The Haunted Earth

Dean Koontz The Haunted Earth

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