The Haunted Earth

'Jessie, the window!' Helena cried, pointing.

A shadow moved against the outside as some supernatural beast tried to peer in at them.

'Jessie Black… Jessie Black… Jessie Black…' The inhuman voice was moaning again, filled with an almost tangible evil, like an audible syrup.

'My name's not Black,' Jessie shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth, to be sure his voice would carry through the thick door. 'It's Jessie Blake, you idiots!'

Beyond the door, several voices rose in argument and consternation, gradually subsided. Then the haunting cry came again, hollow and far away, as if it echoed from the far shore of an infinitely wide sea… 'Jessie Blake… Jessie Blake…'

'What do you want?' he asked.

'You can't escape us…. Why don't you open the door and let us in, make it easy for everyone…?'

'Never!'

'Be reasonable,' the inhuman voice said. 'What have you got to gain by being bullheaded in the face of such overwhelming opposition? Be sensible.'

'You're a bunch of unprincipled hoodlums,' Jessie said.

'If you force us to break in there, you can be certain we'll treat you twice as harshly as we otherwise might. And we will show no mercy at all for the lady.'

Jessie felt like he was in a movie — the one in which the prison rioters are locked in a cell block with the warden as their hostage and the governor pleading with them to give up and come out without their weapons.

'Have it your own way, then,' the inhuman voice said at last. Whatever the creature was — vampire, werewolf or something more strange than that — it sounded hurt, as if it were about to start pouting over his rebuke. 'Well just have to come in the hard way, Mr. Black.'

'Blake!' he roared.

Before the voice could correct itself, the mausoleum windows to their right and toward the front of the building shattered explosively. Thousands of pieces of dirty glass showered into the ranks of opened coffins, and glass tinkled on the gray cement floor. Both Jessie and Helena were unhurt, for the windows were too far forward to break over them.

When the last of the glass had fallen, all was quiet as — a tomb. For a brief moment. The quiet was broken, this time, by the sound of wings as bats flapped through the windows into the musty room, banging into the wooden frame and into each other, in their eagerness to attack.

Jessie grabbed for his luminescent crucifix, caught it in the lining of his jacket pocket, tore his coat getting it out, then dropped it. He felt like Zeke Kanastorous: no thumbs. He bent and picked the cross up again, just in time to face Count Slavek who had metamorphosed from a bat into a man. The Count had stepped forward, reaching for them, grinning a grin that was crammed full of fangs.

'Stop right where you are!' the detective ordered, brandishing his plastic weapon.

The bloodsucker saw the crucifix and recoiled from it in a flurry of satin-lined cape.

Jessie waved the cross again, to make his point.

Slavek hissed and held out one long-fingered, fish-belly-white hand, as if he thought his pointed finger would somehow destroy the hated object. Then he looked more closely at the crucifix and said, scornfully, 'How crass. How cheap. How little-minded and tasteless.'

Hugging Helena against his side, Jessie said, 'Well, it only cost two credits in a relic shop, so you can't expect too much.'

The other vampires formed into men, the little animal faces giving way to human countenances that looked no more innocent, no less terrifying. All eyes were on the detective and the girl; many pairs of saliva-wet fangs shone in the dim, yellow light. Bloodshot eyes were more in evidence than at the second morning of an Elks convention.

A werewolf leaped through the broken window, foam flying from its open mouth. It raised up onto its hind feet and clawed the air with manlike hands whose claws must have measured nearly six inches.

'You can't last much longer,' Slavek said.

'Sure we can,' Jessie said, clutching the crucifix so tightly he was afraid it might shatter in his hand. He couldn't loosen his grip, though; he hoped it was made of tempered plastic. 'This little device I'm holding will keep you, and the werewolves, away from us.'

'But it will mean nothing to the sorcerer,' Slavek said. 'He'll be here in a moment, to put a spell on you. When you're both mesmerized, he'll make you drop the cross. Then we'll move in.'

The bloodsuckers murmured excitedly. Several of those watching Helena licked their pale lips with relish.

Even as Slavek finished speaking, the sorcerer levitated through the nearest broken window. He was lying in the air, flat on his back, his arms folded across his skinny chest. His black robes hung straight down from him. Oddly, his beard had risen straight up, and although the sorcerer was horizontal to the earth, the beard was vertical; it met his chin at a ninety-degree angle. The old man rotated slowly, until he was vertical himself, and his feet touched the floor. Now, his three-foot-long beard stuck straight out from his chin, horizontal to the earth, still perpendicular to the rest of him. He slapped at it with both hands, to no avail, then gripped it firmly and dragged it down until it hung straight. However, when he let go of it, it snapped up again, jutting out three feet in front of him.

'Excuse me,' the old man said. 'I always have problems with that spell. I'm afraid I've never mastered levitation as well as some.' He turned his back on everyone, huddled against himself and muttered some chant in a language that Jessie did not understand. When he turned around, his beard was hanging straight down, as it should be. 'There,' he said. 'Now, we're ready to get on with it.'

'Get this bastard off me!' Willie Whitlock said, as Brutus snapped at his pallid nose.

'I'm afraid the young couple is our first order of business,' the sorcerer said. 'Will you put down the crucifix, Mr. Blake?'

'No.'

'Then I must make you put it down,' the old man said. He raised his arms and began another chant.

'Look,' Jessie said, 'the Tesserax affair can't be so important that it's worth breaking the law over.'

The sorcerer continued to mumble.

'You know you can't keep this atrocity hidden forever, don't you? You know that one day you will all be severely punished for what you're doing to us. Some of you might even have your souls dissipated. Think about that. No more bites after that, legal or illegal!'

The sorcerer chanted, unmoved.

'Jessie,' Helena said, 'I'm getting numb.'

He felt his own feet turn into twin blocks of ice. As the chill rose swiftly above his knees, he said, 'There's still plenty of time to reconsider this, gentlemen.'

Slavek grinned fiercely and tested the points of his handsome fangs against the ball of his thumb. He seemed to feel they were sharp enough.

The chill was up to Jessie's hips.

'Brutus, can't you stop them from doing this?' the detective asked. 'Can't you go for the sorcerer's throat?'

The hell hound said, 'I'd love to. But I'd have to get off Willie to do that, and then he'd be up and after you; he'd knock the crucifix out of your hands anyway.'

'Jessie, no!' Helena cried.

He knew exactly what had caused her terrified exclamation. The chill had reached his own shoulders. In a moment, it would travel down his arms, would affect the hand that now held the crucifix.

'Soon,' Slavek said, clearly thinking of Renee Cuyler as he stared at Helena's breasts and then slowly upward to her slim neck.

The chill reached Jessie's hands.

He watched his fingers open.

The crucifix fell to the floor.

Screeching with delight, Slavek started forward.

'Stop where you are! Police!' The voice came from the broken windows, behind the vampires and the two