“Listen to yourself!” October screamed. “That deserved this?”
“More: Skipper boasted of a scheme to stagnate in the English department of some small university, perceiving that to be the easiest and most nearly effortless livelihood available. A clear intention of wasting an entire lifetime in idle indolence!”
Pascal chuckled. “What a pity Skipper won’t be able to carry it through! In its petty way, that sort of warped perception can cause damage.”
“Are you all crazy?” October exclaimed. “Are the Hell’s Angel and I the only sane—”
“NO!” shouted Jason. Spinning round again, his arm tattoos rubbed almost raw, he hurled himself across the room and seized October by the neck. “I’m no Hell’s Angel, damn you! Do you hear! I’m no bloody gang member! I don’t care what’s happened to the rest of you bastards, this cruddy costume they stuck me with did NOT take!”
His hands choked October’s breath completely. Desperate with strangulation, the vampire got the sole of one foot flat on the floor under him, hove himself up into a standing position, seized Jason’s hands, and ripped them away from his throat.
What? he thought. Me against him?
For a second, he and Jason gaped at each other as if equally dumbfounded that it could have been so easy for the medium-sized, slightly overweight, more or less out of shape Jacky Average to outmatch the solid bruiser. Then October vaguely remembered something about vampires having superhuman strength, and dropped Jason’s wrists.
Still staring, Jason started to back away.
“Hold thy ground, man!” Rodney’s shout and the electric-like charge both hit October at once. While the vampire was busy with the Hell’s Angel, the inquisitor had slipped around to take him from the rear.
Within the trap of invisible membrane, he could still move a little…but where to? He could feel the cross-power draining his strength. Turning around would bring him face to face with the cross and its carrier.
“I call on thy assistance in defeating the forces of evil!” Rodney’s voice thundered on.
Jason lunged forward again, toppling October with a tackle round the waist. They brushed Rodney going down, but he must’ve jumped clear. October found his left arm pinned hard to his side in Jason’s bear hug—his right, however, had escaped, and he would have pushed Jason off again easily, if he’d had one more second before Rodney swooped down to poke the paralyzing crucifix into his face.
It struck his nose with a searing sizzle. He screamed and fell limp in Jason’s hold, almost welcoming the sense of helplessness that allowed his head to dangle as far as possible from the crucifix. He felt Jason gather his right arm into the lockhold, but could no longer resist.
Some people said crosses didn’t really affect vampires. Bullshit! But it wasn’t fair…he’d been a reasonably regular churchgoer most of his life, barring college years ...
“Every soul born of the flesh secretly harbors one or more deadly sins.” Rodney poked his crucifix at October’s face again, not quite making contact, but coming close enough to make the vampire flinch. “We know Skipper’s. Thine, we have still to learn. And all this show of concern for the student is but a pitiful attempt to preserve thyself by making us forget the blood on thine own garments. To the rack with him!”
Succuba, prancing at the edges of October’s vision, wriggled with a hiss of pure sensual delight.
“‘Hell’s Angel,’ huh?” Jason grunted, hauling him up ... like a sack of potatoes, with Rodney keeping the cross a bare couple of centimeters above his head.
“I’m sorry about that!” It cost the vampire a struggle even to speak. Less, maybe, because of the cross than because of hanging head down with Jason’s shoulder pressing into his middle. “If I insulted you, I apologize. And yes! I—I did drink Skipper’s blood! I never asked—If I’d guessed, I’d never have worn it, any more than Skipper would’ve worn—”
The cross hit his forehead. “Down with him!” yelled Rodney.
Jason threw him onto the rack and pinned him there—as if musclepower was needed with the cross over his head—while Succuba snapped the gauntlets around his wrists.
Digging one fingertip between October’s left wrist and the gauntlet, Rodney nodded. “Good. They are iron, that metal which has been from ancient times proof against the uncanny. Can they be tightened?”
“By turning this little sweetheart,” Succuba replied happily, and the right gauntlet tightened. Jason, grunting, leaned over to shackle the victim’s ankles.
“Crazy!” October kept protesting. “This is crazy! You’re crazy! Aaaa! WATCH IT—you’ll break my wrist!”
Succuba began tightening the other gauntlet. Jason said, “What little ... Oh, here,” and the right anklet, already too snug, got tighter.
“For G- G- the Lord’s sake, Pascal!” screamed October. “Cassandra Pascal! Can’t you make them listen to reason?”
“Pascal?” her own famous voice demanded. “Cassandra Pascal? Who is that?”
“Good,” said Rodney. “Now turn the roller. Hell-spawn, show him how! Slowly, for now—”
“Whoever you are!” October tried again—Pascal remained his last hope. “Can’t you stop them?”
“Stop them? Is it not part of my curse that I must encourage such scenes?”
“Slowly!” the inquisitor repeated. “We wish only to stretch and tauten at first, saving the more severe effects for later.”
“‘More severe.’” Succuba smacked her lips. “That means tearing your ligaments…dislocating your joints…eventually, wiggling the roller back and forth at high tension so your bones snap in and out of their sockets.”
“Oh, my Lord!” He tried to stop whimpering. “What do you people want? What kind of confession do you want? What can be worse than drinking a person’s—a wounded person’s—” Rodney had called it Skipper’s punishment for loafing a little through school ... “Keeping airline spoons? Filling in other people’s crossword puzzles?”
“Bare his chest,” said Rodney.
Jason ripped October’s shirt open. Succuba held up one long-nailed forefinger and gave Rodney an eager look. He nodded.
She bent and used the hot talon to etch a cross in the flesh above October’s heart.
He hardly even heard the end of his own scream. Screwing his eyes shut—almost the only muscles he could still move—he seemed to see himself falling through the bloody, burning symbol on his own chest ...
He was back in a room…the jury room in Morgan County Courthouse ... with eleven other people, arguing. All eleven of them trying to argue him down, repeating the same old arguments back and forth.
The woman he thought was called Elaine stuck her face in his and demanded shrilly, “Have you ever had your purse snatched?”
“As a rule, men don’t carry purses,” commented the woman who reminded him of the screenstar Cassandra Pascal.
“That’s what I mean! Of course he’s going to sympathize with the criminal, just because he’s another male and he doesn’t have any idea what it’s like—”
“Hold on a minute, young lady!” said the elderly man named George Seton. “Here’s seven of us gentlemen to five of you ladies, and all us other ‘males’ have been voting ‘Guilty’ right along.”
October glanced at his watch. “My gender doesn’t have anything to do with it. I just don’t think—”
“Men can get their wallets lifted,” said the surly youth who kept wanting to light a cigarette.
“That’s right,” said the insurance salesman. “Picked right out of their pockets. A heck of a lot more personal than getting a purse snatched, wouldn’t you say?”
“Huh!” shrilled Elaine, or whatever her name was. “And you never even know you’ve been robbed until later. You don’t get knocked down and bruised and—”
“And how many of you seven men ever have actually had y
our pockets picked?” the sarcastic woman asked. October wondered how hard she worked at enhancing her resemblance to The Pascal.
“For that matter,” said the college prof, “how many of you five ladies have ever actually had your purses snatched?”
“And how many of any of you,” October demanded, with another glance at his watch, “have ever been mistaken for somebody else? I just don’t think it’s been proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“An unreasonable doubt, you mean,” George shot back. “Hell, young man, she identified him flat out.”
“I’ve had people swear ‘flat out’ that they’d met me at some party or some restaurant or somewhere I’d never even heard of, and that was in quiet social situations. One glimpse of somebody running away, in the heat of a purse-snatching—”
“He’s got a record!” the truck driver exclaimed, slapping his palm down on the table.
“The judge instructed us to ignore that!” October stole another glance at his watch. “I gathered it doesn’t include any previous convictions.”
“Maybe you can ignore it, sonny,” George Seton remarked.
“The point is,” said the insurance salesman, “if we’re going to have to sit here all night, we might as well order dinner and get a meal on the county.”
“I had one last week,” said the surly youth, whose jury duty had landed him on two cases, and who never missed a chance of complaining about it. “The place they’ve got catering jury dinners specializes in cardboard steak and glue-all gravy.”
A rush of icy slush hit October’s head. Gasping and blinking, he gradually came back to the rack in the private party room beneath Hellmouth Park, the scratched cross throbbing furiously over his heart, Succuba’s face grinning at him above a downturned cup. She must have filled it from one of the table’s cooler wells for champagne bottles.
“I…think I know what you want,” he panted humbly.
“Stay your hand for the moment, rackmaster,” Rodney directed Jason. Then, heaving his face near his victim’s, “Well?”
“About ten…eleven years ago, I ... was on a jury. A purse-snatching case. I voted Not Guilty. Everyone else voted Guilty. They ... kept on at me. On and on. It was getting late. I ... it was my first invitation to a Gourmets’ International dinner, and I was going to miss it! I couldn’t…and it wasn’t like a murder case or anything, was it? Only a couple of years at most, probably time off for good behavior, early parole ... maybe even out again right away on appeal or something, who knew? If it’d been the kid’s whole life at stake, I wouldn’t have ... And everyone else acted so damn sure ... Anyway, I…changed my vote to Guilty.”
“Aaah!” the inquisitor exclaimed—a loud, long, deep sigh of satisfaction. “Now we come to it! Gluttony ... vile, greedy, sensual, self-centered gluttony. The sinner abandoning all sense of duty and righteousness in the mere lust to tickle a delicate palate.”
“Let me up! It’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? Now let me up! For G- the Lord’s sake!”
Rodney shook his head. “Confession frees the soul of its sin, but there remains the punishment due. Now, what penance best befits the deadly sin of gluttony?” The expression on his face—upside down from October’s angle—was almost more chilling than his words.
“But it turned out the kid was guilty! I ran into George Seton—one of the other jurors—a few years ago, and he told me the kid had been arrested for doing it again a month after he got out—”
“Nevertheless!” pronounced the inquisitor. “Disobeying thine own conscience, acting contrary to thine own perception of justice, thou sinned most grievously against God, thy fellows, and thyself. Moreover, how canst thou rest assured that the youth did not turn to the bad because of having been wrongfully imprisoned? Aaahh! Excellent reasoning, hellspawn. Thou may’st proceed.”
Succuba came into October’s sight again, holding a platter and a champagne bottle from the refreshment table. Plopping them down near October’s head, she pinched his nostrils shut with one hand and used the other to start cramming his mouth with caviar and deviled ham. He managed a single “NO!” before speech and even screaming became impossible.
Caviar, ham, a whole chocolate head, something he couldn’t recognize except as a gummy mass…desperately he chewed and swallowed, choking for air, only to have a whole Scotch egg stuffed between his jaws. How was it possible to go so many bites, so many swallows, without air? The egg down—more caviar, mixed with salted nuts and ... iced cookies? All on his tongue the least time possible—painful, barely chewed lumps catching as they hitched their way down, and more with every gasped snatch of air…and all of it turning his stomach into a stewpot of nausea, a boiling knot that forced it all back up to meet the next gulp, trying to fight it out in his throat and chest while Succuba laughed and clamped her sharp-nailed hand down on his nose ...
“A little bubbly to wash it down, lover?” She upturned the bottle with its neck down his throat and somehow, still pinching his nose, squeezed his lips tight against the glass.
“Damn you all, enough!” shouted Jason. Something heavy slammed into October’s chest—one sharp pain that blotted out everything else.
His eyes flew open. His pitiful attempts at struggling stopped completely. Along with his attempts at breathing. Along with his pulse and heartbeat.
The pain subsided almost at once, leaving behind only a heavy numbness, like his jaw when the dentist shot it full of novocaine. As if every part of his body ... skin, muscles, stomach, and all…had been shot full of novocaine.
He could still see, but only what came into direct line with his stare…he could not so much as twitch his eyes. He could still hear, but for a few seconds the sound was like a recording played much too slowly.
“S ... p ... ooyy ... lll ... sport,” was the first word he could make out, resolving as it rose and reached more normal speed into Succuba’s voice.
“Too much is enough!” Jason snarled back at her.
“It was premature,” said Rodney. “Thou didst act in too much haste, man. He should have been saved yet a while. Natheless ...”
What is it? October thought helplessly. What’s going on? He could just feel, as if at a great distance, that his mouth was hanging open, slobbers of food and champagne drooling down the sides of his cheeks. Even his ears and temples were wet ... no, that was with tears, he could feel one still rolling down from the corner of his left eye—no more of them seemed to be welling out.
The inquisitor’s hand came into his view, thumb and middle finger descending toward his eyes ... slowly, steadily, and strangely gentle ... landing on the lids, closing them. Fingers wrapped in cloth probed the slobber out of his mouth and pushed his jaws tenderly shut on the tongue that felt like a block of wood, then wiped the rest of his face ... with a fresh napkin, he hoped. Vaguely and fuzzily, he sensed his wrists and ankles being unshackled, his hands swung downward and folded across his chest.
His thumbs touched something hard.
My God, they’ve driven a stake through my heart!
“Requiescat in pace,” the inquisitor was intoning, with a lot of other Latin words, probably qualifiers to the effect, “if you can.”
Then I’m dead?
The Pascal’s famous laugh cut across the funeral proceedings. “‘Defeating the forces of evil’!” she quoted Rodney’s earlier words. “Oh, God, what fools they are! What fools You made them!”
Why can she say ‘God’ when I can’t?
“I tell you again, Liar and Prince of Liars, silence!”
“And I ask you again, minion, where, exactly, do you think you are?”
I must be dead. I couldn’t possibly still be alive with a stake through my heart.
“I am where Divine Wisdom has seen fit to place me, no doubt for the mission of cleansing and purifying.”
“Oh, blow it out your ear, honey.” That voice a
nd laugh were Succuba’s. October could picture her standing on tiptoe, clinging to Rodney’s shoulder, blowing in his ear to illustrate her words ...
“Devil!” A thumping thud. He must have shoved her away hard. “Get thee behind me!”
“Why, sure, sweet thing.” She didn’t sound hurt. “Whatever turns you on.”
“Yu-ugh! Away!”
Shouldn’t I be watching all this from the ceiling or something?
“Satan! By the power vested in me, I command you to call off your minion!”
Maybe vampires don’t have near-death experiences.
“Why? I find this rather entertaining.”
Like you found it when they were torturing and murdering me, Cassandra “The” Pascal?
“I’ll get her off you.” That was Jason. Sounds of scuffling, a few little squeals, more thumps. The Pascal laughed again.
“And I’m not a goddamn bloody gang member!” Jason shouted. “Dammit, you can’t be a gang member without a gang!”
“I enlist thee!” Rodney again. “I claim thee as a limb of the Lord’s chosen, to continue assisting me in my holy mission.”
But I don’t feel dead. Numb and paralyzed, but not dead.
“Look! Just a damn minute here!” Jason still sounded angry. “An inquisitor…a vampire…a gang member—except that I’m not—even a succubus, all right.”
You forgot poor Skipper. And you might sound a little remorseful about me.
“One of a class,” Jason was going on, “that I understand. You could say it’s more or less like we’d been turned into pigs or horses or something. But how can she have turned into the real Head Devil? Dammit, there’s only one Satan, isn’t there?”
“Oh, God, what a fool!” cried Pascal. “How can a soul be so blind to the Mystery and yet survive? Is not Satan present in each and every one of us? As God is present in everyone…except in me! Except in me! God—no longer in me, save as the burning fire of my own rebellion and resistance—Ah! What are any of your sufferings to mine? What were his sufferings to mine?—this poor wretch you have just tortured and murdered in the name of that purblind righteousness you mistake for God! What is anyone’s suffering to mine?”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 106
