The Dark Half

vapor-locks every time you cross your eyes at it. I'm calling from the Beaumont place. The state police wanted me to check it out, but it's a bust.'

'That's too bad. Do you want me to pass the word to anyone? The state police?'

    Alan looked at Stark, who seemed wholly absorbed in tickling the wriggling, cheerful little boy in his arms. Stark nodded absently at Alan's look.

    'Yes. Call the Oxford Barracks for me. I thought I'd catch a bite at that take-out chicken place and then come back here and double-check. That's if I can get my car to start. If not, maybe I'll see what the Beaumonts have got in their pantry. Will you make a note for me, Sheila?'

  He felt rather than saw Stark tighten up slightly beside him. The muzzle of the gun paused, pointing at William's navel. Alan felt slow, cold trickles of sweat running down his ribcage.

  'Sure, Alan.'

    'This is supposed to be a creative guy. I think he can find a better place to stash his spare key than under the doormat.'

Sheila Brigham laughed. 'I've got it.'

    Beside him, the muzzle of the .45 began to move again and William began to grin again. Alan relaxed a little.

  'Would it be Henry Payton I should talk to, Alan?'

  'Uh-huh. Or Danny Eamons if Henry's not there.'

  'Okay.'

  'Thanks, Sheila. More b.s. from the state, that's all. Take care of yourself.'

  'You too, Alan.'

  He hung up the telephone gently and turned to Stark. 'Okay?'

    'Very much okay,' Stark said. 'I particularly liked the part about the key under the doormat. It added that extra touch that means so much.'

   'What a dink you are,' Alan said. Under the circumstances it wasn't a very wise thing to say, but his own anger surprised him.

  Stark surprised him, too. He laughed. 'Nobody likes me very much, do they, Sheriff Alan?'

  'No,' Alan said.

   'Well, that's okay — I like myself enough for everybody. I'm a real New Age sort of fella that way. The important thing is that I think we're in pretty good shape here. I think all that will fly just fine.' He wrapped one hand around the telephone wire and ripped it out of the telephone jack.

   'I guess it will,' Alan said, but he wondered. It was thin — a lot thinner than Stark, who perhaps believed all the cops north of Portland were a bunch of sleepy Deputy Dawg types, seemed to realize. Dan Eamons in Oxford would probably let it pass, unless someone from Orono or Augusta lit a fire under him. But Henry Payton? He was a lot less sure Henry would buy the idea that Alan had taken a single quick, casual look for Homer Gamache's murderer before going off for a chicken basket at Cluck-Cluck Tonite. Henry might smell a rat.

    Watching Stark tickle the baby with the muzzle of the .45, Alan wondered if he wanted that to happen or not, and discovered he didn't know.

'Now what?' he asked Stark.

   Stark drew a deep breath and looked outside at the sunlit woods with evident enjoyment: 'Let's ask Bethie if she can rustle us up a spot of grub. I'm hungry. Country living's great, isn't it, Sheriff Alan? Goddam!'

  'All right,' Alan said. He started back toward the kitchen and Stark grabbed him with one hand.

  'That crack about vapor-lock,' he said. 'That didn't mean anything special, did it?'

   'No,' Alan said. 'It was just another case of . . . what do you call it? The extra touch that means so much. Several of our units have had carburetor troubles this last year.'

   'That better be the truth,' Stark said, looking at Alan with his dead eyes. Thick pus was running down from their inner corners and down the sides of his peeling nose like gummy crocodile tears. 'It'd be a shame to have to hurt one of these kids because you had to go and get clever. Thad won't work half so good if he finds out I had to blow one of his twins away in order to keep you in line.' He grinned and pressed the muzzle of the .45 into William's armpit. William giggled and wriggled. 'He's just as cute as a warm kitten, ain't he?'

    Alan swallowed around what felt like a large dry fuzzball in his throat. 'You doing that makes me nervous as hell, fellow.'

  'You go ahead and stay nervous,' Stark said, smiling at him. 'I'm just the sort of guy a man wants to stay nervous around. Let's eat, Sheriff Alan. I believe this one's gettin lonesome for his sister.'

    Liz heated Stark a bowl of soup in the microwave. She offered him a frozen dinner first, but he shook his head, smiling, then reached into his mouth and plucked a tooth. It came out of the gum with rotten ease.

  She turned her head aside as he dropped it into the wastebasket, her lips pressed tightly together, her face a tense mask of revulsion.

  'Don't worry,' he said serenely. 'They'll be better before long.

  Everything's going to be better before long. Poppa's going to be here soon.'

  He was still drinking the soup when Thad pulled in behind the wheel of Rawlie's VW ten minutes later.

Twenty-five

Steel Machine

1

The Beaumont summer house was a mile up Lake Lane from Route 5, but Thad stopped less than a tenth of a mile in, goggling unbelievingly.

There were sparrows everywhere.

   Every branch of every tree, every rock, every patch of open ground was covered with roosting sparrows. The world he saw was grotesque, hallucinatory: it was as if this piece of Maine had sprouted feathers. The road ahead of him was gone. Totally gone. Where it had been was a path of silent, jostling sparrows between the overburdened trees.

Somewhere a branch snapped. The only other sound was Rawlie's

    VW. The muffler had been in bad shape when Thad began his run west; now it seemed to be performing no function at all. The engine farted and roared, backfiring occasionally, and its sound should have sent that monster flock aloft at once, but the birds did not move.

    The flock began less than twelve feet in front of the place where he had stopped the VW and thrown its balky transmission into neutral. There was a line of demarcation so clean it might have been drawn with a ruler.

  No one has seen a flock of birds like this in years, he thought. Not since the extermination of the passenger pigeons at the end of the last century . . . if then. It's like something out of that Daphne du Maurier story.

   A sparrow fluttered down on the hood of the VW and seemed to peer in at him. Thad sensed a frightening, dispassionate curiosity in the small bird's black eyes.

  How far do they go? he wondered. All the way to the house? If so, George has seen them . . . and there will be hell to pay, if hell hasn't been paid already. And even if they don't go that far, how am I supposed to get there? They're not just in the road; they ARE the road.

    But of course he knew the answer to that. If he meant to get to the house, he would have to drive over them.

  No, his mind almost moaned. No, you can't. His imagination conjured up terrible images: the crunching, breaking sounds of small bodies in their thousands, the jets of blood squirting out from beneath the wheels, the soggy clots of stuck feathers revolving as the tires turned.

   'But I'm going to,' he muttered. 'I'm going to because I have to.' A shaky grin began to stitch his face into a grimace of fierce, half-mad concentration. In that moment he looked eerily like George Stark. He shoved the stick-shift back into first gear and began to hum 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath. Rawlie's VW chugged, almost stalled, then blatted three loud backfires and began to roll forward.

   The sparrow on the hood flew off and Thad's breath caught as he waited for all of them to take wing, as they did in his trance-visions: a great rising dark cloud accompanied by a sound like a hurricane in a bottle.

   Instead, the surface of the road