Nugent's thin lips were tightly compressed. "The management's not happy with you." Joey's laugh was brittle. Nugent walked slowly back to his desk. "I've had more and more complaints about your work." Joey was close behind him. "I take the assignments you hand me. And there's no one on the staff gets a sharper shot." Nugent waved this aside. "It's your manner." He pushed a glossy eight by ten print toward the photographer. "You play up the grisly, the macabre." Joey stared down at the picture. A slow smile narrowed his eyes. "I photograph what I see. I figure it's what your readers want to see, too." Nugent sat heavily. "We had a hundred phone calls about that picture. Brutal ... sadistic ... morbid." The print fell face up before Nugent. He turned it over. Joey laughed. "Sure. It's all those things. And they loved it." He leaned very close to Nugent. "You didn't have to print it." "It was the only shot I had. It was print it or be scooped on one of the big stories of the year." Joey's outward nonchalance failed to mask entirely his inner tension. "When I take a picture, they remember it." "There's a difference between memorable photography and cheap sensationalism." The editor picked up the memo with Ewing's address. "All things considered," he said, "I think you'd better get this interview for me." Joey stared at Nugent for an insolent second. Then, he took the memo. He checked the address, jammed the paper into his pocket, and moved quickly to the door. Hand on the knob, he paused. "Oh, Nugent," he called, "if you can't see the story I bring back, just remember: it's in another dimension." He slammed the door on Nugent's anger. * * * * * Early evening traffic was heavy as he pulled into the quiet, old-fashioned street where Ewing lived. Sober brownstone houses, their front steps rising steeply to stain-glass paneled doors; heavily curtained bay windows; weather-stained and rotting gingerbread; an atmosphere of reluctant decay and genteel senescence. Ewing's house was like a dozen others in the same block. Joey was not a man given to hunches, and yet, as he climbed out of his car and stood staring up at the silent house, he could not repress a shiver of apprehension. He looked up the street. Nothing marred the quiet. A middle-aged woman hurried home with her armload of groceries. A man paraded an ancient dog on a leash. Slowly, Joey climbed the steps. His apprehension was no more than the resentment he felt for the assignment. He yanked the old-fashioned bell and listened for its echoes dying deep in the house. He fidgeted impatiently. Perhaps old Ewing wasn't at home. Or, maybe he was so eccentric he no longer answered the bell. Joey jerked it again. On the traffic-noisy boulevard a block away, he heard a raw squealing of brakes. Joey sighed and turned away. He'd wasted an hour. He started down the steps. And the door opened.