on the bed. Then she helped her daughter lie down.
Earlier, Kathleen had given Marie a long, hot shower. She'd even washed Marie's hair and blow-dried it. As a final touch, trying for anything that would get the girl to speak, she sprayed on some of the expensive perfume Marie had given her for Christmas. In her best sheer white nightgown, in her best dark blue robe and matching corduroy slippers, Marie looked very pretty.
Once her daughter was on the couch with the covers pulled up over her, Kathleen went to the kitchen and fixed them a snack, leftover slices of white turkey meat with light daubs of yellow mustard on rye bread, a big dill pickle each, a scattering of chips and two glasses of skim milk turned into the pauper's malted milk with the help of Kraft Chocolate Malt.
She set the two plates on the coffee table in front of the couch and then sat down. 'Now you eat what you want, hon. Or nothing at all. It's up to you.'
Everything was fine now except for Marie's eyes. They hadn't changed. They still stared off at some horrible private vision.
Kathleen picked up her sandwich. Maybe if she ate, Marie would do likewise. She took a bite from the sandwich, swallowed it, and raised a chip to her mouth. She smiled at her daughter. 'I know I'm supposed to be on a diet, hon. No need to remind me.'
Marie said nothing. Still stared down at the bed in which she sat.
After two more bites, Kathleen said, 'Know what I think I'm going to do? Call Dr. Mason. Tell him everything that's going on and see what he's got to say.' She smiled and leaned over and kissed her lovely daughter on the cheek. Marie sat there statue still. If she was aware of her mother's presence, she gave no hint at all.
Kathleen got up and went over to the alcove between living room and dining room. There, in the corner, was a leather chair and light for reading, and next to it on a small table filled with books was a phone.
She found Dr. Mason's number with her other emergency numbers in the back of the telephone book. She didn't get Dr. Mason, of course, she got a somewhat crabby sounding young woman who seemed displeased that anybody would call Dr. Mason at this time of night. Reluctantly, the young woman took the message and said that she'd have Dr. Mason call back. Kathleen wanted to say something catty-she always curbed her tongue when people insulted her; simply accepted their unkindnesses-but she decided this would be the worst time of all to be self-assertive. What if Marie heard her? An atmosphere of tension and argument would be all the girl would need at a time like this.
Kathleen went back and finished her sandwich. Marie said nothing. Stared.
Once, Marie made a noise. Kathleen almost leapt out of her chair. Was Marie about to talk? No. Marie settled down again, this time even closing her eyes, as if she were drifting off to sleep.
When the phone rang, Kathleen jumped from her chair and strode across the room with only a few steps.
She caught the receiver on the third ring. 'Hello.'
No sound. A presence-you could tell somebody was on the other end of the line-breathing. Listening. But not talking.
'Hello,' Kathleen said.
The breathing again. The listening.
'Who is this please?'
She almost laughed at her politeness. Here it was the worst night of her life-her daughter could easily have become the victim of a senseless slaughter-and she was saying please and thank you.
'If you don't say something, I'm going to hang up.'
'Not. Done.'
A male voice said these two words.
'I beg your pardon?'
'Not. Done.'
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Marie.'
'Yes? What about Marie?' She could hear the panic in her voice.
'Not. Done.'
Then the male caller hung up.
It was clear enough what he'd been getting at.
His work with Marie was not done yet. The work that had started back in the bookstore.
Now Kathleen hung up.
She immediately dialled 911 for the police.
After he hung up, Dobyns leaned forward in the phone booth and pressed his forehead against the glass.
He could see his reflection.
He stared at it the way he would the face of a stranger who, for some reason, looked familiar.
He would not hurt the girl anymore. He would go back to Hastings House and sneak into the tower and rid himself of the being that rode inside his stomach. He would let nobody stop him; nobody.
He stumbled from the phone booth, alternately cold and hot, alternately euphoric and depressed. He was sorry he had called the Fane woman. The thing inside him had taken control again-
He still remembered Marie Fane's eyes in the bookstore.
She could have been his own daughter a few years later-
He staggered through the shadows.
Back to Hastings House and the tower.
Somehow he would rid himself of-
But just then nausea worked its way up from his stomach into his throat and he knew the thing was moving again, demonstrating its dominance.
He kept stumbling forward-
O'Sullivan had started out as a newspaperman back in the glorious days of Watergate. That era had been one of the few in American history when journalists were esteemed and exalted by their fellow citizens, even if they had worn flowered ties and wide lapels and sideburns that reached to their jawlines.
O'Sullivan had been glad to take advantage of all this glory, even if he was little more than a glorified copy boy. Night after night he'd stood drinking white wine in the fashionable singles bars of those days declaiming on the subject of the journalist's responsibility to the democracy Anybody who had even an inkling of what he was talking about thought he sounded pretty silly and full of himself, but-to miniskirted insurance company secretaries (bored with guys who hit on them with little more than a few gags lifted from
A few years later, going nowhere as a reporter on the paper, O'Sullivan had some drinks with Channel 3's then news director and decided what the hell, to try it as a TV guy. Understand now, O'Sullivan had been thirty pounds lighter in those days, and most of his Irish dark hair was intact, and he still had a warm feeling for most people that came across as a kind of ingenuous charm. In other words, he worked pretty well on the tube. He was appealing if not downright handsome, he had a nice 'gonadic' voice (as one of the more eloquent news consultants once described it), and he found that he sort of liked the limitations of the form-cramming everything you could into a minute or a minute-and-a-half report. On the paper you might have two or three thousand words to tell your story; on the tube you had a max of three hundred.
He rarely thought of these things anymore except when he went over to the newspaper. Even late at night, when there were mostly just kids working, O'Sullivan got
The Stare is something that newspaper journalists always visit on television journalists. It transmits, in effect, the notion that TV people aren't really reporters after all and that they couldn't report a parking meter violation with any accuracy or style.
O'Sullivan stood on the edge of the newsroom now, letting the six or seven folks who had the graveyard shift aim The Stare at him.
