Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  Dolores del Osorojo entered the doorway. With a swirl of skirts, she turned and closed the door. She faced him then and advanced slowly toward him, her white arms held out to him. She was not transparent or semiopaque. She was as solid as young flesh could be. Her black hair and white face and red lips and white swelling bust were solid. And sweet.

  Childe was too scared to respond to the arms around him and the breasts and lips pressed close to him. He was cold, although her breath was hot and the tongue she slid back and forth over his tongue was hot. Warm saliva leaked from her mouth over his chin and down his chest. She was panting.

  Childe tried to back away. The wall stopped him. She pressed against him, and he lacked the will, or the strength, to try to push her away. He was still trembling.

  The woman muttered something in Spanish. He did not understand the words, but her tone was intended to be soothing. She backed away and began to undress swiftly. The dress slid off, and the three petticoats, and then the knee length underwear and the long black stockings and corset. Dolores, in the nude, was a magnificent woman. The breasts were full and the nipples, almost as large as the ends of his thumbs, pointed upwards slightly. The pubic hair was thick and black and a line extended from it upward, like the smoke from a distant fire, to her navel. The fluid beginning to soak her hair and run down her leg showed how deeply impatient she was.

  Childe, seeing these, felt less afraid. She looked too much of the protoplasm, too little of the ectoplasm, for him to believe to the core of his mind that she was truly a ghost.

  He was far from being at ease, however. And when he tried his little Spanish to ask her if she could release him, he realized that she had no intention of letting him loose. Or else she was not able to do so.

  He repeated his request that she get the key from Magda. She shook her head, indicating that she would not do so or she did not understand him. Perhaps--he hoped--she meant to release him but only after she had gotten what she wanted What she wanted, for some reason or other, was Childe.

  Not that it was any mystery about what she wanted. The reason why he was her choice was the mystery. At present, he could do nothing to find out.

  She kissed him again and again and finally she began to play with his penis while she kissed him. He could not get an erection; the touch of her fingers turned his flesh cold as a dying man's, and he shrank from her. He was, literally, spooked.

  Finally, she quit kissing him. She backed away again and inspected him with stabs of her black eyes and then frowned. But she approached again, speaking in soothing but incomprehensible Spanish, and got down on her knees in the straw. She took his limp penis into her warm mouth. She began to suck slowly, while the tips of her fingers touched the insides of his thighs where the thigh and belly met. His flesh began to warm, and the penis, as if the blood, once frozen, had suddenly become fluid, began to fill out. The old familiar but never boring sensations began to come back. He put his hands on her hair and pulled the high comb out and let it flood loose around her shoulders. He moved his hips back and forth.

  Suddenly, she had unmouthed his penis and was kissing him again, running her tongue around his mouth. Then she took his penis and, rising to her toes, let herself down upon it. It slid up into her cunt; she moved back and forth a few times, and he came.

  There are orgasms and there are orgasms.

  This was so exquisite that he passed out, very briefly, during the ejaculations.

  It was as if she had sparked within the chamber of her cunt, as if a century and a half of chastity were loosed along the shaft of his cock. Or as if she had generated a current that shot lightning down his nerves. So intense was the sensation, he was not sure that he was not burned out--literally. Perhaps something electrical had been discharged.

  Childe was restricted to an upright position because of the chain. He told the woman, the ghost, or whatever she was, to get the key from Magda, but she paid him no attention except to look at him when he was talking. He could not understand why she did not get the key, since it was to her advantage to do so. And then it occurred to him that she was probably afraid that he would take off and leave her. And she did not want that, because she had too much to unloose. Or so it seemed to him.

  He was limited in his area of activity and angle of position, but Dolores was ingenious. After she had sucked his penis into a full rigidity again, drawing in on it with just the reverse action of blowing up a balloon but with the direct effect of blowing and had licked off and swallowed the spermatic fluid and cleaned off his penis in the process, she released it. She got down on her hands and knees and turned away from him and then stood up on her hands, her legs spread wide. She let herself fall frontward, toward him, and her feet struck the wall on each side of him. After working her way forward on her hands a little, she was in the position she wanted. He thought at first of refusing her, but after considering that she might leave him locked up if he did, he grabbed her hips. His penis went past and under the anus and into the slit and she rocked back and forth.

  Like Magda, she could squeeze upon his dong with the muscles of the vaginal sheath. He moved only a little, pulling her hips in to him with short savage jerks. Within a few seconds, she was shuddering and sobbing, apparently having one orgasm on the heels of the next. Her cries were in Spanish. He knew little of that, but he could catch, "Oh, holy fucking virgin mother Maria! Oh, father of the big cock! Fuck! Fuck! Shit! Shit! Oh, Christ, blessed Jesus, ah, sweet Jesus, he's fucking me! Fuck me, blessed flesh! Sweet flesh, fuck me!"

  At that time he did not think about her words; he was just reacting. But he would remember and wonder. If she were the daughter of old Don del Osorojo, the sheltered daughter of the weird old grandee, she had a surprising vocabulary. But then, during a century and a half of hanging around live people, she could be expected to pick up words she might not have heard before death. But why hadn't she learned English in that time?

  Now, he did not think of what she was saying. He was taking a long time coming, so long that he was able to turn her over, or around. Her arms were then braced below her, her feet against the wall, her cunt rammed against him, and she pushed back and forth while he reached down and rubbed her breasts and nipples with his hands. She had strong muscles; she could remain in that human-arch position, her head hanging down, and rock back and forth and occasionally stab her ass forward with no support of his hands under her hips.

  After what seemed a long time, he jetted. Dolores screamed with the crescendo of climaxes. Then she let her feet slide down the wall while he helped ease her weight with his hands on her buttocks and then clamped her legs between his arms and let her slide on down. On the floor, she lay on her back, panting and looking up while spermatic fluid fell drop by drop into her open mouth. Then she scooted a little to one side to let the drops fall on her breasts and rubbed the sticky stuff over them. The chlorox odor of the fluid and the odor of sweat were strong in the chamber.

  When her breathing became normal, Dolores rose and gave him a long tonguey spermaticky kiss. Her hand fondled his testicles.

  He turned his head away and said, "No more, Dolores. Or whoever or whatever you are."

  His legs trembled. Fucking in bed was demanding enough, but fucking standing up took twice as much out of him. And it seemed to him that Dolores had means for draining him of more than the normal quota of energy. For a few seconds, she had given him energy--he would swear that she had discharged a current down his penis--but then the orgasms had been so exquisite that they had opened gates to drain the reservoir.

  He had no objective reason for thinking so, but he felt that she had robbed him of a certain amount of vital energy and strengthened and solidified herself. Certainly, she had seemed flesh enough when he had felt her. But now, she seemed to have somehow become even more solid.

  Dolores, seeing him shake so, said something, smiled, and held her finger up as if to tell him to wait there. (What the hell else could he do?) And she left the room. In a few seconds, she w
as back with a bottle of red wine and a big chunk of filet mignon. (Did she have secret access to the kitchen?) He said no to the wine but eagerly ate the meat. Although he had finished supper only a half-hour ago, or so it seemed, he was very hungry.

  Dolores tilted the bottle to her lips and drank. Almost, he expected to see a dark column going down the throat and into the stomach, as if she were a transparent figure in a stomach-acid commercial. But he could see only the Adam's apple moving.

  If he was hungry, she was thirsty. She kept the bottle to her lips until it was half empty. She may have intended to fully empty it, but a noise came through the door, which she had left ajar. Dolores jerked and dropped the bottle. It fell on its side and spurted red wine on the straw.

  She bent down and scooped up all her clothes, rolled them into a bundle, which she placed under her right arm, and then kissed him swiftly, breathing wine and sperm. She ran to the wall on his right; her left hand pushed along the juncture of two gray blocks. With a groan and a squeak, a section of wall, consisting of blocks six high and four wide, swung inward on the left side. The interior was dark. Dolores turned and smiled and threw something that glittered. He lunged for it, but the chain jerked him back, cutting off his breath, and the object bounced off his fingertips and fell on the straw.

  It was the key to the lock on the metal collar.

  The darkness swallowed Dolores. The section, squeaking and groaning again, swung shut.

  A huge head with huge jowls, large purplish eyes, and a high-piled blue-black hairdo, came around the corner of the doorway. Mrs. Grasatchow.

  From behind her came excited voices. The fat woman's eyes widened. She pushed the door open and waddled across the straw to Childe. He slowly drew back the foot he had extended to try to move the key toward him.

  Mrs. Grasatchow sniffed loudly and then screamed, "Jism!" She grunted like a sow about to give birth. "Who's been here? Who? Tell me! Who?"

  "Didn't you see her?" Childe said. "She went down the hall!"

  "Who?"

  "Dolores del Osorojo!"

  Mrs. Grasatchow's, skin was naturally pale and made even whiter by her powder. But she managed to turn more white.

  The baron, a long cigar in one hand, entered the room. He said, "I thought it would be Dolores. Only she..."

  The fat woman whirled swiftly, as graceful as a rhinoceros, which is huge but can be very graceful in certain movements.

  "You said...you pooh-poohed Dolores! You said she couldn't be any danger to us!"

  The baron looked shrewdly at Childe before answering. He puffed on his cigar and said, "It didn't seem likely that she would ever get enough plasm long enough to harden it. But I was wrong."

  "What did she do to Magda?" Mrs. Grasatchow said.

  The baron shrugged. "We'll have to ask Magda that when she comes to. If she does."

  The doorway was filled with the body of Glam. He carried Magda, still naked, in his arms. Her head lolled, her long blonde hair hung down, her arms and legs were limp.

  Glam said, "What do I do with her?"

  "Take her upstairs to her room. Put her to bed. Tell Vivienne to look at her."

  Glam's expression flickered from stone-mask to something unreadable and back to stone-mask. The baron said, "She's defenseless now, true. But if I were you, I wouldn't try anything."

  Glam said nothing. He turned and carried the woman off. The two blond youths, Chornkin and Krautschner, looked in, each from a side of the doorway.

  "Did you see Dolores?" the baron said.

  They shook their heads. The baron glanced at the section of wall which had opened for Dolores. He opened his mouth as if he were going to tell the youths where she had gone and to send them after her. But he closed his lips.

  Childe thought that perhaps the baron preferred to keep certain secrets. Didn't he trust the two? Or did he think it would be futile to chase after her? In any event, he must think that Childe had seen the exit.

  "She has to be flesh enough to fuck," Mrs. Grasatchow said. "Look at the redness of his cock and the jism."

  "I can see," the baron said dryly. "Magda's key was gone. Childe, do you have it?"

  Childe shook his head. Igescu went to the two youths and they whispered for a moment. Then the youths turned their backs to each other and went off down the hall, bent over, searching. The baron came back in and said, "Take your eyes off his cock, and help me look for that key."

  "Here it is!" Mrs. Grasatchow said.

  She stooped, picked it up, and straightened, groaning. The baron took it and put it in his jacket pocket.

  Childe tightened his lips. He had no chance now, unless Dolores came back to help him. He doubted that she would. Although she bad thrown the key to him, she had not made sure he had had it, and she had had time to do so. The gesture had seemed to say that he could escape if he were agile enough and clever enough. Perhaps, she was resentful of her long, long frustrating imprisonment in incorporeality. She might have wanted him to suffer, too. After all, she had taken him, not because of affection or love but because she needed an object to relieve herself on.

  But she was partly on his side. That was his only hope, at present.

  The baron left the room, and, in a few seconds, the two youths entered. The boy had the key. He unlocked the collar, and he and the girl, each holding Childe by an arm, hustled him out of the room. They passed two doors and entered the third, which was already open. This was a room the size of the one he had just left, but its walls were oak-paneled, the ceiling was painted light blue, and the floor was covered with a thick Persian rug profuse with swastikas inside circles. There were a number of collars hanging from chains attached to bolts sunk into the wall, however. Childe was again held by a metal collar.

  This room must have no secret entrances.

  The baron looked at his wristwatch and said, "We have to do something about her. She wasn't dangerous until she got enfleshed. But everything has its disadvantage. Now she's dangerous, she's also vulnerable. We can do something about her, and we will. I'm going to call a conference."

  Mrs. Grasatchow pouted. She said, "Now Magda's out of the way, I'd thought..."

  "Half an hour. No more," Igescu said. "I'll send somebody down to escort you. You wouldn't want to be alone on the way up."

  The fat woman started. It was as if a tidal wave were racing through her flesh.

  "You mean I...I... have to worry? That I'm in danger?"

  She bellowed with laughter.

  "We all are," the baron said. "All of a sudden, our security is gone. This," he stabbed a thumb at Childe, "has something to do with it but I don't know what. He's a focus of some sort. Maybe Dolores has been waiting for someone like him all these years.

  "Half an hour," he said. "I mean it. And don't use him up. I still want a piece of him."

  The baron left, closing the door behind him. Mrs. Grasatchow started to take her clothes off. Childe's legs began to shake again.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  He told her that she was wasting her time. He did not tell, her that, even if he had not been drained and weakened, he would have been unable to respond positively to her. The enormous hanging breasts, the tremendous belly, which curved out and overhung the genitals so far that they could not be seen in the shadows and folds, the hips, sackish with fat, the tree-trunk legs, repulsed him. He doubted that he could have gotten a hard-on even if he were in full strength and had not had an emission for a month.

  Mrs. Grasatchow said, "That spook-bitch sucked you dry, heh?" And then she laughed. She was close to him; the blast of alcohol made him feel like vomiting. There must be almost two gallons in that pony-sized gut.

  She had brought into the room a large bear-skin-purse and a bottle of wine and a bottle of Scotch. She poured the wine over his belly and genitals and then got on her knees and licked them off. He did not respond.

  She came up off her knees like a boulder tossed up by a volcanic explosion. Her hand struck him on the side of h
is jaw. He saw comets and fell back, half-unconscious, against the wall.

  "You little asshole!" she screamed. "You may look like George, but you sure aren't the man he was!"

  She waddled to her purse and took out a silvery cone about two inches long. "This will put some life into you! Once it's in you!"

  Grinning, she approached him. He shrank back against the wall and then leaped out at her, striking at her. Laughing, she caught his wrist and turned it until he cried out in agony and sank to his knees as far as the chain would allow. Choking; he tried to stand up again, but she forced him down until he was almost unconscious again.

  He regained his senses to find himself turned around, his face to the wall. Something--he knew it was the cone--was being shoved up his anus.

  "You've never had anything like this, little man!" she crooned. "Never! You'll not forget this night, as long as you live! Oh, little man, I wish I were you just now, so I could fuck me!"

  The cone burned at first and made him feel as if he had to shit. After about half a minute, it seemed to turn icy and to become heavy, as if it were a lead sinker just removed from a freezer. The coldness and heaviness spread out, up his intestines, coil after coil, like a snake racing ahead of the Ice Age but too slow, into his testicles, which became bells ringing with chilliness, into his solar plexus, and, at the other terminus, into his penis. Liquid nitrogen pumping into every tube of his body.

  He squirmed as the stuff fell down the shafts of his legs and flapped slowly spiraling up the shaft of his trunk. The powerful bands of the fat woman tightened, and she said, "Quiet, little lover. This won't hurt you, and you'll be a man such as you never were!"

  The icy weight lapped at the base of his brain. His neckbones and hindbrain felt crystallized. He could distinguish each vertebra and each cell of the cerebellum as a frozen entity. He could also feel the individual vessels of his penis slowly filling with half-frozen blood. By then, Mrs. Grasatchow had turned him around again and was down on her elephantine knees and sucking on his penis. She grunted as if she were a sow tearing into a corncob, but, as far as he could detect, he was being treated gently enough. Her jaws did not move, only her lips, shaped around the glands, moved. He could feel nothing. He might as well have had a hundred local shots of morphine over his body and one massive shot in his penis. But if his brain was receiving no tactile message, part of his body was. The penis, like an independent creature, a leech stuck in her mouth and drawing blood from her tongue, was gradually filling up.