Suddenly he wanted to burn the charming white house to the ground. Touch a match to it--or maybe the flame of the propane torch he had in the pocket of the vest he was wearing--and burn it flat to the foundation. But not until he had been inside. Not until he had smashed the furniture, shat upon the living-room rug, and wiped the excrement across those carefully stencilled walls in crude brown smears. Not until be had taken an axe to those oh-so-precious bureaus and reduced them to kindling.
What right did Beaumont have to children? To a beautiful woman? What right, exactly, did Thad Beaumont have to live in the light and be happy while his dark brother--who had made him rich and famous when he would otherwise have lived poor and expired in obscurity--died in darkness like a diseased mongrel in an alley?
None, of course. No right at all. It was just that Beaumont had believed in that right, and still, in spite of everything, continued to believe in it. But the belief, not George Stark from Oxford, Mississippi, was the fiction.
"It's time for your first big lesson, buddy-roo," Stark murmured in the trees. He found the dips holding the bandage around his forehead, removed them, and tucked them away in his pocket for later. Then he began to unwind the bandage, the layers growing wetter as they got closer to his strange flesh. "It's one you'll never, ever forget. I guaran-fucking-tee it. "
2
It was nothing but a variation on the white-cane scam he'd run on the cops in New York, but that was perfectly okay with Stark; he was a firm believer in the idea that if you happened on a good gag, you should go on using it until you used it up. These cops presented no problem, anyway, unless he got sloppy; they had been on duty for better than a week now, the surety growing in them every day that the crazy guy had been telling the truth when he'd said he was just going to pick up his marbles and go home. The only wild card was Liz--if she happened to be looking out the window when he wasted the pigs, it could complicate things. But it was still a few minutes shy of noon; she and the twins would either be taking naps or getting ready to take them. Regardless of how it went, he was confident things would work out.
In fact, he was sure of it.
Love would find a way.
3
Chatterton lifted his boot to butt his cigarette--he planned to put the stub in the cruiser's ashtray once it was dead; Maine State Police did not litter the driveways of the taxpayers--and when he looked up the man with the skinned face was there, lurching slowly up the driveway. One hand waved slowly at him and Jack Eddings for help; the other was bent behind his back and looked broken.
Chatterton almost had a heart-attack.
"Jack!" he shouted, and Eddings turned. His mouth dropped open.
"--help me--" the man with the skinned face croaked. Chatterton and Eddings ran toward him.
If they had lived, they might have told their fellow officers that they thought the man had been in a car crash, or had been burned by an explosive backlash of gas or kerosene, or that he might have fallen face-first into one of those pieces of farm machinery which decide, every now and then, to reach out and tomahawk their owners with their blades, choppers, or cruel, whirling spokes.
They might have told their fellow officers any of these things, but at that moment they were really thinking of nothing at all. Their minds had been sponged clean by horror. The left side of the man's face seemed almost to be boiling, as if, after the skin had been stripped off, someone had poured a powerful carbolic acid solution over the raw meat. Sticky, unthinkable fluid ran down hillocks of proud flesh and rolled through black cracks, sometimes overspilling in gruesome flash floods.
They thought nothing; they simply reacted.
That was the beauty of the white-cane trick.
"--help me--"
Stark allowed his feet to tangle together and fell forward. Yelling something incoherent to his partner, Chatterton reached out to grab the wounded man before he could fall. Stark looped his right arm around the State Policeman's neck and brought his left hand out from behind his back. There was a surprise in it. The surprise was the pearl-handled straight-razor. The blade glittered feverishly in the humid air. Stark rammed it forward and it split Chatterton's right eyeball with an audible pop. Chatterton screamed and clapped a hand to his face. Stark ran his hand into Chatterton's hair, jerked his head back, and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood burst from his muscular neck in a red shout. All of this happened in four seconds.
"What?" Eddings inquired in a low and weirdly studious tone of voice. He was standing flat-footed about two feet behind Chatterton and Stark. "What?"
One of his dangling hands was hanging beside the butt of his service revolver, but one quick glance convinced Stark that the pig had no more idea that his gun was in reach than he had of the population of Mozambique. His eyes were bulging. He didn't know what he was looking at, or who was bleeding. No, that isn't true, Stark thought, he thinks it's me. He stood there and watched me cut his partner's throat, but he thinks I'm the one bleeding because half my face is gone, and that isn't really why--it's me bleeding, has to be, because he and his partner, they're the police. They're the heroes of this movie.
"Here," be said, "hold this for me, will you?" And shoved Chatterton's dying body backward at his partner.
Eddings uttered a high-pitched little scream. He tried to step away, but he was too late. The two-hundred-pound sack of dying bull that was Tom Chatterton sent him reeling back against the police-car Loose hot blood poured down into his upturned face like water from a busted shower-head. He screamed and flailed at Chatterton's body. Chatterton spun slowly away and grabbed blindly at the car with the last of his strength. His left hand hit the hood, leaving a splattered handprint. His right grabbed weakly at the radio antenna and snapped it off. He fell into the driveway holding it in front of his one remaining eye like a scientist with a specimen too rare to relinquish even in extremis.
Eddings caught a blurred glimpse of the skinned man coming in low and hard and tried to draw back. He struck the car.
Stark sliced upward, splitting the crotch of Eddings' beige Trooper uniform, splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke. Eddings' balls, suddenly untethered from each other, swung back against his inner thighs like heavy knots on the end of an unravelling sash-cord. Blood stained his pants around the zipper. For a moment he felt as if someone had jammed a handful of ice cream into his groin . . . and then the pain struck, hot and full of ragged teeth. He screamed.
Stark snapped the razor out, wicked-quick, at Eddings' throat, but Eddings managed somehow to get a hand up and the first stroke only split his palm in half. Eddings tried to roll to the left, and that exposed the right side of his neck.
The naked blade, pale silver in the day's hazy light, whickered through the air again, and this time it went where it was supposed to go. Eddings sank to his knees, hands between his legs. His beige pants had turned bright red almost to the knees. His head drooped, and now he looked like the object of a pagan sacrifice.
"Have a nice day, motherfucker," Stark said in a conversational voice. He bent over, tangled his hand in Eddings' hair, and jerked his head back, baring the neck for the final stroke.
4
He opened the back door of the cruiser, lifted Eddings by the neck of his uniform shirt and the bloody seat of his trousers, and tossed him in like a sack of grain. Then he did the same with Chatterton. The latter must have weighed close to two hundred and thirty pounds, with his equipment belt and the .45 on his belt thrown in, but Stark handled him as if he were a bag stuffed with feathers. He slammed the door, then shot a glance full of bright curiosity at the house.
It was silent. The only sounds were the crickets in the high grass beside the driveway and the low, strawlike whick! whick! whick! of the lawnsprinklers. To this there was added the sound of an oncoming truck--an Orinco tanker. It roared by at sixty, headed north. Stark tensed and lowered himself slightly behind the side of the police cruiser when he saw the truck's big brake lights flare r
ed for an instant. He uttered a single grunt of laughter when they went out again and the tanker disappeared over the next hill, accelerating again. The driver had glimpsed the State Police cruiser parked in the Beaumont driveway, had checked his speedometer, and had thought speed-trap. The most natural thing in the world. He needn't have worried; this speed-trap was closed forever.
There was a lot of blood in the driveway, but puddled on the bright black asphalt, it could have been water . . . unless you got very close. So that was okay. And even if it wasn't, it would have to do.
Stark folded the straight-razor, held it in one sticky hand, went over to the door. He saw neither the little drift of dead sparrows lying by the stoop, nor the live ones which now lined the roofpeak of the house and sat in the apple tree by the garage, watching him silently.
In a minute or two, Liz Beaumont came downstairs, still half-asleep from her midday nap, to answer the doorbell.
5
She didn't scream. The scream was there, but the stripped face looking at her when she opened the door locked it deep inside her, froze it, denied it, cancelled it, buried it alive. Unlike Thad, she'd had no dreams of George Stark she could remember, but they might have been there all the same, deep in the fastnesses of her unconscious mind, because this glaring, grinning face seemed almost an expected thing, for all its horror.
"Hey lady, wanna buy a duck?" Stark asked through the screen. He grinned, exposing a great many teeth. Most of them were now dead. The sunglasses turned his eyes into big black sockets. Goo dripped from his cheek and jawline and splattered on the vest he was wearing.
Belatedly, she tried to close the door. Stark rammed a gloved fist through the screen and slammed it back open again. Liz stumbled away, trying to scream. She couldn't. Her throat was still locked up.
Stark came in and dosed the door.
Liz watched him walk slowly toward her. He looked like a decayed scarecrow which had somehow come to life. The grin was the worst, because the left half of his upper lip appeared not just decayed or decaying, but chewed away. She could see gray-black teeth, and the sockets where, until recently, other teeth had been.
His gloved hands stretched out toward her.
"Hello, Beth," he said through that terrible grin. "Please excuse the intrusion, but I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop by. I'm George Stark, and I'm pleased to meet you. More pleased, I think, than you could possibly know. "
One of his fingers touched her chin . . . caressed it. The flesh beneath the black leather felt spongy, unsteady. At that moment she thought of the twins, sleeping upstairs, and her paralysis broke. She turned and fled for the kitchen. Somewhere in the roaring confusion of her mind she saw herself snatching one of the butcher-knives from the magnetized runners over the counter and plunging it deep into that obscene caricature of a face.
She heard him after her, quick as the wind.
His hand brushed the back of her blouse, hunting for purchase, and slipped off.
The kitchen door was the sort that swings back and forth. It was propped open with a wooden wedge. She kicked at the wedge on the run, knowing that if she missed it or only knocked it aslant, there wouldn't be a second chance. But she hit it dead-square with one slippered foot, feeling an instant of bright pain in her toes. The wedge flew across the kitchen floor, which was so brightly waxed that she could see the whole room in it, hung upside down. She felt Stark groping for her again. She reached behind her and raked the door shut. She heard the thud as it hit him. He yelled, furious and surprised but unhurt. She groped for the knives--
--and Stark grabbed her by the hair and the back of her blouse. He jerked her backward and spun her around. She heard the rough purr of parting cloth and thought incoherently: If he rapes me oh Jesus if he rapes me I'll go crazy--
She hammered at his grotesque face with her fists, knocking the sunglasses first askew and then off. The flesh below his left eye had sagged and fallen away like a dead mouth, exposing the whole bloodshot bulge of the eyeball.
And he was laughing.
He grabbed her hands and forced them down. She twisted one free, brought it up, and scratched at his face. Her fingers left deep grooves from which blood and pus began to flow sluggishly. There was little or no sense of resistance; she might as well have torn at a piece of flyblown meat. And now she was making a sound--she wanted to shriek, to articulate her horror and fear before they choked her, but the most she was able to manage was a series of hoarse, distressed barks.
He snatched her free hand out of the air, brought it down, forced both hands behind her, and encircled the wrists with his own hand. It was spongy but as unyielding as a manacle. He lifted his other hand to the front of her blouse and cupped a breast. Her flesh moaned at his touch. She dosed her eyes and tried to pull away.
"Oh, quit that," be said. He was not grinning on purpose now, but the left side of his mouth grinned anyway, frozen in its own decayed rictus. "Quit it, Beth. For your own good. It turns me on when you fight. You don't want me turned on. I guarantee it. I think we ought to have a Platonic relationship, you and I.
"At least for now. "
He squeezed her breast harder, and she felt the ruthless strength under the decay, like an armature of articulated steel rods embedded in soft plastic.
How can he be so strong? How can he be so strong when he looks like he's dying?
But the answer was obvious. He wasn't human. She didn't think he was really even alive.
"Or maybe you do want it?" he asked. "Is that it? Do you want it? Do you want it right now?" His tongue, black and red and yellow, its surface blasted with strange cracks like those in a drying floodplain, poked out of his snarling, smiling mouth and wiggled at her.
She stopped struggling at once.
"Better," Stark said. "Now--I'm going to let go of you, Bethie my dear, my sweet one. When I do that, the urge to run the hundred-yard dash in five seconds flat is going to come over you again. That's natural enough; we hardly know each other, and I am aware that I don't look my best. But before you do anything foolish, I want you to remember the two cops outside--they're dead. And I want you to think of your bambinos, sleeping peacefully upstairs. Children need their rest, don't they? Especially very small children, very defenseless children, like yours. Do you understand? Do you follow me?"
She nodded dumbly. She could smell him now. It was a horrible, meaty aroma. He's rotting, she thought. Rotting away right in front of me.
It had become very dear to her why he so desperately wanted Thad to start writing again.
"You're a vampire," she said hoarsely. "A goddam vampire. And he's put you on a diet. So you break in here. You terrorize me and threaten my babies. You're a fucking coward, George Stark. "
He let go of her and pulled first the left glove and then the right one smooth and tight again. It was a prissy yet oddly sinister bit of business.
"I hardly think that's fair, Beth. What would you do if you were in my position? What would you do, for instance, if you were stranded on an island without anything to eat or drink? Would you strike poses of languor and sigh prettily? Or would you fight? Do you really blame me for wanting something so simple as survival?"
"Yes!" she spat at him.
"Spoken like a true partisan . . . but you may change your mind. You see, the price of partisanship can run higher than you know right now, Beth. When the opposition is cunning and dedicated, the price can go right out of sight. You may find yourself more enthusiastic about our collaboration than you'd ever think possible. "
"Dream on, motherfucker!"
The right side of his mouth rose, the eternally smiling left side hitched a little higher, and he favored her with a ghoul-grin she supposed was meant to be engaging. His hand, sickeningly gelid under the thin glove, slid down her forearm in a caress. One finger pressed suggestively into her left palm for an instant before dropping away. "This is no dream, Beth--I assure you. Thad and I are going to collaborate on a new Stark novel . . . for awhile. Put anoth
er way, Thad's going to give me a push. I'm like a stalled car, you see. Only instead of vapor-lock, I've got writer's block. That's all. That's the only problem there is, I judge. Once I get rolling, I'll put her in second, pop the clutch, and vrooom! Off I go!"
"You're crazy," she whispered.
"Yep. But so was Tolstoy. So was Richard Nixon, and they elected that greasy dawg President of the United States." Stark turned his head and looked out the window. Liz heard nothing, but all of a sudden he seemed to be listening with all his concentration, striving to pick up some faint, almost inaudible sound.
"What do you--" she began.
"Hush your mouth a second, hon," Stark told her. "Just put a sock in it. "
Faintly, she heard the sound of a flock of birds taking wing. The sound was impossibly distant, impossibly beautiful. Impossibly free.
She stood there looking at him, her heart pounding too fast, wondering if she could break loose from him. He wasn't exactly in a trance, or anything like that, but his attention was certainly diverted. She could run, maybe. If she could get a gun--
His rotten hand stole around one of her wrists again.
"I can get inside your man and look out, you know. I can feel him thinking. I can't do that with you, but I can look at your face and make some real good guesses. Whatever you're thinking right now, Beth, you want to remember those cops . . . and your kids. You do that, it's gonna help you keep this in perspective. "
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"What? Beth?" He laughed. It was a nasty sound, as if he'd gotten gravel caught in his throat. "It's what he'd call you, if he was smart enough to think of it, you know. "