Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Gandolph was a spirit now. Like Houdini he was an unbeliever who had crossed over.

(Exactly what he had crossed over, Temple was not sure. Perhaps it was the river Styx, perhaps the river Jordan, or the Las Vegas Strip, or even perhaps the fine line between Beyond and bullfeathers.)

Gandolph, presumably, could return, now that he was dead. Ooh! And he had a reason to return here, where he had died, where a murderer might sit who had not only killed him, but had gotten away with it. Temple held her breath. (I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in ghosts, I don't even believe in Tinkerbell. . . .) But the psychics weren't so far out in their objective of the evening. If any spirit was liable to manifest itself here and now, it was Gandolph the Great.

"We begin," Mynah announced coldly.

Behind them a light flashed on. The camera was ready.

Temple glanced at William Kohler. Despite the chill touching the vast, unoccupied space, sweat sheened his face, the betraying protest of an overweight frame. Or a guilty mind.

Oscar held hands with Mynah and Agatha, but kept nervously jerking his head to shake back his dramatically silver forelock of hair, which had fallen against his face like an English judge's wig.

Agatha's eyes were closed; no way to see spirits, and D'Arlene glanced from one to the other participant as if hunting for the thoughts of the maybe-murderer among them. Electra looked determined, focusing on Agatha directly across the table, her hand in the professor's warm grip, which looked more desperate than firm to Temple. Jeff Mangel caught her eye and bit his bottom lip.

Only Crawford and William Kohler seemed unmoved.

"We begin," Mynah went on, "where we have always begun, with the spirit and will of Harry Houdini, who died before times. He was not a friend to mediums, but only mediums remember him well enough to meet and call for his return year after year, Halloween after Halloween for seventy years. Now a man like him has died: an unbeliever. A skeptic. A medium-hunter. Has Gandolph the Great, too, learned the Afterlife's reality? Has he repented? Does he wish to come back to us in his new ephemeral form? Does he wish to tell us something? That he and Houdini occupy the same Beyond? That the notion of an Afterlife is humbug? Come, Houdini. Come, Gandolph, only you can manifest the truth, and you, can do that only by showing yourselves.

Show yourselves, I command you! Show yourselves, I beseech you! For all of those who have believed in you, show us the conviction that lies beyond death. Now! It is now or never."

During Mynah's declamation, the surrounding lights had almost imperceptibly dimmed.

Temple noticed, because she was watching for it. Not only the in-room sconces had dimmed, but the spotlights high above. Who ran the lightboard, she wondered cynically, Gandolph or Houdini? Or maybe Mrs. Houdini, Bess his wife, who'd always played the page girl in his act.

Temple recalled playing the page girl in Max's kitchen performance last night and found herself momentarily distracted.

In that moment, the mist had begun rising, for it was suddenly seeping in everywhere again in hissing serpent-fingers of cloud.

"The temperature," Agatha Welk said hoarsely, never opening her eyes.

And it had plunged. Temple felt icy air wafting up from under the table, slithering down the back of her neck. This was a new effect. Effect, this was an effect, not an act of nature, but an effect.

Hands tightened on each other around the table, in reaction to cold, to fear.

A muffled sound came from the chimney, and all eyes flashed there.

Something dark filled the empty, fire-scorched interior of the hearth. A screaming, snarling yowl announced it: a black cat. No gate-crashing Midnight Louie alleycat, but a long, sinuous feline force. The panther wore a collar studded with nickel-size ruby-red stones, the even larger emeralds of its light-refracting eyes shone like the coals of a perverse icy green hell in its powerful face.

Temple tried to mistake it for Midnight Louie, somehow blown up large. But she couldn't.

Midnight Louie (sorry, fella) was not only not the size of a mastiff, but he was nowhere near this svelte, muscular and carnivorous, not even during his fiercest temper tantrum with a delinquent rubber band.

The Big Cat leaped forward. Hands along the table drew back and almost broke their grip.

The panther's mouth opened to showcase an entire Himalaya range of ice-sharp white teeth. Another wildcat cry pierced the fog as the animal's thin, sleek tail lashed like a possessed bullwhip.

Then ... it was gone, all that feral energy, and behind it came a vacuum, a loss, a little death.

They breathed again, but tightened fingers didn't loosen on each other. Poor Sophie!

Between Temple and Crawford's unconscious tug-of-war, her arms had been twisted... to the breaking point had they been flesh and bone instead of cotton and fiberfill.

"The panther is Houdini," Mynah's husky seance voice decided. "Wiry, muscular energy.

Supreme ego and showmanship. A devouring obsessiveness."

They waited, watching the fireplace's inky mouth as they might a black stage curtain, anticipating the next act, the next appearance.

"Oh."

Agatha Welk's quaver roused them from their own obsession.

Her eyes were still shut, the lids quivering. "Who is that?"

"Where?" Temple asked.

Agatha's head dreamily nodded across the room from herself. They looked in the direction she indicated, the people on Temple's side of the table having to twist in their Gothic chairs.

They saw only the dark outer vastness at the heart of the empty building. Temple, tired of craning her neck, caught a reflection in the window opposite her, behind Agatha Welk.

"Someone is out there," she said.

"Oh, really, T.B.," Crawford objected. " Someone is out there.' It's 'the truth is out there,' if you're trying to use that X-Files catch-phrase. Tired stuff, T.B., derivative and--"

"Shut up, Crawford, and look for yourself. Is that 'someone out there' or not? Then tell me I'm seeing things. At least it isn't you."

"I see some sort of black blob in a bit of light. Of course you re-alize anything out there would be suspended in sheer space."

"The panther," Oscar suggested.

"It's a seated person," Jeff Mangel interjected. "All in black. Can't you all see the big floppy hat, the slope of the shoulders, the long cloak to the ground?"

Temple nodded. He saw what she saw.

"That's Edwina, then!" Mynah sounded truly excited.

"Gandolph," Oscar reminded her.

"Do we all see it?" Electra wanted to know.

"I see it," Agatha said, still facing in the opposite direction, still with her eyes closed.

"William?" Mynah demanded, seeking a second.

"I see something," he mumbled.

"Well, I don't," complained a voice until now silent, which Temple recognized. "I gotta move and focus in. Can you all just settle down for a bit?"

They had forgotten him. Wayne the cameraman. So they waited silently while he stomped to the other side of the room and aimed his light into the glass.

"Damn hard to shoot," he muttered. "All reflection."

"What do you think it is?" D'Arlene asked abruptly.

"Got me, lady. A lump of dark coal. Maybe a hat, maybe a shadow. Maybe nothing."

When he drew back, the image was still there, still vague, still fairly shapeless.

"So?" Crawford demanded. "What is this? I could point to clouds that look more like a person. I could say I have seen Nixon's nose in a Nevada sunset. This is it? This is all that's gonna show itself after all we've gone through? Come on, people, get with it."

"Mediums are sensitive instruments," Oscar said pompously. "They don't perform on command, only as the spirits move them."