Their loss. I leap down to the floor, where I can observe unnoticed. If any shooting starts, I can at least knock some sense into my old man. Which I will do by leaping up to drag him down before the lead flies and finds any convenient holes to fill in the heads here gathered (in which there are quite a few holes, by my count).
I watch the light near, wary of any sudden changes. I know that if I were the shade of something from Beyond, manifesting myself as a warm, glowing light, I would be ready to cream the creators of the current dissonant, monotonous hubbub. Why any lost spirit would head straight for such a clamor is beyond me.
I am right. The light does not head straight into our happy humming midst. Instead it pauses at the window. I flatten my ears, so they should not get notched by any stray bullets, which also has the happy effect of somewhat deadening the humming. Perhaps "deadening" was the wrong word to have in mind.
For, lo! What image breaks in yon window but that of a deathly pale human with haunted, drawn features and thin, elongated hands. In fact, this personage looks as if it has been drawn on a balloon that is inflating, for soon the faint outlines stretch into thin air and vanish.
A pathetic mew of triumph underlines the humming above, which has the table legs practically vibrating. But Midnight Louie knows that what others see and accept as paranormal is merely some cheap trick built into the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead's seance chamber. The light is still there, hanging in air (another old trick). It is still outside the window, a dead giveaway, if you ask me. What self-respecting spirit would ignore getting a few easy horrified gasps by doing something so simple as gliding through glass?
Apparently the bearer of the flashlight agrees, for the light slowly dies, as if ashamed.
Now we will see the night watchman.
But all is dark, and remains so.
The feline hum increases in intensity. Poor desperate fools, trying to lure danger and death in all too human guise!
And ... and there he is! The watchman.
I can see his form quite clearly now. Dark. Portly. Garbed in a brimmed hat and cape. Cape?
Who does this bozo think he is? An escapee from that famous Rembrandt painting of night watchmen? I have seen a Work of Art or two in my day, when Miss Temple's television set was accidentally turned to an educational channel. Of course, this is a haunted-house attraction. It only stands to reason that the night watchman should dress the part. I wait anxiously to see if the face appears from the shadow of the hat brim, and if it is green. Or has fangs. Or fallen eyeballs to match the fallen arches this heavyset house dick must have.
More is coming into focus. Ah! By the hair of his chinny, chin, chin, this antique figure has a beard under that hat. A disguise? A beard and broad cheeks (naturally; he probably spends most of his time guarding the kitchen, not that I would do any differently). And eyes. Merry, twinkling eyes under un-groomed brows. Is Saint Nick working a night job until he gets busy in a couple of months? Then on with the red suit and off with the reindeer?
The would-be apparition's face leans close to the glass. (Here is where he will give himself away; if his nose or chin should touch glass they will pool against it, proving a corporeal presence.) The man grins and looks right at me. That is correct, at me and at no one, nothing else. He puts a chubby finger to his lips, just like jolly old so-and-so. Except his expression is not jolly now. It is pleading. It is conspiratorial. It is urgent.
I stare. I am being enjoined to silence, when I am the only silent one in this room.
Above me, the faithful humming continues unshushed. I stick my head out from under the table and eye my compatriots. All stare vacantly forward, some gazing directly at my night watchman. None see anything but their own faint reflections in the glass.
I look back to the panel the night watchman waits behind. His finger has left his lips. His hands are clasped before the darkness of his cape, clasped in supplication, in urgent supplication. Even as I stare, he suddenly sweeps open his cloak. I see a room lined with bookshelves. I see a lamp upon a table ... no, it is a bright spot upon a table, a pale, square bright spot, like an open luminous book, no, like the face of the machine Miss Temple uses to write upon and that I amuse myself with now and again by running over the keys. Without noise, books begin tumbling from shelves, and the old night watchman is laughing silently behind his beard and under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat. Then the lighted screen dims, as it always does when it is turned off, but more slowly now, dimming like a day dims, when a whole sun must sink somewhere to make it happen ... and the night watchman is sad, downcast, so despondent that he dims with it. The cloak falls closed, the darkness outside is mere darkness, the lit screen is a memory as distant as the first fire.
And still the ninnies on the table hum their tuneless formula. Still they seek a phenomenon from Beyond.
I sit, pondering. Obviously, they did not see what I saw. Then again, I am beginning to think that I am as superior at seeing what is not there as I used to be at seeing what was there. In other words, I am better than they are, even at nothing.
Now the foolish felines begin to moan between their purrs. They sound like a 1973 Volkswagen starting, or thinking about it. Urrrr-rummmm. Urrrr-rummm. Uuuuur-eeee. Uuuur-eee.
Hurry?
Ouuuu-eeee. Ouuuu-eee.
Hurry Louie?
A spark snaps in the fireplace. I turn to look, not wanting my only escape hatch to go up in flames. But I spy only an old flame of mine, after all: Karma, the kibitzing ember. The spark dodges into the room and dances around yours truly, shedding no heat, but much static. My hair is soon whipped into enough peaks to pose as a Baked Alaska dessert, and I am forced to retreat to the high ground of the tabletop.
Once there, the demonic Karma buzzes me with shocks until I am herded back into place in the circle.
"Quick!" Ingram hisses at me through his fangs. "You are the focus of the invading spirit."
Oh, goody. First I am the "focus" of the electric eel of the Circle Ritz, that dominatrix of the light, Karma. Now I am soon to be zapped by some invading spirit. No, thanks.
Before I can shake my coat into shape again and make a break for the chimney, I am stopped cold by the clear sound of a spectral voice amidst the humming.
"Ooo-eee," it moans. Hollowly.
If you accept that "oooo-eee" is ghost talk for "Lou-ie," then I am one marked dude.
If, however, you are of my turn of mind that "ooooo-eeee" could mean absolutely nothing, then I have no reason to remain.
Before my paws can dig into the tabletop for a sudden dash, though, another light beams in the dark.
I wish that I could say that this was Karma's mean little spur of spark, or even my night watchman's spectral TV. But it is not. It is a huge green eye of the feline kind, slit up the middle, and it is looking right at me.
I am now paralyzed. Any cat big enough to own that eye must be the size of a leopard ...
no, of the Leo at the MGM Grand entrance, which is to say a couple of stories, give or take a few feet. It must be so big that, well, that a dude cannot see the other eye, because it is so far away!
While I stand there, frozen, my mind calculating mathematical possibilities, never the most efficient use of my brain cells, I hear the idiotic humming of the humbugs in the circle. If they are what is evoking this giant, staring feline eye, let them be quiet!
But then the eye blinks, and my breath bursts out at the same time, so I think I might have blown it out. No such luck. It is back, just as big again. Only the dark central strip, narrow as a wand, broadens and opens and through it walks--on all fours--a cat I swear I have not seen before, not until ittrods air all the way to the table, where it sits on its haunches about three inches above the actual surface.
What a pussycat! Nothing wrong about this dude, a marmalade torn who looks like a thousand others of the same stripe, including one of my acquaintance.
"Maurice?" I whisper.
"Right the first time," it notes with so
me satisfaction.
Then you are"--I cannot stop a small smirk of triumph from tweaking my whiskers--"dead."
"So they tell me."
I see that no mere Karma-spark has rubbed off on the dude, but that his orange fur is haloed by a corona of pure gold. This is an aura, and like the northern lights, it shifts. Could this dude make a mint on MTV!
"Sudden tragedy, huh?" I ask with all the sympathy I can muster, which is not much. This is the dude, after all, who had pretensions to the Divine Yvette.
"Tragedy, all right, and I want you to avenge me."
"Avenge. That implies something besides accident, veterinary error or ill luck did you in, buddy."
"Someone."
"Oho. Someone I know?" I mean only to be a little lippy, but I get a whole lot of lip back.
"Indeed. Some scum you know."
"I do not know much scum. Intentionally," I add.
"One ... Maurice."
"But... say, take a gander in some spirit mirror, buddy, if you have one where you are. You are Maurice."
"You sure got that right."
"So... since, from what you just told me, you are a suicide, there is not much I can do for you. You are a bit Beyond prosecution for your own death, if you get my meaning."
"My situation is not amusing." The spirit dude tongues his aura into place. "You are the only one who can avenge my restless spirit and allow me to enter Cat Heaven. Otherwise, I go to the Other Place."
'There is a Cat Heaven, really? What is it like?"
"I will tell you when I get there, which will be when you do as I say and avenge me."
"What about this Other Place I never heard of? What is it like?"
"Where dogs go. Need I say more?"
"No." I am aghast. Who runs this universe, anyway, that he/she/it would allow even a dead cat to go where dogs go? "Still, you pose something of a problem. If you are Maurice, and Maurice killed you, I guess you are one of those suicides that no one can help."
"No." The dude's aura snaps back to disorder. "I am Maurice One."
I blink.
"You must avenge yourself upon Maurice Two."
I blink again. But in the meantime, I manage to think.
"Then the current Maurice is Maurice Two, so if you are Maurice One and are dead--the lousy double-crosser killed you to get your job as Yummy Tum-tum-tummy spokescat!"
"He was my body double," Maurice One notes in a morose voice. "He was supposed to do the dangerous stunts and save my hide from unseemly wear and tear. Instead, he fixed it so one of those stunts killed me."
"Well, well, well. I have my own bone to pick with Maurice."
"I wish you would not put that in such personal terms."
"Sorry. You looked all there."
"We ... don an appearance that will not frighten those still among the living."
"Glad to hear it. I am frightened enough to think that I am about to displace Maurice Two as Yummy Tum-tum-tummy cat."
"I know that. Why do you think I am here? You are in a perfect position to avenge me."
"I am a private eye, Maurice, not an executioner."
"If you do not watch out for this killer, you will be his victim."
"On the other hand, a bit of prescient self-defense is always understandable, particularly when one has been tipped off by a reliable Underworld source. Perhaps I can make life so miserable for Maurice Two that he elects to get lost, permanently. By the way, did you mention where carp go? You know, after--?"
Maurice shook his head, dislodging the lopsided halo of light outlining his ears.
"Never cared for carp. I think they go where the birds go. Fish and birds have the same ancestral tree, you know, so that is where they go."
"Which is?"
"I have no idea. You will have to ask when Maurice Two sends you over."
"No, thanks. I will have to call you up on my friend Karma's crystal ball when I send Maurice Two over, and ask both of you, if you two can manage to get along in the Afterlives. Now, have you got any new angles on the human manifestations here Halloween night?"
"Oh, I had nothing to do with that, even though I tried to get through to you then.
Unfortunately, a priority haunting with interference was already in progress. I was put on hold. I only broke through just now behind some party with a power line. I think he was trying to reach you too, but remember, my case comes first. We felines have to help each other, dead or alive."
"Remember that when I call in my IOU. Okay, scram before these airheads think they saw something."
Maurice, dead ham actor that he is, cannot resist making an exit. He fades away stripe by stripe, like a famous Cheshire cat of everyone's acquaintance, only it is not his teeth that are the last thing
left visible, but another, less mentionable article of his anatomy, An ego is a terrible thing to waste.
I shudder to think what I will have to tell the hummers when they snap out of their trance and want to know what happened. I have got a lead from Beyond on a murder all right, only it is not about the matter at hand, but feline felony of the past degree.
It is not the Mauricent, but the more recent death in this very room that is still very much a mystery.
Chapter 28
Cameraman
On a cool early November Monday morning, Temple Barr called the offices of the Las Vegas Scoop to make an appointment with one of its employees.
She once swore that it would be a cold day in Hell before she'd need anything from anyone at what she privately called the Las Vegas Pooper Scooper, but pride goeth before a frigid fall in temperature. And Gandolph the late Great's death was growing very cold, very fast.
When Temple reached the office, she was almost disappointed to find her quarry not only on the job, but reasonably ready and willing to receive her.
She had donned her most washable clothes and expendable shoes. She had confined makeup and nail polish to funereal pales.
She would have worn sackcloth and dumped ashes in her flagrant hair, if she'd had them.
Unfortunately, in this secular age, sackcloth and ashes weren't the staples of life they once were.
Despite the seasonal cold snap, Las Vegas refused to wallow in an autumnal funk. The desert sky was Lake Mead-blue with scat-tered clouds afloat on its surface like icebergs. On a more down-to-earth level, hardy flowers still blossomed among the greenery.
Temple parked the Storm at the weekly papers strip-shopping-center offices, its front wheels on preflattened front pages saturated with oil-pan drip.
Temple entered through a glass door so smudged with fingerprints that it looked opaque.
Why were fingerprints always so obvious when it didn't matter?
Inside was instant chaos--the click and clatter of computer keyboards, and the chatter of people scurrying to pull another Gutenberg miracle out of their heads, hands and hats.
Newsroom noise always made Temple nostalgic for her WCOL-TV days, but the receptionist was never like this.
"Help you?" he asked, sweeping a mailing list aside and showing off a nail polish job far less subtle than Temple's. His spaniel-blond hair was all one length to the tops of his ears, then shaved to the skin below. He wore one tasteful aurora borealis crystal stud in his right ear, and eyeliner on both eyes.
Temple asked for the man she wanted, or rather, the man she didn't want, but needed to see.
The receptionist tossed his hair toward the large room's far wall. "Photo desk. Over there."
Temple headed in the direction indicated. Like all foot soldiers dispatched by duty to foreign turf, she hoped that it would soon be over over there. She kept an edgy eye out for another Scoop employee, whom she was even less eager to encounter.
The photo desk was presided over by a squat, graying man who looked more like Ed Asner with a hangover than Asner himself ever could.
" I've got an appointment with Wayne Tracey," she told him.
"Aren't we fancy now? Appointments and everything. Wayne!" h
e bawled over his shoulder.
A revolving door only big enough for one customer at a time, with opaque black dividers, slowly thumped around until it disgorged a harried guy of thirty in rolled-up shirtsleeves.
"Come on in," he said. "Im souping some stuff and can't stop now."
Cranky at the desk nodded brusque encouragement, so Temple jumped for the revolving door's next empty compartment. She shuffled along in complete darkness, like someone in a small, circular haunted house, until she found the only way out on the other side: the eerie, dim, infrared atmosphere of a development chamber.
She edged up to the only man inside, who was submerging paper in solution until an image appeared. This was not unlike being at a seance, Temple realized, though in the past she had taken photo studios and their processes for granted.
Yet, when you came to think of it, there was something spooky about the entire process.
First you caught people's essences--their frozen images--in reverse light-and-dark. Then you projected them on paper. And finally, you let those encoded vestiges stew in a strong chemical soup until the person begins to peer out from the developing pan like a shy spirit. Instant ectoplasm.
"Yeah?" the photographer asked without looking up.
"Wayne Tracey?"
"Right."
"You must remember me from the haunted-house seance you shot the other night."
He glanced at her, surprised. "Why should I? I shoot a few dozen photos a day, and when I'm videotaping for out-of-town media, I shoot thousands of feet. I don't pay much attention to exactly who's in front of my lens, just as long as the reporter gets the names and faces right, and clues me in on what's happening so I know where to point."
"Oh. Well, I was there. I wondered if any of the spooky effects showed up on your live footage."
He tonged a dripping wet photo of a mangled van surrounded by even more mangled passengers into another chemical bath.
"What was to show up? Fog. No different from when it shows up outside along the road, though we don't get much fog out here. Not wet enough."
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