The Haunted Earth -- Dean R. Koontz

(Version 2002.06.30)


Dedication:
A crazy story for Crazy Tillie Teeshirt


PART ONE: THE ALIEN GRAVEYARD


Chapter One

      Count Slavek, having proposed a toast to his new friend's great beauty,
tossed off the glassful of red wine. Then, smiling so broadly that he revealed
his two gleaming fangs, he said, "Before long, my dear, we shall drink other
toasts together, though not of wine."
      Mrs. Renee Cuyler, dressed alluringly in a thigh-high skirt and a blouse
slashed almost to her navel, smiled at the Count's thinly veiled promise of
inhuman ecstacy and sipped her wine, which she, more decorously, had not
swallowed in one thirsty gulp.
      The Count put his glass down and walked to her, his cape flowing out
behind like dark wings. He touched her lightly along her slim neck. A small
sigh (from both of them) punctuated the caress.
      "Pure Hokum," Jessie Blake whispered.
      He had to whisper, for he was sitting in the closet, watching the Count
and Mrs. Cuyler through a fisheye lens which he had installed in the door some
hours earlier. Neither the Count nor Mrs. Cuyler knew he was in there, and
they would both be acutely disturbed when they learned that he was watching.
The important thing was not to let them know they were observed until the
crucial, incriminating moment had arrived. So Jessie whispered to himself.
      He had bribed the hotel desk clerk into admitting him to the expensive
Blue Suite three hours before either Count Slavek or Renee Cuyler arrived for
their none-too-private assignation. He had chosen, as his observation post, a
stool in the only closet which looked out on the main drawing room of the
suite. Though he knew events would rapidly progress to the bedroom, he
suspected that Count Slavek, in his excitement, would choose to chew on Renee
Cuyler's neck right here, in the drawing room, before moving to other
stimulating but decidedly more mundane, sensual activities. Vampires were
notoriously overeager, especially when, as in the Count's case, they had not
made a convert in some weeks.
      Mrs. Cuyler put down her own wine as the Count's hand pressed more
insistently at her neck.
      "Now?" she asked.
      "Yes," he responded, throatily.
      Jessie Blake, private investigator, got off his stool and put his hand
on the inside knob of the closet door. Still bent over to peer through the
tiny fisheye lens, he made ready to confront the Count the moment that toothy
son of a bitch made a single legal error.
      The Count gazed into Renee Cuyler's eyes in a manner intended to convey
more than mortal longing.
      To Jessie, who was getting a crick in his back, Slavek looked more as if
he had suddenly gotten stomach cramps.
      The woman hooked her fingers in the lapels of her already daring blouse
and opened it wider, giving the Count a better approach to her jugular and
incidentally revealing two full, round, brown-nippled breasts.
      "You look ravishing," the Count said.
      "Then ravish me," Mrs. Cuyler breathed.
      What tripe! Jessie thought. At this crucial moment, he couldn't even
risk a whisper.
      "Of course," the Count said apologetically, "there are certain
formalities we must perform, certain..."
      "I understand," the woman said.
      His voice losing none of its slick, warm charm, the Count said, "I am
obligated, by the Kolchak-Bliss Decision of the United Nations Supreme Court
for International Law, to inform you both of your rights and of your
alternatives."
      "I understand."
      The Count licked his lips. In a sensually guttural voice, clearly too
excited to take much more time with the legal formalities, he said, "At this
time, you need not submit to the consummation of our pending relationship, and
you may either leave or request the services of a licensed advisor on
spiritual matters."
      "I understand," she said. She pulled her blouse open even wider, giving
the Count a good view of the normal pleasures that awaited him once the
greater joy of the bite had passed.
      "Do you wish to leave?" he asked.
      "No."
      "Do you wish the services of a spiritual counselor?"
      "No, darling," she said.
      For a moment, the Count seemed to have forgotten what came next in the
litany engendered by the Kolchak-Bliss Decision, but then he went on, speaking
quickly and softly so as not to break the mood: "Do you understand the nature
of the proposal I've made?"
      "Yes."
      "Do you understand that I wish to initiate you into the World of the
undead?" the Count asked.
      "I do."
      "Do you understand that your new life of damnation is eternal?"
      "Yes, darling, yes," she said. "I want you to -- to bite me. Now!"
      "Be patient, dearest," Slavek said. "Now, do you realize that there is
no return from the life of the undead?"
      "I understand, for Christ's sake!" Mrs. Cuyler moaned.
      "Don't use that name!" the Count roared.
      In the closet, Jessie Blake shook his head, saddened by this spectacle.
Maybe he wouldn't even have to interfere, if things kept going like this.
Another five minutes of questions-and-answers would bleed away most of the
romantic element the Count had spent the early evening hours in building up.
U.N. law certainly had made things tough for the likes of Slavek.
      "I'm sorry," Renee Cuyler told her would-be lover-master.
      The Count composed himself and, still with his fingertips resting on the
pulse at her neck, he said, " You understand that my culture encourages a
certain male chauvinism which you must accept as intimate terms of our blood
contract?"
      "Yes," she said.
      "And you still wish to continue?"
      "Of course!"
      Jessie shook his head again. Mr. Cuyler was going to have his hands full
restraining this wife of his, even if Blake did pull her out of the fire this
time. Obviously, she had a vampire fixation, a need to be dominated and used
in a physical as well as a sexual sense.
      The Count hesitated on the brink of beginning the second and shorter
section of the Kolchak-Bliss litany, the part dealing with the woman's
alternatives, and having hesitated he was lost. He tilted Renee's pretty head,
sweeping back her long, dark hair. Baring his fangs in an unholy grin, he
went, rather gracelessly, for her jugular.
      Delighted that his estimation of Slavek had proven sound, Jessie twisted
the doorknob and threw open the closet door, stepping into the drawing room
with more than a little flair.
      Count Slavek jerked at the noise, whirled away from the woman and,
hissing through his pointed teeth like a broken steam valve, back-stepped with
his arms out to his sides and his cape drawn up like giant wings ready for
flight.
      Jessie brandished his credentials and said, "Jessie Blake, private
investigator. I'm working for Mr. Roger Cuyler and have been assigned to
protect his wife from the influence of certain supernatural persons who have
designs upon both her body and soul."
      "Designs?" Slavek asked, incredulous.
      Jessie turned to the woman. "If you'd be so kind as to close your
blouse, Mrs. Cuyler, we can get out of this dump and -- "
      "Designs?" Count Slavek insisted, moving forward. "This woman is no
innocent victim! She's about the hottest little number I've seen in -- "
      "Are you contesting my intervention?" Jessie asked.
      He was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds, all
of it bone and muscle. And though he couldn't harm a supernatural person
without resorting to the accepted charms and spells, silver bullets and wooden
stakes, he could sure as hell generate a stalemate out of which no one could
gain anything.
      Still, the Count said, "Of course, I contest! You have somehow secreted
yourself in a privately rented hotel suite, against all the laws of individual
-- "
      "And you," Jessie said, "were in the process of biting a victim to whom
you had not recited the entire pertinent information which the Kolchak-Bliss
Decision obligates you to state in easily understood language."
      Mrs. Cuyler began to cry.
      Blake, undaunted, continued: "A mindscan, which you would have to
undergo if I lodged this charge with the authorities, would prove my
allegations and make you vulnerable to a number of unpleasant punishments."
      "Damn you!" Slavek growled.
      "No histrionics, please," Blake said.
      The Count took a threatening step in the detective's direction. "If I
were to make two converts here, then there would be no one to report me, would
there? I'm sure Renee would help me to convert you." He grinned, his black
eyes adance with light.
      Blake removed a crucifix from his jacket and held it in one fist, where,
with a human antagonist,' he might have carried a fully loaded narcotic pin
gun. "I'm not unprepared," he said.
      Slavelj appeared to shrivel a bit and looked guiltily away from the
crucifix. He said, "I was Jewish before I was a vampire. There's no reason for
that device to thwart me."
      "Yet it does," Blake said, smiling down at the plastic Christ-on-a-Cross
which was in four different shades of glow-brite orange. His pin gun was the
best model, an expensive piece of equipment. But he did not believe in toting
around a hand-crafted crucifix when any old hunk of junk would do. He said,
"Studies have been done which show that you people fear this only on a
psychological level. Physically, it has no effect. Yet, because you get your
power from the mythos of vampirism, and because the cross plays such a strong
part in that mythos, you really would die if you came into contact with this -
- if a spirit can be said to die."
      As the detective spoke, Slavek began a strange transformation. His cape
appeared to mold closer to his body and to alter, by slow degrees, into a taut
brown membrane. The Count's features changed, too, growing darker and less
human. Already, he had begun to shrink, his clothes miraculously shrinking
with him and dissolving into him as he strove to attain the form of a bat.
      "That'll do you no good," Jessie said. "Even if you escape out the
window, we know who you are. We can have you subpoenaed in twenty-four hours.
Besides, Brutus can trail you wherever you go."
      The Count hesitated in his metamorphosis. "Brutus?"
      Blake motioned toward the closet where a powerful hound, four and a half
feet high at the shoulders, strode out of the closet Its head was massive, its
snout long and crammed with sharp teeth. Its eyes were an unsettling shade of
red with tiny, black pupils.
      "A hell hound?" Slavek asked.
      "Of course," Brutus said.
      Mrs. Cuyler seemed shocked to hear a deep, masculine voice coming from
the beast, but neither Count Slavek nor Jessie found it odd.
      "Brutus can follow you into any little nether-world cul-de-sac you may
intend to flee to," Blake said.
      The Count nodded reluctantly and reversed his transformation, became
more human again. "You work together, man and spirit?"
      "Quite effectively," Brutus said.
      He held his burly head low between his shoulders, as if he were prepared
to leap after the Count if he should make the slightest move to escape.
      "An unbeatable combination," Slavek said, admiringly. He sighed and
walked to the sofa, sat down, crossed his legs, folded his pale hands in his
lap, and said, "What do you want of me?"
      "You've got to hear my client's ultimatum, and then you can leave."
      "I'm listening," Slavek said.
      He had begun to buff his nails on the hem of his cape.
      Mrs. Cuyler, bewildered, still stood in the center of the room, crying,
her small hands fisted at her sides as if the tears would soon turn to screams
of rage.
      Jessie said, "You've been caught in an illegally executed bite, and you
will remain susceptible to prosecution for seven years. Unless you want Mr.
Roger Cuyler -- my client and this lady's husband -- to initiate that
prosecution, you will henceforth have nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs.
Cuyler. You will neither contact her in person, by telephone, by viewphone or
by messenger. Neither will you employ supernatural methods of communication
where this lady is concerned."
      Slavek looked longingly at the leggy young woman and finally nodded. "I
accept these conditions, naturally."
      "Be off, then," Jessie said.
      At the door of the suite, Slavek turned back to them and said, "I think
it was much better when we kept to ourselves, when you people didn't even
know, for sure, that we existed."
      "Progress," Blake said, with a shrug.
      "I mean," Slavek said, "there's much less risk of a stake through the
heart nowadays -- now that we understand each other -- but the romanticism is
gone. Blake, they've taken away the thrill!"
      "Take it up with city hall," Brutus said. He wasn't in the best of moods
today.
      "It's seven years now since my land of people entered real commerce with
your kind -- and things get worse every day. I don't think we'll ever like it
the way it is now." Slavek had taken on the brooding tone that so many middle-
European bloodsuckers adopted when in a musing mood.
      "The maseni have learned to live with their supernatural brothers -- and
vice versa," Blake reminded Slavek.
      "But they're different," the Count insisted. 'They're alien to begin
with. It was a natural thing for them to establish contact with their
supernatural world. But they forced this on Earth; it isn't a natural
condition here."
      "I hope not," Blake said. "If relations between the flesh and the spirit
worlds, here on Earth, become as easy as they are on the maseni home world,
I'll be out of a job."
      "You exploit other people's problems," Slavek said.
      "Solve other people's problems," Blake corrected.
      Grimacing to express his distaste, Count Slavek left the suite in a
swirl of black cloth.
      At the same moment, Renee Cuyler's tears changed abruptly into anger, as
he had expected they would. The woman ran at him, screaming, clawing with her
well-manicured nails, kicking, biting, slapping.
      Jessie pushed her away and, when he could not settle her with words,
settled her with three narcotics pins in the abdomen. She slumped down on the
thick carpet and went to sleep. She snored.
      "Jesus, what a bore!" Brutus growled. He had no compunctions about using
the Lord's name, in vain or otherwise, though Blake had never heard him use it
otherwise. He padded to the sofa, jumped onto it, curled up with his big,
hairy paws hanging over the edge of the cushions. "It's one infidelity case
after another, these days," he complained.
      "Boring but safe," Blake said. He went to the vid-phone, punched out the
number of their office and waited for Helena to answer it.
      "Hell Hound Investigations," she said, almost five minutes later.
      "You're a poor excuse for a secretary," Blake said. She blinked her
long-lashed, blue eyes, pushed a strand of honey yellow hair away from her
face. "Yeah, but I'm stacked," she said.
      He could see her swelling bosom in the vidphone screen, and he could not
argue with her. He said, " Okay," and he sat down, a bit overwhelmed by
mammary memories. "We've got Renee Cuyler safe and sound. I want you to call
her husband and send him over here." He gave her the address of the hotel, and
the suite number.
      "Congratulations," she said, smiling. She had ripe lips and very white
teeth. She should have made commercials for unnatural sex acts, Blake thought.
"Oh," she said, "you've received four calls this morning from a potential
client."
      "Who?"
      "Galiotor Fils," she said.
      "A maseni?"
      "With that name, what else?" she asked.
      "What's he want?"
      "He'll only talk to you."
      Blake thought amoment. "I'll be back in the office in an hour and a
half, if you get to Roger Cuyler right away. If this Galiotor Fils can be
there, I'll talk to him."
      "Right, chief," she said.
      He winced and didn't have a chance to reply before she snapped off, her
perfect face and better bosom fading from the screen.
      "Looks like you got your wish -- for something interesting to happen,"
Blake told the hell hound.
      Brutus climbed off the couch and shook his head, his ears slapping
against his skull, and he said, " Did I hear right? A maseni for a customer?"
      "You heard right."
      The hound said, "That's a first. What problem could a maseni have that
his own people couldn't solve, that he'd need a human detective for?"
      "We'll know in an hour or so," Blake said. "Let's get our equipment out
of the closet and ready to go, before Mr. Cuyler gets here to collect his
wife."


Chapter Two

      With a six-inch tentacle as thick as a pencil, which passed for his
forefinger, the maseni tapped the glass front of Blake's battery calendar. He
looked hard at the detective, his deep-set yellow eyes intense, his lipless
mouth expressing obvious disapproval, and he said, "Your calendar ran down
three days ago, sir. The date is not October 3, 2000, but October 6, 2000."
      "Only four days short of the tenth anniversary of the initial maseni
landing on Earth," Blake said, leaning back in his shape-changing chair and
staring across the desk at the alien.
      Galiotor Fils blinked, surprised. "True enough, sir. But I fail to see
what that has to do with your inefficiency."
      "And I fail to see what my calendar has to do with your visit to my
office, Mr. Galiotor." Watching the alien, Blake could almost understand why
the right-wing Pure Earthers were so rabidly anti-maseni. Galiot or Fils was
not the most pleasant sight: nearly seven feet tall, as were most of his kind,
dressed in amber robes that matched the color of his eyes, he looked like
something made of wax drippings -- yellow skin with a glistening look to it,
lumpy and yet graceful, with a ballooning forehead, those deep-set yellow
eyes, the squashed nose, the lipless slash of a mouth, hands composed of those
thin tentacles instead of fingers...
      Galiotor Fils said, "If you're inefficient in your daily office routine,
perhaps your work as an investigator would be equally sloppy."
      "Did you just choose my name from the phone book, or did I come
recommended?" Blake asked.
      "Oh," Galiotor said, "you came recommended, sir. Highly recommended." He
nodded his bulbous head, as if agreeing with what he said, but the effect was
that of a puppet being jerked on strings.
      "Then I suggest we get on with the business at hand. If you will just
tell us your situation, what you would like us to do for you, we can -- "
      The maseni interrupted. "Excuse me, but must this animal remain in the
room, sir?" He pointed an undulating tentacle-finger at Brutus, who had curled
up on the only other easy chair in the room, only a half dozen feet from
Galiotor Fils, himself.
      "Him?" Blake asked. "Of course he has to stay. He's my partner in Hell
Hound Investigations. In fact, it's from him we get our name."
      "This is an intelligent creature?" the maseni asked.
      "How would you like a couple dozen canine incisors in your ass?" Brutus
inquired of the alien, his voice like gravel sliding down a sheet of tin.
      Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his seat. "I see," he said. "One of
your supernatural brethren."
      "Exactly," Blake said.
      "Your myths contain some very strange creatures," Galiotor Fils said.
"Of all the races we've met, of all those we've introduced to their
supernatural world-mates, I don't think I've ever seen a collection so
colorful -- "
      "You're pretty colorful yourself," Brutus said. He had raised his big
head from his paws. "In fact, you're downright disgusting."
      The maseni made a throat clearing sound like a cat wailing in hunger.
"Yes," he said, "I suppose it's all a matter of perspective."
      Brutus lowered his head to his paws again.
      Jessie, aware that the maseni was still uneasy about Brutus, decided
that a reassuring little speech, now, would save them time later. Until he was
put at ease, Galiotor Fils was going to be a difficult client. A difficult
potential client. At the moment, Jessie didn't think they would take the case;
both he and Brutus were well-off enough to be choosy, and they were both in
need of something to stir the blood, something exciting. Galiotor Fils did not
seem to be the type to change their luck. Still, on the off chance that he
might be what they were looking for, Jessie decided not to send him away at
once but to try to placate him, if possible.
      "Mr. Galiotor," he said, "I assure you that you have nothing to fear
from my friend, Brutus."
      "Nothing," Brutus grumbled.
      Jessie said, "Two thousand years ago, Brutus was a man much like myself,
a man who had sinned and who, upon death, went straightaway to Hell. There, he
was changed into the hound you see before you, and he was given certain duties
to perform wi thin the hierarchy of file nether world."
      "Interesting duties," Brutus said, grinning widely, almost slavering.
      Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his chair.
      "Brutus's duties were so interesting, by his way of thinking, that he
chose to continue them even after he had spent enough time in Hell to redeem
himself."
      "Five hundred years," Brutus said.
      "At the end of five hundred years, having served his time, Brutus could
have opted for either permanent death or reincarnation. He rejected both and
simply remained a hell hound."
      Brutus still grinned wickedly. "It was delightful."
      "After a second five hundred years, ten centuries after his death,
Brutus had forgotten his old persona. He could not recall who he had been when
he was a man, or what he had done."
      "Just as well," the hound said.
      Jessie said, "After fifteen hundred years, he was weary of his duties in
Hell, and he began to roam the Earth, seeking the unique and the titillating,
anything short of the reincarnation which was his due."
      "It'd be a drag to be human again," Brutus said. Galiotor Fils looked
from the man to the hound, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.
      Jessie said, "Nine years ago, a year after you people first made contact
with Earth, I quit my job as a narcotics agent with Interpol, and I advertised
for a supernatural partner to go halves in the establishment of a detective
agency. Brutus answered the ad."
      "And we've been busy every since," the hound said. He chuckled, deep in
his throat. "You people caused more trouble than a thousand detectives can
handle."
      Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his chair, laced his twelve tentacle-
fingers together, unlaced them, blinked his amber eyes and said, "I hope you
aren't -- well, prejudiced against the maseni race. I am aware that some of
you people feel you would have been far better off -- "
      "No, no," Blake said. "You misunderstand my colleague's meaning. We are
glad you came to Earth; we thrive on the chaos. Ordinary detectives, those who
work on cases involving only human beings, make very little money, but those
of us specializing in human-alien and human-supernatural cases do well. Quite
well."
      "I see," the maseni said.
      "Not everything, you don't," Jessie said. "Mr. Galiotor, my pleasure
with your people's arrival on Earth is not strictly financial in nature. You
see, before that time, ten years ago, I was twenty-seven years old and bored
to tears with nearly everything: my job with Interpol, food, liquor, books,
films, getting up, going to bed... The only things I wasn't bored with were
marijuana and women; I smoked the former and balled the latter, and I was an
enthusiast of both. However, it was a shallow life. Then the maseni came, and
everything changed. Mind you, life would have been lively with one set of
aliens to deal with -- but you brought two, yourselves and your supernatural
brothers. And you introduced us to a third set of aliens that had been with us
all along, our own supernatural brothers. In the following decade, I have not
only earned considerable money, but I have suffered very damn few dull
moments."
      "Until recently," Brutus added.
      "Yes," Blake said. "Until recently. Recently, it seems one case is like
the last -- a wife trying to run off with a vampire; a husband ignoring his
own wife but taking a contract with a succubus; banshees involved in real-
estate swindles, trying to scream down the value of a house or tract of land;
A ghoul interested in robbing graves unsanctioned by the government... Both
Brutus and I need a change, and we're hoping, quite frankly, you're the one to
give it to us."
      "Well, it may be nothing, sir," the maseni said.
      "Whatever it is," Blake said, "it's obviously unusual. So far as I know
you're the first maseni ever to contact a human detective, for aid."
      "Most likely," Galiotor Fils agreed. He looked at both man and hound, in
turn, while he played six tentacles over his open mouth. At last, he dropped
his hand to his lap and said, "I am most distraught, sir. My brood brother has
died, and there has not been a proper ceremony."
      Blake and Brutus exchanged a glance, and the detective rose from his
chair to pace behind his desk. " Brood brother?" he asked. "That would mean
another maseni, like yourself, born in the same brood hole on the home world,
in the same familial mud as yourself?"
      "Even more than that," the maseni said. "In this case, Tesserax was of
the same Birthing as I, from the very same egg batch. We were the same age, by
a hatching day, and we were close." Fat, yellow tears hung at the corners of
the alien's eyes, trembling like liquid jewels, and the corners of his lipless
mouth turned down.
      "Tesserax? That was his name?"
      "Galiotor Tesserax," the maseni said, nodding.
      He was barely able to control his grief, but he held back the threatened
tears and covered up the sorrow in the line of his mouth by raising a hand and
playing six small tentacles there.
      "How did he die?" Blake asked.
      "I have asked the highest officials in the maseni diplomatic mission,"
Galiotor Fils said, "but I have been unable to get a good answer. Invariably,
they tell me the same thing -- 'of natural causes' -- which is to tell me
nothing at all. They commiserate with me in a false manner, saying what they
do not feel, saying they knew him well and miss him too, saying they suffered
much grief themselves... Lies. I see through that."
      "What reason would they have to lie to you?" Jessie asked, pacing yet,
not looking at Galiotor Fils, not able to look at him because of those yellow
tears trembling on those thick, wiry lashes.
      "I believe that they were somehow involved with his death," the alien
said, his sorrow slowly turning to anger, the tone of his voice subtly
different as he spoke.
      "The maseni at the embassy?"
      "Yes," Galiotor Fils said. "Tesserax worked there; indeed, he was the
deputy chief of the embassy staff, the second-ranking maseni on Earth. He was
of high position, respect, dignity, with a great future."
      "No history of illness?"
      "Nothing worse than an occasional tentacle infection," the maseni said,
looking at his own hands. "He was a sexually unrestrained fellow, you see, and
he often indulged in spur-of-the-moment -- ah, you'd call it 'petting' without
first lubricating his tentacles against infection. Our tentacles, you see, are
by far the most delicate portions of our anatomies."
      "How old was Tesserax?" Blake asked, looking at the maseni's twelve
little tentacles from the corner of his eye.
      "Eighty-six Earth years," Galiotor Fils said. "But since we are much
longer-lived than you, I must translate that -- as, say, early middle age."
      "Not quite old enough to just drop off," Blake said.
      "Hardly," Galiotor Fils said.
      Blake said, "But surely the men he worked with at the embassy were the
cream of maseni society. Your diplomatic staffs aren't thugs, mugs, thieves or
murderers, are they?"
      "No, no!" Galiotor Fils said. His yellow face took on the subtle,
greenish hue which indicated embarrassment. He was clearly upset that the
detective could even suggest such a thing, as if it were not merely a slur on
the diplomatic staff, but on the race itself, and on Galiotor Fils as well.
"They are gentlemen of the first mud, I assure you, all intensively tested for
psychological abnormalities. Their function is a very delicate one, after all:
the introduction of maseni civilization, the establishment of trade and
philosophical relations with inferior and superior and equal galactic races.
They must be of sound mind."
      Jessie returned to his desk and gripped the back of his shape-changing
chair with both hands; it molded around his fingers. He said, "Then how can
you suspect these people of murder?"
      "I said I thought they were somehow involved in his murder, but I did
not say they performed it."
      "Call a spade a spade," Brutus growled.
      Galiotor Fils looked at the hound and said, "What?"
      "Make yourself clearer," Jessie suggested.
      "I think my brood brother died in some unconventional manner, and that
the embassy is trying to cover it up." The alient shifted in his chair, too
big for it, and said, "Is that better?"
      Blake chose not to answer that, but began pacing again. In a few
moments, he said, "Thus far, you've given us no reason to believe the people
at your embassy were lying to you. Certainly, you choose not to believe that
he died of natural causes, but that seems to be only opinion. Mr. Galiotor,
when one loses a loved one, grief sometimes makes the acceptance of reality
too hard to bear, and fantasies of paranoid -- "
      "There are a number of reasons why I suspect that I am not being told
the truth about Tesserax's death," the maseni said, a bit angry.
      "Name one," Brutus said.
      "I am stationed on Earth for the purpose of sociological research, along
with several hundred colleagues. A group of your scientists have been taken to
our home world, in exchange for the privilege of unrestricted study here on
Earth. Tesserax and I saw each other frequently. Everyone at the Los Angeles
embassy knew I was here, who I was, how much I loved Tesserax. Yet, when he
died, I was not notified until he was three weeks in the grave!"
      "Bureaucratic red tape, paper errors, fumbling in high office," Blake
said, by way of explanation.
      "That's an institution peculiar to your own race," Galiotor Fils said.
"We haven't 'red tape' in our own government."
      "An honest oversight, then."
      "I can't believe that all fifty of Tesserax's associates at the Los
Angeles embassy could forget me. One, yes, or even a dozen. But certainly not
all of them, sir."
      "What else?" Brutus asked.
      "Every time I try to make an appointment with the embassy doctor, who
was supposed to have treated Tesserax, I get put off. He's always busy with
patients or away or in surgery or something." Galiotor Fils wiped at his huge
eyes with both hands, tentacles wriggling, as if pulling off his weariness. "I
attempted to learn something from the maseni supernaturals who come and go at
the embassy, but I lost out there as well. They fed me the same line as the
embassy officials, as if they'd studied the same script."
      Jessie pulled out his shape-changing chair and sat down behind the desk
again, waited until the chair stopped gurgling and was fitted firmly to him,
then said, "You think that the maseni and the maseni supernaturals at the
embassy are cooperating to hide something about your brood brother's death?"
      "Yes. I know how strange that sounds. Though spirits can learn to live
harmoniously with creatures of flesh and blood, and vice versa, they rarely
present such a monolithic front on any particular topic."
      "Interesting," Jessie said. "Conspiracy of a sort between the real and
the spirit world."
      "One thing," Brutus growled.
      Galiotor Fils looked at the hound. "Yes?"
      "I don't know much about maseni mythology," Brutus said. "When one of
you dies, what happens to the 'soul'?"
      "Any of a dozen different things," Galiotor Fils said. "Tesserax might
have become a ghost, much like the sort that you people believe in. Or he
might have been changed into a Great Tree, assigned to suffer the tortures of
the sentient inanimate before recyling -- ah, this gets difficult to explain
in terms you people would understand."
      "It doesn't matter just now," Jessie said. "In short, Tesserax would
have returned in some form, and you would have known about it."
      "Exactly," the alien said. "Immediately upon learning of his death, I
paid to have a constant call on the netherworld communications network, so
that he would come to me first thing. He hasn't answered it. He would, if he
could. Therefore -- "
      "Perhaps he isn't dead," Jessie suggested.
      "In my central heart, I hope that this is true," Galiotor Fils said,
placing a hand across his abdomen to indicate the seat of his emotions.
"However, I also fear that something even worse than death has happened to
him."
      "Like what?" Brutus asked.
      The alien stood, suddenly, towering almost to the ceiling, unfolding out
of the easy chair like a paper accordion coming to full length. He leaned over
Blake's desk, his palms flat on the blotter, his twelve tentacles wriggling
madly, and he said, "I am afraid, Mr. Blake, that Tesserax was buried without
the proper ceremony, and that his soul -- his soul has been dissipated."
      The last few words came out in a strangled gasp. Everyone was silent in
the wake of this display, until Galiotor Fils could recover. His face had
blanched, and his whole body had locked into a twisted, rigid stance.
      At last, the alien said, "Forgive me for getting so emotional."
      "That's okay," Blake said, not able to meet the creature's gaze. "Can
you go on? Can you explain just what you meant -- when you said that
Tesserax's soul may have been dissipated?"
      Galiotor Fils grimaced, a horrible sight on that nearly featureless,
yellow face. "Yes, of course. You see... Maseni mythology holds that, unless
certain burial procedures are observed, the soul of the departed will simply
disintegrate. He will never return in another form, will have no spiritual
life. He will be, plainly, dead. Because this has long been a maseni belief,
millennia old, it has come to be fact. As you know, the supernatural is at the
mercy of human creation, just as humanity is at the mercy of the spirits'
creations. It is a closed circle. God created us, yet we created God, sort of
like your riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
      "Theoretically," Brutus said, "you've brought us to another impasse."
      Galiotor Fils looked down at the hound and said, "How so?"
      "You told us your embassy people weren't killers. Yet, if they
purposefully denied Tesserax a proper burial ceremony, they killed his soul,
if not his physical being."
      The maseni sat down again, compressing himself into the seat that was
too small for him, arranging his yellow robes, brushing at his face with both
hands. "I've considered this obvious contradiction, before coming here."
      "And you can explain it?" Jessie asked.
      Galiotor Fils leaned away from the back of the chair. "The only reason
for disposing of Tesserax, both physically and spiritually, would be to keep
him from making public some secret which my government finds dangerous. By
letting his soul dissipate, they silence him even after death, when he might
normally have come back to expose them. If he held a secret of proper
magnitude, perhaps the embassy people could be lead into such a heinous
crime."
      "Earlier, you said they were specially tested for psychological defects.
Wouldn't the ability to kill be a defect?" Jessie asked.
      Galiotor Fils looked down at the floor and did not speak for a long
time. When he did finally have something to say, it came in a small voice, a
child's voice, soft and distant: "I don't know what to think, anymore."
      Brutus said, "Where is your brood brother buried?"
      Galiotor looked up. "The maseni cemetery, outside of Los Angeles. Why do
you ask?"
      "It may be necessary to go there, during the course of the
investigation," Brutus said.
      "Then you'll take the case?"
      "We'll take it," Jessie said.
      The alien stood again, energized by elation, this time, and he said,
"How can I express my gratitude?"
      "Give us a fat retainer fee," Brutus said.
      "Yeah," Jessie said. "That'll be a start, anyway."


Chapter Three

      Helena was nude when she reached out and answered the vidphone, her
large breasts grazing the video pickup scanner for a brief moment before she
leaned back. She glanced at the stunned face in the screen and, before the
caller could recover, she handed the receiver to Jessie. "It's for you," she
said. "Myer Hanlon's returning the call you placed to his robosecretary."
      Jessie scrambled off the unmade day bed and slid into the shape-changing
chair behind his desk. He was nude, too, and he shivered as the cool plastic
nuzzled around, him. "It's after midnight, Myer. When I called your mechanical
Girl Friday, I didn't think you'd get my message so soon."
      Myer swallowed hard and said, "Since I've changed over from straight
sleuthing to these supernatural cases, I've had to take on night hours, like
you. So many of the people you deal with, in these things, only come out at
night." He hesitated, craned his neck as if trying to see beyond Jessie, and
he said, "Say, Jess..."
      "Yeah?"
      "Was that Helena?"
      "It was."
      "You know, I've only ever seen Helena over the phone -- and then only
her face. I mean, I didn't know she was so... so... so..."
      "Dynamite," Jessie said.
      "Exactly!" Myer beamed. "Is she -- married?"
      "She doesn't believe in marriage," Jessie said.
      "Wonderful! Do you know if she's doing anything Friday?"
      "Myer, you ought to know that Helena is an unabashed sexist. She can't
seem to establish a normal relationship with a man, because she thinks of us
as sex objects and nothing more."
      "Great, great!" Myer said. "About Friday now -- "
      Behind Jessie, Brutus howled long and low, and Helena cried out in what
sounded like pleasure.
      "Brutus, for God's sake, control yourself while I'm on the phone, would
you?" Jessie asked.
      Myer looked shocked. "You mean the three of you... That she lets
Brutus... I mean, that she..."
      "Like many modern women," Jessie patiently explained, "Helena has
catholic tastes. She goes for flesh-and-blood lovers and for a few
supernatural ones as well."
      "But Brutus!"Myer said.
      "Myer, let's get back to business," Jessie said, scratching his bare,
hairless chest. "You got something for me?"
      Hanlon looked at some notes on his desk top. "Not much," he said.
Clearly, his mind was still on Helena.
      "Tell me anyway."
      "Well, you wanted to know if anyone had come to me about a missing
maseni diplomat named Galiotor Tesserax, and you said you'd pay for the
information. That right?"
      "Twenty credits," Jessie said.
      "I was thinking more like forty," Myer said.
      "Go ahead and think forty. It's not worth more than twenty. Should I
credit your accounts with twenty, then?"
      Myer hesitated only a second. "Okay."
      Jessie lifted the lid on the computerized banking keyboard set in the
top of his desk, and he typed out Myer's name. "What's your account number?"
      'It's 88-88-34-34567," Myer said.
      Jessie typed that out next, then punched twenty credits worth of buying
power to Hanlon's account, closed the lid and looked back at the vidphone
screen. "Now, what have you got?"
      "Well," Hanlon said, "nobody's been to me about this Tesserax fellow.
However, I have been approached by a maseni named Pelinorie Kones and asked to
locate his brood sister, Pelinorie Mesa. So it looks like there's more, than
one missing diplomat."
      "This missing woman -- she was in the L.A embassy, too?"
      "Yes," Myer said. He was a short, heavy-set man who usually perspired
quite a bit. Now, sitting there thinking of Helena, he was running with sweat,
and he was steaming up his video pickup.
      "How have you come on the case?"
      "Less than nowhere," Hanlon said. "Every potential source of information
clams up when I approach them. I've been threatened twice, and told to give up
on the case or else."
      "Are you giving up?"
      'The threats were pretty detailed -- and awful," Hanlon said.
      "Then you have given up."
      "Let's just say I'm not putting my heart into it, anymore."
      "When did this Pelinorie come to you?"
      "A week ago," Myer said.
      "And his sister had just disappeared?"
      "A week before that, two weeks ago."
      "Anything else for me, Myer?"
      "Not that I can think of. Look, Jess, are you working on something
similar to this Pelinorie thing?"
      "Would you really like to know?" Jessie asked.
      "Credit my account with forty units, and I'll tell you exactly what I've
got going."
      Myer scowled. "I don't want to know that much, but thanks just the same.
But, Jess -- ?"
      "What is it, Myer?"
      "Would you ask Helena about Friday?"
      "Speak for yourself, John."
      Hanlon scowled again, the lines in his cheeks deeper, his lips pursed in
a bow. "John?" he asked. " Who's John?"
      "Never mind, Myer. I only meant you will have to speak to Helena
herself. She's a very tough number, and she doesn't like oblique approaches."
      "Maybe I'll call her tomorrow," Myer said. Jessie nodded and hung up.
      When he turned around in his chair, he found Helena lying in the middle
of the bed, a broad smile on her face, her hair in complete disarray. Brutus
was curled up in one of the easy chairs, his big head on his paws. "I think we
have a lead," Jessie told the hound. He explained what Hanlon had said. "If it
were a single case of foul play, an isolated incident, it'd be hard to crack.
But if other maseni, besides Tesserax, have disappeared, there's more of a
chance of a leak in the embassy security."
      "The bigger a secret, the harder it is to keep it a secret," Brutus
agreed, snuffling like a horse to clear his black nostrils of a white mist
which rose over him and hung in the air like thick smoke. "Excess ectoplasm,"
he explained.
      Helena sat up in bed and said, "Speaking of excess ectoplasm, I want you
to trim those claws."
      Brutus examined his claws with his fierce, red eyes, and he said, "I
need them."
      "No, you don't, either," Helena said. "You can grow them or shrink them
at will, so don't try to hand me a line like that. You're basically a sadist,
Brutus. But I'm no masochist."
      Brutus grinned broadly. "Well, now, I think I would disagree with that.
I think you've got a little bit of -- "
      "It's 1:30 in the morning," Jessie interrupted. "If we get moving, we
can squeeze in a few hours work before quitting time."
      "I think this is a case we can work on even after dawn," the hound said.
"There's a strong flesh-and-blood element involved here, as well as a
supernatural one."
      "You're right," Jessie said.
      "We going to see this Pelinorie Kones?" the hound asked.
      "I think that'd be a dead end," the detective said. "We'd just be taking
on another client."
      "Well,'' Helena said, "if you aren't going to start out right now,
you've got time for a little bit of day-bed exercise, haven't you?" She was
grinning more wickedly than Brutus ever could.
      "I suppose I do," Jessie said.
      "I'll watch," the hell hound growled.
      "Damn straight you will," Helena said. "At least until you do something
about those claws."


Chapter Four

      When Jessie and Brutus arrived at the Four Worlds Cafe shortly before
three o'clock in the morning, a group of Pure Earthers was holding a protest
march in the street. There wasn't anything unusual in that: Pure Earthers were
always holding some sort of demonstration in or around the Four Worlds. They
were as much a part of the cafe as its maseni home world rainbow-stone front
and the four big palm trees that grew on its flat roof. Here, the flesh-and-
blood and the supernatural creatures of two different planets met to imbibe,
talk, and make contacts of all sorts. In all of L.A. no place rivalled the
mixture of types that patronized the Four Worlds: maseni men and women, human
men and women, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, banshees in their quieter
moments, golemns, witches, ghouls able to control their more disgusting
habits, and a wide variety of maseni supernatural beings. Of course, the
crusaders, the fanatics like the Pure Earthers, zeroed in on the Four Worlds
like greedy lawyers flocking to a fluttercar accident.
      "You aren't going in that place, are you?" someone asked, grabbing
Jessie's arm.
      He looked down and saw a sweet, gray-haired old woman in a silk dress
patterned with sunflowers. She belonged in the last century somewhere. He
smiled and said, "I was, yes."
      "Oh, but it's a horrible place," the old lady said.
      "How do you know?" he asked, unable to resist hearing her whole line.
"Have you ever been inside?"
      "I'd die first!" she said.
      "It's actually a very respectable place."
      "The foreigners go there."
      "The maseni?" he asked.
      'Them, yes, and others."
      Jessie removed her hand from his arm -- no easy task, since she clung
like a leech -- and he patted it in a conciliatory manner. "I can assure you,
mother, that the best people go there, too. Just the other night I spent half
an hour talking to God; He was sitting at the table next to mine, the father -
- not the son."
      "I know, I know," the old lady moaned, quite distressed, clinging to the
detective's hand as fiercely as she had clung to his sleeve a moment ago.
"I've seen the pictures in the newspapers and on the gossip pages. There He
is, as big as you please, a hussy on His arm, drinking and watching that
scandalous floor show... What's happening to morality these days? If even God
is corrupted, what hope have we?"
      "He hasn't been corrupted," Jessie explained. "Haven't you read the
maseni books, or taken a hypno-course in the nature of man and myth? God is as
much our creation as we are his. He's as much a victim of circumstances as we
are."
      "Tell the old bitch to get lost," Brutus said, from the detective's
side, his red eyes glowing.
      The old woman looked past Jessie, at the hound, and shuddered. "A beast
of Hell," she said.
      "Precisely," Brutus said. He showed lots of teeth.
      "I see there's no use talking to you," the old woman told Jessie. "A man
must contain at least the spark of righteousness if he's to hear and know the
truth." She turned away from him, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the
plastiwalk, and she caught up with the other Pure Earthers who had reached the
end of the block and were turning back for another pass at the Four Worlds.
      "You have this compulsion to talk with zanies," Brutus said. "We never
encounter a batch of Pure Earthers that you pass by; you've always got to stop
and have a few words with them."
      "They fascinate me," Jessie said.
      "Sometimes, I think you could be one of them, with a little nudge," the
hell hound said, contemptuously.
      Jessie ignored the hound's sneering remark. After fifteen hundred years
in Hell, Brutus couldn't pass up a chance to sneer or be condescending; all
those centuries of damnation had severely affected him. He said, " The Pure
Earthers are borderline Shockies; if they'd been just a hair more upset by the
maseni landing and all that's come since, they'd be in one of the homes. I'll
never have the chance to see any real Shockies, but I can get an idea what
they must be like from studying the Pure Earthers."
      "Why this interest in Shockies?" Brutus asked.
      "You know why. My parents are Shockies."
      "Oh, yeah," Brutus said. "I forgot." But he hadn't forgotten at all. He
was just looking for something more to sneer about. "They went starkers when
the maseni touched down, a couple of wide-eyed blubbers."
      Jessie watched the approaching Pure Earthers. "That's right."
      The first maseni interstellar ships had landed a decade ago, in the
second week of October, 1990. Within a year, the population of Earth --
regardless of nationality, race, ethnic group, or education -- had been
roughly divided into three types of reactions. First, there were those who
were profoundly shocked by these developments, but who were able to cope and
reorder the nature of their lives and the limits of their perceptions of the
universe. These were about forty-five percent of the population. Another
forty-five percent were simply unable to adjust. These were the Shockies. They
were jolted by the realization that mankind was not the most intelligent
species in existence, a fact scientists had predicted for years but which the
Shockies had always rejected as "hokum" or "bunkum" or "crap," or "heresy" or
"craziness". They were further jolted to discover -- thanks to the maseni --
that the supernatural world actually existed, that the denizens of nightmare
were real. And they were crushed to discover that God -- Yahweh, Christ,
Buddha, Satan, Mohammed, what have you -- was not quite the being they had
always thought. Not only were their patriotic and racial convictions smashed,
but so was their spiritual belief... Shockies behaved in one of three ways:
uncontrolled rage that led to murder, bombing, rape and rampages of undirected
violence; as they had always acted before, refusing to acknowledge that the
maseni existed or that their world had changed at all, no matter how much that
changed world impinged on their fantasy; or they simply became catatonic,
staring off into another world, unable to speak, unable to feed themselves or
control their own bodily functions. Cultural shock, severe, horrible. Space-
program scientists had long theorized the extent of such a sickness if an
alien race should ever be found, but none of them had realized how far-
reaching the illness would be.
      "Are you going to bleed for them forever?" Brutus asked. "Haven't you
ever heard of 'survival of the fittest'? Did the Cro-Magnon man weep for the
Neanderthal?"
      "These were my parents," Blake said. "My mother and father. If they
could have just accepted change, a little bit -- "
      "Then they'd have been Pure Earthers," Brutus said. "Would you have been
any happier with that?"
      "I guess not."
      The Pure Earthers, at first, had no name and operated under no central
organization; that development had required five years in the making. But they
were all alike, and they could function coherently as a group; the Pure Earth
League was an inevitable product of the maseni landing. Those citizens who had
not gone starkers but who were also unable to cope, about ten percent of the
world population, agitated for an end of human-maseni relations and a return
to the simpler life. They were, of course, doomed to extinction. Their own
children, more accustomed to seeing maseni and supernaturals in the streets,
were falling away from the older folks; succeeding generations would give
fewer and fewer bodies to the Cause.
      "Come on!" the hell hound urged, trotting up to the Four Worlds' main
revolving door. "They're almost back again."
      Jessie looked at the rag-tag mob of Pure Earthers, saw the old lady in
the sunflower dress at a position in the front of the march, sighed and
followed Brutus into the Four Worlds.

      A Shambler, one of the maseni supernaturals, was the current hostess at
the Four Worlds Cafe. She greeted Jessie and Brutus when they entered the
ornate foyer. Shambling up to them, her amorphous face pulsing through
countless lumpy variations, she said, "Welcome to the Four Worlds. May I check
your coat, sir?"
      "I'll keep it, thank you," Jessie said, not bothering to shrug out of
the tailored leather jacket. " You're new, aren't you?"
      "Yes, I am," the Shambler said. "My name's Mabel, sir."
      "Mabel?" Brutus asked.
      "Well, not really Mabel," the Shambler admitted. "But my real maseni
supernatural name is eighty-six characters long, and it really isn't suitable
for human-maseni conversation."
      "I can see that," Jessie said, watching the Shambler's face form and re-
form, a mottled brown-black mass of rotten pudding without eyes, nose or
mouth, with nothing but countless, changing knobby protrusions.
      "May I seat you, sir?" Mabel asked.
      "We're here to meet Mr. Kanastorous," Jessie said.
      "Ah, yes, the charming little demon," Mabel said, bowing a little at the
"waist", her three hundred pounds rippling subtly like a mass of thick jelly
seeking a shape more in harmony with gravity.
      "That's him," Jessie said.
      "Right this way, sir," Mabel said, shambling away across the mirrored
foyer, a contrast with the elegance of rainbow-stone chandeliers, potted
palms, star-glitter flooring and hand-carved maseni pillars. She led Jessie
and Brutus to the door of the main club room and paused by her tip stand,
waiting for Jessie to be generous.
      He typed out MABEL on the bank computer keyboard and said, "What's your
account number, Mabel?"
      The Shambler appeared to be embarrassed by this financial transaction,
and she said, almost demurely, " My number is MAS-55-46-29835, sir, and I
thank you for your generosity."
      Jessie typed out the number, ordered five credits to her account, then
gave his thumbprint to the scanner plate, to finalize the tip. When he was
finished, he said, "May I ask a personal question?"
      Mabel shuddered slightly, her body rippling through another series of
lumpy reformations, and she said, "What, sir?"
      "How does a Shambler spend her credits? What does she buy?"
      The Shambler relaxed, as if she had been expecting something far more
personal than this and was relieved... "According to maseni myth," Mabel said,
"a Shambler is a night prowler who comes after little children who have been
behaving badly during the day. A Shambler moans at their windows." Mabel
paused, hunched over and moaned loudly.
      "I see," Jessie said.
      "Or a Shambler tries to force in their bedroom doors. It hides in their
closets and springs out at them. If they're out past dark, when they shouldn't
be, a Shambler chases them home, snarling horribly behind them." She bent over
again and snarled, ferociously.
      Brutus snarled back.
      Mabel stood again and sighed. "However, ever since we supernaturals and
the flesh-and-blood maseni have opened ordinary relations -- centuries ago --
the law hasn't permitted us to indiscriminately terrorize children. Now, we
have to conform to the monetary-service exchange system, like flesh-and-blood
citizens. We have to advertise for parents who wouldn't mind having their
children frightened now and again -- and we have to pay them for the privilege
of moaning at their brat's window or chasing him along a darkened street, or
hiding in his closet to spring out at him."
      "And you can't manage to give it up -- this terrorizing of the young?"
Jessie asked.
      "You know how it is," Mabel said, shrugging shapeless shoulders. "The
myth of the Shambler guides the reality of the Shambler. The myths say our
compulsion is to terrorize; therefore, we actually are compelled to do just
that. Now, though, we have to get out and work, earn credits to pay for the
satisfaction of this urge."
      Remembering what Count Slavek had said earlier, Jessie asked, "Was it
better, do you think, before people opened relations with the supernaturals,
before they recognized your existence?"
      "Definitely not," Mabel said. "Oh, I have problems now, sure, but I had
worse problems back then. You see, I could pick and choose lads to terrorize -
- but if one of those brats was a nut on ghost stories, he might know the
proper chant or prayer to disintegr ate me. With a few words, he could put an
end to me for good; that was what the myths said, so it was true. Now,
however, since the establishment of friendly relations between flesh-and-
blooders and supernaturals, laws have been set up to keep such murderous
material out of the hands of kids. Very few kids know those prayers anymore.
And before you pay the parents for the right to scare their kids, you can
demand and receive proof and guarantees, in pledge and contract form, that the
brat doesn't know any chants that can hurt you. Oh, certainly, being a
Shambler is more mundane now than it once was -- but it is also considerably
safer."
      "I see," Jessie said.
      "Now, sir, may I escort you to Mr. Kanastorous' table?"
      "Yes, please."
      "Walk this way," Mabel said, shambling through the mirrored door into
the club proper.
      Unwittingly, she had given Jessie one of the hoariest lines he had ever
heard, but he resisted trying to trudge like a Shambler. He and Brutus walked
as they always walked, into the huge, circular night club, past the oval stage
in the center of the room where a weird assortment of human and maseni
supernaturals were playing bi-world music, between tables of colorful diners,
to a back booth, in the shadows, where Mr. Kanastorous waited for them.
      "My old friend, the gumshoe!" Kanastorous exclaimed, standing on his
seat and reaching across the booth table to shake Jessie's hand.
      "How are you, Zeke?" the detective asked, accepting the scaly, four-
fingered mitt and pumping it up and down.
      "Prosperous!" Zeke said, smiling, happy with himself, his horny lips
parted to reveal a hundred tiny, razor-sharp teeth and a long, restless, green
tongue. "Sin merchants have always been popular and wealthy. Now that sin is
legal, we're more popular and wealthier than ever." He looked at Brutus as the
hell hound clambered onto the booth bench beside Jessie and said, "How is my
friend, the nightmare beast?"
      "Thirsty," Brutus grumbled. "Can we get a drink in this dump?"
      "Most assuredly!" Kanastorous said. He punched the intercom beside the
booth and ordered their drinks. "This one on me," he said, typing on the
keyboard under the intercom and pressing his hand to the scanner plate.
      "Thank you, Zeke," Jessie said.
      "He can afford it," Brutus said.
      The demon turned to the hell hound and grinned. "Same old bastard you
always were, huh, Brutus? I think you were the most cantankerous hell hound I
ever worked with."
      "You two were in Hell together?" Jessie asked.
      "Of course," Kanastorous said. "Didn't you know?"
      "I didn't, no."
      "We worked together for -- what was it, fifty years?"
      "An eternity," Brutus said.
      "Fifty years," Kanastorous said, nodding his small, round, scaly head in
agreement with himself. "We were on a project to corrupt the morals of teenage
girls, I believe."
      "A study group," Brutus said.
      "Interesting work," Kanastorous said. "Sort of a think-tank operation
with some first-hand field work, as well."
      "Stimulating," Brutus agreed.
      A Tibetan wolfwoman brought their drinks. She was nearly six feet tall,
though she walked with a slight stoop, because of the nature of her haunches.
Dressed only in her silver pelt, she was quite lovely with eight bare teats
slightly rouged along her soft belly.
      They sipped their drinks and watched her until she was out of sight
among the tables.
      "Well, this must be a strange case you're working on now, my private-op
friend," the demon Kanastorous said, the first to regain his senses from the
unintentional spell the wolf woman had. cast over them.
      "It's unusual," Jessie admitted.
      "Care to tell me about it?"
      "No."
      "Instead, why don't you tell us about this hot little number who's on
her way here to talk to us?" Brutus suggested, raising his snout from his
drink dish and looking across the table at the demon. Droplets of liquor hung
in his bristly, gray muzzle fur, glistening like drops of dew.
      Kanastorous reached for a pretzel from the bowl in the center of the
table, plucked one up and promptly dropped it. "It's so awkward, not having a
thumb," he said, apologetically. "I wish there were some way I could have a
thumb, but the myths say a demon is four-fingered. And these long claws are no
help either, so far as coordination is concerned."
      "About the girl," Brutus said.
      Kanastorous nodded, picked up the pretzel and took a bite of it,
swallowed without chewing. "When you called me from your office a couple of
hours ago," he said, "I knew one of my girls would be able to help you, for
the right price, but I wasn't sure which one." Kanastorous managed about fifty
succubi whom he rented out to horny, flesh-and-blood men and women. "Then I
remembered Gayla."
      "Pretty name," Jessie said.
      "Gorgeous girl," Kanastorous said. "She's strictly a one-way succubus."
      "One-way?" Jessie asked.
      "You don't know about succubi?" the demon asked, finishing his pretzel
and reaching for another. He dropped it.
      "I've never required one," Jessie said.
      "Well, a one-way succubus is one which can only be either male or
female. As you may know, the majority of succubi can appear as voluptuous
women when in bed with men, and as virile men when they are in bed with women.
They transfer sperm from one human lover to another in an alternating and
quite unholy manner. Occasionally, however, because myth requires it, you find
a succubus that cannot change forms, that can be only one sex. Gayla is such a
one; she can only be a woman."
      "Has this some special importance, so far as we're concerned?" Jessie
asked the demon.
      "Yes," Kanastorous said. "When you called me, you said you wanted some
supernatural creature with access to the maseni embassy compound, that you
wanted an informer who could obtain certain restricted information -- not a
sort restricted by law but by bureaucratic perogative."
      "That's right," Jessie said.
      "Well, Gayla is under contract to Willard Aimes, a human attache to the
maseni embassy in Los Angeles. She sleeps with him most every night. And
because she is a one-way succubus, she is just perverse enough to double-cross
him. You see, one-way succubi are, for some reason, perhaps because they feel
inferior or inadequate, far more perverse than their two-way brothers. Or
sisters. Or whatever."
      Just as Kanastorous finished, a stunningly beautiful child-woman, in her
mid-teens, stepped up and said, "Hi, Zeke!" She patted the demon on his scaly
head and slid into the booth beside him, directly across from Brutus and
Jessie. She was perhaps five-two without heels, and a hundred pounds. Her hair
was red and plaited in two pigtails that hung to the middle of her back. Her
face was childish, cherubic and sensuous all at once: full lips but braces on
her teeth, round cheeks, enormous blue eyes and thick lashes but no make-up, a
sprinkle of freckles on flawless, creamy skin... She wore a pair of tight
yellow shorts with her name embroidered on each back pocket, and a thin, white
tee-shirt against which her budding breasts pressed insistently. Her nipples
were sharp little, teasing points that moved as the flesh beneath them bounced
and jiggled.
      "Arf, arf!" Brutus said, grinning.
      Gayla giggled and said, "You're cute."
      "Arf, arf," Brutus said, again.
      Kanastorous introduced everybody, finished his drink in one gulp,
dropped the plastic glass, excused himself, cursed his missing thumbs, and
ordered a new round for everyone -- a malted milkshake for Gayla.
      The wolfwoman brought the order, but no one paid much attention this
time.
      "Are you two going to take out a contract on me?" Gayla asked, smiling
so all her braces showed.
      "We might," Brutus said.
      "And we might not," Jessie said. "Chiefly, we're interested in
information."
      Gayla lifted her milkshake and took a long, cold drink. When she put the
glass down, she had a white ring around her mouth, which was the most obscene
thing Jessie had ever looked at. "Information, you said?" She seemed oblivious
of the milky circle.
      "You're contracted to a man named Aimes," the detective said. "He works
at the L.A. maseni embassy."
      "Willard!" she said, giggling. "Oh, Willard is a naughty boy."
      The detective sipped his drink.
      "Arf, arf," Brutus said, grinning.
      Gayla giggled again.
      "Does Willard talk to you much, about his work?" Jessie asked.
      "Oh, my, yes," Gayla said. "He puts his woolly head right here every
night, and pours out all his troubles to his big sister Gayla." She patted her
small, round breasts.
      "Good, good," Jessie said. "Now, do you recall if he's mentioned a
maseni named Tesserax any time within the last couple weeks?"
      "Tesserax?" she asked, puckering her lips.
      "Tesserax," Jessie said.
      "The name's not familiar."
      "They both work at the embassy -- Aimes and the maseni," Jessie said.
"Lately, there's been some trouble with this Tesserax. Are you sure Willard
never mentioned him?"
      She put a finger to her lips, in thought, discovered the ring of milk,
wiped it off with the finger and licked her hand clean. "I'm sure he hasn't
said anything about a maseni named Tesserax," she said at last.
      "Do you think you could keep an ear open, in case he does?" Jessie
asked. "In fact, could you prod him about this Tesserax, subtly of course, and
then report back to me on his reaction?"
      She turned her head quickly and looked at the demon Kanastorous, her red
pigtails bouncing on her back. "Can I do that, Zeke?"
      "If you're contracted to do it, and if you want to do it," Zeke said.
      "Oh, I'd very much like to," she said. She looked at Jessie and grinned
winningly. "It sounds like fun, spying on the embassy, snitching on old
Willard. It appeals to me. I'm really sort of perverse."
      "I've heard," Jessie said.
      "How much you willing to pay?" Zeke asked.
      Jessie said, "That depends on how soon she can get back to me with
Aimes' reaction."
      "I'm supposed to see him in a little while," Gayla said. "I can bring it
up then, when he's in the right mood, and be back to you by dawn or a little
after." A succubus could come and go in both darkness and daylight.
      "That would be fine," Jessie said.
      "How much?" Kanastorous asked again.
      "A hundred credits?"
      "Impossible. Five hundred as a minimum."
      The detective looked at the hell hound and said, "Well?"
      "I know this greasy little fiend," Brutus said. "We spent half a century
together, corrupting virgins. He'll settle for the hundred, but he'll be
pissed off. Give him a hundred and fifty to soothe him."
      "A hundred and fifty," Jessie told the demon.
      Kanastorous sighed, reached for his drink, knocked it over, grabbed for
it and, in his clumsiness, knocked over Gayla's milkshake as well. As the
succubus giggled and Kanastorous cursed his missing thumbs, a waitress mopped
up the mess and brought them fresh drinks, with a warning to the demon to use
both hands in lifting his glass.
      "Where were we?" Kanastorous asked, warily lifting his glass to take a
sip of his martini.
      "A hundred and fifty credits," Jessie said.
      "Five hundred," the demon insisted.
      "You heard Brutus."
      Kanastorous looked at the hound and made a face, his pointy teeth biting
into his hard lips and drawing no blood. "It is a damnable thing to have to do
business with old friends."
      "A hundred and fifty credits," Brutus said.
      "When I take my commission," Kanastorous said, "the girl is left with
only a hundred and five credits -- and me with only forty-five."
      "A hundred and fifty," Brutus insisted.
      "I'm sure that Gayla, here, makes out quite well from Willard Aimes. And
other contractees, I wouldn't doubt."
      "She has eight contracts to fulfill," Kanastorous admitted, rather like
a proud father.
      Gayla giggled and drank more of her milkshake.
      "Then it's settled at a hundred and fifty?"
      "Okay," the demon said. "For you, my licensed snoop, a special price --
but the whole hundred and a half up front, now."
      Jessie dialed for an open, public channel on the booth's computer
keyboard, made the transaction.
      "Well, I better be off to see Willard," Gayla said, finishing the last
of her new milkshake, wiping at her mouth and getting up. She did a modified
curtsy, her little breasts jiggling, and said, "I'll see you after dawn, Mr.
Blake."
      Then she was gone, pigtails bouncing, tight little behind twitching.
      "She isn't what I think of when I think of a succubus," Jessie said.
      "Well, most of my girls are the voluptuous types," Kanastorous said.
"But not all my customers have the same tastes."
      Brutus said, "Arf, arf!"


Chapter Five

      When they got to Blake's high-rise apartment in downtown L.A., it was
nearly five o'clock in the morning, not much more than half an hour until
sunrise, and little more than an hour or two before Gayla would drop by to
report what she had learned from Willard Aimes. Jessie made breakfast, had a
bloody mary to top it off, and decided to stay up until he got word from the
succubus.
      Seven o'clock came and passed.
      Seven-thirty.
      Eight o'clock.
      "I wonder where she is?" he said to Brutus who was curled up in front of
the fireplace, nose to tail.
      "If Aimes is smart," the hound said, "she's in his bed."
      Nine o'clock came.
      "She should be here by now," Jessie said.
      "Depends on how much stamina Aimes has," the hound said.
      By nine-thirty, they were both aware that something must have gone
wrong, or that Kanastorous was cheating them, somehow.
      "Call the greasy little fiend and find out," Brutus said.
      In his den, Jessie activated the nether-world telephone and typed out
Kanastorous' home number. After a long pause, while the call wailed down the
ethereal line, the demon answered.
      "Where's Gayla?" Jessie asked.
      Sheepishly, Kanastorous said, "I was about to call you about that."
      "Are you trying to back out of your contract?" Jessie asked.
      "Not at all!" the demon said. "It's much more complicated than that, my
pistol-packing friend."
      "How complicated?"
      "I can't tell you now," Kanastorous said,
      "When can you?"
      "Dinner tonight?" the demon asked. "Same booth at the Four Worlds, say
at six o'clock?"
      "I'd like to know what's up. I'd like to know now."
      "What good will it do you to know now instead of later?" the demon
asked. "You're only going to bed for the rest of the day anyhow. Isn't that
right?"
      "Yes, but -- "
      "Besides, this line is too public."
      Grudgingly, Jessie said, "Okay, tonight at six, at the Four Worlds."
      When he hung up and turned around, Brutus was standing in the doorway,
scowling. "I sense very strong forces moving in the background," he growled.
"Someone has made Kanastorous shut his mouth, and that's not easily done."
      "We'll know tonight, at six," Jessie said.
      "We'll know what Kanastorous wants us to know," the hound said. He
padded away into the living room.


Chapter Six

      After seven hours of sound sleep, Jessie and Brutus (who had not slept
at all and did not need to) returned to the Four Worlds Cafe, where a group of
Pure Earthers had just begun a sit-down demonstration before the big,
revolving doors. There were about thirty of them, chained together, and Jessie
recognized the old woman to whom he had spoken the night before. She was at
the end of the line, one arm chained to a comrade, the other to a fire
hydrant.
      "I ought to go say hello to her," Jessie said.
      "If you do, I'll use that fireplug she's chained to."
      "You wouldn't," Jessie said, shocked. "Anyway, you couldn't. The hell
hound myth indicates you can ingest whatever you want, but there isn't a word
about elimination."
      "Well, it would be a symbolic thing," the hound said. "I'd just let out
a stream of ectoplasm."
      "I think we better forget it," the detective said, stepping over the
chained arms in front of the door and going inside.
      In the mirrored foyer, a golden boy with huge wings and a halo rakishly
over his head approached them and said, "Good evening, gentlemen. I am Robert,
your host." He was wearing white robes and leather sandals, a very winning
angel.
      "What happened to Mabel?" Jessie asked.
      "The Shambler?"
      "Yes, her."
      "Mabel comes on when it gets dark and goes home before dawn. She's a
night beast, you know."
      "I guess I knew, but I forgot," Jessie said, punching out a tip on the
angel's stand and letting the scanner have his thumbprint. "How does she find
time to terrorize children if she works during the night and hides from the
sun during the day?"
      "She's off on weekends," the angel said. "Saturday and Sunday nights,
she terrorizes."
      "I see," Jessie said.
      "May I take your coat, sir?"
      "I'll keep it, thank you. Just take us to Mr. Kanastorous. He ought to
be here already."
      "Yes, of course," the angel said. "That round-headed little -- "
      "Demon," Brutus finished.
      "Thank you," the angel said. "I've nothing against Mr. Kanastorous, or
his kind, you understand. It's just that I find it hard to say that word and
others like it." He opened the inner doors and took them into the main club
room.
      Because it was still light outside, some of the club's more exotic
denizens, like Mabel, and vampires, and other beasts, had yet to leave their
coffins for dinner. Though the club was half-filled, with maseni and humans
and supernaturals, the spirits here now were rather plain. They passed a table
of four big black men who were all wearing overalls and eating huge slices of
watermelon. They laughed raucously and used phrases like "scrumptious good"
and " lordy mama" and "dis a fancy sweet melon, all right." Jessie could see
that all four of them hated the goddamned watermelon, but were compelled to
gobble it up. They'd have to finish a slice apiece, spitting seeds across the
room, before they could order what they really wanted. That was, after all,
what the white-man-made myth said the "nigger" was supposed to do. At another
table, a group of mythical Italians were suffering a similar problem. Three
men (all dressed in baggy suits, vests, badly-knotted ties) and three women
(in baggy, flowered dresses, slips showing, hair in greasy disarray, all
wearing rosaries around their necks) were working on small plates of
spaghetti, sauce running down their chins, laughing uproariously, speaking in
heavily accented English, using phrases like "atsa good spaghet" and "you
licka da sauce, or isa too tomatoey?" and "mama mia" and "atsa way to eat,
Vito, bambino!"
      In some ways, Jessie thought, if you had to be a supernatural being, it
was better to be a ghost, a hell hound, a demon, a vampire, a werewolf, a
ghoul -- almost anything other than a mythical Wop or Nigger. Those poor sons
of bitches had it rough.
      "Ah, my friend the shamus!" Zeke Kanastorous cried, when the angel
brought Jessie to the table at last.
      "Hello, Zeke."
      "Sit down, sit down. We'll order drinks and dinner, from the intercom,
and then we can chat."
      They were served their drinks by a lumbering zombie whose eyes were pure
white, containing no pupils or irises. In a sepulchre voice, the creature
said, "Your dinner will be served in fifteen minutes." Then it stomped away,
lurching down the crooked aisles between the tables.
      "They must be hard up for help," the demon said, clicking his long green
tongue with distaste.
      "Yeah," Jessie said. "Now what about Gayla?"
      "And it better be good," Brutus added.
      Nervously, Kanastorous explained. "She was with this Aimes character for
several hours, and when he was in the right mood, she tried bringing him
around to this maseni you're interested in, this Tesserax fellow. His reaction
was immediate and antagonistic. He revealed that he had been given special
emergency powers for the detention of human and supernatural civilians, and he
ordered her to remain on his bed, not to dematerialize and go elsewhere. Then
he got on the nether-world communications network, and he called someone."
      "Who?"
      "We can't say for sure. But it was someone high up in Satanic rule,
someone who could give orders to a demon like myself or a succubus like Gayla.
In a minute, Moloch materialized in Aimes' bedroom, in answer to the call."
      "Moloch? Satan's secretary of state?" Brutus asked.
      "The same," Kanastorous said. "He ordered Gayla to break her contract
with me, and with other clients, and to report for special work as Satan's
envoy in Japan."
      "They've gotten her out of the scene, then, even though she didn't learn
anything," Brutus said.
      "Maybe they're afraid she did know something, from her association with
Aimes, something he didn't even realize he'd told her," the demon said.
      "Whatever their reasons for silencing Gayla," Jessie said, "they've
proven there's something big brewing around Tesserax's disappearance."
      "Maybe too big for you to handle," the demon said.
      "Maybe," Blake said.
      "What will your next step be?"
      "I'll have to think about it," the detective said.
      "You won't expect my fee back, will you, old gumshoe buddy?" the demon
asked anxiously, leaning toward Blake, his martini glass cautiously clasped in
both hands.
      "You can keep it," Jessie said. "I may not have learned what I had hoped
to learn from Gayla -- but the incident has taught me other things."
      Their dinner arrived, along with a bottle of wine which Kanastorous was
paying for, and they spoke no more of Tesserax or Gayla or the strange
situation that Hell Hound Investigations had become involved with. Instead,
they drank a second bottle of wine, which Jessie paid for, and they chatted
about mutual acquaintances.
      By the time they'd finished dessert, Jessie said, "I'm afraid I must be
excused for a moment. I suffer from a condition of the bladder which you
people don't have to contend with."
      "By all means, go ahead," Kanastorous said, letting go of his glass with
one hand to wave airly toward the men's room door. His other hand slipped on
the wet glass, and he dropped his wine into Brutus' lap.
      "You clumsy little creep," Brutus growled.
      "Now, now," Jessie said. "It'll be all gone by the time I get back. Zeke
can't help that he's got only four fingers a hand."
      "You don't even have fingers," Zeke told Brutus, petulantly.
      As Jessie walked away from the table, the zombie was lumbering toward
the scene of the accident, a dish towel draped over one arm.
      "Don't be nasty with him," Jessie told the white-eyed monster. "He can't
help it if he's not got any thumbs."
      "He could drink out of a dish, like that friend of yours," the zombie
said. "I'm not paid to be a nursemaid."
      "He's a good tipper, though," Jessie said.
      The zombie's expression remained grim, his voice deep and monotonous,
but he said, "Well, I guess anyone can have an accident now and then." He went
on, heavy-footed, for the table where Brutus was barking at the demon.
      As Jessie entered the men's room, two of the mythical Italians were
coming out. "Atsa nice-a toilet," the one Italian said.
      The other said, "Clean. Clean as a baby's bottom, that place."
      "Excuse me," Jessie said, sliding by them.
      "Sure-a, sure-a," the one Italian said. He had sauce all over the front
of his shirt and a strand of spaghetti on his lapel. Poor son-of-a-bitch.
      In the men's room, Jessie found the place was as clean as the Italians
had said it was, all white porcelain and plastic and polished glass, six
stalls off to one side, eight urinals out in the open, half a dozen sinks. He
walked to one of the urinals and was about to use it when one of the stall
doors opened behind him and someone said, "Blake?"
      "Yes?" he asked, turning.
      Medusa stood there, in a toga, her eyes boring into his, her hair not
hair at all but a furious tangle of writhing snakes.
      "Uh -- " Jessie said.
      "Not to worry," she said, moving toward him. "It's only temporary,
darling, until we can get you out of the picture."
      As he turned to stone under the Medusa's awful gaze, Jessie could think
only two things: First, if he had not heard the legend of Medusa, didn't know
the myth well, she would not have affected him this way -- for she only had
the power to petrify those who were conversant with her story; second, he
wondered what a woman was doing here in the men's room.


Chapter Seven

      In the office of Hell Hound Investigations, Helena and Brutus stood in
the middle of Blake's private room and watched the company robot move the
furniture against the walls. Soundlessly, it hoisted the desk, chairs, the day
bed, and shoved them out of the way, then came back to stand dutifully in
front of the hound, waiting for further instructions.
      "Do you think this will work?" Helena asked.
      "It'll work," Brutus told her. To the robot, he said, "That's all for
now. Please retire to the waiting room -- far enough away so your audio
receivers can't hear us."
      The robot clanked out of the room, closing the door behind it.
      "You don't trust him?" Helena asked.
      Brutus said, "Anything a robot hears is stored in its microdot memories.
It can be subpoenaed in court, and that might be disasterous."
      "Is what we're doing illegal?" Helena asked.
      "It may be, depending on how it develops," Brutus said. He looked up at
her and said, "You want to leave, too?"
      "Oh, no!" she said. "I'd do anything to help get Blakesy back."
      The hound tilted its head. "Blakesy?"
      Helena smiled. "I sometimes call him that, in private, when it's just
the two of us."
      "Christ," Brutus said.
      "I didn't know you could use words like that."
      "They don't bother me," the hound said.
      She clapped her hands together as if she were making a starting signal,
and she said, "Where do we begin?"
      "I had the robot put all the stuff out for you," Brutus said, crossing
the room to a black, enameled tray filled with instruments. "First, I want you
to fit a piece of chalk to that string compass and draw a big circle in the
middle of the floor."
      "How big?" Helena asked, picking up the tool and the chalk, biting her
full lips prettily as she tried to slip the white stick into the proper clamp.
      "A three foot radius ought to do it," the hound said.
      She got on her hands and knees, her skirt riding up behind, and she
crawled around the room, outlining the circle. "There!" she said, when she was
done, beaming as if she'd created a work of art.
      "Now, draw a smaller circle," Brutus said. "A foot and a half diameter,
due north of the circle you just finished."
      "I don't see how this will get Jessie back," she said.
      "You'll see," Brutus said.
      She drew the second circle.
      "You know what a pentagram is?" the hound asked.
      "Sure."
      "Draw a pentagram inside each circle, with the points touching the
circle walls."
      She needed a couple of minutes to do this, but when she was done, the
pentagrams were tucked neatly inside the circles, never overlapping at any
point, a detail Brutus had made sure of.
      "Now," he told her, "light the seven black candles and the seven white."
      She did this, while he directed the placement of each taper. Then she
placed the leather-bound Bible in the center of the largest circle and went to
turn out the lights, like he said.
      "What now?" she asked, as the glittering, orange candlelight cast eerie
shadows about the room.
      Brutus' eyes shone a brighter red than ever, magnified both by the
darkness and the flickering flames. "Come here and stand beside me in the
largest circle, and don't step outside of it again until I tell you to."
      When she was beside him, she said, "What in the hell are we doing,
Brute?" He didn't like her nickname for him any more than he liked "Blakesy"
for Blake, but he didn't say anything. If she got mad and walked out on him,
he'd have to rely on the robot for anything that needed hands, and he trusted
Helena to keep her mouth shut, in court, more than he did that mechanical
dodo.
      "We're calling forth a demon," he said.
      "With magic?"
      "That's right?"
      "Chants and spells?"
      "That's the sum of it, baby."
      She frowned. "Why don't we just use the nether-world telephone?"
      "Because that's legal," Brutus said. "And it doesn't give you any
control over the demon; it only lets you talk to him."
      "Who are we calling forth?" she asked.
      "Zeke Kanastorous."
      "That horrible little creep?"
      "He's the one. He may know where they've taken Jessie."
      "And you want to have control over him, so you can force him to tell
you. Is that it?" she asked.
      "Helena, you're a genius."
      She stooped and ruffled his furry head, pressed his cold nose between
her hefty breasts. "I like you, too, Brute. Okay, then, let's get on with it."
She pulled away from him and sat down, cross-legged, like an Indian. "I'm
going to enjoy watching that little creep suffer."
      "So am I," Brutus said.
      For a time, they were both silent, letting the night settle down, the
air grow still, the ethereal vibrations quieten.
      The walls of the room appeared to draw closer as they meditated, and the
darkness between the fourteen points of sputtering candle flame grew even more
intense.
      "Remain perfectly still," Brutus said.
      Helena didn't even nod in response.
      Lowering his head, closing his fiery eyes, the hell hound began to chant
in a low, monotonous voice, reciting the names of the places where human souls
were said, sometimes, to rest in preparation for Judgment Day: Hell, Hades,
The Pit, Satan's Antechamber, Limbo, Purgatory, The Black Grotto, and a
hundred others. Next, he went through the names of the hundred most powerful
demons in the Satanic hierarchy, from that list to a rigidly worded chant
which he said in Latin.
      Helena thought that the room was growing perceptively cooler, and she
hugged herself for warmth, unconsciously shifting a bit closer to the hell
hound.
      "Kanastorous! Ezekial Kanastorous, answer me!" The hell hound's voice
was a great, thundering command as he finished the chant and raised his head
like a howling wolf.
      In that same instant, before the echo of his cry had died away, the air
inside the smaller circle, due north of them, seemed to shiver, to take on a
vague phosphorescence.
      "It's working!" Helena cried, slapping the hell hound on the back.
      "Of course it is," Brutus said.
      Then Kanastorous was there: four feet tall, scaly, somewhat green,
flicking his chartreuse tongue and looking anxiously about, bewildered. He
caught sight of Brutus and Helena beyond the candle flames that separated
them, and he said, "What is going on here?"
      "Just a little black magic," Brutus said.
      Kanastorous looked confused, then angry. He started forward but came to
an abrupt halt, as if he had run into an Invisible brick wall, when he tried
to step beyond the chalk barrier that Helena had drawn. He looked down at his
feet and said, "A pentagram?"
      "Precisely," Brutus said.
      "But this is illegal!"
      "Illegal, perhaps, but effective," Brutus said.
      "I'll see that you're given eternal rest for this!" the demon said, his
face turning a darker green.
      "You're in no position to threaten," Brutus said. "Your only choice is
to be silent and answer only when spoken to."
      "Forget that, dogface," the demon said. "I have my rights, and I know
what I can -- "
      The hell hound padded softly to the edge of the largest circle in which
he and Helena were protected, and he blew out one of the seven black candles,
leaving six black and seven white, disturbing the delicate balance between the
spheres of magical influence.
      Kanastorous jerked as if he had been struck by a whip, tottered back
until his spurred heels came up against the chalk circle, then leaned forward,
swaying dizzily.
      "Is he in pain?" Helena asked.
      "Some," Brutus admitted.
      "Good," the woman said. "If he hurt Blakesy in any way, he deserves
every bit of it."
      "I'm an innocent pawn in all of this," Zeke Kanastorous moaned, staring
across the remaining candles at the hound.
      "Ah, you've recovered sufficiently to talk," Brutus said.
      "You can't take your anger out on me. What could I do?" the demon asked.
"How could I stop them?"
      "Stop who?" Brutus asked. "Who has kidnapped Jessie Blake?"
      "He hasn't been kidnapped," Kanastorous said. He was holding his round,
green stomach as if it hurt.
      "You mean he's been killed and disposed of?" Helena asked, tense, her
neck stiff, her jaw tight and fierce.
      "No, no!" Kanastorous said. "He's just been -- well, put on ice."
      "Why?"
      "To keep him out of the Tesserax affair."
      "What isthe Tesserax affair?" Brutus asked.
      "Oh, how should I know?" Kanastorous cried, still clutching his round
gut with both hands, doubled over, blinking stupidly. "Would you please light
that candle again?"
      "I'm out of matches," Brutus said.
      "That's a lie."
      Brutus did not reply.
      "I'll have your supernatural neck for this!" the demon roared, his
tongue flickering in and out, in and out like a snake that lived in his mouth.
      "I doubt that. Now, let's get back to the matter at hand. You were
trying to convince us that you know nothing whatsoever about this Tesserax
business."
      "But I really don't!" the demon wailed. "That's the truth, my old canine
buddyboy, the bitter truth. I was approached by Mr. Willard Aimes and Mr.
Holagosta Mur, the chief of the maseni embassy in Los Angeles; they solicited
my aid in waylaying Mr. Blake."
      "They didn't tell you why they wanted this done?"
      "No, they didn't. I assumed that it had to do with the Tesserax affair,
considering what they had already done to Gayla."
      "She really was transferred to Japan?"
      "Yes."
      Brutus thought for a moment, then said, "Okay, I'll believe you, so far
as the Tesserax business is concerned. I doubt they did tell you anything. But
you must know what they've done to Jessie, since you helped to engineer it."
      "My job was to get him into the bathroom," the demon said. "I arranged
that by buying the first bottle of wine at dinner and by being sure that,
beforehand, it was doctored with a bladder exciter."
      "Who was waiting for him in the men's room?" Brutus asked.
      Kanastorous hesitated, then said, "I don't know, Brutus. They didn't
tell me about that; they only wanted me to be sure he went in there."
      "You're lying."
      "I swear I'm not!"
      "A demon's word..."
      "My part was to serve the doctored wine, which would not affect me or
you, but which would send Jessie to the urinal."
      The hound walked across the large circle again and blew out a second
candle, watched as the demon jerked back and forth, clutched his head and
chest and stomach...
      "I'm glad you did that," Helena said. "I was about to take the
initiative myself."
      Kanastorous went to his knees inside the smaller circle and, in a few
minutes, had recovered sufficiently to speak, though he could not regain his
feet. "This is despicable," he hissed. "This is the most barbaric thing I can
imagine."
      "Come, come, Zeke," Brutus said. "We worked together in Hell for fifty
years, remember? I've seen you perform more barbaric acts a thousand times --
and usually on defenseless virgins."
      "That was before the laws!" the demon groaned.
      "Five black candles and seven white," Brutus said. "Now, if you don't
tell me what I want to know inside the next minute, I'll blow out a third
black taper." He paused for dramatic effect and said, "Who was waiting in the
men's room for Jessie?"
      "Medusa," Kanastorous said.
      "Come again?" the hound growled.
      "The woman who has snakes on her head, instead of hair, the one who can
turn a man to stone with her gaze. She lives here in L.A. now. Haven't you
heard of her?"
      "I have!" Helena said. "She's the one with the awful taste in clothes --
and she always wears those mirrored sunglasses to keep from turning all her
friends to stone."
      "That's the woman," the demon said.
      "She's always at some art show or concert," Helena said. "You see her
picture in the papers and on television, usually on the arm of the maseni
embassy big shots."
      "Yes, yes," Kanastorous said, eager to please them. "The maseni are
fascinated by those snakes she has for hair -- probably because the snakes are
so similar to their own tentacles."
      "This Medusa woman was waiting for Jessie in the men's room of the Four
Worlds?" Brutus asked.
      "She was, yes."
      "And she turned him to stone?"
      "Yes."
      "Isn't that as good as killing him?"
      "It was only a temporary transformation," Kanastorous said. "As I
understand it, there are ways to bring him back to life."
      "Well, when I went in that restroom," Brutus said, "there wasn't any
statue that looked like Jessie. Where'd they take him?"
      Kanastorous looked up beseechingly, not unlike a Christian in the act of
prayer, gazing to the expectant heavens as he kneels. "You must believe that
they didn't tell me."
      Brutus shook his burly head slowly back and forth. "No, I don't have to
believe anything of the sort."
      "But they really didn't!"
      The hound got off his haunches and moved slowly back to the row of
candles. "What will it be like for you, Zeke, if I extinguish yet another of
the black ones?"
      "You wouldn't, my old hairy-muzzled friend." The demon grinned a
sickeningly pleading grin.
      Brutus sighed and leaned toward the nearest of the flames, sucking in
new breath with which to blow it out
      "I'll tell! I'll tell!" the demon cried.
      "No tricks."
      "No tricks," Kanastorous agreed.
      "Where'd they take Jessie?"
      "To Millennium City," the demon rasped.
      "That new shopping mall over in West Los Angeles?" Helena asked, getting
to her feet.
      "That's right," Kanastorous said.
      Brutus grunted. "Why take him there?"
      "It had a perfect hiding place," the demon said.
      "But those stores are open twenty-four hours a day," Helena said.
"They're robotically operated; they have customers at any hour. I don't see
how they could have carted Jessie in there and hidden him."
      "Millennium City is a fancy place," the demon said, still on his knees,
black sweat on his scaly brow. "It has an art museum, a legitimate theater,
fountain displays and a sculpture garden for the enlightenment of the
patrons."
      "So?" Brutus asked.
      "They put Jessie in the sculpture garden, with the other statues. They
intend to keep him there until the Tesserax crisis -- whatever it is --
passes."


Chapter Eight

      Millennium City was a 200-store shopping mall, most of it under a single
roof, with indoor pedwalks, indoor and outdoor parks, fountains, convention
facilities, hotels, more fountains, amusement centers, free theaters and
museums, robot guides to help you find your way, a three hundred million
credit wonder that had been completed only a year before. It was staffed
exclusively by robots and was efficiently run, enormously profitable.
      Only ten years earlier, it could never have been built -- and not only
because maseni technology was required to construct it. Ten years ago, the
city of Los Angeles simply would not have had the room, in the heart of its
west side, to contain such a lavish, three-hundred-acre structure. Then, there
had been too many people, too much crowding. Now, a decade after the maseni
landing on Earth, the city was only half as populated as it had been. Forty-
five percent of the city's people had gone starkers and ended up in homes for
Shockies. Many of these, in the following ten years, either took their own
lives or died from too long in a catatonic trance. For the most part, the
Shockies were those who were already hopelessly at odds with their times; they
were, in many cases, those who ignored the warnings of ecologists and
continued to have large families, polluting the Earth with excess flesh.
Removed from the mating cycle, they no longer contributed to the population
boom. Those who adapted to the maseni and the other changes, tended to have no
families, or small ones. As the Shockies died, the population dropped, and
land became available. With the welfare rolls almost wiped out, and with vital
services crying for good workers, everyone again had a job and everyone was
more affluent than any time in the nation's history. There was not only room
to build Millennium City, but also credits to spend there. Old office
buildings were torn down, as were rows and rows of shabby houses where no one
lived anymore. They razed factories that had once produced useless gadgets and
flashy gewgaws, for none of these things were now in demand; society had
suddenly become aware of its own power and of the true value of possessions.
Millennium City not only provided services and products, but a place to feel
at ease, a center for commerce which was, at the same time, a business
establishment and a community meeting place.
      On the south end of the Millennium City complex, there was a two-acre
sculpture garden, containing abstract and realistic stone and metal work from
all over the world, and from the maseni home world as well. It was here that
Helena and Brutus came, at a quarter to twelve that night.
      "How many statues are in here?" Helena asked.
      "I'd say four or five hundred," Brutus replied. "That is, if you rule
out the abstract ones which we can tell, at a glance, aren't Jessie."
      A young couple passed them, strolling hand-in-hand; the boy was a normal
human being, while the girl was a button-cute wood nymph no taller than four
and a half feet.
      Helena and the hound walked slowly down the main avenue before trying
any of the looping side-streets. They passed statues of maseni kings, American
Presidents and authors, a cavalry man on horseback, a black American liberator
with a Molotov cocktail in his stone hand...
      "Well have to try the smaller walkways," Brutus said.
      They passed a statue of Artemis Frick, the first man to die on Mars; a
statue of President Agnew, the first American President to resign from office
over an embarrassing incident on the Pritchard Robot television talk show-but
not the last to do so...
      "Jessie!" Helena cried, stopping so suddenly that Brutus, looking at a
statue of Snoopy across the way, almost walked into her.
      "Where?"
      She pointed at the next statue, opposite that of Snoopy. "It is him,
isn't it?"
      Brutus padded closer, his claws making a rattling noise on the flagstone
path. "He looks a bit different in granite," the hound said, "but I'm sure
that it is him, my dear."
      Helena looked more closely at the life-size stone figure where it stood
on a marble pedestal that made it tower over them. "My God, do you see what
pose he's in?"
      Brutus chuckled. "Well," he said, "he was at the urinal when Medusa
surprised him, you know."
      Helena walked up and rapped her knuckles on Jessie's thigh. "Really is
stone," she said.
      "The myth requires it."
      She regarded Jessie from straight on, staring into his blank, granite
eyes. "You think he's aware of his condition, where he is? Do you think he
knows we're here?"
      "We'll have to ask him when we get him changed back," the hell hound
said, moving up beside her.
      Helena had been carrying a book on mythology, one of the volumes
published as a guide by the United Nations after the initial chaos the maseni
brought with them to Earth. She thumbed it open, found a listing under MEDUSA,
and said, "The Medusa is a world-wide mythical figure. According to various
versions of the myth, there are eighteen ways to undo the damage of her gaze."
      "Read 'em off," the hell hound said, gazing up at Jessie.
      The detective stared out across the sculpture garden, his head held
high, rather noble despite his pose.
      Helena said, "Well, first of all, we can immerse him in the waters of
the Ganges River."
      "Even if we could get him out of this park without being taken for
statue thieves," the hound said, " it would take too long to fly him to the
Ganges and go through that bit. Something else."
      "Paint him with the blood of newborn babies," Helena said, shivering.
      "Ecchh," Brutus said. "What's next?"
      "A virgin's kiss, against his stone lips," Helena said. She smiled.
"Isn't that romantic?"
      Brutus gave her a long look, from head to toe and back again. "A
virgin's kiss? I suspect you better read number four."
      The Millennium City sculpture garden was one of the open-air parks in
the complex and, now, above them, the night sky split open with a flash of
jagged lightning, followed by a low peal of thunder. They both looked up,
waiting for the rain. When it didn't come, Helena looked back at the book and
said, "Number four -- the victim of the Medusa can be revived to flesh by the
touch of someone who truly loves him."
      'There we are," Brutus said, nodding his hairy head.
      "Oh?"
      "Touch him some more," the hound said.
      "Me?"
      "Don't you love him?"
      "Oh, I love him a little bit, I suppose. I mean, he's awfully nice, and
he's good looking. I like going to bed with him and I like working for him...
But I couldn't honestly say that I truly love him. Not deep and everlasting
and all of that. If the tables were turned, and if that were me up there on
the pedestal, I don't think Jessie would pretend any differently about his own
feelings."
      "Well," the hell hound said, "you can't be sure. Maybe you love him just
enough to make it work."
      "I already touched him," Helena pointed out, "and nothing happened." Her
golden hair had fallen across her face, and she pushed it behind her ears with
her left hand.
      "You didn't exactly touch him," Brutus corrected her. "You rapped on
him."
      "Same thing."
      "A rap isn't the same as a touch," the hound persisted. "So why don't
you try touching him. I mean, for Christ's sake, what have you got to lose?"
      She looked up at the stone Jessie, down at the hell hound again, and she
said, "Well, I guess it can't hurt anything..."
      "Of course it can't."
      "I'll just touch him."
      "Go on," the hound urged.
      Gingerly, Helena reached up and placed the palm of her hand on the
statue's leg.
      Nothing happened.
      "Touch him with both hands," Brutus said.
      "Why?"
      "Look, Blue Eyes, maybe if you don't love him enough to bring him around
with one hand, you love him enough to bring him around with both hands. You
dig it?"
      She touched the statue's leg with both hands.
      Jessie was not returned to flesh.
      "Well, what's number five in the book?" Brutus asked, wearily.
      "Wait a minute?" Helena said, her bright eyes adance with some clever
thought or other.
      "What is it?"
      She said, "Why don't you touch him, Brutus?"
      "Me?"
      "Yes, you."
      "I don't truly love him!"
      "Don't you love him a little?" she asked, kneeling down, taking the
hound's head in both her hands.
      "He's a man, and I was once a man," the hound said. "Or at least I think
I was once a man."
      She said, "What's that got to do with anything?"
      "Well -- true love, the book said. That would be a woman who loved him."
      "Doesn't a father love his son, and the son his father?"
      He looked away from her face, found himself staring down her cleavage
which was handsomely revealed in her low-cut sweater. But that wasn't what he
needed now. He looked up again and said, "Well, I'm not his son or his father,
am I?"
      Overhead, another shattering streak of lightning, as white as snow
against the blue-black night, pierced a powder keg and brought a long roll of
thunder across Millennium City like the volley of an ancient cannon, a battle
in the clouds.
      "It's going to rain, soon," Helena said. "Let's not waste any more time,
Brutus. You jump right up there on that pedestal and touch him; see what may
happen."
      "This is silly."
      "You've known him seven years longer than I have," she observed. "You
must have strong feelings about him, after all that time."
      "The book says one must truly love..."
      She stood up and stamped her foot, a gesture which made her unconfined
breasts bounce wildly up and down. "Brutus, if you don't do your part, if you
don't jump up there this minute and touch Jessie, you can forget about me, you
can forget about that day bed -- whether or not you shorten your claws!"
      "But -- "
      "And that's final."
      More thunder; more lightning, a single fat droplet of rain...
      "Very well," the hell hound said.
      "Good boy," Helena said.
      Brutus tensed and leaped, scrambled on the pedestal and stood beside the
granite Jessie Blake. He looked down at Helena and said, "How should I touch
him -- with a paw?"
      "Try that."
      He lifted one paw and brushed it sheepishly against the stone leg,
yipped when the statue seemed to move.
      "It's working, Brute!"
      "Yeah," the hound said, amazed.
      "Keep it up, Brute!"
      The hound brushed the statue again, pushed his paw back and forth
against the granite. Magically, the gray stone gradually began to fade away,
to take on the color and texture of leather and cloth and flesh and hair,
until Jessie Blake stood before them again, just as he had been earlier in the
night before Me dusa had frozen him with her gaze.
      Dramatically, at that moment, the biggest flash of lightning yet scored
the sky, from horizon to horizon, and the clap of thunder was like a thousand
cymbals meeting with force.
      "Jessie, are you all right?" Helena asked, raising her hands to him, to
help him down.
      He worked his mouth, as if he were surprised to feel his lips moving,
and he said, "Okay, but -- "
      "Come down, darling," she said.
      He ignored her offered hands and jumped down, with Brutus jumping close
behind him.
      "How do you feel?" she asked.
      He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've got a vicious headache," he said.
Then he seemed to remember Brutus, and he turned and bent down and scratched
the hell hound behind the ears. "Thanks, partner."
      Brutus looked bashfully at the ground. "Least I could do," he said. "We
have a case to work on, and -- "
      "Jessie, it was just awful what they did to you," Helena said.
      "I know what they did," the detective assured her, grimly. "I was aware
of my surroundings all the time, even though I had been turned to stone. I
would like to hear how you two found me! I'd like to hear, that is, after I've
found a men's room. I never did have a chance to use the one at the Four
Worlds."


Chapter Nine

      Zeke Kanastorous was still trapped in the small chalk circle in Jessie's
inner office when the three got back from Millennium City just after one
o'clock in the morning. Brutus had relighted the two previously extinguished
black candles, to relieve the angry little creature of the worst of its pain,
but Kanastorous was far from happy. He paced around and around in that tight
circle, where only four steps were needed to make a full circuit, and he cast
occasional glances at Jessie, Helena and the hell hound as they filed into the
room. He was dotted with a black excretion, some form of ectoplasm, and his
four-fingered hands were fisted at his sides.
      "How you feeling, Zeke?" Jessie asked, moving into the main circle with
Helena and Brutus at his back.
      "You'll be sorry for this," the demon said. He stopped pacing and faced
the detective, his shoulders hunched, his eyes blazing.
      "What did I do?" Jessie asked.
      "There is a law against black-magic crudities. It's no longer possible
for some wise ass magician to summon up a demon whenever he wants. They punish
that sort these days!"
      "Do they punish kidnappers?" Jessie asked.
      "What's that mean?" Kanastorous snapped.
      "I was kidnapped," Jessie said. "You were one of the conspirators who
worked to snare me."
      "A gross misrepresentation of the facts," the demon said, drawing
himself up to his full, yet diminutive, height, his carapaced shoulders pulled
back, his bony chest thrust out.
      "Oh?"
      "Yes, my Sam Spade friend. You see, I was working with the government
under special orders from the Regent for the Western States." He gave the
title as much prestige and awe, by his obsequious tone of voice, as some
people had once given the names of God before the maseni had come and exposed
God for what he was.
      Jessie raised his eyebrows and said, "Well, well. The national
government is interested in keeping the Galiotor Tesserax affair quiet"
      "You better believe it, my hardnosed detective friend," Kanastorous
said. "I've already explained to your hound, here, that I know nothing of the
Tesserax business; I wasn't told of it. But I do k now the government's in a
sweat to keep it hushed up. Therefore, if I have broken any laws, as you
assert, I have done so with complete immunity from prosecution in any nether-
world court of law."
      "From their prosecution," Jessie amended.
      "I fail to understand."
      "You've no guarantee of immunity from my prosecution," Jessie said. He
walked to the edge of the larger circle and pointed his index finger at the
demon's squashed nose. "When I let you go tonight, you can follow one of two
courses. One: you can run immediately to the authorities and tell them how you
were illegally called up by ancient means, how your civil liberties were
grieviously violated; you can inform them that I have been rescued by my
friends, and that I am loose again. Two: you can simply forget that all of
this happened; you can let bygones be bygones; you can keep your head and let
things go on as they have always gone before. If you choose the first course -
-"
      "They'll be on your tails in an hour," the demon said.
      "And you will suffer mightily," Jessie said.
      "I don't see how," Kanastorous said, though he watched the detective
through heavy-lidded eyes.
      "Even if an arrest order is issued at once, against Brutus and Helena
and me, the coppers won't catch us all together or even quickly. At least one
of us will have the time to perform the ceremony and summon you up again. And
the next time, Kanastorous, we'll snuff out all seven of the black candles and
give you eternal rest; you'll never have a conscious thought again, for all
eternity; you'll drift, mindlessly, in the void."
      "This is outrageous!" the demon wailed.
      "But that's the way it will be."
      "Throwback," the demon spat.
      "You believe that we would carry out the threat?" Jessie asked.
      "Any of you three?" Kanastorous asked. "Of course I believe it You are a
pack of savages."
      "Then I trust you'll know how to act when we let you go."
      "I'll mind my own business," the demon said. "What else can I do?"
      "What else indeed?" the detective asked. He turned, picked up the open
Bible and began to chant In a few minutes, though all the chalk marks remained
on the floor, Kanastorous had been dispatched.
      As Brutus blew out all fourteen of the candles, both black and white,
alternating from color to color as prescribed by ritual, Jessie crossed the
room and turned on the ceiling lights, which stung both his and Helena's eyes.
Brutus didn't notice. As if the lights had been a signal, the vidphone rang in
the outer office.
      "I'll see who it is," Helena said.
      Jessie went to his desk, which was pushed up against the wall where the
robot had left it, and he got a narcotic pin gun from the center drawer. He
checked the clip to be sure that it was full, strapped the holster on under
his jacket and slipped the weapon into its leather pouch. From the same drawer
he took a plastic crucifix and a bottle of yellowish garlic oil, which he
dropped in a coat pocket.
      Brutus came back from blowing out the candles and said, "What's up? What
do we do now?"
      Before Jessie could answer, Helena stepped in from the front office and
said, "It's Galiotor Fils, your favorite client"
      The detective glanced around, looking for his extension, couldn't see
where the company robot had put it when it was moving furniture, and went into
the outer office to take the call. He sat down on the edge of Helena's desk,
lifted the receiver and looked at Galiotor Fils' face in the vidscreen. "Yes,
Mr. Galiotor?"
      The sad, amber eyes stared back, and the lipless mouth was still turned
down at the corners as the maseni said, "I was wondering if you'd made any
progress in discovering what happened to my brood brother."
      "We're working on it, Mr. Galiotor," Jessie said. "In fact, we've got a
pretty hot lead right now."
      "You have, sir?" The maseni brightened considerably at this bit of news,
his mouth leveling out, his deep amber eyes taking on a glint of life, a
crinkle at the corners.
      "A very hot lead," Jessie repeated. "And I think that you were close to
the truth, when you originally came to me," Jessie told him. "I think your
embassy people, in Los Angeles, have indeed been involved in a cover-up of
some sort."
      "I knew it!" Galiotor Fils declared.
      "They've tried to keep me from asking questions about Tesserax -- and
they've gone to the point of violence to take me out of the picture."
      "Good heavens!" Galiotor Fils said. Violence was not much a part of the
maseni character.
      "And they did have me out for a short time," Jessie admitted. "However,
I intend to be more careful, now that I know how rough they're willing to
play."
      The maseni made a face and said, "What have these scoundrels been up to,
Mr. Blake?"
      "I can't take time to explain the situation to you now," Jessie said.
"We have to move while that tip is hot."
      "Well, yes, I see that," Galiotor Fils said. "But is there anything I
can do to help?"
      "Nothing at the moment," Jessie said. "But rest assured that we are
going to be digging into this affair quite deeply in the next couple of hours.
We are going to dig to the bottom of it."
      "Good luck, then," the maseni said.
      "I'll be getting back to you," Jessie said, hanging up.
      "You have an absolutely fantastic knack for handling clients," Helena
said. "It's a whole different side of you: sugar and syrup."
      "Never mind clients now," Brutus said. "How are we going to dig to the
bottom of the Tesserax affair in only a couple of hours?"
      Jessie smiled. "We can start by tearing up his grave and finding what is
at the bottom of it."


Chapter Ten

      Jessie decided they would go over the cemetery wall on a narrow alley
beside the burial grounds, where there were no street lamps, and he sent
Brutus through first, to check for sentries on the other side. The hell hound
phased through the eight-foot-high stone wall, was g one a long moment, then
melted back again.
      "It's all clear," he told them.
      "I wish we could walk through walls like you," Helena said.
      Brutus chuckled. "It isn't easy, and I can't do it very often, but it is
a handy talent to have, now and again. But if you're wicked enough, and if you
die and go to Hell, maybe you'll be transformed into a hell hound, like me."
      "Never mind," she said. "I'll just go over the top."
      Jessie faced the wall, jumped, hooked his fingers over the top edge,
muscled himself up, got a knee over, twisted around and looked down at the
hound and the woman. He put a hand down as far as he could reach, and he said,
"Come on, Helena."
      Hesitantly, she approached, took his hand, planted her feet against the
rain-wet stones and climbed laboriously up to join him.
      In five minutes, the three of them were inside the alien graveyard,
where most of the city's prominent people -- both maseni and human -- were
either buried or to be buried when their time came.
      Rain had fallen while they were in the office tal king to Zeke
Kanastorous and to Galiotor Fils, and now the earth smelled damp, and the
newly fallen palm leaves were ripe, daubing a strange perfume on the cool,
night air that barely circulated around them.
      In the shallow light of the big moon -- almost a gibbous moon, Jessie
thought -- which shone through a break in the cloud cover, they could see the
twin hillocks of the graveyard, though not the small ravine that lay between
them much like the fold of Helena's formidable cleavage. The mausoleum stood
on the far hill, a square of white stone that seemed to grab the feeble
moonlight, magnify and hold it. Human and maseni tombstones, set between well
cultivated shrubs and fancy palm trees, dotted the hills and disappeared into
the ravine now shrouded in impenetrable shadows spilled there like puddles of
ink.
      "We should have asked Galiotor Fils where his brood brother's grave was,
exactly," Helena said. "I hadn't realized that, in ten short years, you could
fill one of these places to this extent."
      "People die regularly," Jessie said.
      "And a number of vampires have rented plots," Brutus observed.
      The graveyard was a ceremonial luxury that the city had been forced to
do without for many years prior to the maseni landing. Since every foot of
space, in those overpopula ted days, was precious, none of it could be given
over to the storage of corpses. Now, however, since the dead and dying
Shockies, and all the potential children they never produced, were not
cluttering up the place, maintenance of graveyards was again feasible. And
popular. Despite the fact that there was no longer any religious bunkum that
made burial a necessity, people wanted it done and paid well to have it done.
It seemed, to some people, that burial carried with it a certain dignity, an
undeniable status. Jessie didn't much care for it himself; he intended to be
cremated and to have his ashes thrown into any convenient disposal chute or
garbage can. A sentimentalist, he wasn't.
      "Where do we begin?" Helena asked.
      Jessie took a pair of flashlights from the satchel of tools he had
brought along, handed one of them to the woman and kept the other for himself.
      Brutus did not require any artificial aids to see well in the dark; when
shadows pressed in, his eyes grew a deeper, smolder shade of red, and he went
wherever he pleased, as if it were broad daylight.
      "We should split up and take one row each, compare notes when we get to
the end, then go on to three more rows," Jessie said. "The stones seem to be
in relatively straight lines, for the most part, in harmony with the contour
of the yard."
      "Split up?" Helena asked.
      "Why not?"
      She had changed to jeans, a sweater and a thin wind-breaker; now, she
pulled the jacket's nylon collar up around her neck. "We're in an alien
graveyard at two o'clock in the morning, planning to dig up a corpse," she
said. "That's why I don't want to split up."
      "Be reasonable, Helena," Jessie said. "We can get done three times
faster if -- "
      "I'm being perfectly reasonable," she said. "I was more than reasonable
in agreeing to come at all. I'm your Girl Friday, not your partner."
      "You're not going to leave, are you?" Jessie asked. "Look, Helena, I
need your help. Brutus has a powerful set of claws on him, but he can hardly
help me dig open a grave. You're a big, strong girl, and you can take the
shovel, at least a little bit, to give me some rest."
      "If that's all I'm needed for," she said, "you could have brought the
company robot."
      "And have him store the whole illegal affair in his microdot memories?
Besides, he'd have made a hell of a clanking racket coming over the wall."
      "Well, if you need me so badly," Helena said, "you'll just have to give
up the idea that I'm going to go off, in here, by myself and prowl around a
bunch of tombstones."
      "Look," Brutus said, "nothing can happen to you in here, Blue Eyes."
      "Don't be condescending with me," Helena snapped. "I'm not fearful
simply because I need to play any female role. I'm just being sensible. How
can you know what sort of -- thing may be lurking about?" She studied the
trees, the larger stones, anything that might be large enough to conceal a
dangerous adversary.
      Jessie said, "If you encounter a vampire, it has to read your bill of
rights and question you according to the Kolchak-Bliss Decision, and it has to
gain your explicit approval of the bite. Pretty much the same thing goes for a
werewolf. And most other creatures are required to provide you with a
contract... In short, you aren't going to be attacked, ruthlessly, as you
might have been in the old days."
      Helena switched on her flashlight and pointed it at the nearest stone,
played the beam quickly along a row of markers, the splash of yellow
luminescence flitting here and there like an agitated specter moving with the
currents of the night air.
      All was still.
      And quiet.
      Not even a drying palm frond rattled in the gentle stir of air.
      "I've made up my mind," she said.
      The detective sighed and said, "Okay, Helena. Brutus will take one row
by himself, while you and I look at the second."
      "That's better," she said.
      "Let's get going," the hound growled.
      The moon went behind a dense expanse of clouds; both Jessie and the
woman used their flashlights as they started down the avenue of monuments,
reading the names.
      "This one's blank," she said, pointing at the fourth stone. "Why would
they put up a blank stone?"
      "The plot's being rented by a vampire who likes his privacy," Jessie
said. "Look. Stand back a minute."
      When she stepped aside, Jessie searched the base of the tombstone until
he found a switch, which he threw.
      The sod in front of the stone lifted up, smoothly, silently, revealing a
fancy metal coffin in an open grave. "When he goes inside there, during the
day," the detective said, "he'll lock this outer door to keep any playful kids
from letting the sunlight in on him."
      Helena shuddered. "Close it, Jessie, please."
      The detective pushed the switch back the other way and watched as the
slab of hand-sewn sod moved into place once more, leaving a smooth expanse of
wiry grass and no evidence at all of the hollow spot that lay directly
underneath.
      "I don't think it'd be a bad way of life, really," he said.
      "You can't be serious."
      "Well, it is eternal, barring a stake through the heart or an unexpected
exposure to sunlight. And the whole vampire lifestyle is a sensuous one. It's
better than some other things I can think of."
      "For instance?"
      "Well, I don't think I'd want to die and take the chance of coming back
as a ghost, a spiritual gumshoe haunting the offices of Hell Hound for a
couple of hundred years, moaning about all the cases I've hand led, sitting in
my old chair... That would be pretty grim."
      "I guess it would," she said.
      "When I get near my time," Jessie said, "I'm not going to wait around to
die and take my chances. I'm going to find me a cute little vampiress with a
nice body, and I'm going to shack up with her for a few days, until I've been
converted." He looked at Helena and said, "What about you? What are you going
to do, if you've got warning that death is coming?"
      "I haven't thought about it," Helena said.
      "Oh, but you should!" Jessie said. "It's as important as preparing a
will -- more important, actually."
      "I suppose it is," she said. "I'll give it some thought."
      Brutus came back from checking the first row of tombstones, and he
stared hard at both Helena and Jessie, his red eyes unable to shield his
vexation with them.
      "Is this all the two of you have accomplished?" he growled, lowering his
burly head.
      "Well -- "
      "What have you been doing, screwing between the tombstones?"
      "We got to talking," Jessie said.
      "Well, we aren't here to talk," the hell hound said. "We're here to rob
a goddamned grave," he snorted with disgust. A veil of ectoplasm exploded from
his wet, black nostrils, rose over his head and floated away across the
cemetery, slowly dissolving.
      "I'm sorry," Helena said. "It was my fault."
      "Let's get going," the hell hound said. "I'll finish this row while the
two of you start on a third."
      They worked their way slowly along the crest of the hillock, toward the
deeply shadowed ravine, reading the names on the stones, few of which they had
ever heard of, some of which -- in the cases when they were maseni -- they
could not even pronounce.
      The moon came out again for a short while, shedding cold light upon the
yard. Then, before long, it was concealed again by clouds, thick and purple-
black.
      "I have the feeling we're being watched," Helena said, as they looked at
the stones in the ninth row.
      "Watched?"
      "I don't see anyone," the woman said, "but I sure do feel as if -- "
      Brutus, two rows of tombstones out in front of them, interrupted her
with a long, mournful howl.
      "He's found Tesserax's grave," Jessie said. "Come on!"


Chapter Eleven

      Jessie gave Helena a hand, pulled her out of the grave and hunkered down
to help her brush the wet clumps of earth from her jeans, taking an especially
long time to brush off her round little rump, though the seat of her pants was
not anywhere so dirty as the knees or the cuffs or the hips.
      "Well," he said, "that ought to be the last time that you'll have to
spell me."
      She sat down by the hole and dangled her legs over the edge, put her arm
around the hell hound, who had been watching the two of them take turns in the
open grave. She said, "I'm going to be the only well-stacked girl I know who
has huge, muscular arms."
      "You'll be able to scare away unwanted suitors with them," Jessie
suggested. "Just flex your biceps a few times, and you'll terrorize any would-
be rapist."
      "It isn't funny," she said, feeling her biceps through her sweater and
jacket, as if they might already have begun to swell.
      Jessie jumped into the grave and picked up the collapsible shovel he had
brought along in the tool satchel with the flashlights. "We're down to almost
four feet," he said. "And that's about as deep as they bury them around here.
So -- "
      As he stamped the spade into the hard-packed earth, it rang against a
large, metal object.
      Helena picked up her flashlight and directed its strong beam down at the
point of the shovel, revealing a long, twisting streak of silvery metal like a
vein in the earth. The casket lid caught the light and shimmered with it, new
and slightly burnished.
      "Eureka," Brutus said. "The daring group of coffin prospectors has
struck another lode."
      "Thank God," Helena said, feeling her biceps.
      Jessie set to work more industriously than before, clearing away the
last couple of inches of earth, until he had the entire face of the casket
revealed. It was a plain model, not what one expected the second-ranking
embassy maseni to be laid to rest in, without curlicues or decorations. It was
smooth, slightly raised, and very difficult to stand up on, as he was forced
to do. Starting at the top, right corner, Jessie worked his way around the
oblong box, cutting the dirt away from its lid so that they could open the
thing when the time came. At a quarter past four in the morning, he tossed the
shovel out of the hole, finished.
      "Are we going to have to fill this back in again?" Helena wanted to
know, her lips pouted, one hand gingerly testing her other biceps.
      The detective said, "Well worry about that later."
      "I'm worrying about it right now."
      "There's a length of rope in the satchel," Jessie said. "Would you toss
it down to me?"
      "I'll get it," Brutus told the girl.
      "You're a charmer."
      The hound got up and walked over to the open satchel, peered inside,
plucked out a coil of rope with his teeth, brought that to the open grave and
dropped it on Jessie's head.
      "Why didn't you warn me, for Christ's sake?" Blake asked, stooping to
pick up the rope, rubbing his head with the other hand. "This is steel-link
covered by nylon, you know; it isn't quite so light as a feather."
      "Why weren't you looking up?" Brutus asked, sitting down beside Helena
again.
      Still rubbing his head, Jessie said, "I was looking at the twin locks on
the casket lid. I thought I'd have to hammer them off, but it looks like they
were never engaged."
      "They put it down there unsealed?"
      "Seems that way," Jessie said.
      He uncoiled the line which Brutus had thrown on his head, tied one end
of that to the coffin handle, threw the other end up to Helena, then scrambled
out of the hole.
      "Now," he told them, "I'll just pull the lid up so we can see inside
that box. The raising lid's going to block my view, so why don't you two go
around to the other side of the hole, where you can look straight in."
      Helena got to her feet. "I don't like this," she said. "I didn't like it
at the start, and I like it even less now. I'm sure we're being watched."
      Jessie looked around the empty cemetery. "Impossible."
      "I feel eyes on my neck."
      "Just go around the other side and tell me whether Tesserax is laid out
to rest in a normal manner."
      When she and the hound were around on the other side of the grave,
Jessie wiped perspiration out of his eyes, dried his hands on his trousers,
then wrapped the rope around his wrists so he wouldn't lose hold of it.
Putting his broad shoulders into it, he began to backstep across the yard
toward the other aisle of stones, grunting to get himself in the mood, raising
the coffin lid an inch at a time.
      "Must weigh a couple of hundred pounds," he called to them. "You see
anything in there, yet?"
      Helena hunkered down and probed the grave with her flashlight beam,
squinted prettily, either to see better or to register distaste.
      "You'll have to get it open more, Jess," the hell hound said, looking
along the beam of Helena's light.
      Jessie's feet were slipping on the damp grass, and the job proved to be
more difficult than he had originally supposed. Nevertheless, he gritted his
teeth and continued to backstep.
      Something in the hole creaked loudly.
      "Uh -- what was that?" Jessie asked.
      "I hope it was only an unoiled hinge on the coffin lid," Helena said,
her voice quavering.
      "How far have I lifted it?"
      "Four inches," Brutus said.
      Jessie dug in his heels and began to walk faster, feeling the full
weight of the lid coming into the rope.
      "That's it, that's it," the hound called.
      "See anything?"
      "A few more inches," Helena said.
      "A few more inches, and I'll have a hernia," the detective said.
Nevertheless, he continued to back up.
      "More, more," Brutus called, his long tail swishing back and forth like
a metronome guiding the rhythm of the detective's effort. He had bent his
front legs and brought his head level with the edge of the grave, as if he
were beginning to catch a glimpse of the interior of the coffin.
      "Now?" Jessie asked.
      "You need some help?" Helena asked.
      "No, no," Jessie said. "I'm doing okay."
      Truthfully, he wasn't doing okay at all; his heart was thudding, and
blood pounded like hammers at both temples. However, he felt he had to make
Helena think it was a simple matter for him. Already, though she didn't know
it, he felt himself to be in constant competition with her, to such a degree
that he felt their male-female roles had become too equal. He had been born
and raised in an era when women's liberation wasn't amovement, but an accepted
part of society -- yet his home life had been at variance with much of modern
thought. Neither his mother nor his father had held much truck with sexual
equality or freedom, so it was perhaps understandable that he was sometimes
worried about such things.
      "That's far enough, Jessie," Helena called,
      "What do you see?"
      Neither the woman nor the hound answered, but they both continued to
stare into the open hole.
      Jessie began to sweat again. Clear droplets rolled across his face,
tickled his cheeks, caught saltily in the corners of his mouth. "Is it that
terrible?" he asked.
      "Well, 'terrible' isn't quite the word for it," Helena said. "Something
like -- oh, 'frustrating' or 'maddening' would do much better."
      "Is the corpse mutilated beyond endurance?" Jessie asked. He had seen
corpses mutilated beyond endurance before. "Does it look like the picture of
Tesserax we got from Galiotor Fils?"
      "No, the corpse isn't mutilated beyond endurance," Brutus said. "In
fact, it isn't mutilated at all. In fact, there just isn't any corpse; they
buried an empty casket."
      "Oh," Jessie said.
      "Christ," Brutus said, with feeling, "am I glad that I didn't do all
that work for nothing."
      "It wasn't for nothing," Jessie said.
      "It wasn't?"
      The detective let go of the rope and was instantly jerked off his feet
as the coffin lid started to go shut. He slammed into the damp grass, face
first, bit his lip, tasted blood, and looked up at the woman and the hound,
bewildered.
      "You had the end of the rope lashed around your wrists," Brutus said.
"Remember?"
      Jessie looked down at his hands and nodded, sat up and unwound the cord,
let it go again and listened as the empty coffin's lid fell shut with a soft
whump, the rope rattling drily after it.
      "You were saying this expedition was worthwhile," Brutus said.
      Jessie crawled to the edge of the grave, opposite them, and he said,
"That's right."
      A flight of bats, perhaps twenty of them, rose out of the white
mausoleum perched atop the second hillock in the graveyard. In an unexpected
burst of moonlight, they screeched away, into darkness. The moon, which had
only momentarily illuminated them, slid behind the storm clouds again, like a
Spanish woman's face slyly shielded by a fan.
      "But we didn't find anything," Helena protested.
      "Oh, yes we did," Jessie said, "We found that there was no body in
Tesserax's grave."
      "That's the same thing."
      Jessie got to his feet, brushing himself off, even though he really
didn't feel like standing, yet. " No, it isn't the same thing," he said, with
brotherly patience, wiping blood from his cracked lips.
      "Then I'm no detective," she said.
      The bats from the mausoleum streaked by overhead, squeaking furiously,
their leathery wings flapping moistly.
      Jessie picked up the shovel and began to take it apart as he talked, to
repack it in the satchel. "I'm aware that you're not as quick in these matters
as I am," he said. "No one would expect you to be; you've not had the
experience I have." He was pleased that their roles were now returning to a
moderated equilibrium that he could cope with; he no longer felt so damn
foolish. "Don't you see, though... We've got enough evidence to go to Galiotor
Fils, enough stuff for him to bring charges against the maseni embassy
officials. From here on out, it's all up to the police and the courts. They'll
find out what really happened to Tesserax, and why such an elaborate cover-up
was done. All we have to do is get the facts to Galiotor Fils."
      From the darkness behind Jessie, a familiar, rasping voice spoke:
"However, in order to do that, Mr. Blake, you will first have to get out of
this cemetery alive."
      Jessie turned, bringing up his flashlight as Helena raised hers,
pressing back the shadows where a dozen vampires stood not five yards away.
Their eyes glittered brightly in the twin beams of the hand torches, and they
were all smiling.
      The fiend in charge of the group, the tallest and handsomest of the lot,
was Count Slavek, the bloodsucker who had almost illegally bitten Renee Cuyler
only a brief night or two ago.
      "The bats we just heard -- " Jessie began.
      "Us," Slavek said.
      "Jessie?" Helena asked. "What are they going to do with us?"
      "Nothing," the detective said. Slavek laughed.
      Jessie said, "Unless you want to be converted to the life of the undead,
a vampire can't touch you, Helena. That's the law."
      "Ah," Slavek said, "but when all is said and done, the law is nothing
but a piece of paper."
      "Ignore that piece of paper, and see what happens to you," Jessie said.
"An official stake straight through the heart, a quick conversion to a pile of
lifeless ashes."
      Slavek took a step forward; his comrades followed after him in a
sussuration of flowing capes.
      "Slavek, it isn't worth breaking the law over someone like Renee Cuyler,
especially when I was right and you were wrong."
      Slavek advanced another step.
      The pale-faced bloodsuckers behind him spread out on both sides, in a
semi-circle. They all leered at Helena.
      "This hasn't anything whatsoever to do with Renee Cuyler," Count Slavek
said, "Oh, she was a tasty little piece, to be sure. But the world is just
full of tasty little pieces -- like your Helena, for example, who is one of
the tastiest little pieces I've ever seen, bar none." He grinned wickedly at
her.
      "Oh, fuck off," Helena said.
      Slavek winced; male vampires were not accustomed, in their male
chauvinistic society, to hearing such talk from women. He looked back at
Jessie, trying to regain his composure, and he said, "I would not nurture any
grudge because of Renee Cuyler. She was a little bit empty-headed, anyway. You
understand, I prefer empty-headed wenches to your average smart-assed college
girl... But I have my limits: a minimum IQ of 105 being the bottom of those
limits; a top IQ of 120 being the other end. Anyway, Blake, this is no private
vendetta."
      "Then, what -- "
      "I've been sent here to stop the three of you from messing around in the
Tesserax affair. Your hell hound companion will be restrained through the
talents of several sorcerers who have been watching you since you first
entered the cemetery."
      "I knew it!" Helena exclaimed.
      "Meanwhile, both you and your lady friend will be -- ah, converted to
the life of the undead," Slavek finished. "And may I say, I am going to enjoy
munching on this gorgeous child's neck -- and, later, on other things which
also appear delectable indeed."
      "Jessie, stop them," Helena said, from the other side of the open grave.
      Jessie said, "Run!"


Chapter Twelve

      Blake had broken the collapsible shovel into two pieces, and now he used
these to divert Count Slavek's attention. He threw the spade section at
Slavek's face, then tossed the handle hard at his ankles. As the vampire put
up his arms to ward off the blade, he stepped backwards and got his legs
tangled hopelessly in the whirling handle. He cried out, stumbled clumsily to
the side, fell onto his back, thoroughly confusing his fanged comrades.
      Jessie turned as soon as he had thrown the second piece of shovel, not
waiting to see what it would do. Without bothering to scoop up his flashlight,
he leaped across the open grave, grabbed Helena's hand and started running --
not in any planned direction, just away.
      Brutus ran ahead of them, taking enormous strides, leading them
purposefully toward the main cemetery gate. He could have headed for one of
the walls and phased right through, Jessie knew, but he had chosen to stay
with them. Jessie remembered that it had been the hell hound's touch which had
changed him from stone to flesh in the sculpture garden at Millennium City...
      The sound of wings grew behind them.
      "Faster!" Jessie shouted.
      Helena gripped his hand more tightly and increased her pace to match
his, issuing not a word of objection.
      He looked at her as they entered an open aisle where there were no
granite obstacles to beware of, and he saw that she was holding up quite well.
She didn't seem terrified, merely frightened, biting her lip and straining to
get all the speed she could out of her fine, long legs. Then he saw the
flashlight that she carried in her other hand, and he relized it was proof of
his own terror that he hadn't noticed, until now, that it was on and that the
bright beam danced across the earth directly in front of them, pinpointing
their position for Slavek and his pack.
      "Helena!" he shouted.
      Still running, her breasts shoved out like twin ornaments on a new
fluttercar, her yellow hair flying out behind her like a tailfin pennant,
holding tightly to his hand, she glanced sideways at him.
      "The flashlight!"
      She didn't get what he meant.
      "Throw the flashlight away!"
      She held up the hand torch, slowing down and thereby forcing him to slow
as well, looked wonderingly at the instrument for a moment, then realized what
he meant. She pitched it away, to her right. The beam whirled crazily, a
spinning yellow lance that shaved paper-thin wafers of darkness off the bulk
of the night, then struck a large tombstone and shattered.
      They picked up speed again, running as fast as they could, the grass
treacherously damp under them.
      Still, they could hear wings flapping behind them -- and the shrill
cries of many tiny creatures: bats.
      Ahead, Brutus slowed and came to a full stop, his long tail straight up
in the air, his pointed ears thrust forward, the long hair down his neck and
back bristling.
      In a moment, they were up with him.
      "What's the matter?" Jessie asked. His heart was pounding so loudly in
his own ears that he could barely hear his voice.
      "A sorcerer," the hell hound growled.
      "Where?"
      The hound pointed with his snout.
      The magician was an old man, quite tall and thin as a rail, his long
fingered hands raised before him as if he were about to cast a spell or a
charm; his gray, frizzled beard fell nearly to his waist, ruffled by the night
breeze. He stood directly before the main gates in a pool of unnatural, cobalt
blue light that seemed to radiate from the man himself. He was dressed all in
black robes decorated with crimson quarter-moons and silver stars. He also
wore a peaked hat of the same fabric and design.
      Brutus said, "He's a danger to both of us. He could cast a spell on the
two of you... And he could dissipate my soul, if he wanted to, and if he
didn't care about breaking the law." Clearly, the hell hound was recalling his
own treatment of Zeke Kanastorous earlier in the day -- and perhaps regretting
it just a little.
      "Then we don't go out the main gate," Jessie said.
      "We better go somewhere, and damn fast!" Helena said, pulling their
attention back to the aisle down which they had just run. "Slavek will be on
us in a minute."
      It came sooner than that.
      Behind them, screaming bats swooped out of the darkness, small, eager
shadows that swelled rapidly, cancerously into huge-winged, semi-amorphous
creatures that posed a more serious threat than they had in their tinier form.
Their dark and wizened faces, once pinched and vicious, fleshed out, turned
first yellow and then white, deathly white, like expanding balloons losing
their deep color. Their claws changed into hands -- human hands with wicked
nails that gleamed with reflected moonlight Their scrawny legs lengthened, and
the transformation into human form was completed.
      A rush of cold fog rolled over them, as if drawn toward the vampires,
and Helena stepped closer to the detective.
      "This way!" Jessie cried.
      He turned and ran toward the ravine, from which the fog had come, down
between the two round hills on which the major portion of the maseni cemetery
was built.
      "But it's so dark down there!" Helena protested, running along beside
him, her breath now making little white clouds before her.
      "I know."
      The fog was thicker now, and it got nearly impenetrable as they fled.
      Brutus said, "And vampires see better than you two -- especially in the
dark."
      "I know," Jessie repeated.
      Behind: shrill bats. The vampires had taken to the air again.
      "But if we run far enough," Jessie said, "we'll find the back gate. They
might not have guarded that."
      "Wishful thinking," Brutus growled. But that was the extent of his
sarcasm. He loped out ahead of them, down into the darkness and the cool mist
that hung in there like a giant shroud among the stones.


Chapter Thirteen

      Tombstones loomed out of the fog, like rotten teeth chewing marshmallow
candy. Jessie and Helena, still holding hands, weaved left and right to avoid
the obstacles, staggering dangerously on the treacherous expanse of short, wet
grass. They could no longer hear the shrill, inhuman cries of the vampire bats
behind them, but that might be only because their own breathing was so labored
that it effectively covered over all of the other night sounds.
      At the bottom of the hill, as they dug in their heels to keep from
plunging into a row of stones that sprang out of the fog immediately before
them, Helena said, "Jessie, wait."
      "What?"
      "I have to rest."
      "I thought you would," Brutus said. He appeared out of the syrupy,
shifting mist in front of them, only his glowing red eyes visible like puddles
of phosphorescent blood in the darkness. "I found some large markers over this
way," the hound said. " They'll shelter you from any accidental aerial
observation."
      "You're a dear," Helena said.
      "I know," the hound replied.
      He turned and preceded them across the bottom of the ravine to a line of
seven-foot stones and funereal statuary which threw even more intense shadows
on the wall of night.
      Helena went to the widest of the stones, which was cut deep with maseni
letters, and leaned against it. She bent over and rubbed painfully at her
thighs. "Not only am I going to have huge biceps from digging open that empty
grave -- I'm going to have big, knotted, muscular legs from all of this
goddamned running around."
      "We'll love you anyway," Jessie said.
      Brutus said, "I like husky women."
      High above, out of sight, the night popped with an animal wail. It
struck down on the mist-shrouded graveyard like a note from a precision-made,
tiny, silver horn.
      "Passed right over us," Brutus said.
      "This time, yes," Jessie said. "But not for long."
      Helena stood up and moved away from the alien headstone, one hand on
each of her buttocks, as if she were holding them in place while she tried a
few experimental steps. "I feel better, now," she said.
      "Let's move, then, before -- "
      From the darkness close at hand came a moaning sound, an agonized lowing
that made their flesh crawl. Deep, gravel-throated, it had not issued from a
human being, but from some other sort of creature, surely as large as a man,
or larger.
      "What was that?" Helena asked.
      It was naggingly familiar, but Jessie finally said, "I don't know."
      The moaning came again.
      And with it came the sound of something shuffling along the grass,
something quite large, barely able to lift its feet, brushing the dry, fallen
palm fronds away in front of it.
      "Let's get the hell out of here," Helena said. She hugged herself and
shivered responsively as the beast cried out again.
      Jessie didn't hug himself, but he did shiver, because he fancied that he
heard, in the depths of that pitifully inhuman voice, a wet and cold and
genuine agony, a despair that was limitless and, though inhuman, touched
something in himself.
      "This way," Brutus said.
      The hound turned, his enormous tail flowing out behind him, and loped
swiftly toward the second grave-spotted hillside, across the floor of the
narrow ravine, disappearing into the inky, fog-smeared night, making not a
sound, leaving them alone.
      They had taken only two quick steps after him when something huge rose
up on their left, beside Helena, a lighter darkness against the black curtain
of the night. It shuffled out from between two of the high maseni tombstones,
moaning loudly, a vicious cutting edge to its voice now, reaching for Helena
with a pair of monstrous, cancerous-looking, misshapen hands.
      She gasped and grabbed for Jessie, just as he grabbed for her.
      The monster lumbered forward like a surging ameboid mass, out into the
open, towering over them. At that moment, the storm clouds parted a bit and
let through a brief stream of moonlight that illuminated the scene for a
second or two before darkness rolled in as deep as ever.
      The beast recoiled from the splash of light, then groaned and came at
them again, backing them against another row of giant stones.
      "Jessie, what is it?" Helena asked, breathlessly, her hands held out
before her, palms flattened as if she were trying to push the beast away.
      "Mabel?" Jessie asked.
      Helena said, "What?"
      "Mabel?" Jessie took one tentative step toward the thing, as Helena held
desperately to his arm, trying to drag him back beside her.
      The beast stopped, its mottled black-brown hulk shifting and changing,
growing knobs and protrusions, then losing them as concavities took their
places and other protrusions formed elsewhere on its hide, expanding and
contracting like a sackful of lively eels.
      "Is it you, Mabel?" Jessie asked, stepping closer, not quite so
frightened as he had been moments ago.
      The Shambler said, "I go by that name, yes. But I can't place who you
might be, sir."
      "I think I'm losing my mind," Helena said.
      Jessie said, "Not at all. Mabel's a hostess at the Four Worlds,
downtown."
      "Hostess?" Helena asked.
      "She's the night hostess. She has to hide during the day."
      "I'd disintegrate, otherwise," Mabel said.
      "Haven't you ever seen her at the Four Worlds?" Jessie asked.
      "No," Helena said. "And I go every Saturday, usually."
      "Mabel doesn't work weekends," Jessie said.
      "I have weekends off, for the children," the Shambler agreed.
      "Children?" Helena asked.
      "She terrorizes them," Jessie said.
      "Her own children?"
      "No, no," Mabel said. "Just children in general -- anyone's children so
long as they'll give me a contract."
      "Mabel's a maseni supernatural," Jessie explained, as the Shambler
gurgled and resettled. "According to her mythos, she terrorizes young children
who have been bad."
      "I see," Helena said. She put a finger to the corner of her mouth and
shook her head and said, "No, I don't see. Look, we're not children -- "
      Mabel sighed loudly and settled her great bulk. Her "legs" ceased to
exist as her jellied flesh flowed into a gum-drop-shaped lump. "I know you're
not. And believe me, I haven't had much fun here, tonight."
      "What's going on here?" Brutus asked, stalking back to them from the
second hill, his eyes a furious crimson. He looked at the Shambler and said,
"How are you, Mabel?"
      "Not good," the Shambler said.
      "Why aren't you out terrorizing children?"
      "That's what we asked her," Helena said.
      "I was assigned to the graveyard tonight," Mabel said. She grew a big,
bubbly head, then lost it as her body shifted, changed. "They came to me and
told me my services were needed here, tonight, that I was to terrorize a
couple of adults."
      "They?"
      "Some people who are pretty far up in the maseni supernatural
hierarchy," Mabel said. "People who would know the chants that could destroy
me. They didn't make any direct threats, but they strongly hinted that, if I
did not cooperate, I'd find myself disintegrated."
      "That's pretty low," Brutus growled.
      Mabel throbbed with indignation; she pulsed and pounded with
indignation. "Isn't that just the case; isn't that exactly how it is: pretty
damn low?" She appeared to turn around so that she could look more directly at
the detective, though she had no eyes with which to see and could probably
have sensed him as well facing one way as the other. "I remember you now,
sir," she said. "You came to the Four Worlds Cafe not more than a night or t
wo ago, to have dinner with a demon -- Kanastorous, I believe. You gave me an
especially generous tip."
      A vampire bat swooped by, invisible in the darkness twenty feet overhead
and slightly off to their right; it was identifiable by the sharp chatter it
gave out for the benefit of its unholy mates who were searching elsewhere in
the cemetery. It had missed them, now, as they stood in the shelter of the
double row of canted maseni tombstones. It would soon swoop lower, search the
denser shadows that even vampire eyes had trouble with; and then they would be
caught.
      "Look," Jessie said to the Shambler, "we haven't got long before Slavek
and his friends will be onto us. In five minutes, we'll be surrounded by
bloodsuckers, sorcerers and whatever else they have out tonight Maybe you can
help us."
      "How, sir?" the Shambler asked. "Believe me, I will help so long as I
don't jeopardize myself. I'm not pleased with the law-breaking that's going on
here tonight. And I don't want to alienate a good tipper, like yourself; I
can't afford to if I'm going to take a few contracts, each week, to terrorize
bad children. On the other hand, I don't want them to find out I've helped you
in any way. I don't want to be disintegrated."
      "That's perfectly understandable," Jessie said. "You don't have to
become directly involved with us. Just provide me with a bit of information,
and you can go away and pretend that you never ran into us at all."
      Mabel considered this for a moment, forming and reforming her heavy body
while she formed and re-formed her no doubt equally heavy thoughts, all the
while gurgling gently in an infectious, syncopated rhythm. "What would you
like to know, sir?" she asked at last.
      "What's the mystery behind this Galiotor Tesserax? What's going on here
that would compel otherwise honest supernatural to break the laws as they're
doing?"
      Mabel sighed. "I haven't the vaguest idea, sir."
      "You've heard of Tesserax?"
      "Oh, yes!'' the amorphous lump of dark ectoplasm said. "The rumor mill
is grinding away at top speed. But it's all just that -- rumor, easily seen
through. But you'll have to question the supernaturals higher up in the maseni
nether-world hierarchy if you expect the truth. They strongarmed me into this,
without telling me why."
      "Okay," the detective said. "I didn't really expect that you'd know, but
asking the question has become a habit. Let's get more practical. Can you tell
me how well-guarded the rear gate is?"
      "They have a sorcerer stationed there," the Shambler said. "Just as they
have on the front gate."
      "Then that's out," Brutus said.
      "For all of us," Helena added. "Listen, couldn't we send Brutus out on
his own, let him phase through the wall anywhere and get help. If -- "
      "Another thing," the Shambler began.
      "Yeah?" Jessie asked. He was aware that Mabel was about to throw cold
water on Helena's suggestion -- aware, too, that Helena's suggestion was
really the only good idea they had left.
      "They must have been expecting you to raid the cemetery sooner or later,
because they had guards posted. You managed to slip by them on your way in,
but they spied you before you got that grave completely open. They called in
the heavy artillery -- which includes a street-cleaning truck that's been
circling the graveyard spraying holy water on the outside of the wall. No
human supernatural is going to phase through that wall again until they're
willing to let him through."
      "Trapped," Brutus grunted.
      "They can't have thought of everything!" Jessie said. He began to pace,
his hands shoved deep in his pockets, kicking up clods of grass and dirt from
the rounded mounds of the old graves.
      "I'm afraid they have," the Shambler said. She had grown taller in the
last minute, legs forming under her, arms sprouting out of the brown-black
mass once more. "And I better get going before they catch me here with you and
discover that I've gone over to the enemy."
      "Thanks for your help, Mabel," Helena said.
      "It was nothing."
      Groaning, hunched forward, massive "shoulders" drawn up around her
blocky "head," she shambled away into the darkness between the big stones,
arms swinging at her sides, blobby hands nearly scraping the ground.
      "What now?" Helena asked.
      Jessie said, "If we try to get out of the graveyard, they'll locate us
and put an end to us -- they'll disintegrate poor Brutus's soul, and -- "
      " -- give us an unsanctioned bite in the neck," Helena finished, putting
one slim hand against her jugular.
      "Quite right," Jessie said. "On the other hand, if we just sit tight,
they'll still locate us and put an end to us -- only they'll need a few extra
minutes to finish the job." He paused for effect, and as he did the clouds
cracked, bringing a thin wave of moonlight across the shadowed cemetery hills.
The three of them stepped closer to the big maseni stones, to avoid the notice
of aerial patrols. The detective said, "We've got to stay here, somewhere in
the graveyard -- but give them the idea that we've gotten out despite all
their defenses."
      "How?" Helena asked, always the pragmatist.
      "If we hide where they'd never think of looking for us," Jessie said,
"their search will prove fruitless. An hour from now, they'll be convinced we
got out, and they'll use the remaining hours of darkness to find us -- outside
the walls of the cemetery. When their search has shifted away from here, then
we will quietly sneak off the grounds."
      "In theory," Helena said, "it's fine."
      "In reality, it's a pile of crap," Brutus added.
      "Exactly," Helena said.
      "Criers of joy, angels of light," Jessie said.
      "Where could we hide, in this place, that Slavek wouldn't think to
look?" Helena asked.
      "Well -- "
      She said, "There's nothing to hide behind except tombstones."
      "We could -- "
      "And we can't expect to keep dodging them all night," she said.
      Before she could interrupt again, Jessie said, "We could hide in there!"
and he pointed up the second hill.
      At the top of the dark rise, in a clearing where no tombstones had been
erected, the white mausoleum was barely visible between the layers of fog th
at roiled across the brow like steam from a witch's pot. As the currents of
mist shifted around it, obscuring some corners while revealing new ones, the
place looked unreal, ethereal, part of some nightmare that a single blink of
an eye could obliterate forever.
      Helena said, "But that's where Slavek and the others came from, Jessie.
It's their home, their grave."
      "Some of them stay there, in daylight, yes."
      The mausoleum's two windows were black, blank, like blind eyes staring
down the slope at them. It was flanked by two tall palms whose fronds were in
a sad, drooping condition. It looked much like the last outpost on the edge of
the world. The straight, undecorated walls were forbidding, so stark and yet
so shiny in the fading moonlight that they appeared to be carved from a block
of ice.
      "Won't Slavek and the others come back there, and catch us hiding out?"
Helena asked.
      "None of them will be back until dawn."
      "You can't be sure."
      Jessie said, "They're not going to rest until they know that we're no
longer a threat to the Galiotor Tesserax case -- whatever the hell the
Galiotor Tesserax case may be. That means they'll take advantage of every last
minute of darkness to hunt us down. They won't be back to the mausoleum until
dawn's approaching, and we'll be gone by then. We'll wait there just long
enough for them to start looking beyond the graveyard, then we'll sneak out."
      She still had her hand up to her jugular.
      "Don't worry," he said.
      "I can't help it. I -- "
      The mournful howl of a wolf echoed across the cemetery from the brow of
the first hill, behind them. A ululating cry, it rode the rippling rivers of
fog.
      "A werewolf," Brutus said.
      "Maybe one of several."
      "I hate werewolves," Helena said. "They don't have any of your charm,
Brute. And they slobber so much."
      "If they've brought reinforcements," Jessie said, "we've got to move as
fast as possible."
      He wondered if they had also brought any mythical Italians or Blacks,
and he shuddered at the thought of meeting one of them -- tomato sauce
dripping from their chins or watermelon slices in hand -- here in the darkness
and the tombstones...
      The wolf howled again.
      Another answered it.
      "Come on," Jessie said.
      Brutus loped away, up the hill again.
      "I'm coming," Helena said, casting one last apprehensive look at the
mausoleum before the moon slid, once again, behind the dark storm clouds.


Chapter Fourteen

      The heavy mausoleum door -- pressed and painted into a fair imitation of
weathered oak planking -- was closed but not locked. When Jessie turned the
ornate knob, the latch snapped back, and the door squeaked inward a few
inches. It barely fit the frame, and it scraped noisily across the concrete
floor. The coarse sound rumbled past them, into the fog and, perhaps, into the
keen ears of a werewolf lurking nearby.
      "You first," Jessie whispered.
      Brutus stepped across the raised threshold into the lightless chamber,
his large, sharp-clawed paws making surprisingly little noise on the cold
mausoleum floor.
      Jessie and Helena, still holding hands, followed close behind him,
unable to see anything at all, proceeding with caution, feeling their way hike
two blind men.
      "Can you see anything?" Jessie asked the hound.
      "More than you. Seems deserted."
      Outside, moonlight broke through the cloud cover again, throwing a
ghostly luminescence behind them.
      In sympathy, several werewolves raised their heads and howled at the
low, rushing sky.
      "Better close the door," Helena said.
      The detective turned and pushed the heavy panel shut, until the latch
snapped into place. The voices of the werewolves were more distant now, less
threatening.
      "It stinks in here," Helena said.
      "Well, it is the home of about twenty of the living dead," Jessie said.
There's bound to be a little odor, a smidgin of corruption."
      "A girl like me shouldn't have to work for someone who takes her places
like this."
      "If you'd like to resign -- "
      "I mean, for God's sake, I'm stacked! I'm gorgeous! I thought that
counted for something, even these days. But look at me, standing here in this
stinking place, a step ahead of an illegal conversion into a vampire, hiding
like a rat in a hole -- "
      "And loving every minute of it," Jessie added. "You know it's not just
your exorbitant salary or my tremendous sex techniques -- which you enjoy as a
fringe benefit -- that keeps you on the job. You stay because there's more
excitement in one day at Hell Hound Investigations than in a whole year
anywhere else. You crave excitement, Helena."
      "Yeah, well, right now I crave a little peace and quiet."
      "Where better to find that than in a mausoleum?" he asked.
      Gradually, their eyes began to adjust to the darkness. The moonlight
coming through the two windows showed them the outlines of heavy caskets on
cement pedestals, thrusting up all across the large room.
      As their eyes adjusted, so did the hound's, and his sight remained
constantly superior to theirs. He padded forward, between the coffins, and
when he'd gone only a few steps, he growled, "We're not alone, after all."
      As the hound spoke, lights came on: dim, yellow, casting eerie shadows,
recessed in the dirty ceiling and shielded both by cobwebs and wire cages, not
very bright but bright enough to make Jessie squint and raise one hand to ward
off the glare.
      "Who -- what is it?" Helena asked, also squinting as she backed into the
closed mausoleum door.
      "Ifs a dumpy, white-faced, sunken-eyed little man wearing badly wrinkled
clothes," the hell hound said.
      "What on earth is a dumpy, white-faced, sunken-eyed little man in a
badly wrinkled suit doing here?" she asked. "He isn't a vampire, is he? He
doesn't sound like a vampire from your description." She still held a hand
over her eyes, squinting.
      "No," Brutus said. "He doesn't have the style for one."
      Jessie fumbled in his pocket and brought out the cheap, multi-colored,
glowing crucifix. "He doesn't look like a bloodsucker, but we can't be too
careful."
      "I'm no vampire," the dumpy little man said. "My name's Whitlock. First
name, William."
      "What are you doing here?" Jessie asked.
      "I live here."
      "With Slavek and his crowd?"
      "Yes," Willie Whitlock admitted.
      "Why?"
      The dumpy man smiled, leaned on the edge of an open coffin -- brass
fittings on polished mahogany -- which separated him from them. There was a
mad glint in his eye, either that or a speck of dust. "I'm a ghoul," Whitlock
said, smiling. "I like living in a graveyard, with such quiet neighbors.
Modern law, ever since the maseni arrived on Earth, doesn't permit me to
actually exhume recently buried corpses and consume them as I once did, but I
am allowed to live midst the glorious decay and the incredibly lovely
putrefaction, which goes a long way toward taking the edge off my otherwise
insatiable compulsion."
      "Ecchh," Helena said.
      "You might as well put away your cheap crucifix," Willie Whitlock s aid,
rolling one jaundiced eye at the thing. "Such stuff won't harm a ghoul at all,
as you must know. Besides, it is a rather tasteless, grotesque thing to have
to look at, especially glowing so colorfully."
      Reluctantly, Jessie lowered the plastic icon and tucked it into his
jacket pocket.
      Willie Whitlock licked his heavy lips and grinned sardonically as he
leaned even further across the open coffin. He stared hard at them, grizzled
and mean, his beard stubbly, his face seemed like a piece of crumpled paper.
"You robbed a grave tonight, did you not?"
      Jessie cleared his throat and said, "Not actually. There wasn't anything
to rob; it was empty."
      "Still and all, you did get to dig up the casket and pry open the lid,
didn't you?"
      "Yes, but -- "
      "Tell me about it!" The ghoul's voice was a pleading, insistent whine,
undignified yet commanding. His eyes glinted more madly than before. "It must
have been beautiful -- a rewarding experience, indeed! Ah, if only I could
have been at your side!"
      "Actually, it was rather awful," Jessie said.
      "Tell me, tell me!" Willie Whitlock cried, leaning so far over the open
casket that he seemed in danger of falling right into it.
      "You're a deranged, white faced, dirty little man," Helena said, in a
voice dripping with scorn. "You are perfectly disgusting. And your suit is a
wrinkled mess."
      Willie Whitlock jerked at each epithet, as if her words were physical
blows against his head, and his face took on a grim expression. "Look here,
lady, I am only what the damned myths say I am. A ghoul has to be deranged.
And white-faced. And sunken-eyed, for that matter. You have noticed, I am
sure, that I've a mad glint in my eye. Indeed, at times, it interferes with my
sight. I don't want the damn glint, but I have it! And when you live midst
glorious decay and incredibly lovely putrefaction, you can't help getting
dirty." He looked down at his wrinkled clothes. "And this suit's a part of it,
too. I take it to the cleaner's, one of those sonic-press places that does the
job in two minutes, but it gets wrinkled again the instant that I put it back
on." He looked at her, his expression uglier than ever, and said, "You think
it's an easy life, you try it some time." Turning to Jessie, he said, "This
woman you've got with you -- she's a real bitch. I'd never dig her up and eat
her, even if the law allowed it; she'd give me heartburn, sure as hell."
      "Degenerate!" Helena snapped, stepping quickly away from the mausoleum
door, bringing her small hands up before her in tight little fists, as if she
were prepared to cross that coffin-dotted, dust-filmed room and give Willie
Whitlock the soundest beating of his life -- or of his non-life.
      "That's the last straw!" the ghoul squealed. "Degenerate, am I? I was
going to give you people a break, here. I was going to let you have a few more
minutes of freedom while you told me all about digging up that grave. But that
last insult just ruined everything for you!" He reached into the open coffin
in front of him and lifted out a nether-world communications receiver. Before
any of them realized quite what he was doing, the ghoul dialed a single number
and said, into the receiver, " They're here, in the mausoleum. Call off the
search."
      "Stop him!" Jessie shouted.
      The hell hound leaped, slid across the top of a black casket, leaped aga
in from the end of it and landed on the ghoul, sent the small man crashing
backwards into another coffin which fell from its pedestal with a roar that
echoed about the room like thunder in a barrel. The nether-world
communications receiver had fallen from the ghoul's hand, but the damage was
done. The searchers knew where they were.
      Outside, wolves howled maniacally.
      Jessie imagined that he could hear the furious flapping of bat wings on
the wet night air.
      "Lock the door!" he shouted.
      Helena whirled, groped around, found the lock and slipped it into place.
She grabbed the doorknob in both hands, twisted it and yanked, just to be sure
the lock worked. It did. But that really didn't mean too much, because Count
Slavek and the others probably had keys...
      Jessie reached the coffin where the nether-world receiver dangled on a
lanky cord. He found there was also a regular telephone in that oblong box,
resting on the mottled, water-spotted pink satin lining. That seemed odd. But
he supposed that a ghoul living in a mausoleum with a couple of dozen vampires
felt the need for contact with the outside world, once in a while...
      "You can't win! You can't!" Willie Whitlock screamed. He was lying flat
on his back, pinned under the hell hound who stood on his thighs and chest.
Brutus snarled at the ghoul's outburst and snipped less than playfully at his
neck.
      "What are we going to do?" Helena asked, joining Jessie at the coffin
full of telephones.
      "Call the police," he said, dialing the emergency number.
      "But what if the police are in on this?" she asked.
      "I don't think they are. Flesh-and-blooders don't want us to find out
what's behind the Tesserax disappearance -- but they aren't ready to kill us
to keep us quiet. Our only violent confrontation, so far, has been with the
supernaturals."
      Something struck the outside of the mausoleum door.
      "They're here!" Helena said.
      "L.A. Police Department," an efficient, cool voice answered on the other
end of the line. "Sergeant Bode speaking."
      "My name's Jessie Blake, and I'm a private investigator in the L.A.
area. My secretary and I are trapped in the mausoleum of the maseni cemetery.
We desperately need help."
      "Locked yourself in?" the sergeant asked, perplexed.
      "No, no. There are two dozen vampires outside trying to get in at us and
execute an illegal bite."
      "We haven't had a case of illegal bite in two years," the sergeant said.
"And I've never heard of that many vampires getting together -- "
      "Neither have I," Jessie said. "But they're out there all right."
      Sergeant Bode hesitated, then asked, "What number are you calling from,
please?"
      Jessie knew better than to waste time arguing; he read off the number.
      Something crashed heavily against the closed door, again, and a hundred
shrill voices rose up beyond the mausoleum walls.
      "Two dozen vampires?" Sergeant Bode asked.
      "Or more."
      "Anyone harmed yet? Need an ambulance -- or a priest?"
      "Not yet," Jessie said. "But we will if you don't hurry!" He slammed
down the phone, hard.
      From beyond the imitation oak door, an inhuman voice cried: "Jessie
Black, Jessie Black..."
      "Jessie, the window!" Helena cried, pointing.
      A shadow moved against the outside as some supernatural beast tried to
peer in at them.
      "Jessie Black... Jessie Black... Jessie Black..." The inhuman voice was
moaning again, filled with an almost tangible evil, like an audible syrup.
      "My name's not Black," Jessie shouted, cupping his hands around his
mouth, to be sure his voice would carry through the thick door. "It's Jessie
Blake, you idiots!"
      Beyond the door, several voices rose in argument and consternation,
gradually subsided. Then the haunting cry came again, hollow and far away, as
if it echoed from the far shore of an infinitely wide sea... "Jessie Blake...
Jessie Blake..."
      "What do you want?" he asked.
      "You can't escape us... Why don't you open the door and let us in, make
it easy for everyone... ?"
      "Never!"
      "Be reasonable," the inhuman voice said. "What have you got to gain by
being bullheaded in the face of such overwhelming opposition? Be sensible."
      "You're a bunch of unprincipled hoodlums," Jessie said.
      "If you force us to break in there, you can be certain we'll treat you
twice as harshly as we otherwise might. And we will show no mercy at all for
the lady."
      Jessie felt like he was in a movie -- the one in which the prison
rioters are locked in a cell block with the warden as their hostage and the
governor pleading with them to give up and come out without their weapons.
      "Have it your own way, then," the inhuman voice said at last. Whatever
the creature was -- vampire, werewolf or something more strange than that --
it sounded hurt, as if it were about to start pouting over his rebuke. "Well
just have to come in the hard way, Mr. Black."
      "Blake!" he roared.
      Before the voice could correct itself, the mausoleum windows to their
right and toward the front of the building shattered explosively. Thousands of
pieces of dirty glass showered into the ranks of opened coffins, and glass
tinkled on the gray cement floor. Both Jessie and Helena were unhurt, for the
windows were too far forward to break over them.
      When the last of the glass had fallen, all was quiet as -- a tomb. For a
brief moment. The quiet was broken, this time, by the sound of wings as bats
flapped through the windows into the musty room, banging into the wooden frame
and into each other, in their eagerness to attack.
      Jessie grabbed for his luminescent crucifix, caught it in the lining of
his jacket pocket, tore his coat getting it out, then dropped it. He felt like
Zeke Kanastorous: no thumbs. He bent and picked the cross up again, just in
time to face Count Slavek who had metamorphosed from a bat into a man. The
Count had stepped forward, reaching for them, grinning a grin that was crammed
full of fangs.
      "Stop right where you are!" the detective ordered, brandishing his
plastic weapon.
      The bloodsucker saw the crucifix and recoiled from it in a flurry of
satin-lined cape.
      Jessie waved the cross again, to make his point.
      Slavek hissed and held out one long-fingered, fish-belly-white hand, as
if he thought his pointed finger would somehow destroy the hated object. Then
he looked more closely at the crucifix and said, scornfully, "How crass. How
cheap. How little-minded and tasteless."
      Hugging Helena against his side, Jessie said, "Well, it only cost two
credits in a relic shop, so you can't expect too much."
      The other vampires formed into men, the little animal faces giving way
to human countenances that looked no more innocent, no less terrifying. All
eyes were on the detective and the girl; many pairs of saliva-wet fangs shone
in the dim, yellow light. Bloodshot eyes were more in evidence than at the
second morning of an Elks convention.
      A werewolf leaped through the broken window, foam flying from its open
mouth. It raised up onto its hind feet and clawed the air with manlike hands
whose claws must have measured nearly six inches.
      "You can't last much longer," Slavek said.
      "Sure we can," Jessie said, clutching the crucifix so tightly he was
afraid it might shatter in his hand. He couldn't loosen his grip, though; he
hoped it was made of tempered plastic. "This little device I'm holding will
keep you, and the werewolves, away from us."
      "But it will mean nothing to the sorcerer," Slavek said. "He'll be here
in a moment, to put a spell on you. When you're both mesmerized, he'll make
you drop the cross. Then we'll move in."
      The bloodsuckers murmured excitedly. Several of those watching Helena
licked their pale lips with relish.
      Even as Slavek finished speaking, the sorcerer levitated through the
nearest broken window. He was lying in the air, flat on his back, his arms
folded across his skinny chest. His black robes hung straight down from him.
Oddly, his beard had risen straight up, and although the sorcerer was
horizontal to the earth, the beard was vertical; it met his chin at a ninety-
degree angle. The old man rotated slowly, until he was vertical himself, and
his feet touched the floor. Now, his three-foot-long beard stuck straight out
from his chin, horizontal to the earth, still perpendicular to the rest of
him. He slapped at it with both hands, to no avail, then gripped it firmly and
dragged it down until it hung straight. However, when he let go of it, it
snapped up again, jutting out three feet in front of him.
      "Excuse me," the old man said. "I always have problems with that spell.
I'm afraid I've never mastered levitation as well as some." He turned his back
on everyone, huddled against himself and muttered some chant in a language
that Jessie did not understand. When he turned around, his beard was hanging
straight down, as it should be. "There," he said. "Now, we're ready to get on
with it."
      "Get this bastard off me!" Willie Whitlock said, as Brutus snapped at
his pallid nose.
      "I'm afraid the young couple is our first order of business," the
sorcerer said. "Will you put down the crucifix, Mr. Blake?"
      "No."
      "Then I must make you put it down," the old man said. He raised his arms
and began another chant.
      "Look," Jessie said, "the Tesserax affair can't be so important that
it's worth breaking the law over."
      The sorcerer continued to mumble.
      "You know you can't keep this atrocity hidden forever, don't you? You
know that one day you will all be severely punished for what you're doing to
us. Some of you might even have your souls dissipated. Think about that. No
more bites after that, legal or illegal!"
      The sorcerer chanted, unmoved.
      "Jessie," Helena said, "I'm getting numb."
      He felt his own feet turn into twin blocks of ice. As the chill rose
swiftly above his knees, he said, "There's still plenty of time to reconsider
this, gentlemen."
      Slavek grinned fiercely and tested the points of his handsome fangs
against the ball of his thumb. He seemed to feel they were sharp enough.
      The chill was up to Jessie's hips.
      "Brutus, can't you stop them from doing this?" the detective asked.
"Can't you go for the sorcerer's throat?"
      The hell hound said, "I'd love to. But I'd have to get off Willie to do
that, and then he'd be up and after you; he'd knock the crucifix out of your
hands anyway."
      "Jessie, no!" Helena cried.
      He knew exactly what had caused her terrified exclamation. The chill had
reached his own shoulders. In a moment, it would travel down his arms, would
affect the hand that now held the crucifix.
      "Soon," Slavek said, clearly thinking of Renee Cuyler as he stared at
Helena's breasts and then slowly upward to her slim neck.
      The chill reached Jessie's hands.
      He watched his fingers open.
      The crucifix fell to the floor.
      Screeching with delight, Slavek started forward.
      "Stop where you are! Police!" The voice came from the broken windows,
behind the vampires and the two werewolves.
      Jessie looked up and saw uniformed men leaning into the room, holding
long-snouted guns. They opened fire on everyone, attackers and victims a like.
Some of the weapons were narcotic pin guns, these to affect the humans; others
were garlic oil pistols that spat out droplets of fluid from which the
maddened vampires withdrew like vipers from the mongoose. He saw Slavek leap
across two rows of cof fins and flatten himself, in terror, against the far
wall, and then he slumped forward into unconsciousness as the narcotic darts
had their effect on him...


Chapter Fifteen

      The low, waffled ceiling was white, the walls a soft blue. The only
furniture was the comfortable but narrow bed on which he lay. The room had no
windows and only the single door which was wide and padded to resist damage.
It all had the look of a prison of some sort. The light source was a recessed
panel in the ceiling, protected by a sheet of plexiglass. As Jessie sat up on
the edge of the bed, he saw that the floor was the same pleasing shade of blue
as the walls. It was every bit as clean and as spotlessly shiny as everything
else in this place.
      Standing, he felt slightly woozy and weak, as if he hadn't eaten in a
day or so. Indeed, as he recalled the events which had led up to his
incarceration, he realized that this might easily have been the case. How long
had he slept, dreamlessly, in this room? If he had been hit by several
narcotics darts from the police weapons, the cumulative effect could have kept
him out for as much as twelve hours.
      And what of Helena in all that time?
      And Brutus...?
      "You're awake, are you, Mr. Blake?" a voice asked, from behind the light
fixture in the center of the ceiling.
      He looked up, squinting at the soft glow. "Who's that?" he asked.
      "Just the prison computer," the voice said. "One of my duties is to keep
an eye on the inmates and welcome them when they wake."
      "I'm in prison, then?"
      "Oh, you needn't be so down-at-the-mouth, sir," the computer said. It
sounded as if its voice tapes had been recorded by an old maid school teacher
from Altoona. "You aren't in the prison proper, but in the protective-custody
wing."
      "I see. And the others?"
      "They've been put in a special subterranean prison vault, in padlocked
federal coffins with samples of their native soils to sustain them until the
sun sets and they can be questioned."
      "I didn't mean the vampires," Jessie said. "I'm not at all interested in
them right now. But what about my secretary, Helena? And what about my
business partner -- a hell hound named Brutus?"
      "Oh, they're fine, sir, fine," the computer said. "They've been ready to
meet with the proper officials for some time now; we've all been waiting for
your revival."
      "I could have been given drugs to counteract the narcotics. I could have
awakened much earlier."
      "Well," the computer said, "certain arrangements had to be made anyway,
before anyone could talk to you. So it was just as well that you slept."
      "What time is it?"
      "Seven in the evening, sir."
      "I slept the entire day away?"
      "You did that, yes," the computer said.
      "Then let's get on with this meeting that you've made 'special
arrangements' for."
      "Someone will be around shortly, sir, to speak with you. In the
meantime, perhaps you would like to watch some entertaining Tri-Dimensional
shows." A panel slid open in the left-hand wall, revealing a Tri-D set. When
it popped on, the computer said, "There are no controls in the room with you -
- in the past, some prisoners have broken them off either in anger or in an
attempt to find something to use as a weapon -- but I'll tune in whatever you
ask to see. Right now, the early evening Pritchard Robot Show is on. Would you
like to watch that? Most everyone does."
      Jessie looked away from the light fixture and stared at the padded door.
"How long until I can see someone?"
      "Only a few minutes, sir. A quarter of an hour."
      "I demand a lawyer."
      "But you aren't under arrest, sir. Therefore, we are under no obligation
to secure your counsel."
      "I feel like I'm under arrest."
      A tone of exasperation crept into the computer's voice. "No, sir, you
are not, despite how you may feel. As I have already explained, you are in the
protective-custody wing, not in the prison itself."
      "What am I being protected from?" he wanted to know. He saw there was no
handle on the inside of the door, no way to open it except from the hall
beyond.
      "Yourself," the computer said.
      "I'm being protected from myself?"
      "Yes, sir. It's felt that you've generated an enormous amount of
violence these last two days, most of it directed against yourself, in the
end."
      "You have to let me out," Jessie insisted, pushing uselessly at the
door. "How can you protect me from myself if I'm in here with me?"
      The computer was silent.
      "Well?"
      When it spoke, it chose to change the subject. "Would you like to watch
some of the Pritchard Robot Show, sir?"
      Sighing, the detective turned and faced the Tri-D set, saw the world-
famous features of Pritchard Robot, studio lights gleaming dully on the
burnished, metallic head as the simulacrum leaned across his desk and pointed
a ball-jointed, five-inch finger at his guest. "Who's he interviewing
tonight?" Jessie asked.
      "Right now, he's talking with God," the computer said. "From monitoring
other cells and the reactions of the prisoners viewing the show, I'd say this
is one of his most successful interviews."
      Jessie sat down on the edge of his bed and stared morosely at the bright
Tri-D screen. "Bring up the sound," he said.
      "I know you'll enjoy it, sir," the computer said.
      On the screen, Pritchard Robot looked at his guest with the same, flat,
unchanging metallic expression he had been built with, and he said, "You do
not purport to be the ultimate God, the all-powerful God, the number one world
master, the big boy in the sky, the hot shot universe builder?"
      The camera cut to a large, muscular man with rich white hair and an
enormous, flowing beard. He was handsome in spite of his age, filled with an
obvious vitality. "I've never claimed any such thing, as you must well be
aware, Pritchard."
      "Call me Mr. Robot, please," Pritchard said.
      Oh boy, Jessie thought, it's one of those confrontations, is it? He felt
sorry for God, but he leaned forward, anxious to see what Pritchard would do
to the old goat.
      "Tell me, Mr. God, is it not true that you are both the god of the Jews
and Christians alike?"
      "I'm only a third of the Christian pantheon," God said, obviously stung
by the interviewer's personal rebuke.
      "But you do serve a purpose in both theologies?" The harsh, yet winning,
voice of Pritchard Robot brooked no debate.
      "Yes," God said.
      "How is it possible to be both a god of wrath and a god of mercy?"
      "Now wait just a minute," God said.
      "Aren't you deceiving either the Jews or the Christers?" Pritchard Robot
wanted to know.
      "It was human beings who wrote the Bible, flesh-and-blooders who said
these things. They're the ones who created the conflict, not me. I was an
innocent party." The old man brushed at his beard. "I had no say in what I was
to be, as you know."
      "Did you also have no say in the atrocities you forced mankind to suffer
for so many centuries?" Pritchard Robot asked, his voice rising. "Are you
going to try to tell me, and my vast audience, that you were forced to bring
the Great Flood to the Earth?"
      "Well, no," God said, subdued. "But once they'd created me as a god of
wrath, I was forced to live up to the billing."
      "Don't you think -- won't you admit, Mr. God -- that you more than lived
up to your mythical role? Didn't you use that role in a most cynical and
ruthless fashion, use it to excuse the most vicious, sadistic acts ever
recorded in the annals of the written word? Didn't you go overboard, Mr. God,
in fulfilling your myth role? Didn't you willfully and demonically desecrate
the Earth? Didn't you perpetrate these crude and malicious atrocities solely
beca use they excited and gratified your own sick mind?" Pritchard Robot was
smoking around the ears by the time he had delivered this sharp accusation.
      "You're exaggerating and being totally unfair," God said. "As I said
before, I'm only one of many gods. Others have had to live up to their myth
requirements. My requirements were harder than most, that's all."
      Pritchard Robot said, "Then you think the Great Flood was not an
overreaction to tie requirements of your myth role?"
      "I think it was within bounds." God shifted in his chair, putting his
robes in place. "I was then only a wrathful god, and I needed to punish
mankind to fulfill my role."
      "Punish mankind,'' Pritchard Robot said.
      "Yes."
      "For what sins?"
      "Orgies. Disrespect for parents. A rise in the overall crime rate, an
increase in warfare."
      "And your idea of punishment, of teaching mankind a lesson, was to wipe
out the entire race except for one single family -- the Noahs?"
      "At the time, it seemed proper," God said, running a finger around his
ecclesiastical collar.
      Pritchard Robot said, "Tell me, Mr. God, are there no orgies in Heaven?"
      "Well, occasionally, as you can read in the Bible..." He coughed and
wiped perspiration off his face. "Well, after all, some of those angels are as
stacked as..."
      "And are you not, yourself, responsible for the rape of a woman, one
whose last name is unfortunately lost to history, a woman we shall call Mary
of Nazareth?"
      "Well, rape is a strong word," God said.
      "Did she not have a child by you? And was this child not conceived out
of wedlock? And did you not, later, even forsake this child? And when you made
Mary of Nazareth with this child, did you not come to her at night while she
was quite alone and defenseless, and threaten her with your godly position and
your almighty power -- which is nowhere near so almighty as was once thought?"
      "Well..." God said, weakly.
      "And having done all of this," Pritchard Robot said, "you have the
unmitigated gall to sit there and say you reasonably punished humanity with
the Great Flood. For things you had done yourself!"
      "Uh -- " God said.
      "We must break now, for a commercial," Pritchard Robot said. "When we
return, we'll be talking with our second guest for the evening, a mythical
creature we all enjoy when he has time to be on the show: the Honest
Politician. Now, for this word from -- "
      The Tri-D picture clicked into two dimensions then suddenly darkened
altogether as the panel concealing the screen slid into place and locked, all
this command by remote control.
      In that same old-maid-school-teacher-from-Altoona voice, the prison
computer said, "I'm sorry to have to interrupt the Pritchard Robot Show, sir,
but you have an official visitor. I thought that should have preference."
      Jessie turned away from the featureless blue wall where the Tri-D screen
had been and got quickly to his feet as the padded door swung outward and a
maseni bureaucrat, dressed in flame-orange robes and a black necklace, swayed
into the cell.
      "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Blake."
      There was something naggingly familiar about the alien, though Jessie
could not place just what it was. When he couldn't identify it, he dismissed
the thought and said, "I'd like to see my secretary, Helena, and my partner,
to be sure they're okay."
      "Oh, they're fine," the maseni said, patting the air with one long-
tentacled hand. "There were no illegal bites or unauthorized disintegrations
last night."
      "Still, I'd like to see them."
      "Of course you would," the maseni said, bowing slightly from the waist,
his head nearly brushing the ceiling when he stood erect again. "Your
secretary has been awake for some three hours now, and she has expressed
similar desires. And your Mr. Brutus has been in a foul mood ever since you
were rescued last night, demanding this and that, refusing to understand that
it was best for you to sleep off the drug -- to give us time for certain
special arrangements -- "
      "I've heard about these special arrangements before," Jessie said, "from
the prison computer. Just what were you rushing around about while I was
unconscious?"
      "For one thing," the lanky alien said, "I had to be spaced back from the
home world, by an express ship, so that I could make a number of
explanations."
      "Explanations?"
      "Yes," the maseni said. He extended a six-tentacled hand and said, "I'm
pleased to meet you, Mr. Blake. My name is Galiotor Tesserax."


Chapter Sixteen

      "But you're dead!" Helena said, when Jessie introduced her to Galiotor
Tesserax some ten minutes later.
      "That was merely a convenient lie," the maseni said, smiling, blinking
his beady yellow eyes.
      "But how -- "
      "Before we get into all of that, shall we sit down and make ourselves
more comfortable?" He extended a hand toward the shape-changing chairs which
were arranged around the conference table in the warden's private consultation
room. "I've taken the liberty of ordering drinks, all around, to take the edge
off this meeting," the maseni said, nodding nervously at each of them.
      The consultation room door slid open, and a robot clanked in, carrying a
tray containing three liquors, two mixers, four glasses, swizzle sticks and
orange slices. It bent awkwardly at its waist joint and put the tray down,
turned the glasses over and said, "Be there will, sir, more anything?"
      "That's all, thank you," Tesserax said.
      "Please excuse my adjunct," the prison computer said, from its speaker
in the ceiling. "With my budget slashed, I have to make do with damaged
mechanicals."
      "You, sir, thank," the robot said to Tesserax, turned and clanked out of
the room again.
      The maseni took their orders, mixed their drinks and saw that everyone
was relatively content. He added a splash of bourbon to Brutus' dish when the
hell hound complained that his drink was far too weak, and poured himself four
ounces of Scotch and four ounces of vodka in the same glass, stirred them
together without benefit of ice or mixer. He held this awful concoction
tightly in his left hand and never took a single sip of it. That was just as
well, Jessie thought, even though he did not know much about the flexibility
or temperament of the maseni digestive system.
      "First of all," Tesserax began, "I must apologize for the way you three
have been treated. My brood brother Fils should never have come to you in the
first place. And once you were involved, you should have been contacted by the
proper officials and informed of the falsity of my death certificate. You
should never have been treated in the criminal manner you were. I am sorry,
sir."
      "I accept your apology," Helena said, sipping her drink.
      Brutus raised his head from his bourbon and snorted to blow droplets of
reddish-brown liquid from his muzzle. "I don't accept," he said.
      "Well, I do," Jessie said. "But I'm not satisfied with just an apology.
I thought we were going to get some explanations."
      "Yes, sir, straight away," the alien said. "You see, six or seven weeks
ago, a major crisis arose on the home world. This crisis was of a nature that
demanded it be kept quiet. When the home world officials felt a few of the
ranking embassy people here could help solve that problem, we were called away
from L.A., secretly, and our absences explained by phony death certificates."
      "Was Pelinorie Mesa another maseni called home?" Jessie asked,
remembering the brief conversation he'd had with chubby little Myer Hanlon,
whom he'd used in the beginning of the case.
      Tesserax was nonplussed. He fluttered six gray tentacles across his
gaping mouth to conceal his surprise. He didn't manage too well. "Then you
know about the others?"
      "Some of them," Jessie lied, trying to make his meager fund of data seem
like a comprehensive knowledge.
      "You're quite a talented man," the alien said.
      "Let's cut the crap," Brutus said. He was still in a foul mood, even
though he had been reunited with Jessie and Helena and had a big dish of
bourbon and soda in front of him. "What was the nature of this crisis of
yours?"
      "I was getting to that," Tesserax said. He cleared his throat (it
sounded like two cats were fighting under the table). Then he said, "On the
home world, we have encountered a new species of supernatural -- a creature
which does not fit into our own mythology or the mythologies of any of the
races we've come into contact with. Furthermore, our sociologists tell us that
there has been no new mass superstition to account for the rise of this
being."
      "What's it like?" Jessie asked.
      "We're not sure," Tesserax said. "Thus far, no one has seen it and lived
to tell the story."
      "You mean it has killed maseni citizens?" Helena asked.
      "That's the situation," Tesserax said, looking glumly down at his
untouched glass of Scotch and vodka. "Not only has it killed maseni flesh-and-
blooders, but it has ruthlessly dissipated the ethereal essences of a number
of our supernaturals as well."
      "But isn't that impossible?" Jessie asked. "A supernatural can't really
hurt another supernatural."
      "We'd always thought that to be true, sir. Except, of course, for the
sorcerers and their mythical equivalents. But this beast is no sorcerer. This
creature smashes entire villages and leaves footprints as large as the bottoms
of oil drums."
      "Have attempts been made to track it down?" Helena asked.
      "Yes," Tesserax said. "And traps have been set time and again. But it
always strikes where least expected, leaves no survivors, and disappears.
We've followed its prints a short way, but they always gradually fade out,
until the trail is gone."
      "This is all rather horrible," Jessie admitted. "But why have you gone
to such pains to keep it secret?"
      "If word had gotten out that we were having trouble with a murderous
supernatural, after all we've told your people about how flesh-and-blooders
can learn to live in harmony with supernaturals, your Pure Earthers would have
had a field day. Maseni-human relations would have been set back nearly a
decade by the hubbub."
      Jessie nodded. "True enough. But Slavek and his crowd went to extremes
to keep us from -- "
      "Oh, sir, you must not suppose that they were a part of the official
plan to put a security blanket over this affair. They were acting on their
own, all without the consent or even the knowledge of elected flesh-and-blood
authority."
      Jessie finished his drink, twisted the glass in a tight circle on the
wet tabletop. "But what have the supernaturals got to lose, from this, that
would force them to such extreme measures?"
      "That's a question we've been asking ourselves, Mr. Blake," the alien
said, rising from his chair, still holding his glass as he paced back and
forth across the room, his head dangerously close to the low ceiling. "Every
effort we've made, on the home world, to discover the nature and origins of
this new beast has been opposed by our own supernaturals. And, here on Earth,
both maseni and human-born supernaturals conspired to keep the secret from
you. Obviously, they know more of this than we do, but they will not speak of
it."
      "You've got yourself a dandy little mystery there," Helena said. She had
finished her drink and was sucking on the orange slice that had been on the
side of the glass.
      "That's it exactly," Tesserax said. "A mystery. That's why we decided to
tell you the sutuation -- and invite the three of you to come to the home
world and investigate it."
      Jessie raised his eyebrows. "Hunt down this murderous beast that
tramples villages?"
      "It will be dangerous," Tesserax conceded. "But we will pay well."
      Brutus said, "How well?"
      "Five hundred credits a day."
      "That's a flat fee, for all of us?"
      Tesserax clearly did not enjoy talking with the hell hound. He raised a
hand to his mouth and cleared his throat -- cats screaming -- and said, "We
thought that would be a fair -- "
      "Make it five hundred a day, including travel days, for each of us,"
Brutus growled. "Then maybe we'll consider it."
      The alien looked at Jessie and said, "Does this... hound speak for you,
Mr. Blake?"
      "He makes good sense, yes."
      Tesserax considered this and finally said, "Very well, then. Five
hundred a day, for each of you -- fifteen hundred a day in all." He returned
to his chair and folded up in it. "I assume the prison computer has recorded
all of this."
      "Yes, Mr. Tesserax, I have," the computer said, sweetly.
      Tesserax rolled his amber eyes toward Jessie and said, "Will a print-out
be sufficient contract for you?"
      "It'll do," Jessie said.
      "Did you hear that?" Tesserax asked the ceiling.
      The computer said, "I'll send an adjunct around with two print-outs in a
minute, Mr. Tesserax."
      "Thank you."
      "It's nothing, sir," the computer said.
      Jessie looked at the speaker behind the ceiling light and said, "Do you
mind telling me whose voice was used to make your tapes?"
      The prison computer said, "My tapes, which were provided as part of the
overall computer package by Big Brother Building Systems Company, contain two
hundred tapes with every sound that the human voice can produce, in addition
to nearly two hundred thousand words in three Earth languages. My tapes were
recorded by Miss Tessie Alice Armbruster, a retired school teacher from
Holidaysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 9, 1987. The same woman made supplementary
tapes for my system -- in addition to supplementary tapes on the maseni
languages which were fed to me earlier -- on August 3, 1994 and again on
November 1, 1999. Miss Armbruster's voice was employed because psychologists
working with the Big Brother Building Systems Company felt that it had a range
and modulation pattern that combined a lovable motherliness with an undeniable
disciplinarian tone."
      Jessie said, "Is Holidaysburg near Altoona?"
      "Yes, sir, it is a suburb of the larger city," the prison computer
replied,
      "You're amazing!" Tesserax said. "Simply amazing."
      The door opened. One of the computer's adjuncts tripped on the door sill
as it entered the room, crashed flat on its face like a comedian taking a
pratfall in some abominable old movie. Somthing shattered, and it made a
gruesome, internal grinding sound.
      "If they slash my budget any further, I won't be responsible for what
happens to the prison," Tessie Alice Armbruster said.
      The robot clambered to its feet and staggered forward a couple of steps
until it got its balance. It said, "Me please gentlemen excuse."
      "Never mind that," Tesserax said, impatiently, snapping all six of his
right-hand tentacles rapidly, making a noise like popcorn popping. "Just bring
me those papers,, will you?"
      "Sir, yes," the adjunct said. But it just stood there.
      "Well?" Tesserax asked.
      "Knee joint my bent is some, sir," the robot said, mournfully. It made
an obvious effort and broke the temporary paralysis, tottered hesitantly
forward toward the alien. "Are you here, sir," it said, handing him the
crumpled pile of print-outs. "Thought drop them would I."
      "But you didn't."
      The robot was very self-satisfied. "No, sir. Held them did tight I and
fool no make myself of."
      "Very good," Tesserax said, sorting the print-outs into two groups.
      The robot suddenly coughed and fell into the table, knocked the bottles
of liquor over and frightened Helena. It slid slowly to the floor, like a
drunkard passing out, landed on its backside and fell backwards, its metal
skull thunking the blue tiles.
      "When appropriations time comes around," Tessie Alice Armbruster said,
"I'm going to call all of you as witnesses."
      Tesserax slid a complete set of print-outs across the table to Jessie.
"There you are. Five hundred a day, apiece."
      "It looks in order," Jessie said.
      They got out of their shape-changing chairs, and Jessie came around the
table to shake hands with the maseni official. "I think you'll see that your
money was well spent with us, Mr. Galiotor."
      "I sincerely hope you're right," Galiotor Tesserax said. "Not only for
the sake of the maseni treasury, but for the sake of all the beast's potential
victims and for the sake of future maseni-Earth relations." He let go of
Jessie's hand as if he found contact with bone-jointed fingers less than
pleasant. "You'll leave on the starship Poogai tomorrow morning."
      "And good sir to you, luck!" the robot said, staring up at them from the
floor, waving one five-fingered metal hand.


PART TWO: THE BEAST AT MIDNIGHT


Chapter Seventeen

      Riding the escalator down the Poogai's long debarking tube into the
largest terminal on the maseni home world, Tesserax said, "Oh, dear! I forgot
to warn you about the Protector."
      Jessie said, "Who?"
      Tesserax slapped the top of his hairless, bulbous head and said, "Oh,
damnation and thunderpunt! I really should have remembered it. It's all quite
traumatic if you aren't expecting it -- and even if you are." He looked
anxiously ahead at the rapidly approaching terminal entrance, and he said, "
Now don't be alarmed, sir, when it charges at you with all those sharpened
teeth and claws."
      "Teeth and claws?" Helena said.
      "Teeth and claws?" Jessie said, clutching Helena's arm and .wondering if
they should turn around and fight the traffic the whole way to the top of the
moving stairs.
      "Protector?" Brutus asked. "What's the matter with this toothy son of a
bitch, anyhow?"
      "The Protectors are one of our more colorful racial myths," the alien
said. "There's one of them at every space port. You see, in the early days of
maseni space travel -- "
      But the steps had run out, and they were forced through the door by a
crush of other Poogai passengers on the escalator behind them. They walked
into the arrivals hall before Tesserax could tell them anything more.
      The arrivals hall was a masterpiece of aesthetic engineering, fully five
hundred feet on a side, the walls cut by enormous windows shaped like the
windows in an Earth cathedral and soaring from the floor to a point just a few
feet short of the lofty ceiling, some hundred feet overhead. Thick,
transparent pillars supported the massive, luminescent arches which held up
the domed ceiling. All of this was more than mere supportive architecture. The
windows, just like cathedral windows, were made of thousands of bits of
colored glass cemented together to form abstract patterns which cast eerie
images across the great, white floor. The transparent pillars and the
luminescent white arches high over them were carved with hundreds of small
figures, maseni flesh-and-blooders as well as maseni supernaturals: one great,
panoramic, twisting, twining bas-relief that took the breath away and made one
think the pillars were moving, the arches shimmering and twisting with the
strivings of thousands of little living beings...
      "The Protector -- " Jessie began, not having forgotten the warning about
teeth and claws despite the beauty that had taken his breath away.
      However, before he could finish what he had been about to ask Tesserax,
a huge, dark-winged monstrosity, which had been perched on one of the high
arches, leapt away from its glowing white rafter and dropped toward them like
a stone, screaming at the top of its voice, like an aircraft plunging toward
file earth...
      "Good God!" Jessie said, having forgotten altogether that Pritchard
Robot had proven God was no good. He stepped backward into the passengers who
were crowding into the terminal behind him.
      "Never fear," Tesserax said. "It's a terrifying experience, but the
thing won't harm you."
      The beast was fully as large as an elephant, but much meaner looking,
craggier than any pachyderm, with a great head much like that of an enraged
lion and a mouth that took up half of its fluttercar-sized skull. With one
bite, it could devour all of them, with nothing left sticking between its
gravestone teeth. Its eyes were a pair of dinnerplate red discs without any
pupil delineation, and they appeared to be focused directly on Jessie and
Helena. The monster's wings flapped open, to slightly break its fall, though
it still plummeted at them too fast for comfort. In the last second before it
would be on them, it extended two telephone-pole legs tipped with talons as
long as pitchfork tines and as thick as fat winter icicles. And then --
      -- it slammed into an invisible barrier five feet above their heads,
flopped around as if in its death throes.
      "The Protector," Tesserax said.
      They were directly beneath the beast as it regained its senses, and now
it turned its red eyes straight upon them, looking even meaner from this
vantage point. It began to claw at the barrier with its big talons; it hissed
at them, showing row on row of razored teeth and a tongue tipped with what
appeared to be a steel barb.
      The other passengers from the Poogai passed them, with hardly a glance
at the thunder monster apparently lying on thin air only a few feet overhead.
      "In the early days of maseni space travel," Tesserax continued, peering
into the vicious red eyes glaring down at them, "our people encountered a
murderous alien race somewhat superior to our own. A galactic war ensued, and
we were nearly defeated. The enemy, a race much like your mythical centaurs
but far more violent, drove us to our home world and then landed here to claim
complete victory and to exterminate our people. Strangely, however, none of
these aliens could remain on the surface of our home world for more than a few
minutes; they died in the most terrible agony. At first, it was thought that
some bacterium or some trace gas in the home world atmosphere was extremely
toxic to these invaders. But when they donned space suits and used special
tanked air from their own world, they still crumpled up and died when they set
foot on our soil. Only one of them lasted long at all, and he managed to hold
on for eight long hours, raving about horrendous steel claws that were ripping
up his insides -- and great mad, red eyes staring relentlessly down at him,
dark wings, many teeth... Nothing more than the lunatic rantings of a creature
driven mad by pain. However, over the thousands of years since then, the myth
of the Protectors has grown and been nourished by the simpler people. Grown
and nourished, in fact, until, now, we really have them."
      The Protector screamed and clawed the invisible shield more furiously
than ever.
      "But what was the real cause of those alien's deaths?" Jessie asked.
      "We never have learned that," Tesserax said. "Currently, the most
popular theory is that the solar and gravitational fields of our home world
were in some way peculiarly deadly to this single alien race. As you've seen,
many other races come and go, and are not bothered by the invisible killer.
Something in the physiology of those centaurs made them highly susceptible to
our geography, perhaps."
      "They lost the war, in the end?" Brutus asked.
      "Of course," Tesserax said. "We exterminated them."
      The Protector stood on its four powerful legs and began to jump up and
down on the invisible shield, screaming, spitting, flailing at the air with
its barbed tongue.
      "Does he attack everyone who comes to your world?" the detective asked,
watching for a crack in a barrier he couldn't see to begin with.
      "Well, it doesn't have much choice," Tesserax said. "It has to fulfill
its mythical role, after all. It must attempt to destroy any alien which sets
foot on maseni soil, since the myth doesn't specify that it should attack only
hostile aliens. There are three hundred Protectors, one in every spaceport on
the planet, relentlessly bashing their brains out on these power shields that
we've had to erect to contain them."
      "Don't they ever learn that it's no use? Don't they understand that the
barrier's there all the time?" Helena asked.
      "Oh, I suppose they learned that scores of years ago. But they can't
help themselves. The myth says attack: they attack."
      "Poor dears," Helena said.
      "Dumb sons of bitches," Brutus said.
      Tesserax said, "Oh, I wouldn't feel any pity for them. The myth doesn't
specify any intelligence in a Protector, merely an ability to spot and destroy
an alien. They really can't think; they're rather mindless constructs. No need
to be sorry for their lot." He looked away from the monster overhead and said,
"Shall we go through customs and get out of here, so it can go back to its
roost? It's not harmful, but it does make a fearful screeching sound that gets
on the nerves of the terminal employees."
      Five minutes later, having passed through customs without opening their
luggage, they boarded a fluttercar limousine which was waiting for them
outside the terminal. The passenger compartment of the car consisted of two
extremely comfortable bench seats which faced each other across a good two
yards of leg room. Tesserax and the hell hound sat at opposite ends of the
front-facing bench, while Jessie and Helena sat close together on the rear-
facing seat.
      A maseni robot, efficient and well maintained, loaded their bags into
the spacious trunk, slipped into the driver's niche where a front seat would
have been in a manually steered vehicle, and connected itself to the control
leads which dangled from the instrumentless dashboard: acceleration, brakes,
steering, turn signals, and systems monitors. He pulled them away into a heavy
flow of traffic and quickly accelerated above two hundred miles an hour...
      "We're all very pleased that you've chosen to participate, my friend,"
the maseni said. "We believe that your refreshingly alien viewpoint may tear
this case wide open."
      Jessie said, "Where are we going -- into those mountains?" He indicated
a range of snow-capped peaks that flanked the rushing fluttercar, needling the
leaden sky a great distance west of them, beyond the flat grass plains that
now lay all around.
      "That's correct, my friend," Tesserax said. He was speaking in his own
language now; and whereas his form of address in English was "sir", now it had
become "my friend" in translation. Jessie, Brutus and Helena had all taken
speed-teach hypno lessons in the maseni tongue on the way from Earth and, in
two short days, had absorbed enough to speak it well. "Those mountains are
among the highest on our world and are called the Gilorelamans, which is an
Old Tongue word that means 'Home of the Gods'."
      "That's where the beast has been marauding?" Helena asked. She leaned
toward the window and stared at the rugged slopes, and she thought that was
just the sort of place for some invisible gargantuan to play havoc with an
unsuspecting populace. The mountains looked remote, more alien than anything
she had yet seen on this world though, in actual fact, they did not look that
much different from mountain ranges back on Earth.
      "Yes, up there, my friend," Tesserax said. "The beast has slaughtered
nearly five hundred flesh-and-blooders and more than four hundred maseni
supernaturals, all residents of the Gilorelamans."
      The robot chauffeur made several turns onto smaller freeways and, in
time, took them close to the foothills that lay around the greater peaks. They
started the climb on a two-lane road that was closely framed by black-boled,
white-leafed trees that swayed in the wind like fragile dancers, now and then
bending to canopy the road with a frothy lace of snowy leaves.
      They were more than an hour into the foothills when a car passed them
doing quite a bit more than their sedate hundred miles an hour. It forced them
toward the burm, horn blaring, then whipped over a rise and was out of sight.
      "You have highway crazies here, too," Jessie said.
      When they topped the hill over which the car had gone, they found that
it had turned and was barreling back at them, on the wrong side of the
highway.
      The robot wheeled the car into the other lane.
      The unknown driver countered, turned back to his proper lane and came at
them at full speed.
      "He'll kill us all!" Helena cried.
      The robot jerked their limousine violently back into their own lane and
narrowly avoided a collision.
      As the other car flashed by, Jessie thought he saw a middle-aged, bald,
red-faced man looking over at them and laughing. "Was that an Earthman?" he
asked Galiotor Tesserax.
      "I think -- " the maseni began.
      The red-faced man in the car roared past them again, slued back and
forth on the road in front of them, disappeared over another hillock.
      "It was a human being," Helena said. "Is that how our scientists behave
when they come here to study maseni society?"
      When they crested the next rise, the stranger, as before, had turned and
was roaring back at them, blowing his horn and weaving from side to side of
the narrow road.
      "I can't watch," Helena said.
      "I wish I had a dish of bourbon," the hell hound moaned. The stranger
weaved past them, somehow avoiding a collision, was gone, his horn fading,
gradually, until they could no longer hear it at all.
      "I think that wasn't a real Earthman," Tesserax said. "I believe that
was one of our more recent myth figures."
      "You maseni have a myth figure that looks like an Earthman?" Jessie
asked, watching pebbly gray lids slide down and lift off the deepset yellow
eyes.
      "Yes, my friend," Tesserax said. He fluffed his orange robes. " We
maseni are incapable of becoming intoxicated, as you may know. Indeed, your
own race is somewhat unique in that respect, compared to all the races we have
thus far encountered. Certainly, we have drugs that make us -- as you might
say 'high'. But we are al ways in command of our senses, perfectly rational
and able to exercise as good judgment as before taking drugs. It fascinates
our people that your race can become so mindlessly drunk. The fact that tens
of thousands are killed every year on your highways by drunken drivers has
sparked the imagination of the maseni people. A Drunken Driver is a rather
mysterious, inexplicable creature to us. And, in the past few years, a new
myth has arisen to explain accidents on our own highways."
      "The myth of the Drunken Driver?" Jessie asked, not quite able to get
that one down.
      "Yes," Tesserax said. "Enough superstitious people have taken up belief
in the marauding Drunken Driver who haunts our home world highways that, in
fact, he has come to exist. Fortunately, though he's a recent supernatural,
laws have been passed to keep him from killing anyone. He may only careen
around, frightening people -- as you just saw."
      For a while, everyone was silent, digesting this. Then the detective
said, "I didn't realize that diplomatic and social relations between our two
races could give rise to new superstitions."
      "Oh, yes, my friend. It's surprising there are no new Earth-born myths
based on things your people have picked up from our culture."
      Jessie said, "Is it possible that this marauding behemoth in the
mountains is such a new myth?"
      Tesserax shook his large head. "It's unlikely. We've run computer depth
studies of new trends in maseni society, and we found nothing that could
account for this murderous mountain giant."
      "Still..."
      "I don't want to cloud your fresh perspective," the maseni said. "But I
truly believe you'd be wasting time in following up that possibility."
      The black-boled, white-leafed trees grew thicker at the sides of the
road, and the hills grew steeper and the clouds gradually came down like heavy
blankets onto a bed. They drove on toward Gilorelamans Inn, an ancient hotel
on the slopes of the high peaks, which would serve as their base of operations
until the case was closed.


Chapter Eighteen

      Gilorelamans Innlay on the lush green lower slopes of the largest peak
in the whole range, Piotimkin. It was as far down the rocky mountain as it
could get without moving into the foothills, but the view from its grounds was
staggering, no matter which direction one looked. Behind were the snow forests
and then the bare granite cliffs and finally, high above, the snowfields
themselves. On the other three sides one could view vast panoramas of lower
lands: hills, hillocks, sparse woods, plains and robot-tended fields.
      The inn was pleasing to the eye. It was made from the wood of the
conifers which had replaced the black-boled trees as the land rose and the
temperature dropped. Its roof had three peaks and two steep valleys between
and was shingled with slabs of wood stained black by sap and tar. The windows
were deepset and flanked by wooden shutters, reflecting the late afternoon sun
and the moving clouds that raced across the sky. Not a single daub of paint
marred the inn's natural beauty.
      The two-lane road fed directly into the inn's drive, and their robot
chauffeur brought them right around the spouting fountain to the front door,
which was fully ten feet high and six wide, graced by a shining coppery knob
and knocker, each so large it seemed a man would need two hands to grasp them.
      "It's lovely," Helena said. "It must be very old."
      "The whole place is a mythical establishment," Tes-serax said. "It dates
back centuries. And because it is mythical, it remains constant, unweathered,
untouched by decay."
      As they got out of their limousine, the big front door of the rustic inn
swung outward with a great deal of groaning and creaking, successfully
attracting everyone's attention. A maseni in black robes came out to greet
them. He glided forth, his tentacle hands folded against his chest in such a
manner that he suggested a mandarin emperor of another Earth age. He bowed to
them, twice to Helena, and said, "Welcome to Gilorelamans Inn."
      "Thank you," Helena said.
      The mandarin said, "My name is Tooner Hogar, and I am pleased to serve
you. Have you your own service robot, or shall I summon someone to retrieve
your baggage?"
      "We have our own mechanical," Tesserax said.
      "Very well," Hogar said. "When you are ready, please come straight to
the desk inside. I'll be waiting."
      He bowed again. And glided inside.
      "I don't like that one," Brutus said.
      "He was sweet," Helena disagreed.
      "He was slick, that's all," the hound growled.
      "Slick, indeed," Tesserax said. "Tooner Hogar is also known, in maseni
mythology, as Hogar the Poisoner."
      "Poisoner?" Jessie asked.
      "Poisoner of Gods," Tesserax elaborated.
      "I thought he looked too slick," Brutus said.
      "Tell us more," Helena said, as their robot began to lift their
suitcases from the limousine trunk.
      "According to the earliest maseni myths, these mountains are the homes
of all our gods. And this particular inn, overseen by Tooner Hogar -- Hogar
the Poisoner -- is the prime meeting place of the gods. Here, the Great Ones
can gather to make deals, strike bargains -- or merely celebrate some godly
holiday. The inn is neutral ground, where one god is powerless to lift his
hand against another."
      "But Hogar is not so powerless?" Jessie asked.
      "You catch on fast," Tesserax said.
      "I've dealt with so many punks, in my time," the detective said, "that
I'm usually able to see through them."
      Tesserax said, "According to the old myths, though the gods could not
directly harm each other while in the inn, they often hired Hogar to do their
dirty work. Hogar preferred to kill with any of a hundred exotic poisons. Many
gods passed away forever, under Hogar's hand. Others who were hardier died
only temporarily and rose to live again."
      The robot had taken a collapsible power cart from the trunk and had
loaded all their luggage on its flat bed.
      "We'll get our rooms, now," Tesserax said. "But be warned: do not eat or
drink anything which has been prepared by Tooner Hogar."
      "Surely the law doesn't permit him to poison any more," Helena said.
      "You're right," the maseni said. "He may only poison those gods who are
powerful enough to rise and live again. But, by law, he is allowed to slip
certain irritants to others, in place of the poisons he once dispensed. For
example, he might offer you an apple which, though not poisoned, is spiked
with nausea-inducers or potent laxatives. The law restrains him, but it does
not, of course, utterly refuse his urges."
      "But what will we eat?" Jessie asked.
      "Our robot has brought along cooking facilities and supplies," Tesserax
said. "For the duration of our stay here, we will consume only what he has
prepared for us." Tesserax extended an arm toward the open door of the hotel
and said, "My friends, shall we go in?"
      The lobby of the Gilorelamans Inn was large, as were most maseni rooms,
at least two hundred feet long and a hundred and fifty wide, yet the place had
a cozy atmosphere. This was achieved, for the most part, by the use of the
dark, naturally stained wood which constituted the walls and the parquet
ceiling. The floor was covered with a thick maroon carpet, and the sofas and
easy chairs which filled the lounging areas were a matching wine color.
Natural wood pillars thrust up toward the roof thirty feet overhead, and
crystal chandeliers lighted the room well enough for one to read but not so
well that there was the kind of dazzling glare one associated with modern
Earth hotels.
      When the maseni built an inn for the gods, in their myths, they
expressed a bit of taste.
      They crossed the room to the desk, where Tooner Hogar waited for them,
smiling and nodding, his hands still folded against his chest, his tentacles
intertwined.
      "We are so pleased to have these distinguished Earth-men visit us at the
Gilorelamans Inn," Hogar said. He pushed two things across the counter to
them, a register book and a dish of mints. "Would you each sign in, please?
And do take some complimentary candies."
      Jessie signed the book but avoided the mints.
      "No candies?" Hogar asked, smiling gently, amber eyes glittering.
      "Well, actually -- no, thank you," the detective said.
      "Miss?" Hogar said, offering her the dish.
      She refused, picked up the pen and signed both Brutus's and her own name
to the register. When she looked up, she saw that Hogar seemed to be hurt by
her rejection of the candies and, being Helena, she said, "Well, you see, I
just had dinner, and I haven't any room for anything else just now."
      Hogar frowned and stared more closely at the mints. "They aren't dusty,
are they? Sometimes, in an old mythical place like this, the dust settles. If
I don't keep changing the mints every day they get all grimy."
      "It isn't that," Helena said. "The mints are fine. As I said, I've
already eaten -- "
      "Here, then," the alien innkeeper said, shoving the dish into her hands.
"You take them and have them later on, in your room, compliments of the
house." He smiled at her: greasily.
      "I couldn't -- "
      "I insist," the maseni myth figure said.
      "Thank you," she said. She took the mints, holding the dish as if it
were a time bomb.
      Tesserax signed the register and got their room keys. "No need to send a
porter with us," he told Hogar. "We have our own mechanical to get the bags,
and well find the room ourselves."
      They followed the robot as it wheeled the luggage cart to the elevators
which, Tesserax explained, were physical additions to the myth structure,
since no elevators had existed when the Gilorelamans Inn was first imagined.
      The second floor ambience was much like that of the first floor, though
the carpeting here was a deep, cool green. Jessie, Helena and the hell hound
had a two-bedroom suite at the far end of the long, main corridor, while
Tesserax's room was right next door. The drawing room of the suite was
exquisite, with golden tapestries and heavy velvet-like draperies, comfortable
furniture, an indoor fountain where three maseni myth figures spouted water
onto one another's heads. Like all maseni rooms, this was a large one, far
larger than they required, with a fourteen-foot ceiling of alternating squares
of dark and light wood in a stunning parquet. The bedrooms were identical,
spacious, and lavishly appointed.
      "I think I like this place!" Helena said, flopping down on a bed that
was ten feet long and seven wide.
      Tesserax showed them where the baths were. "These, too, are additions,
realities intrude on the original make-believe. But what good are myths if
they aren't useful? And how useful would a hotel be, these days, without
bathrooms?"
      "True enough," Jessie said.
      As they stepped out of the third bath and back into the drawing room, a
knock sounded on the door.
      "Come in," Tesserax said.
      Tooner Hogar entered, bearing a wicker basket full of fruit, all wrapped
in plastic. "Compliments of the house," he said, smiling slickly and handing
the basket to Jessie.
      "I -- uh -- well, thank you," the detective said.
      "Try one of those," the innkeeper said, pointing to a large red fruit
that looked like a combination between an Earth apple and an Earth raspberry,
purple and nubbly.
      "Well, maybe later," Jessie said.
      "Perhaps the lady would like something," Hogar said, as Helena came out
of the bedroom to see what was going on.
      "What might I like?" she asked, stepping closer to see.
      Hogar reached out and tore the sheet of plastic wrap from the gift
basket and, bowing slightly toward Helena, he said, "Some home world fruit,
dear lady. This is a marvelous collection. I believe you will find each piece
delicious, fresh and clean."
      "I don't know if I should eat any alien -- "
      "Oh," Hogar said, "you will find our home world fruit perfectly
compatible with your digestive system. Haven't you eaten any imports, back on
your own world?"
      Helena said, "No, I -- "
      Hogar plucked the raspberry-apple from the basket, rubbed it against one
sleeve to polish it, and held it toward her. "Here. Eat, eat! There is nothing
to be afraid of!"
      Before she could find some new way to refuse the poisoner's gift, their
conversation was interrupted by a booming laugh so loud it shook the walls and
hurt their ears. Immediately following this came a crashing sound that slammed
through the hotel like an explosion in its foundations.
      "What in the world -- " Helena began.
      "It's Pearlamon and Gonius, at it again!" Hogar the Poisoner said. He
put the raspberry-apple back in the basket, turned and hurried into the main
hall, his robes fluttering behind him.
      "Who are Pearlamon and Gonius?" Jessie asked Tesserax.
      "Two gods," the alien said.
      They followed Hogar into the corridor and saw the source of the thumping
racket that was still going on. In the middle of the hall, half-way back
toward the elevators, two huge maseni males, dressed in little loincloths and
headbands, were wrestling, tossing each other into the walls, lacking and
punching and twisting ears, battering noses and pulling hair and biting necks.
      "Maseni gods are a lively sort," Tesserax explained. "They always have
to be up to something. Wrestling, boxing, engaging in relay races, drinking
and singing..."
      "Well, anyway," Jessie said, "it's not going to get dull around here."


Chapter Nineteen

      That same night, Jessie woke in the dark bedroom and found something
soft and warm filling his mouth. For a moment, he suspected someone was trying
to jam a pillow down his throat, but when he came fully awake, he realized the
truth. He and Helena had gone to sleep while lying on their sides, facing each
other; in the hours since, he had slid toward the foot of the bed, and now he
held one of her delectable, round breasts in his mouth. Or p art of one of her
breasts, anyway. It was difficult, if not impossible, he knew, to hold all of
one of Helena's breasts in his mouth.
      He relaxed when he realized no one was trying to smother him. He would
have been perfectly content to remain like that, nipple on his tongue, until
morning, had he not heard the sound that -- he realized upon hearing it once
more -- had originally awakened him: a moan.
      He tensed, staring into the darkness.
      Silence.
      Imagination?
      Then it came again, a low and agonized cry that originated either in the
drawing room of the suite or from the corridor beyond. It cut across his spine
like an ice pick and ended his sleepy satisfaction. He let go of Helena's
breast and drew gently away from her, sat up and listened for the sound to
come again.
      It did: louder, more drawn out, more agonized than ever, like the cry of
a man who knew he was rapidly dying...
      Jessie slid out of bed, felt around on the floor and found his robe, put
it on and belted it tightly around the waist. His narcotics dart gun was on
the dresser, and he managed to pick it up, check that the magazine was in
place and slip it in a robe pocket without waking anyone. He walked quietly
into the drawing room and stood there in the darkness, waiting.
      Again: moaning.
      Now, he realized that the injured party -- whoever or whatever it was --
was in the corridor beyond the drawing room. Moving quickly across the room,
he pulled the door open and looked into the dimly lit hallway. One of the gods
lay there, in front of the door, sprawled on his back, his hefty arms thrown
out at his sides, his legs spread like two lifeless hunks of dark blubber. His
tentacles wriggled senselessly as he groaned.
      Jessie bent over the prostrate giant and looked into the amber eyes.
"What's the matter?"
      "I've been done in," the god said.
      "Poisoned?"
      "Ah, that dastardly Hogar!" the god said, and he moaned twice as loudly
as before. "He'll do anything for a price."
      "What can I do to help you?" Jessie asked.
      The tentacles wriggled more quickly than ever. "Nothing. Nothing at all!
I have been dealt a foul intestinal blow, and I must succumb. But don't fear,
my friend. I know who paid the dastardly Hogar, and I will seek revenge in my
next life! It was Pearlamon, that odorous piece of godflesh, that pretender to
true divinity!"
      "What's going on here?" Helena asked. She had come, nude, from the
bedroom and stood in the doorway, blinking her eyes.
      Brutus appeared at her side and said, "Skullduggery."
      "Exactly!" the god roared. "I had consumed but a cup of broth when the
convulsions took me. I staggered this far and collapsed, seeking help. Now I
am all but paralyzed, and I know help cannot be obtained. I die, I die!" Down
the hall, Tesserax's door opened, and the maseni official came swaying toward
them, nodding his bulbous head. "What's wrong with you, Gonius?"
      "What appears wrong with me?" the god moaned. "I am the victim of those
I took to be my friends. Trusting, I was stabbed in the back, taken sore
advantage of, used, discarded, betrayed!"
      "Does he always talk so goddamned much?" Brutus asked. "If he does, no
wonder someone poisoned him."
      "Oh, woe, woe!" Gonius cried, thrashing about as the poison seeped
deeper into him.
      "Pay, him no mind," Tesserax said. "He'll rise again, once he's dead,
and he'll be poisoned again, too."
      "Heartless mortal," Gonius said.
      Tesserax leaned over the god and said, "How often have you been poisoned
by Hogar?"
      "At least ten thousand times!" the giant cried. "Is that not proof of
this man's awful villainy?"
      "It is, indeed," Tesserax said. "And it's also proof that we need not
shed any tears or hold any concern over you."
      "What a cruel world it has become," Gonius said, "when a god's own
creatures care not for him."
      "Poor, poor dear," Helena said, reaching out to touch the god's smooth,
waxy face.
      But she was too late with her sympathy, for Gonius gasped and shuddered
one last time, died swiftly after decrying the state of the world.
      "His body's fading away," Jessie observed.
      Slowly, the great hulk was taking on an obvious transparent tone, the
green carpet vaguely visible through it.
      "In a few minutes," Tesserax said, "it will be gone altogether. In the
morning, however, Gonius will be back at the breakfast table, screaming at
Pearlamon and Hogar. It's rather a tedious cycle."
      The body winked out of existence.
      "Well, I suppose there's nothing more we can do," Jessie said.
      "Get your sleep," Tesserax said. "Tomorrow, we begin questioning some
locals about this beast we seek."
      On the way back to their bedroom, Helena said, "Now I'm wide awake."
      "I know just what you need," Jessie said. In the bedroom, he removed his
robe. "A sedative."
      Helena grinned and sat on the bed, reached to fluff the pillows, and
found a note. "What's this?" she asked, picking it up. "It's a note to you,"
she answered, without waiting for him.
      "A note? On my pillow? What's it say?"
      She read: "Mr. Jessie Blake -- Beware all things maseni. Do not stir in
cauldrons that do not concern you. If you persist at this, you will be the
next victim of the beast." She flipped the piece of paper over and looked at
the other side, which was blank. "That's it," she said.

      Tesserax finished reading the note and blinked his yellow eyes as if he
might be able to make the writing disappear. "Well, obviously," he said at
last, "some supernatural creature came into your bedroom while you were in the
hall watching Gonius die. Perhaps it phased through the wall, or pryed open a
window... Clearly, however the note was planted, the maseni supernatural
community does not want you to work on this case."
      Jessie said, "Gonius was a diversion, then?"
      "Probably."
      "We'll question him."
      "My friend, he would only lie. There appears to be enough at stake to
justify lying and even more. Besides, supernaturals who were once gods make
the worst subjects for interrogations. They've got a natural superiority
complex that makes them insufferably rude."
      "But what are we going to do about this?" Helena asked. "Look, Tessie,
we have been nearly illegally bitten by vampires and werewolves, momentarily
terrorized by a Shambler, paralyzed by a sorcerer -- and now we have to worry
about being crushed to death by this mountain monster of yours. I will not --
"
      "Be calm, please," Tesserax said. "I have told you that the monster
destroyed supernaturals as well as flesh-and-blooders. The people who wrote
this not do not control it; indeed, they may be its next victims. They are
bluffing, trying to frighten you off."
      "I just don't know," Helena said.
      "Believe me, my friend," Tesserax said, patting her bare shoulder with
six limpid tentacles. "What I say is true. Besides, maseni supernaturals would
never break the law; especially, they would never kill anyone. Except for this
new beast, of course. But on our world, supernaturals have lived in harmony
with flesh-and-blooders for so many centuries that we have no unapproved
interracial violence."
      "Well..."
      "You know I'm right," the maseni said. "Now, let's all get some sleep
and forget this ugly incident."
      "It won't be easy," Jessie said. He took the note back and read it
through again. "I've never before been threatened by a giant, barrel-footed
monster."
      "When I spoke to my brood brother, Galiotor Fils, the day we left
Earth," the alien said, "he informed me that you had taken on his case for
more than money. Indeed, he felt that money was the least of your interests in
finding how I had died. He said that you were bored, weary of your day-to-day
investigative routine, and that you were desperate for something challenging,
something exciting."
      "Your brood brother talks too much," Brutus said. "I should have given
him an ass full of teeth, like I threatened."
      "We've had plenty of excitement already," Helena said.
      "Ah, I know you won't back out on me," Tesserax said. "None of you is a
coward. And, besides, you don't get paid one thin tenth of a credit if you
don't follow through on this."
      "Maybe I'll give you an ass full of teeth," the hell hound said,
lowering his head and opening his mouth.
      Tesserax brushed nervously at his lipless mouth and looked at the rows
of white teeth that Brutus displayed for his benefit. He said, "Surely, my
friend, you jest!"
      Brutus snarled.
      Jessie said, "There are things more important than money, Tesserax."
      "Yes," Helena said. "For instance: sex, contentment, peace of mind,
freedom from insomnia, having two arms and legs, life in general, fame, fun,
bubble baths and pillow fights."
      Tesserax said, "If I were you, I'd also keep in mind the reaction of my
fellow maseni if you should back out now."
      "And what would that be?" Jessie asked.
      "Well, I should guess, for a starter, they'd charge you with grave
robbing and put out an omni-world bulletin for your arrests."
      "Why a bulletin if you've already got us."
      "I don't think we'd admit we already have you, my friend." Tesserax
smiled, because he saw that, now, he had them over the proverbial barrel, no
matter how shallow that proverb might be and how rotten the barrel.
      "You couldn't hold us against our will," Jessie said. But he knew that
was just so much bravado.
      "That's just so much bravado," Tesserax said.
      "Try us," Brutus growled.
      The alien said, "Your people are only beginning to build a space travel
system, at maseni direction. You'd have to leave here in a maseni ship. Do you
seriously believe you could get tickets?"
      Jessie threw the note on the dresser. "You win."
      Tesserax beamed at each of them in turn. "Fine, fine. Well, shall we get
some sleep so we're at least a bit fresh for the morning?" He turned and
walked to the drawing room, then looked back and said, "Remember, if Hogar
brings you anything for breakfast, don't eat it."


Chapter Twenty

      The maseni hermit's name was Kinibobur Biks, and he was quite ordinary
in appearance: seven feet tall like other maseni, with those startling amber
eyes, bulbous forehead, waxy skin, flap of a nose, lipless mouth, tentacles
for fingers... He was, however, decidedly extraordinary so far as his choice
of clothes was concerned. He wore a red and yellow, quilted woman's robe
(which barely reached his first set of knees) and a pair of out-sized, fuzzy
pink slippers, all imported from Earth.
      "It gets damned cold, living in a cave," he told them, when he saw that
they were staring at his slippers.
      "I can imagine," Brutus said.
      Biks said, "These keep my foot tentacles toasty warm." When they
continued to stare, he got a bit defensive and, in a raised voice, he said,
"And I think they're spiffy as all get out. Very stylish. Real class."
      The way in which the hermit Kinibobur Biks had furnished his retreat,
this cave, was also extraordinary. He had two rooms, separated by a wide
archway, both very comfortably proportioned once you got through the foyer on
your hands and knees. The first chamber contained a shape-changing sofa and
chair, end tables, a battery-powered television, a self-contained power-pak
stereo and pole lamp combination built in the shape of an Earth cow.
      "A strange animal indeed," Kinibobur Biks explained. "We maseni have
never seen any creatures like them. The cow silhouette has become all the rage
in furniture, cookie cutters, ice cube trays -- dozens of things."
      Shortly, he realized that they were not staring at the stereo in
admiration, but in disbelief, and he said, "Let me show you the rest of the
place." It was an obvious maneuver to distract their attention from the
furniture cow, but they followed him into the second room anyway.
      This den contained a self-powered kitchen, including refrigerator,
fusion disposal, oven, grill and pressure cooker. There were also several
chairs and a table. The walls here were hung with full color, three-
dimensional photographs of nude m aseni females lying coyly on fur carpets and
lush grass mats.
      "A hermit gets hungry, like anyone else," Kinibobur Biks explained when
he saw them staring at the elaborate self-powered kitchen. And when they
congregated before the 3-D nudes, he said, rather plaintively, "And a hermit
gets lonely, too, sometimes."
      In the main room again, when they were all seated, Jessie said, "Mr.
Kinibobur, why have you chosen to live in a cave, high in the mountains, as a
hermit?"
      The maseni crossed his thin, wax legs and popped a fuzzy slipper off his
heel, swinging it from his foot tentacles as he spoke. "Modern maseni society
is corrupt, depraved, cut through with greed and self-interest. The modern-day
maseni thinks only of material objects, acquisitions, status symbols, creature
comforts. He has forgotten his rugged individualism. He relies on gadgetry to
serve him and has let his natural talents atrophy."
      "But you've got plenty of gadgetry here," Jessie pointed out "You've got
a modern apartment tucked away in a cave."
      Kinibobur Biks sighed. "You're the first person to see through that
excuse, sir, and I congratulate you for your powers of observation. In
reality, I live here because I have fallen madly in love with an earth sprite
who inhabits the center of the mountain."
      "Earth sprite?" Helena asked.
      The hermit's face became suffused with joy. "She's delightful, Miss. So
svelte, so innocent, a child and yet a woman... Anyway, she cannot leave the
caverns, so I had to come to her. We met twenty years ago, when I went
spelunking with some friends, and we've been lovers ever since. Sometimes, she
calls to me -- with voice as sweet as Coca Cola, and I go deeper into the
mountains to be with her."
      "I see," Jessie said.
      "How lovely," Helena said.
      Tesserax said, "Well, let's get off your personal life for a while, my
friend, and discuss the events that transpired here exactly forty days ago."
      "When the village was destroyed," the hermit said.
      "That's correct."
      "I was with Zemena at the time, you know. I didn't have any inkling what
was going on."
      "Zemena is this earth sprite?" Jessie asked.
      "That's her, yes," Kinibobur Biks said. "She had called to me early in
the day, and I went to be with her. We made passionate love in a basin of warm
volcanic mud."
      "Wonderful," Brutus growled.
      "But you were the first to find the ruined village, were you not?"
Tesserax inquired.
      The hermit nodded, frowning. "Oh, it was a horrible sight! Bodies
everywhere, crushed and torn, ripped as if by giant claws, limb smashed from
limb. Blood in pools, enough to fill a lake. The houses were all demolished,
tottering piles of debris, the stones crushed, the mortar powdered, the wood
splintered and smouldering. Fluttercars lay in mangled heaps, and all the
other artifacts of village life had shattered or run together in long streams
of slag. Fires had raged and died; smoke still curled like a hateful mist
through all that remained."
      "You saw the tracks?" Jessie asked.
      "Huge footprints," the hermit said. "It was those that made me turn and
run for help."
      "You saw no beast?"
      "No. I was too late for that."
      "Did you follow the tracks?"
      "They faded out, led nowhere."
      There was little more that Kinibobur Biks could tell them, but he was
very good at describing the horror of the ruined village. Jessie had him run
through that, in more detail, asking questions time and again, until there did
not seem to be anything else they could gain from the hermit.
      Outside the cave, on the narrow dirt path that led down to the road
below and the charred sight of the blasted village, Jessie turned to Tesserax
and said, "He was a strange one."
      "We have many strange ones," Tesserax said. "Especially near these
mountains. So much myth is centered here... It's a crazy place. Recently, we
have had Earth vampires here who have established a clinic to help their kind
kick the blood habit, regardless of their myth requirements. We have had
couvani, our race's werewolves, coming to a doctor here for electrolytic
removal of excess hair. A group of the old gods have gotten together to
worship the people that created them, even though they understand that the
man-myth relationship is like your chicken and its egg. And just two weeks
ago, we had the first recorded suicides of supernaturals in the history of our
planet."
      "Two supernatural creatures took their own lives?" Jessie asked as they
drew toward the bottom of the path.
      "That's right. They sat down facing each other and said a forbidden
chant from one of the old books. They apparently synchronized their voices so
well that they reached the last line precisely together and dissipated each
other simultaneously."
      Jessie said no more until they had reached the ruined village and stood
in the shadows of the blasted walls that still thrust up here and there. He
stared at the vista of scorched stone and charred wood, and he said, "I'd like
to have a report on that, in detail."
      Tesserax followed his gaze across the demolished town, and said, "On
this? An analysis of the rubble?"
      "No, no. Those suicides."
      "Whatever for?"
      'They might tie in."
      "I doubt it very much," Tesserax said.
      "Who's the detective around here?" Brutus asked the alien. "You?"
      Tesserax said, "Well, okay."
      "In a short time, in the same area, you've experienced two unheard of
events: supernatural suicides and this marauding beast. It would be stretching
things a bit to call that coincidental. Coincidence is a word used by men who
are too lazy to find real reasons."
      "You'll have that report tonight," Tesserax said.


Chapter Twenty-One

      The remainder of that day, they spoke with four other maseni who had
been the first on the scene after one or the other of the two disasters, and
all of these tended to repeat, in their own words, what the hermit Kinibobur
Biks had said. The only major difference was that these witnesses lived in
ordinary maseni houses and did not wear fuzzy,pink bedroom slippers.
      Late in the afternoon, they met with subjects six and seven, their last
witnesses for the day, and these, surprisingly, had something vital to offer.
What they contributed was not, however, obvious. In fact, at the time, they
seemed to add very little to Jessie's fund of knowledge. Later, thinking over
the events of the day, he would connect their attitude to other bits and
pieces, begin to build a crazy picture...
      The last two witnesses were both supernaturals, one of them maseni in
origin, the other born of Earth mythology. The maseni was a mist demon by the
name of Yilio, a shapeless mass of vapor, blue-white and icy cold, that hung
together despite the way it whirled and roiled upon itself. He had no face or
mouth, but that did not keep him from speaking. His voice was a hissing
whisper that made Jessie uncomfortable. Yilio's wife, an Earth-born female
angel named Hannah, didn't seem to mind her mate's voice or the pervasive
chill he brought to their small apartment in a town not more than half an hour
from the Gilorelamans Inn. She sat with him hovering over and around her, now
and then preening her neatly clipped, golden wings. She always had a smile on
her face, a big smile when she listened to him talk.
      The strangest thing about the couple was their eagerness to question
Jessie, thereby turning the tables a bit. For every piece of data he got from
them, he had to give back twice as much. They wanted to know everything: how
an earth detective had gotten into the case; whether news of the new monster's
existence had reached the general public on Earth; what the Pure Earthers were
like. Several times, one or the other of them returned to a single, central
question:
      "If this crisis isn't solved, if the beast can't easily be contained and
destroyed, and if the news of its existence is leaked back to Earth, what will
this do to Earth-maseni relations?" Yilio asked it, this time.
      Jessie regarded the mist demon, wishing it had a face where he might
read expressions, guess thoughts. "The Pure Earthers will be upset,
naturally."
      "Is there any chance they could win converts, gain political power?"
Hannah asked, brushing golden curls from her cherubic face.
      "No," Jessie said.
      "Not even an outside chance?" Hannah asked.
      "The Pure Earthers are borderline Shockies. No one will take their
agitating seriously, even if it were learned the maseni were having trouble
with a murderous supernatural. The gates have been opened. It's too late to
close them now. Relations with our supernatural brothers are too advanced for
us to return to total ignorance of them." He looked at his notepad, found his
place, and said, "Now, just two more questions..."
      The remainder of that interview should have taken ten minutes. It
lasted, instead, nearly half an hour, because Yilio and Hannah were not done
with their own interrogation, still interested in the nature of the Pure Earth
movement.
      At the time, Jessie was bothered by their interruptions, but he assigned
no special value to their questions. He thought that they were merely curious
and talkative by nature. Later, he realized that their behaviour, their
curiosity, was another thread in the rope of an explanation which he was
slowly twining together.
      Somewhat depressed that the day had, apparently, yielded so little, the
quartet returned to the inn an hour before nightfall, piled out of their
robot-driven limousine and went inside.
      Hogar was waiting for them in the foyer. "Welcome back, honored
visitors," he said. "Would you care for any home world salted seeds?" He held
out a container full of little brown spheres.
      They all declined. In no mood to humor anyone, they pressed past the
poisoner toward the elevators. When they were within a few yards of the lifts,
the doors on the nearest slid open, and one of the giant maseni gods, fully
ten feet tall, staggered out and fell on his face, clutching his stomach and
screaming at the top of his voice.
      Jessie stepped around the god and punched the service button to call
another lift. "Hello, Pearlamon," he said.
      The oversized maseni myth figure rolled onto its back and looked up.
"You're the detective? Arrest this Tooner Hogar! He has slipped me something
in my milk, some dire concoction, some horrendous poison that is burning out
my innards."
      "You'll feel all right in a few minutes," Jessie said, disinterestedly,
smiling fatuously. "You'll be dead."
      "Nobody cares anymore!" Pearlamon yelled.
      "That's right," Jessie said.
      "That ruthless Gonius can do as he pleases, hire the murderous Hogar to
poison me, and no one cares!"
      Tesserax and the three Earth people crowded into the lift that popped
open for them, and they ascended, leaving Pearlamon to his temporary death
throes in the hotel lobby.
      Two hours later, as they sat at a collapsible dining table in the main
room of the suite, eating a dinner which the robot had prepared for them and
tested for subtle poisons, Hogar brought a message for Tesserax. He knocked
lightly at the door, and when the maseni answered, he handed him an olive-drab
envelope. "This came for you by courier," Hogar said. "The courier is
downstairs, having a drink on the house, so I thought I'd better bring this
around myself."
      Tesserax accepted the envelope and said, "Thank you," rather coldly,
realizing that the courier would shortly be -- if he weren't already --
doubled up in the hotel bathroom with nausea or diarrhea.
      "And," Hogar said, "in hopes that your important investigation has been
proceeding as you would like it to, I have brought you a bottle of wine to
celebrate."
      Tesserax hesitated.
      Hogar showed him the label. "A fine vintage."
      Tesserax opted for the easiest course, took the bottle and said, "Thank
you, Hogar."
      "It's nothing, nothing at all," the poisoner said. "Drink hearty, now!"
      Tesserax closed the door, dropped the unopened bottle into the nearest
wastecan and returned to the table. He handed Jessie the envelope. "It's the
report that you asked for -- on the suicides of those two supernaturals."
      Jessie put it on the table, beside his plate. "I'll read it later," he
said, "after I've stewed over everything else we've got."
      Later, after Tesserax had left and they were alone, Jessie reached for
the report and held it in both hands, looking at it, not opening it yet,
waiting to be sure it was time. He had a certain intuition about how to
proceed on a case, when it was right to consider datum, what order one should
string the clues together for maximum and swiftest solutions. Right now, he
wasn't sure about the wisdom of reading the suicide report. He felt that he
had not let other things jell enough, that it would only cloud his theories
instead of clear them, at this point. Something else should be done first.
      Helena said, "This has been an exciting case."
      He looked up, across the table, and saw she'd removed her gown. Her
heavy breasts thrust across her dirty plate, the nipples turgid. "It sure
has," he agreed.
      "Better than divorce jobs," Brutus agreed.
      "On the other hand," Helena said, "it's been dull."
      "Oh?" Jessie asked. "In what way?"
      "If you have to ask, you've proven my point. With all that's been going
on, we've not had much time for tumbling in the proverbial hay -- or in
anything, for that matter."
      She stood up and slid one hand along her flat belly, to her tangle of
dark pubic curls.
      Jessie put the envelope down. He had known there was something else to
do, first, before reading that report. He just hadn't been able to think what
it was. Now he remembered as, jiggling, Helena walked toward him.

      Everyone was asleep but Jessie. He sat up against the headboard of the
huge bed, trying to enjoy the gentle lines of Helena's nude body as she lay
outside the covers: slightly sagging breasts, deep insweep of waist, thrust of
hip, undulating curves of thighs and calves and ankles... But he couldn't keep
his mind on her; his thoughts kept returning to the suicide report. When he
found himself staring at her flat belly but thinking about the olive envelope,
he knew it was time to read what Tesserax had given him. He had thought out
all the other points.
      He got up, slipped into his robe and went into the main drawing room,
pulled the bedroom door shut and sat down at the dinner table which the robot
had cleared. He tore open the envelope, separated twelve sheets of print and
began to read.
      When he was half finished with the report, Pearlamon or Gonius or one of
the other gods staying on the second floor staggered out of his room, moaning
loudly, cursing Hogar. Jessie ignored the hysterical cries for help, and they
soon ceased. He kept reading. When he finished and considered what he had read
in conjunction with what else he had heard and seen, he knew he had the
answer. He knew what and why the murderous beast was...


Chapter Twenty-Two

      Brutus returned with Tesserax, who closed the door and joined Jessie,
Helena and the service robot at the table in the middle of the room. "Is it
true -- you know what the beast is?"
      "Yes," Jessie said.
      "And you know how to destroy it?"
      "I believe so," the detective said. "I'll have a chance to prove that
tonight. If I'm right, the beast knows we're here and it will be coming after
us, before dawn."
      Tesserax was unsettled by this revelation. He fluttered tentacles before
his own mouth, smoothed his robes, patted the top of his head. "Well! Well,
then we best unpack the EmRec." He turned to the service robot and gave that
order.
      "EmRec?" Jessie asked.
      The service robot opened a large trunk which they had brought with them,
pulled an airtight plastic seal away and activated the machine that waited
inside.
      "EmRec means 'Emergency Recording System'," Tesserax explained. "It's a
device adapted especially for this case."
      A four-foot-high robot, in maseni form, waddled out of the trunk,
swiveled its head to look at each of them, and toddled to the only empty
chair, dragged itself into the seat and said, "I'm ready."
      "You'll notice how compact the EmRec is," Tesserax said. "It has only
stumpy legs, stumpy arms, and no differentiating 'neck' between its head and
body."
      "Yeah," Brutus said. "It looks like a dwarf robot."
      "This compact design, in addition to the thick armored plating that
covers the EmRec's taping areas, makes it nearly indestructible. It can 'live'
through one of the beast's attacks. If the rest of us should perish, it will
have a record of our progress to pass on to the next team of investigators, so
they need not start from scratch."
      Helena said, "But why such an elaborate machine? Would a regular, micro-
miniaturized, armored recorder have done as well, one that didn't walk and
talk?"
      "No," Tesserax said. "The EmRec not only records, but makes comments on
the tapes about facial expressions and gestures -- comments we won't hear, but
which those who later listen to the tape might find valuable." Tesserax sat
down and looked away from the EmRec. "Shall we get on with it, then? What is
this beast that's killed so wantonly, Mr. Blake?"
      Jessie cast one last glance at the stumpy EmRec, then began his detailed
explanation. "You thought my alien viewpoint might give me a fresh enough
slant to solve this puzzle where your best minds could not, and you were
correct. The clues were obvious. Some of them, however, were things you were
so accustomed to that you took them for granted. I didn't; they were unique
things to me, and I employed them in seeking a solution."
      "Excuse me," EmRec said.
      Jessie looked at the metal dwarf. "Yes?"
      "Would say your expression, there, was one of smug self-satisfaction or
a more mild and simple pleasure at your supposed success? That is to say, can
we assume your explanation is untainted by egotism, or is there a shading
element of the ego involved?"
      Tesserax said, "Some ego, clearly. But I believe Mr. Blake's facial
expression was more simple satisfaction that smugness."
      "Proceed," the EmRec said.
      Jessie gathered his wits and said, "First of all there was your new myth
figure -- the Drunken D river. I was aware that new myths are constantly
generated, but not that cross-racial myths could spring up. From the moment I
realized this possibility, I kept it in mind throughout the interviewing of
other witnesses, in weighing everything I saw and heard. Your own people
wouldn't have considered it particularly relevant. Next, I considered how
rough the supernaturals have played to keep us from learning anything about
this affair. It seemed to me that they were aware of a new myth, springing
from maseni-human cultural interaction, but were desperate to keep its nature
unknown for fear of losing something. When I talked with the mist demon Yilio
and his angel wife Hannah, I suspected that what they feared was a law -- or
an Earth government partial to such a law -- that would forbid marriage
between maseni and human supernaturals. The only thing that could generate the
demand for a law like that would be some calamitous result of interracial,
supernatural breeding. In other words, if a maseni-human supernatural couple
produced offspring that was dangerous, the Pure Earthers might get enough
power, from public fear, to force through a law forbidding all interracial
marriages."
      Tesserax was impressed. "Then you think this beast is the offspring of
the coupling of maseni and human supernaturals?"
      "Excuse me," EmRec said. "Mr. Galiotor Tesserax, is that a look of awe
on your face or merely one of surprise? It is difficult for me to give it a
certain interpretation. I apologize for the interruption, but I think one of
my sight circuits was jolted loose during shipment."
      "It was surprise and awe," Tesserax said.
      "Thank you. Proceed."
      Jessie took a moment, recovered, and said, "Yes, your beast is the child
of an interracial, supernatural marriage. And I believe I can explain why this
marriage produced an insane myth creature, a killer. You'll remember our
discussion of the Protector in the space port when we landed. You said some
people felt that those invading aliens, centuries ago, had not been able to
live on this planet because some quirk in its geography, in its natural
magnetic forces, was deadly to them."
      "I recall," Tesserax said.
      "Isn't it also possible," the detective went on, "that the same quirk
might affect the offspring of certain supernatural marriages. Mind you, I'm
not saying that all Earth myths who couple with maseni myths will produce
unruly monsters. But isn't it feasible that one particular maseni species,
matched with one particular Earth species, could produce an insane child by
reason of your world's magnetic make-up, whatever that may be?"
      "Perfectly possible," Tesserax said.
      "Gentlemen," the EmRec said, "I wonder -- "
      "It was awe, this time. No surprise, just awe," Tesserax said.
      "Thank you," the dwarf robot said. "Proceed."
      Jessie said, "Finally, the suicide report convinced me that I was on the
right track. Two unprecedented incidents, so close together in time and space,
seemed more than coincidental to me. I felt the suicides were somehow tied in
with the marauding monster. Now, I believe that the couple who took their own
lives were the parents of this killer plaguing your people. In horror at what
they had unleashed, they took their own lives in a sort of warped atonement
for the deaths of those people in the ruined villages." He picked up the
suicide report, referred to it. "If the suicides were the parents of this
monster, then its mother was Kekiopa, a little-known Carribbean storm goddess
elemental worshipped by a small voodoo cult. And the father was a maseni myth
figure, Ityitsil the Reptile Master."
      "Fascinating," Tesserax said.
      "EmRec," Brutus said, "you can describe me as awe-stricken, too."
      "Proceed," EmRec said.
      Tesserax said, "How do you propose to locate this beast, this cross-bred
monster?"
      "It will locate us," Jessie said. "Part of the myth of the storm goddess
is that she knows what transpires in every nook and cranny where her breezes
blow. If the child inherited this mythical omniscience, it has known about all
our comings and goings today. It will seek and destroy us. It knows we're
here, just as it knew to avoid those traps your people set for it in the
past."
      "But if it knows we're here," Tesserax said, "it also knows we might be
able to destroy it. It knows that you've plumbed its secret."
      "It can't know that," the detective said. "It can't, because its many
breezes do not reach inside four walls; indoors, it has no powers of
observation, no ears and eyes."
      Helena said, "Then, if it's on its way, we should be looking for some
way to deal with it."
      Jessie smiled, started to speak, turned to EmRec and said, "Yes, my ego
is showing. I am smugly satisfied with myself."
      "I thought you were," EmRec said. "I already commented to that effect,
on my inner tapes." It waved one stubby hand again. "Proceed."
      Jessie said, "I cracked my mythology books and found out how to destroy,
how to disintegrate the souls, of each of the monster's parents."
      "But they're already dead," Tesserax said.
      It was Helena who was smiling smugly now. "Yes, they are, Tessie. But
what Jessie means is -- if we go through the rituals for dissipating both the
mother and the father, the combination ought to dissipate the child -- the
beast."
      "Exactly," Jessie said. "Now, to destroy the storm goddess, one has only
to repeat this voodoo chant -- " he tapped an open book, " -- and throw a few
drops of fresh human blood into her winds. To dissipate a Reptile Master, one
must merely repeat a certain maseni prayer and pierce him with a silver
shaft."
      "Therefore," Helena continued, "when we confront this beast, one of us
will say the voodoo thing and throw blood into the wind, while someone else
repeats the maseni prayer and fires a silver shaft into the creature's hide."
      Tesserax got to his feet, patting the top of his head excitedly. "Two
questions come to mind, straight off. First, where will we obtain this silver
shaft, on such short notice?"
      Jessie said, "I have a dip of silver narcotics darts which I use in my
pistol on Earth when I know I might have to shoot werewolves as well as human
beings. There's not enough silver in the darts to kill a supernatural like a
werewolf, but it stings them badly and keeps them back. And, judging from what
I've read of your Reptile Masters, a few silver pins should turn the
dissipation trick."
      "And what about the human blood?" Tesserax asked.
      "The service robot operates a roboclinic out of one of these trunks he
brought along, doesn't he?" the detective asked.
      "Yes. On any dangerous mission, a roboclinic -- "
      Jessie interrupted: "We can have him take a blood sample from me, and I
can throw that into the air."
      "Will that be sufficient quantity of blood to meet the myth
requirements?" the maseni asked.
      "Yes, according to this UN text of mine."
      Excitedly, Tesserax said, "Then we are ready for it -- or nearly so! If
it should come after us tonight -- "
      He was interrupted by a long, blood-curdling scream, a roaring, a
thundering voice that shook the windows in their panes and made the mythical
inn tremble violently on its mythical foundation.
      "Already?" Tesserax asked.
      Jessie said, "We had best move fast."
      EmRec said, "Excuse me, gentlemen, but would you say that scream was
merely one of rage -- or was it touched by madness? I think maybe my audio
receptors were jarred a bit, in transport, in addition to my scanners."


Chapter Twenty-Three

      The home world's two large moons shone down on the detective, the woman,
the hell hound, Tesserax, the service robot, EmRec, Hogar the Poisoner, and a
couple of giant, loin-clothed maseni gods as the group gathered behind the
inn, facing the dark snow forests on, the higher slopes of Piotimkin. The
booming, inhuman voice came from that direction. Soon, the thing would appear.
      "Anyone like a cookie?" Hogar asked. He passed a box of them around; the
box came back to him, still full.
      EmRec said, "Mr. Hogar, sir, is that some form of mad expectancy on your
face, or do you suffer from indigestion?"
      "Drop a bolt," Hogar snarled.
      The stubby robot said, "I wouldn't have to ask if my sight circuits and
interpretation nodes hadn't been badly jarred in transport."
      "Strip your threads," Hogar said, meaner than before.
      Now, from upslope, came the sound of the giant conifers splitting apart
like tiny saplings to make way for the monster. Trees crashed down, colliding
noisily with other trees. Frightened woodland animals called out and rushed
forth into the open meadow that separated the inn from the trees.
      "There!" Helena cried.
      Something enormous reared out of the last of the pines. Trees fell
before it, revealing it in the pale moonlight.
      "Ugly bastard, isn't he?" Brutus asked.
      A core of violent winds, churning like beater blades on a mixmaster,
whipped the trees and tore up the meadow sod and hurled it skyward in fist-
sized chunks. The animals that had run into the meadow now ran out again,
screeching shrilly, bellowing in terror. At the center of the maelstrom lay
the more concretized aspect of the beast: a thirty-foot lizard which looked
much like its father but was twice as large as a Reptile Master and a thousand
times meaner. It turned green eyes on them and ran a pebbled tongue over rows
of sabrelike teeth, started lumbering in their direction. Each of its six feet
left barrel-sized depressions in the earth.
      "I can't interpret the monster's facial expressions at all," EmRec said.
"And considering that its bellows really convey no meaning, I should really
get something down here, I don't suppose one of you gentlemen is in the mood
to assist?"
      "Pop a rivet," Hogar snapped, still holding his big boxful of poisoned
cookies.
      "I didn't think you'd be in the mood," the metal dwarf said.
      Helena had begun the voodoo chant, while Brutus began to read the maseni
prayer that would help dissipate the father's heritage. Jessie held both the
vial of blood and the narcotics dart pistol loaded with silver pins.
      "Blood," Hogar said, sarcastically. "Everyone derides me. But I'll tell
you one thing -- poisoning is at least neat."
      The gargantuan had crossed a third of the meadow and was picking up
speed, bearing down on them with the determination of a wounded bear and the
momentum of a freight train.
      The maseni gods began to nonchalantly back away from the scene, their
eyes wide in terror but not yet terrified enough to soil their godly
reputations with a display of cowardice.
      "Hurry with the chants!" Tesserax cried.
      "That was raw fear," EmRec said, smugly. "That was the clearest
expression of naked terror that I have ever seen, Mr. Galiotor."
      Tesserax did not respond. Indeed, he had not even heard the dwarf, for
his own loud screaming.
      The earth shook with the dragon's approach. The force of the winds hit
them and pasted their clothes tight against them; Tesserax's orange robes
splashed out colorfully in his wake.
      Jessie threw the blood into the wind as Helena finished her chant, then
dropped to one knee and fired a dozen silver darts at the dragon's belly just
as Brutus came to the final verse of the maseni prayer. The effect was quite
dramatic. The charging beast jerked, staggered clumsily to the side, fell down
and rolled past them, into the back of the inn. Mythical boards burst, and
mythical windows shattered...
      "It worked!" Tesserax cried.
      "Elation," EmRec said. "Or is it surprise? It might even be relief of a
sort..."
      The dragon wailed and writhed, trying to regain its feet. But there was
no use to its struggles. The winds around it had abated. Already it was
becoming transparent, like a milk glass novelty in the pale moonlight.
      A few minutes later, Tesserax said, "It's gone. We did it, Blake! Or,
rather, you did it, my friend."
      The animals, having fled to the far edges of the meadow, came slowly
back toward the trees, now, sniffing the air where the beast had once walked.
      "This calls for a celebration!" Hogar said. "Food, wine, candies and
spices! All on the house, of course."
      Pearlamon said, "I must admit, Mr. Blake, that many of us k new what the
beast was. But we hoped to find a way to destroy it ourselves, without letting
the secret out." He was munching on some peanuts which he had taken from a
pouch in his loincloth, and his words were somewhat slurred. "But now that you
and your brave companions -- " He stopped, looked startled, dropped the
peanuts and grabbed his throat. "Ach!" he said.
      Hogar giggled.
      "Ach, ach, ach," Pearlamon choked.
      Jessie turned away from the god as he fell onto his back. To Brutus, the
detective said, "You know, you were right when you said I had a latent fear of
becoming a Shockie like my folks. I don't have that fear any more. If I can
keep my perspective in the midst of this crazy gang, I know I can adjust to
anything at all."
      "I never was afraid of change or of danger or of crazy creatures,"
Helena said. "Excitement always makes me horny, that's all."
      "Ah, hah!" EmRec said. "I recognized that expression. Boy oh boy! Your
face was a mask of sheer lust." The metal dwarf looked at Jessie and said,
"Oh, and yours too, yours too!" He paused. "Or maybe yours isn't lust Perhaps
you're constipated? I have a faulty visual node here, and I can't tell for
sure. Is it, maybe, a tick in your cheek? Or could it be... No. I think what
it is, you have had a religious revelation, a miraculous... No, not that
either. Your expression is more one of... Or is it? Well now..."