The Haunted Earth

'You'll have that report tonight,' Tesserax said.

Chapter Twenty-One

The remainder of that day, they spoke with four other maseni who had been the first on the scene after one or the other of the two disasters, and all of these tended to repeat, in their own words, what the hermit Kinibobur Biks had said. The only major difference was that these witnesses lived in ordinary maseni houses and did not wear fuzzy, pink bedroom slippers.

Late in the afternoon, they met with subjects six and seven, their last witnesses for the day, and these, surprisingly, had something vital to offer. What they contributed was not, however, obvious. In fact, at the time, they seemed to add very little to Jessie's fund of knowledge. Later, thinking over the events of the day, he would connect their attitude to other bits and pieces, begin to build a crazy picture…

The last two witnesses were both supernaturals, one of them maseni in origin, the other born of Earth mythology. The maseni was a mist demon by the name of Yilio, a shapeless mass of vapor, blue-white and icy cold, that hung together despite the way it whirled and roiled upon itself. He had no face or mouth, but that did not keep him from speaking. His voice was a hissing whisper that made Jessie uncomfortable. Yilio's wife, an Earth-born female angel named Hannah, didn't seem to mind her mate's voice or the pervasive chill he brought to their small apartment in a town not more than half an hour from the Gilorelamans Inn. She sat with him hovering over and around her, now and then preening her neatly clipped, golden wings. She always had a smile on her face, a big smile when she listened to him talk.

The strangest thing about the couple was their eagerness to question Jessie, thereby turning the tables a bit. For every piece of data he got from them, he had to give back twice as much. They wanted to know everything: how an earth detective had gotten into the case; whether news of the new monster's existence had reached the general public on Earth; what the Pure Earthers were like. Several times, one or the other of them returned to a single, central question:

'If this crisis isn't solved, if the beast can't easily be contained and destroyed, and if the news of its existence is leaked back to Earth, what will this do to Earth-maseni relations?' Yilio asked it, this time.

Jessie regarded the mist demon, wishing it had a face where he might read expressions, guess thoughts. 'The Pure Earthers will be upset, naturally.'

'Is there any chance they could win converts, gain political power?' Hannah asked, brushing golden curls from her cherubic face.

'No,' Jessie said.

'Not even an outside chance?' Hannah asked.

'The Pure Earthers are borderline Shockies. No one will take their agitating seriously, even if it were learned the maseni were having trouble with a murderous supernatural. The gates have been opened. It's too late to close them now. Relations with our supernatural brothers are too advanced for us to return to total ignorance of them.' He looked at his notepad, found his place, and said, 'Now, just two more questions…'

The remainder of that interview should have taken ten minutes. It lasted, instead, nearly half an hour, because Yilio and Hannah were not done with their own interrogation, still interested in the nature of the Pure Earth movement.

At the time, Jessie was bothered by their interruptions, but he assigned no special value to their questions. He thought that they were merely curious and talkative by nature. Later, he realized that their behaviour, their curiosity, was another thread in the rope of an explanation which he was slowly twining together.

Somewhat depressed that the day had, apparently, yielded so little, the quartet returned to the inn an hour before nightfall, piled out of their robot-driven limousine and went inside.

Hogar was waiting for them in the foyer. 'Welcome back, honored visitors,' he said. 'Would you care for any home world salted seeds?' He held out a container full of little brown spheres.

They all declined. In no mood to humor anyone, they pressed past the poisoner toward the elevators. When they were within a few yards of the lifts, the doors on the nearest slid open, and one of the giant maseni gods, fully ten feet tall, staggered out and fell on his face, clutching his stomach and screaming at the top of his voice.

Jessie stepped around the god and punched the service button to call another lift. 'Hello, Pearlamon,' he said.

The oversized maseni myth figure rolled onto its back and looked up. 'You're the detective? Arrest this Tooner Hogar! He has slipped me something in my milk, some dire concoction, some horrendous poison that is burning out my innards.'

'You'll feel all right in a few minutes,' Jessie said, disinterestedly, smiling fatuously. 'You'll be dead.'

'Nobody cares anymore!' Pearlamon yelled.

'That's right,' Jessie said.

'That ruthless Gonius can do as he pleases, hire the murderous Hogar to poison me, and no one cares!'

Tesserax and the three Earth people crowded into the lift that popped open for them, and they ascended, leaving Pearlamon to his temporary death throes in the hotel lobby.

Two hours later, as they sat at a collapsible dining table in the main room of the suite, eating a dinner which the robot had prepared for them and tested for subtle poisons, Hogar brought a message for Tesserax. He knocked lightly at the door, and when the maseni answered, he handed him an olive-drab envelope. 'This came for you by courier,' Hogar said. 'The courier is downstairs, having a drink on the house, so I thought I'd better bring this around myself.'

Tesserax accepted the envelope and said, 'Thank you,' rather coldly, realizing that the courier would shortly be — if he weren't already — doubled up in the hotel bathroom with nausea or diarrhea.

'And,' Hogar said, 'in hopes that your important investigation has been proceeding as you would like it to, I have brought you a bottle of wine to celebrate.'

Tesserax hesitated.

Hogar showed him the label. 'A fine vintage.'

Tesserax opted for the easiest course, took the bottle and said, 'Thank you, Hogar.'

'It's nothing, nothing at all,' the poisoner said. 'Drink hearty, now!'

Tesserax closed the door, dropped the unopened bottle into the nearest wastecan and returned to the table. He handed Jessie the envelope. 'It's the report that you asked for — on the suicides of those two supernaturals.'

Jessie put it on the table, beside his plate. 'I'll read it later,' he said, 'after I've stewed over everything else we've got.'

Later, after Tesserax had left and they were alone, Jessie reached for the report and held it in both hands, looking at it, not opening it yet, waiting to be sure it was time. He had a certain intuition about how to proceed on a case, when it was right to consider datum, what order one should string the clues together for maximum and swiftest solutions. Right now, he wasn't sure about the wisdom of reading the suicide report. He felt that he had not let other things jell enough, that it would only cloud his theories instead of clear them, at this point. Something else should be done first.

Helena said, 'This has been an exciting case.'

He looked up, across the table, and saw she'd removed her gown. Her heavy breasts thrust across her dirty plate, the nipples turgid. 'It sure has,' he agreed.

'Better than divorce jobs,' Brutus agreed.

'On the other hand,' Helena said, 'it's been dull.'

'Oh?' Jessie asked. 'In what way?'

'If you have to ask, you've proven my point. With all that's been going on, we've not had much time for tumbling in the proverbial hay — or in anything, for that matter.'

She stood up and slid one hand along her flat belly, to her tangle of dark pubic curls.

Jessie put the envelope down. He had known there was something else to do, first, before reading that report. He just hadn't been able to think what it was. Now he remembered as, jiggling, Helena walked toward him.