Don't Look Now: Daphne de Maurier

This is a collection of five short stories. It was interesting that she chose to tell the majority of the five stories through the eyes of a man. In the first story Don't look now A man tells the story of how he and his wife are going on vacation to get away and heal from the unexpected death of their young daughter. The wife meets two old sisters, one who is blind and claims she sees the deceased daughter and that the little girl is happy. This brightens the wife's mood until they get a call that their son is sick and they need to go back. She makes a comment about how it is for the best since the sister's predicted something would happen to the husband if he was still there the next night. The couple had to arrange separate ways home since there is only 1 airplane seat and the wife takes it. On the way out of town the man sees his wife with the sisters on a boat. He fears she missed the flight and goes back to the hotel to wait for her. She never comes. Once the police are involved and the sisters are found, they claim they never saw her. He learns of a murderer loose in the city from the police. He gets a call from his wife back home saying that their son is doing fine. He is confused on who he saw. He apologizes to the sisters who tell him he must have seen a glimpse of the future. He heads back to the hotel confused. He then runs into who he thinks is a child that he and his wife had seen the night before. It ends up being a little woman who kills him. His wife then returns on the boat with the sisters. In The Breakthrough A scientist is transferred to a place out in the middle of nowhere where rumor has it the scientists there are nuts and nothing gets done. Once there he is shocked by the experiments they are doing. They have a machine that can hypnotize people and another that was created to trap a person's energy after death. A person on the staff ends up dying of leukemia and they trap what they think is just his energy, but ends up being his soul. Through a young child he keeps shouting- "let me go let me go". The scientists do finally let his soul escape the machine, but it changes everyone. Not After Midnight was a creepy story. A man does on vacation to paint and ends up in a hotel room that someone had just been murdered in- only they didn't know it was murder. A loud American man is searching through old shipwreck sites and archeological digs and selling the wares he finds illegally. The man finds this out, but doesn't say anything even after the American's wife visits his room late at night pounding on the door. She leaves a little jug as a bribe and then they vanish the next day. Curiosity gets the best of him and he goes to a site they were at to find the body of the American and realizes the wife has killed him. He throws the bad luck jar into the sea by the dead man's body and leaves. A Border-Line Case is a story about a woman that loses her father suddenly. She feels guilty since his last breath was shouting her name. He was looking at photo albums, which bored her, right before he took a nap and woke up screaming her name before he died. The girl becomes determined to find the friend from his past that he was talking about while looking at photos, hoping to relieve herself of some guilt. She finds the friend who is an old duck and falls in love with him, having never revealed who she was. He ends up dumping her off at a hotel and she heads back home, resuming her life. A short while later he sends a photo of himself as a young man and realizes it looks like her. He is her father. The father that raised her must had realized that right before he died after he had looked through the photographs of his youth. The Way of the Cross is about a church group in Jerusalem and passes from each person and their thoughts about the others- very comical and sad. The man that has an affair gets stabbed in the side at the market and the woman who lost her teeth nearly drowned when she tried stealing holy water.