Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  When she felt that it was as swollen and rigid as it could be, she stood up. She said, "You're not going any place, not now!" She unlocked the collar and put the key in her purse. He tried to run from her to the door, but his legs would not move.

  She lay down on the floor and spread her thighs open--it was like the Red Sea splitting to make passage for the horde of Moses--and she said, "Eat me!"

  Obediently, although his frozen brain tried to push out a message of resistance to his nerves, he got down and spread the slit open and prepared to tongue the clitoris first, as was his habit.

  She said, "No, idiot! The other way! Sixty-nine!"

  He crawled up onto her and swiveled around. She took in his penis until his hairs pressed against her lips. He could not feel this, but he looked through the space that existed briefly between their bodies and saw the hairs and the narrow band of the root. He flicked the tip of his tongue over the "little penis." A "little penis" this clitoris was. He had never seen such an enormous one. He did have some difficulty getting to it, however, because her belly was so huge. It was like having to curve over a hill, hanging upside down, to lick at a spring in a crevasse at the bottom of the hill.

  The worst of it was, he felt no sexual stimulation, only disgust. But he had to do exactly as she said, and his organs, outside of the brain, must be responding to some sensory input.

  At another order, he withdrew his penis from her mouth and turned around and inserted it into her vagina. He began pumping slowly but soon speeded up in response to her command. She began groaning and moaning, turning her head from side to side, crying out in a foreign language, rolling the great hips sideways and then thrusting and now and then lifting herself up from the waist and grabbing his buttocks and pulling and pushing him.

  He did not know how long they were in this position nor whether or not he had an orgasm. But the time came when she rolled him off her, the uncoupling wetly announcing itself, and got above him and eased herself down upon his penis and moved the great body as lightly and swiftly as a toy balloon on the end of a string. After what seemed to be a hundred orgasms, judging by her number of frenzies, she got off him and went to the corner after her bottle of whiskey. He seemed able to move a little of his own volition, so he turned to watch her. She sat on the rug, leaning against the wall, looking like an over-yeasted mass of dough.

  Childe became aware that he was gasping. He could hear his breath rattling in and out, but he could not feel the thudding of heart nor the moving of his ribs.

  Mrs. Grasatchow downed at least a fourth of the quart and then looked at her wristwatch.

  "Forty-five minutes," she said. "Igescu will be furious."

  She heaved herself up and said, "Hmm! What's wrong? He said he'd send somebody after me."

  She opened the door and looked down the hallway. Childe tried to run toward her then, hoping to knock her down with his momentum and get away down the hall. He only managed, after a seemingly long time, to get to his feet. If he had exerted himself prodigiously, he did not know it. Reception from his muscles was still cut off.

  On seeing him move, the woman's eyebrows went up, and she said, "Do you feel that suppository burning now?"

  "No," he said. "It's still cold and heavy."

  "You'll feel it in a moment. You'll think a hot-air balloon is going up your ass!"

  A laughquake shook her. Afterward, she said, "That stuff has a very peculiar effect. You didn't feel anything while you were fucking me, but wait. I wish I could take advantage of you then, but you'll have to enjoy yourself with yourself."

  She looked at her wristwatch again. "Maybe I won't go. I think Igescu has forgotten me. Or he knows I'll be very angry indeed if I don't get all of you. Now, you just stand right there, little Georgey Porgey Pudding Pie. I'll fix you up again, and double the effect. I don't want you acting up on me."

  As if a bore tide had reversed and was running back to sea, the coldness and heaviness became warmth and lightness. The second effect started where the first had ended, in the brain and the tip of his glands. The warmth and lightness raced inward from all borders and met in the region of the cone, in his anus, where, for a second, it burned as if a meteorite had just ended its fiery curve there.

  He cried out with the pain.

  The fat woman said, "Oh, oh! It's happened!" and she charged, one hand open to grab him and another cone in the other hand. She seemed to grow as large as the wall. Her flesh shook like a loose robe in a stiff wind. Childe launched himself at her, his hands out to grab her ears, because he meant to tear them off. He would have to fight savagely to get past her to the door. Even when he had his full strength, he would have been outmuscled by her, not to mention outweighed.

  His hands caught her ears, and his face thrust into one breast as violently "as if he had been dropped from the ceiling onto her. She screamed, because he had bitten down on the excrescence suddenly appearing between his teeth. It was- her nipple, as he found out when he got up from the floor where she had thrown him. He spat out the piece of flesh--the nipple and some white skin around it--and rose shakily. She was still screaming and rolling back and forth and clutching her mutilated breast.

  Childe did not wait to completely recover from the impact of the floor. Fighting dizziness and a pain in his shoulder, he kicked her between her legs as she started to roll toward him. His big toe disappeared momentarily in her slit. She screamed again. A flailing arm knocked his leg out from under him. He fell crosswise on top of her belly. She clamped her arms down on his buttocks and then one hand slid down to grab his testicles. With a desperate jerk, he turned over to face her, still crosswise, seized a breast, and twisted.

  Her arms came up; she screamed again. Childe rolled away across her belly and down her legs. It was like rolling down a small hill. He got out of the way of her kicking legs and leaped up and came down with both bare feet on her face. Her head was driven back against the floor; her nose was smashed; blood burst; her eyes crossed.

  Again, he leaped and came down with both feet on her belly. He sank deep. Her wind whooshed out, as if somebody had opened a big door to a distillery with a strong cross-draft. He almost gagged. But he jumped a third time, once more on her face. Her nose became even flatter. Her eyes rolled up until only the whites showed. Her mouth was wide open, braced like a sail against the wind of her agony to get her breath back.

  And, at that moment, the cone reversed its effect. It was as if the entire coition with her had been recorded with a glass window between himself and his nerve endings. He could see but could not hear. Now, the glass was gone, and he could hear the rerun. With this difference.

  He was no longer frozen. He now felt everything exquisitely; he could feel his cock in her mouth and between her breasts and in her cunt, even though they were no longer there.

  During the fight, though he had not been aware of it, he had had an erection. Now, he jetted, and the delayed-reaction orgasm stormed his body. He fell to the floor and writhed helplessly, if ecstatically, in its lightnings. There was nothing else, for the moment, he could do.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 17

  When he could regain control, he got up and staggered toward the door. Although his penis no longer spouted, it remained as hard as before and did not have the delicious emptied-to-good-purpose feeling of an after-orgasm. It did feel pleasurable, increasingly pleasurable, as if he were again working up to coition. He could, however, ignore it for the present.

  Mrs. Grasatchow still lay on her back, arms and legs outflung, her mouth open, and her eyes open and showing white, as if hardboiled eggs had been stuffed into the sockets.

  He noticed a large turd spread out on the rug between him and Mrs. Grasatchow. So, he had been "scared shitless" sometime during the fight. He had not known when he spurted out the excrement; it did not matter. He was sure that he had expelled the turd and not she, although it was possible that she had when he had jumped on her face. It was, however, so far from her that he doubted it.
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br />   Gingerly stepping by the turd, he walked to her purse, which was near the door. In it he found the key to the door. She had locked the door after looking down the hallway the last time. He unlocked it and, carrying her purse, went down the hall toward the room in which he had originally been imprisoned.

  First, though he hated the idea of any delay, he had to investigate the other rooms along the hall. There was always the chance of other prisoners there. Perhaps Sybil was in one. Six doors were closed. Three were unlocked and contained not much of interest. Three opened to the key from the fat woman's purse.

  The first two were small rooms with padded walls and floor. The third contained some furniture, modern Danish, with a color TV set, a well-stocked bar, a pool table, and cartons of cigarettes and cigars and boxes of marijuana sticks and bottles with pills of various sizes, shapes, and colors. It looked as if it might be a rest room or recreation room. The occupants could relax here between their working bouts in the other room. There was also a large bureau with a mirror, which he did not think was one-way. The top of it was crowded with cosmetics and held some wigs.

  He opened the drawers, hoping to find some clothes he could wear. Before he could examine one, he was overcome with another semi-epileptic orgasm and jetted over the clothes in the top drawer. There was a washroom which he used to clean his genitals, face and hands, and his mouth. He drank several glasses of water and returned to the bureau.

  There were some T-shirts and gym shorts. He found some that were near enough to his size and put them on. Then it occurred to him that he was going to have another ejaculation soon and would be very uncomfortable. It was either that or stick his cock out. He decided on the latter, although he felt ridiculous. And he looked ridiculous in the mirror. A knight with a stubby delicate lance. Some knight! Some detective! A private dick become public.

  There were some socks but no shoes. He put the socks on and continued his search. If only a weapon were here. No luck. Too much to hope for, of course. The two lower drawers were crammed with flat transparent plastic envelopes containing something unidentifiable. He opened one and shook out the contents. It fluttered out like a transparent flag to a length of about six feet. It had four extensions, a thick mass of hair on one end, and a circular patch of hair in the middle. Just beside the thick mass of hair was a small red valve like that on a child's plastic inflatable swimming pool. He blew it up and felt weakened by the exertion before he had completed the job.

  After seeing what he had, he was horrified, although he had suspected what the result would be.

  Somehow, Colben's skin had been stripped from his body and made into a balloon. The apertures: earholes, mouth, anus, and the mutilated penis, had been sewn over with flaps of skin. His eyes had been painted blue, and the mouth was painted with a facsimile of labial red. The pubic hairs were still attached, and these, together with the sewed fold between his legs, gave him a womanish appearance.

  Childe did not have time to deflate him. He pushed him sailing away, and frantically removed the contents of the other envelopes. One was the head of Budler. He presumed that the wolf in the film had eaten the rest of Budler or so mangled it that it could not be used for a balloon. His head went spinning over and over toward the corner, where Colben, turned upside down by the weight of his hair, and the valve on the back of his neck, stood on his head.

  There were a number of women, only four of whom had the right length or color of hair for Sybil. Despite this, he inflated all of them. When he had blown up the last one, he was panting as if he had run a half-mile through the smog. The effort was only partly responsible. He had been so certain that the last one would have Sybil's features.

  He sat down and sipped on another glass of water. There were thirty-eight skins at one end of the room. Most of them were upside down, but a few had fallen against the others and leaned one way or another. The light from a lamp in the corner shone through many of them so that they seemed a mob of drunken ghosts. The draft from the air-conditioning moved them back and forth a little as if they were phantoms of the drowned.

  Thirty-eight. Twenty-five males. Thirteen females. Of the males, fifteen were Caucasians, seven were Negroes, three were Mongolians or Indians. Of the females, nine were Caucasians and four were Negresses.

  All were adult. If any had been children, he would not have been able to endure it. He would have run screaming down the hall. He thought he was tough, but he would not have been able to stand the sight of the inflated skins of children.

  As it was, he was angry and sick. More angry than sick at the moment. What were they planning on doing with these...these corpse-balloons? Fill them with hydrogen and send them flying over Los Angeles?

  That was probably exactly what they would do. It would be on a par, no, would surpass, the effrontery of the films.

  He rose and took a bottle of vodka by the neck and went back to the doorway of the room in which he had left Mrs. Grasatchow. She was sitting up and vomiting. Blood was still trickling from her nostrils. On seeing Childe, she snarled and managed to lift herself to her feet. Blood and vomit smeared her immense belly.

  "You'll beg me to kill you!" she screamed.

  "Why will I?" he said. He stepped inside the room. "Before I kill you, I want you to tell me why you did that to all those people? And why did you strip off their skins?"

  "I'll rip your balls off!" she shouted. She charged him then; he braced himself, the bottle lifted high. But she stepped on the turd and her feet shot up and ahead of her and she fell heavily on her back. She lay there, groaning but seemingly knocked out. He hit her, once, on the side of her head with the bottle she had dropped and then locked the door to the room. The bottle in one hand and her purse on the other arm, and his penis sticking out--what a hero I make! he thought--he entered the room in which he had first been chained.

  But he came out of it at once and went into the recreation room. He needed evidence. The police wouldn't believe much of his story after he told it, but they would have to believe that a part of it was true when he showed them Colben and Budler. And another picked at random who might turn out to have been reported missing.

  The deflation was as ghastly as he had expected. The air hissed out, and Budler and the woman shrank like the witch on whom Dorothy had thrown water. But Colben--he always was slippery--got away and shot around the room, butting into several of the phantoms and knocking them heads over heels. He came to rest draped over the bar. Childe pulled him off the bar then as he had pulled him away several times when he was living. He rolled him up and stuffed him into the purse on top of Budler's head and the red-headed woman.

  The section of wall opened for him after a number of experiments of running his hand along the juncture of the blocks which Dolores had pressed. He stepped inside with a pencil-flashlight taken from the purse. The section swung shut behind him, and he began walking slowly. The passageway was warm and dusty and narrow. It led past several rooms, each of which had a one-way mirror but no entrance that he could detect. They were similar to those lining the other hallway. A stairway confronted him. He walked up this uneasily, although he did not think that it could be a trap, since he was so deep in the earth. But he could not be sure. At the top, he was in a passageway which offered him two routes. There were prints in the dust, a long pointed shoeprint which he presumed was the baron's and those of a dog's or a wolf's. The latest led to his right, so he decided to follow them. One way was as good as another; and something had to decide him.

  His flashlight showed him several squares in the walls. When he opened these, he saw through one-way mirrors into a number of rooms, one of which he thought he remembered. It was a Louis Quatorze bedroom, but it did not seem quite like the one he remembered. It did have an entrance through the paneling. He took it and after stepping softly around it and looking into the bathroom, knew this was not the same room. The queer disturbing mirror was missing. He started to open the door to look out into the next room or the hallway but thought better of it.
He placed his ear against the wood and was glad that he had done so. The murmur of voices came through the wood.

  The keyhole let him hear more clearly but not clearly enough. After turning off all the lights in the room, he turned the knob carefully and eased the door open. The voices came from the end of the hall. He could see partway down it but not far enough to see the speakers. The voices were identifiable, except for two. These could be Chornkin's and Krautschner's, since they had not spoken when introduced or at the dinner table. They could also be those of newcomers.

  "...much energy from Magda, as I said before," Igescu was saying loudly. He seemed angered and, perhaps, a little frightened. "I think Dolores had gathered enough around her to take tangible and enduring shape, enough to render Magda powerless for a moment and suck her almost dry. She didn't kill Magda but she came damn close. And then Glam, that damn fool! he deserved what he got! But then what can you expect from his kind? Glam fucked her, although I'd warned him often enough what might happen. I think be thought he was safe. But the very act of fucking gave her energy enough; she came to and found Glam in her, how she hated him! And you saw Glam!"

  The strange male voice interrupted softly. Childe could not understand what he was saying. Igescu's reply was loud enough.

  "Yes, Magda got the energy but not enough! She's stuck in stasis, and she won't get out unless she kills another! Which will mean someone here, in this house!"

  The strange female voice spoke then; it was even softer than the male's. Igescu said, "Childe would do it! I had other plans for him, but I can give them up! We have to find Magda first and get her to Childe! Otherwise...!"