The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Aurea nuzzled his cheek as if trying to forgive him.

  “Oh, yeah. All those ‘X’s’ and ‘T’s’ ...” Did the alphabet have any other letters that would give him trouble? “Well, we could’ve at least gotten up to ... let’s see ... 5Y, and maybe found someplace to hide—”

  The car bumped to a solid stop.

  For a few moments, neither of its occupants moved. Both sat staring at the door. Then the dragon half slithered out of the vampire’s lap, padded to the control panel, and edged her front paws up the wall until she could look at the buttons. She could reach the lower ones easily enough with her nose.

  Slowly swiveling her large head, she looked back at October.

  He nodded wearily. What else could they do? Sit here till they starved? Or maybe suffocated?

  She heaved a snuffling sigh and used the tip of her nose to push “Open Door.”

  It whispered open as politely as if the elevator mechanism had never misbehaved. Tendrils of smoke curled in.

  Along with smells thick enough to smother a baby. It seemed like stale tobacco smoke and stale incense, shot through with a sharp industrial stench.

  Gagging on it, October groped in his pocket. Nothing but disintegrating tissue and the old pocket sketchpad Rodney had given him when they were still themselves.

  Now October remembered. He’d put on clean trousers today, forgotten to stick a handkerchief in the pocket, and substituted a couple of tissues from the rest room dispenser when he got to work. His wallet was gone, too. He couldn’t have forgotten that this morning, could he? He’d have needed it to pay for his supper at Davy Jones’s Locker and his Hellpark entrance fee ... Anyway, if they could just get out of here alive, he wasn’t going to worry about his wallet. Certainly wasn’t going to go back and look for it! Replacing his driver’s license and stuff would be a pleasure.

  As fresh skunk would have been a pleasure compared with the smells flooding the elevator car. At least skunk was natural. The car apparently had an air freshening and circulation system that he hadn’t noticed before—its hum was increasing to fever pitch—but all it could do with the door still open was add a sweetish wash that turned sickly in the polluted atmosphere.

  “What now?” he coughed.

  Looking at him again, Aurea blinked tears out of her eyes. Then she turned and dragged herself through the doorway. He buried his nose in his sleeve as well as he could and followed.

  They found themselves face to face with a blank black surface. Straight, seamless, undecorated, and so smooth that for a second October wondered if it was solid, or a huge, dark emptiness. Shouldn’t it have reflected the light from the open elevator? Still pressing his right sleeve to his nose, he stretched his left arm out—

  And touched the wall, not two strides from the elevator.

  Behind him, the elevator door slid shut, so fast it slammed. Not loudly, but sounding very final. As it closed, it cut off all the light.

  Vampire and dragon were alone—as far as he could tell—in a dark, narrow tunnel of unknown length, with the foulest air he had ever smelled.

  He guessed that it would have been as totally dark as Room 7D when the lights went out at midnight, but the dragon’s mouth and nostrils cast a faint glow. “Aurea,” he suggested, “could you try ... maybe ... Do you think you could breathe out just a tiny flame? About the size of a match. Don’t try it if you don’t want to. For all we know, this air could explode on us!”

  He saw by the way the glowing patches moved that she was shaking her head, maybe to indicate that she had already thought about that, and if the air had been combustible, the heat of her regular breathing would have touched it off. Or maybe to indicate that she wasn’t quite sure how to control her fire. She hadn’t had much chance to practice, had she?

  The large, luminescent “U” that was her mouth grew wider. A long flare shot out, vanished as if sucked back, slowly peeked out again to about the length of a person’s thumb. “Good!” October exclaimed. “That’s good! Can you hold it?”

  How much of a strain it might have been, he had no way of knowing; but she held it, moving her head side to side, up and down. It was precious little light. Finding nothing around them except the elevator door in an otherwise blank wall on one side and a completely blank wall on the other, stone floor beneath and nothing visible above, she blew her flame out to about a hand’s length.

  October tapped both walls. They echoed like metal. “What now?” he asked. “Right, left, or do we try to get back in the elevator?”

  She made it clear she wanted nothing else to do with the elevator—she struck off to the left, which happened to be the side of him she was standing on.

  He followed. Both walls seemed as straight as if they’d been laid out with a precision ruler…a very long precision ruler. As much as he had seen of the subbasements…that would be 7D to 6T, not very much, but nothing to suggest it wasn’t as representative as the park employee who had brought him from the Hellmouth beast’s playground skull down to 7D via the elevator had spieled to him…the semi-public underground levels consisted of a curving corridor spiraling down around a circular central elevator shaft. The car had brought him and Aurea down from somewhere between 6V and 2L. He guessed it all meant that they were in a cellar below the subbasements.

  How deep would that be? The lowest room the paying public ever saw was supposed to be 9Z, wasn’t it? That’s put them ten stories underground. Or more—this might not be the first sub-subbasement. Thinking of all that earth above them, all that weight of stone and concrete and metal, made him feel woozy.

  Or maybe it was just the smell that made him woozy. It was getting a little less noticeable ... smell, he’d heard somewhere, was the sense that blunted first, when it had to blunt for sheer self-defense…but his nose was still so uncomfortable that his lungs felt queasy, too. Not to mention his stomach, though the hunger pains helped keep the nausea at bay.

  They came to a door. Or at least, a door handle—a hard, shiny black knob sticking out of the inner wall. The outlines of the door were invisible, but where there was a knob, there ought to be a door. Unless it was a hoax, but why put a hoax down here, where the public was never supposed to come?

  Squeezing the doorknob, he looked at Aurea. “Well? Should we try it?”

  She nodded.

  “What if it’s ... If we keep on, we might find a fire door. One that’s clearly marked, with one of those reinforced windows so we can see right away ...”

  She tilted her head, as if thinking. After a moment, she whined and scratched the wall beneath the doorknob.

  “Well ... All right.” He shut his eyes, turned the knob with a shaky hand, and pushed.

  Nothing happened. For a moment of sinking relief, he wondered if it was a hoax. or else a locked door ... Then remembering there were two ways a door could open, he drew another breath and pulled.

  A stronger smell hit his nostrils, and stronger light fell on his closed eyelids. He opened them, more than half expecting one of those Inferno landscapes full of jagged rocks and lakes steaming up to underground stormclouds, with damned souls in the form of naked, semi-dismembered bodies writhing everywhere.

  Instead, he saw some kind of warehouse or storage area, a huge room full of square pillars and black boxes, most of them big enough to hold a horse or even a small elephant, stacked up in some places almost to the high, flat ceiling. All the surfaces—boxes, pillars, ceiling, floor, and walls—were solid, unrelieved black, and the whole chamber was flooded with the brightest, harshest white light he had ever come up against except in highly concentrated pills of illumination. He couldn’t see where it came from…he couldn’t spot a light fixture anywhere…but it felt like being inside one huge, unblinking strobe. (Unless “flashing” was part of the definition of “strobe”—he wasn’t sure.)

  And silence. Dead silence, over everything. As if all these black s
urfaces and cold, hot, glaring white light swallowed up every last noise, even his own breathing and heartbeat. As if all the screams that had ever been uttered in Hellmouth Park were what had been stored up in these boxes, waiting to be let out all at once, and that might make Judgment Day ...

  It hurt. It felt unreal. It made October feel unreal, and it hurt with a kind of physical pressure on his eyes, sinuses, forehead, face and neck ... in fact, every square centimeter of skin and flesh. It added vertigo to the nausea in his lungs and the plain old empty hunger in his stomach. His muscles shook, his breath constricted in his throat.

  It seemed to hurt the dragon just as much, guessing by the way she was shaking her head, blinking, and snorting. He was about to pull her back into the passageway and shut the door, when a shriek escaped from one of the boxes.

  No—not from the boxes—from somewhere behind a pile of boxes. A longer, wild, whimpering shriek, pain and fear reduced to sound…human sound. Or, at least, animal sound. They had surely heard enough mechanical screaming by now to teach him the difference between living and mechanized.

  “Aurea?” he whispered.

  She nodded. They had seen too much suffering here tonight—they could not slip away without at least trying to stop more of it.

  They tried to move quietly, but soon found it impossible. Every scrape of her claws and pat of his footsteps on the hard stone floor sent echoes chasing one another throughout the chamber. When a second scream followed the first, October and Aurea dropped all attempt at stealth and broke into a run.

  A run interrupted at every turning, every wall of packing boxes. It was a maze down here, a stark maze of solid, glaring black, through which they bumped their way in a nightmare without shadows. All the shadows the universal light should have cast in every direction were gulped down and lost in the universal darker-than-shadows blackness.

  Not until the third scream did they turn the right corner and come in sight of the victim.

  It was Succuba. She hung by her wrists from the ceiling, her feet high above October’s head, weights on her legs at knees and ankles. The weights were attached to the outside of irons that held her legs separated by one round chain link at the ankles and another at the knees. A tall stake of silvery metal, like a huge needle growing out of the floor, threaded up through the two links. As nearly as October could tell, its tip just cleared the link between her knees. Looking higher again, he saw that her hands were in some kind of harness that appeared to put most of her weight on the thumbs.

  “Coming!” he shouted, pounding forward again, the dragon beside him.

  They reached her in a second, but what next? Standing on tiptoe and stretching his muscles, he could just touch the sole of her foot with one finger.

  Aurea found the pulley that apparently controlled the suspension mechanism, though between the gray pulley and Succuba’s hands the black cords were invisible against their black surroundings. But lowering Succuba in order to work on her shackles would bring the point of the stake closer to…and pulling her up until the ankle chain cleared the stake would put her completely out of reach.

  “If we got you high enough,” he called up to her, “think you could swing yourself a little? Just enough for us to bring you down clear of the stake?”

  She answered with another wordless shriek.

  Aurea was biting the stake near its base. October squatted and joined her in examining it. If they could break it off, they should be able to slide it out harmlessly. But the thing was solid ... steel? Solidly embedded and, even though he could close his hand around it, not even his vampire strength could do more than vibrate it a little.

  “Leave off your work of the Devil,” said a stern, familiar voice.

  They looked up. At first all that was visible of Rodney was his face, hands, and silver cross. Even when he moved, about all that could be seen of his black inquisitor’s costume was a thin sheen marking its outline and folds.

  “‘Work of the Devil’?” October echoed. “Trying to get her out of—this?”

  Rodney stepped forward, his hand ready on the cross. “She is exactly where God would have her at this time—”

  “WHAT?”

  “For the welfare of her soul, she must be made to confess her sin. Prove thy holy intent by assisting me, vampire, and this time I will spare you.”

  Aurea growled.

  “Assist you? How? Even if I wanted to, with that cross of yours—”

  Rodney dumbfounded him by slipping the crucifix beneath the upper part of his garment and then holding his hands palm out at his sides. “It is not fitting,” he pronounced, “that a man of the cloth be the one to operate the engines of torture.”

  “Good Lord, Paynter, Jason is dead! Skipper is dead! I’d have been dead, if—Can’t you get it through your head that if we don’t start sticking together—”

  “Jason dead? That man of wrath? How?”

  Succuba moaned.

  “The Pascal appeared and…blasted him.”

  “Satan herself? Where?”

  “Six ... ‘V.’ I don’t know how she did it. Some kind of projection—”

  “Ah!” Rodney cried as if that explained everything. “She merely manifested herself up there, while personally remaining in the lowest depth of hell. Where we shall seek her out, once we have finished with her minion.” He pointed to the pulley. “Here! And turn at my direction—”

  Aurea rushed him.

  Jumping behind the pulley, the inquisitor yanked out his cross and flourished it at them. October collapsed against the side of the stake. Unaffected herself by the cross, Aurea halted and half turned back to her friend in a perplexed way.

  “And thus you prove that your hearts are not with the righteous cause!” Rodney declared, sounding almost more grieved than wrathful. “So be it. First the succubus. Yes, we will still give her one chance to repent and save her soul, if she will take it. I should not be the one to do this, yet extraordinary circumstances may force any of us to extraordinary measures, and a servant of God must never shrink from his clear duty.”

  Still standing behind the pulley, he unhooked the catch one-handed. With a sudden, horrendous, rattling sound, the wheel turned, dropping the victim about a hand’s length before Rodney could seize the handle and stop it with a jerk. Succuba’s scream choked off in a shudder.

  Aurea growled again, eying Rodney as if measuring the distance between them and considering the best way to get around the pulley and tear his throat out.

  “Keep back, foul worm,” he said, returning her stare. “Never hope that thou couldst stop me in my holy work before my God-given power reached across to strike thine unnatural lover!”

  He moved his crucifix in a big Sign of the Cross in October’s direction, shooting the vampire with pains that started at the top of his head and spasmed through every organ and muscle in his hunched body.

  At October’s moan, the dragon abandoned her position and crouched beside him. Whining, she patted his face with the tip of her nose.

  “Lo ... ver?” he gasped at Rodney. “Good Lord!”

  “Thou wouldst be well advised to cease adding thy poor, feeble blasphemies to the list of thine other sins,” the inquisitor said coldly, and let the pulley wheel turn another centimeter. Succuba screamed again.

  Still whining, Aurea bent her head and closed her jaws around the base of the stake as if gnawing it could help relieve her tensions. October felt the heat of her breath on his right knee.

  “Confess, temptress!” Rodney thundered, lowering Succuba a little farther.

  October squeezed his eyes shut. How close she was to the point by now ... He wouldn’t look. Not from directly below. How could he judge that distance from his angle, anyway? Only ... when it touched ... when it sank in…the blood, her hot blood, rolling down the stake, flowing down, gushing down, so close to his face…all he’d have to do w
ould be put out his tongue ... Oh, God!

  The pulley gave another short rattle. Succuba shrieked yet again. October felt warm liquid hit his forehead where it touched the stake. Hating himself, he put out his tongue.

  Not blood. Thin, pickly urine. He choked, coughed, tried—although in the force field of the crucifix, the muscles of his lips felt stuffed with cotton marbles—to spit.

  “It begins to tickle, does it not?” came Rodney’s voice. “Another hair’s breadth, and it will begin to prick. At first, a drop or two of blood…then down by the further thickness of a fingernail ...”

  “STOP!” she screamed piteously. “STOP IT! OH! STOP! I—when I was nine years old, I tortured Boffy to death! My kitten! And I loved it! Her cute little screams, her helpless little struggles ... I put her in the road where the trucks ran over her, so nobody ever know…how I loved it! I’ve always loved it! I knew then that I’d always love it! You’ve got to be careful ... who you pick…how far you go ... or people might ask questions. You can find lots of people who pay for so much…but no more. Or there might be police. But for the chance to do it again—to a human being—”

  “ENOUGH!” Rodney’s shout was as loud as Succuba’s screams had been. “Fouler even than I had guessed!”

  Again the pulley rattled. Succuba shrieked without words.

  This time October gasped, “Stop it!”

  “She has confessed,” Rodney answered, still shouting, “but not repented! To save her soul, she must repent before she dies! But in either case, she must die—if this kind of body can die!”

  With a noise that drowned Rodney’s words, the stake itself shuddered, pressing October backward until he fell. Straining to see from his new, cramped and painful position, he made out that Aurea had been using contained doses of fire-breath to melt the base of the stake until she could break it off near the floor—now she was backing away, dragging the metal length clear as carefully as she could. The point left a long, dripping scratch along the inner side of Succuba’s left leg ... nothing worse.