And then you saw the gathered impact of outmoded neon signage and suddenly realized what the Strip had lost when it went upscale during the Steve Wynn years. Sheer visceral fantasy.
It surprised and bewitched Max, and for too long.
He heard more than the low sizzle of neon tubes, but a distinctive shuffle. Not Elvis shuffling his neon blue suede shoes, but smaller men moving on soles as soft as his own, like cats in Hush Puppies.
Max spun, looking for a black wall he could blend into despite the neon turning night to day all around him.
He glimpsed the figures then. All in black from sleek hooded masks to gloved hands, to slippered feet. Ninjasfrom a hokey martial arts movie, small, wiry men as agile as grasshoppers.
Hokey didn’t matter. Intention did. And this crew was out to nail him.
Max darted into the neon jungle all around him, behind Elvis, around the lion that roared in all the colors of the rainbow.
There were four, maybe five of them, separating instantly to pursue and trap him.
The Phantom Mage wanted to remain precisely that at this point. It was one thing if this false persona had been caught snooping at Neon Nightmare. It was another thing if he were to be caught and unmasked as Max Kinsella. With one blow, both of Max’s options for infiltrating the Synth would die. And he might too.
So he played tag with these anonymous denizens of the neon night until he could double back, slide through Elvis’s wide-spread legs with a patented knee dip, and scrabble into the black, unlit corridors that had led to this carnival of nervous light and ambushing darkness.
Max ran from a Neon Nightmare into a maze, a labyrinth. The labyrinth. The Minotaur was his shadow, but it had fractured into mini-Minotaurs in pursuit.
The bull-beast thundered behind him. Its name was Uncertainty. History. Myth. Loss. Treachery.
The dark was his brother. The dark was Sean, lost in time and treading the endless moibus strip of Death, always turning back upon itself until it almost became Rebirth. The worm Ouroboros.
Who would have thought this place was so big and intricate? A kind of Hell, learned only by running the length and width and breadth of it.
Which, of course, was endless. Hell is other people, Jean Paul Sartre had said. But what did he know? The French found Hell in endless politics. The Russians in endless bureaucracy. The English in endless colonialism. The Americans in endless self-analysis. The Jews in endless longing. And the Irish? In endless self-destruction.
He was Irish and expected to impale himself upon his own image, except the dark offered no reflections. If they caught him they would kill him.
It was the ultimate race. Not against time, or history, but against enemies.
He had once welcomed enemies, when the thought of them made him one with his dead cousin. You killed my cousin, my brother. Come, kill me if you can.
They could. Max was old enough now to no longer consider himself immortal.
And he had a life now, or a half-life, like all radioactive matter. Temple was most of that half. He thought of her learning that he had been caught and killed … and decided that he could not be caught and killed. Maybe they’d just catch him. Maybe the chase was enough. So far it hadn’t been for Kathleen, but for these unknown men so far away in time and space … Maybe.
He couldn’t rely on it, so he dodged the dark’s sharp unseen corners, raced past easy exits never knowing of their existence, drove himself deeper into darkness, like a screw into hardwood.
He ran by instinct, no longer knowing anything.
His wind was going, and his resilience. He was blind, out of control, everything that he had fought so long from becoming … from going back to.
Someone panted in the dark. Himself.
And the unseen pursuers.
He paused to find a wall and flatten himself against it. This labyrinth was their construction. It was meant to trap intruders like midnight flypaper. They were the spiders; he was the fly.
Finally he would hit a dead end, and they would have him.
He moved forward. Backward? He heard their rustling clothes, the secret almost-silent slide of hidden doors, the thud of feet and heartbeats, his own.
He was running wild, irrational. Lost. Everything thatcould, would fail him. How to capture control again, which he had mastered for so long?
No time.
No time.
Keep running, thinking, losing.
Animals who allowed themselves to be herded, died. He was being herded and he knew it.
Then fresh air assaulted him like the soundless crack of a whip. The crack of a door, rather.
He saw a scimitar of light, felt claws clutch his forearm. He was being drawn in, into light or further dark. A force slammed him against a wall and the door behind him clicked shut.
The light was an illusion, a hissing, dying thread of false fire. A magician’s trick.
“Follow me,” a whisper rasped, as a hand pulled him forward into more dark.
It could have been anyone’s hand, or whisper. Kathleen O’Connor. The Cloaked Conjuror. The ghost of Harry Houdini, or Elvis, for that matter. What an act that would be! Unbidden thoughts of a really wild comeback stage show jousted in his brain. What if he based an act on bringing back ghosts? He could do Elvis … Houdini had been a much smaller, more muscular man, but he’d done a damn good imitation of him at the haunted house … No! This was not about his performing future. This was about escaping his consuming past.
In the dark.
This was about escaping Neon Nightmare before the Synth found him and put a name to their nemesis.
Chapter 31
… Neon Babes
Naturally, I am the Ninth Ninja in this low-budget stalk-athon at Neon Nightmare.
Finally! Tailing Mr. Max has paid off.
I knew something sinister was going on at Neon Nightmare, and tiptoeing through the tulips of neon blossoming in the secret warehouse has not only introduced me to a set of human ninjas, but reacquainted me with the nightmare ninjas from my own dreams.
The place is not only crawling with human agents of the amorphous Synth, but with Miss Hyacinth’s own nonet of Havana-brown hit men.
So while Mr. Max is eluding the human variety, I am sidestepping the determined pursuit of the feline assassin, times nine.
It is not the first, nor, I imagine, the last time.
Even as Mr. Max is whisked away by a strange dude in a hooded robe, rather like a monk, I am dashing back into Disco Central to vanish among the crowd.
Interested as I am to encounter the ninja brigade again,I really crave to cross whiskers—vibrissae is the technical term—with that Siamese siren Hyacinth.
Miss Midnight Louise, being caught up in a post-hormonal hurricane, kicked her can during our previous case, but I am sure that I can get much farther with her by less violent means. In any case, I would rather make love than war.
I decide to hang out by the bar, as that is where the single babes congregate.
I must admit I create quite a sensation.
An unescorted dude of my ilk is the cause for much comment in such a place, and the chicks really like to pat me on the back.
So I strut back and forth on the black glass bar top, accepting tribute and admiration. They are particularly fond of stroking my tail to the very end.
“I’ll buy the dude a saucer of White Russian,” one lonely lady yells over the chaos at the barkeep. Her would-be escort snarls into his frozen margarita, but what is a mere guy compared to a well-furred Casanova?
Anyway, there I am, lounging on the bar, licking up a luscious concoction of cream and KahlOa, thinking of my friend of the same name, a performing panther of great elegance, when I hear a hiss at my rear.