The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Then he threw both arms around Aurea and held onto her as if for sanity. “I’m forty years old today,” he told her, with awe that he could remember the fact. “God! ... God! God! God! I feel two hundred, and I’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of my natural life. Natural life! Thank God! God! God!”

  When they released each other, she showed him the one ring they hadn’t been able to get off her dragon’s paws, the diamond in antique silver setting that she wore on her middle right finger.

  “An heirloom,” she explained shamefacedly. “It meant a lot to the customer who brought it in for enlarging to fit her finger. ... Don’t stop me, I turned into a dragon before I even saw that we were supposed to make our confessions. Anyway, I ... wanted this so much for myself that I ... returned her a modern silver ring with an almost identical diamond, and pretended I’d misunderstood the order, pretended I thought the stone was all she cared about, that I thought she wanted it reset.”

  She took it off and put it into his hand. “Keep it for me. Until I can look up her address and…figure out the best way of getting it back to her.”

  “Good think we couldn’t get it off, then,” he observed, feeling for a pocket that was still safe enough to trust it to. In his back pocket, he found the small sketchpad Rodney had given him. He flipped through it a moment, Aurea looking wordlessly over his shoulder. Then he carefully returned the book to his pocket and put the ring on his left little finger.

  It squeezed only a little.

  * * * *

  The story you have just read (assuming you have, and not just skipped to this commentary) is not a slavish transcription of my holograph draft. As is the way of writers—at least, of this present writer—I tinkered in various small emendations and afterthoughts. The explanation for how Cassandra Pascal can become Satan, however, is not among them. It is there, almost word for word, in my original, written in 1991. “The Santa Clause,” with Tim Allen did not appear in movie theaters until 1994; I myself did not see it until it reached TV, at which time I had pretty well forgotten providing a similar explanation for Cassandra Pascal’s transmogrification into Satan. Thus, the similarity constitutes a clear case of either serendipity, or coincidental inspiration from some common original source which has become totally assimilated, at least for me, in the subconscious.

  * * * *

  These events happened very nearly the same way in both R.S.A. universes. Despite Cassandra Pascal’s best intentions, Hellmouth Amusement Park was rebuilt quickly enough to feature in The Deathguards, which also gives us another look at October and Aurea, grown a few decades older. That October became a much more “traditional” vampire than Clement Czarny is explained by October’s costume imprinting on him his own hazy and limited impressions of pop-culture draculas, whereas Clement worked out for himself more or less from the ground up what actually applied to his condition, and adopted the dracula “uniform” only afterwards and in order to be honest about it.

  * * * *

  Davy Jones’ Locker. In the holograph notebook, I had left a blank space for the restaurant’s name to be filled in later. In 2013, I used the name of a midpriced seafood chain popular in my more recent stories. The two versions of the R.S.A. share as many of the appurtenances of everyday living as I think compatible with the change in chronology and presence or absence of fantasy perceivers.

  * * * *

  For anyone who may have been trying to guess, the point at which I received the letter from my agents which nudged me into wrapping this story up asap and moving on to other projects came in the paragraph beginning “How deep would that be? The lowest room the paying public ever saw was supposed to be 9Z, wasn’t it?” That was where I broke to eat lunch and read the day’s mail. I picked the story up again with “That’d put them ten stories underground.”

  CLEMENT CZARNY

  My vampire. Or is he a real vampire? In my own mind, he is; but for the most part I tried to leave the question open, at least in the fanciers/realizers R.S.A.—it might be only his fantasy, as being a “vegeton” is Ariella Rampal Celeste’s. In the re-imagined, fanciers-free world, it’s more definite; but even there, I think we leave it a little bit to his society’s, and the reader’s, choice.

  To the best of my recollection, Clement Czarny came into being when Jane Yolen sent out an invitation for potential contributors to the collection of vampire stories she and Martin Greenberg were putting together for young readers. Internal evidence in my story, “A Cold Stake” (which was accepted), suggests that it was indeed the first Clement Czarny story to be written, the starting point for all the others. It is also, I think, the only one of the Clement Czarny short stories that depends on being set in the fanciers/realizers world. While it must clearly be easier for someone like Clement to move around freely in this particular umwelt, I rather think he could function almost as well in one not accustomed to registered fantasy-perceivers. Thus, with a few minor adjustments—such as Clement’s exact age on being bitten—all the stories in his section except “A Cold Stake” and the novel The Dracula of Pi Rho can be read as backstory to the new-version R.S.A. novel The Deathguards. As can “Blood Grotto” in the Hellmouth Park section.

  Strangely, it seems to me that these short stories are probably among the most purely domestic I have ever written. Even “Blood Grotto” has strong roots in a basically functional family group. The Dracula of Pi Rho gets a bit more melodramatic, but not entirely because Clement is or fancies he is a vampire.

  I don’t pretend to know for sure that no one else has ever laid out this particular theory of vampirism before Clement Czarny; but I will attest that I cannot remember ever having encountered it anywhere else.

  “Cz” in “Czarny” is pronounced more or less like “ch” in “charcoal.”

  THE DIAMOND DOVE

  Arranging the stories as chronologically as possible in the lives of the central characters puts this one first for Clement Czarny.

  “Hey, come on, Rosie!” said Jeff. “We all looked a good half hour. You must’ve lost it in the pool.”

  “I did not wear it into the pool,” Rosa repeated for the quadrillionth time. “I would never risk it like that!”

  “You almost did,” said Donna, jingling her bracelets. “You came out of the dressing room with it on. If I hadn’t called your attention to it—”

  “And then I took it off! And I put it very, very carefully into its own little flap pocket in my beltcase.”

  “But maybe you didn’t,” Clement said, still playing peacemaker. “Maybe you just thought you did because it’s so much of a habit. Maybe this time it slipped your mind because the rest of us were in so much of a hurry to get in the water.”

  Some last Saturday this had been for Rosa’s year up north as an interstate exchange student! So gray and rainy and chilly it was more like March than June. They even had to have the roof on over the municipal pool in Maplehaven Park, and it was like swimming indoors. And now her dove necklace!

  She looked around the table at her three friends. At least, she had thought Jeff Rosencrantz, whose first name was really Jameel, was her friend, even after the way he’d been pestering her half the school year to give him a keepsake before she went home. The other two were actually Jeff’s friends, who’d just gotten in this morning for their annual summer visit. Making this the first time Rosa had ever seen them.

  Clement Czarny made himself out to be a vampire, right down to the long black cape. Well, he did yawn a lot, excusing himself by reminding them that it was daytime, and always politely covering his mouth with one hand to hide his canine teeth. And they really did look long, kind of.

  Donna Hartline Hammond was Clement’s second or third cousin or something. It had to be some kind of in-law relationship, because Donna was so blond and green-eyed

  and obviously Pureblood Vanilla that just looking at her made Rosa Lone-Cactus Reyes a little uneasy, a little sus
picious. And Donna was Protestant besides.

  That was intolerance, Rosa knew. A social injustice, to distrust somebody just for being Pureblood Vanilla Protestant. Maybe Rosa should say something about it in Reconciliation. All the same, looking back at the day, she thought Donna had eyed her necklace pretty enviously.

  It was Rosa’s most precious thing. A little dove, smaller than a fingertip, made out of real diamond chips, with tiny little dots of sapphire for its eyes, hanging on a sterling silver chain. Her grandmother had given it to her for her twelfth birthday, and she had worn it ever since, all the time except swimming and doing sports and times like that, when she always left it in the beltcase pocket she had lined with rayon batting and never used for anything else.

  “Come on, Jeff,” she said. “If you took it, give it back, and I’ll give you ... I’ll give you my class ring from San Esteban Middle School. My diamond dove isn’t boy’s jewelry anyway.”

  “That’s plain oldtime sexism,” Jeff said. “A man can wear any kind of jewelry he wants, just like a woman. Besides, I haven’t got it.”

  “Look,” said Donna, “it was a pretty little thing, and I’m awfully sorry you lost it, but we can’t do anything about it now. Here comes our ice cream. I wish you’d change your mind and order something good and cheer up a little and stop talking about it.”

  “How can I stop talking about it? It was a gift from my grandmother. How could I sit here and eat ice cream now it’s gone? Maybe forever?” Rosa wasn’t sure she could even swallow the root beer that Li, the fountain boy, put down in front of her.

  Clement said, “Pardon me, I ordered a hemoglobin float. This float has plain cherry cola.”

  “Gee, golly, we’re fresh out of hemoglobin!” said Li. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice.”

  “You’re new here, aren’t you? Is Jeri still around?”

  “Most of the time. She’s off today.”

  “She always used to keep a carton of chicken’s or rabbit’s blood around in the summer for when I came up. Oh, and make sure you bring it in a metal shaker so my friends don’t have to look at it.”

  “Hokay, duke, anything you say.” Li tapped his neck and took away the float.

  Donna dug into her hot toffee fudge sundae and said, “I know I wouldn’t pass up any chance for a Sundae Palace Saturday Afternoon Special, no matter how many necklaces I’d just lost.”

  No, Rosa thought, maybe Donna wouldn’t. Donna had so many. Right now she was wearing two necklaces—a plain gold chain and a silver charm necklace—besides three bracelets on one wrist, four on the other, earrings, a pin on the left shoulder of her tunic, and a ring or two on almost every single finger. What would she want with my poor little dove? It would get lost in her jewelry box!

  “Hey, Clem,” said Jeff, looking up from his Suicide’s Delight. “Why don’t you tell Rosie how you got to be a vampire? Maybe that’ll help take her mind off it.”

  “Here at the table?” Clement replied. “She doesn’t even have any appetite now.”

  “So she isn’t eating,” Donna said between bites. “So it can’t very well hurt her digestion, can it? Just leave out the gory details you throw in when we’re telling ghost stories.”

  “Well,” said Clement, “it’s up to you.”

  Rosa had been thinking, Maybe I want so hard to believe one of them took it because otherwise it’s lost forever. If I really did forget and wear it into the water and it came off there, it’d be invisible—the diamond chips and the tiny little blue eyes, and even the silver would be almost invisible in the water—and if it got into the circulation system ... It took her a minute to understand that Clement had been talking to her. “No, no,” she said. “I mean, yes, please tell about it. It won’t bother me.”

  “Well ... It happened when I was eleven. I was in this terrific accident on Wolf Lake, up near Minnemagantic—dived out of the boat, hit my head and arm on an old wrecked truck that’d gone through the ice one winter and never gotten towed out. They located me by the blood bulging up through the muddy water—”

  “Details, Clemmie,” Donna reminded him through a mouthful.

  “Yes. Anyway, it was pretty bad. I never woke up until they had me in a hospital room, all hooked up to monitors and things. I guess they’d left me alone for a little while with just the monitors to supervise me. Actually, I woke up floating near the ceiling, looking down at my body—Crumbs, I looked terrible! Yes, I know, no gory details. Anyway, seems I was having one of those out-of-body, near-death experiences, drifting up to a big, bright plain, meeting my dad and mom again—the whole shmear.” He sounded half apologetic about it.

  “Only,” he went on, “I kept feeling like something was biting my neck, and when I asked my folks about it, they just said maybe I’d better get on back. And then when I did, there was someone big and dark and shadowy bending over me, stuffing a wrist in my mouth and ... Anyway, I started dreaming again, all about a lot of mirrors—just like in The Phantom of the Opera—and I couldn’t see myself in any of them. And then the medics were coming in because they’d finally noticed the monitors going crazy.

  “But the dreams were true,” he finished, “at least the last one was. I didn’t reflect in mirrors anymore, and I didn’t cast a shadow, and pretty soon I grew these.” He tapped his longish canines with his left thumb and forefinger. “And we found out the only way I could get proper nourishment was ... you know.”

  “Fangs,” said Rosa. She’d been able to follow his story, but as soon as he stopped, her mind filled up again with her lost dove. “Well,” she said with a huge effort, “I’m glad I’ll be out of here Monday, and I guess I’d better get a silver cross for around my neck tonight and tomorrow night, huh?”

  Donna said, “I’ve got one you can borrow. Keep, in fact. It’s filigree, a real antique, it even tarnishes. Not that you’ll need it ... Oh, here we go!”

  Li had come back to put a malt shaker down in front of Clement. “Yo, here you go,” said the fountain boy. “It was there, all right, clear in the back of the freezer. Frozen solid. Probably left over from last summer. We had to microwave it a little. You can tip me extra.” He grinned and disappeared.

  Clement took a sip. “Still frosty, and they forgot ... Well, maybe he doesn’t know and didn’t ask anybody who does.” He reached carefully into the chest pocket of his tunic, pulled up a plastic toothpick case, and fished a needle out of it. “Borrow your thumb, Jeff?”

  “Huh-unh,” Jeff replied, chasing a whole cherry around with his spoon. “Not this time. Mosquitoes are already getting enough from me this year. You can use your own for once, it’s just a snack.”

  “Okay. You guys might want to look the other way.”

  They didn’t, of course. But neither Jeff nor Donna paid any special attention, either. Donna said, “Yug,” but she said it very casually, without missing a bite of her sundae. Jeff just went on eating without saying a word. Rosa might have been interested, maybe even a little disgusted, as she watched the “vampire” jab his own thumb and squeeze three or four drops into the malt shaker, but she was too preoccupied with her own troubles.

  “See?” said Donna, as Clement stirred his float. “That’s all he needs, just a couple drops human in any other kind of blood.”

  Clement nodded, tipped the shaker toward himself, and spooned a bite of ice cream into his mouth. Rosa could just glimpse it, covered with what might have been raspberry sauce. Actually, she thought, he wouldn’t have to put on so much of an act about other people’s sensitivities. Aloud, she said, “I didn’t think the Undead could eat anything else except blood.”

  “I can,” Clement replied. “I don’t get any food value out of it, but I like it, and it’s good roughage.”

  Jeff said, “Ice cream is roughage?”

  “Bulk, anyway,” said Clement.

  Yes, he looked thin enough to make you think that maybe it was jus
t going through him without putting on the calories. But then, so was Donna pretty thin. Downright svelte. How did she do it, packing sundaes away like that? Nervous energy?

  “Besides,” Clement was going on, “I’ve never been able to figure out if I’m really ‘Undead’ or not. Being a vampire doesn’t seem to have stunted my growth or anything like that.”

  “Watch out for this one when he gets a little older,” said Donna.

  “Yeah,” said Jeff. “Not only won’t you need any crosses or crucifixes, they wouldn’t do you any good anyway. Tell her, Clem.”

  The vampire took another bite of ice cream before replying. Maybe it was nervous energy with him, too, that was keeping his weight down? Come to think of it, he hadn’t been yawning nearly as much as before they went swimming. Well, night was getting closer, even if you could hardly tell it on a dark, rainy June day like this. Or maybe he felt perkier after eating.

  “That’s right,” he said at last. “Crosses don’t bother me at all, with or without the crucifix Figure. Holy water doesn’t, either. In fact, I can even make the Sign of the Cross on myself.”

  “Show her, Clem,” Jeff urged.

  “Don’t,” said Donna.

  Clement nodded and swallowed. “Not in here. Irreverent. When we go across the street to Mass in ...” He glanced at his watch. “About twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes?” said Jeff. “Better check your watch. We’ve still got almost three quarters of an hour.”

  “I’d like to Reconciliate, too,” Clement told him. “I want to take Communion.”

  “Yeah.” Jeff turned and gave Rosa a wink. “Blasts your brain a bit about vampires, doesn’t he?”

  “Garlic and silver and sunlight don’t bother me, either. Even days when there is sunlight. Except that I seem to have a little more trouble with sunburning than you might expect with a complexion like mine. I could still have come swimming with you guys even if it’d been a sunny day, but I’d have had to rub myself with sunscreen every ten minutes.”