Mississippi was George Stark's home state, according to Thad's fictional biography of the man. If Thad was schizo enough to think he was Stark, at least some of the time, he might well have provided himself with a black Toronado to enhance the illusion, or fantasy, or whatever it was . . . but in order to get plates, he'd not only have to have visited Mississippi, he'd have to claim residency there.
That's dumb. He could have stolen some Mississippi plates. Or bought an old set. Fuzzy didn't say anything about what year the tags were--from the house he probably couldn't have read them, anyway, not even with binoculars.
But it wasn't Thad's car. Couldn't have been. Liz would have known, wouldn't she?
Maybe not. If he's crazy enough, maybe not.
Then there was the locked door. How could Thad have gotten into the barn without breaking the lock? He was a writer and a teacher, not a cracksman.
Duplicate key, his mind. whispered, but Alan didn't mink so. If Fuzzy was storing wacky tobaccy in there from time to time, Alan thought Fuzzy would be pretty careful of where he left his keys lying around, no matter how careless he was of his cigarette ends.
And one final question, the killer: How come Fuzzy had never seen that black Toronado before, if it had been in his barn all along? How could that be?
Try this, a voice in the back of his mind whispered as he grabbed his hat and left the office. This is a pretty funny idea, Alan. You'll laugh. You'll laugh like hell. Suppose Thad Beaumont was right all the way from the jump? Suppose there really is a monster named George Stark running around out there . . . and the elements of his life, the elements Thad created, come into being when he needs them? WHEN he needs them, but not always WHERE he needs them. Because they'd always show up at places connected to the primary creator's life. So Stark would have to get his car out of storage where Thad stores his, just like he had to start from the graveyard where Thad symbolically buried him. Don't you love it? Isn't it a scream?
He didn't love it. It wasn't a scream. It wasn't even remotely funny. It drew an ugly scratch not just across everything he believed but across the way he had been taught to think.
He found himself remembering something Thad had said. I don't know who I am when I'm writing. That wasn't exact, but it was close. And what's even more amazing, it never occurred to me to wonder until now.
"You were him, weren't you?" Alan said softly. "You were him and be was you and that's the way the killer grew, pop goes the weasel. "
He shivered and Sheila Brigham looked up from her typewriter at the dispatcher's desk in time to see it. "It's too hot to do that, Alan. You must be coming down with a cold. "
"Coming down with something, I guess," Alan said. "Cover the telephone, Sheila. Relay anything small to Seat Thomas. Anything big to me. Where's Clut?"
"I'm in here!" Clut's voice came drifting out of the john.
"I expect to be back in forty-five minutes or so!" Alan yelled at him. "You got the desk until I get back!"
"Where you going, Alan?" Clut came out of the men's room tucking in his khaki shirt.
"The lake," Alan said vaguely, and left before either Clut or Sheila could ask any more questions . . . or before he could reflect on what he was doing. Leaving without a stated destination in a situation like this was a very bad idea. It was asking for more than trouble; it was asking to get killed.
But what he was thinking
(the sparrows are flying)
simply couldn't be true. Couldn't. There had to be a more reasonable explanation.
He was still trying to convince himself of this as he drove his prowl-car out of town and into the worst trouble of his life.
6
There was a rest area on Route 5 about a half a mile from Fuzzy Martin's property. Alan turned in, operating on something which was half hunch and half whim. The hunch part was simple enough: black Toronado or no black Toronado, they hadn't come down here from Ludlow on a magic carpet. They must have driven. Which meant there had to be a ditched car around someplace. The man he was hunting had ditched Homer Gamache's truck in a roadside parking area when he was through with it, and what a perp would do once he would do again.
There were three vehicles parked in the turnaround: a beer truck, a new Ford Escort, and a road-dusty Volvo.
As he got out of the prowler-car, a man in green fatigues came out of the men's convenience and walked toward the cab of the beer truck. He was short, dark-haired, narrow-shouldered. No George Stark here.
"Officer," he said, and gave Alan a little salute. Alan nodded at him and walked down to where three elderly ladies were sitting at one of the picnic tables, drinking coffee from a Thermos and talking.
"Hello, Officer," one of them said. "Can we do something for you?" Or did we maybe do something wrong? the momentarily anxious eyes asked.
"I just wondered if the Ford and the Volvo up there belonged to you ladies," Alan said.
"The Ford is mine," a second said. "We all came in that. I don't know anything about a Volvo. Is it that sticker thing? Did that sticker thing run out again? My son is supposed to take care of that sticker thing, but he's so forgetful! Forty-three years old, and I still have to tell him ev--"
"The sticker's fine, ma'am," Alan said, smiling his best The Policeman Is Your Friend smile. "None of you happened to see the Volvo drive in, did you?"
They shook their heads.
"Have you seen anyone else during the last few minutes who might belong to it?"
"No," the third lady said. She looked at him with bright little gerbil's eyes. "Are you on the scent, Officer?"
"Pardon, ma'am?"
"Tracking a criminal, I mean. "
"Oh," Alan said. He felt a moment of unreality. Exactly what was he doing here? Exactly what had he been thinking to get here? "No, ma'am. I just like Volvos." Boy, that sounded intelligent. That sounded just . . . fucking . . . crackerjack.
"Oh," the first lady said. "Well, we haven't seen anyone. Would you like a cup of coffee, Officer? I believe there's just about one good one left. "
"No, thank you," Alan said. "You ladies have a nice day. "
"You too, Officer," they chorused in an almost perfect three-part harmony. It made Alan feel more unreal than ever.
He walked back up to the Volvo. Tried the driver's-side door. It opened. The inside of the car had a hot attic feel. It had been sitting here awhile. He looked in the back and saw a packet, a little bigger than a Sweet 'n Low packet, on the floor. He leaned between the seats and picked it up.
HANDI-WIPE, the packet said, and he felt someone drop a bowling-ball in his stomach.
It doesn't mean anything, the voice of Protocol and Reason spoke up at once. At least, not necessarily. I know what you're thinking: you're thinking babies. But, Alan, they give those things out at the roadside stands when you buy fried chicken, for heaven's sake.
All the same . . .
Alan stuck the Handi-Wipe in one of the pockets of his uniform blouse and got out of the car. He was about to close the door, and then leaned in again. He tried to look under the dashboard and couldn't quite do it on his feet. He had to get down on his knees.
Someone dropped another bowling-ball. He made a muffled sound--the sound of a man who has been hit quite hard.
The ignition wires were hanging down, their copper cores bare and slightly kinked. The kink, Alan knew, came from being braided together. The Volvo had been hot-wired, and very efficiently from the look of it. The driver had grasped the wires above the bare cores and pulled them apart again to cut the engine when they had parked here.
So it was true . . . some of it, at least. The big question was how much. He was beginning to feel like a man edging closer and closer to a potentially lethal drop.
He went back to his prowl-car, got in, started it up, and took the microphone off its prong.
What's true? Protocol and Reason whispered. God, that was a maddening voice. That someone is at the Beaumonts' lake house? Yes--that might be true. That someone named George Sta
rk backed that black Toronado out of Fuzzy Martin's barn? Come on, Alan.
Two thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously. The first was that, if he contacted Henry Payton at the State Police Barracks in Oxford, as Harrison had told him to do, he might never know how this came out. Lake Lane, where the Beaumonts' summer house was located, was a dead end. The State Police would tell him not to approach the house on his own--not a single officer, not when they suspected the man who was holding Liz and the twins of at least a dozen murders. They would want him to block off the road and no more while they sent out a fleet of cruisers, maybe a chopper, and, for all Alan knew, a few destroyers and fighter-planes.
The second thought was about Stark.
They weren't thinking about Stark; they didn't even know about Stark.
But what if Stark was real?
If that was the case, Alan was coming to believe that sending a bunch of State Troopers who didn't know any better up Lake Lane would be like marching men into a meat-grinder.
He put the microphone back on its prong. He was going in, and he was going in alone. It might be wrong, probably was, but it was what he was going to do. He could live with the thought of his own stupidity; God knew he had done it before. What he couldn't live with was even the possibility that he might have caused the deaths of a woman and two infants by making a radio-call for back-up before he knew thereat nature of the situation.
Alan pulled out of the rest area and headed for Lake Lane.
Twenty - four
THE COMING OF THE SPARROWS
1
Thad avoided the turnpike on the way down (Stark had instructed Liz to use it, cutting half an hour off their time), and so he had to go through either Lewiston-Auburn or Oxford. L. A., as the natives called it, was a much bigger metropolitan area . . . but the State Police Barracks was in Oxford.
He chose Lewiston-Auburn.
He was waiting at an Auburn traffic tight and checking his rearview mirror constantly for police cars when the idea he'd first grasped dearly while talking to Rawlie at the auto junkyard struck him again. This time it was not just a tickle; it was something like a hard open-handed blow.
I am the knower. I am the owner. I am the bringer.
It's magic we are dealing with here, Thad thought, and any magician worth his salt has got to have a magic wand. Everyone knows that. Luckily, I know just where such an item may be had. Where, in fact, they sell them by the dozen.
The nearest stationer's store was on Court Street, and now Thad diverted in that direction. He was sure there were Berol Black Beauty pencils at the house in Castle Rock, and he was equally sure Stark had brought his own supply, but he didn't want them. What he wanted were pencils Stark had never touched, either as a part of Thad or as a separate entity.
Thad found a parking space half a block down from the stationer's, killed the engine of Rawlie's VW (it died hard, with a wheeze and several lunging chugs), and got out. It was good to get away from the ghost of Rawlie's pipe and into the fresh air for awhile.
At the stationer's he bought a box of Berol Black Beauty pencils. The clerk told him to be his guest when Thad asked if he could use the pencil-sharpener on the wall. He used it to sharpen six of the Berols. These he put in his breast pocket, lining it from side to side. The leads stuck up like the warheads of small, deadly missiles.
Presto and abracadabra, he thought. Let the revels commence.
He walked back to Rawlie's car, got in, and just sat there for a moment, sweating in the heat and softly singing "John Wesley Harding" under his breath. Almost all of the words had come back. It was really amazing what the human mind could do under pressure.
This could be very, very dangerous, he thought. He found that he didn't care so much for himself. He had, after all, brought George Stark into the world, and he supposed that made him responsible for him. It didn't seem terribly fair; he didn't think he had created George with any evil intent. He couldn't see himself as either of those infamous doctors, Mssrs. Jekyll and Frankenstein, in spite of what might be happening to his wife and children. He had not set out to write a series of novels which would make a great deal of money, and he had certainty not set out to create a monster. He had only been trying to feel a way around the block that had dropped into his path. He had only wanted to find a way to write another good story, because doing that made him happy.
Instead, he had caught some sort of supernatural disease. And there were diseases, lots of them, that found homes in the bodies of people who had done nothing to deserve them--fun things like cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, Alzheimer's--but once you got one, you had to deal with it. What was the name of that old radio quiz show? Name It and Claim It?
This could be very dangerous for Liz and the kids, though, his mind insisted, reasonably enough.
Yes. Brain surgery could be dangerous, too . . . but if you had a tumor growing in there, what choice did you have?
He'll be looking. Peeking. The pencils are okay; he might even be flattered. But if he senses what you plan to do with them, or if he finds out about the bird-call . . . if he guesses about the sparrows . . . hell, if he even guesses there's something to guess . . . then you're in deep shit.
But it could work, another part of his mind whispered. Goddammit, you know it could work.
Yes. He did know it. And because the deepest part of his mind insisted that there was really nothing else to do or try, Thad started the VW and pointed it toward Castle Rock.
Fifteen minutes later he had left Auburn behind and was out in the country again, heading west toward the Lakes Region.
2
For the last forty miles of the trip, Stark talked steadily about Steel Machine, the book on which he and Thad were going to collaborate. He helped Liz with the kids--always keeping one hand free and close enough to the gun tucked into his belt to keep her convinced--while she unlocked the summer house and let them in. She had been hoping for can parked in at least some of the driveways leading off Lake Lane, or to hear the sounds of voices or chainsaws, but there had been only the steepy hum of the insects and the powerful rumble of the Toronado's engine. It seemed that the son of a bitch had the luck of the devil himself.
All the time they were unloading and bringing things in, Stark went on talking. He didn't even stop while he was using his straight-razor to amputate all but one of the telephone jacks. And the book sounded good. That was the really dreadful thing. The book sounded very good indeed. It sounded as if it might be as big as Machine's Way--maybe even bigger.
"I have to go to the bathroom," she said when the luggage was inside, interrupting him in mid-spate.
"That's fine," he said mildly, turning to look at her. He had taken off the sunglasses once they arrived, and now she had to turn her head aside from him. That glaring, mouldering gaze was more than she could deal with. "I'll just come along. "
"I like a little privacy when I relieve myself. Don't you?"
"It doesn't much matter to me, one way or another," Stark said with serene cheeriness. It was a mood he had been in ever since they left the turnpike at Gates Falls--he had the unmistakable air of a man who now knows things are going to come out all right.
"But it does to me, " she said, as if speaking to a particularly obtuse child. She felt her fingers curling into claws. In her mind she was suddenly ripping those staring eyeballs out of their slack sockets . . . and when she risked a glance up at him and saw his amused face, she knew he knew what she was thinking and feeling.
"I'll just stay in the doorway," he said with mock humility. "I'll be a good boy. I won't peek. "
The babies were crawling busily around the living-room rug. They were cheerful, vocal, full of beans. They seemed to be delighted to be here, where they had been only once before, for a long winter weekend.
"They can't be left alone," Liz said. "The bathroom is off the master bedroom. If they're left here, they'll get into trouble. "
"No problem, Beth," Stark said, and scooped them up
effortlessly, one under each arm. She would have believed just this morning that if anyone but herself or Thad tried something like that, William and Wendy would have screamed their heads off. But when Stark did it, they giggled merrily, as if this were the most amusing thing under the sun. "I'll bring them into the bedroom, and I'll be watching them instead of you." He turned and regarded her with an instant's coldness. "I'll keep a good eye on them, too. I wouldn't want them to come to any harm, Beth. I like them. If anything happens to them, it won't be my fault. "
She went into the bathroom and he stood in the doorway, his back to her as he had promised, watching the twins. As she raised her skirt and lowered her panties and sat down, she hoped he was a man of his word. She wouldn't die if he turned around and saw her squatting on the John . . . but if he saw the sewing scissors inside her underwear, she might.
And, as usual, when she was in a hurry to go, her bladder hung on obstinately. Come on, come on, she thought with a mixture of fear and irritation. What's the matter, do you think you're going to collect interest on that stuff?
At last. Relief.
"But when they try to come out of the barn," Stark was saying, "Machine lights the gasoline they've poured into the trench around it in the night. Won't that be great? There's a movie in it, too, Beth--the assholes who make movies love fires. "
She used the toilet paper and pulled her panties up very carefully. She kept her eyes glued to Stark's back as she adjusted her clothes, praying that he would not turn around. He didn't. He was deeply absorbed in his own story.
"Westerman and Jack Rangely duck back inside, planning to use the car to drive right through the fire. But Ellington panics, and--"
He broke off suddenly, his head cocked to one side. Then he turned to her, just as she was straightening her skirt.
"Out," he said abruptly, and all the good humor had left his voice. "Get the fuck out of there right now. "
"What--"
He grabbed her arm with rough force and yanked her into the bedroom. He went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. "We've got company, and it's too early for Thad. "
"I don't--"
"Car engine," he said briefly. "Powerful motor. Could be a police interceptor. Hear it?"