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 ambushing 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.

In the dark.

This was about escaping Neon Nightmare before the Synth found him and put a name to their nemesis.

Chapter 31.

. . . Neon Babes Naturally, I am the Ninth Ninja in this low-budget stalk-athon at Neon Nightmare.

Finally! Tailing Mr. Max has paid off.

I knew something sinister was going on at Neon Nightmare, and tiptoeing through the tulips of neon blossoming in the secret warehouse has not only introduced me to a set of human ninjas, but reacquainted me with the nightmare ninjas from my own dreams.

The place is not only crawling with human agents of the amorphous Synth, but with Miss Hyacinth's own nonet of Havana-brown hit men.

So while Mr. Max is eluding the human variety, I am sidestepping the determined pursuit of the feline a.s.sa.s.sin, times nine.

It is not the first, nor, I imagine, the last time.

Even as Mr. Max is whisked away by a strange dude in a hooded robe, rather like a monk, I am dashing back into Disco Central to vanish among the crowd.

Interested as I am to encounter the ninja brigade again,I really crave to cross whiskers-vibrissae is the technical term-with that Siamese siren Hyacinth.

Miss Midnight Louise, being caught up in a post-hormonal hurricane, kicked her can during our previous case, but I am sure that I can get much farther with her by less violent means. In any case, I would rather make love than war.

I decide to hang out by the bar, as that is where the single babes congregate.

I must admit I create quite a sensation.

An unescorted dude of my ilk is the cause for much comment in such a place, and the chicks really like to pat me on the back.

So I strut back and forth on the black gla.s.s bar top, accepting tribute and admiration. They are particularly fond of stroking my tail to the very end.

"I'll buy the dude a saucer of White Russian," one lonely lady yells over the chaos at the barkeep. Her would-be escort snarls into his frozen margarita, but what is a mere guy compared to a well-furred Casanova?

Anyway, there I am, lounging on the bar, licking up a luscious concoction of cream and KahlOa, thinking of my friend of the same name, a performing panther of great elegance, when I hear a hiss at my rear.

Either I have a personal problem, or there is a snake or flat tire on the premises. I opt for the snake.

When I turn my head and look down at the floor behind the bar, I am confronting a pair of gleaming, red predatory eyes.

Not even a Sears catalogue could have delivered so fortuitously, back in the days when Sears had catalogues, which only goes to show how many lives I have enjoyed.

"Missster Midnight Louie," the apparition breathes. "Misss Hya.s.ssscinth," I respond in kind.

My human hostess withdraws, fearing a hissing and spitting match.

Often an irresistible attraction looks like that at the onset. "Fancy meeting you here," she says.

"Nothing fancy about it. I came because I thought this was the kind of flashy joint you would be hanging about."

"So you think I am 'flashy.' "

"Not at all. I think you are a show biz kind of girl."

"Really?"

"Indeed. Your career is on the upswing. Not only a cable sci-fi show, but some possibility of a product endors.e.m.e.nt. Obviously, you have your paw on the pulse of the modern entertainment media."

"And you want to resume your role as a cat food spokesman?"

"I would not be averse to it."

"So you had nothing to do with that spitfire who invaded the Cloaked Conjuror's headquarters and dared to cross claws with me?"

'That chit? Obviously a low-cla.s.s upstart. I did try to prevent that grudge match, you recall."

"I recall that you offered to go some rounds with me yourself."

"Can you blame me?" I ask, flexing my brow whiskers like Tom Selleck. We both are luxuriously haired, you know.

"Are you saying your offer was a gallantry, rather than a challenge?"

"Gallantry is always a challenge," I respond.

"So you have no ulterior motive in making my acquaintance."

I allow my ears to flatten and my expression to become downcast. "Alas, I do have an ulterior motive. I cannot resist a foxy female."

"Then come down here and we will do a little line dancing."

Of course I cannot resist an invitation, or a challenge, from an unrelated female.

I leap down, only to find that Miss Hyacinth has pulled a disappearing act. Not so strange for a feline doll who a.s.sists in a magic show. I decide to play her game of hide-and-seek, so I ankle out from behind the bar, where I am at the mercy of the gyrating feet on the dance floor.

No sign of Miss Hyacinth, but a lot of foot-stomping isgoing on. In fact, I am being subjected to such a fever of Sat.u.r.day night feet, even in the relatively static arena of the bar area, that I finally loft back atop the mirrored black surface, which reflects the constellations of panicked neon mares in the heights above us all.

Now I understand what I am experiencing: a kind of psychic stampede. To my keyed-up senses, it is as if these humans are a cat colony in communal heat. Thanks to the efforts of the Ladies of Spaying, among my kind that sort of thing is dying out, but here it is in full, rampant bloom.

I strut along the bar in a direction opposite to my first fling up here, finding dudes wearing backward baseball caps (loathsome fashion!) and the fedora as occasional as the shaved head, knocking back obscure beers, high-octane lemonades, and trendy coolers.

Not many dames line up at the bar on this side, as it seems to be a dudely kind of place, what with a TV perched above the liquor-bottle wallpaper blaring out some sports contest, but one lady does attract my notice.

She is sitting artistically behind a martini gla.s.s, that sublime inverted pyramid shape that spells sophistication and a nodding acquaintance with my ancestors' favored sepulcher.

I ankle over, rubbing against a half-dozen sweaty long-necks on the way.