Cat with an Emerald Eye

by Douglas, Carole Nelson

  "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!"

  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.