The Dark Half Page 21

  "And maybe not just you. "

  Liz chimed in again, speaking with the composed and pleasant voice of a woman addressing a gardening club--perhaps on the subject of when to plant corn, or how to tell when your tomatoes will be ready for harvesting. "He was an ugly, dangerous man when he was . . . living with us . . . and he is an ugly, dangerous man now. The evidence suggests that if anything has happened, he's gotten much worse. He's insane, of course, but by his own lights what he's doing is a perfectly reasonable thing: tracking down the people who conspired to kill him and wiping them out, one after another. "

  "Are you done?"

  She looked at Alan, startled, as if his voice had brought her out of a deep private reverie. "What?"

  "I asked if you were done. You wanted to have your say, and I want to make sure you got it. "

  Her calm broke. She fetched a deep sigh and ran her hands distractedly through her hair. "You don't believe it, do you? Not a single word of it. "

  "Liz," Alan said, "this is just . . . nuts. I'm sorry to use a word like that, but considering the circumstances, I'd say it's the kindest one available. There will be other cops here soon enough. FBI, I imagine--this man can now be considered an interstate fugitive, and that'll bring them into it. If you tell them this story complete with the blackouts and the ghost-writing, you'll hear plenty of less kind ones. If you told me these people had been murdered by a ghost, I wouldn't believe you, either." Thad stirred, but Alan held a hand up and he subsided, at least for the moment. "But I could have come closer to believing a ghost story than this. We're not just talking about a ghost, we're talking about a man who never was. "

  "How do you explain my description?" Thad asked suddenly. "What I gave you was my private picture of what George Stark looked--looks--like. Some of it is in the author-profile sheet Darwin Press has in its files. Some was just stuff I had in my head. I never sat down and deliberately visualized the guy, you know--just formed a kind of mental picture over a period of years, the way you form a mental picture of the disc jockey you listen to every morning on your way to work. But if you ever happen to meet the disc jockey, it turns out you had it all wrong, in most cases. It appears I had it mostly right. How do you explain that?"

  "I can't," Alan said. "Unless, of course, you're lying about where the description came from. "

  "You know I'm not. "

  "Don't assume that," Alan said. He rose, walked over to the fireplace, and jabbed restlessly with the poker at the birch logs piled there. "Not every lie springs from a conscious decision. If a man has persuaded himself he's telling the truth, he can even pass a lie-detector test with flying colors. Ted Bundy did it. "

  "Come on," Thad snapped. "Stop straining so goddam hard. This is like the fingerprint business all over again. The only difference is that this time I can't just trot out a bunch of corroboration. What about the fingerprints, by the way? When you add that in, doesn't it at least suggest that we're telling the truth?"

  Alan turned around. He was suddenly angry at Thad . . . at both of them. He felt as if he were being relentlessly driven into a corner, and they had no goddam right to make him feel that way. It was like being the only person at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society who believes the earth is round.

  "I can't explain any of that stuff . . . yet," he said. "But in the meantime, maybe you'd like to tell me exactly where this guy--the real one--came from, Thad. Did you just sort of give birth to him one night? Did he pop out of a damn sparrow's egg? Did you look like him while you were writing the books that eventually appeared under his name? Exactly how did it go?"

  "I don't know how he came to be," Thad said wearily.

  "Don't you think I'd tell you if I could? So far as I know, or can remember, I was me when I wrote Machine's Way and Oxford Blues and Sharkmeat Pie and Riding to Babylon. I don't have the slightest idea when he became a . . . a separate person. He seemed real to me when I was writing as him, but only in the way all the stories I write seem real to me when I'm writing them. Which is to say, I take them seriously but I don't believe them . . . except I do . . . then . . . "

  He paused and barked a bewildered little laugh.

  "All the times I've talked about writing," he said. "Hundreds of lectures, thousands of classes, and I don't believe I ever said a single word about a fiction-writer's grasp of the twin realities that exist for him--the one in the real world and the one in the manuscript world. I don't think I ever even thought about it. And now I realize . . . well . . . I don't even seem to know how to think about it. "

  "It doesn't matter," Liz said. "He didn't have to be a separate person until Thad tried to kill him. "

  Alan turned toward her. "Well, Liz, you know Thad better than anyone else. Did he change from Dr. Beaumont into Mr. Stark when he was working on the crime stories? Did he slap you around? Did he threaten people with a straight-razor at parties?"

  "Sarcasm isn't going to make this any easier to discuss," she said, looking at him steadily.

  He threw up his hands in exasperation--although he wasn't sure if it was them, himself, or all three of them he was exasperated with. "I'm not being sarcastic, I'm trying to use a little verbal shock-treatment to make you see bow crazy you both sound! You are talking about a goddam pen name coming to life! If you tell the FBI even half of this stuff, they'll be looking up the State of Maine Involuntary Committal laws!"

  "The answer to your question is no," Liz said. "He didn't beat me up or wave a straight-razor around at cocktail parties. But when he was writing as George Stark--and, in particular, when he was writing about Alexis Machine--Thad wasn't the same. When he--opened the door is maybe the best way to put it--when he did that and invited Stark in, he'd become distant. Not cold, not even cool, just distant. He was less interested in going out, in seeing people. He'd sometimes blow off faculty meetings, even student appointments . . . although that was fairly rare. He'd go to bed later at night, and sometimes he'd still be tossing and turning an hour after he did come to bed. When he fell asleep he'd twitch and mutter a lot, as if he were having bad dreams. I asked him on a few occasions if that was the case and he'd say he felt headachy and unrested, but if he'd been having bad dreams, he couldn't remember what they were.

  "There was no big personality change . . . but he wasn't the same. My husband quit drinking alcohol some time ago, Alan. He doesn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous or anything, but he quit. With one exception. When one of the Stark novels was finished, he'd get drunk. Then it was as if he were blowing it all off, saying to himself, 'The son of a bitch is gone again. At least for awhile, he's gone again. George has returned to his farm in Mississippi. Hooray. ' "

  "She's got it right," Thad said. "Hooray--that's just what it felt like. Let me sum up what we have if we leave the blackouts and the automatic writing out of the picture entirely. The man you're looking for is killing people I know, people who were, with the exception of Homer Gamache, responsible for 'executing' George Stark . . . in conspiracy with me, of course. He's got my blood-type, which isn't one of the really rare ones, but is still one that only about six people in every hundred have. He conforms to the description I gave you, which was a distillation of my own image of what George Stark would look like if he existed. He smokes the cigarettes I used to smoke. Last, and most interesting, he appears to have fingerprints which are identical to mine. Maybe six in every hundred have type-A blood with a negative Rh factor, but so far as we know, nobody else in this whole green world has my fingerprints. Despite all of this, you refuse to even consider my assertion that Stark is somehow alive. Now, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, you tell me: who is the one who's operating in a fog, so to speak?"

  Alan felt the bedrock which he had once believed sure and solid shift a little. It really wasn't possible, was it? But . . . if he did nothing else today, he would have to speak to Thad's doctor and start chasing down the medical history. It occurred to him that it would be really wonderful to discover there hadn't been any brain tumor, that Thad had either lied about it . . .
or hallucinated it. If he could prove the man was a psycho, it would all be so much more comfortable. Maybe--

  Maybe shit. There was no George Stark, there never had been any George Stark. He might not be an FBI whiz-kid, but that didn't mean he was gullible enough to fall for that. They might collar the crazy bastard in New York City, going after Cowley, probably would, in fact, but if not, the psycho might decide to vacation in Maine this summer. If be did come back, Alan wanted a shot at him. He didn't think swallowing any of this Twilight Zone shit would help him if the chance came up. And he didn't want to waste any more time talking about it now.

  "Time will tell, I suppose," he said vaguely. "For now, I'd advise you two to stick to the line you took with me last night--this is a guy who thinks he's George Stark, and he's crazy enough to have started at the logical place--logical for a crazyman, anyway--the place where Stark was officially buried. "

  "If you don't at least allow the idea some mental house-room, you're going to be in shit up to your armpits," Thad said. "This guy--Alan, you can't reason with him, you can't plead with him. You could beg him for mercy--if he gave you the time--but it wouldn't do any good. If you ever get close to him with your guard down, he will make sharkmeat pie out of you. "

  "I'll check with your doctor," Alan said, "and with the doctor who operated on you as a kid. I don't know what good it will do, or what light it might shed on this business, but I'll do it. Otherwise, I guess I'll just have to take my chances. "

  Thad smiled with no humor whatsoever. "From my standpoint, there's a problem with that. My wife and kids and I will be taking our chances right along with you. "

  3

  Fifteen minutes later a trim blue-and-white panel truck pulled into Thad's driveway behind Alan's car. It looked like a telephone van, and that was what it turned out to be, although the words maine state police were written on the side in discreet lower-case letters.

  Two technicians came to the door, introduced themselves, apologized for having taken so long (an apology that was wasted on Thad and Liz, since they hadn't known these guys were coming at all), and asked Thad if he had any problem signing the form one of them carried on a clipboard. He scanned it quickly and saw it empowered them to place recording and traceback equipment on his phone. It did not give them blanket permission to use the transcripts obtained in any court proceeding.

  Thad scratched his signature in the proper place. Both Alan Pangborn and one of the technicians (Thad bemusedly noticed that he had a telephone-tester slung on one side of his belt, a .45 on the other) witnessed it.

  "This traceback stuff really works?" Thad asked several minutes later, after Alan had left for the Orono State Police Barracks. It seemed important to say something; following the return of their document, the technicians had fallen silent.

  "Yeah," one of them answered. He had picked the living-room telephone out of its cradle and was rapidly levering off the handset's plastic inner sleeve. "We can trace a call back to its point of origination anywhere in the world. It's not like the old telephone traces you see in the movies, where you have to keep the caller on the line until the trace is done. As long as no one hangs up the phone on this end"--he waggled the phone, which now looked a little like an android demolished by ray-gun fire in a science fiction epic--"we can trace back to the point of origination. Which more often than not turns out to be a pay telephone in a shopping mall. "

  "You got that right," his partner said. He was doing something to the telephone jack, which he had removed from its baseboard plug. "You got a phone upstairs?"

  "Two of them," Thad said. He was beginning to feel as if someone had pushed him rudely down Alice's rabbit hole. "One in my study and one in the bedroom. "

  "They on a separate line?"

  "No--we just have the one. Where will you put the tape-recorder?"

  "Probably down cellar," the first said absently. He was sticking wires from the telephone into a Lucite block which bristled with spring connectors, and there was a wouldja-mind-lettin-us-do-our-job undertone to his voice.

  Thad put his arm around Liz's waist and guided her away, wondering if there was anyone who could or would understand that not all the tape-recorders and high-tech state-of-the-art Lucite blocks in the world would stop George Stark. Stark was out there, maybe resting up, maybe already on his way.

  And if no one would believe him, just what in the hell was he going to do about it? How in the hell was he supposed to protect his family? Was there a way? He thought deeply, and when thought accomplished nothing, he simply listened to himself. Sometimes--not always, but sometimes--the answer came that way when it would come no other.

  Not this time, though. And he was amused to find himself suddenly, desperately horny. He thought about coaxing Liz upstairs--and then remembered the State Police technicians would shortly be up there, wanting to do more arcane things to his outmoded oneline telephones.

  Can't even get laid, he thought. So what do we do?

  But the answer was simple enough. They waited, that's what they did.

  Nor did they have to wait long for the next horrible tidbit: Stark had gotten Rick Cowley after all--booby-trapped his door somehow after ambushing the technicians who had been doing the same thing to Rick's telephone that the men in the living room were doing to the Beaumonts'. When Rick turned his latchkey, the door simply blew up.

  It was Alan who brought them the news. He had gotten less than three miles down the road toward Orono when word of the explosion came over the radio. He had turned back immediately.

  "You told us Rick was safe," Liz said. Her voice and her eyes were dull. Even her hair seemed to have lost its luster. "You practically guaranteed it. "

  "I was wrong. I'm sorry. "

  Alan felt as deeply shocked as Liz Beaumont looked and sounded, but he was trying hard not to let it show. He glanced at Thad, who was looking back at him with a kind of bright-eyed stillness. A humorless little smile lurked just around the edges of Thad's mouth.

  He knows just what I am thinking. This was probably not true, but it felt true to Alan. Well . . . maybe not EVERYTHING, but some of it. Quite a bit of it, maybe. It could be that I'm doing a shitty job of covering up, but I don't think that's it. I think it's him. I think he sees too much.

  "You made an assumption that turned out to be wrong, that's all," Thad said. "Happens to the best of us. Maybe you ought to go back and think about George Stark a little more. What do you think, Alan?"

  "That you could be right," Alan said, and told himself he was only saying that to soothe both of them. But the face of George Stark, as yet unglimpsed except through Thad Beaumont's description, had begun to peer over his shoulder. He couldn't see it as yet, but he could feel it there, looking.

  "I want to talk with this Dr. Hurd--"

  "Hume," Thad said. "George Hume. "

  "Thanks. I want to talk to him, so I'll be around. If the FBI does show up, would you two like me to drop back later on?"

  "I don't know about Thad, but I'd like that very much," Liz said.

  Thad nodded.

  Alan said, "I'm sorry about this whole thing, but the thing I'm sorriest about is promising you something would be okay when it turned out not to be. "

  "In a situation like this, I guess it's easy to underestimate," Thad said. "I told you the truth--at least, the truth as I understand it--for a simple reason. If it is Stark, I think a lot of people are going to underestimate him before this is over. "

  Alan looked from Thad to Liz and back again. After a long time, during which there was no sound except for Thad's police guard talking together outside the front door (there was another around back), Alan said: "The bitch of it is, you guys really believe this, don't you?"

  Thad nodded. "I do, anyway. "

  "I don't," Liz said, and they both looked at her, startled. "I don't believe. I know. "

  Alan sighed and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. "There's one thing I'd like to know," he said. "If this is what you say it is . . . I d
on't believe it, can't believe it, I suppose you'd say . . . but if it is, what the hell does this guy want? Just revenge?"

  "Not at all," Thad said. "He wants the same thing you or I would want if we were in his position. He wants not to be dead anymore. That's all he wants. Not to be dead anymore. I'm the only one who might be able to make that happen. And if I can't, or won't . . . well . . . he can at least make sure he isn't lonely. "

  Sixteen

  GEORGE STARK CALLING

  1

  Alan had left to talk to Dr. Hume and the FBI agents were just wrapping up their interrogation--if that was the right word for something which seemed so oddly exhausted and desultory--when George Stark rang. The call came less than five minutes after the State Police technicians (who called themselves "wiremen") finally pronounced themselves satisfied with the accessories they had attached to the Beaumont telephones.

  They had been disgusted but apparently not very surprised to find that, beneath the state-of-the-art exterior of the Beaumonts' Merlin phones, they were stuck with the town of Ludlow's horse-and-buggy rotary-dial system.

  "Man, this is hard to believe," the wireman whose name was Wes said (in a tone of voice which suggested he really would have expected nothing else out here in East Overshoe).

  The other wireman, Dave, trudged out to the panel truck to find the proper adapters and any other equipment they might need to put the Beaumonts' telephones in line with law-enforcement as it exists in the latter years of the twentieth century. Wes rolled his eyes and then looked at Thad, as if Thad should have informed him at once that he was still living in the telephone's pioneer era.

  Neither wireman spared so much as a glance for the FBI men who had flown up to Bangor from the Boston branch office and then driven heroically through the dangerous and Ludlow. The FBI men might have existed in an entirely different light-spectrum which State Police wiremen could see no more than infrared or X-rays.