The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

The doors slammed shut overhead. The bedspread was jostled a little farther, set down on a hard surface, untied, and allowed to fall open. Not enough of a Method actor to project his consciousness fully into the place of a few grams of dust, he improvised by letting his body spread out with the Orloquilt and keeping his eyes shut, though he felt his eyelids quivering crazily.

  “A few drops of blood stirred into the dust,” Mendoza’s baritone floated down, “and the monster is restored to foul Unlife. Clearwater, lend me thy thumb.”

  Clement would have expected Ramon Mendoza y Mendoza to be able to prick his own thumb with flair and dignity, if anyone could. Maybe it was part of Mendoza’s role to disdain from mingling his blood with a vampire’s.

  Unexpectedly, Stallion said “Ouch!” and the table vibrated as if bumped. A spot of wetness hit Clement’s chin. Maybe Mendoza and Stallion Clearwater Drinkwater were involved in some kind of unbrotherly argument these days.

  Clement’s tongue tingled for the drop of blood on his chin. He controlled it by thinking of the drops that must have hit his shirt, and wondering how soon he could get it to ice water for the stains.

  Then the brothers fell in and started tickling.

  Happily, he wasn’t ticklish, but it gave him a good excuse to kick the kinks from his muscles and let out some of the laughs he’d been holding in. Naturally, his eyes opened.

  Above the ticklers—Fred Fletcher, Hake, and Solly—loomed Mendoza, holding a large silver cross. As well as Clement could see by the light of a few real wax candles, the room was about the size of a walk-in closet, melodramatically bare and sleazy.

  With a hiss, he tried to sit up and claw at Mendoza. Stallion, who had been standing back sucking his thumb, pushed him down and held him with a hand on either shoulder. Stallion was almost as strong as Struwwelpeter.

  “Unclean beast,” Mendoza declaimed, “prepare to suffer purgatory enough to purge even thy black guilt!”

  “Ssss,” Clement replied, pretending to try to shield his eyes from the cross.

  In fact, neither crosses nor even crucifixes affected him unless he had a sin on his soul, and it had to be a mortal sin before silver started bothering him. Having just been to weekly Reconciliation and Mass a few hours ago, he wasn’t suffering from any of the traditional charms against vampires except the lingering taste of dry garlic powder in his mouth, and that would probably have annoyed anybody, even garlic’s biggest fans. The Purple Rose had to be fully aware of all this. He had explained most of it to them when he rushed last fall. Solly knew it, too.

  He put up the token resistance they obviously wanted while they stripped him to the waist. It would have been easier if they’d done it before resurrecting him. If his clothes, as well as his cape, hadn’t been mixed up with his dust then.

  When they had him half naked, they hauled him, still pretending to cringe away from the cross, into the next room.

  It was a much larger chamber, high-ceilinged for a basement, lighted by a big wooden wheel hung up as a chandelier, with thick electric candles. The underside of the stormcellar doors could be seen on one side. On the other side, a wooden cross more than two meters tall stood near the wall.

  They dragged him over, stood him with his back against the cross, and bound him to it at wrists and ankles with silver jewelry chains twisted together into half-centimeter thicknesses. What a total torture it’d be for any traditional dracula ... whom it didn’t kill outright. Guessing that he was still expected to act traditionally, he hammed it up on a grand scale for a couple of minutes, actually feeling one or two of the individual jewelry strands snap. Then he fell quiet and panted theatrically, as if exhausted by pain. He would have slumped, but he wasn’t sure how much weight the chains would take.

  A robed and hooded figure he hadn’t noticed before came out from behind the semicircle of frat brothers and brandished a crucifix at him. That seemed like going a little too far. Plain crosses were one thing. They were everywhere anyway, one of the basic shapes of human art, architecture, and writing. Even nature was full of crude crosses. Clement had never understood how traditional dracs could function at all in a world so filled with crosses. But using a regular church crucifix with the Christ corpus, maybe even a blessed one, in this kind of game seemed almost like sacrilege.

  Well, it hadn’t been Clement’s inspiration to use it, and complaining about it right now could maybe snafu his pledging into the most prestigious fraternity at NMU. So he kept quiet and tried to guess who was beneath the hood.

  Whoever it was said: “What is the true family name of the woman known as April Baxter Greenhill?”

  Clement said, “What?”

  The inquisitor repeated the question. What kind of riddle was it for a ceremony like this? Clement felt blood rushing to his face. His whole upper body. One big blush.

  How he felt about April might not be as much of a secret as he’d like it to be, but why drag her name into this? Was this the kind of thing the Purple Rose ...

  Trick question. It had to be a trick question, just to check his reaction. They couldn’t mean anything by it. Nothing against April, anyway. He swallowed, controlled himself, and replied, “As far as I know, M. Greenhill’s family name is Baxter.” He accented the “M.” as much as he dared. “What is it to me, anyway?”

  “Baxter?” the inquisitor pressed him. Even by the voice, Clement still couldn’t tell who it was, except that it sounded like an older man.

  “Baxter,” the dracula repeated. “As far as I know. What is it to me? Or you, for that matter?”

  The inquisitor took one pace back and motioned the rest of the brothers forward.

  They came by twos and threes, taking their turns brandishing little bits of silver to press on Clement’s bare skin.

  The question about April had confused him, but he could guess how he was supposed to play along with the silver game. Some other kind of scenario—Missionaries and Amerinds, for instance—and they might have wanted him to prove his courage. But traditional dracs weren’t expected to expire stoically, so he howled and writhed as much as he felt was safe without snapping more of the chains or oversetting the big wooden cross, and generally melodramed it as if he were suffering all degrees of agony, when the only thing that caused him any worse discomfort than it would have caused any normal human being was the Egyptian Ankh wielded by somebody he didn’t recognize. But the surge of nausea that caused was mild and quickly over, nothing he couldn’t handle.

  Most of the silver bits were necklace charms, and almost everyone—predictably—had a cross in his right hand, but all kinds of other things showed up in left hands. Saints’ medals, spirals, mazes, fish, doves and tongues of flame, a few chemical symbols and Zodiac signs, even a silver shoe from a collectors’ deluxe Monopoly set. Hake had a crescent in one hand and a silver shamrock in the other. Solly used his star of David.

  Fred Fletcher had an antique silver dollar, and gave it a mean rub with the edge along Clement’s upper arm. At that, the vampire shut his mouth and stood up straight to look Fletcher hard in the eye, just to show that he could give them stoicism if the game got rough.

  “What is April Greenhill’s true family name?” the hooded inquisitor demanded again.

  Clement ignored him and went back to howling, shuddering, and pretending he couldn’t stand the touch of silver. He was beginning to wonder how long it was going to go on, and if they expected him to be the one to move things on to the next stage by “expiring” again.

  When he suddenly said “Ouch!”—a sincere ouch—the difference surprised his own ears. But that last piece to hit his neck really had stung. He tried to see what kind of symbol it was, but Struwwie had already closed it back inside his huge fist and moved aside to give somebody else another turn.

  I

  (From the Memoirs of Sylvia Tomlinson Marlene: Marltown, Kentucky, Friday, October 10, 2042)

  We live in
an old house, built in the late 1990s when insulation was adequate but soundproofing was not. The series of thuds on the front porch carried all the way through to the living room, where Mandy and I were playing Marchpane vs. Clouseau at the gamescreen, while my husband sat at the workscreen sorting and printing out documents for his forthcoming conference in Milwaukee.

  Hearing the thuds, Mandy remarked, “Laud an’ mercy! What am gwine on out dere?” Her accent was pure affectation. Actually, she’s a cross between Irish-Iranian and Hmong, with no more Old Southern blood than a polar bear.

  “It’s a little early for Hallowe’en jokes, isn’t it?” said Arlie, looking up from his keyboard. “Not even the Fourteenth of October yet!”

  Eight or nine frantic knocks hammered the front door even before the doorchime started sounding. Mandy heaved herself to her feet. I got up with her.

  “Lawmercy, M. Tomlinson, yo’ doesn’t hafter go,” she told me. “It’s what y’all pays me fo’, ain’t it?” Mandy being, in the respectable Old American terminology, our “hired girl,” our one contribution to cutting down on unemployment.

  “We’ll all go,” said Arlie, standing up with us. “For curiosity, if nothing else. One other obvious explanation for that thudding springs to mind, besides a very early Hallowe’en prank.”

  “It’s a wonder,” said I, “that it hasn’t woken little Gida.”

  “How do we know?” He winked. “Maybe three-year-olds don’t always start bawling the instant they wake up. But if it is who I suspect at our door, I don’t want to miss seeing anything.”

  It was who we suspected: “Lieutenant” Cagey Warrington Thursday, once my employer and still best friend, the woman who might have been the clumsiest police detective since the immortal Clouseau, if she had been an official policewoman instead of a rich and talented fancier living in her personal quasi-1950s world.

  Tonight another woman was supporting her with one arm while holding the other ready to start pounding on the door again, when Arlie opened it and both of them tumbled through into the vestibule.

  “Laud an’ mercy,” said Mandy. “Ah’ll go fotch the first-aid stuff.”

  Both of Cagey’s trouser legs were torn at the knee and oozing blood.

  “She slipped on wet leaves or something,” the stranger began, “and fell on the stairs—”

  “I fell up the stairs,” Cagey qualified the statement, laughing. “Takes talent. Especially when there aren’t any leaves, wet or otherwise, anywhere near your well-kept porch. Hi, Arlie. You keep a nice yard. Maybe ought to do something about capping your porch steps, though. I think I’ve got my knees full of splinters. Oh, folks, meet April Baxter Greenhill. April, meet my favorite watson, Sergeant ‘Tommi’ Tomlinson, semi-retired, and her hubby—”

  “Who says let’s get you inside right away,” he interrupted, “and treated for shock and splinters.”

  “Shock! What are you talking about, shock?” Cagey protested cheerfully. “All in the day’s work. If I’m not used to it by my time of life ...”

  In 2042 Cagey was only thirty-four. But she grinned, made a comment about her silvering hairs and brittling bones, and let us help her into the living room.

  Her companion, M. April Baxter Greenhill, scarcely looked older than twelfth grade; and I don’t think it was simply my own comparatively advanced thirty-two that gave me that impression. She was tall enough, about sixteen and a quarter decameters—five feet four in the old system—but she had one of those shirley temple faces. With green eyes and reddish-blond hair, long and pulled back in a bun; but that only suggested a little girl playing house. And a baby-clear complexion. Then, too, her movements tended to be a bit awkward and self-unsure: the famous awkwardness of youth rather than the kind of inborn clumsiness that my friend Cagey Thursday never outgrew.

  The only grown-up thing about M. Greenhill seemed to be her expression. So far, I hadn’t seen her flick a single smile.

  When we finally had Cagey settled in the old overstuffed recliner, a mug of Mandy’s coffee laced with brandy in her hand—brandy wouldn’t have been Arlie’s choice of shock absorber, but it was Cagey’s—and Arlie getting ready to work on her injuries, the first-aid kit spread out on a napkin on the hassock, she said, “All right, no reason we shouldn’t get down to brass tacks. M. Greenhill, please tell Sergeant Tomlinson what you told me. Arlie can listen in and work at the same time.”

  “Just a minute, here,” said Arlie. “Do you mean you’re going to want to borrow ‘Sergeant’ Tommi back again, Lieutenant? What happened to Officer Rascal?”

  “He’s Lawn Technician Rascal now,” said Cagey, who made another hobby out of relieving unemployment. “As a cop, the poor floater was pretty much a washout, but he’s making a great grounds and garden assistant.”

  “Hey, c’mon, boss-man,” said Mandy. “Ah’d like t’heah dis heah story, too.” Our hired girl would have been entitled to sass her employers even in a stricter household than ours. Besides getting the coffee and laying out Arlie’s medical kit, she had already checked on our small daughter, all in the time the rest of us had taken just getting settled. If I hadn’t prized Mandy so much around the house, I might have recommended her to Cagey as first-class material for a detective’s sidekick. Or if I had felt less eager to work with Cagey again myself, for old times’ sake.

  Young M. Greenhill sat on the edge of one of our Reform Decade card chairs, twisting a silver jackpen around and around in her fingers. “It may sound like nothing,” she began at last. “That is ... I may just be suffering from Elvigar’s syndrome. When you start to imagine ...”

  “I don’t,” said Cagey, who actually spent most of her life imagining. “Just the facts, M. Greenhill. Just like you told them to me. Ouch!” she added as Arlie dug at a splinter. “I thought you swabbed me down with some of that painkiller antiseptic you swear by.”

  “I did, Lieutenant. You’d have been through the ceiling into your namesake’s bedroom if I hadn’t.”

  M. Greenhill cleared her throat, got out her pocketcom, stared down at it without, as far as I could see, activating it, and began again:

  “My parents were Paul Baxter—Paul B. Baxter, he just double-registered his father’s surname when the Name Reform Amendment was implemented—he’d been born in 1981—and Gloria Greenhill Baxter. She was oldstyle enough to register her husband’s family name as her own new final name, you see. They had a real, religious marriage ceremony, not just a joint procreational permit. Episcopalian. In 2017. I was born in 2022.”

  Making her twenty years old this year. I could still hardly believe she was much more than sixteen.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “they were both killed in 2029, when I was seven. Not in the Great Quake. Say that somebody died in ’29, and everybody always thinks, ‘In the Great California Christmas Quake,’ as if nobody died any other way that year. But they were killed in a plane crash in October, on their way to a literary-historical studies seminar in Winnipeg. Their bodies were ... Excuse me.” She got a handkerchief out of her shrugover sleeve and blew her nose. “Their bodies were burned beyond recognition. They had to be identified from the passenger list and dental records.

  “Well!” she went on bravely. “That really doesn’t have anything to do with why I came here ... unless it’s a factor in Elvigar’s syndrome. My parents were both only children, and my only surviving grandparent was already in his late eighties. Donald B. Baxter—Americanized from something Polish, I think ‘Bashinsky.’ He’s in the Whispering Pines Rest Home on Clear Lake now. The University insurance pays for it. My parents were tenured professors at New Millennium University. Dad had been in the first graduating class in 2004 and just stayed on there, Mom was hired direct from finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 2015. Part of their contracts with New Millennium stipulated that if anything happened to them, their dependents would be taken care of. In Grandpa Baxter’s case, till deat
h. In my case, till graduation with a Master’s from NMU or a Bachelor’s from any other university of my choice. It was easiest for me to stay in Hodag Crossing with Aunt Cherky—not really my aunt, my mother’s best friend—and go for my Master’s from New Millennium. Not so much because it’s a higher degree than they’d finance for me anywhere else. At Hodag Crossing, I’m close to my grandfather. I can get out to Clear Lake and see him two or three times a week. Sometimes he even knows me. He can still talk very coherently about the way things used to be in the 1950s and ’60s, the AIDS epidemic, the Beatnik and Civil Rights eras, the Great Reform and the Tax-Return bonfires when the New Reformed Constitution was signed ... He’s supplied Oral History Studies with a lot of their best tapes ...”

  Arlie remarked, “He must be nearing the personal century mark by now.”

  “A hundred and one,” M. Greenhill replied proudly. “He was born November 23, 1941. His birth certificate was lost in Poland in the Last Great War, but my great-grandparents got a substitute one issued when they became U.S. citizens. But ... Well, a year ago, late in September, I lost a boyfriend almost the same way as my parents—a car crash this time, but his body was burned beyond recognition, just like theirs. And then, just last Saturday, it…ha-happened ...”

  Mandy went over and stood beside April’s chair quietly rubbing her shoulder. The rest of us waited in silence until our young visitor was able to dry her eyes, blow her nose, and go on. Her voice continued shaky and hesitant. For the sake of smoother reading, I’ll omit most of the pauses.

  “I’m sorry,” April said. “Just last Saturday night it happened again. Another boyfriend, one I was really serious about. Burned till there was hardly any point in cremating him afterward. Another car accident!”

  “There,” said Cagey. “That sound like persecution complex to you, Sergeant Tomlinson?”

  “Not hardly!” Mandy put in before I could speak.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “Overload of personal tragedy, certainly, but nothing imaginary! Have you gone to the Hodag Crossing police, M. Greenhill?”