Part 23 (1/2)

Suddenly, a grid of hot pink glowed ahead of him.

Moving along the wall he almost felt a part of, Max discovered the pa.s.sage widened. A giant blocked his path.

Elvis, maybe nine feet high.

His white suit glowed, accented with garish magenta and indigo lightning bolts and the famous Taking Care of Business initials: TCB. Indigo streaked his hair and his hot-pink guitar had strings of poison green.

He was executed all in neon, of course.

Max moved out of the dark and into a neon Wonderland. Behind Elvis lurked a red neon shoe big enough for a potion-expanded Alice, dotted with patriot-blue stars. A neon lion boasted a mane that lit up in alternating strands of orange and hot pink.

The place was a hidden museum of neon. Max moved among the gigantic figures, noting that most of the styles seemed to date from the advertising art's heyday, say the fifties and sixties.

After the concentrated darkness behind the scenes, Max felt he now inhabited some Technicolor dreamscape. A galaxy of neon icons loomed over him, reminding him of fabulous dreams he had as a child, when illuminated pinwheels of planets and galaxies in the night sky spun just above him and he could only gaze in wonder. He'd never forgotten those dreams, and had never had them since. Sometimes he wondered why, wondered what he had lost, what all children lost.

Yet here this universe of forgotten neon silently winked on and off, lighting up a s.p.a.ce as vast and dark as a jumbo-jet hangar. Who would imagine Neon Nightmare harboring such a huge hunk of neon paradise?

Max rarely played the tourist.

He never blinked at the neon icons on the Strip, although he admired their gorgeous chutzpah. Those signs, the Flamingo Hilton's chorus line of hot-pink feathers, the Four Queens's glittering card faces downtown, were the showgirls of the Strip, bejeweled, beplumed, bedazzling. Living in Vegas, you quickly came to take them for granted. Maybe you even wanted to apologize sometimes for their blatant appeal.

And then you saw the gathered impact of outmoded neon signage and suddenly realized what the Strip had lost when it went upscale during the Steve Wynn years. Sheer visceral fantasy.

It surprised and bewitched Max, and for too long.

He heard more than the low sizzle of neon tubes, but a distinctive shuffle. Not Elvis shuffling his neon blue suede shoes, but smaller men moving on soles as soft as his own, like cats in Hush Puppies.

Max spun, looking for a black wall he could blend into despite the neon turning night to day all around him.

He glimpsed the figures then. All in black from sleek hooded masks to gloved hands, to slippered feet. Ninjasfrom a hokey martial arts movie, small, wiry men as agile as gra.s.shoppers.

Hokey didn't matter. Intention did. And this crew was out to nail him.

Max darted into the neon jungle all around him, behind Elvis, around the lion that roared in all the colors of the rainbow.

There were four, maybe five of them, separating instantly to pursue and trap him.

The Phantom Mage wanted to remain precisely that at this point. It was one thing if this false persona had been caught snooping at Neon Nightmare. It was another thing if he were to be caught and unmasked as Max Kinsella. With one blow, both of Max's options for infiltrating the Synth would die. And he might too.

So he played tag with these anonymous denizens of the neon night until he could double back, slide through Elvis's wide-spread legs with a patented knee dip, and scrabble into the black, unlit corridors that had led to this carnival of nervous light and ambus.h.i.+ng darkness.

Max ran from a Neon Nightmare into a maze, a labyrinth. The labyrinth. The Minotaur was his shadow, but it had fractured into mini-Minotaurs in pursuit.

The bull-beast thundered behind him. Its name was Uncertainty. History. Myth. Loss. Treachery.

The dark was his brother. The dark was Sean, lost in time and treading the endless moibus strip of Death, always turning back upon itself until it almost became Rebirth. The worm Ouroboros.

Who would have thought this place was so big and intricate? A kind of h.e.l.l, learned only by running the length and width and breadth of it.

Which, of course, was endless. h.e.l.l is other people, Jean Paul Sartre had said. But what did he know? The French found h.e.l.l in endless politics. The Russians in endless bureaucracy. The English in endless colonialism. The Americans in endless self-a.n.a.lysis. The Jews in endless longing. And the Irish? In endless self-destruction.

He was Irish and expected to impale himself upon his own image, except the dark offered no reflections. If they caught him they would kill him.

It was the ultimate race. Not against time, or history, but against enemies.

He had once welcomed enemies, when the thought of them made him one with his dead cousin. You killed my cousin, my brother. Come, kill me if you can.

They could. Max was old enough now to no longer consider himself immortal.

And he had a life now, or a half-life, like all radioactive matter. Temple was most of that half. He thought of her learning that he had been caught and killed . . . and decided that he could not be caught and killed. Maybe they'd just catch him. Maybe the chase was enough. So far it hadn't been for Kathleen, but for these unknown men so far away in time and s.p.a.ce . . . Maybe.

He couldn't rely on it, so he dodged the dark's sharp unseen corners, raced past easy exits never knowing of their existence, drove himself deeper into darkness, like a screw into hardwood.

He ran by instinct, no longer knowing anything.

His wind was going, and his resilience. He was blind, out of control, everything that he had fought so long from becoming . . . from going back to.

Someone panted in the dark. Himself.

And the unseen pursuers.

He paused to find a wall and flatten himself against it. This labyrinth was their construction. It was meant to trap intruders like midnight flypaper. They were the spiders; he was the fly.

Finally he would hit a dead end, and they would have him.

He moved forward. Backward? He heard their rustling clothes, the secret almost-silent slide of hidden doors, the thud of feet and heartbeats, his own.

He was running wild, irrational. Lost. Everything thatcould, would fail him. How to capture control again, which he had mastered for so long?

No time.

No time.

Keep running, thinking, losing.

Animals who allowed themselves to be herded, died. He was being herded and he knew it.

Then fresh air a.s.saulted him like the soundless crack of a whip. The crack of a door, rather.

He saw a scimitar of light, felt claws clutch his forearm. He was being drawn in, into light or further dark. A force slammed him against a wall and the door behind him clicked shut.

The light was an illusion, a hissing, dying thread of false fire. A magician's trick.

”Follow me,” a whisper rasped, as a hand pulled him forward into more dark.

It could have been anyone's hand, or whisper. Kathleen O'Connor. The Cloaked Conjuror. The ghost of Harry Houdini, or Elvis, for that matter. What an act that would be! Unbidden thoughts of a really wild comeback stage show jousted in his brain. What if he based an act on bringing back ghosts? He could do Elvis . . . Houdini had been a much smaller, more muscular man, but he'd done a d.a.m.n good imitation of him at the haunted house . . . No! This was not about his performing future. This was about escaping his consuming past.