Image of the Beast and Blown (17 page)

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 foot-
ing 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 wear-
ing 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 experi-
enced 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 im-
portant to do. He placed his ear against the glass and
could hear, faintly, Richard Strauss'
Thus Spake Zara-
thustra.
It must be coming from the room into which
she had gone.

The bedroom was in rather somber taste for a beauti-
ful 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 im-
ages too faded to be identified. The bed was, like the
baron's, canopied, but it was of a period he did not rec-
ognize, 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 win-
dow 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. Fi-
nally, 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 con-
tinued 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 steepped 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 satisfac-
tory, 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 uncom-
fortable, 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 side 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 re-
pulsion 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, be-
cause 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 mous-
tache 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 ex-
tended 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 at-
tached 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 wom-
an'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 disap-
peared into the toothless cavity. The body bent and un-
bent, 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 back-
wards until she fell back upon the bed with her legs hang-
ing 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? Vody-
anoi? 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-lipped, black-haired head of
Dolores del Osorojo had appeared around the doorway.

The woman, who must have seen Dolores in the mir-
ror, 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