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
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