The Dark Half

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  Murmur, murmur, murmur.

  Oh Thad wanted to hook his fingers into George Stark's evil neck and choke until his fingers popped through the skin and into the son of a bitch's throat.

'He says Alexis Machine's back from the dead and bigger than ever.' Then, shrilly: 'Please do

what he says, Thad! He's got guns! And he's got a blowtorch! A little blowtorch! He says if you

try anything funny — '

'Liz — '

'Please, Thad, do what he says.'

Her words faded off as Stark took the telephone away from her.

    'Tell me something, Thad,' Stark said, and now there was no teasing in his voice. It was dead serious. 'Tell me something, and you want to make it believable and sincere, buddy-roo, or they'll pay for it. Do you understand me?'

  'Yes.'

  'You sure? Because she was telling the truth about the blowtorch.'

  'Yes! Yes, goddammit!'

   'What did she mean when she told you to remember Aunt Martha? Who the fuck is that? Was it some kind of code, Thad? Was she trying to put one over on me?'

    Thad suddenly saw the lives of his wife and children hanging by a single thin thread. This was not metaphor; this was something he could see. The thread was ice-blue, gossamer, barely visible in the middle of all the eternity there might be. Everything now came down to just two things — what he said, and what George Stark believed.

  'Is the recording equipment off the phones?'

  'Of course it is!' Stark said. 'What do you take me for, Thad?'

  'Did Liz know that when you put her on?'

   There was a pause, and then Stark said: 'All she had to do was took. The wires are layin right on the goddam floor.'

  'But did she? Did she look?'

  'Stop beatin around the bush, Thad.'

   'She was trying to tell me where you're going without saying the words,' Thad told him. He was striving for a patient, lecturing tone — patient, but a little patronizing. He couldn't tell if he was getting it or not, but he supposed George would let him know one way or the other, and quite soon. 'She meant the summer house. The place in Castle Rock. Martha Tellford is Liz's aunt. We don't like her. Whenever she'd call and say she was coming to visit, we'd fantasize about just running away to Castle Rock and hiding at the summer house until she died. Now I've said it, and if they've got wireless recording equipment on our phone, George, it's on your own head.'

   He waited, sweating, to see if Stark would buy this . . . or if the thin thread which was the only thing between his loved ones and forever would snap.

  'They don't,' Stark said at last, and his voice sounded relaxed again. Thad fought the need to lean against the side of the telephone kiosk and close his eyes in relief. If I ever see you again, Liz, he thought, I'll wring your neck for taking such a crazy chance. Except he supposed what he would really do when and if he saw her again would be to kiss her until she couldn't breathe.

  'Don't hurt them,' he said into the telephone. 'Please don't hurt them. I'll do whatever you want.'

   'Oh, I know it. I know you will, Thad. And we're gonna do it together. At least, to start with. You just get moving. Shake your watchdogs and get your ass down to Castle Rock. Get there as fast as you can, but don't move so fast you attract attention. That'd be a mistake. You might think about swapping cars, but I'm leaving the details up to you — after all, you're a creative guy. Get there before dark, if you want to find them alive. Don't fuck up. You dig me? Don't fuck up and don't try anything cute.'

  'I won't.'

  'That's right. You won't. What you're gonna do, hoss, is play the game. If you screw up, all you're gonna find when you get here is bodies and a tape of your wife cursing your name before she died.'

  There was a click. The connection was broken.

9

As he was getting back into the Suburban, Manchester unrolled the passenger window of the Plymouth and asked if everything was okay at home. Thad could see by the man's eyes that this was more than an idle question. He had seen something on Thad's face after all. But that was okay; he thought he could deal with that. He was, after all, a creative guy, and his mind seemed to be moving with its own ghastly-silent speed now, like that Japanese bullet—train. The question presented itself again: lie or tell the truth? And as before, it was really no contest.

   'Everything's fine,' he said. His tone of voice was natural and casual. 'The kids are cranky, that's all. And that makes Liz cranky.' He let his voice rise a little. 'You two guys have been acting antsy ever since we left the house. Is there something happening I should know about?'

    He had enough conscience, even in this desperate situation, to feel a little twinge of guilt at that. Something was happening, all right — but he was the one who knew, and he wasn't telling.

   'Nope,' Harrison said from behind the wheel, leaning forward to speak past his partner. 'We can't reach Chatterton and Eddings at the house, that's all. Might have gone inside.'

  'Liz said she'd just made some fresh iced tea,' Thad said, lying giddily.

  'That's it, then,' Harrison said. He smiled at Thad, who felt another, slightly stronger, throb of conscience. 'Maybe there'll be some left when we get there, huh?'

   'Anything's possible.' Thad slammed the Suburban's door and poked the ignition key into its slot with a hand that seemed to have no more feeling than a block of wood. Questions whirled around in his head, doing their own complicated and not particularly lovely gavotte. Were Stark and his family off for Castle Rock yet? He hoped so — he wanted them solid-gone before the news that they had been snatched went out along the nets of police communication. If they were in Liz's car and someone spotted it, or if they were still close to or in Ludlow, there could be bad trouble. Killing trouble. It was horribly ironic that he should be hoping Stark would make a clean getaway, but that was exactly the position he was in.

  And, speaking of getaways, how was he going to lose Harrison and Manchester? That was another good question. Not by outrunning them in the Suburban, that was for sure. The Plymouth they were driving looked like a dog with its dusty finish and blackwall tires, but the rough idle of its motor suggested it was all roadrunner under the hood. He supposed he could ditch them — he already had an idea of how and where it could be done — but how was he going to keep from being discovered again while he made the hundred-and-sixty-mile drive to The Rock?

  He didn't have the slightest idea . . . he only knew he would have to do it somehow.

  Remember Aunt Martha?

  He had fed Stark a line of bull about what that meant, and Stark had swallowed it. So the bastard's access to his mind wasn't complete. Martha Tellford was Liz's aunt, all right, and they had joked, mostly in bed, about running away from her, but they had talked about running to exotic places like Aruba or Tahiti . . . because Aunt Martha knew all about the summer house in Castle Rock. She had visited them there much more frequently than she had visited them in Ludlow. And Aunt Martha Tellford's favorite place in Castle Rock was the dump. She was a cardcarrying, dues-paying member of the NRA, and what she, liked to do at the dump was shoot rats.

    'If you want her to leave,' Thad could remember telling Liz once, 'you'll have to be the one to tell her.' That conversation had also taken place in bed, toward the end of Aunt Martha's interminable visit in the summer of — had it been '79 or '80? It didn't matter, he supposed. 'She's your aunt. Besides, I'm afraid that if I told her, she might use that Winchester of hers on me.'

    Liz had said, 'I'm not sure that being blood kin would cut much ice, either. She gets a look in her eyes . . . ' She had mock-shivered next to him, he remembered, then giggled and poked him in the ribs. 'Go on. God hates a coward. Tell her we're conservationists, even when it comes to dump—rats. Walk right up to her, Thad, and say 'Bug out, Aunt Martha! You've shot your last rat at the dump! Pack your bags and just bug out!''

  Of course, neither of them had told Aunt Martha to bug out; she had kept on with her daily expeditions to the dump, where she shot dozens of rats (and a few seagulls when the rats ran for cover, Thad suspected). Finally the blessed day came when Thad drove her to the Portland Jetport and put her on a plane back to Albany. At the gate, she had given him her oddly disconcerting man's double-pump handshake — as if she were closing a business deal instead of saying goodbye — and told him she just might favor them with a visit the following year. 'Goddam good shooting,' she'd said. 'Must have gotten six or seven dozen of those little germbags.'

   She never had come back, although there had been one close shave ( that impending visit had been averted by a merciful last-minute invitation to go to Arizona instead, where, Aunt Martha had informed them over the phone, there was