The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “No sweat.” The brawny man stepped forward and blocked “6T” the same way he had “6X.”

  “Hey, vampire, baby!” Succuba sang from his shoulder. “What’re you going to do when we come to an ‘EXIT’ sign, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Hey, wait a minute. Wasn’t there an ‘EXIT’ sign above the door outta our original party room? Or 7A, with the waxworks?”

  “No,” October replied, thinking back. “No, I would’ve noticed it. I mean, even before. When The Pascal first came in—I noticed the effect she made, standing there in that costume framed by a solid background, one that could have been almost anywhere, anytime in history. No ‘EXIT’ sign.”

  “Maybe not,” Succuba teased him, “not right there, not right then. But you can bet we’re going to come to one sooner or later, all lit up as per fire department guiderules, and mounted up too high for big boy to—”

  Another scream drowned her words. One that came from a lot closer by. A wrenchingly realistic shriek from—

  “That came from next door!” Jason exclaimed. Spinning away from 6T, he strode back to 6U, leaving October plastered against the wall opposite the paralyzing letter.

  “Hey!” October got out.

  As if unaware of him, Jason flung open the door of 6U. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Must be the next room down.”

  The dragon emitted a sharp howl and planted her head against October’s leg, trying to push him forward. Her howl brought Jason, but instead of covering the ‘T’ again, he grabbed the crook of October’s arm and hauled him bodily back into the lower safe zone.

  “Come on,” Jason snapped, almost whacking October with Succuba’s legs as he turned back to Room 6V and reached for the doorknob.

  “Wait!” October protested. “Stop and think! It’s probably just another—”

  “Then how come they’ve got the damn door locked?” Jason demanded, furiously rattling the knob. “If it’s another damn exhibit, how come they aren’t exhibiting it?” He dropped Succuba and hurled himself shoulder first at the door. It shook, but held.

  October joined him. If it wasn’t more waxworks…he wasn’t sure what, if anything, they could do, but wouldn’t he have welcomed any kind of interruption in Room 7D earlier that evening? “Let me try it,” he suggested, laying Skipper’s body down on the other side of the corridor. “Vampire superstrength, y’ know.”

  “All right,” Jason said, panting. “Both together. One…two…three!”

  Their shoulders struck the door simultaneously. It gave way with a crash that for an instant—only an instant—covered the next shriek of agony.

  “Jesus!” cried Jason. “Oh, sweet Jesus!”

  “What?” Succuba demanded petulantly. “At least drag me over where I can see.”

  Midway into the room, a naked screaming man hung windmilled taut by wrists and ankles to the four corners of a vertical frame. He oozed crimson in several widely separated patches—chest, left thigh, right arm near the pit. In front of him stood a hairy demon wielding what looked like some kind of longhandled kitchen implement.

  The demon moved with mechanical jerkiness, and the victim’s limbs and body looked scaly or quilted all over, a strangely hokey effect for a place that could turn out such realistic dummies as the one in 7A. Fastening his gaze on the clumsy quilting, October pulled in a breath deep enough to help quiet his heartbeat, and said, “Actually, looks more to me like a rag doll this time.”

  The victim dummy turned its head toward the doorway and yelled, “Help me! Help me!”

  “Damn natural voice, though,” Jason commented stonily.

  October felt something hot bump his leg. Stepping clear, he glanced down to find that Succuba had hunched herself to the doorway for a look. “Ahhh!” she breathed, licking her lips. “Yes ... I see ...”

  The demon dummy’s arm moved, guiding its implement in leisurely jerks here and there around the naked body, sometimes touching for a moment, sometimes just hovering. Stretched too tightly to move anything else, the victim turned its head as if watching terrified, its hands and feet writhing in their shackles. “Help me!” it screamed again.

  “I could’ve sworn it was looking straight at us,” Jason remarked.

  “Yeah,” October agreed, still feeling shaky, but unable to take his eyes off the slow play of mechanized torturer and victim. “They must have it set to look at the door every so often. But what’s the point of running it at all, in a locked room with no audience?”

  “Make chumps like us break in and get billed for damages,” Jason snapped back as if he knew all about getting billed for damages. “Come on, let’s scram.”

  “NO! Help mee! PLEASE! I’m reeaal!” The victim dummy had its face to them again.

  “Hey!” Jason exclaimed. “It’s hard to be sure…but damn if they haven’t given him Chancy Capetto’s face.”

  “Chancy Capetto?” October asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Christ, Bradley, don’t you keep up with the news at all? Just about the second or third biggest mobster in the country, that’s all. Drugs, prostitution, child pornography—you name it, Capetto’s a kingpin.”

  “Yesss,” Succuba went on, obviously enraptured with the exhibit. “Look. It’s like a melon scoop, you see. A melon scoop with a nice, long handle and a sharp edge ... Yes, yes, yes!”

  Maybe they were right. Maybe she deserved every shackle they’d put on her.

  The dummy shrieked again as the thing Succuba called a melon scoop finally came to rest on his hip, flicked neatly around, and spewed a bite-sized gobbet through the air to land at the vampire’s feet.

  Fake or not, it looked so tantalizing that October picked it up, popped it in his mouth, and started to suck.

  Next instant he spat it out. “G- Lord!” he choked, hunger warring with reason and decency. “It’s real!”

  “Yesss,” Succuba cooed again. “Yesss. They’ve poured him into a wire mesh body suit a couple sizes too small, and then tightened it. This way, they can go on killing him as long as they like. It’s an old Chinese invention—”

  Jason charged into the room, October and Aurea on his heels. The vampire crumpled midway, cursing himself for forgetting that the victim’s body formed another giant “X.” The Hell’s Angel planted one punch in the chest of the hairy demon and knocked it over backwards, its melon scoop still jerking in the air until the dragon caught that arm in her teeth and started to gnaw.

  “Help me,” pled the victim.

  “The goddamn executioner’s a dummy, anyway,” Jason announced.

  “Yeah ... machine,” the victim got out between gasps. “Oh, God! A bloody machine! ... But I’m not!”

  “You.” Jason turned to him, eyes glistening. “You really are Chancy Capetto, aren’t you?”

  “Look ... whatever you want…anything you want ...”

  “No more pure silk shirts and diamond stickpins down here, huh, Capetto? No more champagne and caviar and new girls on the half shell?”

  “Look…get me out of this ... you can write your own ticket. Anything!”

  October shouted, “Just get one arm loose—one leg—anything to break the ‘X,’ so I can help—”

  “In a minute, Bradley,” the Hell’s Angel said without taking his eyes from Capetto’s face. “Look. Capetto. I don’t like this business of stealing little kids and using them for porn. Or any of the other stuff, either, but especially that. If anybody ever deserved to be down here, it’s scum like you.”

  “For the love of God—” Capetto began.

  Jason talked louder. “Maybe I oughta prop that machine up in front of you again, but I don’t like all this torture stuff, either. Not even on garbage like you. So ...”

  Pulling a switchblade from his pocket, Jason flicked the blade out and plunged it up into Capetto’s chest.

  The gangster’s eyes bulge
d. He gurgled, seemed to try to jerk upward in his bonds, shuddered, and finally hung still, mouth open and eyes staring. There was very little new blood.

  “Darn it, Jason,” Succuba sang out mockingly, “you spoiled the fun!”

  “You fool,” said a voice they hadn’t heard for…how many hours?”

  Out of the shadows on the far side of the chamber stepped Cassandra Pascal, long cape swirling about her, head and pitchfork both held high. “You interfering idiot!” she repeated icily. “We had a contract with O’Reilly and Horowitz.”

  “‘Bubbleface’ O’Reilly and Fairchild Horowitz?” Jason demanded—alone of the survivors, he seemed uncowed, or at least unsilenced, by Pascal’s reappearance. “The rival mobsters?”

  “One of whom will betray the other to a similar fate within six months.” Flinging out her right arm, she pointed at Capetto’s body. The wire mesh took on a hot, red glow, embossing the quilted flesh. For a second, the deep indentation started to singe and blacken, with a faint smell of charring. Then the whole corpse burst into flame, wriggling with the false appearance of life. Strangely, the rest of the room seemed to grow colder as the body blazed.

  “As far as the mortal world is concerned,” Her Satanic Majesty remarked, “Chancy Capetto has become one more mysteriously missing person who will never be found.”

  Aurea whined and shuffled back to where October lay. Feeling his invisible restraints start to loosen as the flames turned Capetto’s body from an “X” to a shapeless mass, the vampire stroked the dragon and asked, shivering, “But the woman in 7A ... she really was a dummy, wasn’t she?”

  Pascal replied, in a voice dripping with scorn, “We keep our catalog in the form of waxwork exhibits. O’Reilly and Horowitz selected this particular execution—as demonstrated in 8A—to last thirty-six hours. The greater fools they, seeing that this was pleasurable to what we already had waiting for him after death. Nevertheless, a contract is a contract. I ought to honor it by ordering you to be strung up there in Capetto’s place, Jason Shepkowski James!”

  The switchblade fell out of Capetto’s half-consumed carcass. Dropping through the chill air, the knife was still smoking but no longer glowing by the time it clunked on the floor.

  Snatching the red bandana off his head, Jason bundled it around the handle of his knife and straightened, facing Cassandra. “Pascal, you always were a phony and always will be. Okay, let’s see you try it.”

  She pointed at him. The bandana that shielded his palm from the knife handle blossomed into flame racing up the hairs of his arm and grabbing his leather vest like it was tissue paper. Faster than he could react, he was a second mass of flames.

  He shrieked and ran toward Pascal. And right through her! He turned, still shrieking, and groped, trying to seize her in a blazing bear hug, connecting with only his own arms. How could he keep going? Even across the room, October felt shriveled by the heat. He would have shouted—the terrible scorching heat stuffed his voice back down his throat.

  By now the cold blaze around Capetto’s corpse was dying down ... leaving a blackened skeleton still stretched into an X ... not one joint separated to break the pattern…after being hidden by the fire, it showed stark again, crushing the vampire back down hard in its paralyzing force field.

  Aurea clamped her jaws round his forearm and started dragging him away as fast as she could. He saw Pascal sneer at Jason, lift both her arms high, stand posed with her cape billowing, though not because of Jason’s frenzied, weakening assaults.

  He collapsed between her feet, a huge lump of bleeding charcoal. She crowed a satanic laugh. Aurea got October to the door and let go of his arm. Hauling himself up by the doorframe, he half fell, half staggered into the corridor.

  On one side, Skipper’s body was melting down into another hot coal. On the other side, Succuba sprang at October, echoing Pascal’s laugh and waving the broken links of her handcuffs at his face.

  The dragon leapt snapping and knocked her down, but she was up again at once, still laughing, slapping down with one hand while reaching for October with the other. Hot metal clinked on the dragon’s scales.

  Only paces away, an elevator door stood open. Unquestioning, October caught Aurea by one horn and dragged her across the corridor. Happily—or they would have fallen into the shaft—the car was there. Slamming the heel of his palm down hard on the “Close Door” button, he stared dazedly as Succuba jerked her arm back out of the doorway just in time.

  Safe—for how long? He hit the highest button on the panel.

  The car shook. Nothing else happened. It shook, and rattled, and stayed right where it was.

  Aurea yipped and growled. The door was opening again. October jammed his right hand back down on the “Close” button.

  The door slammed shut again, but quivered, with a deep, grinding noise. Succuba must be pounding the “Open” button on the other side. Leaning his whole weight on “Close,” October scanned the control panel. Rows of random-looking room numbers, no “X’s” or “T’s” among them. Still pinning his right hand down on “Close,” he reached up and hit “1A” with his left fist. He hit it again, harder. He hit it a third time and held it down with all the vampire strength he could spare from leaning on the “Close” button. When the elevator car still stayed where it was, he began pummeling every button in turn, working his way from the top.

  Finally, on “2L,” the car budged. After one huge shake, it started moving up, slowly but fairly smoothly.

  With a sigh of relief, he slid to the floor and sat, back resting on the wall. Aurea plopped down on his lap and hunched there, gazing up into his face, tremors shaking her quasi-reptilian body.

  “Maybe we should’ve tried the elevator first, after all,” October mourned. “Maybe Jason would still be alive ... maybe there’d still be some kind of hope for Skipper ...”

  The dragon whined.

  “We should’ve tried to save him ... Jason. But how? So hot…how could we have even gotten close to him?”

  Aurea shook her head.

  “Lord! Poor Jason…even if I could have moved by myself ... How come Jason burned hot and that poor ... Capetto, was his name? burned cold?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  “Burned cold ... Nothing burns cold. Scientifically impossible. But Capetto did. How? Could he have sucked all the other heat out of the room somehow? ... Maybe they had him in just the right place to trigger some kind of fan that brought in cold air from someplace else ...”

  Aurea bent her head and tentatively licked the fast-disappearing marks of her teeth on his forearm.

  “Don’t worry.” He rubbed her head. “It doesn’t hurt. Thanks for saving me. ... What the heck are we doing, talking about ‘scientifically impossible’? Us turning into…how is that ‘scientifically possible’? But it happened!”

  Another soft whine.

  “But why both kinds of fire? Could Capetto have been just another dummy, after all? Bait in a trap?” But the remembered taste of that gobbet of flesh still set the vampire’s mouth watering, his stomach growling. “Or maybe ... I hope ... Jason burned hot—the way fire’s supposed to burn—because he was going up after he died. ... Oh, Lord, he took so damn long dying!”

  Aurea pawed October’s chest gently, careful not to let her claws scratch.

  “The way this elevator is taking so—”

  It stopped dead with a crunching sound.

  “Oh, no! No—oh, no!” Jumping to his feet—Aurea slithering off his legs—he pounded the “2L” button again. Then the thought flashed through his brain that maybe nothing happened because they had arrived at Room 2L, and he hit the “Door Open” button. He leaned on it. He hit “2L” again ...

  “Oh, damn, damn, damn!”

  Once again, desperately, he started hammering every room button, beginning with “1A.” He worked so fast that he couldn’t have said which b
utton finally made the car shake and start moving again…downward.

  Chapter V

  “Two Ell,” he repeated, stabbing the button that once had seemed to work, over and over, more and more slowly, Aurea scrabbling around his legs, until he stopped in horror. “Two Ell ... Oh, no! No…they wouldn’t use a pun like that! It’s ... it’d be too corny for The Pascal!”

  Who had—who must have—inherited this place and her role in it. From ... who?

  He slumped to the floor again, held onto Aurea for all the comfort they could draw from one another.

  “Cassandra Pascal. She couldn’t have been…all along? No,” he corrected himself, with one sharp shake of his head. “Impossible! She’s been as good as living in a public fishbowl for ... Good Lord, it must be twenty years by now! When would she have had the time?

  “But ... look at the way Jason ... went right through her just now! Like some kind of projection ...

  “Jason! Dammit, he probably had the best brain of any of us. I wish ...

  “The other one! Succuba—whatever her real name is! G- ood Lord, I just assumed she ... I never even tried to ask ... Aurea! What if she was desperate to escape with us? What if we abandoned her? Of course she’d keep jabbing at the elevator button, trying to bring us back—”

  He jumped up, searching the control panel again. “Where was it? Where did we leave her? Between 6T and 6X ... Here! 6V!” He drove his thumb down on the button.

  The car dropped as if through a vacuum. Knocked to the floor, October groped for the yelping dragon and held her tight. The car steadied itself and slowed to only about three times faster than it had been going before he hit the 6V button.

  “Damn! Why the—the heck didn’t we keep on running up the corridor? Why did we—why did I—let them scare us into this damn elevator?”