The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Either they really were alone down here, or his voice, added to the noise of their feet, wouldn’t make much difference. Besides, the mental image of tearing somebody’s head off and drinking from the neck wouldn’t go away. No matter what other thoughts he tried substituting, that daydream picture kept coming back. Now it was trying to make itself look virtuous and heroic by showing his victim as a park employee in devil suit, from whom he was saving himself and Aurea.

  They passed Room 6Z. It had a door, shut and silent.

  He started talking again. “What puzzles me is why they mess around with waxworks, too, when they can play the kind of tricks they played on us.”

  Whining, she shook her head.

  “Or are we just the lucky ones? The few, the proud, the chosen?”

  She shook her head again. He interpreted it as an “I don’t know.”

  “It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that they can’t do this to everyone—to all their guests. They’ve been in operation for more than forty years. You couldn’t have people disappearing by the gross every year for forty years, last seen alive going into Hellmouth Park, without ever raising some kind of police investigation.”

  Room 6Y was as shut-up and silent as 6Z had been.

  “And if this is all part of the fun and games, and everybody gets over it and just has a good laugh afterward, why doesn’t anybody ever spread the word? I mean, it’s kind of a bigger secret than one of those ‘Don’t Tell the Ending’ mystery plays, isn’t it? But if it only happens to a few people a year, or every other year, or something like that, then they could probably cover it up, smuggle the bodies out, pass them off as accident victims, even missing persons ...” Damn, he wished he hadn’t said that! Hadn’t even thought it! In some ways, the tearing-somebody’s-head-off vision seemed a little better.

  The dragon was bumping up against his leg.

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “We’re getting out, anyway. And going straight to the police ...”

  His right leg came down sluggishly. His left was hardly moving. All of a sudden, it was like trying to walk through water up to his neck.

  “Aurea,” he said, “are you having trouble walking?”

  She obviously wasn’t. She had already clicked several steps ahead. At his question, she stopped, slithered rapidly around, and scurried back to his side, whining.

  No, it was more like water all the way over his head, except that his lungs still seemed to be working…but did a vampire really need to breathe? Well, maybe not to live, but anyway to talk; and the air seemed to have gotten a little chunky around his face. He gulped down about half a chestful, asked, “What’s going on?” and looked around.

  They had almost reached the door to Room 6X, its number and letter shining brassy on a level with October’s eyes.

  He stared at it for maybe thirty seconds, the horror ... no, not horror exactly…after everything else, that might be too strong a word…the damned inconvenience of his situation sinking in.

  He looked down at the dragon. She was staring at him the way he must have been staring at the door.

  “Aurea.” Moving in slow motion, he transferred Skipper to the floor and then extended his own right hand, palm down. “Make an ‘X’ on my hand.”

  Comprehension dawning in her eyes, she shook her head.

  “Yes! Do it! We’ve got to test this out, doggone it!”

  Still she hesitated. He flapped his hand impatiently. At last she reached up with one quivering claw and etched a slanted line in the top layer of his skin. In one or two places along its length, it just drew a tiny little bit of blood. She looked up at him again. He pressed his lips together and nodded. She etched the second line, dissecting the first at an angle of about eighty degrees ...

  He snatched his hand away. Or tried to. It stuck fast, paralyzed in midair, throbbing like sixty. He tried to grab it with his other hand. The rest of him wasn’t quite frozen, only unbelievably sluggish. It seemed to take forever to get his clawed left fingers over to the back of his right hand. Meanwhile, the X mark was scorching like acid, burning deeper and deeper, actually pulsating with a bluish-white glow ... Aurea whined and scrabbled around the floor as if in agony herself, covering her eyes ...

  He got his fingernails to the marked flesh, dug in, and tore. The skin came away slowly at first, a little faster as he got back a little strength, along with enough mobility in his right hand to pull it in the opposite direction. Skinning himself alive actually felt good, it was so much better than having the X sink into his hand.

  “Dammit! Damn, damn, damn! An ‘X’ is a cross!”

  The dragon blinked at him, looked at his hands, and shuddered. The back of his right hand was a sodden, perversely appetizing red and white mess. The torn-away patch of skin hung from his left fingertips, now paralyzing them.

  “Look, Aurea, can you pull this off my fingers?”

  With an angry chomp, she yanked the patch away. She seemed to have a bit of trouble shaking it free of her teeth. When it finally came loose, it landed well beyond the doorway. She whined and looked back at his hand.

  So did he. He had lost the chance to lick his own blood: the area was already healing over. He made a fist and spread his hand out again several times. Still stiff and slightly painful the first time, the skin and muscles stretched back into shape as he flexed them. By now the surface had grown back without a scar.

  “Well, being a vampire has some pluses, anyway.” He gave Aurea a shaky grin. “Hope I can get used to healing the old-fashioned, human way again after we get out of here. Meanwhile ... you’d think I’d be used to a little pain by now, wouldn’t you?”

  Standing, he took a step backward, retrieved Skipper, and moved to the opposite wall. Maybe, if he could slink past as far as possible from the 6X on the door ...

  “It isn’t actually the pain so much, it’s the paralysis. Seems that the closer I get, the harder it—”

  He broke off in a gasp as the pain hit like electricity. His mind stayed clear—he made a last-ditch effort to swing his left leg forward, get past the direct line on momentum—when that failed, he used his last scrap of strength to force it backwards, then let it buckle. His fall carried him back to a point from which he could continue his retreat on hands and knees, rolling Skipper’s body as carefully as possible.

  Aurea roared and lunged up toward the door markers, scratching furiously at the “X.” Balancing and straining her short forearms, she could just reach the letter…but it was screwed fast. You could almost hear it laughing at her efforts to dislodge it. She scraped her claws furiously across the door. It looked like wood, but either a very hard wood or treated with some kind of incredibly tough finish, because you could barely see the scratches.

  She turned to him, puffed out a flame about the size of a single match, which fell apart and vanished in the air, and made a questioning whine.

  “No! For heaven’s sake, remember the fire danger! There might be other people down here somewhere. Besides the ones up in the main building ...”

  Aurea nodded regretfully, dropped to all fours, and pattered over to him, her talons clicking on the stones. Laying one forepaw tenderly on his knee, she touched the tip of her nose to the hollow of his left shoulder.

  He fondled the crest of her head, between the two tiny red horns. “I can still say ‘heaven,’ anyway,” he observed aloud, trying to be cheerful. “I guess because ‘heaven’ can just mean the sky. Well, dear lady, I seem to be stuck between 6X and 7X. It appears I’ll have to try the elevator. How about you? You might be better off the way we were going.”

  She shook her head almost violently, No.

  “Look, I’d just as soon keep out of the elevator myself, if I could see any other way. Of all the places to risk getting trapped in a stuck elevator ... I could meet you at the top. Better yet, outside—Ouch!”

  She had tightened he
r grip on his knee, incidentally poking her claws through the fabric of his trousers into his flesh.

  At his cry, she looked down and promptly loosed her hold, though complete disengagement took a few seconds.

  “Okay, okay, it’s all right, probably healed up already. The skin, anyway,” he kept reassuring her, thinking, Gad, what a mess I must be! Bloody ripped shirt, cape over there around poor Skipper, now punctured pants leg ... How can I still be trapped in my costume when there’s so little of it left? “Okay?” he repeated as a question, helping her lift her last talon clear. “Fine. Let’s get back to the last elevator door. Do you remember if there was one between here and 7D?”

  She shook her head. He gathered Skipper’s body up again, wondering how much longer they had before rigor mortis set in, and started retracing his steps, Aurea at his side.

  The corridor was steeper than it looked. On the way up he hadn’t noticed any strain in his legs, shortness of breath, or quickening of his heartbeat, no call for any special exertion until they got near 6X, but it could have been his vampire strength coming in handy again. The downward trek was a lot harder, because it depended less on strength and stamina than on sure-footedness and balance. Being a vampire lent him no help there. Aside from still finding Skipper as light as a baby doll, he was back on his own going down. And though lightweight, the corpse was bulky and awkward, obscuring October’s view of his own feet.

  Aurea’s feet sounded as if they were slipping and sliding. He wondered if going down was harder for her, too, or if she had needed more energy than he did going up. How did a lower center of gravity, with four legs on the floor, affect climbing? “How are you doing?” he asked as though she could answer in words. “It isn’t too late to change your mind. I wouldn’t blame you for taking the corridor up and out. Might envy you, but I sure wouldn’t blame you.”

  She whined, brushed his leg, and stuck with him.

  It turned out there was an elevator door directly across from Room 7A. The horrific waxworks must have kept them from noticing it on their way up.

  “Uh ... look,” said October, “I’m not quite sure I want to take it from here. We did quite a bit of damage to that exhibit, and you never know who might be in the elevator when it stops. We know there’s another door facing 7D. Willing to go on down to that one?”

  She clawed her way on down past him, leaving snagged spots in the Level 7 corridor carpet. He found it a little easier going on carpet; she, apparently, didn’t.

  “What do they do,” he mused aloud. “Have an elevator door across from every fourth room? No, that wouldn’t work, not with twenty-six letters, not if they want one facing every ‘A’ room. Assuming every ‘A’ room is another cute little waxworks display. Do they have one at every ‘A’ room and the rest here and there at random? Or maybe one every four rooms, and they skip every other ‘A’ ... would that work out?”

  He started trying to think it through backwards, and found his mind shooting up to the surface structure, the postcard view of Hellmouth Theme Park, that big, famous multi-story head of some medieval monster vaguely akin to a canine monkey, its silently howling mouth making the way in with the rubberized tongue that lolled across the black cinder “lawn” and served in place of a red carpet. The ground floor was mainly an entrance maze of flame images projected on glass partitions, with here and there toward the back a few “You Must Be Twenty-One” coin-operated peepshow cubbyholes. October had sampled two. One was a jerky old silent movie of a plump lady shedding layers of Victorian garments—might have looked naughty in 1900 but seemed amusing and innocent now—and the other turned out to be gruesome rather than titillating: old photographs of such scenes as a man just decapitated in a duel with sabers, a mountain of human bones on a “War to End All Wars” battlefield, and then he had turned away. The middle floor had theme restaurants and some ostentatiously Private rooms “For Meetings and Orgies.” The top floor was an indoor amusement park “For All Ages”—which meant mostly for kids—its back wall and half its ceiling a huge glass hemisphere that let people outside look up and see the rides as if they were the workings of the monster’s brain. The shaggy ears were outside elevators that families could use to bypass the entrance maze and take their tykes straight to the kiddieland top floor. The inside arrangements for getting from floor to floor ... October had used the stairs, when he finally found them, to get from the maze to the restaurant floor and then, after a petit fours that at the time had tasted worth what it cost, he had climbed another flight to the rides. Where, eventually, the costumed employee had approached him with a red ticket, congratulated him, and led him to the central elevator column.

  They had ridden that elevator straight down to 7D. As far as October could tell, there was only about enough space in the shaft for the one car, which was about double the size of an ordinary elevator car. Now that he came to think of it, a single elevator, twice normal size or not, didn’t seem like enough for nine subbasements of twenty-six rooms apiece. Nor were the upper building’s stairways any great shakes, being old, ill-lit, and seldom cleaned—he had guessed that tied in somehow with the theme. If there were any other stairs, any other interior elevators up above, he didn’t know about them. A fire could be pretty disastrous up in the surface building, too.

  Aurea snorted and touched his leg. They had reached the elevator door facing 7D.

  “Okay,” he said, studying the control panel. “Thanks. Just wool-gathering, I guess.”

  The pink bubble still showed the elevator car midway down Level 8. Still? Or again?

  “Aurea. Look at this. Either it hasn’t moved, or it’s back right about where it was before.”

  She pawed the elevator doorframe.

  “You never heard it go past us while we were here in the corridor, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, we haven’t seen anybody else down here since ... Wait a minute! The other three—Rodney, Jason, and Succuba—whatever her real name is—when they went out, wasn’t Rodney shouting something about finding The Pascal again?”

  Aurea nodded.

  “Well, if Pascal’s costume turned her into the real head-honcho Devil—I don’t understand how that could be, but just for the sake of argument, let’s say maybe it did. That’s what Inquisitor Rodney seemed to think, anyway, and she had some kind of explanation for how it could be, herself. Where would they start looking for her? Up at the top or down at the bottom?”

  Aurea lifted her right forepaw and held it with the first digit pointing downward.

  “Yeah, that’s what I think, too. Only, if they took the elevator down, why stop it in the middle of Level 8? Look here, the spiral goes down another full loop—Level 9.”

  The dragon whined.

  “Okay. Maybe they walked. I hope so. Don’t exactly think I care about ever meeting them again. Anyway, we know the letter ‘X’ wouldn’t affect them. Certainly not Rodney, with that cross he’s wearing ... Say, why didn’t that hit me the second I turned into a ... into my costume? He was standing closer to me than I was to that ‘6X’ just now. But I don’t remember ever feeling anything from the cross until he actually picked it up and aimed it at me. You’d think a cross with a figure of Jee- ... Whosis on it would be a lot stronger than a plain ‘X,’ wouldn’t you?”

  She whined again and hit the column a couple of times with the pads of one paw. Her talons clicked slightly.

  “Well, maybe there isn’t anybody else down here. Maybe they booked the whole subbasement area especially for our party. Or maybe everybody else has gone home. I don’t have any idea what time it is, except after midnight. Must be quite a while after midnight by now.”

  Aurea shook her head and hit the elevator column again, her talons clicking a little louder this time.

  “Okay, okay, I don’t know why I’m procrastinating like this. Have to get out before dawn and find someplace safe to hole up for the day,�
�� he reminded himself. Thoughts of his own little single-person apartment had never looked so safe and comfortable. He’d rather be back there, with the shades closed against the sun, than drinking ... He located the elevator buttons for this stop, hitched Skipper into a one-arm hold, and jabbed the “Up” button.

  The machinery responded with a deep, wheezing grind. The pink light stayed right where it was.

  “Damn! Don’t tell me it’s stuck, when I can’t go up the safe way.” Giving Skipper another hitch, October put his thumb on the “Up” button and literally leaned on it.

  Fed with strong, steady pressure, the gears ground again and this time caught. The pink bubble began moving up along the spiral of green light. Stretched as tall as she could make herself, balancing with both front paws on the column, dragon joined vampire in watching the bubble’s progress.

  It reached the turn marked “8,” rounded it smoothly, and kept coming up at about half the speed of an old-fashioned round clock’s second hand. October became aware of a noise like a radio playing far in the distance. He almost said, “Listen! What’s that?” but stopped himself, remembering that Aurea wouldn’t be able to answer, and that hearing noises like a distant radio wasn’t all that unusual.

  Except that these noises got louder as the pink bubble got closer to the black “You Are here” pointer. “It’s people!” October said aloud. “People trapped in the elevator.” And then, recognizing the voices, “It’s them!”

  He jerked his thumb up off the button and stepped away. The bubble halted, just millimeters from the tip of the “You Are Here” arrow. Jason’s voice shouted, “Hey!” Aurea dropped to all fours and scrabbled backwards to stand at October’s side, as if seconding his decision, whatever it was.

  “You, up there!” came Rodney’s voice, thundering in its best inquisitorial style. “As you value your souls, I call on you to assist us!”

  Thudding sounds took over where his voice left off. October could almost see Jason, in his Hell’s Angel costume, walloping the elevator walls with both of his meaty fists.