“Well,” Helena said, “if you aren’t going to start out right now, you’ve got time for a little bit of day-bed exercise, haven’t you?” She was grinning more wickedly than Brutus ever could.
“I suppose I do,” Jessie said.
“I’ll watch,” the hell hound growled.
“Damn straight you will,” Helena said. “At least until you do something about those claws.”
Chapter Four
When Jessie and Brutus arrived at the Four Worlds Cafe shortly before three o’clock in the morning, a group of Pure Earthers was holding a protest march in the street. There wasn’t anything unusual in that: Pure Earthers were always holding some sort of demonstration in or around the Four Worlds. They were as much a part of the cafe as its maseni home world rainbow-stone front and the four big palm trees that grew on its flat roof. Here, the flesh-and-blood and the supernatural creatures of two different planets met to imbibe, talk, and make contacts of all sorts. In all of L.A. no place rivalled the mixture of types that patronized the Four Worlds: maseni men and women, human men and women, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, banshees in their quieter moments, golemns, witches, ghouls able to control their more disgusting habits, and a wide variety of maseni supernatural beings. Of course, the crusaders, the fanatics like the Pure Earthers, zeroed in on the Four Worlds like greedy lawyers flocking to a fluttercar accident.
“You aren’t going in that place, are you?” someone asked, grabbing Jessie’s arm.
He looked down and saw a sweet, gray-haired old woman in a silk dress patterned with sunflowers. She belonged in the last century somewhere. He smiled and said, “I was, yes.”
“Oh, but it’s a horrible place,” the old lady said.
“How do you know?” he asked, unable to resist hearing her whole line. “Have you ever been inside?”
“I’d die first!” she said.
“It’s actually a very respectable place.”
“The foreigners go there.”
“The maseni?” he asked.
‘Them, yes, and others.”
Jessie removed her hand from his arm—no easy task, since she clung like a leech—and he patted it in a conciliatory manner. “I can assure you, mother, that the best people go there, too. Just the other night I spent half an hour talking to God; He was sitting at the table next to mine, the father—not the son.”
“I know, I know,” the old lady moaned, quite distressed, clinging to the detective’s hand as fiercely as she had clung to his sleeve a moment ago. “I’ve seen the pictures in the newspapers and on the gossip pages. There He is, as big as you please, a hussy on His arm, drinking and watching that scandalous floor show…. What’s happening to morality these days? If even God is corrupted, what hope have we?”
“He hasn’t been corrupted,” Jessie explained. “Haven’t you read the maseni books, or taken a hypno-course in the nature of man and myth? God is as much our creation as we are his. He’s as much a victim of circumstances as we are.”
“Tell the old bitch to get lost,” Brutus said, from the detective’s side, his red eyes glowing.
The old woman looked past Jessie, at the hound, and shuddered. “A beast of Hell,” she said.
“Precisely,” Brutus said. He showed lots of teeth.
“I see there’s no use talking to you,” the old woman told Jessie. “A man must contain at least the spark of righteousness if he’s to hear and know the truth.” She turned away from him, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the plastiwalk, and she caught up with the other Pure Earthers who had reached the end of the block and were turning back for another pass at the Four Worlds.
“You have this compulsion to talk with zanies,” Brutus said. “We never encounter a batch of Pure Earthers that you pass by; you’ve always got to stop and have a few words with them.”
“They fascinate me,” Jessie said.
“Sometimes, I think you could be one of them, with a little nudge,” the hell hound said, contemptuously.
Jessie ignored the hound’s sneering remark. After fifteen hundred years in Hell, Brutus couldn’t pass up a chance to sneer or be condescending; all those centuries of damnation had severely affected him. He said, “The Pure Earthers are borderline Shockies; if they’d been just a hair more upset by the maseni landing and all that’s come since, they’d be in one of the homes. I’ll never have the chance to see any real Shockies, but I can get an idea what they must be like from studying the Pure Earthers.”