The Dark Half

  "But he wants me to tell you that you can't do it here. The police will come here soon. He . . . Thad, he says he killed the two that were watching the house. "

  Thad closed his eyes.

  "I don't know how he did it, but he says he did . . . and I . . . I believe him." Now she was crying. Trying not to, knowing it would upset Thad and knowing if he was upset he might do something dangerous. He clutched the phone, ground it against his ear, and tried to look casual.

  Stark, murmuring in the background again. And Thad caught one of the words. Collaboration. Incredible. Fucking incredible.

  "He's going to take us away," she said. "He says you'll know where we're going. Remember Aunt Martha? He says you should lose the men that are with you. He says he knows you can do it, because he could. He wants you to join us by dark tonight. He says--" She uttered a frightened sob. Another one got started, but she managed to swallow it back. "He says you're going to collaborate with him, that with you and him both working on it, it will be the best book ever. He--"

  Murmur, murmur, murmur.

  Oh Thad wanted to book his fingers into George Stark's evil neck and choke until his fingers popped through the skin and into the son of a bitch's throat.

  "He says Alexis Machine's back from the dead and bigger than ever." Then, shrilly : "Please do what he says, Thad! He's got guns! And be's got a blowtorch ! A little blowtorch! He says if you try anything funny--"

  "Liz--"

  "Please, Thad, do what he says!"

  Her words faded off as Stark took the telephone away from her.

  "Tell me something, Thad," Stark said, and now there was no teasing in his voice. It was dead serious. "Tell me something, and you want to make it believable and sincere, buddy-roo, or they'll pay for it. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes. "

  "You sure? Because she was telling the truth about the blowtorch.

  "Yes! Yes, goddammit!"

  "What did she mean when she told you to remember Aunt Martha? Who the fuck is that? Was it some kind of code, Thad? Was she trying to put one over on me?"

  Thad suddenly saw the lives of his wife and children hanging by a single thin thread. This was not metaphor; this was something he could see The thread was ice-blue, gossamer, barely visible in the middle of all the eternity there might be. Everything now came down to just two things--what he said, and what George Stark believed.

  "Is the recording equipment off the phones?"

  "Of course it is!" Stark said. "What do you take me for, Thad?"

  "Did Liz know that when you put her on?"

  There was a pause, and then Stark said: "All she had to do was look. The wires are layin right on the goddam floor. "

  "But did she? Did she look?"

  "Stop beatin around the bush, Thad. "

  "She was trying to tell me where you're going without saying the words," Thad told him. He was striving for a patient, lecturing tone--patient, but a little patronizing. He couldn't tell if he was getting it or not, but he supposed George would let him know one way or the other, and quite soon. "She meant the summer house. The place in Castle Rock. Martha Tellford is Liz's aunt. We don't like her. Whenever she'd call and say she was coming to visit, we'd fantasize about just running away to Castle Rock and hiding at the summer house until she died. Now I've said it, and if they've got wireless recording equipment on our phone, George, it's on your own head. "

  He waited, sweating, to see if Stark would buy this . . . or if the thin thread which was the only thing between his loved ones and forever would snap.

  "They don't," Stark said at last, and his voice sounded relaxed again. Thad fought the need to lean against the side of the telephone kiosk and close his eyes in relief. If I ever see you again, Liz, he thought, I'll wring your neck for taking such a crazy chance Except he supposed what he would really do when and if he saw her again would be to kiss her until she couldn't breathe.

  "Don't hurt them," be said into the telephone. "Please don't hurt them. I'll do whatever you want. "

  "Oh, I know it. I know you will, Thad. And we're gonna do it together. At least, to start with. You just get moving. Shake your watchdogs and get your ass down to Castle Rock. Get there as fast as you can, but don't move so fast you attract attention. That'd be a mistake. You might think about swapping cars, but I'm leaving the details up to you--after all, you're a creative guy. Get there before dark, if you want to find them alive. Don't fuck up. You dig me? Don't fuck up and don't try anything cute. "

  "I won't. "

  "That's right. You won't. What you're gonna do, boss, is play the game. If you screw up, all you're gonna find when you get there is bodies and a tape of your wife cursing your name before she died. "

  There was a click. The connection was broken.

  9

  As he was getting back into the Suburban, Manchester unrolled the passenger window of the Plymouth and asked if everything was okay at home. Thad could see by the man's eyes that this was more than an idle question. He had seen something on Thad's face after all. But that was okay; he thought he could deal with that. He was, after all, a creative guy, and his mind seemed to be moving with its own ghastly-silent speed now, like that Japanese bullet-train. The question presented itself again: lie or tell the truth? And as before, it was really no contest.

  "Everything's fine," he said. His tone of voice was natural and casual. "The kids are cranky, that's all. And that makes Liz cranky." He let his voice rise a little. "You two guys have been acting antsy ever since we left the house. Is there something happening I should know about?"

  He had enough conscience, even in this desperate situation, to feel a little twinge of guilt at that. Something was happening all right--but he was the one who knew, and he wasn't telling.

  "Nope," Harrison said from behind the wheel, leaning forward to speak past his partner. "We can't reach Chatterton and Eddings at the house, that's all. Might have gone inside. "

  "Liz said she'd just made some fresh iced tea," Thad said, lying giddily.

  "That's it, then," Harrison said. He smiled at Thad, who felt another, slightly stronger, throb of conscience. "Maybe there'll be some left when we get there, huh?"

  "Anything's possible." Thad slammed the Suburban's door and poked the ignition key into its slot with a hand that seemed to have no more feeling than a block of wood. Questions whirled around in his head, doing their own complicated and not particularly lovely gavotte. Were Stark ana his family not for Castle "Rock yet? He hoped so-he wanted them solid-gone before the news that they had been snatched went out along the nets of police communication. If they were in Liz's car and someone spotted it, or if they were still close to or in Ludlow, there could be bad trouble. Killing trouble. It was horribly ironic that he should be hoping Stark would make a clean getaway, but that was exactly the position he was in.

  And, speaking of getaways, how was be going to lose Harrison and Manchester? That was another good question. Not by outrunning them in the Suburban, that was for sure. The Plymouth they were driving looked like a dog with its dusty finish and blackwall tires, but the rough idle of its motor suggested it was all roadrunner under the hood. He supposed he could ditch them-he already had an idea of how and where it could be done--but how was he going to keep from being discovered again while he made the hundred-and-sixty-mile drive to The Rock?

  He didn't have the slightest idea . . . he only knew he would have to do it somehow.

  Remember Aunt Martha?

  He had fed Stark a line of bull about what that meant, and Stark had swallowed it. So the bastard's access to his mind wasn't complete. Martha Tellford was Liz's aunt, all right, and they had joked, mostly in bed, about running away from her, but they had talked about running to exotic places like Aruba or Tahiti . . . because Aunt Martha knew all about the summer house in Castle Rock. She had visited them there much more frequently than she had visited them in Ludlow. And Aunt Martha Tellford's favorite place in Castle Rock was the dump. She was a card-carrying, dues-p
aying member of the NRA, and what she liked to do at the dump was shoot rats.

  "If you want her to leave," Thad could remember telling Liz once, "you'll have to be the one to tell her." That conversation had also taken place in bed, toward the end of Aunt Martha's interminable visit in the summer of--had it been '79 or '80? It didn't matter, he supposed. "She's your aunt. Besides, I'm afraid that if I told her, she might use that Winchester of hers on me."

  Liz had said, "I'm not sure that being blood kin would cut much ice, either. She gets a look in her eyes . . ." She had mock-shivered next to him, he remembered, then giggled and poked him in the ribs. "Go on. God hates a coward. Tell her we're conservationists, even when it comes to dump-rats. Walk right up to her, Thad, and say, 'Bug out, Aunt Martha! You've shot your last rat at the dump! Pack your bags and just bug out!' "

  Of course, neither of them had told Aunt Martha to bug out; she had kept on with her daily expeditions to the dump, where she shot dozens of rats (and a few seagulls when the rats ran for cover, Thad suspected). Finally the blessed day came when Thad drove her to the Portland Jetport and put her on a plane back to Albany. At the gate, she had given him her oddly disconcerting man's double-pump handshake--as if she were dosing a business deal instead of saying goodbye--and told him she just might favor them with a visit the following year. "Goddam good shooting," she'd said. "Must have gotten six or seven dozen of those little germbags. "

  She never had come back, although there bad been one close shave (that impending visit had been averted by a merciful last-minute invitation to go to Arizona instead, where, Aunt Martha had informed them over the phone, there was still a bounty on coyotes).

  In the years since her last visit, "Remember Aunt Martha" had become a code-phrase like "Remember the Maine " It meant one of them should get the .22 out of the storage shed and shoot some particularly boring guest, as Aunt Martha had shot the rats at the dump. Now that he thought about it, Thad believed Liz had used the phrase once during the People magazine interview-and-photo sessions. Hadn't she turned to him and murmured, "I wonder if that Myers woman remembers Aunt Martha, Thad?"

  Then she had covered her mouth and started giggling.

  Pretty funny.

  Except it wasn't a joke now.

  And it wasn't shooting rats at the dump now.

  Unless he had it all wrong, Liz had been trying to tell him to come after them and kill George Stark. And if she wanted him to do that, Liz, who cried when she heard about homeless animals being "put to sleep" at the Derry Animal Shelter, must think there was no other solution. She must think there were only two choices now: death for Stark . . . or death for her and the twins.

  Harrison and Manchester were looking at him curiously, and Thad realized he had been sitting behind the wheel of the idling Suburban, lost in thought, for nearly a full minute. He raised his hand, sketched a little salute, backed out, and turned toward Maine Avenue, which would take him off-campus. He tried to start thinking about how he was going to get away from these two before they heard the news that their colleagues were dead over their police-band radio. He tried to think, but he kept hearing Stark telling him that if he screwed up, an he would find when he got to the summer place in Castle Rock would be their bodies and a tape of Liz cursing him-before she died.

  And he kept seeing Martha Tellford, sighting down the barrel of her Winchester, which had been one bell of a lot bigger than the .22 he kept in the locked storage shed of the summer place, aiming at the plump rats scurrying among the piles of refuse and the low orange dump-fires. He realized suddenly that he wanted to shoot Stark, and not with a .22, either.

  Foxy George deserved something bigger.

  A howitzer might be the right size.

  The rats, leaping up against the galaxy-shine of broken bottles and crushed cans, their bodies first twisting, then splattering as the guts and fur flew.

  Yes, watching something like that happen to George Stark would be very fine.

  He was gripping the steering-wheel too hard, making his left hand ache. It actually seemed to moan deep in its bones and joints.

  He relaxed--tried to, anyway--and felt in his breast pocket for the Percodan he had brought along, found it, dry-swallowed it.

  He began thinking about the school-zone intersection in Veazie. The one with the four-way stop sign.

  And he began to think about what Rawlie DeLesseps had said, too. Psychopomps, Rawlie had called them.

  The emissaries of the living dead.

  Twenty - one

  STARK TAKES CHARGE

  1

  He had no trouble planning what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, even though he had never actually been in Ludlow in his life.

  Stark had been there often enough in his dreams.

  He drove the stolen rag-tag Honda Civic off the road and into a rest area a mile and a half down the road from the Beaumont house. Thad had gone up to the University, and that was good. Sometimes it was impossible to tell what Thad was doing or thinking, although he could almost always catch the flavor of his emotions if he strained.

  If he found it very difficult to get in touch with Thad, he simply began to handle one of the Berol pencils he'd bought in the Houston Street stationer's.

  That helped.

  Today it would be easy. It would be easy because, whatever Thad might have told his watchdogs, he had gone to the University for one reason and one reason only: because he was over the deadline, and he believed Stark would try to get in touch with him. Stark intended to do just that. Yes indeed.

  He just didn't plan to do it the way Thad expected.

  And certainly not from a place Thad expected.

  It was almost noon. There were a few picnickers in the rest area, but they were at the tables on the grass or gathered around the small stone barbecues down by the river. No one looked at Stark as he got out of the Civic and walked away. That was good, because if they had seen him, they certainly would have remembered him.

  Remember, yes.

  Describe, no.

  As he strode across the asphalt and then set off up the road toward the Beaumont house on foot, Stark looked a great deal like H. G. Wells's Invisible Man. A wide swath of bandage covered his forehead from eyebrows to hairline. Another swath covered his chin and lower jaw. A New York Yankees baseball cap was jammed down on his head. He wore sunglasses, a quilted vest, and black gloves on his hands.

  The bandages were stained with a yellow, pussy material that oozed steadily through the cotton gauze like gummy tears. More of the yellow stuff dribbled out from behind the Foster Grant sunglasses. From time to time he wiped it off his cheeks with the gloves, which were thin imitation kid. The palms and fingers of these gloves were sticky with the drying ooze. Under the bandages, much of his skin had sloughed off. What remained was not precisely human flesh; it was, instead, dark, spongy stuff that wept almost constantly. This waste matter looked like pus but had a dark, unpleasant smell--like a combination of strong coffee and India ink.

  He walked with his head bent slightly forward. The occupants of the few cars which came toward him saw a man in a ball-cap with his head held down against the glare and his hands stuffed into his pockets. The shadow of the cap's visor would defeat all but the most insistent glances, and if they had looked more closely, they would have seen only the bandages. The cars which came from behind and passed him going north had nothing but his back to get a good look at, of course.

  Closer in toward the twin cities of Bangor and Brewer, this walk would have been a bit more difficult. Closer in you had your suburbs and housing developments. The Beaumonts' part of Ludlow was still far enough out in the country to qualify as a rural community--not the sticks, but definitely not part of either of the big towns. The houses sat on lots large enough, in some cases, to qualify as fields. They were divided one from another not by hedges, those avatars of suburban privacy, but by narrow belts of trees and, sometimes, meandering rock walls. Here and there satellite dishes loomed grimly on th
e horizon, looking like the advance outposts of some alien invasion.

  Stark strode along the shoulder of the road until he passed the Clarks' house. Thad's was the next up. He cut across the far corner of the Clarks' front yard, which was more hay than grass. He glanced once at the house. The shades were pulled against the heat, and the garage door was tightly shut. The Clark place looked more than mid-morning deserted; it had the forlorn air of houses which have been empty for some time. There was no tattletale pile of newspapers inside the screen door, but Stark believed nevertheless that the Clark family was probably off on an early summer vacation, and that was just fine with him.

  He entered the stand of trees between the two properties, stepped over the crumbled remnant of a rock wall, and then sank down to one knee. For the first time he was looking directly at the house of his stubborn twin. There was a police cruiser parked in the driveway, and the two cops who belonged to it were standing in the shade of a nearby tree, smoking and talking. Good.

  He had what he needed; the rest was cake and ice cream. Yet he lingered a moment longer. He did not think of himself as an imaginative man--at least not outside the pages of the books he had had a vital part in creating--nor an emotional one, so he was a little startled by the dull coal of rage and resentment he felt smouldering in his gut.

  What right did the son of a bitch have to refuse him? What goddam right? Because he had been real first? Because Stark did not know just how, why, or when he himself had become real? That was bullshit. As far as George Stark was concerned, seniority cut zero ice in this matter. He had no responsibility to lie down and die without a murmur of protest, as Thad Beaumont seemed to think he should do. He had a responsibility to himself--that was simple survival. Nor was that all.

  He had his loyal fans to think of as well, didn't he?

  Look at that house. Just look at it. A roomy New England Colonial, maybe one wing shy of qualifying for mansionhood. Big lawn, sprinklers twirling busily to keep it green. A wooden stake fence running along one side of the bright black driveway--the sort of fence Stark guessed was supposed to be "picturesque." There was a breezeway between the house and the garage---a breezeway, by God! And inside, the place was furnished in graceful (or maybe they called it gracious) Colonial style to match the outside--a long oak table in the dining room, high handsome bureaus in the rooms upstairs, and chairs that were delicate and pleasing to the eye without being precious; chairs you could admire and still dare to sit on. Walls that were not papered but painted and then stencilled. Stark had seen all these things, seen them in the dreams Beaumont hadn't even known he was having when he had been writing as George Stark.