Image of the Beast / Blown
Page 23
they were not human, as he knew human—and they
might easily detect the jism. Should he move on? If so,
where? To the same circuit?
He had been running long enough. It was time to
fight fire with fire.
Fire.
He looked through the opening. The door of the
room was still shut. Loud voices came through it. A
savage squeal which chased cold over him. It sounded
like an enraged hog. More shouts. Another squeal. The
voices seemed to drift away, down the hall. He crept out
and inspected the room and found what he wanted.
There were books in the shelves, the pages of which he
tore out. He crumpled up a Los Angeles Times and piled
crumpled book-pages over them and ripped open several
pillows and sprinkled their contents on the pile. The cig-
arette lighter in the purse touched off the papers, which
soon blazed up and began feeding on the wall-drapes
under which the fire had been built.
He opened the door to the hall to open the way for a
draft—if it should exist. Taking the classified ad sec-
tions of the Times and a number of books, he went
into the passageway. Having found a one-way mirror,
he broke it with the hilt of his sword to make another
draft or a reinforcement of the first. He started a fire
in the passageway, which was made of old and dry
wood and should soon be blazing like the underbrush
in the hills at the end of a long dry season. He then
entered the room with the broken mirror and built a
fire under a huge canopied bed.
Why hadn't he done this before? Because he had been
too harried to have time to think, that was why. No
more. He was fighting back.
If he could find a room with windows to the outside,
he would go through it, even if it meant a drop from the
second story. He'd let them worry about the fire while
he got over the walls to his car and then to the police.
He heard voices outside the door to the room and
went back into the passageway. He ran down it, using
his flashlight, although the fire was providing an adequate
twilight for him. A corner took him away from it, how-
ever. He stopped and sent the beam down one corridor
to check ahead of him. Nothing there. He started to turn
to probe the corridor on the other side of the intersection,
and he froze. Something had growled at the far end.
Faint clicks sounded. Claws or nails on the naked
boards of the floor?
A howl made him jump.
It was a wolf.
Suddenly, the clicking, which had been leisurely, be-
came rapid. The wolf howled again. He turned his flash-
light on the corner of the passageway at the far end just
in time to see a big gray shape come around it, eyes
glowing in the beam. Then the shape, snarling, was
bounding toward him.
And behind it came another.
Childe thrust almost blindly at the hurtling shape.
His sword traveled in the general direction of the beast
as it sprang, but its speed and ferocious voice discon-
certed him. Despite this, the blade struck it squarely
somewhere. A shock ran along his arm, and, although he
had leaned forward in what he hoped was a reasonable
imitation of a fencer's lunge, he was thrown backward.
He landed on his rump but scrambled to his feet, yelling
as he did so. The flashlight, which had fallen, was point-
ing down along the floor at the second wolf. This was
several yards away and crouching as it advanced slowly
toward Childe.
It was smaller, the bitch of the pair, and presumably
had slowed down to find out what was going on before
it attacked.
Childe did not want to expose his side to the bitch,
but he did not want to meet her charge without a weapon.
He grabbed the hilt of the rapier, put his foot on the
body, and pulled savagely. The carcass was palely illu-
minated in the side-wash of the flashlight. The sword
shone dully, and darkness stained the fur around the
beast's neck. The rapier had gone in three-quarters of its
length, through the neck and out past the bottom rear of
the skull.
The rapier pulled out reluctantly but swiftly. The she-
wolf snarled and bounded forward, her nails clicking
briefly. Childe had a few inches of blade to withdraw
yet and would have been taken on the side. Her jaws
would probably have clamped on his shoulder or head,
and that would have been the end of him. A wolf's jaws
were strong enough to sever a man's wrist with one
snap.
The bitch, however, slipped on something and skidded
on one shoulder into the rump of the dead wolf. Childe
leaped backward, taking the sword with him and then
as quickly lunged and ran her through the shoulder as she
bounded to her feet. She snarled again and her jaws
clashed at him, but he pushed with all his weight against
the hilt and drove her back so that she fell over the dead
wolf. He continued to push, digging his heels into the
wood. The blade sank deeper and presently the tip
ground against the floor. Before that, the bitch was silent
and still.
Shaking, breathing raspingly as if his lungs needed
oil, he pulled the rapier out and wiped it on the she-wolf's
fur. He picked up the flashlight and ran its beam over the
wolves to make sure they were dead. Their outlines
were becoming indistinct. He felt dizzy and had to shut
his eyes and lean against the wall. But he had seen what
the bitch had slipped on. A smear of his semen.
Voices drifted around the corner from which the
wolves had come. He ran down the passageway, hoping
that they would become too occupied with fighting the
fires to chase him. The corridor ran into another at right
angles to it, and he took the left turn. His beam, dancing
ahead of him, picked out a section of wall and a locking
mechanism. He went through it, his sword ready, but he
was unable to restrain his wheezing. Any occupant of
the room, unless he were deaf, would be warned.
The room was broad and high-ceilinged, so high that
it must have displaced two rooms above it and may have
gone almost to the roof. The walls were paneled in dark
oak, and huge rough-hewn oak beams ran just below the
heavily shadowed ceiling. The floor was dark polished
oak. Here and there was a wolf or bear skin. The bed
was a framework with eight thick rough-hewn oaken
logs, low footboard and headboard, and planks laid
across the framework.
Lying on the planks was a huge oak log squared off
at the corners. It had been gouged out on its top with axe
and chisel. The gouge was wide and deep enough to hold
a tall man. It did hold a man. The baron, covered with a
bearskin to his neck, lay on his back in the hollow. There
was dirt beneath him and dirt humped under his head
for a pillow.
His face was turned straight
upward. His nose looked
huge and long. His lower lip had slipped a little to reveal
the long white teeth. His face was as greenish-gray as if
he had just died. This may have been because of the
peculiar greenish light flickering from four fat green
candles, two at each corner of the log-coffin.
Childe pulled the bearskin back. The baron was naked.
He put his hand on the baron's chest and then on his
wrist pulse. There was no detectable heartbeat, and the
chest did not move. An eyelid, peeled back, showed only
white.
Childe left the baron and pulled two drapes back.
Two enormous French windows were grayly bared. It
was daytime, but the light was very dark, as if night
had left an indelible stain. The sky was dark gray with
streamers of green-gray dangling here and there.
Childe looked in the darkness under the planks sup-
porting the log-coffin. He found a roughly-worked oaken
lid. He felt cold. The silence, the sputtering green candles,
the heavy dark wood everywhere, the ponderous beams,
which seemed to drip shadows, the roughness, indeed,
the archaicness, of the room, and the corpse-like sleeper,
who was so expected and yet so unexpected—these fell
like heavy shrouds, one over the other, upon him. His
breath sawed in his throat.
Was this room supposed to be a reproduction of a room
in the ancestral castle in Transylvania? Why the ubiqui-
tous primitively worked oak? And why this coffin when
Igescu could afford the best?
Some things here accorded with the superstitions
(which, as far as he was concerned, were not supersti-
tions). Other things he could not account for.
He had a hunch that this room was built to conform
to specifications far more ancient than medieval ones,
that the oak and the log and the candles had been in use
long before the Transylvanian mountains were so named,
long before Rumania existed as a colony of the
Romans, long before the mother city, Rome, existed,
and probably long before the primitive Indo-European
speakers began to spread out of the homeland of what
would someday be called Austria and Hungary. A type of
this room, and a type of this man who slept in the log, in
one form or another, had existed in central Europe, and
elsewhere, when men spoke languages now perished
without a record and when they still used flint tools.
Whatever the origin of his kind, however closely or
distantly he resembled the creature of folklore, legend,
and superstition, Igescu was forced to be as good as dead
when daylight arrived. The rays of the sun contained
some force responsible for diurnal suspended animation.
Perhaps some other phenomenon connected with the im-
pact of the sunlight caused this strange sleep. Or, per-
haps, it was the other way around, with the absence of
the moon? No, that wasn't logical because the moon was
often present in the daytime. But then, maybe the moon's
effect was greatly reduced by the other luminary.
If Igescu had not been forced to do so, he would never
have quit the search for Dolores and Childe. Why, then,
had he not made sure that he would not be vulnerable?
He knew that both Dolores and Childe were in the
intramural passageways.
Childe felt colder than before except for a hot spot
between his shoulder blades, the focus of something hid-
den somewhere and staring at his back.
He looked swiftly around the room, at the ceiling,
where the shadows clung above the beams, under the
oaken frame of the bed, although he had looked there
once, and behind the few chairs. There was nothing.
The bathroom was empty. So was the room beyond the
thick rough oaken door on the west wall. Nothing living
was there, but a massive mahogany coffin with gold trim-
ming and goldplated handles stood in one corner.
Childe raised the lid, fully expecting to find a body.
It was empty. Either it had housed a daylight sleeper at
one time or it was to be used in some emergency by the
baron. Childe pulled up the satin lining and found earth
beneath it.
He went back to the oaken room. Nothing had visibly
changed. Yet the silence seemed to creak. It was as if
intrusion of another had hauled in the slack of the at-
mosphere, had hauled it in too tightly. The shadows
abruptly seemed darker; the green light of the candles
was heavier and, in some way, even more sinister.
He stood in the doorway, sword ready, motionless,
repressing his breathing so he could listen better.
Something had come into this room, either from the
passageway entrance or through the door at the west wall.
He doubted that it had used the passageway entrance,
because any guard stationed there would have challenged
him before he could get into the room.
It had to have been in the other room, and it must
have been watching him through some aperture which
Childe could not see. It had not moved against him
immediately because he had not tried to harm the baron.
Perhaps the feeling was only too-strained nerves. He
could see nothing, nothing at all to alarm him.
But the baron would not have left himself unguarded.
19
Childe took one step forward. There was still no sound
except that which his mental ear heard. It was a crack-
ling, as if the intrusion of a new mass had bent a
magnetic field. The lines of force had been pushed out.
The rapier held point up, he advanced toward the
enormous log on the bed. The noiseless crackling be-
came louder. He stooped and looked under the frame.
There was nothing there.
Something heavy struck him on his back and drove him
face down. He screamed and rolled over. Fire tore at his
back and his hips and the back of his thighs, but he was
up and away, while something snarled and spat behind
him. He rounded the bed and whirled, the sword still in
his hand although he had no memory of consciously
clinging to it or of even thinking of it. But if his spirit
had unclenched for a moment, his fist had not.
The thing was a beauty and terror of white and black
rosetted fur, and taut yellow-green eyes which seemed to
reflect the ghastly light of the candles, and thin black
lips, and sharp yellow teeth. It was small for a leopard
but large enough to scare him even after most of the
fright of the unexpected and unknown had left him. It
had hidden in the cavity of the log, crouching flattened on
top of Igescu until Childe had come close to it.
Now it crouched again and snarled, eyes spurting
ferocity, claws unsheathed.
Now it launched itself over the bed and the coffin.
Childe, leaning over the baron's body, thrust outward.
The cat was spitted on the blade, which drove through the
neck. A paw flashed before his eyes, but the tips of the
claws were n
ot quite close enough. Childe went over
backward, and the rapier was torn from his hand. When
he got up, he saw that the leopard, a female, was kicking
its last. It lay on its right side, mouth open, the life in its
eyes flying away bit by bit, like a flock of bright birds
leaving a branch one by one as they started south to
avoid the coming of winter.
Childe was panting and shaking, and his heart was
threatening to butt through his ribs. He pulled the sword
out, shoving with his foot against the body, and then
climbed upon the oaken frame. He raised the sword be-
fore him by the hilt with both hands. Its point was down-
ward, parallel with his body. He held it as if he were a
monk holding a cross up to ward off evil, which, in a way,
he was. He brought the blade down savagely with all
his weight and drove it through the skin and heart
and, judging from the resistance and muted cracking
sound, some bones.
The body moved with the impact, and the head turned
a little to one side. That was all. There was no sighing or
rattling of breath. No blood spurted from around the
wound or even seeped out.
The instrument of execution was steel, not wood,
but the hilt formed a cross. He hoped that the symbol
was more important than the material. Perhaps neither
meant anything. It might be false lore which said that a
vampire, to be truly killed, must be pierced through the
heart with a stake or that the undead feared the cross
with an unholy dread and were deprived of force in its
presence.
Also, he remembered from his reading of Dracula,
many years ago, something about the head having to be
removed.
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