The Dark Half (58 page)

What he saw almost made him wish he had been born blind.

“I guess they'll never want me on the cover of
GQ
, huh?” Stark asked. He was grinning. The grin showed more of his teeth and gums (and the empty holes where other teeth had been) than even the widest grin should have done. His face was covered with sores and the skin seemed to be sloughing off the underlying tissue. But that wasn't the whole trouble—that wasn't what made Alan's belly crawl with horror and revulsion. Something seemed to be wrong with the underlying structure of the man's face. It was as if he were not simply decaying, but
mutating
in some horrible way.

He knew who the man with the gun was, all the same.

The hair, lifeless as an old wig glued to the straw bead of a scarecrow, was blonde. The shoulders were almost as broad as those of a football player with his pads on. He stood with a kind of arrogant, light-footed grace even though he was not moving, and he looked at Alan with good humor.

It was the man who couldn't exist, who never
had
existed.

It was Mr. George Stark, that high-toned son of a bitch from Oxford, Mississippi.

It was all true.

“Welcome to the carnival, old boss,” Stark said mildly. “You move pretty good for such a big man. I almost missed you at first, and I been lookin for you. Let's go on down to the house. I want to introduce you to the little woman. And if you make a single wrong move, you'll be dead, and so will she, and so will those cute little kids. I have nothing whatever in the wide world to lose. Do you believe that?”

Stark grinned at him out of his decaying, horribly wrong face. The crickets went on singing in the grass. Out on the lake, a loon lifted its sweet, piercing cry into the air. Alan wished with all his heart that he was that bird, because when he looked into Stark's staring eyeballs he saw only one thing in them other than death . . . and that one thing was nothing at all.

He realized with sudden, perfect clarity that he was never going to see his wife and sons again.

“I believe it,” he said.

“Then drop your gun in the puckies and let's go. ”

Alan did as he was told. Stark followed behind him, and they descended to the road. They crossed it and then walked down the slope of the Beaumonts' driveway toward the house. It jutted out of the hillside on heavy wooden pilings, almost like a beach house in Malibu. So far as Alan could see, there were no sparrows around it. None at all.

The Toronado was parked by the door, a black and gleaming tarantula in the late afternoon sun. It looked like a bullet. Alan read the bumper sticker with a mild sense of wonder. All of his emotions felt oddly muted, oddly mild, as if this were a dream from which he would soon wake up.

You don't want to think like that,
he warned himself.
Thinking like that will get you killed.

That was almost funny, because he was a dead man already, wasn't he? There he had been, creeping up on the Beaumont driveway, meaning to sneak across the road like Tonto, take-um good look round, get-um idea how things are, Kemo Sabe . . . and Stark had simply put a pistol in his ear and told him to drop his gun and there went the ballgame.

“You like my wheels?” Stark asked.

“Right now I think every police officer in Maine must like your wheels,” Alan said, “because they're all looking for them. ”

Stark gave voice to a jolly laugh. “Now why don't I believe that?” The barrel of his gun prodded Alan in the small of the back. “Get on inside, my good old buddy. We're just waiting for Thad. When Thad gets here, I think well be ready ready Teddy to rock and roll. ”

Alan looked around at Stark's free hand and saw an extremely odd thing: there appeared to be no lines on the palm of that hand. No lines at all.

“Alan!” Liz cried. “Are you all right?”

“Well,” Alan said, “if it's possible for a man to feel like an utter horse's ass and still be all right, I guess I am. ”

“You couldn't have been expected to believe,” Stark said mildly. He pointed to the scissors he had removed from her panties. He had put them on one of the night-tables which flanked the big double bed, out of the twins' reach. “Cut her legs free, Officer Alan. No need to bother with her wrists; looks like she's almost got those already. Or are you Chief Alan?”

“Sheriff Alan,” he said, and thought:
He knows that.
He knows ME—Sheriff Alan Pangborn of Castle County
—
because Thad knows me. But. even when he's got the upper hand he doesn't give away everything he knows.
He's as sly as a weasel who's made a career out of
henhouses.

And for the second time a bleak certainty of his own approaching death filled him. He tried to think of the sparrows, because the sparrows were the one element of this nightmare with which he did not believe George Stark was familiar. Then he thought better of it. The man was too sharp. If he allowed himself hope, Stark would see it in his eyes . . . and wonder what it meant.

Alan got the scissors and cut Liz Beaumont's legs free of the tape even as she freed one hand and began to unwrap the tape from her wrists.

“Are you going to hurt me?” she asked Stark apprehensively. She held her hands up, as if the red marks the tape had left on her wrists would somehow dissuade him from doing that.

“No,” he said, smiling a little. “Can't blame you for doin what comes naturally, can I, darlin Beth?”

She gave him a revolted, frightened look at that and then corralled the twins. She asked Stark if she could take them out in the kitchen and give them something to eat. They had slept until Stark had parked the Clarks' stolen Volvo at the rest area, and were now lively and full of fun.

“You bet,” Stark said. He seemed to be in a cheerful, upbeat mood . . . but he was holding the gun in one hand and his eyes moved ceaselessly back and forth between Liz and Alan. “Why don't we all go out? I want to talk to the Sheriff, here. ”

They trooped out to the kitchen, and Liz began to put together a meal for the twins. Alan watched the twins while she did it. They were cute kids—as cute as a pair of bunnies, and looking at them reminded him of a time when he and Annie had been much younger, a time when Toby, now a senior in high school, had been in diapers and Todd had still been years away.

They crawled happily hither and yon, and every now and then he had to redirect one of them before he or she could pull a chair over or bump his/her head on the underside of the Formica table in the kitchen galley.

Stark talked to him while he babysat.

“You think I'm going to kill you,” he said. “No need to deny it, Sheriff; I can see it in your eyes, and it is a look I'm familiar with. I could lie and say it's not true, but I think you'd doubt me. You have a certain amount of experience in these matters yourself, isn't that right?”

“I suppose,” Alan said. “But something like this is a little bit . . . well, outside the normal run of police business. ”

Stark threw back his head and laughed. The twins looked toward the sound, and laughed along with him. Alan glanced at Liz and saw terror and hate on her face. And there was something else there as well, wasn't there? Yes. Alan thought it was jealousy. He wondered idly if there was something else George Stark didn't know. He wondered if Stark had any idea of how dangerous this woman could be to him.

“You got
that
right!” Stark said, stiff chuckling. Then he grew serious. He leaned toward Alan, and Alan could smell the cheesy odor of his decomposing flesh. “But it doesn't
have
to go that way, Sheriff. The odds are against you walking out of this affair alive, I will freely grant you that, but the possibility exists. I have something to do here. A bit of writing. Thad is going to help me—he's going to prime the pump, you might say. I think we'll probably work through the night, he and I, but by the time the sun comes up tomorrow morning, I should pretty much have my house in order. ”

“He wants Thad to teach him bow to write on his own,” Liz said from the galley. “He says they're going to collaborate on a book. ”

“That's not quite right,” Stark said. He glanced at her for a moment, a ripple of annoyance passing over the previously unbroken surface of his good temper. “And he owes me, you know. Maybe he knew how to write before I showed up, but
I
was the one who taught
him
how to write stuff people would want to read. And what good is it, writing a thing, if no one wants to read it?”

“No—you wouldn't understand that, would you?” Liz asked.

“What I want from him,” Stark told Alan, “is a kind of transfusion. I seem to have some sort of . . . of gland that's quit on me.
Temporarily
quit. I think Thad knows how to make that gland work. He ought to, because he sort of cloned mine from his own, if you see what I mean. I guess you could say he built most of my equipment. ”

Oh no, my friend,
Alan thought.
That's not right. You might not know it, but it's not. You did it together, you two, because you were there all along. And you have been terribly persistent. Thad tried to put an end to you before he was born and couldn't quite do it. Then, eleven years later, Dr. Pritchard tried his hand, and that worked, but only for awhile. Finally, Thad invited you back. He did it, but he didn't know what he was doing . . . because he didn't know about YOU. Pritchard never told him. And you came, didn't you? You are the ghost of his dead brother . . . but you're both much more and much less than that.

Alan caught Wendy, who was by the fireplace, before she could topple over backward into the woodbox.

Stark looked at William and Wendy, then back at Alan. “Thad and I come from a long history of twins, you know. And, of course, I came into being following the deaths of the twins who would have been these two kids' older brothers or sisters. Call it some sort of transcendental balancing act, if you like. ”

“I caff it crazy,” Alan said.

Stark laughed. “Actually, so do I. But it happened. The word became flesh, you might say. How it happened doem't much matter—what matters is that I'm here. ”

You're wrong,
Alan thought.
How it happened may be
all that DOES matter now. To us, if not to you. . . because it may be all that can save us.

“Once things got to a certain point, I created
myself, ”
Stark went on. “And it really isn't so surprising that I've been havin problems with my writing, is it? Creating one's own self . . . that takes a lot of energy. You don't think this sort of thing happens every day, do you?”

“God forbid,” Liz said.

That was either a direct hit or dose to it. Stark's head whipped toward her with the speed of a striking snake, and this time the annoyance was more than just a ripple. “I think maybe you better just shut your pie-hole, Beth,” he said softly, “before you cause trouble for someone who can't speak for himself. Or herself. ”

Liz looked down at the pot on the stove. Alan thought she bad paled.

“Bring them over, Alan, would you?” she asked quietly. “This is ready. ”

She took Wendy on her lap to feed, and Alan took William. It was amazing how fast the technique came back, he thought as he fed the chubby little boy. Pop the spoon in, tilt it, then give it that quick but gentle flick up the chin to the lower lip when you take it out again, preventing as many drips and drools as possible. Will kept reaching for the spoon, apparently feeling he was quite old enough and experienced enough to drive it himself, thank you. Alan discouraged him gently, and the boy settled down to serious eating soon enough.

“The fact is I can use yon,” Stark told him. He was leaning against the kitchen counter and running the gunsight of his pistol idly up and down the front of his quilted vest. It made a harsh whispering sound. “Did the State Police call you, tell you to come down and check this place out? That why you're here?”

Alan debated the pros and cons of lying and decided it would be safer to tell the truth, mostly because he did not doubt that this man—if he was a man—had a very efficient built-in lie detector.

“Not exactly,” he said, and told Stark about Fuzzy Martin's call.

Stark was nodding before he had finished. “I
thought
I saw a glint in the window of that farmhouse,” he said, and chuckled. His good humor seemed quite restored. “Well, well! Country folks can't help bein a little nosy, can they, Sheriff Alan? They got so little to do it'd be a wonder if they weren't! So what did
you
do when you hung up?”

Alan told him that, too, and now he did not lie because be believed Stark knew what he had done—the simple fact that he was here alone answered most questions. Alan thought that what Stark really wanted to know was if he was stupid enough to try an untruth.

When he had finished, Stark said: “Okay, that's good. That improves your chances of livin to fight another day all to bell, Sheriff Alan. Now you listen to me, and I'll tell you exactly what we're goin to do once these babies are fed up. ”

“You sure you know what to say?” Stark asked again. They were standing by the telephone in the front hall, the only working telephone left in the house.

“Yes. ”

“And you're not going to try leaving any little secret messages for your dispatcher to pick up?”

“No. ”

“That's good,” Stark said. “That's good because this would be just an
awful
time to forget you're a grown-up and start playing Pirates' Cave or Robbers' Roost. Someone would surely get hurt. ”