Cat with an Emerald Eye Read online

  That is why I shudder to be afoot and aprowl at this superstitious time in the human calendar of events. Though these are modern times, and humans keep congratulating themselves on "knowing better," they have been doing that for millennia, and apparently still have a few geological eras to go.

  Even they have the good grace to fear those of their own kind who hark back to the Bad Old Days with demented fervor and are called Satanists. I got a whiff of these throwbacks when I was investigating crimes against cats at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Poor Peter, one of a pair of convent felines (his pal was called Paul, get it?) was the victim of attempted crucifixion, the same fate almost two thousand years ago of the human for which he was named, which will prove how little the species has advanced in so long a time. Sometimes I have been accused of playing with my food, but I have never resorted to such tortuous strategies.

  Hey, I need to keep up my strength to battle wrongdoing and listen to Karma channel the Great Oblivion.

  So anyway, I am walking along, looking like an ordinary dude, all the while musing on life, death and the eternal verities, such as what is for supper, when something blows by that stops me in my tracks.

  I stare down at a crumpled newsheet of the variety that decent men keep their families from seeing, especially when they are in Las Vegas.

  Besides the odious sight of a lot of bare human of both genders--and I hope no little kits are exposed to all this abnormally furless flesh; our kind does not have much to do with anything in this state but eat it, and I always close my eyes when Miss Temple switches from day- to night-wear, as I prefer her well covered-- I spy another bare-faced horror: Mr. Crawford Buchanan, who appears to have had a face-lift by an earthmover.

  Still, I can glimpse a smidgen of his all-too-mortal prose and a photograph of a many-gabled and -towered edifice, a veritable Frankenstein's monster of architecture; that is to say, a mansion of many parts hacked together.

  I cannot say what comes over me, but I am suddenly shaken by a sense of doom and presentiment that would knock Karma off her high horse. I know where I must go, for it is the place I am least safe: among a flock of humans celebrating Halloween by subjecting themselves to a night of programmed fright, hideous semblances and deviltry. And then they have the nerve to beg for food. Eat, drink and be nasty.

  Only the mind of man would create holidays to scare his kind, as well as those of us who have become unwilling symbols of the season because of our ancient history of mass victimization, which sometimes is all too modern. I have said it before and I will say it again: only humans will sentimentalize the things they Mil.

  Unless, of course, it is another human.

  Chapter 6

  Habitat for Humane Haunting

  Six o'clock of an October twilight was definitely not prime time for the Hell-o-ween Haunted Homestead.

  The painted facade, lit by lukewarm spotlights and an evening sun going down in a spectacular welter of violet and orange clouds, looked like a pallid watercolor by contrast.

  Temple and Matt, fresh from the innocent indulgence of a fast-food hamburger franchise, were among the first thirty customers.

  A kiosk that resembled a Gothic outhouse now sat ten feet from the front door. Inside, a chainsaw-massacre victim was exchanging lime-green tickets for leafy-green money.

  "Looks like later is better," Matt commented. "The spotlights will really show up, and the crowds should rev up then, too. Right now the potential hauntees outside probably outnumber the possible haunters inside."

  "It doesn't look . . . lively," Temple admitted.

  "That's what you get for inviting an escort who works the night shift. I could call ConTact, see if they need me there first thing," he offered.

  "No. The inside lighting is the same, regardless of time." A sudden thought occurred. "You're not allergic to haunted houses, are you? They're not against your religion or something?"

  "Heavens, no."

  "What about The Exorcist?"

  Matt took Temple's elbow and ushered her toward the people waiting for admission.

  "Sounds to me like you're the one who has reservations."

  "I don't have reservations, or we wouldn't have to stop at the Horror in the Ticket Kiosk. I'm paying, by the way, or, rather, the Crystal Phoenix is."

  When Temple flashed a blue pass card, a huge red-smeared hand proffered a pair of slime-green tickets.

  "Thanks," she told the Abomination from the Beyond, extracting the tickets without touching the loathsome rubber extremity.

  "Bfkerdiouwdanuummph," the misshapen head murmured, nodding so that its dangling eyeball did a little jig against its mushy cheekbone.

  "I hope the stuff inside is a little less hokey than that," Temple whispered to Matt as they queued up. "Why does everyone think that extreme gore and walking states of decay are so scary? It's what you don't see that truly terrifies."

  As he bent forward to listen, the lurid spotlights highlighted his blond hair with purple and green and put his face in a sinister, up-cast light.

  "Ooh, counselor, you look spooky!"

  "You should see what these lights do to your red hair."

  "Scary?"

  "More like ... turned brown."

  "Berrown, oh, no!" Temple remembered Electra's disdain for that everyday color. "Isn't there a blond light somewhere around here?"

  "Too cheery. They're shuffling in ahead."

  Temple bit her lip and clasped her arms.

  "Did I detect a shudder?"

  "It's cold," she complained in self-defense.

  But, in fact, she was happy to have company. Much as she was not about to be impressed by this homegrown effort, Temple knew that special effects were state-of-the-art nowadays, and could be more realistic than she might want.

  "Hang on," Matt warned as she handed their tickets to the ghoul at the door.

  He took her elbow again, just in time, because an instant later the four teenagers in front of them vanished into sudden darkness.

  "How bad can it get?" Temple asked the darkness. "We're just walking a programmed maze.

  I've been here by daylight."

  Still, shrieks erupted ahead and behind, whether from happily scared paying customers or tape-recorded actors imported to raise the fear factor, Temple couldn't tell.

  "Hey!" Matt laughed as a figure whooshed toward them from the dark into sudden light, a giant bloated spider spewing creepy-crawly mini-spiders.

  Temple couldn't keep from squeaking as a few of the spider spawn tumbled into her hair.

  She batted them away like autumn leaves. Bats. That's another featured creature she should expect to see and hear tonight. Ick.

  Because she was slightly ahead of Matt, she was the first to step off the sudden step-down.

  This time she screamed, because now it was so dark, and because the spider spawn kept falling off with feathery parting gestures that gloved her forearms in goosebumps.

  "You better grab my hand," Matt's calm voice counseled from the darkness above her head.

  Boy, if she ever needed a helpline, it would be great to dial up a voice like that.

  His hand felt warm, which meant hers was icy. This was ridiculous! If a spider on a guy wire and a six-inch drop were going to unnerve her, what would happen when the real effects made an appearance?

  "Eerie light ahead," Matt warned, steering her around a corner as if he could see in the dark.

  Eerie indeed, a soft pulsating blue ... and while she was straining to see, hands closed around her neck.

  "Matt-- Don't scare me!"

  Hot breath panted on her cheekbone. Warm, gooey liquid drooled down her neck. Spit? Did public health laws permit spit-ting on paying customers? Or indirectly paying customers?

  A villainous voice grated in her ear. "Hello, BatgirL Time for a transfusion."

  Something pricked her neck. She would have screeched again, except a strobe light flashed on to reveal waves of red-eyed bats flying right at her....

  Matt jerked h
er out of Count Dracula's custody. The vampire himself was stepping back into the stone wall, vanishing into the solid rock, blood drooling down his chin.

  Dodging a screaming surf of bats, Temple swatted at her neck. Her mopping-up operation found nothing wet except for some soft, rubbery threads that dropped to the floor.

  "Why did I fall for that?" she wondered aloud. "How can they see us in the dark?"

  "They're used to it, while we're being unpredictably plunged from dark to light so our eyes never adjust."

  "Any spiders, bats or eye of newt still caught in my brown hair?"

  "Naw."

  By the strobe light Temple could see Matt grin as he dusted bat droppings--tiny black rubber balls the size of poppy seed--from his own hair before he added, "We would have to pay for classy souvenirs like that. If you catch one of those spiders, save it."

  "This is all such simple stuff, but I've learned one thing."

  What?"

  They were walking in the dark again, waiting for the next shock to the system.

  "Fright is not about sophistication, is it?"

  His hand tightened on hers. "That's a rather profound observation-- Watch out!"

  Where? Who? What? When--now? Arghghgh ...

  Temple tripped on an unexpected sudden step up and found herself scooped into a passing chair. Matt grunted as he landed beside her.

  They were swept away together, into the dark, a situation that might have been romantic if their stomachs hadn't been fighting mal de mer.

  No hand-holding here. Just grabbing for anything stable to hang on to ... the seat-side, the floor beneath their feet, a pipe ... no, a steel bar that held them in the open car.

  "This is a ride! " Temple announced indignantly to the dark.

  The dark echoed her, adding vibrato and a bass to a first-soprano slide that made her words into a shriek.

  "Nobody mentioned an echo-mike," she added, hearing those few words expand into an eerie aria for all to hear. "Must it make me sound like I'm whining?"

  It did.

  "Shhh," Matt counseled sensibly from the dark.

  Even though he was male, he probably wasn't as fiercely adamant as she about being in control of herself. When you're a grown woman five feet zero short, you have to fight to keep both your feet on the ground. Temple felt real anxiety. Where was she? Where was she being carried away to? When would it stop? Was there a God?

  This wasn't a foxhole, but it certainly wasn't what she had expected. That alone made it a successful attraction. She would have to rethink subjecting impressionable youngsters to this kind of trauma in the Jersey Joe Jackson Hidden Mine. On the other hand, only kids could take such programmed stress and bounce back giggling for more. When did they grow up and realize that they have something more to lose than their cookies? When had that happened to her?

  "You okay?" Matt sounded worried.

  "Apparently. You?"

  "I won't order the fried onion rings before this thing next year."

  "You'd come back?"

  "Sure. It's a hoot."

  Temple hooted in despair and had it reverberated right back.

  "What do they do if they don't get an over-reacter like me?" she wondered under her breath.

  "They probably run a tape of Madonna backwards."

  "You know about Madonna?"

  "How could I not?"

  "Is she a hoot, too?"

  Silence. Temple wondered whether the outerwear underwear or the almost-blasphemous name gave him pause.

  "I think she's a troubled soul," he said, loudly enough for the mocking sound system to pick it up and repeat it until the word "soul" rocketed off the unseen walls like spraying surf.

  Wails and shrieks, laughter turned to screams came rolling in like breakers, breakers of the sound barrier. Uninhibited, the sounds sobbed and crashed. Some seemed to come from other riders; other sounds--groans, moans, cries of anguish--seemed piped in, at least Temple hoped so.

  Now they were climbing the dark, their small car seeming to travel upward at a right angle.

  Temple tensed her body against any surface it touched, fearful of losing this last island of solidity. Matt, she knew, was engaged in the same struggle. Only sound ricocheted around them. She began to feel sub-marine, like something that floated, steering by sound, an explorer of watery spaces.

  Brightness sifted into the vastness, spotlights cut through midnight Jell-O. The cries continued, but not from their car. Something bobbled in the dark distance, fuzzy and unfocused like fog, or fireflies, or Tinkerbell on LSD.

  "Hang on," Matt warned just before the phantom swooped toward them, grew into motes of shimmering rainbow light, shot out ectoplasmic limbs ... eight of them, like Shiva, goddess of death. The head was feline, panther-black in a ruby collar.

  Temple felt the soft passage of boneless limbs; saw the cat face fracture into a fang-lined maw, then reel by waving eight long black fuzzy tails like a tarantula's legs.

  "Ooooh!"

  They were spun around, dipped quickly enough to maroon their stomachs on an upper level, then spun fast into a cavern lit by undersea green. Skeletons danced on the water, skulls floated under the water-dappled ceiling, bony hands snagged their clothes, the car sides, then pulled away and snapped into fragments while a spectral voice promised to reveal all the secrets of the dead seas.

  They plunged again, and the car was streaking through water!

  Splashed by liquid again, this time quite wet and wild and genuine, Temple squealed on cue. So, from the sound effects, did every other female currently enduring the attraction.

  Why didn't men scream?

  Matt was an unseen stoic beside her. She had her own spirit guide along. Not as spirit, but as a person unafraid of the spiritual. Of the spooky by necessity. Of the dead and the undead.

  Or, at least, she thought he was beside her....

  Temple uncurled her fist from the steel bar hot under her grip and reached into the dark beside her.

  A phosphorescent snake of mist wreathed her arm, then coiled toward her torso.

  She batted it away, but now it curled around the steel bar toward the only hand that still clenched it. Hers. Matt. Where was Matt?

  Ghostly faces hovered and whispered. Dank, chill breath brushed her face. Other faces loomed up from underwater beneath the car, floating like lilies on the black, mottled surface.

  Swoop.

  Up again, where flying monsters shrieked louder than the screams of women and children, and came onward with great, stretched talons. Temple ducked, as programmed to do, hating the knee-jerk reaction.

  And then something caught her attention, and held it.

  A crystal ball floating in the middle distance, encompassing a room. A normal room, though glassed in all around, like a custom railroad car. And, as the car careened closer, with normal people in it.

  Maybe.

  For a woman in a long gown paced before the fireplace.

  A man lifted a glass of brandy to his mustached lips. Music whined from an old record on an older Victrola. A child sat on the wooden bench, turning the pages of a book much too big for its tiny hands. A dog lay on the hearth rug sleeping, floppy ears fanned on the Oriental design.

  So sharp, that scene, like a play when the curtain is opened and the little world of stage set and directions begins to turn and unfold. A mystery in the making.

  And she, floating toward it on mental swells of a Viennese waltz....

  Then the woman's face turns from the firelight, and is scarred into a mere mask of humanity. The man stands to smash his glass into the hearth... on goat-hoof stumps protruding from his striped trousers. The child rises, upside down, and floats up to the ceiling to float there like a jellyfish just under the surface of the sea. The book flaps its pages like wings and begins beating against the window glass, again and again. The dog... the dog rises as a gigantic black cat, a panther bigger than the Parthenon, powerful as a bat-winged lion, and turns around and around until screams shriek to
escape the tiny world growing bigger, big enough to crush, as Temple is swept past it like Dorothy in her wind-borne house on the way to Oz.

  Now she can hear and feel the rattle of the rails her car rides on, now inhale the dark smells of stone and water, now sense a straight, level shot to somewhere recognizable.

  "Some ride," Matt's voice declares from the dark.

  Ride. Right. Over.

  The light is real, constant and unbearable.

  Gruesome faces hover, leaning over to help them leave the car that was their wooden shoe through Foreverland. That's how long it felt they had been gone, out of touch, in other hands, not in command of themselves.

  Matt looks .. .taken aback by the friendly ghouls pulling them forward.

  Next! Hurry up, please, it's time.

  Standing on shaky legs, Temple tries not to totter along the dim exit corridor, Matt behind her. It feels like leaving a mansion via the cloakroom.

  Outside, night in full bloom. Now the dark is lit by millions of gaudy kilowatts and mythical beasts hover above the Strip in living color, demanding tribute and attention. Trash snakes along the dry ground. The air is cold enough to demand sweaters.

  Temple breathes.

  "More than you expected," Matt suggested.

  She nodded. "Maybe Houdini could come back from the dead. Maybe I shouldn't get involved in something so ... borderline kinky. We're supposed to do the seance in ... that room."

  "The Little Big Room from Hell?"

  She nodded again. "What do you think?"

  "I think it's an exercise in special effects, just as your seance will be."

  "The usual hokey hocus-pocus, huh?"

  "Do you know what the word 'hocus-pocus' derives from?"

  "Huh? A dance: do the hocus-pocus? Really, it just sounds spooky, like heebie-jeebies, right?"

  "Wrong. It comes from the Latin of the mass, a key part of the transubstantiation."