woodworked Victorian style even if it was in the Spanish
part). At the corner, he halted and stuck his head around.
The woman at the extreme end was facing him. By the
light of a floor lamp near her, he could see that she was
tall and black-haired and beautiful—the woman in the
portrait above the mantel in the drawing room.
She beckoned to him and turned and disappeared
around the corner.
He felt a little disoriented, not so much as if he were
being disconnected from a part of himself inside himself
but as if the walls around him were being subtly warped.
Just as he rounded the corner, he saw her skirt going
into a doorway. This led to a room halfway down the hall.
The only light was .that from the lamp on a stand in the
hallway. He groped around until he felt the light switch.
The response was the illumination of a small lamp at the
other end on a stand by a huge bed with a canopy. He did
not know much about furniture, but it looked like a bed
from one of the Louis series, Louis Quatorze, perhaps.
The rest of the expensive-looking furniture seemed to go
with the bed. A large crystal chandelier hung from the
center of the ceiling.
The wall was White paneling, and one of the panels was
just swinging shut.
Childe thought it was swinging shut. He had blinked,
and then the wall seemed solid.
There was no other way for the woman to have gone.
Do ghosts have to open doors, or panels, to go from
one room to another?
Perhaps they did, if they existed. However, he had seen
nothing to indicate that Dolores—or whoever the woman
was—must be a ghost.
If she were a hoax set up by Baron Igescu for the bene-
fit of others, and particularly for Childe, she was leading
him on for a reason that he could only believe was sinis-
ter. The panel led to a passage between the walls, and
Igescu must want him to go through a panel.
The newspaper article had said that the original house
had contained between-walls passages and underground
passages, and several secret tunnels which led to exits in
the woods. Don del Osorojo had built these because he
feared attacks from bandits, wild Indians, revolting peas-
ants, and, possibly, government troops. The Don, it
seemed, was having trouble with tax-collectors; the gov-
ernment claimed that he was hiding gold and silver.
When the first Baron Igescu, the present owner's uncle,
had added the wings, he had also built secret passageways
which connected to those in the central house. Not so
secret, actually, since the workers had talked about them,
but no drawings or blueprints of the house's construction
existed, as far as anybody knew. And most of the workers
would now be dead or so old they could not remember the
layout, even if any of them could be found.
The panel had been opened long enough for him to
know that it was an entrance. Perhaps the baron wanted
him to know it; perhaps Dolores, the ghost. In any event,
he meant to go through it.
Finding the actuator of the entrance was another matter.
He pressed the wood around the panel, tried to move
strips around it, knocked at various places on the panel
(it sounded hollow), and examined the wood closely for
holes. He found nothing out-of-the-way.
Straightening up, he half-turned in an angry movement
and then turned back again, as if he would catch some-
thing—or somebody—doing something behind his back.
There was nothing behind him that had not been there
before. But he did glimpse himself in the huge floor-to-
ceiling mirror that constituted half of the wall across the
room.
13
The mirror certainly was not reflecting as a mirror should.
Nor was it reflecting grossly or exaggeratedly, like a funny-
house mirror. The distortions—if they could be called dis-
tortions—were subtle. And as evasive as drops of mer-
cury.
There were slight shirtings of everything reflected, of
the wall behind him, the painting on the wall to one side
of him, the canopied bed, and himself. It was as if he
were looking at an underwater room through a window,
with himself deep in the water and the mirror a window,
or porthole, to a room in a subaquatic palace. The objects
in the room, and he seemed to be as much an object as
the bed or a chair, swayed a little. As if currents of cold
water succeeded by warmer water compressed or ex-
panded the water and so changed the intensity and the
refraction of lighting.
There was more to the shifting than that, however. At
one place, the room and everything in it, including him-
self, seemed almost—not quite—normal. As they should
be or as it seemed that they should be. Seemed, he
thought, because it struck him that things as they are
were not necessarily things as they should be, that custom
had made strangeness, or outrageousness (a peculiar
word, what made him think of that?), comfortable.
Then the "normality" disappeared as the objects twisted
or swayed, he was not sure which they did, and the room,
and he, became "evil."
He did not look "weak" nor "petty" nor "sneaky" nor
"selfish" nor "indifferent," all of which he felt himself to
be at various times. He looked "evil." Malignant, destroy-
ing, utterly loveless.
He walked slowly toward the mirror. His image, waver-
ing, advanced. It smiled, and he suddenly realized that he
was smiling. That smile was not utterly loveless; it was a
smile of pure love. Love of hatred and of corruption and
of all living things.
He could almost smell the stink of hate and of death.
Then he thought that the smile was not of love but
of greed, unless greed was a form of love. It could be.
The meanings of words were as shifting and elusive as
the images in the mirror.
He became sick; something was gnawing at his nerves
in the pit of his stomach.
It was a form of sea-sickness, he thought. See-sickness,
rather.
He turned away from the mirror, feeling as he did so a
chill pass over his scalp and a vulnerability—a hollowness
—between his shoulders, as if the man in the mirror
would stick him in the back with a knife if he exposed his
back to him.
He hated the mirror and the room it mirrored. He had
to get out of it. If he could not get the panel open in a
few seconds, he would have to leave by the door.
There was no use in repeating his first efforts. The key
to the panel was not in its immediate neighborhood, so
he would have to look elsewhere. Perhaps its actuator, a
button, a stud, something, could be behind the large oil
painting. This was of a man who looked much like the
baron and was probably his uncle. Childe lifted it up and
off its hooks and placed it upright on the fl
oor, leaning
against the wall. The space behind where it had been was
smooth. No actuator mechanism here.
He replaced the painting. It seemed twice as heavy
when he lifted it
up as it had when he had taken it down.
This room was draining him of his strength.
He turned away from the painting and stopped. The
panel had swung inward into the darkness behind the
wall.
Childe, keeping an eye on the panel, placed a hand on
the lower corner of the portrait-frame and moved it
slightly. The panel, however, had already started to close.
Evidently the actuating mechanism opened it briefly and
then closed it automatically.
He waited until the panel shut and again moved the
frame sideways. Nothing happened. But when he lifted
the painting slightly, the panel again swung open.
Childe did not hesitate. He ran to the panel, stepped
through cautiously, making sure that there was firm foot-
ing in the darkness, and then got to one side to permit the
panel to swing shut. He was in unrelieved black; the air
was dead and odorous of decaying wood, plaster falling
apart, and a trace of long-dead mice. There was also a
teaser (was it there or not?) of perfume.
The flashlight showed a dusty corridor about four feet
wide and seven high. It did not end against the wall of
the hallway, as he had expected. A well of blackness
turned out to be a stairway under the hall. At its bottom
was a small platform and another stairway leading up, he
presumed, to another passageway on the other side of the
hall.
In the opposite direction, the passageway ran straight
for about fifty feet and then disappeared around a corner.
He walked slowly in that direction and examined the
walls, ceiling, and floor carefully. When he had gone far
enough to be past the baron's bedroom, he found a panel
on hinges. It was too small and too far up the wall for
passage. He unlocked its latch, turned his flashlight off,
and swung it slowly out to avoid squeaking of hinges.
They gave no sound. The panel had hidden a one-way
mirror. He was looking into a bedroom. A titian-haired
woman came through the door from the hall about seven
seconds later. She walked past him, only five feet away,
and disappeared into another doorway. She was wear-
ing a print dress with large red flowers; her legs were
bare and her feet were sandaled.
The woman was so beautiful that he had felt sick in
his solar plexus for a moment, a feeling he had experi-
enced three times, when seeing for the first time women
so beautiful that he was agonized because he would never
have them.
Childe thought that it would be better to continue his
exploring, but he could not resist the feeling that he might
see something significant if he stayed here. The woman
had looked so determined, as if she had something im-
portant to do. He placed his ear against the glass and
could hear, faintly, Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zara-
thustra. It must be coming from the room into which
she had gone.
The bedroom was in rather somber taste for a beauti-
ful young woman; the baron's room, if it had been the
baron's room, would have been more appropriate for her.
It was far cheerier, if you excepted the wall-mirror. The
walls were of dark dull wooden paneling about six feet
up from the floor; above them was a dull dark wallpaper
with faint images: queer birds, twisted dragons, and the
recurring figures of what could be a nude Adam and Eve
and an apple tree. There were no snakes.
The carpet was thick and also dull and dark with im-
ages too faded to be identified. The bed was, like the
baron's, canopied, but it was of a period he did not rec-
ognize, although this did not mean much, because he
knew very little about furniture or furnishings. Its legs
were wrought-iron in the form of dragon's claws. The
bedspread and the canopy were a dark red. There was a
mirror on the wall opposite. It was three-sided, like the
mirrors used in the clothing departments of stores. It
seemed to be nothing extraordinary; it reflected the win-
dow through which Childe was looking as another mirror
above a large dull red-brown dresser.
There was a chandelier of cut quartz with dull yellow
sockets for candles. The light in the room, however, came
from a number of table and floor lamps. The corners of
the room were in shadow.
Childe waited for a while and sweated. It was hot in
the corridor, and the various odors, of wood, plaster, and
long-dead mice, became stronger instead of dying on a
dulling nose. The teaser of perfume was entirely gone. Fi-
nally, just as he decided that he should be moving on—
and why was he standing here in the first place—the
woman came through the door. She was naked; her titian-
red hair hung loosely around her shoulders and down her
back. She held a long-necked bottle to her lips as she
walked toward the dresser. She paused before it and con-
tinued to drink until only about two inches of the liquid
was left. Then she put the bottle on the dresser and
leaned forward to look into the mirror.
She had taken her makeup off. She peered into the
mirror as if she were searching for defects. Childe stepped
back, because it seemed impossible that she would not
see him. Then he steepped forward again. If she knew that
this was a one-way mirror, she did not care if another was
on the other side. Or supposed that no hostile person
would be there. Perhaps only the baron knew of this
passageway.
She seemed to find her inspection of her face satisfac-
tory, and she might have found it very pleasing, to judge
from her smile. She straightened up and looked at her
body and also seemed pleased at this. Childe felt uncom-
fortable, as if he were doing something perverted by
spying on her, but he also began to get excited.
She wriggled a little, swayed her hips from side to
side, and ran her hands up and down her ribs and hips
and then cupped them over her breasts and rubbed the
nipples with the ends of her thumbs. The nipples swelled.
Childe's penis swelled, also.
Keeping her left hand busy with her breast, she put her
right hand on her pubes, and opened the top of the slit
with one finger and began to rub her clitoris. She worked
swiftly at it, rubbing vigorously, and suddenly she threw
her head back, her mouth open, ecstasy on her face.
Childe felt both excited and repulsed. Part of the re-
pulsion was because he was no voyeur; he felt that it was
indecent to watch anyone under these circumstances. It
was true that he did not have to stay, but he was here to
investigate kidnapping and murder, and this certainly
looked worth investigating.
She continued to rub her clitoris a
nd the hairy lips.
And then—here Childe was startled and shaken but also
knew that he had somehow expected it—a tiny thing,
like a slender white tongue, spurted from the slit.
It was not a tongue. It was more like a snake or an eel.
It was as small in diameter as a garter snake but much
longer. How long it was he could not determine yet, be-
cause its body kept sliding out and out. It kept coming,
and its skin was smooth and hairless, as smooth as the
woman's belly and as white, and the skin glistened with
the fluid released from her cunt.
It shot out in a downward arc, like a half-erect penis,
and then it turned and flopped over against her belly and
began to zigzag upwards. It continued to slide out from
the slit as if yards of it were still coiled inside her womb,
and it oozed up until its snaky length was coiled once
around her left breast.
Childe could see the details of the thing's head, which
was the size of a golf ball. It turned twice to look directly
at him. Into the mirror, rather.
Its head was bald except for a fringe of oil-plastered
black hair around the tiny ears. It had two thin but wet-
black eyebrows and a wet black Mephistophelean mous-
tache and beard. The nose was relatively large and meat
cleaver shaped. The eyes were dark, but they were so
small and set so far back that they would have seemed
dark to Childe even if they had been palest blue. The
mouth was as much a slit as the vagina from which the
creature had issued, but it briefly opened it and Childe
could see two rows of little yellow teeth and a pink-red
tongue.
The face was tiny, but there was nothing feeble about
its malignancy.
The woman's lips moved. Childe could not hear her,
but he thought that she was crooning.
The snaky body resumed its climbing while more of its
body slid out of the pink fissure and the dark-red bush.
It rounded her breast and went up her shoulder and
around her neck and came around the right side and ex-
tended a loop outwards and then in so that the Lilliputian
head faced her. The woman turned a little then, thus
permitting Childe a .quarter-view of her profile.
Image of the Beast and Blown Page 15
