The Haunted Earth

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Count Slavek, having proposed a toast to his new friend's great beauty, tossed off the glassful of red wine. Then, smiling so broadly that he revealed his two gleaming fangs, he said, "Before long, my dear, we shall drink other toasts together, though not of wine."

Mrs. Renee Cuyler, dressed alluringly in a thigh-high skirt and a blouse slashed almost to her navel, smiled at the Count's thinly veiled promise of inhuman ecstacy and sipped her wine, which she, more decorously, had not swallowed in one thirsty gulp.

The Count put his glass down and walked to her, his cape flowing out behind like dark wings. He touched her lightly along her slim neck. A small sigh (from both of them) punctuated the caress.

"Pure Hokum," Jessie Blake whispered.

He had to whisper, for he was sitting in the closet, watching the Count and Mrs. Cuyler through a fisheye lens which he had installed in the door some hours earlier. Neither the Count nor Mrs. Cuyler knew he was in there, and they would both be acutely disturbed when they learned that he was watching. The important thing was not to let them know they were observed until the crucial, incriminating moment had arrived. So Jessie whispered to himself.

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