The Dark Half (50 page)

Stark carried Wendy out to the driveway after putting his dark glasses on again. Liz ran to the window and looked after them anxiously. Part of her was positive he intended to hop into the police cruiser and drive away with her baby on the seat beside him and the two dead State Troopers in the back.

But for a moment he did nothing—simply stood there in hazy sunshine by the driver's door, head down, the baby cradled in his arms. He remained in that motionless position for some time, as if speaking seriously to Wendy, or perhaps praying. Later, when she had more information, she decided he had been trying to get in touch with Thad again, perhaps to read his thoughts and divine whether he intended to do what Stark wanted him to do or if he had plans of his own.

After about thirty seconds of this, Stark lifted his head, shook it briskly as if to dear it, then got into the cruiser and started it up.
The keys were in the ignition,
she thought dully.
He didn't even have to hot-wire it, or whatever they do. That man has got the luck of the devil.

Stark drove the cruiser into the garage and cut the motor. Then she heard the car door slam and he came back out, pausing long enough to hit the button that sent the door rumbling down on its tracks.

A few moments later he was in the house again and handing Wendy back to her.

“You see?” he asked. “She's fine. Now tell me about the people next door. The Clarks. ”

“The Clarks?” she asked, feeling extraordinarily stupid. “Why do you want to know about them? They're in Europe this summer. ”

He smiled. It was, in a way, the most hideous thing yet, because under more ordinary circumstances it would have been a smile of genuine pleasure . . . and quite a winning one, she suspected. And didn't she feel just an instant of attraction? A freakish flicker? It was insane, of course, but did that mean she could deny it? Liz didn't think so, and she even understood why it might be. After all, she had married this man's closest relative.

“Wonderful!” he said. “Couldn't be better! And do they have a car?”

Wendy began to cry. Liz looked down and saw her daughter looking at the man with the rotten face and the bulging marble eyes, holding her small and pleasantly chubby arms out. She was not crying because she was afraid of him; she was crying because she wanted to go back to him.

“Isn't that sweet!” Stark said. “She wants to come back to Daddy. ”

“Shut up, you monster!” she spat at him.

Foxy George Stark threw his head back and laughed.

He gave her five minutes to pack a few more things for herself and the twins. She told him it would be impossible to get together half of what they'd need in that length of time, and he told her to do the best she could.

“You're lucky I'm giving you any more time at all, Beth, under the circumstances—there are two dead cops in your garage and your husband knows what's going on. If you want to take the five minutes debating the point with me, that's your choice. You're already down to . . .” He glanced at his watch, then smiled at her. “Four-and-a-half. ”

So she did what she could, pausing once while tossing jars of baby food into a shopping bag to look at her children. They were sitting side by side on the floor, playing an idle sort of pat-a-cake with each other and looking at Stark. She was dreadfully afraid she knew what they were thinking about.

No. She wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't think about it but it was all she
could
think about: Wendy, crying and holding out her pudgy little arms. Holding them out to the murderous stranger.

He was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her, smiling, and she wanted to use the scissors right then. She had never in her life wanted anything so badly. “Can't you give me a hand?” she cried angrily at him, gesturing at the two bags and the cooler she had filled.

“Of course, Beth,” he said. He took one of the bags for her. His other hand, the left, he kept free.

They crossed the side yard, passed through the little greenbelt between properties, and then walked across the Clarks' yard to their driveway. Stark insisted that she move fast, and she was panting by the time they stopped in front of the closed garage door. He had offered to take one of the twins, but she'd refused.

He set down the cooler, took his wallet from his back pocket, removed a narrow strip of metal which tapered to a point, and stamped it into the lock of the garage door. He turned it first to the right and then back to the left, one ear cocked. There was a click and he smiled.

“Good,” he said. “Even Mickey Mouse locks on garage doors can be a pain in the ass. Big springs. Hard to tip them over. This one's as tired as an old whore's twat at daybreak, though. Lucky for us.” He turned the handle and shoved. The door rumbled up on its tracks.

The garage was hot as a haymow, and the Clarks' Volvo wagon was even hotter inside. Stark bent beneath the dashboard, exposing the back of his neck to her as she sat in the passenger seat. Her fingers twitched. It would only take a second to rip the scissors free, but that could still be too long. She had seen how quickly he reacted to the unexpected. It did not really surprise her that his reflexes were as fast as those of a wild animal, since that was what he was.

He raked down a bunch of wires from behind the dash, then produced a bloody straight-razor from his front pocket. She shivered a little and had to swallow twice, fast, to stifle a gag-reflex. He unfolded the blade, bent down again, stripped insulation from two of the wires, and touched the bare copper cores together. There was a sliver of blue spark, and then the engine began to turn over. A moment later the car was running.

“Well, all
right!”
George Stark crowed. “Let's roll, what do you
say?”

The twins giggled together and waved their hands at him. Stark waved gaily back. As he backed the car out of the garage, Liz reached stealthily behind Wendy, who was sitting on her lap, and touched the rounds that were the fingerholes of the scissors. Not now, but soon. She had no intention of waiting for Thad. She was too uneasy about what this dark creature might decide to do to the twins in the meantime.

Or to her.

As soon as he was sufficiently distracted, she intended to free the scissors from their hiding place and bury them in his throat.

“The poets talk about love,” Machine said. running the straight-razor back and forth along the strop in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, “and that's okay. There is love. The politicians talk about duty, and that's okay. too. There is duty. Eric Hoffer talks about post-modernism, Hugh Hefner talks about sex, Hunter Thompson talks about drugs, and Jimmy Swaggart talks about God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those things all exist and they are all okay. Do you know what I mean, Jack?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Jack Rangely said. He really didn't know. didn't have the slightest idea, but when Machine was in this sort of mood, only a lunatic would argue with him.

Machine turned the straight-razor's edge down and suddenly slashed the strop in two. A long section fell to the pool-hall floor like a severed tongue. “But what I talk about is doom,” he said. “Because, in the end, doom is all that counts. ”

 

—Riding to Babylon
by George Stark

THAD ON THE RUN

Pretend it's a book you're writing,
he thought as he turned left onto College Avenue, leaving the campus behind.
And pretend you're a character in that book.

It was a magic thought. His mind had been filled with roaring panic—a kind of mental tornado in which fragments of some possible plan spun like chunks of uprooted landscape. But at the idea that he could pretend it was all a harmless fiction, that he could move not only himself but the other characters in this story (characters like Harrison and Manchester, for instance) around the way he moved characters on paper, in the safety of his study with bright lights overhead and either a cold can of Pepsi or a hot cup of tea beside him . . . at this idea, it was as if the wind howling between his ears suddenly blew itself out. The extraneous shit blew away with it, leaving him with the pieces of his plan lying around . . . pieces he found he was able to put together quite easily. He discovered he had something which might even work.

It better work,
Thad thought.
If it doesn't, you'll wind up in protective custody and Liz and the kids will most likely wind up dead.

But what about the sparrows? Where did the sparrows fit?.

He didn't know. Rawlie had told him they were psychopomps, the harbingers of the living dead, and that fit, didn't it? Yes. Up to a point, anyway. Because foxy old George was alive again, but foxy old George was also dead . . . dead and rotting. So the sparrows fit in . . . but not all the way. If the sparrows had guided George back from

wherever he had been, bow come George himself knew nothing about them? How come he did not remember writing that phrase, THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, in blood on the walls of two apartments?

“Because
I
wrote it,” Thad muttered, and his mind flew back to the things he had written in his journal while he had been sitting in his study, on the edge of a trance.

Suddenly all the answers trembled almost within his grasp—the terrible, unthinkable answers. Thad heard a long, shaky sound emerging from his own mouth. It was a groan.

“I didn't
mean
to!” he cried.

But was that true? Was it really? Hadn't there always been a part of him in love with George Stark's simple, violent nature? Hadn't part of him always admired George, a man who didn't stumble over things or bump into things, a man who never looked weak or silly, a man who would never have to fear the demons locked away in the liquor cabinet? A man with no wife or children to consider, with no loves to bind him or slow him down? A man who had never waded through a shitty student essay or agonized over a Budget Committee meeting? A man who had a sharp, straight answer to all of life's more difficult questions?

A man who was not afraid of the dark because he
owned
the dark?

“Yes, but he's
a
BASTARD!”
Thad screamed into the hot interior of his sensible American-made four-wheel-drive car.

Perhaps he, Thad Beaumont, had not really created George . . . but was it not possible that some longing part of him had allowed Stark to be recreated?

No answer came. It
wanted
to come; be could feel its longing. But it danced just out of his reach, and Thad found himself suddenly afraid that he himself—some Stark-loving part of him—might be holding it off. Some part that didn't want George to die.

He paused at the Orono traffic light and then was heading out along Route 2, toward Bangor and Ludlow beyond.

Rawlie was a part of his plan—a part of it which he at least understood. What would he do if he actually managed to shake the cops following him only to find that Rawlie had already left his office?

He didn't know.

What would he do if Rawlie was there but refused to help him?

He didn't know that, either.

And he would be coming to them soon enough.

He was passing Gold's on the right, now. Gold's was a long, tubular building constructed of pre-fab aluminum sections. It was painted a particularly offensive shade of aqua and was surrounded by a dozen acres of junked-out cars. Their windshields glittered in the hazy sunlight in a galaxy of white starpoints. It was Saturday afternoon—had been for almost twenty minutes now. Liz and her dark kidnapper would be on their way to The Rock. And, although there would be a clerk or two selling parts to weekend mechanics in the pre-fab building where Gold's did its retail business, Thad could reasonably hope that the junkyard itself would be unattended. With nearly twenty thousand cars in varying states of decay roughly organized into dozens of zig-zagging rows, he should be able to hide the Suburban . . . and he
had
to hide it. High-shouldered, boxy, gray with brilliant red sides, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

SLOW SCHOOL ZONE. the sign coming up read. Thad felt a hot wire poke into his gut. This was it.

He checked the rearview minor and saw the Plymouth was still riding two cars back. It wasn't as good as he could have wished, but it was probably as good as it was going to get. For the rest, he would have to depend on luck and surprise. They weren't expecting him to make a break; why would he? And for a moment he thought of not doing it. Suppose he just pulled over instead? And when they pulled up behind him and Harrison got out to ask what was wrong, he would say:
Plenty. Stark's got my family. The sparrows are still flying, you see.

“Thad, he says he killed the two that were watching the house. I don't know how he did it, but he says he did
. . .
and I
. . .
I believe him. ”