Read The Sandman for Free Online Page B

furious,” she said. “You know why people call you that? Because you’re a little aloof and you like to read something other than junk. Like Poe.”
    “That’s probably it,” Cross said. “Too much for the conservative, soulless mind of science.”
    He chuckled a bit to himself, and she laughed with him. He was much easier to talk to than she had imagined. In fact, he was charming. She looked at his book.
    “Poe,” she said. “I remember seeing a Poe play when I was a kid. They brought The
Black Cat
to our high school. Just a local group in Rochester. I watched it, and it didn’t make any real impression on me—at the time, that is. Then later that night I went home and got in bed, and I began hearing the damned heartbeat under my bed. I mean it—it scared the hell out of me.”
    Cross looked at her in amazement. The simple story seemed to him a revelation.
    “How did you feel?” he said.
    “Scared,” she said. “Very scared.”
    “Only scared?” he said.
    “I don’t see what you mean. No, wait, I do. No, there was something else. It was like I wanted it to stop, but part of me didn’t. Part of me wanted to go right on being afraid. It was terrible, but it was deliciously terrible.”
    “Aha,” Peter said, laughing. “Eureka.”
    He laughed wildly and touched her shoulder. She broke into laughter herself then and looked at his face. God, he was a handsome man, and strange.
    “Poe will do that to you,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”
    They laughed a little more, but then neither of them seemed to be able to pick up the thread. She sat there for a second, a little nervous, tense, and waited for him to say something more, to ask for her number, but he just sat staring at her, and she finally had to get up.
    “I’ll be seeing you, Peter,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
    “Sure,” he said. “See you soon.”
    She moved away from him then, and wondered if he was attracted to her. And if he was, why he had blown his chance.

5
    “You look as though you could use a cup of tea.”
    “Don’t try subtlety, Mrs. O’Shea,” Robert Beauregard said. “I look like I’ve been stuffed into a bottle of hydrochloride.”
    “Not that bad, darlin’,” Mrs. O’Shea said, taking Beauregard’s coat and hanging it in the closet. Beauregard looked down at his old Chippendale table and picked up the mail. Nothing but bills and requests for money from charity organizations.
    Beauregard put down the mail and walked across the living room. What he saw depressed him. Not that there was disorder. Mrs. O’Shea had done a terrific job. His dark brown carpet and comfortable modern couches were spotless. His large glass coffee table was neatly stacked with magazines, and over in the corner, at the bar, all the ingredients for his vodka and tonic stood ready, including freshly cut limes. In the days before Heather had left him, he would have felt happiness that all this could be his. Especially the original Lyle Blackmore painting on the wall. An abstract in blues and yellows, with a jagged red line through its center, the painting had been Heather’s purchase, not his own. She had seen talent in the young man from SoHo, whereas Beauregard had initially only used the painting as an occasion to get off a good one-liner. “Looks like the price index graph at Con Ed.” But now he had gotten used to that damned painting and he regretted his lame little joke. Perhaps that’s why she had taken off to Europe—to escape his one-liners.
    He mixed his drink, stared at the painting, trying to relax his brain in its cool colors. But his mind circled endlessly around Lorraine Bell’s death.
    Beauregard sipped the drink, and shut his eyes, and saw a hand reaching up toward him … a long, thin hand, like that of a concentration camp victim. He reached for the hand, and it grasped his wrist, the bony fingers clammy and cold. Then he looked down the length of the arm at the pathetically bony