The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “You phony!” said Jason. “Can’t you do anything without overselling yourself?”

  “Phony!” Though a scream, her response was low-pitched, cold, and strangely calm after the passion of her outburst. A sharp rap to the floor followed it, a sizzle like dozens of tiny sparks, and an instant of silence.

  “That’s showing them, your Majesty!” shouted Succuba.

  “All right, Pascal, where’d you go?” Jason demanded. “What are you, in thick with this rotten park all along?”

  “The demon!” cried Rodney. “The succubus! Seize her!”

  Sounds of chase—thumps, clunks, shouts, squeals, smackings, crashes ... it seemed to take in most of the room. At least I’m out of it. Hope they don’t bump the rack. Wonder if they’re keeping clear of Skipper’s body? What happened to Aurea Goldsmith, anyway? Maybe she slipped out the door in time and got away when the lights went off.

  The capture was noisy. “All right!” Jason hollered over Succuba’s half-delighted protests. “I’ve got her—ouch! Okay, baby, by the elbows—no fire there! What the hell do we want with her?”

  “We want Hell. If any of us knows where to find the sovereign, it is the slave.”

  “Ow! Okay, big boys, think her Satanic Majesty isn’t keeping an eye on us right along? But come on! Let’s go hunting, if that’s what tickles you—”

  “Silence! By the Holiest of Names, I command thee to silence, hellspawn!”

  “And whenever she decides to grant you your l’il showdown, watch out! That’s when the fun really begins.”

  “Ignore the demon’s idle threats,” the inquisitor went on, this time obviously to Jason. (Who else was left?)

  “Don’t worry. Unh. I’ve got her now. She isn’t getting away from me again.”

  “Not until I want to, sweetheart.”

  Their footsteps, jumbled out of rhythm, receded across the room and paused. The door creaked and shrieled open…the hinges had been oiled and silent before midnight, but when the guests got transmogrified, why shouldn’t the door change to match?

  “Forward!” cried Rodney. “Armed with the power of righteousness, we issue forth in the Holy Name to harrow Hell!”

  Succuba tittered. “It’s been tried before, bucko. It’s been tried before. And by bigger guns than yours.”

  The door slammed shut on her laughter, and October lay alone in silence and darkness.

  At first it was a relief. Very restful. A chance to figure things out. Eventually he became aware again of Skipper lying mangled somewhere across the floor, but considering what he himself must look like made the presence of the other corpse seem a little less horrible…a little more nearly…companionable.

  Only…am I waiting to die? Or am I already dead? Is this what it’s like, for a vampire? God! No wonder Dracula ...

  Didn’t Dracula crumble away to dust when they staked him? Oh, yes…because he was supposed to be centuries old, anyway. What about October, then? Did he have to just lie there for centuries feeling himself decay and flake away bit by bit?

  It could have been worse. The novocaine feeling made him almost comfortable. The one pain that he guessed might have cut through—the cross scratched over his heart—must have vanished when the stake crashed through that spot. Handy guide Succuba had drawn there for Jason. “X” marked the spot.

  Who’s going to water my plants at home? Migosh, I didn’t even stop at the apartment this evening, just changed at the shop, got a blue plate at Swensen’s, and came straight on here.

  “Come on,” his fellow clerk Mikki Pargeter had told him that afternoon. “You’re forty tomorrow. For once in your life, do something wild tonight.”

  “What?”

  “Here we are, ten minutes from Hellmouth Park. And every night this month, everybody who shows up in costume even gets a chance at being invited down to the VIP basements, don’t they?”

  “I don’t own a costume. Don’t think I’ve had one on since college.”

  “No problem.” Mattie had just stepped out of her manager’s office. “Help yourself to one of our Hallowe’en Special mistakes over there. Take one of them off our hands and we’ll call it part of your birthday bonus.”

  Great bonus. So why of all the possiblities had he let them stick him with a vampire costume? He could have been Superman, or Bozo, or Bugs Bunny, or…he didn’t even like Dracula movies all that much!

  What are Mom and Dad going to say? Will they ever even find out, or do I get written down as a missing person forever? God, I hope they don’t find me! They’ll put me in a coffin and bury ... or maybe cremate ...

  Cremation. That would have to end him, wouldn’t it? And then what? If being dead would mean “setting his soul free” to fly around and generally act like ghosts in the movies, he’d be all for it. But, even if people had souls…did vampires? If being dead meant complete nothingness—the thought panicked him for a moment. Only a moment, because there was no outlet for the panic, no place for it to go. The heaviness calmed him down whether he felt like it or not.

  “Poor wretch,” The Pascal called me. Would she really have changed places? Liked what they put me through ... liked lying here like this…any better than whatever she claims she’s suffering? She never seemed to have any trouble with the word “God”!

  If she’s really turned into the Devil, does she know I’m still alive…conscious, anyway ... in here?

  Would she even care?

  At least, if they find me, I hope they don’t ever figure out ... what I did before ... I hope they just remember me as one of the victims, not one of the—

  Something rustled.

  On the other side of the room ... Not a rustling sound, exactly. More like a slow clattering slither across the stones.

  The door hadn’t opened again ... unless its hinges had re-silenced themselves as suddenly and mysteriously as they’d gone creaky after the midnight transformations. But they’d only creaked that once, when Rodney hauled the other two out. That meant ... if reason applied anywhere down here…that Aurea Goldsmith must have been hiding somewhere in the room all along.

  Now, why would anyone want to hide from such a lovable bunch of monsters as us?

  But Aurea hadn’t been in costume, wouldn’t have changed. (Then why had they brought her down here?) And that clittering slither didn’t sound like any woman approaching. So, if she was still here, that meant something else was in here with them both, something—big, he thought, and ... reptilian? With feet, and claws, and scales ...

  And a snuffle. A reptile with a snuffle?

  He tried to open his eyes. They wouldn’t even twitch. If he was dreaming—the thought had never struck him before—he was well and truly locked into the dream.

  All right, let’s look at the nightmare theory.

  Anything to distract his thoughts from the slither coming closer and closer.

  It’d make some kind of sense out of all this. Wouldn’t it? From ... what I did, to the way we all just seemed to…accept what happened to us?

  In fact, Succuba, and maybe Rodney, had seemed to enjoy it.

  But can you dream without visuals?

  He could remember dreams without color, but none in which he hadn’t been able to see anything at all, not even once when he’d dreamed he was supposedly blind. One or two that he thought had been silent, but none that consisted totally of sound in darkness. One or two in which he’d felt pain…but the degree of gut-wrenching, mind-warping pain he’d felt a few minutes ago? If that hadn’t jerked him awake ...

  Wasn’t Pascal holding the light? That didn’t sound as if she left them in darkness just now. For that matter, this darkness isn’t quite as bad as when the lights went out the first time. Did they light a candle or two for my funeral service before—

  Something hard tapped his cheek.

  He couldn’t even tense up. His reflexes
were as paralyzed as his eyelids and breathing.

  The thing prodded his cheek several times. It felt like the end of some kind of thick stick. Slightly abrasive, slightly moist.

  Not even paralyzed stiff, the way he’d always assumed paralysis would be. Paralyzed soft, flabby, like a rag doll. Not even offering the thing—the reptile’s snout?—passive resistance.

  A whine began.

  A long, mournful, desolate whine, not quite like that of a dog, but anyway like that of something that had lost its last hope and only friend in the universe. A whine, he thought—terror and despair having backlashed him into flippancy—that the producers of tearjerkers would kill to get on their sound tracks.

  A pair of somethings—paws?—patted his chest. He felt them as he had been feeling everything: painlessly and distantly, like dull, miniature thuddings.

  They disappeared up the totally numb spot that marked the stake through his heart. For a moment, he felt nothing. Then there came a deep grinding between his ribs, and the hard surface touching his thumbs began to sway.

  It would have been excruciating if his pain sense was working. He thanked God it was not.

  The movements grew faster, more desperate…and the stake loosened. Slowly, it began sliding up and out.

  The sense of pain started coming back. He gasped. The stake halted. He opened his eyes.

  A dragon stood over him.

  Watching him with what looked like an anxious expression on its snout, and tears dripping from its black eyes.

  His lips moved, but the paralysis was still too thick to let him speak. He substituted a feeble nod. He tried adding a wink, but both his eyelids shut at once. Leaving them shut, he made a start toward clenching his jaws and fists.

  With two or three jerks, the stake popped out. Pain flooding back through every part of him, he sat up with a short scream, hunched over briefly clutching himself, then turned and leaned trembling over the side away from the dragon, to vomit. His nausea had come back along with all the other side effects of torture.

  For a few moments, he thought he would never finish upchucking. When at last his gorge returned to normal and he opened his eyes, he was appalled at all the blood he had brought up. It wasn’t until he’d clamped his eyes shut and turned away from the sight that he remembered pigging out on poor Skipper’s blood. That must have come up with all the stuff he’d been force-fed like a pate’ goose.

  His stomach had been angry enough to throw all his other agonies, even the hole in his chest, into the background while it unburdened itself; and now, to his surprised relief, the other pangs seemed to be subsiding as well. He glanced at his chest. It was healing over.

  He groped around for something to wipe his mouth with, settled for a corner of the cheap Dracula cape that had lain tangled up beneath him the whole time he was on the rack, and turned his full attention to the dragon.

  It seemed to have been waiting the entire time, standing balanced with both front paws on the rack, watching him out of anxious-looking eyes. The eyes gleamed whiteless black with a vertical red slit through the center of each for a pupil, yet somehow they reminded him more of a dog’s or horse’s eyes than a storybook dragon’s. Tears still rolled down from them over the green scales of the flat places behind the jaws, which still held the long, bloody spike Jason had used for a stake.

  The dragon’s snout was as long as October’s forearm, and shaped something like an alligator’s, only much thinner, ending in a tip that had nostrils as long as the red slits in the black eyes. The top of the head was crowned with whimsically unreptilian ears and small but sharp-looking red horns. A ridge of shiny blue plates shaped like those in pictures of stegosauruses ran down its spine. Its forepaws, splayed out on the wooden planks, ended in five digits, each one sporting a three-centimeter long curbed talon, and the shortest, innermost ones looking almost like opposable thumbs.

  The hide was almost completely armored in green scales, but loop on loop of gold jewelry hid the shoulders. Some of the loops squeezed tightly, being almost too small to fit around the thick neck. Hitting the edge of the rack was a gold owl with pearl eyes.

  “My G- Lord, Aurea! Aurea Goldsmith! Is it you?”

  Chapter III

  Whining again, the dragon let the makeshift stake clatter to the floor, nodded its gargoylian head, held its right forepaw up in a begging gesture.

  One ring still bit cruelly into the base of the middle “finger,” a medium-sized diamond in an ornate silver setting. Looking more closely, he saw streaks of blood staining the tiny green scales of the digits on both right and left forepaws. Red as human blood, it actually reawakened his appetite!

  “The sequins! All those damn green sequins on your dress—so that’s why they decided you were ‘in costume’!” he exclaimed, maddened with the desire to lick her bloody fingers. “Look, do you want me to try to get this ring off?”

  Another whining nod.

  He closed his fingertips around the diamond ring, cried out in pain, and snatched them away again at once. It was so hot to his touch that it felt like razors slicing his flesh. Stuffing his fingertips into his mouth, he stared at the piece of jewelry.

  When the pain in his fingers subsided, thanks either to being licked or to his apparently marvelous vampire power of recovery, he asked, “Is it ... uh…burning you?”

  She nodded her head and pawed the air with her splayed, reptilian fingers.

  “Ouch!” he exclaimed in sympathy. “Okay, let’s try again.” Getting a corner of his cape between his fingers and the ring, he gripped it once more and started alternate attempts at slowly pulling and wiggling the thing loose. He couldn’t even twist it.

  Her only protest was a soft whine of pain. Once or twice he thought he felt her twitch involuntarily, but she made no other movement. Obviously, she wanted this ring off. How she had functioned at all with it on ... He felt its white heat through his layer of cape. What if it set the cloth on fire? No! By God, she had pulled the stake out of his heart, the least he could do was get this torture device off her! Gritting his teeth, he gripped tighter and pulled again ...

  With a cry, he dropped her paw and clutched his wrist. Was that scorched flesh he smelled? His own flesh? Opening his eyes, he stared at the angry blisters on his fingertips. Second-degree burns. Befuddled, he stared back at her paw. No smoke, no singe marks, just the puffy swelling of much-too-tight.

  “Wait a minute! Silver! Good Lord, something about vampires and silver ... Oh, hell! But didn’t you say it was burning you, too?”

  She whined, gently touched his burned hand with her left forepaw—its tantalizingly bloody digits scraped free of all rings—put her right forepaw behind her back, and shook her head.

  “Uh ... ‘burning’ you, but not that way? Not literally? Look, can’t you talk at all?”

  She turned her head left to right, then threw it back, stretched her jaws ninety degrees apart, and emitted the most piteous whine yet since that one over his body. Narrow though they looked, her jaws had room for a triple row of teeth.

  “The Nazis! The dirty, rotten ...” He couldn’t think of anything bad enough to call them, whoever ‘they’ were ... “The devils!” That might be literally true. How else could you begin to explain tonight’s party?

  His blisters were already shrinking, the skin around them returning to its normal color. That was something, anyway ... only, was it one of the few benefits of being a vampire, or was it just part of tonight’s sick game? Heal ’em up so we can hurt ’em again, wasn’t that another trademark of Hell?

  “Maybe if I took the costume off!” he said aloud, fumbling with the cape strings even as the inspiration struck. “All to it, is the cape, shirt front and cummerbund and some make-up pencil. I threw the fangs away almost as soon as I tried ’em on ...” He was bounding off the rack as he spoke, eager to test his new hope. The cape was off ... shirt front was a rui
n anyway, what was left of it—and his own shirt beneath it—which wasn’t much after Jason and Succuba had ripped it open to bare his chest. He peeled the whole mess off, leaving himself completely naked to the waist, then yanked off the cheap fake-satin cummerbund.

  The dragon turned around, trying to cover its eyes.

  “Hey, don’t worry, the pants didn’t come out of the box! They’re my own—they shouldn’t count as part of the costume.”

  Scrubbing his face with ice water from the champagne pockets felt so good that he washed his arms and chest as well, wiping them with paper napkins. The napkins that he rubbed over his face came away heavy with the black make-up he’d used to etch hairline and eyebrows as per the diagram on the box.

  “Now, let’s see ...”

  Scanning the table, he spotted one shiny chrome platter among the glass and china ones. Leaning over, he seized it, shook off its assorted canapes, and held it up to his face.

  No reflection.

  After a moment of staring back at a blank, shiny surface, he snatched the nearest champagne bottle in his left hand and waved it in front of the serving tray. The bottle reflected, his hand didn’t.

  He hurled both of them across the room. They hit against the far wall, the bottle smashing, the platter clattering.

  “Garlic!” That was the other big thing—yeah, crosses, silver, and garlic. “Let’s see ...” A tray at the other end of the table had sliced cheese and sausage ... salami or summer sausage, one of the few food items that still looked halfway edible, at least from this distance. Rushing around the table, he grabbed a slice of the sausage—

  And dropped it immediately, his hand throbbing as if a thousand mosquitoes had bitten it, his nostrils clogging like those of a hay-fever victim in a ragweed field. It was garlic sausage, all right; and what the screenplays said about vampires and garlic was obviously true.