Ed Gorman - Serpent's kiss

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 The Mary Tyler Moore Show ), O'Sullivan sounded pretty good, especially after the young women had had more than their share of drinks.

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 .

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.

O'Sullivan missed the clackety-clack of the typewriter days. Now everything was word processors and they didn't make any respectable journalistic noises at all.

At this time of night, the vast room with its teletypes and desks, its paste-up boards and overloaded photo desks, was quiet and dark. Now that they'd had their fun flinging The Stare at him, the reporters went back to their work on the phones and their computer screens.

They knew him from his occasional appearances on TV but he didn't know them. There was a whole new generation at work here and not a friendly face among them. Who could he get to let him into the computer morgue?

From behind him then came a thunderous flushing noise from one of the johns. A few moments later the tune of Eleanor Rigby was whistled on the air and a tall, gaunt man bald on top but with shoulder length hair in back came strolling out from the men's room. Despite his white shirt and conservative necktie, his little granny-glasses and his PEACE NOW button on the pocket of his shirt said that he still wished the era of Flower Power were upon us. He was obviously O'Sullivan's age or thereabouts but there was something youthful about him, too, some vitality and wryness that too many meetings with too many TV consultants had drained from O'Sullivan.

"Hey, O'Sullivan."

"Hey, Rooney."

"You must be slumming."

O'Sullivan grinned. "You're right. I am."

"Still going out with Chris Holland?"

"Sometimes."

"I envy you that."

"What's wrong with your wife? Last time I looked, she was a pretty nice woman."

"Dumped me."

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, so am I actually." For a moment pain tightened Rooney's gaze and then he said, "Whatever happened to that beer you were going to buy me last year when I let you go through our morgue?"

"How about adding it to the other beer I'm going to buy you for letting me use the morgue tonight?"

Rooney smiled. "TV has made you a ruthless, cynical sonofabitch, hasn't it."

O'Sullivan patted his stomach. "No, TV has made me a chunk-o who picks up a Snickers every time he has an anxiety attack."

"Why don't you come back to the newspaper? They don't pay us enough to afford Snickers."

"Maybe that's a good idea."

Rooney clapped him on the back. "Actually, it's good to see you, O'Sullivan. You're not half as big an asshole as most people think."

Laughing, O'Sullivan followed Rooney down the hall to the computer morgue. Rooney opened the door, pointed to the coffee-pot in the corner of the big room that was laid out with computers much like viewers in the microfilm room of a library. Here was where the newspaper stored decades of information on thousands of local subjects.

"You got to leave a quarter for each cup of coffee, though," Rooney said. "You remember Marge? The little black woman who runs this room?"

"I remember Marge all right."

"She runs a tight ship. She'll hunt you down to the ends of the earth if you take a cup of coffee without leaving a quarter for it."