Book Read Free

The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

Page 141

by Phyllis Ann Karr

“I take it you can’t do any of that stuff yourself?” Cagey asked with a straight face.

  “Sometimes I wish I could! There ought to be beneficent uses as well as ...” Suddenly looking self-conscious, he broke off and then went on, “Our local reviewers would tell you, you didn’t miss anything worth seeing. Unless it was Holly Sendak’s sets, or Ted Appledore’s Renfield, or Santiaga Smith’s Lucy, or ... Well, the critical consensus was that everything was good except the title character, so maybe you did miss something. I think my mistake may have been playing it without stage fangs. But I insisted it would be too much trouble trying to fit them over my own.”

  I couldn’t help asking, “Your own?”

  He parted his jaws slightly, drew his upper lip back a little, and flicked one forefinger up off the ball of his thumb toward his right eyetooth. His nail came to a stop about five millimeters below the bottom tip of the tooth.

  The busgirl winked at me, pocketed her tip, and left. I asked Czarny to do it again. He obliged.

  I have tried it myself more than once since then. When a fingertip is flicked gently up from the ball of the thumb, it travels until it reaches full extension or meets an obstacle. If the person flicking tries to stop it sooner on purpose, there is a quick little recoil. But Czarny’s fingertip simply stopped in the air, five millimeters below the end of the tooth.

  It might be possible, with plenty of practice, to achieve that effect voluntarily; but my own opinion is that Clement Czarny’s personal perception of those fangs was absolutely perfect.

  “You’ll pardon us,” said Cagey, “if we point out that we don’t see any fangs in your mouth.”

  “Most people don’t. Draculas don’t fit into the standard-reality view of the world, and even with fantasy perceivers, a surprising number of personal worlds seem to be dracula-incompatible. They accept that I perceive myself as one, but ... I’d counted on the mystique of the total stage effect to make my fangs generally visible for once. Next time I’ll have to try to get a pair of stage fangs. I’d still like to have another go at the old count, though what I’d really like is to sing him in Molinar’s ‘Dracula’ opera, the one that’s updated to 1940, with bombs falling in the background—plenty of good work for the drums and percussion section. Only it might not be easy to get stage fangs fitted. I’ve never yet found a dentist who can perceive my actual fangs. If I could, maybe I’d get them filed down. I seem to bite my lip twice as often as most people do, and it’s a pretty bad handicap for a music major to be cut out from a whole range of wind instruments because of stupid fangs getting in the way of a good embouchure. But dentists have to be standard reality perceivers almost by definition.”

  Al reappeared with a cranberry-glass goblet in one hand and a pot of coffee in the other. He put the goblet down in front of Czarny, said, “There ya go, bloodsucker, one hemoglobin Bugs Bunny,” filled Cagey’s and my coffee cups, and departed again. Czarny picked up the teaspoon with Cagey’s blood and stirred it briskly into his drink.

  “I’d like a look at that,” said Cagey.

  “Some people—when they can perceive it for what it is—find the sight unappetizing. That’s why I always try to drink it from some kind of glass or mug that doesn’t let it show through.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re cops. Our stomachs can take it.”

  She spoke for herself; I wasn’t sure about my stomach. Still, when he slid the goblet across the table to us, I bravely took a look. To me, it looked like pure tomato juice. But they say there’s a little bit of fantasy-perceiver in virtually every realizer, and I’m no more of an exception than anyone else, as my Test scores prove.

  Cagey nodded soberly and slid the goblet back to him. It hit the blade of her table knife but, happily, the knife simply turned without interfering. “Rabbit blood?” she queried.

  “How did ... Oh, of course, ‘Bugs Bunny.’ Yes, duck’s blood would have been a ‘Donald,’ cow’s blood an ‘Elsie,’ and so on. Wait, they try to fool me sometimes. Just as other people sometimes try to fool me with broth and tomato juice. If I don’t happen to be feeling undernourished at the time, I play along. It’s easier ...” He took a sip and nodded. “Yes, rabbit’s. I don’t claim to be able to taste the difference between, say, a Transylvanian peasant maiden vintage ’28 and a Bulgarian diplomat vintage ’32, but I can taste the difference between rabbit, chicken, cow, et cetera. And between the various human types—”

  “Drink that much human, do you?”

  “The special-occasion half liter from the blood bank. And the few drops that make a cup of animal’s blood complete nutrition for me. I can’t explain the chemistry—might be able to if I were a chem major—but I’m surely thankful it works.”

  “And you can taste three drops of human in all that animal blood?”

  “Oh, yes, very definitely.” He took another sip and seemed to hold it in his mouth awhile before swallowing. “Yours is Rh positive…type AB.”

  Cagey took out her license and checked the emergency data. She nodded. “Either you’re a good guesser, or you really do have a sharp sense of taste.”

  He answered with an “Aw, shucks, folks” grin. “Can you guess how monotonous blood would get if it didn’t have all these little variations in flavor? I think medical science would have figured it out about blood types a lot earlier if society hadn’t gone paranoid about us vampires when it did.”

  Cagey said, “Maybe. Do I get a glimmer what you’re doing carrying around pocket folders of bandage dots?”

  “Yes. That is, I suppose so. I carry a supply of individually packeted sterile jabbers in the same pocket, exactly the same kind they use in medical labs for drawing samples of only a few drops. It’s still an imposition, of course, even if the jabbers are supposed to be ‘painless,’ and I’m constantly grateful that so many people are willing to put up with it.”

  Cagey kept her voice neutral: “What about the legality of that special-occasion half liter from your friendly local blood bank?”

  “Legality? You mean they may be breaking a law by reselling it to me?” He looked stunned.

  “We aren’t out to make things hot for anyone,” Cagey assured him. “I’m just curious whether your jewelry ever tingles about it.”

  “No. ... No, it never has ... But does ‘illegal’ necessarily mean ‘immoral’?” He looked so uncomfortable, almost distressed, that I put in,

  “No, of course not! We’ve got any number of useless old laws carried over from preReform days.”

  Still sounding unsettled, he said, “A glass of pure human is a treat, but nothing I can’t give up if—”

  “Forget I asked the question!” Cagey cut in, sounding annoyed. “Give us your views on this one: I’ve read an old theory that it isn’t just the blood, it’s the psychic life force that vampires need.”

  “What?” said Czarny.

  “That they need their victims’ fear as much as the actual physical blood.”

  He replied, “I find that absolutely disgusting. ... You might as well say it isn’t the physical protein that nourishes people, it’s the animals’ fear of the slaughterhouse or hunter!”

  I found it ironic that just at this point, Al brought our salads.

  Looking down at mine—carrots, cubed squash, golden tomatoes, red pepper, and pimento, in a bed of spinach, lettuce, zucchini, and broccoflower—I felt that I had lost my appetite. A green-and-orange salad should have green peppers, not bright red, and it should never have pimento at all; otherwise, it would be called a “green, orange, and red” salad.

  Czarny seemed to eye his salad with a lack of enthusiasm equal to mine. As for Cagey, she seized a pac of salad dressing and dug her thumb into it so fiercely that it squirted halfway across the table. It was French or tamale or some other kind of red dressing. “Cagey!” I said, annoyed.

  “Sorry. Wasn’t what I wanted, anyway.” Making a more careful selection
and attack, she smothered her salad in two pacs of blue cheese and one of green sesame dressing.

  Still staring down into his own salad, Czarny remarked, “I suppose I am a kind of cannibal ...”

  Smashing her fork down into her salad, Cagey got away from the embarrassing topic by diving into another that could prove even more embarrassing. “How about paternity, M. Czarny? Have you applied for a procreation permit yet?”

  I think I winced. It sounded so Twenty-twentyish.

  He shot a glance at her, picked up a pac of lemon juice, and began working his thumbnail between its edges. “That’s a very personal question, Lieutenant.”

  “But one that has a clear and definite bearing on your life as a dracula.” She put a bite of salad in her mouth and spoke around it—possibly, I thought, so that she could get off the subject again at need by staging a choking fit. “I used to hear, back in the Twenties, that draculas weren’t able to procreate in the usual mechanical sense of the word.”

  “As far as the medics can tell, there isn’t any reason why I shouldn’t be able to…father children ‘in the usual sense,’ or why my children shouldn’t be perfectly normal in every sense. And, yes, I hope someday to apply for a pro-permit, if and when I get married ... if I don’t join the Trappists first.” He was blushing, but he spoke calmly enough; he worked the pac open and sprinkled lemon juice over his salad with a steady hand; and I saw that Cagey had pulled us back into safer waters, after all. Czarny took a bite of spinach and carrots and started to chew. Relaxing, I opened and emptied a pac of sesame dressing over my own salad.

  “Well, you eat, all right,” Cagey observed genially as he swallowed his first bite and lifted his fork with another.

  “Would I have ordered dinner if I didn’t?”

  “No offense. Just curiosity. If you get your nourishment from raw blood, why do you need to eat anything else? Why not save yourself a bundle on food bills?”

  “I get all my vitamins, minerals, protein, energy, et cetera from raw blood. Ordinary food gives me bulk and roughage. Besides, I enjoy eating. Maybe too much. Sometimes I’m afraid of falling into gluttony.”

  “I guess I never really thought about that before,” Cagey remarked. “You mean you vampires need bulk and roughage to keep your systems working?”

  “Just like everybody else. I’m not ‘Undead.’ At least, not as far as we can tell. Becoming a vampire hasn’t exactly stunted my growth ...” He reminded us of his height by patting the top of his head ... “or kept my voice from changing, or my beard from growing, or any of the rest of it.”

  I said, “Is that why you have a reflection?”

  “I don’t,” he replied, sitting there with his back to a mirror that was reflecting him line by line, every clean black hair from the top of his head to the high collar of his dracula cape.

  “Is that a fact?” Cagey shot back. “Turn around and take a gander.”

  As if to humor us, he grinned and turned toward the mirror. Not for the first time, I remembered his cousin’s comment about how persuasive he could be. If he saw his own face reflected, he gave no indication of it. “There’s a pretty big black speckle in the mirror,” he observed.

  “From where I sit,” Cagey told him, “it’s right over your left eyebrow.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t say the end of my nose. Hey! who is that coming in ... No, it’s Blondie Van Pelt. Is that another speckle in the mirror, or ...” He leaned closer. “No, it’s moving.”

  “It’s on your cheek,” I said. “A speck of salad dressing, I think.” It must have hit him when Cagey’s thumb punched through that first pac she’d taken. I remember wondering if any had hit me.

  He picked his napkin up from his lap. “Which cheek?”

  “The right one,” Cagey said quickly, lying on purpose.

  Turning back around to face us, he followed her misdirection by wiping the wrong cheek.

  “Sorry,” Cagey said innocently. “It’s on your left one. I always get confused with mirror images. Why didn’t you watch the mirror?”

  “Because I’d watched it about as long as I could stand. I still find it a little unnerving. My clothes reflect, you understand. So does the napkin. And to see the sleeve come up and the napkin bounce around in thin air ... Well, I kind of enjoyed things like that when I was a kid. Shadow plays, too—my clothes cast shadows, I don’t. Now that I’m older, it just looks grotesque. That’s why I’d have wanted to sit with my back to the mirror, even if I wasn’t watching the door.”

  “Let me guess,” said Cagey. “To us, it only looks as if you’ve got a solid reflection, and a solid shadow, because draculas ‘don’t fit into standard reality.’ We see you, and our minds register the reflections and shadows they figure you’ve got to be casting, whether our eyes are really feeding the data into our brains or not.”

  “That’s a very good way of explaining it.”

  “Thanks.”

  I had been trying to remember whether I had caught his mirror image before looking around and seeing him in the doorway; but if his clothes reflected, my mind could have supplied a head ... Oh, stop it, ‘Sergeant Tommi’! I told myself. Still, how had he seen that young woman coming into the restaurant when he had been facing the mirror and, as nearly as I could tell from my angle, the actual reflection of his head—whether he could see it or not—would have blocked his reflected view of the door? Could he have simply seen it opening at the top, caught a glimpse of blond hair, and next moment guessed who it was by the distinctive piled-up hairdo? If her name really was Blondie Van Pelt, for which we had only his word.

  I asked, “If you aren’t Undead, why shouldn’t you cast reflections and shadows?”

  “My favorite guess is that there’s some kind of metaphysical change involved, maybe at a molecular level, that only seems to defy the known laws of physics because science doesn’t know everything yet; and that the newer religions played it for all they could get out of it. That the whole ‘Undead’ business got started as a clever piece of propaganda based on our lack of reflections and shadows. Of course,” he confessed, “I may be wrong about it. The vampire who bit me may have gotten the job only half done. Or the hospital people may have been able to save my life without understanding enough to preserve my old metabolism. I’d rather think that whoever bit me did it to call me back to life, but I guess it’s possible that there really are ‘Undead’ vampires around, and that what I tell you about my own life doesn’t necessarily apply to them.”

  “Mmm,” said Cagey. “Tell us about that hospital experience of yours.”

  Though longer and more detailed, Czarny’s account of how he had become a vampire matched his cousin Donna’s, which was to be expected if she had heard it from him.

  By now Al had brought the rest of our food. Czarny sprinkled some of the liquid from his goblet onto his steak so that it would work the same kind of nutritional reaction with the virtually raw meat that Cagey’s blood sample had worked with the beverage; and we all tucked in, the vampire’s knife being sharp enough, and the all but raw steak naturally tender enough, to let him manage quite reasonably well. Aside from that gaffe with the green-and-orange salad, the food was quite good, and the coffee excellent.

  “It strikes me,” said Cagey, “that in our world today, vampires might be able to get along pretty nicely without ever letting on that they’re vampires.”

  “You’re probably right,” Czarny agreed, swallowing a bite. “I wouldn’t like sneaking around for the little human blood I need, but anyone with the right hospital or Red Cross or whatever connections, and adequate refrigeration, could make one liter last quite a while. I suspect there are other vampires around that even I’m not recognizing. My mind filling in their shadows and reflections the same way your minds fill in mine.”

  “Then why put on the whole dracula bit at all?” Cagey inquired.

  He ate a bite of popco
rn before replying. “Well, there are those few people who perceive the blood. To avoid them, I’d have to get and drink it all on the sly, and if anybody found out, that’d really make me look sinister. Putting on the costume and all the trimmings, I can live openly as a vampire. When a restaurant gets to know me, it’s happy to lay in a supply of animal blood for a regular customer, and when I ask people for a few drops from a fingertip, most of the time they’re ready to give it. It’s so much more harmless than the old fangs in the neck routine that it makes me look benevolent. Oh, I run into the occasional trouble with van helsings, but most of them are basically play-actors, and when a truly dangerous one turns up, so far I’ve found most people readier to take my part than theirs.”

  Cagey said, “Okay, but did you think all this through when you were eleven years old?”

  “Probably not. Back then all the melodramatically romantic trappings may have seemed more like some kind of compensation for having to drink raw blood. Raw blood is very much an acquired taste.”

  We all ate for a few moments in silence. Czarny ate slowly, chewing his food thoroughly, a habit more and more common with the younger generation; though he offered the explanation that his “fangs” forced him to chew with care.

  At length Cagey asked, “What about this business of not being able to go into any house until after somebody inside has invited you in?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t tested that one for years. But how often do honest people have to go barging into other people’s private homes without being invited?”

  “Emergency medics,” I suggested.

  “Socially speaking,” he replied, “they have tacit invitations everywhere, when serving as emergency medics. So do firefighters, et cetera. Fortunately, I never had any ambitions to become a professional housebreaker. And untrained amateurs who only suspect something wrong might have trouble getting inside, no matter how good their intentions.”

  Thinking I heard a slightly resentful note in his voice, I remembered Cagey’s own annoyance at being told the Pi Rho house was off limits to women without a specific invitation.

 

‹ Prev