be?'
She frowned. 'God, Jeff, you're really frightening me. You're losing it. Don't you see that? You're losing it.'
He felt the heat begin in his belly. It was like the pain of an ulcer, only fifty times worse. He started to double over and clutch for the wall, but it was then that he noticed his hand and heard her begin to scream.
Across from where he stood was a framed oil painting of the agency founder, a white-haired man all got up in a white commodore's suit. In the glass of the painting, Jeff could see his own reflection. He understood why Brenda was screaming. He wanted to scream, too.
His head was a bubbling mass of leprosy-like open sores dripping green pus. Over this was a scraggly covering of oily black hair. His hands had also distended and were large, gnarled claws with the same open sores as on his head.
He reached for her to assure her everything would soon be all right, but she only screamed all the more and fled down the hall.
He could hear doors opening and male voices shouting, asking her what was wrong. She was so upset that she couldn't tell them in any coherent way.
Jeff glanced around. In either direction he went, he was bound to run into somebody. He had no idea what had happened to him, and there was no time right now to think about it.
Instinctively, he started down the carpeted hall. Footfalls sounded behind him. People-getting closer.
Seeing a broom closet, he dived forward, grasping the doorknob, and jumping inside.
In the darkness, pushed far back against the wall, he stood sweating, chest heaving, feeling the searing warmth cover his body, smelling a fetid odor that was like an animal that had lain dead for days in extreme heat.
At some point in his terror and delirium, he passed out, sliding down the wall, unconscious before he reached the floor in a heap.
He had no idea what time it was when he awoke. Disoriented, he grasped into the darkness, touching the edge of a tin bucket and the handle of a broom.
Closet.
A few memories came flooding back. He had been talking-well, pleading was a more accurate term-with Brenda when suddenly he had…
He did not want to think about it.
On hands and knees, he crawled to the door, eased it open.
The hall was in shadow. The building thrummed with building sounds. No human voices, not even faint ones, could be heard.
He glanced down at his digital watch. It was nearly midnight.
Stunned, he realized he must have been in the closet for nearly…ten hours!
Grappling to his feet, he went down the hallway, past darkened and silent work areas, to his own office.
In the frost-rimmed window was a portrait of the city late at night, the red light on the fifty-story Hawthorne Building warning pilots, the downtown area still ablaze and vast display windows filled with goodies, and the further city, up in the timbered hills, an unbroken chain of lights from the suburbs.
He was enjoying a certain peace looking at all this when the phone rang.
He turned sharply and looked at it as if it were a gun that had just been fired at his back.
It continued ringing, shatteringly loud, almost ugly in its ceaselessness.
He picked it up.
'You should have seen yourself, Jeff. You were really scary this afternoon.'
Then she started laughing as, lately, she always laughed.
She hung up.
He stood there, frozen, numb, listening to the words she'd just spoken, wondering how she'd known about- Naked. Snow. Brook Crash.
The terrible memories were a little plainer now. He felt last night's pain from the cold, from his suicide attempt.
Yes, she had had something to do with that, too. Just as she'd had something to do with turning him into a repellent beast this afternoon right in front of Brenda…
He looked back at the phone.
How had she known just when to call?
'Oh, God,' he said, slipping down into his chair, covering his face with his damp hands. He was no longer a monster, but he was not quite a man, either.
Jenny and her phone call had seen to that.
Jenny.
The following morning, Diane got up early to bake chocolate-chip cookies for an orphanage she worked at a few hours a month. She found the young people of the orphanage very appreciative of her efforts. She'd gotten to know many of them and liked them.
By ten o'clock that morning, the temperature outside below zero, the kitchen was warm and smelled sweetly of baking.
A yellow apron tied around her thin waist, Diane sat at the counter sipping decaf coffee and reading the paper. A festive red ribbon was affixed to the side of her lustrous dark hair.
From across the way, the McCay house came a shout.
When she looked up, she recalled for the first time that morning how a similar shout had awakened her last night. Her initial impression had been that Jeff and Mindy had been having a furious argument. But while one voice was definitely Jeff's, the other voice did not necessarily belong to Mindy.
Now, she realized that voice definitely was not Mindy's. A harsh crone's voice, the person made screeching noises that Diane could not quite comprehend as words.
As abruptly as it had come up, the voice vanished. Diane sat in the kitchen, brow furrowed, looking across the way at the McCay house. The curtains all drawn, smoke curling up from the chimney, the place seemed quiet and normal enough.
Shrugging, Diane went back to her newspaper, reading for twenty minutes until the timer went off, and she took the first batch of cookies from the oven.
Using a spatula to pick the cookies up neatly from the cookie sheet, Diane was filling a plate with plump chocolate-chip dreams when she heard another shout from next door. The voice was positively that of Jeff McCay.
Sensing the urgency of his tone, she set the spatula down next to the cookie sheet, and then ran across the kitchen to the window.
Jeff, dressed for the cold weather this time, stood on the front porch shouting to a closed door, 'This is your only chance, Mindy! You'd better take it!'
With that, he turned, picked up a lone leather suitcase, and started down the stairs to the shoveled drive, where the BMW was parked.
He turned around once again and addressed the house. Because there was no sign of Mindy at any of the windows, his shouts seemed theatrical, even a bit mad.
'Don't you understand, Mindy? Don't you understand by now? We've got to get out-and get out now! Mindy, please! Believe me!'
Maybe his tormented style would have seemed less crazy if it had not been a sunny winter morning and if 'The Young and the Restless' hadn't been playing in the background.
Under the circumstances, however, he struck Diane as being insane, pathetically so.
Apparently waiting for a response, Jeff stood in the driveway rubbing his head with a black-gloved hand, staring up at a second-story window.
Three minutes went by, during which time Diane heard two complete plot turns take place on 'The Young and the Restless.'
'Mindy! I'm going to get in the car now! I mean it!'
With that, Jeff picked up the massive brown leather bag and walked down the driveway to where the red BMW had been parked overnight in front of the three-car garage.
