The Omen Read Online Free PDF Page B

stumbling to one side. It was a dead rabbit, still warm, its blood staining the grass where the head should have been.
    The following morning he rose early, questioning Horton as to whether he was still setting traps for rabbits. Horton said he was not, and Thorn took him to the place where the dead carcass lay. It was buzzing with flies now, and Horton shooed them off as he knelt to examine it.
    "What do you figure?" asked Thorn. "Do we have a predator in there?"
    "Couldn't say, sir. But I doubt it."
    He lifted the stiffened body, pointing to it with distaste.
    "The head's what they leave, not what they take. Whatever killed this did it for fun."
    Thorn instructed Horton to dispose of the body and to say nothing of it to anyone in the house. As they headed away, Horton stopped.
    "I don't like that forest much, sir. And I don't like Mrs. Baylock taking your boy in there."
    "Tell her not to," replied Thorn. "There's plenty to do here on the lawn."
    That afternoon Horton did as he was told, and it brought the first indication to Thorn that something in the house was amiss. Mrs. Baylock sought him out in the drawing room that night and expressed irritation at having orders relayed to her through another member of the staff.
    "It's not that I don't follow orders," she said indignantly, "it's just that I expect to receive them direct."
    "I don't see what difference it makes," replied Thorn, and he was surprised at the anger that flashed in the woman's eyes.
    "It's just the difference between a great house and a small house, Mr. Thorn. I get the feeling here that no one's in charge."
    Turning on her heel, she left him alone; Thorn wondered what she meant. As far as the household was concerned, Katherine was in charge. But then again, he was away every day. Perhaps Mrs. Baylock was trying to tell him that things were not as they appeared. That Katherine was, in fact, not in control.
    In his cramped six-flight walk-up in Chelsea, Haber Jennings was awake, gazing at the growing gallery of Thorn portraits that adorned his darkroom wall. There were the funeral pictures, dark and moody, the close-up of the dog among the headstones, the close-up of the boy. And then there were the pictures of the birthday party: Katherine watching the nanny, the nanny in clown costume, all alone. It was the latter photograph that most interested him, for above the nanny's head there was a kind of blemish, a photographic imperfection that somehow added to the portent of the scene. It was a fleck of faulty emulsion, a vague haze that hung over the nanny, forming a halo around her head and neck. Though normally a flawed photo would have been discarded, this one was worth keeping. The knowledge of what happened immediately after it was taken gave the blemish a symbolic quality—the shapeless form like a shadow of doom. The final photograph was of her dead body suspended by a rope; a jarring reality to complete the montage. Altogether the Thorn gallery was a photographic study in the macabre. And it delighted Jennings. He had taken the same subjects that adorned the pages of Good Housekeeping and found something extraordinary in them, something different that no one had found before. He had also begun to research, using a contact in America to check into the Thorns' backgrounds for more information on them.
    He found that Katherine had come from Russian immigrant parentage and that her natural father had died by his own hand. According to a back issue of the Minneapolis Times, he had leaped from the roof of a downtown Minneapolis office building. Katherine was born a month later and her mother remarried within a year, moving to New Hampshire with her new husband who gave the child his name. In a few interviews that Katherine had given out over the years there was never any mention of the stepfather, and Jennings speculated that she herself might not know the truth. It wasn't important, but somehow it gave Jennings an edge. Just one more delightful morsel,