ONE.
One hill. One farm. One family. What harm?
TWO.
Two twins were born on Candlemas. One twin you’d see at church, at mass. One twin you’d see grow tall too fast… a year of growing every week, a chin too long, a voice too bleak.
and one twin…
no one saw.
THREE.
Three books old Wizard Whateley kept. Three locks upon the room where… slept?… Where something slept, or didn’t sleep. Three floors he tore out, making room. Three cows a month went in that gloom.
The cows did not come out.
FOUR.
Four whippoorwills on the windowsill. They sing when someone’s getting ill. They time their song to dying breath… They hope to catch a soul at death.
Count the birds. Go on. It’s fun! Four for grandpa.
Then there were none.
They caught him. Yes. The birds all laughed. That’s what the old folks say. Don’t ask.
FIVE.
Five hundred pounds the one twin weighed by seventeen. The neighbors prayed. He smelled of something none could place… of under-earth, of outer-space. He went to borrow one small book, a moldy book the college took. “Please let me copy just one spell!”
They did not let him.
Just as well?
SIX.
Six dogs attacked him at the gate. The dogs had always sensed his weight… Not pounds, I mean. The other weight. The weight of what he carried in. And when the dogs tore through his skin, what leaked was not what should have been.
SEVEN.
Seven miles you’d hear the sound When That Which Grew came popping out… The twin no person ever saw, now big as barns and mostly maw. It flattened farms. It drank the herds. Too big for houses. Bored of birds. It left great footprints in the loam, round as barrels, far from home…
But wait… count the prints… count with me now. More feet than four… more feet than cow… more feet than twenty, pressed in mud.
What walks on twenty feet?
His blood.
EIGHT.
Eight fine professors, so it’s said, knew just enough to feel the dread. But three went up the hill with spray, with powder, chant, and words to say, and on the top, for just a blink, the whole town saw it… heard it think…
A face, a half a face, up high, ten yards of face against the sky, And it was screaming for its Pa, and it looked just a bit like Grandma.
NINE.
Nine words the horror screamed at last. Nine words in English… screamed them fast. For half of it was human, dears. It had a name. It had its fears. It didn’t ask to be a door. Nobody does.
There is no more.
TEN?
There is no ten. We stop at nine. The hill is quiet. The town is fine. The Whateley farm is weeds and stone, And nothing’s left and nothing’s grown,
Except…
Up on the highest ledge, where stone rings stand at heaven’s edge, on certain nights, the old folks say, The whippoorwills still wait. Still pray.
So count your blessings. Count your sheep. Count your siblings.
Count them twice.
THE END
Are you sure there’s only one of you?
