The Haunted Earth

by Dean R. Koontz

  "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."