D'Arlene frowned, though she kept her eyes shut as if to listen better. "This boy is not French. But I do not sense the man you describe."
Temple wondered why mediums always talked without using contractions, in the overformal manner of someone who has learned English as a second language. Perhaps the dead also lost the ability to use contractions because their stiff jaws were too clumsy to articulate well.
"Death, useless death!" Mynah Sigmund said suddenly, shaking back her dramatic hair in a curling, quicksilver wave. "The cards were in confusion, the magician misled. But what willpower! He performed as usual that evening, although the pain of a bruised appendix must have been excruciating. Always the agony aimed at his center: the fist in the solar plexus, the bullet in the palm of a hand. Do you feel his pain, his will that overcame it?"
Her anguished words caused a chain reaction of hands tightening on hands around the table. Temple remained skeptical. She had hastily researched Harry Houdini via the Internet, and none of this was new to her. Everyone else present had even more pressing reasons and the luxury of much more time to do the same thing. Now they were parroting back facts of Houdini's life--and death--as if receiving them from the man himself.
Temple was tempted to put on a little act and throw some hints into the pot. Raise the ante.
Mention his always-loyal wife, Bess. Maybe suggest the fatal blow was deliberate, a conspiracy by rival magicians to lay Houdini low, only it had been too successful. Murder! What a scoop for Crawford Buchanan, HOUDINI SPILLS BEANS
AT VEGAS SEANCE! MAGICIAN DEFIES DEATH TO REVEAL HE WAS MURDERED SEVENTY YEARS
AGO!
But it hadn't been anything sensational like murder. Houdini the magician often used the prowess of Houdini the athlete to confound the public and buttress his carefully built reputation as a mighty man of almost supernatural endurance. He often invited men to punch him in the stomach, relying on tensed, well-developed muscles to shield him from the blow.
Then, in 1926, a young man hesitated to strike the famous escape artist, despite the older man's encouragement. Houdini relaxed his muscles just as the challenger belatedly decided to give Houdini his best blow, after all, following up with more for good measure. The first punches caught Houdini utterly unprotected.
He managed to cover his distress, continuing to hide it during that evening's dangerous underwater escape trick. He concealed his condition so successfully and for so long that by the time his weakness was obvious and he had been rushed to the hospital, the doctors could do nothing but watch the world's most famed magician die of acute appendicitis at age fifty-four.
Men of iron will and flexible steel bodies and solid-gold egos, Temple summed up. That's what magicians were made of behind the cool, studied stage presence that these days sometimes reached Liberace extremes of showmanship, and even swish.
Agile, athletic, determined to deceive. Temple found herself contemplating the magician's personality in light of both Houdini and Kinsella. Some, like Houdini, came to believe too much in their own powers. Hubris had killed Houdini. Professionalism to the point of martyrdom.
Temple wondered how much of that occupational tendency explained Max's reserve about his past and present danger. A magician was always in command ... of the stage, the audience, the action. The ultimate control freak. Such a man wouldn't ask for help, even when he desperately needed it. Like Houdini, he would rather die than reveal feet of ordinary clay, much less calluses and corns. Would Max?
"This is fascinating," Edwina murmured, grabbing Temple's knuckles painfully tight.
Temple snapped her attention back to the seance at hand, quite literally. This was why she was here: to observe a terrific publicity stunt firsthand (ouch!) and get ideas for the Crystal Phoenix's subterranean complex.
"Not to worry, my dear." Edwina tilted head, and hat, so the trailing veil scratched Temple's wrist. A knee nudged hers, but at least Crawford Buchanan wasn't her encroaching next-door neighbor!
"Spirits are just that," the woman went on, leaning close on a husky whisper. "Mere air, no matter how they storm and shriek. Like Tinkerbell, they die if you don't believe in them."
"But, don't you--?" This was an eminent psychic, after all.
A hand patted Temple's knee. "Remember: most spirits seen at stances are the creations of under-table manipulations."
"And the remainder?"
The woman chuckled and tilted back into her own place. "We shall see. We shall all see, indeed."
Temple wanted to see soon. She wasn't used to this nerve-racking hand-holding, and her arms were tiring from extending across the table; they had to stretch farther than anyone else's.
But others felt the strain as well. Temple could detect a tremor traveling along the conjoined hands, like a message vibrating along a telegraph wire, but how much of that was mental telepathy and how much mere muscle fatigue?
One thing living with Max Kinsella had taught hen magicians were an act, period. *
Psychics, however ... the jury was still out on that, in Temple's mind.
A sudden vibration shook the table. Eyes consulted eyes, then the table shuddered again as the room lifted imperceptibly. No unworldly phenomenon, that, except the giant elevator they rode reversing gears and directions. They were edging upward now, past an ever-fresh audience on rails. Temple glimpsed pale, flying faces in the dark window-glass beyond the psychics sitting opposite her.
This entire environment had been set up as a ghost-factory, she reminded herself, from the costumed attendants to the paying customers, whose amazed faces played on the mirroring glass like rapid-transit spirit forms.
The psychics were a fairly, eccentric bunch, so what tricks hid in the veils of Edwina Mayfair's hat, up Oscar Grant's theatrically full sleeves or within Mynah Sigmund's supernaturally thick head of hair?
Doves did not propagate in thin air; neither did ghosts.
"Harry Houdini!" Mynah intoned. Commanded.
"Ehrich Weiss," D'Arlene's faint voice echoed.
"Come," Oscar ordered.
The lights dimmed.
A confederate on the light board, Temple thought.
The lights flared.
An ambidextrous confederate on the light board, she revised.
A smell suddenly filled the chamber. Familiar but not yet name-able.
Everybody's heads twisted as they inhaled, trying to identify the source.
Temple, who'd written radio ad copy at one time, cross-examined her sensory memory until she could label the odor. Roast duck. Canard to the French, who most often served roast duck, as far as she knew.
Roast duck?
What did that mean? That somebody was a dead duck? Ergo, it must be Houdini?
Noses around the room lifted and sniffed. The psychics resembled a convention of blind gourmands. And now an astringent but somewhat fruity odor accompanied the olfactory entree like a glass of good wine.
"A wine smell," Oscar diagnosed, the others nodding agreement. "A Sauternes?"
"Not with venison!" Edwina Mayfair sounded affronted by any flaws in this phantom menu.
"I smell a sublime, and appropriate, Bordeaux."
Temple lifted her eyebrows as the others chimed in with Champagne, port, brandy.
Everybody was smelling a different wine to accompany a different dish, from soup to dessert!
"Beer," Crawford Buchanan put it. "With hot pretzels."
The others stared coldly at him for having such a proletarian nose, but Temple had no time to savor the moment or the symphony of odors.
Now, what did this confusion of scents signify? Collusion among the mediums? Or a baker's dozen of spirits present, each wafting his or her favorite cooking odor in a sort of disembodied duel?
She started to giggle.
And then the lights dimmed, from the tacky crystal chandelier swaying softly above the table to the sconces mounted on the narrow pillars of solid wall between the windows.
On cue, Temple thought. First the
funky smells. Then ... ta da! ... the ominous dimming of the lights, prefacing a--
A manifestation!
A boyish form hovered at one window, looking in.
Quite a little man, in fact. Perhaps five or six, with a grave, intelligent face slightly petulant. A soft black scarf was looped around his neck. He wore a suit coat and knee-length pants, reminding Temple of the Depression era's Li'l Rascals' smarter, younger brother.
He stared in at them with an odd expression, half enchantment, half boredom, as if they were both mesmerizing marionettes, and too utterly childish to believe.
"Hologram," the woman on her left whispered without moving her mouth, nudging Temple's knee.
Perhaps, perhaps not. This image was too solid to be such an airy projection. He looked more like a Lost Boy than a ghost.
And then, like a photo negative dipped in solution, he sank back into the outer darkness.
Wait! Temple wanted to shout. Don't go away mad, little boy. But that was the sad part.
He hadn't seemed like a little boy.
"Cigar smoke," Mynah exclaimed. "Heavenly scent."
"Hideous!" Agatha Welk wrinkled her nose.
Temple smelled.. . sulphur, like the scent left behind by expired matches. Or the Devil. Was the Devil just a spoiled little boy old beyond his years looking in at them through a window?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Her feet didn't quite touch the floor, as always, and her fingertips were growing numb from compression. Maybe she was developing carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting the computer keyboard too much. Maybe this stupid seance would cripple her for real work. Maybe she was getting... nervous.
"I see ..." Mynah murmured, "... nothing."
Had there been a grandfather clock in the room, and that was one detail the designers had left out, it would have been ticking off the seconds. It would have counted a decade to each second, so that time weighed heavier than normal.
Temple tried to squint at the large-size watch face on her left wrist, but Edwina had clasped her hand so tightly that the wrist was turned toward her, not Temple. Time remained an unreadable expansion band on the white underside of her wrist, where, she remembered from some dim, teenage devouring of a palmistry book, the "bracelet" lines of her fortune lay.
Bracelets, or scars of another, less livable life? Temple shook her head. Dark thoughts circled the room, infecting them all. The seductive scents of food had given way to a strong odor of alcohol, old alcohol at the bottom of a glass, crystallizing into a sugary haze.
"Look!" Electra was staring at a window on the opposite wall.
A man filled it as a portrait would a frame, the etched brocade of phantom wallpaper tattooing his pale hands and face, his starched white shirtfront. He wore formal dress, like a Fred Astaire blow-up doll, a big man, with a wounded, brute power to his bigness. He lifted a glass to them all, a lock of curly dark hair sagging over one eyebrow like a neglected drape on a window.
The man's figure was limned all in black and white and grainy grays, like a filmed image.
Temple caught her breath. She loved the old black-and-white films, their Expressionistic rainy-day distance, their glamour, their endearing decadence. Frankenstein and Dracula and Fred all lunged, slunk and danced through the black-and-white cinematic worlds of the thirties and forties. It was a time when newspaper columnists called movie actresses "cinemactresses," and magicians "mysteriarchs." It wasn't that long ago, but it was as dead as any corpse.
Was he dead too, the dignified man peering rather puzzledly at them through a window etched with wallpaper in the stippled patterns of raindrops? Or was he only an actor hired to play a hologram?
He seemed tall, and carried a white-tipped cane, like Fred, though he could hardly trip the light fantastic like Fred, for he was a mammoth man, broadening from his feet up and his neck down like a Russian nesting doll, only one painted in black and white and gray, instead of the usual carnival of colors.
Familiarity cloaked this figure, as if Temple had seen a black-and-white cardboard cutout of him somewhere. .. maybe at the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Hollywood Museum. He should be standing next to a like figure of Mae West, or Ann Miller or Rita Hayworth, but he looked like a man who had stood alone most of his life.
"I'm a believer," Electra whispered from Temple's right, leaning forward to speak past William Kohler's unmoved and unmoving bulk. "But this has got to be slide projections, right? I mean, the attraction's usual spooky effects will run as programmed?"
Temple nodded slowly. That was true. She just wasn't sure this was the usual spooky effects.
"Some holographic program," Oscar announced with disdain.
"I see nothing seriously spiritual," Mynah seconded.
Edwina leaned forward to stare through the image as if trying to dissect it with laser light. "I sense nothing, no dominant intelligence, no moving spirit. But I see this man, his silver nitrite image, as if he had been excised from a reel of old film."
"Houdini made films," Oscar Grant put in. "Bad ones."
"Execrable ones," the professor concurred. "Exploitation films of an earlier and cruder era.
Would make Waterworld look like the Flood according to the Bible."
"This is not Houdini," Agatha announced. "Houdini's mental self-image may have been as looming, but the man himself was diminutive."
"Still--" D'Arlene sounded troubled. "I'm picking up a word. Wisconsin. And a date: April sixth, eighteen seventy-four."
"Wisconsin." Professor Mangel whistled through his teeth, an odd, informal sound for a seance. "Houdini made out he was born there, but he was actually born in Budapest and was brought to the U.S. soon after. He wanted to be utterly of the New World, you see."
"But he was born in March!" Mynah insisted. "On March twenty-fourth. He later changed the date in his biographical material to April sixth, and never satisfactorily explained why."
"Can a ghost mix up the month of his birth?" Temple asked.
"Anyone can mix up the month of his birth, if he lives long enough," Edwina said testily.
Professor Mangel had an academic answer, which he leaned around Electra to tell Temple.
"The confusion owes itself to the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, which were still both in effect when Houdini was born."
Temple was duly impressed by the encyclopedic nature of the psychics' knowledge of Houdini's background. They knew it in and out, top to bottom, apparently. Pretty easy to declare a stain on the wall or a reflection on a window to be the manifestation of someone dead if you know that person's resume like a corporate recruiter.
Yet even as they speculated aloud, the still-life figure dissolved, so slowly that Temple couldn't quite believe her eyes ... believe that she had seen it, and was now not seeing it.
This was a haunting spirit, Temple mused, that teased as much in absentia as in presence.
Another scent filled the room: fusty, musty, neglected. No rich aroma of gourmet cooking, of spirits and wine, of cigars. Only the smell of absence, of abandonment.
The eyes around the table widened and stared at Temple until she felt distinctly uneasy.
Then she realized that they were gazing past her, through her, beyond her.
Without disengaging her hands from the others, she turned toward the window-wall behind her, straining to see over the high wooden chair-back.
She saw mostly an upper bust, also in dim shades of gray, and the huge, bulging-eyed head that loomed over it like the face of an apoplectic Pekingese. The hair fell gray and stringy across the broad forehead from beneath the kind of brimmed black felt hat a highwayman would have worn in an earlier century.
The face did not seem of this time, nor did the loose black silk cravat that couldn't quite conceal a stunning expanse of shirtfront. The man was a monument to immensity both personal and spiritual, the most corpulent, fleshy ghost she had ever seen, if he was indeed a ghost.
His pasty gray face was distorted with fear, and fo
r the first time his image moved, the mouth loose and round as an operatic tenor's. He was mouthing something at them, some words beyond hearing.
Edwina Mayfair twisted fruitlessly in her chair, determined to see what had materialized directly behind her. "I can't see, I can't see," she complained in bitter agitation. "If only I could free my hands."
"No," the other psychics thundered as one.
"Hey." Crawford Buchanan's voice came in like the bassoon in Peter and the Wolf. "I'll let go if you want, lady, so you can get a look-see. Camera! I hope you're getting all this migrating wallpaper."
Temple bit her lip. That adorable Crawford, shouting "Camera!" as if the cameraman was his function, nameless unless he was doing something at Buchanan's direction. Or camerawoman.
It could be a woman these days, though Temple had no chance to see the camera operator beyond the blare of bright light. Who did Crawford think he was, an old-time epic director?
Still straining to see, Temple watched the flaccid lips pantomime some word or words over and over again. Lip-reading wasn't as easy as it looked on TV. The motion could have mimed a dozen sounds.
And then the face drowned in the blackness behind it. An illuminated car swerved across the brim of its hat, and as the car streaked out of sight, it erased that part of the image. Other parts melted away, until only the lips were faintly visible, still moving.
"Ugh!" Electra wrenched back to the table, jerking William's right arm with her until Temple felt the pressure pull on her right hand clasped around his left. "Loose lips sink hips, at least that's what they say in my Pound Hounders' meetings. That guy, whoever he was, could use a diet, and if he really is a spirit, all the more."
"Do not be distracted by the special effects," Oscar urged. "That is what we must battle tonight. These tacky manifestations will compete with the true call from beyond. Once our seance is over, I'll check with the management. I'm sure we'll discover that this monotone blimp is one of their effects, not ours."
"What of our effects?" Mynah demanded. "Have we got any to compete with that?"
Cat with an Emerald Eye Page 10