The Dark Half

'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

AFTERWORD

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.