The ghost?
Eyes still tear-blurred, Temple looked around. The form in the fireplace still shimmered there, as if a photograph had been superimposed over it, a grainy photo of an almost naked man with dark eyes and hair. He seemed bent over, like a dwarf. He seemed ... bound in metal cuffs and chains.
"Houdini!" Mynah screamed, rising yet not breaking the grip that had lasted until then. People were pulled upright in jerky motion: Electra, Crawford, D'Arlene Hendrix.
A silver slice of light flashed above them. Looking up, Temple saw something hovering over the table ... a mace from the display of arms hanging before the window-walls. How eerie to see something that must weigh twenty or more pounds floating like a heavy-metal fairy in midair.
Another weapon fell from its place suspended before the opposite wall, smashing into the nearest lighted sconce. That light vanished in a cascade of breaking glass. In the dimmed room, other weapons were flying across the chamber, dipping low over the table, flashing with glints of fugitive light.
A battle-ax came swooping soundlessly toward the seance table like some great metal hawk.
Though the circle of clasped hands never loosened, everyone ducked by instinct, and Agatha suddenly slumped face down on the table. D'Arlene, cowering in her own chair, reached out an arm to keep the unconscious woman from slipping to the floor. Next to them, only the white streak in Oscar Grant's dark hair was visible above the table edge while he took blatant cover.
Mynah Sigmund had not only sat again, but had laid her face and arms along the tabletop, watching the dancing blades as they swept past, ready to take cover if they menaced her flowing locks.
Electra just barely had her nose and crown of red hair above the table rim. Stoic William Kohler, oddly enough, had not moved.
Temple checked Crawford Buchanan next to D'Arlene and Agatha, but not even the top of his head was to be seen. She pulled her legs in closer to the chair, just in case. She herself, being small to begin with, didn't have far to go when she shrank in her chair, and so far the flying blades hadn't frightened her. She figured they were rigged on fish line to perform at certain intervals.
Louie, too, was not about to give up his possession of the table, even if the tableware seemed to be possessed and indulging in overkill. He crouched on the smooth wood, fur roughed into bat de-halo, tail lashing.
Temple, savvy magician's ex-squeeze that she was, remembered much too late where she should be looking: where the action wasn't.
There was one person, so to speak, who had really turned tail and run when the sword dance began.
No chain-dragging spirit still crouched in the fireplace.
Everyone had given up the ghost. Even the ghost.
Temple glanced at William Kohler again, suddenly worried about his oddly stiff posture and immobile, clammy hand still grasping hers. Could he have had some kind of attack?
In the dimness, his figure remained pressed upright against the back of the chair and his eye whites glistened. Temple was wondering if she really had to inch her fingers up his flaccid hand to feel for a pulse, when she realized that his eyes looked her way, frozen in that extreme sideways glance of disbelieving horror. They did blink while she watched. Once.
She let her own eyes stray in the direction that William Kohler gazed.
Temple realized then that Edwina Mayfair had buried her face in her arms to protect it, and that her gloved hand had pulled away so gently that Temple hadn't even noticed it. Still the circle was unbroken, for their fingertips connected as lightly as the life-giving (and life-taking) touch of God's and Adam's forefingers on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Above the stance table hung only the dimmed chandelier; nothing moved but a faint sparkle of fairy dust.
The weapons now hung motionless back at their posts, but before she called the all-clear, Temple wanted to rouse Edwina. The poor woman must have been terrified. Even in the dim light, Temple could see her disarray.
Edwina's gloved hands clutched together as if in prayer, and the unwieldy hat had sagged off her head, revealing ... the pale perfect circle of a bald spot.
Beyond her slumped form, Crawford Buchanan was emerging like a mole from his hole.
Following the direction of Temple's stare, he bent over Edwina, officious fingers searching for the bare wrist of the gloved hand that he had, presumably, held throughout the seance.
Temple retrieved the crumpled hat and veil ... to reveal a downed battle-ax lying beneath it.
"Lights!" Oscar Grant called. "Dammit! Someone turn on the lights!"
Crawford stepped back from Edwina and the battle-ax cheek by jowl with her face, dusting his hands on his jacket sides.
"She's dead," he announced in his always-funereal baritone. Then he frowned. "I think so.
Dead, for certain. Better film this."
Temple quickly replaced the hat and its tangle of veiling, now understanding its cosmetic purpose, as the camcorder's relentless bright light zoomed in.
Blinking again, this time from too much light, everyone studied the scene. Across the table Agatha was stirring awake with frequent sighs.
"What happened? Oh! Did Edwina faint too? Where are all the nasty knives?"
Temple's eyes were mesmerized by the battle-ax's sharp and shining blade. In the full sunlight of the camcorder, a wavering line of red rusted the metal's edge.
And something else macabre showed a steely grin for the television camera... the clumsy metal handcuffs that locked Edwina's black-gloved wrists together like a pair of particularly ugly vintage bracelets.
"What happened?" Agatha demanded as querulously as a child whom no adult will listen to.
"Houdini," Mynah answered absently for them all. "What happened? ... Houdini knows."
Chapter 15
Amateur Hour
You cannot imagine how surprised I am when I only do what I do best--get inside someplace where I am not supposed to be--and the supposed coal chute I stick my nose into turns out to be a slide to stardom.
Actually, the expression "slide" is too nice. It is really a drop, a ten-foot drop straight down to a bunch of bricks. Luckily, I instinctively execute my fabled feline twist in midair, which has been scientifically proven to save lives, and manage to enter standing, looking as if I were always Santa's little helper.
While the room is cooing over my spectacular entrance, I fade into the background and try to figure out what to do next.
I do not like the fog that is snaking around the premises. The occupants of the room seem much enchanted by it, but then they are an exotic lot, I see at first glance. Even my little doll looks more exotic than usual, but that is because she is attired in a gown that makes it look like she is peeking out from behind an azalea bush.
I am surprised to recognize an old opponent of mine. Crawford Buchanan. He is sitting at the table holding hands with some dame in a black hat that looks like it got caught on a mortuary trellis and brought most of it along for the ride. Then there is a white-hot witchy number in platinum-blond everything, a dude in black with hair Yanni might envy, a fat guy in the ever-popular black, a woman whose tail would be twitching if she had one, some bespectacled dude with no hair and the usual black, Miss Electra Lark in her usual Technicolor and a woman who looks like she should be hawking bug repellent in TV commercials.
While all present are debating my method of arrival and importance to the event under way, I sidle out of sight and look around some more.
There is something unnatural about the fog hugging the windows and ceiling and oozing all over the floor and table. It is white, like regular fog, and misty-murky, but something else bothers me. I sniff around, recognizing a scent that some of my kind go kit-crazy over, chlorine, the stuff they use to stink up swimming pools and spas, so as to keep the bacteria brigade from invading the neighborhood. If I am to sniff something sublime, it will be edible at least, or perhaps a bit of primo nip obtained through purely legal channels. This here chemical trip is not my type of transportation, however, and it leaves me untransported.