Night certainly brought out the scent of jasmine.

"About thish time," I said, "you met Hank Mann."

"Hee haw, hee haw," said Sister. She was not braying but laughing.

In the healthfood restaurant, Hiroko slapped the carrot-juicer with a filthy cloth and fed me brown rice and chilled bean-curd with chopped onion and ginger on top, pursing her lips with distaste; she herself only ate Kentucky fried chicken. Business was slack in the mid-afternoon and I wanted her to come upstairs with me for a while, to remind me there was more to flesh than light and illusion, but she shook her head.

"Now, the priest is he who prints the anagrams of desire upon the stock; but whom does he project upon the universe? Another? Or, himself?"

At once I went into automatic, I assumed the stance of gigolo. I picked up her hand, kissed it, said: "Enchanté", bowed. Had I not been wearing sneakers, Id have clicked my heels. The Spirit appeared pleased but not surprised by this, but she couldnt smile for fear of cracking her make-up. She whispered me a throaty greeting, eyeing me in a very peculiar way, a way that made the look in the lions eye seem positively vegetarian.

She heaved herself up with a sigh so huge that, horrors! it blew out all the candles and then, worse and worse! she left me alone with the Spirit. But nothing more transpired because the Spirit seemed to have passed, if not on, then out, flat out in her wheel-chair, and the inner light that brought out the shine on her satin dress was extinguished too. I saw nothing, until a set of floods concealed in the pines around us came on and everything was visible as common daylight, the old lady, the drowsing lion, the depleted drinks trolley, the slices of lemon ground into the terrace by my nervous feet, the little plants pushing up between the cracks in the paving, the black water of the swimming pool in which my overexcited, suddenly light-wounded senses hallucinated a corpse.

"They wore away her face by looking at it too much. So we made her a new one."

She must have hated the movies. Hated them. She had the lion in back. They looked as if they were enjoying the ride. Probably Leo had smiled for the cameras once too often, too. They parked at the place where the cliff road ended and waited there, quite courteously, until I was safely embarked among the heavy traffic, out of their lives.

The old beast cocked its head from side to side and roared again, in unmistakable fashion, as if to identify itself. Mickey Mouse does her chauffeuring. Every morning, she takes a ride on Trigger.

I burbled in the affirmative.

She overtook me at illicit speed, blasting the horn joyously, waving with one hand, her face split in a toothless grin. When I saw that smile, even though the teeth were missing, I knew who she reminded me of -- of a girl in a dirndl on a cardboard alp, smiling because at last she saw approaching her the man who would release her. . . If I hadnt, in the interests九九藏書 of scholarship, sat yawning through that dire operetta in the viewing booth, I would never have so much as guessed.

The lion grumbled a little in his throat but trotted off into the house with the most touching obedience and I took breath, again -- I noticed Id somehow managed not to for some little time -- and sank into one of the white metal terrace chairs. My poor heart was going pit-a-pat, I can tell you, but the personage who had at last appeared from somewhere in the darkening compound neither apologised for nor expressed concern about my nasty shock. She stood there, arms akimbo, surveying me with a satirical, piercing, blue eye.

I realised I was just a wild oat to her, a footnote to her trip, and, although she had been just the same to me, all the same I grew glum to realise how peripheral I was, and suddenly wanted to go home, too, and longed for rain again, and television, that secular medium.

The Spirit propped herself on the arm of her wheel-chair and pierced me with a look. Something told me we had gone over some kind of edge. Nancy Carrolls evening dress, indeed. Enough of that nonsense. Now we were on a different plane.

That roused the Spirit somewhat, who chuckled and lunged at the gin which, fortunately, stood within her reach. She poured a fresh drink down the hatch in a matter of seconds, then made a vague gesture with her left hand, inadvertently biffing the lion in the ear. The lion had dozed off and grumbled like an empty stomach to have his peace disturbed.

She aimed a foot at the brake on the Spirits wheel-chair and briskly pushed it and its unconscious contents into the house. The lion woke up, yawned like the opening of the San Andreas fault and padded after. The sliding door slid to. After a moment, a set of concealing crimson curtains swished along the entire length of the glass wall and that was that. I half-expected to see the words, THE END, come up on the curtains, but then the lights went off and I was in the dark.

Then Sister, whose vision was not one whit impaired by time or liquor, extended her trousered leg in one succinct and noiseless movement and kicked my briefcase clear into the pool, where it dropped with a liquid plop.

The Spirit broke into speech again.

Her eyelids were drooping now, and as they closed her mouth fell open, but she spoke no more.

Night and candlelight turned the red mouth black, but her satin dress shone like water with plankton in it.

Perhaps, having constructed this masterpiece of subterfuge, von Mannheim couldnt bear to die without leaving some little hint, somewhere, of how, having made her, he then became her, became a better she than she herself had ever been, and wanted to share with his last little acolyte, myself, the secret of his greatest hit. But, more likely, he simply couldnt resist turning himself into the Spirit one last time, couldnt let down his public. . . for they werent to know Id seen a picture of him in a frock, already, were they, although in those days, he still wore 九-九-藏-書a moustache. And that clinched it, in my own mind, when I remembered the second Mrs Manns spanking picture, although this conviction did not make me any the less ill at ease.

"I used to think of prayer wheels," she informed me. "Night after night, prayer wheels ceaselessly turning in the darkened cathedrals, those domed and gilded palaces of the Faith, the Majesties, the Rialtos, the Alhambras, those grottoes of the miraculous in which the creatures of the dream came out to walk within the sight of men. And the wheels spun out those subtle threads of light that wove the liturgies of that reverential age, the last great age of religion. While the wonderful people out there in the dark, the congregation of the faithful, the company of the blessed, they leant forward, they aspired upwards, they imbibed the transmission of divine light.

"Boring," she said, offensively. After a while she added, though in no conciliatory tone, "Not just you. Everything. California. Ive seen this movie. Im going home."

How long had she spent dressing up for the interview? Hours. Days. Weeks. She had on a white satin bias-cut lace-trimmed negligee circa 1935, her skin had that sugar almond, one hundred per cent Max Factor look and she wore what I assumed was a wig due to the unnatural precision of the snowy curls. Only shed gone too far with the wig; it gave her a Medusa look. Her mouth looked funny because her lips had disappeared with age so all that was left was a painted-in red trapezoid.

"Heinrich," she corrected with a click of orthodontics; and then, or so it seemed, fell directly into the trance for, all at once, she fixed her gaze on the middle distance and said no more.

Which last resolved itself, as I peered, headachy and blinking, into my own briefcase, opened, spilling out a floating debris of papers and tape boxes. I poured myself another gin, to steady my nerves. Sister appeared again, right behind my shoulder, making me jog my elbow so gin soaked my jeans. Her Indian headband had knocked rakishly askew, giving her a piratical air. In close-up, her bones, clearly visible under her ruined skin, reminded me of somebody elses, but I was too chilled, drunk and miserable to care whose they might be. She was cackling to herself, again.

"You the one thats come about the thesis?" she queried. Her diction was pure hillbilly.

"No, the art director certainly was not Ben Carre, how absurd to think that!. . . My goodness me, young man, Wallace Reid was dead and buried by then, and good riddance to bad rubbish. . . Edith Head? Edith Head design Nancy Carrolls patent leather evening dress? Who put that into your noddle?"

"My sister," she husked, gesturing towards the lumberjack lady who was watching this performance of domination and submission with her thumbs stuck in her belt and an expression of unrelieved cynicism on her face. Her sister. God.

"Age does not wither her; weve made quite sure of thaｈttpｓ://reａd.９9csｗ•comt, young man. She still irradiates the dark, for did we not discover the true secret of immortality together? How to exist almost and only in the eye of the beholder, like a genuine miracle?"

Except for the jarring circumstances that in one hand she held a stainless steel, many-branched candlestick of awesomely chaste design, she looked like a superannuated lumberjack, plaid shirt, blue jeans, workboots, butch leather belt with a giant silver skull and crossbones for a buckle, coarse, cropped, grey hair escaping from a red bandana tied Indian-style around her head. Her skin was wrinkled in pinpricks like the surface of Parmesan cheese and a putty grey in colour.

She shrugged, staring through her midnight bangs at the white sunlight outside.

But now an ear-splitting roar announced action was about to commence. This Ma, or Pa, Kettle person set down her candlestick on the terrace table, briskly struck a match on the seat of her pants and applied the flame to the wicks, dissipating the gathering twilight as She rolled out the door. Rolled. She sat in a chrome and ivory leather wheel-chair as if upon a portable throne. Her right hand rested negligently on the lions mane. She was a sight to see.

Now and then the lion sandpapered the back of my hand with its tongue, as if to show sympathy. The butch sister put away gin by the tumblerful, two to my one, and creaked resonantly from time to time, like an old door.

It freaked me. She freaked me. It was her star quality. So thats what they mean! I thought. Id never before, nor am I likely to again, encountered such psychic force as streamed out of that frail little old lady in her antique lingerie and her wheel-chair. And, yes, there was something undeniably erotic about it, although she was old as the hills; it was as though she got the most extraordinary sexual charge from being looked at and this charge bounced back on the looker, as though some mechanism inside herself converted your regard into sexual energy. I wondered, not quite terrified, if I was for it, know what I mean.

And all the time I kept thinking, it kept running through my head: "The phantom is up from the cellars again!"

The Sister broke the silence as if it were wind.

"I thought you said you felt like an enemy alien at home, Hiroko."

After the third poolside martini, which was gin at which a lemon briefly sneered, I judged it high time to broach the subject of Hank Mann. It was pitch dark by then, a few stars burning, night sounds, sea sounds, the creak of those metal chairs that seemed to have been designed, probably on purpose, by the butch sister, to break your balls. But it was difficult to get a word in. The Spirit was briskly checking out my knowledge of screen history.

"Hes come about the thesis," she repeated to herself sardonically and discomforted me still further by again cackling to herself.

All this was somewhat more than Id bargained for. I fought with the gin fumes reeling in my head, I needed all myread.99csw.com wits about me. Moment by moment, she became more gnomic. Surreptitiously, I fumbled with my briefcase. I wanted to get that tape recorder spooling away, didnt I; why, it might have been Mannheim talking.

"She is only in semi-retirement, you know. She still spends three hours every morning looking through the scripts that almost break the mailmans back as he staggers beneath them up to her cliff-top retreat.

I thankfully took advantage of her lapse of attention to pour my gin down the side of my chair, trusting that by the morrow it would be indistinguishable from lion piss. Sister, clanking her deaths head belt-buckle as she readjusted her clothing, came back to us and juggled ice and lemon slices as if nothing untoward was taking place. Then, in a perfectly normal, even conversational tone, the Spirit said: "White kisses, red kisses. And coke in a golden casket on top of the baby grand. Those were the days."

"No, no, no, young man! Laughton certainly was not addicted to self-abuse!"

Sister tsked, possibly with irritation.

Evidently equipped with night vision, she rolled off into the gloaming from whence, after a pause, came the tinkle of running water. Shed gone back to Nature as far as toilet training was concerned, cut out the frills. The raunchy sound of Sister making pee-pee brought me down to earth again. I clutched my tumbler, for the sake of holding something solid.

"Thats about the long and short of it, young man," she said. "Got enough for your thesis?"

"Reckon youve had a skinful," said Sister. "Reckon you deserve a stiff whupping."

"Drinkies!" announced Sister, magnificently clattering a welcome, bottle-laden trolley.

Then Sister belched and announced: "Gonna take a leak."

"Is he the one who interprets the spirit or does the spirit speak through him? Or is he only, all the time, nothing but the merchant of shadows?

Unwilling to negotiate the crazy steps down to the gate, I reached sightlessly for the gin and sucked it until I fell into a troubled slumber.

"And this -- oh! youll have seen him a thousand times; more exposure than any of us. Allow me to introduce Leo, formerly of MGM."

"Ars gratia artis," she reminded me, as if guessing my thoughts. "Where could he go, poor creature, when they retired him? Nobody would touch a fallen star. So he came right here, to live with Mama, didnt you, darling."

And you knew at once this was the face that launched a thousand ships. Not because anything lovely was still smouldering away in those old bones; shed, as it were, transcended beauty. But something in the way she held her head, some imperious arrogance, demanded that you look at her and keep on looking.

Well, not exactly. I woke up to find myself tucked into the back seat of my own VW, parked on the cliff beside the Toyota truck in the grey hour before dawn, my frontal lobes and all my joints a-twang with pain. I didnt even try the gate of the ho九九藏書use. I got out of the car, shook myself, got back in again and headed straight home. After a while, on the perilous road to the freeway, I saw in the driving mirror a vehicle approaching me from behind. It was the red Toyota truck. Sister, of course, at the wheel.

I cannot say it comforted me to theorise this lady was, to some degree, possessed, and so was perfectly within her rights to refer to herself in the third person in that ventriloquial, insubstantial voice that scratched the ear as smoke scratches the back of the throat. But by whom or what possessed? I felt very close to the perturbed spirit of Heinrich von Mannheim and the metaphysics of the Great Art of Light and Shade, I can tell you. And speaking of the latter -- Athanias Kircher, author, besides, of Spectacula Paradoxa Rerum (1624), The Universal Theatre of Paradoxes.

She whispered me a throaty greeting. Her faded voice meant you had to crouch to hear her, so her cachou-flavoured breath stung your cheek, and you could tell she loved to make you crouch.

"Better the devil you know," she said.

The lion rubbed its head against my leg, making me jump, and she pummelled its greying mane.

In spite of the element of poetic justice in it, that my file on Mannheim should suffer the same fate as he, I must admit that now I fell into a great fear. I even thought they might have lured me here to murder me, this siren of the cinema and her weird acolyte. Remember, they had made me quite drunk; it was a moonless night and I was far from home; and I was trapped helpless among these beings who could only exist in California, where the light made movies and madness. And one of them had just arbitrarily drowned the poor little tools of my parasitic trade, leaving me naked and at their mercy. The kindly lion shook himself awake and licked my hand again, perhaps to reassure me, but I wasnt expecting it and jumped half out of my skin.

And out of the dark it came to me that that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no flowering shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Indemnity, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of impending erotic doom, so that I shivered, and Sister, alert and either comforting or complicitous, sloshed another half pint of gin into my glass.

How had they found a corpse to substitute for von Mannheim? A corpse was never the most difficult thing to come by in Southern California, I suppose. I wondered if, after all those years, they finally decided to let me in on the masquerade. And, if so, why.

And I awoke me on the cold hill-side.

But she didnt look her age, at all, at all -- oh, no; she looked a good ten or fifteen years younger, though I doubt the vision of a sexy septuagenarian was the one for which shed striven as she decked herself out. Impressive, though. Impressive as hell.

"Hie," she interrupted herself.

"We hates yall with the tape recorders," she said. "Reckon us folks thinks you is dancin on our graves."