Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  Bill shook and moaned and kept his gaze fixed upon the penis diving in and out of those full red lips. He was evidently getting a heightened ecstasy out of watching his cock pistoning into her mouth.

  Herald Childe did not know whether he should stay there or not. He wanted to explore the house for anything he might be able to use for evidence against Vivienne and her partners. If he could find names and addresses, documents, recordings, films, anything that would tend to prove their criminal activities, he should do it now. Vivienne was occupied, and she was unlikely to notice any noise outside this bedroom.

  However, he was worried about the man. His behavior made it evident that he was not aware of Vivienne's peculiarities of physiology or her fatal actions. At least, Childe supposed that they were fatal for others. He had never seen her kill or even harm anyone, but he was certain that she was no different from her monstrous associates.

  Bill was an innocent in the sense that he was a victim. He had probably never done anything to offend or hurt Vivienne and her group. He was just a pickup, as Childe's partner had been a pickup.

  Childe shuddered at the memory of that film that had been shipped to the LAPD by the killers. It had shown his partner being sucked off, as Bill now was. The woman had removed her false teeth and inserted razor-edged iron teeth, and bitten off the end of his partner's cock.

  The blood was a crimson fountain that burst out frequently in his visions and his dreams.

  Childe decided that he would have to interfere. This meant that he could not prowl around the house now. He would have to make sure that the man was safe. He should do so now, but he could not. He wanted to find out what would happen. He would wait a while and then step in.

  Vivienne abruptly stood up, revealing Bill's red and pulsing beak sticking out at a 45-degree angle.

  She said, "Slide back onto the bed, baby, and lie down."

  Whatever reservations he had about her had diminished with the increase in blood pressure. He moved back and lay down with his head on the pillow while she climbed onto the bed. She mouthed the head of his penis for a minute and then said, "Bill?"

  He was flat on his back, his hands spread out, his face turned upwards. His eyes were open. He did not answer.

  "Bill?" she said again, a little louder.

  When he did not respond, she crawled down to him and looked into his face. She pinched his cheek and then raked it with her fingernails. Blood flowed from four rows on his flesh, but he did not move. His penis, however, reared up, thick, squat, red-purplish, glistening.

  Vivienne turned then, and Childe saw the smirk. Whatever she was planning, it was proceeding smoothly.

  It was then that he should walk into the room, but he was too fascinated to make his move as yet. Bill seemed to be paralyzed, though how it had happened, Childe could not guess. Not at first. Then he realized that that thing had bitten Bill's peter with poisonous teeth. The venom had frozen him, with the exception of his prick. The blood was still pumping into it.

  The woman straddled him with the intention of easing down on his cock and letting it slide up into the slit of her vagina. But she only allowed the head to enter and then she stopped descending. She crouched there for about thirty seconds, during which she shook as if she were having an orgasm.

  Immediately after, she withdrew, exposing the penis, which was still upright. But there were tiny rills of blood running down its side from several places between the head and the shaft.

  Vivienne turned around to straddle him facing away from him. She put her hand below her buttocks to grab the penis and to slide it in again. This time, however, she let her weight slowly down to guide the cock into her anus. And when its head was engulfed, she stopped.

  Childe anticipated what would happen next. He felt sick, and he knew he should halt the monstrous rape, but he also was gripped with the desire to witness what, as far as he knew, no man alive had seen. Emphasis on the alive.

  Vivienne waited, and then the lips of her slit bulged open. The thick meat of rich red hair was pushed aside, and a tiny head emerged. It was soaked with the lubricating fluids within her cunt, and it had the features of a man. Its hair was black; it had a tiny moustache and goatee; its eyes were two garnets under eyebrows no thicker than the leg of a black widow spider. The lips' were so thin as to be invisible; the nose was long and curved.

  The head moved forward as the body continued to slide out from the vagina. It raised upon the shaft of the body like a snake, and Childe heard it hiss but knew that that had to be his imagination. It glided on over the wrinkled sac of the testicles and underneath, apparently headed for the anus. Then it disappeared while the uncoiling body kept issuing from the slit. By then, its head must have gone deep into the man's bowels.

  Childe unfroze abruptly. He shook his head as if trying to clear away sleep. He was not sure that he had not fallen into a semihypnotic state while watching the bizarre scene.

  He stepped through the door just as Vivienne eased herself down on the penis, driving it all the way up her own anus. Her eyes were closed, and her face was ecstatic. He managed to get close to her while she was moving up and down on the shaft and moaning phrases in a foreign language. The only sounds were her voice, the striking of rain against the windows, and the squeak of the bed springs as she slid up and down on the cock like a monkey on a stick.

  Now that he was closer, he could see that the pale and slimy body of the thing was in the man's anus. It apparently had gone in as deeply as it could, or as it cared to, because the motion was stopped. Childe felt sick because he could imagine that golfball-sized head with its vicious eyes blind in the night of the bowels and its mouth chewing on whatever it was that it found delectable in there.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 23

  He reached out and touched the pink-red and swollen nipple on that superb breast.

  She reacted violently. Her eyes flew open, exposing the beautiful violet, and she rose up off the bed, leaving the throbbing penis sticking up and dragging the body of the thing out of the man's body. Both came loose with a slurping sound, and the tiny mouth of the thing chattered a high-pitched and angry stream of expletives. At least, they sounded like cursing to Childe, although he did not know the language. The words seemed to be Latin in origin, they were vaguely French or perhaps Catalan or something in between.

  On seeing Childe, the thing reared up on its body, which coiled behind the head as if it were a rattlesnake. Vivienne continued to move away from Childe, however, retreating to the opposite end of the bed. There she crouched, while the thing swung between her legs and then started to slide back into the vagina. The head was fixed on Childe while this withdrawal occurred. Its red-gleaming eyes were hateful and deadly. Then the head was gone into the slit; the labia closed; it was as if the thing had never existed. Certainly, the thing should not exist.

  Childe moved up along the bed and reached out and slapped the man in the face. The hand left a red imprint,, but that was the only reaction from him. He continued to stare upwards, and his chest rose and fell slowly. His dong was beginning to dwindle and sag.

  "That will do no good unless I give him the antidote," Vivienne said.

  Her color was beginning to return, and she was even smiling at him.

  "Then give it to him!"

  "Or you'll do what?"

  The tone was not hostile, just questioning.

  "I'll call the cops."

  "If you do," she said evenly, "you'll be the one hauled away. I'll charge you with breaking and entering, threatened rape, and assault, and battery on my friend here and maybe even attempted murder."

  Childe wondered why she would not charge him with actual rape, then it occurred to him that she would not want a physical examination.

  He said, "I'm not in too good a position, it's true. But I don't think you could stand much publicity."

  She climbed down off the bed, brushing against him with one soft hip, and walked to her dresser. She picked up a cigarette, lit it, a
nd then offered him one. He shook his head.

  "Then it's a Mexican standoff?"

  "Not unless you give this man the antidote," he said. "I don't care what it costs me, I'll raise a howl that'll bring this place down around your ears."

  "Very well."

  She opened a drawer while he stood behind her to make sure that there was no weapon in it. She picked up a large sewing needle from a little depression in top of a block of dark-red wood and walked with it to the man. She inserted its tip into the jugular vein and then walked back to the dresser. By the time she had replaced the needle, Bill was beginning to move his legs and his head. A few minutes later, he groaned and then he sat up, his feet on the floor. He looked at the naked Vivienne and at Childe as if he was not sure what was happening.

  Childe said, "Were you conscious?"

  Bill nodded. He was concentrating on Vivienne with a peculiar expression.

  "I can't believe it!" he said. "What the hell were you doing with me? You pervert!"

  Childe did not understand for a moment. The accusation seemed so mild compared with what had happened. Then he saw that Bill had not witnessed the thing issuing from her vagina. He must have believed that she had stuck some object up his anus.

  "Your clothes are over there," she said, pointing at a chair on the other side of the bed. "Get dressed and get out."

  Bill stood up unsteadily and walked around the bed. While he dressed clumsily, he said, "I'll have the cops down here so fast your heads'll swim. Drugging me! Drugging me! What the hell for? What did you intend to do?"

  "I wouldn't call in the cops," Childe said. "You heard what she said she'd do. You'd end up with all sorts of charges flung at you, and, believe me, this woman has some powerful connections. Moreover, she is quite capable of murder."

  Bill, looking scared, dressed more swiftly.

  Vivienne looked at her wristwatch and said, "Herald and I have some things we're eager to discuss. Please hurry."

  "Yeah, I'll bet you two perverts do!" Bill said, glaring at both.

  "For Christ's sake!" Childe said. "I saved your life!"

  Childe watched Vivienne. She was leaning against the dresser with her weight on one leg, throwing a hip into relief. He hated her. She was so agonizingly beautiful, so desirable. And so coldly fatal, so monstrous, in all senses of that overused and misused word.

  Bill finally had his clothes on, except for his raincoat and rubbers. These, Childe supposed, would be in the closet in the vestibule downstairs just off the entrance.

  "So long, you queers!" Bill mumbled as he stumbled through the door. "I'll see you in jail, you can bet on that!"

  Vivienne laughed. Childe wondered if he should go with him. Now that he had followed her and was in this den of whatever it was that she and her colleagues were, he wondered if he had made a very wrong decision. It was true he had rescued a victim, but the victim was so stupid he did not realize what he had escaped. Certainly, he did not seem worth the trouble or the risk.

  Vivienne waited until the front door loudly slammed. Then she moved slowly towards him, rolling her hips.

  He backed away, saying, "Keep your distance, Vivienne. I have no desire for you; you couldn't possibly seduce me, if that's what you have in mind."

  She laughed again and sat down on the edge of the bed. "No, of course not! But why are you here? We left you alone, though we could have killed you easily enough at any time. And perhaps we should have, after what you did to us."

  "If you were human, you'd understand why."

  "Oh, you mean the monkey sense of curiosity? Let me remind you of how Malayans catch monkeys. They put food in a jar with a mouth large enough for the monkey to get his paw into but too small for him to withdraw the hand unless he lets loose of the food. Of course, he doesn't let loose, and so the trapper takes him easily."

  "Yes, I know that," he said. "Your analogy may be a fairly exact one. I'm here because I still think that your bunch had something to do with my wife's disappearance. I know you denied that, but I can't get it out of my mind that you did away with Sybil. You're certainly capable of doing that. You're capable of anything that's cruel and inhuman."

  "Inhuman?" she said, smiling.

  "All right. Point well taken," he said. "However, here we are, alone together in this house with no one except Bill knowing that I am here. And he not only does not know who I am, he isn't going to say anything about me. Not after he considers the possible repercussions, especially the fact that he might be suspected."

  "Suspected of what?" she said, her eyes widening. Before he could reply, she said, "I doubt that he'll say anything to anybody."

  "What do you mean?" he said, although he thought he knew what she was going to say.

  She looked at her watch and said, "He ought to be dying of a heart attack about now."

  She looked up at him and smiled again. "So pale! So shocked! What did you expect, you babe in the woods? Did you think I'd let him go so he could talk to the police? I could make him regret it, of course, with charges that would put him in jail, but I don't want any publicity whatsoever. Now, really, Herald Childe, how could you be so naive?"

  Childe broke loose from the casing of ice that had seemed to be around him. He leaped at her, his hands outstretched, and she tried to roll away from him on the bed to the other side, but he seized her ankle. He dragged her to him, although she slammed one heel into his shoulder. He leaned down between her legs and thrust three fingers into the wet vagina and probed. Something fiery touched one of his fingers, and he knew he had been bitten, but he plunged his hand in as far as he could.

  Vivienne screamed with the pain then, but he kept the hand in and, despite the agony of more bites on his other fingers, managed to seize that tiny head. It was slippery, and it resisted, but it came on out of her cunt, its mouth working, the minute teeth glittering in the light, its eyes looking like red jewels stuck into its bearded doll face.

  He pressed his left shoulder against her right leg to keep it from kicking him and braced his right shoulder against her other leg. She reached down and grabbed his hair and pulled, and the pain was so intense he almost let loose of the thing. But he clung to it and then threw himself backward as hard as he could. The snakelike body shot out from the slit while the tiny mouth screamed like a rabbit dying.

  As he fell on his back on the floor, he saw the tail slide out of the slit. It came loose much easier than he had thought it would. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that it was anchored to her in a plexus of flesh.

  But there were red and bloody roots hanging from the end of the tail, and Vivienne was down on the floor by him writhing and screaming.

  He jumped up and threw the thing away. Its slimy muscle-packed body and the grease-soaked head and unadulterated viciousness of the face and eyes were so loathsome he was afraid he was going to vomit.

  The body soared across the bed, hit the other edge, flopped, and then slithered off the edge to fall out of sight.

  Vivienne quit screaming, though her skin was gray and her eyes were great areas of white with violet islets. She said, "Now you've done it! I hope I can get back together again!"

  He said, "What?"

  He was having difficulty standing. The pain in his fingers was lessening, but that was because a numbness was shooting up his arm and down his side. The room was beginning to be blurred, and Vivienne's white body with the auburn triangle between the legs and torn fleshy roots hanging out of the slit was starting to spin and, at the same time, to recede.

  "You wouldn't understand, you stupid human!"

  He sank to his knees and then sat down, lowering himself with one arm that threatened to turn into rubber under him. Vivienne's pubis was directly under his eyes, so he saw what was happening despite the increasing fuzziness of vision.

  The skin was splitting along the hairline of the pubis. The split became a definite and deep cleavage as if invisible knives were cutting into her and the operators of the knives intended to scoop out the vagin
a and the womb in one section.

  Cracks were appearing across her waist, across her thighs, her knees, her calves, and her feet.

  He bent over to see more clearly. There were cracks on her wrists, her elbows, around her breasts, her neck. She looked like a china doll that had fallen onto a cement sidewalk.

  When he looked back at her cunt, it had walked out of the space it had occupied between her legs. It was staggering on its own legs, a score or more of needle-thin many-jointed members with a red-flesh color. Its back was the pubis, the rich auburn hair, the slit, and the mound of Venus. Its underside was the protective coating of the vaginal canal. The uterus came next on its many tiny legs, following the vagina as if it hoped to reconnect.

  Out from the cavity left by the exodus came other organs, some of which he recognized. That knot and fold of flesh certainly must be the fallopian tube and ovary, and that, what the hell was that?

  By then the cleavages around the base of the breasts had met, and the breasts reeled off the steep slope of the ribs and fell down, turning over. One landed on its legs and scuttled off, but the other breast lay on its back--its front, actually--and kicked its many red spider legs until it succeeded in getting on its feet--so-called.

  The belly had split across and down, as had the upper part of the trunk. The anus and the two cheeks of the buttocks crawled off. The legs of this creature were thicker but the weight of the flesh seemed to be almost too much. It moved slowly, whereas the hands, using the fingers as legs, ran across the room quickly and disappeared under the bed.

  The head was also walking towards the underside of the bed. It was lifted off the floor by legs about three inches high and perhaps a sixteenth of an inch thick. Four longer legs that had sprouted from behind her ears supported the head and kept it from falling to one side or another. Vivienne's eyes were open and blinking, so that she seemed to be as aware in this state as she was in the other. She did not, however, look at Childe.