The Dark Half (46 page)

It was the kind of
déjà vu
he could have done without.

The second time he got it right and stood there with the handset pressed so tightly against his ear that it hurt. He tried consciously to relax his stance. He mustn't let Harrison and Manchester know something was wrong—above all else, he must not do that. But he couldn't seem to unlock his muscles.

Stark picked up the telephone on the first ring. “Thad?”

“What have you done to them?” Like spitting out dry balls of lint. And in the background he could hear both twins howling their heads off. Thad found their cries strangely comforting. They were not the hoarse whoops that Wendy had made when she tumbled down the stairs; they were bewildered cries, angry cries, perhaps, but not
hurt
cries.

Liz, though—where was Liz?

“Not a thing,” Stark replied, “as you can hear for yourself. I haven't harmed a hair of their precious little heads. Yet. ”

“Liz,” Thad said. He was suddenly overcome with lonely terror. It was like being immersed in a long, cold comber of surf.

“What about her?” The teasing tone was grotesque, insupportable.

“Put her on!” Thad barked. “If you expect me to ever write another goddam word under your name,
you
put her on!”
And there was a part of his mind, apparently unmoved by even such an extreme of terror and surprise as this, which cautioned:
Watch your face, Thad. You're only three-quarters turned away from the cops A man doesn't scream into the telephone when he's phoning home to ask his wife if she's got enough eggs.

“Thad! Thad, old hoss!” Stark sounded injured, but Thad knew with horrible and maddening certainty that the son of a bitch was grinning. “You got one bell of a bad opinion of me, buddy-roo. I mean it's
low
, son! Cool your jets, here she is. ”

“Thad? Thad, are you there?” She sounded harried and afraid, but not panicked. Not quite.

“Yes. Honey, are you okay? Are the kids?”

“Yes, we're okay. We . . .” The last word trailed off a bit. Thad could hear the bastard telling her something, but not what it was. She said yes, okay, and was back on the phone. Now she sounded dose to tears. “Thad, you've got to do what he wants. ”

“Yes. I know that. ”

“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.

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.

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-paying 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.