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    Image of the Beast / Blown

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      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 were-

      leopards 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 an-

      other fire below the central plank. A third pile below

      the left side of the framework blazed up. In a few min-

      utes, 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 cough-

      ing. 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, hunt-

      ing 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 unfasten-

      ing 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 hap-

      pened 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 there
    of.

      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 porchsteps. 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 her little fist, ran back

      into the house when he drove toward the porch.

      Flames and smoke were pouring out of a dozen win-

      dows 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 be-

      fore 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 deter-

      mined 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 stand-

      ing to fight for good reasons. He also suspected that

      Pao and the baroness bad not come out of the house be-

      cause of what Dolores had done to them, although it

      was possible that Magda or Mrs. Grasatchow had 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 be-

      lieving 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 to-

      ward the woods into which the three women had disap-

      peared. 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 some-

      thing 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, prob-

      ably, since the baron could not have been worried about

      Childe escaping to tell what he 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 compart-

      ment, 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, any-

      way.

      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 sini-

      ster conference they had been scheduled to attend. Or be-

      cause 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 sur-

      prised. 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, al-

      though he expected to be observed. He had no excuse for

      being naked and 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 f
    ell asleep, a few seconds later, he put

      out his hand to feel for something. What did he want?

      Then he realized that it was Mrs. Grasatchow's purse,

      which contained the skins. Somewhere between the bar-

      on's bedroom and this bedroom, he had lost the purse.

      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 mount-

      ing 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 de-

      livered 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 funer-

      als 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 the 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

     
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