Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"Howdy, Miss Barr," he said, further startling her. "You don't remember me, I bet. Wild Blue Pike from Three O'Clock Louie's out on the lake. You remember this ole black devil, though, right?"

"Three O'Clock Louie." The cat lifted its head as she greeted it. Temple saw the white hairs dusting the muzzle. Older, and maybe wiser, than her Midnight Louie.

"I'm here to see the layout before I join the Halloween seance party Thursday night."

"You git roped into that deal?" Wild Bill politely spit (if any such action could be deemed polite) a stream of tobacco juice to the ground, where it added a new indignity to Crawford Buchanan's beautifully besmirched features.

"I like your aim," Temple noted. "And 'roped' is the right word."

"Bunch of hocus-smokus, if you were to ask me, which no one has so far. Me an' some of the other boys are here as consultants, but so far nobody wants any consultin' " , He stood aside as Temple went through the door into the dark beyond. "These are high' tech whiz kids.

Know everything. All we know is a real ghost town."

"Can you give me a tour?"

"Sure, but you should really do it at night to get the full effect."

"I think I will. Tomorrow." She bent to pat Three O'clock Louie's head. "What's he doing here?"

"Migrating local color," Wild Blue said dryly. "You can't exactly count on a cat to perform on schedule."

"Tell me about it."

Wild Blue led her through the usual spook-house terrain, a Frankenstein monster's birth canal of twisting corridors draped with spray-on cobwebs. There was the usual Unexpected Sudden Step Down, guaranteed to make one's stomach defy gravity. There were the traditional Concealed Mirrors to Hell, which would reflect not only whoever walked by, but the unseen grisly figure towering behind the unsuspecting stroller.

"It's all in the angles," Wild Blue said.

"So I've heard." Temple ducked a dangling web. When someone her height had to duck, that meant the spider-soft network would caress most people in the face. Wild Blue Pike ducked too, being a wiry, compact man, like most old-time pilots.

He led her through a tangle-town of corridors, the kind of classic maze setup where the confused visitor trudges for what seems like forever, but has actually corkscrewed through a surprisingly short distance, if seen from a raven's-eye view.

Looking up, Temple noticed that the black-painted high ceilings had vanished, and that the black above them seemed seriously remote.

"I guess you Glory Hole guys aren't over-impressed by the special effects around here," she commented.

"Nope. But the centerpiece is a corker, I'll give 'em that."

He made his comment just as they arrived at the complex web's heart. Temple's own heart paused a beat to give due honor.

She and Wild Blue gazed into the convoluted heart of darkness: a vast dim chamber the size of a Hollywood sound studio, plumbed by veins of metal scaffolding. Most of the trestles twisted like pretzels, but a core before them rose up like the shaft of a mine, perhaps forty or fifty feet.

All the scaffolding reminded Temple of the Eiffel Tower's deceptively lacy look, but the real phenomenon was what lay directly before them.

She gazed into a large room through glass windows that faintly reflected their own shapes on the opposite windows. A pale tracery suggesting spectral wallpaper overlaid the glass, so Temple had the sensation of peering through a solid wall made transparent.

The room was furnished in a style that Temple called Olde English Manor Eerie. It had served the classic black-and-white horror movies of the thirties and was revived in Hammer Films's more lurid Technicolor terrors in the sixties. Yards of glum brocade upholstered elaborately carved chairs fresh from Torquemada's Gothic torture chamber. A massive hearth large enough for a man to stand in, or perhaps to decorate a turning spit in, was surmounted by a mock-stone mantel bristling with grotesque faces and figures. Medieval weapons--battle-axes, maces and other appliances far nastier than mere dagger and sword--hung surrealistically before the window-walls.

"The whole setup is three stories," Wild Blue boasted with a pilot's love of even ground-bound height.

"We didn't go up or down."

"No, but that does." He pointed to the empty room. "If you kept on the right path, you'd go down, too. No stairs, except for the odd heart-stopping six-inch drop. The so-called ground-level slants up ... and down. So you don't know how high or low you really are at any given time. But in the open middle, the roof is three stories up. And that there room goes up and down, bringing different ghosties past depending on what level you're on. And that's where the stance will be held."

"So it's a moveable feast?" Temple couldn't resist asking.

"Feast, hah! More like a famine, if you're planning on it making do for dinner. The house schedules regular shenanigans in the room, but Halloween night all you hand-holders will be going up and down like a yo-yo, but slower, so everybody gets to eavesdrop, and see the action as well."

"Oh, my queasy stomach! Talk about your mobile local color. We'll be nothing but a traveling carnival of the weird. I suppose this method makes it harder for any hanky-panky to go on."

Wild Blue shot her a slitty look through his famous Lake Mead-azure eyes. "Or easier, Miss Barr. You know what happens when the magician keeps one hand moving."

"Do I ever," she muttered.

Wild Blue Pike knew nothing of her ex-private life with the Mystifying Max, so he continued unperturbed, scratching at his shock of bleach-white hair like Will Rogers delivering a particularly down-home line. "Waal, it's a chance for the other hand to pull some pretty tricky stuff."

"Are you saying that the seance Thursday night will be rigged to provide a successful materialization?"

Wild Blue frowned and shrugged simultaneously. "Not that nobody tells us, but then they don't tell us nothin'."

Temple waited for the herd of double negatives to thunder through her head, leaving her none the wiser as to his answer.

"Just tell me yes, or no," she suggested.

"It ain't that easy. We're jest 'consultants,' here to make sure none of the works tangles up.

When you're in that room, jest expect to be gawked at plenty, and keep your feet on the floor."

"That's what my mother told me when I went to my first prom."

Wild Blue's laugh was an eerie echo bouncing along the huge glass-sided room before them.

"Good advice for here, too. If it gets too spooky, and that Houdini feller ambles in with his head upon a hors d'oovers tray, remember that there are a bunch of folks out back here pulling all kinds of strings and don't take it too serious like."

"Gotcha!"

Despite his own sensible advice, Wild Blue jumped.

By six that evening, Temple was standing in front of Electra Lark's penthouse door, her forefinger nailing the doorbell button to the backplate.

One invariably had to wait a geological age or so for Electra to answer her door. That made Temple, always imaginative, speculate about secret admirers being hustled out a back entrance, or tarot cards being hastily swept up and hidden away.

When the door finally opened, Temple unconsciously sniffed the air for cigar smoke or incense. What her nose picked up was ... tuna-fish casserole in the oven.

Electra's always interesting hair was wrapped in something plastic, pink and chemical-smelling.

"Temple! Sorry I can't ask you in. I'm conditioning."

"That's okay. I just wanted to know if you could go through a haunted house with me tomorrow. It's for work, so I have passes."

"Oh, dear... not that Hell-o-ween House?"

"Yes."

"Sorry, kid. I'm participating in a seance there Thursday night. It would be ... inappropriate for me to go through like a regular tourist beforehand. Might upset the spirit world, you know, to mix play-haunting with the true Beyond. It's bad enough that the local psychic society agreed to sponsor this Houdini-hunting scheme under such commercial terms. I didn't vote for it."