She touched the statue's leg with both hands.
Jessie was not returned to flesh.
"Well, what's number five in the book?" Brutus asked, wearily.
"Wait a minute?" Helena said, her bright eyes adance with some clever thought or other.
"What is it?"
She said, "Why don't you touch him, Brutus?"
"Me?"
"Yes, you."
"I don't truly love him!"
"Don't you love him a little?" she asked, kneeling down, taking the hound's head in both her hands.
"He's a man, and I was once a man," the hound said. "Or at least I think I was once a man."
She said, "What's that got to do with anything?"
"Well — true love, the book said. That would be a woman who loved him."
"Doesn't a father love his son, and the son his father?"
He looked away from her face, found himself staring down her cleavage which was handsomely revealed in her low-cut sweater. But that wasn't what he needed now. He looked up again and said, "Well, I'm not his son or his father, am I?"
Overhead, another shattering streak of lightning, as white as snow against the blue-black night, pierced a powder keg and brought a long roll of thunder across Millennium City like the volley of an ancient cannon, a battle in the clouds.
"It's going to rain, soon," Helena said. "Let's not waste any more time, Brutus. You jump right up there on that pedestal and touch him; see what may happen."
"This is silly."
"You've known him seven years longer than I have," she observed. "You must have strong feelings about him, after all that time."
"The book says one must truly love…"
She stood up and stamped her foot, a gesture which made her unconfined breasts bounce wildly up and down. "Brutus, if you don't do your part, if you don't jump up there this minute and touch Jessie, you can forget about me, you can forget about that day bed— whether or not you shorten your claws!"
"But—"
"And that's final."
More thunder; more lightning, a single fat droplet of rain…
"Very well," the hell hound said.
"Good boy," Helena said.
Brutus tensed and leaped, scrambled on the pedestal and stood beside the granite Jessie Blake. He looked down at Helena and said, "How should I touch him — with a paw?"
"Try that."
He lifted one paw and brushed it sheepishly against the stone leg, yipped when the statue seemed to move.
"It's working, Brute!"
"Yeah," the hound said, amazed.
"Keep it up, Brute!"
The hound brushed the statue again, pushed his paw back and forth against the granite. Magically, the gray stone gradually began to fade away, to take on the color and texture of leather and cloth and flesh and hair, until Jessie Blake stood before them again, just as he had been earlier in the night before Medusa had frozen him with her gaze.
Dramatically, at that moment, the biggest flash of lightning yet scored the sky, from horizon to horizon, and the clap of thunder was like a thousand cymbals meeting with force.
"Jessie, are you all right?" Helena asked, raising her hands to him, to help him down.
He worked his mouth, as if he were surprised to feel his lips moving, and he said, "Okay, but—"
"Come down, darling," she said.
He ignored her offered hands and jumped down, with Brutus jumping close behind him.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've got a vicious headache," he said. Then he seemed to remember Brutus, and he turned and bent down and scratched the hell hound behind the ears. "Thanks, partner."
Brutus looked bashfully at the ground. "Least I could do," he said. "We have a case to work on, and—"
"Jessie, it was just awful what they did to you," Helena said.
"I know what they did," the detective assured her, grimly. "I was aware of my surroundings all the time, even though I had been turned to stone. I would like to hear how you two found me! I'd like to hear, that is, after I've found a men's room. I never did have a chance to use the one at the Four Worlds."
Chapter Nine
Zeke Kanastorous was still trapped in the small chalk circle in Jessie's inner office when the three got back from Millennium City just after one o'clock in the morning. Brutus had relighted the two previously extinguished black candles, to relieve the angry little creature of the worst of its pain, but Kanastorous was far from happy. He paced around and around in that tight circle, where only four steps were needed to make a full circuit, and he cast occasional glances at Jessie, Helena and the hell hound as they filed into the room. He was dotted with a black excretion, some form of ectoplasm, and his four-fingered hands were fisted at his sides.
"How you feeling, Zeke?" Jessie asked, moving into the main circle with Helena and Brutus at his back.
"You'll be sorry for this," the demon said. He stopped pacing and faced the detective, his shoulders hunched, his eyes blazing.
"What did I do?" Jessie asked.
"There is a law against black-magic crudities. It's no longer possible for some wise ass magician to summon up a demon whenever he wants. They punish that sort these days!"
"Do they punish kidnappers?" Jessie asked.
"What's that mean?" Kanastorous snapped.
"I was kidnapped," Jessie said. "You were one of the conspirators who worked to snare me."
"A gross misrepresentation of the facts," the demon said, drawing himself up to his full, yet diminutive, height, his carapaced shoulders pulled back, his bony chest thrust out.
"Oh?"
"Yes, my Sam Spade friend. You see, I was working with the government under special orders from the Regent for the Western States." He gave the title as much prestige and awe, by his obsequious tone of voice, as some people had once given the names of God before the maseni had come and exposed God for what he was.
Jessie raised his eyebrows and said, "Well, well. The national government is interested in keeping the Galiotor Tesserax affair quiet"
"You better believe it, my hardnosed detective friend," Kanastorous said. "I've already explained to your hound, here, that I know nothing of the Tesserax business; I wasn't told of it. But I do know the government's in a sweat to keep it hushed up. Therefore, if I have broken any laws, as you assert, I have done so with complete immunity from prosecution in any nether-world court of law."
"From their prosecution," Jessie amended.
"I fail to understand."
"You've no guarantee of immunity from my prosecution," Jessie said. He walked to the edge of the larger circle and pointed his index finger at the demon's squashed nose. "When I let you go tonight, you can follow one of two courses. One: you can run immediately to the authorities and tell them how you were illegally called up by ancient means, how your civil liberties were grieviously violated; you can inform them that I have been rescued by my friends, and that I am loose again. Two: you can simply forget that all of this happened; you can let bygones be bygones; you can keep your head and let things go on as they have always gone before. If you choose the first course—"
"They'll be on your tails in an hour," the demon said.
"And you will suffer mightily," Jessie said.
"I don't see how," Kanastorous said, though he watched the detective through heavy-lidded eyes.
"Even if an arrest order is issued at once, against Brutus and Helena and me, the coppers won't catch us all together or even quickly. At least one of us will have the time to perform the ceremony and summon you up again. And the next time, Kanastorous, we'll snuff out all seven of the black candles and give you eternal rest; you'll never have a conscious thought again, for all eternity; you'll drift, mindlessly, in the void."