Image of the Beast and Blown (27 page)

on even if he had wished. The smoke would kill him
sooner, the fire would kill him later, but not so much
later, if he did not get out. There was no time to crawl
on around until he got to the west door. The windows
were the only way out. He climbed out after unfasten-
ing and pushing out the lower edge of the screen, let
himself down until he clung by his hands, and then
dropped. He struck a bush, broke it, felt as if he had
broken himself, too, rolled off it, and then stood up. His
left leg hurt even more, but he could see no blood.

And then he jetted again—at least, his penis had not
been hurt in the fall—and was helpless while two bodies
hurtled through the window he had just left. The screen,
torn off, struck near him. Magda Holyani and Mrs.
Grasatchow crushed more bushes and rolled off them
onto the ground near the driveway.

Immediately after, several people ran out of the
house onto the porch.

Both the women were bleeding from many wounds
and blackened with smoke. Magda had ended her roll
at his feet in time to receive a few drops of sperm on
her forehead. This, he could not help thinking even in
his pain, was an appropriate extreme unction for her.
The fat woman had struck as heavily as a sack of wet
flour and now lay unconscious, a gray bone sticking
out of the flesh of one leg and blood running from her
ears and nostrils.

Bending Grass, Mrs. Pocyotl, and O'Faithair were
on the porch. That left Chornkin, Krautschner, Ngima,
Pao, Vivienne, the two maids, the baroness, and Dolores
unaccounted for. He thought he knew what had hap-
pened to the first three. Two were dead of rapier
thrusts in a passageway and one was burning with Igescu.

The clothes of the three on the porch were ripped,
their hair was disarrayed, and they were bleeding from
wounds. They must have tangled with Magda or Mrs.
Grasatchow or Dolores or any combination thereof.
But they were not disabled, and they were now looking
for him, their mouths moving, their hands pointing at
him now and then.

Childe limped, but swiftly, to the Rolls-Royce parked
twenty feet away on the driveway. Behind came a
shout and shoes slapping against the porchsteps. The

Rolls was unlocked, and the key was in the ignition
lock. He drove away while Bending Grass and O'Faithair
beat on the windows with their fists and howled like
wolves at him. Then they had dropped off and were racing
toward another car, a red Jaguar.

Childe stopped the Rolls, reversed, and pressed the
accelerator to the floor. Going backward, the Rolls
bounced O'Faithair off the right rear fender and
then crashed to a halt. Bending Grass had whirled just
before it pinned him against the Jaguar. His dark broad
face stared into the rear window for a few seconds.
Then it was gone.

Childe drove forward until he could see the Indian's
body, red and mashed from the thighs down, face
downward on the pavement. The outlines of his
body looked fuzzy; he seemed to be swelling.

Childe had no time to keep looking. He stopped the
Rolls again, backed it up over O'Faithair, who was just
beginning to sit up, went forward over him again, turned
around, and drove the wheels back and forth three times
each over the bodies of Holyani, Grasatchow, Bending
Grass, and O'Faithair. Mrs. Pocyotl, who had been
screaming at him and shaking her little fist, ran back
into the house when he drove toward the porch.

Flames and smoke were pouring out of a dozen win-
dows on all three stories of the left wing and out of one
window of the central house. Unchecked, the first would
destroy the entire building in an hour or two. And there
was nobody to check it.

He drove away. Coming around the curve just be-
fore entering the road through the woods, he saw part of
the yard to one side of the house. The red-headed
Vivienne, her naked body white in the ghastly half-
dark daylight, Mrs. Pocyotl with her shoes off, and the
two maids were running for the woods. Behind them
came the nude Dolores, her long dark hair flying. She
looked grim and determined. The others looked deter-
mined also, but their determination was inspired by fright.

Childe did not know what she would do if she caught
them, but he was sure that they knew and were not stand-
ing to fight for good reasons. He also suspected that
Pao and the baroness bad not come out of the house be-
cause of what Dolores had done to them, although it

was possible that Magda or Mrs. Grasatchow had killed
them. He could not be sure, of course, but he suspected
that the two had been in metamorphosis as pig and snake
and that they had been unmanageable.

The three women disappeared in the trees.

He struck himself on his forehead. Was he really be-
lieving all this metamorphosis nonsense?

He looked back. From this slight rise, he could see
Bending Grass and Mrs. Grasatchow. The clothes seemed
to have split off the Indian, and he looked black and
bulky, like a bear. The fat woman was also dark and
there was something nonhuman about the corpse.

At that moment, from behind the house, the biggest
black fox he had ever seen raced out and tore off to-
ward the woods into which the three women had disap-
peared. It barked three times and then turned its head
and seemed to grin at him.

The chill that had transfixed him when he first saw
Dolores went through him again. He remembered some-
thing now, something he had read long ago. The shape-
shifting fox-people of China. They lost control of their
ability to change form if they drank too much wine.
And, that first evening, the baron had been trying to
restrain Pao's wine consumption. Why? Because he had
not wanted Childe to witness the metamorphosis? Or
for some other reason? For some other reason, prob-
ably, since the baron could not have been worried about
Childe escaping to tell what he had seen.

He shrugged and drove on. He had had too much of
this and wanted only to get away. He was beginning to
believe that a 150-pound man could become fluid, twist
bone and flesh into a nonhuman mold, and, somewhere
along the transformation, shed 125 pounds, just tuck
them away some place to be withdrawn later when
needed. Or, if not cached, the discarded mass trailed
along, like an invisible jet exhaust, an attached plume
of energy ready for reconversion.

The gate of the inner wall was before him. He opened
this and drove through, and soon was stopped by the
outer wall. Here he left the Rolls on the driveway, after
wiping off his prints with a rag from the glove compart-
ment, and walked through the big gate to his own car,
parked under the trees at the end of the road.

He found the key he had hidden—how long ago? it
seemed days—and drove away. He was naked, bloody,
bruised, and hurting, and he still had an erection that
was automatically working up to yet another—oh, God!
—orgasm, but he did not care. He would get into his
apartment, and the rest of the world, smog, monsters,
and all, could go to hell, which they were doing, any-
way.

A half-mile down the road, a big black Lincoln shot
by him toward the Igescu estate. It held three men and
three women, all of whom were handsome or beautiful
and well dressed. Their faces were, however, grim, and
he knew that their destination was Igescu's and that they
were speeding because they were late for whatever sini-
ster conference they had been scheduled to attend. Or be-
cause someone in the house had called them for help.
The car had California license plates. Perhaps they were
from San Francisco.

He smiled feebly. They would be unpleasantly sur-
prised. Meanwhile, he had better get out of here, because
he did not know whether or not they had noted his
license plate.

Before he had gone a mile, the sky had become even
darker, growled, thundered, lightninged. A strong wind
tore the smog apart, and then the rains washed the air
and the earth without letup for an hour and a half.

He parked the car in the underground garage and
took the elevator up to his floor. No one saw him, al-
though he expected to be observed. He had no excuse for
being naked and with a hard-on, and it would be just
like life, the great ironist, to have him arrested for in-
decent exposure and God knows what else after all he
had been through, he, the abused innocent. But no one
saw him, and, after locking the door and chaining it, he
showered, dried himself, put on pajamas, ate a ham and
cheese sandwich and drank half a quart of milk, and
crawled into bed.

Just before he fell asleep, a few seconds later, he put
out his hand to feel for something. What did he want?
Then he realized that it was Mrs. Grasatchow's purse,
which contained the skins. Somewhere between the bar-
on's bedroom and this bedroom, he had lost the purse.

20

Childe slept, though often restlessly, for a day, a night,
and most of the next day. He got up to empty bladder
and bowels, to eat cereal or a sandwich and sometimes
wake up at the end of a wet dream.

His dreams were often terrors, but were sometimes
quite pleasant copulations. Sometimes Mrs. Grasatchow
or Vivienne or Dolores rode him, and he woke up jetting
and groaning. Other times, he was riding Sybil or some
woman he had known or some faceless woman. And
there were at least two dreams in which he was mount-
ing a female animal from the rear, once with a beautiful
leopardess and once with a bitch wolf.

When he was awake, he wondered about the dreams,
because he knew that the Freudians insisted that all
dreams, no matter how terrifying or horrible, were wishes.

By the time he was slept out, his pajamas and sheets
were a mess, but the effects of the cone were gone. He
was very happy to have a flaccid penis. He showered and
breakfasted, and then read the latest
Los Angeles Times.
Life was almost normal now; the papers were being de-
livered on schedule. Industries were running full-time.
The migration back was still going on but was only a
trickle now. The mortuaries were overloaded, and funer-
als were taking place far into the night. The police were
swamped with missing persons reports. Otherwise, the
city was functioning as usual. The smog was beginning
to build up but would not become alarming while the
present breeze continued.

Childe read the front page and some articles. Then he
used the phone to check on Sybil. She had not come
home. A call to San Francisco was answered by Sybil's
sister, Cherril. She said that the mother had died, and
Sybil was supposed to have come for the funeral. She
presumably left as soon as she had packed. She had been
unable to get a plane out, and her car wouldn't start, so
she had phoned back that she was coming up with a
friend who also wanted to get out of town.

Who was the friend? Cherril did not know. But she was

frantic, and she had tried to get hold of Childe. When he
had not answered after five tries, she had given up on
him. The state police had reported that Sybil was not
involved in any of the many accidents between Los
Angeles and San Francisco during that time.

Childe told Cherril not to worry, that many people
were still missing. Sybil would show up safe and sound.
He would not rest until he found her. And so on.

When he hung up the phone, he felt empty. The next
day, he was as hollow, and he had to admit that he knew
no more than what Cherril had told him. The "friend"
he suspected Sybil to have driven off with, Al Porthouse,
denied having seen her for two weeks.

Childe gave up, temporarily, and turned his attention
elsewhere. The baron's house had been burned out, al-
though the rains had kept it from being completely de-
stroyed. There were no bodies in the ruins, in the yard, or
in the woods. Mrs. Grasatchow's purse was not found.

Childe remembered the automobile that had raced
by him after he had driven away from the baron's. Who-
ever the six had been, they had cleaned up thoroughly.

But what had happened to Dolores?

He drove out to the estate and went over the wall
again, the police having locked the main gate. His poking
around uncovered nothing. The police did not know his
story, of course. He knew better than to tell them any-
thing except that he had visited the baron just once and
that briefly. They had questioned him and then had
said that they were puzzled by the disappearance of the
baron, secretary, servants, and chauffeur, but so far no
information had come in. For all they knew, the house-
hold had left for parts unknown, the house had burned
by accident, and any day now they might hear from the
baron.

Late that afternoon, he returned to his apartment.
He was shrouded in his thoughts, which were concerned
with moving to some place where smog would not be a
problem for years to come. It was some time before he
realized that the phone must have rung at least a dozen
times. It had started while he was unlocking the door.

The voice was a pleasant baritone.

"Mr. Childe? You don't know me. We haven't met,
fortunately for you, although I think we passed each

other on the road outside the Baron Igescu's estate sev-
eral days ago."