Image of the Beast / Blown

  Her hands moved along the ophidian shaft as if she

  were feeling an unnaturally long penis—hers. Her slim

  fingers—beautiful fingers—traced the length and then,

  while one hand curled gently back of the head to support

  the body, the other slid back and forth behind the head

  as if she were masturbating the snake-penis.

  The thing quivered. Then the head moved forward,

  and its minute lips touched her lower lip. It bit down, or

  seemed to, because she jerked her head back a little as

  if stung. Her head moved forward again, however, and

  her mouth wide open. The head was engulfed in her

  mouth; she began to suck.

  Childe had been too shocked to do anything but react

  emotionally. Now he began to think. He wondered how

  the thing could breathe with its head in her mouth. Then

  it occurred to him that it would be even more difficult for

  it to breathe when it was coiled in her womb or whatever

  recess of her body it lived in. So, though it had a nose,

  it perhaps did not need it. Its oxygen could be supplied

  by the woman's circulatory system, which surely must be

  connected through some umbilical device to the other

  end of the thing.

  That head. It had belonged at one time to a full-grown

  man. Childe, with no rational reason, knew this. The

  head had belonged to the body of an adult male. Now,

  through some unbelievable science, the head had been

  reduced to the size of a golf ball, and it had been at-

  tached to this uterine snake, or the original human body

  had been altered, or …

  He shook his head. How could this be? Had he been

  drugged? That mirror and now this.

  The body bent, and the head withdrew from the wom-

  an's mouth. It swayed back and forth like a cobra to a

  flute, while the woman put her hands to her mouth and

  then removed a pair of false teeth. Her lips fell in; she

  was an old woman—from the neck up. But the thing

  thrust forward before she had put the teeth on the

  dresser, and the tiny head and part of the body disap-

  peared into the toothless cavity. The body bent and un-

  bent, slid back and forth between her lips.

  At first, the movements were slow. Then her body

  trembled, and her skin became paler, except around the

  mouth and the pubes, where the intense darkening spoke

  of the concentration of blood. She shook; her great eyes

  fluttered open; she stared as if she were half-stunned. The

  thrustings of the body became swifter, and more of the

  body appeared and disappeared. She staggered back-

  wards until she fell back upon the bed with her legs hang-

  ing over the edge and one foot resting on the floor, the

  other lifted up.

  For perhaps ninety seconds, she jerked. Then, she was

  quiet. The snaky body lifted; the head came out of the

  lips and turned with the turning of the upper quarter of

  body. A thick whitish fluid was dribbling out of the open

  mouth.

  The shaft rose up and up until all but the last six inches

  were lifted from the woman's body. It teetered like a

  sunflower in a flood and then collapsed. The tiny mouth

  chewed on a nipple for a while. The woman's hands

  moved like sleeping birds half-roused by a noise, then

  they became quiet again.

  The mouth quit chewing. The body began a slow zigzag

  retreat into the dark-red bush and the fissure, trailing

  the head behind it. Presently, the body was gone and the

  head was swallowed up, bulging open the labia as it sank

  out of sight.

  Childe thought, Werewolf? Vampire? Lamia? Vody-

  anoi? What?

  He had never read of anything like this woman and the

  thing in her womb. Where did they fit in with the theories

  of Le Garrault as expounded by Igescu?

  The woman rose from the bed and walked to the

  dresser. Looking into the mirror, she fitted the false teeth

  into her mouth and once more was the most beautiful

  woman in the world.

  But she was also the most horrifying woman he had

  ever seen. He was shaking as much as she had been in

  her orgasm, and he was sick.

  At that moment, the door that opened onto the hallway

  moved inward.

  Childe felt as cold as if he had been dipped into an

  opening in polar ice.

  The pale-skinned, scarlet-lipped, black-haired head of

  Dolores del Osorojo had appeared around the doorway.

  The woman, who must have seen Dolores in the mir-

  ror, grayed. Her mouth dropped open; saliva and the

  spermy fluid dribbled out. Her eyes became huge. Her

  hands flew up—like birds again—to cover her breasts.

  Then she screamed so loudly that Childe could hear her,

  and she whirled and ran towards the door. She had

  snatched up the bottle by the neck so swiftly that Childe

  was not aware of it until she was halfway across the room.

  She was terrified. No doubt about that. But she was also

  courageous. She was attacking the cause of her terror.

  Dolores smiled, and a white arm came around the door

  and pointed at the woman.

  The woman stopped, the bottle raised above her head,

  and she quivered.

  Then Childe saw that Dolores was not pointing at the

  woman. She was pointing past her. At him.

  At the mirror behind which he stood, rather. The

  woman whirled and looked at it and then, bewildered,

  looked around. Again, she whirled, and this time she

  shouted something in an unidentifiable language at the

  woman. The woman smiled once more, withdrew her

  arm, and then her head. The door closed.

  Shaking, the woman walked slowly to the door, slowly

  opened it, and slowly looked through the doorway into

  the hall. If she saw anything, she did not care to pursue it,

  because she closed the door. She emptied the bottle then

  and returned to the dresser, where she pulled up a chair

  and sat down on it and then put her head on her arms on

  the table. After a while, the pinkish glow returned to her

  skin. She sat up again. Her eyes were bright with tears,

  and her face seemed to have gotten about ten years older.

  She leaned close to the mirror to look at it, grimaced, got

  up, and went through the other door, which Childe pre-

  sumed led to a bathroom or to a room which led to a

  bathroom.

  Her reaction to Dolores certainly was not the baron's,

  who had seemed blasé. The sight of the supposed ghost

  had terrified her.

  If Dolores were a hoax, one of which the woman would

  surely be aware, why should she react so?

  Childe had a more-than-uneasy feeling that Dolores

  del Osorojo was not a woman hired to play ghost.

  It was, however, possible that the woman was terrified

  for other reasons.

  He had no time to find out what. He used the flashlight

  in quick stabs to determine if there was an entrance to

  her room, but he could find none. He went on then and

  came across another panel which opened t
o another one-

  way mirror. This showed him a small living room done in

  Spanish colonial style. Except for the telephone on a

  table, it could have been a room in the house shortly af-

  ter it was built. There was nobody in it.

  The corridor turned past the room. Along the wall was

  a hinged panel large enough to give entrance to the other

  side. There was also a peephole behind a small sliding

  panel. He put his eye to it but could see only a darkened

  room. At the periphery of his vision was a lightening of

  the darkness, as if light were leaking through a barely

  opened door or a keyhole. A voice was coming from

  somewhere far-off. It was in a strange language, and it

  seemed to be carrying on a monologue or a telephone

  conversation.

  Beyond this room the corridor became two, the legs of

  a Y. He went down each for a short distance and found

  that two entrance panels existed on opposite walls of one

  leg and an entrance panel and peephole on opposite walls

  of the other. If, at another time, he could locate a

  triangular-shaped room, he would know where these

  passageways were.

  He looked through the peephole but could see nothing.

  He went back the passageway and up the other leg to the

  panel and opened this. His hand, thrust through the

  opening, felt a heavy cloth. He slid through carefully so

  that he would not push the cloth. It could be a drapery

  heavy enough to keep light on the other side from shining

  through. If anybody were in that room, he must not see

  the drapery move.

  Squatting, his shoulder to the wall and squeezing his

  shoulders so that he would not disturb the cloth, he duck-

  walked until he had come to the juncture of two walls.

  Here the edges of the draperies met. He turned and pulled

  the edges apart and looked through with one eye.

  The room was dark. He rose and stepped through and

  turned his flashlight on. The beam swept across a movie

  camera on a dolly and then stopped on a Y-shaped table.

  He was in the room, or one much like it, in which

  Colben and Budler had spent their—presumably—last

  few hours.

  There was a bed in one corner, a number of movie

  cameras, some devices the use of which he did not know,

  and a large ashtray of some dark-green material. In the

  center of its roughly circular dish stood a long thin statue.

  It looked like a nude man in the process of turning into

  a wolf, or vice versa. The body up to the chest was hu-

  man; from there on it was hairy and the arms had become

  legs and the face had wolf-like ears and was caught in

  metamorphosis. There were about thirty cigarette stubs

  in the dish. Some had lipstick marks. One had a streak of

  dried blood, or it looked like dried blood, around the

  filter.

  Childe turned on the lights and with his tiny Japanese

  camera took twenty shots. He had what he needed now,

  and he should get out. But he did not know whether or

  not Sybil was in this house.

  And there might be other, even more impressive, evi-

  dence to get the police here.

  He turned off the lights and crawled out of the panel

  into the passageway. He had a choice of routes then and

  decided to take the right leg of the Y. This led to another

  hall—the horizontal bar of a T. He turned right again

  and came to a stairway. The treads were of a glassy sub-

  stance; it would have been easy to slip on them if he had

  not been wearing sneakers. He walked down six steps,

  and then his feet slid out from under him and he fell

  heavily on his back.

  He struck a smooth slab and shot downward as if on a

  chutey-chute, which, in a sense, he was on. He put out

  his hands against the walls to brake himself but the walls,

  which had not seemed vitreous, were. The flashlight

  showed him a trapdoor opening at the bottom of the steps

  —these had straightened out to fall against each other

  and form a smooth surface—and then he slid through the

  dark opening. He struck heavily but was unhurt. The

  trapdoor closed above him. The flashlight showed him the

  padded ceiling, walls, and floor of a room seven feet high,

  six broad, ten wide. There were no apparent doors or

  windows.

  He smelled nothing nor heard anything, but gas must

  have been let into the room. He fell asleep before he

  knew what was happening.

  14

  He did not know how long he had been there. When he

  awoke, his flashlight, his wristwatch, his revolver, and his

  camera were missing. His head ached, and his mouth was

  as dry as if he were waking up after a three-day drunk.

  The gas must have had a very relaxing effect, because he

  had wet his shorts and pants. Or else he had wet them

  when the steps had dropped out from under him and he

  had begun his slide. He had needed to piss before the

  trap caught him.

  Five lights came on. Four were from floor lamps set in

  the corners, and one was from an iron wall-lamp shaped

  like a torch and set at forty-five degrees to the wall.

  He was not in the padded chamber. He was lying on a

  huge four-postered bed with scarlet sheets and bedspread

  and a scarlet black-edged canopy. The room was not one

  he had seen before. It was large; its black walls were

  hung with scarlet yellow-trimmed drapes and two sets of

  crossed rapiers. The floor was dark-glossy brown hard-

  wood with a few crimson starfish-shaped thick-fibered

  rugs. There were some slender wrought-iron chairs with

  high skeletal backs and crimson cushions on the seats and

  a tall dresser of dense-grained brown wood.

  It was while looking around that he thought of the

  dread of iron and of the cross that vampires were sup-

  posed to have. There were iron objects all over the house,

  and, while he had seen no crucifixes, he had seen plenty

  of objects, such as these crossed rapiers, which made

  cruciforms. If Igescu was a vampire (Childe felt ridicu-

  lous even thinking this), he certainly did not object to

  contact with iron or sight of the cross.

  Perhaps (just perhaps), these creatures had acquired

  an immunity from these once-abhorred things during

  thousands of years. If they had ever dreaded iron and the

  cross, that is. What about the years before iron was used

  by man? Or the cross was used by man? What guards and

  wards did man have then against these creatures?

  Shakily, Childe got out of the bed and stood up. He

  had no time to search for a secret wall-exit, which he

  thought could exist here and which he might find before

  his captors returned. But the door at the far end swung

  open, and Glam entered, and the big room seemed much

  smaller. He stopped very close to Childe and looked down

  at him. For the first time, Childe saw that his eyes were

  light russet. The face was heavy and massive as a boulder,

  but those eyes seemed to glow as if they
were rocks which

  had been subjected to radioactivity. Hairs hung from the

  cavernous nostrils like stalactites. His breath stank as if

  he had been eating rotten octopus.

  "The baron says you should come to dinner," he rum-

  bled.

  "In these clothes?"

  Glam looked down at the wet patch on the front of

  Childe's pants. When he looked up, he smiled briefly, like

  a jack-o'lantern just before the candle died.

  "The baron says you can dress if you want to. There's

  clothes your size or near enough in the closet."

  The closet was almost big enough to be a small room.

  His eyebrows rose when he saw the variety of male and

  female clothing. Who were the owners and where were

  they? Were they dead? Did some of the clothes bear labels

  with the names of Colben and Budler, or had borne the

  labels, since the baron would not be stupid enough, surely,

  to leave such identification on.

  Perhaps he was stupid. Otherwise, why the sending of

  the films to the Los Angeles Police Department?

  But he did not really believe this about the baron.

  Childe, after washing his hands and face and genitals

  and thighs in the most luxurious bathroom he had ever

  been in, and after dressing in a tuxedo, followed Glam

  down several hallways and then downstairs. He did not

  recognize any of the corridors nor the dining room. He

  had expected to be in the dining room he had seen yes-

  terday, but this was another. The house was truly enor-

  mous.

  The motif of this room was, in some respects, Early

  Grandiose Victorian-Italian, or so it seemed to him. The

  walls were gray black-streaked marble. A huge red marble

  fireplace and mantel were at one end, and above the

  mantel was a painting of a fierce old white-haired man

  with long moustachioes. He wore a wine-red coat with

  wide lapels and a white shirt with thick ruffles around the neck.

  The floor was of black marble with small mosaics at

  each of the eight corners. The furniture was massive and

  of a black dense-grained wood. A white damascene cloth

  covered the main table; it was set with massive silver

  dishes and goblets and tableware and tall thick silver

  candleholders which supported thick red candles. There