The Dark Half (5 page)

“Stop what?”

“You grin,
they
grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad. ”

“Sorry,” he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green-rimmed smiles widened for a moment.

Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.

“Hon?” He looked up at his wife, who was concentrating on getting the last of William's peas into him. The kid appeared to be wearing quite a lot of them on his bib.

“What?”

“Look over here for a sec. ”

She did.

Thad winked.

“Was that cryptic?”

“No, dear. ”

“I didn't think it was. ”

Thad looked up from the article with a little smile. All at once his amazement at
People
's staged photographs seemed itself a little sanctimonious, a little posed. Because magazine photographers weren't the only ones who sometimes arranged things so they'd have the look readers wanted and expected. He supposed most interview subjects did it, too, to a greater or lesser degree. But he guessed he might have been a little better at arranging things than some; he was, after all, a novelist . . . and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

How direct.

How winning.

How utterly full of shit.

“Honey?”

“Hmmm?”

She was trying to wipe Wendy clean. Wendy was not keen on the idea. She kept twisting her small face away, babbling indignantly, and Liz kept chasing it with the washcloth. Thad thought his wife would catch her eventually, although he supposed there was always a chance she would tire first. It looked like Wendy thought that was a possibility, too.

“Were we wrong to lie about Clawson's part in all this?”

“We didn't lie, Thad. We just kept his name out of it. ”

“And he was a nerd, right?”

“No, dear. ”

“He wasn't?”

“No,” Liz said serenely. She was now beginning to clean William's face. “He was a dirty little Creepazoid. ”

Thad snorted. “A Creepazoid?”

“That's right. A Creepazoid. ”

“I think that's the first time I ever heard that particular term. ”

“I saw it on a videotape box last week when I was down at the corner store looking for something to rent. A horror picture called
The Creepazoids.
And I thought, ‘Marvelous. Someone made a movie about Frederick Clawson and his family. I'll have to tell Thad. ' But I forgot until just now. ”

“So you're really okay on that part of it?”

“Really very much okay,” she said. She pointed the hand holding the washcloth first at Thad and then at the open magazine on the table. “Thad, you got your pound of flesh out of this.
People
got
their
pound of flesh out of this. And Frederick Clawson got jack shit . . . which was just what he deserved. ”

“Thanks,” he said.

She shrugged. “Sure. You bleed too much sometimes, Thad. ”

“Is that the trouble?”

“Yes—
all
the trouble . . . William, honestly! Thad, if you'd help me just a little—”

Thad closed the magazine and carried Will into the twins' bedroom behind Liz, who had Wendy. The chubby baby was warm and pleasantly heavy, his arms slung casually around Thad's neck as he goggled at everything with his usual interest. Liz laid Wendy down on one changing table; Thad laid Will down on the other. They swapped dry diapers for soggy ones, Liz moving a little faster than Thad.

“Well,” Thad said, “we've been in
People
magazine, and that's the end of that. Right?”

“Yes,” she said, and smiled. Something in that smile did not ring quite true to Thad, but he remembered his own weird laughing fit and decided to leave it be. Sometimes he was just not very sure about things—it was a kind of mental analogue to his physical clumsiness—and then he picked away at Liz. She rarely snapped at him about it, but sometimes he could see a tiredness creep into her eyes when he went on too long. What had she said?
You bleed too much sometimes, Thad.

He pinned Will's diapers closed, keeping a forearm on the wriggling but cheerful baby's stomach while he worked so Will wouldn't roll off the table and kill himself, as he seemed determined to do.

“Bugguyrah!”
Will cried.

“Yeah,” Thad agreed.

“Divvit!”
Wendy yelled.

Thad nodded. “That makes sense, too. ”

“It's good to have him dead,” Liz said suddenly.

Thad looked up. He considered for a moment, then nodded. There was no need to specify who
he
was; they both knew. “Yeah. ”

“I didn't like him much. ”

That's a hell of a thing to say about your husband,
he almost replied, then didn't. It wasn't odd, because she wasn't talking about him. George Start's methods of writing hadn't been the only essential difference between the two of them.

“I didn't, either,” he said. “What's for supper?”

That night Thad had a nightmare. He woke from it near tears and trembling like a puppy caught out in a thunderstorm. He was with George Stark in the dream, only George was a real estate agent instead of a writer, and he was always standing just behind Thad, so he was only a voice and a shadow.

The Darwin Press author-sheet—which Thad had written just before starting
Oxford Blues,
the second George Stark opus—stated that Stark drove “a 1967 GMC pick-up truck held together by prayer and primer paint.” In the dream, however, they had been riding in a dead-black Toronado, and Thad knew he had gotten the pick-up truck part wrong.
This
was what Stark drove. This jet-propelled hearse.

The Toronado was jacked in the back and didn't look like a realtor's car at all. What it looked like was something a third-echelon mobster might drive around in. Thad looked over his shoulder at it as they walked toward the house Stark was for some reason showing him. He thought he would see Stark, and an icicle of sharp fear slid into his heart. But now Stark was standing just behind his other shoulder (although Thad had no idea how he could have gotten there so fast and so soundlessly), and all he could see was the car, a steel tarantula gleaming in the sunlight. There was a sticker on the high-rise rear bumper. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, it read. The words were flanked left and right by a skull and crossbones.

The house Stark had driven him to was
his
house—not the winter home in Ludlow, not too far from the University, but the summer place in Castle Rock. The north bay of Castle Lake opened out behind the house, and Thad could hear the faint sound of waves lapping against the shore. There was a POR SALE sign on the small patch of lawn beyond the driveway.

Nice house, isn't it? Stark almost whispered from behind his shoulder. His voice was rough yet caressing, like the lick of a tomcat's tongue.

It's
my
house, Thad answered.

You're quite wrong. The owner of this one is dead. He killed his wife and children and then himself. He pulled the plug. Just wham and jerk and bye-bye. He had that streak in him. You didn't have to look hard to see it, either. You might say it was pretty stark.

Is that supposed to be funny? he intended to ask—it seemed very important to show Stark he wasn't frightened of him. The
reason
it was important was that he was utterly terrified. But before he could frame the words, a large hand which appeared to have no lines on it at all (although it was hard to tell for sure because the way the fingers were folded cast a tangled shadow over the palm) was reaching over his shoulder and dangling a bunch of keys in his face.

No—not dangling. If it had just been that, be might have spoken anyway, might even have brushed the keys away in order to show how little he feared this fearsome man who insisted on standing behind him. But the hand was bringing the keys
toward
his face. Thad had to grab them to keep them from crashing into his nose.

He put one of them into the lock on the front door, a smooth oak expanse broken only by the knob and a brass knocker that looked like a small bird. The key turned easily, and that was strange, since it wasn't a housekey at all but a typewriter key on the end of a long steel rod. All the other keys on the ring appeared to be skeleton keys, the kind burglars carry.

He grasped the knob and turned it. As he did, the iron-bound wood of the door shrivelled and shrank in on itself with a series of explosions as loud as firecrackers. Light showed through the new cracks between the boards. Dust puffed out. There was a brittle snap and one of the decorative pieces of ironmongery fell off the door and thumped on the doorstep at Thad's feet.