Unknown - 15_Cat_In_A_Neon_Nightmare

Not for Matt Devine. He wouldn’t lift a magic wand to save Matt Devine, would he? The ex-priest was grudgingly likeable, and he was a true innocent, but Max owed himnothing. No. And not for Molina. She had twisted her professional and personal life into a barbed-wire spiral of ethics and self-interest like the briar and the rose in an old English ballad. Sweet and sour turned mostly sour. He would do it for Temple, but she was on the fringe of this. No. He did this for himself, for the nagging certainty that everything bad that had happened in this town in the past year affecting the other three had something to do with him.

Call it instinct, call it ego. It was time to face the music and dance.

Trouble was, the Man of a Thousand Faces had problems coming up with a credible new identity. Elvis was too obvious to fly here. The Cloaked Conjuror’s masked costume had come in handy a couple of times, but at a magician’s club would only get Max stoned by flying doves if not more lethal missiles. He’d considered a mime’s disguise: leotards and white-face, but the costume would only emphasize his trademark lanky muscularity, and he couldn’t picture himself, even in deep disguise, with painted teardrops and a bowstring mouth.

So … Max sighed at his newest persona, one he would have never seriously presented to an audience. So unoriginal, but apt and useful here and now. He came to this new costume party as a glitzy Phantom of the Opera, black sequins turning the cape into a distracting, glittering carapace, the porcelain half-mask sporting an Austrian crystal jet-black bat as a tattoo over right temple and cheekbone.

With the cape he could crouch a little to hide his sixfoot-four frame, another trademark he didn’t want ringing a bell of memory.

No one would have heard of the Phantom Mage, but the costume was flashy enough to banish thoughts of the recently vanished Mystifying Max, who had always been both bare-faced and discreet and who religiously wore matte-black.

Max studied the building’s sloped exterior, planning his entrance. It should be noticeable, but not too spectacular.

He wanted to move among colleagues, not rivals. This was a fine line: he must impress, but not over-dazzle.

For some reason he thought of Midnight Louie, a master of surreptitious dazzle if he ever saw one. Always turning up where he was least expected, and always looking like a long-lost alley cat who had happened to get lucky.

Max didn’t believe in happening to get lucky. Neither, he suspected, did Midnight Louie.

He was equipped with all the bells and whistles seen on screen and stage. He could fly like Peter Pan, he could rappel down a skyscraper like Spider Man. Thing was, what to do where, and when.

The dark of night was an ally, for the building kept the neon fireworks at its pinnacle. He finally scaled the rear of the volcano’s rough red stucco surface like an upright Dracula and ducked under the massive neon signage crowning the structure.

Neon required maintenance. Maintenance required a service hatch.

He found the two-foot-square camouflaged flap under the mare’s running right hoof and eeled inside, pulling his cape after him like a train. Or a tail.

Immediately he was surrounded by pulsing wood and glass, the man inside an MTV video. Music, music, music. The building was constructed like a bullhorn. He was at the narrow tip, and all the bass beat came throbbing up at him like a bad dinner. Neon Nightmare was a dance club first, a magic showplace second.

Wishing for earplugs, Max let his feet find the service ladder in the dark and started down. Hmmm. The Phantom/ Dracula would enjoy a swooping appearance. He touched the dark belt at his waist, equipped with a stuntman’s gadgetry, and snapped the steel fastener over a ladder rung.

Below him the bad vibes ratcheted up to a piercing, wounded falsetto howl.

“The music of the night,” as the Master had said.

Max swung out and down, into the pulse of a strobe light above a floor of writhing forms.

They looked like imps in hell, but were mostly teenagers and wished-they-were-still teenagers.

Max landed as light as a thistle-down in a swath of magenta spotlight.

He released two dozen bat-shaped balloons that sped to the building’s peak, farting air unheard in the uproar. They seemed to vanish even as they fell like used condoms, unnoticed, to the floor below, to be trod underfoot.

The Prince of Darkness had arrived.

He was cheered by the drunken crowds for this tawdry, second-rate illusion, and then the dance went on. He unfastened his belt line and left it dangling invisibly for retrieval later.

By strobe light he moved from the floor to the entry area, and there he was, thank God, intercepted.

“Lounge act, or magician?” he was asked.

“A little of both. It’s a cross-media world.”

“Indeed,” said the black-tails-attired round little man who had accosted him. “I applaud your entrance, but we are a private club. Can you pass muster?”

“I don’t know the qualifications, but the place, like the music, hath its charms.” Max loathed the frenetic blend of hip hop and jazz. He favored Respighi, Rimsky-Korsakov, Vangelis, and the lugubrious poetic charms of Leonard Cohen.

“Hmmm. May I escort you to our clubrooms? We are always interested in new would-be members.”

Max recognized that the exact opposite was true, but he was here to overturn custom.

“Please do. I am not often a member of anything, but I do like your ambiance.”

“Ambiance is our specialty. This way.”

Max found the dance music muting as he followed the man up a spiral that reminded him of the interior of a giant conch shell. The spiraling upward path both confused and enthralled, like a fun house attraction.

The trick was the same as in a maze. The route bore only in one direction, no matter how many times it seemed to twist in another. This was a left-handed maze, perhaps in tribute to the left-handed art. Magic. And sometimes, the occult.

Max arrived at as commonplace a destination as any club might boast: a wood-paneled, four-square room at the heart of spiraling darkness.

One wall was solid glass, and it overlooked the madly lit dance floor below.

As he stepped nearer to analyze the view, he noticed other faintly lit windows onto the chaos positioned at irregular intervals in the upper darkness.

A soft whirr made him check the room behind him in the black mirror of the glass wall. A desk was rotating into view.

By the time he turned, it was in place and occupied.

A man in a business suit sat behind it in a silver mesh chair. Its spare, ultramodern shape and bristling levers reminded Max of an aluminum praying mantis. Or preying mantis? Ordinary man. Extraordinary chair. Max began to feel less melodramatic in his Phantom getup.

“New to Vegas?” the man asked.

Max nodded.

“New to magic?”

“Not quite.”

“Not new to the spotlight.”

“I did circus work for a while.”

“Trapeze?”

“Some.”

“High-wire act?”

“Always.”

“This is a private club.”

Max turned his head over his shoulder to regard the masses gyrating to the music unheard up here.

“That’s the paying public,” the man said. “They take us for a New Age disco. We are much more.”

“I’d heard.”

“Are you much more than you appear to be?”

“I hope so.”

The man leaned back in his airy chair, steepling manicured fingers, the epitome of a businessman: overstuffed, well-suited, conservatively groomed, losing a little hair. Ultimately nondescript.

Such men never projected personalities strong enough to seem capable of running anything. Such men were always dangerous to underestimate.