Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  There were slight shiftings of everything reflected, of the wall behind him, the painting on the wall to one side of him, the canopied bed, and himself. It was as if he were looking at an underwater room through a window, with himself deep in the water and the mirror a window, or porthole, to a room in a subaquatic palace. The objects in the room, and he seemed to be as much an object as the bed or a chair, swayed a little. As if currents of cold water succeeded by warmer water compressed or expanded the water and so changed the intensity and the refraction of lighting.

  There was more to the shifting than that, however. At one place, the room and everything in it, including himself, seemed almost--not quite-normal. As they should be or as it seemed that they should be. Seemed, he thought, because it struck him that things as they are were not necessarily things as they should be, that custom had made strangeness, or outrageousness (a peculiar word, what made him think of that?), comfortable.

  Then the "normality" disappeared as the objects twisted or swayed, he was not sure which they did, and the room, and he, became "evil."

  He did not look "weak" nor "petty" nor "sneaky" nor "selfish" nor "indifferent," all of which he felt himself to be at various times. He looked "evil." Malignant, destroying, utterly loveless.

  He walked slowly toward the mirror. His image, wavering, advanced. It smiled, and he suddenly realized that he was smiling. That smile was not utterly loveless; it was a smile of pure love. Love of hatred and of corruption and of all living things.

  He could almost smell the stink of hate and of death.

  Then he thought that the smile was not of love but of greed, unless greed was a form of love. It could be. The meanings of words were as shifting and elusive as the images in the mirror.

  He became sick; something was gnawing at his nerves in the pit of his stomach.

  It was a form of sea-sickness, he thought. See-sickness, rather.

  He turned away from the mirror, feeling as he did so a chill pass over his scalp and a vulnerability--a hollowness--between his shoulders, as if the man in the mirror would stick him in the back with a knife if he exposed his back to him.

  He hated the mirror and the room it mirrored. He had to get out of it. If he could not get the panel open in a few seconds, he would have to leave by the door.

  There was no use in repeating his first efforts. The key to the panel was not in its immediate neighborhood, so he would have to look elsewhere. Perhaps its actuator, a button, a stud, something, could be behind the large oil painting. This was of a man who looked much like the baron and was probably his uncle. Childe lifted it up and off its hooks and placed it upright on the floor, leaning against the wall. The space behind where it had been was smooth. No actuator mechanism here.

  He replaced the painting. It seemed twice as heavy, when he lifted it up as it had when he had taken it down. This room was draining him of his strength.

  He turned away from the painting and stopped. The panel had swung inward into the darkness behind the wall.

  Childe, keeping an eye on the panel, placed a hand on the lower corner of the portrait-frame and moved it slightly. The panel, however, had already started to close. Evidently the actuating mechanism opened it briefly and then closed it automatically.

  He waited until the panel shut and again moved the frame sideways. Nothing happened. But when he lifted the painting slightly, the panel again swung open.

  Childe did not hesitate. He ran to the panel, stepped through cautiously, making sure that there was firm footing in the darkness, and then got to one side to permit the panel to swing shut. He was in unrelieved black; the air was dead and odorous of decaying wood, plaster falling apart, and a trace of long-dead mice. There was also a teaser (was it there or not?) of perfume.

  The flashlight showed a dusty corridor about four feet wide and seven high. It did not end against the wall of the hallway, as he had expected. A well of blackness turned out to be a stairway under the hall. At its bottom was a small platform and another stairway leading up, he presumed, to another passageway on the other side of the hall.

  In the opposite direction, the passageway ran straight for about fifty feet and then disappeared around a corner. He walked slowly in that direction and examined the walls, ceiling, and floor carefully. When he had gone far enough to be past the baron's bedroom, he found a panel on hinges. It was too small and too far up the wall for passage. He unlocked its latch, turned his flashlight off, and swung it slowly out to avoid squeaking of hinges. They gave no sound. The panel had hidden a one-way mirror. He was looking into a bedroom. A titian-haired woman came through the door from the hall about seven seconds later. She walked past him, only five feet away, and disappeared into another doorway. She was wearing a print dress with large red flowers; her legs were bare and her feet were sandaled.

  The woman was so beautiful that he had felt sick in his solar plexus for a moment, a feeling he had experienced three times, when seeing for the first time women so beautiful that he was agonized because he would never have them.

  Childe thought that it would be better to continue his exploring, but he could not resist the feeling that he might see something significant if he stayed here. The woman had looked so determined, as if she had something important to do. He placed his ear against the glass and could hear, faintly, Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra. It must be coming from the room into which she had gone.

  The bedroom was in rather somber taste for a beautiful young woman; the baron's room, if it had been the baron's room, would have been more appropriate for her. It was far cheerier, if you excepted the wall-mirror. The walls were of dark dull wooden paneling about six feet up from the floor; above them was a dull dark wallpaper with faint images: queer birds, twisted dragons, and the, recurring figures of what could be a nude Adam and Eve and an apple tree. There were no snakes.

  The carpet was thick and also dull and dark with images too faded to be identified. The bed was, like the baron's, canopied, but it was of a period he did not recognize, although this did not mean much, because he knew very little about furniture or furnishings. Its legs were wrought-iron in the form of dragon's claws. The bedspread and the canopy were a dark red. There was a mirror on the wall opposite. It was three-sided, like the mirrors used in the clothing departments of stores. It seemed to be nothing extraordinary; it reflected the window through which Childe was looking as another mirror above a large dull red-brown dresser.

  There was a chandelier of cut quartz with dull yellow sockets for candles. The light in the room, however, came from a number of table and floor lamps. The corners of the room were in shadow.

  Childe waited for a while and sweated. It was hot in the corridor, and the various odors, of wood; plaster, and long-dead mice, became stronger instead of dying on a dulling nose. The teaser of perfume was entirely gone. Finally, just as he decided that he should be moving on--and why was he standing here in the first place--the woman came through the door. She was naked; her titian-red hair hung loosely around her shoulders and down her back. She held a long-necked bottle to her lips as she walked toward the dresser. She paused before it and continued to drink until only about two inches of the liquid was left. Then she put the bottle on the dresser and leaned forward to look into the mirror.

  She had taken her makeup off. She peered into the mirror as if she were searching for defects. Childe stepped back, because it seemed impossible that she would not see him. Then he stepped forward again. If she knew that this was a one-way mirror, she did not care if another was on the other side. Or supposed that no hostile person would be there. Perhaps only the baron knew of this passageway.

  She seemed to find her inspection of her face satisfactory, and she might have found it very pleasing, to judge from her smile. She straightened up and looked at her body and also seemed pleased at this. Childe felt uncomfortable, as if he were doing something perverted by spying on her, but he also began to get excited.

  She wriggled a little, swayed her hips from sid
e to side, and ran her hands up and down her ribs and hips and then cupped them over her breasts and rubbed the nipples with the ends of her thumbs. The nipples swelled. Childe's penis swelled, also.

  Keeping her left hand busy with her breast, she put her right hand on her pubes, and opened the top of the slit with one finger and began to rub her clitoris. She worked swiftly at, it, rubbing vigorously, and suddenly she threw her head back, her mouth open, ecstasy on her face.

  Childe felt both excited and repulsed. Part of the repulsion was because he was no voyeur; he felt that it was indecent to watch anyone under these circumstances. It was true that he did not have to stay, but he was here to investigate kidnapping and murder, and this certainly looked worth investigating.

  She continued to rub her clitoris and the hairy lips. And then--here Childe was startled and shaken but also knew that he had somehow expected it--a tiny thing, like a slender white tongue, spurted from the slit.

  It was not a tongue. It was more like a snake or an eel.

  It was as small in diameter as a garter snake but much longer. How long it was he could not determine yet, because its body kept sliding out and out. It kept coming, and its skin was smooth and hairless, as smooth as the woman's belly and as white, and the skin glistened with the fluid released from her cunt.

  It shot out in a downward arc, like a half-erect penis, and then it turned and flopped over against her belly and began to zigzag upwards. It continued to slide out from the slit as if yards of it were still coiled inside her womb, and it oozed up until its snaky length was coiled once around her left breast.

  Childe could see the details of the thing's head, which was the size of a golf ball. It turned twice to look directly at him. Into the mirror, rather.

  Its head was bald except for a fringe of oil-plastered black hair around the tiny ears. It had two thin but wet black eyebrows and a wet black Mephistophelean moustache and beard. The nose was relatively large and meat cleaver shaped. The eyes were dark, but they were so small and set so far back that they would have seemed dark to Childe even if they had been palest blue. The mouth was as much a slit as the vagina from which the creature had issued, but it briefly opened it and Childe could see two rows of little yellow teeth and a pink-red tongue.

  The face was tiny, but there was nothing feeble about its malignancy.

  The woman's lips moved. Childe could not hear her, but he thought that she was crooning.

  The snaky body resumed its climbing while more of its body slid out of the pink fissure and the dark-red bush. It rounded her breast and went up her shoulder and around her neck and came around the right side and extended a loop outwards and then in so that the Lilliputian head faced her. The woman turned a little then, thus permitting Childe a quarter-view of her profile.

  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 attached 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 woman'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 disappeared into the toothless cavity. The body bent and unbent, 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 backwards until she fell back upon the bed with her legs hanging 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? Vodyanoi? 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-dipped, black-haired head of Dolores del Osorojo had appeared around the doorway.

  The woman, who must have seen Dolores in the mirror, 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 presumed 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 to 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 after 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.