The Dark Half

  In the meantime, they sat and waited.

   He felt an urge to try Miriam's number again, but didn't dare Alan might pick that very moment to call back, and would find the Beaumont number busy. He found himself again wishing, in an aimless sort of way, that they had a second line. Well, he thought, wish in one hand, spit in the other.

  Reason and rationality told him that Stark could not be out there, ramming around like some weird cancer in human form, killing people. As the country rube in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer was wont to say, it was perfectly unpossible, Diggory.

  He was, though. Thad knew he was, and Liz knew it, too. He wondered if Alan would also know when he told him. You'd think not; you'd expect the man would simply send for those fine young men in their clean white coats. Because George Stark was not real, and neither was Alexis Machine, that fiction within a fiction. Neither of them had ever existed, any more than George Eliot had ever existed, or Mark Twain, or Lewis Carroll, or Tucker Coe, or Edgar Box. Pseudonyms were only a higher form of fictional character.

   Yet Thad found it difficult to believe Alan Pangborn would not believe, even if he did not want to at first. Thad himself did not want to, yet found himself helpless to do anything else. It was, if you could pardon the expression, inexorably plausible.

  'Why doesn't he call?' Liz asked restlessly.

  'It's only been five minutes, babe.'

  'Closer to ten.'

    He resisted an urge to snap at her — this wasn't the Bonus Round in a TV game-show, Alan would not be awarded extra points and valuable prizes for calling back before nine o'clock.

    There was no Stark, part of his mind continued to insist upon insisting. The voice was rational but oddly powerless, seeming to repeat this screed not out of any real conviction but only by rote, like a parrot trained to say Pretty boy! or Polly wants a cracker! Yet it was true, wasn't it? Was he supposed to believe Stark had come BACK FROM THE GRAVE, like a monster in a horror movie? That would be a neat trick, since the man — or un—man — had never been buried, his marker only a papier-mache headstone set up on the surface of an empty cemetery plot, as fictional as the rest of him —

  Anyhow, that brings me to the last point . . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it . . . What's your shoe-size, Mr Beaumont?

    Thad had been slouched in his chair, crazily close to dozing in spite of everything. Now he sat up so suddenly he almost spilled his tea. Footprints. Pangborn had said something about —

  What footprints are these?

  Doesn't matter. We don't even have photos. We've got almost everything on the table . . .

  'Thad? What is it?' Liz asked.

    What footprints? Where? In Castle Rock, of course, or Alan wouldn't have known about them. Had they perhaps been in Homeland Cemetery, where the neurasthenic lady photographer had shot the picture he and Liz had found so amusing?

  'Not a very nice guy,' he muttered.

  'Thad?'

  Then the phone rang, and both of them spilled their tea.

4

Thad's hand dived for the receiver . . . then paused for a moment, floating just above it.

What if it's him?

   I'm not done with you, Thad. You don't want to fuck with me, because when you fuck with me, you're fucking with the best.

  He made his hand go down, close around the telephone, and bring it to his ear. 'Hello?'

  'Thad?' It was Alan Pangborn's voice. Suddenly Thad felt very limp, as if his body had been held together with stiff little wires which had just been removed.

  'Yes,' he said. The word came out sibilant, in a kind of sigh. He drew in another breath. 'Is Miriam all right?'

    'I don't know,' Alan Pangborn said. 'I've given the N.Y.P.D. her address. We should hear quite soon, although I want to caution you that fifteen minutes or half an hour may not seem like quite soon to you and your wife this evening.'

  'No. It won't.'

  'Is she all right?' Liz was asking, and Thad covered the phone mouthpiece long enough to tell her that Pangborn didn't know yet. Liz nodded and settled back, still too white but seeming calmer and more in control than before. At least people were doing things now, and it wasn't solely their responsibility anymore.

'They also got Mr Cowley's address from the telephone company — '

'Hey! They won't — '

  'Thad, they won't do anything until they know what the Cowley woman's condition is. I told them we had a situation where a mentally unbalanced man might be after a person or persons named in the People magazine article about the Stark pen name, and explained the connection the Cowleys had to you. I hope I got it right. I don't know much about writers and even less about their agents. But they do understand it would be wrong for the lady's ex-husband to go rushing over there before they arrive.'

  'Thank you. Thank you for everything, Alan.'

    'Thad, N.Y.P.D. is too busy moving on this to want or need further explanations right now, but they will want them. I do, too. Who do you think this guy is?'

   'That's something I don't want to tell you over the telephone. I'd come to you, Alan, but I don't want to leave my wife and children right now. I think you can understand. You'll have to come here.'

  'I can't do that,' Alan said patiently. 'I have a job of my own, and — '

  'Is your wife ill, Alan?'

  'Tonight she seems quite well. But one of my deputies called in sick, and I've got the duty. Standard procedure in small towns. I was just getting ready to leave. What I'm saying is that this is a very bad time for you to be coy, Thad. Tell me.'

  He thought about it. He felt strangely confident that Pangborn would buy it when he heard it. But maybe not over the telephone.

  'Could you get up here tomorrow?'

    'We'll have to get together tomorrow, certainly,' Alan said. His voice was both even and utterly insistent. 'But I need whatever you know tonight. The fact that the fuzz in New York are going to want an explanation is secondary, as far as I'm concerned. I have my own garden to tend. There are a lot of people here in town who want Homer Gamache's murderer collared, pronto. I happen to be one of them. So don't make me ask you again. It's not so late that I can't get the Penobscot County D.A. on the phone and ask him to collar you as a material witness in a Castle County murder case. He knows already from the state police that you're a suspect, alibi or no alibi.'

  'Would you do that?' Thad asked, bemused and fascinated.

  'I would if you made me, but I don't think you will.'

  Thad's head seemed clearer now; his thoughts actually seemed to be going somewhere. It wouldn't really matter, either to Pangborn or to the N.Y.P.D., if the man they were looking for was a psycho who thought he was Stark, or Stark himself . . . would it? He didn't think so, any more than he thought they were going to catch him either way.

    'I'm pretty sure it's a psychotic, as my wife said,' he told Alan finally. He locked eyes with Liz, tried to send her a message. And he must have succeeded in sending her something, because she nodded slightly. 'It makes a weird kind of sense. Do you remember mentioning footprints to me?'

  'Yes.'

  'They were in Homeland, weren't they?' Across the room, Liz's eyes widened.

  'How did you know that?' Alan sounded off-balance for the first time. 'I didn't tell you that.'

  'Have you read the article yet? The one in People?'

  'Yes.

  'That's where the woman set up the fake tombstone. That's where George Stark was buried.'

  Silence from the other end. Then: 'Oh shit.'

  'You get it?'

   'I think so,' Alan said. 'If this guy thinks he's Stark, and if he's crazy, the idea of him starting at Stark's grave makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it? Is this photographer in New York?'

Thad started. 'Yes.'

'Then she might also be in danger?'

'Yes, I . . . well, I never thought of that, but I suppose she might.'