The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  In the end, the committee compromised on Tannhauser with a three to one vote, Dr. Hoffman abstaining.

  Sunlight almost never gave Clement trouble but, considering his mood by the time he got out of the building, he was glad today was one of the shortest days of the year, with the sun already safely set. He hoped they weren’t having spaghetti or anything else with garlic for dinner. Tonight, unless he could simmer down quickly, even garlic—forgotten though its ancient holy symbolism was—might react on him. And he felt too tired to shake out of the anger groove and simmer down quickly.

  Tired in mind and soul, but in body he was so full of angry energy that he covered the ten-minute walk home in six minutes.

  He opened the door and heard his two oldest in the dining room having a teenage squabble about singing stars as they slammed silverware on the table. Shutting his eyes, he shouted, “I’m home!” in some faint hope of sidetracking the argument before it completed the ruination of his nerves.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” That was Terry, his youngest, pattering out to meet him on her first-grader’s legs.

  He stooped to sweep her up in his arms. Her little fists hit the back of his neck with a stabbing, searing pain.

  He jerked, stifling a scream, desperate to keep his grip on the child. Something hit the floor with more of a crunch than a crash. The little girl gave a wail that brought the rest of the family.

  “Uh-oh,” said Solly, picking up the pieces. “You’re gonna catch it now, Terry. The Christ Child from Pop’s old manger set. How often do we have to tell you, don’t run around with breakables in your hands!”

  So that was it. For a few confused seconds, Clement had wondered how his child could run around with anything that hot in her bare fingers.

  One of the last, most precious mementos they had of his parents ...

  “Forget it, Solly,” the vampire told his son. “Let Terry alone. The key figure of a manger set is as much a holy symbol as a crucifix is, and your father has had a very hassling day. Don’t make it any worse.”

  * * * *

  “He never punished me for it,” Amarantha remembered softly. “Mother wasn’t able to mend it, so we had to heap a handkerchief up over a tiny little cloth doll in the manger to make it look as if the Christ Child was all covered up. And we never found a replacement—we checked every antique shop, secondhand store, and yard sale for years. But he never punished me.”

  Mendoza remarked, “When he could get people to accept him as a vampire, they wouldn’t accept him as a human being. I doubt that very many at all, outside his own family and closest friends, could ever accept him as both at once.”

  “I’ve just understood something,” Amarantha went on. “Losing that figurine must have cost him more than it cost me. But he never even scolded me about it. I think he took all the blame on himself. ...” She rose. “May I use your—”

  “Down the hall and across from the bedroom.”

  When she came back to the combination living-dining room, she observed, “You have a very nice mirror in there.”

  “I’d have said a very ordinary one. It serves its purpose.”

  “I was beginning to suspect ... You may call this silly! ... only, when I didn’t see mirrors anywhere else in your home ...”

  “Not everyone hangs them everywhere. People expect one above the bathroom sink, however. You always had one in each of your bathrooms, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, “but we had four plain, ordinary people in the house. You live alone.”

  He smiled. “I have guests from time to time. More cherry cordial?”

  “No, thank you. My glass is still half full.” She sat and sipped a moment in silence, lowering the level of cordial by a millimeter or two, before speaking again. “M. Mendoza, is my father’s theory correct?”

  “Most of it, I believe,” he answered in a matter-of-fact voice. “Possibly all of it.”

  “Then vampirism really is a state of incredibly heightened sensitiveness to the holy?” She felt that her eyes must be shining.

  “Well, for myself, I have never suffered quite as much inconvenience with religious symbols as your father did on his worst days. But then, I never developed conscience to such a fine, gnat-straining art.”

  “But you’ve spent your life being heroically good!” she protested. “Working for Greenpeace, Amnesty, all those movements for human and animal and planetary rights—”

  “Only because I lacked the courage to do what my son and your father did—come out of the closet and live openly and honestly. It isn’t that I lack a conscience, Amarantha. It’s that I lacked whatever it takes to live life in its little, everyday, babbitt fulfillments and frustrations. ‘Heroism’ has simply been my way of coping on a grand scale, quieting my conscience by overpaying for any petty little peccadilloes I may commit.”

  “Your son ...”

  “In a manner of speaking. My foster-son, if you prefer.”

  “Did he ever know it was you?”

  “Not so far as I can tell. Anyway, I never confessed it to him. I’ve sometimes wondered if he ever had his secret suspicions, the way I used to step in and guardian-angel him from time to time. Never with advice about our condition, of course. He was my teacher there, whether or not he ever guessed that his theories might apply to me personally.”

  “He liked to think,” Amarantha said slowly, “that whoever made him a vampire did it to save his life.”

  Her host shook his head. “I was just a teenager myself at the time, still experimenting, prowling around hospitals in search of meals I could sneak from comatose patients when nobody else was in the room. Your father’s blood had a good, fresh tang. I don’t know if it was my drinking that almost pushed him over the edge, or if it was just coincidence, but when I noticed what the monitors were doing, I had an instant remorse attack. I jabbed my wrist vein and stuffed it in his mouth as an emergency measure to repair the damage I guessed I’d done.”

  She asked, “Then it was a complete accident, his being a vampire?”

  “Oh, I’d probably already come across the idea that it’s the sharing of blood between vampire and victim that does the trick, but I doubt I remembered it at the crucial moment. I think that giving him my vein to suck was simply the first way that occurred to my green brain to pour back some of the blood I’d just taken out of him. Crucifixes bothered me for several days afterward, especially when I heard that he’d gone vampire, too.” Mendoza smiled. “My conscience may not be as fussy as your father’s, but it’s kept me out of any really serious evildoing ever since.”

  She finally admitted, “His got a little less fussy after the midlife crisis years. Enough to stop nagging him about having been pushed to the limit by other people. Still, to have a built-in alarm system ... That’s all I ever wanted from him. To be forced to hold myself in check. Lord knows I don’t like flying off the handle, saying hurtful things, weltering in angry thoughts ... Why wouldn’t he ever trust me with the gift?”

  Instead of repeating arguments, Mendoza asked, “After living with him, can you really think it makes it that easy?”

  “M. Mendoza, you’re as much my grandfather as his father. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have been born.”

  “If it hadn’t been for an infinity of circumstances, none of us would have been born, and a totally different set of people would be inhabiting the universe.”

  She had appropriated some of the old medical bloodtest lancets her father used to carry for soliciting drops from people’s thumbs. She had a few in her pocket now. Pulling one out, she jabbed it into her thumb and squeezed half a dozen drops into her cherry cordial, then got up to set both glass and lancet on the table beside her host.

  He looked at her. “Determined, aren’t you?”

  “It’s what I’ve wanted ever since I was a little girl. If my father’s theory is correct, this
should work as well as any actual biting and body-to-body sucking.”

  “All that is needed is sharing the blood. The possible origin of all blood-brotherhood and -sisterhood rituals…almost sacramental in its pure simplicity.” He picked up her glass and frowned into it for several seconds, twirling it slowly by the stem. Setting it down at last, he ignored the lancet, got a case of needles from his pocket, extracted one, and used it on his thumb. He squeezed three or four drops into his own half-drunk cordial, laid the needle crosswise over the lancet, and touched the rim of his glass lightly to hers. The crystal ping sounded clear in the silent moment.

  He lifted the glass with Amarantha’s blood to his lips and drained it, wiped his lips on his handkerchief, and returned her gaze. After another moment, he nodded and gestured at the glass seasoned with his blood. “In my foster-grandfatherly way, I’m going to leave you alone five minutes with that and your father’s memory. If you think that, wherever he is, he would be ready to trust you with ‘the gift’ now…the choice belongs to you.”

  * * * *

  The invitation was for stories centered on a female character. I was quite pleased with how I managed to suggest Clement Czarny’s complete life in three flashbacks while maintaining a focus on his younger daughter. The editors expressed gratifying satisfaction with the finished product.

  APPENDICES

  The next piece started out to be a single-page handout sheet for a convention panel I was on, about vampires.

  It grew. By the time the panel came around, I had handout pamphlets.

  Like so much of the Clement Czarny material, it works well in either version of the R.S.A.

  THE VAMPIRE AS SHAMAN: Clement Czarny’s Theory

  I. RECONSTRUCTED NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE.

  The two essential conditions of the human vampire are a super-heightened sensitivity to holiness and a dependence on raw blood for nourishment.

  Vampirism is not in itself a religion—though certain groups of vampires may have made it one from time to time—but it is a condition adaptable to almost any religious tradition. Most likely it dates back to the dawn of human religious awareness, when some idea of the Earth Mother seems to have been the dominant conception of God, and animals were regarded as endowed with their own share of the sacred. Being made a vampire may have been at least one form of the ancient shamanic ordeal.

  The change appears to involve some kind of readjustment in bodily make-up. It may as well be called “etherealization” as anything else, because in a few ways vampires seem to become less “solid.” Possibly a vampire’s molecules or atoms or subatomic particles move at an infinitesimally altered speed or some such thing, though neither Czarny nor Karr knows enough about atomic physics to hazard more than the wildest guess in this area.

  Whatever its cause, this etherealization seems to have three major results: (1) Vampires are forced to their famous “liquid protein” diet. (2) While retaining full bodily presence to their own and other people’s senses, vampires lose their shadows and reflections. (3) Holiness apparently passes right through the bodies of vampires—harmlessly and even beneficially as long as it meets no obstacle, but with pain if it meets any obstruction, such as sin. The more serious the sinfulness, the more pain the vampire feels. Czarny believes that the third result is the basic one, and the others are side effects.

  We are coming to discover or rediscover that the human digestive tract seems designed for a predominantly herbivorous diet. Vampires may have been the original human carnivores, through whom meat and blood got into the common diet. Some groups, like the Masai of Africa, still make or until recently made their diet largely if not exclusively of blood. Blood soups, sausages, and puddings may also be secularized holdovers from the ancient and originally vampiric diet. Could cooking have been an invention to set everybody else’s intake of animal protein apart from the vampire’s sacred, raw share?

  We should remember that the Blood sacrament continues to this day, under a form more palatable to modern tastes, in the Christian Communion service.

  Persecution of vampires, and the vilifying propaganda that goes with persecution, may have begun as early as the rise of the Thunder God religions and their attack on the Earth Mother forms of worship. But unless time has buried evidence and otherwise softened the impact, any such early campaigns look comparatively manageable, leaving some room to recognize the possibility of harmless or beneficent vampires.

  The Christian world “discovered” vampires to be automatically evil, redeemable only by the stake through the heart and similar extermination rituals, about the same time it “discovered” witches to be creatures of the Devil, in late medieval and early modern times. The anti-vampire frenzy was roughly contemporary with the witch-hunting craze and various violent schisms within Christianity itself. (Notice that both vampires and witches have strong ties to the ancient Nature forms of religion.) It may be worth observing that this was also about the time the Western Church stopped giving the Communion Wine, or “Blood of Christ,” to the general congregation, and promoted an attitude that caused even partaking of the Bread, or “Flesh of Christ,” to fall off greatly.

  As with every other group, so with vampires: there are good ones and bad ones. Thanks to the propaganda of the centuries of persecution, as well as the natural human tendency to spotlight villains, the bad vampires get the lion’s share of attention. The good ones, however, have little or no trouble with holy things, and could still serve shamanic or priestly functions. History may be full of saints unrecognized as vampires. Unfortunately, thanks to persecution propaganda, vampirism has gotten such a bad name that many vampires themselves may suffer from horrific self-images and a sincere conviction that they have no choice but to be evil.

  Most people enjoy the luxury of being able to sin as much as they like and still live normal earthly lives. For vampires, there is little or no middle ground. They must be saints in order to live like normal people. But they do have that choice—to be either very bad or very good.

  II. THE VAMPIRE’S EVERYDAY LIFE

  Diet.

  The vampire depends on raw blood for virtually all food value and energy. Raw or rare meat can also provide some nourishment, and pure sugars can help give temporary spurts of energy. Everything else goes through like so much bran.

  A straight diet of animal protein leads to fierce constipation, so it is understandable if many vampires prefer to drop the raw meat, stick to blood, and give up completely on their systems for eliminating solid wastes. But by eating plenty of vegetable bulk and roughage, vampires can keep their entire digestive tracts in excellent operation.

  The vampire does not need much raw blood—can subsist (though not fatten!) on about a deciliter (3.38 fluid ounces) a day, or two deciliters every other day. By some providential chemistry, three or four drops of human blood added to two or three deciliters of animal blood makes a glassful of total nutrition for a vampire.

  Nevertheless, vampires need some human blood. A vampire can sometimes recycle a few drops of his or her own blood; but after two or three days of this, malnutrition symptoms set in. A vampire can get more food value from a few drops of somebody else’s blood stirred into fruit or vegetable juice, or milk, than from his own in cow’s blood. The vampire who wants to be good must learn many home truths about how people need one another and often depend on the kindness of strangers.

  “I do not drink ... wine.”

  Actually, vampires are probably as free as anybody else either to imbibe or teetotal. Based on his own experience, Czarny thinks vampires can get drunk on alcohol, but confesses that the few times he tried personal experimentation, he could have built his state of intoxication out of fancy and imagination rather than true physiological reaction. Generally, except for the sip of Communion wine, he prefers to teetotal.

  Drugs (Hallucinogens, etc.)

  Czarny has never experimented, but assumes that as wi
th alcohol, so with other controlled substances.

  Medicines.

  Vampires may rarely if ever need medicinal preparations. See Health, below.

  Feeding on Emotions.

  Some people have been proposing that the vampire’s nourishment comes largely or predominantly from the fear or other emotions of the victim. Czarny considers this to be morbid modern nonsense.

  There may be “psychic vampires,” but they are products of a totally unrelated phenomenon.

  The Vampiric Pallor.

  This would seem to result more from avoiding the sun than from the “etherealization” itself. Czarny does not avoid daylight and, as far as he knows, continues to show the same healthy brunette complexion he had before being made a vampire.

  Lack of Reflection and Shadow.

  Quite true, and probably part of the same phenomenon that makes the vampire preternaturally sensitive to holy things. (See above, under “Reconstructed Natural History of the Vampire.”)

  Of course, the vampire’s clothes cast their reflections and shadows, as does anything else on the vampire’s person that is not an organic part of it, like make-up or even food being chewed and swallowed. With experience, shadows become fairly easy to ignore; but Czarny finds that the mirror reflection of empty but animated clothing can seem more and more grotesque to his own eyes. No wonder if a vampire sometimes smashes a mirror!

  By and large, people perceive what they expect to perceive; and it is always the brain, acting on data supplied by the eyes, that forms the actual image. In scientific and rational eras, most people’s eyes register the reflections and shadows of the vampire’s clothing, and their brains fill in the rest. The common film and fictional misconception that not even the vampire’s clothing shows in the mirror seems to suggest that during superstitious and paranoiac centuries people could fail to perceive the actual reflections and shadows of individuals whom they had already decided to be vampires.