The Dark Half(10)

Thad closed the magazine and carried Will into the twins' bedroom behind Liz, who had Wendy. The chubby baby was warm and pleasantly heavy, his arms slung casually around Thad's neck as he goggled at everything with his usual interest. Liz laid Wendy down on one changing table; Thad laid Will down on the other. They swapped dry diapers for soggy ones, Liz moving a little faster than Thad.

'Well,' Thad said, 'we've been in People magazine, and that's the end of that. Right?'

'Yes,' she said, and smiled. Something in that smile did not ring quite true to Thad, but he remembered his own weird laughing fit and decided to leave it be. Sometimes he was just not very sure about things - it was a kind of mental analogue to his physical clumsiness - and then he picked away at Liz. She rarely snapped at him about it, but sometimes he could see a tiredness creep into her eyes when he went on too long. What had she said? You bleed too much sometimes,

Thad.

He pinned Will's diapers closed, keeping a forearm on the wriggling but cheerful baby's stomach while he worked so Will wouldn't roll off the table and kill himself, as he seemed determined to do.

'Bugguyrah!' Will cried.

'Yeah,' Thad agreed.

'Divvit!' Wendy yelled.

Thad nodded. 'That makes sense, too.'

'It's good to have him dead,' Liz said suddenly.

Thad looked up. He considered for a moment, then nodded. There was no need to specify who he was; they both knew. 'Yeah.'

'I didn't like him much'

That's a hell of a thing to say about your husband, he almost replied, then didn't. It wasn't odd, because she wasn't talking about him. George Stark's methods of writing hadn't been the only essential difference between the two of them.

'I didn't, either,' he said. 'What's for supper?'.

Chapter Two

Breaking Up Housekeeping

1

That night Thad had a nightmare. He woke from it near tears and trembling like a puppy caught out in a thunderstorm. He was with George Stark in the dream, only George was a real estate agent instead of a writer, and he was always standing just behind Thad, so he was only a voice and a shadow.

2

The Darwin Press author-sheet - which Thad had written just before starting Oxford Blues, the second George Stark opus - stated that Stark drove 'a 1967 GMC pick-up truck held together by prayer and primer paint.' In the dream, however, they had been riding in a dead black Toronado, and Thad knew he had gotten the pick-up truck part wrong. This was what Stark drove. This jetpropelled hearse.

The Toronado was jacked in the back and didn't look like a realtor's car at all. What it looked like was something a third-echelon mobster might drive around in. Thad looked over his shoulder at it as they walked toward the house Stark was for some reason showing him. He thought he would see Stark, and an icicle of sharp fear slid into his heart. But now Stark was standing just behind his other shoulder (although Thad had no idea how he could have gotten there so fast and so soundlessly), and all he could see was the car, a steel tarantula gleaming in the sunlight. There was a sticker on the high-rise rear bumper. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, it read. The words were flanked left and right by a skull and crossbones.

The house Stark had driven him to was his house - not the winter home in Ludlow, not too far from the University, but the summer place in Castle Rock. The north bay of Castle Lake opened out behind the house, and Thad could hear the faint sound of waves lapping against the shore. There was a FOR SALE sign on the small patch of lawn beyond the driveway. Nice house, isn't it? Stark almost whispered from behind his shoulder. His voice was rough yet caressing, like the lick of a tomcat's tongue.

It's my house, Thad answered.

You're quite wrong. The owner of this one is dead. He killed his wife and children and then himself. He pulled the plug. Just wham and jerk and bye-bye. He had that streak in him. You didn't have to look hard to see it, either. You might say it was pretty stark. Is that supposed to be funny? he intended to ask - it seemed very important to show Stark he wasn't frightened of him. The reason it was important was that he was utterly terrified. But before he could frame the words, a large hand which appeared to have no lines on it at all (although it was hard to tell for sure because the way the fingers were folded cast a tangled shadow over the palm) was reaching over his shoulder and dangling a bunch of keys in his face. No - not dangling. If it had just been that, he might have spoken anyway, might even have brushed the keys away in order to show how little he feared this fearsome man who insisted on.standing behind him. But the hand was bringing the keys toward his face. Thad had to grab them to keep them from crashing into his nose.

He put one of them into the lock on the front door, a smooth oak expanse broken only by the knob and a brass knocker that looked like a small bird. The key turned easily, and that was strange, since it wasn't a housekey at all but a typewriter key on the end of a long steel rod. All the

other keys on the ring appeared to be skeleton keys, the kind burglars carry. He grasped the knob and turned it. As he did, the iron-bound wood of the door shrivelled and shrank in on itself with a series of explosions as loud as firecrackers. Light showed through the new cracks between the boards. Dust puffed out. There was a brittle snap and one of the decorative pieces of ironmongery fell off the door and thumped on the doorstep at Thad's feet. He stepped inside.

He didn't want to; he wanted to stand on the stoop and argue with Stark. More! Remonstrate with him, ask him why in God's name he was doing this, because going inside the house was even more frightening than Stark himself. But this was a dream, a bad one, and it seemed to him that the essence of bad dreams was lack of control. It was like being on a roller-coaster that might at any second crest an incline and plunge you down into a brick wall where you would die as messily as a bug slapped with a flyswatter.