The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  She accepted them, found the blank sheet, and wrote so quickly that October wondered if she’d formed all the letters. She took longer detaching the sheet and fluttering it graciously at her one-person fan club.

  Skipper took both sheets, Pascal’s with so much more obvious enthusiasm that October actually forgot the way Rodney had been trying to act out his costume.

  “Mind if I have a look at that sketchpad?” the mock vampire asked, leaning over the table and tapping the mock inquisitor’s shoulder.

  “Be my guest. Keep it, if you like. All used up, anyway.”

  To October, it looked like a notebook filled with doodles and scribbles. But then, what did he know about art? He thought, I should’ve told her that if they thought skinny people were the only ones who should wear Dracula costumes, they wouldn’t make them for medium builds.

  That made him think, Well, at least The Pascal didn’t point out how cheap my costume is, how mass-produced, how full of wrinkles straight from the box ... Of course, she may just consider all that too obvious for her profound commentary, but at least she didn’t say it aloud. She said something else instead. And with that incredible cape she’s wearing ...

  Aloud, he told Rodney, “Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to take away anything you need. Isn’t this like a writer’s notebook of ideas or something? For future reference?”

  “Not for me. All the value, such as it is, was in the exercise. Nope. More like a little schoolkid’s alphabet workbook. If you want it, keep it.”

  October didn’t want it, but he heard too much doubt and despair in the other’s voice. Lord, he thought, is this what I’ll be coming to in ... what? Ten or twenty years? No—he’s an artist, or wanted to be one, anyway. What do any of us average, uncreative jackies know about artistic doldrums? “Well…thanks!” he told the artist, acting as eager and gratified as he could. “Thanks a lot! This is really something.” (Better not lay it on too thick. Don’t want to risk sounding phony.) “I’ll have to find a safe pocket for it.”

  “Hi, everybody.”

  Another new voice. What is this? October thought, spinning to face the door again. Is the park doing it on purpose—aiming to pop new people in as if they were materializing out of nowhere? Did my entrance hit the first three like this? My guide melt away before they saw him at the door?

  This latest arrival first impressed herself on October’s vision as a mound of gold and green. Jewelry—masses of it, in chains, loops, and links—necklaces, belts, bracelets, and rings, mostly gold in all its shades, with here and there some strands of silver or platinum, dashed over generously with glittering gemstones and gleaming pearls. A glittery green cocktail dress provided the background. The wearer herself eventually resolved into a tallish, plumpish, youngish lady with darkish skin and dark red hair full of jeweled combs and things. Except for a pair of large, dark brown eyes, her face was plain and looked bare of make-up; but it took October’s eyes awhile to get past her huge, curling earrings and reach her face.

  “I’m Aurea Goldsmith,” she went on, too eagerly. Her eagerness suggested a very shy person—despite all the jewelry—trying to force a show of good fellowship.

  “Good evening.” La Pascal sounded like a monarch extending largesse.

  “I’m the licensed gemologist and artisan at my sister’s shop, The Jewel Box,” Aurea added. “My! Don’t you all look…er, nice? Oh! Oh, my, I’m sorry, I must be in the wrong room.”

  “You are not the first of us to make the mistake of thinking so,” Pascal informed her. “Have you no faith in the discretion of Hellmouth Park?”

  “It’s probably our company she objects to,” Rodney grumbled.

  No, October thought, she’s spotted our stag-party talent back there, and it’s making her nervous. Afraid of what a backward glance at them might do to his own posture, he stepped forward with right hand extended. “The Jewel Box? That’s only about five or six spots down from the Games Corner—the place where I work. We must’ve seen each other around. My name’s Bradley. October Bradley.”

  “October? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named that before. Oh—because your birthday is this month?”

  “As a matter of fact, tomorrow.”

  As if to keep her gaze off the erotic dancers, she kept it glued to his face. Plain Jane, he thought, relaxing. Not ugly, though. Comfortably homely. In the “homelike” sense.

  Rodney tried his cough again. “And what, exactly, are you dressed up as, if we might ask? A walking treasure chest?”

  “What? Oh. Oh, no, as a matter of fact, I’m not really dressed up as anything at all. I don’t know why they gave me a red ticket. Two demons—I noticed them whispering together, pointing at me—and then one of them came up and put it in my hand and motioned for me to follow him. Or her? Sometimes you can’t quite tell, you know. I wondered if maybe I ought to explain about not really coming in costume, but it all happened so quickly ...”

  Pascal had stepped closer. “I believe you. At least, that is hardly costume jewelry. Though the dress is ... rather remarkable. By the style, I should guess it to be an heirloom.”

  “Why, thank you! Just a little thing I lucked into at a New-to-You sale. I think it may be a real antique.”

  Aurea sounded so genuinely complimented that October wondered if he had only imagined the irony in Pascal’s speech. After all, didn’t studies always prove that women possessed much greater social sensitivity than men? But Aurea turned slowly, as if delighted to show off her rummage-sale find.

  On a larger woman—she’d have to be a woman of what October thought the poets called “Junoesque” proportions—it might have been slinky. On Aurea, comfortably padded and tallish for a woman though she was, the dress still had to be a couple of sizes too large. The straight skirt swung a little, the long sleeves hung down well over the wrists, and the whole thing looked a little like a tube hitched in here and there by the belts and bracelets and so on. The most eye-catching thing about the dress was that it resembled scales: overlapping, semi-flexible green sequins the size of quarters, shining and glittering until—once noticed—they almost drew attention away from the jewelry.

  Almost. In a way, the jewelry drew attention away from itself. One of the necklace medallions was an owl with huge pearls for eyes. Aside from that, individual details vanished in the golden mass.

  “Very effective,” Pascal pronounced. “But, if you don’t mind the suggestion—though perhaps I should resist the temptation to scatter my pearls, so few people value them—next time, choose only a few pieces and wear dark velvet to set them off. Seventeenth-century jewelers may have supposed that foil made the best background for gemstones, but I must confess some surprise that a modern gemologist should share that opinion.”

  This time Aurea could not mistake the tone. She stopped three-quarters of the way around, her back still to Pascal, but her profile to October.

  He saw her blink, saw her lips quiver and tighten. He started to say, “Well, I like it—”

  The lights went out.

  All of them at once. Even the candles on the table—as cleanly as if switched off.

  They were in a concrete room several basements below ground level. Blackness didn’t fall. It didn’t close in. It just ... was. A black, smothering nothingness. No more dimensions, no proportions—for an instant, no more sense of anything or anyone else at all. Only the total absence of light pressing in like a physical weight on every square centimeter of flesh, seeming to squeeze the top of the head from eyes on up tight against the roof of the skull ...

  “What the hell’s going on?” The voice belonged, October thought, to either Jason or Rodney.

  Somebody screamed. Somebody else, probably in an effort to ease the tension, started making the kind of ooohing sounds that go up when a theater full of kids gets dark. Either Rodney or Jason ordered, “Stop that! Dammit, stop it!”

  The
other voice paused to giggle, than ooh’d louder. October joined in, trying to vent some of the pressure out of his own skull.

  Cassandra Pascal’s voice sliced through, maybe the only one there that could have been identified at once: “‘Hell,’ I believe, is the operative word.”

  “Oh, no! Please, everybody, let’s just keep calm.” That voice, October guessed, was Aurea’s. “It must be just a power failure. Does anyone have a match?”

  “Power failure, my ass!” said Jason or Rodney. “Damn practical joke, compliments of the management.”

  “We should demand our money back,” said Rodney or Jason.

  “Who’s got a match?” the first power-failure voice repeated plaintively. “Oh, please, somebody has to have a match! Or a lighter?”

  “If it lasts, how do we get out of here? How do we find the stairs? Are there any stairs, or is it all just elevators?” October hadn’t wanted to speak aloud, wasn’t even sure whether he had until someone responded.

  A throaty chuckle—the woman in skintights?—followed by the words, “Get out, honey? Why would you want to get out of here just when the real fun is about to start?”

  A gong sounded, deep and ringing, like the gong struck at the beginning of some film studio or other’s movies. It sounded again. Again. Except for the gong, silence fell. Everyone must be counting. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve—

  A scream. The earlier scream had been kidstuff to it. Horrible, agonized, scarcely human, screeching like a knife on raw nerves, surrounding itself with noises of thumping, thrashing, collapsing—

  “Who is that? In pain?”

  “Better not be somebody else’s idea of another goddamn joke.”

  “No! Can’t you hear?” This voice actually sounded pleased. “Somebody’s really hurt!”

  And the shrieking and thumping going on over all the other voices, all the sounds of people starting to bump around in the dark…and a new smell rising to October’s nostrils—a warm, wet, salty smell. The darkness no longer stifled him. His eyes must be getting used to it. Another minute, and he should be able to see through it, to see where the new smell, the smell that made all the refreshments on the table nothing but a mildly nauseating memory, was coming from.

  “I have a match!” Cassandra Pascal announced.

  “Then why the hell don’t you use it?”

  “Silence, slave. Why waste a match before its time? Here!”

  A spot of blinding redness jumped from her hand to one of the skull candles on the table. She lifted the candle, held it high. On her palm, it looked like a real skull, the light staring from its eyes to turn her smile—her smile? with that scream going on?—into an evil leer.

  The lounge chair lay tumbled on its side. One leg caught under it, Skipper humped and thrashed on the floor, still shrieking. From the graphic vivisection of the body mask, blood splattered onto anything that stood near enough, blood pooled on the floor, blood pumped out of a loose-dangling vein ...

  Hardly aware of moving, October found himself on his knees at Skipper’s side, stuffing the end of the vein into his mouth, drinking eagerly, blissfully, of the rich, red, real blood.

  Chapter II

  Chances were that Skipper never even noticed October sucking—a relatively insignificant pain among the horrendous ones of having been laid open and torn half apart. Even though, in order to drink, October had to sprawl across the victim’s thrashing body, holding down limbs and torso, his sucking probably did not increase Skipper’s struggles. Eyes closed, he gave himself over to the pure sensual delight of swallowing fresh blood, hot from the vein, as fast as it flooded his mouth.

  After a few swallows, the struggles seemed to abate and the screams subside, as if the victim might finally be relaxing into a coma. Then a sudden convulsion wrenched the vein from October’s mouth. Skipper’s redoubled howls deafening his ears, he opened his eyes and, scrabbling for the blood vessel, saw that he was not alone on Skipper’s body. The woman in skintights was kneeling on the victim’s legs, gleefully burrowing the fingers of both her hands through the exposed bowels.

  The sight was too much. Jumping up, October struck the woman away with a two-arm thrust to her sternum. She fell backward, wrenching handfuls of intestine with her, landing hard on her behind, the wet, pulsating coils stretching from her fingers back to the bleeding abdomen. Skipper gave one last horrible, rattling scream and lay suddenly quiet, right eye fixed in a frozen stare. The left eye was gone. It had been hanging from an empty, bloody socket on the rubber mask—it must have been punctured or pulled completely off when the rubber mask became reality.

  October turned away, choking and gagging. His mind wanted to vomit, but his stomach felt too comfortable, despite everything, to give up its meal.

  Cassandra Pascal still stood beside the table, skull candle in one hand and pitchfork in the other, her face unreadable. Rodney Paynter hovered behind the table, somehow looking taller than before, his arms folded into his sleeves and his expression full of dignity and righteous wrath. Jason James hovered some paces away, watching in stunned horror—the only one of them reacting like a normal human being. The only one? What about Aurea? No ... she seemed to have disappeared. October hoped she had missed the worst part.

  Jason broke the silence. “My God!”

  “Yes! God!” cried The Pascal, flinging her arms wide. The flame—which was throwing out an incredible amount of light for one candle—flickered, making shadows jump and shudder throughout the room for a few seconds. “You allow such things, and wonder why anyone should rebel against Your rule?”

  “Blasphemy!” the inquisitor exclaimed, pointing one finger at her.

  “Oh, shut up, you phony pseudo-intellectual for the masses,” Jason told her at almost the same moment. “Wanting people to call you ‘The’ Pascal, like there hadn’t ever been any real philosopher of that name before—”

  “Silence, you!” she replied coldly, pointing her pitchfork at Jason. “You know not whom you address. You,” she added, turning the fork in Rodney’s direction without glancing back at him, “may proceed, for the time being.”

  He scowled. “As if I needed your authorization.”

  “As if you did not.”

  “Are we all crazy?” October burst out. “Standing around arguing like this after what’s happened to Skipper—”

  “Delightful, isn’t it?” the woman in skintights sang out, adding a high laugh of sheer enjoyment.

  October looked at her again. The reflective fabric on her hands, feet, neck, shoulders, and crotch, the red glass in her navel, now seemed to be real flame…though burning without adding any extra light to the scene. Still sitting spraddle-legged on the floor, she disengaged her fiery hands from Skipper’s bowels, laughed again, and daintily began to lick each finger in turn. For the first time, October noticed how abnormally long her fingernails were.

  “Oh, lord!” he whispered. “Poor Skipper!” But he still could not vomit.

  “My God!” Jason repeated, gaping at her. “What are you?”

  “Succuba,” Skintights answered with yet another titter.

  “Succubus!” Rodney thundered, pointing his finger at her. “Foul demon in the form but not the substance of woman, to suck out men’s souls in foul temptations of the flesh.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m not all female, big boy?” she taunted back, springing to her feet with legs apart, planting her hands on her hips, and presenting first him and then Jason with a full frontal view. “Succuba is my name, and I’ll be making you want me again before we’re through. And again! And again! See if I don’t!”

  Jason choked, “I’ll smash my dick first!”

  Succuba laughed. Jason turned his back on her and began scrubbing his right hand over the tattoos on his left arm. Cassandra Pascal held her pose like a statue and looked on with frozen scorn.

 
The inquisitor wore a cross around his neck. Holding it out on its long chain, he brandished it at Succuba, who laughed again even as she melodramatically pretended to cower. “Hell-spawn!” Rodney declaimed. “Demon in this world but not of it, I have no jurisdiction over thee.” He whirled toward October. “But thou, vile spawn of earth’s darkest forces, art another matter!”

  A wave of pain reached October ... like a protracted electrical charge airborne from the cross to his body. He flinched and recovered—it was still fairly mild, thanks to the distance, but he sensed what it would be up close. Taking a step backward, he tried to sidle out of direct line with the cross, but found the air at his sides behaving like a tough though invisible membrane, trapping him. Retreating another step, he tried again. The inquisitor stepped forward, matching him.

  “You would have no jurisdiction at all,” said The Pascal, “were it not given to you from Below.”

  “Silence, Parent of Lies!” The inquisitor turned his cross on her.

  Her laugh had a more majestic sound than Succuba’s, and it echoed more scornfully. “Whose world do you think you are in, Churchman? Who do you think is amused to let you go on with your silly little games?”

  “‘Silly little games’?” October shouted, glancing at Skipper’s mangled corpse. “Look! One of us is dead! Was that staged? What the hell is happening here?”

  Rodney started turning back toward him. October dodged to the right, looking around for cover before the beam or whatever it was the cross threw out could trap him again.

  “Here, big boy!” Succuba chanted gleefully. “Get thee behind me!”

  Her? Smeared all over with Skipper’s blood and burning with lightless fire? October shuddered away in the other direction so fast he stumbled, couldn’t catch himself, fell sprawling on the stone floor, her laugh grating his eardrums.

  “Skipper!” the inquisitor sneered. “I know the cause of that young scholar’s punishment. I learned it from Skipper’s own lips before any of you others had joined us two in this room. It was the deadly sin of sloth: luxury and indolence so deeply graven in that youthful soul that the sinner could not even recognize the sin as matter for shame. Almost, Skipper boasted of having slipped through the early years of schooling on mediocre marks, of having learned the art of getting better grades by lazily pandering to the biases of vain instructors, of long hours spent in sports and gymnasium workouts used as a pretext to avoid academic studies—”