“Bad things. Really bad things.”
“Uh…the police! We can get out of here right away and go for the police.”
Omar shook his head. “And get laughed at. Maybe slapped in the cooler. For being drunk at our age.”
“We aren’t drunk.”
“We’ve been drinking. That’s enough for the pollies. At our age. We aren’t underage for here, but we are outside. To be drinking.”
“Then what—”
“Look, Drac.” Omar moved his clutch to Clement’s arm. “They say they’ll let him go if you’ll ...”
“Take his place?”
“Sign a contract or something. Go to work for them.”
“Go to work for them?” the vampire repeated, very slowly.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, for you. Maybe you could just make it a summer job or something.”
“Look, Omar, how bad could they…do anything to him? I mean, we’ve got laws in this country. They can’t—”
“Bad things, Drac! Listen, I mean it! People can disappear—kids, especially—and a lot of the time the law can’t do anything about it. And even when it can, it’s too late for the kid who disappeared.”
When it was all over, Omar was going to swear he couldn’t remember ever coming up to the kiddieland at all. Sure, he was going to say, we got in trouble about Ted being underage, and for a little while it looked pretty serious, but when I pointed out the trouble they could get in with the authorities, they let us go all right. So this was about where the dream—if it was a dream—would have started. At the time, it never crossed Clement’s mind that the person standing beside him on the Nightmare Wheel could be anybody except Omar, or anything but dead serious about the danger Ted was in.
“All right.” The vampire nodded. “I’ll go ... uh…talk to them. But I still think you’d better go for the police while—”
“Shh! Right, Drac.” Omar slipped away.
Just in time, because the Nightmare Wheel was speeding up again. Maybe it never came to a complete stop, just slowed down between rides. Again Clement tried sliding off his horse, and again he couldn’t make it. He wasn’t sure, but he thought it looked like the floor of the turntable was spinning faster than the horses who stood on it. And sparking, like a huge friction toy. Not smoking? No, just sparking. Anything would spark, going this fast. Clement would spark, if he fell off. “I’ve got to go talk to them,” he muttered, hanging on tight. “I’ve got to go find ... Ted ...” But not now. The minute it slowed down again, but not ... yet ... Except he was getting too dizzy—the wheel was spinning so fast now, it seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, just one little point, just like spinning around and around all by yourself like a top until you drop—
And Clement dropped.
He woke up in somebody’s bedroom, very plain, just one window, and one four-poster bed on bare wood floorboards. The window had four panes divided by strips of wood. The pale, flimsy curtains were tied back as if on purpose to let the moonlight pour through onto the bed.
Not that the vampire’s night sight would have needed so much help. There could have been blackout curtains over the window, and he’d still have been able to see that the one person in the bed was a woman with the looks of a screenstar. One of those screenstars who can play the sweet innocent or the hooker, either one.
She gave a little sigh and rolled over in her sleep, long blond hair falling away to expose a lovely length of neck. He wanted…he wanted ...
There were some writers who said that there was only one way a male vampire could perform: bite all the way into the jugular and suck. Clement was as sure as a—darnit—male virgin could be that they were wrong. He got hard evidence just looking at the lovely female swells beneath the sheet.
He stepped closer and looked down, breathing fast. He’d guess her to be in her twenties. Her mouth was slightly open, and a soft snore came out of it, gentle as a sigh. God! he didn’t want to be a virgin anymore! His hand almost going to his zipper, he thought furiously about falling on top of her, his mouth on hers, opening it all the way ... Her eyes would come open. Her arms would wrap around him, hugging. Her tongue would play around with his, and then ...
Or maybe not. More likely she would struggle, scream if she got her mouth free, knee him, maybe use martial arts. And rape was just about as bad as murder. Disgusting and perverted. Doing It had to be a lot more fun with somebody who was willing and eager.
He sort of wished he hadn’t been so quick to shrug off the business about vampires having hypnotic powers. It might have been worth a little more practice, after all. Meanwhile, he started backing away from the bed, looking around for the door ...
There was a sharp gasp. He looked back at her. Her eyes were wide open, staring at him.
“Oh!” she gasped again. “Spare my virtue! I beg you!” She sat up, threw off the sheet, and sprawled herself across the bed on her stomach, all in one motion, propping herself up on one elbow and craning her head to bare the side of her neck at him. “I beg you, help yourself to my blood, but spare my maidenhead!”
Why the heck couldn’t she have put it the other way? Hell, her blood didn’t even sound appetizing right now. Did other people think vampires could never get their fill? His stomach was still a little queasy from double helpings at supper, beer and whiskey afterward, and half a stick of cotton candy. But her body…her nightgown was about as flimsy as cloth could get without falling apart, and up around the top, where she was propping herself up, she might as well not be wearing anything ... He forced himself to take another step back, looking around again for the door.
There wasn’t any.
She scrabbled across the bed, hit the floor with her bare feet, and started toward him, still babbling about taking her blood but sparing her virtue.
There couldn’t not be a door. There had to be some way in and out, didn’t there? Giving her as wide a margin as he could, he circled for the window. By the time he got there, he was almost running.
There wasn’t any glass. He put his hand right through one of the “panes” and…touched the moon.
It was all a fake! Moon and all, the sky was painted on a backdrop not even a hand’s length outside the window.
“Drain my lifeblood drop by drop, if you will,” she was pleading, coming up behind him, “but oh! spare my virginity!” She was starting to sound like a bad actress.
But looking like a darned good one—no, like one of those who didn’t need to be able to act at all, as long as their looks held out. Her virginity was all but glaring out at him from beneath her gauzy nightgown, and when he tried wrenching his gaze up away from it, the next thing he saw was her nipples, standing out like little mountains ...
She was almost on him. He turned back to the window—trying to remember when he’d turned around to look at her—and thinking that he was skinny, maybe if he could get through the opening he could squeeze out between the sky and the wall—he grabbed at the wood between what would have been window panes if there’d been any glass—
And snatched his hand back in a hurry. The woodframe window formed a cross. Usually crosses didn’t bother him, but this one felt red hot. Obviously one of those times ...
It isn’t fair! he thought, dodging out from beneath her arms. She’s the one who’s after me!
He ran up against a corner, knocked his head a good one, and found himself staggering into some kind of windowless dormer nook. She was on top of him at once, arms curling around him, one set of fingertips digging into his shoulder and the other set into the small of his back.
“Drink as much as you want,” she murmured huskily. “But please, oh please—”
It was too much. He opened his mouth and lunged up at her slightly parted lips.
At the last second, she turned her head and jerked in close so that his fangs hit her neck, sinking in.
He didn’t think t
hey hit the vein, but he still got a good, warm trickle ... sweet, heady ... if he’d been at all hungry, he wasn’t sure he’d have tried to disengage right away. As it was, he had so much trouble—she was moaning and squeezing and he was afraid of tearing skin and sinews or something if he made a wrong move getting his fangs out—his lower teeth were already pressing against something fleshy—God, was it her little female adam’s apple?—he couldn’t have gotten a better anchor for a bite if he’d wanted one, and he didn’t think he could stretch his jaws any wider ... so he kept getting trickle after trickle of hot human blood, straight from the source. It made his head swim worse than the Old Crow had, and that made it even harder trying to concentrate on getting out ...
At last there was a horrible grinding feel and a sort of tearing pop, and his head fell free, while she whipped her hand to her neck and started screaming.
He tried to sit up. Everything seemed to spin around him, and the floor started caving in under him ...
This time he came to gradually. The first thing he felt was pain. Terrible pain. Not terrible enough to sober him up after that woman’s blood ... Holy Mother, had she been drinking something? Smoking something? Injecting something? But terrible enough to hurt right through the waves of giddiness and haze of so-drunk-I-don’t-much-care.
And then there was the smell ... Heavy, rich, so thick it was hard to breathe. He thought groggily that it was his own breath, that that was what drinking blood straight from somebody’s neck did to your breath. Worse than onions, because you couldn’t smell onions on your own breath. This must be the stench Stoker talked about in Dracula’s lairs. And yet, if it hadn’t been quite so heavy, and if he hadn’t been nauseated anyway with pain and overindulgence, it might have smelled rather good.
He tried to move, and only rocked a little.
Thinking he finally had the source of the pain traced to his armpits and a line across his back, he opened his eyes to check.
He was in an underground grotto, cave walls all around, glowing a faint red like embers that were thinking about burning out. He was hanging…this took him a little while and a little painful, giddy turning of his head to figure out…hanging by a clothesline beneath his armpits. The line was strung tight from wall to wall, though both its ends were hidden from his sight. His wrists were tied or handcuffed in back, to what seemed to be…as well as he could feel anything, his arms were numb all the way down and his fingers felt like thick round blocks of wood ... some kind of metal bar, and he thought his ankles seemed to be hooked together to the other end of the bar, holding his knees slightly bent.
And the cavern was full of water—a wide, dark pool that covered the whole floor beneath him, with no dry footing in sight anywhere. He couldn’t tell how deep it was, but it seemed to be steaming just a little, so it must be some kind of a hot spring, and didn’t hot springs have to be fairly deep?
He thought his toes were almost touching the water. A little more thought, and he figured out that if he slipped around upside down on the clothesline, his head would be under the water. Unless it was very shallow, and then his head would probably hit rock. He guessed it was largely the weight of the bar between his hands and feet that was keeping him upright, and he made up his mind to stop wiggling around.
Then it hit him like a flood that the liquid down there wasn’t water. It was blood. That was where the smell was coming from.
At first he felt like somebody still gorged from Thanksgiving dinner hung up above a pool of gravy. Or like a piece of batter-fried sweet cheese on a toothpick, about to be dipped into chocolate fudge fondue. The horror that would have sickened most people at once right through their souls, only crept in on him bit by bit through the brain. When it did hit, it boomed around and around doubled by the horror of its having taken so long to hit. Was that what being a vampire did to you? After five crummy years?
Human blood ... other people might be able to hope it was animal blood, but Clement could smell the difference, and this had to be almost entirely human. Where had it all come from? Out of whose veins?
A dream! he thought. This has got to be a dream! And he started running his mind through all the tests.
But if there were any hundred-percent reliable tests, he couldn’t think of them. He’d boned up on dream research, back when he was still trying to find some other possible explanation for the experience that had changed his dietary needs and made his fangs grow. There’d been a time when people thought you could pinch yourself. Not that he could have done it now, with his hands in the condition they were, but that had been about the first dream superstition to get blasted, anyway. You couldn’t use color, sound, smell, touch, taste, or pain, either—even today, there were people who still thought nobody ever dreamed in anything but black and white visuals, but in fact, people could dream every sense and every sensation. Memories didn’t work, either—any dream could manufacture any memories and the dreamer wouldn’t know the difference. If you could do something you couldn’t do when you were awake, like breathing under water or turning into a bat and flying, that proved you were dreaming—assuming your memory wasn’t kidding you about what you could do when you were awake—but if you couldn’t do anything like that, it didn’t necessarily prove you weren’t dreaming.
The only test he could figure out was, if it had been a dream, he should have gone a lot farther with the woman in the bedroom, and not in her neck, either! But that test brought him to the conclusion he didn’t want—that he was awake. No, this had to be a dream. It just had to! Just, maybe not my dream? he thought hopefully. I’m in Hellmouth Park. Maybe I’m wandering around in the catacombs of somebody else’s mind? Whose?
A booming sound cut off his thoughts. Loud as being inside a big churchbell. It echoed around and around in the grotto, and was still reverberating when he started to hear the hissing and the bubbles.
They were coming up from beneath the blood near the far side of the grotto, where the ceiling lifted in a low archway into the next cavern. He had just finally spotted the bubbles, when the whole surface broke and a boulder heaved into sight.
It rose higher and higher, until he could see that it looked like the back of a giant head. When the base of the skull appeared, the formation stopped rising. Then it turned, slowly, counterclockwise. A profile came into sight—domed forehead, craggy brow, drooping eyelid, aquiline nose, long upper lip, chin still beneath the surface. The head filled its half of the grotto, from the top of the pool almost to the ceiling.
It went on turning until it could look straight at him. Then the eyelids lifted all the way. The eyes were blazing red irises and bright white pupils, set in smoky black eyeballs.
Rays of light seemed to shoot out of the pupils, and for a second he thought they were like physical spikes. Then for a minute he thought that, for the first time since he got turned into a vampire, he could see the reflection of his own face, in those red irises.
“Clement Batory Czarny!” the head boomed. When it spoke, its lower lip dipped beneath the surface, and blood washed in and out of its mouth. It went on, “We are disappointed in you.”
Clement began, “Well, I’m ...” stopped when he heard the squeak in his voice, swallowed hard, and tried again, speaking as deeply as he could, “Well, maybe I’m disappointed in you, too!”
“Still on probation, and already you have broken the terms of your contract.”
“Con - contract?”
“That customer came to be bitten. She paid her money to feel the bite of a vampire.”
“What contract? When did—”
“She paid for you to drink her blood.”
“Then she needs a headshrink! And so do you—”
“You failed to give satisfaction. Worse, you have put the reputation of Hellmouth Park at serious risk.”
“Look, I never saw any dumb contract, I never signed any—”
With a drenching splash, a gia
nt hand sprang up out of the pool, grabbed Clement’s feet, and tipped him upside down on the line, bringing his face to a stop just centimeters above the surface.
Mindless, paralyzed panic.
The first clear thought that seeped back into Clement’s brain was, “Oh, God, if he lets go of my feet! They were throbbing with pain from the strong pinchhold, but that pain was a lifeline.
“Signed?” shouted the head. “Do you think we still need your puny fingers guiding a puny pen over some puny piece of paper? You bound yourself to us by oral agreement. On the strength of that contract, we have already let your pitiful cousin go!”
All Clement could remember agreeing to was that he’d “talk to them.” But this didn’t seem like the time to bring that argument up. “Uh ... look ...” he began, and swallowed again, trying not to vomit into the blood. It was a blend, a real stew, A, B, and O all mixed up together, Rh positive diluted with Rh negative ... God, it was just making him even sicker! “Uh ... look ... I’ve ... uh…got to be hungry. I ... uh ... I think I need a little practice ... But anyway, I couldn’t do it unless I was hungry…but I’d need a little practice, anyway ...”
The head said softly and sarcastically, “You need practice.” The way Clement was hanging, he couldn’t see the expression on its face. But the grip on his feet seemed to loosen a little.
“Look! ... uh ... Uh, don’t you have some other kind of ... uh ...jobs going?”
“For a person of your talents?”
“I can ... I could ... uh ... I’m a pretty good singer!” When the head made no immediate response, Clement swallowed again and started singing, “The Phantom of Your Dreams” from Murphy’s Phantom of the Opera. He managed to get as far as the verse about riding through the catacombs of his mind when the head shouted,
“Call yourself a vampire, do you?”
And the hand pushed his face a centimeter closer to the surface.
“An underage one!” Clement squeaked.
“What?” It felt like the hand was hesitating.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 102
