Image of the Beast and Blown (28 page)

Childe did not reply for a moment, then he said,
"What do you want?"

His voice was steady. He had thought it would crack,
as if it were crystallized with the ice encasing him.

"You have been very discreet, Mr. Childe, in not tell-
ing the police. Or, as far as we know, anybody. But we
want to ensure your silence, Mr. Childe. We could easily
do that by methods you well know by now. But it pleases
us to have you know about us and yet be able to do
nothing."

Childe shouted, "What did you do with Sybil?"

There was a silence. And then the voice, "Sybil?
Who's she?"

"My wife! My ex-wife, I mean! You know, damn
you! What have you done with her, you filthy monster,
unnatural … !"

"Nothing, I assure you, Mr. Childe."

The voice was cool and mocking.

"We rather admire you, Mr. Childe, because of what
you accomplished. Congratulations. You managed to
kill, permanently, a number of our friends who have
survived for a very long time indeed, Mr. Childe. You
could not have done it without the help of del Osorojo, of
course, but that was something we did not foresee. The
baron did not anticipate it, and for his carelessness, or
ignorance, he paid, and those with him. Some of them,
anyway."

This was his last chance to find out anything about
them.

He said, "Why the films? Why were they sent in to
the police?"

"The films are made for our private use, for our en-
tertainment, Mister Childe. We send them to each other
all over the world. Via private couriers, of course. The
baron decided to break a precedent and to let the
others
in on some of them. Because we would enjoy the furor
and the shaking up of the police. The shaking up of all
humans, in fact. The baron and his group were going
to move out soon, anyway, so there was no chance of our
being connected with the films.

"The baron planned on mailing the films of earlier

subjects, working backward chronologically, to the police.
Most of the subjects had been listed as missing persons,
you know, and the earliest had been dropped by the
police because the cases were so old. You found their
skins. And lost them.

"You were lucky or smart. You used an unorthodox
method of investigation and stumbled across the truth.
The baron couldn't let you go then because you knew
too much, so he decided you would become the latest
subject. Now, the baron won't have to leave this area
to get away from the smog ..."

"I saw the old woman, the baroness, trying to conjure
up smog!" Childe said. "What ..."

"She was trying to get rid of it, you fool! This used
to be a nice place to live in but you humans … !"

Childe could feel the fury making the man inarticulate.
However, when the voice returned, it was again cool and
mocking.

"I suggest you look in your bedroom. And remember
to keep silent, Mister Childe. Otherwise …"

The phone must have been moving down to the rest.
But, before the click, he heard bells tolling and an organ
playing the first bar of
Gloomy Sunday.
He could ima-
gine the rest of the music and the
Inner Sanctum
rusty-
hinge screeching.

He stood for a while with the phone in his hand.
Woolston Heepish? That call came from the house of
Woolston Heepish?

Nonsense! There must be another explanation. He did
not even want to think about the implications, if … no,
forget this.

He put the phone down, and then remembered with a
start what the man had advised. He slowly walked into
the bedroom. The bedside lamp had been turned on
during his absence.

She was in bed, staring straight up. A sheet was
draped over her to just below the naked breasts. Her
black hair was spread out on the pillow.

He came closer and murmured. "I didn't think they
could harm you, Dolores."

He pulled the sheet back, expecting to find the
evidences of some horror committed upon her. She was
unmarked.

But her body tilted upward, the feet rising first, the
stiff legs following, and then, as the body began to point
straight upward, it rose toward the ceiling. The heavy
hair, and the little red valve on the back of the neck,
stopped it from floating up all the way.

The makeup was very good. It had given her skin a
solid fleshy appearance and kept him from seeing through
it.

Childe had to leave the room for a while and sit
down.

When he came back, he stuck a pin in her. She ex-
ploded with a bang as loud as a pistol's. He cut her up
into strips with scissors and flushed her down the toilet,
except for the head hair, which he put into the garbage.

A century and a half of haunting, a brief fleshing, a
few short and wild copulations, a few killings of ancient
enemies, and here she was. Rather, there she went. One
dark eye, long eyelashes, a thick black eyebrow whirled
around and around and then were sucked down.

At least, he had not found Sybil's skin in his bed.

Where was she? He might never find out. He did not
think those "people" knew. The "man" had sounded
genuinely puzzled.

It was not necessary to postulate those "people" to ac-
count for her disappearance. Human beings had enough
monsters of their own.

21

It seemed that the rain would never stop.

On the evening of the sixth day, in a city like the
planet of Venus in a 1932 science-fiction story, Herald
Childe followed Vivienne Mabcrough.

A few minutes before, he had stopped behind a big
black Rolls-Royce, waiting for a light change at the
intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Canon
Drive in Beverly Hills. The Rolls was equipped with
rear window wipers, and these enabled Childe to see
Vivienne Mabcrough. She was in the back seat with a
man and turned her head just as the light changed to
green.

For several seconds, while horns blared behind
him, he had an impulse to let her go. If he trailed her,
he might find himself the object of attention from her
and her kind. That was something no sane man and very
few insane would wish.

Despite this, he moved the 1972 Pontiac across the
street after the Rolls, cutting off a Jaguar which had
swung illegally to his left to pass him. The Jaguar's
horn blared, and the driver mouthed curses behind his
glass and plastic enclosure. A spray of water covered
Childe's car, and then the wipers removed it. He
could see the Rolls turn west on Little Santa Monica,
going through a yellow light. He stopped for the red
and, seeing no police car in any direction—though he
could not see far because of the gray curtains of water
—he went left on the red light. He saw the taillights of
the Rolls turn right and followed. The Rolls was stopped
before the Moonlark Restaurant, and Vivienne and her
escort were getting out. They only had to take one step
to be under the canopy and a doorman assisted them.
The Rolls drove off then, and Childe decided to follow
it. The driver was a uniformed chauffeur and possibly he
would take the car back to Vivienne's residence. Of
course, the car could be her partner's, but that did not
matter. Childe wanted to know where he lived, too.

Although he was no longer a private detective,

Childe had kept his recording equipment in the car. He
described the car and the license plate number into the
microphone while he tracked it back across Santa
Monica and then north of Sunset Boulevard. The
car swung onto Lexington, and in two blocks drove
onto the circular driveway before a huge Georgian man-
sion. The chauffeur got out and went down the walk
along the side of the house to the rear. Childe drove
half a block and then got out and walked back. The
rain and the dusky light made it impossible for
him
to see any house addresses from the street. He had to go
up the driveway, hoping that no one would look out. The
house was lit within, but he could see no sign of life.

He returned to the car, which he entered on the right
side because he did not wish to wet his shoes and legs.
The dirty gray-brown water had filled the street from
curb to curb and was running over onto the strips of
grass between street and sidewalk.

In the car, he recorded the address. But instead of
driving off, he sat a long time and considered what he
should do next.

They had not bothered him since that night in Baron
Igescu's house, so why should he bother them?

They were murderers, torturers, abductors. He knew
this with the certainty of personal experience. Yet he
could not prove what he knew. And if he told exactly
what had happened, he would be committed to a
mental institution. Moreover, he could not blame the
authorities for putting him away.

There were times when he could not believe his own
vivid memories. Even the most piercing, of when he
had flushed the complete skin of Dolores del Osorojo,
eyes and all, down the toilet, was beginning to seem un-
believable.

The mind accepted certain forms and categories, and
his experiences in that enormous old house in north-
ern Beverly Hills were outside the accepted. And so it
had been natural that his mind should be trying to bury
these forms and categories. Shove them down, choke
them off in the dusty dusky cellar of the unconscious.

He could just go home to his place in Topanga Canyon
and forget all about this, or try to.

He groaned. He was hooked and couldn't fight loose.

If he had not seen Vivienne, he might have continued to
ignore his desires to take up the trail once more. But
the sight of her had gotten him as eager as an old blood-
hound that whiffs fox on the wind from the hills.

He drove away and did not stop until he pulled into a
Santa Monica service station. There was a public phone
booth here, which he used to call the Los Angeles Po-
lice Department. His friend, Sergeant Furr, finally an-
swered. Childe asked him to check out the license
number of the Rolls. Furr said he would call him back
within a few minutes. Three minutes later, the phone
in the booth rang.

"Hal? I got it for you. The Rolls belongs to a Mrs.
Vivienne—V-I-V-I-E-N-N-E—Mabcrough. I don't know
how you pronounce that last name. M-A-B-C-R-O-U-G-H.
Mabcrow, Mabcruff?"

"Mabcrow," Childe said.

The address was that of the house where the Rolls
was parked.

Childe thanked Furr and hung up. Vivienne was con-
fident that he would not bother her anymore. She had
not changed her name. Evidently she believed that he
had had such a scare thrown into him, he would under
no circumstances come near her or her kind—whatever
that was.

He trudged through the rain and got into the car
and drove slowly and carefully back to the house in
which Vivienne Mabcrough lived. It was nightfall now,
and the streets of Beverly Hills in the downtown dis-
trict were little rivers, curb to curb and overflowing.
Although this was a Thursday night, there were very
few pedestrians out. The usual bumper-to-bumper traf-
fic was missing. Not half a dozen cars were in sight
within the distance of three blocks in any direction.
Santa Monica Boulevard traffic was heavier, because
it served as a main avenue for those on their way to
Westwood or West Los Angeles or Santa Monica on
one side of the street, and on their way to Los Angeles,
or parts of Beverly Hills, on the other.

The headlights looked like the eyes of diluvian mon-
sters burning with a fever to get on the Ark. A car had
stalled as it was halfway through making a left turn
from Santa Monica onto Beverly Drive, and the mon-

sters were blaring or hooting at it. Childe nudged his
car through the intersection, taking two changes of light
to do so because cars in the lanes at right angles insisted
on coming through instead of waiting so that the inter-
section could be cleared.

When he got through, he proceeded up Beverly Drive
at about twenty miles an hour but slowed to fifteen after
several blocks. The water was so high that he was afraid
of drowning out his motor, and his brakes were
getting wet. He kept applying a little pressure intermit-
tently to the pedal in order to keep the brakes dry, but
he did not think he was having much success. Four cars
went by him, passing from behind or going the other
way, and these traveled so fast they threw water all
over his car. He wanted to stick his head out of the win-
dow and curse at them for their stupidity and general
swinishness, but he did not care to be drenched by the
next car.

He parked half a block down from the Mabcrough
residence. Hours passed. He was impatient at first, and
then the habits of years of sitting and waiting while he
was a private eye locked into his nervous system. He
pissed a couple of times into a device much like air-
plane pilots use. He munched on some crackers and a
stick of beef jerky and drank coffee from a canteen.
Midnight came, and his patience was beginning to thin
out against the grindstone of time.

Then the chauffeur came out from behind the house,
got into the Rolls, and drove off. Childe could see the
dark figure, outlined by the lights from within the house.
He wore a slicker and a shiny transparent covering over
his cap. As the car went by, Childe hunkered down
behind the wheel. He waited until it was a block away
and then swung out to follow it without turning his
lights on immediately. The rain had not ceased, and the
streets were even deeper in water.

The Rolls picked up Vivienne and her escort at the
club and then went back towards the mansion. Childe
had hoped it would; he did not feel like trailing her
from one spot to another. The Rolls stopped before the
big porch to let its passengers off, and they went into
the house. The chauffeur drove the car away, presumably
to the side entrance and into the garage behind the house.