The Dark Half(68)

'Not at all,' Liz said in a slow, distracted voice. She was gently massaging her left temple with the tips of her fingers, as if she were experiencing the onset of a really bad headache. Probably, Thad thought, she is.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel and saw it was just past two-thirty. Was this the longest afternoon of his life? He didn't like to rush to such judgments, but he suspected it was. Liz stood. 'I think I'm going to put my feet up for awhile, if that's okay. I don't feel very chipper.'

'That's a good - ' Idea was of course how he meant to finish, but before he could, the telephone rang.

All of them looked at it, and Thad felt a pulse begin to triphammer in his neck. A fresh bubble of acid, hot and burning, rose slowly in his chest and then seemed to spread out in the back of his throat.

'Good deal,' Wes said, pleased. 'We won't have to send someone out to make a test call.'

Thad suddenly felt as if he were encased in an envelope of chilly air. It moved with him as he walked toward the telephone, which was now sharing its table with a gadget that looked like a Lucite brick with lights embedded in its side. One of the lights was pulsing in sync with the ringing of the telephone.

Where are the birds? I should be hearing the birds. But there were none; the only sound was the Merlin phone's demanding warble.

Wes was kneeling by the fireplace and putting tools back into a black case which, with its over-sized chrome latches, resembled a workman's dinner-bucket. Dave was leaning in the doorway be-tween the living room and the dining room. He had asked Liz if he could have a banana from the bowl on the table, and was now peeling it thoughtfully, pausing every now and then to examine his work with the critical eye of an artist in the throes of creation.

'Get the circuit-tester, why don'tcha?' he said to Wes. 'If we need some line clarification we can do it while we're right here. Might save a trip back.'

'Good idea,' Wes said, and plucked something with a pistol grip out of the over-sized dinner-bucket. Both men looked mildly expectant and no more. Agents Malone and Prebble were standing, replacing notebooks, shaking out the knife-edge creases in the legs of their pants, and generally confirming Thad's original opinion: these men seemed more like H & R Block tax consultants than gun-toting G-men. Malone and Prebble seemed totally unaware the phone was ringing at all. But Liz knew. She had stopped rubbing her temple and was looking at Thad with the wide, haunted eyes of an animal which has been brought to bay. Prebble was thanking her for the coffee and Danish she had supplied, and seemed as unaware of her failure to answer him as he was of the ringing telephone..What is the matter with you people? Thad suddenly felt like screaming. What in

the hell did you

set up all this equipment for in the first place?

Unfair, of course. For the man they were after to be the first person to phone the Beaumonts after the tap-and-trace equipment had been set up, a bare five minutes after installation was complete, in fact, was just too fortuitous . . . or so they would have said if anyone had bothered to ask them. Things don't happen that way in the wonderful world of law enforcement as it exists in the latter years of the twentieth century, they would have said. It's another writer calling you up for a nice fresh plot idea, Thad, or maybe someone who wants to know if your wife could spare a cup of sugar. But the guy who thinks he's your alter ego? No way, Jos?. Too soon, too lucky. Except it was Stark. Thad could smell him. And, looking at his wife, he knew that Liz could, too.

Now Wes was looking at him, no doubt wondering why Thad didn't answer his freshly rigged phone.

Don't worry, Thad thought. Don't worry, he'll wait. He knows we're home, you see.

'Well, we'll just get out of your hair, Mrs Beau - ' Prebble began, and Liz said in a calm but terribly pained voice, 'I think you'd better wait, please.'

Thad picked up the telephone and shouted: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the f**k do you WANT?'

Wes jumped. Dave froze just as he was preparing to take the first bite from his banana. The heads of the federal agents snapped around. Thad found himself wishing with miserable intensity that Alan Pangborn were here instead of talking to Dr Hume up in Orono. Alan didn't believe in Stark either, at least not yet, but at least he was human. Thad supposed these others might be, but he had serious doubts as to whether or not they knew he and Liz were.

'It's him, it's him!' Liz was saying to Prebble.

'Oh Jesus,' Prebble said. He and the other fearless minion of the law exchanged an utterly nonplussed glance: What the f**k do we do now?

Thad heard and saw these things, but was separate from them. Separate even from Liz. There were only Stark and him now. Together again for the first time, as the old vaudeville announcers used to say.

'Cool down, Thad,' George Stark said. He sounded amused. 'No need to get your panties all in a bunch.' It was the voice he had expected. Exactly. Every nuance, right down to the faint Southern slur that turned 'get your' into something that was not 'getcho' but wanted to be. The two wiremen put their heads together briefly, and then Dave bolted for the panel truck and the auxiliary telephone. He was still holding his banana. Wes ran for the cellar stairs to check the voice-activated tape-recorder.

The fearless minions of the Effa Bee Eye stood in the middle of the living room and stared. They looked as if they wanted to put their arms about each other for comfort, like babes lost in the woods.