Matt looks .. .taken aback by the friendly ghouls pulling them forward.
Next! Hurry up, please, it's time.
Standing on shaky legs, Temple tries not to totter along the dim exit corridor, Matt behind her. It feels like leaving a mansion via the cloakroom.
Outside, night in full bloom. Now the dark is lit by millions of gaudy kilowatts and mythical beasts hover above the Strip in living color, demanding tribute and attention. Trash snakes along the dry ground. The air is cold enough to demand sweaters.
Temple breathes.
"More than you expected," Matt suggested.
She nodded. "Maybe Houdini could come back from the dead. Maybe I shouldn't get involved in something so ... borderline kinky. We're supposed to do the seance in ... that room."
"The Little Big Room from Hell?"
She nodded again. "What do you think?"
"I think it's an exercise in special effects, just as your seance will be."
"The usual hokey hocus-pocus, huh?"
"Do you know what the word 'hocus-pocus' derives from?"
"Huh? A dance: do the hocus-pocus? Really, it just sounds spooky, like heebie-jeebies, right?"
"Wrong. It comes from the Latin of the mass, a key part of the transubstantiation."
"Beg your pardon?"
"When the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The priest says, or used to say in Latin the world over, 'Hoc est corpus,' repeating what Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper. 'This is my body' "
"How did the Latin phrase get translated into a magical formula?"
"Maybe because miracles are magic, and there were a lot of wonders in both the Old and the New Testament."
"Doesn't it bother you that something sacred was garbled into a password to something so secular?"
"No, because it happened in an Age of Belief, when the sacred and secular were not opposed, but allied. Today 'hocus-pocus* means 'piffle,' means 'fraud and foolery,' means that miracles don't happen, and Lazarus stays unrisen."
"You don't have the slightest expectation that anything uncommon could happen at this seance?"
"Only if you've got a sleight-of-hand artist present to make it happen. Theater, Temple. You say you've had experience. It's just theater."
"Like The Exorcist. Doesn't this get to you at all? This extra religious ritual drama of challenging death? The potential for touching evil by violating whatever afterlife might be?"
He shook his head. "You don't understand. True evil always looks so ordinary." His face softened with an emotion she couldn't name. "True evil doesn't give a damn about dramatics."
Chapter 7
Could This Be Louie's Lucky Number?
It is only an hour after sundown that I lurch out of the House from Hell.
I have done my duty and reconnoitered.
And I am Indeed sobered beyond belief by what I have seen and heard inside the Hell-oween Haunted Homestead.
What a disappointment!
First of all, despite all the advertised blood and guts, I can tell you with the certainty of one to the red claw born that mass produced substitutes masquerade as the real thing. Fee fo fi fum, what I smell is not the blood of an Englishman but the aroma of paint tubes and polyurethane.
Granted, there is a nasty puddle area the little carts splash through in the dark, but it is only standing city water perfumed with an oily ambiance from the gears and wheels churning through it.
And I do not like the dark, vast high space that houses the maze of tracks for these open vehicles that cart the gullible public around half the attraction. Imagine, if you will, a rollercoaster framework twisted into a pretzel. I am not afraid of heights, but my climbing efforts are perilous. At any time a parade of these miserable cars packed with screeching humans may whiz by, destroying my concentration, and soon I will be hanging from a support structure by one nail--mine, not its.
As for the quality of the spirit infestation, I have eavesdropped behind the scenes. Oddities of a sort do prowl the premises. Most of the so-called horrors are unemployable teenagers who should well don masks to hide their pimple-ridden pusses. When not engaged in popping put at some unsuspecting stroller, they hang about behind the scenes; their fright masks pulled half off, smoking pungent unfiltered cigarettes that seem to have come from places farther south than Tobacco Road.
And the hubba-hubba and hullabaloo! It is enough to wake the undead. As if the piercing shrieks of startled clients were not enough, the entire place is rigged with speakers that bawl forth howls, pants, gasps, whines, bays and basso growls. One would think one was at a dog fanciers' convention. I am sorry to say that I add to the chorus when some careless visitor stomps on my extremities in the dark, which is so deep at times that even my fabled night vision is useless.
Yet this same impeccable vision is called upon to witness the impossible. I glimpse in the unseen vistas above me airy spirits rushing to and fro. My first such sighting did cause me to freeze like a Labrador retriever, one foot paused in midair. I have seen dry-ice fog and I have seen the diaphanous garments on the ladies of the Las Vegas chorus. What I spy pirouetting above me resembles both of these special effects, if they were blown from the mouth of a fairy tale's giant who was smoking swamp gas.
At first I take them for UFOs, so high above me are they. Then they float down, wreathing the little cars jerking along the twisted tracks, and I see that they are larger than they appear to me on the ground. In fact they begin to swoop and swirl from high to low and back again, causing a new epidemic of shrieking. One thread of this mist falls all the way to my level where it gathers into a mass, takes shape and stretches until it is the granddaddy of all cats, perhaps even Kitty Kong himself. (Or herself, as I understand the case may be nowadays.) This creature snarls, which is duly echoed by the speakers, and springs aloft like a constellation to stalk the cowering people in their airborne go-carts. They scream and apparently enjoy their terror.
My own is made of subtler stuff. For the Big Cat is not real, I perceive, but most realistic. I actually wonder for a moment if my kind has an elephants' graveyard where those of us free to do so withdraw as our lives dwindle down to the ninth one's final moments. A place where we can sit in a circle and sing at the night without anyone hearing. A place where large and small sniff noses and shake whiskers, where feral and tame meet and step politely around each other, some last great Litter's End of the rainbow.
But the fact is that our wild shadows shrink in the jungles as our fiercest species dwindle like our lives, and their only safety is in subtle cages made to look like all outdoors. So I watch the shadow cat pounce and play among the little mouse-cars that dart along their zigzag tracks to no avail... until I realize that the Great Cat is preprogrammed too, and will threaten but not win.
And I hear again the wretched wails of my kind, somewhere near but far, and this gives me the shivers, for this mighty imitation is silent.
This moment is truly chilling. It is one thing to sit smugly by and listen to humans howling like dogs, and vice versa, but when the mellifluous feline voice is presented in scalding hysterical tones, it hits uncomfortably close to home.
Speaking of which, that brings me to the only truly terrifying moment of my entire expedition.
I am on my way out, having concluded that Karma's utter evil is hardly likely to haunt this frightful funhouse. If I truly wish to scare myself out of my catsuit, I can do it more efficiently trying to cross the Strip during rush hour.