Temple waited. If they weren't satisfied with the multigenerational poster boy with a face for every window, what would keep them happy?
In a moment her nose knew.
No longer did it detect French-roasted duck, or Italian wine or English gin or even Cuban cigars. No, now she sniffed something truly out-of-this-world.
A wet smell, Temple thought, damp and chlorinated.
"Ummmph!" That was Electra's inarticulate whimper.
She was staring white-eyed away from the circle of psychics, toward the giant fireplace that dominated the room's only solid end.
In the six-foot opening, a soot-shadowed mouth of black bricks leading up into a chimney-to-nowhere, stood--not Saint Nick, wrong season--but something that had definitely not been there before!
Not a breath was taken at the oval table.
Then the darker pool of shadow, where the fireplace logs should lie stretched, poured onto the gray marble apron with the silent, liquid ease of India ink.
"A stupid cat!" Oscar hissed in disappointment.
"A black cat," the hatted lady noted significantly.
"My cat," Temple said, craning her neck. "Louie?"
He blinked, looking very pleased with himself for a critter presumed to be behind a locked bathroom window, who had just plummeted from God-knew-where for Lord-knew-how-many feet.
"Leave him," Mynah ordered. "He was meant to be here. He is an omen."
No, thought Temple rebelliously, he is an anomaly, but there's nothing mysterious about it, other than that a cat will go where he wants to, when he wants to, and leave you to guess just how and why.
Magician, her mind accused him. After all, he wore the prerequisite black.
Louie moved to the side of the hearth and began washing his paws with a hot pink tongue.
"Do not let yourselves be distracted," Oscar ordered a little desperately. "We focus on Houdini. On the boy Ehrich who became the hero Houdini. We concentrate on his life, and death, and his avowed intention to return after death, if anyone could."
"Yet he was a skeptic," Edwina put in. "He used to debunk false psychics."
"False," Mynah repeated sharply. "We have no false psychics here, unless the unknown, unvouched-for participants--"
Eyes turned to Temple and Electra. And Crawford. Temple saw the cameraman's light hovering in the black glass opposite Buchanan as he zoomed in for a close-up. Bet even C.B.'s cameraman didn't care much for him, Temple thought.
Crawford's body fidgeted in his chair, sending tension along the linked hands.
"Listen, folks. I'm only here to report the show. If you don't come up with anything camera worthy, no airtime. I'm not about to bother messing with the stage props to produce some weird phenomena. That's not what I get paid for."
"A cat is hardly a weird phenomenon," D'Arlene noted.
"It is if it belongs to one of the people we don't know much about at the table," Mynah said.
" 'Belongs' is hardly accurate," Temple said. "I left him locked in at my apartment four miles away. Maybe he's an astral projection."
"Locked in." Agatha Welk's voice was so low it seemed a delusion. Her eyes were closed, but the lids quivered. "Don't you see? He's an ... escape artist."
"Oh." Electra sounded awestruck. "Cats can be very ... unsettling sometimes. I never took Louie for having a sensitive bone in his body, but it's possible--"
"He is a medium!" Mynah announced with her customary certainty. "We needed another to complete the circle, the mental circle. Now Houdini will come!"
"I don't think so," Temple whispered to herself.
"Why not, dear heart?" The veiled lady leaned close again.
"He's just a cat--a strong, stubborn, clever cat--but I've never seen him do the slightest thing strange. Except for ... this."
"You see!" Mynah glowed with triumph. "I can feel Houdini's life force thrusting at the glass that encloses us. I can feel it building like heat lightning, so strong, so stubborn, so strange. Do you feel it? Do you?"
There was indeed an electric sense of suspended animation in the artificial chamber. Temple felt it, felt it along the tense, fisted hands, felt it among the many minds searching for signs and explanations.
She also felt something prowling among their common intentions and discordant personalities. She looked at the hearth. Louie was gone!
Now her own tension communicated along the line of linked hands. Agatha's eyelids trembled at a speed mimicking REM sleep. Mynah's head was thrown so far back her throat was as well articulated as a spine and her eyes showed only white. Oscar's head was lowered, lost behind his Christ-like curtain of hair. Electra was transfixed by their alarming states, only her eyes moving as she studied one psychic after the other. Beside Temple, Edwina Mayfair had turned her head away, as if listening for something very faint.
The table rapped. Thumped. Vibrated.
They all jumped, as if a strong electric current had rushed from hand to hand.
Midnight Louie had appeared upon the table's center. He stood staring raptly at the chamber's ceiling. Then he sat and patted at something--clearly nothing--on the tabletop, tilting his head to pursue the invisible prey with curious feline concentration.
Then something cylindrical rolled away from his paws.
Oscar Grant leaped up, taking his partners' hands with him, and caught it as it came within reach.
"A bullet," he announced.
"From the heart of Houdini's hand," Mynah declaimed. "He carried that bullet in his hand from some mysterious incident when he left home as a young boy and roamed for a year. It is a sign! S-s-something is immi-n-nent." Mynah's confident voice trembled like Agatha's eyelids and her hands began to shake at an intensity felt among all the participants.
Temple searched the corners and shadows of the pseudo room for the imminent--or was it eminent?--Something. She saw nothing.
Louie lay on the table, defrauded of his find, his tail lashing as if to dust it, each swish making the sound as if someone gently rapping ... rapping at their seance chamber door.
Electra had a pressing confession for no one in particular. "My knees are shaking so much, I think they're rapping the table."
" No, it's Louie's tail," Temple said.
"But why is Louie here? Karma is the psychic one."
"Karma?"
"I mean, his karma has no psychic overtones. He has no experience in this sort of thing. Does he?"
"How should I know? He didn't come with a resume."
"Oh."
Mynah's head was horizontal to the ceiling now, and her long, violent sigh caught their wandering attention like a clap of hands.
Even Midnight Louie looked up.
And well he--and they--should.
Mist was creeping along the seams of the walls, oozing out of the light sconces as if from an invisible dragon's nostrils, hovering at the ceiling.
Mist rose between those seated at the table, from the center seam dissecting the table. Mist encased Midnight Louie in an ethereal aura.
Mist congealed like cumulous smoke in the high hearth, obscuring its blackness. Mist moved, a nebulous form not terribly tall. Mist floated into a humanoid mass that reminded Temple of an abducting alien, black-hole eyes an abyss in a vague white figure.
Mist sifted at the windows like a lace curtain, concealing, revealing.
A fresh, sudden scent of chlorinated water almost seared their nostrils.
Their heads pulled back from this sensory assault, hands nearly separating as they coughed and gasped for breath, eyes blinking against instant, caustic tears.
A woman's moan was almost orgasmic. (Mynah, Temple suspected cynically.) A man made an anguished, throat-clearing bark,
Louie's growl was long, low and as deep as the darkness in his throat, sounding black-panther formidable. Temple was too shaken to make any noise.
Someone hiccoughed. Someone else sighed, softly, slowly.