The Dark Half(93)

grass-fire melanoma, perhaps caused by exposure to high-level radiation. Still, the sores did not worry him greatly. He supposed they would multiply in number, spread in area, join each other, and eventually eat him alive . . . if he let them. Since he didn't intend to let that happen, there was no need for them to worry him. But he couldn't be just another face in the crowd if the features on that face were transforming themselves into an erupting volcano. Hence, the make-up.

He applied the liquid foundation carefully with one of the sponge wedges, spreading it up from cheekbones to temples, eventually covering the dull red lump beyond the end of his right brow and the new sore just beginning to poke through the skin over his left cheekbone. A man wearing pancake make-up looked like only one thing on God's earth, Stark had discovered, and that was a man wearing pancake make-up. Which was to say, either an actor in a TV soap opera or a guest on the Donahue show. But anything was an improvement on the sores, and the tan mitigated some of the phony effect. If he stayed in the gloom or was seen in artificial lighting, it was hardly noticeable at all. Or so he hoped. There were other reasons to stay out of direct sunlight, as well. He suspected the sun actually accelerated the disastrous chemical reaction going on inside him. It was almost as if he were turning into a vampire. But that was all right; in a way, he had always been one. Besides - I'm a night-person, always have been; that's just my nature. This made him grin, and the grin exposed teeth like fangs. He screwed the cover back on the liquid make-up and began to powder. I can smell myself, he thought, and pretty soon other people are going to be able to smell me, too - a thick, unpleasant smell, like a can of potted meat that's spent the day standing in the sun. This is not good, friends and dear hearts. This is not good at all.

'You will write, Thad,' he said, looking at himself in the mirror. 'But with luck, you won't have to do it for long.'

He grinned more widely, exposing an incisor which had gone dark and dead.

'I'm a quick study.'

5

At half-past ten the next day, a stationer on Houston Street sold three boxes of Berol Black Beauty pencils to a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a checked shirt, blue-jeans, and very large sunglasses. The man was also wearing pancake make-up, the stationer observed - probably the remains of a night spent tomcatting around in the leather bars. And from the way he smelled, the stationer thought he had done a little more than just splash on the old English Leather; he smelled as if he had bathed in it. The cologne didn't disguise the fact that the broad-shouldered dude smelled filthy. The stationer thought briefly - very briefly - about making a wisecrack, and then.thought again. The dude smelled bad but looked strong. Also, the transaction was mercifully brief.

After all, it was just pencils the fruitcake was buying, not a Rolls-Royce Corniche. Best to leave ill enough alone.

6

Stark made a brief stop back at the East Village 'efficiency' to stuff his few belongings into the packsack he had bought in an Army-Navy store on his first day in the maggoty old Big Apple. If not for the bottle of Scotch, he probably would not have bothered to return at all. On his way up the crumbling front steps, he passed the small bodies of three dead sparrows without noticing them.

He left Avenue B on foot . . . but he didn't walk for long. A determined man, he had discovered, can always find a ride if he really needs one..

Chapter Twenty

Over the Deadline

1

The day Thad Beaumont's week of grace ended felt more like a day in late July than one in the third week of June. Thad drove the eighteen miles to the University of Maine under a sky the color of hazy chrome, the air-conditioner in the Suburban going full blast in spite of the havoc it wreaked on the gas mileage. There was a dark brown Plymouth behind him. It never got closer than two car-lengths and never dropped back farther than five. It rarely allowed another car to come between itself and Thad's Suburban; if one did happen to ease its way into the two-car parade at an intersection or the school-zone in Veazie, the brown Plymouth passed quickly . . . and if this didn't look almost immediately feasible, one of Thad's guardians would pull the cover off the blue bubble on the dashboard. A few flashes from that would do the trick. Thad drove mostly with his right hand, using his left only when he absolutely had to. The hand was better now, but it still hurt like hell if he bent or flexed it too ruthlessly, and he found himself counting down the last few minutes of the last hour before he could swallow another Percodan. Liz hadn't wanted him to go up to the University today, and the state police assigned to the Beaumonts hadn't wanted him to, either. For the state boys, the issue was simple: they hadn't wanted to split their watch team. With Liz, things were a little more complex. What she talked about was his hand; he might open the wound trying to drive, she said. What was in her eyes was

quite different. Her eyes had been full of George Stark. Just what in the hell do you have to go up to the shop for today, anyway? she had wanted to know - and this was a question he had had to prepare himself for, because the semester was over, had been for some time now, and he wasn't teaching any summer classes. What he'd settled on, finally, were the Honors folders.

Sixty students had applied for Eh-7A, the Department's Honors course in creative writing. This was over twice the number that had applied for the previous fall semester's Honors writing course, but (elementary, my dear Watson) last fall the world - including that part of it majoring in English at the University of Maine - had not known that boring old Thad Beaumont also just happened to be funky George Stark.