The Dark Half(82)

Wendy's sobs were winding down to sniffles. Accordingly, William also began to dry up. He reached out a chubby arm and snatched at his sister's white cotton t-shirt. She looked around. He cooed, then babbled at her. To Thad, their babbling always sounded a little eerie: like a foreign language which had been speeded up just enough so you couldn't quite tell which one it was, let alone understand it. Wendy smiled at her brother, although her eyes were still streaming tears and her cheeks were wet with them. She cooed and babbled in reply. For a moment it was as if they were holding a conversation in their own private world - the world of twins. Wendy reached out and caressed William's shoulder. They looked at each other and went on cooing.

Are you all right, sweet one?

Yes; I hurt myself, dear William, but not badly.

Will you want to stay home from the Stadleys' dinner-party, dear heart?

I should think not, although you are very thoughtful to ask. Are you quite sure, my dear Wendy?

Yes, darling William, no damage has been done, although I greatly fear I have shit in my diapers

Oh sweetheart, how TIRESOME!.Thad smiled a little, then looked at Wendy's leg. 'That's going to bruise,' he said. 'In fact, it

looks like it's started already.'

Liz offered him a little smile. 'It will heal,' she said. 'And it won't be the last.'

Thad leaned forward and kissed the tip of Wendy's nose, thinking how fast and how furiously these storms blew in - not three minutes ago he had been afraid she might die from lack of oxygen - and how fast they blew back out again. 'No,' he agreed. 'God willing, it won't be the last.'

3

By the time the twins got up from their late naps at seven that evening, the bruise on Wendy's upper thigh had turned a dark purple. It had an odd and distinctive mushroom shape.

'Thad?' Liz said from the other changing-table. 'Look at this.'

Thad had removed Wendy's nap-diaper, slightly dewy but not really wet, and dropped it into the diaper-bucket marked HERS. He carried his naked daughter over to his son's changing-table to see what Liz wanted him to see. He looked down at William and his eyes widened.

'What do you think?' she asked quietly. 'Is that weird, or what?'

Thad looked down at William for a long time. 'Yeah,' he said at last. 'That's pretty weird.'

She was holding their wriggling son on the changing-table with a hand on his chest. Now she looked sharply around at Thad. 'Are you okay?'

'Yes,' Thad said. He was surprised at how calm he sounded to himself. A large white light seemed to have gone off, not in front of his eyes, like a flashgun, but behind them. Suddenly he thought he understood about the birds - a little - and what the next step should be. Just looking down at his son and seeing the bruise on his leg, identical in shape, color, and location to the one on Wendy's leg, had made him understand that. When Will had grabbed Liz's teacup and upended it all over himself, he had sat down hard on his butt. So far as Thad knew, William hadn't done anything to his leg at all. Yet there it was - a sympathetic bruise on the upper thigh of his right leg, a bruise which was almost mushroom-shaped.

'You sure you're okay?' Liz persisted.

'They share their bruises, too,' he said, looking down at William's leg.

'Thad?'

'I'm fine,' he said, and brushed her cheek with his lips. 'Let's get Psycho and Somatic dressed, what do you say?'

Liz burst out laughing. 'Thad, you're crazy,' she said.

He smiled at her. It was a slightly peculiar, slightly distant smile. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Crazy like a fox.'

He took Wendy back to her changing-table and began to diaper her..

Chapter Eighteen

Automatic Writing

1

He waited until Liz had gone to bed before going up to his study. He paused outside their bedroom door for a minute or so on his way, listening to the regular ebb and flow of her breathing, assuring himself that she was asleep. He wasn't at all sure that what he was going to try would work, but if it did, it might be dangerous.

Extremely dangerous.

His study was one large room - a renovated barn loft - which had been divided into two areas: the 'reading room,' which was a book-lined area with a couch, a reclining chair, and track lighting, and, at the far end of the long room, his work-area. This part of the study was dominated by an old-fashioned business desk without a single feature to redeem its remarkable ugliness. It was a scarred, battered, uncompromisingly utilitarian piece of furniture. Thad had owned it since he was twenty-six, and Liz sometimes told people he wouldn't let it go because he secretly believed that it was his own private Fountain of Words. They would both smile when she said this, as if they really believed it was a joke.

Three glass-shaded lights hung down over this dinosaur, and when Thad turned on only these lights, as he did now, the savage, overlapping circles of light they made on the desk's littered landscape made it seem as if he were about to play some strange version of billiards there - what the rules for play on such a complex surface might be it was impossible to tell, but on the night after Wendy's accident, the tight set of his face would have convinced an observer that the game would be for very high stakes, whatever the rules.

Thad would have agreed with that one hundred per cent. It had, after all, taken him over twentyfour hours to work his courage up to this.