The Dark Half

Thad didn't think so.

   'Alan,' he said slowly, 'you'd laugh. No — I take it back. I know you better than that now. You wouldn't laugh — but I strongly doubt if you would believe me, either. I've been up and down on this, but that's how it shakes out: I really don't think you'd believe me.'

Alan's voice came back at once, urgent, imperative, hard to resist. 'Try me.'

   Thad hesitated, looked at Liz, then shook his head. 'Tomorrow. When we can look at each other face to face. Then I will. For tonight you'll just have to take my word that it doesn't matter, that what I've told you is everything of any practical value that I can tell you.'

   'Thad, what I said about having you held as a material witness 'If you have to do it, do it. There will be no hard feelings on my part. But I won't go any further than I have right now until I see you, regardless of what you decide.'

Silence from Pangborn's end. Then a sigh. 'Okay.

    'I want to give you a scratch description of the man the police are looking for. I'm not entirely sure it's right, but I think it's close. Close enough to give the cops in New York, anyway. Have you got a pencil?'

'Yes. Give it to me.'

   Thad closed the eyes God had put in his face and opened the one God had put in his mind, the eye which persisted in seeing even the things he didn't want to look at. When people who had read his books met him for the first time, they were invariably disappointed. This was something they tried to hide from him and could not. He bore them no grudge, because he understood how they felt . . . at least a little bit. If they liked his work (and some professed even to love it), they thought of him beforehand as a guy who was first cousin to God. Instead of a God they saw a guy who stood six-feet-one, wore spectacles, was beginning to lose his hair, and had a habit of tripping over things. They saw a man whose scalp was rather flaky and whose nose had two holes in it, just like their own.

   What they could not see was that third eye inside his head. That eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade . . . that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it. If they could, he thought many of them would try to steal it. Yes, even if it meant gouging it right out of his flesh with a dull knife.

    Looking into the dark, he summoned up his private image of George Stark — the real George Stark, who looked nothing like the model who had posed for the jacket photo. He looked for the shadow-man who had accreted soundlessly over the years, found him, and began showing him to Alan Pangborn.

  'He's fairly tall,' he began. 'Taller than me, anyway. Six-three, maybe six-four in a pair of boots. He's got blonde hair, cut short and neat. Blue eyes. His long vision is excellent. About five years ago he took to wearing glasses for close work. Reading and writing, mostly.

   'The reason he gets noticed isn't his height but his breadth. He's not fat, but he's extremely wide. Neck size maybe eighteen-and-a-half, maybe nineteen. He's my age, Alan, but he's not fading the way I'm starting to or running to fat. He's strong. Like Schwarzenegger looks now that Schwarzenegger has started to build down a little. He works out with weights. He can pump a bicep hard enough to pop a sleeve-seam on his shirt, but he's not muscle-bound.

   'He was born in New Hampshire, but following the divorce of his parents, he moved with his mother to Oxford, Mississippi, where she was raised. He's lived most of his life there. When he was younger, he had an accent so thick he sounded like he came from Dogpatch. A lot of people made fun of that accent in college — not to his face, though, you don't make fun of a guy like this to his face — and he worked hard on getting rid of it. Now I think the only time you'd be apt to hear cracker in his voice would be when he gets mad, and I think people who make him mad are often not available for testimony later on. He's got a short fuse. He's violent. He's dangerous. He is, in fact, a practicing psychotic.'

  'What —' Pangborn began, but Thad overrode him.

  'He's quite deeply tanned, and since blonde men usually don't tan all that well, it might be a good point of identification. Big feet, big hands, big neck, wide shoulders. His face looks like somebody talented but in a hurry chopped it out of a hard rock.

   'Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones that had a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's probably switched them.' He paused, then added: 'Oh, and there's a sticker on the back bumper. It says HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH.'

  He opened his eyes.

  Liz was staring at him. Her face was paler than ever.

  There was a long pause on the other end of the tine.

'Alan? Are you — ?'

   just a sec. I'm writing.' There was another, shorter, pause. 'Okay,' he said at last. 'I got it. You can tell me all of this but not who the guy is or your connection with him or how you know him?'

  'I don't know, but I'll try. Tomorrow. Knowing his name isn't going to help anyone tonight anyway, because he's using another one.'

  'George Stark.'

    'Well, he could be crazy enough to be calling himself Alexis Machine, but I doubt it. Stark is what I think, yeah.' He tried to wink at Liz. He did not really believe the mood could be lightened by a wink or anything else, but he tried, anyway. He only succeeded in blinking both eyes, like a sleepy owl.

  'There's no way I can persuade you to go on with this tonight, is there?'

  'No. There's not. I'm sorry, but there's not.'

  'All right. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.' And he was gone, just like that, no thank you, no goodbye. Thinking it over, Thad supposed he didn't really rate a thank you.

    He hung up the phone and went to his wife, who sat looking at him as if she had been turned into a statue. He took her hands — they were very cold — and said, 'This is going to be all right, Liz. I swear it is.'

    'Are you going to tell him about the trances when you talk to him tomorrow? The sound of the birds? How you heard it when you were a kid, and what it meant then? The things you wrote?'

   'I'm going to tell him everything,' Thad said. 'What he chooses to pass on to the other authorities . . . He shrugged. 'That's up to him.'

  'So much,' she said in a strengthless little voice. Her eyes were still fixed on him — seemed powerless to leave him. 'You know so much about him. Thad . . . how?'

    He could only kneel there before her, holding her cold hands. How could he know so much? People asked him that all the time. They used different words to express it — how did you make that up? how did you put that into words? how did you remember that? how did you see that? — but it always came back to the same thing: how did you know that?

  He didn't know how he knew.

  He just did.

   'So much,' she repeated, and she spoke in the tone of a sleeper who is in the grip of a distressful dream. Then they were both silent. He kept expecting the twins to sense their parents' upset, to wake up and begin crying, but there was only the steady tick of the clock. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor by her chair and went on holding her hands, hoping he could warm them up. They were still cold fifteen minutes later when the phone rang.