Button, Button(19)

Frank drove on, nodding grimly.

Over lunch he found himself humming, "Margie. I'm always thinkin' of you-"

He stopped, shaken. He couldn't finish the meal. He prowled the streets until one, marble-eyed. The mass mind, he thought, that evil old mass mind.

Before he went into his office he tore the little card to confetti and snowed it into a disposal can.

In the figures he wrote that afternoon the number 39 cropped up with dismaying regularity.

Once with an exclamation point.

I almost think you are defending this-this thing," accused Sylvia. "You and your cultural phenomenons!"

Frank sat in the living room listening to her bang dishes in the kitchen sink. Cranky old thing, he thought.

MARGIE

(specialties)

Will you stop! he whispered furiously to his mind.

That night while he was brushing his teeth, he started to sing, "I'm just a poor little-" "Damn!" he muttered to his wild-eyed reflection.

That night there were dreams. Unusual ones.

The next day he and Sylvia argued.

The next day Maxwell told him his system.

The next day Frank muttered to himself more than once, "I'm so tired of it all."

The next night the women stopped coming.

"Is it possible?" said Sylvia. "Are they actually going to leave us alone?"

Frank held her close. "Looks like it," he said faintly. Oh, I'm despicable, he thought.

A week went by. No women came. Frank woke daily at six a.m. and did a little dusting and vacuuming before he left for work.

"I like to help you," he said when Sylvia asked. She looked at him strangely. When he brought home bouquets three nights in a row she put them in water with a quizzical look on her face.

It was the following Wednesday night.

The doorbell rang. Frank stiffened. They'd promised to stop coming!

"I'll get it," he said.

"Do," she said.

He clumped to the door and opened it.

"Evening, sir."

Frank stared at the handsome, mustached young man in the jaunty sports clothes.

"I'm from the Exchange," the man said. "Wife home?"





No Such Thing as a Vampire


In the early autumn of the year 18-Madame Alexis Gheria awoke one morning to a sense of utmost torpor. For more than a minute, she lay inertly on her back, her dark eyes staring upward. How wasted she felt. It seemed as if her limbs were sheathed in lead. Perhaps she was ill, Petre must examine her and see.

Drawing in a faint breath, she pressed up slowly on an elbow. As she did, her nightdress slid, rustling, to her waist. How had it come unfastened? she wondered, looking down at herself.

Quite suddenly, Madame Gheria began to scream.

In the breakfast room, Dr. Petre Gheria looked up, startled, from his morning paper. In

an instant, he had pushed his chair back, slung his napkin on the table and was rushing for the hallway. He dashed across its carpeted breadth and mounted the staircase two steps at a time.

It was a near hysterical Madame Gheria he found sitting on the edge of her bed looking down in horror at her breasts. Across the dilated whiteness of them, a smear of blood lay drying.

Dr. Gheria dismissed the upstairs maid, who stood frozen in the open doorway, gaping at her mistress. He locked the door and hurried to his wife.

"Petre!" she gasped.

"Gently." He helped her lie back across the bloodstained pillow.

"Petre, what is it?" she begged.

"Lie still, my dear." His practiced hands moved in swift search over her breasts. Suddenly, his breath choked off. Pressing aside her head, he stared down dumbly at the pinprick lancinations on her neck, the ribbon of tacky blood that twisted downward from them.

"My throat," Alexis said.

"No, it's just a-" Dr. Gheria did not complete the sentence. He knew exactly what it was.

Madame Gheria began to tremble. "Oh, my God, my God," she said.

Dr. Gheria rose and foundered to the washbasin. Pouring in water, he returned to his wife and washed away the blood. The wound was clearly visible now-two tiny punctures close to the jugular. A grimacing Dr. Gheria touched the mounds of inflamed tissue in which they lay. As he did, his wife groaned terribly and turned her face away.

"Now listen to me," he said, his voice apparently calm. "We will not succumb, immediately, to superstition, do you hear? There are any number of-"

"I'm going to die," she said.

"Alexis, do you hear me?" He caught her harshly by the shoulders.

She turned her head and stared at him with vacant eyes. "You know what it is," she said. Dr. Gheria swallowed. He could still taste coffee in his mouth.

"I know what it appears to be," he said, "and we shall-not ignore the possibility. However-"

"I'm going to die," she said.