The Dark Half

telling people to get hold of themselves. He drew in another long breath, held it, hit the disconnect button on the phone, and started in again, forcing himself to slow down. He hit the last button and listened to the deliberate clicks of the connection falling into place.

   Let her be all right, God, and if she's not entirely all right, if You can't manage that, at least let her be all right enough to answer the telephone. Please.

  But the phone didn't ring. There was only the insistent dah-dah-dah of a busy signal. Maybe it really was busy; maybe she was calling Rick or the hospital. Or maybe the phone was off the hook.

  There was another possibility, though, he thought as he pushed the disconnect button again. Maybe Stark had pulled the phone cord out of the wall. Or maybe

  (don't let the bad man cut me again)

  he had cut it.

  As he had cut Miriam.

  Razor, Thad thought, and a shudder twisted up his back. That had been another of the words in the stew of them he had written that afternoon. Razor.

2

The next half-hour or so was a return to the ominous surrealism he had felt when Pangborn and the two state troopers had turned up on his doorstep to arrest him for a murder he hadn't even known about. There was no sense of personal threat — no immediate personal threat, at least — but the same feeling of walking through a dark room filled with delicate strands of cobweb which brushed across your face, first tickling and ultimately maddening, strands which did not stick but whispered away just before you could grab them.

  He tried Miriam's number again, and when it was still busy, he pushed the disconnect button once more and hesitated for just a moment, torn between calling Pangborn and calling an operator in New York to check Miriam's phone. Didn't they have some means of differentiating among a line where someone was talking, one that was off the hook, and one which had been rendered inoperable in some way? He thought they did, but surely the important thing was that Miriam's communication with him had suddenly ceased, and she was no longer reachable. Still, they could find out — Liz — could find out — if they had two lines instead of just one. Why didn't they have two lines? It was stupid not to have two lines, wasn't it?

  Although these thoughts went through his mind in perhaps two seconds, they seemed to take much longer, and he berated himself for playing Hamlet while Miriam Cowley might be bleeding to death in her apartment. Characters in books — at least in Stark's books — never took pauses like this, never stopped to wonder something nonsensical like why they had never had a second telephone line put in for cases where a woman in another state might be bleeding to death. People in books never had to take time out so they could move their bowels, and they never clutched up like this.

   The world would be a more efficient place if everyone in it came out of a pop novel, he thought. People in pop novels always manage to keep their thoughts on track as they move smoothly from one chapter to the next.

  He dialed Maine directory assistance, and when the operator asked 'What city, please?' he foundered for a moment because Castle Rock was a town, not a city but a small town, county seat or not, and then he thought: This is panic, Thad. Sheer panic. You've got to get it under control. You mustn't let Miriam die because you panicked. And he even had time, it seemed, to wonder why he couldn't let that happen and to answer the question: he was the only real character over whom he had any control at all, and panic was simply not a part of that character's image. At least as he saw it.

  Down here we call that bullshit, Thad. Down here we call it fool's —

  'Sir?' the operator was prodding. 'What city, please?'

  Okay. Control.

   He took a deep breath, got his shit together, and said, 'Castle City.' Christ. Closed his eyes. And with them still closed, said slowly and clearly: 'I'm sorry, operator. Castle Rock. I'd like the number for the sheriff's office.'

   There was a lag, and then a robot voice began to recite the number. Thad realized he had no pen or pencil. The robot repeated it a second time, Thad strove mightily to remember it, and the number zipped right across his mind and into blackness again, not even leaving a faint trace behind.

    'If you need further assistance,' the robot voice was continuing, please remain on the line for an operator — '

'Liz?' he pleaded. 'Pen? Something to write with?'

    There was a Bic tucked into her address book and she handed it to him. The operator — the human operator — came back on the line. Thad told her he hadn't noted the number down. The operator summoned the robot, who recited once again in her jig-jagging, vaguely female voice. Thad jotted the number on the cover of a book, almost hung up, then decided to double-check by listening to the second programmed recital. The second rendition showed he had transposed two of the numbers. Oh, he was getting right on top of his panic, that was crystal clear.

  He punched the disconnect button. Light sweat had broken out all over his body.

  'Take it easy, Thad.'

  'You didn't hear her,' he said grimly, and dialed the sheriff's office.

  The phone rang four times before a bored Yankee voice said, 'Castle County sheriff 's office, Deputy Ridgewick speaking, may I help you?'

  'This is Thad Beaumont. I'm calling from Ludlow.'

  'Oh?' No recognition. None. Which meant more explanations. More cobwebs. The name Ridgewick rang a faint bell. Of course — the officer who had interviewed Mrs Arsenault and found Gamache's body. Jesus bleeding Christ, how could he have found the old man Thad was supposed to have murdered and not know who he was?

   'Sheriff Pangborn came up here to . . . to discuss the Homer Gamache murder with me, Deputy Ridgewick. I have some information on that, and it's important that I speak to him right away.

  'Sheriff's not here,' Ridgewick said, sounding monumentally unimpressed with the urgency in Thad's voice.

  'Well, where is he?'

  'T'home.'

  'Give me the number, please.'

    And, unbelievably: 'Oh, I don't know's I should, Mr Bowman. The sheriff — Alan, I mean — hasn't had much time off just lately, and his wife has been a trifle poorly. She has headaches.'

'I have to talk to him!'

   'Well,' Ridgewick said comfortably, 'it's pretty clear you think you do, anyway. Maybe you even do. Really do, I mean. Tell you what, Mr Bowman! Why don't you just lay it out for me and kind of let me be the ju — '

   'He came up here to arrest me for the murder of Homer Gamache, Deputy, and something else has happened, and if you don't give me his number right Now — '

  'Oh, holy crow!' Ridgewick cried. Thad heard a faint bang and could imagine Ridgewick's feet coming down off his desk — or, more likely, Pangborn's desk — and landing on the floor as he straightened up in his seat. 'Beaumont, not Bowman!'

'Yes, and — '

'Oh, Judas! Judas Priest! The sheriff — Alan — said if you was to call, I should see you got

through right away!'

'Good. Now — '

'Judas Priest! I'm a damn lunkhead!'

  Thad, who could not have agreed more, said: 'Give me his number, please.' Somehow, calling upon reserves he'd had no idea he possessed, he managed not to scream it.

   'Sure. Just a sec. Uh . . .' An excruciating pause ensued. Seconds only, of course, but it seemed to Thad that the pyramids could have been built during that pause. Built and then tom down again. And all the while, Miriam's life could be draining out on her living-room rug five hundred miles away. I may have killed her, he thought, simply by deciding to call Pangborn and getting this congenital idiot instead of calling the New York Police Department in the first place. Or 911. That's what I probably should have done; dialed 911 and thrown it into their laps.

   Except that option did not seem real, even now. It was the trance, he supposed, and the words he had written while in that trance. He did not think he had foreseen the attack on Miriam . . . but he had, in some dim way, witnessed Stark's