The Dark Half (44 page)

They left, and Thad opened the file marked HNRS APPS. In his mind's eye he kept seeing Rawlie DeLesseps dropping that quick, unobtrusive wink. And listening to that voice telling him he was over the deadline, that he had crossed to the dark side. The side where the monsters were.

The phone sat there and didn't ring.

Come on
, he thought at it, stacking the Honors folders on the desk beside his University-supplied IBM Selectric.
Come on, come on, here I am, standing right next to a phone with no bug on it, so come on, George, give me a call, give me a ring, give me the scoop.

But the phone only sat there and didn't ring.

He realized he was looking into a file cabinet that wasn't just pruned but entirely empty. In his preoccupation he had pulled
all
the folders, not just the ones belonging to Honors students interested in taking creative writing. Even the Xeroxes of those who wanted to take Transformational Grammar, which was the Gospel according to Noam Chomsky, translated by that Dean of the Dead Pipe, Rawlie DeLesseps.

Thad went to the door and looked out. Harrison and Manchester were standing in the door of the Department common room, drinking coffee. In their ham-sized fists, the mugs looked the size of demitasse cups. Thad raised his hand. Harrison raised his in return and asked him if he would be much longer.

“Five minutes,” Thad said, and both cops nodded.

He went back to his desk, separated the creative writing files from the others, and began to replace the latter in the file drawer, doing it as slowly as possible, giving the phone time to ring. But the phone just went on sitting there. He heard one ring someplace far down the corridor, the sound muffled by a closed door, somehow ghostly in the building's unaccustomed summer silence.
Maybe George got the wrong number,
he thought, and uttered a little laugh. The fact was, George wasn't going to call. The fact was, he, Thad, had been wrong. Apparently George had some other trick up his sleeve. Why should he be surprised? Tricks were George Stark's
spécialité de la maison.
Still, he had been so
sure,
so goddamned sure—

“Thaddeus?”

He jumped, almost spilling the contents of the last half a dozen files onto the floor. When he was sure they weren't going to slip out of his grasp, he turned around. Rawlie DeLesseps was standing just outside the door. His large pipe poked in like a horizontal periscope.

“Sorry,” Thad said. “Yon threw a jump into me, Rawlie. My mind was ten thousand miles away. ”

“Someone calling for you on my phone,” Rawlie said amiably. “Must have gotten the number wrong. Lucky I was in. ”

Thad felt his heart begin to beat slow and hard—it was as if there were a snare-drum inside his chest, and someone had begun to whack it with a great deal of measured energy.

“Yes,” Thad said. “That was very lucky. ”

Rawlie gave him an appraising glance. The blue eyes under his puffy, slightly reddened lids were so alive and inquisitive they were almost rude, and certainly at odds with his cheerful, bumbling, absent-minded-professor manner. “Is everything quite all right, Thaddeus?”

“All right? Why wouldn't everything be all right?”

“I seem to detect the faint but unmistakably ferrous odor of irony, Thad. ”

“You're mistaken. ”

“Am I? Then why do you look like a deer caught in a pair of headlights?”

“Rawlie—”
.

“And the man I just spoke to sounds like the sort of salesman you buy something from on the phone just to make sure he'll never visit your home in person. ”

“It's nothing, Rawlie. ”

“Very well.” Rawlie didn't look convinced.

Thad left his office and headed down the hall toward Rawlie's.

“Where are you off to?” Harrison called after him.

“Rawlie has a call for me in his office,” he explained. “The phone numbers up here are all sequential. The guy must have gotten the numbers bolloxed. ”

“And just happened to get the only other faculty member here today?” Harrison asked skeptically.

Thad shrugged and kept on walking.

Rawlie DeLesseps' office was cluttered, pleasant, and still inhabited by the smell of his pipe—two years' abstinence apparently did not make up for some thirty years of indulgence. It was dominated by a dart-board with a photograph of Ronald Reagan mounted on it. An encyclopedia-sized volume, Franklin Barringer's
Folklore
of
America,
lay open on Rawlie's desk. The telephone was off the hook, lying on a stack of blank blue-books. Looking at the handset, Thad felt the old dread fall over him in its familiar stifling folds. It was like being bundled in a blanket that badly needs to be washed. He turned his head, sure he would see all three of them—Rawlie, Harrison, and Manchester—lined up in the doorway like sparrows on a telephone wire. But the office doorway was empty, and from somewhere down the hall, he could hear the soft rasp of Rawlie s voice. He had buttonholed Thad's guard-dogs. Thad doubted that he had done it by accident.

He picked up the telephone and said, “Hello, George. ”

“You've had your week,” the voice on the other end said. It was Stark's voice, but Thad wondered if the voice-prints would match so exactly now. Stark's voice wasn't the same. It had grown hoarse and rough, like the voice of a man who had spent too much time hollering at some sporting event. “You had your week and you haven't done doodly-squat. ”

“Right you are,” Thad said. He felt very cold. He had to expend a conscious effort to keep from shivering. That cold seemed to be coming out of the telephone itself, oozing out of the holes in the earpiece like icicles. But he was also very angry. “I'm not going to do it, George. A week, a month, ten years, it's all the same to me. Why not accept it? You're dead, and dead you will stay. ”

“You're wrong, old boss. If you want to be dead wrong, y'all just keep goin. ”

“Do you know what you sound like, George?” Thad asked. “You sound like you're falling apart. That's why you want me to start writing again, isn't it? Losing cohesion, that's what you wrote. You're biodegrading, right? It won't be long before you just crumble to bits, like the wonderful one-hoss shay. ”

“None of that matters to you, Thad,” the hoarse voice rephed. It went from a scabrous drone to a harsh sound like gravel falling out of the back of a dump-truck to a squeaking whisper—as if the vocal cords had given up functioning altogether for the space of a phrase or two—and then back to the drone again. “None of what's going on with me is your concern. That's nothing but a distraction to you, buddy. You just want to get going by nightfall, or you're going to be one sorry son of a bitch. And you won't be the only one. ”

“I don't—”

Click!
Stark was gone. Thad looked at the telephone handset thoughtfully for a moment, then replaced it in the cradle. When he turned around, Harrison and Manchester were standing there.

“Who was it?” Manchester asked:

“A student,” Thad said. At this point he wasn't even sure why he was lying. The only thing he was really sure of was that he had a terrible feeling in his guts. “Just a student. As I thought. ”

“How did he know you'd be in?” Harrison asked. “And how come he called on this gentleman's phone?”

“I give up,” Thad said humbly. “I'm a Russian deep-cover agent. It was really my contact. I'll go quietly. ”

Harrison wasn't angry—or, at least, he did not appear to be angry. The look of slightly tired reproach he sent Thad's way was a good deal more effective than anger. “Mr. Beaumont, we're trying to give you and your wife a help. I know that having a couple of fellows trail after you wherever you go can get to be a pain in the ass after awhile, but we really
are
trying to give you a help. ”

Thad felt ashamed of himself . . . but not ashamed enough to tell the truth. That bad feeling was still there, the feeling that things were going to go wrong, that maybe they already
had
gone wrong. And something else, as well. A light, fluttery feeling along his skin. A wormy feeling
inside
his skin. Pressure at his temples. It wasn't the sparrows; at least, he didn't think it was. All the same, some mental barometer he hadn't even been aware of was falling. Nor was this the first time he'd felt it. There had been a sensation similar to this, although not as strong, when he was on the way to Dave's Market eight days ago. He had felt it in his own office while he had been getting the files. A low, jittery feeling.

“I apologize,” he said. He was aware that Rawlie DeLesseps was now standing behind the two policemen, watching Thad with quiet, curious eyes. He would have to start lying now, and the lies came so naturally and smoothly to mind that, for all he knew, they might have been planted there by George Stark himself. He wasn't entirely sure Rawlie would go along, but it was a little late to worry about that. “I'm on edge, that's all. ”

“Understandable,” Harrison said. “I just want you to realize we're not the enemy, Mr. Beaumont. ”

Thad said, “The kid who phoned knew I was here because he was coming out of the bookstore when I drove by. He wanted to know if I was teaching a summer writing course. The faculty telephone directory is divided into departments, the members of each department listed in alphabetical order. The print is very fine, as anyone who has ever tried to use it will testify. ”

“It's a very naughty book that way,” Rawlie agreed around his pipe. The two policemen turned to look at him for a moment, startled. Rawlie favored them with a solemn, rather owlish nod.

“Rawlie follows me in the directory listings,” Thad said. “We don't happen to have any faculty member whose last name begins with C this year.” He glanced at Rawlie for a moment, but Rawlie had taken his pipe from his mouth and appeared to be inspecting its fire-blackened bowl with dose attention. “As a result,” Thad finished, “I'm always getting his calls and he's always getting mine. I told this kid he was out of luck; I'm off Until fall. ”

Well, that was that. He had a feeling he might have overexplained the situation a little, but the real question was when Harrison and Manchester had gotten to the doorway of Rawlie's office and how much they had overheard. One did not ordinarily tell students applying for writing courses that they were biodegrading, and that they would soon just crumble to bits.

“I wish
I
was off until fall,” Manchester sighed. “Are you about done, Mr. Beaumont?”

Thad breathed an interior sigh of relief and said, “I just have to put back the files I won't be needing. ”

“And, of course, I have to write a note to Mrs. Fenton,” he heard himself saying. He didn't have the slightest idea why he was saying this; he only knew he had to. “She's the English Department secretary. ”

“Do we have time for another cup of coffee?” Manchester asked.

“Sure. Maybe even a couple of cookies, if the barbarian hordes left any,” he said. That feeling that things were out of joint, that things were wrong and going wronger all the time, was back and stronger than ever. Leave a note for Mrs. Fenton? Jesus,
that
was a laugh. Rawlie must be choking on his pipe.

As Thad left Rawlie's office, Rawlie asked: “Can speak to you for a minute, Thaddeus?”

“Sure,” Thad said. He wanted to tell Harrison and Manchester to leave them alone, he would be right up, but recognized—reluctantly—that such a remark was not exactly the sort of thing you said when you wanted to allay suspicions. And Harrison, at least, had his antennae up. Maybe not quite all the way just yet, but almost.

Silence worked better, anyway. As he turned to Rawlie, Harrison and Manchester strolled slowly up the hall. Harrison spoke briefly to his partner, then stood in the doorway of the Department common room while Manchester hunted up the cookies. Harrison had them in sight, but Thad thought they were out
of
earshot.

“That was quite a tale about the faculty directory,” Rawlie remarked, putting the chewed stem of his pipe back in his mouth. “I believe you have a great deal in common with the little girl in Saki's ‘The Open Window, ' Thaddeus—romance at short notice seems to be your specialty. ”

“Rawlie, this isn't what you think it is. ”

“I don't have the slightest idea
what
it is,” Rawlie said mildly, “and while I admit to a certain amount of human curiosity, I'm not sure I really want to know. ”

Thad smiled a little.

“And I
did
get the clear feeling that you'd forgotten Gonzo Tom Carroll on purpose. He may be retired, but last time I looked, he still came between us in the current faculty directory. ”

“Rawlie, I better get going. ”

“Indeed,” Rawlie said. “You have a note to write to Mrs. Fenton. ”

Thad felt his cheeks grow a bit warm. Althea Fenton, the English Department secretary since 1961, had died of throat cancer in April.

“The only reason I held you at all,” Rawlie went on, “was to ten you that I may have found what you were looking for. About the sparrows. ”