Image of the Beast and Blown (36 page)

did not seem likely. Childe would not have believed
such a story if he had not experienced it.

He gave Forry his phone number and address and
said, "Call me when you're ready to talk this over. I have
a lot to tell you. Maybe together we can get a more
complete picture."

Forry said he would do so. He conducted Childe to the
door but before he let him through, he said, "I think I'll
take that painting into my office with me. I wouldn't
put it past Heepish to try again."

Childe did not ask why he did not call the police. Ob-
viously, if he did, he would be held up even more in
getting out
Vampirella.

30

Herald Childe did not get home until seven in the
morning. The rain had stopped by four-thirty, but
the canyons were roaring streams. He was stopped by
the police, but when he explained that he lived off the
main road, he was permitted to go ton. Only residents
could use this section of Topanga Canyon, and they
were warned that it would be better if they stayed away.
Childe pushed on—literally—and eventually got to
his driveway. He saw three houses that had slipped
their moorings and moved downhill anywhere from six
to twenty feet. Two of the houses must have been
deserted, but outside the third a family was moving some
furniture and clothes into the back of a pickup truck.
Childe thought momentarily about helping them and
then decided that they could handle their own affairs.
The pickup truck was certainly more equipped to move
through the high water than his low-slung car, and if
they wanted to break their backs moving their sofa,
that was their foolish decision.

Another car of the same year and model as the others
was parked under the branches of the oak tree. The
water flowing down the street was up past the hubs of
the wheels. So strong was the force of the current, it
sometimes lifted Childe's car a fraction of an inch.
But at no time was more than one wheel off the ground.

He parked the car in the driveway. The garage floor
was flooded and, besides, he wanted the car to be avail-
able for a quick takeoff. He was not sure that the water
pouring off the cliff and drowning his backyard would
not lift the garage eventually. Or, if the cliff did col-
lapse, it might move far enough to smash the garage,
which was closer to the cliff than the house.

He unlocked the door and locked it behind him.
He started to cross the room when, in the pale day-
light, a shapeless form rose from the sofa. He thought
his heart would stop.

The shapelessness fell off the figure. It was a blanket
which had disguised it.

For a moment, he could not grasp who was standing
before him. Then he cried, "Sybil!"

It was his ex-wife.

She ran to him and threw her arms around him, put
her face against his chest, and sobbed. He held her and
whispered, over and over, "Sybil! Sybil! I thought you
were dead! My God, where have you been?"

After a while she quit crying and raised her face to
kiss him. She was thirty-four now, her birthday had
been six days ago, but she looked as if she had aged
five years. There were large dark circles under her eyes
and the lines from nose to mouth had gotten deeper. She
also seemed thinner.

He led her to the sofa and sat her down and then said,
"Are you all right?"

She started to cry again, but after a minute she
looked up at him and said, "I am and I'm not."

"Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked.

"Yes, you can get me a cup of coffee. And a joint,
if you have one."

He waved his hand as if to indicate a complete change
of character. "I don't have any pot. I've gone back to
drinking."

She looked alarmed, and he said, hastily, "Only a
shot very infrequently. I'm going to school again. UCLA.
History major."

Then, "How did you find this house? How did you
get here? Is that your car out in front?"

"I was brought, up here by somebody—somebodies—
and let into the house. I took off the blindfold and looked
around, I found my photograph on your bedside table, so
I knew where I was. I decided to wait for you, and I fell
asleep."

"Just a minute," he said. "This is going to be a long
story, I can see that. I'll make some coffee and some
sandwiches, too, in case we get hungry."

He did not like to put off hearing what had happened,
but he knew that he would not want to be interrupted
after she got started. He did everything that had to be
done very swiftly and brought in a tray with a big pot
of coffee, food, and some rather dried-out cigarettes he
found in the pantry. He no longer smoked, but he had

gotten cigarettes for women he had brought into the
house.

Sybil said, "Oh, good!" and reached for the cigarettes.
Then she withdrew her hand and said, wearily, "I haven't
smoked for six months, and my lungs feel much better.
I won't start up again."

She had said this before and sounded as if she
meant it. But this time her voice had a thread of steel in
it. Something had happened to change her.

"All right," he said. "You left for your mother's
funeral in San Francisco. I called your sister, and she
said you'd phoned her and told her you couldn't get a
plane out and your car wouldn't start. You told her
you were coming up with a friend, but you hung up
without saying who the friend was. And that was the
last I heard of you. Now, over a year later, you show
up in my house."

She took a deep breath and said, "I don't expect you
to believe this, Herald."

"I'll believe anything. With good reason."

"I couldn't get hold of you, and, anyway, after that
horrible quarrel, I didn't think you'd want to ever see
me again. I had to get to San Francisco, but I didn't
know how. Then I thought of a friend of mine, and I
walked over to his apartment. He only lived a block
from me."

"He?"

"Bob Guilder. You don't know him."

"A lover?" he said, feeling a pinprick of jealousy.
Thank God that emotion was dying out, in regard to
her, anyway.

"Yes," she said. "Earlier. We parted but not because
we couldn't stand one another. We just didn't strike fire
off each other, sexually. But we remained fairly good
friends. Anyway, I got there just as he was packing to
leave for Carmel. He couldn't stand the smog anymore,
and even though the governor didn't want people leav-
ing, he said he was going anyway. He was glad to drive
me all the way into San Francisco, since he had some
things to do there."

They had driven out Ventura Boulevard because
the San Diego Freeway was jammed, according to the
radio. At a standstill. Ventura Boulevard was not

much better, but ten miles an hour was an improve-
ment over no miles.

Just off the Tarzana ramp, the car overheated. Guilder
managed to get it into Tarzana, but there was only one
service station operating. The proprietors of the others
were either staying home or were also attempting to get
out of the deadly smog.

"You won't believe this," she said, "but I stole a
motorcycle. It was sitting by the curb, its key in the ig-
nition. There was no one in sight, although the owner
may have been only thirty feet away, the smog was that
thick. I've ridden Hondas before, did you know that7
Another friend of mine used to take me out on one for
fun, and he taught me how to ride it."

And other things, thought Childe without pain. The
thought was automatic, but he was glad that it did not
mean much now.

There had been no use in her trying to reach 'Frisco
on the Honda. The traffic was so thick and slow-moving
that she did not see any chance of getting to her destin-
ation until the funeral was over, if then. She decided
to return to her apartment. Eyes burning, sinuses on fire,
lungs hurting, she rode the Honda home. That took two
hours. The cars were filling both sides of the street,
all going in the same direction, but there was enough
room, if she took the sidewalk now and then, to travel.

She got to her apartment, and five minutes afterwards,
someone knocked on her door. She thought it must be
another tenant. Without a key, it was difficult to get
into the building.

But she did not recognize the two men, and before
she could shut the door, they were on her. She felt a
needle enter her arm, and she became unconscious.
When she awoke, she was in a suite of three rooms, not
including the bathroom. All were large and luxuriously
furnished, and throughout her captivity she was given
the best of food and liquor, cigarettes and marijuana,
and anything she desired, except clothes. She had one
beautiful robe and two flimsy negligees which were
cleaned each week.

When she first awoke, she was alone. She prowled
around and found that there were no windows and
the two doors were locked. There was a big color TV

set and a radio, both of which worked. The telephone
was not connected to the outside line. When she lifted
it, she heard a man's voice answer, and she put the
receiver down without saying anything. A few minutes
later, a door swung open, and two men and a woman
came in.

She described them in detail. One of them could be
one of the Paos; the woman had to be Vivienne Mab-
crough. The second man did not sound like anyone he
knew.

Sybil became hysterical, and they injected her once
more. When she woke up again, she controlled her-
self. She was told that she would not be harmed and
that, eventually, she would be released. When she asked
them what, they wanted her for, she got no answers.
Over the year's time, she concluded that her captors
were planning on using her, somehow, as a weapon
or lever against Childe.

Childe, thinking of the sexual abuse he had suffered
during his short imprisonment in the Igescu house, could
not conceive that she was not molested in any way. He
asked her if she had been raped.

"Oh, many times!" she said, almost matter-of-factly.

"Did they hurt you?" She did not seem to be affected
by his question or any painful memories.

"A little bit, at first," she said.

"How do you feel now? I mean, were the experiences
psychologically traumatic?"

He was beginning to feel like a psychiatrist, or, perhaps,
a prosecuting attorney.

"Come here, sit down by me," she said. She held out
a slim and pale hand. He came to her and put his arm
around her and kissed her. He expected her to burst into
tears again, but she only sighed. After a while, she said,
"I've always been very frank with you, right?"

"Yes. But I don't know that a compulsion to honesty
was the main factor," he said. "That may have been your
rationalization, but I thought that your frankness was
more to hurt me than anything else."

"You might be right," she said. She sipped on some
coffee and then said, "I'll tell you what happened to me,
but it won't be to hurt you. I don't think so, anyway."

31

Sybil exercised, smoked more than was good for her,
watched TV and listened to radio, read the magazines
and books supplied whenever she asked for them, and
generally tried to keep from going crazy. The uncertainty
of her position was the largest element pushing her to-
wards insanity. However, it was not as bad as being in
solitary. The man who answered the phone would talk
to her, and she got visitors at least five times a day. The
woman who brought the meals would sit with her and
talk when asked to do so, and a man called Plugger and
a woman called Panchita came quite often. Occasionally,
the fantastically beautiful Vivienne Mabcrough would
drop in.

"They talked to me about many things, but they also
asked many questions about you," Sybil said. "Mostly
what I knew about your childhood, although they also
wanted to know about your personal habits, what you
read, your dreams—imagine that, your dreams!—and
other things I might just happen to know because I was
your wife."

Sybil had seen nothing damaging to Herald in this.
Besides, her drive to honesty almost forced her to give
them complete answers. Or that was her rationalization.

After a while, she began to suffer from sexual depriva-
tion. Her nipples swelled whenever they touched cloth.
Her cunt itched. She found herself sitting with her foot
under her and rocking back and forth on the heel or
rubbing up, against the bed post or the back of a chair.
She even kept a banana from her meal and masturbated
with it.

"If it's any consolation to you," she said, "I fantasized
that you were my lover. Mostly, that is."

He did not ask her who the others were. Actually, he
did not care anymore. And that was strange, because he
was feeling a genuine warmth and affection for her, per-
haps even a love. He was happy to see her again and to
be with her.

Sybil may have changed but she had not changed
completely. She still had to tell him everything.

"You needn't be jealous of the other man," she said.
"He doesn't exist. He's a fiction. Can you guess who?"

"This isn't exactly the time for guessing games," he
said. "But no, I don't know who you imagined at the
other end of the banana."

"Tarzan!" she said.

"Tarzan? Oh, for cripe's sake! Well, why not? Bananas,
big dongs, and all that. It only stands to reason that the
superman of the jungle would be heavy hung."

He was sarcastic, but he was also surprised. There
were still things about her he did not know. Tarzan!

There might have been a closed circuit TV monitoring
her, she said. Otherwise, why would Plugger enter that
evening and tell her she did not need to suffer anymore?

Plugger was a tall, rangy man with a deep tan, black
hair which came down in a widow's peak, somewhat
pointed ears, and a very handsome face. He stood before
her and stripped while she asked him what he thought he
was doing, though she knew well enough.

"He had a beautiful body with the smoothest skin,
almost like glass. But his cock was big. Not enormous,
just big and thick and it had the biggest knob at the end
of it I've ever seen. I don't mean the glans. That was big
enough, but he had a growth, I guess you could call it a
wart, on the side of the head. I told him that really turned
me off."

"You sound as if you were pretty cool about the whole
thing," he said.

"Well, I was
suffering.
The banana was a long way
off from being perfectly satisfactory. Or perfectly satis-
fying. And he was a hell of a good looking man, and he
had talked with me enough so that I rather liked him,
even if he was my warden. So I just told myself, you
know, the cliché, if you have to be raped, lean back and
enjoy it."

"Really?" he said.

"Well, not really. I was scared. But then he said he
wouldn't force me. That helped relax me a lot."

Plugger sat down by her and kissed her. She tried to
turn her head away, but he turned it gently back. She
protested that he was forcing her, and he replied that he