Image of the Beast / Blown

  later, he followed her. She was on the divan and glar-

  ing at him.

  "I haven't had such a ball ache since I was a teen-

  ager and came home from my first necking party," he

  said. He did not know why he said it; certainly, he did

  not expect her to feel sorry for him, and to do some-

  thing about it. Or did he?

  "Necking party? You're sure dating yourself, old man!"

  She looked furious. Unfortunately, fury did not make

  her beautiful.

  Yet, he hated to leave; he had a vague feeling that

  he was somehow at fault.

  He took one step toward her and stopped. He was go-

  ing to kiss her, but it was force of habit that pushed him.

  "Good-by," he said. "I really am sorry, in a way."

  "In a way!" she screamed. "Now isn't that just like

  you! You can't be all sorry or all righteously indignant

  or all right or all wrong! You have to be half-sorry. You

  ... you … half-assed half-man!"

  "And so we leave exotic Sybil-land," he said, as he

  swung the door open. "It sinks slowly into the smog of

  fantastic Southern California, and we say aloha, farewell,

  adieu, and kiss my ass!"

  Sybil sprang out of the chair with a scream and came

  at him with fingers hooked to catch his face with her

  nails. He caught them and shoved her back so that she

  staggered against the sofa. She caught herself and then

  yelled, "You asshole! I hate you! I had a choice to make!

  I let you come here, instead of Al! I wanted you, not

  him! He was strictly second-choice, and a bad second at

  that! You think you're hard up, you don't know

  what hard up is! I've turned down lots of men because I

  kept hoping every night you'd call me! I'd eat you up;

  you'd be days getting out of here. I'd love you, oh, how

  I'd love you! And now this, you stinking bastard! Well,

  I'm going to call Al, and he's going to get everything I

  was going to give you and more! More! More! Do

  you understand that, you?"

  He understood that he could still feel jealous. He felt

  like punching her and then waiting for Al and kicking

  him downstairs.

  But it would be no good trying to make up with her.

  Not now. Actually, not ever, but he wasn't quite ready to

  believe this. Not down there where certainty dwelt.

  Trying to grasp what ruined their love was like trying

  to close your fingers on a handful of smog.

  He strode through the door and, knowing that she ex-

  pected him to slam it behind him, did not.

  Perhaps it was this that drove her to the last barbarism.

  She stepped into the hall and shouted, "I'll suck his

  cock! I'll suck his cock, you!"

  He turned and shouted, "You're no lady!" and spun

  around and walked off.

  Outside, in the biting veils of gray-green, he laughed

  until he coughed raspingly, and then he cried. Part of

  the tears was engendered by the smog, part by his grief

  and rage. It was sad and heart-rending and disgusting

  and comical. One-upmanship was all right, but the

  one-upman actually upped it up his own one.

  "When the hell is she going to grow up?" he groaned,

  and then, "When the hell am I? When will the Childe

  become father to the man?"

  Dante was thirty-five, midway in his life's journey,

  when he went astray from the straight road and woke

  to find himself alone in a dark wood.

  But he obtained a professional guide, and he had at

  least once been on the straight road, the True Way.

  Childe did not remember having been on the straight

  road. And where was his Virgil? The son of a bitch must

  be striking for higher pay and shorter hours.

  Every man his own Virgil, Childe said, and, coughing

  (like Miniver Cheevy), pushed through the smog.

  5

  Somebody had broken the left front window of the

  Olds while he was with Sybil. A glance at the front seat

  showed him why. The gas mask was gone. He cursed.

  The mask had cost him fifty dollars when he purchased

  it yesterday, and there were no more to be had except

  in the black market. The masks were selling for two hun-

  dred or more dollars, and it took time to locate a seller.

  He had the time, but he did not have the cash in hand

  and he doubted that his check would be accepted. The

  banks were closed, and the smog might disappear so sud-

  denly that he would not need the mask and would

  stop payment of the check. There was nothing to do

  except use a wet handkerchief and a pair of goggles he

  had worn when he had a motorcycle. That meant he

  must return to his apartment.

  He made up a pile of handkerchiefs and filled a can-

  teen with water as soon as he was home. He dialed the

  LAPD to report the theft, but, after two minutes, he

  gave up. The line was likely to be busy all day and all

  night and indefinitely into the future. He brushed his

  teeth and washed his face. The wash rag looked yellow.

  Probably it was his imagination, but the yellow could be

  the smog coming out. The yellow looked like the stuff

  that clouded his windshield in the morning after several

  days of heavy smog. The air of Los Angeles was an

  ocean in which poisonous plankton drifted.

  He ate a sandwich of cold sliced beef with a dill

  pickle and drank a glass of milk, although he did

  not feel hungry. Visualizations of Sybil with Al troubled

  him. He didn't know Al, but he could not bar shad-

  owy images whose only bright features—too bright—

  were a rigid monstrosity and a pair of hairy, never-empty

  testicles. The pump-pump-pumping sound was also only

  a shadow, but it would not go away either. Shadows

  sometimes turned out to be indelible ink blots.

  He forced himself to consider Matthew Colben and his

  murderers. At least, he thought they were murderers.

  There was no proof that Colben had been killed. He

  might be alive, though not well, somewhere in this area.

  Or someplace else.

  Now that he was recovering from his shock, he could

  even think that Colben might be untouched and the

  film faked.

  He could think this, but he did not believe it.

  The phone rang. Someone was getting through to him,

  even if he could get through to no one. Suspecting that

  only the police could ram through a call, he picked up

  the phone. Sergeant Bruin's voice, husky and growling

  like a bear just waking up from hibernation, said,

  "Childe?"

  "Yes."

  "We got proof that they mean business. That film

  wasn't faked."

  Childe was startled. He said, "I was just thinking

  about a fraud. How'd you find out?"

  "We just opened a package mailed from Pasadena."

  Bruin paused. Childe said, "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Colben's prick was in it. The end of it, any-

  way. Somebody's prick, anyway. It sure as hell had

  been bitten off."

  "No leads yet?" Childe said after some hesitation.

  "The packa
ge's being checked, but we don't expect

  anything, naturally. And I got bad news. I'm being taken

  off the case, well, almost entirely taken off. We got too

  many other things just now, you know why. If there's

  going to be any work done on this, Childe, you'll have to

  do it. But don't go off half-cocked and don't do nothing

  if you get a definite lead, which I think you ain't going

  to get. You know what I mean. You been in the busi-

  ness."

  "Yes, I know," Childe said. "I'm going to do what

  I can, which, as you said, probably won't be much. I

  have nothing else to do now, anyway."

  "You could come down here and swear in," Bruin

  said. "We need men right now! The traffic all over the

  city is a mess, like I never saw before. Everybody's try-

  ing to get out. This is going to be a ghost town. But it'll

  be a mess, a bloody mess, today and tomorrow. I'm tell-

  ing you, I never seen nothing like it before."

  Bruin could be stolid about Colben, but the prospect

  of the greatest traffic jam ever unfroze his bowels. He

  was really being moved.

  "If I need help, or if I stumble—and I mean stumble

  —across anything significant, should I call you?"

  "You can leave a message. I'll call you back when—

  if—I get in. Good luck, Childe."

  "Same to you, Bruin," Childe said and muttered as he

  hung up, "O Ursus Horribilis! Or whatever the voca-

  tive case is."

  He became aware that he was sweating, that his eyes

  felt as if they'd been filed, his sinuses hurt, he had a

  headache, his throat felt raw, his lungs were wheezing

  for the first time in five years since he had quit smoking

  tobacco, and, not too far off, horns were blaring.

  He could do something to ease the effects of the

  poisoned air, but he could do little about the cars out in

  the street. When he had left his wife's apartment, he

  had had a surprising amount of trouble getting across

  Burton Way to San Vicente. There was no stop light at

  this point on Le Doux. Cars had to buck traffic coming

  down Burton Way on one side and going up on the other

  side of the divider. Coming down to the apartment, he

  had not seen a car or even a pair of headlights in the

  dimness. But, going back, he had had to be careful in

  crossing. The lights sprang out of the gray-greenness with

  startling rapidity as they rounded a nearby curve of

  Burton Way to the west. He had managed to find a break

  large enough to justify gunning across. Even so, a pair

  of lights and a blaring horn and squealing brakes and a

  shouted curse—subject to the Doppler effect—told him

  that a speeder had come close.

  The traffic going west toward Beverly Hills was light,

  but that coming across Burton Way between the boule-

  vards to cut southeast on San Vicente was heavy. There

  was panic among the drivers. The cars were two deep,

  then suddenly three deep, and Childe had barely had

  room to squeeze through. He was being forced out of

  his own lane and against the curb. Several times, he only

  got by by rubbing his tires hard against the curb.

  The light at San Vicente and Third was red for him,

  but the cars coming down San Vicente were going

  through it. A car going east on Third, horn bellowing,

  tried to bull its way through. It collided lightly with

  another. From what Childe could see, the only damage

  was crumpled fenders. But the two drivers, hopping out

  and swinging at each other, looked as if they might

  draw some blood, inept as they were with their fists. He

  had caught a glimpse of several frightened faces—chil-

  dren—looking through the windows of both damaged

  cars. Then he was gone.

  Now he could hear the steady honking of horns. The

  great herd was migrating, and God help them.

  The deadly stink and blinding smoke had been bad

  enough when most cars suddenly ceased operating. But

  now that two million automobiles were suddenly on the

  march, the smog was going to be intensified. It was true

  that, in time, the cars would be gone, and then the

  atmosphere could be expected to start cleaning itself. If

  it was going to do it. Childe had the feeling that the

  smog wasn't going to leave, although he knew that that

  was irrational.

  Meanwhile, he, Childe, was slaying. He had work to

  do. But would he be able to do anything? He had to get

  around, and it looked as if he might not be able to do

  that.

  He sat down on the sofa and looked across the room

  at the dark golden bookcases. The Annotated Sherlock

  Holmes, the two great boxed volumes, was his treasure,

  the culminating work of his collection unless you counted

  a copy of The White Company personally inscribed by

  A. Conan Doyle, once the possession of Childe's father.

  It was his father who had introduced him at an early age

  to interesting and stimulating books, and his father who

  had managed to pass on his devotion to the greatest

  detective to his son. But his father had remained a pro-

  fessor of mathematics; he had felt no burning to emulate

  The Master.

  Nor would any "normal" child. Most kids wanted to be

  airplane pilots or railroad engineers or cowboys or astro-

  nauts when they grew up. Many, of course, wanted to be

  detectives, Sherlock Holmeses, Mark Tidds (what boy

  nowadays knew of Mark Tidd?), even Nick Carters

  since he had been revived with modern settings and plots,

  but few stuck to that wish. Most of the policemen and

  private investigators whom he knew had not had these

  professions as boyhood goals. Many had never read

  Holmes or had done so without enthusiasm; he had never

  met a Holmes buff among them. But they did read true

  detective magazines and devoured the countless paper-

  backs of murder mysteries and of private eyes. They

  made fun of the books, but, like cowboys who also

  deride the genuineness of Westerns, they were addicted.

  Childe made no secret of his "vices." He loved them,

  even the bad ones, and gloried in the "good" ones.

  And so why was he trying to justify being a detective?

  Was it something to be ashamed of?

  In one way, it was. There was in every American,

  even the judge and the policeman, a more-or-less strong

  contempt for lawmen. This lived side by side with an

  admiration for the lawman, but for the lawman who is

  a strong individualist, who fights most of his battles by

  himself against overwhelming evil, who fights often out-

  side the law in order to bring about justice. In short, the

  frontier marshal, the Mike Hammerish private eye. This

  lawman is so close to the criminal that there is a cer-

  tain sympathy between the lawman and the criminal.

  Or so it seemed to Childe, who, as he told himself

  now, tended to do too much theorizing and also to pro-

  ject his own feelings as those of others.

  Matthew Colben. Where wa
s he now? Dead or suf-

  fering? Who had forcibly taken him to some dwelling

  somewhere in this area? Why was the film sent to the

  LAPD? Why this gesture of mockery and defiance? What

  could the criminals hope to gain by it, except a perverse

  pleasure in frustrating the police?

  There were no clues, no leads, except the vampire

  motif, which was nothing but a suggestion of a direction

  to take. But it was the only handle to grasp, ectoplasmic

  though it was, and he would try to seize it. At least, it

  would give him something to do.

  He knew something about vampires. He had seen the

  early Dracula movies and the later movies on TV. Ten

  years ago, he had read the novel Dracula, and found

  it surprisingly powerful and vivid and convincing. It

  was far better than the best Dracula movie, the first;

  the makers of the movie should have followed the book

  more closely. He had also read Montague Summers and

  had been an avid reader of the now-dead Weird Tales

  magazine. But a little knowledge was not dangerous; it

  was just useless.

  There was one man he knew who was deeply inter-

  ested in the occult and the supernatural. He looked up

  the number in his record book because it was unlisted

  and he had not called enough to memorize it. There

  was no response. He hung up and turned on the radio.

  There was some news about the international and na-

  tional situations, but most of the broadcast was about

  the exodus. A number of stalled cars on the freeways

  and highways had backed up traffic for a total of several

  thousand miles. The police were trying to restrict passage

  on the freeways to a certain number of lanes to permit

  the police cars, ambulances, and tow trucks to pass

  through. But all lanes were being used, and the police

  were having a hell of a time clearing them out. A number

  of fires had started in homes and buildings, and some

  of them were burning down with no assistance from the

  firemen because the trucks could not get through. There

  were collisions all over the area with no help available,

  not only because of the traffic but because there just

  was not enough hospital and police personnel available.

  Childe thought, to hell with the case! I'll help!