The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Hellmouth Park carried over into the re-imagined version of the R.S.A. and became an important feature in The Deathguards. Thus, much of the Hellmouth Park fiction can be read as background for that novel. There are small descriptive differences, but these could as well be accounted for by the park surviving for some decades with continual minor redecorating and one complete rebuilding, as by the transfer from the fanciers/realizers to the fanciers-free R.S.A. There is in any case about Hellmouth Park something very strange, some evilly mystical element.

  There were always pickets around Hellmouth Theme Park. There had been ever since it opened on April 30, 2023, before Ace and Zoe were born. The pickets were a Hellmouth Park tradition: religious people carrying signs that said, “Sinner Do You Love Your Jesus?” or “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here,” Church of Set people carrying signs that said, “This Is Not Our Satan!”

  Beyond the pickets was the parkground, a hectare of smoking black cinders with imitation dead trees made out of wire sticking up here and there, and a couple of fountains shaped like monsters coughing sluggish red liquid into steaming black birdbaths. Birdsized robot skeletons popped in and out of the birdbaths, but hardly anybody ever saw any real birds land there. Kids said that bats did, late at night.

  The pickets stayed on the walkway and grass strip around the parkground, almost never setting foot on the cinders.

  Dead in the middle of the park ground stood Hellmouth itself, a building forty stories high, shaped like the head of a huge monster with hair and scales both. The back of its skull was curved panes of clear steelglass that showed what was inside: a lot of ferris wheels and tilted merry-go-rounds and loop-de-loops and other stuff that was supposed to look like the workings of an antique mechanical brain.

  The head’s huge wolf-ears were outside elevators that ran up and down the building. Its eyes were a pair of cupolas shut with metal lids in the daytime, but open at night to send out orange fireworks. Below the eyes was a big, snub nose with only one nostril, which always glowed red and sometimes had black shapes moving around inside. Nobody ever seemed able to figure out exactly what the shapes were.

  The monster’s open mouth stretched up for thirty of the forty stories, from a few meters above the ground almost to the nose, and looked like the monster was roaring or screaming. Its tongue lolled out, making a pathway up from the ground into a maze of holographic flames. Finding the way through the maze was part of the game of getting in.

  Ace and Zoe’s first problem tonight, however, was getting past the pickets.

  Hellmouth Park was mainly for adults. Kids could get in—for three times what it cost grownups—but only when “accompanied by at least one adult twenty-five years or older,” and only in the elevators to the amusement rides up in the brainpan. The twins had been up there once, and it was just like any other theme park. A lot uglier than most, but the same old rides. One of the merry-go-rounds tilted almost vertical for most of the ride, making it tricky to stay on some of the monsters it had instead of horses; the ferris wheels jerked a lot; and the roller coasters had some dips and whips that Zoe, who was an expert judge of roller coasters, pronounced the sharpest anywhere in the tricounty area except for the big one in the Sparkler Streak at Perennial Fairgrounds. But if all that people wanted to do was go on plain old rides, they might just as well go to Perennial Fairgrounds or WonderWorlds Theme Park. Everyone knew the real action at Hellmouth was in the parts where kids weren’t allowed, which meant most of the forty stories and, even more, the hundred floors or however many there were underground in the monster’s buried steel and concrete body.

  Those were the parts Ace and Zoe intended to see with the money from their birthday last week. But first they had to get past the pickets. And then they had to get past the people who sold and collected the tickets.

  “The pickets should be zip, anyway,” Zoe remarked.

  Two or three times a year, enough pickets turned out to make a human fence all around the parkground. But most of the time they could only patrol the perimeter one by one or in little groups, stopping every so often at the complimentary coffeebreak autoserve some charity or other had set up for them years ago. The twins’ Uncle Crackerjack said he knew for a fact that it was the Hellmouth Park management that had set up that autoserve and kept it stocked, through a front organization, and that sometimes, when real pickets were too thin, the same park management sent out scabs to fill in.

  “I’d like to try something out of the autoserve,” said Ace. “I still bet it’d serve anybody for free. How can it know the difference?”

  “Later,” Zoe told him. “After we get inside and come out again, then we’ll get something to celebrate.”

  They strolled around the parkground, pretending they were just sightseeing, Ace sticking his hands in his pockets and whistling Lavular Lights rock tunes, Zoe humming. They would have liked to make their run straight across the cinders for the mouth-doorway, but the pickets were closest together right in front. That was where most people approached the building from, and also where the autoserve was.

  Tonight the twins found a break near the northwest corner of the field, on a diagonal line to the building between the mouth and left ear. As soon as Zoe counted a good twenty car lengths between the nearest pickets—a “Not Our Satan” woman coming up and an “Only Jesus Saves” man passing on ahead—she gave her brother the arm signal and they set off running.

  “Hey!” a woman’s voice shouted behind them. “Hey! Kids!”

  They ignored her and went on running across the cinders, glad they had worn running shoes with good, thick soles.

  “Hey, Jeff!” the woman shouted again. “Kids! Stop ’em!”

  “Right, Jazzy!”

  Two sets of adult footfalls started crunching over the cinders after the twins.

  Ace, who had passed Zoe up, paused to swing round one of the imitation dead trees for a look back. Jeff and Jazzy—the “Jesus Saves” man and Satanist woman—had dropped their picket signs and started chasing the twins, but they seemed to be having a tougher time on the cinders. They must be wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

  “Come on!” Zoe snapped, running past Ace’s tree. “Don’t just ...” The rest of her comment was lost as she ran on.

  He soon caught up again. “Don’t just what?”

  “Wait around to get caught.”

  “No glitch.” He put on a spurt and passed her once more, not stopping again till he reached the building.

  He touched it, jerked his hand away, tried touching it again. The molded concrete stung a little, nothing serious, more like touching him back with its unpleasantly gritty surface.

  Zoe ran up, stopped herself with both hands on the building, jumped back, and said, “Hey! All right!”

  Jeff and Jazzy had reached the dead tree and were shouting at them. Jazzy was hopping on one foot. Maybe she’d gotten a cinder in her shoe.

  “Come on,” Zoe repeated, tugging her brother’s sleeve. “Race you to the tongue.”

  He beat her, scrambled up into its middle dip, stayed on one knee and held out a hand to help pull her up beside him. The tongue was made out of something rough, rubbery, and just a little damp. It would have been interesting to try and figure out what it was, but they didn’t have time. Jeff and Jazzy had altered course and almost reached the tip of the tongue, Jeff in the lead and Jazzy half hopping along in stocking feet, carrying her shoes in one hand. “Hey, kids!” Jeff was shouting. “Stop!”

  “Like heck,” Zoe muttered. Still clutching each other’s hands, the twins pelted up the tongue.

  And had to pull up short at the doorway flames. They knew there must be a way through the maze of holoscreens, but where was it? The screens turned out to be hot. Not hot enough to sear skin at a touch, but hot enough that nobody would want to find the edges by feeling.

  The woman on their heels was shouting, “Let’s talk about t
his!” and the man, “You kids don’t want to—”

  “Here!” Zoe announced, pulling her brother in between two licks of flame. The pickets’ shouts stopped like someone had tabbed an “Off” button on them.

  “Wow!” said Ace. “How’d you find it?”

  “Intuition.”

  “Yeah? Well, come on, before they come in after us. Hey, just a nanosecond! I want to test ...” Ace turned and popped one hand at the opening they’d just come through. His fingers bounced back, their tips stinging from the hot hard surface. “Wow!” he repeated. “I knew they moved these screens around to change the maze, but I didn’t know they did it so fast!”

  “Must be automated,” Zoe reasoned. “From below, I bet. Computer-randomized, too, if they’re smart.”

  Ace grabbed her hand again. “We’d better hold tight if we want to keep together.”

  “Yeah.” For once, Zoe interlocked fingers with him and squeezed hard. “If we can make it to the ticket counter, we should be okay.” Beyond the ticket counter, the holoflames were supposed to thin out and leave a fairly direct route to the inner areas.

  Getting past the ticket counter promised to be the tricky part for a pair of kids. Considering the park theme, it couldn’t very well be “honor system,” and anything or anybody that could tell whether or not people paid their entrance fee might also be able to tell kids from adults.

  “Hey!” said Zoe. “Maybe the restrictions on juveniles are all just part of the act, too. Rulebreaking would go right along with the theme, wouldn’t it?”

  “Actually,” said Ace, cautiously feeling the air above some of the flame licks, “I think this maze is interesting. Seems like they aren’t just plain oblong screens. They seem to change shape right along with the flames, and the flames are always changing. Fast. I wonder how they do it?”

  “Yeah,” said Zoe, who just took it for granted that science and modern technology could do anything, “and I wonder if we’re going to find that ticket counter before those gunzhos back there find us.”

  She was right. The twins could hear Jeff and Jazzy again, and that must mean they had come into the maze too. “I didn’t think any of the pickets ever came in so far,” Ace protested.

  “They’re People with a Purpose,” said Zoe. “And right now the Purpose is to stop us. Come on, brother.”

  The twins weaved and dodged their way through the constantly changing maze, while the pickets’ shouts followed them, sometimes sounding nearer and sometimes farther away, seeming to come from the left, then the right, then the left again, and once or twice from somewhere up ahead. Ace wondered how the park people moved the screens around at the same time people were going through, and decided it had to involve magnets on the underside of the floor. But that meant the magnets or metal strips at the bottoms of the screen were really well hidden. He could have understood how it worked if the flames seemed to be coming up from logs or lines of coal, but they seemed to shoot up straight from the floor. It wasn’t holographic projection over a clear area, either, because Ace could feel the solid screen every time he brushed against a flame. People couldn’t just hold their breath and run through the flames. They had to find a way between them.

  The maze area might not be quite hot enough to scramble eggs or boil water, but it felt about twice as hot as a record-breaking summer scorcher in the sun. The twins were as good as swimming inside their clothes when Zoe stepped on something squeaky and all at once a green thing shot up from the floor in front of them.

  The green thing was a grinning monster that looked remotely like a dog sitting up on its haunches to beg, about a meter tall, made out of some kind of slick, rubbery stuff. “Pay or stay!” it barked at them in a growling computer voice. Then it tilted its head back and opened its mouth wide for their money.

  “‘Pay or stay’?” asked Ace.

  “Yeah,” Zoe figured out. “Pay your money or they’ll make you stay here forever.”

  The twins went closer and found the prices etched on the monster’s teeth:

  ADULTS

  25 & up—$5

  NEARLIES

  16 to 25— $10

  NO KIDS THROUGH HERE!!!

  7-16 take your adults to Ears

  Under 7, GO HOME

  “We’re supposed to take our adults around to the ear elevators,” said Zoe, “where, as I remember, they have to pay fifteen tridols apiece for us.”

  “Huh!” said Ace. “Well, do we pretend to be sixteen, or—”

  “We pretend to be twenty-five and up. It’s cheaper.”

  Each of the twins had a ten tridol bill from Aunt Harriet and a five from Uncle Crackerjack. Remembering that if they waited too long Jeff and Jazzy might find them, Ace pulled out what he thought was his five and fed the dog. A whoosh of suction gulped the bill down right away.

  “Thanks,” said Zoe. “You just paid for both of us.”

  “Huh?” Ace checked his clip. His blue five remained. He had accidentally fed the dog his green ten. The colors looked a lot alike in the light from the holoflames.

  “Oh, here!” Grinning, Zoe held out her five to him. “Your change.”

  “Naw, forget it. This one’s on me.”

  “No, take it.”

  As he hesitated, they heard the pickets shout again, somewhere to the right and sounding pretty close, like they might be able to head the twins off even now.

  “All right,” said Zoe, stuffing the bill back in her pocket and catching her brother’s hand, “we can fight about it later.”

  “Right. I’ll let you buy me dinner or something. Hey, aren’t the flames supposed to part for us and show us the way in, now we’ve paid?”

  “Not part for us. Make a tunnel for us, and I think this is where it begins, right here.”

  Sure enough, big holoflames just beyond the money-eating dog seemed to be arching up and meeting at the top as if to form a long tunnel. Squeezing hands, the twins took three or four steps forward.

  And the floor dropped out from under them.

  They slid down a wide chute that felt longer than a football field, accelerating all the way, until they popped to a stop in a big tub of loose feathers.

  “Help!” Zoe shouted—once—and then kept her mouth shut. The feathers were worse than quicksand, and tickly and prickly besides. She caught one glimpse of Ace’s arm going under before she had to shut her eyes. This is ridiculous! she thought. Feathers, for the love of Elvis! Plain, harmless, downy feathers. The kind that make the most expensive pillows. Lost in an ocean of feathers worth a fortune.

  The tub had a bottom, because her feet came to rest on something hard that stopped the sinking. And it wasn’t completely impossible to breathe through the feathers, just very, very, very hard. It’d kill them eventually, she knew, trying to move her hand up through the mass in order to get the ticklish down out of her nostrils. How deep was it? And how far to the sides? The tub had to have sides. She’d glimpsed them on the way down. Maybe the sides would have handholds to climb up. Unable to talk to her brother, she thought at him as she started groping and pushing forward, hoping he was doing the same.

  Her hand found a hard vertical surface. She felt it eagerly. Smooth and slick, as high as she could reach ...

  Something scaly closed around her wrist and hauled her up and over the side to let her fall coughing on a floor so rough that when she picked herself up, still coughing, she found her knees bleeding a little. Ace was already up, still hacking and wheezing and picking feathers off his face.

  In front of the twins stood a floater who had to be at least three meters tall, dressed in a corny rubber devil costume that looked skintight but bulged in funny ways over odd places as if whatever he was really like underneath was a lot worse than the costume.

  “Ah, ha!” he said. “Which one didn’t pay, and apologies of the management to the one who did.”

 
“What d’ye mean?” Ace demanded. “We both paid!”

  “Unh-unh. Sorry, sprout,” said the guy in the devil suit, sounding anything but sorry. “Our tickers say different.”

  “I put in a ten! Five for each of us.”

  “A.,” said the floater. “I might buy you two as sixteen-year-olds, if you bribed me enough, but no way in the Devil’s underearth I’m going to buy you as twenty-five-year olds. B. It doesn’t matter anyway, since we never bend the rule about every customer feeding our poochie a separate bundle. At least one bill per customer.”

  “Then you should warn people about that on your sign!” Zoe protested.

  “A. We’re Hellmouth. We don’t have to play fair. B. People don’t read signs anyway. You’d be amazed how many people never even read far enough to notice we charge more for sixteen- to twenty-five-year olds than for twenty-five and up. Okay, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Who paid and who didn’t?”

  The twins looked at each other.

  “I’m waiting,” said the guy. “And no conferencing about it, either. I want an answer ... NOW!” He banged his pitchfork on the ringing metal floor.

  The twins used their oldest trick. Each of them pointed at the other and Zoe said, “He did,” while Ace said, “She did!”

  “Uh-huh! Okay, pigeons, that little piece of noble generosity lands you both in the soup.” Tucking his pitchfork under one arm, he clamped a hand on one of each of their shoulders. His fingernails were sharp as talons…and he had six fingers to a hand.

  “Hey, wait a minute!” Ace yelped, doing some rapid mental arithmetic. “We’ve got twenty tridols. That be enough to bribe you with?”

  “A. You’d need ten of it to pay the regular entry fee for whoever didn’t pay the first time. B. There’s no way in the Devil’s underearth you can bribe me with a lousy ten tridollars. Miss and Master, this way, if you please.”

  His hands and arms like metal clamps on their shoulders, he turned around, forcing them to turn with him, and started marching them toward one of a bunch of tunnel mouths, all of which looked grungy and gummy, dirty gray holes in a wall the color of a dusty old junkyard TV screen. This didn’t feel like adventure, and the twins’ idea of adventure didn’t include being forced into it. But trying to hold back against this floater in the devil costume was like trying to hold back against a whole football team.