Image of the Beast and Blown (26 page)

The room was broad and high-ceilinged, so high that
it must have displaced two rooms above it and may have
gone almost to the roof. The walls were paneled in dark
oak, and huge rough-hewn oak beams ran just below the
heavily shadowed ceiling. The floor was dark polished
oak. Here and there was a wolf or bear skin. The bed
was a framework with eight thick rough-hewn oaken
logs, low footboard and headboard, and planks laid
across the framework.

Lying on the planks was a huge oak log squared off
at the corners. It had been gouged out on its top with axe
and chisel. The gouge was wide and deep enough to hold
a tall man. It did hold a man. The baron, covered with a
bearskin to his neck, lay on his back in the hollow. There
was dirt beneath him and dirt humped under his head
for a pillow.

His face was turned straight upward. His nose looked
huge and long. His lower lip had slipped a little to reveal
the long white teeth. His face was as greenish-gray as if
he had just died. This may have been because of the
peculiar greenish light flickering from four fat green
candles, two at each corner of the log-coffin.

Childe pulled the bearskin back. The baron was naked.
He put his hand on the baron's chest and then on his
wrist pulse. There was no detectable heartbeat, and the
chest did not move. An eyelid, peeled back, showed only
white.

Childe left the baron and pulled two drapes back.
Two enormous French windows were grayly bared. It
was daytime, but the light was very dark, as if night
had left an indelible stain. The sky was dark gray with
streamers of green-gray dangling here and there.

Childe looked in the darkness under the planks sup-
porting the log-coffin. He found a roughly-worked oaken
lid. He felt cold. The silence, the sputtering green candles,
the heavy dark wood everywhere, the ponderous beams,
which seemed to drip shadows, the roughness, indeed,
the archaicness, of the room, and the corpse-like sleeper,
who was so expected and yet so unexpected—these fell

like heavy shrouds, one over the other, upon him. His
breath sawed in his throat.

Was this room supposed to be a reproduction of a room
in the ancestral castle in Transylvania? Why the ubiqui-
tous primitively worked oak? And why this coffin when
Igescu could afford the best?

Some things here accorded with the superstitions
(which, as far as he was concerned, were not supersti-
tions). Other things he could not account for.

He had a hunch that this room was built to conform
to specifications far more ancient than medieval ones,
that the oak and the log and the candles had been in use
long before the Transylvanian mountains were so named,
long before Rumania existed as a colony of the
Romans, long before the mother city, Rome, existed,
and probably long before the primitive Indo-European
speakers began to spread out of the homeland of what
would someday be called Austria and Hungary. A type of
this room, and a type of this man who slept in the log, in
one form or another, had existed in central Europe, and
elsewhere, when men spoke languages now perished
without a record and when they still used flint tools.

Whatever the origin of his kind, however closely or
distantly he resembled the creature of folklore, legend,
and superstition, Igescu was forced to be as good as dead
when daylight arrived. The rays of the sun contained
some force responsible for diurnal suspended animation.
Perhaps some other phenomenon connected with the im-
pact of the sunlight caused this strange sleep. Or, per-
haps, it was the other way around, with the absence of
the moon? No, that wasn't logical because the moon was
often present in the daytime. But then, maybe the moon's
effect was greatly reduced by the other luminary.

If Igescu had not been forced to do so, he would never
have quit the search for Dolores and Childe. Why, then,
had he not made sure that he would not be vulnerable?
He knew that both Dolores and Childe were in the
intramural passageways.

Childe felt colder than before except for a hot spot
between his shoulder blades, the focus of something hid-
den somewhere and staring at his back.

He looked swiftly around the room, at the ceiling,
where the shadows clung above the beams, under the

oaken frame of the bed, although he had looked there
once, and behind the few chairs. There was nothing.

The bathroom was empty. So was the room beyond the
thick rough oaken door on the west wall. Nothing living
was there, but a massive mahogany coffin with gold trim-
ming and goldplated handles stood in one corner.

Childe raised the lid, fully expecting to find a body.
It was empty. Either it had housed a daylight sleeper at
one time or it was to be used in some emergency by the
baron. Childe pulled up the satin lining and found earth
beneath it.

He went back to the oaken room. Nothing had visibly
changed. Yet the silence seemed to creak. It was as if
intrusion of another had hauled in the slack of the at-
mosphere, had hauled it in too tightly. The shadows
abruptly seemed darker; the green light of the candles
was heavier and, in some way, even more sinister.

He stood in the doorway, sword ready, motionless,
repressing his breathing so he could listen better.

Something
had come into this room, either from the
passageway entrance or through the door at the west wall.
He doubted that it had used the passageway entrance,
because any guard stationed there would have challenged
him before he could get into the room.

It had to have been in the other room, and it must
have been watching him through some aperture which
Childe could not see. It had not moved against him
immediately because he had not tried to harm the baron.

Perhaps the feeling was only too-strained nerves. He
could see nothing, nothing at all to alarm him.

But the baron would not have left himself unguarded.

19

Childe took one step forward. There was still no sound
except that which his mental ear heard. It was a crack-
ling, as if the intrusion of a new mass had bent a
magnetic field. The lines of force had been pushed out.

The rapier held point up, he advanced toward the
enormous log on the bed. The noiseless crackling be-
came louder. He stooped and looked under the frame.
There was nothing there.

Something heavy struck him on his back and drove him
face down. He screamed and rolled over. Fire tore at his
back and his hips and the back of his thighs, but he was
up and away, while something snarled and spat behind
him. He rounded the bed and whirled, the sword still in
his hand although he had no memory of consciously
clinging to it or of even thinking of it. But if his spirit
had unclenched for a moment, his fist had not.

The thing was a beauty and terror of white and black
rosetted fur, and taut yellow-green eyes which seemed to
reflect the ghastly light of the candles, and thin black
lips, and sharp yellow teeth. It was small for a leopard
but large enough to scare him even after most of the
fright of the unexpected and unknown had left him. It
had hidden in the cavity of the log, crouching flattened on
top of Igescu until Childe had come close to it.

Now it crouched again and snarled, eyes spurting
ferocity, claws unsheathed.

Now it launched itself over the bed and the coffin.
Childe, leaning over the baron's body, thrust outward.
The cat was spitted on the blade, which drove through the
neck. A paw flashed before his eyes, but the tips of the
claws were not quite close enough. Childe went over
backward, and the rapier was torn from his hand. When
he got up, he saw that the leopard, a female, was kicking
its last. It lay on its right side, mouth open, the life in its
eyes flying away bit by bit, like a flock of bright birds
leaving a branch one by one as they started south to
avoid the coming of winter.

Childe was panting and shaking, and his heart was

threatening to butt through his ribs. He pulled the sword
out, shoving with his foot against the body, and then
climbed upon the oaken frame. He raised the sword be-
fore him by the hilt with both hands. Its point was down-
ward, parallel with his body. He held it as if he were a
monk holding a cross up to ward off evil, which, in a way,
he was. He brought the blade down savagely with all
his weight and drove it through the skin and heart
and, judging from the resistance and muted cracking
sound, some bones.

The body moved with the impact, and the head turned
a little to one side. That was all. There was no sighing or
rattling of breath. No blood spurted from around the
wound or even seeped out.

The instrument of execution was steel, not wood,
but the hilt formed a cross. He hoped that the symbol
was more important than the material. Perhaps neither
meant anything. It might be false lore which said that a
vampire, to be truly killed, must be pierced through the
heart with a stake or that the undead feared the cross
with an unholy dread and were deprived of force in its
presence.

Also, he remembered from his reading of
Dracula,
many years ago, something about the head having to be
removed.

He felt that probably there were many things said
about this creature that were not true and also there
were many things unknown. Whether the lore was
superstition or not, he had done his best, was going to
do his best, to ensure that it died a permanent death.

As for the leopard, it might be just that—a leopard. He
suspected that it was Ngima or Mrs. Pocyotl because it
was so small. It did not seem likely that Pocyotl, who
was Mexican, some of whose ancestors undoubtedly
spoke one form or another of Nahuatl, would be a
wereleopard. A werejaguar, yes. No, it must be, if
not a genuine leopard, Ngima or the Chinaman Pao.

Whatever it was, it showed no sign of changing after
death. Perhaps it really was not a metamorph but a pet
trained to guard Igescu.

What am I thinking of? he thought. Of course, it is.
There are no such creatures as werewolves and were-
leopards and vampires. Maybe there are vampires,

psychological vampires, psychotics who think they are
vampires. But an actual metamorphosis! What kind of
mechanism would be involved, what mechanism could
effect a change like that? Bones become fluid, change
shape even in the cellular structure, and harden again?
Well, maybe the bones are not
our
kind of bones. But
what about the energy involved? And even if the body
could shift shape, the brain surely couldn't! The brain
would have to retain its human size and shape.

He looked at the leopard and he remembered the
wolves. Their heads were wolf-sized, their brains were
small.

He should forget this nonsense. He had been drugged;
the rest was suggestion.

Not until then did he become aware that the leopard,
when it had been fastened to him for such a short time,
had done more than he had thought. It had torn off his
shirt and pants and belt, and his hand, feeling his back
and hips and legs, was wet with blood. He hurt, and he
was alarmed, but a closer examination convinced him
that the leopard had done more harm to his clothes
than to him. The wounds were superficial or seemed so.

He went into the next room, which was a small study,
and picked up an armful of newspapers and magazines.
Returning to the huge room, he wadded up the papers
and ripped out pages and stacked a pile on each side
of the baron's neck. After dripping some lighter fluid
on the two piles and over the baron's hair and chest,
he touched off the fluid.

Childe then opened the large windows and built an-
other fire below the central plank. A third pile below
the left side of the framework blazed up. In a few min-
utes, he added a wooden chair to that fire. After a while,
the oak of the frame and the plank were blazing, and
the log was blackening and smoking. The stench
of burned hair and flesh rose from the baron.

More paper and lighter fluid got the drapes over the
windows to burning. Then he struggled with the body
of the leopard until he dropped it on the fire. Its
head burned fiercely with lighter fluid; its black nose
lost its wet shininess and wrinkled with heat.

Opening the entrance to the passageway made a
stronger draft. The smoke in the room streamed out

through the hole to meet the smoke in the passageway.

The entrance did not seem big enough to handle all
the smoke, which soon filled the room. He began to cough
and, suddenly, as if the coughs had triggered him, he
had a long shuddering orgasm the roots of which seemed
to be wrapped around his spine and to be pulling his
spine down his back and out through his penis.

Just as the last spurt came, a shriek tore from the
smoke in the center of the room. He spun around but
could see nothing. One of the two had not been
dead and still was not dead because the shrieks were
continuing with full strength.

And then, before he could turn again to face the new
sound, a grunting and squealing shot from the wall-
entrance. There was a rapid clicking, much louder than
the wolves' claws, a tremble of the boards under his
feet, and he was knocked upward to one side. Half-
stunned, his left leg hurting, he sat up. He began cough-
ing. The squealing became louder and the boards shook
under him. He rolled away under cover of the smoke
while the thing that had hit him charged around, hunt-
ing for him.

Crawling on his hands and knees along the wall, his
head bent near the floor to keep from breathing the
smoke, he headed for the French windows. The swine
noises had now given way to a deep coughing. After a
dozen racks that seemed strong enough to suck in all
the smoke in the room during the in-breaths, the hooves
clattered again. Childe rounded the corner and slid along
the wall until he came to the next corner. His hand,
groping upward into the smoke, felt the lower edges
of the French windows. The open ones were about ten
feet away, as he remembered them.

The hooves abruptly stopped. The squealing was even
more ferocious, less questing and more challenging.
Hooves hit the floorboards again. Punctuating the two
sounds was a loud hissing.

A battle was taking place somewhere in the smoke.
Several times, the walls shook as heavy bodies hit them,
and the floor seldom ceased to tremble. Blows—a great
hand hammering into a thick solid body—added codas
to the crackling of the fires.

Childe could not have waited to see what was going