The Dark Half (35 page)

Foxy old George, and down here in Endsville all the sparrows were flying again.

He fought the feeling, fought hard.

“Go on, George,” he said, a little surprised by the rough edge of fury in his voice. He was dazed, caught in a powerful undertow of distance and unreality . . . but God, he sounded so awake and aware! “Say it right out loud, why don't you?”

“If you insist. ”

“I do. ”

“It's time to start a new book. A new Stark novel. ”

“I don't think so. ”

“Don't say that!” The edge in that voice was like a whiplash loaded with tiny pellets of shot. “I've been drawing you a picture, Thad. I've been drawing it
for
you. Don't make me draw it
on
you. ”

“You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down. ”

Rosalie's head turned a little; Thad glimpsed one wide eye before she turned hurriedly back to the cigarette racks again.

“You just watch your mouth!”
Real fury in that voice. But was there something more? Was there fear? Pain? Both? Or was he only fooling himself?

“What's wrong, George?” he jeered suddenly. “Are you losing some of your happy thoughts?”

There was a pause, then. That had surprised him, thrown him off-stride, at least momentarily. Thad was sure of that. But why? What had done it?

“Listen to me, buddy-roo,” Stark said at last. “I'll give you a week to get started. Don't think you can bullshit me, because you can't.” Except the last word was really
cain't
. Yes, George was upset. It might cost Thad a great deal before this was over, but for the time being he felt only savage gladness. He had gotten through. It seemed he was not the only one that felt helpless and dreamily vulnerable during these nightmarishly intimate conversations; he had hurt Stark, and that was utterly fine.

Thad said, “That much is true. There's no bullshit between us. Whatever else there may be, there's none of that. ”

“You got an idea,” Stark said. “You had it before that damn kid even thought about blackmailing you. The one about the wedding and the armored-car score. ”

“I threw away my notes. I'm done with you. ”

“No, those were
my
notes you threw away, but it doesn't matter. You don't need notes. It'll be a good book. ”

“You don't understand. George Stark is
dead. ”

“You're
the one don't understand,” Stark replied. His voice was soft, deadly, emphatic. “You got a week. And if you haven't got at least thirty pages of manuscript, I'll be coming for you, hoss. Only it won't start with you—that'd be too easy. That'd be
entirely
too easy. I'll take your kids first, and they will die slow. I'll see to it. I know how. They won't know what's happening, only that they're dying in agony. But you'll know, and I'll know, and your wife will know. I'll take her next . . . only before I take her, I'll
take
her. You know what I mean, old boss. And when they're gone, I'll do you, Thad, and you'll die like no man on earth ever died before. ”

He stopped. Thad could hear him panting harshly in his ear, like a dog on a hot day.

“You didn't know about the birds,” Thad said softly. “That much is true, isn't it?”

“Thad, you're not making sense. If you don't start pretty soon, a lot of people are gonna get hurt. Time is runnin out. ”

“Oh, I'm paying attention,” Thad said. “What I'm wondering is how you could have written what you did on Clawson's wall and then on Miriam's
and not know about it. ”

“You better stop talkin trash and start makin sense, my friend,” Stark said, but Thad could sense bewilderment and some rough fear just under the surface of that voice. “There wasn't anything written on their walls. ”

“Oh yes. Yes there was And do you know what, George? I think maybe the reason you don't know about that is because
I
wrote it. I think part of me was
there.
Somehow part of me was there, watching you. I think I'm the only one of us who knows about the sparrows, George. I think maybe
I
wrote it. You want to think about that . . . think about it hard . . . before you start pushing me. ”

“Listen to me,” Stark said with gentle force. “Hear me real good. First your kids . . . then your wife . . . then you. Start another book, Thad. It's the best advice I can give you. Best advice you ever got in y'damn life. Start another book. I'm not dead. ”

A long pause. Then, softly, very deliberately:

“And I don't want to be dead. So you go home and you sharpen y'pencils, and if you need any inspiration, think about how your little babies would look with their faces full of glass.

“There ain't no goddam birds. Just forget about em and start writin. ”

There was a click.

“Fuck you,” Thad whispered into the dead line, and slowly hung up the phone.

The situation would have resolved itself in some way or other no matter what happened—Thad was sure of that. George Stark wasn't simply going to go away. But Thad came to feel, and not without justification, that Wendy's tumble from the stairs two days after Stark called him at Dave's Market set just what course the situation would take for good and all.

The most important result was that it finally showed him a course of action. He had spent those two days in a sort of breathless lull. He found it difficult to follow even the most simple-minded TV program, impossible to read, and the idea of writing seemed roughly akin to the idea of faster-than-light travel. Mostly he wandered from one room to the next, sitting for a few moments, and then moving on again. He got under Liz's feet and on her nerves. She wasn't sharp with him about it, although he guessed she had to bite her tongue on more than one occasion to keep from giving him the verbal equivalent of a paper-cut.

Twice he set out to tell her about the second call from Stark, the one where foxy George had told him exactly what was on his mind, secure in the knowledge that the line wasn't tapped and they were speaking privately. On both occasions he had stopped, aware that he could do nothing but upset her more.

And twice he had found himself up in his study, actually holding one of those damned Berol pencils he had promised never to use again and looking at a fresh, cellophane-wrapped pile of the notebooks Stark had used to write his novels.

And that was true. Thad even had a title, a good one:
Steel Machine
. Something else was true, too: part of him really wanted to write it. That itch was there, like that one place on your back you can't quite reach when you need to scratch.

Oh yes. George would be
happy
to scratch it for him. But something would happen to him, because things had changed now, hadn't they? What, exactly, would that thing be? He didn't know, perhaps
couldn't
know, but a frightening image kept recurring to him. It was from that charming, racist children's tale of yore,
Little Black Sambo.
When Black Sambo climbed the tree and the tigers couldn't get him, they became so angry that they bit each other's tails and raced faster and faster around the tree until they turned into butter. Sambo gathered the butter up in a crock and took it home to his mother.

George the alchemist,
Thad had mused, sitting in his study and tapping an unsharpened Berol Black Beauty against the edge of the desk.
Straw into gold. Tigers into butter.
Books into best-sellers.
And Thad into
. . .
what?

He didn't know. He was
afraid
to know. But
he
would be gone,
Thad
would be gone, he was sure of that. There might be somebody living here who
looked
like him, but behind that Thad Beaumont face there would be another mind. A sick, brilliant mind.

He thought the new Thad Beaumont would be a good deal less clumsy . . . and a good deal more dangerous.

Liz and the babies?

Would Stark leave them alone if he did make it into the driver's seat?

Not him.

He had considered running, as well. Packing Liz and the twins into the Suburban and just going. But what good would that do? What good when Foxy Old George could look out through Dumb Old Thad's eyes? It wouldn't matter if they ran to the end of the earth; they would get there, look around, and see George Stark mushing after them behind a team of huskies, his straight-razor in his hand.

He considered and, even more rapidly and decisively, dismissed the idea of calling Alan Pangborn. Alan had told them where Dr. Pritchard was, and his decision not to try to get a message through to the neurosurgeon—to wait until Pritchard and his wife returned from their camping trip—told Thad all he needed to know about what Alan believed . . . and, more important, what he did not believe. If he told Alan about the call he'd received in Dave's, Alan would think he was making it up. Even if Rosalie confirmed the fact that he had received a call from
someone
at the market, Alan would go on not believing. He and all the other police officers who had invited themselves to this particular party had a big investment in not believing.

So the days passed slowly, and they were a kind of white time. Just after noon on the second day, Thad jotted
I feel as if I'm in a mental version of the horse latitudes
in his journal. It was the only entry he had made in a week, and he began to wonder if he would ever make another one. His new novel,
The Golden Dog,
was sitting dead in the water. That, he supposed, went almost without saying. It was very hard to make up stories when you were afraid a bad man—a
very
bad man—was going to show up and slaughter your whole family before starting in on you.

The only time he could recall being at such a loss with himself had been in the weeks after he had quit drinking—after he'd pulled the plug on the booze-bath he'd wallowed in following Liz's miscarriage and before Stark appeared. Then, as now, there had been the feeling that there was a problem, but it was as unapproachable as one of those water-mirages you see at the end of a flat stretch of highway on a hot afternoon. The harder be ran toward the problem, wanting to attack it with both hands, dismantle it, destroy it, the faster it receded, until he was finally left, panting and breathless, with that bogus ripple of water still mocking him at the horizon.

These nights he slept badly, and dreamed George Stark was showing him his own deserted house, a house where things exploded when he touched them and where, in the last room, the corpses of his wife and Frederick Clawson were waiting. At the moment he got there, all the birds would begin to fly, exploding upward from trees and telephone lines and electricity poles, thousands of them, millions of them, so many that they blotted out the sun.

Until Wendy fell on the stairs, he felt very much like fool's stuffing himself, just waiting for the right murderous somebody to come along, tuck a napkin into his collar, pick up his fork, and begin to eat.

The twins had been crawling for some time, and for the last month or so they had been pulling themselves up to a standing position with the aid of the nearest stable (or, in some cases, unstable) object—a chair-leg was good, as was the coffee-table, but even an empty cardboard carton would serve, at least until the twin in question put too much weight on it and it crumpled inward or turned turtle. Babies are capable of getting themselves into divine messes at any age, but at the age of eight months, when crawling has served its purpose and walking has not quite been learned, they are clearly in the Golden Age of Mess-Making.

Liz had set them out on the floor to play in a bright patch of sun around quarter of five in the afternoon. After ten minutes or so of confident crawling and shaky standing (the latter accompanied by lusty crows of accomplishment to their parents and to each other), William pulled himself up on the edge of the coffee-table. He glanced around and made several imperious gestures with his right arm. These gestures reminded Thad of old newsfilm showing
Il Duce
addressing his constituency from his balcony. Then William seized his mother's teacup and managed to pour the lees all over himself before toppling backward onto his bottom. The tea was fortunately cold, but William held onto the cup and managed to rap it against his mouth smartly enough to make his lower lip bleed a little. He began to wail. Wendy promptly joined in.

Liz picked him up, examined him, rolled her eyes at Thad, and took him upstairs to soothe him and then clean him up. “Keep an eye on the princess,” she said as she went.

“I will,” Thad said, but he had discovered and would shortly rediscover that, in the Golden Age of Mess-Making, such promises often amount to little. William had managed to snatch Liz's teacup from under her very nose, and Thad saw that Wendy was going to fall from the third stair-riser just a moment too late to save her the tumble.

He had been looking at a news magazine—not reading it but thumbing idly through it, glancing every now and then at a picture. When he was finished, he went over to the large knitting basket by the fireplace which served as a sloppy sort of magazine-rack to put it back and get another. Wendy was crawling across the floor, her tears forgotten before they were entirely dry on her chubby cheeks. She was making the breathy little
rum-rum-rum
sound both of them uttered when crawling, a sound that sometimes made Thad wonder if they associated all movement with the cars and trucks they saw on TV. He squatted, put the magazine on top of the pile in the basket, and thumbed through the others, finally selecting a month-old
Harper's
for no particular reason. It occurred to him that he was behaving quite a bit like a man in a dentist's office waiting for a tooth extraction.