Trolley No. 1852 (15 page)

Howard didn’t know what to
say.
I stole the pen from the library, and
the desk came from a neighbour’s rubbish heap.

“You must tell me, sir—”

“
Howard,
please.”

Her cheeks turned rosy. “How did you devise
such an imaginative tale as ‘Trolley No. 1852?’”

Here in the light from the
window, Howard took greater note of her body’s voluptuous secrets
beneath the smart, belted overcoat. Certainly, she wore a brassiere
and blouse as well, yet he could swear that the distinct out-dents
of formidable areolae were evident. “Oh,” he sloughed off, “it was
more creative self-cannibalism than any feat of elaborate
imagination. I merely took several samplings from my
Yog-Sothian
pantheon,
stripped them to the bone, and added new flesh. Old wine into new
bottles? The nefarious ancient hag, Keziah Mason, was metamorphosed
to the lusty-physiqued but corrupt-skinned witch-priestess Isimah
el-Aheb; the planet Yuggoth became the para-dimensional terrascape;
my sho
ggoths
became
thoggs;
the shimmering violet flux of ‘Dreams in the Witch-House’
became the
Abhorrescence;
and my ‘daemon-sultan’ Azathoth who lives
lifelessly at the pith of Chaos became the Pyramidiles.” Howard’s
stooped shoulders shrugged. “It was quite simple,
actually.”

“You’re too lenient in
your appraisal of your talent, Howard.” She took a breath, then
grinned and blushed once more. “And the
sex scenes!
I won’t even
ask
how you conceived of
those!”

Howard fidgeted. Delighted
as he was by her charming presence and flattering air, face-to-face
discourse entailing matters of licentiousness with a member of the
opposite sex made him
uncomfortable.
Instead, he uttered,
“Oh, they just came to me and I wrote them.”

Perhaps she sensed his discomfiture, for,
next, she abruptly turned her back to him and gazed through the
window in the space between the swags. (Regular folk had “curtains”
over their windows; poor writers had “swags”: any sundry fabric
that had outlived its original purpose, such as old bedsheets or
holey shirts, tacked over the panes. One writer, in the distant
future, would have shower-curtain liners and dollar-store beach
towels over his windows, a note mentioned here only in passing.)
However, Francine seemed awed. “So this is the view that the master
of modern horror sees every day when he writes…”

“Why, yes, and it’s a view
near and dear to me,” Howard said, but just as the comely woman
seemed awed by the sight of west Providence, Howard remained
equally awed by the sight of her jutting rump as she leaned over
his writing-table. His eyes inched downward, scouring first the
derriere’s exquisite curves, then the legs which could only be
described as absolutely and inarguably
bereft of defect.
Momentarily, her
heels rose out of her shoes as she stood on tiptoes, and Howard
actually cringed like a fetishist, for the action caused her
gorgeously toned calves to flex…

“The epicenter of what you’re looking at is
called Federal Hill,” he remarked after a gulp. “Oh, pardon me! I
forgot the coffee!” and then he embarked for the alcove where the
pot percolated.

When he was out of
Francine’s view, Howard did something he
never
did…

He gave his crotch a squeeze.

Oh… my…

He heard her voice as he tended to the
cups.

“But, Howard, why are your swags
half-closed? You’d have a much better view if you opened them
more.”

Howard’s hands shook
minutely as he poured the brew, yet as he did so, a mouse popped
its head out of a toppled soda-cracker box.
Wonderful,
he thought with a frown.
But he
hated
spending money on traps! To her query, however, he responded,
“Oh, I suppose you’re right but I never bother, in fear that the
swags might fall and, hence, inundate me in dust.”

She laughed. “You’re so silly, Howard! But
you really must let me improve this view for you…”

What an odd choice of
words,
he mused and then took the twin,
aromatic cups back to his writing chamber.

He stopped cold.

The view, indeed, had been improved, as he
found it impossible not to take immediate notice of two paramount
changes.

One, Francine hadn’t opened the swags at all
but instead had closed them! She’d also turned on the shadeless
incandescent lamp he used at night…

Two, she sat up now upon the writing-table
after having shed completely her handsome overcoat, to reveal that
all along she’d been utterly nude beneath…

“Have I improved the view for you, Howard?”
her whisper flowed like some warm, ambrosian fluid.

“I…should say so.” The mere vision of the
woman’s flawless nudity left Howard feeling as though he were
staring down from a precipice of insurmountable height.

“Oh, Howard. Please come closer to me…”

In gingerly steps he did
so, making every effort not to allow his shaking hands to spill the
coffee. Even knowing as he did—the extreme degree by which he now
violated every gentleman’s law—he stared unblinking at, first, the
dizzyingly full breasts whose tea-rose-pink nipples stood so gorged
they even seemed to minutely
beat
with the pace of her heart; the poreless skin
smooth as the finest white chocolate; then—in the most shameful
departure from urbanity—the glorious mound of pubic thatch shiny as
new-spun gold and the tantalizing, half-seen secret of its precious
folds which clearly glimmered in anticipatory
excitement.

Her face looked dreamy yet burning up in
wanton intent. “Make my dream come true, Howard…”

Howard stammered, “But—but…the coffee!”

“Oh,
bugger
the coffee!” Francine whined,
and so excited was she that those secret folds tucked beneath the
blond private hair had leaked her equally private nectar onto the
very pages of his holograph of “The Shadow Out of Time.”

“I need to have the
dickens
fucked out of
me,” she pleaded now, “by the great H. P. Lovecraft…”

So upon the universal
edict that the true gentleman
never
fails to oblige a lady, Howard, after setting
aside the two cups of Postum, lowered his trousers and engaged
himself as requested. The details of this engagement need not be
elaborated upon; however,
attentive
readers will very much want to be educated as to
whether or not the real Howard was possessed of a masculine
endowment commensurate with that of his courageous protagonist, Mr.
Morgan Phillips.

The answer to this query
would be, regrettably, no, for Howard’s member, when fully aroused,
measured only
eleven and a half
inches,
not twelve.

— | — | —

EDWARD LEE has had more than 40
books published in the horror and suspense field, including CITY
INFERNAL, THE GOLEM, and BLACK TRAIN. His movie, HEADER was
released on DVD by Synapse Films, in June, 2009. Recent releases
include the stories, “You Are My Everything” and “The
Cyesologniac,” the Lovecraftian novella “Trolley No. 1852,” and the
hardcore novel HEADER 2. Currently, Lee is working on HEADER 3. Lee
lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

http://www.edwardleeonline.com