Free Image of the Beast and Blown by Philip José Farmer Page B

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