The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Well, well, well,” Cagey began, looking at her food-spotted menu. “‘Prime cuts of Montana eland, done your way. Regional specialty: petite minilobsters’—that’ll be crayfish. Uk. ‘Superior trout, caught on the fly.’ I wonder—”

  “Shhh!” I said, touching her wrist. I had just glanced toward the door. “Look there!”

  A tall, thin young man in a long black cape had come in and was standing at the door, looking all around the restaurant as if searching for somebody. He looked—to my ever-susceptible eyes—achingly beautiful and vulnerably youthful. His cape hung open far enough to let us see his pure white shirtfront and the thumb-length silver cross hanging at his throat. His eyes were the same color as his cousin’s—somewhere between blue, green, and gray.

  Cagey nodded. “Has to be. Looks like I got my wish, too. Lighted area with plenty of people around. Go get him, Sergeant. We can guess what’ll happen if I try jumping up and scuttling over there in this crowd.”

  I jumped up and started scuttling over, bumping the occasional chairback and narrowly dodging our waiter, who was on his way to set our table; but I managed to wreak no damage that couldn’t be smoothed over quickly with a smile and a “Sorry.” I’m sure the tables were too close together for fire safety guidelines. Thinking I saw our target about to turn back to the door, I exclaimed, “Oh! M. Czarny?”

  He looked around again, and I reached his side.

  “M. Czarny?” I repeated. “Clement Czarny?”

  Looking puzzled, he answered with a bashful smile and one nod of his black-haired head. “You ... uh…have the advantage of me.”

  I could think of no better lead-in than, “We’ve been looking for you most of the day.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve been sleeping most of the day. Uh ... Do I know you?”

  “We know your cousin Donna in Eau Claire,” I replied with only a tiny bending of the truth. “Come join us.”

  “I was hoping to meet somebody here,” he said.

  April? I thought.

  “But I don’t see her ...” he added.

  “There’s room for four at our table, if she comes in.” I actually put out my hand, found his arm beneath the black fabric, and gave it a tug before remembering how brazen such contact had become according to the new etiquette that developed in the 2030s, and moving my grasp to a pinch of the cape.

  Strangely, my gesture seemed more to relax him than put him on his guard. He smiled again, said, “Well, thanks for the invitation,” and followed me back to our table.

  On the way, I managed to say, “We’d hoped to spot you at church, but everyone was gone by the time we got there.”

  “Oh? I’d have been here sooner, but sometimes my friend and I go to another restaurant. I checked there first.”

  We reached the table. “M. Czarny?” said Cagey, standing up and reaching out to offer him a handshake. Her arm bumped her water glass and knocked it over. It struck the edge of the polished stone lamp base and cracked. At the same moment, she was making an instinctive snatch at it.

  “Ouch!” she exclaimed, snatching her hand away and squeezing it. A line of deep red drops appeared across her palm.

  Of course, I looked at Czarny. So did my lieutenant. I still wonder if she could have staged the mishap for her own purposes.

  A very obvious longing did indeed flash into Czarny’s face, the sort of greedy lust you see in a child’s eyes, or a dieter’s, when a laden dessert trolley rolls by.

  It lasted only an instant. Then he flipped back his cape, pulled a folder of stickum bandage dots out of his pocket, and dropped it on the table in front of Cagey. “Please,” he said, “help yourself. Only first—if I could ask the favor? May I?” He picked up a teaspoon and held it out in a hand that seemed to shake very slightly. “You’ll have heard I’m a dracula? Please don’t worry. I’m not going to give you that line about being careful how you cut yourself. I can control my appetite at least as well as any floater at a buffet table. But it seems a shame to let it all go to waste. If you’d just collect a few drops for me before you bandage it up?”

  “Sure. Why not?” Taking the spoon, she grazed it along the cut in her palm, while I started unwrapping the largest of the bandage dots. “We were going to offer you dinner anyway,” Cagey went on, handing the spoon back to him. “That is, if you eat ...”

  “Oh, yes, I eat ordinary food, too. But I couldn’t accept—”

  “Yes, you could,” Cagey told him. “Think of it as payment for the grilling we’re going to give you.”

  Busy applying the first dot to Cagey’s hand, I paused, ready to grab Czarny if he bolted. But she seemed to have already taken his measure better than I; unless she had simply been testing his reaction. In any event, he seemed if anything another degree closer to relaxing with us. Laying the spoon down carefully, he took the unset place that faced the door, and asked,

  “By ‘grilling,’ do you mean an interview?”

  “If you like.”

  “All right, I may as well accept it without arguing. Uh ... By the way, you still have the advantage of me.”

  “C. W. Thursday. Lieutenant Thursday.” Cagey gave him a nod. “And this is Tomlinson, my sergeant.”

  “Lieutenant ... Sergeant ... Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t perceive you in any kind of uniform ...?”

  “Plainclothes coppers.” Her hand bandaged, Cagey sat down and pushed the folder of dots back across the table to him.

  I sat, too, watching his hands. Cagey’s choice of the old slang should have tipped him off that we were hobbyists without any real authority. Yet I thought that his clasped fingers tightened into each other, whitening his nails a little.

  “Is it about Solly Goldfein?” he asked.

  “What if it is?” Cagey replied.

  “I don’t want anybody making a game out of Solly’s death. That’s all. He was my best friend. I don’t like to think that ... His death or Tony’s, either.”

  “Tony Tallpines?” Cagey nodded sympathetically. “We don’t intend to make a game out of anybody’s death, M. Czarny. We’re interested in your life as a dracula, that’s all.”

  “Oh.” He unclasped his hands and sat back in his chair. “That’s all right, then. I’m something of an authority on my life as a dracula. Grill away.”

  Cagey coughed before leaning forward and continuing, “Okay, then, let’s begin with your jewelry. Silver filigree cross, looks antique. Real silver?”

  “Sterling. So pure and so antique that it still tarnishes and needs polishing. A gift from my cousin Donna,” he added with a touch of pride.

  “And your earring,” I put in, guessing that Cagey would want to compare his response with what we had already been told about it. “Is that a tiny silver cross?”

  “No, actually, white gold. My finger ring is silver, however.” He held the back of his hand up to display the fraternity ring.

  “If you’re a real vampire,” said Cagey, “how do you explain away this knack for wearing crosses and silver?”

  “Yes, that surprises a lot of people at first. Most of us have been given the idea ever since we were children that being a vampire—the condition itself—somehow creates the violent allergy to crosses, silver, sunlight, garlic, roses and hawthorn wood, et cetera. Actually, being a vampire just makes a person more sensitive. To a certain extent, holy things affect everybody—to their comfort when they’re in a state of grace, to their discomfort when they’re in a state of sin. Only most people have been so toughened, so ... secularized, if you don’t mind my using that word? that they never notice it, not consciously anyway. I think that maybe once, back in the dawn of the race’s moral sense, they did, everybody did. As a vampire, I’ve been resensitized, whether I want to be or not. In a state of grace, I have no trouble at all with crosses, et cetera. In a state of sin, I do. The worse the sin, the worse the reaction.”

&nbs
p; “So it was all in Count Dracula’s mind?” said Cagey.

  “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘all in the mind’ when we’re talking about the moral sense. But otherwise, yes, that may more or less sum it up in a manner of speaking. Look at the common vampire bats of South America. Or our own ticks and mosquitoes. They’re vampires, too. They drink blood. But they don’t have or need consciences, being animals and insects, and have you ever seen a mosquito pay any attention to a cross?”

  “Somehow,” Cagey remarked, “I never thought of garlic as a holy thing. Or silver and running water, either.”

  “And what about sunlight?” I added. “Isn’t considering sunlight holy a bit pagan somehow? Doesn’t it suggest sun worship?”

  He sighed. “We’re getting into the old problem of true religion versus false. I’m afraid I don’t have anything like a personal answer yet, but—just tentatively—it is possible that somewhere down at bedrock, all religions grew out of the same original religion and revolve around exactly the same God. I think that garlic must have had a holy significance at some time or other, probably fairly recently, since it’s still such a big thing in vampire lore. Maybe one of those traces of old religion that the medieval missionaries didn’t quite stamp out, but what they succeeded in stamping out was the knowledge of why it was considered holy. The sun symbolism is much more widespread. You can even find traces of it in the New Testament: ‘And the Light shines in the darkness.’ The full moon can give me a bad time, too, if I’ve got anything on my conscience. I’ve never been able to figure out how it seems to have more or less dropped out of vampire lore, when it’s still so strong in werewolf lore. The symbolism of water is very ancient and widespread, too, especially running water. And every metal must have been considered sacred at some time. That has to be the reason elves and fairies can’t stand iron in old fairy tales. They—the tales—must date back to the age when iron was new and holy. Then, as other metals became plain, everyday items, the ‘holiness’ got transferred to the rarer money-metals. My guess is that silver must have been the big sacred metal about the time vampires first came to be feared as evil monsters. That’s the only reason I can find why silver is still considered proof against us when gold isn’t. Usually, the more a symbol is in current use, the more sensitive the vampire is to it—at least, taking myself as an example—and gold was a sacred metal more recently than silver. Right down to the middle of last century, the Eucharistic chalices used at Mass had to be goldplated at least on the inside of the cup. For myself, I’m more sensitive to gold than silver, maybe because I’m aware of the consecrated uses of gold. That’s why my earring is white gold. Not to cheat. To keep me even more on my toes than if it was silver.”

  I said, “But haven’t vampires always been feared as evil monsters?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. There seems to be anthropological evidence that raw blood may have made up a big part of everyone’s diet in the prehistoric ages. I think that as civilization advanced, the ancient blood diet was relegated more and more to religious and sacramental rituals, the way older languages tend to be relegated to ritual use. I think ... I hope this won’t shock you ...”

  “Shock us,” said Cagey.

  “Well, I think that in the Roman Empire, Christians would have been considered vampires, because of the Sacrament. Not that they necessarily were, of course. The business about vampires and earth seems to me like another suggestion that we date back to the primitive Earth Mother religion, that had already been stamped down on millennia before Christ, when the Sky Father creeds thundered in. But, symbolically, Christ fulfilled—you might prefer to say ‘revived’—part of the ancient rite in his new Sacrament. And when the Christians insisted that the wine became the real, actual Blood of Jesus ... Well, if Christianity hadn’t won out ...”

  At this point, a round of coincidental laughter from a nearby table drowned out our conversation. Czarny added something in American Sign Language to the effect, as I recall, that all Christians might still be considered vampires today, instead of joining the extermination efforts against vampires. American Sign Language was still a rather new thing in schools when I came through the grades, so I didn’t perfectly catch quite everything Czarny told us in it, and of course it made no impression on our sound tapes.

  “I think,” he went on, as the other table quieted again, “that we got made out to be evil monsters for the same kind of reasons that older ‘gods’ get made out to be devils. My theory is that in prehistoric ages we were the priests or shamans. Being made a vampire may have been the secret in some very long-lost prototypical version of the shamanic ordeal. And of course newer forms of religion always come down hardest on the priests and holy people of older forms.”

  “What you’re doing with this theory of yours,” Cagey observed, “is rationalizing how you can be a good Catholic and a good vampire at the same time.”

  He looked down as if embarrassed. “I’m just trying to be a good person. After all, getting turned into a vampire didn’t take away my free will.”

  “No, Philosophy One-oh-one did that,” said our waiter, who had come up without our noticing. “Clem, you old bloodsucker! Picking up a pair of new ones, huh?”

  “Actually, I think they picked me up.” Czarny introduced us to our waiter—another student, as I had suspected, Al Olafson. It was a rapid introduction, the restaurant being busy, but Czarny seized time to add, “Have you seen Keiko this evening, Al? Or April?”

  “Nope, neither one. Must’ve stood you up, old floater.” He added in Sign Language that he’d pass on Czarny’s best if he saw them, meanwhile adding aloud, “Your usual?”

  Cagey cut in, “What is a vampire’s ‘usual’?”

  “Raw meatballs on toothpicks,” Al began.

  “Make it steak,” Cagey ordered. “Porterhouse.”

  “No, please!” said Czarny. “I’ll let you buy my dinner, but nothing I wouldn’t have ordered for myself.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re giving us enough information to pay for a Porterhouse or three.”

  “Well ... Thank you again, Lieutenant.” Looking up at the waiter, he added, “But have them expose the top to the broiler a few seconds, Al.”

  Al winked. “So your new buddies don’t have to look at it bloody, huh? And our absolutely sharpest knife, of course. Let’s see, baked potato with bransauce, veggie of the day, and slaw?”

  “Slaw?” Cagey echoed, pulling a face. “Come on, kid, shoot the works.”

  “Uh, make that a green and orange salad, then? And a bowl of cheddar popcorn on the side.”

  “Check. With your usual to drink?”

  “Naturally. Oh—nobody has to prick a thumb tonight. The good lieutenant has already provided. But I’d appreciate it if you hurried before this clots.” Czarny pointed to the teaspoon with Cagey’s blood. Cagey winked and opened her bandaged palm at Al. He nodded, gathered the waterglass shards into Cagey’s napkin, used mine to sop up most of the spilled water, and promised to send someone to reset our places.

  Having had very little time to study the menu, Cagey and I simply ordered the Lake Superior trout, with the same side dishes Czarny was getting, and coffee to drink.

  As Al moved away, Cagey resumed, “Then you’d say that the original Count Dracula was just a ‘bad’ vampire as opposed to a ‘good’ one.”

  “A thoroughly bad person all the way around. In fact, if he really was Vlad the Impaler, he may have been even worse in history than in fiction—though it’s always seemed to me that Vlad the Impaler was more likely a pathological van helsing. After all, it isn’t the vampires who get all rotated on driving stakes through bodies, it’s the vampire hunters. The thing that’s always bothered me about Stoker’s Van Helsing is the way he seems to assume that a vampire must automatically be evil, never makes it clear that they have to hunt the count down because he happens to be a wicked individual whose vampirism gives him
an extra weapon against his fellow creatures.”

  Cagey argued, “Didn’t Mina get a bad burn from the cross right after the count had bitten her the first time?”

  “Not the cross. If you look it up, I think you’ll see it was the Consecrated Host. Mina probably came out of a strong English Protestant background that would have predisposed her to perceive the Roman Catholic Communion Wafer as a ... well, as a piece of faintly sinister superstition in Itself. Not to mention the other uses Van Helsing was putting It to—they shock me as much as anything the count himself does ... Well, better not go into that right now. Anyway, I think Mina was reacting to several centuries of anti-Catholicism when Van Helsing touched her with the Host. She might have been able to handle a simple, Protestant cross with no trouble at all, but they never risked the experiment. Of course, it could also be that she wasn’t really quite as good as all those Victorian gentlemen assumed, that secretly she was enjoying a little tumble off the pedestal. Or it could be that Stoker just got it wrong. He didn’t seem to know about the silver taboo—he has Count Dracula handling everyday silver objects freely.”

  A busgirl arrived to clear up the last remains of Cagey’s broken water glass and reset our table. I slipped her a tridollar tip.

  Cagey was saying, “You seem to be pretty well on top of your Dracula, M. Czarny. I’d have liked to see you play the part.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard about that? Yes, it’s a fun role. Why should villains be so much fun to play?”

  “You’re the philosopher, you tell us.”

  “I can’t,” he replied. “Unless it has something to do with the knowledge that it’s all make-believe. With Count Dracula, it may have something to do with his powers, too. Turning himself into a bat and flying, ordering the ‘creatures of the night’ around, seeping through closed doors, and all that.”