The Dark Half

   'Well, we'll just get out of your hair, Mrs Beau — ' Prebble began, and Liz said in a calm but terribly pained voice, 'I think you'd better wait, please.'

   Thad picked up the telephone and shouted: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the fuck do you WANT?'

    Wes jumped. Dave froze just as he was preparing to take the first bite from his banana. The heads of the federal agents snapped around. Thad found himself wishing with miserable intensity that Alan Pangborn were here instead of talking to Dr Hume up in Orono. Alan didn't believe in Stark either, at least not yet, but at least he was human. Thad supposed these others might be, but he had serious doubts as to whether or not they knew he and Liz were.

  'It's him, it's him!' Liz was saying to Prebble.

  'Oh Jesus,' Prebble said. He and the other fearless minion of the law exchanged an utterly nonplussed glance: What the fuck do we do now?

    Thad heard and saw these things, but was separate from them. Separate even from Liz. There were only Stark and him now. Together again for the first time, as the old vaudeville announcers used to say.

   'Cool down, Thad,' George Stark said. He sounded amused. 'No need to get your panties all in a bunch.' It was the voice he had expected. Exactly. Every nuance, right down to the faint Southern slur that turned 'get your' into something that was not 'getcho' but wanted to be.

    The two wiremen put their heads together briefly, and then Dave bolted for the panel truck and the auxiliary telephone. He was still holding his banana. Wes ran for the cellar stairs to check the voice-activated tape-recorder.

  The fearless minions of the Effa Bee Eye stood in the middle of the living room and stared. They looked as if they wanted to put their arms about each other for comfort, like babes lost in the woods.

  'What do you want?' Thad repeated in a quieter voice.

   'Why, just to tell you that it is over,' Stark said. 'I got the last one this noontime — that little girl who used to work at Darwin Press for the boss of the accounting department?'

Almost, but not quite, the accountin depawtment.

   'She was the one got that Clawson boy's coffee perkin in the first place,' Stark said. 'The cops'll find her; she's got a place on Second Avenue way downtown. Some of her's on the floor; I put the rest on the kitchen table.' He laughed. 'It's been a busy week, Thad. I been hoppin as fast as a onelegged man in an ass-kickin contest. I just called to set your mind at rest.'

'It doesn't feel very rested,' Thad said.

    'Well, give it time, old hoss; give it time. I think I'll head down south, do me some fishing. This city life tires me out.' He laughed, a sound so monstrously jolly it made Thad's flesh crawl.

  He was lying.

  Thad knew this as surely as he knew that Stark had waited until the tap-and-trace equipment was in place to make his call. Could he know something like that? The answer was yes. Stark might be calling from somewhere in New York City, but the two of them were tied together by the same invisible but undeniable bond that connected twins. They were twins, halves of the same whole, and Thad was terrified to find himself drifting out of his body, drifting along the phone line, not all the way to New York, no, but halfway; meeting the monster at the center of this umbilicus, in western Massachusetts, perhaps, the two of them meeting and merging again, as they had somehow met and merged every time he had put the cover on his typewriter and picked up one of those goddamned Berol Black Beauty pencils.

  'You lying fuck!' he cried.

  The FBI agents jumped as if they had been goosed.

   'Hey, Thad, that's not very nice!' Stark said. He sounded injured. 'Did you think I was gonna hurt you? Hell, no! I was getting revenge for you, boy! I knew I was the one had to do it. I know you got a chicken liver, but I don't hold it against you; it takes all kinds to spin a world as busy as this one. Why in hail would I bother to revenge you if I was gonna fix things so you couldn't enjoy it?'

   Thad's fingers had gone to the small white scar on his forehead and were rubbing there, rubbing hard enough to redden the skin. He found himself trying — trying desperately — to hold on to himself. To hold on to his own basic reality.

  He's lying, and I know why, and he KNOWS I know, and he knows it doesn't matter, because no one will believe me. He knows how odd it all looks to them, and he knows they're listening, he knows what they think . . . but he also knows How they think, and that makes him safe. They believe he's a psvcho who only THINKs he's George Stark, because that's what they HAVE to think. To think in any other way goes against everything they've learned, everything they ARE. All the fingerprints in the world won't change that. He knows that if he implies he's not George Stark, if he implies that he's finally figured that out, they'll relax. They won't remove the police protection right away . . . but he can speed it UP —

  'You know whose idea it was to bury you. It was mine.

   'No, no!' Stark said easily, and it was almost (but not quite) Naw, naw! 'You were misled, that's all. When that slimeball Clawson came along, he knocked you for a loop — that's the way it was. Then, when you called up that trained monkey who called himself a literary agent, he gave you some real bad advice. Thad, it was like someone took a big crap on your dining—room table and you called up someone you trusted to ask em what to do about it, and that someone said, 'You haven't got a problem; just put you some pork gravy on it. Shit with pork gravy on it tastes right fine on a cold night.' You never would have done what you did on your own. I know that, hoss.'

'That's a goddam lie and you know it!'

    And suddenly he realized just how perfect this was, and how well Stark understood the people he was dealing with. He's going to come right out and say it pretty soon. He's going to come right out and say that he isn't George Stark. And they'll believe him when he does. They'll listen to the tape that's turning down in the basement right now, and they'll believe what it says. Alan and everyone else. Because that's not just what they WANT to believe; it's what they ALREADY believe.

'I don't know any such thing,' Stark said calmly, almost amiably.

    'I'm not going to bother you anymore, Thad, but let me give you at least one chunk of advice before I go. May do you some good. Don't you get thinkin I'm George Stark. That's the mistake I made. I had to go and kill a whole bunch of people just to get my head squared around again.'

  Thad listened to this, thunderstruck. There were things he should be saying, but he couldn't seem to get past this weird feeling of disconnection from his body and his amazement at the pure and perfect gall of the man.

  He thought of the futile conversation with Alan Pangborn, and wondered again who he was when he made up Stark, who had started off being just another story to him. Where, exactly, was the line of belies Had he created this monster by losing that line somehow, or was there some other factor, an X-factor which he could not see but only hear in the cries of those phantom birds?

   'I don't know,' Stark was saying with an easy laugh, 'maybe I actually am crazy as they said I was when I was in that place.'

   Oh good, that's good, get them checking the insane asylums in the South for a tall, broadshouldered man with blonde hair. That won't divert all of them, but it will do for a start, won't it?

Thad clenched the phone tight, his head throbbing with sick fury now.

   'But I'm not a bit sorry I did it, because I did love those books, Thad. When I was . . . there . . . in that loony-bin . . . I think they were the only things kept me sane. And you know something? I feel a lot better now. I know for sure who I am now, and that's something. I believe you could call what I did therapy, but I don't think there's much future in it, do you?'

'Quit lying, goddammit!' Thad shouted.

   'We could discuss this,' Stark said. 'We could discuss it all the way to hell and back, but it'd take awhile. I guess they told you to keep me on the line, didn't they?'

No. They don't need you on the line. And you know that, too.

   'Give my best regards to your lovely wife,' Stark said, with a touch of what almost sounded like reverence.