Image of the Beast and Blown (9 page)

Childe was willing to thrust through the crack in the
armor.

"Well!" Heepish said.

He cocked his head and smiled thinly. The moustache,
however, was still swelled like an elephant seal in mating
season, and his fingers were making a steeple, then sepa-
rating to form the throat-holding attitude.

"Well!" he said again. His voice was as hard, but there
was also a whine in it, like a distant mosquito.

"Well!" Childe said, aware that he would never know
what Heepish was going to say and not caring. "I'd like to
see the newspaper files, if possible."

"Oh? Oh, yes! They're upstairs. This way, please."

They left the garage, but Heepish put the photograph of
Rodder under his arm before following him out. Childe
had wondered what it was doing out in the garage, any-
way, but on re-entering the house, he saw that there were
many more photographs—and paintings and pencil
sketches and even framed newspaper and magazine clip-
pings containing Rodder's portrait—than he had thought.
Heepish had had one too many and stored that one in the
garage. But now, as if to show Childe his place, to put him
down in some obscure manner, Heepish was also bringing
this photograph into the house.

Childe grinned at this as he waited for Heepish to lead
him through the kitchen and hall-room and turn right to go
up the narrow stairs. The walls were hung with many pic-
tures and paintings of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula
and an original by Hannes Bok and another by Virgil
Finlay, all leaning at slightly different angles like head-
stones in an old neglected graveyard.

They went down a short hallway and into a room with
the walls covered with paintings and photographs and
posters and movie ad stills. There were a number of curi-
ous wooden frames, sawhorses with castles on their backs,
which held a series of illustrations and photos and news-
paper clippings on wooden frames. These could be turned
on a central shaft, like pages of a book.

Childe looked through all of them and, at any other
time, would have been delighted and would have lingered
over various nostalgic items.

Heepish, as if the demands on him were really getting
to be too much, sighed when Childe asked to see the

scrapbooks. He went into an enormous closet the walls of
which were lined with bookshelves stuffed with large scrap-
books, many of them dusty and smelling of decay.

"I really must do something about these before it's too
late," Heepish said. "I have some very valuable—some
invaluable and unreplaceable—material here."

He was still carrying Rodder's photo under one arm.

It was Childe's turn to sigh as he looked at the growing
hill of stuff to peruse. But he sat down in a chair, placed
his right ankle over his left thigh, and began to turn the
stiff and often yellowed and brittle pages of the scrap-
books. After a while, Heepish said that he would have to
excuse himself. If Childe wanted anything, he should just
holler. Childe looked up and smiled briefly and said that
he did not want to be any more bother than he had to
be. Heepish was gone then, but left an almost visible ecto-
plasm of disdain and hurt feelings behind him.

The scrapbooks were titled with various subjects:
MOVIE VAMPIRES, GERMAN AND SCANDINA-
VIAN, 1919-1939; WEREWOLVES, AEMRICAN, 1865-
1900; WITCHES, PENNSYLVANIAN, 1880-1965;
GOLEM, EXTRA-FORTEANA, 1929-1960; SOUTH-
ERN CALIFORNIA VAMPIRE FOLKLORE AND
GHOST STORIES, 1910-1967; and so on.

Childe had gone through thirty-two such titles before he
came to the last one. They had all been interesting but not
very fruitful, and he did not
know
that the one which was
in his hands was relevant. But he felt his heart quicken
and his back became less stiff. It could not be called a clue,
but it at least was something to investigate.

An article from the
Los Angeles Times,
dated May 1,
1958, described a number of reputedly "haunted" houses
in the Los Angeles area. Several long paragraphs were de-
voted to a house in Beverly Hills which not only had a
ghost, it had a "vampire."

There was a photograph of the Trolling House taken
from the air. According to the article, no one could get
close enough to it on the ground to use a camera effec-
tively. The house was set on a low hill in the middle of
a large—for Southern California—walled estate. The
grounds were well wooded so that the house could not
be seen from anywhere outside the walls. The newspaper
cameramen had been unable to get photos of it in 1948,

when the owner of Trolling House had become temporar-
ily famous, and the newsmen had no better luck in 1958,
when this article, recapitulating the events of ten years
before, had been published. There was, however, a picture
of a pencil sketch made of the "vampire," Baron Igescu,
by an artist who had depended upon his memory after
seeing the baron at a charity ball. No photographs of the
baron were known to be in existence. Very few people
had seen the baron, although he had made several ap-
pearances at charity balls and once at a Beverly Hills'
taxpayers' protest meeting.

Trolling House was named after the uncle of the present
owner. The uncle, also an Igescu, had traveled from Ru-
mania to England in 1887, stayed there one year, and then
moved on to America in 1889. Upon becoming a citizen of
the United States of America, Igescu had changed his name
to Trolling. No one knew why. The mansion was on
woodland surrounded on all sides by a high brick wall
topped with iron spikes between which barbed wire was
strung. Built in very late Victorian style in 1900 in what
was then out-of-the-way agricultural land, it was a huge
rambling structure. The nucleus was a part of the original
house. This was, naturally, a Spanish-style mansion which
had been built by the eccentric (some said, mad) Don
Pedro del Osorojo in the wilderness of what was to be-
come, a century later, Beverly Hills. Del Osorojo was
supposed to have been a relative of the de Villa family,
which owned this area, but that was not authenticated.
Actually little was known of del Osorojo except that he
was a recluse with an unknown source of wealth. His wife
came from Spain (this was when California was under
Spanish rule) and was supposed to have been a Cas-
tilian noble.

The present owner, Igescu, was involuntarily publicized
in 1938 when he was brought dead-on-arrival into the
Cedars of Lebanon Hospital after a car collision at Holly-
wood and La Brea. At twilight of the following day, the
county coroner was to perform an inquest. Igescu had no
perceptible wounds or injuries.

At the first touch of the knife, Igescu sat up on the
dissection slab.

This story was picked up by newspapers throughout the
States because a reporter jestingly pointed out that Igescu

had (1) never been seen in the daytime, (2) was of
Transylvanian origin, (3) came from an aristocratic fam-
ily which had lived for centuries in a castle (now aban-
doned) on top of a high steep hill in a remote rural area,
(4) had shipped his uncle's body back to the old country to
be buried in the family tomb, but the coffin had disap-
peared en route, and (5) was living in a house already
well known because of the ghost of Dolores del Osorojo.

Dolores was supposedly the spirit of Don Pedro's daugh-
ter. She had died of grief, or killed herself because of grief.
Her lover, or suitor, was a Norwegian sea-captain who had
seen Dolores at a governor's ball during one of her rare
appearances in town. He seemed to have lost his sanity
over her. He neglected his ship and its business, and his
men deserted or were thrown into the local jail for drunk-
enness and vagrancy.

Lars Ulf Larsson, the captain, barred by the old don
from seeing Dolores, managed to sneak into the house and
woo her so successfully that she promised to run off with
him within a week. But the night of the elopement came,
and Larsson did not show up. He was never seen again;
a legend had it that Don Pedro had killed him and buried
his body on the estate. Another said that the body had
been thrown into the sea.

Dolores had gone into mourning and died several weeks
later. Her father went hunting into the hills several weeks
after she was buried and failed to return. Search parties
could not find him; it was said that the Devil had taken
him.

Later occupants of the house reported that they some-
times saw Dolores in the house or out on the lawn. She
was always dressed in a black formal gown of the 1810's
and had black hair, a pale skin, and very red lips. Her
appearances were not frequent, but they were nerve-
wracking enough to cause a long line of tenants and own-
ers to move out. The old mansion had fallen into ruins,
except for two rooms, when Uncle Igescu bought the prop-
erty and built his house around the still-standing part.

Despite the publicity about the present Igescu, not much
was really known about him. He had inherited a chain of
grocery stores and an export business from his uncle. He,
or his managers, had built the stores into a large chain of

supermarkets in the Southwest and had expanded the ex-
port business.

Childe found the ghost interesting. Whether or not she
had been seen recently was not known, because Igescu
had never said anything about her. Her last recorded
appearance was in 1878, when the Reddes had moved out.

Igescu's sketch in the newspaper showed a long lean face
with a high forehead and high cheekbones and large eyes
and thick eyebrows. He had a thick downdrooping Slovak
coalminer's type of moustache.

Heepish returned, and Childe, holding the sketch so he
could see it, said, "This man certainly doesn't look Dracu-
laish does he? More like the grocery store man, which he
is, right?"

Heepish poked his head forward and squinted his eyes.
He smiled slightly. "Certainly, he doesn't look like Bela
Lugosi. But the Dracula of the book, Bram Stoker's, had
just such a moustache. Or one like it, anyway. I tried to
get in touch with Igescu several times, you know, but I
couldn't get through his secretary. She was nice but very
firm. The Baron did not want to be disturbed with any such
nonsense."

Heepish's tone and weak hollow chuckle said that, if
there were any nonsense, it was on the Baron's part.
"You have his phone number?"

"Yes, but it took me a lot of trouble to get it. It's un-
listed."

"You don't owe him anything," Childe said. "I'd like to
have it. If I find anything you might be interested in, I'll
tell you. How's that? 1 feel I owe you something, for your
time and fine cooperation. Perhaps, I might be able to dig
up something for your collection."

"Well, you can have the number," Heepish said, warm-
ing up. "But it's probably been changed."

He conducted Childe downstairs and, while Childe
waited under a shelf which held the heads of Franken-
stein's monster, The Naked Brain, and a huge black long-
nailed warty rubbery hand of some nameless creature
from some (deservedly) forgotten movie, Heepish plunged
into the rear of the house down a dim corridor with plastic
cobwebs and spiderwebs between ceiling and wall. He
dived out of the shadows and webs with a little black book
in his hand. Childe wrote down the number and address in

his own little black book and asked permission to try the
number. He dialed and got what he expected, nothing. The
lines were still tied up. He tried the LAPD number. He
tried his own phone. More nothing.

Just for stubbornness, he tried Igescu's number again.
And this time, as if the fates had decided that he should
be favored, or by one of those coincidences too implausible
to be believed in a novel but sometimes happening in
"real" life, the connection went through. A woman's voice
said, "Hello? My God, the phone works! What hap-
pened?"

"May I speak to Baron Igescu?" Childe said.

"Who?"

"Isn't this Baron Igescu's residence?"

"No! Who is this speaking?"

"Herold Wellston," Childe said, giving the name he had
decided to use. "May I ask who is speaking?"

"Go away! Or I'll call the police!" the woman screamed,
and she hung up.

"I don't think that was Igescu's secretary," Childe said
in answer to Heepish's quizzical expression. "Somebody
else has their number now."

Not believing that it would work but willing to try, he
dialed information. The call went right through, and he
succeeded almost immediately in getting transferred to
his contact. She did not have to worry about a supervisor
listening in; she was the supervisor.

"What happened, Linda? All of a sudden, the lines're
wide open."

"I don't know, one of those unexplainable lulls, the eye
of the storm, maybe. But it won't last, you can bet your
most precious possession on that, Herald. You better
hurry."

He told her what he wanted, and she got Igescu's un-
listed number for him within a few seconds.

"I'll drop off the usual to you in the mail before evening.
Thanks, Linda, you beautiful beautiful."

"I may not be here to get it if this smog keeps up," she
said. "Or the mailman may have skipped town with every-
one and his brother."

He hung up the telephone. Heepish, who had stepped
out of the room but not out of hearing range, raised his
eyebrows. Childe did not feel that he had to justify him-