Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Agatha Welk set her teacup down so swiftly it almost broke against the saucer. "You? You saw ... something?"

"Didn't everybody?"

"No." She put her right hand to the center of her forehead, as if reversing or turning on some mental movie camera. "No. They all said they had seen nothing but that laughable Houdini, although not all agreed the Houdini sighting was laughable."

"When you say 'all,' who do you mean?"

"Oscar. D'Arlene. That Mynah woman. Jeff. I never had a chance to ask Edwina."

"But you didn't ask Electra, or myself?"

"You were amateurs, mere observers! You couldn't possibly have--" She stared at Temple, those limpid gray eyes widening until they seemed to match the two, dark, bitter wells of filled teacups hiding fortunes in their tepid depths. "But you say you did. You saw the boy? The old man?"

"I assumed that everybody did."

"What about this Electra?"

"I never asked her."

"Do so. At the first opportunity.*'

Nothing wavery about Agatha Welk now, Temple noticed as she mulled that snapped directive. She tapped her own recall in the ordinary way, by thinking back and visualizing.

"The Other Apparition. He appeared in different windows, so not everybody might have seen if the angle was wrong."

"Angles! Those are the concerns of magicians, not mediums. Viewing angles had nothing to do with it. You and I were opposite each other, don't you remember? I saw the boy in the window behind you."

"He was in the window behind you! " .

"No doubt, to your view. And the old man--?"

"Was behind Gandolph."

Agatha nodded, picking up her cup again for a good, long bracing swallow.

"What about the man in midlife?" Temple asked.

Agatha regarded her with icy suspicion. "I never saw him."

"But I did. He was... over to the left, between the boy and the old man. But they never appeared together."

"I saw no adult male but the old man, and the ridiculous projection of Houdini bound for one of his escape challenges. You know how he arranged those?"

Temple shook her head.

"Well, he was first a master of self-promotion. Frankly, a better promoter than he was an accomplished stage magician, though no one could top him for 'escapeology.' He was desperate earlier in his career, I suppose. Fixated on escaping, but no one found the notion of a magician getting out of handcuffs compelling; obviously the cuffs were phonies, or a key was concealed on the magician. But Houdini was a former locksmith obsessed with breaking bonds by apparently mystical means. He needed an audience that would share and even applaud his obsession. So he went to policemen in the various cities in which he was booked. He challenged them to lock and bind him however they could, and he would escape. Then he proceeded to do it, so successfully that policemen felt this was a bad example. They strived to produce truly escape-proof chains, cuffs, crates, cells--every manner of confinement. Houdini once even had himself sewn into the washed-up partial carcass of a whale."

"Ooooh!" Temple wrinkled her nose and every other feature that could crinkle in disgust.

"Dead meat. "

"Exactly. Houdini almost became your 'dead meat' as well. Some scientists had preserved the carcass with chemicals: formaldehyde; the closed atmosphere inside was so toxic that he couldn't remain conscious long enough to escape."

"But he got out?"

"His associates realized something was wrong and pulled him out, much to Houdini's humiliation. Another of those cases where he bit off more than he could chew."

"Or would want to chew!" Temple sipped tea to remove the bad taste imagination had put in her mouth, glad she hadn't chosen green tea, rot-green tea.... "That stunt was gross."

"Grossly egocentric. That's why Houdini's death is so pitiful. Felled by a moment's inattention, then denying it by ignoring all danger signals and pain until it was too late and the infected appendix--a tiny entity scarce the size of his little finger--destroyed him slowly."

"He died on Halloween."

"But only after fighting death for several days. Such a personality, such an ego, would find extinction particularly galling. That's why, if any psychic shard of himself exists, in any form, anywhere, he would be the one to return. He even left a strongbox with coded ritual words that his wife would recognize; except that after his death they were revealed in various autobiographies, so they be-came worthless."

"How would you know any phenomenon was Houdini, then?"

"My instinct. I have raised remnants before."

Remnants. To Temple, that expression was redolent of animated strips of rotting whale flesh, pieces of dead bodies: Wanda the Whale-stripper singing "Don't Get Around Much Any More" while Houdini's marvelous talking appendix pops out from a split seam to huckster a new tell-all book: How I Did In the Master . Or maybe the revived remnant would come in purely auditory form, like a few last words from Thomas Edison, recorded in The Twilight Zone with Rod Sterling singing backup.

"This is more gruesome than the actual stance," Temple noted.

"A proper seance shouldn't be gruesome; it should be effective. Honestly effective. But I still can't imagine why you would see what I saw, and no one else."

"Perhaps the others just didn't admit to it."

"Why would they deny it?"

"Whoever that was, he wasn't on the guest list. So the others are prepared to accept Houdini on the half shell."

"Houdini on the half shell--? Whatever does that mean?"

"Like Venus on the half shell, he sure wasn't wearing much."

"My dear, no one cares if a ghost is naked, although the vast majority of ghosts sighted are indeed clothed."

"Makes you wonder who the couturier in Beyond is."

"I don't wonder any such thing. Once you accept that the soul's energy can survive, you understand how that energy can preserve the image of the dead person as it was in life. Very few... decayed ghosts are reported also."

"Thank heaven this Houdini didn't decide to do his Jonah routine right this time and materialize inside the rotting blubber!"

"You do have a way of putting things in their most sensational form. No wonder you're a publicist."

"At least I'm not going around swearing that Houdini is back."

"Are any of the others?"

"Not... yet. But they're busy with the fair."

Agatha sat forward, extending a bony forearm to tip up Temple's teacup. "Are you done yet?"

Regrettably no. She chugalugged the last of the now-cold tea, then surrendered her cup.

"No. You must swirl the dregs three times, then upend the cup on your saucer and tap three times."

Temple followed these instructions while her tongue worked large leaf flakes from her teeth. This kind of tea-drinking was as messy as smoking. She refrained from tapping her heels together three times and hoping for Kansas.

"No one brews the proper large-leaf tea anymore," Agatha said. "The art of geomancy is a dying one. Such a reading has become a rarity."

Silently thanking her good luck, Temple hoped that the tea would not lead to the good fortune of an emergency-room stomach-pumping. In fact, here she was interviewing possible murderers ... and she had just consumed a beverage so strong-tasting that it could mask Liquid Plumber. Did she feel a bit... light-headed? Mildly anxious? Somewhat sweaty? What had she done?

Miss Welk had pulled a jeweler's loupe from one of her jacket pockets and now bent over the cup. Temple wondered what jewels of misinformation the medium would find among the damp tea leaves.

"This is fascinating," the woman murmured. "Absolutely fascinating."

"What?"

"Apparently you are a very brash young lady. I see you menaced on all sides by danger. No wonder a spirit would appear to you. Someone needs to warn you!"