The Dark Half (48 page)

Eddings caught a blurred glimpse of the skinned man coming in low and hard and tried to draw back. He struck the car.

Stark sliced upward, splitting the crotch of Eddings' beige Trooper uniform, splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke. Eddings' balls, suddenly untethered from each other, swung back against his inner thighs like heavy knots on the end of an unravelling sash-cord. Blood stained his pants around the zipper. For a moment he felt as if someone had jammed a handful of ice cream into his groin . . . and then the pain struck, hot and full of ragged teeth. He screamed.

Stark snapped the razor out, wicked-quick, at Eddings' throat, but Eddings managed somehow to get a hand up and the first stroke only split his palm in half. Eddings tried to roll to the left, and that exposed the right side of his neck.

The naked blade, pale silver in the day's hazy light, whickered through the air again, and this time it went where it was supposed to go. Eddings sank to his knees, hands between his legs. His beige pants had turned bright red almost to the knees. His head drooped, and now he looked like the object of a pagan sacrifice.

“Have a nice day, motherfucker,” Stark said in a conversational voice. He bent over, tangled his hand in Eddings' hair, and jerked his head back, baring the neck for the final stroke.

He opened the back door of the cruiser, lifted Eddings by the neck of his uniform shirt and the bloody seat of his trousers, and tossed him in like a sack of grain. Then he did the same with Chatterton. The latter must have weighed close to two hundred and thirty pounds, with his equipment belt and the .45 on his belt thrown in, but Stark handled him as if he were a bag stuffed with feathers. He slammed the door, then shot a glance full of bright curiosity at the house.

It was silent. The only sounds were the crickets in the high grass beside the driveway and the low, strawlike
whick! whick! whick!
of the lawnsprinklers. To this there was added the sound of an oncoming truck—an Orinco tanker. It roared by at sixty, headed north. Stark tensed and lowered himself slightly behind the side of the police cruiser when he saw the truck's big brake lights flare red for an instant. He uttered a single grunt of laughter when they went out again and the tanker disappeared over the next hill, accelerating again. The driver had glimpsed the State Police cruiser parked in the Beaumont driveway, had checked his speedometer, and had thought speed-trap. The most natural thing in the world. He needn't have worried; this speed-trap was closed forever.

There was a lot of blood in the driveway, but puddled on the bright black asphalt, it could have been water . . . unless you got very close. So that was okay. And even if it wasn't, it would have to do.

Stark folded the straight-razor, held it in one sticky hand, went over to the door. He saw neither the little drift of dead sparrows lying by the stoop, nor the live ones which now lined the roofpeak of the house and sat in the apple tree by the garage, watching him silently.

In a minute or two, Liz Beaumont came downstairs, still half-asleep from her midday nap, to answer the doorbell.

She didn't scream. The scream was there, but the stripped face looking at her when she opened the door locked it deep inside her, froze it, denied it, cancelled it, buried it alive. Unlike Thad, she'd had no dreams of George Stark she could remember, but they might have been there all the same, deep in the fastnesses of her unconscious mind, because this glaring, grinning face seemed almost an expected thing, for all its horror.

“Hey lady, wanna buy a duck?” Stark asked through the screen. He grinned, exposing a great many teeth. Most of them were now dead. The sunglasses turned his eyes into big black sockets. Goo dripped from his cheek and jawline and splattered on the vest he was wearing.

Belatedly, she tried to close the door. Stark rammed a gloved fist through the screen and slammed it back open again. Liz stumbled away, trying to scream. She couldn't. Her throat was still locked up.

Stark came in and dosed the door.

Liz watched him walk slowly toward her. He looked like a decayed scarecrow which had somehow come to life. The grin was the worst, because the left half of his upper lip appeared not just decayed or decaying, but chewed away. She could see gray-black teeth, and the sockets where, until recently, other teeth had been.

His gloved hands stretched out toward her.

“Hello, Beth,” he said through that terrible grin. “Please excuse the intrusion, but I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop by. I'm George Stark, and I'm pleased to meet you. More pleased, I think, than you could possibly know. ”

One of his fingers touched her chin . . . caressed it. The flesh beneath the black leather felt spongy, unsteady. At that moment she thought of the twins, sleeping upstairs, and her paralysis broke. She turned and fled for the kitchen. Somewhere in the roaring confusion of her mind she saw herself snatching one of the butcher-knives from the magnetized runners over the counter and plunging it deep into that obscene caricature of a face.

She heard him after her, quick as the wind.

His hand brushed the back of her blouse, hunting for purchase, and slipped off.

The kitchen door was the sort that swings back and forth. It was propped open with a wooden wedge. She kicked at the wedge on the run, knowing that if she missed it or only knocked it aslant, there wouldn't be a second chance. But she hit it dead-square with one slippered foot,
feeling an instant of bright pain in her toes.
The wedge flew across the kitchen floor, which was so brightly waxed that she could see the whole room in it, hung upside down. She felt Stark groping for her again. She reached behind her and raked the door shut. She heard the thud as it hit him. He yelled, furious and surprised but unhurt. She groped for the knives—

—and Stark grabbed her by the hair and the back of her blouse. He jerked her backward and spun her around. She heard the rough purr of parting cloth and thought incoherently:
If he rapes me oh Jesus if he rapes me I'll go crazy—

She hammered at his grotesque face with her fists, knocking the sunglasses first askew and then off. The flesh below his left eye had sagged and fallen away like a dead mouth, exposing the whole bloodshot bulge of the eyeball.

And he was
laughing.

He grabbed her hands and forced them down. She twisted one free, brought it up, and scratched at his face. Her fingers left deep grooves from which blood and pus began to flow sluggishly. There was little or no sense of resistance; she might as well have torn at a piece of flyblown meat. And now she was making a sound—she wanted to shriek, to articulate her horror and fear before they choked her, but the most she was able to manage was a series of hoarse, distressed barks.

He snatched her free hand out of the air, brought it down, forced both hands behind her, and encircled the wrists with his own hand. It was spongy but as unyielding as a manacle. He lifted his other hand to the front of her blouse and cupped a breast. Her flesh moaned at his touch. She dosed her eyes and tried to pull away.

“Oh, quit that,” be said. He was not grinning on purpose now, but the left side of his mouth grinned anyway, frozen in its own decayed rictus. “Quit it, Beth. For your own good. It turns me on when you fight. You don't want me turned on. I guarantee it. I think we ought to have a Platonic relationship, you and I.

“At least for now. ”

He squeezed her breast harder, and she felt the ruthless strength under the decay, like an armature of articulated steel rods embedded in soft plastic.

But the answer was obvious. He wasn't human. She didn't think he was really even
alive.

“Or maybe you do want it?” he asked. “Is that it? Do you want it? Do you want it right now?” His tongue, black and red and yellow, its surface blasted with strange cracks like those in a drying floodplain, poked out of his snarling, smiling mouth and wiggled at her.

She stopped struggling at once.

“Better,” Stark said. “Now—I'm going to let go of you, Bethie my dear, my sweet one. When I do that, the urge to run the hundred-yard dash in five seconds flat is going to come over you again. That's natural enough; we hardly know each other, and I am aware that I don't look my best. But before you do anything foolish, I want you to remember the two cops outside—they're dead. And I want you to think of your bambinos, sleeping peacefully upstairs. Children need their rest, don't they? Especially very
small
children, very
defenseless
children, like yours. Do you understand? Do you follow me?”

She nodded dumbly. She could smell him now. It was a horrible, meaty aroma.
He's rotting,
she thought.
Rotting away right in front of me.

It had become very dear to her why he so desperately wanted Thad to start writing again.

“You're a vampire,” she said hoarsely. “A goddam vampire. And he's put you on a diet. So you break in here. You terrorize me and threaten my babies. You're a fucking coward, George Stark. ”

He let go of her and pulled first the left glove and then the right one smooth and tight again. It was a prissy yet oddly sinister bit of business.

“I hardly think that's fair, Beth. What would
you
do if you were in my position? What would you do, for instance, if you were stranded on an island without anything to eat or drink? Would you strike poses of languor and sigh prettily? Or would you fight? Do you really blame me for wanting something so simple as survival?”

“Yes!”
she spat at him.

“Spoken like a true partisan . . . but you may change your mind. You see, the price of partisanship can run higher than you know right now, Beth. When the opposition is cunning and dedicated, the price can go right out of sight. You may find yourself more enthusiastic about our collaboration than you'd ever think possible. ”

“Dream on, motherfucker!”

The right side of his mouth rose, the eternally smiling left side hitched a little higher, and he favored her with a ghoul-grin she supposed was meant to be engaging. His hand, sickeningly gelid under the thin glove, slid down her forearm in a caress. One finger pressed suggestively into her left palm for an instant before dropping away. “This is no dream, Beth—I assure you. Thad and I are going to collaborate on a new Stark novel . . . for awhile. Put another way, Thad's going to give me a push. I'm like a stalled car, you see. Only instead of vapor-lock, I've got writer's block. That's all. That's the only problem there is, I judge. Once I get rolling, I'll put her in second, pop the clutch, and
vrooom!
Off I go!”

“You're crazy,” she whispered.

“Yep. But so was Tolstoy. So was Richard Nixon, and they elected
that
greasy dawg President of the United States.” Stark turned his head and looked out the window. Liz heard nothing, but all of a sudden he seemed to be listening with all his concentration, striving to pick up some faint, almost inaudible sound.

“What do you—” she began.

“Hush your mouth a second, hon,” Stark told her. “Just put a sock in it. ”

Faintly, she heard the sound of a flock of birds taking wing. The sound was impossibly distant, impossibly beautiful. Impossibly
free.

She stood there looking at him, her heart pounding too fast, wondering if she could break loose from him. He wasn't exactly in a trance, or anything like that, but his attention was certainly diverted. She could run, maybe. If she could get a gun—

His rotten hand stole around one of her wrists again.

“I can get inside your man and look out, you know. I can
feel
him thinking. I can't do that with you, but I can look at your face and make some real good guesses. Whatever you're thinking right now, Beth, you want to remember those cops . . . and your kids. You do that, it's gonna help you keep this in perspective. ”

“Why do you keep calling me that?”

“What? Beth?” He laughed. It was a nasty sound, as if he'd gotten gravel caught in his throat. “It's what
he'd
call you, if he was smart enough to think of it, you know. ”

“You're cr—”

“Crazy, I know. This is charmin, darlin, but we'll have to defer your opinions on my sanity until later. Too much happening right now. Listen: I have to call Thad, but not at his office. Phone there might be tapped.
He
doesn't think it is, but the cops might have done it without telling him. Your man is a trusting sort of fellow. I'm not. ”

“How can you—”

Stark leaned toward her and spoke very slowly and carefully, as a teacher might speak to a slow first-grader. “I want you to stop pickin this bone with me, Beth, and answer my questions. Because if I can't get what I need out of you, maybe I can get it out of your twins. I realize they can't talk yet, but maybe I can teach them. A little incentive does wonders. ”

He was wearing a quilted vest over his shirt in spite of the heat, the kind with many zippered pockets favored by hunters and hikers. He pulled down one of the side zippers where some cylindrical object bulged the polyester quilting. He took out a small gas torch. “Even if I can't teach em to talk, I bet I could teach em to sing. I bet I could teach em to sing just like a couple of larks. You might not want to face that music, Beth. ”

She tried to take her gaze away from the torch, but it wouldn't go. Her eyes followed it heplessly as he switched it back and forth from one gloved hand to the other. Her eyes seemed nailed to the nozzle.