The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  But how much does a mere author know about such things?

  Anyway, I still think the original is a finished novel and good yarn in its own right. Had it ever been published on its own, I would have liked to do it under my birth surname of Karmilowicz.

  NOTES

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

  It was Cagey Warrington Thursday’s career-long habit to carry an inconspicuous recorder for taping virtually all her conversations, and to insist that her partner do the same. Hence, Tommi’s ability to recreate conversational passages.

  On July 23, 2013, coincidentally to my transcribing this previously unpublished 1989 novel, the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched an “Operation Last Chance” to hunt down still-fugitive Nazis. Will it really be the “Last,” or might what I had supposed a mere plot hinge turn out to be more accurate extrapolation than my 1989 efforts to foresee future computer and telephone developments?

  There exists in our timeline at least one actual fraternity designated “Pi Rho.” A little Internet research has satisfied me that finding any combination of Greek letters not used for any actual group would probably be not only fruitless, but potentially soon outdated—just as attempting to find personal names never worn in the past or future by any actual person would seriously cripple writers’ efforts to produce fiction. Therefore, I content myself with testifying that no resemblance or connection whatsoever is intended between the Pi Rho and Pi Psi Greek houses of the Reformed States of America and any or all Pi Rho and Pi Psi organizations of our own U.S.A. Just as all the characters not actually named in our own history books are fictional and any resemblance with actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  PROLOGUE

  (Hodag Crossing, Wisconsin, Saturday, February 9, 2041)

  Clement had advance notice, ten minutes’ worth. It came Saturday evening at about 20:30, and when it came, it was hard to miss: angry villager sounds approaching noise pollution level in front of the Amy Ryan Thelwell Residence Hall. Killing the room light and looking out, he and Keiko watched the mob gather, a dozen stout hearts in full costume, brandishing battery-powered stage torches that cast an artificially flickering glow along the snowbanks.

  “The Purple Rose!” he exalted. The oldest and most prestigious fraternity at NMU, Pi Rho had a proud tradition of collecting each eager new candidate by surprise, with a pledge ceremony carefully tailored to his personal quirks.

  Pi Rho! So Cousin Donna—from her influential place in the sister sorority, Pi Psi—had finally swung it!

  Storing his notes for the Palestrina study and shutting down the screen, Clement told Keiko, “Maybe you’d better get back to your own part of the dorm.”

  “No. Not till we know they aren’t going to hurt you.” She was a great study buddy, but a confirmed Independent with a deepseated mistrust of fraternities, sororities, social clubs—every kind of organized group. “How can we even be sure they are Pi Rho?”

  “Who else would they be? Come on, Keiko, real van helsings would’ve come after me my first semester, and they wouldn’t have come in full costume.” He grabbed his cloak and fumbled it on. Had to meet them in style!

  “Okay, maybe I’ll buy the costume bit. But if they’re the Rose, they should have been here to collect you last semester, when you rushed.”

  He stole another look out the window. “Look there! That one’s Struwwie—Spuds Struwwelpeter! Who else do you know around campus with shoulders like a bulldozer?”

  “So it’s the great Spuds Bartlett Struwwelpeter and he’s in Pi Rho. So what? If they didn’t think you were good enough for them your first semester—”

  “All right, maybe I’m only an alternate-list second choice. I’ll take it! Especially from Pi Rho!” His cloak swishing with the flow, he swung Keiko round and thought briefly that this was the kind of situation in which someone who wasn’t cursed with fangs might peck a jubilant kiss on a good buddy’s cheekbone.

  “I’m still waiting right here with you until we’re sure.”

  “Well, if you’re really set on it,” he replied, opaquing the window glass and dialing the room light back up as far as its soft twilight setting. “Then you might as well help me enhance my reputation.”

  A strange expression crossed her face.

  “Hey, don’t go nervous, study buddy,” he told her. “Leave nervous to me. Here, take the lute. It won’t get hurt if you’re the one holding it. No, better give you the guitar instead.” The guitar had cost him two tridols secondhand at a porch sale, the lute must have run Uncle Jan and Aunt Cele at least fifty tridollars in a musica antiqua store. The fellows wouldn’t hurt either instrument on purpose, of course, but in a rough-house ...

  Apparently there was more nervousness mixed with his delight than he liked to think about. He stored his lute carefully away in the wardrobe before sitting beside Keiko on the bed.

  She was jerking her right thumb down the guitar strings so gingerly that each ping was the mere ghost of a note. An odd set of ghosts, too, seeing how her left hand was simply clutching the neck of the instrument anyhow, fingers and thumb clamped down over the strings at random. “Come on,” he said, trying to loosen her left hand, “we may as well work on your chords until they get here.”

  “No. I want to listen.”

  Anyone would have thought there was something to worry about. Beyond an hour of hazing. Unpleasant, but everything had its price code, and as far as Clement knew there hadn’t been a single university fraternity casualty anywhere in North America since the 2020s. Certainly never here at New Millennium U.

  “We can’t even be absolutely sure it’s me they’re coming for,” he said suddenly.

  “How many other Reeltime movie monsters do we have here at Thelwell Hall? Aside from Theda Hari, and she doesn’t—Shhh! There!” Keiko slapped her right palm down firmly on the guitar strings. “The fire door.”

  “Wonder who opened it for them.”

  “I wonder why they couldn’t come in through the front lounge, like honest fratties.”

  “Shhh.” Hard to tell if they were making more noise with their voices or their feet, stomping up the single flight of fire stairs to his floor, starting down the corridor, all chant-shouting together, but ... “Yes! That’s Solly’s voice! Great, he’s with them, too. Everything has to be all right, Keiko, Solly’s with them!”

  “And Stallion Clearwater Drinkwater,” she said dryly, listening to the voices. “Had to be Stallion, I guess!”

  “They’re almost here. Come on, pose! Let’s make it look good!”

  Rolling up her eyes, she threw her head back. He stretched his mouth as wide open as he could, positioned his fangs a few centimeters above where he supposed the jugular was—anatomy had never been his best subject, good thing his scholarship hadn’t depended on it—and held the pose for at least three seconds before they reached the door ...

  To give it a rattling thud.

  “What?” He raised his head. “The boneheads! It isn’t locked!”

  “So just sing out to them to come on in.”

  “I can’t do that. Scream!”

  “Okay. If you insist.” She shut her eyes and let out a halfhearted crescendo in something like high A double-flatted.

  “Ye gods, the fiend has a victim in there!” That was Fred Fletcher’s voice, followed by more pounding and kicking.

  “Darn!” Clement muttered. “They’re going to break it.”

  “So? What do you care, fraternity man?”

  “Yeah, but who’s going to pay? I’m on a—”

  “Okay, okay.” Lifting her voice, she shrilled, “The handle! Try the haannndle!”

  He resumed his pose above her jugular (?) just in the nick. Shouting, “Hey! Smart maiden,” somebody tried the handle, the door slammed open, and they were crowding into the room.
>
  “Unhand her, Prince of Darkness!” Fred Fletcher cried—rhetorically, seeing that what felt like a couple hundred horsepower worth of muscles were already dragging Clement clear of the bed. “Maiden,” the spokesman went on, “artest thee unharmeth?”

  “Oh, for the love of Elvis!” she grumbled. “Tell this grummer to unhand me, himself.”

  At the moment, Clement happened to be facing the other way, panting in a stranglehold, but gradually figuring out that what had felt at first like a dozen arms and half a dozen Hercules bodies were in standard reality Spuds Struwwelpeter and two helpers. He obliged them by hissing and struggling. They obliged him by pretending that he really had the alleged superhuman strength of a dracula, and puffing as if it was hard to hold him.

  He heard Keiko and Stallion saying something that didn’t sound polite, but couldn’t catch their words. Next time he had a glimpse of them, she was standing at the window, handing Stallion something dark and longish, in a way that suggested she didn’t like having him any closer to her than she absolutely had to. The next time after that, as they were spreading the vampire out face up on his bed, Keiko was still standing at the window—upside down, from his point of view—looking on without a glimmer of amusement, both her arms clamped protectively around the guitar.

  Guessing that Stallion had been trying to make her leave and she had refused, Clement wished he could tell her to lighten up.

  Until he saw the length of wood Stallion was holding.

  Clement had developed a galloping phobia of stakes.

  Which wasn’t any secret, he reminded himself desperately, and even if he hadn’t talked about it himself, it would have been traditional anyway. Lighten up, lighten up! It’s some kind of trick—all just part of the haze. They’re weren’t really going to use it. Keiko would have ... Hadn’t he heard her demanding, “Let me see that?” Wasn’t that what she and Stallion had been talking about?

  All the same, it was a very bad moment when Stallion positioned the stake on Clement’s chest and Fred Fletcher lifted what looked like a 3000-gram hammer and smacked it down—

  And the upper part of the stake slid down around the point.

  A stage prop. That must have been what Keiko had demanded to test.

  He was still going to have a bruised sternum. In actual stage use, the actor would wear padding. Later on Clement would be flinching at the thought that if the point hadn’t been rubber, or if he had been lying on a hard surface instead of a yielding mattress, it might have caused worse than a bruise, stage prop or not. But for the moment he was lightheaded with relief. He remembered to go limp with a slightly belated hiss, and then just tried to relax and not giggle as they “cut off his head” with an ice cube, sprinkled a few shakes of garlic powder into his mouth, and dialed up the room’s sunlamp setting.

  “Look!” Fletcher said. “You all saw it? The look of peace on his face in the moment of final dissolution!”

  It had to be more like a look of suppressed laughter, as Clement struggled to keep his eyes shut and lips clamped together. But they had boned up on their Stoker. The Purple Rose didn’t do things halfway.

  “And see!” someone else declaimed ... Hake—Hakim O’Reilly—Clement thought. “It hath not been in vain! The snow itself is not so stainless as this fair maid’s forehead!”

  In a soft but disgusted voice, Keiko repeated, “Oh, for the love of Elvis.” Clement wondered who they would have delivered the stainless forehead line about if she hadn’t been there. One of the Pi Psi sisters? Or maybe a fellow costumed in drag, ready to come up with his brothers, if they hadn’t seen Clement’s study buddy with him before he’d killed the room light.

  A crowd of dormies had gathered at the open door. He could hear them laughing, everything from titters to guffaws, making it even harder to keep from laughing himself. Again he envied people without fangs, who could bite their lips together without puncturing them.

  The voice of Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza, who must have pushed through the crowd, floated into the room from the direction of the doorway: “No! What have you done? Was this not far too easy an end for so foul a fiend?”

  The dormies put up a chorus of mixed “You said it’s” and “Blow it out your whatever’s.” Clement was tempted to sit up and add a “Says who,” but officially he was a pile of dust.

  “Maybe, my Lord Mendoza of the Purple Rose,” Solly replied, speaking for the first time, “but ’tis done now. The beast is dissoluted.”

  “Gather up his ashes and bring them along,” Mendoza commanded. “These creatures can be revived as often as need be.”

  Of course it wasn’t over yet. So far, except for that moment about the stake, Clement might just as well have been playing the lead in a rehearsed play. And they had to get to the Pi Rho house. Or would it be the hunting cabin in the woods? Part of the ceremony always had to be secret, for Pi Rho eyes alone.

  He continued pretending to be dust, which wasn’t easy for the stringbean star of the frosh swimming team, while they bundled him up in the Orloquilt bedspread and hoisted him onto somebody’s back. Almost certainly Struwwie’s. Who else? Friendly slaps caught him on odd joints and muscles on the way through the dorm crowd.

  The Orloquilt sack was impossible to see through and might eventually have been impossible to breathe in, if it had been sealed tightly instead of just bunched up and tied loosely at the top. As they reached the bottom landing and someone opened the fire door, however, Clement was glad for any protection from the February chill.

  He heard Keiko say, “Brrr.” She sounded more annoyed than uncomfortable.

  “You don’t have to tag along,” came Stallion’s voice.

  Fred Fletcher added, “It’s three quarters of a klick to the house, and we aren’t letting you in once we get there. And we aren’t waiting now for you to go back and get your coat.”

  “Don’t be a gunzho, Fletcher,” said Solly. “This brave maiden hath just been rescued from Undeath. The Sigh sisters can give her something hot when we get there, and lend her a coat to wear back. Meanwhile, she can borrow mine. How about it, Ko-Ko?”

  “Thanks, Sol, I’m wearing a sweatshirt,” she pointed out. “I might take your scarf.”

  “I know,” rumbled Struwwie. “Let’s give her the vampire’s cape.”

  “You can’t,” she replied matter-of-factly. “It’s all mixed up with his ashes. You might spill some if you try to get it out. Hey! Watch it, M. Drinkwater! Here, Solly, you keep me warm for the walk.”

  Clement’s next concern was for his own bones, as they hit something hard, cold, and contoured. A wheelbarrow, he guessed. Not even such a football superstar as Spuds Bartlett Struwwelpeter was going to be expected to backpack him three quarters of a kilometer. Well, his bones were okay. From Struwwie’s back to the wheelbarrow had been more of a swing than a drop. There’d be a few more bruises, but the main pain was the metal coldness seeping up through the Orloquilt. Also, the wheelbarrow lacked shock absorbers. Long before they reached the house in Greektown, Clement started to wonder if they were taking a long way around. Wouldn’t Keiko have complained about that? Or had she peeled back to the dorm, after all?

  No, because when they finally came to a stop he heard Fletcher tell her, “Sorry, fair maiden, brothers only beyond this point.”

  “You let women into the downstairs front of your house. I’ll go wait there.”

  “Not all women, and not just any occasion. You’ll have to beg waiting space at the Sigh sisters’ house. Let’s see, who can we spare to escort—”

  “All right, all right, I can find my own way! It’s just next door, for catsake.”

  Her steps crunched away. Clement wondered briefly whether the Sighs would let her in without a brother’s recommendation, and decided that if they wouldn’t, at least they’d lend her a coat for the walk back to the dorm.

  Meanwhile, doors were being slammed
, the Orloquilt sack and its contents hauled out of the wheelbarrow and down a flight of steps. They must have come around to the back. The Pi Rho house had been built in 2001. As far as possible, within the guidelines of early Reform Era safety, comfort, and convenience, it was a near replica of a late Victorian mansion, complete with stormcellar doors to the basement…the basement that nobody but the Purple Rose—not even their sisters of the Purple Sigh—ever saw.

  Of course, the Rose never saw the Sigh basement, either. It was the tradition at New Millennium U. that no Greek house except Alpha Tau Sigma ever let anybody except members and on occasion pledges into its basement. But no other Greek basement at NMU had so palpitating a reputation as that of the Pi Rho house. Nor had anyone who afterward depledged—for any reason—ever broken the provisional vow of secrecy implicit in the honor of being brought here.