Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane by William Peter Blatty

of ballpoint pens. Suddenly Cutshaw swooped upon Zook, flicked an eye over what he was writing. “Slashing, Zook, slashing!” he said, then lifted his head to the others. “Gentlemen, Zook has come up with ‘throbbing pulse’ and I think we should all try to use it!”
    Corfu, nearby, lifted a pondering look to Cutshaw. “Bestial lust?” he inquired tentatively.
    The astronaut beamed with pleasure. “ Splendid, Corfu!” Then he loudly commanded the inmates to “add ‘bestial lust’ to the list of basic phrases.”
    An inmate named Nammack fronted Cutshaw with a letter. “Do I give it to Fromme?”
    “Heavens, no! I must grade it!” Cutshaw whipped the letter away, turning now to Klenk, a quondam pilot who, at the moment, looked inspired. Meantime, Fromme was at a typewriter, busily typing addresses onto stickers under carbon paper, thus achieving an effect that was not dissimilar to an addressograph machine. He used a telephone book as his source, selecting the names of hapless females that were prefixed by a “Miss.”
    Klenk blossomed, “Finished!”, lifting his pen with a flourish.
    “Marvey good!” commended Cutshaw. “Sign it ‘Colonel Hudson Kane’!”
    Cutshaw glided over to Fromme, now humming “Some Enchanted Evening” while his finger skimmed hopefully down a page in the phone book, halting at last at one that pleased him. “Miss Vorpal Katz,” he announced. “Now she’s got to be a loser! Right?”
    “Right!” Cutshaw was rapidly flipping through the letters he had collected. He halted at one, chagrined, and looked up with fury at the men. “Okay, fellas, who signed ‘Lamont Cranston’?”
    Fairbanks was upon him, thrusting a letter into his hands, burbling, “Here! It’s a classic! Does the best one get a prize?”
    “Douglas, heaven will reward you. Tomorrow night some lonely spinster will be pressing your words to her lips. Doesn’t that make your juices tingle?”
    “I think we should have some kind of incentive.”
    “Douglas Morris, I just gave you one.”
    “Bah!”
    “What?”
    “Your incentive reeks of socialism. Freaking creeping socialism.”
    Cutshaw had glanced at Fairbanks’ letter, and now thrust it back at him with annoyance. “Do it over! ‘D’ in spelling!”
    Fairbanks’ hand flew to his sword. The astronaut lifted an eyebrow. “‘F’ in deportment! You’d draw your sword on Mighty Manfred?”
    “I am merely holding the hilt.”
    “I interpret it as a threat.”
    “Can’t a man hold his hilt?”
    “That is a quibble.”
    “For heaven’s sake, who’s quibbling? I am merely holding my hilt! ”
    A breathless Spoor had burst into the dormitory and now irrupted between them. “Mighty Manfred, I saw it again!”
    “Saw what again?”
    “The Lady in Black! The Phantom of the Nut House! How the hell do I know! I swear, it looked like a ghost! It had three giant heads! ”
    An exasperated exhale fluttered out of the astronaut. “Never con a con man, Spoor; never fox a fox.”
    “But I saw it! I really saw it!”
    “Then you’re crazy, really crazy! ”
    It was conceded among the inmates that Lieutenant Leslie Spoor entertained magnificent obsessions. For instance, once he had reported that while strolling through the grounds on a cloudless, moonlit night he’d heard “hissing from above” and, looking up, detected Groper “crouched in the branches of a cypress, deep in whispered conversation with a black-and-white owl.” Nothing had shaken him from this story. When the astronaut gently admonished him that the estate was visibly barren of any variety of cypress tree, Spoor had eyed him pityingly and very softly rebutted that “anyone with money can pull out a tree.” He had further advised that “certain parties then could easily fill in the hole.” And “Groper,” he’d added triumphantly, “is still here! Notice?”
    From that day forward, no one noticed Spoor; or, especially, his persistent sightings of a certain “Lady in