The Omen Read Free Page A

enjoying his silent presence, amazed by the child's fascination with everything that went on in the world.
    "He's like a little man from Mars," Horton once remarked to his wife. "Like he was sent here to study the human race."
    "He's the apple of his mother's eye," she responded. "Wouldn't do you no good to be heard saying that."
    "I'm not downing him. Just that he is a bit unusual."
    The only other troubling aspect about Damien was that he rarely used his voice. Joy was expressed with a wide, dimpled grin; sorrow with strangely silent tears. Katherine once mentioned this to her physician, but the doctor was most reassuring. He told the story of a child who never uttered a word until he was eight years old, and then only to remark that he didn't like mashed potatoes. When, in amazement, the mother asked him why, if he could speak, he'd never spoken before, the child replied that up until now she'd never served mashed potatoes.
    Katherine had laughed at the story and relaxed about Damien. After all, Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was four, and Damien was only three and a half. Aside from being quiet and observant, he was in every way the perfect child, the appropriate issue of the perfect marriage of Jeremy and Katherine Thorn.

Chapter Three
    The man named Haber Jennings was born an Aquarian; a textbook product of Uranus on the rise in conjunction with a waxing moon. He was ill-kempt and persistent to the point of embarrassment. Jennings was a paparazzi; one of the geeks of the journalism world, tolerated only because he was willing to do what none of the others would. Like a cat stalking a mouse he had been known to hole up for days waiting for a single photo: Marcello Mastroianni sitting on the toilet, taken with a long lens from the top of a eucalyptus tree; the Queen Mother having her corns removed; Jackie Onassis on her yacht, vomiting. These were his stock in trade. He knew where to be and when, his photos unlike any others in the trade. He lived in a one-room flat in Chelsea and seldom wore socks. But he researched his subjects with the thoroughness of Salk seeking the cure for polio.
    Lately he had become fixated on the Ambassador to London, a prime target because of his perfect facade. Did the beautiful couple ever have sex? And if so, how? He sought to reveal what he called their humanity, but in truth he wanted to prove that everyone was as disgusting as himself. Did the Ambassador ever buy an obscene magazine and masturbate? Did he have any girls on the side? These were the questions that intrigued him, and though they would never be answered, there was always hope; this was the impetus that motivated him to watch and wait.
    Today he would go to the Thorn estate in Pereford, probably not to photograph because there would b many others, but just to get the layout, to find the right windows, the entrances and exits, determine which servants could be bought for a couple of pounds.
    Rising early, he checked out his cameras, wiping the lenses with Kleenex, then squeezed a boil, using the same tissue to absorb the discharge. He was thirty-eight years old and still plagued with skin blemishes, this being no small factor in going through life with a camera in front of his face. His body was lean but without muscle tone, the only definition coming from the rumpled clothes that he pulled from a pile at the foot of his bed.
    Before leaving, he set his darkroom timers, then shuffled through piles of papers looking for the engraved invitation. It was to be a birthday party. The fourth birthday of the Thorn child. From all the ghetto areas of London busloads of crippled children and orphans were already on the way to Pereford.
    The drive through the English countryside was relaxing and Jennings lit up an opium joint to free his mind. After a while the road seemed to be moving beneath him, the car standing still, and he released his hold on reality, exploring the corners of his mind. His fantasies were still life, like the