Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Crimson Haze

''She went to see about backstage matters." Matt waved toward the service elevators. The brothers' overwhelming presence had made evasion devoutly to be wished. "I'll tell her the bad news about everything being okay here."

The brothers nodded morosely, twitching the armed portions of their anatomy in reckless abandon: shoulders, hips and even ankles. All that hardware was now redundant. Pity.

Matt broke their charmed circle and headed for the service area. Temple was going to miss the Gridiron finale unless she showed up pronto. What could be keeping her?

He didn't bother with the elevator, instead clattering down the empty stairs once so unexpectedly threatening. The hand-rail felt as solid as Gibraltar, but he didn't trust any weight to it.

The downstairs, where only hours before performers had dashed and chattered, was eerily silent. He peered into abandoned dressing rooms, inhaling the oily chemical scent of open stage-makeup tins. Askew chairs, scattered pencils and jars, carelessly tossed items of clothing gave the place a Twilight Zone feel, as if the cast had truly been wafted away in a UFO, leaving everything behind.

When Matt reached the under stage area, he saw a hushed crowd huddled around the strangely compelling form of the UFO, and stopped. A muffled din filtered down from the stage above like smothered Musak. No sense disturbing the cast. Temple wasn't here. She probably had returned to their banquette by some arcane backstage route and was now wondering where he was.

Matt retraced his steps, enjoying the echoing silence, He began to understand Temple's fascination with the theater's big, rumbling underbelly. The atmosphere reminded him of a team locker room while the big game was played elsewhere. Full of past and promise, for now it was a place where time stood still.

Then Matt stopped. He had heard something, faint but accidental-sounding. A clang of some kind. And the sound came from ahead, away from the under stage area. A clang like a cell door slamming, and then--a shriek. A thin, tiny scream, so distant it could have been the squeal of an unoiled wheel.

Except that nothing moved here, not even a ceiling fan. He stood and listened to the building breathe; the air conditioner's constant drone became a white noise to ignore. He looked back down the hall toward the now-invisible UFO. No, not from behind . . . from ahead.

But nothing waited ahead--only the stairs and elevator at the left, the empty dressing rooms on the right. He glanced at a spooky rack of hanging costumes of every type and color. It looked like Halloween had been lynched. The stuffed black cat with a fear-arched back planted at the hems of the tawdry costumes only added to the macabre impression.

The cat hissed as it saw him, then lowered its back and stepped forward tentatively to greet him.

"Caviar!"

Matt was shocked to the soles of his black wing-tips. The little cat had been off on her own of late, and he had worried about that, but his own multiple anxieties had overridden any other concern. He was surprisingly relieved to see her. Now if only he could pinpoint Temple. . . .

Caviar was rubbing frantically back and forth on the swaying costumes, her nervous turning, pacing and tail-waving lashing them into an eerie imitation of live-action,

''What are you doing here?"

He neared the animal cautiously, knowing the idiocy of asking a cat anything, but the creatures responded to vocalizations. He had learned that much.

Caviar meowed plaintively. At his approach she transferred her rubbings from inanimate clothing to his pant legs. At least she was also black.

He bent to pick her up, but she eluded him. Mincing over the costume rack's bottom metal support, she nudged between the hanging curtains of costume.

''Hey, kitty! Don't do that."

He bent lower to retrieve her, and that's when he heard the distant echo of scuffles and muffled shouts. Caviar was disappearing where the costumes gaped in the middle like a carelessly closed stage curtain.

Matt reached into the narrow aisle of space and thrust back the costumes as far as he could force them.

The faint noises he had heard were louder. He was facing a black velvet curtain where the wall should be. Caviar nosed right into that dark barrier, her front half vanishing except for the glow of her golden eyes.

She looked back at Matt with that patented feline gaze of calm expectancy: You know what I want. Now do it ignorant human.

The wall was obviously absent without leave here. Matt thought with new anxiety. Since Temple was truant, being Temple, she must have gone where the missing wall went.

Sure. Matt stepped over the rack frame and into instant darkness. Looking back, he saw the costumes had sprung almost closed again now that he was no longer holding them apart.

Temple could have performed the same vanishing act, and no one would have been the wiser had Caviar not played lookout and attracted his attention.

Who--or what--Matt wondered, would attract attention to where he had gone? Maybe his guardian angel, he thought, hearing Caviar's gentle purr of satisfaction and feeling her rubbing pull on his pant legs.

The smothered racket deep in the darkness intensified. Was this some theatrical storage area? Was a crew moving unneeded Gridiron props? Whatever, Temple was even more likely than he to explore such an interesting anomaly. She really was as curious as a cat. He was not, but he had another bad trait: a bulldog sense of responsibility to and for others.

Matt plunged into the unknown territory, his hands a buffer zone before him in the blackness. His fingertips bounced off the paint-smoothed roughness of concrete blocks. He quickly discovered that the space was a broad tunnel, and that it curved as it continued. Light gleamed off a turn far ahead. When his reaching hands found an empty space that proved to be another arm of the tunnel, he began to doubt his wisdom in being there.

''Caviar?" he questioned the dark.

There was no answer, not even a tug against the satin side seams of his rented trousers. He weighed alternatives and decided that feeling his way in a dark so dense he couldn't even see a black cat was idiotic.

He retreated while he still sensed the way, despite a plaintive meow from the abyss. Fools will rush in where even guardian angels fear to tread. He couldn't guarantee any angels, anywhere, anymore. But he could keep at least one fool from further folly Chapter 39

An Uplifting Escape

Temple wasn't sure how far she had walked.

In her high heels, it felt like blocks, but how could that be?

The Crystal Phoenix grounds weren't that extensive.

Farther into the tunnels the occasional bare light bulb provided periodic gobbets of light.

She guessed that they were on the same line as other lights at the Phoenix; the same circuit as the dressing rooms, say. Maybe this had once been storage space for casino and theatrical equipment.

Now the space was utterly empty, but not deteriorated. At least this was Las Vegas, and the walls weren't damp and discolored, or covered with lichen and slime, she thought as she skimmed along the tunnel wall with her hand as a guide.

She could still hear the faint sound of stage machinery. The tunnels were curved, not straight. She may have circled back behind the stage elevator for all she knew. Still, she hadn't found another exit yet, and she didn't even have a humble trail of bread crumbs to lead her back.

She knew she should have turned back long before, but Midnight Louie kept eager pace with her. Every time she stopped, she felt him brush against her calves. Occasionally his upright tail tickled her thighs, the naughty boy! He acted like a dog in a Disney movie; he had something to show her.