The Dark Half (14 page)

“What is
wrong
with you, Sheriff? Why are you so bullheadedly determined to lay this off on my husband? Are you a stupid man? A lazy man? A
bad
man? You don't look like any of those things, but your behavior makes me wonder. It makes me wonder very much. Perhaps it was a lottery. Was that it? Did you draw his name out of a fucking
hat?”

Alan recoiled slightly, clearly surprised—and discomfited—by her ferocity. “Mrs. Beaumont—”

“I have the advantage, I'm afraid, Sheriff,” Thad said. “You
think
I killed Homer Gamache—”

“Mr. Beaumont, you have not been charged with—”

“No. But you think it, don't you?”

Color, solid and bricklike, not embarrassment, Thad thought, but frustration, had been slowly climbing into Pangborn's cheeks like color in a thermometer. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I
do
think it. In spite of the things you and your wife have said. ”

This reply filled Thad with wonder. What, in God's name, could have happened to make this man (who, as Liz had said, did not look at all stupid) so sure? So goddamned
sure?

Thad felt a shiver go up his spine . . . and then a peculiar thing happened. A phantom sound filled his mind—not his head but his
mind
—for a moment. It was a sound which imparted an aching sense of
déjà vu,
for it had been almost thirty years since he had last heard it. It was the ghostly sound of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small birds.

He put a hand up to his head and touched the small scar there, and the shiver came again, stronger this time, twisting through his flesh like wire.
Lie me an alibi, George,
he thought.
I'm in a bit of a tight here, so lie me an alibi.

“Thad?” Liz asked. “Are you all right?”

“Hmmm?” He looked around at her.

“You're pale. ”

“I'm fine,” he said, and he was. The sound was gone. If it had really been there at all.

He turned back to Pangborn.

“As I said, Sheriff, I have a certain advantage in this matter. You think I killed Homer. I, however,
know
I didn't. Except in books, I've never killed anyone. ”

“Mr. Beaumont—”

“I understand your outrage. He was a nice old man with an overbearing wife, a funky sense of humor, and only one arm. I'm outraged, too. I'll do anything I can to help, but you'll have to drop this secret police stuff and tell me why you're here—what in the world led you to me in the first place. I'm bewildered. ”

Alan looked at him for a very long time and then said: “Every instinct in my body says you are telling the truth. ”

“Thank God,” Liz said. “The man sees sense. ”

“If it turns out you are,” Alan said, looking only at Thad, “I will personally find the person in A. S. R. and I. who screwed up this ID and pull his skin off. ”

“What's A. S. and whatever?” Liz asked.

“Armed Services Records and Identification,” one of the Troopers said. “Washington. ”

“I've never known them to screw up before,” Alan went on in the same slow tone. “They say there's a first time for everything, but . . . if they
haven't
screwed up and if this party of yours checks out, I'm going to be pretty damned bewildered myself. ”

“Can't you tell us what this is all about?” Thad asked.

Alan sighed. “We've come this far; why not? In all truth, the last guests to leave your party don't matter that much anyway. If you were here at midnight, if there are witnesses who can swear you were—”

“Twenty-five at least,” Liz said.

“—then you're off the hook. Putting together the eyewitness account of the lady the Trooper mentioned and the Medical Examiner's post-mortem, we can be almost positive Homer was killed between one and three a. m. on June first. He was bludgeoned to death with his own prosthetic arm. ”

“Dear Jesus,” Liz muttered. “And you thought Thad—”

“Homer's truck was found two nights ago in the parking lot of a rest stop on 1-95 in Connecticut, close to the New York border.” Alan paused. “There were fingerprints all over it, Mr. Beaumont. Most were Homer's, but a good many belonged to the perpetrator. Several of the perp's were excellent. One was almost moulage-cast in a wad of gum the guy took out of his mouth and then stuck on the dashboard with his thumb. It hardened there. The best one of all, though, was on the rearview mirror. It was every bit as good as a print made in a police station. Only the one on the mirror was rolled in blood instead of ink. ”

“Then why
Thad?”
Liz was demanding indignantly.

“Party or no party, how could you think that
Thad—”

Alan looked at her and said, “When the people at A. S. R. and I. fed the prints into their graphics computer, your husband's service record came back. Your husband's
prints
came back, to be exact. ”

For a moment Thad and Liz could only look at each other, stunned to silence. Then Liz said: “It was a mistake, then. Surely the people who check these things
do
make mistakes from time to time. ”

“Yes, but they're rarely mistakes of this magnitude. There are gray areas in print identification, sure. Laymen who grow up watching shows like
Kojak
and
Barnaby Jones
get the idea that fingerprinting is an exact science, and it isn't. But computerization has taken a lot of the grays out of print comparisons, and this case yielded prints which were extraordinarily good. When I say they were your husband's prints, Mrs. Beaumont, I mean what I say. I've seen the computer sheets, and I've seen the overlays. The match is not just close. ”

Now he turned back to Thad and stared at him with his flinty blue eyes.

“The match is
exact. ”

Liz stared at him with her mouth open, and in her arms first William and then Wendy began to cry.

PANGBORN PAYS A VISIT

When the doorbell rang again at quarter past seven that evening, it was Liz again who went to answer it because she was done getting William ready for bed and Thad was still hard at work on Wendy. The books all said parenting was a learned skill which had nothing to do with the sex of the parent, but Liz had her doubts. Thad pulled his weight, was in fact scrupulous about doing his share, but he was
slow.
He could whip out to the store and back on a Sunday afternoon in the time it took her to work her way over to the last aisle, but when it came to getting the twins ready for bed, well . . .

William was bathed, freshly diapered, zippered into his green sleep-suit, and sitting in the playpen while Thad was still laboring over Wendy's diapers (and he hadn't gotten all the soap out of her hair, she saw, but considering the day they'd put in, she believed she'd get it herself with a washcloth later on and say nothing).

Liz walked through the living room to the front door and looked out the side window. She saw Sheriff Pangborn standing outside. He was alone this time, but that didn't do much to alleviate her distress.

She turned her head and called across the living room and into the downstairs bathroom
cum
baby service station, “He's back!” Her voice carried a clearly discernible note of alarm.

There was a long pause and then Thad came into the doorway on the far side of the parlor. He was barefoot, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. “Who?” he said in an odd, slow voice.

“Pangborn,” she said. “Thad, are you okay?” Wendy was in his arms, wearing her diaper but nothing else, and she had her hands all over his face . . . but the little Liz could see of him just didn't look right.

“I'm fine. Let him in. I'll get this one in her suit.” And before Liz could say anything else, he was abruptly gone.

Alan Pangborn, meanwhile, was still standing patiently on the stoop. He had seen Liz look out and hadn't rung again. He had the air of a man who wished he had worn a hat so he could hold it in his hands, perhaps even wring it a little.

Slowly, and with no welcoming smile at all, she took the chain off and let him in.

Wendy was wiggly and full of fun, which made her hard to handle. Thad managed to get her feet into the sleep-suit, then her arms, and was finally able to pop her hands out of the cuffs. She immediately reached up with one of them and honked his nose briskly. He recoiled instead of laughing as he usually did, and Wendy looked up at him from the changing-table in mild puzzlement. He reached for the zipper which ran up the suit from the left leg to the throat, then stopped and held his hands out in front of him. They were shaking. It was a tiny tremble, but it was there.

No; not the guilts. He almost wished it was. The fact was, he'd just had another scare in a day which had been too full of them.

First had come the police, with their odd accusation and their even odder certainty. Then that strange, haunted, cheeping sound. He hadn't known what it was, not for sure, although it had been familiar.

After supper it had come again.

He had gone up to his study to proof what he had done on the new book,
The Golden Dog,
that day. And suddenly, as he was bending over the sheaf of manuscript to make a minor correction, the sound filled his head. Thousands of birds, all cheeping and twittering at once, and this time an image came with the sound.

Sparrows.

Thousands and thousands of them, lined up along roofpeaks and jostling for place along the telephone wires, the way they did in the early spring, while the last snows of March were still lying on the ground in dirty little granulated piles.

Oh the headache is coming,
he thought with dismay, and the voice in which that thought spoke—the voice of a frightened boy—was what tipped familiarity over into memory. Terror leaped up his throat then and seemed to clutch at the sides of his head with freezing hands.

The phantom sound—the voices of the birds—grew suddenly louder, almost deafening. It was joined by a thin, tenebrous flutter of wings. Now he could see them taking off, all of them at once; thousands of small birds darkening a white spring sky.

“Gonna hook back north, hoss,” he heard himself say in a low, guttural voice, a voice which was not his own.

Then, suddenly, the sight and sound of the birds was gone. It was 1988, not 1960, and he was in his study. He was a grown man with a wife, two kids, and a Remington typewriter.

He had drawn a long, gasping breath. There had been no ensuing headache. Not then, not now. He felt fine. Except . . .

Except when he looked down at the sheaf of manuscript again, he saw that he had written something there. It was slashed across the lines of neat type in large capital letters.

THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, he had written.

He had discarded the Scripto pen and used one of the Berol Black Beauties to write it, although he had no memory of trading one for the other. He didn't even use the pencils anymore. The Berols belonged to a dead age . . . a dark age. He tossed the pencil he had used back into the jar and then bundled the whole thing into one of the drawers. The hand he used to do this was not quite steady.

Then Liz had called him to help get the twins ready for bed, and he had gone down to help her. He had wanted to tell her what had happened, but found that simple terror—terror that the childhood tumor had recurred, terror that this time it would be malignant—had sealed his lips. He might have told her just the same . . . but then the doorbell had rung, Liz had gone to answer it, and she had said exactly the wrong thing in exactly the wrong tone.

He's back!
Liz had cried in perfectly understandable irritation and dismay, and terror had swept through him like a cold, clear gust of wind. Terror, and one word:
Stark.
In the one second before reality reasserted itself, he was positive that was who she meant. George Stark. The sparrows were flying and Stark had returned. He was dead, dead and publicly buried, he had never really existed in the first place, but that didn't matter; real or not, he was back just the same.

Quit it,
he told himself.
You're not a jumpy man, and there's no need to let this bizarre situation make you into one. The sound you heard—the sound of the birds—is a simple psychological phenomenon called “persistence of memory.” It's brought on by stress and pressure. So just get yourself under control

But some of the terror lingered. The sound of the birds had caused not only
déjà vu,
that sense of having experienced something before, but
presque vu
as well.

Presque vu:
a sense of experiencing something which has not happened yet but will. Not precognition, exactly, but misplaced memory.

He held his hands out and looked fixedly at them. The trembling became infinitesimal, then stopped altogether. When he was sure he wasn't going to pinch Wendy's bath-pink skin into the zipper of her sleep-suit, he pulled it up, carried her into the living room, popped her into the playpen with her brother, then went out to the hall, where Liz was standing with Alan Pangborn. Except for the fact that Pangborn was alone this time, it could have been this morning all over again.

Now this is a legitimate time and place for a little vu of one kind or another,
he thought, but there was nothing funny in it. That other feeling was still too much with him . . . and the sound of the sparrows. “What can I do for you, Sheriff?” he asked, not smiling.