999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [207]
Suddenly my tongue shot out of my mouth, enlarging at a rapid rate and splitting into a tempered steel fork. I strode over to Donnalie, my protruding tongue now six feet in length and hard as granite. “Lookth at this,” I lisped, as my abnormally prehensile tongue stabbed down onto her legs. Over and over the forked tongue fell, until finally her legs gave way at the knees. I keened in delight as I grabbed the severed limbs. Reaching around and grabbing two extension cords from the wall, I feverishly lashed the limbs to my own legs, making sure that the feet extended a good six inches beyond my own. Clambering to my “feet,” I stumbled across the room, roaring with laughter. “Look, Donnalie, I don’t need elevator shoes … I got elevator feets!” (My height—only 5’3” at maturity—had always been an issue in my psyche.) Mercifully, however, Donnalie had fainted dead away.
The alarm blared, sending piercing shards of noise into my shattered sleep. I clutched the pillow closer to my head, trying to drown out the tintinnabulations crescendoing in my screeching brain. Finally, I gave up the fight and swung out of bed, cradling my pained head in my hands. Suddenly the memories of the night before crashed blindingly into my consciousness. “My God!” I thought. “Did I do that?” My cat, Mr. Menick, leapt to the floor as I realized I had spoken my thoughts instead of just thinking them. I jumped to my feet and raced into the kitchen, where the events of the previous evening seemed to have occurred. Sighing with relief, I slumped against the refrigerator. No, there was no blood, no breasts, staining the lovely white walls of my modern prepatoire de manger. Everything was as it should be.
I crept over to the stove and poured into a large mug the dregs of the coffee I had prepared the morning before. I stared out the window, at the robin redbreasts bob, bob, bobbin’ outside at the birdfeeder, as I pulled a Thomas’s English muffin out of the box, split it open with my stainless steel forked tongue, and watched the surface of my coffee as a taupe nipple bobbed insouciantly to the surface.
The End?
Ed Gorman
ANGIE
Ed Gorman, like Joe Lansdale and a few others in this book, has worn many hats—which is an apt description, since he’s been a Western writer, and the image of Ed in a cowboy bat just isn’t something I can hold in my head. He’s also been a book editor (as one example, he edited, with Martin H. Greenberg, one of the most successful and lauded horror anthologies of the 1980s, Stalkers), magazine editor (Mystery Scene), columnist (Cemetery Dance magazine), mystery writer (A Cry of Shadows and the more recent thrillers Black River Falls and Cold Blue Midnight), and, of course, horror writer (short stories under his own name, novels under the name of Daniel Ransom). The fact that he’s managed to distinguish himself in all these capacities is remarkable, and ample proof of his energy and versatility.
For 999, Gorman has produced a cold-eyed and sneaky little study of human nature; if Guy de Maupassant were still around, he might have penned this story.
Roy said, “He heard us last night.”
Angie said, “Heard what?”
“Heard us talking about Gina.”
“No, he didn’t. He was asleep.”
“That’s what I thought. But I went back to the can one time and I saw his door was open and I looked in there and he was sittin’ up in bed, wide awake. Listenin’.”
“He probably’d just woken up.”
“He heard us talkin’.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked him,” Roy said.
“Yeah? And what did he say?”
“He said he didn’t.”
“See, I told ya.”
“Well, he was lyin’.”
“How do you know?