The Dark Half (65 page)

But that was a question for another time, another day. And there was this—perhaps the bill
had
been paid.

Perhaps he was finally even.

“Is he dead?” Liz was asking . . . almost begging.

“Yes,” Thad said. “He's dead, Liz. Third time's the charm. The book is closed on George Stark. Come on, you guys—let's get out of here. ”

And that was what they did.

Henry did not kiss Mary Lou that day, but he did not leave her without a word, either, as he could have done. He saw her, he endured her anger, and waited for it to subside into that blockaded silence he knew so well. He had come to recognize that most of these sorrows were hers, and not to be shared or even discussed. Mary Lou had always danced best when she danced alone.

At last they walked through the field and looked once more at the play-house where Evelyn had died three years ago. It was not much of a goodbye, but it was the best they could do. Henry felt it was good enough.

He put Evelyn's little paper ballerinas in the high grass by the ruined stoop, knowing the wind would carry them off soon enough. Then he and Mary Lou left the old place together for the last time. It wasn't good, but it was all right. Right enough. He was not a man who believed in happy endings. What little serenity he knew came chiefly from that.

 

—The Sudden Dancers
by Thaddeus Beaumont

People's dreams—their real dreams, as opposed to those hallucinations of sleep which come or not, just as they will—end at different times. Thad Beaumont's dream of George Stark ended at quarter past nine on the night the psychopomps carried his dark half away to whatever place it was that had been appointed to him. It ended with the black Toronado, that tarantula in which he and George had always arrived at this house in his recurrent nightmare.

Liz and the twins were at the top of the driveway, where it merged with Lake Lane. Thad and Alan stood by George Stark's black car, which was no longer black. Now it was gray with bird droppings.

Alan didn't want to look at the house, but he could not take his eyes from it. It was a splintered ruin. The east side—the study side—had taken the brunt of the punishment, but the entire house was a wreck. Huge holes gaped everywhere. The railing hung from the deck on the lake side like a jointed wooden ladder. There were huge drifts of dead birds in a circle around the building. They were caught in the folds of the roof; they stuffed the gutters. The moon had come up and it sent back silverish tinkles of light from sprays of broken glass. Sparks of that same elf-light dwelt deep in the glazing eyes of the dead sparrows.

“You're sure this is okay with you?” Thad asked.

Alan nodded.

“I ask, because it's destroying evidence. ”

Alan laughed harshly. “Would anyone believe what it's evidence
of?”

“I suppose not.” He paused and then said, “You know, there was a time when I felt that you sort of liked me. I don't feel that anymore. Not at all. I don't understand it. Do you hold me responsible for . . . all this?”

“I don't give a fuck,” Alan said. “It's over. That's all I give a fuck about, Mr. Beaumont. Right now that's the only thing in the whole
world
I give a fuck about. ”

He saw the hurt on Thad's tired, harrowed face and made a great effort.

“Look, Thad. It's too much. Too much all at once. I just saw a man carried off into the sky by a bunch of sparrows. Give me a break, okay?”

Thad nodded. “I understand. ”

No you don't,
Alan thought.
You don't understand what you are, and I doubt that you ever will. Your wife might . . . although I wonder if things will ever be right between the two of you after this, if she'll ever want to understand, or dare to love you again. Your kids, maybe, someday . . . but not you, Thad. Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of. The monster is gone now, but you still don't like to be too close to where it came from. Because there might be another. Probably not; your mind knows that, but your emotions—they play a different tune, don't they? Oh boy. And even if the cave is empty forever, there are the dreams. And the memories. There's Homer Gamache, for instance, beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. Because of you, Thad. All because of you.

That wasn't fair, and part of Alan knew it. Thad hadn't asked to be a twin; he hadn't destroyed his twin brother in the womb out of malice
(We're not talking about Cain rising up and slaying Abel with a rock,
Dr. Pritchard had said); he had not known what sort of monster was waiting when he began writing as George Stark.

Still, they had been twins.

And he could not forget the way Stark and Thad had laughed together.

That crazy, loony laughter and the look in their eyes.

He wondered if Liz would be able to forget.

A little breeze gusted and blew the nasty smell of LP gas toward him.

“Let's burn it,” he said abruptly. “Let's burn it all. I don't care who thinks what later on. There's hardly any wind; the fire trucks will get here before it spreads much in any direction. If it takes some of the woods around this place, so much the better. ”

“I'll do it,” Thad said. “You go on up with Liz. Help with the twi—

“We'll do it together,” Alan said. “Give me your socks. ”

“What?”

“You heard me—I want your socks. ”

Alan opened the door of the Toronado and looked inside. Yes—a standard shift, as he'd thought. A macho man like George Stark would never be satisfied with an automatic; that was for married Walter Mitty types like Thad Beaumont.

Leaving the door open, he stood on one foot and took off his right shoe and sock. Thad watched him and began to do the same. Alan put his shoe back on and repeated the process with his left foot. He had no intention of putting his bare feet down in that mass of dead birds, even for a moment.

When he was done, he knotted the two cotton socks together. Then he took Thad's and added them to his own. He walked around to the passenger-side rear, dead sparrows crunching under his shoes like newspaper, and opened the Toronado's fuel port. He spun off the gas cap and stuck the makeshift fuse into the throat of the tank. When he pulled it out again, it was soaked. He reversed it, sticking in the dry end, leaving the wet end hanging against the guano-splattered flank of the car. Then he turned to Thad, who had followed him. Alan fumbled in the pocket of his uniform shirt and brought out a book of paper matches. It was the sort of matchbook they give you at newsstands with your cigarettes. He didn't know where he had gotten this one, but there was a stamp-collecting ad on the cover.

The stamp shown was a picture of a bird.

“Light the socks when the car starts to roll,” Alan said. “Not a moment before, do you understand?”

“Yes. ”

“It'll go with a bang. The house will catch. Then the LP tanks around back. When the fire inspectors get here, it's going to look like your friend lost control and hit the house and the car exploded. At least that's what I hope. ”

“Okay. ”

Alan walked back around the car.

“What's going on down there?” Liz called nervously. “The babies are getting cold!”

“Just another minute!” Thad called back.

Alan reached into the Toronado's unpleasantly smelly interior and popped the emergency brake. “Wait until it's rolling,” he called back over his shoulder.

“Yes. ”

Alan depressed the clutch with his foot and put the Hurst shifter into neutral.

The Toronado began to roll at once.

He drew back and for a moment he thought Thad hadn't managed his end . . . and then the fuse blazed alight against the rear of the car in a bright line of flame.

The Toronado rolled slowly down the last fifteen feet of driveway, bumped over the little asphalt curb there, and coasted tiredly onto the small back porch. It thumped into the side of the house and stopped. Alan could read the bumper sticker clearly in the orange light of the fuse:

HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH.

“Not anymore,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Never mind. Get back. The car's going to blow. ”

They had retreated ten paces when the Toronado turned into a fireball. Flames shot up the pecked and splintered east side of the house, turning the hole in the study wall into a staring black eyeball.

“Come on,” Alan said. “Let's get to my cruiser. Now that we've done it, we've got to turn in the alarm. No need for everybody on the lake to lose their places over this. ”

But Thad lingered a moment longer and Alan lingered with him. The house was dry wood beneath cedar shingles, and it was catching fast. The flames boiled into the hole where Thad's study was, and as they watched, sheets of paper were caught in the draft the fire had created and were pulled outward and upward. In the brightness, Alan could see that they were covered with words written in longhand. The sheets of paper crinkled, caught fire, charred, and turned black. They flew upward into the night above the flames like a swirling squadron of dark birds.

Once they were above the draft, Alan thought that more normal breezes would catch them. Catch them and carry them away, perhaps even to the ends of the earth.

Good,
he thought, and began to walk up the driveway toward Liz and the babies with his head down.

Behind him, Thad Beaumont slowly raised his hands and placed them over his face.

He stood there like that for a long time.

 

November 3, 1987—March 16, 1989

The name Alexis Machine is not original to me. Readers of
Dead City,
by Shane Stevens, will recognize it as the name of the fictional hoodlum boss in that novel. The name so perfectly summed up the character of George Stark and his own fictional crime boss that I adopted it for the work you have just read . . . but I also did it as an
hommage
to Mr. Stevens, whose other novels include
Rat Pack, By Reason of Insanity, and The Anvil Chorus.
These works, where the so-called “criminal mind” and a condition of irredeemable psychosis interweave to create their own closed system of perfect evil, are three of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream. They are, in their own way, as striking as Frank Norris's
McTeague
or Theodore Dreiser's
Sister Carrie.
I recommend them unreservedly . . . but only readers with strong stomachs and stronger nerves need apply.

S. K.

Available now from Signet.

J
essie could hear the back door banging lightly, randomly, in the October breeze blowing around the house. The jamb always swelled in the fall and you really had to give the door a yank to shut it. This time they had forgotten. She thought of telling Gerald to go back and shut the door before they got too involved or that banging would drive her nuts. Then she thought how ridiculous that would be, given the current circumstances. It would ruin the whole mood.

A good question, that. And as Gerald turned the hollow barrel of the key in the second lock, as she heard the minute click from above her left ear, she realized that, for her at least, the mood wasn't worth preserving. That was why she had noted the unlatched door in the first place, of course. For her, the sexual turn-on of the bondage games hadn't lasted long.

The same could not be said of Gerald, however. He was wearing only a pair of Jockey shorts now, and she didn't have to look as high as his face to see that his interest continued unabated.

This is stupid,
she thought, but stupid wasn't the whole story, either. It was also a little scary. She didn't like to admit it, but there it was.

“Gerald, why don't we just forget this?”

He hesitated for a moment, downing a little, then went on across the room to the dresser which stood to the left of the bathroom door. His face cleared as he went. She watched him from where she lay on the bed, her arms raised and splayed out, making her look a little like Fay Wray chained up and waiting for the great ape in
King Kong
. Her wrists had been secured to the mahogany bedposts with two sets of handcuffs. The chains gave each hand about six inches' worth of movement. Not much.

He put the keys on top of the dresser—two minute clicks, her ears seemed in exceptionally fine working order for a Wednesday afternoon—and then turned back to her. Over his head, sunripples from the lake danced and wavered on the bedroom's high white ceiling.