Grant, directing him to a seat. He immediately added an apology.
"The table is oval, not quite round; we couldn't get a round one that big up those stairs.
And... there, I guess." He nodded his imperiously waiting wife to the chair on Oscar's left. "Ah, next ... an-other fella. Might as well do boy-girl, boy-girl like in the movies. Professor Mangel.
And you, miss, the redhead. One of the redheads, I guess." Electra sat with an airy, settling motion of her muumuu.
"Now I guess one of you media boys--"
"No!" Temple objected in the semidark. She could see what was coming with "boy-girl, boy-girl." Crawford, then her, hand in hand.
"Okay, I guess I'll sit next. And you, miss. The other redhead."
Temple complied, surprised to discover that much as she often lamented her flaming red hair, neither did she like being "the Other Redhead."
"Now, who've we got left? Mr. Cameraman? Oh, you stand. Is that right? Well, the, Mr., uh--"
"Buchanan, Crawford Buchanan," came the deep, eloquently phony tones from behind Temple.
She visibly cringed. The sheen on William Kohler's broad, corrugated forehead became dewdrops.
"Ah, the media guy should go farther along, where you can get a good view of everything."
At an oval table, in a theater-in-the-round setting, Temple thought, that doesn't make sense, but she would endorse any excuse to keep out of range of Crawford Buchanan.
Yet Mr. Mynah might not be able to pull it off. His frown deepened even as his voice clogged more. "That means, ahem, that... that leaves, next to Miss Temple, ah--"
"I'm afraid we've run out of boy-girl, sonny," said a fruity yet brisk voice. "Mr. Media Guy can settle on my left, if Miss Temple doesn't mind sitting next to one of her own gender--?"
"Not at all!" Temple caroled, happy to have the Hat between her and Crawford, and hopefully his snooping cameraman.
"Well, then," the older woman's deeply assured voice continued, "that leaves D' Arlene and Agatha to hold down the fort on Oscar's left, but we still have almost perfect segregation of the sexes so the spirits have no hanky-panky among the mediums to complain of. Let us all sit and have at it."
Temple felt the air shift as Edwina Mayfair leaned toward her to say in a confidential tone, Tm an expert at this, young lady; don't worry about a thing." A reassuring hand pat, ending in an encouraging clasp. Temple was surprised to feel thick cotton between herself and the other woman, and glanced down at the hand gloved in black that enfolded hers.
"I'm a very powerful medium," Edwina whispered. "I try to cushion my seance partners from the worst."
Temple thanked her lucky stars that someone strongly maternal sat between her and Crawford Buchanan, though being merely one body apart didn't seem quite enough when they were dealing with the disembodied.
On Electra's right, the professor cleared his throat, purely for attention. His voice rang clear and confident. "Someone must lead. I, being a neutral party, will decide. Much as Ms. Sigmund bears the respect of this entire assembly, I feel that Houdini was a man from another era, who would respond best to a masculine summoning, and Mr. Grant is perhaps our best publicized member. Hence, I have asked Mr. Grant to do the honors."
Silence held. Temple wondered how happily the woman in white took news of her reduction to a supporting role when she was dressed to deliver the crucial aria. She certainly slid Oscar Grant a poisonous glance.
But no one raised an objection.
Temple heard feet shuffle and throats clear around her, not unlike a troupe of actors awaiting the drawing of the first-act curtain, holding their places and getting ready to shine.
Then, like dawn teasing the horizon at five in the morning, a subtle light surfaced around them. It seemed too faint to detect, much less name, yet it grew. First came the glint of glass.
Unlike the others, Temple perfectly understood their situation.
They were marooned on an artificial island in a vast space. They were surrounded by busy paths of programmed chaos, the moving cars of spectators. Witnesses. They themselves, the seancers, were mobile, easing up and down three stories, so they were displayed to equally mobile viewers at different times.
These few people under a bell jar were like chessmen and women on a transparent, three-dimensional Star Trek board placed on an invisible elevator. Up and down they would go, and where they would stop, nobody could know.
With the rising lights--sconces placed between the panes of ghostly brocade-etched glass--
they were able to distinguish each other's forms across the table's empty polished wood surface. There were some confusions: the shoulder-dusting hair of both man and woman, for instance, Temple noted. She supposed that she and Electra, dressed in matching, conflicting-patterned muumuus and with their electric hair colors both natural and unnatural, looked like Tweedledee and Tweedledum on AC/DC.
Crawford in his dark suit, as faintly reflected in the opposite window glass, looked oddly nineteenth century.
And the cameraman, the only free-floating body in the room, was a lightning bug flitting at the edges of everything, ceaselessly recording, recording.
"Hands, everybody," Oscar Grant ordered.
Temple's abandoned their polite and private clasp on her lap to lift onto the table. Two others grasped them from either side, Edwina's cotton glove warm and dry from the left, William Kohler's bare hand oddly clammy from the right.
Temple had not held hands with strangers since a childhood game of ring-around-the-rosy.
She discovered she suffered from a bit of xenophobia. Only reminding herself of the ignominy, of the utter disgust of holding hands with Crawford Buchanan, encouraged her to buck up.
And these strangers' hands were supposed to be conduits of unseen powers. Not the professor's though. He was another amateur. Psychically brain-dead, like her. She couldn't speak for Electra and her possibly female phantom cat. Imagine! Electra with a cat.
Maybe. One thing was for sure, Temple was learning more about plectra tonight than she had before. Now, if this trend continued with the dead...
Wow! She had opened herself to the spirit world, and who could say who might drop by.
Suddenly, Temple realized that she "knew" a lot more dead people than she had before. There was Chester Royal, who might drop in to admonish her for falling on his last, best suit of clothes at the ABA. Or the poor cat lady might come calling through, hunting her dispersed charges. Or the strip teasing Gold Dust Twins, manifesting themselves, still joined, in a cloud of golden motes ... or (horrors!) a handsome cover-hunk, all that marbled muscle mere phantasm now, tossing his golden mane and threatening to "swoop" her into the Underworld.
Temple closed her eyes. That was the trouble with dying and going to heaven--or hell--you might actually encounter people you had known in life. Many of them, she never wanted to see again.
"Concentrate," Oscar Grants slightly foreign voice intoned. "Free your thoughts. Open yourself to the empyrean. See all time, all space."
Temple peeked. Outside their lit crystal ball, she glimpsed distorted visages rushing by.
Happy Halloweeners on the ride of a lifetime? Or tormented spirits wafted to and fro by the Afterlife?
She felt herself sinking, very slowly. Felt the room diminishing into a tiny glass globe on the stage of an indifferent and vast universe. Felt the hands upon hers thrum with unsuspected tens
ion. Felt a ... pricking of her thumbs. Something wicked this way comes--
No!
Her hands were simply going to sleep from the unaccustomed pressure. How could she tell her seance-mates that she was just a computer-age baby prone to carpal tunnel syndrome ... ?
Tunnel.
Rabbit hole.
She was going down and down, and the late little white rabbit was a black cat in an emerald collar. The Queen of Diamonds wore swords for a crown, and the caterpillar sported a hookah pipe that blew rainbow bubbles and a hat made of cabbage roses that sang....
"Don't worry," said an unfamiliar voice. "Hang on. The spirits are miffed tonight. We're going to have a bumpy ride."
And Bette Davis was the Queen of Hearts.
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."
Chapter 14
Whoudini Dunnit?
The glass-walled room was a true fishbowl surrounded by a dark and deep sea filled with amazing creatures who floated by to peer in.
Although the room was lit, the contrast between its own milky illumination and the dark beyond that hosted sudden flashes was very disorienting. So was the fact that the room itself wafted slowly up and down like a translucent jellyfish. Temple felt no overt movement, but could glimpse the outside flashes edging away into the unseen area above the windows. Being in the room felt a bit like sitting in a sinking cruise-ship game room, playing at spooks before everyone became one. Even the chairs aided the image: high backed carved dark wood with scant upholstery on the arms and seats.
Mynah Sigmund spoke first, at last. "I feel a strong presence. We must reach for that. We must not be distracted by this haphazard mortal activity all around us, but only heed the deep, endless pull of a powerful soul."
"Ehrich," D'Arlene Hendrix whispered. "I hear the word Ehrich.
Is that a name? The name of someone at the table? Wait! I see him, Ehrich. A boy, a dark-haired young boy. Could that be some child on the ride outside?"
"Wonderful, D'Arlene. You are already attuned. Ehrich was Harry Houdini's true given name," Oscar Grant intoned as liturgically as a priest, and Temple ought to know, having recently at' tended mass. "At an early age he became captivated by magic. By sixteen he had renamed himself Houdini after the great French magician Robert-Houdin."
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