Stark came in and closed the door.
Liz watched him walk slowly toward her. He looked like a decayed scarecrow which had somehow come to life. The grin was the worst, because the left half of his upper lip appeared not just decayed or decaying, but chewed away. She could see gray-black teeth, and the sockets where, until recently, other teeth had been.
His gloved hands stretched out toward her.
'Hello, Beth,' he said through that terrible grin. 'Please excuse the intrusion, but I was in the neighborhood and thought I'd drop by. I'm George Stark, and I'm pleased to meet you. More pleased, I think, than you could possibly know.'
One of his fingers touched her chin . . . caressed it. The flesh beneath the black leather felt spongy, unsteady. At that moment she thought of the twins, sleeping upstairs, and her paralysis broke. She turned and fled for the kitchen. Somewhere in the roaring confusion of her mind she saw herself snatching one of the butcher-knives from the magnetized runners over the counter and plunging it deep into that obscene caricature of a face.
She heard him after her, quick as the wind.
His hand brushed the back of her blouse, hunting for purchase, and slipped off.
The kitchen door was the sort that swings back and forth. It was propped open with a wooden wedge. She kicked at the wedge on the run, knowing that if she missed it or only knocked it aslant, there wouldn't be a second chance. But she hit it dead-square with one slippered foot, feeling an instant of bright pain in her toes. The wedge flew across the kitchen floor, which was so brightly waxed that she could see the whole room in it, hung upside down. She felt Stark groping for her again. She reached behind her and raked the door shut. She heard the thud as it hit him. He yelled, furious and surprised but unhurt. She groped for the knives —
— and Stark grabbed her by the hair and the back of her blouse. He jerked her backward and spun her around. She heard the rough purr of parting cloth and thought incoherently: If he rapes me oh ,Jesus if he rapes me I'll go crazy —
She hammered at his grotesque face with her fists, knocking the sunglasses first askew and then off. The flesh below his left eye had sagged and fallen away like a dead mouth, exposing the whole bloodshot bulge of the eyeball.
And he was laughing.
He grabbed her hands and forced them down. She twisted one free, brought it up, and scratched at his face. Her fingers left deep grooves from which blood and pus began to flow sluggishly. There was little or no sense of resistance; she might as well have torn at a piece of flyblown meat. And now she was making a sound — she wanted to shriek, to articulate her horror and fear before they choked her, but the most she was able to manage was a series of hoarse, distressed barks.
He snatched her free hand out of the air, brought it down, forced both hands behind her, and encircled the wrists with his own hand. It was spongy but as unyielding as a manacle. He lifted his other hand to the front of her blouse and cupped a breast. Her flesh moaned at his touch. She closed her eyes and tried to pull away.
'Oh, quit that,' he said. He was not grinning on purpose now, but the left side of his mouth grinned anyway, frozen in its own decayed rictus. 'Quit it, Beth. For your own good. It turns me on when you fight. You don't want me turned on. I guarantee it. I think we ought to have a Platonic relationship, you and I.
'At least for now.'
He squeezed her breast harder, and she felt the ruthless strength under the decay, like an armature of articulated steel rods embedded in soft plastic.
How can he be so strong? How can he be so strong when he looks like he's dying?
But the answer was obvious. He wasn't human. She didn't think he was really even alive.
'Or maybe you do want it?' he asked. 'Is that it? Do you want it? Do you want it right now?' His tongue, black and red and yellow, its surface blasted with strange cracks like those in a drying flood-plain, poked out of his snarling, smiling mouth and wiggled at her.
She stopped struggling at once.
'Better,' Stark said. 'Now — I'm going to let go of you, Bethie my dear, my sweet one. When I do that, the urge to run the hundred—yard dash in five seconds flat is going to come over you again. That's natural enough; we hardly know each other, and I am aware that I don't look my best. But before you do anything foolish, I want you to remember the two cops outside — they're dead. And I want you to think of your bambinos, sleeping peacefully upstairs. Children need their rest, don't they? Especially very small children, very defenseless children, like yours. Do you understand? Do you follow me?'
She nodded dumbly. She could smell him now. It was a horrible, meaty aroma. He's rotting, she thought. Rotting away right in front of me.
It had become very clear to her why he so desperately wanted Thad to start writing again.
'You're a vampire,' she said hoarsely. 'A goddam vampire. And he's put you on a diet. So you break in here. You terrorize me and threaten my babies. You're a fucking coward, George Stark.'
He let go of her and pulled first the left glove and then the right one smooth and tight again. It was a prissy yet oddly sinister bit of business.
'I hardly think that's fair, Beth. What would you do if you were in my position? What would you do, for instance, if you were stranded on an island without anything to eat or drink? Would you strike poses of languor and sigh prettily? Or would you fight? Do you really blame me for wanting something so simple as survival?'
'Yes!' she spat at him.
'Spoken like a true partisan . . . but you may change your mind. You see, the price of partisanship can run higher than you know right now, Beth. When the opposition is cunning and dedicated, the price can go right out of sight. You may find yourself more enthusiastic about our collaboration than you'd ever think possible.'
'Dream on, motherfucker!'
The right side of his mouth rose, the eternally smiling left side hitched a little higher, and he favored her with a ghoul-grin she supposed was meant to be engaging. His hand, sickeningly gelid under the thin glove, slid down her forearm in a caress. One finger pressed suggestively into her left palm for an instant before dropping away. 'This is no dream, Beth — I assure you. Thad and I are going to collaborate on a new Stark novel . . . for awhile. Put another way, Thad's going to give me a push. I'm like a stalled car, you see. Only instead of vapor-lock, I've got writer's block. That's all. That's the only problem there is, I judge. Once I get rolling, I'll put her in second, pop the clutch, and vrooom! Off I go!'
'You're crazy,' she whispered.
'Yep. But so was Tolstoy. So was Richard Nixon, and they elected that greasy dawg President of the United States.' Stark turned his head and looked out the window. Liz heard nothing, but all of a sudden he seemed to be listening with all his concentration, striving to pick up some faint, almost inaudible sound, 'What do you — ?' she began.
'Hush your mouth a second, hon,' Stark told her. 'Just put a sock in it.'
Faintly, she heard the sound of a flock of birds taking wing. The sound was impossibly distant, impossibly beautiful. Impossibly free.