12 + 1

i

  When she was younger, she believed that people who smoked were dragons.

  She would watch them draw smoke into their lungs during the cold months of winter. The air around them would be freezing with their very breath; yet there they stood, taking in the very smoke of fire. She deduced that the only way they could possibly be warm was if they had an inner heat source. Something inside of them that would keep their flesh whole.

  They could only be dragons. Their human shells but a thin skin to hide their true identities- they still needed to regenerate the heat. Thus they took the fire into them. They took their fire into their bellies and held it there, as a protector from the cold.

  She learned later that this is wrong.

  She understood that people smoked because everyone was addicted to something. Yet the image has never left her. When the very Dragon himself rain straight into she knew that tonight’s planning had not gone to waste.

  She knew that the Dragon would die. And she would make it happen.

  ii

  “Shit,” She smiled. She smiled with a small grimace that pulled my skin taunt. “Sorry. You know, it’s the last fucking thing I need around the holidays.”

  The man was older. He was tall and thin as a whip. But there was a jaunt in his step none the less. His skin had paled in years and his hair had turned greyer, but yes, he was the same man. I remembered who he was.

  When Oliver said nothing, She shrugged. “You ever get to the point where you want to punch the next fucking caroller who comes to your door in the face?” She hoped the line would work with him. She hoped the lines wouldn’t sound too forced.

  Oliver laughed at her false turn at brutal honesty. “You have no idea.” Though old, there was something in him that gave him vibrancy even now. Though his body was old, the voice inside of it sounded youthful and full of vigour. He wiped a tear away from his eye and held out a gloved hand. “I’m Oliver.”

  She took his hand in a firm but gentle grip. She remembered about his lesson on the proper form of a handshake and the horrible price she had paid for it: that only whores shake like sissies. “You don’t want to look like you’re giving it away for free.” The words echoed silently as she calculated the strength of my grip. She was aware that she could take him then, at that moment. I could slay the Dragon right now if I wanted to, she thought.

  But there was so much writing to be done. She wondered how she ever got anything done in the day, all those words pouring out of her. Sentences and consonants had to come out to form sound, and there had to be somewhere to preserve them. There had to be somewhere to write it on. I knew this. It was what she did, after all. It was what all the planning had been for.

  Looking at her him, she smiled. “I’m Lenore,” she said. “Merry fucking Christmas.” She said. She hoped he wouldn’t see behind the changes she had made-besides, she was older now and it had been so many years since he had seen her. The plastic surgery helped, however; she had bigger breasts. At a curve here and there and voila, you are erased by those that have known you. You can be anyone to them.

  She could be anyone now to him, but she still had the same heat source. They were both dragons after all. And he was the Dragon. He had to believe that she was not his daughter. Oliver had to believe that she was a completely different woman and not the little girl he had brought into the world. He could not know it was her.

  “Oh, my dear.” His voice was a soft croon. He was trying to be seductive. It made my skin want to crawl. “I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

  Oliver bent to gather up fallen packages. Lenore breathed a silent breath of relief when she saw his eyes. They were twinkling and not the hard glint she remembered. Those eyes meant that everything would be alright, that the night would not be filled with what she could only describe as solid fear.

  These were the kind eyes. These were the charmer and snake eyes, the ones that could convince you of anything. However, she remembered the harsh sight of his eyes in the dark when they turned dark. She was wary of them but the twinkling eyes meant she was okay.

  Oliver bent picked up and bags, and then took her hand. She tried not to cringe at the feel of his fingers. She could remember them on all parts of her body. “Can I buy you a nightcap?” he asked.

  Lenore smiled at him. He believed it wasn’t her. She smiled, but it was still a hard line across her face. She had a roll to play after all, same as him. He was a writer after all-she knew who he was. Her mother had told her. She knew he was the Dragon. . “As long as you’re buying.” She said.

  When Oliver smiled at her, Lenore breathed a silent breath of relief. It was all going to work. All her planning and practice one had to practice one’s craft-she was a writer, too. Hadn’t she taken many bodies, just for this very moment?

  Tonight, there would be blood. She had come to kill her father.

  Merry fucking Christmas.

  iii

  Lenore tried to act cheerful. Isn’t that what people are supposed to do during the Holiday Season? It was Christmas Eve, after all. Weren’t people supposed to spread joy?

  Well, maybe, but Lenore didn’t see it. Not in anybody. There was no joy left, only skin to write upon. She took in the smell of him. It was a scent she remembered well. Old Spice cologne filled her nostrils and she shuddered.

  “Are you cold?” Oliver, ever the gentleman took off his scarf and wrapped it around her shoulders. She feigned interest and let him tuck the edges of the scar around her neck. Lenore looked away from him, wanting to strengthen herself for what was to come.

  The people loomed around her, a crowd of people clutching tightly wrapped gifts in their hands, the gleam of the paper like stars caught in moonlight. There was song, yes, she could hear carolling in the distance. Lights bloomed around her, bulbs festooned on tree branches, filling the air around them with a soft, hazy glow. She clutched her bag of presents tighter to her chest and looked around her some more.

  Though people were streaming by, none of them looked happy and full of joy cheer. The carolling she heard was canned music; she hadn’t noticed its tinny sound before. It was coming from a store window, advertising Christmas Eve Madness sales. Lenore tried to let the lights around her lift her spirit, but the truth was: she just didn’t feel it.

  Where was the joy she was supposed to feel toward her fellow man? Where was the Christmas without presents that was still as joyful? Again, she tried to let the spirit of the season fill her-but all she experienced was her normal sense of anger. If she was truthful with herself, she hated Christmas.

  It had become the very soul of commercialism. If that wasn’t enough to hate a holiday, there were the family obligations, the constant demands on time. Instead of a blissful kind of joy, all Lenore experienced was a coldness that left her wanting. She began to walk and Oliver fell into step beside her. His was startled her.

  “You don’t look like you’re impressed either.” He said.

  Lenore reminded herself that she had a role to play if she wanted to use what was inside her bag. She shook her head. “No, I’m not.” She shrugged. “I mean it’s all so fucking Norman Rockwell, isn’t it? A perfect candy Christmas.” She almost spat the last word out. “I think Christmas died for me when the childhood naivety was gone. When the magic was no longer real but had to be re-manufactured each year in exactly the same way. In hopes that I would capture it again.”

  Oliver gave a little chuckle. “Well put, my dear.” They walked under more lights, their glow turning Oliver’s skin a red, stark hue and then a deep blue one, then green. The lights passed over his skin like stripes. “When did you lose the magic of the Holiday season?”

  There was humour in his voice. Lenore let herself relax into her role a bit more. She reminded herself that she could do this, that she had killed before and she would kill again, but that this one was worth the money shot. She couldn’t blow it. Cynthia had laid everything on the line for her. Lenore couldn’t let her down.


  “I was a little girl.” She said. “My father had gotten drunk again the night before. We came downstairs on Christmas morning to find everything destroyed. The tree had been ripped from its base, the decorations were smashed everywhere. My younger brother cut his feet on the decorations. I remember the blood on his feet.” She turned her eyes away from his again, hoping that he would not recall the memory. It had, after all, been forty years since she had seen him last. Lenore knew she should lie, should make anything up, but the truth insisted on coming to her lips.

  “I found my mother, beaten, under the tree.” She wiped a tear from her right eye that had nothing to do with theatrics. “There was blood on the Christmas presents that morning, the branches of the tree.” Lenore took a deep breath and tried to keep the shiver of memory out of it, but it was no good. “He had beaten her with the baseball bat that they had gotten for my brother as one of his presents that Christmas.”

  There was a moment of shocked silence from Oliver. He looked at her for a moment, an eyebrow raised archly over one eye, and she waited to see if memory would spark within his eyes. Instead, she was the one to be shocked by his laughter. It bubbled up from his throat, filling him with the only happy sound she heard in the cold air.

  The small bubble soon popped and real laughter poured forth. Oliver had to prop himself on his knees and lean forward as his laughter continued, tears streaming down his cheeks. Lenore said nothing as he stood again, the sounds of laughter coming from him already soft, their echo fading. He wiped his eyes with a gloved hand. “I’m sorry, my dear, but that’s the funniest Holiday tale I’ve ever heard. A better ending to Christmas morning than A Christmas Story, wouldn’t you say? No red rider air rifle under the tree, eh?” He let out another bubble of a laugh and she smiled.

  Fucking bastard, she thought. She strained her lips with a smile and led him further down the street. She didn’t live too far away, only a few steps. Only a few steps and he would be in her house. Then, he was hers. It didn’t matter that he didn’t remember, that he didn’t recall what he had done to her mother. What he had done to her. What Lenore had done to others?

  All that came after that morning, all the suffering. None of it had meant anything to him.

  She plastered on a smile as she let him into her house and thought about the gun at the bottom of her bag of gifts.

  iv

  The door closed behind her with a soft click. Oliver’s form seemed more frail in the half darkness of her hallway.

  “Did you really think I’d believe you?” He stood looking at her with a scalpel in his hand.

  A plume of fear ran through Lenore’s body. “I don’t know what you mean.” Please, she thought. Please. I was so close.

  “You thought I wouldn’t know it was you. Do you think I’m stupid? Why would you insult my intelligence this way?”

  Fuck, Lenore thought.

  “Oh Lenore.” Oliver whispered. “Betrayed by my own daughter, and a fellow wordsmith I hear.”

  “I write in my own ways.” She said. “I am a Performance Artist.”

  Oliver barked out a laugh. “You’re a what?”

  “I’m an artist.” Lenore said. “I write on skin to highlight the plights of mankind. I write on skin to show the world that great literature can be found once again.”

  “You’re just making books of blood then.” Oliver huffed at her. “You’re a serial killer, not an artist.” He gave her a sardonic look. “You leave bodies for police to find.”

  “So do you.”

  “But I do it with cunning, I do it with skill.” He smashed his hand against her apartment table. The drinks jumped, the ice cubes rattling like castanets.

  It was her turn to glare. “You call it what you want.” She almost looked away from him, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Those eyes that burned like hot embers of sulphurous coals. There was already fire in his eyes. “But I call what I do art.”

  Oliver barked out another laugh, wheezing slightly. She wondered how long he would have; how long could a Dragon live?

  “Oh, sweetheart.” His voice was slightly mocking. “You’re such a simple minded bitch. Just like your mother. I quote great visionaries lines from past texts. You write things on people that you’ve read in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood.”

  Lenore sniffed. “That piece was very popular. It was in a lot of newspapers, they featured it for weeks. It told a story I had written. They were able to read every single word” She moved to refill her glass. “You have to be careful with what you’re doing, it takes precision, and you taught me that. It received a lot of national attention.”

  “Yes, but you don’t go taking ten bodies a month! You have to draw it out. You have to make it last. His voice was dark with disappointment. A final wall of ice enclosed her lungs. “I only take twelve a year, there’s style to it, there’s class.”

  Oliver spit on her and it hit her skin like fire.

  “Haven’t I taught you anything at all?” He asked her.

  “Well at least I don’t plagiarise.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Oliver had raised his eyebrows at her and looked affronted. “I told you, I quote-”

  “Yes,” Lenore said. “You quote. You write other people’s poems, other people’s words on their skin.

  “I certainly don’t plagiarise.” The coldness was back in his voice. “Those words are public domain now. Poe’s been dead for centuries.”

  “Whatever, at least I write my own.”

  “It doesn’t matter how we do it. You’re being too hasty, taking too many. You’ve got no rhyme or reason to it.”

  “Art doesn’t have to have reason.”

  “It does when you’re taking people’s lives. You have to contain yourself.”

  “Like you did with me when I was younger?”

  Oliver stepped back from her as if stunned. His eyes darkened and he looked at her with eyes that were dark like shadows moving along molten ice. She had seen that look before and knew what it meant. It meant that her minutes were numbered.

  She had seen that look when he was about to strike. She wondered if she used it herself, as she was writing. She wondered if, even now, he had the hum of the blood running through his veins.

  “You fucking bitch.” Each word was like a slap.

  v

  “You’ve killed her then?” If she was going to die, Lenore had to know if Cynthia was dead. She had to know about her Mum. It would not ease her grief, but knowledge brought some kind of power. One she had yet to understand.

  Oliver blinked at her, as if he was wondering if he had seen her this entire time. “Why of course I’ve killed your mother.” He narrowed his eyes. “I thought that’s why we took to each other so well.” He had the audacity to grin. “We do know each other so very well.”

  The timber of his voice was dark. It was tinged with thirst. The Dragon was hungry. It was a voice she knew well, one that she had heard within the dark. Lenore held on to her last desperate hope. It was dashed. Memories of the first one they had taken together, had shared in that desperate and dark place, sliced like icicles bright with Christmas lights into her eyes. Despite herself, Lenore clutched at her throat, her eyes. She was a strong woman, but she had always counted on her mother’s safety. It would guarantee her own. She was wrong.

  “You didn’t think I’d find you?” The voice was a soft croon. “I’ve gone through so much to find you-aren’t you happy to see me again?”

  Lenore’s body chilled again, like a dark smear of ice across the inside of her lungs. She found it difficult to breathe.

  “She warned me.” Lenore whispered. “Cynthia warned me when you were on your way. If she couldn’t stop you, I was supposed to.” She could see the steam rising in his eyes, the hunger of heat making them burn with fire. “She gave her life so that I could take yours.”

  “And now I’ll take yours, too.” He said. He came closer to her, hel
d out a hand to touch her. “Unless you’re willing to give me something in return?”

  She shrunk back from his touch. “How did you know it was me?” She asked. “What gave it away?”

  Oliver shrugged. “Like recognizes like.” He slipped his hand into his coat pocket and took out a slim cigarette case. Taking a cigarette out of the case and closed both with a click. “You also used your real name. A tab obvious, you know. You should have chosen something else.”

  “I thought the name would throw you off, that you couldn’t possibly believe it would be me.”

  “You’ve had plastic surgery. Even I can see that. Your face is older, more aged than it should be. Unless the blood is too hard on you?”

  “You don’t look too good yourself.” Lenore spat back.

  “You are a butcher.”

  “I am an artist.”

  He scoffed at her. “So you say, I say you’re wrong. Tell me how you create art instead of butchering them. Everyone you make into art, everyone you touch, dies. I’ve seen it, I’ve followed it.” Oliver slipped his hand into another pocket and pulled out another slim device. Its silver back gleamed and she saw photo’s on its front.

  “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing?” Oliver asked.