The Dark Half

  "Hello, Rawlie," Thad said, picking through his keys.

  Rawlie blinked at him, shifted his gaze to scan the two men behind Thad, dismissed them, and returned his gaze to Thad once more.

  "Hello, Thaddeus," he said. "I didn't think you were teaching any summer courses this year. "

  "I'm not. "

  "Then what can have possessed you to come here, of all places, on the tint bona fide dog day of summer?"

  "Just picking up some Honors files," Thad said. "I'm not going to be here any longer than I have to, believe me. "

  "What did you do to your hand? It's black and blue all the way to the wrist. "

  "Well," Thad said, looking embarrassed. The story made him sound like a drunk or an idiot, or both . . . but it still went down a lot easier than the truth would have done. Thad had been dourly amused to find that the police accepted it as easily as Rawlie did now--there had not been a single question about how or why he had managed to slam his own hand in the door of his bedroom closet.

  He had instinctively known exactly the right story to tell--even in his agony he had known that. He was expected to do clumsy things--it was part of his character. In a way, it was like telling the interviewer from People (God rest his soul) that George Stark had been created in Ludlow instead of Castle Rock, and that the reason Stark wrote in longhand was because he had never learned to type.

  He hadn't even tried to lie to Liz . . . but he had insisted she keep quiet about what had really happened, and she had agreed to do so. Her only concern had been extracting a promise from him that he would not try to contact Stark again. He had given the promise willingly enough, although he knew it was one he might not be able to keep. He suspected that, on some deep level of her mind, Liz knew that, too.

  Rawlie was now looking at him with real interest. "In a closet door," he said. "Marvelous. Were you perhaps playing hide and seek? Or was it some strange sexual rite?"

  Thad grinned. "I gave up strange sexual rites around 1981," he said. "Doctor's advice. Actually, I just wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. The whole thing is sort of embarrassing. "

  "I imagine so," Rawlie said . . . and then winked. It was a very subtle wink, a bate flutter of one puffed and wrinkled old eyelid . . . but it was very definitely there. Had he thought he had fooled Rawlie? Pigs might fly.

  Suddenly a new thought occurred to Thad. "Rawlie, do you still teach that Folk Myth seminar?"

  "Every fall," Rawlie agreed. "Don't you read your own Department's catalogue, Thaddeus? Dowsing, Witches, holistic remedies, Hex Signs of the Rich and Famous. It's as popular now as ever. Why do you ask?"

  There was an all-purpose answer to that question, Thad had discovered; one of the best things about being a writer was that you always had an answer to Why do you ask? "Well, I have a story idea," he said. "It's still in the exploration stage, but it's got possibilities, I think. "

  "What did you want to know?"

  "Do sparrows have any significance in American superstition or folk myth that you know of?"

  Rawlie's furrowing brow began to resemble the topography of some alien planet which was clearly inimical to human life. He gnawed on the stem of his pipe. "Nothing occurs right off the top of my head, Thaddeus, although

  . . . I wonder if that's really why you're interested. "

  Pigs might fly, Thad thought again: "Well . . . maybe not, Rawlie. Maybe not. Maybe I just said that because my interest is nothing I could explain in a hurry." His eyes flicked briefly to his watchdogs, then returned to Rawlie's face. "I'm a bit pressed for time right now. "

  Rawlie's tips quivered in the faintest ghost of a smile. "I understand, I think. Sparrows . . . such common birds. Too common to have any deep superstitious connotations, I'd think. Yet . . . now that I think about it . . . there is something. Except I associate it with whippoorwills. Let me check. Will you be here awhile?"

  "Not more than half an hour, I'm afraid. "

  "Well, I might find something right away in Barringer's book. Folklore of America. It's really not much more than a cookbook of superstitions, but it comes in handy. And I could always call you. "

  "Yes. You could always do that. "

  "Lovely party you and Liz threw for Tom Carroll," Rawlie said. "Of course, you and Liz always throw the best parties. Your wife is much too charming to be a wife, Thaddeus. She should be your mistress. "

  "Thanks. I guess. "

  "Gonzo Tom," Rawlie continued fondly. "It's hard to believe Gonzo Tom Carroll has sailed into the Gray Havens of retirement. I've been listening to him cut those trumpet-blast farts of his in the next office for better than twenty years. I suppose the next fellow will be quieter. Or at least more discreet. "

  Thad laughed.

  "Wilhelmina also enjoyed herself," Rawlie said. His eyelids drooped roguishly. He knew perfectly well how Thad and Liz felt about Billie.

  "That's fine," Thad said. He found Billie Burks and the concept of enjoyment mutually exclusive . . . but since she and Rawlie had formed part of a badly needed alibi, he supposed he should be glad she had come. "And if anything occurs to you about that other thing . . . "

  "Sparrows and their place in the Invisible World. Yes indeed." Rawlie nodded to the two policemen behind Thad. "Good afternoon, gentlemen." He skirted them and continued on down to his office with a little more purpose. Not much, but a little.

  Thad looked after him, bemused.

  "What was that?" Garrison-or-Harriman asked.

  "DeLesseps," Thad murmured. "Chief grammarian and amateur folklorist. "

  "Looks like the kind of guy who might need a map to find his way home," the other cop said.

  Thad moved to the door of his office and unlocked it. "He's more alert than he looks," he said, and opened the door.

  He wasn't aware that Garrison-or-Harriman was beside him, one hand inside his specially tailored Tall Fella sport-coat, until he had flicked on the overhead lights. Thad felt a moment of belated fear, but the office was empty, of course--empty and so neat, after the soft and steady fallout of an entire year's clutter, that it looked dead.

  For no reason that he could place, he felt a sudden and nearly sickening wave of homesickness and emptiness and loss--a mix of feelings like a deep, unexpected grief. It was like the dream. It was as if he had come here to say goodbye.

  Stop being so goddam foolish, he told himself, and another part of his mind replied quietly: Over the deadline, Thad. You're over the deadline, and I think you might have made a very bad mistake in not at least trying to do what the man wants you to do. Short-term relief is better than no relief at all.

  "If you want coffee, you can get a cup in the common room," he said. "The pot will be full, if I know Rawlie. "

  "Where's that?" Garrison-or-Harriman's partner asked.

  "Other side of the hall, two doors up," Thad said, unlocking the files. He turned and gave them a grin that felt crooked on his face. "I think you'll hear me if I scream. "

  "Just make sure you do yell, if something happens," Garrison-or-Harriman said.

  "I will. "

  "I could send Manchester here for the coffee," Garrison-or-Harriman said, "but I get the feeling that you're asking for a little privacy. "

  "Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. "

  "That's fine, Mr. Beaumont," he said. He looked at Thad seriously, and Thad suddenly remembered that his name was Harrison. Just like the ex-Beatle. Stupid to have forgotten it. "You just want to remember those people in New York died from an overdose of privacy. "

  Oh? I thought Phyllis Myers and Rick Cowley died in the company of the police. He thought of saying this out loud and then didn't. These men were, after all, only trying to do their duty.

  "Lighten up, Trooper Harrison," he said. "The building's so quiet today a barefoot man would make echoes. "

  "Okay. We'll be across the hall in the what-do-you-call-it. "

  "Common room. "

  "Right. "

  They left, and Thad opened the file marke
d HNRS APPS. In his mind's eye he kept seeing Rawlie DeLesseps dropping that quick, unobtrusive wink. And listening to that voice telling him he was over the deadline, that he had crossed to the dark side. The side where the monsters were.

  4

  The phone sat there and didn't ring.

  Come on, he thought at it, stacking the Honors folders on the desk beside his University-supplied IBM Selectric. Come on, come on, here I am, standing right next to a phone with no bug on it, so come on, George, give me a call, give me a ring, give me the scoop.

  But the phone only sat there and didn't ring.

  He realized he was looking into a file cabinet that wasn't just pruned but entirely empty. In his preoccupation he had pulled all the folders, not just the ones belonging to Honors students interested in taking creative writing. Even the Xeroxes of those who wanted to take Transformational Grammar, which was the Gospel according to Noam Chomsky, translated by that Dean of the Dead Pipe, Rawlie DeLesseps.

  Thad went to the door and looked out. Harrison and Manchester were standing in the door of the Department common room, drinking coffee. In their ham-sized fists, the mugs looked the size of demitasse cups. Thad raised his hand. Harrison raised his in return and asked him if he would be much longer.

  "Five minutes," Thad said, and both cops nodded.

  He went back to his desk, separated the creative writing files from the others, and began to replace the latter in the file drawer, doing it as slowly as possible, giving the phone time to ring. But the phone just went on sitting there. He heard one ring someplace far down the corridor, the sound muffled by a closed door, somehow ghostly in the building's unaccustomed summer silence. Maybe George got the wrong number, he thought, and uttered a little laugh. The fact was, George wasn't going to call. The fact was, he, Thad, had been wrong. Apparently George had some other trick up his sleeve. Why should he be surprised? Tricks were George Stark's specialite de la maison. Still, he had been so sure, so goddamned sure--

  "Thaddeus?"

  He jumped, almost spilling the contents of the last half a dozen files onto the floor. When he was sure they weren't going to slip out of his grasp, he turned around. Rawlie DeLesseps was standing just outside the door. His large pipe poked in like a horizontal periscope.

  "Sorry," Thad said. "Yon threw a jump into me, Rawlie. My mind was ten thousand miles away. "

  "Someone calling for you on my phone," Rawlie said amiably. "Must have gotten the number wrong. Lucky I was in. "

  Thad felt his heart begin to beat slow and hard--it was as if there were a snare-drum inside his chest, and someone had begun to whack it with a great deal of measured energy.

  "Yes," Thad said. "That was very lucky. "

  Rawlie gave him an appraising glance. The blue eyes under his puffy, slightly reddened lids were so alive and inquisitive they were almost rude, and certainly at odds with his cheerful, bumbling, absent-minded-professor manner. "Is everything quite all right, Thaddeus?"

  No, Rawlie. These days there's a mad killer out there who's partly me, a fellow who can apparently take over my body and make me do fun things like sticking pencils into myself, and I consider each day which concludes with me still sane a victory. Reality is out of joint, good buddy.

  "All right? Why wouldn't everything be all right?"

  "I seem to detect the faint but unmistakably ferrous odor of irony, Thad. "

  "You're mistaken. "

  "Am I? Then why do you look like a deer caught in a pair of headlights?"

  "Rawlie--".

  "And the man I just spoke to sounds like the sort of salesman you buy something from on the phone just to make sure he'll never visit your home in person. "

  "It's nothing, Rawlie. "

  "Very well." Rawlie didn't look convinced.

  Thad left his office and headed down the hall toward Rawlie's.

  "Where are you off to?" Harrison called after him.

  "Rawlie has a call for me in his office," he explained. "The phone numbers up here are all sequential. The guy must have gotten the numbers bolloxed. "

  "And just happened to get the only other faculty member here today?" Harrison asked skeptically.

  Thad shrugged and kept on walking.

  Rawlie DeLesseps' office was cluttered, pleasant, and still inhabited by the smell of his pipe--two years' abstinence apparently did not make up for some thirty years of indulgence. It was dominated by a dart-board with a photograph of Ronald Reagan mounted on it. An encyclopedia-sized volume, Franklin Barringer's Folklore of America, lay open on Rawlie's desk. The telephone was off the hook, lying on a stack of blank blue-books. Looking at the handset, Thad felt the old dread fall over him in its familiar stifling folds. It was like being bundled in a blanket that badly needs to be washed. He turned his head, sure he would see all three of them--Rawlie, Harrison, and Manchester--lined up in the doorway like sparrows on a telephone wire. But the office doorway was empty, and from somewhere down the hall, he could hear the soft rasp of Rawlie s voice. He had buttonholed Thad's guard-dogs. Thad doubted that he had done it by accident.

  He picked up the telephone and said, "Hello, George. "

  "You've had your week," the voice on the other end said. It was Stark's voice, but Thad wondered if the voice-prints would match so exactly now. Stark's voice wasn't the same. It had grown hoarse and rough, like the voice of a man who had spent too much time hollering at some sporting event. "You had your week and you haven't done doodly-squat. "

  "Right you are," Thad said. He felt very cold. He had to expend a conscious effort to keep from shivering. That cold seemed to be coming out of the telephone itself, oozing out of the holes in the earpiece like icicles. But he was also very angry. "I'm not going to do it, George. A week, a month, ten years, it's all the same to me. Why not accept it? You're dead, and dead you will stay. "

  "You're wrong, old boss. If you want to be dead wrong, y'all just keep goin. "

  "Do you know what you sound like, George?" Thad asked. "You sound like you're falling apart. That's why you want me to start writing again, isn't it? Losing cohesion, that's what you wrote. You're biodegrading, right? It won't be long before you just crumble to bits, like the wonderful one-hoss shay. "

  "None of that matters to you, Thad," the hoarse voice rephed. It went from a scabrous drone to a harsh sound like gravel falling out of the back of a dump-truck to a squeaking whisper--as if the vocal cords had given up functioning altogether for the space of a phrase or two--and then back to the drone again. "None of what's going on with me is your concern. That's nothing but a distraction to you, buddy. You just want to get going by nightfall, or you're going to be one sorry son of a bitch. And you won't be the only one. "

  "I don't--"

  Click! Stark was gone. Thad looked at the telephone handset thoughtfully for a moment, then replaced it in the cradle. When he turned around, Harrison and Manchester were standing there.

  5

  "Who was it?" Manchester asked:

  "A student," Thad said. At this point he wasn't even sure why he was lying. The only thing he was really sure of was that he had a terrible feeling in his guts. "Just a student. As I thought. "

  "How did he know you'd be in?" Harrison asked. "And how come he called on this gentleman's phone?"

  "I give up," Thad said humbly. "I'm a Russian deep-cover agent. It was really my contact. I'll go quietly. "

  Harrison wasn't angry--or, at least, he did not appear to be angry. The look of slightly tired reproach he sent Thad's way was a good deal more effective than anger. "Mr. Beaumont, we're trying to give you and your wife a help. I know that having a couple of fellows trail after you wherever you go can get to be a pain in the ass after awhile, but we really are trying to give you a help. "

  Thad felt ashamed of himself . . . but not ashamed enough to tell the truth. That bad feeling was still there, the feeling that things were going to go wrong, that maybe they already had gone wrong. And something else, as well. A light, fluttery feeling along his ski
n. A wormy feeling inside his skin. Pressure at his temples. It wasn't the sparrows; at least, he didn't think it was. All the same, some mental barometer he hadn't even been aware of was falling. Nor was this the first time he'd felt it. There had been a sensation similar to this, although not as strong, when he was on the way to Dave's Market eight days ago. He had felt it in his own office while he had been getting the files. A low, jittery feeling.

  It's Stark. He's with you somehow, in you. He's watching. If you say the wrong thing, he'll know. And then somebody will suffer.

  "I apologize," he said. He was aware that Rawlie DeLesseps was now standing behind the two policemen, watching Thad with quiet, curious eyes. He would have to start lying now, and the lies came so naturally and smoothly to mind that, for all he knew, they might have been planted there by George Stark himself. He wasn't entirely sure Rawlie would go along, but it was a little late to worry about that. "I'm on edge, that's all. "

  "Understandable," Harrison said. "I just want you to realize we're not the enemy, Mr. Beaumont. "

  Thad said, "The kid who phoned knew I was here because he was coming out of the bookstore when I drove by. He wanted to know if I was teaching a summer writing course. The faculty telephone directory is divided into departments, the members of each department listed in alphabetical order. The print is very fine, as anyone who has ever tried to use it will testify. "

  "It's a very naughty book that way," Rawlie agreed around his pipe. The two policemen turned to look at him for a moment, startled. Rawlie favored them with a solemn, rather owlish nod.

  "Rawlie follows me in the directory listings," Thad said. "We don't happen to have any faculty member whose last name begins with C this year." He glanced at Rawlie for a moment, but Rawlie had taken his pipe from his mouth and appeared to be inspecting its fire-blackened bowl with dose attention. "As a result," Thad finished, "I'm always getting his calls and he's always getting mine. I told this kid he was out of luck; I'm off Until fall. "

  Well, that was that. He had a feeling he might have overexplained the situation a little, but the real question was when Harrison and Manchester had gotten to the doorway of Rawlie's office and how much they had overheard. One did not ordinarily tell students applying for writing courses that they were biodegrading, and that they would soon just crumble to bits.