The Dark Half

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'Alan? Are you — ?'

   just a sec. I'm writing.' There was another, shorter, pause. 'Okay,' he said at last. 'I got it. You can tell me all of this but not who the guy is or your connection with him or how you know him?'

  'I don't know, but I'll try. Tomorrow. Knowing his name isn't going to help anyone tonight anyway, because he's using another one.'

  'George Stark.'

    'Well, he could be crazy enough to be calling himself Alexis Machine, but I doubt it. Stark is what I think, yeah.' He tried to wink at Liz. He did not really believe the mood could be lightened by a wink or anything else, but he tried, anyway. He only succeeded in blinking both eyes, like a sleepy owl.

  'There's no way I can persuade you to go on with this tonight, is there?'

  'No. There's not. I'm sorry, but there's not.'

  'All right. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.' And he was gone, just like that, no thank you, no goodbye. Thinking it over, Thad supposed he didn't really rate a thank you.

    He hung up the phone and went to his wife, who sat looking at him as if she had been turned into a statue. He took her hands — they were very cold — and said, 'This is going to be all right, Liz. I swear it is.'

    'Are you going to tell him about the trances when you talk to him tomorrow? The sound of the birds? How you heard it when you were a kid, and what it meant then? The things you wrote?'

   'I'm going to tell him everything,' Thad said. 'What he chooses to pass on to the other authorities . . . He shrugged. 'That's up to him.'

  'So much,' she said in a strengthless little voice. Her eyes were still fixed on him — seemed powerless to leave him. 'You know so much about him. Thad . . . how?'

    He could only kneel there before her, holding her cold hands. How could he know so much? People asked him that all the time. They used different words to express it — how did you make that up? how did you put that into words? how did you remember that? how did you see that? — but it always came back to the same thing: how did you know that?

  He didn't know how he knew.

  He just did.

   'So much,' she repeated, and she spoke in the tone of a sleeper who is in the grip of a distressful dream. Then they were both silent. He kept expecting the twins to sense their parents' upset, to wake up and begin crying, but there was only the steady tick of the clock. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor by her chair and went on holding her hands, hoping he could warm them up. They were still cold fifteen minutes later when the phone rang.

5

Alan Pangborn was flat and declarative. Rick Cowley was safe in his apartment, and was under police protection. He would soon be on his way to his ex-wife, who would now be his ex-wife forever; the reconciliation of which both had spoken from time to time, and with considerable longing, was never going to happen. Miriam was dead. Rick would make the formal identification at the Borough of Manhattan morgue on First Avenue. Thad should not expect a call from Rick tonight or attempt to make one himself; Thad's connection with Miriam Cowley's murder had been withheld from Rick 'pending developments.' Phyllis Myers had been located and was also under police protection. Michael Donaldson was proving a tougher nut, but they expected to have him located and covered by midnight.

   'How was she killed?' Thad asked, knowing the answer perfectly well. But sometimes you had to ask. God knew why.

  'Throat was cut,' Alan said with what Thad suspected was intentional brutality. He followed it up a moment later. 'Still sure there's nothing you want to tell me?'

  'In the morning. When we can look at each other.'

  'Okay. I didn't think there was any harm in asking.'

  'No. No harm.'

  'The New York City Police have an APB out on a man named George Stark, your description.'

   'Good.' And he supposed it was, although he knew it was also probably pointless. They almost certainly wouldn't find him if he didn't want to be found, and if anyone did, Thad thought that person would be sorry.

  'Nine o'clock,' Pangborn said. 'Make sure you're at home, Thad.'

  'Count on it.'

6

Liz took a tranquilizer and finally fell asleep. Thad drifted in and out of a thin, scratchy doze and got up at quarter past three to use the bathroom. As he was standing there, urinating into the bowl, he thought he heard the sparrows. He tensed, listening, the flow of his water drying up at once. The sound neither grew nor diminished, and after a few moments he realized it was only crickets.

   He looked out the window and saw a state police cruiser parked across the road, dark and silent. He might have thought it was also deserted if he hadn't seen the fitful wink of a cigarette ember. It seemed that he, Liz, and the twins were also under police protection.

Or police guard, he thought, and went back to bed.

  Whichever it was, it seemed to provide a little peace of mind. He fell asleep and woke at eight, with no memory of bad dreams. But of course the real bad dream was still out there. Somewhere.

Fourteen

Fools Stuffing

1

The guy with the stupid little pussy-tickler mustache was a lot quicker than Stark had expected.

  Stark had been waiting for Michael Donaldson in the ninth-floor hallway of the building where Donaldson lived, just around the comer from Donaldson's apartment door. It all would have been easier if Stark could have gotten into the apartment first, as he had done with the bitch, but a single glance was enough to convince him that these locks, unlike hers, had not been put in by jiminy Cricket. It should have been all right just the same. It was late, and all the rabbits in the warren should have been fast asleep and dreaming of clover. Donaldson himself should have been slow and fuddled — when you came home at quarter of one in the morning, it wasn't from the public library. Donaldson did seem a trifle fuddled, but he was not slow at all.

   When Stark stepped around the corner and slashed out with the razor as Donaldson fiddled and diddled with his keyring, he expected to blind the man quickly and efficiently. Then, before he could more than begin a cry, he would open Donaldson's throat, cutting his plumbing at the same time he severed his vocal cords.

   Stark did not try to move quietly. He wanted Donaldson to hear him, wanted Donaldson to turn his face toward him. It would make it easier.

   Donaldson did what he was supposed to at first. Stark whipped the razor at his face in a short, hard arc. But Donaldson managed to duck a little — not much, but too much for Stark's purposes. Instead of getting his eyes, the straight-razor laid his forehead open to the bone. A flap of skin curled down over Donaldson's eyebrows like a loose strip of wallpaper.

  'HELP!' Donaldson blatted in a strangled, sheeplike voice, and there went your no-hitter. Fuck.

  Stark moved in, holding the straight-razor out in front of his own eyes with the blade slightly, turned up, like a matador saluting the bull before the first corrida. Okay; it didn't go just according to Hoyle every time. He hadn't blinded the stool-pigeon, but blood was pouring out of the cut on his forehead in what looked like pints, and what little Donaldson was seeing would be coming through a sticky red haze.

  He slashed at Donaldson's throat and the bastard pulled his head back almost as fast as a rattlesnake recoiling from a strike, amazing speed, and Stark found himself admiring the man a little, ridiculous pussy-tickler mustache or not.

   The blade cut only air a quarter of an inch from the man's throat and he screamed for help again. The rabbits, who never slept deeply in this city, this maggoty old Big Apple, would be waking up. Stark reversed direction and brought the blade back again, at the same time rising on his toes and thrusting his body forward. It was a graceful, balletic movement, and should have finished it. But Donaldson somehow managed to get a hand up in front of his throat; instead of killing him, Stark only administered a series of long, shallow wounds which police pathologists would call defense cuts. Donaldson raised his hand palm out, and the razor passed across the base of all four fingers. He wore a heavy class ring on the third, and so that one sustained no wound. There was a crisp and minute metallic sound —