Read Image of the Beast and Blown Online
Authors: Philip Jose Farmer
Image of the Beast and Blown (4 page)
or like strange fish appearing suddenly from the shadows.
Strange fish could be sharks.
He passed a car with three goggled, snouted monstros-
ities in it. Their heads swiveled, the cyclopean eyes stared
blindly, the noses seemed to sniff. He sped away from
them until their headlights were muffled and then
slowed down. Once, a car suddenly appeared behind him,
and a red light flashed. He looked through the rear view
mirror before he stopped; there were fake prowl cars
stopping motorists and robbing, beating, or even killing
them on the streets during daylight, within twenty feet
of passers-by. He decided to pull over, eased the car
gently toward the dimly visible curb, and stopped. He
kept the motor running and peered at the car and the
cop getting out of it on the right side. If he did not like
the looks of them he could still get out of the right side
of his car and take off into the dimness. But he rec-
ognized the cop, although he did not know his name,
and stayed behind the wheel. He flipped open his coat and
slowly reached within it so that the cop would not get
the impression he was reaching for a gun. He had a
license for a gun but it was at home.
The cops had stopped too many to make him get out
of the car and assume the stance of the friskee. Besides,
there were many legitimate drivers, and within a short
time, there would be so many cars on the streets that
they might as well give up, except for obvious cases.
Childe established his identity quickly enough. They
knew of him by hearsay and had also read the papers.
One, Chominshi, wanted to discuss the case, but the
other was coughing, and Childe started to cough, so they
let him go. He continued up Third toward West Los
Angeles. His apartment and his office were a few blocks
away from Beverly Hills. He planned to go straight home
and do some thinking.
If he could think. He was in a mild state of shock. His
reflexes seemed to be slow as if he had been drugged or
was recovering from being knocked out. He felt a slight
sense of detachment, as if he had been disengaged some-
what from reality, no doubt to soften the effects of the
film. The smog did not help him keep an anchor on
things; it induced a feeling of slippage of self.
He was not burning with lust for revenge on those
who had killed Colben. He had not liked Colben, and
he knew that Colben had done some things which were
criminal but he had escaped without (as far as Childe
knew) even the punishment of conscience. He had
knocked up a teenager and kicked her out, and the girl
had taken sleeping pills and died. There were others,
although none had ended in death for the girls. But some
would have been better off dead. And there was the wife
of a client who had been found beaten and would always
be an idiot. Childe had had no basis for suspicion of
Colben, but he had felt that Colben might have done the
beating for the client, especially after he had discovered
that Colben was going to bed with the woman. He could
prove nothing; he could not even make an accusation
which would not sound stupid, because he lacked any
evidence. That Colben was neglecting the business, how-
ever, was reason enough to get rid of him. Childe did not
have enough money to buy Colben out; he had meant to
make it so unpleasant for Colben that he would be glad
to dissolve the partnership.
Nevertheless, no man deserved to die as Colben had.
Or did he? The horror was more in the viewers' minds
than in Colben's. He had been hurt very much, but only
briefly, and had died quickly.
That did not matter. Childe intended to find out all he
could, although he suspected that he would find out very
little. And soon enough the need to pay bills would take
him off the case; he would only be able to work on it
during his leisure moments. Which meant that, in effect,
he would be able to accomplish almost nothing.
But he had nothing else to do, and he certainly did
not intend to sit still in his apartment and breathe in
poison gas. He had to do something to keep going. He
could not even read comfortably because of the burning
and the tears. He was like a shark that has to keep moving
to allow water to flow through the gills. Once
he
stopped, he would suffocate.
But a shark can breathe and also stand still if the
water is moving. Sybil could be his flowingness. Sybil
was a name that sounded like running brooks and sun-
shine in quiet green glades and wisdom like milk from
full flowing breasts. Certainly not green milk. White
creamy milk of tenderness and good sense.
Childe smiled. The Great Romanticist. He not only
looked like Lord Byron, he thought like him. Reincarna-
tion come. George Gordon, Lord Byron, reborn as a
private eye and without a club foot. One thing about a
club mind, it didn't show. Not at first. But the limp
became evident to others who had to walk with him day
after day.
The Private Eyes of the novels. They were simple
straightforward men with their minds made up—all black
and white—vengeance is mine, saith Lord Hammer—
true heroes with whom the majority of readers had no
trouble identifying.
This was strange, because the antiheroes of the existen-
tial novels were supposed to be representative of the
modern mind, and they certainly were uncertain. The
antithero got far more publicity, far more critical trumpet-
ing, than the simple, stable, undoubting private eye, the
hero of the masses.
Childe told himself to cut, as if his thoughts were a
strip of film. He was exaggerating and also simplifying.
Inwardly, he might be an existential antihero, but out-
wardly he was a man of action, a Shadow, a Doc Savage,
a Sam Spade. He smiled again. Truth to tell, he was
Herald Sigurd Childe, red-eyed, watery-eyed, drippy-
nosed, sickened, wanting to run home to Mother. Or to
that image named Sybil.
Mother, unfortunately, became angry if he did not
phone her to ask if he could come over. Mother wanted
privacy and independence, and if she did not get it, she
expressed herself unpleasantly and exiled him for an
indeterminate time.
He parked the car outside his apartment, ran up the
steps, hearing someone cough behind a door as he passed,
and unlocked his door. The apartment was a living room,
a kitchenette, and a bedroom. Normally, it was bright
with white walls and ceilings and creamy woodwork and
lightly colored, lightly built furniture. Today, it was
gloomy; even the unshadowed places had a greenish
tinge.
Sybil answered the phone before the second ring had
started.
"You must have been expecting me," he said gaily.
"I was expecting," she said. Her voice was not, how-
ever, unfriendly.
He did not make the obvious reply. "I'd like to come
over," he finally said.
"Why? Because you're hard up?"
"For your company."
"You haven't got anything to do. You have to find
some
way to spend the time."
"I have a case I'm working on," he said. He hesitated
and then, knowing that he was baiting the hook and
hating himself for it, said, "It's about Colben. You read
the papers?"
"I thought that was what you'd be working on. Isn't
it horrible?"
He did not ask her why she was home today. She
was the secretary of an advertising agency executive.
Neither she nor her boss would have a driving priority.
"I'll be right over," he said. He paused and then said,
"Will I be able to stay a while or will I have to get out
after a while? Don't get mad! I just want to know; I'd
like to be able to relax."
"You can stay for a couple of hours or more, if you
like. I'm not going anyplace, and nobody is coming—
that I know of."
He took the phone from his ear but her voice was
laud enough for him to hear, and he returned it to his ear.
"Herald? I really do want you to come!"
He said, "Good!" and then, "Hell! I've just been think-
ing of myself! Is there anything I can get you from the
store?"
"No, you know there's a supermarket only three
blocks from here. I walked."
"OK. I just thought you might not have gone out yet
or you forgot something you might want me to pick up
for you."
They were both silent for a few seconds. He was
thinking about his irritations when they had been married,
about how many times he had had to run out to get
things that she had forgotten during her shopping. She
must be thinking about his recriminations, too; she was
always thinking about them when they got together.
"I'll be right over," he said hurriedly. "So long."
He hung up and left the apartment. The man was
still coughing behind the door. A stereo suddenly blared
Strauss'
Thus Spake Zarathustra
downstairs. Somebody
protested feebly; the music continued to play loudly. The
protests became louder, and there was a pounding on a
wall. The music did not soften.
Herald considered walking the four blocks to Sybil's
and then decided against it. He might need to take off
suddenly, although there did not seem much chance of it.
His answering service was not operating; it had no prior-
ity. He did not intend to leave Sybil's number with the
police operator or Sergeant Bruin while he was with her.
She would get unreasonably angry about this. She did not
like to be interrupted by calls while she was with him, at
least, not by business calls. That had been one of the
things bugging her when they were man and wife. Theo-
retically, she should not be bothered by such matters
now. In practice, which operates more on emotion than
logic, she was as enraged as ever. He well knew how
enraged. The last time he had been at her apartment, the
exchange had interrupted them at a crucial moment, and
she had run him out. Since then, he had called several
times but had been cooled off. The last time he'd phoned
had been two weeks ago.
She was right in one guess. He was hard up. But he
did not expect to be any less so after seeing her. He
intended to talk, to talk only, to soothe some troublings
and to scare away the loneliness that had come more
strongly after seeing the film of Colben.
It was strange, or, if not so strange, indicative. He had
lived twenty of his thirty-five years in Los Angeles
County. Yet he knew only one woman to whom he could
really unburden himself and feel relaxed and certain of
complete understanding. No. He was wrong. There was
not even one woman, because Sybil did not completely
understand him, that is, sympathize with him. If she did,
she would not now be his ex-wife.
But Sybil had said the same thing about men in
general and about him in particular. It was
the human
situation
—whatever that phrase meant.
He parked the car in front of her apartment—no
trouble finding parking space now—and went into the lit-
tle lobby. He rang her bell; she buzzed; he went up the
steps through the inner door and down the hall to the
end. Her door was on the right. He knocked; the door
swung open. Sybil was dressed in a floor-length morning
robe with large red and black diamond shapes. The black
diamonds contained white ankhs, the looped cross of the
ancient Egyptians. Her feet were bare.
Sybil was thirty-four and five feet five inches tall. She
had long black hair, sharp black eyebrows, large green-
ish eyes, a slender straight nose perhaps a little bit too
long, a full mouth, a pale skin. She was pretty, and the
body under the kimono was well built, although she may
have been just a little too hippy for some tastes.
Her apartment was light, like his, with much white
on the walls and ceilings, and creamy woodwork and
light and airy furniture. But a tall gloomy El Greco re-
production hung incongruously on the wall; it hovered
over everything said and done in the one room. Childe
always felt as if the elongated man on the cross was de-
livering judgment upon him as well as upon the city on
the plain.
The painting was not as visible as usual. There was al-
most always a blue haze of tobacco—which accounted
for the walls and ceiling not being as white as those of
his apartment—and today the blue had become gray-
green. Sybil coughed as she lit another cigarette, and
then she went into a spasm of coughing and her face
became blue. He was not upset by this, no more than
usual, anyway. She had incipient emphysema and had
been advised by her doctor to chop off the smoking two
years ago. Certainly, the smog was accelerating her dis-
ease, but he could do nothing about it. Still, it was one
more cause for quarreling.
She finally went into the kitchen for water and came
out several minutes later. Her expression was challenging,
but he kept his face smooth. He waited until she sat
down on the sofa across the room from his easy chair.
She ground the freshly lit cigarette out on an ash tray
and said, "Oh God! I can't breathe!"
By which she meant that she could not smoke.
"Tell me about Colben," she said, and then, "first,
could I get you ... ?"
Her voice decayed. She was always forgetting that he
had quit drinking four years ago.
"I need to relax," he said. "I'm all out of pot and no
chance to get any. You ... ?"
"I'll get some," she said eagerly. She rose and went
into the kitchen. A panel creaked as it slid back; a min-
ute passed; she came back with two cigarettes of white
paper twisted at both ends. She handed him one. He
said, "Thanks," and sniffed it. The odor always brought
visions of flat-topped pyramids, of Aztec priests with
sharp obsidian knives, naked brown men and women
working in red clay fields under a sun fiercer than an
eagle's glare, of Arab feluccas scudding along in the
Indian ocean. Why, he did not know.
He lit up and sucked in the heavy smoke and held it
in his lungs as long as he could. He tried at the same
time to empty his mind and body of the horror of
this morning and the irritations he had felt since calling
Sybil. There was no use smoking if he retained the
bad feelings. He had to pour them out, and he could do
it—sometimes. The discipline of meditation that a friend
had taught him—or tried to teach him—had sometimes
been effective. But he was a detective, and the prosecu-
tion of human beings, the tracking down, the immer-
sion in hate and misery, negated the ability to meditate.
Nevertheless, stubborn, he had persisted in trying,
and he could sometimes empty himself. Or seem to. His
friend said that he was not truly meditating; he was us-
ing a trick, a technique without essence.
Sybil, knowing what he was doing, said nothing. A
clock ticked. A horn sounded faintly; a siren wailed.
Sirens were always wailing nowadays. Then he breathed
out and sucked in again and held his breath, and pres-
ently the
crystallization
came. There was a definite shift-
ing of invisible lines, as if the currents of force that
thread every centimeter of the universe had rearranged
themselves into another,
straighter
configuration.
He looked at Sybil and now he loved her very much,
as he had loved her when they were first married. The
snarls and knots were yanked loose; they were in a
beautiful web which vibrated love and harmony through
them with every movement they made. Never mind the
inevitable spider.