Douglas, Nelson - Cat with an Emerald Eye

"No one has ever told me that it takes a stupid teenager to get involved with me."

"You know what I mean. I have no business being with you now. So if you have something...

compelling going on in your life, just tell me, and you'll never hear from me again."

"Oh, fabulous. It's either all or nothing with you. And this noble renunciation doesn't ring very true when you seem fairly obsessed with us getting back to where we used to be ... in bed together."

"Oh, absolutely," he admitted. "In a New Delhi minute. No lies or obfuscations there. I just don't know if I can be there tomorrow, or the next day, or if it's safe for you. I'm tired of other people paying for knowing me."

"And in a way you like it: popping in and out of people's lives like a stage magician, mystifying them, confusing everyone, your friends as well as your enemies."

"Maybe you're right." Max finished his second glass of wine. "We'll find out."

"How?"

"I'm staying this time, Temple. I'm not running again. I may have to lie low. I may have to work some not-so-legal magic, but I'm going to get to the bottom of everything that's worked against me in the past. Do you have any problems with that?"

There was only one possible answer.

"We'll find out," she said.

Chapter 40

The Mother of All Hauntings

I am by no means a fancier of the occult.

I do not wish to see what is not there, and even what is there if it is not readily apparent to the average individual.

I have never been subsumed into the belly of an extraterrestrial vehicle. The only missing time I suffer is when I am snoozing.

I have never walked through walls unless a door or window of some kind had gotten there before me. And I have never walked on water except occasionally in the pursuit of carp, and then only for the tiniest nanosecond.

So I am not enthralled by my recent encounters with things that go bump in the night, apparently having grown myopic in the Afterlife.

Most of all, I am sorry to have been visited by the spirit of the original Maurice. I was really happier not knowing that Maurice is--was--a decent dude I might even have liked in life, with no particular interest in the Divine Yvette, had certain appalling events not come to pass. How am I better off knowing that the yellow-striped dude who struts his stuff on the Yummy Tum-tum-tummy commercials today is a homicidal huckster who has dusted the true spokescat. We are talking a body double with a triple helping of chutzpah.

So, given my distaste for spirit emanations, you will understand that only my great loyalty to Miss Temple Barr could have lured me back to the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead on the occasion of the second stance. In television circles this is called a rerun, plain and simple.

However, I got more than I bargained for, least among them the hyste'rical bats bouncing their high-pitched little screeches off my cranium.

Of course the actual goings-on of that event are hardly known to the human participants, who, as usual, missed the main events.

I arrived before the first of the so-called psychics, ready to scout the territory for any unauthorized spooks. My attention was first drawn to someone big in a black catsuit. At first I took it for my esteemed sire, Three O'Clock Louie, but no such luck. Once the little shop of Halloween horrors was closed for the season, the organizers did not need local color any more.

Three O'Clock was returned to his retirement home on Lake Mead. Besides, this new cat is a more impressive dude than my old man, being kept in a cage ... except that an introductory sniff reveals that this is no dude! Her name, I discover after a few gingerly inquiries, is Kahlua and she does a nightly disappearing act at the Oasis.

"So, who's paying the freight on your ruby collars tonight?"

"Colleague of my boss's," Kahlua answers with a quite unnecessary preliminary snarl. (I think she just likes the sound of her own voice.) Like the coffee-flavored liqueur she is named for, Kahlua is strong, dark and heady. Her big green eyes flash toward the catwalk under the roof.

"He is a long, narrow cat all in black, fast as a mongoose and smooth as a velvet glove. I would go anywhere to work with him."

Naturally, I had spotted the Mystifying Max right away, so I never had any delusions about who was pulling strings in the dark wings above the seance chamber. (I feel the word "chamber"

adds a nice touch of the classy macabre to the scene below.)

"So what is on your program tonight?" I ask the lady, who is obviously a primadonna of in-the-body prestidigitation, unlike Karma, who just projects her meddling ditzy little aura into situations that are none of her business.

"Cameo role." Kahlua touches up her manicure. "Nothing to break a nail over. I do my usual appearing act in a fireplace, look gorgeous, exotic and lethal, then bug out as usual. I could do it in my sleep."

"You might not want to," I warn her. "I did a sudden entrance down that same chimney and it is rigged with enough fish line to bag a barracuda."

'Thanks for the tip, but Mr. Max would never let me go into a situation he had not checked out from top to bottom," Kahlua tells me with a yawn that reveals a maw the size of a pink-velvet cave lined with elephant tusks for teeth.

Well, Midnight Louie does not have a devoted frontman to do his dirty work for him, but I am not about to point this out to Kahlua when she is showing her dentures. Those fangs are probably all capped or bonded or bleached. Show biz!

Bidding this she-panther a distant farewell, I explore the rest of the area. That is when I discover an even bigger population explosion at the fringes of the seance chamber. Eightball, Wild Blue and Spuds of the Glory Hole Gang are posted as guards on all three levels, at Miss Temple's behest, I suspect. I am relieved to know that reinforcements are at hand should revelations during the seance prove too dramatic for a guilty party's nerves.

It is while I wander--small (relatively speaking), silent and the same color as the vast darkness that surrounds the seance chamber--that I become aware of disquieting influences.

For there are again Uninvited Guests. I am still seeing much more than I should be. Not a glimpse of Elvis and Amelia and Mae, sadly (to them I could sell tickets), but faint flickers of the phantoms seen before, like photo stills from old black-and-white films. The boy in the Little Lord Flauntleroy suit dangles from a rollercoaster scaffold. The fat old man in black sits in empty air, hunched under a bandit's hat and over a cane--or is that what's left of Edwina May-fair, animated by the spirit of Gandolph the Great? Even Old Doyly, the hearty-looking (for a ghost) chap with pipe who seemed to be urging on Houdini's apparition flickers in and out of view near the baronial fireplace in the seance chamber. As for the reputed Houdini himself, what a fizzle! I do not see even a mote of his previous image, crouched in his seine of chains, a bare pale gray blot on the darkness. Why do all these ghost guys turn up in shades of gray? I wonder. They are a sober-sided lot, unlike Elvis. It is nice to know the King is having a blast even in the Beyond. I hope that when my lives have run their course, I will have as much joie de vivre in the Afterlife too.

I finally find a concealed niche where I can get an overview of the action below without coming into the purview of the Mystifying Max or the Glory Hole Boys. With my natural advantages of coat and color, I am part of the scenery at this scene of the crime ... or crime to be confessed.

And I like the setup: the seance chamber has no roof, which makes sleight-of-hand easy to perform, and easy to oversee. I am not deceived for one moment by the stuffed figure that looks like it escaped from a taxidermist's shop; I have seen soft-sculpture people, and animals, before, and much prefer them to the real things. One by one the dramatis personae arrive. My little doll and Karma's Madame Electra are the last to assemble.