The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  CAGEY WARRINGTON THURSDAY

  SOMETHING SHADY AT SUNVALE CLINIC

  THE CYCLOPS KILLER

  THE REALIZERS/FANCIERS WORLD

  THE STANDARD MURDER MYSTERY

  VARIETY’S NAME

  ROSEMARY LOZINSKI LESTRADE

  THE MONDAY AFTER MURDER

  WHO MOURNS FOR SILVERSTAIRS?

  THE BLUE THREAD KILLER

  MURDER WITH AN ARTIST’S RAG

  LOVE AND DEATH IN THE ASTEROID BELT

  HOUSE OF THE PENTAGRAM

  CORWIN AND ANGELA

  THE SPIDER: AN INCIDENT FROM THE BOYHOOD OF M. CORWIN POE

  A PREDICAMENT IN THE BELFRY

  THE BREAKING POINT

  MAYDAY ON THE MELON

  AUTUMN LEAF

  THE DREAMSTONE

  THE DREAMSTONE I: SOULS FOR TRADE

  THE DREAMSTONE II: LICENSED TO KILL

  THE DREAMSTONE III: CURLING SNAKES

  HELLMOUTH PARK

  THE PICKETS OF HELLMOUTH

  BLOOD GROTTO

  THE HELLMOUTH SEVEN

  CLEMENT CZARNY

  THE DIAMOND DOVE

  THE BIGOT AND THE BARITONE

  A COLD STAKE

  THE TITLE ROLE

  THE DRACULA OF PI RHO

  BABBITT’S DAUGHTER

  APPENDICES

  THE VAMPIRE AS SHAMAN: Clement Czarny’s Theory

  THE PURGATORY CLUB

  A PARTIAL DICTIONARY OF THE FANCIERS/REALIZERS WORLD

  The MEGAPACK® Ebook Series

  COPYRIGHT INFO

  The Fanciers and Realizers MEGAPACK® is copyright © 2017 by Phyllis Ann Karr. All rights reserved. Cover art © Katafree / Fotolia.

  * * * *

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

  * * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

  My association with Phyllis Ann Karr goes back more decades than I care to think about. I bought and read her first fantasy novels when they appeared from Ace Books in the early 1980s, became her literary agent for a few years, went on to reprint many of her books through Wildside Press, and today am still releasing more of her work—in MEGAPACK® collections.

  Her Fanciers & Realizers series—parts of which have appeared in anthologies over the years—is collected here in toto, including several previously unpublished novels, essays, and stories, and an unfinished novel. This is a book you probably ought to read in linear order; notes to stories are at the beginnings and ends of stories, and the various sections have still more info. And don’t miss Phyllis’s introduction, which explains far better than I can what the series is all about.

  Enjoy!

  —John Betancourt

  Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  ABOUT THE SERIES

  Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK® ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

  The MEGAPACK® ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Sam Cooper, Helen McGee and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

  RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

  Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the MEGAPACK® ebook series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://wildsidepress.forumotion.com/ (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

  Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

  TYPOS

  Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

  If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected] or use the message boards above.

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  Chances are that this is a “closed canon.”

  In 1982, I hatched an idea for a novel using “fantasy perceivers,” and crafted a future where I thought it could work. The initial version of the “Reformed States of America” was that future. I developed it, not to make any political statement, still less to build a utopia, but simply as a setting where my fantasy perceivers could interact with the reality-perceiving majority.

  Over the next few decades, the series went into four and a half novels—The Standard Murder Mystery, The Monday after Murder, Mayday on the Melon, The Dracula of Pi Rho, and The Purgatory Club (unfinished) and two novellas—Something Shady at Sunvale Clinic and Seven Against Hellmouth. As well as a multitude of short stories, by my old-fashioned definition of “short story,” not SFWA’s current word-count definition. In late 2005, my husband’s premature death of vCJD, following an unusually long decline, pretty well stopped my fictioneering for several years; and when I got back into it, there had been a kind of break. Then early in 2011, my last remaining close relative, my mother, suffered a stroke. By that autumn, striving very hard to publish something sufficiently popular to bring in four-figure advances, I re-imagined the R.S.A. without the fantasy-perception idea that had been its original raison d’etre and commenced redoing my favorite characters’ stories according to the template of modern romance. A few of the pieces in this present volume, with minor adjustments, would supplement the re-imagined cycle very nicely.

  The new R.S.A. stories are very different from the original. For example, any similarities between The Standard Murder Mystery and All But a Pleasure are purely coincidental, and there is virtually no resemblance at all between the big Rosemary Lestrade novel of the first series, The Monday after Murder, and the new R.S.A. novel Lestrade in Love. Nevertheless, in process of transcribing my old holograph notebooks and typescripts (as good a pastime as any), I find myself intrigued all over again with my earlier vision of “fantasy perceivers” and “reality perceivers” somehow building a society together.

  How it works should become apparent in the following stories themselves. The present collection comprises all the pieces set in this world that have yet turned up in my old files, excepting only the “Computer Wizard of Oz” tales, which are a cycle unto themselves.

  This cycle was begun when the Computer Age we know and love was still in its dawning, and I failed to foresee what it would become in only a few decades. This, as well as the political developments never happening that I had postulated in order to fashion my Fanciers/Realizers world—and some, like the break-up of the Soviet Union, happening that I had never suspected—threw my R.S.A. timeline from futuristic into alternate-history speculative fiction. I further emphasized the alternative-timeline aspect by placing the political reform of my re-imagined R.S.A. back more than a century, to the decades following our Civil War. But for these original R.S.A. stories, the reader must simply imagine that developments have gone otherwise than in our own timeline.

  Four of the stories found early publication: “Murder with an Arti
st’s Rag” and “Who Mourns for Silverstairs?” in Gordon Linzer’s semi-prozine Space & Time (Winter 1989 and Winter 1991), “A Cold Stake” in Yolen and Greenberg’s 1991 anthology Vampires, and “Babbitt’s Daughter” in Shwartz and Greenberg’s 1995 anthology Sisters in Fantasy. The rest of the short stories, and all the novels, appear here for the first time.

  Recommended practice is to begin and end an anthology or collection with its two strongest works. By that criterion, I would probably choose The Monday after Murder and The Dracula of Pi Rho for the two prize slots. But what is the critical opinion of the author’s self worth?

  Strict chronological arrangement would be extraordinarily difficult. By date of composition: both because some of the pieces were being written simultaneously, and because the state of my back files is such as to render finding the dated draft notebooks an extremely hit-or-miss process, some of these notebooks being no longer in my possession anyway. By the fictitious dates in which these incidents are supposed to have happened: because some of the stories overlap, and many share recurring characters. I eventually determined on an arrangement largely by central characters, though even this has its idiosyncrasies. E.g., The Dracula of Pi Rho could have gone either with either the Cagey Thursday or the Clement Czarny material.

  Hoyts’ Hobbitat, 2016

  CAGEY WARRINGTON THURSDAY

  I decided to kick off with Something Shady at Sunvale Clinic, not because I judge it either the first or the best (though it is one of the earliest by the internal chronology of the Fanciers/Realizers R.S.A.), but because the name of its culprit became so much a household word that if anyone reading this collection straight through is to have any hope of not knowing in advance whodunit, the only way was to put this mystery novella first.

  Maybe giving Cagey Warrington Thursday the kick-off place serves also as my apology to a character who would almost certainly have had a much longer series of her own, had the Realizers/Fanciers tales only taken off commercially during the 1980s.

  Let me say here at the outset that I totally reject, as inappropriate to stories set in the speculative future, the old mystery-writers’ taboo against introducing any new toxic substances “unknown to science.” Science is discovering new substances all the time.

  SOMETHING SHADY AT SUNVALE CLINIC

  Chapter 1

  I met Rob Grove on Tuesday, February 19, 2036. I was almost a quarter of a century old; he was maybe a dozen years older. The three weeks I knew him seemed, at the time, the best three weeks of my life.

  In the small hours of Tuesday morning, March 11, he was dead. Of Carmine’s disease, the official personal-access report told us much later that day.

  It wasn’t until 2038 that Dr. Georgina Siroonian ever thought to connect Carmine’s disease with Zinkola’s famous “secret ingredient just discovered in the last preserved rain forests of the Amazon,” Erythoxylon gremlothenia, which turned out to be less potent than vodka on most people but to have serious or deadly effects on a very small minority, the way that bee or wasp venom can be fatal to a tiny percentage of the population. The Zinkola company had gone bankrupt early in the new decade; but caches of cans, plastibulbs, and collectors’ bottles kept turning up in semi-secret circulation among diehard “Free 2020s” people throughout the 2030s, even after it was proved to be responsible for Carmine’s disease.

  Most of the Erythoxylon gremlothenia deaths must have happened when the beverage was at its most popular in ’28, ’29, and ’30, before anyone really noticed—that is, before Dr. Mel Swimming-Beaver Carmine diagnosed the syndrome as a new mystery disease. The earlier deaths must have been chalked up to various other causes; the known victims between when it was named Carmine’s and when it was officially renamed Gremlothenia poisoning eventually numbered 446. That doesn’t seem so many, spaced out over the better part of a decade; but in March of 2036, Carmine’s was still the most feared new sickness of the century. As far as we could see then, it could strike anybody, anywhere, with the speed of lightning, and nobody could figure out how it was transmitted or how long it might take to incubate. For all we knew then, it might have been the start of a new Black Death. There was enough fear of panic that the diagnosis of Carmine’s didn’t appear in Rob’s public obit, only in the personal-access official death report.

  My closest personal contact with Rob had consisted of handshakes and two Saturday night kisses with well puckered lips—I may have been a child of the 2020s, but I was a grownup of the 2030s—and I told myself that if Carmine’s could be spread that casually, most of the population would already be dead. I won’t pretend that in my grief about Rob I stopped caring about myself. But until well after the funeral my grief for him came first.

  Monday evening, March 10…the start of a perfect date…then that terrible purple rash spreading across his neck up his jawline to his cheeks, looking like a shadow at first in the restaurant’s candlelight…a few coughs, throat clearings, sips of water, and then all at once he was in a fit of coughing, deeper and deeper, finally pitching forward across his framboises glacees…the emergency alarm, the ambulance, the hospital, the attendants gurneying him away behind those sterile ultraviolet doors…the helpless, nightlong waiting, waiting for the cherub-faced old woman, the grandmotherly nurse they always keep for breaking bad news, to appear with her soft hands and soft sympathies that never really help at all…then being sent home with a sedative and Rob’s personal access number, to wait for the posthumous examination report…and they weren’t even very willing to give his personal access number to a mere casual friend, because “you weren’t really anything more to him than that, were you, dear?” Not yet ...

  Then the funeral, arranged and paid for by I didn’t know whom; I only knew that the hospital never called me back, as they’d promised to do if nobody else showed up to claim his body; I had to get the when and where from the public newscreen obituary notices.

  I knew they must have had to take part of Rob for the postmortem, but it had been a tactful and partial autopsy, its traces invisible on him as he lay in his casket, almost as handsome as a waxwork effigy and even less like himself. The casket, I supposed, was expensive; at least, it didn’t look cheap, but I’d never had to buy a coffin for anybody. There were heartbreakingly few flowers, though: only five more arrangements besides mine, two of them immense and one so small and so full of the cheapest and gaudiest flowers as to suggest a practical joke. The two immense arrangements had ribbons reading, “Dear Friend,” and “Respected Fried.” The tiny one had no ribbon at all.

  The last two floral baskets, respectably sized but not flashy, had ribbons reading “Dearly Beloved” and “Good Friend”; I suspected they were generic arrangements put there by the funeral parlor in an effort to save appearances, because during the entire visitation evening, the only other person I saw in the small chapel besides myself and the occasionally-appearing funeral director was my employer, who came only to keep me company.

  But then, the visitation evening was Tuesday, the evening of the same day he’d died, and the funeral was Wednesday, which gave any family and friends he might have had elsewhere around the country very little time. Today it seems indecently hasty that a person should die between 02:00 and 02:30 hours at night, be postmortemed and in the casket by afternoon of the same day, spend a single evening on view, and go into the crematorium the following morning. But that had become fairly common practice during the 2020s, and even by 2036 we still saw nothing strange in it, especially when a person was transient or little known in town, and/or when something like Carmine’s was the cause of death. It’s funny, how some things can change all at once within just a few months or years, and other things, like funeral practices, can take decades to change. I was only grateful that the authorities allowed one evening of visitation, Carmine’s being such a fearsome disease.

  Cagey—my employer—didn’t go to the actual funeral. To her, Rob had been nothing but a male presence who showed
up at Warrington House to collect me for a date or bring me home, and who often phoned between whiles for long conversations with me about this and that. Besides, at the funeral home on visitation evening she had slipped while pouring herself a cup of coffee in the hall, overturning a flower pedestal next to the beverage dispenser; and, observing that something like that happened to her every time she entered a funeral home—as if it never happened to her anyplace else—she had declared her intention to start legal inquiries into ways and means of not attending her own funeral. At the time, I resented her joking about such things. But she may have been perfectly serious.

  Anyway, Nancy, Gucchi, Harve, and Ilene, my fellow workers at Warrington House, went with me instead, and the five of us made up more than half the attendance.

  Not counting the funeral home people, one of whom gave a generic eulogy, there were only four others besides us: a tall woman, a short woman, a short man, and a medium-sized man. The short woman and man were both quite elderly, and I guessed they were senior citizens earning a few tridollars as generic mourners provided, like some of the flowers, by the funeral home for the sake of appearances. Cagey checked with the funeral director some time later and found out in confidence that they were hired mourners; they never came into the story at all except for Rob’s funeral.

  I had some suspicion that the other two were hired mourners as well. They were middle-aged and well dressed; but the country’s employment level still hadn’t gotten back to normal from the long decades around the turn of the century, and the funeral home provided suitable clothing for mourners, when necessary. I thought they could be out-of-work actors, though in that case their stony faces, at a time when some show of grief would be appropriate, demonstrated why they’d be out of work as actors. At least the elderly woman had the grace to dab a tissue at her eyes from time to time for her money, and the elderly man to look somber.

  That tall, middle-aged woman looked to me so hard and angry, so like Agnes Morehead in a sinister-housekeeper role, that it never occurred to me at all to wonder if I should feel jealous of her. Besides, she looked too old to have been any romantic interest of Rob’s, though not old enough to be his mother. I remember thinking in a misty way that she might have been one of his high-school teachers, except that he was a stranger to this area.