The Dark Half(78)

Park, camping, until the end of the month.'

There, Alan thought. You see? You're down here jumping at shadows in the middle of the night. No cut throats. No writing on the wall. Just two old folks on a camping trip..But he was not much relieved, he found. Dr Pritchard was going to be a hard man to get hold of, at least for the next couple of weeks.

'If I needed to get a message to the guy, do you think I could do it?' Alan asked.

'I'd think so,' Dispatch said. 'You could call Park Services at Yellowstone. They'll know where he is, or they should. It might take awhile, but they'd probably get him for you. I've met him a time or two. He seems like a nice enough old fella.'

'Well, that's good to know,' Alan said. 'Thanks for your time.'

'Don't mention it - it's what we're here for.' Alan heard the faint rattle of pages, and could imagine this faceless man picking up his Penthouse again, half a continent away.

'Goodnight,' he said.

'Goodnight, Sheriff.'

Alan hung up and sat where he was for a moment, looking out the small den window into the darkness.

He is out there. Somewhere. And he's still coming.

Alan wondered again how he would feel if it were his own life and the lives of Annie and his children - at stake. He wondered how he would feel if he knew that, and no one would believe what he knew.

You're taking it home with you again, dear, he heard Annie say in his mind. And it was true. Fifteen minutes ago he had been convinced - in his nerve-endings, if not in his head - that Hugh and Helga Pritchard were lying dead in a pool of blood. It wasn't true; they were sleeping peacefully under the stars in Yellowstone National Park tonight. So much for intuition; it had a way of just fading out on you.

This is the way Thad's going to feel when we find out what's really going on, he thought. When we find out that the explanation, as bizarre as it may turn out to be, conforms to all the natural laws.

Did he really believe that?

Yes, he decided - he really did. In his head, at least. His nerve-endings were not so sure. Alan finished his milk, turned off the desk-lamp, and went upstairs. Annie was still awake, and she was gloriously naked. She folded him into her arms, and Alan gladly allowed himself to forget everything else.

7

Stark called again two days later. Thad Beaumont was in Dave's Market at the time. Dave's was a mom-and-pop store a mile and a half down the road from the Beaumont house. It was a place to go when running to the supermarket in Brewer was just too much of a pain in the ass.

Thad went down that Friday evening to get a six-pack of Pepsi, some chips, and some dip. One of the troopers watching over the family rode with him. It was June 10th, six-thirty in the evening, plenty of light left in the sky. Summer, that beautiful green bitch, had ridden into Maine again. The cop sat in the car while Thad went in. He got his soda and was inspecting the wild array of dips (you had your basic clam, and if you didn't like that, you had your basic onion) when the telephone rang.

He looked up at once, thinking: Oh. Okay..Rosalie behind the counter picked it up, said hello, listened, then held the phone out to him, as

he had known she would. He was again swallowed by that dreamy feeling of presque vu.

'Telephone, Mr Beaumont.'

He felt quite calm. His heart had stumbled over a beat, but only one; now it was jogging along at its usual rate. He was not sweating.

And there were no birds.

He felt none of the fear and fury he'd felt two days earlier. He didn't bother asking Rosalie if it was his wife, wanting him to pick up a dozen eggs or maybe! a carton of o.j. while he was here. He knew who it was.

He stood by the Megabucks computer with its bright green screen announcing there had been no winner last week and this week's lottery jackpot was four million dollars. He took the phone from Rosalie and said, 'Hello, George.'

'Hello, Thad.' The soft brush-stroke of Southern accent was still there, but the overlay of country bumpkin was entirely gone - Thad only realized how strongly yet subtly Stark had managed to convey that feeling of 'Hail-fahr, boys, I ain't too bright but I shore did get away with it, didn't I, hyuck, hyuck, hyuck?' when he heard its complete absence here. But of course now it's just the boys, Thad thought. Just a coupla white novelists standin around, talkin.

'What do you want?'

'You know the answer to that. There's no need for us to play games, is there? It's a little bit late for that.'

'Maybe I just want to hear you say it out loud.' That feeling was back, that weird feeling of being sucked out of his body and pulled down the telephone line to someplace precisely between the two of them.

Rosalie had taken herself down to the far end of the counter, where she was removing packs of cigarettes from a pile of cartons and restocking the long cigarette dispenser. She was ostentatiously not listening to Thad's end of the conversation in a way that was almost funny. There was no one in Ludlow - this end of town, anyway - who wasn't aware that Thad was under police guard or police protection or police some-damn-thing, and he didn't have to hear the rumors to know they had already begun to fly. Those who didn't think he was about to be arrested for drug-trafficking no doubt believed it was child abuse or wife-beating. Poor old Rosalie was down there trying to be good, and Thad felt absurdly grateful. He also felt as if he were looking at her through the wrong end of a powerful telescope. He was down the telephone line, down the rabbit hole, where there was no white rabbit but only foxy old George Stark, the man who could not be there but somehow was all the same.