Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Maybe. Maybe not.

Her feet didn't quite touch the floor, as always, and her fingertips were growing numb from compression. Maybe she was developing carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting the computer keyboard too much. Maybe this stupid seance would cripple her for real work. Maybe she was getting... nervous.

"I see ..." Mynah murmured, "... nothing."

Had there been a grandfather clock in the room, and that was one detail the designers had left out, it would have been ticking off the seconds. It would have counted a decade to each second, so that time weighed heavier than normal.

Temple tried to squint at the large-size watch face on her left wrist, but Edwina had clasped her hand so tightly that the wrist was turned toward her, not Temple. Time remained an unreadable expansion band on the white underside of her wrist, where, she remembered from some dim, teenage devouring of a palmistry book, the "bracelet" lines of her fortune lay.

Bracelets, or scars of another, less livable life? Temple shook her head. Dark thoughts circled the room, infecting them all. The seductive scents of food had given way to a strong odor of alcohol, old alcohol at the bottom of a glass, crystallizing into a sugary haze.

"Look!" Electra was staring at a window on the opposite wall.

A man filled it as a portrait would a frame, the etched brocade of phantom wallpaper tattooing his pale hands and face, his starched white shirtfront. He wore formal dress, like a Fred Astaire blow-up doll, a big man, with a wounded, brute power to his bigness. He lifted a glass to them all, a lock of curly dark hair sagging over one eyebrow like a neglected drape on a window.

The man's figure was limned all in black and white and grainy grays, like a filmed image.

Temple caught her breath. She loved the old black-and-white films, their Expressionistic rainy-day distance, their glamour, their endearing decadence. Frankenstein and Dracula and Fred all lunged, slunk and danced through the black-and-white cinematic worlds of the thirties and forties. It was a time when newspaper columnists called movie actresses "cinemactresses," and magicians "mysteriarchs." It wasn't that long ago, but it was as dead as any corpse.

Was he dead too, the dignified man peering rather puzzledly at them through a window etched with wallpaper in the stippled patterns of raindrops? Or was he only an actor hired to play a hologram?

He seemed tall, and carried a white-tipped cane, like Fred, though he could hardly trip the light fantastic like Fred, for he was a mammoth man, broadening from his feet up and his neck down like a Russian nesting doll, only one painted in black and white and gray, instead of the usual carnival of colors.

Familiarity cloaked this figure, as if Temple had seen a black-and-white cardboard cutout of him somewhere. .. maybe at the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Hollywood Museum. He should be standing next to a like figure of Mae West, or Ann Miller or Rita Hayworth, but he looked like a man who had stood alone most of his life.

"I'm a believer," Electra whispered from Temple's right, leaning forward to speak past William Kohler's unmoved and unmoving bulk. "But this has got to be slide projections, right? I mean, the attraction's usual spooky effects will run as programmed?"

Temple nodded slowly. That was true. She just wasn't sure this was the usual spooky effects.

"Some holographic program," Oscar announced with disdain.

"I see nothing seriously spiritual," Mynah seconded.

Edwina leaned forward to stare through the image as if trying to dissect it with laser light. "I sense nothing, no dominant intelligence, no moving spirit. But I see this man, his silver nitrite image, as if he had been excised from a reel of old film."

"Houdini made films," Oscar Grant put in. "Bad ones."

"Execrable ones," the professor concurred. "Exploitation films of an earlier and cruder era.

Would make Waterworld look like the Flood according to the Bible."

"This is not Houdini," Agatha announced. "Houdini's mental self-image may have been as looming, but the man himself was diminutive."

"Still--" D'Arlene sounded troubled. "I'm picking up a word. Wisconsin. And a date: April sixth, eighteen seventy-four."

"Wisconsin." Professor Mangel whistled through his teeth, an odd, informal sound for a seance. "Houdini made out he was born there, but he was actually born in Budapest and was brought to the U.S. soon after. He wanted to be utterly of the New World, you see."

"But he was born in March!" Mynah insisted. "On March twenty-fourth. He later changed the date in his biographical material to April sixth, and never satisfactorily explained why."

"Can a ghost mix up the month of his birth?" Temple asked.

"Anyone can mix up the month of his birth, if he lives long enough," Edwina said testily.

Professor Mangel had an academic answer, which he leaned around Electra to tell Temple.

"The confusion owes itself to the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, which were still both in effect when Houdini was born."

Temple was duly impressed by the encyclopedic nature of the psychics' knowledge of Houdini's background. They knew it in and out, top to bottom, apparently. Pretty easy to declare a stain on the wall or a reflection on a window to be the manifestation of someone dead if you know that person's resume like a corporate recruiter.

Yet even as they speculated aloud, the still-life figure dissolved, so slowly that Temple couldn't quite believe her eyes ... believe that she had seen it, and was now not seeing it.

This was a haunting spirit, Temple mused, that teased as much in absentia as in presence.

Another scent filled the room: fusty, musty, neglected. No rich aroma of gourmet cooking, of spirits and wine, of cigars. Only the smell of absence, of abandonment.

The eyes around the table widened and stared at Temple until she felt distinctly uneasy.

Then she realized that they were gazing past her, through her, beyond her.

Without disengaging her hands from the others, she turned toward the window-wall behind her, straining to see over the high wooden chair-back.

She saw mostly an upper bust, also in dim shades of gray, and the huge, bulging-eyed head that loomed over it like the face of an apoplectic Pekingese. The hair fell gray and stringy across the broad forehead from beneath the kind of brimmed black felt hat a highwayman would have worn in an earlier century.

The face did not seem of this time, nor did the loose black silk cravat that couldn't quite conceal a stunning expanse of shirtfront. The man was a monument to immensity both personal and spiritual, the most corpulent, fleshy ghost she had ever seen, if he was indeed a ghost.

His pasty gray face was distorted with fear, and for the first time his image moved, the mouth loose and round as an operatic tenor's. He was mouthing something at them, some words beyond hearing.

Edwina Mayfair twisted fruitlessly in her chair, determined to see what had materialized directly behind her. "I can't see, I can't see," she complained in bitter agitation. "If only I could free my hands."

"No," the other psychics thundered as one.

"Hey." Crawford Buchanan's voice came in like the bassoon in Peter and the Wolf . "I'll let go if you want, lady, so you can get a look-see. Camera! I hope you're getting all this migrating wallpaper."

Temple bit her lip. That adorable Crawford, shouting "Camera!" as if the cameraman was his function, nameless unless he was doing something at Buchanan's direction. Or camerawoman.

It could be a woman these days, though Temple had no chance to see the camera operator beyond the blare of bright light. Who did Crawford think he was, an old-time epic director?

Still straining to see, Temple watched the flaccid lips pantomime some word or words over and over again. Lip-reading wasn't as easy as it looked on TV. The motion could have mimed a dozen sounds.