Image of the Beast by Philip Jose Farmer

Author:Philip Jose Farmer [Farmer, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

Lying on the planks was a huge oak log squared off at thecorners. It had been gouged out on its top with axe and chisel. The gouge was wideand deepenough to hold a tall man. It did hold a man. The baron, covered witha bearskin to his neck, lay on his back in the hollow. There was dirt beneathhim and dirt humped under his head for a pillow.

His face was turned straight upward. His nose looked huge andlong. Hislower lip had slipped a little to reveal the long white teeth. Hisface was as greenish-gray as if he had just died. This may have been because ofthe peculiargreenish light flickering from four fat green candles, two at eachcorner of the log-coffin.

Childe pulled the bearskin back. The baron was naked. He put hishand on the baron's chest and then on his wrist pulse. There was no detectableheartbeat, and the chest did not move. An eyelid, peeled back, showed onlywhite.

Childe left the baron and pulled two drapes back. Two enormousFrench windows were grayly bared. It was daytime, but the light was verydark, as ifnight had left an indelible stain. The sky was dark gray withstreamers of green-gray dangling here and there.

Childe looked in the darkness under the planks supporting thelog-coffin. Hefound a roughly-worked oaken lid. He felt cold. The silence, thesputteringgreen candles, the heavy dark wood everywhere, the ponderous beams, which seemed to drip shadows, the roughness, indeed, the archaicness, of the room, and the corpse-like sleeper, who was so expected and yet so unexpected--thesefell like heavy shrouds, one over the other, upon him. His breath sawed in histhroat.

Was this room supposed to be a reproduction of a room in theancestral castle in Transylvania? Why the ubiquitous primitively worked oak? And why thiscoffin when Igescu could afford the best?

Some things here accorded with the superstitions (which, as faras he was concerned, were not superstitions). Other things be could not accountfor.

He had a hunch that this room was built to conform to specifications farmore ancient than medieval ones, that the oak and the log and thecandles had been in use long before the Transylvanian mountains were so named, long beforeRumania existed as a colony of the Romans, long before the mothercity, Rome, existed, and probably long before the primitive Indo-European speakers began tospread out of the homeland of what would someday be called Austriaand Hungary. A type of this room, and a type of this man who slept in the log, inone form or another, had existed in central Europe, and elsewhere, when men spokelanguagesnow perished without a record and when they still used flint tools.

Whatever the origin of his kind, however closely or distantly heresembled the creature of folklore, legend, and superstition, Igescu was forcedto be as good as dead when daylight arrived. The rays of the sun containedsome force responsible for diurnal suspended animation. Perhaps some otherphenomenonconnected with the impact of the sunlight caused this strange sleep. Or, perhaps, it was the other way around, with the absence of the moon? No, thatwasn't logical because the moon was often present in the daytime.

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