Outside the cave, on the narrow dirt path that led down to the road below and the charred sight of the blasted village, Jessie turned to Tesserax and said, “He was a strange one.”
“We have many strange ones,” Tesserax said. “Especially near these mountains. So much myth is centered here…. It’s a crazy place. Recently, we have had Earth vampires here who have established a clinic to help their kind kick the blood habit, regardless of their myth requirements. We have had couvani, our race’s werewolves, coming to a doctor here for electrolytic removal of excess hair. A group of the old gods have gotten together to worship the people that created them, even though they understand that the man-myth relationship is like your chicken and its egg. And just two weeks ago, we had the first recorded suicides of supernaturals in the history of our planet.”
“Two supernatural creatures took their own lives?” Jessie asked as they drew toward the bottom of the path.
“That’s right. They sat down facing each other and said a forbidden chant from one of the old books. They apparently synchronized their voices so well that they reached the last line precisely together and dissipated each other simultaneously.”
Jessie said no more until they had reached the ruined village and stood in the shadows of the blasted walls that still thrust up here and there. He stared at the vista of scorched stone and charred wood, and he said, “I’d like to have a report on that, in detail.”
Tesserax followed his gaze across the demolished town, and said, “On this? An analysis of the rubble?”
“No, no. Those suicides.”
“Whatever for?”
‘They might tie in.”
“I doubt it very much,” Tesserax said.
“Who’s the detective around here?” Brutus asked the alien. “You?”
Tesserax said, “Well, okay.”
“In a short time, in the same area, you’ve experienced two unheard of events: supernatural suicides and this marauding beast. It would be stretching things a bit to call that coincidental. Coincidence is a word used by men who are too lazy to find real reasons.”
“You’ll have that report tonight,” Tesserax said.
Chapter Twenty-One
The remainder of that day, they spoke with four other maseni who had been the first on the scene after one or the other of the two disasters, and all of these tended to repeat, in their own words, what the hermit Kinibobur Biks had said. The only major difference was that these witnesses lived in ordinary maseni houses and did not wear fuzzy, pink bedroom slippers.
Late in the afternoon, they met with subjects six and seven, their last witnesses for the day, and these, surprisingly, had something vital to offer. What they contributed was not, however, obvious. In fact, at the time, they seemed to add very little to Jessie’s fund of knowledge. Later, thinking over the events of the day, he would connect their attitude to other bits and pieces, begin to build a crazy picture…
The last two witnesses were both supernaturals, one of them maseni in origin, the other born of Earth mythology. The maseni was a mist demon by the name of Yilio, a shapeless mass of vapor, blue-white and icy cold, that hung together despite the way it whirled and roiled upon itself. He had no face or mouth, but that did not keep him from speaking. His voice was a hissing whisper that made Jessie uncomfortable. Yilio’s wife, an Earth-born female angel named Hannah, didn’t seem to mind her mate’s voice or the pervasive chill he brought to their small apartment in a town not more than half an hour from the Gilorelamans Inn. She sat with him hovering over and around her, now and then preening her neatly clipped, golden wings. She always had a smile on her face, a big smile when she listened to him talk.
The strangest thing about the couple was their eagerness to question Jessie, thereby turning the tables a bit. For every piece of data he got from them, he had to give back twice as much. They wanted to know everything: how an earth detective had gotten into the case; whether news of the new monster’s existence had reached the general public on Earth; what the Pure Earthers were like. Several times, one or the other of them returned to a single, central question: