"What happened with the tests?" Sharon asked as they walked slowly to the kitchen.
"Not a thing. All negative. I'm going to have to get her a shrink," Chris answered dully.
**********
After sandwiches and coffee, Sharon showed Chris how to give an injection.
"The two main things," she explained, "are to make sure that there aren't any air bubbles, and then you make sure that you haven't hit a vein. See, you aspirate a little, like this"--- she was demonstrating--- "and see if there's blood in the syringe."
For a time, Chris practiced the procedure on a grapefruit, and seemed to grow proficient. Then at 9:28, the front doorbell rang. Willie answered. It was Karl. As he passed through the kitchen, en route to his room, he nodded a good evening and remarked he'd forgotten to take his key.
"I can't believe it," Chris said to Sharon. "That's the first time he's ever admitted a mistake."
They passed the evening watching television in the study.
At 11:46, Chris answered the phone. The young director of the second unit, He sounded grave.
"Have you heard the news yet, Chris?"
'No, what?"
"Well, it's bad."
"What is it?" she asked.
"Burke's dead."
He'd been drank. He had stumbled. He had fallen down the steep flight of steps beside the house, fallen far to the bottom, where a passing pedestrian on M Street watched as he tumbled into night without end. A broken neck. This bloody, crumpled scene, his last.
As the telephone fell from Chris's fingers, she was silently weeping, standing unsteadily.
Sharon ran and caught her, supported her, hung up the phone and led her to the sofa.
"Burke's dead," Chris sobbed.
"Oh, my God!" gasped Sharon. "What happened?" But Chris could not speak yet. She wept.
Then, later, they talked. For hours. They talked. Chris drank. Reminisced about Dennings.
Now laughed. Now cried. "Ah, my God," she kept sighing. "Poor Burke... poor Burke..." Her dream of death kept coming back to her.
At a little past five in the morning, Chris was standing moodily behind the bar, her elbows propped, head lowered, eyes sad. She was waiting for Sharon to return from the kitchen with a tray of ice.
She heard her coming.
"I still can't believe it," Sharon was sighing as she entered the study.
Chris looked up and froze.
Gliding spiderlike, rapidly, close behind Sharon, her body arched backward in a bow with her head almost touching her feet, was Regan, her tongue flicking quickly in and out of her mouth while she hissed sibilantly like a serpent.
"Sharon?" Chris said numbly, still staring at Regan.
Sharon stopped. So did Regan. Sharon turned and saw nothing. And then screamed as she felt Regan's tongue snaking out at her ankle.
Chris whitened. "Call that doctor and get him out of bed! Get him now!"
Wherever Sharon moved, Regan would follow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Friday, April 29. While Chris waited in the hall outside the bedroom, Dr. Klein and a noted neuropsychiatrist were examining Regan.
The doctors observed for half all hour. Flinging. Whirling. Tearing at the hair. She occassionally grimaced and pressed her hands against her ears as if blotting out sudden, deafening noise. She bellowed obscenities. Screamed in pain. Then at last she flung herself face downward onto the bed and tucked her legs up under her stomach. She moaned incoherently.
The psychiatrist motioned Klein away from the bed.
"Let's get her tranquilized," he whispered. "Maybe I can talk to her."
The internist nodded and prepared an injection of fifty milligrams of Thorazine. When the doctors approached the bed, however, Regan seemed to sense them and quickly turned over, and as the neuropsychiatrist attempted to hold her, she began to shriek in malevolent fury. Bit him. Fought him. Held him off. It was only when Karl was called in to assist that they managed to keep her sufficiently rigid for Klein to administer the injection.
The dosage proved inadequate. Another fifty milligrams was injected. They waited.
Regan grew tractable. Then dreamy. Then stared at the doctors in sudden bewilderment.
"Where's Mom? I want my Mom!" she wept.
At a nod from the neuropsychiatrist, Klein left the room to go and get Chris.
