Cat in a Jeweled Jumpsuit

The foreman removed his hard hat to scratch his bald spot. "It's like this. The set dressers come down after us to paint up the rocks. Like you said, real nice job. Except the phosphorescence detail comes behind us. And we suddenly got a little swamp gas ahead of us.”

Temple advanced into their midst, aware of Aldo like a reversed shadow on her heels. Such as those heels were. "What's ahead of you?" She peered into the tunnel's continuation on the cavern's other side.

Teddy shrugged. "Doesn't show up right now." "Maybe the light's bad," she suggested.

Hard hats shook.

“Lights are what made us see it," Teddy the Foreman said.

“It was weird," another voice volunteered. "It moved." "These beams of light are always moving." Templelooked to Aldo for agreement. His nod demonstrated how wavery a hard hat beam could be. "Even breathing makes them tremble a little, you know how it is when you look through binoculars.”

A man stood up, his beam a tremor in the dimness, like his voice.

“We saw it. We shouldn'ta seen it. It was brighter than those paintings behind us. It was moving. Away."

“Cold lightning." Aldo's voice sounded firm as a firearm.

“Naw. We've seen cold lighting. We've seen blue light arcing. Spark showers. Electricity on a bad trip.”

A third man's voice joined the chorus. "This was .. . thin light, but shaped, like those tunnels people who are dying see. Only the light wasn't the tunnel, the light was the man in it."

“Man?" Temple asked sharply.

“Or a woman in pants, or an ape in chaps," an anonymous voice snapped from the dark. "Jeez, lady, I guess we know what a man or a woman looks like in the dark, even when they're gussied up in some strange-fangled halo—"

“Or an aura?" Temple wondered.

“Coulda been this guy here in the ice-cream suit, if it glowed. You know, pale with the pinched-in waist. Don't care what you call it—halo, aura, Day-Glo gasoline, it was weird."

“You think you saw a ghost," Temple concluded. They were silent.

Temple realized it was more serious than that. "An ... alien?”

Another silence.

“Know what I think? I don't think it was really anything weird like that." The foreman nodded, a Daniel come to judgment. "It was Elvis.”

The silence went unbroken for a long, long time. The simple rightness of the suggestion had struck everyone dumb.

At last, a consensus.

Like the apparition itself, the inescapable conclusion was very, very weird.

Chapter 3

Blue Suede Blues

(Elvis recorded "Blue Suede Shoes" in 1956, and sang it at his screen test on April Fools Day that year)

"Elvis ... Presley?”

Van von Rhine, an elegant taffy-haired woman in an Escada sueded-silk suit, lifted nearly invisible eyebrows with her voice.

That she should even have to use the last name indicated how bizarre she found the problem that Templeand Aldo had duly brought to her ultramodern office.

Then she laughed. "Really. This is ... incredible. We'll be accused of angling for publicity if this gets out. Elvis. Presley. Please! That's another hotel. Better that the ... visitant should be Howard Hughes. Or one of those X-Files creatures."

“Aliens," Aldo put in.

Van nodded absently, staring at the transparent surface of her glass desktop as if it were a wishing well. Temple realized that she had never seen anyone who kept an office so neat that a glass desktop remained empty except for its carefully placed accoutrements.

Van's fingers tapped the end of a fountain pen on the glass. She looked worried when she glanced back up at them. "Glowing, they say. A man's figure. You don't suppose it could be the—the—"

“The ghost of Jersey Joe Jackson is too much to hope for," Temple interjected. "There hasn't been any .. . unauthorized activity in the Ghost Suite lately, has there?"

“Nothing anyone has had the nerve to tell me." Van threw down the pen with a discordant click. "You do understand that if there is any subject on which the staff would spare my feelings—?"

“Van, your superstitious ways are legendary," Templesaid. "But other people eat up the odd, the weird, the eerie. Jersey Joe Jackson is a fabulous legend to build the theme ride around: a poor person's Howard Hughes, a desert pack-rat and miner-nineteen-forty-niner with stashes of hidden assets all over the place, who built this hotel in the old days, went broke, and died here. Anybody that interesting was bound to leave a little eau de ectoplasm behind. I wish I'd seen him hanging around his old suite, seven thirteen, instead of you. I'd have asked him for personal appearances." Temple laughed as Van looked horrified. "But I know you don't want to hear that because you believe in ghosts and other superstitious sightings. I'm amazed you let a black cat like Midnight Louie hang around out back before he migrated down the Strip to the Circle Ritz."

“As long as he didn't cross my path. And his successor, Midnight Louise, is especially good at avoiding me. I wish I could say as much for the ghost," she finished with a mutter.