I recognize some of the ugliest pugs to grace the TV screen: Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, several anonymous witches and Freddy from A Nightmare on Elm Street (Now there is a guy with a mental health problem; obviously he suffers from tooth-and-nail envy, or he would not be wearing those razor-sharp gloves).
I so forget myself while I am observing the human being's quaint manner of play that I am quite startled when four talons curl into my left shoulder.
"Hsssppphhht!" I say, whirling with my own shivs bared and ready for blood.
'Take it easy, boy," growls a voice I recognize in the dark. Mine papa.
'Then watch out who you surprise from behind in future, Dad-dio."
"Daddio. You kits nowadays have no respect. Where do you learn such terms?"
I am not about to give my own disrespectful daughter credit for my newly hip vocabulary, but I must say it is pleasant to pass the ignominy on. After all, the old man did not hang about the nursery to dote on me and my littermates, did he? As for our mama, she admitted that he had not stuck around long enough afterward to even smoke a cigarette, much less a cigar, when we wee ones arrived in a mewling six-pack a few weeks later.
I ignore his question and address more vital matters, such as territory.
I hope you are not going to abandon your cushy retirement home on Lake Mead to crowd my action here in Vegas. We may be related, but we are not compatible."
"How could an old fellow like me give a young tom like you any competition? Unless you are falling down on the job."
"Not at all. At the moment I am following up on my roommate, who is part of the seance set somewhere upstairs."
"You do not say? I saw the superstitious ninnies trooping upstairs in a body: a sleek shaded silver rhymes-with-witch, a fancy torn with a white blaze on his head and shoulder, a fussy dude with spectacle circles around his eyes, an aging tortie-shell Easter dye-job and a petite Abysscinnamon wrapped in some sort of wallpaper. I guess there was one of those preening little blue-cream types and a no-name all-breed toting a camera. You claim any of the above?"
"What you call an Abysscinnamon. My roommate has great ginger hair, almost a flame-point.
But I do not understand why she is wearing wallpaper. Usually she dresses with more regard for observers' sensibilities than that."
"Maybe she is in disguise so the spooks do not get her. Well, what are you waiting for?
Better trot up the stairs about your business. I cannot leave my station here, so you are on your own, son. I am obliged to show myself and scare the spittle out of these passing people every now and then."
Three O'Clock Louie shakes his big black head. "Who ever thought I would come to making personal appearances in a spook show? But my old dudes enjoy showing me off, I guess. I am the house mascot. I even have special billing on the sign outside, along with the restaurant."
I shrug and sneak up the stairs, leaving behind my old man. I can see that I will have to face the evil Karma foresees alone.
By the time I reach the room in question, it is gone, along with the pack of psychics and Miss Temple Barr in her wallpaper wrappings.
I peer over the abyss, seeing only the black of night. The stairs end in empty space.
What a conundrum. Now that I examine my situation, it is perilous in the extreme. I am perched atop a stairway to nowhere, in the middle of a roller-coaster fretwork of careening cars filled with scared-silly people, while a light show of delusions twinkle like gruesome stars all around me.
What I do not see twinkling around me is Karma's glowing astral projection, that little piece of pussycat pixiedom I call Klinker-bell.
I am not about to slink back down and confess my impasse to my papa.
I am not about to leap into the Unknown.
I am not about to connect with the incorporeal, after all.
To quote the impudent Midnight Louise, "Bummer, pops."
Chapter 14
Whoudini Dunnit?
The glass-walled room was a true fishbowl surrounded by a dark and deep sea filled with amazing creatures who floated by to peer in.
Although the room was lit, the contrast between its own milky illumination and the dark beyond that hosted sudden flashes was very disorienting. So was the fact that the room itself wafted slowly up and down like a translucent jellyfish. Temple felt no overt movement, but could glimpse the outside flashes edging away into the unseen area above the windows. Being in the room felt a bit like sitting in a sinking cruise-ship game room, playing at spooks before everyone became one. Even the chairs aided the image: high backed carved dark wood with scant upholstery on the arms and seats.
Mynah Sigmund spoke first, at last. "I feel a strong presence. We must reach for that. We must not be distracted by this haphazard mortal activity all around us, but only heed the deep, endless pull of a powerful soul."
"Ehrich," D'Arlene Hendrix whispered. "I hear the word Ehrich.
Is that a name? The name of someone at the table? Wait! I see him, Ehrich. A boy, a dark-haired young boy. Could that be some child on the ride outside?"
"Wonderful, D'Arlene. You are already attuned. Ehrich was Harry Houdini's true given name," Oscar Grant intoned as liturgically as a priest, and Temple ought to know, having recently at' tended mass. "At an early age he became captivated by magic. By sixteen he had renamed himself Houdini after the great French magician Robert-Houdin."
D'Arlene frowned, though she kept her eyes shut as if to listen better. "This boy is not French. But I do not sense the man you describe."
Temple wondered why mediums always talked without using contractions, in the overformal manner of someone who has learned English as a second language. Perhaps the dead also lost the ability to use contractions because their stiff jaws were too clumsy to articulate well.
"Death, useless death!" Mynah Sigmund said suddenly, shaking back her dramatic hair in a curling, quicksilver wave. "The cards were in confusion, the magician misled. But what willpower! He performed as usual that evening, although the pain of a bruised appendix must have been excruciating. Always the agony aimed at his center: the fist in the solar plexus, the bullet in the palm of a hand. Do you feel his pain, his will that overcame it?"
Her anguished words caused a chain reaction of hands tightening on hands around the table. Temple remained skeptical. She had hastily researched Harry Houdini via the Internet, and none of this was new to her. Everyone else present had even more pressing reasons and the luxury of much more time to do the same thing. Now they were parroting back facts of Houdini's life--and death--as if receiving them from the man himself.
Temple was tempted to put on a little act and throw some hints into the pot. Raise the ante.
Mention his always-loyal wife, Bess. Maybe suggest the fatal blow was deliberate, a conspiracy by rival magicians to lay Houdini low, only it had been too successful. Murder! What a scoop for Crawford Buchanan, HOUDINI SPILLS BEANS
AT VEGAS SEANCE! MAGICIAN DEFIES DEATH TO REVEAL HE WAS MURDERED SEVENTY YEARS
AGO!
But it hadn't been anything sensational like murder. Houdini the magician often used the prowess of Houdini the athlete to confound the public and buttress his carefully built reputation as a mighty man of almost supernatural endurance. He often invited men to punch him in the stomach, relying on tensed, well-developed muscles to shield him from the blow.
Then, in 1926, a young man hesitated to strike the famous escape artist, despite the older man's encouragement. Houdini relaxed his muscles just as the challenger belatedly decided to give Houdini his best blow, after all, following up with more for good measure. The first punches caught Houdini utterly unprotected.
He managed to cover his distress, continuing to hide it during that evening's dangerous underwater escape trick. He concealed his condition so successfully and for so long that by the time his weakness was obvious and he had been rushed to the hospital, the doctors could do nothing but watch the world's most famed magician die of acute appendicitis at age fifty-four.