Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  Budler must have had a latent homosexual tendency which was developed, possibly under the influence of drugs, during the conditioning. One of the men blew him several times, and twice Budler buggered the big man. The third man appeared in one scene only, and this time it was in what Childe thought would be the grand finale. He braced himself for something terrible to happen to Budler, but aside from being exhausted, Budler seemed to suffer no ill effects. Budler and the three men and three women formed many configurations with, usually, Budler as the focus of the group.

  The Commissioner, sitting by Childe, said at this point, "This is quite an organization. Besides the six there, there must be two, at least, handling the cameras."

  The last scene (Childe knew it was the last because the Commissioner told him just as it flashed on) showed Budler screwing one of the well-built women dog-fashion. The cameras came in at every angle except that which would show the woman's face. There were a number of shots which must have been taken through a long flexible optical fiber device, because there were close-ups of a seemingly gargantuan penis driving in under a cavernous anus into an elephantine slit. The lubricating fluid flowed like spillage over a too-full dam.

  And then the camera seemed to inch forward along the penis, now quiescent, and into the slit. Light blazed up, and the viewers seemed to be surrounded by thousands of tons of flesh. They were looking down at the penis, a whale that had crashed into an underseas cave. Then they were looking up at the ceiling of wet pale red flesh.

  Suddenly, the light went out and they were back again, looking at Budler and the woman from the side. The two were on the bed, she face-down and her arms to one side and her buttocks raised by a pillow under her stomach. He was straddling her, one knee between the legs, and rocking back and forth.

  Suddenly, so suddenly that Childe gasped and thought his heart would stop, the woman became a female wolf. Budler was still astride her and pumping slowly away when the transformation took place. (A trick of photography, of course. A trick involving drugs, surely, because Budler acted as if the woman had metamorphosed.) He stopped, raised his hands, and then sat up, his penis withdrawing and beginning to droop. He looked shocked.

  Snarling, the wolf turned and slashed.

  It happened so quickly that Childe did not understand immediately that the powerful jaws had taken the penis off close to the root.

  Blood spurted out of the stump and over the wolf and the bed.

  Screaming, Budler fell backward. The wolf bolted the organ down and then began biting at the man's testicles. Budler quit screaming. His skin turned blue-gray, and the camera left the wounds where the genitals had been and traveled up to show his dying face.

  There was the tinny piano music again, Dvorak's Humoresque. The Dracula burst through the curtains with the same dramatic gesture of the cape thrown aside to reveal his face. The camera traveled down then and verified what Childe thought he had seen when the man entered but had riot been certain about. The Dracula's penis, a very long and thin organ, was sticking out of the fly. The Dracula cackled and bounded forward and leaped upon the bed and grabbed the wolf by the hairs of its flanks and sank his penis into it from behind.

  The wolf yowled, its mouth open, a piece of testicle falling out. Then, as the Dracula rammed it, driving her forward and inching along on his knees, the wolf began tearing at the flesh between the legs of Budler.

  Fadeout. TO BE CONTINUED: in blazing white letters across the screen. End of film.

  Childe became sick again. Afterward, he talked with the Commissioner, who was also pale and shaking. But he was not shaky in his refusal to take any action about Igescu. He explained (which Childe knew) that the evidence was too slight, in fact, it was nonexistent. The "vampire" angle, the wolves on the estate, the (supposed) drugging of him by Igescu's secretary, the wolf hairs found in Budler's car, the wolf in the film, all these certainly would make investigation of Igescu legitimate. But Igescu was a very rich and powerful man with no known criminal records or any suspicions by the authorities of criminal connections. If the police were to do anything, and he did not see how they could, the Beverly Hills Police would have to handle the investigation.

  The essence of his remarks was what Childe had expected. He would have to get more conclusive evidence, and he would have to do it without any help from the police.

  Childe drove back through a darkening air. The weird white light was slowly turning green-gray. He stopped at a service station to fill his tank and also to replace the broken headlamp. The attendant, after stamping the form for his credit card, said, "You may be my last customer. I'm taking off just as soon as I get the paperwork out of the way. Getting out of town, friend. This place has had it!"

  "I may follow you," Childe said. "But I got some unfinished business to attend to first."

  "Yeah? This town's gonna be a ghost town; it's already on the way."

  Childe drove into Beverly Hills to shop. He had a difficult time finding a parking space. If it was going to be a ghost town, it did not seem that it would be so soon. Perhaps most of the people were getting supplies for the second exodus or were stocking up before the stores were again closed. Whatever the reason, it was two and a half hours before he got all he wanted, and it took a half-hour to drive the mile and a half to his apartment. The streets were again jammed with cars. Which, of course, only speeded up the poisoning of air.

  Childe had intended to drive out to Igescu's at once, but he knew that he might as well wait until the traffic thinned out. He spent an hour reviewing what he meant to do and then tried to call Sybil, but the lines were busy again. He walked to her apartment. He was goggled and snouted with a gas mask he had purchased at a store which had just gotten a shipment in. So many others were similarly masked, the street looked like a scene on Mars.

  Sybil was not home. Her car was still in the garage. The note he had left in her apartment was in the exact position in which he had placed it. He tried to get a long-distance call to her mother put through but had enough trouble getting the operator, who told him he would have to wait for a long time. She had been ordered to put through only emergency calls. He told her it was an emergency, his wife had disappeared and he wanted to find out if she had gone to San Francisco. The operator said that he would still have to wait, no telling how long.

  He hung up. He walked back to his apartment and re-checked the automatic recorder with the same negative results. For a while he watched the news, most of which was a repetition or very slight up-dating of accounts of the smog and the emigration. It was too depressing, and he could not get interested in the only non-news program, Shirley Temple in Little Miss Marker. He tried to read, but his mind kept jumping back and forth from Budler to his wife.

  It was maddening not to be able to act. He almost decided to buck the traffic, because he might, as well be doing something and, moreover, once off the main roads, he might be able to travel speedily. He looked out at the street, packed with cars going one way, horns blaring, drivers cursing out their windows or sitting stoic, tight-lipped, hands gripping the wheels. He would not be able to get his car out of the driveway.

  At seven, the traffic suddenly became normal, as if a plug had been pulled some place and the extra vehicles gulped down it. He went into the basement, drove the car out, and got into the street without any trouble. A few cars drove down the wrong side, but these quickly pulled over into the right lane. He got to Igescu's before dusk; he had had to stop to change a flat tire. The roads were littered with many objects, and one of these, a nail, had driven into his left rear tire. Also, he was stopped by the police. They were looking for a service station robber driving a car of his make and color. He satisfied them that he was not a criminal, not the one they were looking for, anyway, and continued on. The fact that they could concern themselves- with a mere holdup at this time showed that the traffic had eased up considerably, in this area, at least.

  At the end of the road outside Igescu's, he turned the car around and backed it into
the bushes. He got out and, after removing the gas mask, raised the trunk and took out the bundle he had prepared. It took him some time to carry the cumbersome load through the thick woods and up the hill to the wall. Here he unfolded the aluminum ladder, locked the joints, and, with the pack on his back, climbed up until his head was above the wire. He did not intend to find out if the wire was electrified. To do so might set off an alarm. He pulled up the long rubberized flexibile tunnel, a child's plaything, by the rope tied around its end.

  He hoisted it until half its length was over the wire and then began the unavoidably clumsy and slow maneuver of crawling, not into it but over it. His weight pressed it down so that he had a double thickness between him and the sharp points of the wire. He was able to turn, straddling the wire, and pull the ladder slowly up after him with the rope, which he had taken from the tunnel and tied to the ladder. He was very careful not to touch the wire with the ladder.

  He lifted it up and turned it and deposited its end upon the ground on the inside of the wall. Once his feet were on the rungs, be lifted up the tunnel and dropped it on the ground and then climbed down. He repeated this procedure at the inner wall up to the point where he reached the top of the wall. Instead of climbing on over, he took two large steaks from his backpack and threw them as far as he could.. Both landed upon leaves near the foot of a large oak. Then he pulled the tunnel back and retreated down the ladder. He sat with his back against the wall and waited. If he did not succeed with this step within two hours, he would go on in, anyway.

  The darkness settled, but it did not seem to get any cooler. There was no air moving, no sound of bird or insect. The moon rose. A few minutes later, a howling jerked him to his feet. His scalp moved as if rubbed by a cold hand. The howling, distant at first, came closer. Soon there was a snuffling and then a growling and gobbling. Childe waited and checked his Smith & Wesson Terrier .32 revolver again. After five minutes by his wristwatch, he climbed over the wall, pulling the tunnel and ladder after him as he had done at the first wall. He laid them on the ground behind a tree in case anybody should be patrolling the wall. Gun in hand, he set out to look for the wolves. The bones of the steaks had been cracked and partially swallowed; the rest was gone.

  He did not find the wolves. Or he was not sure that what he did find were the wolves.

  He stepped into a clearing and then sucked in his breath.

  Two bodies lay in the moonlight. They were unconscious, which state he had expected from the eating of drugged meat. But these were not the hairy, four-legged, long-muzzled bodies he had thought to see. These were the nude bodies of the young couple who had played billiards in the Igescu house. Vasili Chornkin and Mrs. Krautschner slept on the grass under the moon. The boy was on his face, his legs under him and his hands by his face. The girl was on her side, her legs drawn up and her arms folded beside her head. She had a beautiful body. It reminded him of one of the girls he had seen in the films and especially of the girl Budler had been fucking dog style.

  He had to sit down for a while. He felt shaky. He did not think that this was possible or impossible. It just was, and the 'was' threatened him. It threatened his belief in the order of the universe, which meant that it threatened him.

  After a while he was able to act. He used tape from his backpack to secure their hands behind them and their ankles together. Then he taped their mouths tightly and placed them on their sides, facing each other and as close together as possible and taped them together around the necks and the ankles. He was sweating by the time he had finished. He left them in the glade and hoped that they would be very happy together. (That he could think this showed him that he was recovering swiftly.) They should be happy if they knew that he had planned to cut the throats of the wolves.

  He headed toward where the house should be and within five minutes saw its bulk on top of the hill and some rectangles of light. Approaching it on the left, he stopped suddenly and almost fired his revolver, he was so upset by the abrupt appearance of the figure. It flitted from moonlight into shadow and back into shadow and was gone. It looked as if it were a woman wearing an ankle-length dress with a bare back.

  For the third time that night, he felt a chill. It must have been Dolores. Or a woman playing the ghost. And why should a fraud be out here when there was no need to play the fraud? They did not know that he was here. At least, he hoped not.

  It was possible that the baron wanted to shock another guest tonight and so was using this woman.

  The driveway had five cars besides the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. There were two Cadillacs, a Lincoln, a Cord, and a 1929 Duesenberg. Neither wing showed a light, but the central part was well-lit.

  Childe looked for Glam, did not see him, and went around the side. There was a vine-covered trellis which afforded easy access to the second story balcony. The window was closed but not locked. The room was dark and hot and musty. He groped along the wall until he found a door and slowly swung it out. It was a closet door in which hung dark musty clothes. He closed the door and felt along it until he discovered another door. This led to a hallway which was dimly lit by moonlight through a window. He used his pencil-thin flashlight now and then to guide himself. He passed by a stairway leading to the story below and the story above and pushed open a door to another hallway. This had no illumination at all; he fingered his way to the other end with his flashlight.

  Sometimes he stopped to put his ear against a doorway. He had thought he had heard the murmurs of voices behind them. Intent listening convinced him that nobody was there, that his imagination was tricking him.

  At the end of this hallway, twice as long as the first, he found a locked door. A series of keys left the lock unturned. He used his pick and, after several minutes work, during which the sweat ran down his eyes and his ribs and he had to stop several times because he thought he heard footsteps and, once, a breathing, he solved the puzzle of the tumblers.

  The door opened to a shaft of light and a puff of cold air.

  As he stepped through into the hallway, he caught a flash of something on his left at the far end. It had moved too swiftly for him to identify it, but he thought that it was the tail end of Dolores skirt. He ran down the hallway as quietly as he could with his sneakers on the marble tile floor (this was done in much-marbled and ornate-woodworked Victorian style even if it was in the Spanish part). At the corner, he halted and stuck his head around.

  The woman at the extreme end was facing him. By the light of a floor lamp near her, he could see that she was tall and black-haired and beautiful--the woman in the portrait above the mantel in the drawing room.

  She beckoned to him and turned and disappeared around the corner.

  He felt a little disoriented, not so much as if he were being disconnected from a part of himself inside himself but as if the walls around him were being subtly warped.

  Just as he rounded the corner, he saw her skirt going into a doorway. This led to a room halfway down the hall. The only light was that from the lamp on a stand in the hallway. He groped around until he felt the light switch. The response was the illumination of a small lamp at the other end on a stand by a huge bed with a canopy. He did not know much about furniture, but it looked like a bed from one of the Louis series, Louis Quatorze, perhaps. The rest of the expensive-looking furniture seemed to go with the bed. A large crystal chandelier hung from the center of the ceiling.

  The wall was white paneling, and one of the panels was just swinging shut.

  Childe thought it was swinging shut. He had blinked, and then the wall seemed solid.

  There was no other way for the woman to have gone. Do ghosts have to open doors, or panels, to go from one room to another?

  Perhaps they did, if they existed. However, he had seen nothing to indicate that Dolores--or whoever the woman was--must be a ghost.

  If she were a hoax set up by Baron Igescu for the benefit of others, and particularly for Childe, she was leading him on for a reason that he could only believe was sinis
ter. The panel led to a passage between the walls, and Igescu must want him to go through a panel.

  The newspaper article had said that the original house had contained between-walls passages and underground passages, and several secret tunnels which led to exits in the woods. Don del Osorojo had built these because he feared attacks from bandits, wild Indians, revolting peasants, and, possibly, government troops. The Don, it seemed, was having trouble with tax-collectors; the government claimed that he was hiding gold and silver.

  When the first Baron Igescu, the present owner's uncle, had added the wings, he had also built secret passageways which connected to those in the central house. Not so secret, actually, since the workers had talked about them, but no drawings or blueprints of the house's construction existed, as far as anybody knew. And most of the workers would now be dead or so old they could not remember the layout, even if any of them could be found.

  The panel had been opened long enough for him to know that it was an entrance. Perhaps the baron wanted him to know it; perhaps Dolores, the ghost. In any event, he meant to go through it.

  Finding the actuator of the entrance was another matter. He pressed the wood around the panel, tried to move strips around it, knocked at various places on the panel (it sounded hollow), and examined the wood closely for holes. He found nothing out-of-the-way.

  Straightening up, he half-turned in an angry movement and then turned back again, as if he would catch something--or somebody--doing something behind his back. There was nothing behind him that had not been there before. But he did glimpse himself in the huge floor-to-ceiling mirror that constituted half of the wall across the room.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  The mirror certainly was not reflecting as a mirror should. Nor was it reflecting grossly or exaggeratedly, like a funny-house mirror. The distortions--if they could be called distortions--were subtle. And as evasive as drops of mercury.