The Dark Half (28 page)

“Liz, I don't think you really mean—”

“
Don't
tell me what I do and do not
mean!”
she said.

Alan blinked. Her voice remained modulated, not loud enough to waken Wendy or cause William to do more than raise his head one final time before lying down on his side and falling asleep beside his sister. Alan had a feeling that, if not for the kids, he
would
have heard a louder voice, though. Maybe even one turned up to full volume.

“Thad has got some things to tell you now. You need to listen to him very carefully, Alan, and you need to try and believe him. Because if you don't, I'm afraid this man—or whatever he is—will go on killing until he's worked all the way to the bottom of his butcher's bill. I have some very personal reasons for not wanting that to happen. You see, I think Thad and I and our babies may well be on that list. ”

“All right.” His own voice was mild, but his thoughts were clicking over at a rapid rate. He made a conscious effort to push frustration, anger, even wonder aside and consider this mad idea as clearly as he could. Not the question of whether it was true or false—it was, of course, impossible even to consider it as true—but the one of just why they were even bothering to tell such a story in the first place. Was it concocted to hide some imagined complicity in the murders? A real one? Was it even possible that they
believed
it? It seemed impossible that such a pair of well-educated and rational—up to now, anyway—people
could
believe it, but it was as it had been on the day he had come to arrest Thad for Homer's murder; they just didn't give off the faint but unmistakable aroma of people who were lying.
Consciously
lying, he amended to himself. “Go on, Thad. ”

“All right,” Thad said. He cleared his throat nervously and got up. His hand went to his breast pocket and he realized with an amusement that was half-bitter what he was doing: reaching for the cigarettes which had not been there for years now. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at Alan Pangborn as he might look at a troubled advisee who had washed up on the mostly friendly shores of Thad's office.

“Something very odd is going on here. No—it's more than odd. It's terrible and it's inexplicable, but it is happening. And it started, I think, when I was just eleven years old. ”

Thad told it all: the childhood headaches, the shrill cries and muddy visions of the sparrows which had heralded the arrival of these headaches, the return of the sparrows. He showed Alan the manuscript page with THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING slashed across it in dark pencil strokes. He told him about the fugue state he had entered at his office yesterday, and what he had written (as well as he could remember it) on the back of the order-form. He explained what had happened to the form, and tried to express the fear and bewilderment which had compelled him to destroy it.

Alan's face remained impassive.

“Besides,” Thad finished, “I know it's Stark. Here.” He made a fist and knocked lightly on his own chest.

Alan said nothing at all for a few moments. He had begun turning his wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand, and this operation seemed to have captured all his attention.

“You've lost weight since you were married,” Liz said quietly. “If you don't have that ring sized, Alan, you'll lose it one day. ”

“I suppose I will.” He raised his head and looked at her. When he spoke, it was as if Thad had left the room on some errand and only the two of them were there. “Your husband took you upstairs to his study and showed you this first message from the spirit world after I left . . . is that correct?”

“The only spirit world I know about for sure is the Agency Liquor Store about a mile down the road,” Liz said evenly, “but
he did
show me the message after you left, yes. ”

“Right
after I left?”

“No—we put the twins to bed, and then, while we were getting ready for bed ourselves, I asked Thad what he was hiding. ”

“Between the time when I left and the time when he told you about the blackouts and the bird-sounds, there were periods when he was out of your sight? Times when he could have gone upstairs and written the phrase I mentioned to you?”

“I don't remember for sure,” she said. “I think we were together all that time, but I can't say absolutely. And it wouldn't matter even if I told you he never left my sight, would it?”

“What do you mean, Liz?”

“I mean you'd then assume I was also lying, wouldn't you?”

Alan sighed deeply. It was the only answer either of them really needed.

“Thad isn't lying about this. ”

Alan nodded his head. “I appreciate your honesty—but since you can't swear he never left you for a couple of minutes, I don't have to accuse you of lying. I'm glad of that. You admit the opportunity may have been there, and I think you'll also admit that the alternative is pretty wild. ”

Thad leaned against the mantel, his eyes shifting back and forth like the eyes of a man watching a tennis match. Sheriff Pangborn was not saying a thing Thad had not foreseen, and he was pointing out the holes in his story a good deal more kindly than he might have done, but Thad found that he was still bitterly disappointed . . . almost heartsick. That premonition that Alan would believe—somehow just instinctively
believe
—had proved as bogus as a bottle of medicine show cure-all.

“Yes, I admit those things,” Liz said evenly.

“As for what Thad claims happened at his office . . . there are no witnesses to either the blackout or to what he claims to have written down. In fact, he didn't mention the incident to you at all until after Ms. Cowley called, did he?”

“No. He did not. ”

“And so . . .” He shrugged.

“I have a question for you, Alan. ”

“All right. ”

“Why would Thad lie? What purpose would it serve?”

“I don't know.” Alan looked at her with complete candor. “He may not know himself.” He glanced briefly at Thad, then returned his eyes to Liz's. “He may not even know he is lying. What I'm saying is pretty flat: this is not the sort of thing any police officer could accept without strong proof. And there is none. ”

“Thad is telling the truth about this. I understand everything you've said, but I want very badly for you to believe he is telling the truth, too. I want that desperately. You see, I
lived
with George Stark. And I know how Thad was about him as time went on. I'll tell you something that wasn't in
People
magazine. Thad started talking about getting rid of Stark two books before the last one—”

“Three,” Thad said quietly from his place by the mantel. His craving for a cigarette had become a dry fever. “I started talking about it after the first one. ”

“Okay, three. The magazine article made it sound as though this was a pretty recent thing, and that just wasn't true. That's the point I'm trying to make. If Frederick Clawson hadn't come along and forced my husband's hand, I think Thad would still be talking about getting rid of him in the same way. The way an alcoholic or drug addict tells his family and his friends that he'll quit tomorrow . . . or the next day . . . or the day after that. ”

“No,” Thad said. “Not exactly like that. Right church but the wrong pew. ”

He paused, frowning, doing more than thinking.
Concentrating
. Alan reluctantly gave up the idea that they were lying, or having him on for some weird reason. They were not spending their efforts in order to convince him, or even themselves, but only to articulate how it had been . . . the way men might try to describe a fire-fight long after it was over.

“Look,” Thad said finally. “Let's drop the subject of the blackouts and the sparrows and the precognitive visions—if that's what they were—for a minute. If you feel you need to, you can talk to my doctor, George Hume, about the physical symptoms. Maybe the head-tests I took yesterday will show something odd when they come back, and even if they don't, the doctor who performed the operation on me when I was a kid may still be alive and able to talk to you about the case. He may know something that could cast some light on this mess. I can't remember his name right off-hand, but I'm sure it's in my medical records. But right now, all of this psychic shit is a side-track. ”

This struck Alan as a very odd thing for Thad to say . . . if he
had
planted the one precognitive note and lied about the other. Someone crazy enough to do such a thing—and crazy enough to forget he'd done it, to actually believe the notes were real manifestations of psychic phenomena—would want to talk about nothing else. Wouldn't he? His head was beginning to ache.

“All right,” he said evenly, “if what you call ‘this psychic shit' is a side-track, then what's the main line?”

“George Stark is the main line,” Thad said, and thought:
The line that goes to Endsville, where all rail service terminates.
“Imagine that some stranger moved into your house. Someone you've always been a little bit frightened of, the way Jim Hawkins was always a little bit frightened of the Old Sea-Dog at the Admiral Benbow—have you read
Treasure Island
, Alan?”

He nodded.

“Well, you know the sort of feeling I'm trying to express, then. You're scared of this guy, and you don't like him at all, but you let him stay. You don't run an inn, like in
Treasure Island,
but maybe you think he's a distant relative of your wife's, or something. Do you follow me?”

Alan nodded.

“And finally one day, after this bad guest has done something like slam the salt-cellar against the wall because it's clogged, you say to your wife, ‘How long is your idiot second cousin going to hang around, anyway?' And she looks at you and says, ‘My second cousin? I thought he was your second cousin!' ”

Alan grunted laughter in spite of himself.

“But do you kick the guy out?” Thad went on. “No. For one thing, he's already been in your house for awhile, and as grotesque as it might sound to someone who's not actually in the situation, it seems like he's got . . . squatter's rights, or something. But that isn't the important thing. ”

Liz had been nodding. Her eyes had the excited, grateful look of a woman who has just been told the word which has been dancing on the tip of her tongue all day long.

“The important thing is how goddamned
scared
of him you are,” she said. “Scared of what he might do if you actually told him, flat out, to take his act and put it on the road. ”

“There you go,” Thad said. “You want to be brave and tell him to leave, and not just because you're afraid he might be dangerous, either. It becomes a matter of self-respect. But . . . you keep putting it off. You find reasons to put it off. Like it's raining out, and he's less apt to raise the roof about going if you show him the door on a sunny day. Or maybe after you've all had a good night's sleep. You think of a thousand reasons to put it off. You find that, if the reasons sound good enough to yourself, you can retain at least
some
of your self-respect, and some is better than none at all. Some is also better than all of it, if having all of it means you wind up hurt, or dead.

“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?”