Serpent's Kiss (21 page)

    The taller of the two officers-the slender one-nodded. It was easy to see the grief in his eyes. Obviously police officers were no more exempt from urban horrors than anyone else. The officer told Kathleen about taking Marie to the hospital, about the doctor's examination of the cut on her neck, and of her state in general.

    Kathleen took in a breath sharply, thinking of the poor boy's mother. It made so little sense. You send your kids off for what's supposed to be a night of light work and lots of fun and a few hours later, one of them is dead and the other has totally withdrawn from reality.

    "Shouldn't she be at the hospital?" Kathleen said, just before taking Marie inside.

    "The doctor said she'll be all right tonight but that you should call your family doctor in the morning. He gave her some medication." The officer handed Kathleen a small brown plastic bottle.

    "Thank you, officers," Kathleen said.

    She took her daughter inside. There were three locks-a dead bolt and two chain locks-but ordinarily she only used one of them. She used to laugh about how paranoid the previous occupant of this apartment must have been. But tonight, without any hesitation, she used all three locks. And she knew that she would for the rest of her life.

    The couch made into a comfortable double bed. Kathleen plumped it up even further with two layers of blankets and a nice clean peppermint-striped sheet with matching pillowcases. She then put two heavy comforters 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
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."

    "Don't worry. I will. She scares the hell out of me."

    Rooney smiled and left, closing the door behind him.

    

    

    Hastings House was built just before the turn of the century. In the photos from that time, the place looked about a tenth the size of its present form. A couple of stiff looking gents in top hats and long Edwardian coats could be seen, in one photo, turning over shovelfuls of dirt to get the project started-and then a year later standing in the same top hats and long Edwardian coats on the steps of the new building.

    In the background, the tower was clear and impressive in the winter sunlight. Constructed of native stone, with a kind of turreted top, it rose against the sky with medieval grace, though the stories from the time quickly noted that the tower could not be used because of faulty construction.

    In 1912 patient escapes tied to murders began. The first such incident involved a man named Fogarty. He had managed to walk away from the facility and had, several hours later, accosted a woman in her home. After raping her, he took a knife and began what the paper vaguely described as 'a series of mutilations.' She was found dead, at suppertime, by her two youngest children who had been 'down the road playing.' He had also been suspected of killing a four-year-old girl, but her body was never found.

    Reading this, O'Sullivan sighed. Most people like to look back on past times with a patronising nostalgia. People were so much simpler then, they like to think. And life was so much easier, a Currier and Ives world of humble, pleasant people leading humble, pleasant lives. Well, to cure that nonsense, just sit down and read through some old newspapers as O'Sullivan was doing tonight. The Currier and Ives nonsense gets quickly buried. People then were just as petty, mean, and scared as they are now.