The Dark Half

of genuine pleasure . . . and quite a winning one, she suspected. And didn't she feel just an instant of attraction? A freakish flicker? It was insane, of course, but did that mean she could deny it? Liz didn't think so, and she even understood why it might be. After all, she had married this man's closest relative.

  'Wonderful!' he said. 'Couldn't be better! And do they have a car?'

   Wendy began to cry. Liz looked down and saw her daughter looking at the man with the rotten face and the bulging marble eyes, holding her small and pleasantly chubby arms out. She was not crying because she was afraid of him; she was crying because she wanted to go back to him.

  'Isn't that sweet!' Stark said. 'She wants to come back to Daddy. '

  'Shut up, you monster!' she spat at him.

  Foxy George Stark threw his head back and laughed.

9

He gave her five minutes to pack a few more things for herself and the twins. She told him it would be impossible to get together half of what they'd need in that length of time, and he told her to do the best she could.

  'You're lucky I'm giving you any more time at all, Beth, under the circumstances — there are two dead cops in your garage and your husband knows what's going on. If you want to take the five minutes debating the point with me, that's your choice. You're already down to . . . ' He glanced at his watch, then smiled at her. 'Four- and-a-half.'

   So she did what she could, pausing once while tossing jars of baby food into a shopping bag to look at her children. They were sitting side by side on the floor, playing an idle sort of pat-a-cake with each other and looking at Stark. She was dreadfully afraid she knew what they were thinking about.

Isn't that sweet.

   No. She wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't think about it but it was all she could think about: Wendy, crying and holding out her pudgy little arms. Holding them out to the murderous stranger.

  They want to go back to Daddy.

  He was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her, smiling, and she wanted to use the scissors right then. She had never in her life wanted anything so badly. 'Can't you give me a hand?' she cried angrily at him, gesturing at the two bags and the cooler she had filled.

'Of course, Beth,' he said. He took one of the bags for her. His other hand, the left, he kept free.

10

They crossed the side yard, passed through the little greenbelt between properties, and then walked across the Clarks' yard to their driveway. Stark insisted that she move fast, and she was panting by the time they stopped in front of the closed garage door. He had offered to take one of the twins, but she'd refused.

   He set down the cooler, took his wallet from his back pocket, removed a narrow strip of metal which tapered to a point, and slipped it into the lock of the garage door. He turned it first to the right and then back to the left, one car cocked. There was a click and he smiled.

  'Good,' he said. 'Even Mickey Mouse locks on garage doors can be a pain in the ass. Big springs. Hard to tip them over. This one's as tired as an old whore's twat at daybreak, though. Lucky for us.' He turned the handle and shoved. The door rumbled up on its tracks.

    The garage was hot as a haymow, and the Clarks' Volvo wagon was even hotter inside. Stark bent beneath the dashboard, exposing the back of his neck to her as she sat in the passenger seat. Her fingers twitched. It would only take a second to rip the scissors free, but that could still be too long. She had seen how quickly he reacted to the unexpected. It did not really surprise her that his reflexes were as fast as those of a wild animal, since that was what he was.

    He raked down a bunch of wires from behind the dash, then produced a bloody straight-razor from his front pocket. She shivered a little and had to swallow twice, fast, to stifle a gag-reflex. He unfolded the blade, bent down again, stripped insulation from two of the wires, and touched the bare copper cores together. There was a sliver of blue spark, and then the engine began to turn over. A moment later the car was running. 'Well, all right!' George Stark crowed. 'Let's roll, what do you say?'

  The twins giggled together and waved their hands at him. Stark waved gaily back. As he backed the car out of the garage, Liz reached stealthily behind Wendy, who was sitting on her lap, and touched the rounds that were the fingerholes of the scissors. Not now, but soon. She had no intention of waiting for Thad. She was too uneasy about what this dark creature might decide to do to the twins in the meantime.

  Or to her.

  As soon as he was sufficiently distracted, she intended to free the scissors from their hiding place and bury them in his throat.

PART 3

THE COMING OF THE

PSYCHOPOMPS

'The poets talk about love,' Machine said, running the straight-razor back and forth along the strop in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, 'and that's okay. There is love. The politicians talk about duty, and that's okay, too. There is duty. Eric Hoffer talks about post-modernism, Hugh Hefner talks about sex, Hunter Thompson talks about drugs, and Jimmy Swaggart talks about God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those things all exist and they are all okay. Do you know what I mean, Jack?'

  'Yeah, I guess so,' Jack Rangely said. He really didn't know, didn't have the slightest idea, but when Machine was in this sort of mood, only a lunatic would argue with him.

  Machine turned the straight-razor's edge down and suddenly slashed the strop in two. A long section fell to the pool—hall floor like a severed tongue. 'But what I talk about is doom,' he said. 'Because, in the end, doom is all that counts.'

— Riding to Babylon by George Stark

Twenty-two

Thad on the Run

1

Pretend it's a book you're writing, he thought as he turned left onto College Avenue, leaving the campus behind. And pretend you're a character in that book.

   It was a magic thought. His mind had been filled with roaring panic — a kind of mental tornado in which fragments of some possible plan spun like chunks of uprooted landscape. But at the idea that he could pretend it was all a harmless fiction, that he could move not only himself but the other characters in this story (characters like Harrison and Manchester, for instance) around the way he moved characters on paper, in the safety of his study with bright lights overhead and either a cold can of Pepsi or a hot cup of tea beside him . . . at this idea, it was as if the wind howling between his ears suddenly blew itself out. The extraneous shit blew away with it, leaving him with the pieces of his plan lying around . . . pieces he found he was able to put together quite easily. He discovered he had something which might even work.

  It better work, Thad thought. If it doesn't, you'll wind up in protect ve custody and Liz and the kids will most likely wind up dead.

  But what about the sparrows? Where did the sparrows fit?

    He didn't know. Rawlie had told him they were psychopomps, the harbingers of the living dead, and that fit, didn't it? Yes. Up to a point, anyway. Because foxy old George was alive again, but foxy old George was also dead . . . dead and rotting. So the sparrows fit in . . . but not all the way. If the sparrows had guided George back from

(the land of the dead)

    wherever he had been, how come George himself knew nothing about them? How come he did not remember writing that phrase, THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, in blood on the walls of two apartments?

  'Because I wrote it,' Thad muttered, and his mind flew back to