Temple couldn't see her own outfit, since she was the dreamer, but she knew she wore the Midnight Louie Austrian-crystal shoes, and the audience was applauding her, them.
And though everything was viewed through the bright and gleaming telescope of Dream, Temple remembered an odd ominous sense of the darkness beyond the stage lights. Feral eyes gleamed where the audience should be, untamed Big Cats waiting to pounce and take back the stage.
Then one animal on stage leaped: the Black Panther balanced on the Chrysler Building (which had somehow become an Art Deco step pyramid) soared through the thin, spot lit air into the density of the darkness beyond.
Oh, Temple had cried in the dream. That wasn't in the script. Then the darkness coalesced into a pride ofblack panthers and they all crowded onto the stage, devouring the light.
A dark magician stood atop the highest perch, a man in matte black without a face. Just before the last light went out, before the only thing Temple could sense was a smothering sound of purring, she saw him wave one arm
The dream ended. She was awake, and knew it. She wished she had photographs of the gorgeous bejeweled cats, of Siegfried and Roy in Elvis sideburns. She probably should get up and write this one down, but then she could search for Freudian symbolism and that would ruin the effect.
Temple shivered. She wished Midnight Louie weren't gone. He was warm and fairly friendly and reassuringly portable. She wished she hadn't dreamed about the dark magician. She knew she wouldn't have to look too far or too Freudian to assign the real Max Kinsella an even-more-mythic role in this dream: Death.
Chapter 2
Bad Vibrissae
"Nice night," I greet Karma.
"Not really." She turns toward me, the moonlight silvering her turquoise-blue eyes in passing.
I admit that my salutation was not original, but that is no reason to turn contrary. However, I am well aware that Contrary is Miss Karma's middle moniker. I have no idea what her last name is; certainly it is not "Lark."
"I thought you did not take the night air," I go on.
"Evil intentions frisk through the dark like dust motes," she notes lugubriously.
"Yeah, the night is made for felony. Lucky for me, or I would not have a mission in life."
"And at this time of the year, evil turns blacker."
"Oh, come now! I happen to wear that much-libeled color."
"So?"
"So I am not so bad."
Karma is silent.
"At least you come when called," she says at last.
Before I can resent that comment, she turns tail on me--a long, bushy tail that rearranges my whiskers and tickles my nose--and plummets to the patio stones. I am expected to follow, so I do.
The French door is ajar. Once there, she gives me the flounder eye over her shoulder. Talk about cold fish! I am facing piranha on ice here.
"You will have to be silent within, and no clumsiness, Louie. I do not want Madame Electra awakened."
"Ninja is my middle name."
"Not in my address book." In she pads on her dainty white mittens and spats.
I eel through after her, only the door seems to have swung shut again, because my midsection forces it further ajar. As I pass through, the hinge gives a screech that would disconcert an owl.
"Sssst!" my guide hisses, pausing to slip a Dainty White under the French door and pull it shut.
I am sorry to report that she manages to close it without making a sound.
Not much light squeezes through the mini-blinds drooping shut on every window. Even the French doors have shirred drapes over their glassed sections. You would think Miss Electra Lark was practicing something illegal up here, given the blackout curtains.
"It is I," Karma whispers suddenly.
"I already know that, and then some!"
"I mean that it is for my sake that the mistress darkens the windows and doors. I am too sensitive."
Oh, Bast! (I should not take in vain the name of my kind's most ancient goddess, but I hate these dames that act as if they are made of mother-of-pearl and you are sandpaper.)
"Louie, please! Your negative emotions and Neanderthal attitudes rub my delicate psychic vibrissae the wrong way. You did not like it when my tail ruffled your whiskers. Please consider my spectral extensions, and contain your worst intentions, even mentally."
"Huh? You are saying that you got ghost whiskers?"
I see her fangy little smirk even in the dark.
"A primitive way of putting it, but then what else could I expect from one of your background and temperament? Yes, Louie, my vibrissae are sensitive to more than the mere corporeal."
More than the mere corporeal...It only takes me a minute to figure that out.
"You say you have a private line to dead things? Cannot do much for your appetite."
"My appetite has always been dainty."
That is a laugh. This babe is a long-fendered, cream-colored limo of a lady, even if her car radio is always tuned to the Spirit Channel.
"I think better without too much food," she adds. "You could do worse than to follow my example."
"No, thanks. Heretofore, I have had no wish to communicate with the hereafter, and I do not foresee that changing. So what does a highfalutin' High Priestess of Hocus-pocus want with a streetwise dude like me? Am I not simply too down-to-earth for the likes of you?"
"Indeed." She sighs. "But I cannot subject myself to outer infelicities, particularly at this hazardous time of year. I need an emissary."
"You need your furry little forehead examined! You think this is a hazardous time of year for you? How would you like to walk in my pads, wearing my--albeit handsome--risky cat suit every day? Popular as black cats are in holiday decorations, on the street they are bait for every sadistic kid and the occasional deranged Satanist. You should go out in my place these days, not vice versa."
"That lamentable bias against black may be real, Louie, but you have survived the dangers of the season for several years, though you have never confronted dangers of the spiritual sort before."
"Say you! You should know, my good feline, that I have seen the ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson on more than one occasion."
"Oh, pooh! So have some humans who are barely psychic. A kitten could spot that tired old revenant at the age of two weeks with its eyes closed! I am not speaking of benign and paltry spirits, but of those too terrible to name. I am talking of an unholy conjunction of means, motive and opportunity. I am seeing death in the cards."
"Death? Or ... murder?"
"All death is the murder of hopes."
"All death is not against the law, not the law of this state anyway. People do it religiously every day. So all this staring at the moon and mooning about the penthouse in the dark is to say you think someone will be murdered? You could predict that every day in Las Vegas and be right."
"This will be a most... unnatural death."
"Are not they all? At least in my book."
"I see someone near to you involved."
"Miss Temple Barr? Another easy prediction. She has been up to her kneecaps in murder ever since I hid behind the corpse at the American Booksellers Association convention and helped her find her first body. Our association has been the same old same-old since then."