The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “I said, it’s nothing,” he repeated, this time in some pain from his earring. Apparently more on account of the unkind thoughts than the lie. “I just want to try something here.”

  Crumpling the remains of the poster into a tight, prickly ball, he threw it into the wastebasket and sat again, watching the mirror reflect his moving clothes. He flicked his mirror lights on, reached up, and finally took off his earring, thankful that he had never since dress rehearsals worn it onstage anyway. Not that the audience would have been able to see its cruciform, but they might have seen its glint. Besides, tonight it might have pinched enough to distract him. Cause his performance to suffer, he thought ironically. It stung his fingers. Not very much, but more than it should have on a Saturday evening only an hour after church.

  To his eyes, the earring’s mirror reflection seemed to dance in the air a few seconds and then drift down to the little jewelry box ready for it on the dressing table. Just like the private magic shows he used to put on for himself the first year or so after he became a vampire.

  He reached for the greasepaint and began rubbing it on fiercely, watching the mirror. The make-up, not being an organic part of him, reflected, floating up in gobs and smearing itself gob by gob into a ghost mask hovering above the reflection of his white wraparound, unconnected until he rubbed greasepaint on his throat. Blinking invisibly at the effect, he picked up a pencil and leaned closer to add the lines around his mouth, trying to get them right by feel and by the way his face muscles moved and molded the greasepaint in the bright mirror lights.

  “Hey!” Ted Appledore exclaimed, getting up and coming over to him. “Ma-a-ster?” he went on in a self-parody of his stage work, pronouncing the “a” as if he was imitating a sheep. “Ma-a-ster, what are you doing?”

  “What does—” Clement began, but swallowed the angry tone and went on in a carefully mild voice, “What does it look like?”

  “Like you’re out to play Frankenstein’s Monster. Here.” Ted scooped up a fingerful of cold cream and slapped it over Clement’s pencil lines.

  “I can’t even do my own make-up,” the vampire observed bitterly, rubbing the cold cream in.

  “Oh, the base looks okay. Hey, I said the base is okay! Don’t go after it all, just those age lines. Here.” Ted handed him a tissue to wipe the creamed area. “Now touch up your base coat and let me do the rest of it again, Ma-a-ster. Why virus up a good system?”

  “You can’t pay any attention to the critics,” said Winsor. “Where would I have been if I had paid any attention to what they said about my Mercutio back in ’thirty-six? Not doing Abraham Van Helsing this weekend! I don’t think they should even let us consume the reviews.”

  “Yeah,” said Ted. “Make all the reviews banned reading and listening for everybody concerned with putting on a play until a full year after the last performance.”

  “Be unconstitutional,” said Gerry. “Besides, how would they keep us from getting the word of mouth trickledown?”

  Clement worked away at his base coat and managed not to say anything else. He knew they were trying to be friendly—even if they were just accidentally rubbing it in—and he was the one acting like a grunzho. He also knew that they had gotten good notices themselves, and that Winsor W. Windsor would be paying plenty of attention to the review board, for his doctorate next spring.

  “Who ever decided a static blip like Hodag Crossing rated four entertainment critics, anyway?” Ted demanded rhetorically.

  “The critics themselves,” Gerry replied. “And the Journalistic Media school. Bashaw’s the only one who isn’t connected with NMU, remember.”

  Clement broke silence to mutter an alternate reply: “The same powers that decided every school play should get three performances.”

  “Hey, didn’t you hear?” Gerry enthused. “Box Office wants us to add a Sunday matinee for this one!”

  Clement groaned.

  “Say,” said Ted, “who do you think they want to see, anyway, Ma-a-ster? A real vampire in the title role—that’s what’s packing them in, all right!”

  Clement groaned again.

  “I don’t think any of you tads were around yet the year we did Mousetrap,” Winsor informed them. “That was the year we had Julia Smythe-Hunter over from England on a grant. She did Mrs. Boyle. Three guesses as to the identity of the one and only member of that cast whom our local critics jumped on for a phony British accent.”

  Gerry said, “I think the real trouble, Clem, is that you’re too doggone nice in real life. Sort of cancels out the additional insights and affinities, if you see what I mean.”

  The dracula wished he could have bitten his lip without puncturing it. Trying to ignore the thought that even the Blessed Virgin Mary would have hated being called “nice,” he gave his greasepaint a last rub, took a deep breath, and said, “An actor’s never had to be rotten in real life in order to play a convincing Iago or Jack the Ripper. Okay, Ted, I think I’m ready.” He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes.

  “Ma-a-ster.”

  “Hey,” said Gerry, “all I meant was, maybe you depended too much on figuring you understood the Count’s mental works just by natural affinity.”

  “Yeah, Gerry, pawneemyou,” Clement said, figuring he could sound lighter and more neutral with the Russian for “I see what you mean” than the English.

  “Well, your interpretation works for me,” said Winsor. “I don’t care what these smalltown critics say. What do they know about anything, anyway? I only know that when I’m out on that stage with you, you get me absolutely convinced you’re a polluted ‘thing’ that has to be exterminated.”

  “Thanks, but that’s because you get so wrapped up in your own role you’d feel the same way if Shirley Temple was playing Count Dracula.” Clement tried to make it sound like a compliment to Winsor, but he couldn’t help thinking that Shirley Temple could probably have gotten better critical notices in the part, too.

  Besides, “polluted ‘thing’” wasn’t exactly the interpretation he’d been aiming for.

  “Ma-a-ster, hold still.” Ted was working on his eyebrows, expertly penciling in the hint of a joining across the bridge of his nose. “Okay, Ma-a-ster, give me that little frown.”

  “Say, Ted,” the vampire suggested suddenly, without opening his eyes, “how about trading parts tonight? I’ll bet we know each other’s lines well enough—”

  “Unh-unh! No, nein, nyet, iie, ixnay, nope! No way you’re prying me out of Renfield. Meatiest part in the whole doggone play. Besides, I’m too short. How would it look, a six-foot Renfield cringing to a little shrimp of a Count Dracula? Now come on, pucker those brows for me.”

  “Well, how about one of you other floaters? Gerry? Winsor?” Maybe whenever Oakie Woolley got in, he’d jump at the chance to trade his little asylum attendant part for the title role ...

  “Keep it, Czarny,” said a voice he hadn’t expected to hear backstage tonight.

  Swinging around in his chair, he opened his eyes. Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza was standing in the doorway. He must have come up quietly in time to hear the last couple of exchanges.

  Mendoza came the rest of the way into the room to a chorus of greetings, with Florian Argyle, the Dr. Seward, pushing in at his heels. As Florrie made his jacket do a somersault over the clothes rack and reached whistling for his wraparound, Mendoza looked the dressing room over with an old-home-week expression. “Ah, yes,” he remarked, “some things never change. Remember what I told you about the critics this afternoon, Czarny?”

  The vampire swallowed and nodded. His fraternity brother had told him, “Bashaw is an embittered curmudgeon who failed to make a national name for good taste and now consoles himself for his own failure by tearing down other people’s efforts, just for the affectation of it. Carpenter and Sierramentez are school contemporaries and self-appointed partisans of mine who wanted to see me in
this part and would have panned Lugosi, Lee, or Langella if they thought he had ‘taken it away from Mendoza.’ I didn’t ask for their partisanship, and in another age of American journalism I might have broken in on them with a bullwhip, but there it is. Besides, Sierramentez actually admires Bashaw’s style and follows his lead. That leaves the anonymous ‘Pundita’ as the only honest critical opinion currently being published in or near Hodag Crossing, and ‘Pundita’ is probably the only reviewer on the continent who thinks that Tournamello’s ‘Faust’ is a good screenshow and Capdike’s ‘Last Return of Batman’ a bad one.”

  Mendoza’s pep talk might have helped more if Clement didn’t share ‘Pundita’s’ opinion of the Tournamello screenshow, or if, putting all four reviews together, every other member of the cast—even Tricia Dartle as the Maid—hadn’t been singled out for someone’s praise. Even Bashaw had come as near as he ever came to raving when he mentioned Ted’s Renfield, Winsor’s Van Helsing, Santiaga’s Lucy, and Holly Sendak’s sets.

  Mendoza didn’t repeat any of his afternoon’s comments tonight in the dressing room. Nor did Clement. To call the reviewers wrong in their negative opinions might seem like hinting that they were wrong in their positive opinions, too. So Clement just said, “Thanks, brother,” and tried to look more cheerful as he offered his face up to Ted again.

  “Good,” said Mendoza, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “Break a leg, kid. Winsor! Do you have a minute? I’d like to step over to the Green Room with you and reminisce a little about that time I played Chorus to your Oedipus.”

  Eyes shut, Clement let the sounds drum at him for a few seconds—Mendoza and Winsor going out, Florrie still whistling, Gerry wondering aloud how close Oakie would cut it tonight, make-up supplies clicking on the table tops. The room light wasn’t supposed to cast any heat, but tonight it felt close to uncomfortable and, with it beating on his eyelids, the vampire felt as if he was floating in a fiery red darkness. He did whatever Ted told him to do with his eyebrows, but as Ted set to work drawing the lines around his eyes ...

  “Why not cut Dracula out of the play completely?” Clement asked.

  “Huh?” said Florrie.

  “Make him strictly an offstage character, I mean. Hey, yes! I’ll bet it could be done pretty easily. Make the play just a little more like the book, too.”

  “What’s going on?” Florrie asked.

  “I mean it,” the vampire insisted. “I’ll bet we could work it up right here and now—”

  “Oh, yeah!” Gerry cut in. “Want to make the rest of us look bad, too, huh? Stand back safe in the wings and watch us stumble around out there trying to ad-lib our way around a ‘little cut’ like that ...”

  “What the heck is going on here?” Florrie insisted plaintively.

  “Oh, it’s just the stupid reviews,” Ted explained. “Clem’s feeling a little down because—”

  “Stop it! Stop right there!” said Florrie. “Never read the doggone things, myself.”

  Clement began, “They thought Dr. Seward was—”

  “I don’t want to know!” Florrie cut him off. “If they liked me, I’ll get a swelled head, and if they didn’t, I’ll get a shrunken one. Chances are I wouldn’t agree with them either way, anyway.” He went back to whistling the Toreador Song from Carmen.

  Clement sighed. “Too bad we aren’t using understudies. I could have called in sick.”

  “You never get sick,” Gerry pointed out. “Vampire health.”

  “There are a lot of other kinds of sickness besides physical,” Clement replied. “If artistic sickness counts—”

  “Mouth lines!” said Ted.

  Clement gave it one more try. “How about you, Florrie? Like to switch parts for the rest of the run?”

  Florrie stopped whistling just long enough to say in imitation Bogey, “Keep it up, sweethearts, and I go over and keep Tricia and ‘Taga company in the ladies’ dressing room.”

  “Come on, Ma-a-ster, who’d I just tell you they’re coming to see? Now make a face so I can do your mouth lines.”

  Clement sighed again and obeyed. He listened to Gerry pretending dislike of Florrie’s whistling, Florrie offering to take requests, Ted and Gerry snapping song titles at him—a lot of them obscure or obviously made up—and Florrie answering every request with something from Bizet or Rossini. The vampire tried not to envy Florrie’s attitude. But wishing you could be more like somebody else in some particular way wasn’t ‘envying,’ was it?

  “There!” Ted announced. “My ma-a-sterpiece! Okay, Ma-a-ster, you can wake up now.”

  Clement sat up and studied it in the mirror. “Well, it certainly scares me,” he remarked. “Thanks, Ted. If I can’t raise a few shivers in this, it won’t be your fault.”

  “Come on,” Ted told him. “You look just like some refined, oldstyle European gentleman. Just like our wise director said to make you look.”

  Of course, for Clement, the ghastly effect came from a mask of make-up appearing to float unsupported by anything solid. The only suggestion of hair above or around the mask were the silver highlights Ted had added. Eyes, nostrils, and mouth were just empty spaces showing reflected bits of the room behind him. He tried resting his fangs outside his lower lip, thinking that they might block out two little points in the lipstick, but they didn’t. He thought he could catch a slight reflection of their glister when he moved his head, that was all.

  Winsor came back into the room, alone. Stepping over to the make-up table, he studied himself in the mirror panel neighboring the vampire’s and remarked casually, “Say, Clement. How would you like to deliver Van Helsing’s curtain line tonight?”

  “How would I like ...?”

  “You know it pretty well already, don’t you?”

  “Know it?” Jumping up, the vampire faced into the room and delivered the whole thing, from “Just a moment, Ladies and Gentlemen!” to “... remember that after all there are such things,” exactly the way he’d dreamed about delivering it, even pantomiming the final twirl, flourish, and bow he’d give with his cape at the finish.

  Ted, Gerry, and Florrie applauded. Winsor said, “Bravo! Yes, I’d guess you want it, right enough.”

  “If I hadn’t been so ‘nice,’ I’d have ... Wait a minute. You don’t really want to give it to the weakest member of the whole cast.”

  “I do,” said Winsor. “To show the critics that in the judgment of the rest of the cast, we have a fine leading player.”

  “Will you please blank it with the critics?” said Florrie. “I think Clement should get it because as long as we’ve got a real drac, it’s just plain logical sense for him to say, ‘there are such things.’”

  Clement still played it cautious. “Thanks again. But what will Dr. Belstar say?”

  “If I know our good director,” Winsor replied, “as I think I should, after so many seasons, she’ll only regret that she didn’t think of it first, and then tell you to take it for the rest of the run.”

  “Take a vote,” said Ted, shooting up his arm. “Those in favor?”

  At this moment, Oakie Woolley burst in, jacket half off. “What’s going on?”

  “Voting on whether Clement should take the final curtain line,” Florrie told him.

  “Oh, right.” Oakie made it unanimous by jerking his right arm up briefly before peeling it out of his jacket sleeve and heading for his locker. “Always thought it’d make more sense coming from Dracula than Van Helsing.”

  “What about Santiaga and Tricia?” said Clement.

  “They’ll vote with us,” Florrie predicted cheerfully. “And even if they don’t, it’ll still be five to two. The only thing that can stop it tonight would be your own veto.”

  “Veto? If I hadn’t been so doggone ‘nice,’ I’d have bitten necks to get it. Thanks, everybody. Thanks.”

  “Hmmm,” Winsor said dryly. “Dr. Belstar ma
y even want to know why nobody suggested it before now, seeing that it’s such an obviously logical change.”

  Could Mendoza have told Winsor to make the offer, when he called him out to the Green Room? Clement put the sudden doubt away. It didn’t change the vote of confidence all the rest of them, even Gerry, had just given him. Feeling better than he had since this morning before the first review hit the newscreens, the dracula turned to get his costume, which, unlike his make-up, he could put on for himself.

  * * * *

  N.B. The version they are doing is the Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston play, which does not include Mina among the onstage characters.

  THE DRACULA OF PI RHO

  I suppose this could be called “the original version” of The Deathguards. The two novels could be seen as companion pieces in that where not flat contradictory, they may be taken as complementary, as for instance in the reviews of Clement’s performance as Count Dracula in his college production. But where contradictory, for instance in the matter of Clement’s boyhood first name and his age at being made a vampire, the differences must simply be accepted as part of one story or the other. Even if you should memorize one of these two novels, it would not tell you who done what to whom , or why, in the other.

  When I got the idea to do Clement Czarny’s big collegiate adventure in the re-imagined R.S.A., I did what I had not done for All But a Pleasure or Lestrade in Love, and reassembled the original cast. Cagey Thursday simply would not translate out of the fanciers’ world, but in place of her and her watson, I brought October and Aurea over from The Hellmouth Seven. Nor are these the only characters to appear in only one of the two novels. And seeing that the original plot would not work in the re-imagined R.S.A. world, we built anew from the ground up, using a number of the earlier elements but involving a re-orientation that may at first blush make some of the characters look like different people who happen to be namesakes. I think they remain the same people, their apparent change resulting from the variant socio-historical situations having molded them in different ways. For example, the forces that make Stallion what he is in the timeline developed from our own simply do not apply in the timeline developed from a major historical change transpiring in the aftermath of the American Civil War. I think some of the original cast came along with me so cheerfully because they got either happier outcomes or more dramatic opportunities in the new story, others because in the new story they got the chance to take things a little easier. While certain of their biographies have been readjusted, at least some of the nomenclature differences can be explained by the R.S.A. having adopted the new system of gender-crossing family names in a different generation relative to the events of the story. Just as the question of which graduation class a certain minor character belongs to can be explained by the different versions of the R.S.A. having different cut-off birth dates dividing one class from the next.