The Omen

by David Seltzer

For at that moment, in the basement of the Ospedale Generale in Rome, a stone crushed the head of the child that was meant to be his.

The first signal of her distress had gone almost unnoticed, Thorn expressing anger instead of concern when he returned home to find she had taken scissors and fairly butchered her hair.

but a year later he found her in their bathroom making small cuts in the end of her fingers with a razor blade, dismayed herself at why she was doing it.

blue water washing away her hope

The plane touched down on the runway and there was a spattering of light applause,

Why do we fly? wondered Thorn. Is life all that dispensable?

The estimate that his personal wealth was close to a hundred million dollars was unverifiable, and in truth Thorn himself did not know.

"For the sake of your wife, Signor, God will forgive this deception. And for the sake of this child who will otherwise have no home ..."

Immediately after his birth they dutifully brought the infant to church, but so abject was his terror upon entering the cathedral that they cut the ceremony short.

"He's like a little man from Mars,"

The man named Haber Jennings was born an Aquarian; a textbook product of Uranus on the rise in conjunction with a waxing moon.

Marcello Mastroianni sitting on the toilet,

He lived in a one-room flat in Chelsea and seldom wore socks.

Okay 🙂

Did the Ambassador ever buy an obscene magazine and masturbate?

It was Hobie talking,

A coroner's report had shown that there was a high amount of Benadryl, an allergy drug, in the girl's bloodstream when she died, but this only added to the confusion and speculation as to why she had taken her life.

"It's not as though she were a member of our family." "She was," replied Katherine quietly. "She told me she wanted to stay with us forever."

"I guess she changed her mind,"

"Maybe my girdle is filled with tape recorders. Why don't you send up a young Marine to check it out?"

Even her lovemaking had changed, becoming more exciting, more passionate; Thorn failed to realize that it was possibly an expression of desperation rather than desire.

"I've seen those sheiks. I've seen the women they buy. Wherever they go, they're followed by whores. Is that what they want you to do, too?" "Frankly, I don't know."

"So if they want you to sleep with a whore—" "If they want me to sleep with their eunuch, I'll sleep with their eunuch. Do you know what's at stake here?"

"I guess we're all whores, Jeremy," she said. "You're theirs and I'm yours. So let's just go to bed."

"The head's what they leave, not what they take. Whatever killed this did it for fun."

a vague haze that hung over the nanny, forming a halo around her head and neck.

the shapeless form like a shadow of doom.

"Why does a dog, a rat, have breath … and Thou no breath at all …"

"I fear the good because it will go away … I fear the bad because I'm too weak to withstand it.

"You've done beautifully,"

"But I've hated it."

"He's his own man. He doesn't seem to need anybody."

"Kathy and Jerry, going at it And old Lincoln rolling in his grave."

jauntily

Katherine looked at Damien, who was playing with the laces of his new shoes and apparently oblivious of the conversation.

"This part's indelicate and you'll have to excuse me," continued Horton. "But we've noticed she doesn't use any bathroom paper. By the toilet, you know? We haven't had to change it since she arrived."

"Look up ahead," said Horton. "Communists."

inexorably

"Drivel"

Classical music was playing softly on the hi-fi,

It crystallized in silence, but it was not real unless voiced.

duties,"

Was it the old one, the demon of depression come back to haunt?

perfunctory

"Its mother, sir … was a jackal!" A sob escaped the priest's throat. "He was born of a jackal! I saw it myself!"

It looked like a ghostlike javelin about to skewer the priest to the ground.

What was the meaning of energy that clung to the outside of a human form? Did it come at random, or did it have some meaning? Did it have to do with external influences, or was it perhaps born of anxieties festering within?

Democracy is equal opportunity. And without equal opportunity the word 'democracy' is a lie!"

and more important even than his own innate abilities was the fact that he could make people believe.

It occurred to Thorn that the priest might be a potential assassin, for in the cases of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremmer, the assassins tried to make personal contact of the kind the priest had made.

Her child was four and a half years old and he had never even been to a zoo.