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Devils' Dissemble no morel Here! Here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!
    * * *
    She seemed to explode all at once.
    * * *
    Sitting in a boilin hotel room in Bombay, Gerald re-wrote the story he had begun at the cottage on the other side of the world. The original title had been "The Hog." After some deliberation he retitled it "The Blue Air Compressor."
    He had resolved it to his own satisfaction. There was a certain lack of motivation concerning the final scene where the fat old woman was murdered, but he did not see that as a fault. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar A. Poe's finest story, there is no real motivation for
    the murder of the old man, and that was as it should be. The motive is not the point.
    * * *
    She got very big just before the end: even her legs swelled up to twice their normal size. At the very end, her tongue popped out of her mouth like a party-favor.
    * * *
    After leaving Bombay, Gerald Nately went on to Hong Kong, then
    to Kowloon. The ivory guillotine caught his fancy immediately.
    * * *
    As the author, I can see only one correct omega to this story, and that is to tell you how Gerald Nately got rid of the body. He tore up the floor boards of the shed, dismembered Mrs. Leighton, and buried the sections in the sand beneath.
    When he notified the police that she had been rnissing for a week, the local constable and a State Policeman came at once. Gerald entertained them quite naturalIy, even offering them coffee. He heard no beating heart, but then--the interview was conducted in the big house.
    On the following day he flew away, toward Bombay, Hong Kong, and Kowloon.

----
    The Cat from Hell
    STEPHEN KING
    First appeared in Cavalier Magazine, 1971
    Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look.
    The house - mansion, actually - was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the November wind outside.
    "I want you to make a kill," the old man said. His voice was quavery and high, peevish. "I understand that is what you do."
    "Who did you talk to?" Halston asked.
    "With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him."
    Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man - Drogan - said was entrapment.
    "Who do you want hit?"
    Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Closeup, Halston could smell the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed.
    They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and smooth. "Your victim is right behind you," Drogan said softly.
    Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning, hand inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of the short-barreled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment later it was out and pointed at ... a cat.
    For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have remembered.
    Its face was an even split: half black, half white. The dividing line ran from the top of its flat skull and down its nose to its mouth, straight-arrow. Its eyes were huge in the gloom, and caught in each nearly circular black pupil was a prism of firelight, like a sullen coal of hate.
    And the thought echoed back to Halston: We know each other, you and I. Then it passed. He put the gun away and stood up. "I ought to