Image of the Beast and Blown

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Image of the Beast and Blown Page 24

by Philip José Farmer


  wereleopard. A werejaguar, yes. No, it must be, if

  not a genuine leopard, Ngima or the Chinaman Pao.

  Whatever it was, it showed no sign of changing after

  death. Perhaps it really was not a metamorph but a pet

  trained to guard Igescu.

  What am I thinking of? he thought. Of course, it is.

  There are no such creatures as werewolves and were-

  leopards and vampires. Maybe there are vampires,

  psychological vampires, psychotics who think they are

  vampires. But an actual metamorphosis! What kind of

  mechanism would be involved, what mechanism could

  effect a change like that? Bones become fluid, change

  shape even in the cellular structure, and harden again?

  Well, maybe the bones are not our kind of bones. But

  what about the energy involved? And even if the body

  could shift shape, the brain surely couldn't! The brain

  would have to retain its human size and shape.

  He looked at the leopard and he remembered the

  wolves. Their heads were wolf-sized, their brains were

  small.

  He should forget this nonsense. He had been drugged;

  the rest was suggestion.

  Not until then did he become aware that the leopard,

  when it had been fastened to him for such a short time,

  had done more than he had thought. It had torn off his

  shirt and pants and belt, and his hand, feeling his back

  and hips and legs, was wet with blood. He hurt, and he

  was alarmed, but a closer examination convinced him

  that the leopard had done more harm to his clothes

  than to him. The wounds were superficial or seemed so.

  He went into the next room, which was a small study,

  and picked up an armful of newspapers and magazines.

  Returning to the huge room, he wadded up the papers

  and ripped out pages and stacked a pile on each side

  of the baron's neck. After dripping some lighter fluid

  on the two piles and over the baron's hair and chest,

  he touched off the fluid.

  Childe then opened the large windows and built an-

  other fire below the central plank. A third pile below

  the left side of the framework blazed up. In a few min-

  utes, he added a wooden chair to that fire. After a while,

  the oak of the frame and the plank were blazing, and

  the log was blackening and smoking. The stench

  of burned hair and flesh rose from the baron.

  More paper and lighter fluid got the drapes over the

  windows to burning. Then he struggled with the body

  of the leopard until he dropped it on the fire. Its

  head burned fiercely with lighter fluid; its black nose

  lost its wet shininess and wrinkled with heat.

  Opening the entrance to the passageway made a

  stronger draft. The smoke in the room streamed out

  through the hole to meet the smoke in the passageway.

  The entrance did not seem big enough to handle all

  the smoke, which soon filled the room. He began to cough

  and, suddenly, as if the coughs had triggered him, he

  had a long shuddering orgasm the roots of which seemed

  to be wrapped around his spine and to be pulling his

  spine down his back and out through his penis.

  Just as the last spurt came, a shriek tore from the

  smoke in the center of the room. He spun around but

  could see nothing. One of the two had not been

  dead and still was not dead because the shrieks were

  continuing with full strength.

  And then, before he could turn again to face the new

  sound, a grunting and squealing shot from the wall-

  entrance. There was a rapid clicking, much louder than

  the wolves' claws, a tremble of the boards under his

  feet, and he was knocked upward to one side. Half-

  stunned, his left leg hurting, he sat up. He began cough-

  ing. The squealing became louder and the boards shook

  under him. He rolled away under cover of the smoke

  while the thing that had hit him charged around, hunt-

  ing for him.

  Crawling on his hands and knees along the wall, his

  head bent near the floor to keep from breathing the

  smoke, he headed for the French windows. The swine

  noises had now given way to a deep coughing. After a

  dozen racks that seemed strong enough to suck in all

  the smoke in the room during the in-breaths, the hooves

  clattered again. Childe rounded the corner and slid along

  the wall until he came to the next corner. His hand,

  groping upward into the smoke, felt the lower edges

  of the French windows. The open ones were about ten

  feet away, as he remembered them.

  The hooves abruptly stopped. The squealing was even

  more ferocious, less questing and more challenging.

  Hooves hit the floorboards again. Punctuating the two

  sounds was a loud hissing.

  A battle was taking place somewhere in the smoke.

  Several times, the walls shook as heavy bodies hit them,

  and the floor seldom ceased to tremble. Blows—a great

  hand hammering into a thick solid body—added codas

  to the crackling of the fires.

  Childe could not have waited to see what was going

  on even if he had wished. The smoke would kill him

  sooner, the fire would kill him later, but not so much

  later, if he did not get out. There was no time to crawl

  on around until he got to the west door. The windows

  were the only way out. He climbed out after unfasten-

  ing and pushing out the lower edge of the screen, let

  himself down until he clung by his hands, and then

  dropped. He struck a bush, broke it, felt as if he had

  broken himself, too, rolled off it, and then stood up. His

  left leg hurt even more, but he could see no blood.

  And then he jetted again—at least, his penis had not

  been hurt in the fall—and was helpless while two bodies

  hurtled through the window he had just left. The screen,

  torn off, struck near him. Magda Holyani and Mrs.

  Grasatchow crushed more bushes and rolled off them

  onto the ground near the driveway.

  Immediately after, several people ran out of the

  house onto the porch.

  Both the women were bleeding from many wounds

  and blackened with smoke. Magda had ended her roll

  at his feet in time to receive a few drops of sperm on

  her forehead. This, he could not help thinking even in

  his pain, was an appropriate extreme unction for her.

  The fat woman had struck as heavily as a sack of wet

  flour and now lay unconscious, a gray bone sticking

  out of the flesh of one leg and blood running from her

  ears and nostrils.

  Bending Grass, Mrs. Pocyotl, and O'Faithair were

  on the porch. That left Chornkin, Krautschner, Ngima,

  Pao, Vivienne, the two maids, the baroness, and Dolores

  unaccounted for. He thought he knew what had hap-

  pened to the first three. Two were dead of rapier

  thrusts in a passageway and one was burning with Igescu.

  The clothes of the three on the porch were ripped,

  their hair was disarrayed, and they were bleeding from

  wounds. They must have tangled with Magda or
Mrs.

  Grasatchow or Dolores or any combination thereof.

  But they were not disabled, and they were now looking

  for him, their mouths moving, their hands pointing at

  him now and then.

  Childe limped, but swiftly, to the Rolls-Royce parked

  twenty feet away on the driveway. Behind came a

  shout and shoes slapping against the porchsteps. The

  Rolls was unlocked, and the key was in the ignition

  lock. He drove away while Bending Grass and O'Faithair

  beat on the windows with their fists and howled like

  wolves at him. Then they had dropped off and were racing

  toward another car, a red Jaguar.

  Childe stopped the Rolls, reversed, and pressed the

  accelerator to the floor. Going backward, the Rolls

  bounced O'Faithair off the right rear fender and

  then crashed to a halt. Bending Grass had whirled just

  before it pinned him against the Jaguar. His dark broad

  face stared into the rear window for a few seconds.

  Then it was gone.

  Childe drove forward until he could see the Indian's

  body, red and mashed from the thighs down, face

  downward on the pavement. The outlines of his

  body looked fuzzy; he seemed to be swelling.

  Childe had no time to keep looking. He stopped the

  Rolls again, backed it up over O'Faithair, who was just

  beginning to sit up, went forward over him again, turned

  around, and drove the wheels back and forth three times

  each over the bodies of Holyani, Grasatchow, Bending

  Grass, and O'Faithair. Mrs. Pocyotl, who had been

  screaming at him and shaking her little fist, ran back

  into the house when he drove toward the porch.

  Flames and smoke were pouring out of a dozen win-

  dows on all three stories of the left wing and out of one

  window of the central house. Unchecked, the first would

  destroy the entire building in an hour or two. And there

  was nobody to check it.

  He drove away. Coming around the curve just be-

  fore entering the road through the woods, he saw part of

  the yard to one side of the house. The red-headed

  Vivienne, her naked body white in the ghastly half-

  dark daylight, Mrs. Pocyotl with her shoes off, and the

  two maids were running for the woods. Behind them

  came the nude Dolores, her long dark hair flying. She

  looked grim and determined. The others looked deter-

  mined also, but their determination was inspired by fright.

  Childe did not know what she would do if she caught

  them, but he was sure that they knew and were not stand-

  ing to fight for good reasons. He also suspected that

  Pao and the baroness bad not come out of the house be-

  cause of what Dolores had done to them, although it

  was possible that Magda or Mrs. Grasatchow had killed

  them. He could not be sure, of course, but he suspected

  that the two had been in metamorphosis as pig and snake

  and that they had been unmanageable.

  The three women disappeared in the trees.

  He struck himself on his forehead. Was he really be-

  lieving all this metamorphosis nonsense?

  He looked back. From this slight rise, he could see

  Bending Grass and Mrs. Grasatchow. The clothes seemed

  to have split off the Indian, and he looked black and

  bulky, like a bear. The fat woman was also dark and

  there was something nonhuman about the corpse.

  At that moment, from behind the house, the biggest

  black fox he had ever seen raced out and tore off to-

  ward the woods into which the three women had disap-

  peared. It barked three times and then turned its head

  and seemed to grin at him.

  The chill that had transfixed him when he first saw

  Dolores went through him again. He remembered some-

  thing now, something he had read long ago. The shape-

  shifting fox-people of China. They lost control of their

  ability to change form if they drank too much wine.

  And, that first evening, the baron had been trying to

  restrain Pao's wine consumption. Why? Because he had

  not wanted Childe to witness the metamorphosis? Or

  for some other reason? For some other reason, prob-

  ably, since the baron could not have been worried about

  Childe escaping to tell what he had seen.

  He shrugged and drove on. He had had too much of

  this and wanted only to get away. He was beginning to

  believe that a 150-pound man could become fluid, twist

  bone and flesh into a nonhuman mold, and, somewhere

  along the transformation, shed 125 pounds, just tuck

  them away some place to be withdrawn later when

  needed. Or, if not cached, the discarded mass trailed

  along, like an invisible jet exhaust, an attached plume

  of energy ready for reconversion.

  The gate of the inner wall was before him. He opened

  this and drove through, and soon was stopped by the

  outer wall. Here he left the Rolls on the driveway, after

  wiping off his prints with a rag from the glove compart-

  ment, and walked through the big gate to his own car,

  parked under the trees at the end of the road.

  He found the key he had hidden—how long ago? it

  seemed days—and drove away. He was naked, bloody,

  bruised, and hurting, and he still had an erection that

  was automatically working up to yet another—oh, God!

  —orgasm, but he did not care. He would get into his

  apartment, and the rest of the world, smog, monsters,

  and all, could go to hell, which they were doing, any-

  way.

  A half-mile down the road, a big black Lincoln shot

  by him toward the Igescu estate. It held three men and

  three women, all of whom were handsome or beautiful

  and well dressed. Their faces were, however, grim, and

  he knew that their destination was Igescu's and that they

  were speeding because they were late for whatever sini-

  ster conference they had been scheduled to attend. Or be-

  cause someone in the house had called them for help.

  The car had California license plates. Perhaps they were

  from San Francisco.

  He smiled feebly. They would be unpleasantly sur-

  prised. Meanwhile, he had better get out of here, because

  he did not know whether or not they had noted his

  license plate.

  Before he had gone a mile, the sky had become even

  darker, growled, thundered, lightninged. A strong wind

  tore the smog apart, and then the rains washed the air

  and the earth without letup for an hour and a half.

  He parked the car in the underground garage and

  took the elevator up to his floor. No one saw him, al-

  though he expected to be observed. He had no excuse for

  being naked and with a hard-on, and it would be just

  like life, the great ironist, to have him arrested for in-

  decent exposure and God knows what else after all he

  had been through, he, the abused innocent. But no one

  saw him, and, after locking the door and chaining it, he

  showered, dried himself, put on pajamas, ate a ham and

  cheese sandwich and drank half a quart of milk, and />
  crawled into bed.

  Just before he fell asleep, a few seconds later, he put

  out his hand to feel for something. What did he want?

  Then he realized that it was Mrs. Grasatchow's purse,

  which contained the skins. Somewhere between the bar-

  on's bedroom and this bedroom, he had lost the purse.

  20

  Childe slept, though often restlessly, for a day, a night,

  and most of the next day. He got up to empty bladder

  and bowels, to eat cereal or a sandwich and sometimes

  wake up at the end of a wet dream.

  His dreams were often terrors, but were sometimes

  quite pleasant copulations. Sometimes Mrs. Grasatchow

  or Vivienne or Dolores rode him, and he woke up jetting

  and groaning. Other times, he was riding Sybil or some

  woman he had known or some faceless woman. And

  there were at least two dreams in which he was mount-

  ing a female animal from the rear, once with a beautiful

  leopardess and once with a bitch wolf.

  When he was awake, he wondered about the dreams,

  because he knew that the Freudians insisted that all

  dreams, no matter how terrifying or horrible, were wishes.

  By the time he was slept out, his pajamas and sheets

  were a mess, but the effects of the cone were gone. He

  was very happy to have a flaccid penis. He showered and

  breakfasted, and then read the latest Los Angeles Times.

  Life was almost normal now; the papers were being de-

  livered on schedule. Industries were running full-time.

  The migration back was still going on but was only a

  trickle now. The mortuaries were overloaded, and funer-

  als were taking place far into the night. The police were

  swamped with missing persons reports. Otherwise, the

  city was functioning as usual. The smog was beginning

  to build up but would not become alarming while the

  present breeze continued.

  Childe read the front page and some articles. Then he

  used the phone to check on Sybil. She had not come

  home. A call to San Francisco was answered by Sybil's

  sister, Cherril. She said that the mother had died, and

  Sybil was supposed to have come for the funeral. She

  presumably left as soon as she had packed. She had been

  unable to get a plane out, and her car wouldn't start, so

  she had phoned back that she was coming up with a

 

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