The Haunted Earth

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