“Lawks-a-mercy, it is too frigging cold to be in the nude.”
“Wait on, my dear.” He eased off his own sackings and dressed her in them. Then he struggled into her sackings. He felt he would wear them like a princess.
“Ooh, Padgett, you’re a devil!”
He unpeeled the long gloves from her arms and rolled them up his own like prophylactics. “Don’t you enjoy it, though, Elizabeth, when we make love in each other’s clothes?”
She did not answer as they renewed their embrace. The stench of their rags mingled as the Great Old Ones flapped in from those ink-well cores in the sky. The leader on bony oars spotted that titbit it had yearned for, since eternities of flight. Within the human skull, it would crack out the softest, juiciest shellfish of a brain ever conceived. Even now, the pulpy innards twitched and seethed upward like frothy meat-shake, winding and whining within the bony conch: ready to rocket up and escape…
And, so, one Great Old One plummeted and, faster than a blink of its artery-mapped eyelid, plucked what it thought was the man’s brain being passed from mouth to mouth, during a French kiss. Despite the confused clothes, with green-spunk lips, it sucked upon this bewildered blob and ingested it through a funnel of twisting flesh-metal and perpetual metabolic darkness. Meanwhile, the real Elizabeth Lakeminster and the real Dan Williams regained the Platonic Form of every pair of creatures who decided to come together as one. They loved to watch each mote and microbe of each other wriggle free and become characters in the flickering play of the universe. Such skittering offspring from their metaphysical loins were the half-breeds and double-breeds who were ready to soak the light in black oil to make it night, or vice versa, vice versa, vice versa, V V V V V…
Salustrade sat in the sewer, his hands locked in prayer like two fleshy moth-wings having sex. He desperately wanted to be the Child who was Father to us all.
THE POWER OF ONE
by Nancy Kilpatrick
Nancy Kilpatrick was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Toronto with her Canadian husband. Since she still hasn’t given me her date of birth, I’ll just guess it at around 1870, judging by her love for vampire fiction.
Nancy Kilpatrick’s over fifty horror stories have appeared in small press publications and in anthologies, including Sinistre, Deathsport, Xanadu 3, Bizarre Bazaar 93, After Hours, Freak Show, and Dead of Night. The first novel of an erotic horror series has just been released from Masquerade Books under a pseudonym, which she does not disclose. A collection of her vampire stories is slated for 1994 from TAL Publications, entitled Sex and the Single Vampire. Her horror novel, Near Death, is scheduled to be published by Pocket Books about the same time as this book you’re reading now, so go out and look for it. Fans who can supply your editor with a copy of Kilpatrick’s pseudonymous erotic horror novel will receive a wreath of garlic.
Mira counted the checkered squares that made up the deep pile on Dr. Rosen’s waiting room floor. A row of sixty black and sixty white lined the cardiologist’s broadloom from the door to the window. Seventy of each across. Sixteen thousand eight hundred. She felt sure the space taken up by the desk held twenty and twenty. Those plus the three blacks and three whites under every one of the six chairs meant the floor should contain, altogether, sixteen thousand eight hundred seventy-six. Only base numbers from one to nine held meaning. She had to reduce that large total.
Quickly she added the individual digits that made up that number horizontally. One plus six plus eight plus seven plus six. The muscles of her chest tensed. She considered using the calculator her dad had given her but felt guilty, as though that would be cheating. After all, she thought, he wouldn’t use it, although the gift implied that she would.
Twenty-eight. Two plus eight equals ten. One and zero. Uh oh… One. A paralyzingly unlucky number. The number of sacrifice. Her chest constricted further.
Dr. Rosen’s nurse stood and walked down the hall. Mira watched her, twisting a Kleenex into a corkscrew, more of a nervous wreck than usual. The test results would seal her fate, the predestination that she had been struggling to avoid since birth.
The three other patients waiting and Mira made four: a stable, balanced number, but not good enough. There had to be a way to annihilate that one.
She sighed and glanced around the room. A Wandering Jew hung in a macrame hangar near the window. The first vine had thirteen leaves. One and three makes four again. She took a deep, relaxing breath. Her chest muscles eased some. The second vine had ten. One plus zero. One again. Her pulse escalated as neck muscles cramped. If she added the four and one she’d have a five. Even numbers were safer but this was midway. Adventurous yet solid. She felt a dull ache beneath her rib cage. If only she could stop now. But she’d have to count the other vines; she knew she took after her dad in that way: compelled, as always, to finish what was begun.
She multiplied the fifty leaves by the number of vines: twenty. One thousand. One plus three zeros. The horror of one was just slicing into her mind when the nurse said, “Ms. Jacyk? Doctor will see you now.”
Mira stumbled across the room and down the crisp white hallway with the chain of mini Monet prints—ten of them, or one—clinging to the walls. The ache in her chest had increased to a steady throb. The nurse led her to the examination room at the end of the hall. Still unsteady, Mira sat in the white chair next to the small desk.
Dr. Rosen followed her in. He carried a red file folder with her name typed across the flap. She already knew that by assigning the letters of the alphabet numbers from one to twenty-six, the letters of her name added up to one. And she’d been the only child of a single parent. She’d been trying to pay off that solitary karma all her life.
“Mira.” He smiled, a bit crookedly, and she counted seven upper teeth. She wondered if he had all thirty-two, like her father. Three and two. Five.
“We’ve received the results from your EKG.” His mouth was tight but not nearly as severe as her dad’s. Her heartbeat accelerated and the ache intensified. “I don’t want to frighten you, but it looks as though you’ve suffered a myocardial infarction. A mild heart attack.”
He paused. The silence made her aware that she was shaking. To keep from falling apart completely, Mira concentrated on counting the pencils and pens in his tray. Six pencils, five pens, plus the ballpoint in his hand. One plus two. Three. The number of change. Amidst the fear she felt a glimmer of elation.
“I think we should look on the positive side,” he said. “Take this as an early warning. Now’s the time to make lifestyle changes. I’ve reviewed the results of your cholesterol test and the cardiovascular evaluation. There’s room for improvement in both areas. Here’s a diet that’s worked very well in cases like yours.” He handed her one sheet of daily menus: three per day for seven days. Twenty-one. Two plus one. Three. “High in fiber and carbohydrates, low in fatty foods. We’ll also get you on an exercise plan, walking, swimming, easy at first and gradually we’ll have your pulmonary status to where it should be.”
Mira had stopped listening. She’d been studying the numbers on his large day planner attached to the wall. One plus two plus three plus four, all the way to thirty-one. Adding each of the digits together produced four hundred and ninety six. Adding four, nine and six gave her nineteen. One and nine equaled ten. One. It would be unfair to add in the number values of the word December to try to dilute that one. Her father always said what goes around, comes around. He’d never blamed her for her mother, never said a word. Not one word.