“Maybe I should come with you,” she said.
I shook my head. “You got vision, Velma. You can see the thin man inside me and that’s the man you like. But I’m never going to be thin, ever. The poboys call and my stomach always listens.”
The last I saw of her, she was shading her eyes against the sun, and I have to admit that I was sorry to leave her behind. I’ve never been back to Calais since and I doubt if I ever will. I don’t even know if Tony’s Gourmet Burgers is still there. If it is, though, and you’re tempted to stop in and order one, remember there’s always a risk that any burger you buy from Tony Le Renges is people.
Ecstasy
NANCY KILPATRICK
“Ecstasy” was first published in Master/Slave, edited by Thomas Roche and published by Venus Books in 2004.
Award-winning author Nancy Kilpatrick writes and edits in the horror, dark fantasy, mystery and erotica genres. She has published 18 novels, including the popular 4-book Power of the Blood vampire series. A unique reprinting (in slipcase) of her seven novel erotic horror series The Darker Passions (writing as Amarantha Knight) is available from MHB Press.
Some of her roughly 200 published short stories have worked their way into 5 short story collections. You can read a few of her recent pieces in Blood Lite, Blood Lite 2—Overbite (both Pocket Books), Hellbound Hearts (Pocket Books), The Bleeding Edge (Dark Discoveries), The Living Dead and By Blood We Live (both Night Shade Books), Don Juan and Men (MLR Press), Vampires: Dracula and the Undead Legions (Moonstone Books), The Bitten Word (Newcon Press), Campus Chills (Stark Publishing), Darkness on the Edge (PS Publishing), Vampires: The Recent Undead (Prime Books), Best New Vampire Tales #1 and Best New Zombie Tales #3 (both from Books of the Dead Press). Upcoming stories will appear in The Moonstone Book of Zombies and The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women.
She has also written one non-fiction book The Goth Bible: A Compendium for the Darkly Inclined (St. Martin’s Press), and has edited ten anthologies, the latest (from Edge SF&F Publishing) being a horror/dark fantasy anthology Tesseracts Thirteen (co-edited with David Morrell, 2009), Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead (www.vampires-evolve.com, 2010), Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (August 2011). A new anthology is in the works.
For Brainstorm Comics, she scripted three of her short stories in VampErotica #5, 6, and 13 and these comics and stories combine with interviews to create the graphic novel Nancy Kilpatrick’s Vampyre Theater, out in 2011. You can find out the latest about Nancy on her webpage www.nancykilpatrick.com and follow her on facebook.
Ecstasy came out of my perception of how far some people will go to be loved.
The world, it seems, is bound for hell. You grip the hand basket tighter, holding onto your life.
This is the first time you have come for him, and that unnerves you. With luck you will find him. With more luck, you won’t. Either way, intuition implies you are not in a good position, despite what you now believe.
Everywhere you turn, white light assaults your eyes as if it were the white-light tunnel of death instead of moonlight glinting knife blade sharp off snow. Harsh air forces you to pull inward, shrinking back to yourself, shriveling, becoming smaller to hide from the cold. Nowhere you have been was the environment this inhospitable to human survival, although you realize other places on the planet are worse. Still, you haven’t been there and, in the midst of this trauma your cells suffer in anticipation of freezing to death, speculation seems pointless.
You have searched this city for hours with this lanky sexy prostitute by your side. Together you visited places where Kevin has been seen. Inquiries here, there, his identity verified by photo, all painting a fresh trail, or so your companion assures you. “Listen, Fran,” Didi said at the last transvestite bookstore, your name on his crimson lips sounding far too intimate, “we’ll find him. There are only so many places a broken boy can hide.” That was many hours ago. Between then and now: dozens of taxi rides taken, club entrance fees paid, drinks bought in bars, seedy hotel clerks questioned, meals eaten and coffees drunk in greasy-spoons and diners frequented by she-males as Kevin likes to identify himself. You are not naive; this world is not the one you glide through ordinarily, yet it is not entirely alien. So many personas, each in its own way demanding love and acceptance. How you envy their seduction techniques; how they terrify you.
The last club was in the middle of a ghetto and as you left it, once again, you congratulated yourself that you only paid this pretty hustler a fraction of the promised money — he will make efforts to keep you unharmed to get the rest. “Listen, sweetie, taxis won’t answer calls to this neighborhood we’re going,” Didi assured you. “We’ll hike it. Just you and me, romping through the snow!” Said with a Madonna toss-ofthe-head and a devilish sparkle to almond-eyes. That he plays with you, laughs at your expense does not bother you. Since long before Kevin’s treatments began, before his breasts swelled and his voice rose an octave and his body hair thinned, all of it leading to “the change” as he calls it, you have been to hell and back many times. Nothing bothers you anymore. Except for one thing. The nightmare.
This northern city’s mean winter streets leave you hopeless. Life does not exist here in the dead of a cold night. No one sane walks around at 3 a.m. The last vehicle to pass inspired a fantasy of jumping in front of the bumper and pleading with the driver, “Take me home! I just want to go home!” But there is no home, not anymore. Mother is gone. Father was too often there. Kevin is all you have. You do not even care that your baby brother is becoming your baby sister. You just want to find him before, as the nightmare leaves you feeling, things have gone too far.
Hands and feet half frozen, you finally reach a wide street, but you are so far from downtown that here it is deserted, of people, vehicles, shops. Life has ended, or so it seems. What must it be like in daylight? You shudder to think about the corruption that will be exposed when the ice melts. Now, a ridge of danger lingers, danger and desolation, two emotions that, combined, combust and leave a raw scar from a wound that runs deep to the marrow. A wound you have suffered. A scar you still possess. You know it is the same with Kevin.
Your companion points ahead gleefully. “See! I told you!” he cries, as if you did not believe he would find this place, and in truth you had doubts. The building resembles a burnt out factory: windows not boarded up are blacked out; bricks smoked and charred; aluminum siding covered by graffiti in various languages. It amuses you to think that tagging might bridge linguistic solitudes.
There appears to be no door, no sign. “It’s here somewhere,” Didi insists, voice reeking with false confidence which relaxes into real confidence the moment a cab pulls up and two persons of indistinguishable gender emerge. They know right where the door is, a crack in the aluminum wall, a spike for a handle. “This is the place, Fran,” Didi says, as if you are dim, unable to see the world for what it is.