Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

But no one raised an objection.

Temple heard feet shuffle and throats clear around her, not unlike a troupe of actors awaiting the drawing of the first-act curtain, holding their places and getting ready to shine.

Then, like dawn teasing the horizon at five in the morning, a subtle light surfaced around them. It seemed too faint to detect, much less name, yet it grew. First came the glint of glass.

Unlike the others, Temple perfectly understood their situation.

They were marooned on an artificial island in a vast space. They were surrounded by busy paths of programmed chaos, the moving cars of spectators. Witnesses. They themselves, the seancers, were mobile, easing up and down three stories, so they were displayed to equally mobile viewers at different times.

These few people under a bell jar were like chessmen and women on a transparent, three-dimensional Star Trek board placed on an invisible elevator. Up and down they would go, and where they would stop, nobody could know.

With the rising lights--sconces placed between the panes of ghostly brocade-etched glass--

they were able to distinguish each other's forms across the table's empty polished wood surface. There were some confusions: the shoulder-dusting hair of both man and woman, for instance, Temple noted. She supposed that she and Electra, dressed in matching, conflicting-patterned muumuus and with their electric hair colors both natural and unnatural, looked like Tweedledee and Tweedledum on AC/DC.

Crawford in his dark suit, as faintly reflected in the opposite window glass, looked oddly nineteenth century.

And the cameraman, the only free-floating body in the room, was a lightning bug flitting at the edges of everything, ceaselessly recording, recording.

"Hands, everybody," Oscar Grant ordered.

Temple's abandoned their polite and private clasp on her lap to lift onto the table. Two others grasped them from either side, Edwina's cotton glove warm and dry from the left, William Kohler's bare hand oddly clammy from the right.

Temple had not held hands with strangers since a childhood game of ring-around-the-rosy.

She discovered she suffered from a bit of xenophobia. Only reminding herself of the ignominy, of the utter disgust of holding hands with Crawford Buchanan, encouraged her to buck up.

And these strangers' hands were supposed to be conduits of unseen powers. Not the professor's though. He was another amateur. Psychically brain-dead, like her. She couldn't speak for Electra and her possibly female phantom cat. Imagine! Electra with a cat.

Maybe. One thing was for sure, Temple was learning more about plectra tonight than she had before. Now, if this trend continued with the dead...

Wow! She had opened herself to the spirit world, and who could say who might drop by.

Suddenly, Temple realized that she "knew" a lot more dead people than she had before. There was Chester Royal, who might drop in to admonish her for falling on his last, best suit of clothes at the ABA. Or the poor cat lady might come calling through, hunting her dispersed charges. Or the strip teasing Gold Dust Twins, manifesting themselves, still joined, in a cloud of golden motes ... or (horrors!) a handsome cover-hunk, all that marbled muscle mere phantasm now, tossing his golden mane and threatening to "swoop" her into the Underworld.

Temple closed her eyes. That was the trouble with dying and going to heaven--or hell--you might actually encounter people you had known in life. Many of them, she never wanted to see again.

"Concentrate," Oscar Grants slightly foreign voice intoned. "Free your thoughts. Open yourself to the empyrean. See all time, all space."

Temple peeked. Outside their lit crystal ball, she glimpsed distorted visages rushing by.

Happy Halloweeners on the ride of a lifetime? Or tormented spirits wafted to and fro by the Afterlife?

She felt herself sinking, very slowly. Felt the room diminishing into a tiny glass globe on the stage of an indifferent and vast universe. Felt the hands upon hers thrum with unsuspected tension. Felt a ... pricking of her thumbs. Something wicked this way comes--

No!

Her hands were simply going to sleep from the unaccustomed pressure. How could she tell her seance-mates that she was just a computer-age baby prone to carpal tunnel syndrome ... ?

Tunnel.

Rabbit hole.

She was going down and down, and the late little white rabbit was a black cat in an emerald collar. The Queen of Diamonds wore swords for a crown, and the caterpillar sported a hookah pipe that blew rainbow bubbles and a hat made of cabbage roses that sang....

"Don't worry," said an unfamiliar voice. "Hang on. The spirits are miffed tonight. We're going to have a bumpy ride."

And Bette Davis was the Queen of Hearts.

Chapter 13

Louie's Lucky Number Is Up

Hello. Here I am again, in my old, familiar spot.

Lucky Thirteen.

Have you ever considered that thirteen is just thirty-one spelled backwards, as in October thirty-first? That is no doubt how the association of the number thirteen with ill luck began, with All Hallows' Eve, and flying witches and furred familiars like black cats.

All a filthy lie. The only witch I have ever associated with was the stuffed one in The Wizard of Oz exhibit at the MGM Grand Hotel, and she was not talking (unless they turned on her recorded message). Even she was not such a bad old egg. A nose job and a wen removal would have cheered up her outlook considerably.

But now I am surrounded by witches in peaked hats, with nasty painted-on faces that would stop an hourglass in mid-dribble, some of them only three feet high. So here it is. Near midnight, and here I am on the sandy lot outside the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead. Inside, people are shrieking in happy terror.

This is an alien notion to me, that people would go out of their way to be scared. There is enough scary about the normal world to last a lifetime, if you ask me. I cannot imagine seeking out the paranormal to add to the toll.

Of course, to some, the extraordinary is glamorous. Some might no doubt find Karma intriguing. I find her a pain in the psyche, not to mention the keister, which is generally a site unmentionable in polite circles.

Still, I am here, and she is not, and that is one of the many advantages of the purely physical state, in which I have happily disported myself for, lo, these many years. (Although some would seem to be intent on taking away my happy disportment and replacing it with the usual boredom, responsibility and male-pattern hair loss.)

Certainly Miss Temple Barr has not assured me a stress-free life by blocking my only means of slipping out to sniff the poppies now and then. I am miffed enough that I would not trouble myself to worry about what is happening to her in the programmed chaos within, were I not such a sterling fellow.

I recall my last visit to this site in relative daylight, when I was routed by a gang of do-gooders who wished to save my soul by catching me, locking me up and no doubt practicing culturally sanctioned genital mutilations upon me, all for my own good.

But I remain free and whole, and fairly invisible if I keep out of the rainbow of spotlights targeting the grotesque facade of the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead. Keeping to the black side of things, I slink around to the back and wait patiently by a low-profile door. This is the service entrance, and although this is not a hotel, I know according to Feline Foundation Rules that if I wait patiently by a service door, it will eventually open to admit or release a human being who very likely carries something and will not notice me flashing by his or her legs and inside.

In due time it happens, as it always does. An open door, a jug of wine coming or going, and I am inside the House of Hard Knocks and Spectral Raps.