The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  * * * *

  “M. Hammersmith,” said Lestrade, “I think I’ll have that drink after all. Scotch and water, no ice.”

  Chapter

  Hilton-Maracott’s promotional brochure had mentioned no such edifice as the Purgatory Pavilion—Corwin could not, indeed, envision the corporation planning any construction so named. Could it be any of the listed buildings adapted? Once inside, the guests of a security hotel were subject to no external authority. Provided they always let out daystaff, chaplains, and special visitors unthreatened and unharmed, they might do whatsoever they liked, either constructive or destructive, with themselves and their home. Click had told Corwin of two security hotels, one in the earliest years of the penal experiment and the other about a decade ago, which the guests had almost totally demolished in rioting. The hotel corporation had simply sent in nothing except such supplies as would have been needed in the normal course of daily life, and left the inmates to repair their own damages or live like a colony of crusoes, meanwhile continuing to charge them the full occupancy rates. Not until seven years after each incident did the corporation refurbish and reopen the institutions to assimilate new guests.

  Those of the clockround staff who were serving limited sentences also enjoyed a measure of protection imposed by outside authority: luxuries would be withheld from paying guests should any of these staff members be unavailable for release at the proper time. Moreover, in all the history of private security hotels, no guests had ever been unable to come back outside temporarily for their appearances in the courts of appeal, save one who had fallen victim to natural illness.

  Corwin needed this semi-comforting reflection on the way to the Purgatory Pavilion. Less so when they actually reached it. Constructed at the edge of the meadow, in the shadow of the “woods” (more nearly a grove), facing the “totally realistic” miniature mountain, it seemed to Corwin’s perception a large rustic summerhouse or giant gazebo of clean knotty pine, gleaming golden brown with clear varnish. Duodexagonal, it had a roof resting on twelve square columns each two meters high. Eight of its sides were open above a wide, waist-high ledge beneath which planks crisscrossed in the manner of decorative board fences. The remaining four sides, one at each cardinal point of the compass, were completely open doorways. The roof rose to a high central peak, overhung the sides by about a meter, and appeared to be covered with grassy turf. No, he could remember no amenity in Hilmar’s brochure that would easily lend itself to such adaptations. Could it be a completely new structure, erected by the paying guests with materials ordered and paid for by themselves?

  “How does our lordship perceive it?” asked M. Magadance.

  Probably, he suspected, much as it was in standard reality, save for the turf on the roof—though he wondered at such a quantity of timber being shipped in…by helicopter? But he doubted how far this perception would fit his assumed persona. “A long-abandoned frame house,” he replied, “its walls agape with great, staring holes and the tiles of its ancient, miraculously unfallen roof green with a heavy growth of moss and lichen.”

  “We have wickerwork screens to fit over the holes in the wall when occasion demands. If it pleases your lordship to go in by the north door, it is prescribed that I enter by the south and meet you in the middle.”

  Following these instructions, he found the interior dotted with nine wooden columns supporting the roof. Eight were square-cut and arranged in pairs, each pair set midway between the center and one of the doors. Spaced widely enough apart for him to pass between them with ease, they suggested ceremonial archways. They were also spaced so as to hold a human body uncomfortably spread-eagled; and as Corwin walked between the northern pair he noticed, with a prickle of unease, things which appeared to him to be iron rings fixed in the wood at points appropriate to such a purpose. They might, of course, be merely intangible results of the power of suggestion, and he refrained from attempting to touch one.

  The ninth column was circular, twice the width of the others, and set in or very near the exact center of the floor, which seemed of hard-packed earth. Approaching this central pillar, he gazed up. Not only did its top appear to protrude some short distance above the roof, it was framed in a circle of blue sky—the hole in the roof was wider across by perhaps half a meter than the wooden post looming up through it. Four black bars spanned the open expanse: roof beams, obviously stouter than their seeming girth might suggest. They looked like two solid lengths, one running north-south, the other east-west, bored straight through the pillar, in whose treen heart they must cross. How and where the other roof beams connected to them for support must remain to Corwin, for the time being at least, one more mystery of the carpenter’s art.

  There was at present no artificial illumination. Lighted only by the high corona around the central pillar and by the walls and doorways—open but generously shaded by the overhanging roof—the interior of the Purgatory Pavilion seemed as though bathed in cool dusk.

  M. Magadance, approaching from the opposite doorway, now carried a fist-sized stone and an ostrich plume, both of which must have been awaiting her near the threshold. Reaching the pillar, she put the stone into Corwin’s left hand and the plume into his right, their arms for a moment forming a new circle around the wood. She then stepped back and instructed him to clap stone and feather lightly against the pillar on each stressed beat of the couplet:

  * * * *

  “Here I am, and here I stay,

  Air to air, and clay to clay.”

  * * * *

  Under her direction, he repeated this formula four times, moving clockwise to each of the cardinal points in turn. At the end, he had to drop the stone and feather simultaneously, consider the individual rates of speed with which they obeyed the law of gravity, and, when both had reached the ground, replace the stone on top of the feather.

  All this faithfully performed, the Mistress of Ritual heaved a sigh. “Now your lordship is at your own disposal until six p.m.—eighteen hundred hours, if you prefer.”

  “Thank you. I prefer ante and post meridian.”

  “Fine. Shall I show you to your rooms, or would you rather learn a little about that business M. Acreblade Lestrade asked you to look into, as long as you were coming inside anyway?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Why could we not do both at once?”

  “Because it might be unwise to talk about these things as we walk through the grounds, and etiquette as well as prudence bars me from spending too much time together with your lordship in your rooms until after your first appeal. Besides, this is the scene of one of the attempts on M. Withycombe’s life.”

  “Is it?” He stood back, folded his arms, and waited.

  “Among other things,” she said, “we sun dance here.”

  He stepped forward to look up again at the roof opening. “Not, I take it, according to the merely athletic tradition made popular in the twentieth century.”

  She shook her head. “According to the ancient traditions of the Mandans, Sioux, Crows, and other tribes. To the full extent allowed by law under the Mandan Nation versus Montana decision.”

  “I did not notice any missing fingers.”

  “No. We leave that part out. Too many of us find it too convenient to have a full set of fingers for playing musical instruments or indulging other pass-the-times. But now and then someone asks to substitute a splint beneath one nail for the old Mandan finger amputation. John Stock claims that after the rest of the sun dance, the splinter beneath a fingernail seems like whipped cream.”

  “Then you modify the ceremonial somewhat according to personal preferences.”

  “Of course,” she replied. “Everybody does. Probably everybody always did. For one thing, we have too much tenderness for our daystaffers ever to dance by sunlight. We usually choose nights of the full moon instead. Occasionally someone suggests calling it ‘moon dancing,’ but Chief running Stag, who acts as fi
nal authority on all Native American lore, can always come back with precedents and rationales, and ‘sun dance’ it stays, even when the dancer times it during the dark of the moon. We’ve all taken our turns at it except M.’s Bluehair, Walker, and Klipspringer, and Dr. Macumber.”

  “‘Except’? Then it is not obligatory?”

  “Of course not. Strictly voluntary.”

  “For a moment, I had envisioned some enforced initiation ritual.”

  “In certain other security hotels, maybe,” she informed him. “But you’ll find us all very considerate here. Besides, we have our own Native American shaman-chief to keep us pure in theory and practice. Dr. Macumber refrains from the dance and other purgatorial practices because of his age, M. Bluehair because she feels no pangs of conscience—or so she claims—and M. Walker because he couldn’t manage the preliminary fasting. A minimum of twelve hours without food, he says, would be easy—but not without his ‘liquid nourishment.’ Neither of them even attend. Delila Bluehair never has.” Magadance’s lips curled into a smile that appeared involuntary. “After eliminating six spouses for their fortunes, Mrs. Abercrombie Baxter Chadfield D’Alessio Eveready Farnol Bluehair considers our penitential rites to be barbaric, unwholesome, and disgusting. M. Walker is less hygienic in his thinking: he used to try attending once a year or so, but it made him feel woozy. Now he humbly explains, just before every gathering, that he gets enough surrealism out of the bottle. Dr. Macumber, however, attends every time, as supervising physician.”

  Corwin said, “I think you also mentioned M. Klipspringer as one who abstains?”

  “Oh, yes! Dear little Elsin attends almost every time in the effort to screw her courage to the sticking point. She sincerely wants to suffer penitentially. We shall be as gentle as possible with her if and when she finally steps forward. Elsin Klipspringer is almost the only one of us whom I would consider above suspicion.”

  “Of attempting to truncate the terrestrial existence of M. Withycombe, I assume you mean.” Corwin remembered that Elsin Siddiqui Klipspringer had beyond any doubt murdered her ten-year-old nephew.

  M. Magadance seemed to have the Dupinesque talent of following a companion’s train of thought. “Elsin’s ‘victim,” said she, “was a particularly vile and nasty little boy who pulled wings off flies, broke the shells of living turtles, fed rat poison to pet canaries, and tried to molest younger girls every chance he got. His aunt caught him at this last hobby one day on the beach, tearing the swimsuit off a four-year-old. Elsin got a little carried away in administering discipline, more unhappily for her than for the late M. Tommy Rogers Siddiqui, his parents, and everyone who would have had the misfortune to know him in later life. The bare newscreen account made her look like the monster, of course. Even in these enlightened times, who is going to speak ill of a dead ten-year-old, no matter what he was like while still alive?”

  “Who, indeed?” Corwin murmured, trying not to think of those lines from Belloc, “When Nurse informed his parents, they/Were more distressed than I can say,” accompanied by the famous original line drawing of a gleefully exuberant Nurse.

  “Not that the victim’s character has any bearing on the strict administration of justice meted out to the murderer,” the Mistress of Ritual went on, and Corwin remembered that she herself had murdered her sister’s rapist, plotting his death coldly and deliberately; and that according to Junior Sergeant Click, Senior Sergeant Lestrade had been highly annoyed at the necessity of arresting her for it.

  Reverting to the original concern, he said, “But you do not place M.’s Bluehair and Walker above suspicion, even though they absent themselves from these ceremonial observances?”

  “Your lordship is familiar with the more ancient form of the sun dance?”

  He suppressed a shiver. “I have looked into Catlin’s illustrated narrative.”

  His guide pointed to a large wicker chest beneath one of the windows. “We keep our equipment in that trunk. With several convicted lockbreakers among the servants, we think it better to defuse curiosity by leaving everything unlocked. You see how easy it would be for anyone to poison the knives or skewers.”

  He swallowed twice, approached the chest at a forced stroll, knelt, and opened it, gripping the lid tightly. The equipment had been put away with consummate tidiness: coiled lengths of rope; stone and metal weights in the shape of buffalo skulls, much smaller than but presumably equal in weight to the actual thing; numerous artificial eagle feathers and one or two that might be real; a crucifix with an unusually and grotesquely graphic corpus; two flint knives with carefully nocked blades; and a bundle of thick splints—all laid on a folded brown blanket.

  Wondering but fearing to ask whether the crucifix was really such in standard reality, he moved his scrutiny to the splints, going so far as to pick them up and handle them, gingerly. There were ten, and they seemed to him polished steel, each one about six inches long, needle sharp at both ends and grooved about an inch and a half from either tip, perhaps to help keep the loop of cord from slipping. He strove to hold down a shudder. “Yes, these or the knives might have been poisoned…but do I understand that you neglect to sterilize them before each use?”

  “Dr. Macumber cleans and sterilizes them after each use, then returns them to this trunk. Each purgatant may request that they be resterilized right before the ceremony. Also that a little antiseptic be swabbed on the skin over the places where the skewers will go in. The purgatant may even request a little mild desensitizing solution swabbed on with the antiseptic. The desensitizing solution makes very little difference. I requested it on my right shoulder but not my left, on purpose to see whether it did. M. Withycombe requested none of the above, not the desensitizing solution, not the antiseptic, and not the resterilization of either knives or skewers.”

  Corwin said, “So they reposed here unsupervised from the time of their previous sterilization until they were brought out to be used upon M. Withycombe. In which case a servant might have poisoned them as easily as one of us.”

  “It’s possible. The Purgatory Club is a ‘secret society,’ but it includes all paying guests, whether they choose to participate or not, and all servants who are doing life sentences for murder. Membership is also open to any staffer doing life without parole for any other crime. In theory, the club’s hallowed haunts—this pavilion, the back chamber of the artificial cave, and two cellar rooms below the hotel—are off limits to nonmembers. In practice, since posting clockround guards would crimp our other social activities, it’s strictly an honor-system rule. I think we manage to prevent spying on our actual ceremonies, and we’ve never noticed any of our things missing or obviously tampered with. On the whole, you’ll find Hummingbird Hill a remarkably law-abiding cloister. But as for snooping and speculating ...” She shrugged before concluding, “I think, however, it was more likely someone who knew exactly how these things are used than someone who could only speculate.”

  “Of course,” said Corwin, “it shouldn’t prove so very impossible to research the subject independently.”

  “Oh, no. All one would need was literacy. Our library room is open to all. A thousand print volumes, five hundred codex readers with several hundred thousand chips, and a warden willing to order any other title we may care to request—oh! I forgot to mention that Warden Warren doesn’t attend our ceremonies, either. Or very rarely. He’s interested only in the folkloric aspect, and he’d just as soon hear about that as see it.”

  “You call him ‘Warden Warren’? Rather than ‘M. Parkinson’?”

  “‘M. Parkinson’ to his face, ‘the Warden’ when he’s out of hearing. We can’t really consider him quite one of us, you see. Slice it as you like, he remains the only mouthpiece of outside authority here on the inside, under sentence himself or not. He may consider himself one of us in spirit, but he still has the power to discipline us by instructing the corporation to cut off some or all of our supplies. He did
it, too, right after he came in, just to cement his authority. Only affecting the champagne and caviar, and only for a week, but he made his point very clear. I wasn’t here then, but the veterans have told me all about it. More than once.”

  “I see.”

  “Most of our stories tend to be told more than once. Warden Warren’s the next thing to a realizer, too. His only fantasy perception is that he doesn’t see color unless it’s some color-coding essential to his work or comfort. Stoplights when he was still in the outside world, for instance. A few electrical cords and control tabs in here. Otherwise, he lives in a world of blacks, whites, and grays.”

  “Dr. Macumber, I believe, is and always has been a registered reality perceiver.”

  “With the mad doctor, it doesn’t matter. But I started out to say, a non-Purgatoriant might be able to learn enough to poison the equipment for the next purgatant, but not to know who that was going to be. Only the members know. And M. Withycombe has been the only purgatant to come so near expiring. Twice.”

  “I think,” said Corwin, “that perhaps an explanation of this association’s specilized terminology might be in order. Is there, for example, a distinction between ‘purgatant’ and ‘purgatoriant’?”

  “Purgatoriant: any member of the Purgatory Club. Purgatant: the one presently suffering. Purgators: the ones administering the suffering. I should have explained all that earlier. One ceremony’s purgatant may be a purgator the next time. Not all the members are qualified for that role, but where more than one is qualified, they draw lots just before the ceremony. Everyone except the purgatant and Dr. Macumber wear masks, so you aren’t always sure exactly who the purgators are.”

  “But on occasion,” Corwin mused, “neither do they themselves know it ahead of time. That is why you suspect that poison was used on the skewers or knives well in advance, rather than administered on the spot by a purgator. But how could this supposed would-be assassin know that the things would not be sterilized?”