The Haunted Earth

by Dean R. Koontz

  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 maseni 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 o
f 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….