The Haunted Earth Page 6

  "That was before the laws!" the demon groaned.

  "Five black candles and seven white," Brutus said. "Now, if you don't tell me what I want to know inside the next minute, I'll blow out a third black taper." He paused for dramatic effect and said, "Who was waiting in the men's room for Jessie?"

  "Medusa," Kanastorous said.

  "Come again?" the hound growled.

  "The woman who has snakes on her head, instead of hair, the one who can turn a man to stone with her gaze. She lives here in L.A. now. Haven't you heard of her?"

  "I have!" Helena said. "She's the one with the awful taste in clothes — and she always wears those mirrored sunglasses to keep from turning all her friends to stone."

  "That's the woman," the demon said.

  "She's always at some art show or concert," Helena said. "You see her picture in the papers and on television, usually on the arm of the maseni embassy big shots."

  "Yes, yes," Kanastorous said, eager to please them. "The maseni are fascinated by those snakes she has for hair — probably because the snakes are so similar to their own tentacles."

  "This Medusa woman was waiting for Jessie in the men's room of the Four Worlds?" Brutus asked.

  "She was, yes."

  "And she turned him to stone?"

  "Yes."

  "Isn't that as good as killing him?"

  "It was only a temporary transformation," Kanastorous said. "As I understand it, there are ways to bring him back to life."

  "Well, when I went in that restroom," Brutus said, "there wasn't any statue that looked like Jessie. Where'd they take him?"

  Kanastorous looked up beseechingly, not unlike a Christian in the act of prayer, gazing to the expectant heavens as he kneels. "You must believe that they didn't tell me."

  Brutus shook his burly head slowly back and forth. "No, I don't have to believe anything of the sort."

  "But they really didn't!"

  The hound got off his haunches and moved slowly back to the row of candles. "What will it be like for you, Zeke, if I extinguish yet another of the black ones?"

  "You wouldn't, my old hairy-muzzled friend." The demon grinned a sickeningly pleading grin.

  Brutus sighed and leaned toward the nearest of the flames, sucking in new breath with which to blow it out

  "I'll tell! I'll tell!" the demon cried.

  "No tricks."

  "No tricks," Kanastorous agreed.

  "Where'd they take Jessie?"

  "To Millennium City," the demon rasped.

  "That new shopping mall over in West Los Angeles?" Helena asked, getting to her feet.

  "That's right," Kanastorous said.

  Brutus grunted. "Why take him there?"

  "It had a perfect hiding place," the demon said.

  "But those stores are open twenty-four hours a day," Helena said. "They're robotically operated; they have customers at any hour. I don't see how they could have carted Jessie in there and hidden him."

  "Millennium City is a fancy place," the demon said, still on his knees, black sweat on his scaly brow. "It has an art museum, a legitimate theater, fountain displays and a sculpture garden for the enlightenment of the patrons."

  "So?" Brutus asked.

  "They put Jessie in the sculpture garden, with the other statues. They intend to keep him there until the Tesserax crisis — whatever it is — passes."

  Chapter Eight

  Millennium City was a 200-store shopping mall, most of it under a single roof, with indoor pedwalks, indoor and outdoor parks, fountains, convention facilities, hotels, more fountains, amusement centers, free theaters and museums, robot guides to help you find your way, a three hundred million credit wonder that had been completed only a year before. It was staffed exclusively by robots and was efficiently run, enormously profitable.

  Only ten years earlier, it could never have been built — and not only because maseni technology was required to construct it. Ten years ago, the city of Los Angeles simply would not have had the room, in the heart of its west side, to contain such a lavish, three-hundred-acre structure. Then, there had been too many people, too much crowding. Now, a decade after the maseni landing on Earth, the city was only half as populated as it had been. Forty-five percent of the city's people had gone starkers and ended up in homes for Shockies. Many of these, in the following ten years, either took their own lives or died from too long in a catatonic trance. For the most part, the Shockies were those who were already hopelessly at odds with their times; they were, in many cases, those who ignored the warnings of ecologists and continued to have large families, polluting the Earth with excess flesh. Removed from the mating cycle, they no longer contributed to the population boom. Those who adapted to the maseni and the other changes, tended to have no families, or small ones. As the Shockies died, the population dropped, and land became available. With the welfare rolls almost wiped out, and with vital services crying for good workers, everyone again had a job and everyone was more affluent than any time in the nation's history. There was not only room to build Millennium City, but also credits to spend there. Old office buildings were torn down, as were rows and rows of shabby houses where no one lived any more. They razed factories that had once produced useless gadgets and flashy gewgaws, for none of these things were now in demand; society had suddenly become aware of its own power and of the true value of possessions. Millennium City not only provided services and products, but a place to feel at ease, a center for commerce which was, at the same time, a business establishment and a community meeting place.

  On the south end of the Millennium City complex, there was a two-acre sculpture garden, containing abstract and realistic stone and metal work from all over the world, and from the maseni home world as well. It was here that Helena and Brutus came, at a quarter to twelve that night.

  "How many statues are in here?" Helena asked.

  "I'd say four or five hundred," Brutus replied. "That is, if you rule out the abstract ones which we can tell, at a glance, aren't Jessie."

  A young couple passed them, strolling hand-in-hand; the boy was a normal human being, while the girl was a button-cute wood nymph no taller than four and a half feet.

  Helena and the hound walked slowly down the main avenue before trying any of the looping side-streets. They passed statues of maseni kings, American Presidents and authors, a cavalry man on horseback, a black American liberator with a Molotov cocktail in his stone hand…

  "Well have to try the smaller walkways," Brutus said.

  They passed a statue of Artemis Frick, the first man to die on Mars; a statue of President Agnew, the first American President to resign from office over an embarrassing incident on the Pritchard Robot television talk show-but not the last to do so…

  "Jessie!" Helena cried, stopping so suddenly that Brutus, looking at a statue of Snoopy across the way, almost walked into her.

  "Where?"

  She pointed at the next statue, opposite that of Snoopy. "It is him, isn't it?"

  Brutus padded closer, his claws making a rattling noise on the flagstone path. "He looks a bit different in granite," the hound said, "but I'm sure that it is him, my dear."

  Helena looked more closely at the life-size stone figure where it stood on a marble pedestal that made it tower over them. "My God, do you see what pose he's in?"

  Brutus chuckled. "Well," he said, "he was at the urinal when Medusa surprised him, you know."

  Helena walked up and rapped her knuckles on Jessie's thigh. "Really is stone," she said.

  "The myth requires it."

  She regarded Jessie from straight on, staring into his blank, granite eyes. "You think he's aware of his condition, where he is? Do you think he knows we're here?"

  "We'll have to ask him when we get him changed back," the hell hound said, moving up beside her.

  Helena had been carrying a book on mythology, one of the volumes published as a guide by the United Nations after the initial chaos the maseni brought with them to Earth. She thu
mbed it open, found a listing under MEDUSA, and said, "The Medusa is a world-wide mythical figure. According to various versions of the myth, there are eighteen ways to undo the damage of her gaze."

  "Read 'em off," the hell hound said, gazing up at Jessie.

  The detective stared out across the sculpture garden, his head held high, rather noble despite his pose.

  Helena said, "Well, first of all, we can immerse him in the waters of the Ganges River."

  "Even if we could get him out of this park without being taken for statue thieves," the hound said, "it would take too long to fly him to the Ganges and go through that bit. Something else."

  "Paint him with the blood of newborn babies," Helena said, shivering.

  "Ecchh," Brutus said. "What's next?"

  "A virgin's kiss, against his stone lips," Helena said. She smiled. "Isn't that romantic?"

  Brutus gave her a long look, from head to toe and back again. "A virgin's kiss? I suspect you better read number four."

  The Millennium City sculpture garden was one of the open-air parks in the complex and, now, above them, the night sky split open with a flash of jagged lightning, followed by a low peal of thunder. They both looked up, waiting for the rain. When it didn't come, Helena looked back at the book and said, "Number four — the victim of the Medusa can be revived to flesh by the touch of someone who truly loves him."

  'There we are," Brutus said, nodding his hairy head.

  "Oh?"

  "Touch him some more," the hound said.

  "Me?"

  "Don't you love him?"

  "Oh, I love him a little bit, I suppose. I mean, he's awfully nice, and he's good looking. I like going to bed with him and I like working for him…. But I couldn't honestly say that I truly love him. Not deep and everlasting and all of that. If the tables were turned, and if that were me up there on the pedestal, I don't think Jessie would pretend any differently about his own feelings."

  "Well," the hell hound said, "you can't be sure. Maybe you love him just enough to make it work."

  "I already touched him," Helena pointed out, "and nothing happened." Her golden hair had fallen across her face, and she pushed it behind her ears with her left hand.

  "You didn't exactly touch him," Brutus corrected her. "You rapped on him."

  "Same thing."

  "A rap isn't the same as a touch," the hound persisted. "So why don't you try touching him. I mean, for Christ's sake, what have you got to lose?"

  She looked up at the stone Jessie, down at the hell hound again, and she said, "Well, I guess it can't hurt anything…"

  "Of course it can't."

  "I'll just touch him."

  "Go on," the hound urged.

  Gingerly, Helena reached up and placed the palm of her hand on the statue's leg.

  Nothing happened.

  "Touch him with both hands," Brutus said.

  "Why?"

  "Look, Blue Eyes, maybe if you don't love him enough to bring him around with one hand, you love him enough to bring him around with both hands. You dig it?"

  She touched the statue's leg with both hands.

  Jessie was not returned to flesh.

  "Well, what's number five in the book?" Brutus asked, wearily.

  "Wait a minute?" Helena said, her bright eyes adance with some clever thought or other.

  "What is it?"

  She said, "Why don't you touch him, Brutus?"

  "Me?"

  "Yes, you."

  "I don't truly love him!"

  "Don't you love him a little?" she asked, kneeling down, taking the hound's head in both her hands.

  "He's a man, and I was once a man," the hound said. "Or at least I think I was once a man."

  She said, "What's that got to do with anything?"

  "Well — true love, the book said. That would be a woman who loved him."

  "Doesn't a father love his son, and the son his father?"

  He looked away from her face, found himself staring down her cleavage which was handsomely revealed in her low-cut sweater. But that wasn't what he needed now. He looked up again and said, "Well, I'm not his son or his father, am I?"

  Overhead, another shattering streak of lightning, as white as snow against the blue-black night, pierced a powder keg and brought a long roll of thunder across Millennium City like the volley of an ancient cannon, a battle in the clouds.

  "It's going to rain, soon," Helena said. "Let's not waste any more time, Brutus. You jump right up there on that pedestal and touch him; see what may happen."

  "This is silly."

  "You've known him seven years longer than I have," she observed. "You must have strong feelings about him, after all that time."

  "The book says one must truly love…"

  She stood up and stamped her foot, a gesture which made her unconfined breasts bounce wildly up and down. "Brutus, if you don't do your part, if you don't jump up there this minute and touch Jessie, you can forget about me, you can forget about that day bed— whether or not you shorten your claws!"

  "But—"

  "And that's final."

  More thunder; more lightning, a single fat droplet of rain…

  "Very well," the hell hound said.

  "Good boy," Helena said.

  Brutus tensed and leaped, scrambled on the pedestal and stood beside the granite Jessie Blake. He looked down at Helena and said, "How should I touch him — with a paw?"

  "Try that."

  He lifted one paw and brushed it sheepishly against the stone leg, yipped when the statue seemed to move.

  "It's working, Brute!"

  "Yeah," the hound said, amazed.

  "Keep it up, Brute!"

  The hound brushed the statue again, pushed his paw back and forth against the granite. Magically, the gray stone gradually began to fade away, to take on the color and texture of leather and cloth and flesh and hair, until Jessie Blake stood before them again, just as he had been earlier in the night before Medusa had frozen him with her gaze.

  Dramatically, at that moment, the biggest flash of lightning yet scored the sky, from horizon to horizon, and the clap of thunder was like a thousand cymbals meeting with force.

  "Jessie, are you all right?" Helena asked, raising her hands to him, to help him down.

  He worked his mouth, as if he were surprised to feel his lips moving, and he said, "Okay, but—"

  "Come down, darling," she said.

  He ignored her offered hands and jumped down, with Brutus jumping close behind him.

  "How do you feel?" she asked.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've got a vicious headache," he said. Then he seemed to remember Brutus, and he turned and bent down and scratched the hell hound behind the ears. "Thanks, partner."

  Brutus looked bashfully at the ground. "Least I could do," he said. "We have a case to work on, and—"

  "Jessie, it was just awful what they did to you," Helena said.

  "I know what they did," the detective assured her, grimly. "I was aware of my surroundings all the time, even though I had been turned to stone. I would like to hear how you two found me! I'd like to hear, that is, after I've found a men's room. I never did have a chance to use the one at the Four Worlds."

  Chapter Nine

  Zeke Kanastorous was still trapped in the small chalk circle in Jessie's inner office when the three got back from Millennium City just after one o'clock in the morning. Brutus had relighted the two previously extinguished black candles, to relieve the angry little creature of the worst of its pain, but Kanastorous was far from happy. He paced around and around in that tight circle, where only four steps were needed to make a full circuit, and he cast occasional glances at Jessie, Helena and the hell hound as they filed into the room. He was dotted with a black excretion, some form of ectoplasm, and his four-fingered hands were fisted at his sides.

  "How you feeling, Zeke?" Jessie asked, moving into the main circle with Helena and Brutus at his back.

  "You'll be sorry for t
his," the demon said. He stopped pacing and faced the detective, his shoulders hunched, his eyes blazing.

  "What did I do?" Jessie asked.

  "There is a law against black-magic crudities. It's no longer possible for some wise ass magician to summon up a demon whenever he wants. They punish that sort these days!"

  "Do they punish kidnappers?" Jessie asked.

  "What's that mean?" Kanastorous snapped.

  "I was kidnapped," Jessie said. "You were one of the conspirators who worked to snare me."

  "A gross misrepresentation of the facts," the demon said, drawing himself up to his full, yet diminutive, height, his carapaced shoulders pulled back, his bony chest thrust out.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, my Sam Spade friend. You see, I was working with the government under special orders from the Regent for the Western States." He gave the title as much prestige and awe, by his obsequious tone of voice, as some people had once given the names of God before the maseni had come and exposed God for what he was.

  Jessie raised his eyebrows and said, "Well, well. The national government is interested in keeping the Galiotor Tesserax affair quiet"

  "You better believe it, my hardnosed detective friend," Kanastorous said. "I've already explained to your hound, here, that I know nothing of the Tesserax business; I wasn't told of it. But I do know the government's in a sweat to keep it hushed up. Therefore, if I have broken any laws, as you assert, I have done so with complete immunity from prosecution in any nether-world court of law."

  "From their prosecution," Jessie amended.

  "I fail to understand."

  "You've no guarantee of immunity from my prosecution," Jessie said. He walked to the edge of the larger circle and pointed his index finger at the demon's squashed nose. "When I let you go tonight, you can follow one of two courses. One: you can run immediately to the authorities and tell them how you were illegally called up by ancient means, how your civil liberties were grieviously violated; you can inform them that I have been rescued by my friends, and that I am loose again. Two: you can simply forget that all of this happened; you can let bygones be bygones; you can keep your head and let things go on as they have always gone before. If you choose the first course—"