R. C. Matheson is an acclaimed author as well as a screenwriter and producer for television and film. He has worked with Steven Spielberg, Bryan Singer, Roger Corman, and many other directors. He is also the president of Matheson Entertainment, a production company he formed with his father, Richard Matheson. Currently, Matheson is writing and producing several films, and adapting and executive producing a four-hour miniseries based on H. G. Wells’s
Matheson has investigated several paranormal cases with a parapsychology lab at University of California, Los Angeles, including the infamous house upon which the film
Matheson’s new novella,
SHE STARED.
TRYING TO be sure. Trying to hide it.
He was somehow perfect, somehow virulent; handsome in a way that slit her restraint open. Drew her in. He was about thirty. By himself in the bar. The town, asleep ten stories below, was flat and black. Streetlights stared up, inspecting the hotel bar with orange eyes, and occasionally a sleepy police car would pass, roving pointlessly.
She stared more, wiping long nails with a napkin.
She was becoming sure.
The
Maybe even more than the ones before.
She ordered another kamikaze and walked to the pay phone, passing him. He stared out the window, chewing on a match, and she noticed the way his index finger traced the edge of his beer as if touching a woman’s body.
Every location, she found it.
When the company was done filming and she’d finished going over the next day’s setups with whichever director she was currently working under, she’d grab the location van back to the hotel the studio had booked the production team into, pick up mail and messages at the front desk, and go to her room. Always exhausted, always hating being an assistant director. Hating not being the one to set the vision. Run the set.
Be in control.
Then she’d strip; shower. Let the water scratch fingernails down her body as she closed tired eyes. Try to let the sensations take over. Try to feel something. But she never did.
She couldn’t.
The sensual voyage her girlfriends felt when they were alone and naked, touching their bodies, allowing their skin to respond, no longer interested her. Her body searched for greater responses. Searched for the one who could hold her the right way, touch her with the exact touch. Make her respond; transcend. Stare into her eyes when she came.
Stare with that look.
She stood at the phone and called collect. Her husband was asleep and when he answered told her he loved her. She said it back but kept watching the man. He was pressing his lips against the matchstick, gently sucking it in and out as she stared in unprotected fascination.
Her husband offered to wake the kids so they could tell her good-night.
“They miss Mommy,” he told her, in a sweet voice she hated.
