The Dark Half

'Take care of your babies. And you take it easy your own self, Thad. I'm not going to bother you anymore. It's — '

'What about the birds?' Thad asked suddenly. 'Do you hear the birds, George?'

   There was a sudden silence on the line. Thad seemed to feel a quality of surprise in it . . . as if, for the first time in the conversation, something had not gone according to George Stark's carefully prepared script. He did not know exactly why, but it was as if his nerve-endings possessed some arcane understanding the rest of him did not have. He felt a moment of wild triumph — the sort of triumph an amateur boxer might feel, slipping one past Mike Tyson's guard and momentarily rocking the champ back on his heels.

'George — do you hear the birds?'

   The only sound in the room was the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. Liz and the FBI agents were staring at him.

  'I don't know what you're talkin about, hoss,' Stark said slowly. 'Could be you — '

  'No,' Thad said, and laughed wildly. His fingers continued to rub the small white scar, shaped vaguely like a question mark, on his forehead. 'No, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Well, you listen to me for a minute, George. I hear the birds. I don't know what they mean yet . . . but I will. And when I do . . . '

  But that was where the words stopped. When he did, what would happen? He didn't know.

   The voice on the other end said slowly, with great deliberation and emphasis: 'Whatever you are talking about, Thad, it doesn't matter. Because this is over now.'

  There was a click. Stark was gone. Thad almost felt himself being yanked back along the telephone line from that mythical meeting-place in western Massachusetts, yanked along not at the speed of sound or light but at that of thought, and thumped rudely back into his own body, Stark naked again.

  Jesus.

  He dropped the phone and it hit the cradle askew. He turned around on legs which felt like stilts, not bothering to replace it properly.

  Dave rushed into the room from one direction, Wes from another.

   'It worked perfect!' Wes screamed. The FBI agents jumped once more. Malone made an 'Eeek!' noise very much like the one attributed to women in comic strips who have just spotted mice. Thad tried to imagine what these two would be like in a confrontation with a gang of terrorists or shotgun-toting bank-robbers and couldn't do it. Maybe I'm just too tired, he thought.

   The two wiremen did a clumsy little dance, slapping each other on the back, and then raced out to the equipment van together.

'It was him,' Thad said to Liz. 'He said he wasn't, but it was him. Him.'

   She came to him then and hugged him tightly and he needed that — he hadn't known how badly until she did it.

'I know,' she whispered in his ear, and he put his face into her hair and closed his eyes.

2

The shouting had wakened the twins; they were both crying lustily upstairs. Liz went to get them. Thad started to follow her, then returned to set the telephone properly into its cradle. It rang at once. Alan Pangborn was on the other end. He had stopped in at the Orono State Police Barracks to have a cup of coffee before his appointment with Dr Hume, and had been there when Dave the wireman radioed in with news of the call and the preliminary trace results. Alan sounded very excited.

    'We don't have a complete trace yet, but we know it was New York City, area code 212,' he said. 'Five minutes and we'll have the location nailed down.'

   'It was him,' Thad repeated. 'It was Stark. He said he wasn't, but that's who it was. Someone has to check on the girl he mentioned. The name is probably Darla Gates.' 'The slut from Vassar with the bad nasal habits?'

    'Right,' Thad said. Although he doubted if Darla Gates would be worrying about her nose much anymore, one way or the other. He felt intensely weary.

  'I'll pass the name on to the N.Y.P.D. How you doing, Thad?'

  'I'm all right.'

  'Liz?'

    'Never mind the bedside manner just now, okay? Did you hear what I said? It was him. No matter what he said, it was him.'

  'Well . . . why don't we just wait and see what comes of the trace?'

  There was something in his voice Thad hadn't heard there before. Not the sort of cautious incredulity he'd evinced when he first realized the Beaumonts were talking about George Stark as a real guy, but actual embarrassment. It was a realization Thad would happily have spared himself, but it was simply too clear in the sheriff 's voice. Embarrassment, and of a very special sort — the kind you felt for someone too distraught or stupid or maybe just too self-insensitive to feel it for himself. Thad felt a twinkle of sour amusement at the idea.

    'Okay, we'll wait and see,' Thad agreed. 'And while we're waiting and seeing, I hope you'll go ahead and keep your appointment with my doctor.'

   Pangborn was replying, but all of a sudden Thad didn't much care. The acid was percolating up from his stomach again, and this time it was a volcano. Foxy George, he thought. They think they see through him. He wants them to think that. He is watching them see through him, and when they go away, far enough away, foxy old George will arrive in his black Toronado. And what am I going to do to stop him?

  He didn't know.

  He hung up the telephone, cutting off Alan Pangborn's voice, and went upstairs to help Liz change the twins and dress them for the afternoon.

  And he kept thinking about how it had felt, how it had felt to be somehow trapped in a telephone line running beneath the countryside of western Massachusetts, trapped down there in the dark with foxy old George Stark. It had felt like Endsville.

3

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. It stopped halfway through the second ring, and Wes the wireman called Thad to the phone. He went downstairs to take the call.

  'Where are the FBI agents?' he asked Wes.

  For a moment he really expected Wes to say, FBI agents? I didn't see any FBI agents.

    'Them? They left.' Wes gave a big shrug, as if to ask Thad if he had expected anything else. 'They got all these computers, and if someone doesn't play with them, I guess someone else wonders how come there's so much down-time, and they might have to take a budget cut, or something.'

'Do they do anything?'

    'Nope,' Wes said simply. 'Not in cases like these. Or if they do, I've never been around when they did it. They write stuff down; they do that. Then they put it in a computer someplace. Like I said.'

'I see.'

    Wes looked at his watch. 'Me'n Dave are out of here, too. Equipment'll run on its own. You won't even get a bill.'

  'Good,' Thad said, going to the phone. 'And thank you.'

  'No problem. Mr Beaumont?'

  Thad turned.

   'If I was to read one of your books, would you say I'd do better with one you wrote under your own name, or one under the other guy's name?'

  'Try the other guy,' Thad said, picking up the phone. 'More action.'

  Wes nodded, sketched a salute, and went out.

    'Hello?' Thad said. He felt as if he should have a telephone grafted onto the side of his head soon. It would save time and trouble. With recording and traceback equipment attached, of course. He could carry it around in a back-pack.

    'Hi, Thad. Alan. I'm still at the State Police Barracks. Listen, the news is not so good on the phone trace. Your friend called from a telephone kiosk in Penn Station.'

  Thad remembered what the other wireman, Dave, had said about installing all that expensive high-tech equipment in order to trace a call back to a bank of phones in a shopping mall somewhere. 'Are you surprised?'

    'No. Disappointed, but not surprised. We hope for a slip, and believe it or not, we usually get one, sooner or later. I'd like to come over tonight. That okay?'

  'Okay,' Thad said, 'why not? If things get dull, we'll play bridge.

  'We expect to have voice-prints by this evening.'

  'So you get his voice-print. So what?'

  'Not print. Prints.'

  'I don't — '

  'A voice-print is a computer-generated graphic which accurately represents a person's vocal qualities,' Pangborn said. 'It doesn't have anything to do with speech, exactly — we're not interested in accents, impediments, pronunciation, that