He felt that probably there were many things said about this creature that were not true and also there were many things unknown. Whether the lore was superstition or not, he had done his best, was going to do his best to ensure that it died a permanent death.
As for the leopard, it might be just that--a leopard. He suspected that it was Ngima or Mrs. Pocyotl because it was so small. It did not seem likely that Pocyotl, who was Mexican, some of whose ancestors undoubtedly spoke one form or another of Nahuatl, would be a wereleopard. A werejaguar, yes. No, it must be, if not a genuine leopard, Ngima or the Chinaman Pao.
Whatever it was, it showed no sign of changing after death. Perhaps it really was not a metamorph but a pet trained to guard Igescu.
What am I thinking of? he thought. Of course, it is. There are no such creatures as werewolves and wereleopard's and vampires. Maybe there are vampires, psychological vampires, psychotics who think they are vampires. But an actual metamorphosis! What kind of mechanism would be involved, what mechanism could effect a change like that? Bones become fluid, change shape even in the cellular structure, and harden again? Well, maybe the bones are not our kind of bones. But what about the energy involved? And even if the body could shift shape, the brain surely couldn't! The brain would have to retain its human size and shape.
He looked at the leopard and he remembered the wolves. Their heads were wolf-sized, their brains were small.
He should forget this nonsense. He had been drugged; the rest was suggestion.
Not until then did he become aware that the leopard, when it had been fastened to him for such a short time, had done more than he had thought. It had torn off his shirt and pants and belt, and his hand, feeling his back and hips and legs, was wet with blood. He hurt, and he was alarmed, but a closer examination convinced him that the leopard had done more harm to his clothes than to him. The wounds were superficial or seemed so.
He went into the next room, which was a small study, and picked up an armful of newspapers and magazines. Returning to the huge room, he wadded up the papers and-ripped out pages and stacked a pile on each side of the baron's neck. After dripping some lighter fluid on the two piles and over the baron's hair and chest, he touched off the fluid.
Childe then opened the large windows and built another fire below the central plank. A third pile below the left side of the framework blazed up. In a few minutes, he added a wooden chair to that fire. After a while, the oak of the frame and the plank were blazing, and the log was blackening and smoking. The stench of burned hair and flesh rose from the baron.
More paper and lighter fluid got the drapes over the windows to burning. Then he struggled with the body of the leopard until he dropped it on the fire. Its head burned fiercely with lighter fluid; its black nose lost its wet shininess and wrinkled with heat.
Opening the entrance to the passageway made a stronger draft. The smoke in the room streamed out through the hole to meet the smoke in the passageway. The entrance did not seem big enough to handle all the smoke, which soon filled the room. He began to cough and, suddenly, as if the coughs had triggered him, he had a long shuddering orgasm the roots of which seemed to be wrapped around his spine and to be pulling his spine down his back and out through his penis.
Just as the last spurt came, a shriek tore from the smoke in the center of the room. He spun around but could see nothing. One of the two had not been dead and still was not dead because the shrieks were continuing with full strength.
And then, before he could turn again to face the new sound, a grunting and squealing shot from the wall-entrance. There was a rapid clicking, much louder than the wolves' claws, a tremble of the boards under his feet, and he was knocked upward to one side. Half-stunned, his left leg hurting, he sat up. He began coughing. The squealing became louder and the boards shook under him. He rolled away under cover of the smoke while the thing that had hit him charged around, hunting for him.
Crawling on his hands and knees along the wall, his head bent near the, floor to keep from breathing the smoke, he headed for the French windows. The swine noises had now given way to a deep coughing. After a dozen racks that seemed strong enough to suck in all the smoke in the room during the in-breaths, the hooves clattered again. Childe rounded the corner and slid along the wall until he came to the next corner. His hand, groping upward into the smoke, felt the lower edges of the French windows. The open ones were about ten feet away, as he remembered them.
The hooves abruptly stopped. The squealing was even more ferocious, less questing and more challenging. Hooves hit the floorboards again. Punctuating the two sounds was a loud hissing.
A battle was taking place somewhere in the smoke. Several times, the walls shook as heavy bodies hit them, and the floor seldom ceased to tremble. Blows--a great hand hammering into a thick solid body--added codas to the crackling of the fires.
Childe could not have waited to see what was going on even if he had wished. The smoke would kill him sooner, the fire would kill him later, but not so much later, if he did not get out. There was no time to crawl on around until he got to the west door. The windows were the only way out. He climbed out after unfastening and pushing out the lower edge of the screen, let himself down until he clung by his hands, and then dropped. He struck a bush, broke it, felt as if he had broken himself, too, rolled off it, and then stood up. His left leg hurt even more, but he could see no blood.
And then he jetted again--at least, his penis had not been hurt in the fall--and was helpless while two bodies hurtled through the window he had just left. The screen, torn off, struck near him. Magda Holyani and Mrs. Grasatchow crushed more bushes and rolled off them onto the ground near the driveway.
Immediately after, several people ran out of the house onto the porch.
Both the women were bleeding from many wounds and blackened with smoke. Magda had ended her roll at his feet in time to receive a few drops of sperm on her forehead. This, he could not help thinking even in his pain, was an appropriate extreme unction for her. The fat woman had struck as heavily as a sack of wet flour and now lay unconscious, a gray bone sticking out of the flesh of one leg and blood running from her ears and nostrils.
Bending Grass, Mrs. Pocyotl, and O'Faithair were on the porch. That left Chornkin, Krautschner, Ngima, Pao, Vivienne, the two maids, the baroness, and Dolores unaccounted for. He thought he knew what had happened to the first three. Two were dead of rapier thrusts in a passageway and one was burning with Igescu.
The clothes of the three on the porch were ripped, their hair was disarrayed, and they were bleeding from wounds. They must have tangled with Magda or Mrs. Grasatchow or Dolores or any combination thereof. But they were not disabled, and they were now looking for him, their mouths moving, their hands pointing at him now and then.
Childe limped, but swiftly, to the Rolls-Royce parked twenty feet away on the driveway. Behind came a shout and shoes slapping against the porch steps. The Rolls was unlocked, and the key was in the ignition lock. He drove away while Bending Grass and O'Faithair beat on the windows with their fists and howled like wolves at him. Then they had dropped off and were racing toward another car, a red Jaguar.
Childe stopped the Rolls, reversed, and pressed the accelerator to the floor. Going backward, the Rolls bounced O'Faithair off the right rear fender and then crashed to a halt. Bending Grass had whirled just before it pinned him against the Jaguar. His dark broad face stared into the rear window for a few seconds. Then it was gone.
Childe drove forward until he could see the Indian's body, red and mashed from the thighs down, face downward on the pavement. The outlines of his body looked fuzzy; he seemed to be swelling.
Childe had no time to keep looking. He stopped the Rolls again, backed it up over O'Faithair, who was just beginning to sit up, went forward over him again, turned around, and drove the wheels back and forth three times each over the bodies of Holyani, Grasatchow, Bending Grass, and O'Faithair. Mrs. Pocyotl, who had been screaming at him and shaking he
r little fist, ran back into the house when he drove toward the porch.
Flames and smoke were pouring out of a dozen windows on all three stories of the left wing and out of one window of the central house. Unchecked, the first would destroy the entire building in an hour or two. And there was nobody to check it.
He drove away. Coming around the curve just before entering the road through the woods, he saw part of the yard to one side of the house. The red-headed Vivienne, her naked body white in the ghastly half-dark daylight, Mrs. Pocyotl with her shoes off, and the two maids were running for the woods. Behind them came the nude Dolores, her long dark hair flying. She looked grim and determined. The others looked determined also, but their determination was inspired by fright.
Childe did not know what she would do if she caught them, but he was sure that they knew and were not standing to fight for good reasons. He also suspected that Pao and the baroness had not come out of the house because of what Dolores had done to them, although it was possible that Magda or Mrs. Grasatchow bad killed them. He could not be sure, of course, but he suspected that the two had been in metamorphosis as pig and snake and that they had been unmanageable.
The three women disappeared in the trees.
He struck himself on his forehead. Was he really believing all this metamorphosis nonsense?
He looked back. From this slight rise, he could see Bending Grass and Mrs. Grasatchow. The clothes seemed to have split off the Indian, and he looked black and bulky, like a bear. The fat woman was also dark and there was something nonhuman about the corpse.
At that moment, from behind the house, the biggest black fox he had ever seen raced out and tore off toward the woods into which the three women had disappeared. It barked three times and then turned its head and seemed to grin at him.
The chill that had transfixed him when he first saw Dolores went through him again. He remembered something now, something he had read long ago. The shape-shifting fox-people of China. They lost control of their ability to change form if they drank too much wine. And, that first evening, the baron had been trying to restrain Pao's wine consumption. Why? Because he had not wanted Childe to witness the metamorphosis? Or for some other reason? For some other reason, probably, since the baron could not have been worried about Childe escaping to tell what be had seen.
He shrugged and drove on. He had had too much of this and wanted only to get away. He was beginning to believe that a 150-pound man could become fluid, twist bone and flesh into a nonhuman mold, and, somewhere along the transformation, shed 125 pounds, just tuck them away some place to be withdrawn later when needed. Or, if not cached, the discarded mass trailed along, like an invisible jet exhaust, an attached plume of energy ready for reconversion.
The gate of the inner wall was before him. He opened this and drove through, and soon was stopped by the outer wall. Here he left the Rolls on the driveway, after wiping off his prints with a rag from the glove compartment, and walked through the big gate to his own car, parked under the trees at the end of the road.
He found the key he had hidden--how long ago? it seemed days--and drove away. He was naked, bloody, bruised, and hurting, and he still had an erection that was automatically working up to yet another--oh, God!--orgasm, but he did not care. He would get into his apartment and the rest of the world, smog, monsters, and all, could go to hell, which they were doing, anyway.
A half-mile down the road, a big black Lincoln shot by him toward the Igescu estate. It held three men and three women, all of whom were handsome or beautiful and well dressed. Their faces were, however, grim, and he knew that their destination was Igescu's and that they were speeding because they were late for whatever sinister conference they had been scheduled to attend. Or because someone in the house had called them for help. The car had California license plates. Perhaps they were from San Francisco.
He smiled feebly. They would be unpleasantly surprised. Meanwhile he had better get out of here, because he did not know whether or not they had noted his license plate.
Before he had gone a mile, the sky had become even darker, growled, thundered, lightninged. A strong wind tore the smog apart, and then the rains washed the air and the earth without letup for an hour and a half.
He parked the car in the underground garage and took the elevator up to his floor. No one saw him, although he expected to be observed. He had no excuse for being naked with a hard-on, and it would be just like life, the great ironist, to have him arrested for in decent exposure and God knows what else after all he had been through he, the abused innocent. But no one saw him, and after locking the door and chaining it, he showered, dried himself, put on pajamas; ate a ham and cheese sandwich and drank half a quart of milk, and crawled into bed.
Just before he fell asleep, a few seconds later, he put out his hand to feel for something. What did be want? Then he realized that it was Mrs. Grasatchow's purse, which contained the skins. Somewhere between the Baron's bedroom and this bedroom, he had lost the purse.
* * *
CHAPTER 20
Childe slept, though often restlessly, for a day, a night, and most of the next day. He got up to empty bladder and bowels, to eat cereal or a sandwich and sometimes wake up at the end of a wet dream.
His dreams were often terrors, but were sometimes quite pleasant copulations. Sometimes Mrs. Grasatchow or Vivienne or Dolores rode him, and he woke up jetting and groaning. Other times, he was riding Sybil or some woman he had known or some faceless woman. And there were at least two dreams in which he was mounting a female animal from the rear, once with a beautiful leopardess and once with a bitch wolf.
When he was awake, he wondered about the dreams, because he knew that the Freudians insisted that all dreams, no matter how terrifying or horrible, were wishes.
By the time he was slept out, his pajamas and sheets were a mess, but the effects of the cone were gone. He was very happy to have a flaccid penis: He showered and breakfasted, and then read the latest Los Angeles Times. Life was almost normal now; the papers were being delivered on schedule. Industries were running full-time. The migration back was still going on but was only a trickle now. The mortuaries were overloaded, and funerals were taking place far into the night. The police were swamped with missing persons reports. Otherwise, the city was functioning as usual. The smog was beginning to build up but would not become alarming while the present breeze continued.
Childe read the front page and some articles. Then he used the phone to check on Sybil. She had not come home. A call to San Francisco was answered by Sybil's sister, Cherril. She said that their mother had died, and Sybil was supposed to have come for the funeral. She presumably left as soon as she had packed. She had been unable to get a plane out, and her car wouldn't start, so she had phoned back that she was coming up with a friend who also wanted to get out of town.
Who was the friend? Cherril did not know. But she was frantic, and she had tried to get hold of Childe. When he had not answered after five tries, she had given up on him. The state police had reported that Sybil was not involved in any of the many accidents between Los Angeles and San Francisco during that time.
Childe told Cherril not to worry, that many people were still missing. Sybil would show up safe and sound. He would not rest until he found her. And so on.
When he hung up the phone, he felt empty. The next day, he was as hollow, and he had to admit that he knew no more than what Cherril had told him. The "friend" he suspected Sybil to have driven off with, Al Porthouse, denied having seen her for two weeks.
Childe gave up, temporarily, and turned his attention elsewhere. The baron's house had been burned out, although the rains had kept it from being completely destroyed. There were no bodies in the ruins, in the yard, or in the woods. Mrs. Grasatchow's purse was not found.
Childe remembered the automobile that had raced by him after he had driven away from the baron's. Whoever the six had been, they had cleaned up thoroughly.
But what had happened to Dolo
res?
He drove out to the estate and went over the wall again, the police having locked the main gate. His poking around uncovered nothing. The police did not know his story, of course. He knew better than to tell them anything except that he had visited the baron just once and that briefly. They had questioned him and then had said that they were puzzled by the disappearance of the baron, secretary, servants, and chauffeur, but so far no information had come in. For all they knew, the household had left for parts unknown, the house had burned by accident, and any day now they might hear from the baron.
Late that afternoon, he returned to his apartment. He was shrouded in his thoughts, which were concerned with moving to some place where smog would not be a problem for years to come. It was some time before he realized that the phone must have rung at least a dozen, times. It had started while he was unlocking the door.
The voice was a pleasant baritone.
"Mr. Childe? You don't know me. We haven't met, fortunately for you, although I think we passed each other on the road outside the Baron Igescu's estate several days ago."
Childe did not reply for a moment, then he said, "What do you want?"
His voice was steady. He had thought it would crack, as if it were crystallized with the ice encasing him.
"You have been very discreet, Mr. Childe, in not telling the police. Or, as far as we know, anybody. But we want to ensure your silence, Mr. Childe. We could easily do that by methods you well know by now. But it pleases us to have you know about us and yet be able to do nothing."
Childe shouted, "What did you do with Sybil?"
There was a silence. And then the voice, "Sybil? Who's she?"
"My wife! My ex-wife, I mean! You know, damn you! What have you done with her, you filthy monster, unnatural...!"
"Nothing, I assure you, Mr. Childe.
"The voice was cool and mocking.
"We rather admire you, Mr. Childe, because of what you accomplished. Congratulations. You managed to kill, permanently, a number of our friends who have survived for a very long time indeed, Mr. Childe. You could not have done it without the help of del Osorojo, of course, but that was something we did not foresee. The baron did not anticipate it, and for his carelessness, or ignorance, he paid, and, those with him. Some of them, anyway."