The Dark Half

knew perfectly well how Thad and Liz felt about Billie.

    'That's fine,' Thad said. He found Billie Burks and the concept of enjoyment mutually exclusive . . . but since she and Rawlie had formed part of a badly needed alibi, he supposed he should be glad she had come. 'And if anything occurs to you about that other thing . . . '

  'Sparrows and their place in the Invisible World. Yes indeed.' Rawlie nodded to the two policemen behind Thad. 'Good afternoon, gentlemen.' He skirted them and continued on down to his office with a little more purpose. Not much, but a little.

  Thad looked after him, bemused.

  'What was that?' Garrison-or-Harrirnan asked.

  'DeLesseps,' Thad murmured. 'Chief grammarian and amateur folklorist.'

'Looks like the kind of guy who might need a map to find his way home,' the other cop said.

    Thad moved to the door of his office and unlocked it. 'He's more alert than he looks,' he said, and opened the door.

  He wasn't aware that Garrison-or-Harriman was beside him, one hand inside his specially tailored Tall Fella sport-coat, until he had flicked on the overhead lights. Thad felt a moment of belated fear, but the office was empty, of course — empty and so neat, after the soft and steady fallout of an entire year's clutter, that it looked dead.

   For no reason that he could place, he felt a sudden and nearly sickening wave of homesickness and emptiness and loss — a mix of feelings like a deep, unexpected grief. It was like the dream. It was as if he had come here to say goodbye.

  Stop being so goddam foolish, he told himself, and another part of his mind replied quietly: Over the deadline, Thad. You're over the deadline, and I think you might have made a very bad mistake in not at least trying to do what the man wants you to do. Short-term relief is better than no relief at all.

  'If you want coffee, you can get a cup in the common room,' he said. 'The pot will be full, if I know Rawlie.'

  'Where's that?' Garrison-or-Harriman's partner asked.

   'Other side of the hall, two doors up,' Thad said, unlocking the files. He turned and gave them a grin that felt crooked on his face. 'I think you'll hear me if I scream.'

'Just make sure you do yell, if something happens,' Garrison-or-Harriman said.

'I will.'

    'I could send Manchester here for the coffee,' Garrison-or-Harriman said, 'but I get the feeling that you're asking for a little privacy.'

  'Well, yeah. Now that you mention it.'

  'That's fine, Mr Beaumont,' he said. He looked at Thad seriously, and Thad suddenly remembered that his name was Harrison. Just like the ex-Beatle. Stupid to have forgotten it. 'You just want to remember those people in New York died from an overdose of privacy.'

  Oh? I thought Phyllis Myers and Rick Cowley died in the company of the police. He thought of saying this out loud and then didn't. These men were, after all, only trying to do their duty.

  'Lighten up, Trooper Harrison,' he said. 'The building's so quiet today a barefoot man would make echoes.'

  'Okay. We'll be across the hall in the what-do-you-call-it.'

  'Common room.'

  'Right.

  They left, and Thad opened the file marked HNRS APPS. In his mind's eye he kept seeing Rawlie DeLesseps dropping that quick, unobtrusive wink. And listening to that voice telling him he was over the deadline, that he had crossed to the dark side. The side where the monsters were.

4

The phone sat there and didn't ring.

  Come on, he thought at it, stacking the Honors folders on the desk beside his Universitysupplied IBM Selectric. Come on, come on, here I am, standing right next to a phone with no bug on it, so come on, George, give me a call, give me a ring, give me the scoop.

  But the phone only sat there and didn't ring.

    He realized he was looking into a file cabinet that wasn't just pruned but entirely empty. In his preoccupation he had pulled all the folders, not just the ones belonging to Honors students interested in taking creative writing. Even the Xeroxes of those who wanted to take Transformational Grammar, which was the Gospel according to Noam Chomsky, translated by that Dean of the Dead Pipe, Rawlie DeLesseps.

    Thad went to the door and looked out. Harrison and Manchester were standing in the door of the department common room, drinking coffee. In their ham-sized fists, the mugs looked the size of demitasse cups. Thad raised his hand. Harrison raised his in return and asked him if he would be much longer.

  'Five minutes,' Thad said, and both cops nodded.

  He went back to his desk, separated the creative writing files from the others, and began to replace the latter in the file drawer, doing it as slowly as possible, giving the phone time to ring. But the phone just went on sitting there. He heard one ring someplace far down the corridor, the sound muffled by a closed door, somehow ghostly in the building's unaccustomed summer silence. Maybe George got the wrong number, he thought, and uttered a little laugh. The fact was, George wasn't going to call. The fact was, he, Thad, had been wrong. Apparently George had some other trick up his sleeve. Why should he be surprised? Tricks were George Stark's specialite de la maison. Still, he had been so sure, so goddamned sure —

  'Thaddeus?'

  He jumped, almost spilling the contents of the last half a dozen files onto the floor. When he was sure they weren't going to slip out of his grasp, he turned around. Rawlie DeLesseps was standing just outside the door. His large pipe poked in like a horizontal periscope.

  'Sorry,' Thad said. 'You threw a jump into me, Rawlie. My mind was ten thousand miles away.'

  'Someone calling for you on my phone,' Rawlie said amiably. 'Must have gotten the number wrong. Lucky I was in.'

   Thad felt his heart begin to beat slow and hard — it was as if there were a snare-drum inside his chest, and someone had begun to whack it with a great deal of measured energy.

  'Yes,' Thad said. 'That was very lucky.'

  Rawlie gave him an appraising glance. The blue eyes under his puffy, slightly reddened lids were so alive and inquisitive they were almost rude, and certainly at odds with his cheerful, bumbling, absent-minded-professor manner. 'Is everything quite all right, Thaddeus?'

  No, Rawlie. These days there's a mad killer out there who's partly me, a fellow who can apparently take over my body and make me do fun things like sticking pencils into myself, and I consider each day which concludes with me still sane a victory. Reality is out of joint, good buddy.

  'All right? Why wouldn't everything be all right?'

  'I seem to detect the faint but unmistakably ferrous odor of irony, Thad.'

  'You're mistaken.'

  'Am I? Then why do you look like a deer caught in a pair of headlights?'

  'Rawlie — '

    'And the man I just spoke to sounds like the sort of salesman you buy something from on the phone just to make sure he'll never visit your home in person.'

  'It's nothing, Rawlie.'

  Very well.' Rawlie didn't look convinced.

  Thad left his office and headed down the hall toward Rawlie's.

  'Where are you off to?' Harrison called after him.

  'Rawlie has a call for me in his office,' he explained. 'The phone numbers up here are all sequential. The guy must have gotten the numbers bolloxed.'

  'And just happened to get the only other faculty member here today?' Harrison asked skeptically.

  Thad shrugged and kept on walking.

    Rawlie DeLesseps's office was cluttered, pleasant, and still inhabited by the smell of his pipe — two years' abstinence apparently did not make up for some thirty years of indulgence. It was dominated by a dart-board with a photograph of Ronald Reagan mounted on it. An encyclopedia— sized volume, Franklin Barringer's Folklore of America, lay open on Rawlie's desk. The telephone was off the hook, lying on a stack of blank blue-books. Looking at the handset, Thad felt the old dread fall over him in its familiar stifling folds. It was like being bundled in a blanket that badly needs to be washed. He turned his head, sure he would see all three of them — Rawlie, Harrison, and Manchester — lined up in the doorway like sparrows on a telephone wire. But the office doorway was empty, and from somewhere down the hall, he could hear the soft rasp of Rawlie's voice ' He had buttonholed Thad's guard-dogs. Thad doubted that he had done it by accident.