The Haunted Earth

'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 said, 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 again 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…'