Men of iron will and flexible steel bodies and solid-gold egos, Temple summed up. That's what magicians were made of behind the cool, studied stage presence that these days sometimes reached Liberace extremes of showmanship, and even swish.
Agile, athletic, determined to deceive. Temple found herself contemplating the magician's personality in light of both Houdini and Kinsella. Some, like Houdini, came to believe too much in their own powers. Hubris had killed Houdini. Professionalism to the point of martyrdom.
Temple wondered how much of that occupational tendency explained Max's reserve about his past and present danger. A magician was always in command ... of the stage, the audience, the action. The ultimate control freak. Such a man wouldn't ask for help, even when he desperately needed it. Like Houdini, he would rather die than reveal feet of ordinary clay, much less calluses and corns. Would Max?
"This is fascinating," Edwina murmured, grabbing Temple's knuckles painfully tight.
Temple snapped her attention back to the seance at hand, quite literally. This was why she was here: to observe a terrific publicity stunt firsthand (ouch!) and get ideas for the Crystal Phoenix's subterranean complex.
"Not to worry, my dear." Edwina tilted head, and hat, so the trailing veil scratched Temple's wrist. A knee nudged hers, but at least Crawford Buchanan wasn't her encroaching next-door neighbor!
"Spirits are just that," the woman went on, leaning close on a husky whisper. "Mere air, no matter how they storm and shriek. Like Tinkerbell, they die if you don't believe in them."
"But, don't you--?" This was an eminent psychic, after all.
A hand patted Temple's knee. "Remember: most spirits seen at stances are the creations of under-table manipulations."
"And the remainder?"
The woman chuckled and tilted back into her own place. "We shall see. We shall all see, indeed."
Temple wanted to see soon. She wasn't used to this nerve-racking hand-holding, and her arms were tiring from extending across the table; they had to stretch farther than anyone else's.
But others felt the strain as well. Temple could detect a tremor traveling along the conjoined hands, like a message vibrating along a telegraph wire, but how much of that was mental telepathy and how much mere muscle fatigue?
One thing living with Max Kinsella had taught hen magicians were an act, period. *
Psychics, however ... the jury was still out on that, in Temple's mind.
A sudden vibration shook the table. Eyes consulted eyes, then the table shuddered again as the room lifted imperceptibly. No unworldly phenomenon, that, except the giant elevator they rode reversing gears and directions. They were edging upward now, past an ever-fresh audience on rails. Temple glimpsed pale, flying faces in the dark window-glass beyond the psychics sitting opposite her.
This entire environment had been set up as a ghost-factory, she reminded herself, from the costumed attendants to the paying customers, whose amazed faces played on the mirroring glass like rapid-transit spirit forms.
The psychics were a fairly, eccentric bunch, so what tricks hid in the veils of Edwina Mayfair's hat, up Oscar Grant's theatrically full sleeves or within Mynah Sigmund's supernaturally thick head of hair?
Doves did not propagate in thin air; neither did ghosts.
"Harry Houdini!" Mynah intoned. Commanded.
"Ehrich Weiss," D'Arlene's faint voice echoed.
"Come," Oscar ordered.
The lights dimmed.
A confederate on the light board, Temple thought.
The lights flared.
An ambidextrous confederate on the light board, she revised.
A smell suddenly filled the chamber. Familiar but not yet name-able.
Everybody's heads twisted as they inhaled, trying to identify the source.
Temple, who'd written radio ad copy at one time, cross-examined her sensory memory until she could label the odor. Roast duck. Canard to the French, who most often served roast duck, as far as she knew.
Roast duck?
What did that mean? That somebody was a dead duck? Ergo, it must be Houdini?
Noses around the room lifted and sniffed. The psychics resembled a convention of blind gourmands. And now an astringent but somewhat fruity odor accompanied the olfactory entree like a glass of good wine.
"A wine smell," Oscar diagnosed, the others nodding agreement. "A Sauternes?"
"Not with venison!" Edwina Mayfair sounded affronted by any flaws in this phantom menu.
"I smell a sublime, and appropriate, Bordeaux."
Temple lifted her eyebrows as the others chimed in with Champagne, port, brandy.
Everybody was smelling a different wine to accompany a different dish, from soup to dessert!
"Beer," Crawford Buchanan put it. "With hot pretzels."
The others stared coldly at him for having such a proletarian nose, but Temple had no time to savor the moment or the symphony of odors.
Now, what did this confusion of scents signify? Collusion among the mediums? Or a baker's dozen of spirits present, each wafting his or her favorite cooking odor in a sort of disembodied duel?
She started to giggle.
And then the lights dimmed, from the tacky crystal chandelier swaying softly above the table to the sconces mounted on the narrow pillars of solid wall between the windows.
On cue, Temple thought. First the funky smells. Then ... ta da! ... the ominous dimming of the lights, prefacing a--
A manifestation!
A boyish form hovered at one window, looking in.
Quite a little man, in fact. Perhaps five or six, with a grave, intelligent face slightly petulant. A soft black scarf was looped around his neck. He wore a suit coat and knee-length pants, reminding Temple of the Depression era's Li'l Rascals' smarter, younger brother.
He stared in at them with an odd expression, half enchantment, half boredom, as if they were both mesmerizing marionettes, and too utterly childish to believe.
"Hologram," the woman on her left whispered without moving her mouth, nudging Temple's knee.
Perhaps, perhaps not. This image was too solid to be such an airy projection. He looked more like a Lost Boy than a ghost.
And then, like a photo negative dipped in solution, he sank back into the outer darkness.
Wait! Temple wanted to shout. Don't go away mad, little boy. But that was the sad part.
He hadn't seemed like a little boy.
"Cigar smoke," Mynah exclaimed. "Heavenly scent."
"Hideous!" Agatha Welk wrinkled her nose.
Temple smelled.. . sulphur, like the scent left behind by expired matches. Or the Devil. Was the Devil just a spoiled little boy old beyond his years looking in at them through a window?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Her feet didn't quite touch the floor, as always, and her fingertips were growing numb from compression. Maybe she was developing carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting the computer keyboard too much. Maybe this stupid seance would cripple her for real work. Maybe she was getting... nervous.
"I see ..." Mynah murmured, "... nothing."
Had there been a grandfather clock in the room, and that was one detail the designers had left out, it would have been ticking off the seconds. It would have counted a decade to each second, so that time weighed heavier than normal.
Temple tried to squint at the large-size watch face on her left wrist, but Edwina had clasped her hand so tightly that the wrist was turned toward her, not Temple. Time remained an unreadable expansion band on the white underside of her wrist, where, she remembered from some dim, teenage devouring of a palmistry book, the "bracelet" lines of her fortune lay.
Bracelets, or scars of another, less livable life? Temple shook her head. Dark thoughts circled the room, infecting them all. The seductive scents of food had given way to a strong odor of alcohol, old alcohol at the bottom of a glass, crystallizing into a sugary haze.