The Dark Half(111)

but she was still sure it was Thad. There was no time for eavesdropping, anyway. He had asked her to ask herself if she dared chance crossing .him. She did not. She threw diapers into the diaper-bag, clothes into a suitcase. She swept the creams, baby powder, Handi-Wipes, diaper pins, and other odds and ends into a shoulder-bag. The conversation had ended downstairs. She was heading for the twins, about to wake them, when he called up to her.

'Beth! It's time!'

'I'm coming!' She lifted Wendy, who began to cry sleepily.

'I want you down here - I'm expecting a telephone call, and you're the sound effects.'

But she barely heard this last. Her eyes were fixed on the plastic diaper-pin caddy on top of the twins' bureau.

Lying beside the caddy was a bright pair of sewing scissors. She put Wendy back in her crib, threw a glance at the door, and then hurried across to the bureau. She took the scissors and two of the diaper pins. She stuck the pins in her mouth like a woman making a dress, and unzipped her skirt. She pinned the scissors to the inside of her panties, then zipped the skirt again. There was a small bulge where the handle of the scissors and the heads of the pins were. She didn't think an ordinary man would notice, but George Stark was not an ordinary man. She left her blouse hanging out. Better.

'Beth! ' The voice was on the verge of being angry now. Worse, it was coming from halfway up the stairs and she had never even heard him, although she would have said it was impossible to use the main staircase in this old place without producing all sorts of creaks and groans. Just then the telephone rang.

'You get them down here now!' he screamed up at her, and she hurried to rouse William. She had no time to be gentle, and as a result she had a baby squalling at top volume in each arm when she came downstairs.

Stark was on the telephone and she expected that he would be even more furious at the noise. On the contrary, he looked quite pleased . . . and then she realized that if he was talking to Thad,.he should be pleased. He could hardly have done better if he had brought his own soundeffects record.

The ultimate persuader, she thought, and felt a flash of powerful hate for this rotten creature who had no business existing but who refused to disappear. Stark was holding a pencil in one hand, tapping the eraser end gently on the edge of the telephone table, and she realized with a little shock of recognition that it was a Berol Black Beauty. One of Thad's pencils, she thought. Has he been in the study?

No - of course he hadn't been in the study, nor was it one of Thad's pencils. They had never been Thad's pencils, not really he just bought them sometimes. The Black Beauties belonged to Stark. He had used the pencil to write something in block letters on the back of the faculty directory. As she neared him she could read two sentences. GUESS WHERE I CALLED FROM, THAD? read the first one. The second was brutally direct: TELL ANYBODY AND THEY DIE. As if to confirm this, Stark said: 'Not a thing, as you can hear for yourself. I haven't harmed a hair of their precious little heads.'

He turned toward Liz and winked at her. It was somehow the most hideous thing of all - as if they were in on this together. Stark was twirling his sunglasses between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His eyeballs glared out of his face like marbles in the face of a melting wax statue.

'Yet,' he added.

He listened, then grinned. Even if his face had not been decomposing almost before her eyes, that grin would have struck her as teasing and vicious.

'What about her?' Stark asked in a voice which was almost lilting, and that was when her anger got on top of her fear and she thought for the first time of Aunt Martha and the rats. She wished Aunt Martha were here now, to take care of this particular rat. She had the scissors, but that didn't mean he would give her the opening she would need to use them. But Thad . . . Thad knew about Aunt Martha. And the idea winked into her mind.

7

When the conversation was over and Stark had hung up, she asked him what he meant to do.

'Move fast,' he said. 'It's my specialty.' He held out his arms. 'Give me one of the kids. It doesn't matter which one.'

She shrank away from him, reflexively hugging both babies tighter to her br**sts. They had quieted down, but at her convulsive hug, both began to whimper and wriggle again. Stark looked at her patiently. 'I don't have time to argue with you, Beth. Don't make me persuade you with this.' He patted the cylindrical bulge in the pocket of the hunting vest. 'I'm not going to hurt your kids. In a funny sort of way, you know, I'm their daddy, too.'

'Don't you say that!' she shrieked at him, drawing away farther still. She trembled on the edge of flight.

'You get control of yourself, woman.'

The words were flat, accentless, and deadly cold. They made her feel as if she had been slapped across the face with a bag of cold water.

'Get hip, sweetheart. I have to go outside and move that cop car into your garage. I can't have you running down the road in the other direction while I do it. If I'm holding one of your kids - as collateral, so to speak - I won't have to worry about that. I mean what I say about bearing you.and them no ill will . . . and even if I did, what good would I do myself by hurting one of your kids? I need your cooperation. That's not the way to get it. Now you give one of them over right now, or I'll hurt them both - not kill them but hurt them, really hurt them - and you'll be the one to blame.'