“Can you see anything?” Jessie asked the hound.
“More than you. Seems deserted.”
Outside, moonlight broke through the cloud cover again, throwing a ghostly luminescence behind them.
In sympathy, several werewolves raised their heads and howled at the low, rushing sky.
“Better close the door,” Helena said.
The detective turned and pushed the heavy panel shut, until the latch snapped into place. The voices of the werewolves were more distant now, less threatening.
“It stinks in here,” Helena said.
“Well, it is the home of about twenty of the living dead,” Jessie said. There’s bound to be a little odor, a smidgin of corruption.”
“A girl like me shouldn’t have to work for someone who takes her places like this.”
“If you’d like to resign—”
“I mean, for God’s sake, I’m stacked! I’m gorgeous! I thought that counted for something, even these days. But look at me, standing here in this stinking place, a step ahead of an illegal conversion into a vampire, hiding like a rat in a hole—”
“And loving every minute of it,” Jessie added. “You know it’s not just your exorbitant salary or my tremendous sex techniques—which you enjoy as a fringe benefit—that keeps you on the job. You stay because there’s more excitement in one day at Hell Hound Investigations than in a whole year anywhere else. You crave excitement, Helena.”
“Yeah, well, right now I crave a little peace and quiet.”
“Where better to find that than in a mausoleum?” he asked.
Gradually, their eyes began to adjust to the darkness. The moonlight coming through the two windows showed them the outlines of heavy caskets on cement pedestals, thrusting up all across the large room.
As their eyes adjusted, so did the hound’s, and his sight remained constantly superior to theirs. He padded forward, between the coffins, and when he’d gone only a few steps, he growled, “We’re not alone, after all.”
As the hound spoke, lights came on: dim, yellow, casting eerie shadows, recessed in the dirty ceiling and shielded both by cobwebs and wire cages, not very bright but bright enough to make Jessie squint and raise one hand to ward off the glare.
“Who—what is it?” Helena asked, also squinting as she backed into the closed mausoleum door.
“Ifs a dumpy, white-faced, sunken-eyed little man wearing badly wrinkled clothes,” the hell hound said.
“What on earth is a dumpy, white-faced, sunken-eyed little man in a badly wrinkled suit doing here?” she asked. “He isn’t a vampire, is he? He doesn’t sound like a vampire from your description.” She still held a hand over her eyes, squinting.
“No,” Brutus said. “He doesn’t have the style for one.”
Jessie fumbled in his pocket and brought out the cheap, multi-colored, glowing crucifix. “He doesn’t look like a bloodsucker, but we can’t be too careful.”
“I’m no vampire,” the dumpy little man said. “My name’s Whitlock. First name, William.”
“What are you doing here?” Jessie asked.
“I live here.”
“With Slavek and his crowd?”
“Yes,” Willie Whitlock admitted.
“Why?”
The dumpy man smiled, leaned on the edge of an open coffin—brass fittings on polished mahogany—which separated him from them. There was a mad glint in his eye, either that or a speck of dust. “I’m a ghoul,” Whitlock said, smiling. “I like living in a graveyard, with such quiet neighbors. Modern law, ever since the maseni arrived on Earth, doesn’t permit me to actually exhume recently buried corpses and consume them as I once did, but I am allowed to live midst the glorious decay and the incredibly lovely putrefaction, which goes a long way toward taking the edge off my otherwise insatiable compulsion.”
“Ecchh,” Helena said.
“You might as well put away your cheap crucifix,” Willie Whitlock said, rolling one jaundiced eye at the thing. “Such stuff won’t harm a ghoul at all, as you must know. Besides, it is a rather tasteless, grotesque thing to have to look at, especially glowing so colorfully.”
Reluctantly, Jessie lowered the plastic icon and tucked it into his jacket pocket.
Willie Whitlock licked his heavy lips and grinned sardonically as he leaned even further across the open coffin. He stared hard at them, grizzled and mean, his beard stubbly, his face seemed like a piece of crumpled paper. “You robbed a grave tonight, did you not?”