The looming figure swiped at the air, fruitlessly. Hawks wondered why, since he was in no position to do anything about it if Martin’s killer decided to do something like stamp on his head and pound it into the concrete slab it was laying on. Choking on the alcoholic stench of aftershave that saturated the very air he tried to scramble away from the giant, snarling adversary and get to his feet. From there, he might be able to, if not fight back, perhaps escape with his skin where it ought to be.
Pulling himself up on a fence railing, he thought he could see a light in the distance. Then a strong hand clamped around his ankle and pulled, yanking his arm near out of its socket and dropping him to the floor. His head struck the ground and he saw stars.
“Come on, kid. Pick yourself up!” said the apparition of Cary Grant that had just swum into view in front of him. He started laughing, and darkness overcame him.

He woke up, which was the first surprise. Second was the face looking down at him. It was a round, good-natured face belonging to a police officer.
“You hale?” said the officer, and Hawks worried the crack on the head had knocked his speech centres out of line. “All put together fine, I mean,” the officer continued. Hawks huffed out a breath and let his worries go. “Fine, officer. Did you catch an eyeful of the fink that knocked me down?”
The police officer shrugged. “Not much of one. Only saw a little less than what you did, I imagine. Went straight out of view as soon I got here.”
“I didn’t catch much myself. Except that he was hard on the nose. Any fellow wears that much aftershave is looking to hide something,” he said. “That and, well, he was missing a finger.”
“His finger? How’d you happen to spot that?”
“Got a good look while he was working my face over,” said Hawks. “Focusses the mind, I find.”
The policeman’s brow formed a deep channel over his nose. “That hasn’t been my experience at all,” he said.
“Well, thank you officer. You scared him off good,” said Hawks, hoping to be done with him quickly. The policeman made some noise to the tune that he should come down to the station and make up some kind of report, but Hawks didn’t have time for that. In the process of picking himself up he had realised that the little notecard with the address of the medium called Laroux was gone. No doubt lay in his mind that it was stolen by the killer, and if the killer made it to Laroux before Hawks did, that was most likely his only lead vanished into the night.

Hawks ran uptown, hoping like hell that his mental notebook wasn’t failing him in this crucial moment. The address was 1182 Jupiter. He repeated it to himself. One one eight two – one one eight two – one one eight two – like the rattle of a train passing over the sleepers. Or was that one one two eight? As he ran, it began to rain, big drops of water sloshing on the brim of his hat and scattering up under his feet from each step. The orange glow of the streetlights illuminated everything from above and reflected from below eerily. He wiped a soaking sleeve over his face to pull some of the water away and kept running. He was at the intersection of Jupiter and 29th now, and he spun and ran up the Roman god’s namesake bending his head to the ground, his feet barely touching the floor anymore.
1182 Jupiter looked right. A skinny house, tightly squeezed between two that seemed to dwarf it. A narrow alleyway down one side served the backyards of both houses. Hawks skipped up all three steps before the front door in a single elegant leap and rapped smartly on the black-painted wood. There was no response, so he clenched his fist tight and hammered on the door. As if in answer a crash sounded from within, like a vase or a decanter. A flash of lightning struck, followed a second later by a thunderous grumbling from above.
Hawks vaulted the fence easily and touched feet to slab in the backyard. Most of it was concreted over, save for a stretch at the far end that had been torn up and left as bare dirt. The door this side had enough space, so he squared up to it and then kicked just to the right of the handle, smashing the lock and sending a jarring jolt up his leg in retaliation. Limping inside, Hawks saw filthy bootprints criss-crossing the kitchen which he now entered into. His moment of respite would soon be over, and he grabbed a kitchen knife from the block. It sat easily in his hand; he had fought with many kinds of blade in his short life, but knife-fighting would always be his home turf.
He came forward, shifting out of the kitchen and into the squarish entry hall. Off to one side was an open sitting room, while a staircase ascended steeply onto the next floor beside him. A floorboard creaked above. Stairs it was then. He flipped the knife over in his hand and examined the blade. It was freshly sharpened. Freshly cleaned too. Someone had scrubbed it hard, maybe too hard. The telltale marks of the wire wool were visible on its flat surface. The cutting edge, however, was as to a razor’s.
He quickly ascended the stairs, silent as a rat, knife poised. Another crash! He ran the last few steps and turned around. Before him was a big window, busted open from the inside. He ran to the window, just in time to glimpse the huge, lumbering figure make its way down the street, arms swinging from side to side like a gorilla. It would have been comical in different circumstances. Hawks decided to try laughing at it anyway. It didn’t feel good, so he stopped.
There was a big room adjacent to the window. At first Hawks thought that it was open-plan style, like the sitting room downstairs, with an archway instead of a door. Then he realised that the door was merely burst inwards, in fragments scattered across the room. It was about fifteen feet square, and every wall was floor to ceiling with bookshelves, made of some black wood that seemed to drain the light from the room. Each shelf creaked with overuse, stuffed with fat, leatherbound books. One was open on the big dark table, one page covered with dense gothic script, the other with a crude woodcut of a dancing skeleton menacing a peasant. It occurred to Hawks that the skeleton might not have been dancing, and that that was just how the artist had chosen to represent an altogether more intimidating stature. Without reading the book he had no way of knowing, and the book was least of his worries. There was another doorway in the room, similarly exploded to the entrance, leading into a small bathroom. The wall above the bath was tiled in uniform white squares, which were cracked and cratered around an impact in the wall.
Hawks edged closer to the bathroom, hearing a low groaning as he approached. He dreaded what the killer might have done just as much as he needed to see. The woman – Laroux presumably – lay at the bottom of the deep claw-footed tub in a crumpled heap. She was dressed in a fine black gown which fell about her like a crow’s wings. Here, she suddenly looked up where before she had seemed totally insensate and a bloody hand clutched Hawks’ for a second before falling limp again, forever. In that tiny moment of clarity Laroux had whispered a single word and passed him a piece of paper. The word, in an accent that he couldn’t identify, was “exhumare”. The piece of paper, in a fine cursive script, read “He walks only by night.”
Exhumare was the title of the black book that was open on the table. Hawks had been looking at it for some time, nonplussed, when he realised that the thick-inked lettering was in English, not some sinister occult speech as he had assumed, and he began to read.
“Gentle reader,” the book began. “If seekst ye knowledge of the living dead-”
Hawks closed the book. Living dead. Absurd. And yet his enemy had leapt through a window from the upper floor of the house and run away as if he had been skipping down the front step. Had thrown Hawks around as if he were made of paper. And, most saliently, had left a rotting corpse finger in Martin’s apartment which to all appearances was his own. Hawks lifted the book, closing it and balancing it on its thick spine. He let the pages fall open and read from the top:
“The dead man walks only by night, but by day he must slumber among those of his own kind.”
Thoughts of sleep were gone from Hawks’ mind. He closed the book, put it under his arm, and quickly made his exit.