“Body guarding ain’t much, but it’s all I know,” Guido said glumly. “I’m supposed to be guardin’ that body of yours, so where it goes, I go. I’m just not wild about the odds, know what I mean?”
“Then it’s settled,” I said firmly. “All right. As I see it, our next stop is Blut.”
“Blut,” Massha echoed carefully.
“That’s right. I want to look up this Dispatcher character and see what he has to say. I mean, a town is a town, and we’ve all visited strange towns before. What we really need now is information, and the nearest source seems to be Blut.”
“The Dispatcher,” Massha said without enthusiasm.
“Blut,” Guido repeated with even less joyful anticipation.
It occurred to me that while my assistants were bound and determined to stay with me on this caper, if I wanted wholehearted support, I’d better look for it from the natives… a prospect I didn’t put much hope in at all.
Chapter Six:
“An agent is a vampire with a telephone!”
-ANY EDITOR
REMEMBER how I said that if you’ve seen one town, you’ve seen ’em all? Well, forget it. Even though I’ve visited a lot of dimensions and seen a lot of towns, I had to admit that Blut looked a little strange.
Everything seemed to be done to death in basic black. (Perhaps “done to death” is an unfortunate turn of a phrase. Whatever.) Mind you, when I say everything, I mean everything. Cobblestones, walls, roof tiles, everything had the same uninspired color scheme. Maybe by itself the black overtones wouldn’t have seemed too ominous, if it weren’t for the architectural decorations that seemed to abound everywhere you looked. Stone dragons and snakes adorned every roof peak and ledge, along with the inescapable gargoyles and, of course, bats. I don’t mean “bats” here, I mean “BATS”!!! Big bats, little bats, bats with their wings half open and others with their wings spread wide . . . BATS!!! The only thing they all seemed to have in common (besides being black) was mouths full of needle-sharp teeth . . . an image which did nothing to further the confidence of my already nervous party. I myself felt the tension increasing as we strode down the street under the noses of those fierce adornments. One almost expected the stone figures to come to life and swoop down on us for a pint or two of dinner.