Image of the Beast

  The smoke did expand and become denser. She was sitting in a ragged column of it. And she was suddenly coughing. Smoke blew out of the way of her breath and then coiled back in to fill the gap. He caught a whiff of a tendril and stepped back. It was acrid, burning, filled with the essence of a million automobile exhausts and smokestack products of chemical factories and refineries.

  By now, he was opposite her and could see that the cloud had spread downward and was beginning to cover the map.

  She looked up, as if she had suddenly detected his presence. She squalled and fell backward off the stool but whirled and landed on all fours and then was up and running toward the doorway through which he had just come. He was startled for a second at her swiftness and agility but recovered and went after her. She had slammed the door before he could stop her, and when he turned the knob and pulled on it, he found that the door was locked. To break it down was useless, since she would be long gone down the stairway and the passageway.

  No, there was Dolores. She might stop the old woman. Then, again, she might not. Her position in this situation was ambiguous. He suspected that she would do what was best for Dolores and that might not coincide with what would be good for him. It would be good sense to quit chasing after the baroness and try to get out before she could warn the others.

  The smog over the table was disappearing swiftly and was gone by the time he left the room. The door led directly into an elevator cage which must have been made about 1890. He hated the idea of being trapped in it but he had no other way out. He pressed the DOWN button. Nothing happened except that a small light glowed above the button and a lever near it. He pushed down on the lever, and the elevator began to sink. He pressed more on the lever, and the rate of descent was a little faster. When he pushed the lever upwards past the neutral position, the elevator stopped. He pressed the UP button and then pushed the lever upward, and the elevator began to ascend. Satisfied that he could operate it, he started it downward and stopped at the second story. If the alarm had been given, they would be waiting for him on the ground floor. They might also be waiting on every floor, but he had to take some chances.

  The door was just like the other doors, which was why he may not have known about the elevator. He turned the knob and pushed it and found himself near the door to Magda's bedroom. At the same time, increasingly loud voices and rapid footsteps came up the stairway. He didn't have time to run down the hall and try other doors. He slipped into the room again. Glam's body was still in the marble enclosure, the boots sticking over it. The wall-section was open. He considered for a moment hiding under the many pillows and cushions inside the enclosure but decided that he would be found if they moved Glam's body. There was nothing to do except enter again the passage behind the wall.

  He hid behind the inner wall and waited. The first one to step through was going to get a sword in his guts. The sword trembled in his grip, partly from weariness and partly from nervousness. He had had no experience in swordplay, no fencing lessons, no conditioned reflexes built up, and so he suddenly realized that he was not as dangerous as he would have liked to be. To handle a sword expertly, a man had to know where to thrust and where not to thrust. An ill-placed stab could hit a bone and glance off and leave the intended victim only lightly wounded and able to run off or attack, if he were tough and experienced. Even a hard musculature could turn an inept thrust.

  He swore. He had been so intent on what he was going to do with the sword that he had not noticed that his penis was working up to another orgasm. Stormed, he dropped the sword with a clatter but did not care about the noise for a few seconds. He jetted, the chlorox odor rising strong in the dusty hot passageway. Then he picked up the sword and waited, but he was even more uneasy. Those people out there might have nostrils more sensitive than human beings--he admitted by now that they were not human, as he knew human--and they might easily detect the jism. Should he move on? If so, where? To the same circuit?

  He had been running long enough. It was time to fight fire with fire.

  Fire.

  He looked through the opening. The door of the room was still shut. Loud voices came through it. A savage squeal which chased cold over him. It sounded like an enraged hog. More shouts. Another squeal. The voices seemed to drift away, down the hall. He crept out and inspected the room and found what he wanted. There were books in the shelves, the pages of which he tore out. He crumpled up a Los Angeles Times and piled crumpled book-pages over them and ripped open several pillows and sprinkled their contents on the pile. The cigarette lighter in the purse touched off the papers, which soon blazed up and began feeding on the wall-drapes under which the fire had been built.

  He opened the door to the hall to open the way for a draft--if it should exist. Taking the classified ad sections of the Times and a number of books, he went into the passageway. Having found a one-way mirror, he broke it with the hilt of his sword to make another draft or a reinforcement of the first. He started a fire in the passageway, which was made of old and dry wood and should soon be blazing like the underbrush in the hills at the end of a long dry season. He then entered the room with the broken mirror and built a fire under a huge canopied bed.

  Why hadn't he done this before? Because he had been too harried to have time to think, that was why. No more. He was fighting back.

  If he could find a room with windows to the outside, he would go through it, even if it meant a drop from the second story. He'd let them worry about the fire while he got over the walls to his car and then to the police.

  He heard voices outside the door to the room and went back into the passageway. He ran down it, using his flashlight, although the fire was providing an adequate twilight for him. A corner took him away from it, however. He stopped and sent the beam down one corridor to check ahead of him. Nothing there. He started to turn to probe the corridor on the other side of the intersection, and he froze. Something had growled at the far end.

  Faint clicks sounded. Claws or nails on the naked boards of the floor?

  A howl made him jump.

  It was a wolf.

  Suddenly, the clicking, which had been leisurely, became rapid. The wolf howled again. He turned his flashlight on the corner of the passageway at the far end just in time to see a big gray shape come around it, eyes glowing in the beam. Then the shape, snarling, was bounding toward him.

  And behind it came another.

  Childe thrust almost blindly at the hurtling shape. His sword traveled in the general direction of the beast as it sprang, but its speed and ferocious voice disconcerted him. Despite this, the blade struck it squarely somewhere. A shock ran along his arm, and, although he had leaned forward in what he hoped was a reasonable imitation of a fencer's lunge, he was thrown backward. He landed on his rump but scrambled to his feet, yelling as he did so. The flashlight, which had fallen, was pointing down along the floor at the second wolf. This was several yards away and crouching as it advanced slowly toward Childe.

  It was smaller, the bitch of the pair, and presumably had slowed down to find out what was going on before it attacked.

  Childe did not want to expose his side to the bitch, but he did not want to meet her charge without a weapon. He grabbed the hilt of the rapier, put his foot on the body, and pulled savagely. The carcass was palely illuminated in the side-wash of the flashlight. The sword shone dully, and darkness stained the fur around the beast's neck. The rapier had gone in three-quarters of its length, through the neck and out past the bottom rear of the skull.

  The rapier pulled out reluctantly but swiftly. The shewolf snarled and bounded forward, her nails clicking briefly. Childe had a few inches of blade to withdraw yet and would have been taken on the side. Her jaws would probably have clamped on his shoulder or head, and that would have been the end of him. A wolf's jaws were strong enough to sever a man's wrist with one snap.

  The bitch, however, slipped on something and skidded on one shoulder into the rump of the dead wolf. Childe leaped backward
, taking the sword with him and then as quickly lunged and ran her through the shoulder as she bounded to her feet. She snarled again and her jaws clashed at him, but he pushed with all his weight against the hilt and drove her back so that she fell over the dead wolf. He continued to push, digging his heels into the wood. The blade sank deeper and presently the tip ground against the floor. Before that, the bitch was silent and still.

  Shaking, breathing raspingly as if his lungs needed oil, he pulled the rapier out and wiped it on the she-wolf's fur. He picked up the flashlight and ran its beam over the wolves to make sure they were dead. Their outlines were becoming indistinct. He felt dizzy and had to shut his eyes and lean against the wall. But he had seen what the bitch had slipped on. A smear of his semen.

  Voices drifted around the corner from which the wolves had come. He ran down the passageway, hoping that they would become too occupied with fighting the fires to chase him. The corridor ran into another at right angles to it, and he took the left turn. His beam, dancing ahead of him, picked out a section of wall and a locking mechanism. He went through it, his sword ready, but he was unable to restrain his wheezing. Any occupant of the room, unless he were deaf, would be warned.

  The room was broad and high-ceilinged, so high that it must have displaced two rooms above it and may have gone almost to the roof. The walls were paneled in dark oak, and huge rough-hewn oak beams ran just below the heavily shadowed ceiling. The floor was dark polished oak. Here and there was a wolf or bear skin. The bed was a framework with eight thick rough-hewn oaken logs, low footboard and headboard, and planks laid across the framework.

  Lying on the planks was a huge oak log squared off at the corners. It had been gouged out on its top with axe and chisel. The gouge was wide and deep enough to hold a tall man. It did hold a man. The baron, covered with a bearskin to his neck, lay on his back in the hollow. There was dirt beneath him and dirt humped under his head for a pillow.

  His face was turned straight upward. His nose looked huge and long. His lower lip had slipped a little to reveal the long white teeth. His face was as greenish-gray as if he had just died. This may have been because of the peculiar greenish light flickering from four fat green candles, two at each corner of the log-coffin.

  Childe pulled the bearskin back. The baron was naked. He put his hand on the baron's chest and then on his wrist pulse. There was no detectable heartbeat, and the chest did not move. An eyelid, peeled back, showed only white.

  Childe left the baron and pulled two drapes back. Two enormous French windows were grayly bared. It was daytime, but the light was very dark, as if night had left an indelible stain. The sky was dark gray with streamers of green-gray dangling here and there.

  Childe looked in the darkness under the planks supporting the log-coffin. He found a roughly-worked oaken lid. He felt cold. The silence, the sputtering green candles, the heavy dark wood everywhere, the ponderous beams, which seemed to drip shadows, the roughness, indeed, the archaicness, of the room, and the corpse-like sleeper, who was so expected and yet so unexpected--these fell like heavy shrouds, one over the other, upon him. His breath sawed in his throat.

  Was this room supposed to be a reproduction of a room in the ancestral castle in Transylvania? Why the ubiquitous primitively worked oak? And why this coffin when Igescu could afford the best?

  Some things here accorded with the superstitions (which, as far as he was concerned, were not superstitions). Other things be could not account for.

  He had a hunch that this room was built to conform to specifications far more ancient than medieval ones, that the oak and the log and the candles had been in use long before the Transylvanian mountains were so named, long before Rumania existed as a colony of the Romans, long before the mother city, Rome, existed, and probably long before the primitive Indo-European speakers began to spread out of the homeland of what would someday be called Austria and Hungary. A type of this room, and a type of this man who slept in the log, in one form or another, had existed in central Europe, and elsewhere, when men spoke languages now perished without a record and when they still used flint tools.

  Whatever the origin of his kind, however closely or distantly he resembled the creature of folklore, legend, and superstition, Igescu was forced to be as good as dead when daylight arrived. The rays of the sun contained some force responsible for diurnal suspended animation. Perhaps some other phenomenon connected with the impact of the sunlight caused this strange sleep. Or, perhaps, it was the other way around, with the absence of the moon? No, that wasn't logical because the moon was often present in the daytime. But then, maybe the moon's effect was greatly reduced by the other luminary.

  If Igescu had not been forced to do so, he would never have quit the search for Dolores and Childe. Why, then; had he not made sure that he would not be vulnerable? He knew that both Dolores and Childe were in the intramural passageways.

  Childe felt colder than before except for a hot spot between his shoulder blades, the focus of something hidden somewhere and staring at his back.

  He looked swiftly around the room, at the ceiling, where the shadows clung above the beams, under the oaken frame of the bed, although he had looked there once, and behind the few chairs. There was nothing.

  The bathroom was empty. So was the room beyond the thick rough oaken door on the west wall. Nothing living was there, but a massive mahogany coffin with gold trimming and gold-plated handles stood in one corner.

  Childe raised the lid, fully expecting to find a body. It was empty. Either it had housed a daylight sleeper at one time or it was to be used in some emergency by the baron. Childe pulled up the satin lining and found earth beneath it.

  He went back to the oaken room. Nothing had visibly changed. Yet the silence seemed to creak. It was as if intrusion of another had hauled in the slack of the atmosphere, had hauled it in too tightly. The shadows abruptly seemed darker; the green light of the candles was heavier and, in some way, even more sinister.

  He stood in the doorway, sword ready, motionless, repressing his breathing so he could listen better.

  Something had come into this room, either from the passageway entrance or through the door at the west wall. He doubted that it had used the passageway entrance, because any guard stationed there would have challenged him before he could get into the room.

  It had to have been in the other room, and it must have been watching him through some aperture which Childe could not see. It had not moved against him immediately because he had not tried to harm the baron.

  Perhaps the feeling was only too-strained nerves. He could see nothing, nothing at all to alarm him.

  But the baron would not have left himself unguarded.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 19

  Childe took one step forward. There was still no sound except that which his mental ear heard. It was a crackling, as if the intrusion of a new mass had bent a magnetic field. The lines of force had been pushed out.

  The rapier held point up, he advanced toward the enormous log on the bed. The noiseless crackling became louder. He stooped and looked under the frame. There was nothing there.

  Something heavy struck him on his back and drove him face down. He screamed and rolled over. Fire tore at his back and his hips and the back of his thighs, but he was up and away, while something snarled and spat behind him. He rounded the bed and whirled, the sword still in his hand although he had no memory of consciously clinging to it or of even thinking of it. But if his spirit had unclenched for a moment, his fist had not.

  The thing was a beauty and terror of white and black rosetted fur, and taut yellow-green eyes which seemed to reflect the ghastly light of the candles, and thin black lips, and sharp yellow teeth. It was small for a leopard but large enough to scare him even after most of the fright of the unexpected and unknown had left him. It had hidden in the cavity of the log, crouching flattened on top of Igescu until Childe had come close to it.

  Now it crouched again and snarled, eyes spurtin
g ferocity, claws unsheathed.

  Now it launched itself over the bed and the coffin. Childe, leaning over the baron's body, thrust outward. The cat was spitted on the blade, which drove through the neck. A paw flashed before his eyes, but the tips of the claws were not quite close enough. Childe went over backward, and the rapier was torn from his hand. When he got up, he saw that the leopard, a female, was kicking its last. It lay on its right side, mouth open, the life in its eyes flying away bit by bit, like a flock of bright birds leaving a branch one by one as they started south to avoid the coming of winter.

  Childe was panting and shaking, and his heart was threatening to butt through his ribs. He pulled the sword out, shoving with his foot against the body, and then climbed upon the oaken frame. He raised the sword before him by the hilt with both hands. Its point was downward, parallel with his body. He held it as if he were a monk holding a cross up to ward off evil, which, in a way, he was. He brought the blade down savagely with all his weight and drove it through the skin and heart and, judging from the resistance and muted cracking sound, some bones.

  The body moved with the impact, and the head turned a little to one side. That was all. There was no sighing or rattling of breath. No blood spurted from around the wound or even seeped out.

  The instrument of execution was steel, not wood, but the hilt formed a cross. He hoped that the symbol was more important than the material. Perhaps neither meant anything. It might be false lore which said that a vampire, to be truly killed, must be pierced through the heart with a stake or that the undead feared the cross with an unholy dread and were deprived of force in its presence.

  Also, he remembered from his reading of Dracula, many years ago, something about the head having to be removed.