Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  "I keep my duplicates, second-rate things, and stuff I just don't have room for in the house at the moment," Heepish said. Childe felt that he was expected to ejaculate over at least a few items. He wanted to get out of the hot, close, and dead air into the house. He hoped that the files he wanted were not stored here.

  Childe commented on an entire bookshelf dedicated to the works of D. Nimming Rodder.

  Heepish said, "Oh, you noticed that he is the only living author with an individual placard in my collection in the house? Nim is my favorite, of course, I think he's the greatest writer of all time, in the Gothic or horror genre, even greater than Monk Lewis or H. P. Lovecraft or Bram Stoker. He is a very good friend of mine.

  "I keep many duplicates of his works out here because he needs one now and then to use as tearsheets or reference for a new anthology. He has had many anthologies, you know, just scads of reprints and collections taken from his collections, and collections from these. He's probably the most recollected man on Earth."

  Childe did not smile. Heepish shrugged.

  There was a large blow-up of Rodder tacked to an upright. In heavy black ink below: TO MY FIRST FAN AND A GREAT FRIEND, MISTER HORROR HIMSELF, WITH INTENSE AFFECTION FROM NIM. The thin, pale face with the collapsed cheeks, sharp nose, and the huge-rimmed spectacles looked like that of a spooky and spooked primate of the Madagascar jungle, like a lemur's. And lemur, now that Childe considered it, originally meant a ghost. He grinned. He remembered the entry in the big unabridged dictionary he had referred to so often at college.

  Lemur--Latin lemures nocturnal spirits, ghosts; akin to Greek lamia, a devouring monster, lamas crop, maw, lamia, pl., chasm, Lettish lamata mousetrap; basic idea, open jaws.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  Childe, looking at Rodder's photograph, grinned widely.

  Heepish said, "What's so funny? I could stand a little laugh in these trying times."

  "Nothing, really."

  "Don't you like Rodder?"

  Heepish's voice was controlled, but it contained a hint of a well-oiled mousetrap aching to snap shut.

  Childe said, "I liked his Shadow Land series. And I liked his underlying themes, aside from the spooky element. You know, the little man fighting bravely against conformity, authoritarianism, vast forces of corruption, and so on, the lone individual, the only honest man in the word--I liked those things. And every time I read an article in the newspapers about Rodder, he's always described as honest, as a man of integrity. Which is really ironic."

  Childe stopped and then, not wishing to continue but impelled to, said, "But I know a guy..."

  He stopped. Why tell Heepish that the guy was Jeremiah?

  "This guy was at a party which consisted mainly of science-fiction people. He was standing within earshot of a group of authors. One was the great fantasy writer, Breyleigh Bredburger. You know of him, of course?"

  Heepish nodded and said, "After Rodder, Monk Lewis, and Bloch, my favorite."

  Childe said, "Another author, I forget his name, was complaining that Rodder had stolen one of his magazine stories for his series. Just lifted it, changed the title and few things, credited it to somebody with an outlandish Greek name, and had, so far, refused to correspond with the author about the alleged theft. Bredburger said that was nothing. Rodder had stolen three of his stories, giving credit to himself, Rodder, as author. Bredburger cornered Rodder twice and forced him to admit the theft and to pay him. Rodder's excuse was that he'd signed to write two-thirds of the series himself and he wasn't up to it, so, in desperation, he'd lifted Bredburger's stories. He didn't say anything about plagiarizing from other people, of course. Bredburger said he'd been promised payment for the third stolen story but so far hadn't gotten it and wouldn't unless he vigorously pursued Rodder or went through the courts.

  "A third author then said that the first would have to stand in line behind about twenty if he wanted to sue or to take it out of Rodder's hide.

  "That's your D. Nimming Rodder. Your great champion of the little man, of the nonconformist, of the honest man."

  Childe stopped. He was surprised that he had run on so. He did not want to quarrel. After all, he was to be indebted to this man, if this grand tour ever ended. On the other hand, he was itchy with anger. He had seen too many corrupt men highly honored by the world, which either did not know the truth or ignored it. Also, the irritation caused by the smog, the repressed panic arising from fear of what the smog might become, Colben's death, the frustrating scene with Sybil, and Heepish's attitude, undefinedly prickly, combined to wear away the skin and fat over his nerves.

  Heepish's gray eyes seemed to retreat, as if they were afraid they might combust if they got too close to the light and air. His neck quivered. His moustache drew down; invisible weights had been tied to each end. His nostrils flared like bellows. His pale skin had become red. His hands clenched.

  Childe waited while the silence hardened like bird lime. If Heepish got nasty, he would get just as nasty, even though he would lose access to the literature he needed. Childe had been told by Jeremiah that Heepish had gotten the idea for his collection from observing a man by the name of Forrest J Ackerman, who had probably the greatest private collection of science-fiction and fantasy in the world. In fact, Heepish had been called the poor man's Ackerman, though not to his face. However, he was far from poor, he had much money--from what source nobody knew--and his collection would someday be the world's greatest, private or public.

  But at this moment he was very vulnerable, and Childe was willing to thrust through the crack in the armor.

  "Well!" Heepish said.

  He cocked his head and smiled thinly. The moustache, however, was still swelled like an elephant seal in mating season, and his fingers were making a steeple, then separating to form the throat-holding attitude.

  "Well!" he said again. His voice was as hard, but there was also a whine in it, like a distant mosquito.

  "Well!" Childe said, aware that he would never know what Heepish was going to say and not caring. "I'd like to see the newspaper files, if possible."

  "Oh? Oh, yes! They're upstairs. This way, please."

  They left the garage, but Heepish put the photograph of Rodder under his arm before following him out. Childe had wondered what it was doing out in the garage, anyway, but on re-entering the house, he saw that there were many more photographs and paintings and pencil sketches and even framed newspaper and magazine clippings containing Rodder's portrait--than he had thought. Heepish had had one too many and stored that one in the garage. But now, as if to show Childe his place, to put him down in some obscure manner, Heepish was also bringing this photograph into the house.

  Childe grinned at this as he waited for Heepish to lead him through the kitchen and hall-room and turn right to go up the narrow stairs. The walls were hung with many pictures and paintings of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula and an original by Hannes Bok and another by Virgil Finlay, all leaning at slightly different angles like headstones in an old neglected graveyard.

  They went down a short hallway and into a room with the walls covered with paintings and photographs and posters and movie ad stills. There were a number of curious wooden frames, sawhorses with castles on their backs, which held a series of illustrations and photos and newspaper clippings on wooden frames. These could be turned on a central shaft, like pages of a book.

  Childe looked through all of them and, at any other time, would have been delighted and would have lingered over various nostalgic items.

  Heepish, as if the demands on him were really getting to be too much, sighed when Childe asked to see the scrapbooks. He went into an enormous closet the walls of which were lined with bookshelves stuffed with large scrapbooks, many of them dusty and smelling of decay.

  "I really must do something about these before it's too late," Heepish said. "I have some very valuable--some invaluable and unreplaceable--material here."

  He was still carrying Rodder's phot
o under one arm.

  It was Childe's turn to sigh as he looked at the growing hill of stuff to peruse. But he sat down in a chair, placed his right ankle over his left thigh, and began to turn the stiff and often yellowed and brittle pages of the scrapbooks. After a while, Heepish said that he would have to excuse himself. If Childe wanted anything, he should just holler. Childe looked up and smiled briefly and said that he did not want to be any more bother than he had to be. Heepish was gone then, but left an almost visible ectoplasm of disdain and hurt feelings behind him.

  The scrapbooks were titled with various subjects: MOVIE VAMPIRES, GERMAN AND SCANDINAVIAN, 1919-1939; WEREWOLVES, AEMRICAN, 1865-1900; WITCHES, PENNSYLVANIAN, 1880-1965; GOLEM, EXTRA-FORTEANA, 1929-1960; SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA VAMPIRE FOLKLORE AND GHOST STORIES, 1910-1967; and so on.

  Childe had gone through thirty-two such titles before he came to the last one. They had all been interesting but not very fruitful, and he did not know that the one which was in his hands was relevant. But he felt his heart quicken and his back became less stiff. It could not be called a clue, but it at least was something to investigate.

  An article from the Los Angeles Times, dated May 1, 1958, described a number of reputedly "haunted" houses in the Los Angeles area. Several long paragraphs were devoted to a house in Beverly Hills which not only had a ghost, it had a "vampire."

  There was a photograph of the Trolling House taken from the air. According to the article, no one could get close enough to it on the ground to use a camera effectively. The house was set on a low hill in the middle of a large--for Southern California--walled estate. The grounds were well wooded so that the house could not be seen from anywhere outside the walls. The newspaper cameramen had been unable to get photos of it in 1948, when the owner of Trolling House had become temporarily famous, and the newsmen had no better luck in 1958, when this article, recapitulating the events of ten years before, had been published. There was, however, a picture of a pencil sketch made of the "vampire," Baron Igescu, by an artist who had depended upon his memory after seeing the baron at a charity ball. No photographs of the baron were known to be in existence. Very few people had seen the baron, although he had made several appearances at charity balls and once at a Beverly Hills taxpayers protest meeting.

  Trolling House was named after the uncle of the present owner. The uncle, also an Igescu, had traveled from Rumania to England in 1887, stayed there one year, and then moved on to America in 1889. Upon becoming a citizen of the United States of America, Igescu had changed his name to Trolling. No one knew why. The mansion was on woodland surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall topped with iron spikes between which barbed wire was strung. Built in very late Victorian style in 1900 in what was then out-of-the-way agricultural land, it was a huge rambling structure. The nucleus was a part of the original house. This was, naturally, a Spanish-style mansion which had been built by the eccentric (some said, mad) Don Pedro del Osorojo in the wilderness of what was to become, a century later, Beverly Hills. Del Osorojo was supposed to have been a relative of the de Villa family, which owned this area, but that was not authenticated. Actually little was known of del Osorojo except that he was a recluse with an unknown source of wealth. His wife came from Spain (this was when California was under Spanish rule) and was supposed to have been a Castilian noble.

  The present owner, Igescu, was involuntarily publicized in 1938 when he was brought dead-on-arrival into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital after a car collision at Hollywood and La Brea. At twilight of the following day, the county coroner was to perform an inquest. Igescu had no perceptible wounds or injuries.

  At the first touch of the knife, Igescu sat up on the dissection slab.

  This story was picked up by newspapers throughout the States because a reporter jestingly pointed out that Igescu had (1) never been seen in the daytime, (2) was of Transylvanian origin, (3) came from an aristocratic family which had lived for centuries in a castle (now abandoned) on top of a high steep hill in a remote rural area, (4) had shipped his uncle's body back to the old country to be buried in the family tomb, but the coffin had disappeared en route, and (5) was living in a house already well known because of the ghost of Dolores del Osorojo.

  Dolores was supposedly the spirit of Don Pedro's daughter. She had died of grief, or killed herself because of grief. Her lover, or suitor, was a Norwegian sea-captain who had seen Dolores at a governor's ball during one of her rare appearances in town. He seemed to have lost his sanity over her. He neglected his ship and its business, and his men deserted or were thrown into the local jail for drunkenness and vagrancy.

  Lars Ulf Larsson, the captain, barred by the old don from seeing Dolores, managed to sneak into the house and woo her so successfully that she promised to run off with him within a week. But the night of the elopement came, and Larsson did not show up. He was never seen again; a legend had it that Don Pedro had killed him and buried his body on the estate. Another said that the body had been thrown into the sea.

  Dolores had gone into mourning and died several weeks later. Her father went hunting into the hills several weeks after she was buried and failed to return. Search parties could not find him; it was said that the Devil had taken him.

  Later occupants of the house reported that they sometimes saw Dolores in the house or out on the lawn. She was always dressed in a black formal gown of the 1810's and had black hair, a pale skin, and very red lips. Her appearances were not frequent, but they were nerve wracking enough to cause a long line of tenants and owners to move out. The old mansion had fallen into ruins, except for two rooms, when Uncle Igescu bought the property and built his house around the still-standing part.

  Despite the publicity about the present Igescu, not much was really known about him. He had inherited a chain of grocery stores and an export business from his uncle. He, or his managers, had built the stores into a large chain of supermarkets in the Southwest and had expanded the export business.

  Childe found the ghost interesting. Whether or not she had been seen recently was not known, because Igescu had never said anything about her. Her last recorded appearance was in 1878, when the Reddes had moved out.

  Igescu's sketch in the newspaper showed a long lean face with a high forehead and high cheekbones and large eyes and thick eyebrows. He had a thick down drooping Slovak coal miner's type of moustache.

  Heepish returned, and Childe, holding the sketch so he could see it, said, "This man certainly doesn't look Draculaish does he? More like the grocery store man, which he is, right?"

  Heepish poked his head forward and squinted his eyes. He smiled slightly. "Certainly, he doesn't look like Bela Lugosi. But the Dracula of the book, Bram Stoker's, had just such a moustache. Or one like it, anyway. I tried to get in touch with Igescu several times, you know, but I couldn't get through his secretary. She was nice but very firm. The Baron did not want to be disturbed with any such nonsense."

  Heepish's tone and weak hollow chuckle said that, if there were any nonsense, it was on the Baron's part.

  "You have his phone number?"

  "Yes, but it took me a lot of trouble to get it. It's unlisted."

  "You don't owe him anything," Childe said. "I'd like to have it. If I find anything you might be interested in, I'll tell you. How's that? I feel I owe you something, for your time and fine cooperation. Perhaps, I might be able to dig up something for your collection."

  "Well, you can have the number," Heepish said, warming up. "But it's probably been changed."

  He conducted Childe downstairs and, while Childe waited under a shelf which held the heads of Frankenstein's monster, The Naked Brain, and a huge black long-nailed warty rubbery hand of some nameless creature from some (deservedly) forgotten movie, Heepish plunged into the rear of the house down a dim corridor with plastic cobwebs and spiderwebs between ceiling and wall. He dived out of the shadows and webs with a little black book in his hand. Childe wrote down the number and address in his own little black book and asked permiss
ion to try the number. He dialed and got what he expected, nothing. The lines were still tied up. He tried the LAPD number. He tried his own phone. More nothing.

  Just for stubbornness, he tried Igescu's number again. And this time, as if the fates had decided that he should be favored, or by one of those coincidences too implausible to be believed in a novel but sometimes happening in "real" life, the connection went through. A woman's voice said, "Hello? My God, the phone works! What happened?"

  "May I speak to Baron Igescu?" Childe said.

  "Who?"

  "Isn't this Baron Igescu's residence?"

  "No! Who is this speaking?"

  "Herald Wellston," Childe said, giving the name he had decided to use. "May I ask who is speaking?"

  "Go away! Or I'll call the police!" the woman screamed, and she hung up.

  "I don't think that was Igescu's secretary," Childe said in answer to Heepish's quizzical expression. "Somebody else has their number now."

  Not believing that it would work but willing to try, he dialed information. The call went right through, and he succeeded almost immediately in getting transferred to his contact. She did not have to worry about a supervisor listening in; she was the supervisor.

  "What happened, Linda? All of a sudden, the lines're wide open."

  "I don't know, one of those unexplainable lulls, the eye of the storm, maybe. But it won't last, you can bet your most precious possession on that, Herald. You better hurry."

  He told her what he wanted, and she got Igescu's unlisted number for him within a few seconds.

  "I'll drop off the usual to you in the mail before evening. Thanks, Linda, you beautiful beautiful."

  "I may not be here to get it if this smog keeps up," she said. "Or the mailman may have skipped town with everyone and his brother."