The Dark Half

behind him like Mary's little lamb? Man, you're crazy.'

  'Sure, I'm crazy,' Thad said, and laughed. It was eerily like the sound Stark had made — the laughter of a man who was dancing on the edge of oblivion. ' He is, and he came from me, didn't he? Like some cheap demon from the brow of a third-rate Zeus. But I know how it has to be.' He turned and looked at Alan fully and gravely for this first time. 'I know how it has to be,' he repeated slowly and with great emphasis. 'Go ahead, Liz.'

   Alan made a rude, disgusted sound and turned his back, as if to disassociate himself from all of them.

    Feeling like a woman in a dream, Liz crossed the living room, knelt down, and fished the knife out from under the couch.

    'Be careful of that thing,' Stark said. He sounded very alert, very serious. 'Your kids would tell you the same thing, if they could talk.'

    She looked around, brushed her hair out of her face, and saw he was pointing his gun at Thad and William.

  'I am being careful!' she said in a shaky, scolding voice that was close to tears. She slid the door in the window-wall back on its track and stepped out onto the deck. There were now half a dozen sparrows perched on the rail. They moved aside in two groups of three as she approached the rail and the steep drop beyond it, but they did not fly.

  Alan saw her pause for a moment, considering them, the handle of the knife pinched between her fingers and the tip of the blade pointing down at the deck like a plumb-bob. He glanced at Thad and saw Thad watching her tensely. Last of all, he glanced at Stark.

  He was watching Liz carefully, but there was no look of surprise or suspicion on his face, and a sudden wild thought streaked across Alan Pangborn's mind: He doesn't see them! He doesn't remember what he wrote on the apartment walls, and he doesn't see them now! He doesn't know they're there!

   Then he suddenly realized Stark was looking back at him, appraising him with that flat, mouldy stare.

  'Why are you looking at me?' Stark asked,

  'I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is,' Alan said. 'I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.'

  'If you don't watch your fucking mouth, you won't have to worry about grandchildren,' Stark said. 'Not a bit. You want to quit doin that starin thing, Sheriff Alan. It's just not wise.'

   Liz threw the butcher-knife over the deck rail. When she heard it land in the bushes twenty-five feet below, she did begin to cry.

4

'Let's all go upstairs,' Stark said. 'That's where Thad's office is. I reckon you'll want your typewriter, won't you, old hoss?'

  'Not for this one,' Thad said. 'You know better.'

  A smile touched Stark's cracked lips. 'Do I?'

   Thad pointed to the pencils which lined his breast pocket. 'These are what I use when I want to get back in touch with Alexis Machine and Jack Rangely.'

   Stark looked absurdly pleased. 'Yeah, that's right, isn't it? I guess I thought this time you'd want to do it different.'

'No different, George.'

    'I brought my own,' he said. 'Three boxes of them. Sheriff Alan, why don't you be a good boy and trot on out to my car and get em? They're in the glove-compartment. The rest of us will babysit.' He looked at Thad, laughed his loony laugh, and shook his head. 'You dog, you!'

    'That's right, George,' Thad said. He smiled a little. 'I'm a dog. So are you. And you can't teach old dogs new tricks.'

   'You're kind of up for it, ain't you, hoss? No matter what you say, part of you is just raaarin to go. I see it in your eyes. You want it.'

  'Yes,' Thad said simply, and Alan didn't think he was lying.

  'Alexis Machine,' Stark. said. His yellow eyes were gleaming.

  'That's right,' Thad said, and now his own eyes were gleaming.

  ''Cut him while I stand here and watch.''

    'You got it!' Stark cried, and began to laugh. ''I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.''

Now they both began to laugh.

    Liz looked from Thad to Stark and then back at her husband again and the blood fell from her cheeks because she could not tell the difference.

All at once the edge of the cliff felt closer than ever.

5

Alan went out to get the pencils. His head was only in the car for a moment, but it seemed much longer and he was very glad to get it out again. The car had a dark and unpleasant smell that left him feeling slightly woozy. Rooting around in Stark's Toronado was like sticking his head into an attic room where someone had spilled a bottle of chloroform.

  If that's the odor of dreams, Alan thought, I never want to have another one.

  He stood for a moment beside the black car, the boxes of Berol pencils in his hands, and looked up the driveway.

  The sparrows had arrived.

   The driveway was disappearing beneath a carpet of them. As he watched, more of them landed. And the woods were full of them. They only landed and sat staring at him, ghastly-silent, a massed living conundrum.

  They are coming for you, George, he thought, and started back toward the house. Halfway there he stopped suddenly as a nasty idea struck him.

  Or are they coming for us? He looked back at the birds for a long moment, but they told no secrets, and he went inside.

6

'Upstairs,' Stark said. 'You go first, Sheriff Alan. Go to the rear of the guest bedroom. There's a glass case filled with pictures and glass paperweights and little souvenirs against the wall there. When you push against the left-hand side of the case, it rotates inward on a central spindle. Thad's study is beyond it.'

  Alan looked at Thad, who nodded.

  'You know a hell of a lot about this place,' Alan said, 'for a man who's never been here.'

  'But I have been here,' Stark said gravely. 'I have been here often, in my dreams.'

7

Two minutes later, all of them were gathered outside the unique door of Thad's small study. The glass case was turned inward, creating two entrances to the room separated by the thickness of the case. There were no windows in here; give me a window down here by the lake, Thad had told Liz once, and what I'll do is write two words and then stare out of the damned thing for two hours, watching the boats go by.

   A lamp with a flexible goose-neck and a brilliant quartz-halogen bulb cast a circle of white light on the desk. An office chair and a folding camp chair stood behind the desk, side by side, facing the two blank notebooks which had been placed side by side in the circle of light. Resting on top of each notebook were two sharpened Berol Black Beauty pencils. The IBM electric Thad sometimes used down here had been unplugged and stuck in a corner.

   Thad himself had brought in the folding chair from the hall closet, and the room now expressed a duality Liz found both startling and extremely unpleasant. It was, in a way, another version of the mirror-creature she fancied she had seen when Thad finally arrived. Here were two chairs where there had always been one; here were two little writing stations, also side by side, where there should have been only one. The writing implement which she associated with Thad's

(better)

    normal self had been shunted aside, and when they sat down, Stark in Thad's office chair and Thad in the folding chair, the disorientation was complete. She felt almost sea-sick.

  Each of them had a twin on his lap.

  'How long do we have before someone gets suspicious and decides to check on this place?' Thad asked Alan, who was standing in the doorway with Liz. 'Be honest, and be as accurate as you can. You have to believe me when I tell you this is the only chance we have.'

  'Thad, look at him!' Liz burst out wildly. 'Can't you see what's happening to him? He doesn't just want help writing a book! He wants to steal your life! Don't you