The Dark Half

  "All the phones in town are this way," Thad said humbly. He was developing a nasty case of acid indigestion. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have made him grouchy and hard to live with. Today, however, he only felt tired and vulnerable and terribly sad.

  His thoughts kept turning to Rick's father, who lived in Tucson, and Miriam's parents, who lived in San Luis Obispo. What was old Mr. Cowley thinking about right now? What were the Penningtons thinking? How, exactly, would these people, often mentioned in conversation but never actually met, be managing? How did one cope, not just with the death of one's child, but with the unexpected death of one's adult child? How did one cope with the simple, irrational fact of murder?

  Thad realized he was thinking of the survivors instead of the victims for one simple, gloomy reason : he felt responsible for everything. Why not? If he was not to blame for George Stark, who was? Bobcat Goldthwaite? Alexander Haig? The fact that the outdated rotary-dial system still in use here made his phones unexpectedly difficult to tap was just something else to feel guilty about.

  "I think that's everything, Mr. Beaumont," one of the FBI men said. He had been reviewing his notes, apparently as oblivious of Wes and Dave as the two wiremen were of him. Now the agent, whose name was Malone, flipped his notebook closed. It was leather-bound, with his initials discreetly stamped in silver on the lower left-hand corner of the cover. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit, and his hair was parted ruler-straight on the left. "Have you got anything else, Bill?"

  Bill, a. k. a. Agent Prebble, flipped his own notebook--also leather-bound, but sans initials--closed and shook his head. "Nope. I think that about does it." Agent Prebble was dressed in a conservative brown suit. His hair was also parted ruler-straight on the left. "We may have a few more questions later on in the investigation, but we've got what we need for the time being. We'd like to thank you both for your cooperation." He gave them a big smile, disclosing teeth which were either capped or so perfect they were eerie, and Thad mused: If we were five, I believe he'd give each of us a TODAY WAS A HAPPY-FACE DAY! certificate to take home and show Mommy.

  "Not at all," Liz said in a slow, distracted voice. She was gently massaging her left temple with the tips of her fingers, as if she were experiencing the onset of a really bad headache.

  Probably, Thad thought, she is.

  He glanced at the clock on the mantel and saw it was just past two-thirty. Was this the longest afternoon of his life? He didn't like to rush to such judgments, but he suspected it was.

  Liz stood. "I think I'm going to put my feet up for awhile, if that's okay. I don't feel very chipper. "

  "That's a good--" Idea was of course how he meant to finish, but before he could, the telephone rang.

  All of them looked at it, and Thad felt a pulse begin to triphammer in his neck. A fresh bubble of acid, hot and burning, rose slowly in his chest and then seemed to spread out in the back of his throat.

  "Good deal," Wes said, pleased. "We won't have to send someone out to make a test call. "

  Thad suddenly felt as if he were encased in an envelope of chilly air. It moved with him as he walked toward the telephone, which was now sharing its table with a gadget that looked like a Lucite brick with lights embedded in its side. One of the lights was pulsing in sync with the ringing of the telephone.

  Where are the birds? I should be hearing the birds. But there were none; the only sound was the Merlin phone's demanding warble.

  Wes was kneeling by the fireplace and putting tools back into a black case which, with its oversized chrome latches, resembled a workman's dinner-bucket. Dave was leaning in the doorway between the living room and the dining room. He had asked Liz if he could have a banana from the bowl on the table, and was now peeling it thoughtfully, pausing every now and then to examine his work with the critical eye of an artist in the throes of creation.

  "Get the circuit-tester, why don'tcha?" he said to Wes. "If we need some line clarification, we can do it while we're right here. Might save a trip back. "

  "Good idea," Wes said, and plucked something with a pistol grip out of the oversized dinner-bucket.

  Both men looked mildly expectant and no more. Agents Malone and Prebble were standing, replacing notebooks, shaking out the knife-edge creases in the legs of their pants, and generally confirming Thad's original opinion: these men seemed more like H&R Block tax consultants than gun-toting G-men. Malone and Prebble seemed totally unaware the phone was ringing at all.

  But Liz knew. She had stopped rubbing her temple and was looking at Thad with the wide, haunted eyes of an animal which has been brought to bay. Prebble was thanking her for the coffee and Danish she had supplied, and seemed as unaware of her failure to answer him as he was of the ringing telephone.

  What is the matter with you people? Thad suddenly felt like screaming. What in the hell did you set up all this equipment for in the first place?

  Unfair, of course. For the man they were after to be the first person to phone the Beaumonts after the tap-and-trace equipment had been set up, a bare five minutes after installation was complete, in fact, was just too fortuitous . . . or so they would have said if anyone had bothered to ask them. Things don't happen that way in the wonderful world of law-enforcement as it exists in the latter years of the twentieth century, they would have said. It's another writer calling you up for a nice fresh plot idea, Thad, or maybe someone wants to know if your wife could spare a cup of sugar. But the guy who thinks he's your alter ego? No way, Jose. Too soon, too lucky.

  Except it was Stark. Thad could smell him. And, looking at his wife, he knew that Liz could, too.

  Now Wes was looking at him, no doubt wondering why Thad didn't answer his freshly rigged phone.

  Don't worry, Thad thought. Don't worry, he'll wait. He knows we're home, you see.

  "Well, we'll just get out of your hair, Mrs. Beau--" Prebble began, and Liz said in a calm but terribly pained voice, "I think you'd better wait, please. "

  Thad picked up the telephone and shouted: "What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the fuck do you WANT?"

  Wes jumped. Dave froze just as he was preparing to take the first bite from his banana. The heads of the federal agents snapped around. Thad found himself wishing with miserable intensity that Alan Pangborn were here instead of talking to Dr. Hume up in Orono. Alan didn't believe in Stark, either, at least not yet, but at least he was human. Thad supposed these others might be, but he had serious doubts as to whether or not they knew he and Liz were.

  "It's him, it's him!" Liz was saying to Prebble.

  "Oh Jesus," Prebble said. He and the other fearless minion of the law exchanged an utterly non-plussed glance: What the fuck do we do now?

  Thad heard and saw these things, but was separate from them. Separate even from Liz. There were only Stark and him now. Together again for the first time, as the old vaudeville announcers used to say.

  "Cool down, Thad," George Stark said. He sounded amused. "No need to get your panties all in a bunch." It was the voice he had expected. Exactly. Every nuance, right down to the faint Southern slur that turned "get your" into something that was not "getcho" but wanted to be.

  The two wiremen put their heads together briefly, and then Dave bolted for the panel truck and the auxiliary telephone. He was still holding his banana. Wes ran for the cellar stairs to check the voice-activated tape-recorder.

  The fearless minions of the Effa Bee Eye stood in the middle of the living room and stared. They looked as if they wanted to put their arms about each other for comfort, like babes lost in the woods.

  "What do you want?" Thad repeated in a quieter voice.

  "Why, just to tell you that it is over," Stark said. "I got the last one this noontime--that little girl who used to work at Darwin Press for the boss of the accounting department?"

  Almost, but not quite, the accountin depawtment.

  "She was the one got that Clawson boy's coffee perkin in the first place," Stark said. "The cops'll find he
r; she's got a place on Second Avenue way downtown. Some of her's on the floor; I put the rest on the kitchen table." He laughed. "It's been a busy week, Thad. I been hoppin as fast as a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. I just called to set your mind at rest. "

  "It doesn't feel very rested," Thad said.

  "Well, give it time, old boss; give it time. I think I'll head down south, do me some fishing. This city life tires me out." He laughed, a sound so monstrously jolly it made Thad's flesh crawl.

  He was lying.

  Thad knew this as surely as he knew that Stark had waited until the tap-and-trace equipment was in place to make his call. Could he know something like that? The answer was yes. Stark might be calling from somewhere in New York City, but the two of them were tied together by the same invisible but undeniable bond that connected twins. They were twins, halves of the same whole, and Thad was terrified to find himself drifting out of his body, drifting along the phone line, not all the way to New York, no, but halfway; meeting the monster at the center of this umbilicus, in western Massachusetts, perhaps, the two of them meeting and merging again, as they had somehow met and merged every time he had put the cover on his typewriter and picked up one of those goddamned Berol Black Beauty pencils.

  "You lying fuck!" he cried.

  The FBI agents jumped as if they had been goosed.

  "Hey, Thad, that's not very nice!" Stark said. He sounded injured. "Did you think I was gonna hurt you? Hell, no! I was getting revenge for you, boy! I knew I was the one had to do it. I know you got a chicken liver, but I don't hold it against you; it takes all kinds to spin a world as busy as this one. Why in hail would I bother to revenge you if I was gonna fix things so you couldn't enjoy it?"

  Thad's fingers had gone to the small white scar on his forehead and were rubbing there, rubbing hard enough to redden the skin. He found himself trying--trying desperately--to hold on to himself. To hold on to his own basic reality.

  He's lying, and I know why, and he knows I know, and he knows it doesn't matter, because no one will believe me. He knows how odd it all looks to them, and he knows they're listening, he knows what they think . . . but he also knows how they think, and that makes him safe. They believe he's a psycho who only thinks he's George Stark, because that's what they have to think. To think in any other way goes against everything they've learned, every thing they are. All the fingerprints in the world won't change that. He knows that if he implies he's not George Stark, if he implies that he's finally figured that out, they'll relax. They won't remove the police protection right away . . . but he can speed it up.

  "You know whose idea it was to bury you. It was mine. "

  "No, no!" Stark said easily, and it was almost (but not quite) Naw, naw! "You were misled, that's all. When that slimeball Clawson came along, he knocked you for a loop--that's the way it was. Then, when you called up that trained monkey who called himself a literary agent, he gave you some real bad advice. Thad, it was like someone took a big crap on your dining-room table and you called up someone you trusted to ask em what to do about it, and that someone said, 'You haven't got a problem; just put you some pork gravy on it. Shit with pork gravy on it tastes right fine on a cold night. ' You never would have done what you did on your own. I know that, hoss. "

  "That's a goddam lie and you know it!"

  And suddenly he realized just how perfect this was, and how well Stark understood the people he was dealing with. He's going to come right out and say it pretty soon. He's going to come right out and say that he isn't George Stark. And they'll believe him when he does. They'll listen to the tape that's turning down in the basement right now, and they'll believe what it says, Alan and everyone else. Because that's not just what they want to believe, it's what they already believe.

  "I don't know any such thing," Stark said calmly, almost amiably. "I'm not going to bother you anymore, Thad, but let me give you at least one chunk of advice before I go. May do you some good. Don't you get thinkin I'm George Stark. That's the mistake I made. I had to go and kill a whole bunch of people just to get my head squared around again. "

  Thad listened to this, thunderstruck. There were things he should be saying, but he couldn't seem to get past this weird feeling of disconnection from his body and his amazement at the pure and perfect gall of the man.

  He thought of the futile conversation with Alan Pangborn, and wondered again who he was when he made up Stark, who had started off being just another story to him. Where, exactly, was the line of belief? Had he created this monster by losing that line somehow, or was there some other factor, an X-factor which he could not see but only hear in the cries of those phantom birds?

  "I don't know," Stark was saying with an easy laugh, "maybe I actually am as crazy as they said I was when I was in that place. "

  Oh good,that's good, get them checking the insane asylums in the South for a tall, broad-shouldered man with blonde hair. That won't divert all of them, but it will do for a start, won't it?

  Thad clenched the phone tight, his head throbbing with sick fury now.

  "But I'm not a bit sorry I did it, because I did love those books, Thad. When I was . . . there . . . in that loony-bin . . . I think they were the only things kept me sane. And you know something? I feel a lot better now. I know for sure who I am now, and that's something. I believe you could call what I did therapy, but I don't think there's much future in it, do you?"

  "Quit lying, goddammit!" Thad shouted.

  "We could discuss this," Stark said. "We could discuss it all the way to hell and back, but it'd take awhile. I guess they told you to keep me on the line, didn't they?"

  No. They don't need you on the line. And you know that, too.

  "Give my best regards to your lovely wife," Stark said, with a touch of what almost sounded like reverence. "Take care of your babies. And you take it easy your own self, Thad. I'm not going to bother you anymore. It's--,

  "What about the birds?" Thad asked suddenly. "Do you bear the birds, George?"

  There was a sudden silence on the line. Thad seemed to feel a quality of surprise in it . . . as if, for the first time in the conversation, something had not gone according to George Stark's carefully prepared script. He did not know exactly why, but it was as if his nerve-endings possessed some arcane understanding the rest of him did not have. He felt a moment of wild triumph--the sort of triumph an amateur boxer might feel, slipping one past Mike Tyson's guard and momentarily rocking the champ back on his heels.

  "George--do you hear the birds?"

  The only sound in the room was the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. Liz and the FBI agents were staring at him.

  "I don't know what you're talkin about, hoss," Stark said slowly. "Could be you--"

  "No," Thad said, and laughed wildly. His fingers continued to rub the small white scar, shaped vaguely like a question mark, on his forehead. "No, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Well, you listen to me for a minute, George. I hear the birds. I don't know what they mean yet . . . but I will. And when I do . . . "

  But that was where the words stopped. When he did, what would happen? He didn't know.

  The voice on the other end said slowly, with great deliberation and emphasis: "Whatever you are talking about, Thad, it doesn't matter. Because this is over now. "

  There was a dick. Stark was gone. Thad almost felt himself being yanked back along the telephone line from that mythical meeting-place in western Massachusetts, yanked along not at the speed of sound or light but at that of thought, and thumped rudely back into his own body, Stark naked again.

  Jesus.

  He dropped the phone and it hit the cradle askew. He turned around on legs which felt like stilts, not bothering to replace it properly.

  Dave rushed into the room from one direction, Wes from another.

  "It worked perfect!" Wes screamed. The FBI agents jumped once more. Malone made an "Eeek!" noise very much like the one attributed to women in comic strips who have just spotted
mice. Thad tried to imagine what these two would be like in a confrontation with a gang of terrorists or shotgun-toting bank-robbers and couldn't do it. Maybe I'm just too tired, he thought.

  The two wiremen did a clumsy little dance, slapping each other on the back, and then raced out to the equipment van together.

  "It was him," Thad said to Liz. "He said he wasn't, but it was him. Him. "

  She came to him then and hugged him tightly and he needed that--he hadn't known how badly until she did it.

  "I know," she whispered in his ear, and he put his face into her hair and closed his eyes.

  2

  The shouting had wakened the twins; they were both crying lustily upstairs. Liz went to get them. Thad started to follow her, then returned to set the telephone properly into its cradle. It rang at once. Alan Pangborn was on the other end. He had stopped in at the Orono State Police Barracks to have a cup of coffee before his appointment with Dr. Hume, and had been there when Dave the wireman radioed in with news of the call and the preliminary trace results. Alan sounded very excited.

  "We don't have a complete trace yet, but we know it was New York City, area code 212," he said. "Five minutes and we'll have the location nailed down. "

  "It was him," Thad repeated. "It was Stark. He said he wasn't, but that's who it was. Someone has to check on the girl he mentioned. The name is probably Darla Gates. "

  "The slut from Vassar with the bad nasal habits?"

  "Right," Thad said. Although he doubted if Darla Gates would be worrying about her nose much anymore, one way or the other. He felt intensely weary.

  "I'll pass the name on to the N. Y. P. D. How you doing, Thad?"

  "I'm all right. "

  "Liz?"

  "Never mind the bedside manner just now, okay? Did you hear what I said? It was him. No matter what he said, it was him. "

  "Well . . . why don't we just wait and see what comes of the trace?"

  There was something in his voice Thad hadn't heard there before. Not the sort of cautious incredulity he'd evinced when he first realized the Beaumonts were talking about George Stark as a real guy, but actual embarrassment. It was a realization Thad would happily have spared himself, but it was simply too clear in the Sheriff's voice. Embarrassment, and of a very special sort--the kind you felt for someone too distraught or stupid or maybe just too self-insensitive to feel it for himself. Thad felt a twinkle of sour amusement at the idea.