She gasped and grabbed for Jessie, just as he grabbed for her.
The monster lumbered forward like a surging ameboid mass, out into the open, towering over them. At that moment, the storm clouds parted a bit and let through a brief stream of moonlight that illuminated the scene for a second or two before darkness rolled in as deep as ever.
The beast recoiled from the splash of light, then groaned and came at them again, backing them against another row of giant stones.
“Jessie, what is it?” Helena asked, breathlessly, her hands held out before her, palms flattened as if she were trying to push the beast away.
“Mabel?” Jessie asked.
Helena said, “What?”
“Mabel?” Jessie took one tentative step toward the thing, as Helena held desperately to his arm, trying to drag him back beside her.
The beast stopped, its mottled black-brown hulk shifting and changing, growing knobs and protrusions, then losing them as concavities took their places and other protrusions formed elsewhere on its hide, expanding and contracting like a sackful of lively eels.
“Is it you, Mabel?” Jessie asked, stepping closer, not quite so frightened as he had been moments ago.
The Shambler said, “I go by that name, yes. But I can’t place who you might be, sir.”
“I think I’m losing my mind,” Helena said.
Jessie said, “Not at all. Mabel’s a hostess at the Four Worlds, downtown.”
“Hostess?” Helena asked.
“She’s the night hostess. She has to hide during the day.”
“I’d disintegrate, otherwise,” Mabel said.
“Haven’t you ever seen her at the Four Worlds?” Jessie asked.
“No,” Helena said. “And I go every Saturday, usually.”
“Mabel doesn’t work weekends,” Jessie said.
“I have weekends off, for the children,” the Shambler agreed.
“Children?” Helena asked.
“She terrorizes them,” Jessie said.
“Her own children?”
“No, no,” Mabel said. “Just children in general—anyone’s children so long as they’ll give me a contract.”
“Mabel’s a maseni supernatural,” Jessie explained, as the Shambler gurgled and resettled. “According to her mythos, she terrorizes young children who have been bad.”
“I see,” Helena said. She put a finger to the corner of her mouth and shook her head and said, “No, I don’t see. Look, we’re not children—”
Mabel sighed loudly and settled her great bulk. Her “legs” ceased to exist as her jellied flesh flowed into a gum-drop-shaped lump. “I know you’re not. And believe me, I haven’t had much fun here, tonight.”
“What’s going on here?” Brutus asked, stalking back to them from the second hill, his eyes a furious crimson. He looked at the Shambler and said, “How are you, Mabel?”
“Not good,” the Shambler said.
“Why aren’t you out terrorizing children?”
“That’s what we asked her,” Helena said.
“I was assigned to the graveyard tonight,” Mabel said. She grew a big, bubbly head, then lost it as her body shifted, changed. “They came to me and told me my services were needed here, tonight, that I was to terrorize a couple of adults.”
“They?”
“Some people who are pretty far up in the maseni supernatural hierarchy,” Mabel said. “People who would know the chants that could destroy me. They didn’t make any direct threats, but they strongly hinted that, if I did not cooperate, I’d find myself disintegrated.”
“That’s pretty low,” Brutus growled.
Mabel throbbed with indignation; she pulsed and pounded with indignation. “Isn’t that just the case; isn’t that exactly how it is: pretty damn low?” She appeared to turn around so that she could look more directly at the detective, though she had no eyes with which to see and could probably have sensed him as well facing one way as the other. “I remember you now, sir,” she said. “You came to the Four Worlds Cafe not more than a night or two ago, to have dinner with a demon—Kanastorous, I believe. You gave me an especially generous tip.”
A vampire bat swooped by, invisible in the darkness twenty feet overhead and slightly off to their right; it was identifiable by the sharp chatter it gave out for the benefit of its unholy mates who were searching elsewhere in the cemetery. It had missed them, now, as they stood in the shelter of the double row of canted maseni tombstones. It would soon swoop lower, search the denser shadows that even vampire eyes had trouble with; and then they would be caught.