The Dark Half

fangs.

   He screwed the cover back on the liquid make-up and began to powder. I can smell myself, he thought, and pretty soon other people are going to be able to smell me, too — a thick, unpleasant smell, like a can of potted meat that's spent the day standing in the sun. This is not good, friends and dear hearts. This is not good at all.

'You will write, Thad,' he said, looking at himself in the mirror. 'But with luck, you won't have to do it for long.'

  He grinned more widely, exposing an incisor which had gone dark and dead.

  'I'm a quick study.'

5

At half-past ten the next day, a stationer on Houston Street sold three boxes of Berol Black Beauty pencils to a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a checked shirt, blue-jeans, and very large sunglasses. The man was also wearing pancake make-up, the stationer observed — probably the remains of a night spent tomcatting around in the leather bars. And from the way he smelled, the stationer thought he had done a little more than just splash on the old English Leather; he smelled as if he had bathed in it. The cologne didn't disguise the fact that the broad-shouldered dude smelled filthy. The stationer thought briefly — very briefly — about making a wisecrack, and then thought again. The dude smelled bad but looked strong. Also, the transaction was mercifully brief. After all, it was just pencils the fruitcake was buying, not a Rolls-Royce Corniche.

Best to leave ill enough alone.

6

Stark made a brief stop back at the East Village 'efficiency' to stuff his few belongings into the packsack he had bought in an Army-Navy store on his first day in the maggoty old Big Apple. If not for the bottle of Scotch, he probably would not have bothered to return at all.

  On his way up the crumbling front steps, he passed the small bodies of three dead sparrows without noticing them.

   He left Avenue B on foot . . . but he didn't walk for long. A determined man, he had discovered, can always find a ride if he really needs one.

Twenty

Over the Deadline

1

The day Thad Beaumont's week of grace ended felt more like a day in late July than one in the third week of June. Thad drove the eighteen miles to the University of Maine under a sky the color of hazy chrome, the air-conditioner in the Suburban going full blast in spite of the havoc it wreaked on the gas mileage. There was a dark brown Plymouth behind him. It never got closer than two car- lengths and never dropped back farther than five. It rarely allowed another car to come between itself and Thad's Suburban; if one did happen to ease its way into the two-car parade at an intersection or the school-zone in Veazie, the brown Plymouth passed quickly . . . and if this didn't look almost immediately feasible, one of Thad's guardians would pull the cover off the blue bubble on the dashboard. A few flashes from that would do the trick.

    Thad drove mostly with his right hand, using his left only when he absolutely had to. The hand was better now, but it still hurt like hell if he bent or flexed it too ruthlessly, and he found himself counting down the last few minutes of the last hour before he could swallow another Percodan.

  Liz hadn't wanted him to go up to the University today, and the state police assigned to the Beaumonts hadn't wanted him to, either. For the state boys, the issue was simple: they hadn't wanted to split their watch team. With Liz, things were a little more complex. What she talked about was his hand; he might open the wound trying to drive, she said. What was in her eyes was quite different. Her eyes had been full of George Stark.

    Just what in the hell do you have to go up to the shop for today, anyway? she had wanted to know — and this was a question he had had to prepare himself for, because the semester was over, had been for some time now, and he wasn't teaching any summer classes. What he'd settled on, finally, were the Honors folders.

   Sixty students had applied for Eh-7A, the Department's Honors course in creative writing. This was over twice the number that had applied for the previous fall semester's Honors writing course, but (elementary, my dear Watson) last fall the world — including that part of it majoring in English at the University of Maine — had not known that boring old Thad Beaumont also just happened to be funky George Stark.

    So he had told Liz that be wanted to pull those files and start going through them, winnowing the sixty applicants down to fifteen students — the maximum he could take on (and probably fourteen more than he could actually teach) in a creative writing course.

  She had, of course, wanted to know why he couldn't put it off, at least until July, and had reminded him (also of course) that he had put it off until mid-August the year before. He had gone back to the big leap in applications, then added virtuously that he didn't want last summer's laziness to become a habit.

   At last she had stopped protesting — not because his arguments had convinced her, he thought, but because she could see he meant to go, no matter what. And she knew as well as he did that they would have to start going out again, sooner or later — hiding in the house until someone killed or collared George Stark wasn't a very palatable option. But her eyes had still been full of a dull, questioning fear.

   Thad had kissed her and the twins and left quickly. She looked as if she might start crying soon, and if he was still home when she did that, he would stay home.

  It wasn't the Honors folders, of course.

  It was the deadline.

  He had awakened this morning full of his own dull fear, a feeling as unpleasant as a belly cramp. George Stark had called on the evening of June 10th and had given him a week to get going on the novel about the armored-car heist. Thad had still done nothing about starting . . . although he saw how the book could go more clearly with each passing day. He had even dreamed about it a couple of times. It made a nice break from touring his own deserted house in his sleep and having things explode when he touched them. But this morning his first thought had been, The deadline. I'm over the deadline.

   That meant it was time to talk to George again, as little as he wanted to do that. It was time to find out just how angry George was. Well . . . he supposed he knew the answer to that one. But it was just possible that, if he was very angry, out-of-control angry, and if Thad could goad him until he was all the way out of control, foxy old George might just make a mistake and let something slip.

Losing cohesion.

   Thad had a feeling that George had already let something slip when he allowed Thad's intruding hand to write those words in his journal. If he could only be sure of what they meant, that was. He had an idea . . . but he wasn't sure. And a mistake at this point could mean more than just his life.

    So he was on his way to the University, on his way to his office in the English—Math building. He was on his way there not to collect the Honors files — although he would — but because there was a telephone there, one that wasn't tapped, and because something had to be done. He was over the deadline.

    Glancing down at his left hand, which rested on the steering wheel, he thought (not for the first time during this long, long week) that the telephone was not the only way to get in touch with George. He had proved that . . . but the price had been very high. It was not just the excruciating agony of plunging a sharpened pencil into the back of his hand, or the horror of watching while his out-of-control body hurt itself at the command of Stark — foxy old George, who seemed to be the ghost of a man who had never been. He had paid the real price in his mind. The real price had been the coming of the sparrows; the terror of realizing that the forces at work here were much greater and even more incomprehensible than George Stark himself.

The sparrows, he had become more and more sure, meant death. But for whom?

    He was terrified that he might have to risk the sparrows in order to get in touch with George Stark again.

   And he could see them coming; he could see them arriving at that mystic halfway point where the two of them were linked, that place where he would eventually have to wrestle George Stark for