The Haunted Earth

Chapter Twenty

The maseni hermit's name was Kinibobur Biks, and he was quite ordinary in appearance: seven feet tall like other maseni, with those startling amber eyes, bulbous forehead, waxy skin, flap of a nose, lipless mouth, tentacles for fingers…. He was, however, decidedly extraordinary so far as his choice of clothes was concerned. He wore a red and yellow, quilted woman's robe (which barely reached his first set of knees) and a pair of out-sized, fuzzy pink slippers, all imported from Earth.

'It gets damned cold, living in a cave,' he told them, when he saw that they were staring at his slippers.

'I can imagine,' Brutus said.

Biks said, 'These keep my foot tentacles toasty warm.' When they continued to stare, he got a bit defensive and, in a raised voice, he said, 'And I think they're spiffy as all get out. Very stylish. Real class.'

The way in which the hermit Kinibobur Biks had furnished his retreat, this cave, was also extraordinary. He had two rooms, separated by a wide archway, both very comfortably proportioned once you got through the foyer on your hands and knees. The first chamber contained a shape-changing sofa and chair, end tables, a battery- powered television, a self-contained power-pak stereo and pole lamp combination built in the shape of an Earth cow.

'A strange animal indeed,' Kinibobur Biks explained. 'We maseni have never seen any creatures like them. The cow silhouette has become all the rage in furniture, cookie cutters, ice cube trays — dozens of things.'

Shortly, he realized that they were not staring at the stereo in admiration, but in disbelief, and he said, 'Let me show you the rest of the place.' It was an obvious maneuver to distract their attention from the furniture cow, but they followed him into the second room anyway.

This den contained a self-powered kitchen, including refrigerator, fusion disposal, oven, grill and pressure cooker. There were also several chairs and a table. The walls here were hung with full color, three-dimensional photographs of nude maseni females lying coyly on fur carpets and lush grass mats.

'A hermit gets hungry, like anyone else,' Kinibobur Biks explained when he saw them staring at the elaborate self-powered kitchen. And when they congregated before the 3-D nudes, he said, rather plaintively, 'And a hermit gets lonely, too, sometimes.'

In the main room again, when they were all seated, Jessie said, 'Mr. Kinibobur, why have you chosen to live in a cave, high in the mountains, as a hermit?'

The maseni crossed his thin, wax legs and popped a fuzzy slipper off his heel, swinging it from his foot tentacles as he spoke. 'Modern maseni society is corrupt, depraved, cut through with greed and self-interest. The modern-day maseni thinks only of material objects, acquisitions, status symbols, creature comforts. He has forgotten his rugged individualism. He relies on gadgetry to serve him and has let his natural talents atrophy.'

'But you've got plenty of gadgetry here,' Jessie pointed out 'You've got a modern apartment tucked away in a cave.'

Kinibobur Biks sighed. 'You're the first person to see through that excuse, sir, and I congratulate you for your powers of observation. In reality, I live here because I have fallen madly in love with an earth sprite who inhabits the center of the mountain.'

'Earth sprite?' Helena asked.

The hermit's face became suffused with joy. 'She's delightful, Miss. So svelte, so innocent, a child and yet a woman…. Anyway, she cannot leave the caverns, so I had to come to her. We met twenty years ago, when I went spelunking with some friends, and we've been lovers ever since. Sometimes, she calls to me — with voice as sweet as Coca Cola, and I go deeper into the mountains to be with her.'

'I see,' Jessie said.

'How lovely,' Helena said.

Tesserax said, 'Well, let's get off your personal life for a while, my friend, and discuss the events that transpired here exactly forty days ago.'

'When the village was destroyed,' the hermit said.

'That's correct.'

'I was with Zemena at the time, you know. I didn't have any inkling what was going on.'

'Zemena is this earth sprite?' Jessie asked.

'That's her, yes,' Kinibobur Biks said. 'She had called to me early in the day, and I went to be with her. We made passionate love in a basin of warm volcanic mud.'

'Wonderful,' Brutus growled.

'But you were the first to find the ruined village, were you not?' Tesserax inquired.

The hermit nodded, frowning. 'Oh, it was a horrible sight! Bodies everywhere, crushed and torn, ripped as if by giant claws, limb smashed from limb. Blood in pools, enough to fill a lake. The houses were all demolished, tottering piles of debris, the stones crushed, the mortar powdered, the wood splintered and smouldering. Fluttercars lay in mangled heaps, and all the other artifacts of village life had shattered or run together in long streams of slag. Fires had raged and died; smoke still curled like a hateful mist through all that remained.'

'You saw the tracks?' Jessie asked.

'Huge footprints,' the hermit said. 'It was those that made me turn and run for help.'

'You saw no beast?'

'No. I was too late for that.'

'Did you follow the tracks?'

'They faded out, led nowhere.'

There was little more that Kinibobur Biks could tell them, but he was very good at describing the horror of the ruined village. Jessie had him run through that, in more detail, asking questions time and again, until there did not seem to be anything else they could gain from the hermit.

Outside the cave, on the narrow dirt path that led down to the road below and the charred sight of the blasted village, Jessie turned to Tesserax and said, 'He was a strange one.'

'We have many strange ones,' Tesserax said. 'Especially near these mountains. So much myth is centered here…. It's a crazy place. Recently, we have had Earth vampires here who have established a clinic to help their kind kick the blood habit, regardless of their myth requirements. We have had couvani, our race's werewolves, coming to a doctor here for electrolytic removal of excess hair. A group of the old gods have gotten together to worship the people that created them, even though they understand that the man-myth relationship is like your chicken and its egg. And just two weeks ago, we had the first recorded suicides of supernaturals in the history of our planet.'

'Two supernatural creatures took their own lives?' Jessie asked as they drew toward the bottom of the path.

'That's right. They sat down facing each other and said a forbidden chant from one of the old books. They apparently synchronized their voices so well that they reached the last line precisely together and dissipated each other simultaneously.'

Jessie said no more until they had reached the ruined village and stood in the shadows of the blasted walls that still thrust up here and there. He stared at the vista of scorched stone and charred wood, and he said, 'I'd like to have a report on that, in detail.'

Tesserax followed his gaze across the demolished town, and said, 'On this? An analysis of the rubble?'

'No, no. Those suicides.'

'Whatever for?'

'They might tie in.'

'I doubt it very much,' Tesserax said.

'Who's the detective around here?' Brutus asked the alien. 'You?'

Tesserax said, 'Well, okay.'

'In a short time, in the same area, you've experienced two unheard of events: supernatural suicides and this marauding beast. It would be stretching things a bit to call that coincidental. Coincidence is a word used by men who are too lazy to find real reasons.'