Something hissed softly beside him and a luminescent cone puffed out. A couple of seconds later, the half dozen treads of the stairway glowed milkily.
Buck chuckled inches from Phil's ear. "Lum'niscint mist," he explained with professional casualness. "You get going. I'll spray."
Phil started up, the milky surface light keeping two or three treads ahead of him in blobby advances. The mist got on Otie, so that he glowed like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Some of it even got on Phil's trouser bottoms and sockasins.
"We're certainly marked if we have to run away and hide," Phil commented dubiously as he reached the corridor he and Juno had come through and then took the unknown way upward.
"Uh-uh," Buck chuckled wisely, "'cause I'm spraying a neutralizer behind us." He directed at Phil's feet a dark, faintly hissing cannister and Phil's feet blacked out, along with a blob of surrounding treads. Looking back, Phil saw that the glow on the stairs vanished abruptly. He could not see Mitzie, Carstairs, and Llewellyn.
He asked Buck, "How do you manage two cannisters and Otie all at the same time?"
"Hell, I could aim a squirrel rifle and run a still in addition," Buck assured him.
Phil became aware of a dim radiance above him, beyond the range of Buck's mist. Buck hurriedly neutralized all the luminescence, including that on Otie and Phil. Phil cautiously went up the last ten treads, the upper radiance increasing all the while, and found himself in a shadowy, curving corridor. His steps got shorter and shorter, then stopped.
A couple yards ahead lay three swollen furry shapes, each with a half dozen slim black things stuck into them, like feathered darts.
He recognized at least two of the dead cats. Although grotesquely puffed up, their markings told him they were a Siamese and a short hair he had seen at the Akeleys'.