The Dark Half Page 17

  Across from him, Liz was growing steadily whiter. Don't let her faint, Thad wished or prayed. Please don't let her faint now.

  "She was screaming. Then the line went dead. I think he cut it or pulled it out of the wall." Except that was bullshit. He didn't think anything. He knew. The line had been cut, all right. With a straight-razor. "I tried to get her again, but--"

  "What's her address?"

  Pangborn's voice was still crisp, still pleasant, still calm. But for the bright line of urgency and command running through it, he might have simply been batting the breeze with an old friend. It was right to call him, Thad thought. Thank God for people who know what they are doing, or at least believe they do. Thank God for people who behave like characters in pop novels. If I had to deal with a Saul Bellow person here, I believe I would lose my mind.

  Thad looked below Miriam's name in Liz's book. "Honey, is this a three or an eight?"

  "Eight," she said in a distant voice.

  "Good. Sit in the chair again. Put your head in your lap. "

  "Mr. Beaumont? Thad?"

  "I'm sorry. My wife is very upset. She looks faint. "

  "I'm not surprised. You're both upset. It's an upsetting situation. But you're doing well Just keep it together, Thad. "

  "Yes." He realized dismally that if Liz fainted, he would have to leave her lying on the floor and plug along until Pangborn had enough information to make a move. Please don't faint, he thought again, and looked back at Liz's address book. "Her address is 109 West 84th Street. "

  "Phone number?"

  "I tried to tell you--her phone doesn't "

  "I need the number just the same, Thad. "

  "Yes. Of course you do." Although he didn't have the slightest idea why. "I'm sorry." He recited the number.

  "How long ago was this call?"

  Hours, he thought, and looked at the clock over the mantelpiece. His first thought was that it had stopped. Must have stopped.

  "Thad?"

  "I'm right here," he said in a calm voice which seemed to be coming from someone else. "It was approximately six minutes ago. That's when my communication with her ended. Was broken off. "

  "Okay, not much time lost. If you'd called N. Y. P. D., they might have had you on hold three times that long. I'll get back to you as quick as I can, Thad. "

  "Rick," he said. "Tell the police when you talk to them that her ex can't know yet. If the guy's . . . you know, done something to Miriam, Rick will be next on his list. "

  "You're pretty sure this is the same guy who did Homer and Clawson, aren't you?"

  "I am positive." And the words were out and flying down the wire before he could be sure he even wanted to say them: "I think I know who it is. "

  After the briefest hesitation, Pangborn said: "Okay. Stay by the phone. I'll want to talk to you about this when there's time." He was gone.

  Thad looked over at Liz and saw she had slumped sideways in the chair. Her eyes were large and glassy. He got up and went to her quickly, straightened her, tapped her cheeks lightly.

  "Which one is it?" she asked him thickly from the gray world of not-quite-consciousness. "Is it Stark or Alexis Machine? Which one, Thad?"

  And after a very long time he said, "I don't think there's any difference. I'll make tea, Liz. "

  3

  He was sure they would talk about it. How could they avoid it? But they didn't. For a long time they only sat, looking at each other over the rims of their mugs, and waited for Alan to call back. And as the endless minutes dragged by, it began to seem right to Thad that they not talk--not until Alan called back and told them whether Miriam was dead or alive.

  Suppose, he thought, watching her bring her mug of tea to her mouth with both hands and sipping at his own, suppose we were sitting here one night, with books in our hands (we'd look, to an outsider, as if we were reading, and we might be, a little, but what we'd really be doing is savoring the silence as if it were some particularly fine wine, the way only parents of very young children can savor it, because they have so little of it), and further suppose that while we were doing that, a meteorite crashed through the roof and landed, smoking and glowing, on the living-room floor. Would one of us go into the kitchen and fill up the floor-bucket with water, douse it before it could light up the carpet, and then just go on reading? No--we'd talk about it. We'd have to. The way we have to talk about this.

  Perhaps they would begin after Alan called back. Perhaps they would even talk through him, Liz listening carefully as Alan asked questions and Thad answered them. Yes--that might be how their own talking would start. Because it seemed to Thad that Alan was the catalyst. In a weird way it seemed to Thad that Alan was the one who had gotten this thing started, even though the Sheriff had only been responding to what Stark had already done.

  In the meantime, they sat and waited.

  He felt an urge to try Miriam's number again, but didn't dare--Alan might pick that very moment to call back, and would find the Beaumont number busy. He found himself again wishing, in an aimless sort of way, that they had a second line. Well, he thought, wish in one hand, spit in the other.

  Reason and rationality told him that Stark could not be out there, ramming around like some weird cancer in human form, killing people. As the country rube in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer was wont to say, it was perfectly unpossible, Diggory.

  He was, though. Thad knew he was, and Liz knew it, too. He wondered if Alan would also know when he told him. You'd think not; you'd expect the guy to simply send for those fine young men in their clean white coats. Because George Stark was not real, and neither was Alexis Machine, that fiction within a fiction. Neither of them had ever existed, any more than George Eliot had ever existed, or Mark Twain, or Lewis Carroll, or Tucker Coe, or Edgar Box. Pseudonyms were only a higher form of fictional character.

  Yet Thad found it difficult to believe Alan Pangborn would not believe, even if he did not want to at first. Thad himself did not want to, yet found himself helpless to do anything else. It was, if you could pardon the expression, inexorably plausible.

  "Why doesn't he call?" Liz asked restlessly.

  "It's only been five minutes, babe. "

  "Closer to ten. "

  He resisted an urge to snap at her--this wasn't the Bonus Round in a TV game-show, Alan would not be awarded extra points and valuable prizes for calling back before nine o'clock.

  There was no Stark, part of his mind continued to insist upon insisting. The voice was rational but oddly powerless, seeming to repeat this screed not out of any real conviction but only by rote, like a parrot trained to say Pretty boy! or Polly wants a cracker! Yet it was true, wasn't it? Was he supposed to believe Stark had come BACK FROM THE GRAVE. like a monster in a horror movie? That would be a neat trick, since the man--or un-man--had never been buried, his marker only a papier-mache headstone set up on the surface of an empty cemetery plot, as fictional as the rest of him--

  Anyhow, that brings me to the last point. . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it. . . What's your shoe-size, Mr. Beaumont?

  Thad had been slouched in his chair, crazily close to dozing in spite of everything. Now he sat up so suddenly he almost spilled his tea. Footprints. Pangborn had said something about--

  What footprints are these?

  Doesn't matter. We don't even have photos. We've got almost everything on the table . . .

  "Thad? What is it?" Liz asked.

  What footprints? Where? In Castle Rock, of course, or Alan wouldn't have known about them. Had they perhaps been in Homeland Cemetery, where the neurasthenic lady photographer had shot the picture be and Liz had found so amusing?

  "Not a very nice guy," he muttered.

  "Thad?"

  Then the phone rang, and both of them spilled their tea.

  4

  Thad's hand dived for the receiver . . . then paused for a moment, floating just above it.

  What if it's him?

  I'm not done wi
th you, Thad. You don't want to fuck with me, because when you fuck with me, you're fucking with the best.

  He made his hand go down, dose around the telephone, and bring it to his ear. "Hello?"

  "Thad?" It was Alan Pangborn's voice. Suddenly Thad felt very limp, as if his body had been held together with stiff little wires which had just been removed.

  "Yes," he said. The word came out sibilant, in a kind of sigh. He drew in another breath. "Is Miriam all right?"

  "I don't know," Alan said. "I've given the N. Y. P. D. her address. We should hear quite soon, although I want. to caution you that fifteen minutes or half an hour may not seem like a quite soon to you and your wife this evening. "

  "No. It won't. "

  "Is she all right?" Liz was asking, and Thad covered the phone mouthpiece long enough to tell her that Pangborn didn't know yet. Liz nodded and settled back, still too white but seeming calmer and more in control than before. At least people were doing things now, and it wasn't solely their responsibility anymore.

  "They also got Mr. Cowley's address from the telephone company--"

  "Hey! they won't--"

  "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 fingerprin
ts 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.