Image of the Beast Page 4

  He made up a pile of handkerchiefs and filled a canteen with water as soon as he was home. He dialed the LAPD to report the theft, but, after two minutes, he gave up. The line was likely to be busy all day and all night and indefinitely into the future. He brushed his teeth and washed his face. The wash rag looked yellow. Probably it was his imagination, but the yellow could be the smog coming out. The yellow looked like the stuff that clouded his windshield in the morning after several days of heavy smog. The air of Los Angeles was an ocean in which poisonous plankton drifted.

  He ate a sandwich of cold sliced beef with a dill pickle and drank a glass of milk, although he did not feel hungry. Visualizations of Sybil with Al troubled him. He didn't know Al, but he could not bar shadowy images whose only bright features--too bright--were a rigid monstrosity and a pair of hairy, never-empty testicles. The pump-pump-pumping sound was also only a shadow, but it would not go away either. Shadows sometimes turned out to be indelible ink blots.

  He forced himself to consider Matthew Colben and his murderers. At least, he thought they were murderers. There was no proof that Colben had been killed. He might be alive, though not well, somewhere in this area. Or someplace else.

  Now that he was recovering from his shock, he could even think that Colben might be untouched and the film faked.

  He could think this, but he did not believe it.

  The phone rang. Someone was getting through to him, even if he could get through to no one. Suspecting that only the police could ram through a call, he picked up the phone. Sergeant Bruin's voice, husky and growling like a bear just waking up from hibernation, said, "Childe?"

  "Yes."

  "We got proof that they mean business. That film wasn't faked."

  Childe was startled. He said, "I was just thinking about a fraud. How'd you find out?"

  "We just opened a package mailed from Pasadena."

  Bruin paused. Childe said, "Yeah?"

  "Yeah.. Colben's prick was in it. The end of it, anyway. Somebody's prick, anyway. It sure as hell had been bitten off."

  "No leads yet?" Childe said after some hesitation.

  "The package's being checked, but we don't expect anything, naturally. And I got bad news. I'm being taken off the case, well, almost entirely taken off. We got too many other things just now, you know why. If there's going to be any work done on this, Childe, you'll have to do it. But don't go off half-cocked and don't do nothing if you get a definite lead, which I think you ain't going to get. You know what I mean. You been in the business."

  "Yes, I know," Childe said. "I'm going to do what I can, which, as you said, probably won't be much. I have nothing else to do now, anyway,"

  "You could come down here and swear in," Bruin said. "We need men right now! The traffic all over the city is a mess, like I never saw before. Everybody's trying to get out. This is going to be a ghost town. But it'll be a mess, a bloody mess, today and tomorrow. I'm telling you, I never seen nothing like it before."

  Bruin could be stolid about Colbert, but the prospect of the greatest traffic jam ever unfroze his bowels. He was really being moved.

  "If I need help, or if I stumble--and I mean stumble--across anything significant, should I call you?"

  "You can leave a message. I'll call you back when--if--I get in. Good luck, Childe."

  "Same to you, Bruin," Childe said and muttered as he hung up, "O Ursus Horribilis! Or whatever the vocative case is."

  He became aware that he was sweating, that his eyes felt as if they'd been filed, his sinuses hurt, he had a headache, his throat felt raw, his lungs were wheezing for the first time in five years since he had quit smoking tobacco, and, not too far off, horns were blaring.

  He could do something to ease the effects of the poisoned air, but he could do little about the cars out in the street. When he had left his wife's apartment; he had had a surprising amount of trouble getting across Burton Way to San Vicente. There was no stop light at this point on Le Doux. Cars had to buck traffic coming down Burton Way on one side and going up on the other side of the divider. Coming down to the apartment, he had not seen a car or even a pair of headlights in the dimness. But, going back, he had had to be careful in crossing. The lights sprang out of the gray-greenness with startling rapidity as they rounded a nearby curve of Burton Way to the west. He had managed to find a break large enough to justify gunning across. Even so, a pair of lights and a blaring horn and squealing brakes and a shouted curse--subject to the Doppler effect--told him that a speeder had come close.

  The traffic going west toward Beverly Hills was light, but that coming across Burton Way between the boulevards to cut southeast on San Vicente was heavy. There was panic among the drivers. The cars were two deep, then suddenly three deep, and Childe had barely had room to squeeze through. He was being forced out of his own lane and against the curb. Several times, he only got by by rubbing his tires hard against the curb.

  The light at San Vicente and Third was red for him, but the cars coming down San Vicente were going through it. A car going east on Third, horn bellowing, tried to bull its way through: It collided lightly with 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--children--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 staying. 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 professor 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 astronauts 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 paperbacks 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 outside 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 certain 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 project his own feelings as those of others.

  Matthew Colbert. Where was he now? Dead or suffering? 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 interested 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 national 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 Department 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 Boulevard.

  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 comer, 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 without 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 driving 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 peered."

  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 a sprawl 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 hospital, 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 bandage 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-operat
ed 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 rued, 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 light, 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 up on the second floor. I'll help as soon as I get to feeling better."

  "What happened to the man?" Childe said.

  "He's on a mattress on the floor of the second level. He's unconscious, breathing a few bubbles of blood, poor unhappy soul, but Sheila's taking care of him, too. She feels bad about shoving him; she's got a hasty temper but underneath it all she truly loves."

  "I was going to offer to help," Childe said, "but I can't see standing around for hours. Besides..."