The Dark Half

Thad as Thad cut across his bows and headed back down toward Gold's junkyard, the pedal again stamped to the floor. If a roving cop happened to observe him not just breaking the speed limit but apparently trying to disintegrate it, that was just too bad. He couldn't afford to finger. He had to get this vehicle, which was just too big and too bright, off the road as fast as he could.

    It was half a mile back to the automobile junkyard. Thad drove most of it with his eyes on the rearview mirror, looking for the Plymouth. It was still nowhere to be seen when he turned left into Gold's.

    He rolled the Suburban slowly through an open gate in the chain-link fence. A sign, faded red letters on a dirty white background, read EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT! On a weekday he would have been spotted almost at once, and turned back. But it was Saturday, and now well into the lunch-hour to boot.

    Thad drove down an aisle lined with wrecked cars stacked up two and sometimes three deep. The ones on the bottom had lost their essential shapes and seemed to be melting slowly into the ground. The earth was so black with oil you would have believed nothing could grow there, but rank green weeds and huge, silently nodding sunflowers sprouted in cheesy clusters, like survivors of a nuclear holocaust. One large sunflower had grown up through the broken windshield of a bakery truck lying on its back like a dead dog. Its hairy green stern had curled like a knotted fist around the stump of a wheel, and a second fist clung to the hood ornament of the old Cadillac which lay on top of the truck. It seemed to stare at Thad like the black-and-yellow eye of a dead monster.

It was a large and silent Detroit necropolis, and it gave Thad the creeps.

   He made a right turn, then a left. Suddenly he could see sparrows everywhere, perched on roofs and trunks and greasy amputated engines. He saw a trio of the small birds bathing in a hubcap fined with water. They did not fly away as he approached but stopped what they were doing and watched him with their beady black eyes. Sparrows lined the top of a windshield which leaned against the side of an old Plymouth. He passed within three feet of them. They fluttered their wings nervously but held their positions as he passed.

  The harbingers of the living dead, Thad thought. His hand went to the small white scar on his forehead and began to rub it nervously.

   Looking through what appeared to be a meteor-hole in the windshield of a Datsun as he passed it, he observed a wide splash of dried blood on the dashboard.

  It wasn't a meteor that made that hole, he thought, and his stomach turned over slowly and giddily.

  A congregation of sparrows sat on the Datsun's front seat.

  'What do you want with me?' he asked hoarsely. 'What in God's name do you want?'

    And in his mind he seemed to hear an answer of sorts; in his mind he seemed to hear the shrill single voice of that avian intelligence: No, Thad — what do You want with us? You are the owner. You are the bringer. You are the knower.

  'I don't know jack shit,' he muttered.

  At the end of this row, space was available in front of a late-model Cutlass Supreme — someone had amputated its entire front end.

   He backed the Suburban in and got out. Looking from one side of the narrow aisle to the other, Thad felt a little bit like a rat in a maze. The place smelled of oil and the higher, sourer odor of transmission fluid. There were no sounds but the faraway drone of cars on Route 2.

  The sparrows looked at him from everywhere — a silent convocation of small brown—black birds.

  Then, abruptly, they took wing all at once — hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. For a moment the air was harsh with the sound of their wings. They flocked across the sky, then banked west — in the direction where Castle Rock lay. And abruptly he began to feel that crawling sensation again . . . not so much on his skin as inside it.

  Are we trying to have a little peek, George?

   Under his breath he began to sing a Bob Dylan song: 'John Wesley Harding . . . was a friend to the poor . . . he travelled with a gun in every hand . . . '

   That crawling, itching sensation seemed to increase. It found and centered upon the hole in his left hand. He could have been completely wrong, engaging in wishful thinking and no more, but Thad seemed to sense anger . . . and frustration.

   'All along the telegraph his name it did resound . . . ' Thad sang under his breath. Ahead, lying on the oily ground like the twisted remnant of some steel statue no one had ever really wanted to look at in the first place, was a rusty motor-mount. Thad picked it up and walked back to the Suburban, still singing snatches of 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath and remembering his old raccoon buddy of the same name. If he could camouflage the Suburban by beating on it a little, if he could give himself even an extra two hours, it could mean the difference between life and death to Liz and the twins.

    'All along the countryside. sorry, big guy, this hurts me more than it does you . . . he opened many a door . . .' He threw the motor-mount at the driver's side of the Suburban, bashing a dent as deep as a washbasin in it. He picked up the motor-mount again, walked around to the front of the Suburban, and pegged it at the grill hard enough to strain his shoulder. Plastic splintered and flew. Thad unlatched the hood and raised it a little, giving the Suburban the dead- alligator smile which seemed to be the Gold's version of automotive haute couture.

' . . . but he was never known to hurt an honest man . . . '

   He picked up the motor-mount again, observing as he did so that fresh blood had begun to stain the bandage on his wounded hand. Nothing he could do about it now.

'. . . with his lady by his side, he took a stand . . . '

    He threw the mount a final time, sending it through the windshield with a heavy crunch, which — absurd as it might be — pained his heart.

He thought the Suburban now looked enough like the other wrecks to pass muster.

    Thad started walking up the row. He turned right at the first intersection, heading back toward the gate and the retail parts shop beyond it. He had seen a pay telephone on the wall by the door when he drove in. Halfway there he stopped walking and stopped singing. He cocked his head. He looked like a man straining to catch some small sound. What he was really doing was listening to his body, auditing it.

  The crawling itch had disappeared.

  The sparrows were gone, and so was George Stark, at least for the time being.

  Smiling a little, Thad began to walk faster.

3

After two rings, Thad began to sweat. If Rawlie was still there, he should have picked up his phone by now. The faculty offices in the English-Math building were just not that big. Who else could he call? Who the hell else was there? He could think of no one.

Halfway through the third ring, Rawlie picked up his phone. 'Hello, DeLesseps.'

    Thad closed his eyes at the sound of that smoke-roughened voice and leaned against the cool metal side of the parts shop for a moment.

  'Hello?'

  'Hi, Rawlie. It's Thad.'

  'Hello, Thad.' Rawlie did not seem terribly surprised to hear from him. 'Forget something?'

  'No. Rawlie, I'm in trouble.'

  'Yes.' Just that, and not a question. Rawlie spoke the word and then just waited.

   'You know those two' — Thad hesitated for a moment — 'those two fellows who were with me?'

'Yes,' Rawlie said calmly. 'The police escort.'

    'I ditched them,' Thad said, then took a quick glance over his shoulder at the sound of a car rumbling onto the packed dirt which served as Gold's customer parking area. For a moment he was so sure it was the brown Plymouth that he actually saw it . . . but it was some sort of foreign car, what he had taken at first for brown was a deep red dulled by road—dust, and the driver was just turning around. 'At least I hope I've ditched them.' He paused. He had come to the place where the only choice was to jump or not to jump, and he had no time to delay the decision. When you came right down to it, there really wasn't any decision, either, because he had no choice. 'I need help, Rawlie. I need a car they don't know.'

  Rawlie was silent.

  'You said if there was anything you could do for me, I should ask.

   'I'm aware of what I said,' Rawlie replied mildly. 'I also recall saying that if those two men were following you around in a protective capacity, you might be wise to give