The Dark Half (24 page)

“Thad, they won't do
anything
until they know what the Cowley woman's condition is. I told them we had a situation where a mentally unbalanced man might be after a person or persons named in the
People
magazine article about the Stark pen name, and explained the connection the Cowleys had to you. I hope I got it right. I don't know much about writers and even less about their agents. But they do understand it would be wrong for the lady's ex-husband to go rushing over there before they arrive. ”

“Thank you. Thank you for everything, Alan. ”

“Thad, N. Y. P. D. is too busy moving on this to want or need further explanations right now, but they
will
want them. I do, too. Who do you think this guy is?”

“That's something I don't want to tell you over the telephone. I'd come to you, Alan, but I don't want to leave my wife and children right now. I think you can understand. You'll have to come here. ”

“I can't do that,” Alan said patiently. “I have a job of my own, and—”

“Is your wife ill, Alan?”

“Tonight she seems quite well. But one of my deputies called in sick, and I've got to sub for him. Standard procedure in small towns. I was just getting ready to leave. What I'm saying is that this is a very bad time for you to be coy, Thad. Tell me. ”

He thought about it. He'd felt strangely confident that Pangborn would buy it when he heard it. But maybe not over the telephone.

“Could you get up here tomorrow?”

“We'll have to get together tomorrow, certainly,” Alan said. His voice was both even and utterly insistent. “But I need whatever you know
tonight.
The fact that the fuzz in New York are going to want an explanation is secondary, as far as I'm concerned. I have my own garden to tend. There are a lot of people here in town who want Homer Gamache's murderer collared, pronto. I happen to be one of them. So don't make me ask you again. It's not so late that I can't get the Penobscot County D. A. on the phone and ask him to collar you as a material witness in a Castle County murder case. He knows already from the State Police that you're a suspect, alibi or no alibi. ”

“Would you do that?” Thad asked, bemused and fascinated.

“I would if you made me, but I don't think you will. ”

Thad's head seemed dearer now; his thoughts actually seemed to be going somewhere. It wouldn't really matter, either to Pangborn or to the N. Y. P. D., if the man they were looking for was a psycho who thought he was Stark, or Stark himself . . . would it? He didn't think so, any more than he thought they were going to catch him either way.

“I'm pretty sure it's a psychotic, as my wife said,” he told Alan finally. He locked eyes with Liz, tried to send her a message. And he must have succeeded in sending her something, because she nodded slightly. “It makes a weird kind of sense. Do you remember mentioning footprints to me?”

“Yes.

“They were in Homeland, weren't they?” Across the room, Liz's eyes widened.

“How did you know that?” Alan sounded off-balance for the first time. “I didn't tell you that. ”

“Have you read the article yet? The one in People?”

“Yes. ”

“That's where the woman set up the fake tombstone. That's where George Stark was buried. ”

Silence from the other end. Then: “Oh shit. ”

“You get it?”

“I think so,” Alan said. “If this guy thinks he's Stark, and if he's crazy, the idea of him starting at Stark's grave makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it? Is this photographer in New York?”

Thad started. “Yes. ”

“Then she might also be in danger?”

“Yes, I . . . well, I never thought of that, but I suppose she might. ”

“Name? Address?”

“I don't have her address.” She had given him her business card, he remembered—probably thinking about the book on which she hoped he would collaborate with her—but he had thrown it away.
Shit.
All he could give Alan was the name. “Phyllis Myers. ”

“And the guy who actually wrote the story?”

“Mike Donaldson. ”

“Also in New York?”

Thad suddenly realized he didn't know that, not for sure, and backtracked a little. “Well, I guess I just assumed both of them were—”

“It's a reasonable enough assumption. If the magazine's offices are in New York, they'd stick dose, wouldn't they?”

“Maybe, but if one or both of them is freelance—”

“Let's go back to this trick photo. The cemetery wasn't specifically identified, either in the photo caption or in the body of the story, as Homeland. I'm sure of that. I should have recognized it from the background, but I was concentrating on the details. ”

“No,” Thad said. “I guess it wasn't. ”

“The First Selectman, Dan Keeton, would have insisted that Homeland not be identified—that would have been a brass-bound condition. He's a very cautious type of guy. Sort of a pill, actually. I can see him giving permission to do the photos, but I think he would have nixed an ID of the specific cemetery in case of vandalism . . . people looking for the headstone and all of that. ”

Thad was nodding. It made sense.

“So your psycho either knows you or comes from here,” Alan was going on.

Thad had made an assumption of which he was now heartily ashamed: that the Sheriff of a small Maine county where there were more trees than people must be a jerk. This was no jerk; he was certainly running rings around that world champeen novelist Thaddeus Beaumont.

“We have to assume that, at least for the time being, since it seems he had inside information. ”

“Then the tracks you mentioned were in Homeland. ”

“Sure they were,” Pangborn said almost absently. “What are you holding back, Thad?”

“What do you mean?” he asked warily.

“Let's not dance, okay? I've got to call New York with these other two names, and you've got to put on your thinking cap and see if there are any more names I should have. Publishers . . . editors . . . I don't know. Meantime, you tell me the guy we want actually thinks he is George Stark. We were theorizing about it Saturday night, blue-skying it, and tonight you tell me it's a stone fact. Then, to back it up, you throw the footprints at me. Either you've made some dizzying leap of deduction based on the facts we have in common, or you know something I don't. Naturally, I like the second alternative better. So give. ”

But what did he have? Blackout trances which were announced by thousands of sparrows crying in unison? Words that he might have written on a manuscript after Alan Pangborn had told him those same words were written on the living-room wall of Frederick Clawson's apartment? More words written on a paper which had been torn to shreds and then fed into the English-Math Building's incinerator? Dreams in which a terrible unseen man led him through his house in Castle Rock and everything he touched, including his own wife, self-destructed? I could call what I believe a known fact of the heart instead of an intuition of the mind, he thought, but there's still no proof, is there? The fingerprints and saliva suggested something was very odd—sure!—but that odd?

Thad didn't think so.

“Alan,” he said slowly, “you'd laugh. No—I take it back, I know you better than that now. You wouldn't laugh—but I strongly doubt if you would believe me, either. I've been up and down on this, but that's how it shakes out: I really don't think you'd believe me. ”

Alan's voice came back at once, urgent, imperative, hard to resist.

“Try me. ”

Thad hesitated, looked at Liz, then shook his head. “Tomorrow. When we can look at each other face to face. Then I will. For tonight you'll just have to take my word that it doesn't matter, that what I've told you is everything of any practical value that I can tell you. ”

“Thad, what I said about having you held as a material witness—”

“If you have to do it, do it. There will be no hard feelings on my part. But I won't go any further than I have right now until I see you, regardless of what you decide. ”

Silence from Pangborn's end. Then a sigh. “Okay. ”

“I want to give you a scratch description of the man the police are looking for. I'm not entirely sure it's right, but I think it's dose. Close enough to give the cops in New York, anyway. Have you got a pencil?”

“Yes. Give it to me. ”

Thad dosed the eyes God had put in his face and opened the one God had put in his mind, the eye which persisted in seeing even the things he didn't want to look at. When people who had read his books met him for the first time, they were invariably disappointed. This was something they tried to hide from him and could not. He bore them no grudge, because he understood how they felt . . . at least a little bit. If they liked his work (and some professed even to love it), they thought of him beforehand as a guy who was first cousin to God. Instead of a God they saw a guy who stood six-feet-one, wore spectacles, was beginning to lose his hair, and had a habit of tripping over things. They saw a man whose scalp was rather flaky and whose nose had two holes in it, just like their own.

What they could not see was that third eye inside his head. That eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade . . .
that
was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it. If they could, he thought many of them would try to steal it. Yes, even if it meant gouging it right out of his flesh with a dull knife.

Looking into the dark, he summoned up his private image of George Stark—the
real
George Stark, who looked nothing like the model who had posed for the jacket photo. He looked for the shadow-man who had accreted soundlessly over the years, found him, and began showing him to Alan Pangborn.

“He's fairly tall,” he began. “Taller than me, anyway. Six-three, maybe six-four in a pair of boots. He's got blonde hair, cut short and neat. Blue eyes. His long vision is excellent. About five years ago he took to wearing glasses for close work. Reading and writing, mostly.

“The reason he gets noticed isn't his height but his
breadth
. He's not fat, but he's extremely wide. Neck size maybe eighteen-and-a-half, maybe nineteen. He's my age, Alan, but he's not fading the way I'm starting to or running to fat. He's
strong.
Like Schwarzenegger looks now that Schwarzenegger has started to build down a little. He works out with weights. He can pump a bicep hard enough to pop a sleeve-seam on his shirt, but he's not muscle-bound.

“He was born in New Hampshire, but following the divorce of his parents, he moved with his mother to Oxford, Mississippi, where she was raised. He's lived most of his life there. When he was younger, he had an accent so thick he sounded like he came from Dogpatch. A lot of people made fun of that accent in college-not to his face, though, you don't make fun of a guy like this to his face—and he worked hard on getting rid of it. Now I think the only time you'd be apt to hear cracker in his voice would be when he gets mad, and I think people who make him mad are often not available for testimony later on. He's got a short fuse. He's violent. He's dangerous. He is, in fact, a practicing psychotic. ”

“What—” Pangborn began, but Thad overrode him.

“He's quite deeply tanned, and since blonde men usually don't tan all that well, it might be a good point of identification. Big feet, big hands, big neck, wide shoulders. His face looks like somebody talented but in a hurry chopped it out of a hard rock.

“Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones that had a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's probably switched them.” He paused, then added: “Oh, and there's a sticker on the back bumper. It says HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH. ”

He opened his eyes.

Liz was staring at him. Her face was paler than ever.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“Alan? Are you—”

“Just a sec. I'm writing.” There was another, shorter, pause. “Okay,” he said at last. “I got it. You can tell me all of this but not who the guy is or your connection with him or how you know him?”

“I don't know, but I'll try. Tomorrow. Knowing his name isn't going to help anyone tonight anyway, because he's using another one. ”

“George Stark. ”

“Well, he could be crazy enough to be calling himself Alexis Machine, but I doubt it. Stark is what I think, yeah.” He tried to wink at Liz. He did not really believe the mood could be lightened by a wink or anything else, but he tried, anyway. He only succeeded in blinking both eyes, like a sleepy owl.

“There's no way I can persuade you to go on with this tonight, is there?”

“No. There's not. I'm sorry, but there's not. ”

“All right. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.” And he was gone, just like that, no thank-you, no goodbye. Thinking it over, Thad supposed he didn't really rate a thank-you.

He hung up the phone and went to his wife, who sat looking at him as if she had been turned into a statue. He took her hands—they were very cold—and said, “This is going to be all right, Liz. I swear it is. ”

“Are you going to tell him about the trances when you talk to him tomorrow? The sound of the birds? How you heard it when you were a kid, and what it meant then? The things you wrote?”

“I'm going to tell him everything,” Thad said. “What he chooses to pass on to the other authorities. . .” He shrugged. “That's up to him. ”