Carole douglas: Cat in an Indigo Mood

Cat in an Indigo Mood

Prologue

Midnight Louie's Dream

The best thing about dreaming is that you do not know you are doing it until you wake up screaming.

I do not exactly wake up screaming, but all four of my limbs are thrashing to beat the band .

. . actually to beat the band of baddies I am fleeing down the endless alleys of dreamland. I can still feel the breath of the hounds from hell that are on my tail.

I lie there on the bed, whiskers still twitching, while l wait for reality to reassemble around me. I wait for the oblong of security light cast through the French door to look less like the shadow of a sneak thief. For the inky blot on the bedroom throw rug to look more like a pair of toppled high heels and less like a chain saw momentarily set down by a serial killer.

Okay, so it was a pretty bad dream.

The pads of my feet are damp with distress. I rub the sleep from my eyes, but still l see alien shapes in the familiar bedroom landscape.

Maybe a familiar shape would reassure my dream-drugged mind, but Miss Temple Barr is in absentia again. What is the use of having a roommate who is off mating in someone else's room?

But I am being selfish. I have left my Miss Temple home alone many a time while I pursued a merry night out on the town, and when the town one lives in is Las Vegas, there are plenty of exciting nights out to be had.

So now that the tables are turned, I have no business complaining.

Like the lady poet said a long, long time ago, a dream is a dream is a dream.

Unless it is a nightmare.

The images return in the slow-motion crawl of dawning recall.

I am back in the eternal alleyway, alone, on the lam.

Those mean streets are lit by aged light bulbs that buzz and crackle, threatening to go nova like a dying star, then darken for good.

The wet streets are patent leather slick and reflect whole constellations of light.

Nine relentless Havana Browns are on my tail, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, fanning out on the liquid asphalt streets. Lean athletic dudes in licorice-brown cat suits. Ninjas with nine lives.

Is the number nine recurring in my dream like an unlucky card?

I hear dice or teeth rattling down the cul-de-sacs I race past Throw them bones . . . or, better yet, get my own bones moving faster Then l see it. A light in the window.

I leap for one or the other the light or the window or both before I spot the figure also in the window: a masked lady in lavender-brown, dilly dilly.

She extends eight blood-ruby red claws, all wearing shiny fresh Curare Coral nail enamel.

I leap short at the last minute, and fall. ..

. . . into a nettle-patch of flailing Havana Browns, shivs drawn.

Then I wake up, my legs still pumping.

By the pricking of my lamentably non-opposable thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Chapter 1

E-mail Man

Like stars, Cyberspace only really came out at night. That's what Max Kinsella thought anyway.

Nine to I've were not its prime-time working hours. It jived, and jammed, spammed, and buzzed like a beehive only after dark. The Internet was a hobbyist's highway, a global beltline jerry-built for enthusiasts and crooks and cranks.

The Net was better than magic, it was technology in irresponsible hands. Amateur Night at the Alhambra Cyber Cafe and Techno-Theater. Babel and the Byzantine Empire online. A Carnivale of commerce. It was all quite quirky, maddening, enchanting. Sometimes it was even dangerous.

Max stared at the large calligraphy letters wriggling like Technicolor worms on screen.

"To tell is to tempt Illusion. The Master Magician dissolves all doubts," Temple read from the screen aloud over his shoulder.

Another thing about the World Wide Web, Max thought. When it pulled you into its online orbit, you lost touch with where you were. This in his case was up at two in the morning, hypnotized by a seventeen-inch monitor.

"Couldn't sleep?" Temple sounded endearingly sleepy herself, but even that wasn't enough to counter the siren lure of cyberspace. Especially when it had turned mysteriously personal.

So he didn't immediately answer her, me-rely spun around to boot up the second computer.

She'd want to know what was going on anyway. He never forgot that she used to be a television news reporter, and that's an investigative job.

"When did you get that?" she wondered, yawning at the twenty-inch screen on his 400-megahertz model.

"Last week, when that other one started burping messages like that at me."

Temple leaned near the static seventeen-inch screen, the luminous image of wildly colored letters painting her ted hair with blue-green punk-rocker streaks.

"Stained-glass threats," she said. Diagnosed. She was awake enough now to sound clinical.

"I think so too."

"Think what?"

"That it's tacky to send poison-pen messages in calligraphic script via computer. Talk about mixed media."

"Sounds like the parchment stuff Gandolph was getting in the mail before he died. Or was killed. Whichever it was."

Max nodded.

"But is this cybergram meant for Gandolph or for you now?"

"I started using Gandolph's computer with his name and password, so it could be either."

Temple pulled a stool to the abandoned computer station.

" 'The vagrant brother will be outcast into the Final Illusion.' Same old pseudo-antique gobbledygook. You think we should take these folks seriously?"

"I take anybody who enjoys long-distance harassment seriously. That's where serial killers come from."

"And major national governments," Temple added with the solemn twinkle of a satirist born.

"Exactly."

Max was not twinkling back. He suddenly needed a change of mood and topic. Poor Temple.

And she'd once thought that consulting with an itinerant magician who worked nights was chaos enough. That was before she knew about his actual vocation.

Max checked his watch. "One of our favorite old movies is on. Why don't we explode some popcorn and forget about computers and cryptic messages for a while?"

"You mean there's a television set in this joint?"

"Is there a television set?" He knew that his tone of voice promised something truly wondrous in the way of TV sets; magicians were inclined to exaggerate and worry about living up to it afterward. "Let me show you to my parlor."

****************

Fifteen minutes later they were ensconced on a massive tufted leather chair big enough for two across the room from a sixty-inch rear-projection TV, an equally oversize aluminum bowl of popcorn warming their laps. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. appeared to be literally jumping into those laps as the opening action scenes of The Fighting O'Flynn unreeled.

"This butter spray is great," Temple said, between the mouth-cramming that popcorn-eating demanded, "but this room is hardly a parlor."

"Den," Max amended amiably.

"Den is right. This chair is big enough for Papa Bear. I guess Baby Bear would get the footstool."

"No, we get the footstool." Max wiggled his stocking toes on the upholstered matching ottoman. "Baby Bear can camp outside."

Temple, now fully awake, snuggled beside him. For a while there was only the music-scored choreographed action of the movie's inspired swordplay and daring-do and the contented crunch of popcorn. "It feels like we're back in Minneapolis again," Temple finally said, a bit astounded.

"You liked that, didn't you?"

"Yeah. I mean the only exotic thing I knew about you then was your working hours. And everybody in the theater works nights."