eorge 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-the-art exterior of the Beaumonts' Merlin phones, they were stuck with the town of Ludlow's horse-and-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 over-sized chrome latches, resembled a workman's dinner-bucket. Dave was leaning in the doorway be-tween 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 dinner-bucket. 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, Jos?. 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, blood-typing 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 - voice-prints, 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 tape-recording. 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.

Yeah, but he's dead. He and his wife, too. What was her name? Helga. 'I'm probably playing golf; God knows what Helga's up to.' But I know what Helga's up to; I know what you're both up to. You're up to your cut throats in blood, that's what I think, and there's a message written on your living-room wall out there in Big Sky Country. It says THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING

AGAIN.

Alan Pangborn shuddered. It was crazy, but he shuddered anyway. It twisted through him like a wire.

He dialed Wyoming Directory Assistance, got the number for the Fort Laramie Sheriff 's Office, and made another call. He was answered by a dispatcher who sounded half asleep. Alan identified himself, told the dispatcher whom he had been trying to contact and where he lived, and then asked if they had Dr Pritchard and his wife in their vacation file. If the doctor and his wife had gone off on holiday - and it was getting to be that season - they would probably have informed the local law and asked them to keep an eye on the house while it was empty.

'Well,' Dispatch said, 'why don't you give me your number? I'll call you back with the information.'

Alan sighed. This was just more standard operating procedure. More bullshit, not to put too fine a point on it. The guy didn't want to give out the information until he was sure Alan was what he said he was.

'No,' he said. 'I'm calling from home, and it's the middle of the night - '

'It's not exactly high noon here, Sheriff Pangborn,' Dispatch answered laconically. Alan sighed. 'I'm sure that's true,' he said, 'and I'm also sure that your wife and kids aren't asleep upstairs. Do this, my friend: call the Maine State Police Barracks in Oxford, Maine - I'll give you the number - and verify my name. They can give you my LAWS ID number. I'll call back in ten minutes or so, and we can exchange passwords.'

'Shoot it to me,' Dispatch said, but he didn't sound happy about it. Alan guessed he might have taken the man away from the late show or maybe this month's Penthouse.

'What's this about?' Dispatch asked after he had read back the Oxford State Police Barracks phone number.

'Murder investigation,' Alan said, 'and it's hot. I'm not calling you for my health, pal.' He hung up.

He sat behind his desk and made shadow animals and waited for the minute hand to circle the face of the clock ten times. It seemed very slow. It had only gone around five times when the study door opened and Annie came in. She was wearing her pink robe and looked somehow ghostly to him; he felt that shudder wanting to work through him again, as if he had looked into the future and seen something there which was unpleasant. Nasty, even. How would I feel if it was me he was after? he wondered suddenly. Me and Annie and Toby and Todd? How would I feel if I knew who he was . . . and nobody would believe me?.'Alan? What are you doing, sitting down here so late?'

He smiled, got up, kissed her easily. 'Just waiting for the drugs to wear off,' he said.

'No, really - is it this Beaumont business?'

'Yeah. I've been trying to chase down a doctor who may know something about it. I keep getting his answering machine, so I called the sheriff 's office to see if he's in their vacation file. The man on the other end is supposedly checking my bona fides.' He looked at Annie with careful concern. 'How are you, honey? Headache tonight?'

'No,' she said, 'but I heard you come in.' She smiled. 'You're the world's quietest man when you want to be, Alan, but you can't do a thing about your car.'

He hugged her.

'Do you want a cup of tea?' she asked.

'God, no. A glass of milk, if you want to get one.'

She left him alone and came back a minute later with the milk. 'What's Mr Beaumont like?' she asked. 'I've seen him around town, and his wife comes into the shop once in awhile, but I've never spoken to him.' The shop was You Sew and Sew, owned and operated by a woman named Polly Chalmers. Annie Pangborn had worked there part-time for four years. Alan thought about it. 'I like him,' he said at last. 'At first I didn't - I thought he was a cold fish. But I was seeing him under difficult circumstances. He's just . . . distant. Maybe it's because of what he does for a living.'

'I liked both of his books very much,' Annie said.

He raised his eyebrows. 'I didn't know you'd read him.'

'You never asked, Alan. Then, when the story broke about the pen name, I tried one of the other ones.' Her nose wrinkled in displeasure.

'No good?'

'Terrible. Scary. I didn't finish it. I never would have believed the same man wrote both books.'

Guess what, babe? Alan thought. He doesn't believe it, either.

'You ought to get back to bed,' he said, 'or you'll wake up with another pounder.'

She shook her head. 'I think the Headache Monster's gone again, at least for awhile.' She gave him a look from beneath lowered lashes. 'I'll still be awake when you come up . . . if you're not too long, that is.'

He cupped one breast through the pink robe and kissed her parted lips. 'I'll be up just as fast as I can.'

She left, and Alan saw that more than ten minutes had passed. He called Wyoming again and got the same sleepy dispatcher.

'Thought you'd forgot me, my friend.'

'Not at all,' Alan said.

'Mind giving me your LAWS number, Sheriff'

109-44-205-ME.'

'I guess you're the genuine article, all right. Sorry to put you through this rigamarole so late, Sheriff Pangborn, but I guess you understand.'

'I do. What can you tell me about Dr Pritchard?'

'Oh, he and his wife are in the vacation file, all right,' Dispatch said. 'They're in Yellowstone

Park, camping, until the end of the month.'

There, Alan thought. You see? You're down here jumping at shadows in the middle of the night. No cut throats. No writing on the wall. Just two old folks on a camping trip..But he was not much relieved, he found. Dr Pritchard was going to be a hard man to get hold of, at least for the next couple of weeks.

'If I needed to get a message to the guy, do you think I could do it?' Alan asked.

'I'd think so,' Dispatch said. 'You could call Park Services at Yellowstone. They'll know where he is, or they should. It might take awhile, but they'd probably get him for you. I've met him a time or two. He seems like a nice enough old fella.'

'Well, that's good to know,' Alan said. 'Thanks for your time.'

'Don't mention it - it's what we're here for.' Alan heard the faint rattle of pages, and could imagine this faceless man picking up his Penthouse again, half a continent away.

'Goodnight,' he said.

'Goodnight, Sheriff.'

Alan hung up and sat where he was for a moment, looking out the small den window into the darkness.

He is out there. Somewhere. And he's still coming.

Alan wondered again how he would feel if it were his own life and the lives of Annie and his children - at stake. He wondered how he would feel if he knew that, and no one would believe what he knew.

You're taking it home with you again, dear, he heard Annie say in his mind. And it was true. Fifteen minutes ago he had been convinced - in his nerve-endings, if not in his head - that Hugh and Helga Pritchard were lying dead in a pool of blood. It wasn't true; they were sleeping peacefully under the stars in Yellowstone National Park tonight. So much for intuition; it had a way of just fading out on you.

This is the way Thad's going to feel when we find out what's really going on, he thought. When we find out that the explanation, as bizarre as it may turn out to be, conforms to all the natural laws.

Did he really believe that?

Yes, he decided - he really did. In his head, at least. His nerve-endings were not so sure. Alan finished his milk, turned off the desk-lamp, and went upstairs. Annie was still awake, and she was gloriously naked. She folded him into her arms, and Alan gladly allowed himself to forget everything else.

7

Stark called again two days later. Thad Beaumont was in Dave's Market at the time. Dave's was a mom-and-pop store a mile and a half down the road from the Beaumont house. It was a place to go when running to the supermarket in Brewer was just too much of a pain in the ass.

Thad went down that Friday evening to get a six-pack of Pepsi, some chips, and some dip. One of the troopers watching over the family rode with him. It was June 10th, six-thirty in the evening, plenty of light left in the sky. Summer, that beautiful green bitch, had ridden into Maine again. The cop sat in the car while Thad went in. He got his soda and was inspecting the wild array of dips (you had your basic clam, and if you didn't like that, you had your basic onion) when the telephone rang.

He looked up at once, thinking: Oh. Okay..Rosalie behind the counter picked it up, said hello, listened, then held the phone out to him, as

he had known she would. He was again swallowed by that dreamy feeling of presque vu.

'Telephone, Mr Beaumont.'

He felt quite calm. His heart had stumbled over a beat, but only one; now it was jogging along at its usual rate. He was not sweating.

And there were no birds.

He felt none of the fear and fury he'd felt two days earlier. He didn't bother asking Rosalie if it was his wife, wanting him to pick up a dozen eggs or maybe! a carton of o.j. while he was here. He knew who it was.

He stood by the Megabucks computer with its bright green screen announcing there had been no winner last week and this week's lottery jackpot was four million dollars. He took the phone from Rosalie and said, 'Hello, George.'

'Hello, Thad.' The soft brush-stroke of Southern accent was still there, but the overlay of country bumpkin was entirely gone - Thad only realized how strongly yet subtly Stark had managed to convey that feeling of 'Hail-fahr, boys, I ain't too bright but I shore did get away with it, didn't I, hyuck, hyuck, hyuck?' when he heard its complete absence here. But of course now it's just the boys, Thad thought. Just a coupla white novelists standin around, talkin.

'What do you want?'

'You know the answer to that. There's no need for us to play games, is there? It's a little bit late for that.'

'Maybe I just want to hear you say it out loud.' That feeling was back, that weird feeling of being sucked out of his body and pulled down the telephone line to someplace precisely between the two of them.

Rosalie had taken herself down to the far end of the counter, where she was removing packs of cigarettes from a pile of cartons and restocking the long cigarette dispenser. She was ostentatiously not listening to Thad's end of the conversation in a way that was almost funny. There was no one in Ludlow - this end of town, anyway - who wasn't aware that Thad was under police guard or police protection or police some-damn-thing, and he didn't have to hear the rumors to know they had already begun to fly. Those who didn't think he was about to be arrested for drug-trafficking no doubt believed it was child abuse or wife-beating. Poor old Rosalie was down there trying to be good, and Thad felt absurdly grateful. He also felt as if he were looking at her through the wrong end of a powerful telescope. He was down the telephone line, down the rabbit hole, where there was no white rabbit but only foxy old George Stark, the man who could not be there but somehow was all the same.

Foxy old George, and down here in Endsville all the sparrows were flying again. He fought the feeling, fought hard.

'Go on, George,' he said, a little surprised by the rough edge of fury in his voice. He was dazed, caught in a powerful undertow of distance and unreality . . . but God, he sounded so awake and aware! 'Say it right out loud, why don't you?'

'If you insist.'

'I do.'

'It's time to start a new book. A new Stark novel.'

'I don't think so.'

'Don't say that!' The edge in that voice was like a whiplash loaded with tiny pellets of shot. 'I've been drawing you a picture, Thad. I've been drawing it for you. Don't make me draw it on you

..'You're dead, George. You just don't have the sense to lie down.'

Rosalie's head turned a little; Thad glimpsed one wide eye before she turned hurriedly back to the cigarette racks again.

'You just watch your mouth!' Real fury in that voice. But was there something more? Was there fear? Pain? Both? Or was he only fooling himself?

'What's wrong, George?' he jeered suddenly. 'Are you losing some of your happy thoughts?'

There was a pause, then. That had surprised him, thrown him off-stride, at least momentarily. Thad was sure of that. But why? What had done it?

'Listen to me, buddy-roo,' Stark said at last. 'I'll give you a week to get started. Don't think you can bullshit me, because you can't.' Except the last word was really cain't. Yes, George was upset. It might cost Thad a great deal before this was over, but for the time being he felt only savage gladness. He had gotten through. It seemed he was not the only one that felt helpless and dreamily vulnerable during these nightmarishly intimate conversations; he had hurt Stark, and that was utterly fine.

Thad said, 'That much is true. There's no bullshit between us. Whatever else there may be, there's none of that.'

'You got an idea,' Stark said. 'You had it before that damn kid even thought about blackmailing you. The one about the wedding and the armored-car score.'

'I threw away my notes. I'm done with you:'

'No, those were my notes you threw away, but it doesn't matter. You don't need notes. It'll be a good book.'

'You don't understand. George Stark is dead.'

'You're the one don't understand,' Stark replied. His voice was soft, deadly, emphatic. 'You got a week. And if you haven't got at least thirty pages of manuscript, I'll be coming for you, hoss. Only it won't start with you - that'd be too easy. That'd be entirely too easy. I'll take your kids first, and they will die slow. I'll see to it. I know how. They won't know what's happening, only that they're dying in agony. But you'll know, and I'll know, and your wife will know. I'll take her next . . . only before I take her, I'll take her. You know what I mean, old hoss. And when they're gone, I'll do you, Thad, and you'll die like no man on earth ever died before.'

He stopped. Thad could hear him panting harshly in his ear, like a dog on a hot day.

'You didn't know about the birds,' Thad said softly. 'That much is true, isn't it?'

'Thad, you're not making sense. If you don't start pretty soon, a lot of people are gonna get hurt. Time is runnin out.'

'Oh, I'm paying attention,' Thad said. 'What I'm wondering is how you could have written what you did on Clawson's wall and then on Miriam's and not know about it.'

'You better stop talkin trash and start makin sense, my friend,' Stark said, but Thad could sense bewilderment and some rough fear just under the surface of that voice. 'There wasn't anything

written on their walls.'

'Oh yes. Yes there was. And do you know what, George? I think maybe the reason you don't know about that is because I wrote it. I think part of me was there. Somehow part of me was there, watching you. I think I'm the only one of us who knows about the sparrows, George. I think maybe I wrote it. You want to think about that . . . think about it hard . . . before you start pushing me.'

'Listen to me,' Stark said with gentle force. 'Hear me real good. First your kids . . . then your wife . . . then you. Start another book, Thad. It's the best advice I can give you. Best advice you ever got in y'damn life. Start another book. I'm not dead.'.A long pause. Then, softly, very deliberately:

'And I don't want to be dead. So you go home and you sharpen y'pencils, and if you need any inspiration, think about how your little babies would look with their faces full of glass.

'There ain't no goddam birds just forget about em and start writin.'

There was a click.

'Fuck you,' Thad whispered into the dead line, and slowly hung up the phone..