Image of the Beast and Blown (6 page)

another. From what Childe could see, the only damage
was crumpled fenders. But the two drivers, hopping out
and swinging at each other, looked as if they might
draw some blood, inept as they were with their fists. He
had caught a glimpse of several frightened faces—chil-
dren—looking through the windows of both damaged
cars. Then he was gone.

Now he could hear the steady honking of horns. The
great herd was migrating, and God help them.

The deadly stink and blinding smoke had been bad
enough when most cars suddenly ceased operating. But
now that two million automobiles were suddenly on the
march, the smog was going to be intensified. It was true
that, in time, the cars would be gone, and then the
atmosphere could be expected to start cleaning itself. If
it was going to do it. Childe had the feeling that the
smog wasn't going to leave, although he knew that that
was irrational.

Meanwhile, he, Childe, was slaying. He had work to
do. But would he be able to do anything? He had to get
around, and it looked as if he might not be able to do
that.

He sat down on the sofa and looked across the room
at the dark golden bookcases.
The Annotated Sherlock
Holmes,
the two great boxed volumes, was his treasure,
the culminating work of his collection unless you counted
a copy of
The White Company
personally inscribed by
A. Conan Doyle, once the possession of Childe's father.
It was his father who had introduced him at an early age
to interesting and stimulating books, and his father who
had managed to pass on his devotion to the greatest
detective to his son. But his father had remained a pro-
fessor of mathematics; he had felt no burning to emulate
The Master.

Nor would any "normal" child. Most kids wanted to be
airplane pilots or railroad engineers or cowboys or astro-
nauts when they grew up. Many, of course, wanted to be
detectives, Sherlock Holmeses, Mark Tidds (what boy
nowadays knew of Mark Tidd?), even Nick Carters
since he had been revived with modern settings and plots,
but few stuck to that wish. Most of the policemen and
private investigators whom he knew had not had these
professions as boyhood goals. Many had never read

Holmes or had done so without enthusiasm; he had never
met a Holmes buff among them. But they did read true
detective magazines and devoured the countless paper-
backs of murder mysteries and of private eyes. They
made fun of the books, but, like cowboys who also
deride the genuineness of Westerns, they were addicted.

Childe made no secret of his "vices." He loved them,
even the bad ones, and gloried in the "good" ones.

And so why was he trying to justify being a detective?
Was it something to be ashamed of?

In one way, it was. There was in every American,
even the judge and the policeman, a more-or-less strong
contempt for lawmen. This lived side by side with an
admiration for the lawman, but for the lawman who is
a strong individualist, who fights most of his battles by
himself against overwhelming evil, who fights often out-
side the law in order to bring about justice. In short, the
frontier marshal, the Mike Hammerish private eye. This
lawman is so close to the criminal that there is a cer-
tain sympathy between the lawman and the criminal.

Or so it seemed to Childe, who, as he told himself
now, tended to do too much theorizing and also to pro-
ject his own feelings as those of others.

Matthew Colben. Where was he now? Dead or suf-
fering? Who had forcibly taken him to some dwelling
somewhere in this area? Why was the film sent to the
LAPD? Why this gesture of mockery and defiance? What
could the criminals hope to gain by it, except a perverse
pleasure in frustrating the police?

There were no clues, no leads, except the vampire
motif, which was nothing but a suggestion of a direction
to take. But it was the only handle to grasp, ectoplasmic
though it was, and he would try to seize it. At least, it
would give him something to do.

He knew something about vampires. He had seen the
early Dracula movies and the later movies on TV. Ten
years ago, he had read the novel
Dracula,
and found
it surprisingly powerful and vivid and convincing. It
was far better than the best Dracula movie, the first;
the makers of the movie should have followed the book
more closely. He had also read Montague Summers and
had been an avid reader of the now-dead
Weird Tales

magazine. But a little knowledge was not dangerous; it
was just useless.

There was one man he knew who was deeply inter-
ested in the occult and the supernatural. He looked up
the number in his record book because it was unlisted
and he had not called enough to memorize it. There
was no response. He hung up and turned on the radio.
There was some news about the international and na-
tional situations, but most of the broadcast was about
the exodus. A number of stalled cars on the freeways
and highways had backed up traffic for a total of several
thousand miles. The police were trying to restrict passage
on the freeways to a certain number of lanes to permit
the police cars, ambulances, and tow trucks to pass
through. But all lanes were being used, and the police
were having a hell of a time clearing them out. A number
of fires had started in homes and buildings, and some
of them were burning down with no assistance from the
firemen because the trucks could not get through. There
were collisions all over the area with no help available,
not only because of the traffic but because there just
was not enough hospital and police personnel available.

Childe thought, to hell with the case! I'll help!

He called the LAPD and hung on for fifteen minutes.
No luck. He then called the Beverly Hills Police Depart-
ment and got the same result. He had no more luck
with the Mount Sinai Hospital on Beverly Boulevard,
which was within walking distance. He put drops in his
eyes and snuffed up nose drops. He wet a handkerchief
to place over his nose and put his goggles on top of his
head. He stuck a pencil flashlight in one pocket and a
switch-blade knife in another. Then he left the apartment
building and walked down San Vicente to Beverly Boul-
evard.

In the half hour that he had been home, the situation
had changed. The cars that had been bumper-to-bumper
curb-to-curb were gone. They were within earshot; he
could hear the horns blaring off somewhere around
Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega, but there was not
a car in sight.

Then he came across one. It was lying on its side. He
looked down into the windows, dreading what he might
see. It was empty. He could not understand how the

vehicle had been overturned, because no one could
have gone fast enough in the jam to hit anything and be
overturned. Besides, he would have heard the crash.
Somebody—somebodies—had rocked it back and forth
and then pushed it over. Why? He would never know.

The signal lights at the intersection were out. He
could see well enough across the street to make out the
thin dark shape of the pole. When he got to the foot of
the light pole on his corner, he saw broken plastic, which
would have been green, red, and yellow under more
lightened circumstances, scattered about.

He stood for a while on the curb and peered into the
sickly gray. If a car were to speed down the street with-
out lights, it could be on him before he could get across
the street. Nobody but a damned fool would go fast or
without lights, but there were many damned fools driv-
ing the streets of Los Angeles.

The wailing of a siren became stronger, a flashing red
light became visible, and an ambulance whizzed by. He
looked up and down the street and dashed across, hoping
that the light and noise would have made even the
damnedest of fools cautious and that anybody following
the ambulance would be blowing his horn. He got across
with only a slight burning of the lungs. The smog was
slowly rusting off their lining. His eyes ran as if they were
infected.

The sound of bedlam came to him before the hospital
building loomed out of the mists. He was stopped by a
white-haired man in the uniform of a security guard.
Perhaps the old man had worked at an aircraft plant or
at a bank as a guard and had been deputized by the
police to serve at the hospital. He flashed his light into
Childe's face and asked him if he could help him. The
smog was not dark enough to make the light brilliant,
but it did annoy Childe.

He said, "Take that damned light away! I'm here to
offer my services in whatever capacity I'm needed,"

He opened his wallet and showed his I.D.

The guard said, "You better go in the front way. The
emergency room entrance is jammed, and they're all too
busy to talk to you."

"Who do I see?" Childe said.

The guard hurriedly gave the supervisor's name and

directions for getting to his office. Childe entered the
lobby and saw at once that his help might be needed, but
he was going to have to force it on the hospital. The
lobby was jammed and asprawl with people who had
been shunted out of the emergency room after more or
less complete treatment, relatives of the wounded, people
inquiring after lost or injured friends or relatives, and a
number who, like Childe, had come to offer their services.
The hall outside the supervisor's office was crowded too
thickly for him to ram his way through even if he had
felt like doing so. He asked a man on the fringes how
long he had been trying to get into the office.

"An hour and ten minutes, Mister," the man said
disgustedly.

Childe turned to walk away. He would return to his
apartment and do whatever he could to pass the time.
Then he would return after a reasonable amount of time
(if there were such a thing in this situation), with the
hope that some order would have been established. He
stopped. There, standing near the front door of the hospi-
tal, his head wrapped in a white cloth, was Hamlet
Jeremiah.

The cloth could have been a turban, because the last
time Childe had seen Jeremiah he was sporting a turban
with a spangled hexagram. But the cloth was a band-
age with a three-pointed scarlet badge, almost a triskelion.
The Mephistophelean moustaches and beard were gone,
and he was wearing a grease-smeared T-shirt with the
motto: NOLI ME TANGERE SIN AMOR. His pants
were white duck, and brown sandals were on his feet.

"Herald Childe!" he called, smiling, and then his face
twisted momentarily as if the smile had hurt.

Childe held out his hand.

Jeremiah said, "You touch me with love?"

"I'm very fond of you, Ham," Childe said, "although I
can't really say why. Do we have to go through that at
this time?"

"Any time and all time," Jeremiah said. "Especially
this time."

"OK. It's love then," and Childe shook his hand. "What
in hell happened? What're you doing down here? Listen,
did you know I tried to phone you a little while ago and
I was thinking about driving up to see you. Then ..."

Jeremiah held up his hand and laughed and said, "One
thing at a time! I'm out of my Sunset pad because my
wives insisted we get out of town. I told them we ought to
wait a day or so until the roads were cleared. By then,
the smog'd be gone, anyway, or on its way out. But
they wouldn't listen. They cried and carried on something
awful, unreeled my entrails and tromped on them. One
good thing about tears', they wash out the smog, keep
the acids from eating up your corneas. But they're also
acid on the nerves, so I said, finally, OK, I love you both,
so we'll take off. But if we get screwed up or anything
bad happens, don't blame me. Stick it up your own lovely
asses. So they smiled and wiped away the tears and
packed up and we took off down Doheny. Sheila had a
little hand-operated prayer wheel spinning and Lupe
was getting three roaches out so we could enjoy what
would otherwise be a real drag, or so we at least could
enjoy a facsimile of joy. We came to Melrose, and the
light changed to red, so I stopped, being a law-abiding
citizen when the law is for the benefit of all and well-
founded. Besides, I didn't want to get run into. But the
son of Adam behind me got mad; he thought I ought to
run the light. His soul was really ruffled, Herald, he was in
a cold-sweat panic. He honked his horn and when I
didn't jump like a dog through a hoop and go through
the fight, he jumped out of his car and opened my door
—dumb bastard, I, didn't have it locked—and he jerked
me out and whirled me around and shoved my head
against the handle. It cut my head open and knocked me
half-silly. Naturally, I didn't resist; I really believe this
turn-the-other-cheek dictum.

"I was half in the next lane, and the other cars weren't
going to stop, so Sheila jumped out and shoved the man in
the path of one and pulled me into the car. That Sheila
has a temper, you got to forgive her. The man was hit;
he bounced off one car and into ours. So Sheila drove the
car then while Lupe was trying to heave the man out. He
was lying on the back seat with his legs dragging on the
street. I stopped her and told Sheila to take us to the
hospital.

"So she did, though reluctantly, I mean reluctant to
take the man, too, and we got here, and my head finally
got bandaged, and Sheila and Lupe are helping the nurses