The Dark Half

if he's as sharp as Thad says, he'll hear that, all right. He'll hear that just fine.

   He began to walk. The sparrows did not move . . . but a fresh flock appeared and settled into the trees. They were all around him now, staring down at him like a hard-hearted jury staring at a murderer in the dock. Except back by the road. The woods bordering Lake Lane were still clear.

He decided to go back that way.

   A dismal thought, just shy of being a premonition, came to him — that this might be the biggest mistake of his professional life.

  I'm just going to recon the place, he thought. If the birds don't fly and they don't seem to want to — I should he okay. I can go up this driveway, cross the Lane, and work my way down to the Beaumont house through the woods. If the Toronado's there, I'll see it. If I see it, I may see him. And if I do, at least I'll know what I'm up against. I'll know if it's Thad, or. . . someone else.

  There was another thought, as well. One Alan hardly dared think, because thinking it might queer his luck. If he did see the owner of the black Toronado, he might get a clear shot. He might be able to take the bastard down and end it right here. If that was the way things worked out, he would take a heavy roasting from the state police for going against their specific orders . . . but Liz and the kids would be safe, and right now that was all he cared about.

  More sparrows fluttered soundlessly down. They were carpeting the asphalt surface of the Williamses' driveway from the bottom up. One landed less than five feet from Alan's boots. He made a kicking gesture at it, and instantly regretted it, half-expecting to send it — and the whole monster flock with it — into the sky at once.

  The sparrow hopped a little. That was all.

   Another sparrow landed on Alan's shoulder. He couldn't believe it, but it was there. He brushed at it, and it hopped onto his hand. Its beak dipped, as if it meant to peck his palm . . . and then it stopped. Heart beating hard, Alan lowered his hand. The bird hopped off, fluttered its wings once, and landed on the driveway with its fellows. It stared up at him with its bright, senseless eyes.

    Alan swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat. 'What are you?' he muttered. 'What the fuck are you?'

    The sparrows only stared at him. And now every pine and maple he could see on this side of Castle Lake appeared to be full. He heard a branch crack somewhere under their accumulated weight.

  Their bones are hollow, he thought. They weigh next to nothing. How many of them must it take to crack a branch like that?

  He didn't know. Didn't want to know.

    Alan unsnapped the strap across the butt of his .38 and walked back up the steep slant of the Williamses' driveway, away from the sparrows. By the time he reached Lake Lane, which was only a dirt track with a ribbon of grass growing up between the wheel-ruts, his face was oiled with sweat and his shirt was stuck damply to his back. He looked around. He could see the sparrows back the way he had come — they were all over the top of his car now, roosting on the hood and the trunk and the roof-flashers — but there were none up here.

  It's as if, he thought, they don't want to get too close . . . at least not yet. It's as if this were their staging area.

   He looked both ways along the Lane from what he hoped was a place of concealment behind a tall sumac bush. Not a soul in sight — only the sparrows, and they were all back on the slope where the Williamses' A-frame stood. Not a sound except for the crickets and a couple of mosquitoes whining around his face.

  Good.

  Alan trotted across the road like a soldier in enemy territory, head low between his hunched shoulders, jumped the weed- and rock-choked ditch on the far side, and disappeared into the woods. Once he was in concealment, he concentrated on working his way down to the Beaumont summer house as quickly and silently as he could.

4

The eastern side of Castle Lake lay at the bottom of a long, steep hill. Lake Lane was halfway down this slope, and most of the houses were so far below Lake Lane that Alan could see only their roofpeaks from his position, which was about twenty yards up the hill from the road. In some cases they were hidden from his view entirely. But he could see the road, and the driveways which branched off from it, and as long as he didn't lose count, he would be okay.

   When he reached the fifth turn-off beyond the Williamses', he stopped. He looked behind him to see if the sparrows were following him. The idea was bizarre but somehow inescapable. He could see no sign of them at all, and it occurred to him that perhaps his overloaded mind had imagined the whole thing.

  Forget it, he thought. You didn't imagine it. They were back there . . . and they're still back there.

  He looked down at the Beaumonts' driveway, but could see nothing from his current position. He began to work his way down, moving slowly, crouched over. He moved quietly and was just congratulating himself on this fact when George Stark put a gun into his left ear and said, 'If you move, good buddy, most of your brains are going to land on your right shoulder.'

5

He turned his head slowly, slowly, slowly.

What he saw almost made him wish he had been born blind.

   'I guess they'll never want me on the cover of GQ, huh?' Stark asked. He was grinning. The grin showed more of his teeth and gums (and the empty holes where other teeth had been) than even the widest grin should have done. His face was covered with sores and the skin seemed to be sloughing off the underlying tissue. But that wasn't the whole trouble — that wasn't what made Alan's belly crawl with horror and revulsion. Something seemed to be wrong with the underlying structure of the man's face. It was as if he were not simply decaying but mutating in some horrible way.

  He knew who the man with the gun was, all the same.

  The hair, lifeless as an old wig glued to the straw head of a scarecrow, was blonde. The shoulders were almost as broad as those of a football player with his pads on. He stood with a kind of arrogant, light-footed grace even though he was not moving, and he looked at Alan with good humor.

  It was the man who couldn't exist, who never had existed.

  It was Mr George Stark, that high-toned son of a bitch from Oxford, Mississippi.

  It was all true.

  'Welcome to the carnival, old hoss,' Stark said mildly. 'You move pretty good for such a big man. I almost missed you at first, and I been lookin for you. Let's go on down to the house. I want to introduce you to the little woman. And if you make a single wrong move, you'll be dead, and so will she, and so will those cute little kids. I have nothing whatever in the wide world to lose. Do you believe that?'

    Stark grinned at him out of his decaying, horribly wrong face. The crickets went on singing in the grass. Out on the lake, a loon lifted its sweet, piercing cry into the air. Alan wished with all his heart that he was that bird, because when he looked into Stark's staring eyeballs he saw only one thing in them other than death . . . and that one thing was nothing at all.

  He realized with sudden, perfect clarity that he was never going to see his wife and sons again.

  'I believe it,' he said.

  'Then drop your gun in the puckies and let's go.'

  Alan did as he was told. Stark followed behind him, and they descended to the road. They crossed it and then walked down the slope of the Beaumonts' driveway toward the house. It jutted out of the hillside on heavy wooden pilings, almost like a beach house in Malibu. So far as Alan could see, there were no sparrows around it. None at all.

   The Toronado was parked by the door, a black and gleaming tarantula in the late afternoon sun. It looked like a bullet. Alan read the bumper sticker with a mild sense of wonder. All of his emotions felt oddly muted, oddly mild, as if this were a dream from which he would soon wake up.

You don't want to think like that, he warned himself. Thinking like that will get you killed.

  That was almost funny, because he was a dead man already, wasn't he? There he had been, creeping up on the Beaumont driveway, meaning to sneak across the road like Tonto, take-um good look round, get-um idea how things are, Kemo Sabe . . . and Stark had simply put a pistol in his ear and told him to drop his gun and there went the ballgame.

  I didn't hear him; I didn't even intuit