If federal investigators are correct in their belief that Mr. Almihdhar and Mr. Alhazmi were among the hijackers, Dr. Shaikh stands as one of the best examples of how astonishingly careful and disciplined the hijackers were, managing to conceal from him any hint of the hatred and calculation that seems to have gone into the horrors of Sept. 11.
"It almost goes into the horror category, it's so gruesome," she says.
The older priests tended to be rock-jawed and thick-armed; some were World War II veterans who had gone into the priesthood after the horror of the war.
"I think when people are past 27," she says, "they go into a world of horror, so that might be what I write about next.
"We went into the chamber of horrors and there was a wax dummy of me in a cage.
"You think you're going to open construction floor plates," Mr. Schick said, "and instead you're going into a house of horrors".
I don't want to explain the human gorilla and all the chains of horror that went into that caricature because I'm afraid of the follow-up questions.
Cash then went into the realms of gothic horror when she described the unassuming Labor finance minister Penny Wong as "sitting reaping the spoils of the victory, drinking from the chalice of blood".
But Mr. Cohen, then the head of Cohen Brothers Realty, acknowledged that the interiors needed embellishing: "When you went into it, it was a horror," he told The New York Times in 1990.
The idea is that their innocent-seeming, candy-colored daydreams careen toward something nightmarish, and by the end Mr. Jackson's horror effects go into overdrive, magnifying every fatal step the characters take on the road to their grisly destiny.
