The Dark Half

Liz took a tranquilizer and finally fell asleep. Thad drifted in and out of a thin, scratchy doze and got up at quarter past three to use the bathroom. As he was standing there, urinating into the bowl, he thought he heard the sparrows. He tensed, listening, the flow of his water drying up at once. The sound neither grew nor diminished, and after a few moments he realized it was only crickets.

He looked out the window and saw a state police cruiser parked across the road, dark and silent. He might have thought it was also deserted if he hadn't seen the fitful wink of a cigarette ember. It seemed that he, Liz, and the twins were also under police protection.

Or police guard, he thought, and went back to bed.

Whichever it was, it seemed to provide a little peace of mind. He fell asleep and woke at eight, with no memory of bad dreams. But of course the real bad dream was still out there. Somewhere.

Fourteen

Fools Stuffing

1

The guy with the stupid little pussy-tickler mustache was a lot quicker than Stark had expected.

Stark had been waiting for Michael Donaldson in the ninth-floor hallway of the building where Donaldson lived, just around the comer from Donaldson's apartment door. It all would have been easier if Stark could have gotten into the apartment first, as he had done with the bitch, but a single glance was enough to convince him that these locks, unlike hers, had not been put in by jiminy Cricket. It should have been all right just the same. It was late, and all the rabbits in the warren should have been fast asleep and dreaming of clover. Donaldson himself should have been slow and fuddled — when you came home at quarter of one in the morning, it wasn't from the public library. Donaldson did seem a trifle fuddled, but he was not slow at all.

When Stark stepped around the corner and slashed out with the razor as Donaldson fiddled and diddled with his keyring, he expected to blind the man quickly and efficiently. Then, before he could more than begin a cry, he would open Donaldson's throat, cutting his plumbing at the same time he severed his vocal cords.

Stark did not try to move quietly. He wanted Donaldson to hear him, wanted Donaldson to turn his face toward him. It would make it easier.

Donaldson did what he was supposed to at first. Stark whipped the razor at his face in a short, hard arc. But Donaldson managed to duck a little — not much, but too much for Stark's purposes. Instead of getting his eyes, the straight-razor laid his forehead open to the bone. A flap of skin curled down over Donaldson's eyebrows like a loose strip of wallpaper.

'HELP!' Donaldson blatted in a strangled, sheeplike voice, and there went your no-hitter. Fuck.

Stark moved in, holding the straight-razor out in front of his own eyes with the blade slightly, turned up, like a matador saluting the bull before the first corrida. Okay; it didn't go just according to Hoyle every time. He hadn't blinded the stool-pigeon, but blood was pouring out of the cut on his forehead in what looked like pints, and what little Donaldson was seeing would be coming through a sticky red haze.

He slashed at Donaldson's throat and the bastard pulled his head back almost as fast as a rattlesnake recoiling from a strike, amazing speed, and Stark found himself admiring the man a little, ridiculous pussy-tickler mustache or not.

The blade cut only air a quarter of an inch from the man's throat and he screamed for help again. The rabbits, who never slept deeply in this city, this maggoty old Big Apple, would be waking up. Stark reversed direction and brought the blade back again, at the same time rising on his toes and thrusting his body forward. It was a graceful, balletic movement, and should have finished it. But Donaldson somehow managed to get a hand up in front of his throat; instead of killing him, Stark only administered a series of long, shallow wounds which police pathologists would call defense cuts. Donaldson raised his hand palm out, and the razor passed across the base of all four fingers. He wore a heavy class ring on the third, and so that one sustained no wound. There was a crisp and minute metallic sound — brinnk! — as the blade ran across it, leaving a tiny scar in the gold alloy. The razor cut the other three fingers deeply, sliding as effortlessly into the flesh as a warm knife slides into butter. Tendons cut, the fingers slumped forward like sleepy puppets, leaving only the ring—finger standing upright, as if in his confusion and horror, Donaldson had forgotten which finger you used when you wanted to flip somebody the bird.

This time when Donaldson opened his mouth he actually howled, and Stark knew he could forget about getting out of this one unheard and unnoticed. He'd had every expectation of doing just that, since he didn't have to save Donaldson long enough to make any telephone calls, but it just wasn't happening. But neither did he intend to let Donaldson live. Once you'd started the wetwork, you didn't quit until either it was done or you were.

Stark bored in. They had moved down the corridor almost to the next apartment door by now. He flicked the straight-razor casually sideways to clear the blade. A fine spray of droplets splashed the cream-colored wall.

Farther down the hall a door opened and a man in a blue pajama shirt with his hair in sleepcorkscrews poked his head and shoulders out.

'What's going on?' he cried in a gruff voice which proclaimed that he didn't care if it was the Pope of Rome out here, the party was over.

'Murder,' Stark said conversationally, and for just a moment his eyes shifted from the bloody, howling man in front of him to the man in the doorway. Later this man would tell the police that the intruder's eyes were blue. Bright blue. And utterly mad. 'Do you want some?'

The door shut so fast it might never have been opened at all.

Panicked though he must be, hurt though he undoubtedly was, Donaldson saw an opportunity when Stark's gaze shifted, even though the diversion was only momentary. He took it. The little bastard really was quick. Stark's admiration grew. The mark's speed and sense of self-preservation were almost enough to outweigh the fucking nuisance he was making of himself.

Had he leaped forward, grappled with Stark, he might have graduated from the nuisance stage to something approaching a real problem. Instead, Donaldson turned to run.

Perfectly understandable, but a mistake.

Stark ran after him, big shoes whispering on the carpet, and slashed at the back of the man's neck, confident that this would finally finish it.

But in the instant of time before the straight—razor should have slashed home, Donaldson simultaneously jerked his head forward and somehow tucked it, like a turtle pulling into its shell. Stark was beginning to think Donaldson was telepathic. This time what was meant to be the killing strike merely split the scalp above the protective bulge of bone at the back of the neck. It was bloody, but far from fatal.

This was irritating, maddening . . . and edging into the land of the ludicrous.

Donaldson lurched down the corridor, veering from one side to the other, sometimes even banging off the walls like a pinball striking one of those lighted posts that score the player 100,000 points or a free game or some fucking thing. He screamed as he lurched down the hall. He poured blood on the carpet as he lurched down the hall. He left the occasional gory handprint to mark his progress as he lurched down the hall. But he was not yet dying as he lurched down the hall.

No other doors opened, but Stark knew that right now in at least half a dozen apartments, half a dozen fingers were punching (or had already punched) 911 on half a dozen phones.

Donaldson lurched and stumbled onward toward the elevators.

Not angry or frightened, only terribly exasperated, Stark strode after him. Suddenly he thundered: 'Oh why don't you just stop it and BEHAVE!'

Donaldson's current cry for help turned into a shocked squeak. He tried to look around. His feet tangled in each other and he fell sprawling ten feet from where the hallway opened into the small elevator lobby. Even the most nimble of fellows, Stark had found, eventually ran out of happy thoughts if you cut them enough.

Donaldson got to his knees. He apparently meant to crawl to the elevator lobby now that his feet had betrayed him. He looked around with his bloody no-face to see where his attacker was, and Stark launched a kick at the red-drenched ridge of his nose. He was wearing brown loafers and he kicked the goddam pest as hard as he could, hands down at his sides and thrust slightly backward to maintain balance, left foot connecting and then rising in an arc as high as his own forehead. Anyone who had ever seen a football game would have inevitably been reminded of a very good, very strong punt.

Donaldson's head flew backward, smashed into the wall hard enough to cave the plaster into a shallow bowl-shape at that point, and rebounded.

'Finally pulled your batteries, didn't I?' Stark murmured, and heard a door open behind him. He turned and saw a woman with tousled black hair and huge dark eyes looking out of an apartment door almost all the way down the hall. 'GET BACK IN THERE, BITCH!' he screamed. The door slammed as if it were on a spring.

He bent, grabbed Donaldson's tacky, gruesome hair, twisted his head back, and cut his throat. He thought Donaldson had probably been dead even before his head connected with the wall, and almost certainly after, but it was best to be sure. And besides: when you started cutting, you finished cutting.

He stepped back quickly, but Donaldson did not spurt as the woman had. His pump had already quit or was wheezing to a stop. Stark walked rapidly toward the elevators, folding the straightrazor and sliding it back into his pocket.

An arriving elevator binged softly.

It might have been a tenant; going-on-one wasn't really late in the big city, even for a Monday night. AU the same, Stark moved rapidly for the large potted plant which occupied the comer of the elevator lobby along with an absolutely useless non-representational painting. He stepped behind the plant. All his radar was pinging loudly. It could be someone returning from a postweekend bout of Disco Fever or the bibulous aftermath of a business dinner, but he didn't believe it would be either. He believed it would be the police. In fact, he knew it.

A cruiser which fortuitously happened to be in the vicinity of the building when one of the residents of this wing telephoned to say that a murder was being committed in the hallway? Possible, but Stark doubted it. It seemed more likely that Beaumont had raised the roof, sissy had been discovered, and this was Donaldson's police protection arriving. Better belated than never.

He slid slowly down the wall with his back against it, the bloodstained sport—coat he was wearing making a husky whispering noise. He did not so much hide as submerge like a submarine going to periscope depth, and the concealment the potted plant offered was at best minimal. If they looked around, they would see him. Stark, however, was betting all their attention would be riveted by Exhibit A there, halfway down the hall. For a few moments, anyway — and that would be enough.

The plant's broad, crisscrossing leaves printed sawtoothed shadows on his face. Stark stared out from between them like a blue-eyed tiger.

The elevator doors opened. There was a muffled exclamation, holy something-or-other, and two uniformed cops rushed out. They were followed by a black guy in a pair of pegged jeans and big old ditty—bop sneakers with Velcro closures. The black guy also wore a t-shirt with cut-off sleeves. PROPERTY OF THE N.Y. YANKEES was printed on the front. He also wore a pair of wraparound pimp shades, and if he wasn't a detective, Stark was George of the Motherfucking Jungle. When they went undercover, they always went too far . . . and then acted self-conscious about it. It was as if they knew they were going overboard but simply couldn't help it. This was — or had been meant to be, anyhow — Donaldson's protection, then. There wouldn't have been a detective in a passing squad-car. That was just a little too fortuitous. This guy had come along with the door-guards to first question Donaldson and then babysit him.

Sorry, fellows, Stark thought. I think this baby's talking days are over.

He pushed to his feet and walked around the potted plant. Not a single leaf whispered. His feet were soundless on the carpet. He passed less than three feet behind the detective, who was bent over, pulling a .32 from a shin holster. Stark could have booted him a damned good one in the ass if he'd cared to.

He slipped into the open elevator car in the last whisker of time before the door began to slide closed. One of the uniformed cops had caught a flicker of movement — perhaps the door, perhaps Stark himself, and it didn't really matter — out of the corner of his eye and raised his head from Donaldson's body. 'Hey — '

Stark raised one hand and solemnly twiddled his fingers at the cop. Bye—bye. Then the door cut off the hallway tableau.

The street-level lobby was deserted — except for the doorman, who lay comatose beneath his desk. Stark went out, turned the corner, got into a stolen car, and drove away.

2

Phyllis Myers lived in one of the new apartment buildings on the West Side of Manhattan. Her police protection (accompanied by a detective wearing Nike running pants, a New York Islanders sweat-shirt with ripped-off sleeves, and wraparound pimp shades) had arrived at half-past ten on the evening of June 6th to find her fuming over a broken date. She was surly at first, but cheered up considerably when she heard that someone who thought he was George Stark might be interested in murdering her. She answered the detective's questions about the Thad Beaumont interview which she referred to as the Thad Beaumont Shoot — while loading three cameras with fresh film and fiddling with some two dozen tenses. When the detective asked her what she was doing, she gave him a wink and said: 'I believe in the Boy Scout motto. Who knows — something might really happen.'

After the interview, outside her apartment door, one of the uniforms asked the detective, 'Is she for real?'

'Sure,' the detective said. 'Her problem is that she doesn't really think anything else is. To her, the whole world's just a photograph waiting to happen. What you got in there is a silly bitch who really believes she's always going to be on the right side of the lens.'

Now, at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, the detective was long gone. Two hours or so before, the two men assigned to protect Phyllis Myers had gotten the news of Donaldson's murder on the police radios clipped to their belts. They were advised to be extremely cautious and extremely vigilant, as the psyche they were dealing with had proved to be both extremely bloodthirsty and extremely quick-witted.

'Cautious is my middle name,' said Cop #1.

'That's a coincidence,' said Cop #2. 'Extremely is mine.'

They had been partners for over a year, and they got on well. Now they grinned at each other, and why not? They were two armed, uniformed members of the maggoty old Big Apple's Finest, standing in a well-lit air-conditioned hallway on the twenty-sixth floor of a brand-new apartment building — or maybe it was a condo, who the fuck knew, when Officers Cautious and Extremely were boys, a condo was something a guy with a speech impediment wore on the end of his dingus — and no one was going to creep up on them or jump out of the ceiling on top of them or hose them down with a magic Uzi that never jammed or ran out of ammunition. This was real life, not an 87th Precinct novel or a Rambo movie, and what real life consisted of tonight was a little special duty one hell of a lot softer than riding around in a cruiser, stopping fights in bars until the bars closed, and then stopping them, until the dawn's early light, in shitty little walk-ups where drunk husbands and wives had agreed to disagree. Real life should always consist of being Cautious and Extremely in air-conditioned hallways on hot nights in the city. Or so they firmly believed.

They had progressed this far in their thinking when the elevator doors opened and the wounded blind man staggered out of the car and into the corridor.

He was tall, with very broad shoulders. He looked about forty. He was wearing a torn sport-coat and pants which did not match the coat but at least complemented it. More or less, anyway. The first cop, Cautious, had time to think that the sighted person who picked the blind man's clothes must have pretty good taste. The blind man was also wearing big black glasses that were askew on his nose because one of the bows had been snapped clean off. They were not, by any stretch of the imagination, wraparound pimp shades. What they looked like were the sunglasses Claude Rains had worn in The Invisible Man.

The blind man was holding both hands out in front of him. The left was empty, just waving aimlessly. In the right he clutched a dirty white cane with a rubber bicycle handgrip on the end. Both hands were covered with drying blood. There were maroon smears of blood drying on the blind man's sport-coat and shirt. If the two cops assigned to guard Phyllis Myers had actually been Extremely Cautious, the whole thing might have struck them as odd. The blind man was hollering about something which had apparently just happened, and from the look of him, something sure had happened to him, and not a very nice thing, either, but the blood on his skin and clothes had already turned brownish. This suggested it had been spilled some time ago, a fact which might have struck officers deeply committed to the concept of Extreme Caution as a trifle off-beat. It might even have hoisted a red flag in the minds of such officers.

Probably not, though. Things just happened too fast, and when things happen fast enough, it stops mattering if you are extremely cautious or extremely reckless — you just have to go with the flow.

At one moment they were standing outside the Myers woman's door, happy as kids on a day when school is cancelled because the boiler went kaflooey; at the next, this bloody blind man was in their faces, waving his dirty white cane. There was no time to think, let alone deduce.

'Poleeece!' the blind man was yelling even before the elevator doors were all the way open. 'Doorman says the police are on twenty-six! Po-leeeece! Are you here?'

Now he was wallowing his way down the hall, cane swinging from side to side, and WHOCK!, it hit the wall on his left, and swish, back it went, and WHOCK!, the wall on his right, and anyone on the goddam floor who wasn't awake already would be soon.

Extremely and Cautious both started forward without so much as exchanging a glance.

'Po-leeece! Po — '

'Sir!' Extremely barked. 'Hold it! You're going to fall d — '

The blind man jerked his head in the direction of Extremely's voice but did not stop. He plunged onward, waving his empty hand and his dirty white cane, looking a bit like Leonard Bernstein trying to conduct the New York Philharmonic after smoking a vial or two of crack. 'Po-leeece! They killed my dog! They killed Daisy! PO-LEEECE!'

'Sir — '

Cautious reached for the reeling blind man. The reeling blind man put his empty hand in the left pocket of his sport-coat and came out not with two tickets to the Blind Man's Gala Ball but a .45 revolver. He pointed it at Cautious and pulled the trigger twice. The reports were deafening and toneless in the close hallway. There was a lot of blue smoke. Cautious took the bullets at nearly point-blank range. He went down with his chest caved in like a broken peach-basket. His tunic was scorched and smouldering.

Extremely stared as the blind man pointed the .45 at him.

'Jesus please don't,' Extremely said in a very tiny voice. He sounded as if someone had knocked the wind out of him. The blind man fired two more times. There was more blue smoke. He shot very well for a blind man. Extremely flew backward, away from the blue smoke, hit the hall carpet on his shoulder-blades, went through a sudden, shuddery spasm, and lay still.

3

In Ludlow, five hundred miles away, Thad Beaumont turned over restlessly on his side. 'Blue smoke,' he muttered. 'Blue smoke.'

Outside the bedroom window, nine sparrows sat on a telephone line. They were joined by half a dozen more. The birds sat, silent and unseen, above the watchers in the state police car.

'I won't need these anymore,' Thad said in his sleep. He made a clumsy pawing motion at his face with one hand and a tossing gesture with the other.

'Thad?' Liz asked, sitting up. 'Thad, are you okay?'

Thad said something incomprehensible in his sleep.

Liz looked down at her arms. They were thick with goosebumps.

'Thad? Is it the birds again? Do you hear the birds?'

Thad said nothing. Outside the windows, the sparrows took wing in unison and flew off into the dark, although this was not their time to fly.

Neither Liz nor the two policemen in the state police cruiser noticed them.

4

Stark tossed the dark glasses and the cane aside. The hallway was acrid with cordite smoke. He had fired four Colt Hi-Point loads which he had dum-dummed. Two of them had passed through the cops and had left plate-sized holes in the corridor wall. He walked over to Phyllis Myers's door. He was ready to talk her out if he had to, but she was right there on the other side, and he could tell just listening to her that she would be easy.

'What's going on?' she screamed. 'What happened?'

'We've got him, Ms Myers,' Stark said cheerfully. 'If you want the picture, get it goddam fast, and just remember later I never said you could take one.'

She kept the door on the chain when she opened it, but that was okay. When she placed one wide brown eye to the crack, he put a bullet through it.

Closing her eyes — or closing the one eye still in existence — was not an option, so he turned and started back toward the elevators. He did not linger, but he did not run, either. One apartment door eased open — everyone was opening doors on him tonight, it seemed — and Stark raised the gun at the starey-eyed rabbit face he saw. The door slammed at once.

He pushed the elevator button. The doors of the car he'd ridden up in after knocking out his second doorman of the evening (with the cane he had stolen from the blind man on 60th Street) opened at once, as he had expected they would — at this hour of the night, the three elevators were not exactly in great demand. He tossed the gun back over his shoulder. It thumped onto the carpet.

'That went all right,' he remarked, got into the elevator car, and rode down to the lobby.

5

The sun was coming up in Rick Cowley's living-room window when the telephone rang. Rick was fifty, red-eyed, haggard, half drunk. He picked up the telephone with a hand that shook badly. He hardly knew where he was, and his tired, aching mind kept insisting all this was a dream. Had he been, less than three hours ago, down at the borough morgue on First Avenue, identifying his ex— wife's mutilated corpse less than a block from the chic little French restaurant where they took only the clients who were also friends? Were there police outside his door, because the man who had killed Mir might also want to kill him? Were these things true? Surely not. It surely had to be a dream . . . and maybe the phone wasn't really the phone at all but the bedside alarm. As a rule, he hated that fucking thing . . . had thrown it across the room on more than one occasion. But this morning he would kiss it. Hell, he would Frenchkiss it.

But he didn't wake up. Instead he answered the telephone. 'Hello?'

'This is the man who cut your woman's throat,' the voice in his ear said, and Rick was suddenly wide awake. Any lingering hope he'd had that this was all just a dream dissipated. It was the sort of voice you should only hear in dreams . . . but that is never where you hear it.

'Who are you?' he heard himself asking in a strengthless little voice.

'Ask Thad Beaumont who I am,' the man said. 'He knows all about it. Tell him I said you're walking around dead. And tell him I'm not done making fool's stuffing yet.'

The phone clicked in his ear, there was a moment of silence, and then the vapid hum of an open line.

Rick lowered the telephone into his lap, looked at it, and suddenly burst into tears.

6

At nine that morning, Rick called the office and told Frieda that she and John should go home — they would not be working today, nor for the rest of the week. Frieda wanted to know why and Rick was astounded to find himself on the verge of lying to her, as if he had been busted for some nasty and serious crime — child molestation, say — and couldn't bring himself to admit it until the shock was a little less acute.

'Miriam is dead,' he told Frieda. 'She was killed in her apartment last night.'

Frieda drew in her breath in a quick, shocked hiss. 'Jesus—God, Rick! Don't joke about things like that! You joke about things like that, they come true!'

'It is true, Frieda,' he said, and found he was on the edge of tears again. And these — the ones he'd shed at the morgue, the ones he'd shed in the car coming back here, the ones he'd shed when that crazy man called, the ones he was trying not to shed now these were only the first. Thinking of all the tears in his future made him feel intensely weary. Miriam had been a bitch, but she had also been, in her own way, a sweet bitch, and he had loved her. Rick closed his eyes. When he opened them, there was a man looking in at him through the window, even though the window was fourteen stories up. Rick started, then saw the uniform. A window-cleaner. The windowcleaner waved to him from his scaffold. Rick lifted a hand in a token return salute. The hand seemed to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred pounds, and he let it fall back onto his thigh almost as soon as he had raised it.

Frieda was telling him again not to joke, and he felt more weary than ever. Tears, he saw, were only the beginning. He said, 'Just a minute, Frieda,' and put the phone down. He went to the window to draw the drapes. Crying over the telephone with Frieda at the other end was bad enough; he didn't have to have the goddam window-cleaner watch him do it.

As he reached the window, the man on the scaffold reached into the slash pocket of his coverall to get something. Rick felt a sudden twinge of unease. Tell him I said you're walking around dead.

(Jesus — )

The window—cleaner brought out a small sign. It was yellow with black letters. The message was flanked with moronic smiley-smile faces. HAVE A NICE DAY! it read.

Rick nodded wearily. Have a nice day. Sure. He drew the drapes and went back to the phone.

7

When he finally convinced Frieda he wasn't joking, she burst into loud and utterly genuine sobs — everyone at the office and all the clients, even that goddam putz Ollinger, who wrote the bad science fiction novels and who had apparently dedicated himself to the task of snapping every bra in the Western world, had liked Mir — and, sure enough, Rick cried with her until he finally managed to disengage himself. At least, he thought, I closed the drapes.

Fifteen minutes later, while he was making coffee, the crazy man's call jumped into his head again. There were two cops outside his door, and he hadn't told them a thing. What in hell was wrong with him?

Well, he thought, my ex-wife died, and when I saw her at the morgue it looked like she'd grown an extra mouth two inches below her chin. That might have something to do with it.

Ask Thad Beaumont who I am. He knows all about it.

He had meant to call Thad, of course. But his mind was still in free fall — things had assumed new proportions which he did not, at least as yet, seem capable of grasping. Well, he would call Thad. He would do it just as soon as he told the police about the call.

He did tell them, and they were extremely interested. One of them got on his walkie-talkie to police headquarters with the information. When he finished, he told Rick that the chief of detectives wanted him to come down to One Police Plaza and talk to them about the call he had received. While he did that, a fellow would pop into his apartment and fit his telephone with a tape-recorder and traceback equipment. In case there were any more calls.

'There probably will be,' the second cop told Rick. 'These psychos are really in love with the sound of their own voices.'

'I ought to call Thad first,' Rick said. 'He may be in trouble, too. That's the way it sounded.'

'Mr Beaumont has already been placed under police protection up in Maine, Mr Cowley. Let's go, shall we?'

'Well, I really think — '

'Perhaps you can call him from the Big One. Now — do you have a coat?'

So Rick, confused and not at all sure any of this was real, allowed himself to be led away.

8

When they got back two hours later, one of Rick's escorts frowned at his apartment door and said, 'There's no one here.'

'So what?' Rick asked wanly. He felt wan, like a pane of milky glass you could almost see through. He had been asked a great many questions, and had answered them as well as he could — a difficult task, since so few of them seemed to make any sense.

'If the guys from Communications finished before we got back, they were supposed to wait.'

'They're probably inside,' Rick said.

'One of them, maybe, but the other one should be out here. It's standard procedure.'

Rick took out his keys, shuffled through them, found the right one, and slipped it into the lock. Any problems these fellows might be having with the operating procedure of their colleagues was no concern of his. Thank God; he had all the concerns he could manage this morning. 'I ought to call Thad first thing,' he said. He sighed and smiled a little. 'It isn't even noon and I already feel like the day is never going to e — '

'Don't do that!' one of the cops shouted suddenly, and sprang forward.

'Do wha — ' Rick began, turning his key, and the door exploded in a flash of light and smoke and sound. The cop whose instincts had triggered just an instant too late was recognizable to his relatives; Rick Cowley was nearly vaporized. The other cop, who had been standing a little farther back and who had instinctively shielded his face when his partner cried out, was treated for burns, concussion, and internal injuries. Mercifully — almost magically — the shrapnel from the door and the wall flew around him in a cloud but never touched him. He would never work for the N.Y.P.D. again, however; the blast struck him stone deaf in an instant.

Inside Rick's apartment, the two technicians from Communications who had come to cook the phones lay dead on the living-room rug. Tacked to the forehead of one with a push-pin was this note:

THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN.

Tacked to the forehead of the other was a second message:

MORE FOOL'S STUFFING. TELL THAD.

PART 2

STARK TAKES CHARGE

'Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls,' Machine told Jack Halstead. 'Did you know that?'

Jack began to laugh. The look Machine turned on him made him think better of it.

'Wipe that asshole grin off your face and pay attention to me,' Machine said. 'I am giving you instruction here. Are you paying attention?'

'Yes, Mr Machine.'

'Then hear this, and never forget it. Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls, but it takes a hero to keep on squeezing. I'll tell you something else, while I'm at it: only heroes and quitters walk away, Jack. No one else. And I am no quitter.'

— Machine's Way by George Stark

Fifteen

Stark Disbelief

1

Thad and Liz sat encased in shock so deep and blue it felt like ice, listening as Alan Pangborn told them how the early morning hours had gone in New York City. Mike Donaldson, slashed and beaten to death in the hallway of his apartment building; Phyllis Myers and two policemen gunned down at her West Side condo. The night doorman at Myers's building had been hit with something heavy, and had suffered a fractured skull. The doctors held out odds slightly better than even that he would wake up on the mortal side of heaven. The doorman at Donaldson's building was dead. The wet-work had been carried out gangland-style in all cases, with the hitter simply walking up to his victims and starting in.

As Alan talked, he referred to the killer repeatedly as Stark.

He's calling him by his right name without even thinking about it, Thad mused. Then he shook his head, a little impatient with himself. You had to call him something, he supposed, and Stark was maybe a little better than 'the perp' or 'Mr X.' It would be a mistake at this point to think Pangborn was using the name in any way other than as a convenient handle.

'What about Rick)' he asked when Alan had finished and he was finally able to unlock his tongue.

'Mr Cowley is alive and well and under police protection.' It was quarter of ten in the morning; the explosion which would kill Rick and one of his guardians was still almost two hours away.

'Phyllis Myers was under police protection, too,' Liz said. In the big playpen, Wendy was fast asleep and William was nodding out. His head would go down on his chest, his eyes would close . . . then he would jerk his head up again. To Alan he looked comically like a sentry trying not to fall asleep on duty. But each head—jerk was a little weaker. Watching the twins, his notebook now closed and in his lap, Alan noticed an interesting thing: every time William jerked his head up in an effort to stay awake, Wendy twitched in her sleep.

Have the parents noticed that? he wondered, and then thought, Of course they have.

'That's true, Liz. He surprised them. Police are as prone to surprise as anyone else, you know; they're just supposed to react to it better. On the floor where Phyllis Myers lived, several people along the hall opened their doors and looked out after the shots were fired, and we've got a pretty good idea of what went down from their statements and what the police found at the crime scene. Stark pretended to be a blind man. He hadn't changed his clothes following the murders of Miriam Cowley and Michael Donaldson, which were . . . forgive me, both of you, but they were messy. He comes out of the elevator, wearing dark glasses he probably bought in Times Square or from a pushcart vendor and waving a white cane covered with blood. God knows where he got the cane, but N.Y.P.D. thinks he also used it to bash the doormen.'

'He stole it from a real blind man, of course,' Thad said calmly. 'This guy is not Sir Galahad, Alan.'

'Obviously not. He was probably yelling that he'd been mugged, or maybe that he had been attacked by burglars in his apartment. Either way, he came on to them so fast they didn't have much time to react. They were, after all, a couple of prowl-car cops who were hauled off their beat and stuck in front of this woman's door without much warning.'

'But surely they knew that Donaldson had been murdered, too?' Liz protested. 'If something like that couldn't alert them to the fact the man was dangerous — '

'They also knew Donaldson's police protection had arrived after the man had been murdered,' Thad said. 'They were overconfident.'

'Maybe they were, a little,' Alan conceded. 'I have no way of knowing. But the guys with Cowley know that this man is daring and quite clever as well as homicidal. Their eyes are open. No, Thad — your agent is safe. You can count on it.'

'You said there were witnesses,' Thad said.

'Oh yeah. Lots of witnesses. At the Cowley woman's place, at Donaldson's. at Myers's. He didn't seem to give a shit.' He looked at Liz and said, 'Excuse me.'

She smiled briefly. 'I've heard that one a time or two before, Alan.'

He nodded, gave her a little smile, and turned back to Thad.

'The description I gave you?'

'It checks out all down the line,' Alan said. 'He's big, blonde, got a pretty good tan. So tell me who he is, Thad. Give me a name. I've got a lot more than Homer Gamache to worry about now. I've got the goddam Police Commissioner of New York City leaning on me. Sheila Brigham — that's my chief dispatcher — thinks I'm going to be a media star, but it's still Homer I care about. Even more than the two dead police officers who were trying to protect Phyllis Myers, I care about Homer. So give me a name.'

'I already have,' Thad said.

There was a long silence — perhaps ten seconds. Then, very softly, Alan said, 'What?'

'His name is George Stark.' Thad was surprised to hear how calm he sounded, even more surprised to find that he felt calm . . . unless deep shock and calm felt the same. But the relief of actually saying that — You have his name, his name is George Stark — was inexpressible.

'I don't think I understand you,' Alan said after another long pause.

'Of course you do, Alan,' Liz said. Thad looked at her, startled by the crisp, no-nonsense tone of her voice. 'What my husband is saying is that his pseudonym has somehow come to life. The tombstone in the picture . . . what it says on that tombstone where there should be a homily or a little verse is something Thad said to the wire-service reporter who originally broke the story. NOT A VERY NICE GUY. Do you recall that?'

'Yes, but Liz — ' He was looking at them both with a kind of helpless surprise, as if realizing for the first time that he had been holding a conversation with people who had lost their minds.

'Save your buts,' she said in the same brisk tone. 'You'll have plenty of time for buts and rebuttals. You and everyone else. For the time being, just listen to me. Thad wasn't kidding when he said George Stark wasn't a very nice guy. He may have thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. I knew it even if he didn't. Not only was George Stark not a very nice guy, he was in fact a horrible guy. He made me more nervous with each of the four books he wrote, and when Thad finally decided to kill him, I went upstairs to our bedroom and cried with relief.' She looked at Thad, who was staring at her. She measured him with her gaze before nodding.

'That's right. I cried. I really cried. Mr Clawson in Washington was a disgusting little Creepazoid, but he did us a favor, maybe the biggest favor of our married life together, and for that reason I'm sorry he's dead, if for no other.'

'Liz, I don't think you really mean — '

'Don't tell me what I do and do not mean!' she said.

Alan blinked. Her voice remained modulated, not loud enough to waken Wendy or cause William to do more than raise his head one final time before lying down on his side and falling asleep beside his sister. Alan had a feeling that, if not for the kids, he would have heard a louder voice, though. Maybe even one turned up to full volume.

'Thad has got some things to tell you now. You need to listen to him very carefully, Alan, and you need to try and believe him. Because if you don't, I'm afraid this man — or whatever he is — will go on killing until he's worked all the way to the bottom of his butcher's bill. I have some very personal reasons for not wanting that to happen. You see, I think Thad and I and our babies may well be on that list.'

'All right.' His own voice was mild, but his thoughts were clicking over at a rapid rate. He made a conscious effort to push frustration, anger, even wonder aside and consider this mad idea as clearly as he could. Not the question of whether it was true or false — it was, of course, impossible even to consider it as true — but the one of just why they were even bothering to tell such a story in the first place. Was it concocted to hide some imagined complicity in the murders? A real one? Was it even possible that they believed it? It seemed impossible that such a pair of well—educated and rational — up to now, anyway people could believe it, but it was as it had been on the day he had come to arrest Thad for Homer's murder; they just didn't give off the faint but unmistakable aroma of people who were lying. Consciously lying, he amended to himself. 'Go on, Thad.'

'All right,' Thad said. He cleared his throat nervously and got up. His hand went to his breast pocket and he realized with an amusement that was half-bitter what he was doing: reaching for the cigarettes which had not been there for years now. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at Alan Pangborn as he might look at a troubled advisee who had washed up on the mostly friendly shores of Thad's office.

'Something very odd is going on here. No — it's more than odd. It's terrible and it's inexplicable, but it is happening. And it started, I think, when I was just eleven years old.'

2

Thad told it all: the childhood headaches, the shrill cries and muddy visions of the sparrows which had heralded the arrival of these headaches, the return of the sparrows. He showed Alan the manuscript page with THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING slashed across it in dark pencil strokes. He told him about the fugue state he had entered at his office yesterday, and what he had written (as well as he could remember it) on the back of the order-form. He explained what had happened to the form, and tried to express the fear and bewilderment which had compelled him to destroy it.

Alan's face remained impassive.

'Besides,' Thad finished, 'I know it's Stark. Here.' He made a fist and knocked lightly on his own chest.

Alan said nothing at all for a few moments. He had begun turning his wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand, and this operation seemed to have captured all his attention.

'You've lost weight since you were married,' Liz said quietly. 'If you don't have that ring sized, Alan, you'll lose it one day.'

'I suppose I will.' He raised his head and looked at her. When he spoke, it was as if Thad had left the room on some errand and only the two of them were there. 'Your husband took you upstairs to his study and showed you this first message from the spirit world after I left . . . is that correct?'

'The only spirit world I know about for sure is the Agency Liquor Store about a mile down the road,' Liz said evenly, 'but he did show me the message after you left, yes.'

'Right after I left?'

'No — we put the twins to bed, and then, while we were getting ready for bed ourselves, I asked Thad what he was hiding.'

'Between the time when I left and the time when he told you about the blackouts and the birdsounds, there were periods when he was out of your sight? Times when he could have gone upstairs and written the phrase I mentioned to you?'

'I don't remember for sure,' she said. 'I think we were together all that time, but I can't say absolutely. And it wouldn't matter even if I told you he never left my sight, would it?'

'What do you mean, Liz?'

'I mean you'd then assume I was also lying, wouldn't you?'

Alan sighed deeply. It was the only answer either of them really needed.

'Thad isn't lying about this.'

Alan nodded his head. 'I appreciate your honesty . . . but since you can't swear he never left you for a couple of minutes, I don't have to accuse you of lying. I'm a glad of that. You admit the opportunity may have been there, and I think you'll also admit that the alternative is pretty wild.'

Thad leaned against the mantel, his eyes shifting back and forth like the eyes of a man watching a tennis match. Sheriff Pangborn was not saying a thing Thad had not foreseen, and he was pointing out the holes in his story a good deal more kindly than he might have done, but Thad found that he was still bitterly disappointed . . . almost heartsick. That premonition that Alan would believe somehow just instinctively believe — had proved as bogus as a bottle of medicine show cure-all.

'Yes, I admit those things,' Liz said evenly.

'As for what Thad claims happened at his office . . . there are no witnesses to either the blackout or to what he claims to have written down. In fact, he didn't mention the incident to you at all until after Ms Cowley called, did he?'

'No. He did not.'

'And so . . .' He shrugged.

'I have a question for you, Alan.'

'All right.'

'Why would Thad lie? What purpose would it serve?'

'I don't know.' Alan looked at her with complete candor. 'He may not know himself.' He glanced briefly at Thad, then returned his eyes to Liz's. 'He may not even know he is lying. What I'm saying is pretty flat: this is not the sort of thing any police officer could accept without strong proof And there is none.'

'Thad is telling the truth about this. I understand everything you've said, but I want very badly for you to believe he is telling the truth, too. I want that desperately. You see, I lived with George Stark. And I know how Thad was about him as time went on. I'll tell you something that wasn't in People magazine. Thad started talking about getting rid of Stark two books before the last one —'

'Three,' Thad said quietly from his place by the mantel. His craving for a cigarette had become a dry fever. 'I started talking about it after the first one.'

'Okay, three. The magazine article made it sound as though this was a pretty recent thing, and that just wasn't true. That's the point I'm trying to make. If Frederick Clawson hadn't come along and forced my husband's hand, I think Thad would still be talking about getting rid of him in the same way. The way an alcoholic or drug addict tells his family and his friends that he'll quit tomorrow . . . or the next day . . . or the day after that.'

'No,' Thad said. 'Not exactly like that. Right church but the wrong pew.'

He paused, frowning, doing more than thinking. Concentrating. Alan reluctantly gave up the idea that they were lying, or having him on for some weird reason. They were not spending their efforts in order to convince him, or even themselves, but only to articulate how it had been . . . the way men might try to describe a fire-fight long after it was over.

'Look,' Thad said finally. 'Let's drop the subject of the black-outs and the sparrows and the precognitive visions — if that's what they were — for a minute. If you feel you need to, you can talk to my doctor, George Hume, about the physical symptoms. Maybe the head-tests I took yesterday will show something odd when they come back, and even if they don't, the doctor who performed the operation on me when I was a kid may still be alive and able to talk to you about the case. He may know something that could cast some light on this mess. I can't remember his name right off-hand, but I'm sure it's in my medical records. But right now, all of this psychic shit is a side-track.'

This struck Alan as a very odd thing for Thad to say . . . if he had planted the one precognitive note and lied about the other. Someone crazy enough to do such a thing — and crazy enough to forget he'd done it, to actually believe the notes were real manifestations of psychic phenomena — would want to talk about nothing else. Wouldn't he? His head was beginning to ache.

'All right,' he said evenly, 'if what you call 'this psychic shit' is a side-track, then what's the main line?'

'George Stark is the main line,' Thad said, and thought— The line that goes to Endsville, where all rail service terminates. 'Imagine that some stranger moved into your house. Someone you've always been a little bit frightened of, the way Jim Hawkins was always a little bit frightened of the Old Sea-Dog at the Admiral Benbow have you read Treasure Island, Alan?'

He nodded.

'Well, you know the sort of feeling I'm trying to express, then. You're scared of this guy, and you don't like him at all, but you let him stay. You don't run an inn, like in Treasure Island, but maybe you think he's a distant relative of your wife's, or something. Do you follow me?'

Alan nodded.

'And finally one day, after this bad guest has done something like slam the salt-cellar against the wall because it's clogged, you say to your wife, 'How long is your idiot second cousin going to hang around, anyway?' And she looks at you and says, 'My second cousin? I thought he was your second cousin!''

Alan grunted laughter in spite of himself.

'But do you kick the guy out?' Thad went on. 'No. For one thing, he's already been in your house for awhile, and as grotesque as it might sound to someone who's not actually in the situation, it seems like he's got . . . squatter's rights, or something. But that isn't the important thing.'

Liz had been nodding. Her eyes had the excited, grateful look of a woman who has just been told the word which has been dancing on the tip of her tongue all day long.

'The important thing is how goddamned scared of him you are,' she said. 'Scared of what he might do if you actually told him, flat out, to take his act and put it on the road.'

'There you go,' Thad said. 'You want to be brave and tell him to leave, and not just because you're afraid he might be dangerous, either. It becomes a matter of self-respect. But . . . you keep putting it off. You find reasons to put it off. Like it's raining out, and he's less apt to raise the roof about going if you show him the door on a sunny day. Or maybe after you've all had a good night's sleep. You think of a thousand reasons to put it off. You find that, if the reasons sound good enough to yourself, you can retain at least some of your self-respect, and some is better than none at all. Some is also better than all of it, if having all of it means you wind up hurt, or dead.

'And maybe not just you.'

Liz chimed in again, speaking with the composed and pleasant voice of a woman addressing a gardening club — perhaps on the subject of when to plant corn, or how to tell when your tomatoes will be ready for harvesting. 'He was an ugly, dangerous man when he was . . . living with us . . . and he is an ugly, dangerous man now. The evidence suggests that if anything has happened, he's gotten much worse. He's insane, of course, but by his own lights what he's doing is a perfectly reasonable thing: tracking down the people who conspired to kill —him and wiping them out, one after another.'

'Are you done?'

She looked at Alan, startled, as if his voice had brought her out of a deep private reverie. 'What?'

'I asked if you were done. You wanted to have your say, and I want to make sure you got it.'

Her calm broke. She fetched a deep sigh and ran her hands distractedly through her hair. 'You don't believe it, do you? Not a single word of it.'

'Liz,' Alan said, 'this is just . . . nuts. I'm sorry to use a word like that, but considering the circumstances, I'd say it's the kindest one available. There will be other cops here soon enough. FBI, I imagine — this man can now be considered an interstate fugitive, and that'll bring them into it. If you tell them this story complete with the blackouts and the ghost-writing, you'll hear plenty of less kind ones. If you told me these people had been murdered by a ghost, I wouldn't believe you, either.' Thad stirred, but Alan held a hand up and he subsided, at least for the moment. 'But I could have come closer to believing a ghost story than this. We're not just talking about a ghost, we're talking about a man who never was.'

'How do you explain my description?' Thad asked suddenly. 'What I gave you was my private picture of what George Stark looked — looks — like. Some of it is in the author-profile sheet Darwin Press has in its files. Some was just stuff I had in my head. I never sat down and deliberately visualized the guy, you know — I just formed a kind of mental picture over a period of years, the way you form a mental picture of the disc jockey you listen to every morning on your way to work. But if you ever happen to meet the disc jockey, it turns out you had it all wrong, in most cases. It appears I had it mostly right. How do you explain that?'

'I can't,' Alan said. 'Unless, of course, you're lying about where the description came from.'

'You know I'm not.'

'Don't assume that,' Alan said. He rose, walked over to the fireplace, and jabbed restlessly with the poker at the birch logs piled there. 'Not every lie springs from a conscious decision. If a man has persuaded himself he's telling the truth, he can even pass a lie-detector test with flying colors. Ted Bundy did it.'

'Come on,' Thad snapped. 'Stop straining so goddam hard. This is like the fingerprint business all over again. The only difference is that this time I can't just trot out a bunch of corroboration. What about the fingerprints, by the way? When you add that in, doesn't it at least suggest that we're telling the truth?'

Alan turned around. He was suddenly angry at Thad . . . at both of them. He felt as if he were being relentlessly driven into a corner, and they had no goddam right to make him feel that way. It was like being the only person at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society who believes the earth is round.

'I can't explain any of that stuff . . . yet,' he said. 'But in the meantime, maybe you'd like to tell me exactly where this guy — the real one — came from, Thad. Did you just sort of give birth to him one night? Did he pop out of a damn sparrow's egg? Did you look like him while you were writing the books that eventually appeared under his name? Exactly how did it go?'

'I don't know how he came to be,' Thad said wearily. 'Don't you think I'd tell you if I could? So far as I know, or can remember, I was me when I wrote Machine's Way and Oxford Blues and Sharkmeat Pie and Riding to Babylon. I don't have the slightest idea when he became a . . . a separate person. He seemed real to me when I was writing as him, but only in the way all the stories I write seem real to me when I'm writing them. Which is to say, I take them seriously but I don't believe them . . . except I do . . . then .

He paused and barked a bewildered little laugh.

'All the times I've talked about writing,' he said. 'Hundreds of lectures, thousands of classes, and I don't believe I ever said a single word about a fiction-writer's grasp of the twin realities that exist for him — the one in the real world and the one in the manuscript world. I don't think I ever even thought about it. And now I realize . . . well . . . I don't even seem to know how to think about it.'

'It doesn't matter,' Liz said. 'He didn't have to be a separate person until Thad tried to kill him.'

Alan turned toward her. 'Well, Liz, you know Thad better than anyone else. Did he change from Dr Beaumont into Mr Stark when he was working on the crime stories? Did he slap you around? Did he threaten people with a straight-razor at parties?'

'Sarcasm isn't going to make this any easier to discuss,' she said, looking at him steadily.

He threw up his hands in exasperation — although he wasn't sure if it was them, himself, or all three of them he was exasperated with. 'I'm not being sarcastic, I'm trying to use a little verbal shock-treatment to make you see how crazy you both sound! You are talking about a goddam pen name coming to life! If you tell the FBI even half of this stuff, they'll be looking up the State of Maine Involuntary Committal laws!'

'The answer to your question is no,' Liz said. 'He didn't beat me up or wave a straight-razor around at cocktail parties. But when he was writing as George Stark — and, in particular, when he was writing about Alexis Machine — Thad wasn't the same. When he — opened the door is maybe the best way to put it — when he did that and invited Stark in, he'd become distant. Not cold, not even cool, just distant. He was less interested in going out, in seeing people. He'd sometimes blow off faculty meetings, even student appointments . . . although that was fairly rare. He'd go to bed later at night, and sometimes he'd still be tossing and turning an hour after he did come to bed. When he fell asleep he'd twitch and mutter a lot, as if he were having bad dreams. I asked him on a few occasions if that was the case and he'd say he felt headachy and unrested, but if he'd been having bad dreams, he couldn't remember what they were.

'There was no big personality change . . . but he wasn't the same. My husband quit drinking alcohol some time ago, Alan. He doesn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous or anything, but he quit. With one exception. When one of the Stark novels was finished, he'd get drunk. Then it was as if he were blowing it all off, saying to himself, 'The son of a bitch is gone again. At least for awhile, he's gone again. George has returned to his farm in Mississippi. Hooray.''

'She's got it right,' Thad said. 'Hooray — that's just what it felt like. Let me sum up what we have if we leave the blackouts and the automatic writing out of the picture entirely. The man you're looking for is killing people I know, people who were, with the exception of Homer Gamache, responsible for 'executing' George Stark . . . in conspiracy with me, of course. He's got my blood-type, which isn't one of the really rare ones, but is still one that only six people in every hundred have. He conforms to the description I gave you, which was a distillation of my own image of what George Stark would look like if he existed. He smokes the cigarettes I used to smoke. Last, and most interesting, he appears to have fingerprints which are identical to mine. Maybe six in every hundred have type-A blood with a negative Rh factor, but so far as we know, nobody else in this whole green world has my fingerprints. Despite all of this, you refuse to even consider my assertion that Stark is somehow alive. Now, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, you tell me: who is the one who's operating in a fog, so to speak?'

Alan felt the bedrock which he had once believed sure and solid shift a little. It really wasn't possible, was it? But . . . if he did nothing else today, he would have to speak to Thad's doctor and start chasing down the medical history. It occurred to him that it would be really wonderful to discover there hadn't been any brain tumor, that Thad had either lied about it . . . or hallucinated it. If he could prove the man was a psycho, it would all be so much more comfortable. Maybe —

Maybe shit. There was no George Stark, there never had been any George Stark. He might not be an FBI whiz-kid, but that didn't mean he was gullible enough to fall for that. They might collar the crazy bastard in New York City, going after Cowley, probably would, in fact, but if not, the psycho might decide to vacation in Maine this summer. If he did come back, Alan wanted a shot at him. He didn't think swallowing any of this Twilight Zone shit would help him if the chance came up. And he didn't want to waste any more time talking about it now.

'Time will tell, I suppose,' he said vaguely. 'For now, I'd advise you two to stick to the line you took with me last night — this is a guy who thinks he's George Stark, and he's crazy enough to have started at the logical place — logical for a crazyman, anyway — the place where Stark was officially buried.'

'If you don't at least allow the idea some mental house-room, you're going to be in shit up to your armpits,' Thad said. 'This guy — Alan, you can't reason with him, you can't plead with him. You could beg him for mercy — if he gave you the time — but it wouldn't do any good. If you ever get close to him with your guard down, he will make sharkmeat pie out of you.'

'I'll check with your doctor,' Alan said, 'and with the doctor who operated on you as a kid. I don't know what good it will do, or what light it might shed on this business, but I'll do it. Otherwise, I guess I'll just have to take my chances.'

Thad smiled with no humor whatsoever. 'From my standpoint, there's a problem with that. My wife and kids and I will be taking our chances right along with you.'

3

Fifteen minutes later a trim blue-and-white panel truck pulled into Thad's driveway behind Alan's car. It looked like a telephone van, and that was what it turned out to be, although the words maine state police were written on the side in discreet lower-case letters.

Two technicians came to the door, introduced themselves, apologized for having taken so long (an apology that was wasted on Thad and Liz, since they hadn't known these guys were coming at all), and asked Thad if he had any problem signing the form one of them carried on a clipboard. He scanned it quickly and saw it empowered them to place recording and traceback equipment on his phone. It did not give them blanket permission to use the transcripts obtained in any court proceeding.

Thad scratched his signature in the proper place, both Alan Pangborn and one of the technicians (Thad bemusedly noticed that he had a telephone-tester slung on one side of his belt, a .45 on the other) witnessed it.

'This traceback stuff really works?' Thad asked several minutes later, after Alan had left for the Orono State Police Barracks. It seemed important to say something; following the return of their document, the technicians had fallen silent.

'Yeah,' one of them answered. He had picked the living-room telephone out of its cradle and was rapidly levering off the handset's plastic inner sleeve. 'We can trace a call back to its point of origination anywhere in the world. It's not like the old telephone traces you see in the movies, where you have to keep the caller on the line until the trace is done. As long as no one hangs up the phone on this end' — he waggled the phone, which now looked a little like an android demolished by ray-gun fire in a science fiction epic — 'we can trace back to the point of origination. Which more often than not turns out to be a pay telephone in a shopping mall.'

'You got that right,' his partner said. He was doing something to the telephone jack, which he had removed from its baseboard plug. 'You got a phone upstairs?'

'Two of them,' Thad said. He was beginning to feel as if someone had pushed him rudely down Alice's rabbit hole. 'One in my study and one in the bedroom.'

'They on a separate line?'

'No — we just have the one. Where will you put the tape-recorder?'

'Probably down cellar,' the first said absently. He was sticking wires from the telephone into a Lucite block which bristled with spring connectors, and there was a wouldja-mind-lettin-us-doour-job undertone to his voice.

Thad put his arm around Liz's waist and guided her away, wondering if there was anyone who could or would understand that not all the tape-recorders and high-tech state-of-the-art Lucite blocks in the world would stop George Stark. Stark was out there, maybe resting up, maybe already on his way.

And if no one would believe him, just what in the hell was he going to do about it? How in the hell was he supposed to protect his family? Was there a way? He thought deeply, and when thought accomplished nothing, he simply listened to himself. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — the answer came that way when it would come no other.

Not this time, though. And he was amused to find himself suddenly, desperately horny. He thought about coaxing Liz upstairs — and then remembered the state police technicians would shortly be up there, wanting to do more arcane things to his outmoded one-line telephones.

Can't even get laid, he thought. So what do we do?

But the answer was simple enough. They waited, that's what they did.

Nor did they have to wait long for the next horrible tidbit: Stark had gotten Rick Cowley, after all — booby-trapped his door somehow after ambushing the technicians who had been doing the same thing to Rick's telephone that the men in the living room were doing to the Beaumonts'. When Rick turned his latchkey, the door simply blew up.

It was Alan who brought them the news. He had gotten less than three miles down the road toward Orono when word of the explosion came over the radio. He had turned back immediately.

'You told us Rick was safe,' Liz said. Her voice and her eyes were dull. Even her hair seemed to have lost its luster. 'You practically guaranteed it.'

'I was wrong. I'm sorry.'

Alan felt as deeply shocked as Liz Beaumont looked and sounded, but he was trying hard not to let it show. He glanced at Thad, who was looking back at him with a kind of bright-eyed stillness. A humorless little smile lurked just around the edges of Thad's mouth.

He knows just what I am thinking. This was probably not true, but it felt true to Alan. Well . . . maybe not EVERYTHING, but some of it. Quite a bit of it, maybe. It could be that I'm doing a shitty job of covering up, but I don't think that's it. I think it's him. I think he sees too much.

'You made an assumption that turned out to be wrong, that's all,' Thad said. 'Happens to the best of us. Maybe you ought to go back and think about George Stark a little more. What do you think, Alan?'

'That you could be right,' Alan said, and told himself he was only saying that to soothe both of them. But the face of George Stark, as yet unglimpsed except through Thad Beaumont's description, had begun to peer over his shoulder. He couldn't see it as yet, but he could feel it there, looking.

'I want to talk with this Dr Hurd — '

'Hume,' Thad said. 'George Hume.'

'Thanks. I want to talk to him, so I'll be around. If the FBI does show up, would you two like me to drop back later on?'

'I don't know about Thad, but I'd like that very much,' Liz said.

Thad nodded.

Alan said, 'I'm sorry about this whole thing, but the thing I'm sorriest about is promising you something would be okay when it turned out not to be.'

'In a situation like this, I guess it's easy to underestimate,' Thad said. 'I told you the truth — at least, the truth as I understand it for a simple reason. If it is Stark, I think a lot of people are going to underestimate him before this is over.'

Alan looked from Thad to Liz and back again. After a long time during which there was no sound except for Thad's police guard talking together outside the front door (there was another around back), Alan said: 'The bitch of it is, you guys really believe this, don't you?'

Thad nodded. 'I do, anyway.'

'I don't,' Liz said, and they both looked at her, startled. 'I don't believe. I know.'

Alan sighed and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. 'There's one thing I'd like to know,' he said. 'If this is what you say it is . . . I don't believe it, can't believe it, I suppose you'd say . . . but if it is, what the hell does this guy want? Just revenge?'

'Not at all,' Thad said. 'He wants the same thing you or I would want if we were in his position. He wants not to be dead anymore. That's all he wants. Not to be dead anymore. I'm the only one who might be able to make that happen. And if I can't, or won't . . . well . . . he can at least make sure he isn't lonely.

Sixteen

George Stark Calling

1

Alan had left to talk to Dr Hume and the FBI agents were just wrapping up their interrogation — if that was the right word for something which seemed so oddly exhausted and desultory — when George Stark rang. The call came less than five minutes after the state police technicians (who called themselves 'wiremen') finally pronounced themselves satisfied with the accessories they had attached to the Beaumont telephones.

They had been disgusted but apparently not very surprised to find that, beneath the state-of-theart exterior of the Beaumonts' Merlin phones, they were stuck with the town of Ludlow's horseand-buggy rotary-dial system.

'Man, this is hard to believe,' the wireman whose name was Wes said (in a tone of voice which suggested he really would have expected nothing else out here in East Overshoe).

The other wireman, Dave, trudged out to the panel truck to find the proper adapters and any other equipment they might need to put the Beaumonts' telephones in line with law—enforcement as it exists in the latter years of the twentieth century. Wes rolled his eyes and then looked at Thad, as if Thad should have informed him at once that he was still living in the telephone's pioneer era.

Neither wireman spared so much as a glance for the FBI men who had flown up to Bangor from the Boston branch office and then driven heroically through the dangerous wolf- and bear-infested wilderness between Bangor and Ludlow. The FBI men might have existed in an entirely different light-spectrum which state police wiremen could see no more than infrared or X-rays.

'All the phones in town are this way,' Thad said humbly. He was developing a nasty case of acid indigestion. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have made him grouchy and hard to live with. Today, however, he only felt tired and vulnerable and terribly sad.

His thoughts kept turning to Rick's father, who lived in Tucson, and Miriam's parents, who lived in San Luis Obispo. What was old Mr Cowley thinking about right now? What were the Penningtons thinking? How, exactly, would these people, often mentioned in conversation but never actually met, be managing? How did one cope, not just with the death of one's child, but with the unexpected death of one's adult child? How did one cope with the simple, irrational fact of murder?

Thad realized he was thinking of the survivors instead of the victims for one simple, gloomy reason: he felt responsible for everything. Why not? If he was not to blame for George Stark, who was? Bobcat Goldthwaite? Alexander Haig? The fact that the outdated rotary-dial system still in use here made his phones unexpectedly difficult to tap was just something else to feel guilty about.

'I think that's everything, Mr Beaumont,' one of the FBI men said. He had been reviewing his notes, apparently as oblivious of Wes and Dave as the two wiremen were of him. Now the agent, whose name was Malone, flipped his notebook closed. It was leather-bound, with his initials discreetly stamped in silver on the lower left-hand corner of the cover. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit, and his hair was parted ruler-straight on the left. 'Have you got anything else, Bill?'

Bill, aka Agent Prebble, flipped his own notebook — also leatherbound, but sans initials — closed and shook his head. 'Nope. I think that about does it.' Agent Prebble was dressed in a conservative brown suit. His hair was also parted ruler-straight on the left. 'We may have a few more questions later on in the investigation, but we've got what we need for the time being. We'd like to thank you both for your cooperation.' He gave them a big smile, disclosing teeth which were either capped or so perfect they were eerie, and Thad mused: If we were five, I believe he'd give each of us a TODAY WAS A HAPPY-FACE DAY! certificate to take home and show Mommy.

'Not at all,' Liz said in a slow, distracted voice. She was gently massaging her left temple with the tips of her fingers, as if she were experiencing the onset of a really bad headache.

Probably, Thad thought, she is.

He glanced at the clock on the mantel and saw it was just past two-thirty. Was this the longest afternoon of his life? He didn't like to rush to such judgments, but he suspected it was.

Liz stood. 'I think I'm going to put my feet up for awhile, if that's okay. I don't feel very chipper.'

'That's a good — ' Idea was of course how he meant to finish, but before he could, the telephone rang.

All of them looked at it, and Thad felt a pulse begin to triphammer in his neck. A fresh bubble of acid, hot and burning, rose slowly in his chest and then seemed to spread out in the back of his throat.

'Good deal,' Wes said, pleased. 'We won't have to send someone out to make a test call.'

Thad suddenly felt as if he were encased in an envelope of chilly air. It moved with him as he walked toward the telephone, which was now sharing its table with a gadget that looked like a Lucite brick with lights embedded in its side. One of the lights was pulsing in sync with the ringing of the telephone.

Where are the birds? I should be hearing the birds. But there were none; the only sound was the Merlin phone's demanding warble.

Wes was kneeling by the fireplace and putting tools back into a black case which, with its oversized chrome latches, resembled a workman's dinner-bucket. Dave was leaning in the doorway between the living room and the dining room. He had asked Liz if he could have a banana from the bowl on the table, and was now peeling it thoughtfully, pausing every now and then to examine his work with the critical eye of an artist in the throes of creation.

'Get the circuit-tester, why don'tcha?' he said to Wes. 'If we need some line clarification we can do it while we're right here. Might save a trip back.'

'Good idea,' Wes said, and plucked something with a pistol grip out of the over-sized dinnerbucket.

Both men looked mildly expectant and no more. Agents Malone and Prebble were standing, replacing notebooks, shaking out the knife-edge creases in the legs of their pants, and generally confirming Thad's original opinion: these men seemed more like H & R Block tax consultants than gun-toting G-men. Malone and Prebble seemed totally unaware the phone was ringing at all.

But Liz knew. She had stopped rubbing her temple and was looking at Thad with the wide, haunted eyes of an animal which has been brought to bay. Prebble was thanking her for the coffee and Danish she had supplied, and seemed as unaware of her failure to answer him as he was of the ringing telephone.

What is the matter with you people? Thad suddenly felt like screaming. What in the hell did you set up all this equipment for in the first place?

Unfair, of course. For the man they were after to be the first person to phone the Beaumonts after the tap-and-trace equipment had been set up, a bare five minutes after installation was complete, in fact, was just too fortuitous . . . or so they would have said if anyone had bothered to ask them. Things don't happen that way in the wonderful world of law enforcement as it exists in the latter years of the twentieth century, they would have said. It's another writer calling you up for a nice fresh plot idea, Thad, or maybe someone who wants to know if your wife could spare a cup of sugar. But the guy who thinks he's your alter ego? No way, José. Too soon, too lucky.

Except it was Stark. Thad could smell him. And, looking at his wife, he knew that Liz could, too.

Now Wes was looking at him, no doubt wondering why Thad didn't answer his freshly rigged phone.

Don't worry, Thad thought. Don't worry, he'll wait. He knows we're home, you see.

'Well, we'll just get out of your hair, Mrs Beau — ' Prebble began, and Liz said in a calm but terribly pained voice, 'I think you'd better wait, please.'

Thad picked up the telephone and shouted: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the fuck do you WANT?'

Wes jumped. Dave froze just as he was preparing to take the first bite from his banana. The heads of the federal agents snapped around. Thad found himself wishing with miserable intensity that Alan Pangborn were here instead of talking to Dr Hume up in Orono. Alan didn't believe in Stark either, at least not yet, but at least he was human. Thad supposed these others might be, but he had serious doubts as to whether or not they knew he and Liz were.

'It's him, it's him!' Liz was saying to Prebble.

'Oh Jesus,' Prebble said. He and the other fearless minion of the law exchanged an utterly nonplussed glance: What the fuck do we do now?

Thad heard and saw these things, but was separate from them. Separate even from Liz. There were only Stark and him now. Together again for the first time, as the old vaudeville announcers used to say.

'Cool down, Thad,' George Stark said. He sounded amused. 'No need to get your panties all in a bunch.' It was the voice he had expected. Exactly. Every nuance, right down to the faint Southern slur that turned 'get your' into something that was not 'getcho' but wanted to be.

The two wiremen put their heads together briefly, and then Dave bolted for the panel truck and the auxiliary telephone. He was still holding his banana. Wes ran for the cellar stairs to check the voice-activated tape-recorder.

The fearless minions of the Effa Bee Eye stood in the middle of the living room and stared. They looked as if they wanted to put their arms about each other for comfort, like babes lost in the woods.

'What do you want?' Thad repeated in a quieter voice.

'Why, just to tell you that it is over,' Stark said. 'I got the last one this noontime — that little girl who used to work at Darwin Press for the boss of the accounting department?'

Almost, but not quite, the accountin depawtment.

'She was the one got that Clawson boy's coffee perkin in the first place,' Stark said. 'The cops'll find her; she's got a place on Second Avenue way downtown. Some of her's on the floor; I put the rest on the kitchen table.' He laughed. 'It's been a busy week, Thad. I been hoppin as fast as a onelegged man in an ass-kickin contest. I just called to set your mind at rest.'

'It doesn't feel very rested,' Thad said.

'Well, give it time, old hoss; give it time. I think I'll head down south, do me some fishing. This city life tires me out.' He laughed, a sound so monstrously jolly it made Thad's flesh crawl.

He was lying.

Thad knew this as surely as he knew that Stark had waited until the tap-and-trace equipment was in place to make his call. Could he know something like that? The answer was yes. Stark might be calling from somewhere in New York City, but the two of them were tied together by the same invisible but undeniable bond that connected twins. They were twins, halves of the same whole, and Thad was terrified to find himself drifting out of his body, drifting along the phone line, not all the way to New York, no, but halfway; meeting the monster at the center of this umbilicus, in western Massachusetts, perhaps, the two of them meeting and merging again, as they had somehow met and merged every time he had put the cover on his typewriter and picked up one of those goddamned Berol Black Beauty pencils.

'You lying fuck!' he cried.

The FBI agents jumped as if they had been goosed.

'Hey, Thad, that's not very nice!' Stark said. He sounded injured. 'Did you think I was gonna hurt you? Hell, no! I was getting revenge for you, boy! I knew I was the one had to do it. I know you got a chicken liver, but I don't hold it against you; it takes all kinds to spin a world as busy as this one. Why in hail would I bother to revenge you if I was gonna fix things so you couldn't enjoy it?'

Thad's fingers had gone to the small white scar on his forehead and were rubbing there, rubbing hard enough to redden the skin. He found himself trying — trying desperately — to hold on to himself. To hold on to his own basic reality.

He's lying, and I know why, and he KNOWS I know, and he knows it doesn't matter, because no one will believe me. He knows how odd it all looks to them, and he knows they're listening, he knows what they think . . . but he also knows How they think, and that makes him safe. They believe he's a psvcho who only THINKs he's George Stark, because that's what they HAVE to think. To think in any other way goes against everything they've learned, everything they ARE. All the fingerprints in the world won't change that. He knows that if he implies he's not George Stark, if he implies that he's finally figured that out, they'll relax. They won't remove the police protection right away . . . but he can speed it UP —

'You know whose idea it was to bury you. It was mine.

'No, no!' Stark said easily, and it was almost (but not quite) Naw, naw! 'You were misled, that's all. When that slimeball Clawson came along, he knocked you for a loop — that's the way it was. Then, when you called up that trained monkey who called himself a literary agent, he gave you some real bad advice. Thad, it was like someone took a big crap on your dining—room table and you called up someone you trusted to ask em what to do about it, and that someone said, 'You haven't got a problem; just put you some pork gravy on it. Shit with pork gravy on it tastes right fine on a cold night.' You never would have done what you did on your own. I know that, hoss.'

'That's a goddam lie and you know it!'

And suddenly he realized just how perfect this was, and how well Stark understood the people he was dealing with. He's going to come right out and say it pretty soon. He's going to come right out and say that he isn't George Stark. And they'll believe him when he does. They'll listen to the tape that's turning down in the basement right now, and they'll believe what it says. Alan and everyone else. Because that's not just what they WANT to believe; it's what they ALREADY believe.

'I don't know any such thing,' Stark said calmly, almost amiably.

'I'm not going to bother you anymore, Thad, but let me give you at least one chunk of advice before I go. May do you some good. Don't you get thinkin I'm George Stark. That's the mistake I made. I had to go and kill a whole bunch of people just to get my head squared around again.'

Thad listened to this, thunderstruck. There were things he should be saying, but he couldn't seem to get past this weird feeling of disconnection from his body and his amazement at the pure and perfect gall of the man.

He thought of the futile conversation with Alan Pangborn, and wondered again who he was when he made up Stark, who had started off being just another story to him. Where, exactly, was the line of belies Had he created this monster by losing that line somehow, or was there some other factor, an X-factor which he could not see but only hear in the cries of those phantom birds?

'I don't know,' Stark was saying with an easy laugh, 'maybe I actually am crazy as they said I was when I was in that place.'

Oh good, that's good, get them checking the insane asylums in the South for a tall, broadshouldered man with blonde hair. That won't divert all of them, but it will do for a start, won't it?

Thad clenched the phone tight, his head throbbing with sick fury now.

'But I'm not a bit sorry I did it, because I did love those books, Thad. When I was . . . there . . . in that loony-bin . . . I think they were the only things kept me sane. And you know something? I feel a lot better now. I know for sure who I am now, and that's something. I believe you could call what I did therapy, but I don't think there's much future in it, do you?'

'Quit lying, goddammit!' Thad shouted.

'We could discuss this,' Stark said. 'We could discuss it all the way to hell and back, but it'd take awhile. I guess they told you to keep me on the line, didn't they?'

No. They don't need you on the line. And you know that, too.

'Give my best regards to your lovely wife,' Stark said, with a touch of what almost sounded like reverence. 'Take care of your babies. And you take it easy your own self, Thad. I'm not going to bother you anymore. It's — '

'What about the birds?' Thad asked suddenly. 'Do you hear the birds, George?'

There was a sudden silence on the line. Thad seemed to feel a quality of surprise in it . . . as if, for the first time in the conversation, something had not gone according to George Stark's carefully prepared script. He did not know exactly why, but it was as if his nerve-endings possessed some arcane understanding the rest of him did not have. He felt a moment of wild triumph — the sort of triumph an amateur boxer might feel, slipping one past Mike Tyson's guard and momentarily rocking the champ back on his heels.

'George — do you hear the birds?'

The only sound in the room was the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece. Liz and the FBI agents were staring at him.

'I don't know what you're talkin about, hoss,' Stark said slowly. 'Could be you — '

'No,' Thad said, and laughed wildly. His fingers continued to rub the small white scar, shaped vaguely like a question mark, on his forehead. 'No, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you? Well, you listen to me for a minute, George. I hear the birds. I don't know what they mean yet . . . but I will. And when I do . . . '

But that was where the words stopped. When he did, what would happen? He didn't know.

The voice on the other end said slowly, with great deliberation and emphasis: 'Whatever you are talking about, Thad, it doesn't matter. Because this is over now.'

There was a click. Stark was gone. Thad almost felt himself being yanked back along the telephone line from that mythical meeting-place in western Massachusetts, yanked along not at the speed of sound or light but at that of thought, and thumped rudely back into his own body, Stark naked again.

Jesus.

He dropped the phone and it hit the cradle askew. He turned around on legs which felt like stilts, not bothering to replace it properly.

Dave rushed into the room from one direction, Wes from another.

'It worked perfect!' Wes screamed. The FBI agents jumped once more. Malone made an 'Eeek!' noise very much like the one attributed to women in comic strips who have just spotted mice. Thad tried to imagine what these two would be like in a confrontation with a gang of terrorists or shotgun-toting bank-robbers and couldn't do it. Maybe I'm just too tired, he thought.

The two wiremen did a clumsy little dance, slapping each other on the back, and then raced out to the equipment van together.

'It was him,' Thad said to Liz. 'He said he wasn't, but it was him. Him.'

She came to him then and hugged him tightly and he needed that — he hadn't known how badly until she did it.

'I know,' she whispered in his ear, and he put his face into her hair and closed his eyes.

2

The shouting had wakened the twins; they were both crying lustily upstairs. Liz went to get them. Thad started to follow her, then returned to set the telephone properly into its cradle. It rang at once. Alan Pangborn was on the other end. He had stopped in at the Orono State Police Barracks to have a cup of coffee before his appointment with Dr Hume, and had been there when Dave the wireman radioed in with news of the call and the preliminary trace results. Alan sounded very excited.

'We don't have a complete trace yet, but we know it was New York City, area code 212,' he said. 'Five minutes and we'll have the location nailed down.'

'It was him,' Thad repeated. 'It was Stark. He said he wasn't, but that's who it was. Someone has to check on the girl he mentioned. The name is probably Darla Gates.' 'The slut from Vassar with the bad nasal habits?'

'Right,' Thad said. Although he doubted if Darla Gates would be worrying about her nose much anymore, one way or the other. He felt intensely weary.

'I'll pass the name on to the N.Y.P.D. How you doing, Thad?'

'I'm all right.'

'Liz?'

'Never mind the bedside manner just now, okay? Did you hear what I said? It was him. No matter what he said, it was him.'

'Well . . . why don't we just wait and see what comes of the trace?'

There was something in his voice Thad hadn't heard there before. Not the sort of cautious incredulity he'd evinced when he first realized the Beaumonts were talking about George Stark as a real guy, but actual embarrassment. It was a realization Thad would happily have spared himself, but it was simply too clear in the sheriff 's voice. Embarrassment, and of a very special sort — the kind you felt for someone too distraught or stupid or maybe just too self-insensitive to feel it for himself. Thad felt a twinkle of sour amusement at the idea.

'Okay, we'll wait and see,' Thad agreed. 'And while we're waiting and seeing, I hope you'll go ahead and keep your appointment with my doctor.'

Pangborn was replying, but all of a sudden Thad didn't much care. The acid was percolating up from his stomach again, and this time it was a volcano. Foxy George, he thought. They think they see through him. He wants them to think that. He is watching them see through him, and when they go away, far enough away, foxy old George will arrive in his black Toronado. And what am I going to do to stop him?

He didn't know.

He hung up the telephone, cutting off Alan Pangborn's voice, and went upstairs to help Liz change the twins and dress them for the afternoon.

And he kept thinking about how it had felt, how it had felt to be somehow trapped in a telephone line running beneath the countryside of western Massachusetts, trapped down there in the dark with foxy old George Stark. It had felt like Endsville.

3

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. It stopped halfway through the second ring, and Wes the wireman called Thad to the phone. He went downstairs to take the call.

'Where are the FBI agents?' he asked Wes.

For a moment he really expected Wes to say, FBI agents? I didn't see any FBI agents.

'Them? They left.' Wes gave a big shrug, as if to ask Thad if he had expected anything else. 'They got all these computers, and if someone doesn't play with them, I guess someone else wonders how come there's so much down-time, and they might have to take a budget cut, or something.'

'Do they do anything?'

'Nope,' Wes said simply. 'Not in cases like these. Or if they do, I've never been around when they did it. They write stuff down; they do that. Then they put it in a computer someplace. Like I said.'

'I see.'

Wes looked at his watch. 'Me'n Dave are out of here, too. Equipment'll run on its own. You won't even get a bill.'

'Good,' Thad said, going to the phone. 'And thank you.'

'No problem. Mr Beaumont?'

Thad turned.

'If I was to read one of your books, would you say I'd do better with one you wrote under your own name, or one under the other guy's name?'

'Try the other guy,' Thad said, picking up the phone. 'More action.'

Wes nodded, sketched a salute, and went out.

'Hello?' Thad said. He felt as if he should have a telephone grafted onto the side of his head soon. It would save time and trouble. With recording and traceback equipment attached, of course. He could carry it around in a back-pack.

'Hi, Thad. Alan. I'm still at the State Police Barracks. Listen, the news is not so good on the phone trace. Your friend called from a telephone kiosk in Penn Station.'

Thad remembered what the other wireman, Dave, had said about installing all that expensive high-tech equipment in order to trace a call back to a bank of phones in a shopping mall somewhere. 'Are you surprised?'

'No. Disappointed, but not surprised. We hope for a slip, and believe it or not, we usually get one, sooner or later. I'd like to come over tonight. That okay?'

'Okay,' Thad said, 'why not? If things get dull, we'll play bridge.

'We expect to have voice-prints by this evening.'

'So you get his voice-print. So what?'

'Not print. Prints.'

'I don't — '

'A voice-print is a computer-generated graphic which accurately represents a person's vocal qualities,' Pangborn said. 'It doesn't have anything to do with speech, exactly — we're not interested in accents, impediments, pronunciation, that sort of thing. What the computer synthesizes is pitch and tone — what the experts call head voice — and timbre and resonance, which is known as chest or gut voice. They are verbal fingerprints, and like fingerprints, no one has ever found two which are exactly alike. I'm told that the difference in the voice-prints of identical twins is much wider than the difference in their fingerprints.'

He paused.

'We've sent a high-resolution copy of the tape we got to FOLE in Washington. What we'll get is a comparison of your voice-print and his voice-print. The guys at the state police barracks here wanted to tell me I was crazy. I could see it in their faces, but after the fingerprints and your alibi, no one quite had the nerve to come right out and say it.'

Thad opened his mouth, tried to speak, couldn't, wet his lips, tried again, and still couldn't.

'Thad? Are you hanging up on me again?'

'No,' he said, and all at once there seemed to be a cricket in the middle of his voice. 'Thank you, Alan.'

'No, don't say that. I know what you're thanking me for, and I don't want to niislead you. All I'm trying to do is follow standard investigatory procedure. The procedure is a little odd in this case, granted, because the circumstances are a little odd. That doesn't mean you should make unwarranted assumptions. Get me?'

'Yes. What's FOLE?'

'F — ? Oh. The Federal Office of Law Enforcement. Maybe the only good thing Nixon did the whole damn time he was in the White House. It's mostly made up of computer banks that serve as a central clearing—house for the local law—enforcement agencies . . . and the program-crunchers who run them, of course. We can access the fingerprints of almost anyone in America convicted of a felony crime since 1969 or so. FOLE also supplies ballistics reports for comparison, bloodtyping on felons where available, voice-prints and computer-generated pictures of suspected criminals.'

'So we'll see if my voice and his — ?'

'Yes. We should have it by seven. Eight if there's heavy computer traffic down there.'

Thad was shaking his head. 'We didn't sound anything alike.'

'I heard the tape and I know that,' Pangborn said. 'Let me repeat: a voice-print has absolutely nothing to do with speech. Head voice and gut voice, Thad. There's a big difference.'

'But — '

'Tell me something. Do Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck, sound the same to you?'

Thad blinked. 'Well . . . no.'

'Not to me, either,' Pangborn said, 'but a guy named Mel Blanc does both of them . . . not to mention the voices of Bugs Bunny, Tweetie Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, and God knows how many others. I've got to go. See you tonight, okay?'

'Yes.'

'Between seven-thirty and nine, all right?'

'We'll look for you, Alan.'

'Okay. However this goes, I'll be heading back to The Rock tomorrow, and barring some unforeseen break in the case, there I will remain.'

'The finger, having writ, moves on, right?' Thad said, and thought: That's what he's counting on, after all.

'Yeah — I've got lots of other fish to fry. None are as big as this one, but the people of Castle County pay my salary for fryin em. You know what I mean?' This seemed to Thad to be a serious question and not just a place—holder in the conversation.

'Yes. I do know.' We both do. Me . . . and foxy George.

'I'll have to go, but you'll see a state police cruiser parked out in front of your house twenty-four hours a day until this thing is over. Those guys are tough, Thad. And if the cops in New York let down their guards a little, the Bears you got watching out for you won't. No one is going to underestimate this spook again. No one is going to forget you, or leave you and your family to cope with this on your own. People will be working on this case, and while they do, other people will be watching out for you and yours. You understand that, don't you?'

'Yes. I understand.' And thought: Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Maybe next month. But next year? No way. I know it. And he knows it, too. Right now they don't completely believe what he said about coming to his senses and laying off. Later on, they will . . . as the weeks pass and nothing happens, it will become more than politic for them to believe it; it will also become economic. Because George and I know how the world goes rolling around the sun in its accustomed groove, just as we know that, as soon as everybody is busy frying those other fish, George will show up and fry me. US.

4

Fifteen minutes later, Alan was still in the Orono State Police Barracks, still on the telephone, and still on hold. There was a click on the line. A young woman spoke to him in a slightly apologetic tone. 'Can you hold a little longer, Chief Pangborn? The computer is having one of its slow days.'

Alan considered telling her he was a sheriff, not a chief, and then didn't bother. It was a mistake everyone made. 'Sure,' he said.

Click.

He was returned to Hold, that latter-twentieth-century version of limbo.

He was sitting in a cramped little office all the way to the rear of the barracks; any farther back and he would have been doing business in the bushes. The room was filled with dusty files. The only desk was a grammar—school refugee, the type with a sloping surface, a hinged lid, and an inkwell. Alan balanced it on his knees and swung it idly back and forth that way. At the same time he turned the piece of paper on the desk around and around. Written on it in Alan's small, neat hand were two pieces of information: Hugh Pritchard and Bergenfield County Hospital, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

He thought of his last conversation with Thad, half an hour ago. The one where he had told him all about how the brave state troopers were going to protect him and his wife from the bad old crazyman who thought he was George Stark, if the bad old crazyman showed up. Alan wondered if Thad had believed it. He doubted it; he guessed that a man who wrote fiction for a living would have a keen nose for fairy tales.

Well, they would try to protect Thad and Liz; give them that. But Alan kept remembering something which had happened in Bangor in 1985.

A woman had requested and had received police protection after her estranged husband had beaten her severely and threatened to come back and kill her if she went through with her plans for a divorce. For two weeks, the man had done nothing. The Bangor P.D. had been about to cancel the watch when the husband showed up, driving a laundry truck and wearing green fatigues with the laundry's name on the back of the shirt. He had walked up to the door, carrying a bundle of laundry. The police might have recognized the man, even in the uniform, if he had come earlier, when the watch order was fresh, but that was moot; they hadn't recognized him when he did show up. He knocked on the door and when the woman opened it, her husband pulled a gun out of his pants pocket and shot her dead. Before the cops assigned to her had fully realized what was happening, let alone got out of their car, the man had been standing on the stoop with his hands raised. He had tossed the smoking gun into the rose bushes. 'Don't shoot me,' he'd said calmly. 'I'm finished.' The truck and the uniform, it turned out, had been borrowed from an old drinking buddy who didn't even know the perp had been fighting with his wife.

The point was simple: if someone wanted you badly enough, and if that someone had just a little luck, he would get you. Look at Oswald; look at Chapman; look what this fellow Stark had done to those people in New York.

Click.

'Are you still there, Chief?' the female voice from Bergenfield County Hospital asked brightly.

'Yes,' he said. 'Still right here.'

'I have the information you requested,' she said. 'Dr Hugh Pritchard retired in 1978. I have an address and telephone number for him in the town of Fort Laramie, Wyoming.'

'May I have it, please?'

She gave it to him. Alan thanked her, hung up, and dialed the number. The telephone uttered half a ring, and then an answering machine cut in and began spieling its recorded announcement into Alan's ear.

'Hello, this is Hugh Pritchard,' a gravelly voice said. Well, Alan thought, the guy hasn't croaked, anyway — that's a step in the right direction. 'Helga and I aren't in right now. I'm probably playing golf; God knows what Helga's up to. ' There was an old man's rusty chuckle. 'If you've got a message, please leave it at the sound of the tone. You've got about thirty seconds.'

Bee-eep!

'Dr Pritchard, this is Sheriff Alan Pangborn,' he said. 'I'm a law-enforcement officer in Maine. I need to talk to you about a man named Thad Beaumont. You removed a lesion from his brain in 1960, when he was eleven. Please call me collect at the Orono State Police Barracks — 207-866

212 I. Thank you.'

He finished in a mild sweat. Talking to answering machines always made him feel like a contestant on Beat the Clock.

Why are you even bothering with all this?

The answer he had given Thad was a simple one: procedure. Alan himself could not be satisfied with such a pat answer, because he knew it wasn't procedure. It might have been — conceivably — if this Pritchard had operated on the man calling himself Stark,

(except he's not anymore now he says he knows who he really is)

but he hadn't. He had operated on Beaumont, and in any case, that had been twenty—eight long years ago.

So why?

Because none of it was right, that was why. The fingerprints weren't, the blood—type obtained from the cigarette ends wasn't, the combination of cleverness and homicidal rage which their man had displayed wasn't, Thad's and Liz's insistence that the pen name was real wasn't. That most of all. That was the assertion of a couple of lunatics. And now he had something else which wasn't right. The state police accepted the man's assertion that he now understood who he really was without a qualm. To Alan, it had all the authenticity of a three-dollar bill. It screamed trick, ruse, runaround.

Alan thought maybe the man was still coming.

But none of that answers the question, his mind whispered. Why are you bothering with all this? Why are you calling Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and chasing down an old doc who probably doesn't remember Thad Beaumont from a hole in the wall?

Because I don't have anything better to do, he answered himself irritably. Because I can call from here without the town selectmen bitching about the goddam long-distance charges. And because THEY believe it Thad and Liz. It's crazy, all right, but they seem sane enough otherwise . . . and, goddammit, THEY believe it. That doesn't mean I do.

And he didn't.

Did he?

The day passed slowly. Dr Pritchard didn't call back. But the voiceprints came in shortly after eight o'clock, and the voice-prints were amazing.

5

They weren't what Thad had expected at all.

He had expected a sheet of graph paper covered with spiky mountains and valleys which Alan would try to explain. He and Liz would nod wisely, as people did when someone was explaining a thing too complex for them to understand, knowing that if they did ask questions, the explanations which followed would be even less comprehensible.

Instead, Alan showed them two sheets of plain white paper. A single line ran across the middle of each. There were a few groups of spike-points, always in pairs or trios, but for the most part, the lines were peaceful (if rather irregular) sine-waves. And you only had to look from one to the other with the naked eye to see that they were either identical or very close to it.

'That's it?' Liz asked.

'Not quite,' Alan said. 'Watch.' He slid one sheet on top of the other. He did this with the air of a magician performing an exceptionally fine trick. He held the two sheets up to the light. Thad and Liz stared at the doubled sheets.

'They really are,' Liz said in a soft awed voice. 'They're just the same.'

'Well . . . not quite,' Alan said, and pointed at three spots where the voice-print line on the undersheet showed through the tiniest bit. One of these show-throughs was above the line on the top sheet, the other two below. In all three cases, the show-through was in places where the line spiked. The sine-wave itself seemed to match perfectly. 'The differences are in Thad's print, and they come only at stress—points.' Alan tapped each show-through in turn. 'Here: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch? Just what the fuck do you want?' And here: 'That's a goddam lie and you know it!' And, finally, here: 'Quit lying, goddammit.' Right now everyone's focusing on these three minute differences, because they want to hang onto their assumption that no two voice-prints are ever alike. But the fact is, there weren't any stress-points in Stark's part of the conversation. The bastard stayed cool, calm, and collected all the way through.'

'Yeah,' Thad said. 'He sounded like he was drinking lemonade.'

Alan put the voice-prints down on an end table. 'Nobody at state police headquarters really believes these are two different voice-prints, even with the minute differences,' he said. 'We got the prints back from Washington very fast. The reason I'm so late is because, after the expert in Augusta saw them, he wanted a copy of the tape. We sent it down on an Eastern Airlines commuter flight out of Bangor and they ran it through a gadget called an audio enhancer. They use it to tell if someone actually spoke the words under investigation or if they're listening to a voice which was on tape.'

'Is it live or is it Memorex?' Thad said. He was sitting by the fireplace, drinking a soda.

Liz had returned to the playpen after looking at the voice-prints. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to keep William and Wendy from rapping their heads together as they examined each other's toes. 'Why did they do that?'

Alan cocked a thumb at Thad, who was grinning sourly. 'Your husband knows.'

Thad asked Alan, 'With the little differences in the spikes, they can at least kid themselves that two different voices were speaking, even if they know better — that was your point, wasn't it?'

'Uh-huh. Even though I've never heard of voice-prints even remotely as close as these.' He shrugged. 'Granted, my experience with them isn't as wide as the guys at FOLE who study them for a living, or even the guys in Augusta who are more or less general practitioners — voiceprints, fingerprints, footprints, tire-prints. But I do read the literature, and I was there when the results came back, Thad. They are kidding themselves, yes, but they're not doing it very hard.'

'So they've got three small differences, but they're not enough. The problem is that my voice was stressed and Stark's wasn't. So they went to this enhancer thing hoping for a fall-back position. Hoping, in fact, that Stark's end of the conversation would turn out to be a taperecording. Made by me.' He cocked an eyebrow at Alan. 'Do I win the stewing chicken?'

'Not only that, you win the glassware for six and the free trip to Kittery.'

'That's the craziest thing I ever heard,' Liz said flatly.

Thad laughed without much humor. 'The whole thing is crazy. They thought I might have changed my voice, like Rich Little . . . or Mel Blanc. The idea is that I made a tape in my George Stark voice, building in pauses where I could reply, in front of witnesses, in my own voice. Of course I'd have to buy a gadget that could hook a cassette tape-recorder into a pay telephone. There are such things, aren't there, Alan?'

'You bet. Available at fine electronics supply houses everywhere, or just dial the 800 number that will appear on your screen, operators are standing by.'

'Right. The only other thing I'd need would be an accomplice someone I trusted who would go to Penn Station, attach the tapeplayer to a phone in the bank which looked like it was doing the least business, and dial my house at the proper time. Then — ' He broke off. 'How was the call paid for? I forgot about that. It wasn't collect.'

'Your telephone credit card number was used,' Alan said. 'You obviously gave it to your accomplice.'

'Yeah, obviously. I only had to do two things once this shuck-and-jive got started. One was to make sure I answered the telephone myself. The other was to remember my lines and plug them into the correct pauses. I did very well, wouldn't you say, Alan?'

'Yeah. Fantastic.'

'My accomplice hangs up the telephone when the script says he should. He unhooks the tape— player from the phone, tucks it under his arm — '

'Hell, slips it into his pocket,' Alan said. 'The stuff they've got now is so good even the CIA buys at Radio Shack.'

'Okay, he slips it into his pocket and just walks away. The result is a conversation where I am both seen and heard to be talking to a man five hundred miles away, a man who sounds different — who sounds, in fact, just the tiniest bit Southern-fried — but has the same voice-print as I do. It's the fingerprints all over again, only better.' He looked at Alan for confirmation.

'On second thought,' Alan said, 'make that an all-expenses-paid trip to Portsmouth.'

'Thank you.'

'Don't mention it.'

'That's not just crazy,' Liz said, 'it's utterly incredible. I think all those people should have their heads — '

While her attention was diverted, the twins finally succeeded in knocking their own heads together and began to cry lustily. Liz picked up William. Thad rescued Wendy.

When the crisis passed, Alan said, 'It's incredible, all right. You know it, I know it, and they know it, too. But Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say at least one thing that still holds true in crime detection: when you eliminate all the likely explanations, whatever is left is your answer no matter how improbable it may be.'

'I think the original was a little more elegant,' Thad said.

Alan grinned. 'Screw you.'

'You two may find this funny, but I don't,' Liz said. 'Thad would have to be crazy to do something like that. Of course, the police may think we're both crazy.'

'They don't think any such thing,' Alan replied gravely, 'at least not at this point, and they won't, as long as you go on keeping your wilder tales to yourselves.'

'What about you, Alan?' Thad asked. 'We've spilled all the wild tales to you — what do you think?'

'Not that you're crazy. All of this would be a lot simpler if I did believe it. I don't know what's going on.'

'What did you get from Dr Hume?' Liz wanted to know.

'The name of the doctor who operated on Thad when he was a kid,' Alan said. 'It's Hugh Pritchard — does that ring a bell, Thad?'

Thad frowned and thought it over. At last he said, 'I think it does . . . but I might only be kidding myself. It was a long time ago.'

Liz was leaning forward, bright—eyed; William goggled at Alan from the safety of his mother's lap. 'What did Pritchard tell you?' she asked.

'Nothing. I got his answering machine — which allows me to deduce that the man is still alive — and that's all. I left a message.'

Liz settled back in her chair, clearly disappointed.

'What about my tests?' Thad asked. 'Did Hume have anything back? Or wouldn't he tell you?'

'He said that when he had the results, you'd be the first to know,' Alan said. He grinned. 'Dr Hume seemed rather offended at the idea of telling a county sheriff anything.'

'That's George Hume,' Thad said, and smiled. 'Crusty is his middle name.'

Alan shifted in his seat.

'Would you like something to drink, Alan?' Liz asked. 'A beer or a Pepsi?'

'No thanks. Let's go back to what the state police do and do not believe. They don't believe either of you is involved, but they reserve the right to believe you might be. They know they can't hang last night's and this morning's work on you, Thad. An accomplice, maybe — the same one, hypothetically, who would have worked the tape-recorder gag — but not you. You were here.'

'What about Darla Gates?' Thad asked quietly. 'The girl who worked in the comptroller's office?'

'Dead. Mutilated pretty badly, as he suggested, but shot once through the head first. She didn't suffer.

'That's a lie.'

Alan blinked at him.

'He didn't let her off so cheaply. Not after what he did to Clawson. After all, she was the original stoolie, wasn't she? Clawson dangled some money in front of her — it couldn't have been very much, judging from the state of Clawson's finances — and she obliged by letting the cat out of the bag. So don't tell me he shot her before he cut her and that she didn't suffer.'

'All right,' Alan said. 'It wasn't like that. Do you want to know how it really was?'

'No,' Liz said immediately.

There was a moment of heavy silence in the room. Even the twins seemed to feet it; they looked at each other with what seemed to be great solemnity. At last Thad asked, 'Let me ask you again: what do you believe? What do you believe now?'

'I don't have a theory. I know you didn't tape Stark's end of the conversation, because the enhancer didn't detect any tape-hiss, and when you jack up the audio, you can hear the Penn Station loudspeaker announcing that the Pilgrim to Boston is now ready for boarding on Track Number 3. The Pilgrim did board on Track 3 this afternoon. Boarding started at two thirty-six p.m., and that's right in line with your little chat. But I didn't even need that. If the conversation had been taped on Stark's end, either you or Liz would have asked me what the enhancing process showed as soon as I brought it up. Neither of you did.'

'All this and you still don't believe it, do you?' Thad said. 'I mean, it's got you rocking and rolling — enough so you really are trying to chase down Dr Pritchard — but you really can't get all the way to the middle of what's happening, can you?' He sounded frustrated and harried even to himself.

'The guy himself admitted he wasn't Stark.'

'Oh, yes. He was very sincere about it, too.' Thad laughed.

'You act as though that doesn't surprise you.'

'It doesn't. Does it surprise you?'

'Frankly, yes. It does. After going to such great pains to establish the fact that you and he share the same fingerprints, the same voice-prints — '

'Alan, stop a second,' Thad said.

Alan did, looking at Thad inquiringly.

'I told you this morning that I thought George Stark was doing these things. Not an accomplice of mine, not a psycho who has somehow managed to invent a way to wear other people's finger prints — between his murderous fits and identity fugues, that is and you didn't believe me. Do you now?'

'No, Thad. I wish I could tell you differently, but the best I can do is this: I believe that you believe.' He shifted his gaze to take in Liz. 'Both of you.'

'I'll settle for the truth, since anything less is apt to get me killed,' Thad said, 'and my family along with me, more likely than not. At this point it does my heart good just to hear you say you don't have a theory. It's not much, but it's a step forward. What I was trying to show you is that the fingerprints and voice-prints don't make a difference, and Stark knows it. You can talk all you want about throwing away the impossible and accepting whatever is left, no matter how improbable, but it doesn't work that way. You don't accept Stark, and he's what's left when you eliminate the rest. Let me put it this way, Alan: if you had this much evidence of a tumor in your brain, you would go into the hospital and have an operation, even if the odds were good you'd not come out alive.'

Alan opened his mouth, shook his head, and snapped it shut again. Other than the clock and the soft babble and coo of the twins, there was no sound in the living room, where Thad was rapidly coming to feel he had spent his entire adult life.

'On one hand you have enough hard evidence to make a strong circumstantial court case,' Thad resumed softly. 'On the other, you have the unsubstantiated assertion of a voice on the phone that he's 'come to his senses', that he 'knows who he is now'. Yet you're going to ignore the evidence in favor of the assertion.'

'No, Thad. That's not true. I'm not accepting any assertions right now — not yours, not your wife's, and least of all the ones made by the man who called on the phone. All my options are still open.'

Thad jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the window. Beyond the gently wavering drapes, they could see the state police car that belonged to the troopers who were watching the Beaumont house.

'What about them? Are all their options still open? I wish to Christ you were staying here, Alan — I'd take you over an army of state troopers, because you've at least got one eye half-open. Theirs are stuck shut.'

'Thad — '

'Never mind,' Thad said. 'It's true. You know it . . . and he knows it, too. He'll wait. And when everybody decides it's over and the Beaumonts are safe, when all the police fold their tents and move on, George Stark will come here.'

He paused, his face a dark and complicated study. Alan saw regret, determination, and fear at work in that face.

'I'm going to tell you something now — I'm going to tell both of you. I know exactly what he wants. He wants me to write another novel under the Stark byline — probably another novel about Alexis Machine. I don't know if I could do that, but if I thought it would do any good, I'd try. I'd trash The Golden Dog and start tonight.'

'Thad, no!' Liz cried.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'It would kill me. Don't ask me how I know that; I just do. But if my death was the end of it, I still might try. But I don't think it would be. Because I don't really think he is a man at all.'

Alan was silent.

'So!' Thad said, speaking with the air of a man bringing an important piece of business to a close. 'That's where matters stand. I can't, I won't, I mustn't. That means he'll come. And when he comes, God knows what will happen.'

'Thad,' Alan said uncomfortably, 'you need a little perspective on this, that's all. And when you get it, most of it will just . . . blow away. Like a milkweed puff. Like a bad dream in the morning.'

'It isn't perspective we need,' Liz said. They looked at her and saw she was crying silently. Not a lot, but the tears were there. 'What we need is for someone to turn him off.'

6

Alan returned to Castle Rock early the next morning, arriving home shortly before two o'clock. He crept into the house as quietly as possible, noticing that Annie had once again neglected to activate the burglar alarm. He didn't like to hassle her about it — her migraines had become more frequent lately — but he supposed he would have to, sooner or later.

He started upstairs, shoes held in one hand, moving with a smoothness that made him seem almost to float. His body possessed a deep grace, the exact opposite of Thad Beaumont's clumsiness, which Alan rarely showed; his flesh seemed to know some arcane secret of motion which his mind found somehow embarrassing. Now, in this silence, there was no need to hide it, and he moved with a shadowy ease that was almost macabre.

Halfway up the stairs he paused . . . and went back down again. He had a small den off the living room, not much more than a broom-closet furnished with a desk and some bookshelves' but adequate for his needs. He tried not to bring his work home with him. He did not always succeed in this, but he tried very hard.

He closed the door, turned on the light, and looked at the telephone.

You're not really going to do this, are you? he asked himself. I mean, it's almost midnight, Rocky Mountain Time, and this guy is not just a retired doctor; he's a retired NEUROSURGEoN. You wake him up and he's apt to chew you a new asshole.

Then Alan thought of Liz Beaumont's eyes — her dark, frightened eyes — and decided he was going to do it. Perhaps it would even do some good; a call in the dead of night would establish the fact that this was serious business, and get Dr Pritchard thinking. Then Alan could call him back at a more reasonable hour.

Who knows, he thought without much hope (but with a trace of humor), maybe he misses getting calls in the middle of the night.

Alan took the scrap of paper from the pocket of his uniform blouse and dialed Hugh Pritchard's number in Fort Laramie. He did it standing up, setting himself for a blast of anger from that gravelly voice.

He need not have worried; the answering machine cut in after the same fraction of a ring, and delivered the same message.

He hung up thoughtfully and sat down behind his desk. The goose-neck lamp cast a round circle of light on the desk's surface, and Alan began to make a series of shadow animals in its glow — a rabbit, a dog, a hawk, even a passable kangaroo. His hands possessed that same deep grace which owned the rest of his body when he was alone and at rest; beneath those eerily flexible fingers, the animals seemed to march in a parade through the tiny spotlight cast by the hooded lamp, one flowing into the next. This little diversion had never failed to fascinate and amuse his children, and it often set his own mind at rest when it was troubled.

It didn't work now.

Dr Hugh Pritchard is dead. Stark got him, too.

That was impossible, of course; he supposed he could swallow a ghost if someone put a gun to his head, but not some malignant Superman of a ghost who crossed whole continents in a single bound. He could think of several good reasons why someone might turn on his answering machine at night. Not the least of them was to keep from being disturbed by late-calling strangers such as Sheriff Alan J. Pangborn, of Castle Rock, Maine.