Image of the Beast and Blown (30 page)

ing, 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, and 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 re-
placed 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 accu-
sation seemed so mild compared with what had hap-
pened. 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, glar-
ing 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 beau-
tiful, 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, Vivi-
enne. 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 disap-
pearance. I know you denied that, but I can't get it out
of my mind that you did away with Sybil. You're cer-
tainly capable of doing that. You're capable of anything
that's cruel and inhuman."

"
In
human?" 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 any-
thing about me. Not after he considers the possible re-
percussions, especially the fact that he might be sus-
pected."

"Suspected of what?" she said, her eyes widening.
Before he could reply, she said, "I doubt that hell
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 shoul-
der 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 him-
self 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 in-
visible knives were cutting into her and the operators
of the knives intended to scoop out the vagina 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 al-
most 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.

He felt sick, but he did not think he was going to
vomit. If he was, he could not feel anything churning
up. His insides were too numb for anything except a
vague feeling of queasiness.

He fell over on his side and could not get up again
no matter how hard he struggled. Or tried to struggle,
rather, because his efforts were all mental. His mus-
cles, as far as he could tell, failed to respond with
even a tremor.

24

When he saw the golfball-sized head of the thing poke
out from beyond the end of the bed, Childe realized
what he had done. By yanking so savagely on that
thing, he had jerked it loose from some base in her body,
probably in her uterus. This was what he had intended.
But he could never have visualized that pulling the thing
was like pulling the cord on one of those burro dolls—
what were they called?—that were hung up in Mexican
homes on Christmas. Pull the string, and they ripped open,
and all the goodies spilled out.

The thing had been her string, and when it was torn
out, she fell apart, and all her goodies, separate entities,
spilled out. And began a walk that only a Bosch could
paint.

Now the thing was gliding snakelike towards him, its
forepart raised off the ground and the slimy, goateed,
shark-toothed, scimitar-nosed, garnet-eyed head was
pointed at him. Its mouth was writhing, and a piping
was issuing from the invisible lips.

Childe could do nothing but lie on his side, his eyes
fixed on the approaching thing. He wondered what it
had in mind for him. Its bite was poisonous, and while
its poison had paralyzed Bill but left his sexual organs
active, it might be fatal if he were bitten again. More-
over, Vivienne said an antidote had to be given, and
she, as far as he knew, was the only one who could do
that. But not while she was in this condition.

A glob of coiled intestines crossed before him, cutting
off his view of the snake-thing. Behind it came the
spinal area, a flesh centipede. This reeled blindly into
a foot, which was traveling upside down, its sole pointed
towards the ceiling, while twenty legs bore it to wherever
it was going. The spine and the foot fell over on their
side and kicked their legs for a while before managing
to get back up.

The snake-thing crawled nearer. Childe watched it and
speculated on whether or not its underside was equipped