Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

Temple considered it notable that a guy with a gang tattoo had learned to be pompous in the intervening years.

"Well, these spirits better get on the move, or we're outta here and there goes your slot on Hot Heads ."

"The spirits do not manifest in the face of crassness," Agatha said, never opening her eyes to regard the face of crassness, which was clearly Crawford.

Temple had to admire her technique.

Still, she squinted her eyes at the lonely figure visible yet through--or on--the window. Yes, it reminded her of Gandolph as Edwina Mayfair, and he was dead, so it was logical to presume that his spirit haunted the outer darkness and would be visible to all. Indivisible to all.

But Temple remembered the last seance, and the boy/man/elder she had seen, along with Agatha. The others seemed to have seen him less clearly and had dismissed him as a holographic effect programmed by the haunted-house operators. But hologram or hoodoo, in his last form he had worn the brigand's swashbuckling hat and cape. So although this vision might be Gandolph/Edwina, it might also be this other man, who had appeared before Gandolph had died. A projection of the dead magician's spirit? Or ...

No! Temple would not consider that eventuality. It was too far-out. Too "out there." Yet goosebumps lifted on her arms as she re-called the neighbors who had heard "voices" at Gandolph's house on Halloween night, at the very hour that first seance was taking place.

Goosebumps remained as she remembered the three stages of man she had glimpsed in the ambiguous dark mirrors of the seance room windows. She remembered the frantic old man, mouthing syllables into the dark behind Gandolph's hatted head, the mouth moving, moving even as its owner vanished, until, like the Cheshire cat's grin, it was the very last thing seen, pantomiming a word, a word Temple could visualize, could imagine her own mouth making and could almost put a name to

"That smell!" Electra was taken aback. "It's not like before, not food or wine."

"Not chlorine," pronounced the professor.

"Roses," Agatha said with a smile in her voice. "The most delicious scent of roses. A kind spirit comes."

Roses, yes. Temple shut her eyes like Agatha, the better to let that heavenly scent roll over her, as tangible as the mist that clung to the room's square corners. Sweet beyond description, that perfume. Piped in probably, she reminded herself, but by a true romantic. It was to swoon for ... and then, awash in scent, it came to her, the word, the key word to the entire business ...

the name of the rose, which was ... Rose.

"Rose," she said aloud as a charm against the overwhelming tide of scent.

That is what the lips in her vision had striven to say. She saw the lips now, behind their barrier of beard, as if she had her fingers on them and read them like one deaf, and blind. Rose.

But there was a second syllable.

"Rose ... Rosa ... Rose-beh--"

"Oh, my God!" Professor Mangel sounded like he'd gone to the moon and back in the past three seconds. "Temple is picking it up. The key to Houdini's code that he left to his wife Bess.

She can't have known it; she knew nothing about Houdini when this began."

"Yes!" Mynah sounded transported.

"R-R-Rose ... Rosa ... beh--" Temple almost had it, but not quite. The word. The one word to unbind them all.

Agatha Welk could not wait.

"Rosabelle!"

"We all know it," Mynah said. "Every devotee of Houdini for seventy years has hoped to hear it spoken genuinely at a Halloween seance. We all thought we would never hear it: the title of the song Houdini's wife sang in Vaudeville with her sister when Houdini met her. It was engraved inside Bess's wedding ring; it was in the safety-deposit box in which Houdini left the code verifying his return, an acrostic beginning with the letters R-OS-A-B-E-L-L-E; the key to his cipher that would identify his return. If this ... amateur has received it, then Houdini has sent it.

We have broken through at last!"

Agatha's eyes had finally opened. They were filled with tears. She stared directly at Temple.

"After seventy years of silence, Houdini speaks. Through her!"

Chapter 38

Ghoststalker

"Oh, please, no close-ups." Temple blinked into the Cyclops face of Wayne's camera under its blazing coronet of light. "I was just . . . thinking out loud."

"Through you, Houdini speaks to us," Mynah said reverently. "I pave your path with peridot."

No one else understood the reference. I don't want your miserable peridot , Temple wanted to scream . I don't want to be Houdini's conduit. I don't want to have seen what I saw, which apparently not everybody did. And, most of all, I don't want these two thousand megawatts of light in my face!

Luckily, Wayne backed off to register everyone else's surprise. Temple sighed and loosened her grip on Sophie, who cared not, and on poor William Kohler, who sat like a lump of stuffed seance potato beside her, offering her his fleshy hand to be wrung dry, which it desperately needed.

Temple gauged the people around her. They watched her with the wary awe of those who were convinced she had done something remarkable. This was the reaction Houdini had lived--

and died-- for? That Max was hooked on?

Temple hated it. She felt more like Matt. She felt like a fraud among frauds. She felt unworthy. Why had the little boy/old man made her the recipient of his undelivered message?

Why did she have to see something others didn't? She wasn't psychic, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"And now he's come in person!"

Oscar Grant could only point with his eyes, but their dark stare focused on the chimney.

Temple joined the others in looking there; glad to have the spotlight, and Wayne's camera, directed elsewhere.

She didn't feel right about what had just happened. Something was missing. Looking to the window behind Agatha, she saw that the Edwina-figure was gone. Vanished. Disappeared.

The fireplace, however, was jumping.

Inside its smoky frame again stood the bound, stooped and chained figure of last week, the intense eyes staring out at them as boldly as the panther's.

Except now it moved.

A sharp clink sounded as a massive handcuff dropped to the hearth floor. The man in chains twisted, writhed. His naked muscles knotted with terrible effort. Hollow groans filled the room, the sounds echoing in the vast distances beyond the chamber.

The sight, the sounds were truly appalling. Temple watched with a wince; her cynical debunking eye was history.

A length of chain swagged across his chest fell loose, and then the arm and chest muscles bulged again and a two-inch-wide manacle snapped open with the ease of a cigarette case.

Now the figure crouched like a caveman to worry at the ankle manacles. Misty as the figure appeared, with every loosened bond it seemed to solidify. Breaking free was causing it to materialize. Houdini, suspected of dematerialization in life, was now guilty of materialization after death.

"He's coming for us!" Agatha crooned.

And at that moment dark swelling images crashed like bats against the windows. Images of a bat-man in black, with a floppy, veiled hat and shapeless cloak, Dracula beating at the glass for old blood, Gandolph clawing for breath and vengeance. ...

Then the wall-mounted weapons began sweeping from wall to wall, and beyond. They crashed through the windows one after another, until the hand-clasps broke as one. The women lifted their arms against presumed flying glass, the men clutched the arms of their chairs as if hoping to wrest them off as weapons.

Only the battle-ax ranged through the room now, swooping as low as some demonic metal bat. The women screamed and protected their heads. Temple the cynical observer was too shocked to scream, but as unnerved as anybody. It was as if the mild phenomena of the first stance had returned, berserk and lusting for human blood.