The Haunted Earth Read online

  "And I fail to see what my calendar has to do with your visit to my office, Mr. Galiotor." Watching the alien, Blake could almost understand why the right-wing Pure Earthers were so rabidly anti-maseni. Galiotor Fils was not the most pleasant sight: nearly seven feet tall, as were most of his kind, dressed in amber robes that matched the color of his eyes, he looked like something made of wax drippings — yellow skin with a glistening look to it, lumpy and yet graceful, with a ballooning forehead, those deep-set yellow eyes, the squashed nose, the lipless slash of a mouth, hands composed of those thin tentacles instead of fingers….

  Galiotor Fils said, "If you're inefficient in your daily office routine, perhaps your work as an investigator would be equally sloppy."

  "Did you just choose my name from the phone book, or did I come recommended?" Blake asked.

  "Oh," Galiotor said, "you came recommended, sir. Highly recommended." He nodded his bulbous head, as if agreeing with what he said, but the effect was that of a puppet being jerked on strings.

  "Then I suggest we get on with the business at hand. If you will just tell us your situation, what you would like us to do for you, we can—"

  The maseni interrupted. "Excuse me, but must this animal remain in the room, sir?" He pointed an undulating tentacle-finger at Brutus, who had curled up on the only other easy chair in the room, only a half dozen feet from Galiotor Fils, himself.

  "Him?" Blake asked. "Of course he has to stay. He's my partner in Hell Hound Investigations. In fact, it's from him we get our name."

  "This is an intelligent creature?" the maseni asked.

  "How would you like a couple dozen canine incisors in your ass?" Brutus inquired of the alien, his voice like gravel sliding down a sheet of tin.

  Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his seat. "I see," he said. "One of your supernatural brethren."

  "Exactly," Blake said.

  "Your myths contain some very strange creatures," Galiotor Fils said. "Of all the races we've met, of all those we've introduced to their supernatural world-mates, I don't think I've ever seen a collection so colorful—"

  "You're pretty colorful yourself," Brutus said. He had raised his big head from his paws. "In fact, you're downright disgusting."

  The maseni made a throat clearing sound like a cat wailing in hunger. "Yes," he said, "I suppose it's all a matter of perspective."

  Brutus lowered his head to his paws again.

  Jessie, aware that the maseni was still uneasy about Brutus, decided that a reassuring little speech, now, would save them time later. Until he was put at ease, Galiotor Fils was going to be a difficult client. A difficult potential client. At the moment, Jessie didn't think they would take the case; both he and Brutus were well-off enough to be choosy, and they were both in need of something to stir the blood, something exciting. Galiotor Fils did not seem to be the type to change their luck. Still, on the off chance that he might be what they were looking for, Jessie decided not to send him away at once but to try to placate him, if possible.

  "Mr. Galiotor," he said, "I assure you that you have nothing to fear from my friend, Brutus."

  "Nothing," Brutus grumbled.

  Jessie said, "Two thousand years ago, Brutus was a man much like myself, a man who had sinned and who, upon death, went straightaway to Hell. There, he was changed into the hound you see before you, and he was given certain duties to perform within the hierarchy of file nether world."

  "Interesting duties," Brutus said, grinning widely, almost slavering.

  Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his chair.

  "Brutus's duties were so interesting, by his way of thinking, that he chose to continue them even after he had spent enough time in Hell to redeem himself."

  "Five hundred years," Brutus said.

  "At the end of five hundred years, having served his time, Brutus could have opted for either permanent death or reincarnation. He rejected both and simply remained a hell hound."

  Brutus still grinned wickedly. "It was delightful."

  "After a second five hundred years, ten centuries after his death, Brutus had forgotten his old persona. He could not recall who he had been when he was a man, or what he had done."

  "Just as well," the hound said.

  Jessie said, "After fifteen hundred years, he was weary of his duties in Hell, and he began to roam the Earth, seeking the unique and the titillating, anything short of the reincarnation which was his due."

  "It'd be a drag to be human again," Brutus said. Galiotor Fils looked from the man to the hound, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.

  Jessie said, "Nine years ago, a year after you people first made contact with Earth, I quit my job as a narcotics agent with Interpol, and I advertised for a supernatural partner to go halves in the establishment of a detective agency. Brutus answered the ad."

  "And we've been busy every since," the hound said. He chuckled, deep in his throat. "You people caused more trouble than a thousand detectives can handle."

  Galiotor Fils shifted uneasily in his chair, laced his twelve tentacle-fingers together, unlaced them, blinked his amber eyes and said, "I hope you aren't — well, prejudiced against the maseni race. I am aware that some of you people feel you would have been far better off—"

  "No, no," Blake said. "You misunderstand my colleague's meaning. We are glad you came to Earth; we thrive on the chaos. Ordinary detectives, those who work on cases involving only human beings, make very little money, but those of us specializing in human-alien and human-supernatural cases do well. Quite well."

  "I see," the maseni said.

  "Not everything, you don't," Jessie said. "Mr. Galiotor, my pleasure with your people's arrival on Earth is not strictly financial in nature. You see, before that time, ten years ago, I was twenty-seven years old and bored to tears with nearly everything: my job with Interpol, food, liquor, books, films, getting up, going to bed…. The only things I wasn't bored with were marijuana and women; I smoked the former and balled the latter, and I was an enthusiast of both. However, it was a shallow life. Then the maseni came, and everything changed. Mind you, life would have been lively with one set of aliens to deal with — but you brought two, yourselves and your supernatural brothers. And you introduced us to a third set of aliens that had been with us all along, our own supernatural brothers. In the following decade, I have not only earned considerable money, but I have suffered very damn few dull moments."

  "Until recently," Brutus added.

  "Yes," Blake said. "Until recently. Recently, it seems one case is like the last — a wife trying to run off with a vampire; a husband ignoring his own wife but taking a contract with a succubus; banshees involved in real-estate swindles, trying to scream down the value of a house or tract of land; A ghoul interested in robbing graves unsanctioned by the government… Both Brutus and I need a change, and we're hoping, quite frankly, you're the one to give it to us."

  "Well, it may be nothing, sir," the maseni said.

  "Whatever it is," Blake said, "it's obviously unusual. So far as I know you're the first maseni ever to contact a human detective, for aid."

  "Most likely," Galiotor Fils agreed. He looked at both man and hound, in turn, while he played six tentacles over his open mouth. At last, he dropped his hand to his lap and said, "I am most distraught, sir. My brood brother has died, and there has not been a proper ceremony."

  Blake and Brutus exchanged a glance, and the detective rose from his chair to pace behind his desk. "Brood brother?" he asked. "That would mean another maseni, like yourself, born in the same brood hole on the home world, in the same familial mud as yourself?"

  "Even more than that," the maseni said. "In this case, Tesserax was of the same Birthing as I, from the very same egg batch. We were the same age, by a hatching day, and we were close." Fat, yellow tears hung at the corners of the alien's eyes, trembling like liquid jewels, and the corners of his lipless mouth turned down.

  "Tesserax? That was his name?"

  "Galiotor Tessera
x," the maseni said, nodding.

  He was barely able to control his grief, but he held back the threatened tears and covered up the sorrow in the line of his mouth by raising a hand and playing six small tentacles there.

  "How did he die?" Blake asked.

  "I have asked the highest officials in the maseni diplomatic mission," Galiotor Fils said, "but I have been unable to get a good answer. Invariably, they tell me the same thing—'of natural causes'—which is to tell me nothing at all. They commiserate with me in a false manner, saying what they do not feel, saying they knew him well and miss him too, saying they suffered much grief themselves…. Lies. I see through that."

  "What reason would they have to lie to you?" Jessie asked, pacing yet, not looking at Galiotor Fils, not able to look at him because of those yellow tears trembling on those thick, wiry lashes.

  "I believe that they were somehow involved with his death," the alien said, his sorrow slowly turning to anger, the tone of his voice subtly different as he spoke.

  "The maseni at the embassy?"

  "Yes," Galiotor Fils said. "Tesserax worked there; indeed, he was the deputy chief of the embassy staff, the second-ranking maseni on Earth. He was of high position, respect, dignity, with a great future."

  "No history of illness?"

  "Nothing worse than an occasional tentacle infection," the maseni said, looking at his own hands. "He was a sexually unrestrained fellow, you see, and he often indulged in spur-of-the-moment — ah, you'd call it 'petting' without first lubricating his tentacles against infection. Our tentacles, you see, are by far the most delicate portions of our anatomies."

  "How old was Tesserax?" Blake asked, looking at the maseni's twelve little tentacles from the corner of his eye.

  "Eighty-six Earth years," Galiotor Fils said. "But since we are much longer-lived than you, I must translate that — as, say, early middle age."

  "Not quite old enough to just drop off," Blake said.

  "Hardly," Galiotor Fils said.

  Blake said, "But surely the men he worked with at the embassy were the cream of maseni society. Your diplomatic staffs aren't thugs, mugs, thieves or murderers, are they?"

  "No, no!" Galiotor Fils said. His yellow face took on the subtle, greenish hue which indicated embarrassment. He was clearly upset that the detective could even suggest such a thing, as if it were not merely a slur on the diplomatic staff, but on the race itself, and on Galiotor Fils as well. "They are gentlemen of the first mud, I assure you, all intensively tested for psychological abnormalities. Their function is a very delicate one, after all: the introduction of maseni civilization, the establishment of trade and philosophical relations with inferior and superior and equal galactic races. They must be of sound mind."

  Jessie returned to his desk and gripped the back of his shape-changing chair with both hands; it molded around his fingers. He said, "Then how can you suspect these people of murder?"

  "I said I thought they were somehow involved in his murder, but I did not say they performed it."

  "Call a spade a spade," Brutus growled.

  Galiotor Fils looked at the hound and said, "What?"

  "Make yourself clearer," Jessie suggested.

  "I think my brood brother died in some unconventional manner, and that the embassy is trying to cover it up." The alient shifted in his chair, too big for it, and said, "Is that better?"

  Blake chose not to answer that, but began pacing again. In a few moments, he said, "Thus far, you've given us no reason to believe the people at your embassy were lying to you. Certainly, you choose not to believe that he died of natural causes, but that seems to be only opinion. Mr. Galiotor, when one loses a loved one, grief sometimes makes the acceptance of reality too hard to bear, and fantasies of paranoid—"

  "There are a number of reasons why I suspect that I am not being told the truth about Tesserax's death," the maseni said, a bit angry.

  "Name one," Brutus said.

  "I am stationed on Earth for the purpose of sociological research, along with several hundred colleagues. A group of your scientists have been taken to our home world, in exchange for the privilege of unrestricted study here on Earth. Tesserax and I saw each other frequently. Everyone at the Los Angeles embassy knew I was here, who I was, how much I loved Tesserax. Yet, when he died, I was not notified until he was three weeks in the grave!"

  "Bureaucratic red tape, paper errors, fumbling in high office," Blake said, by way of explanation.

  "That's an institution peculiar to your own race," Galiotor Fils said. "We haven't 'red tape' in our own government."

  "An honest oversight, then."

  "I can't believe that all fifty of Tesserax's associates at the Los Angeles embassy could forget me. One, yes, or even a dozen. But certainly not all of them, sir."

  "What else?" Brutus asked.

  "Every time I try to make an appointment with the embassy doctor, who was supposed to have treated Tesserax, I get put off. He's always busy with patients or away or in surgery or something." Galiotor Fils wiped at his huge eyes with both hands, tentacles wriggling, as if pulling off his weariness. "I attempted to learn something from the maseni supernaturals who come and go at the embassy, but I lost out there as well. They fed me the same line as the embassy officials, as if they'd studied the same script."

  Jessie pulled out his shape-changing chair and sat down behind the desk again, waited until the chair stopped gurgling and was fitted firmly to him, then said, "You think that the maseni and the maseni supernaturals at the embassy are cooperating to hide something about your brood brother's death?"

  "Yes. I know how strange that sounds. Though spirits can learn to live harmoniously with creatures of flesh and blood, and vice versa, they rarely present such a monolithic front on any particular topic."

  "Interesting," Jessie said. "Conspiracy of a sort between the real and the spirit world."

  "One thing," Brutus growled.

  Galiotor Fils looked at the hound. "Yes?"

  "I don't know much about maseni mythology," Brutus said. "When one of you dies, what happens to the 'soul'?"

  "Any of a dozen different things," Galiotor Fils said. "Tesserax might have become a ghost, much like the sort that you people believe in. Or he might have been changed into a Great Tree, assigned to suffer the tortures of the sentient inanimate before recyling — ah, this gets difficult to explain in terms you people would understand."

  "It doesn't matter just now," Jessie said. "In short, Tesserax would have returned in some form, and you would have known about it."

  "Exactly," the alien said. "Immediately upon learning of his death, I paid to have a constant call on the netherworld communications network, so that he would come to me first thing. He hasn't answered it. He would, if he could. Therefore—"

  "Perhaps he isn't dead," Jessie suggested.

  "In my central heart, I hope that this is true," Galiotor Fils said, placing a hand across his abdomen to indicate the seat of his emotions. "However, I also fear that something even worse than death has happened to him."

  "Like what?" Brutus asked.

  The alien stood, suddenly, towering almost to the ceiling, unfolding out of the easy chair like a paper accordion coming to full length. He leaned over Blake's desk, his palms flat on the blotter, his twelve tentacles wriggling madly, and he said, "I am afraid, Mr. Blake, that Tesserax was buried without the proper ceremony, and that his soul — his soul has been dissipated."

  The last few words came out in a strangled gasp. Everyone was silent in the wake of this display, until Galiotor Fils could recover. His face had blanched, and his whole body had locked into a twisted, rigid stance.

  At last, the alien said, "Forgive me for getting so emotional."

  "That's okay," Blake said, not able to meet the creature's gaze. "Can you go on? Can you explain just what you meant — when you said that Tesserax's soul may have been dissipated?"

  Galiotor Fils grimaced, a horrible sight on that nearly featureless, yellow fa
ce. "Yes, of course. You see…. Maseni mythology holds that, unless certain burial procedures are observed, the soul of the departed will simply disintegrate. He will never return in another form, will have no spiritual life. He will be, plainly, dead. Because this has long been a maseni belief, millennia old, it has come to be fact. As you know, the supernatural is at the mercy of human creation, just as humanity is at the mercy of the spirits' creations. It is a closed circle. God created us, yet we created God, sort of like your riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"

  "Theoretically," Brutus said, "you've brought us to another impasse."

  Galiotor Fils looked down at the hound and said, "How so?"

  "You told us your embassy people weren't killers. Yet, if they purposefully denied Tesserax a proper burial ceremony, they killed his soul, if not his physical being."

  The maseni sat down again, compressing himself into the seat that was too small for him, arranging his yellow robes, brushing at his face with both hands. "I've considered this obvious contradiction, before coming here."

  "And you can explain it?" Jessie asked.

  Galiotor Fils leaned away from the back of the chair. "The only reason for disposing of Tesserax, both physically and spiritually, would be to keep him from making public some secret which my government finds dangerous. By letting his soul dissipate, they silence him even after death, when he might normally have come back to expose them. If he held a secret of proper magnitude, perhaps the embassy people could be lead into such a heinous crime."

  "Earlier, you said they were specially tested for psychological defects. Wouldn't the ability to kill be a defect?" Jessie asked.

  Galiotor Fils looked down at the floor and did not speak for a long time. When he did finally have something to say, it came in a small voice, a child's voice, soft and distant: "I don't know what to think, anymore."

  Brutus said, "Where is your brood brother buried?"

  Galiotor looked up. "The maseni cemetery, outside of Los Angeles. Why do you ask?"

  "It may be necessary to go there, during the course of the investigation," Brutus said.