“Speak for yourself,” Succuba tittered. “Give me the chance, and I’ll cast stones at anybody.”
“Shut up, bitch,” Jason repeated like an automatic response. He went on, “Who the hell is that hypocrite to accuse us of anything?”
“An inquisitor, honey,” Succuba replied. “That’s who the big little boy is.”
“Okay, if we’re Anger, Lust, Gluttony, and Greed, who’s he? There’s Seven Deadly Sins, as I recall, and seven—it started out seven anyway—of us. So which one is he? Pride?”
October shook his head. “The Pascal is Pride. Has to be.”
“Huh? That pseudo-philosopher for the masses? I’d have pegged her for Envy.”
“No, Rodney must be Envy.”
“Unh. Okay. Well, I guess that other poor sack ...”
“Skipper.”
“Skipper. Yeah. Must’ve been Sloth.”
October nodded. “Poor Skipper. ... What are the virtues?”
“Huh?”
“Between us, we remembered the Seven Deadly Sins. I guess almost anybody could list them, given time. But aren’t there supposed to be seven virtues, too? What do they call ’em, the ‘Lively Virtues’? How many people could list them?”
Succuba laughed.
Jason said, “Hmmm. Faith, Hope, Charity, and ... let’s see ... Wisdom, I think ...”
Succuba repeated her laugh. “You can’t remember them, because everybody squabbles about what they are. The so-called Seven Lively Virtues don’t exist. They’re just another excuse for fighting. The Sins, now, they’re solid!”
“Naw,” said Jason. “We can’t remember the Seven Virtues for the same reason we can think of a lot more verbs for hating than for loving. It’s the way our minds are made. To function in the negative.”
“Or maybe,” October said slowly, “there are only seven sins, but a lot more than seven virtues.”
Aurea snuffled and ground her left forepaw over the ring on her right one.
Jason said, looking at October, “Y’ know, I don’t think he should’ve lumped you in with the rest of us. Your secret isn’t still ‘festering’ inside. You confessed it, didn’t you? Or do you have any others?”
October shook his head bemusedly. “I don’t know. It was tough enough remembering that one.” Should he confess the fantasies that kept pestering him about yanking heads off and drinking blood? And make them nervous about him? “Anyway,” he went on, gazing sadly at the corpse waiting in the doorway of 7D, “poor Skipper never even got a chance to confess.”
Jason turned his head for a glower at the bundle. “That Skipper, there? Yeah, poor bastard. Never even got the chance to confess.” Then he turned and patted the dragon’s snout. “Looks like they made sure you wouldn’t get a chance to sing either, huh, honey? The lousy so-and-so’s!”
Aurea snuffled again and blinked up at him.
Giving her head one last rub, October stood. “Anyway, confession seems to go only so far down here. I’m still a vampire. Guess that’s all His Inquisitorship sees or cares about.”
“’S not all I care about, honeybunch,” Succuba almost purred.
He took a sidestep away from her, but asked Jason, “Don’t you have the keys for those things?”
“They were in the Emergency box, too,” Jason said coldly. “We left them laying in the same position.”
“We should be able to get them. I think the elevator’s still here, and I can open the door—”
“No!” Jason snapped.
“At least the leg irons, so she can walk—”
“I’d rather take my chances carrying her!” Jason stood and once again slung Succuba over his shoulder, watching out for her fiery parts and holding her in place by clamping one arm over the backs of her knees.
Hearing a sound like a faint sizzle, October wondered how long Jason’s leather vest would protect him from Succuba’s smoldering crotch.
“It’s better than you might think, blood-boy,” Succuba crooned, winking at October as she wriggled on Jason’s shoulder as if seeking the least uncomfortable position. “You should try it sometime.”
With a mental shrug, the vampire gathered up Skipper’s body. “All right, but we’d better not waste any more time.”
Jason stared at him. “You mean you’re lugging that messy corpse all the way up?”
“If there’s any chance at all that getting out of here will dissolve our costumes, Skipper might come back to life. I did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but you say you weren’t ever actually dead. Staying conscious the whole time isn’t my definition of ‘dead,’ anyway.”
Cringing from the idea even as he said it, October demanded, “How do we know that Skipper isn’t still conscious?”
“You’re a vampire,” Jason argued. “Coming back to life when the stake gets pulled out is all part of your costume. Which I shoulda remembered. Skipper’s costume is just a poor, mangled human body.”
“All the same, if there’s any chance, any hope at all, we’ve got to take it. We owe Skipper that much.” October stepped forward.
“Whatever you say, sweetie!” Succuba sang after him. “Have fun with your deadweight!”
He ignored her and kept on up the corridor. Aurea scrabbled along on one side and Jason quickly fell into step on the other.
“The inquisitor’s crazy,” Jason grumbled, still looking at October. “You’re damned near saintly, you know that?”
“I’m famished, and I keep having these damn daydreams about yanking people’s heads off to drink their blood, did you know that?”
“Anybody’s head in particular?” Succuba asked suggestively.
October thought, Whoever I happen to be looking at. Aloud, he answered: “A total stranger’s, by preference.”
“Fight it,” Jason told him. “You, too, bitch,” he added, giving Succuba a jounce with his shoulder that made her gasp happily. After a few steps in silence, he went on, “Look. Bradley. I’m going to give you my confession. And you, hellcat—” jouncing Succuba again—”keep quiet! No kibitzing, or I’ll do something to you that even you won’t like.”
“Ooo-oo-ooo, big boy, I’m really scared.”
“SHUT UP!”
Succuba let out a yelp that sounded genuine.
October hadn’t been watching—didn’t know what Jason had done—but said, “Hey! I don’t like—”
“You just haven’t seen quite enough of her, that’s all. I’m telling you, Bradley, if anybody belongs down here, it’s this one, and if she doesn’t start behaving herself pretty damn soon, I’m just going to dump her down right here and leave her, irons and all.”
Aurea growled. October glanced at the nearest door and saw it was 7B.
“Uh ... look,” he said. “Have you seen what’s in 7A?”
“I said, I’m giving you my confession. What’s the matter, not interested?”
“You should’ve given it to Rodney-Godney when he asked you for it, so nice and polite,” said Succuba; but she sounded a little subdued.
“Sure,” October told Jason. “That is, I’m not pressing you or anything, but sure, if you want to get it off your chest, whatever it is, I’m interested. I just think—”
“I don’t even care if you go to the police with it.”
“Uh ... I can’t quite see myself doing that. Not unless it’s something really big. I mean, knowing what I know about how juries work, I wouldn’t want to stick anybody with a jury of saps like me. I just think maybe you ought to wait until we’re past Room 7A, that’s all.”
“Why? What’s ...” Jason’s voice trailed off as they drew abreast of 7A’s open doorway and looked in.
“Waxworks,” October explained, swinging to a stop beside him. “Uh-oh.”
The victim dummy had been put back together. Now it hung spreadeagled above t
he floor, looking stretched to its limit, as the four devil automatons shuffled farther apart by slow centimeters.
Whole, the victim dummy formed a big ‘X.’ Even horizontal, close to the floor, and imperfect as it was thanks to the curved and bumpy human shape, it radiated a faint nausea at the vampire standing at the doorway. Before, when he’d rushed right in, it had already been in pieces, the ‘X’ destroyed.
Had a repair team already found the damage and corrected it? Or did the exhibit put itself back together somehow, to keep repeating the show over and over automatically? The dummy’s head might show them ... if it hadn’t been replaced, if it was still melted from Aurea’s breathing on it…but it faced away from the watchers.
“Waxworks, huh?” Jason half turned so that the woman lying across his shoulder could see into the room. “Look there, bitch. Any more trouble outta you, and maybe next time it won’t be a waxwork dummy in that harness.”
The dummy groaned. The groan loudened, covering the noise of imitation muscles and ligaments giving way, and finally turned into a full-blown scream. The near shoulder separated, the arm clumping wetly to the floor. The shrieking head turned toward the doorway…to October’s relief, most of the face was still melted away, exposing the grotesquely staring glass eyeballs in their metal framework.
What really sickened the vampire was the thought that he might not have found it nauseating at all—or nauseating only because of the victim’s “X” position—if the dummy had been an actual human leaking actual blood. “If I were you,” he told Succuba, “I wouldn’t like to depend on the maintenance crew getting you out in time. They apparently haven’t been around to check things since Aurea breathed fire on the dummy’s head.”
“What about the wig?” Succuba pointed out sweetly. “Looks like they replaced that. Or didn’t the first wig get even a little frizzled when your dragon friend melted the face down?”
“She could be right,” Jason grumbled. “They could grab a new wig from the costume shop upstairs. A whole wax head might take longer, even need to be custom made. You say you did the damage?”
“The first time we came by.”
Jason nodded. “All the more reason to get outta here. Come on.”
Almost banging Succuba’s head on the doorpost as he turned—his companion couldn’t be sure if he did it on purpose to scare her or not—Jason took the lead. October wouldn’t have reminded him about his promised confession, but after a couple of strides, the blond man went on as if the waxworks in 7A had never broken into the conversation.
“It’s like this. I’ve got a temper. Always had. You may have noticed. When I ran that metal spike through you, Bradley, it was really the others I was mad at—that hypocrite Paynter, and this bitch on my shoulder. Yes, and Cassandra Phony-Baloney Pascal, for standing there acting like she could stop it if she so deigned, but chose to let it all happen anyway! Sorry you got the worst of it. What I shoulda done, was run the stake right through Paynter’s guts instead. It’s too bad that when I start seeing red, logic has this lousy way of going out the window.”
For a second October wondered whether that summed it up and Jason was pausing to hear some kind of forgiveness, something like, “No hard feelings,” or, “Well, you were just trying to put me out of my misery, after all.” But about the time the vampire opened his mouth, the Hell’s Angel started talking again.
“The thing is, I was already on a short fuse when they shoved me in with the rest of you this evening. I never particularly wanted a red ticket in the first place, and when they stuck me with this damn biker’s costume ... Hell, I never shoulda let anyone talk me into it. I shoulda told ’em to shove it up there—Scratch that, I shoulda shoved it up their assholes myself! Thing is, all my life I’ve hated bikers. Goddamn scum. Think they own the roads. Back when I was still in school, I saw it in the news about this motorcycle punk who ran down a kid. Drunk as a sponge—the punk, not the little tyke. Smeared her all over the sidewalk right there by her own front lawn, right in front of her mother’s eyes. I tell you, whenever I think about it, think about that poor woman looking out her window just in time to see this lousy punk in a ‘Smoking Wheels Club’ jacket plow into her little daughter, I just ...”
“I understand,” October agreed. He doubted that Jason even heard him.
“And then, about ten years or so after that, there was this other case. Some so-called businessman so-called ‘commuting to work’ on his damn Harley-Davidson, probably left over from when he was another punk biker, and he plows into a three-year-old! Claims the kid ‘just darted out in front of him,’ and the lousy jury buys it and lets him off the hook! Think that brings the kid back?”
Tuning in on the phrase, ‘lousy jury,’ October made a small noise of sympathetic outrage.
Succuba, who had surprised them by keeping quiet, sang into the rest of Jason’s pause, “Room 6X coming up on your left!”
“Huh?” said Jason. “Oh, yeah, the ‘X.’” With a couple of long strides that looked unhurried but put him ahead of October and Aurea like a racer passing a baby stroller, he swung into a sidewise position with his free shoulder blocking the dangerous letter.
“Thanks,” October told him, finding that he could walk past the covered symbol with no hesitation or discomfort.
Jason waited until he and Aurea were halfway to Room 6W, then caught up again in a few more long strides. “Well, anyway,” he went on, “a year or two after that—must be about ten or a dozen years back, by now—I’m driving west along this highway about sunset, see, just a backwoods, two-lane road, but a pretty good, smooth one. I’m clipping along about sixty-five, maybe seventy, when here comes this truck, heading east with the solid line on his side, and a damn biker trying to get around him. Coming straight, head-on toward me in a no-passing zone.
“Now, get this, Bradley,” Jason continued with very little pause. “I don’t want you to think I couldn’t help it, to think I was another poor, helpless victim or anything like that. That was okay for the police report—got me off the hook nice and neat—but, dammit, I’m making you my full confession now! Sure, it was a no-passing zone, and sure, I was facing into the sun, but it was behind some trees at just that point, and I saw the kid in time. Had a good, clear shoulder all the way down my side of the road, too—six or eight car widths almost flat, and then into a nice, gentle little dry ditch. I could’ve swung off the road in plenty of time. But when I saw that biker, it all flashed back on me—all these lousy, rotten bikers running little kids down in cold blood, and so I ... never budged an inch. Splattered him all over the road. And never regretted it. Not even when the bills…for my hospital costs, car repair, the kid’s ... Hell, I had insurance, didn’t I? Besides, the kid’s insurance covered his funeral and most of my costs on top of it. Sure, his folks woulda liked to sue me, but their son was the one legally in the wrong. I had the trucker for my witness to that! Poor guy had even tried to swing out, warn the kid not to try it in a no-passing zone. Yeah, you can bet all the sympathy that counted for anything was on my side, all right! Well, maybe I was just a little bit sorry when I got an eyeful of the kid with his head ... But, hell, he shoulda at least been wearing a helmet, shouldn’t he? Anyway, not sorry enough to come clean. And it passed. ... Until now.”
Succuba laughed. “Big boy, I’d rather have the vampire’s sin on my soul!”
“Why?” said October. “I don’t see that much difference. I probably would’ve waffled on my vote even if it had been a murder charge, and I had time to think about what I was doing.”
“Besides, you’ve paid for it,” Jason said bitterly. “Christ! You overpaid for it. We made damn sure of that, didn’t we?”
“I guess so. Assuming the kid really had been guilty. Of snatching that particular purse. If he was innocent, there’s no way I could ever make it up to—”
“Shhh!” said Succuba. “Listen.”
They stopped and list
ened.
A scream was coming from somewhere…distant and muffled—they’d have missed it if they weren’t concentrating—but long and drawn-out, finishing in what could have been a choked sob.
Succuba let out her breath in a satisfied, “Ahhh!”
“You sadistic bitch,” said Jason. “You love it down here, don’t you? God, you belong down here. We really oughta just leave you.”
“Not shackled like that,” October protested.
“Why not? If you’d seen enough of her, you’d know she isn’t exactly helpless this way. Let her loose, and I wouldn’t give much for our chances. She’d be on our heels ... In fact, that’s why we’re stuck carrying her along. Leave her, and somebody might come along and let her loose.”
October said, “Nobody can be that bad.”
“You poor, sweet innocent!” Succuba answered for Jason. “Like the big boy says, you ain’t seen enough of me.”
“Shut up, bi—”
“Hey, how ’bout stopping and peeling me down, boys? Or would you rather hurry up and see where that scream was coming from?”
“More waxworks, probably,” October guessed. “Sounded far enough away to be coming from 6A. That’s assuming they have one of those exhibits in the first room of every ‘level.’”
“You really hope so, don’t you?” Succuba teased.
“Coming up on 6T,” said Jason. “What about the letter ‘T,’ Bradley? That do anything to you?”
“‘T’? Why should it?”
“That’s what those old Roman crosses really were—’T’ shapes. They usta nail the guy’s wrists, or maybe sometimes just tie ’em, if they were in the right mood and wanted his death taking even longer, to a loose crosspiece and then haul it up and fasten it to the stationary upright. That’s how the crucifixion actually went. Seems to me I read somewhere the Church added the little top piece later to make the Christian cross look more like some old Pagan holy symbol.”
“Ouch!” said October. “So ‘T’ is a cross, too? ... Yeah.” It was getting harder to lift his feet. The air was starting to get soupy ... lumpy around him. Maybe it was just power of suggestion, maybe if Jason hadn’t told him ... On the other hand, he’d come up on 6X the first time all unsuspecting. Anyway, he’d never know. “Yeah, I guess I’ll have to ask you to cover that ‘T’ for me, too. Thanks.”
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 111
