"Earth sprite?" Helena asked.
The hermit's face became suffused with joy. "She's delightful, Miss. So svelte, so innocent, a child and yet a woman…. Anyway, she cannot leave the caverns, so I had to come to her. We met twenty years ago, when I went spelunking with some friends, and we've been lovers ever since. Sometimes, she calls to me — with voice as sweet as Coca Cola, and I go deeper into the mountains to be with her."
"I see," Jessie said.
"How lovely," Helena said.
Tesserax said, "Well, let's get off your personal life for a while, my friend, and discuss the events that transpired here exactly forty days ago."
"When the village was destroyed," the hermit said.
"That's correct."
"I was with Zemena at the time, you know. I didn't have any inkling what was going on."
"Zemena is this earth sprite?" Jessie asked.
"That's her, yes," Kinibobur Biks said. "She had called to me early in the day, and I went to be with her. We made passionate love in a basin of warm volcanic mud."
"Wonderful," Brutus growled.
"But you were the first to find the ruined village, were you not?" Tesserax inquired.
The hermit nodded, frowning. "Oh, it was a horrible sight! Bodies everywhere, crushed and torn, ripped as if by giant claws, limb smashed from limb. Blood in pools, enough to fill a lake. The houses were all demolished, tottering piles of debris, the stones crushed, the mortar powdered, the wood splintered and smouldering. Fluttercars lay in mangled heaps, and all the other artifacts of village life had shattered or run together in long streams of slag. Fires had raged and died; smoke still curled like a hateful mist through all that remained."
"You saw the tracks?" Jessie asked.
"Huge footprints," the hermit said. "It was those that made me turn and run for help."
"You saw no beast?"
"No. I was too late for that."
"Did you follow the tracks?"
"They faded out, led nowhere."
There was little more that Kinibobur Biks could tell them, but he was very good at describing the horror of the ruined village. Jessie had him run through that, in more detail, asking questions time and again, until there did not seem to be anything else they could gain from the hermit.
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:
"If this crisis isn't solved, if the beast can't easily be contained and destroyed, and if the news of its existence is leaked back to Earth, what will this do to Earth-maseni relations?" Yilio asked it, this time.
Jessie regarded the mist demon, wishing it had a face where he might read expressions, guess thoughts. "The Pure Earthers will be upset, naturally."
"Is there any chance they could win converts, gain political power?" Hannah asked, brushing golden curls from her cherubic face.
"No," Jessie said.
"Not even an outside chance?" Hannah asked.
"The Pure Earthers are borderline Shockies. No one will take their agitating seriously, even if it were learned the maseni were having trouble with a murderous supernatural. The gates have been opened. It's too late to close them now. Relations with our supernatural brothers are too advanced for us to return to total ignorance of them." He looked at his notepad, found his place, and said, "Now, just two more questions…"
The remainder of that interview should have taken ten minutes. It lasted, instead, nearly half an hour, because Yilio and Hannah were not done with their own interrogation, still interested in the nature of the Pure Earth movement.
At the time, Jessie was bothered by their interruptions, but he assigned no special value to their questions. He thought that they were merely curious and talkative by nature. Later, he realized that their behaviour, their curiosity, was another thread in the rope of an explanation which he was slowly twining together.