tark Takes Charge

1

He had no trouble planning what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, even though he had never actually been in Ludlow in his life.

Stark had been there often enough in his dreams.

He drove the stolen rag-tag Honda Civic off the road and into a rest area a mile and a half down the road from the Beaumont house. Thad had gone up to the University, and that was good. Sometimes it was impossible to tell what Thad was doing or thinking, although he could almost always catch the flavor of his emotions if he strained.

If he found it very difficult to get in touch with Thad, he simply began to handle one of the Berol pencils he'd bought in the Houston Street stationer's. That helped.

Today it would be easy. It would be easy because, whatever Thad might have told his watchdogs, he had gone to the University for one reason and one reason only: because he was over the deadline, and he believed Stark would try to get in touch with him. Stark intended to do just that. Yes indeed.

He just didn't plan to do it the way Thad expected.

And certainly not from a place Thad expected.

It was almost noon. There were a few picnickers in the rest area, but they were at the tables on

the grass or gathered around the small stone barbecues down by the river. No one looked at Stark as he got out of the Civic and walked away. That was good, because if they had seen him, they certainly would have remembered him.

Remember, yes.

Describe, no.

As he strode across the asphalt and then set off up the road toward the Beaumont house on foot, Stark looked a great deal like H. G. Wells's Invisible Man. A wide swath of bandage covered his forehead from eyebrows to hairline. Another swath covered his chin and lower jaw. A New York Yankees baseball cap was jammed down on his head. He wore sunglasses, a quilted vest, and black gloves on his hands.

The bandages were stained with a yellow, pussy material that oozed steadily through the cotton gauze like gummy tears. More of the yellow stuff dribbled out from behind the Foster Grant sunglasses. From time to time he wiped it off his cheeks with the gloves, which were thin imitation kid. The palms and fingers of these gloves were sticky with the drying ooze. Under the bandages, much of his skin had sloughed off. What remained was not precisely human flesh; it was, instead, dark, spongy stuff that wept almost constantly. This waste matter looked like pus but had a dark, unpleasant smell - like a combination of strong coffee and India ink. He walked with his head bent slightly forward. The occupants of the few cars which came toward him saw a man in a ball-cap with his head held down against the glare and his hands.stuffed into his pockets. The shadow of the cap's visor would defeat all but the most insistent glances, and if they had looked more closely, they would have seen only the bandages. The cars which came from behind and passed him going north had nothing but his back to get a good look at, of course.

Closer in toward the twin cities of Bangor and Brewer, this walk would have been a bit more difficult. Closer in you had your suburbs and housing developments. The Beaumonts' part of Ludlow was still far enough out in the country to qualify as a rural community not the sticks, but definitely not part of either of the big towns. The houses sat on lots large enough, in some cases, to qualify as fields. They were divided one from another not by hedges, those avatars of suburban privacy, but by narrow belts of trees and, sometimes, meandering rock walls. Here and there satellite dishes loomed grimly on the horizon, looking like the advance outposts of some alien invasion.

Stark strode along the shoulder of the road until he passed the Clarks' house. Thad's was the next up. He cut across the far corner of the Clarks' front yard, which was more hay than grass. He glanced once at the house. The shades were pulled against the heat, and the garage door was tightly shut. The Clark place looked more than mid-morning deserted; it had the forlorn air of houses which have been empty for some time. There was no tattletale pile of newspapers inside the screen door, but Stark believed nevertheless that the Clark family was probably off on an early summer vacation, and that was just fine with him.

He entered the stand of trees between the two properties, stepped over the crumbled remnant of a rock wall, and then sank down to one knee. For the first time he was looking directly at the house of his stubborn twin. There was a police cruiser parked in the driveway, and the two cops who belonged to it were standing in the shade of a nearby tree, smoking and talking. Good. He had what he needed; the rest was cake and ice cream. Yet he lingered a moment longer. He did not think of himself as an imaginative man - at least not outside the pages of the books he had had a vital part in creating - nor an emotional one, so he was a little startled by the dull coal of rage and resentment he felt smouldering in his gut.

What right did the son of a bitch have to refuse him? What goddam right? Because he had been real first? Because Stark did not know just how, why, or when he himself had become real? That was bullshit. As far as George Stark was concerned, seniority cut zero ice in this matter. He had no responsibility to lie down and die without a murmur of protest, as Thad Beaumont seemed to think he should do. He had a responsibility to himself - that was simple survival. Nor was that all. He had his loyal fans to think of as well, didn't he?

Look at that house. Just look at it. A roomy New England Colonial, maybe one wing shy of qualifying for mansionhood. Big lawn, sprinklers twirling busily to keep it green. A wooden stake fence running along one side of the bright black driveway - the sort of fence Stark guessed was supposed to be 'picturesque.' There was a breezeway between the house and the garage - a breezeway, by God! And inside, the place was furnished in graceful (or maybe they called it gracious) Colonial style to match the outside - a long oak table in the dining room, high handsome bureaus in the rooms upstairs, and chairs that were delicate and pleasing to the eye without being precious; chairs you could admire and still dare to sit on. Walls that were not papered but painted and then stencilled. Stark had seen all these things, seen them in the dreams Beaumont hadn't even known he was having when he had been writing as George Stark. Suddenly he wanted to burn the charming white house to the ground. Touch a match to it - or

maybe the flame of the propane torch he had in the pocket of the vest he was wearing - and burn it flat to the foundation. But not until he had been inside. Not until he had smashed the furniture,.shat upon the living-room rug, and wiped the excrement across those carefully stencilled walls in

crude brown smears. Not until he had taken an axe to those oh-so-precious bureaus and reduced them to kindling.

What right did Beaumont have to children? To a beautiful woman? What right, exactly, did Thad Beaumont have to live in the light and be happy while his dark brother - who had made him rich and famous when he would otherwise have lived poor and expired in obscurity - died in darkness like a diseased mongrel in an alley?

None, of course. No right at all. It was just that Beaumont had believed in that right, and still, in spite of everything, continued to believe in it. But the belief, not George Stark from Oxford, Mississippi, was the fiction.

'It's time for your first big lesson, buddy-roo,' Stark murmured in the trees. He found the clips holding the bandage around his forehead, removed them, and tucked them away in his pocket for later. Then he began to unwind the bandage, the layers growing wetter as they got closer to his strange flesh. 'It's one you'll never, ever forget. I guaran-fucking-tee it.'

2

It was nothing but a variation on the white-cane scam he'd run on the cops in New York, but that was perfectly okay with Stark; he was a firm believer in the idea that if you happened on a good gag, you should go on using it until you used it up. These cops presented no problem, anyway, unless he got sloppy; they had been on duty for better than a week, now, the surety growing in them every day that the crazy guy had been telling the truth when he'd said he was just going to pick up his marbles and go home. The only wild card was Liz - if she happened to be looking out the window when he wasted the pigs, it could complicate things. But it was still a few minutes shy of noon; she and the twins would either be taking naps or getting ready to take them. Regardless of how it went, he was confident things would work out.

In fact, he was sure of it.

Love would find a way.

3

Chatterton lifted his boot to butt his cigarette - he planned to put the stub in the cruiser's ashtray once it was dead; Maine state police did not litter the driveways of the taxpayers - and when he looked up the man with the skinned face was there, lurching slowly up the driveway. One hand waved slowly at him and Jack Eddings for help; the other was bent behind his back and looked broken.

Chatterton almost had a heart-attack.

'Jack!' he shouted, and Eddings turned. His mouth dropped open.

'-help me -' the man with the skinned face croaked. Chatterton and Eddings ran toward him..If they had lived, they might have told their fellow officers that they thought the man had been in a car crash, or had been burned by an explosive backlash of gas or kerosene, or that he might have fallen face-first into one of those cruel pieces of farm machinery which decide, every now and then, to reach out and tomahawk their owners with their blades, choppers, or cruel, whirling spokes.

They might have told their fellow officers any of these things, but at that moment they were really thinking of nothing at all. Their minds had been sponged clean by horror. The left side of the man's face seemed almost to be boiling, as if, after the skin had been stripped off, someone had poured a powerful carbolic acid solution over the raw meat. Sticky, unthinkable fluid ran down hillocks of proud flesh and rolled through black cracks, sometimes overspilling in gruesome flash floods.

They thought nothing; they simply reacted.

That was the beauty of the white-cane trick.

'-help me -'

Stark allowed his feet to tangle together and fell forward. Yelling something incoherent to his partner, Chatterton reached out to grab the wounded man before he could fall. Stark looped his right arm around the state policeman's neck and brought his left hand out from behind his back. There was a surprise in it. The surprise was the pearl-handled straight-razor. The blade glittered feverishly in the humid air. Stark rammed it forward and it split Chatterton's right eyeball with an audible pop. Chatterton screamed and clapped a hand to his face. Stark ran his hand into Chatterton's hair, jerked his head back, and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood burst from his muscular neck in a red shout. All of this happened in four seconds.

'What?' Eddings inquired in a low and weirdly studious tone of voice. He was standing flat-footed about two feet behind Chatterton and Stark. 'What?'

One of his dangling hands was hanging beside the butt of his service revolver' but one quick glance convinced Stark that the pig had no more idea that his gun was in reach than he had of the

population of Mozambique. His eyes were bulging. He didn't know what he was looking at, or who was bleeding. No, that isn't true, Stark thought, he thinks it's me. He stood there and watched me cut his partner's throat, but he thinks I'm the one bleeding because half my face is gone, and that isn't really why - it's me bleeding, has to be, because he and his partner, they're the police. They're the heroes of this movie.

'Here,' he said, 'hold this for me, will you?' And shoved Chatterton's dying body backward at his partner.

Eddings uttered a high-pitched little scream. He tried to step away, but he was too late. The twohundred-pound sack of dying bull that was Tom Chatterton sent him reeling back against the police car. Loose hot blood poured down into his upturned face like water from a busted shower-head. He screamed and flailed at Chatterton's body. Chatterton spun slowly away and grabbed blindly at the car with the last of his strength. His left hand hit the hood, leaving a splattered handprint. His right grabbed weakly at the radio antenna and snapped it off. He fell into the driveway holding it in front of his one remaining eye like a scientist with a specimen too rare to relinquish even in extremism

Eddings caught a blurred glimpse of the skinned man coming in low and hard and tried to draw back. He struck the car.

Stark sliced upward, splitting the crotch of Eddings's beige trooper uniform, splitting his scrotal sac, drawing the razor up and out in a long, buttery stroke. Eddings's balls, suddenly untethered from each other, swung back against his inner thighs like heavy knots on the end of an unravelling.sash-cord. Blood stained his pants around the zipper. For a moment he felt as if someone had

jammed a handful of ice cream into his groin . . . and then the pain struck, hot and full of ragged teeth. He screamed.

Stark snapped the razor out, wicked-quick, at Eddings's throat, but Eddings managed somehow to get a hand up and the first stroke only split his palm in half. Eddings tried to roll to the left, and that exposed the right side of his neck.

The naked blade, pale silver in the day's hazy light, whickered through the air again, and this time it went where it was supposed to go. Eddings sank to his knees, hands between his legs. His beige pants had turned bright red almost to the knees. His head drooped, and now he looked like the object of a pagan sacrifice.

'Have a nice day, motherfucker,' Stark said in a conversational voice. He bent over, tangled his hand in Eddings's hair, and jerked his head back, baring the neck for the final stroke. 4

He opened the back door of the cruiser, lifted Eddings by the neck of his uniform shirt and the bloody seat of his trousers, and tossed him in like a sack of grain. Then he did the same with Chatterton. The latter must have weighed close to two hundred and thirty pounds, with his equipment belt and the .45 on his belt thrown in, but Stark handled him as if he were a bag stuffed with feathers. He slammed the door, then shot a glance full of bright curiosity at the house. It was silent. The only sounds were the crickets in the high grass beside the driveway and the low, strawlike whack! whick! whack! of the lawnsprinklers. To this there was added the sound of an oncoming truck - an Orinco tanker. It roared by at sixty, headed north. Stark tensed and lowered himself slightly behind the side of the police cruiser when he saw the truck's big brake lights flare red for an instant. He uttered a single grunt of laughter when they went out again and the tanker disappeared over the next hill, accelerating again. The driver had glimpsed the state police cruiser parked in the Beaumont driveway, had checked his speedometer, and had thought speed-trap. The most natural thing in the world. He needn't have worried; this speed-trap was closed forever.

There was a lot of blood in the driveway, but puddled on the bright black asphalt, it could have been water . . . unless you got very close. So that was okay. And even if it wasn't, it would have to do.

Stark folded the straight-razor, held it in one sticky hand, went over to the door. He saw neither the little drift of dead sparrows lying by the stoop, nor the live ones which now lined the roofpeak of the house and sat in the apple tree by the garage, watching him silently. In a minute or two, Liz Beaumont came downstairs, still half-asleep from her midday nap, to answer the doorbell.

5.She didn't scream. The scream was there, but the stripped face looking at her when she opened the

door locked it deep inside her, froze it, denied it, cancelled it, buried it alive. Unlike Thad, she'd had no dreams of George Stark she could remember, but they might have been there all the same, deep in the fastnesses of her unconscious mind, because this glaring, grinning face seemed almost an expected thing, for all its horror.

'Hey lady, wanna buy a duck?' Stark asked through the screen. He grinned, exposing a great

many teeth. Most of them were now dead. The sunglasses turned his eyes into big black sockets. Goo dripped from his cheek and jawline and splattered on the vest he was wearing. Belatedly, she tried to close the door. Stark rammed a gloved fist through the screen and slammed it back open again. Liz stumbled away, trying to scream. She couldn't. Her throat was still locked up.

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.

She stood there looking at him, her heart pounding too fast, wondering if she could break loose from him. He wasn't exactly in a trance, or anything like that, but his attention was certainly diverted. She could run, maybe. If she could get a gun - His rotten hand stole around one of her wrists again.

'I can get inside your man and look out, you know. I can feel him thinking. I can't do that with you, but I can look at your face and make some real good guesses. Whatever you're thinking right now, Beth, you want to remember those cops . . . and your kids. You do that, it's gonna help you keep this in perspective.'

'Why do you keep calling me that?'

'What? Beth?' He laughed. It was a nasty sound, as if he'd gotten gravel caught in his throat. 'It's what he'd call you, if he was smart enough to think of it, you know.'

'You're cr - '

'Crazy, I know. This is charmin, darlin, but we'll have to defer your opinions on my sanity until later. Too much happening right now. Listen: I have to call Thad, but not at his office. Phone there might be tapped. He doesn't think it is, but the cops might have done it without telling him. Your man is a trusting sort of fellow. I'm not.'

'How can you - ?'

Stark leaned toward her and spoke very slowly and carefully, as a teacher might speak to a slow first-grader. 'I want you to stop pickin this bone with me, Beth, and answer my questions. Because if I can't get what I need out of you, maybe I can get it out of your twins. I realize they can't talk yet, but maybe I can teach them. A little incentive does wonders.'

He was wearing a quilted vest over his shirt in spite of the heat, the kind with many zippered pockets favored by hunters and hikers. He pulled down one of the side zippers where some cylindrical object bulged the polyester quilting. He took out a small gas torch. 'Even if I can't teach em to talk, I bet I could teach em to sing. I bet I could teach em to sing just like a couple of larks. You might not want to face that music, Beth.'

She tried to take her gaze away from the torch, but it wouldn't go. Her eyes followed it helplessly as he switched it back and forth from one gloved hand to the other. Her eyes seemed nailed to the nozzle.

'I'll tell you anything you want to know,' she said, and thought: For now.

'That's good of you,' he said, and stowed the gas torch back in its pocket. The vest pulled a little to the side when he did it, and she saw the butt of a very big handgun. 'Very sensible, too, Beth. Now listen. There's somebody else there today, in the English department. I can see him as clearly.as I can see you right now. Short little fella, white hair, got a pipe in his mouth almost as big as he

is. What's his name?'

'It sounds like Rawlie DeLesseps,' she said drearily. She wondered how he could know Rawlie was there today . and decided she didn't really want to know.

'Could it be anyone else?'

Liz thought it over briefly and then shook her head. 'It must be Rawlie.'

'Have you got a faculty directory?'

'There's one in the telephone table drawer in the living room.'

'Good.' He had slipped past her almost before she realized he was moving - the oily cat-grace of this decaying piece of meat made her feet a little sick - and plucked one of the long knives from the magnetized runners. Liz stiffened. Stark glanced at her and that caught-gravel sound came from his throat again. 'Don't worry, I ain't gonna cut you. You're my good little helper, aren't you? Come on.'

The hand, strong but unpleasantly spongy, slid around her wrist again. When she tried to pull away, it only tightened. She stopped pulling at once and allowed him to lead her.

'Good,' he said.

He took her into the living room, where she sat on the sofa, and hugged her knees in front of her. Stark glanced at her, nodded to himself, and then turned his attention to the telephone. When he determined that there was no alarm wire - and that was sloppy, just sloppy - he slashed the cords the state police had added: the one going to the trace-back gadget and the one that went down to the voice-activated recorder in the basement.

'You know how to behave, and that's very important,' Stark said to the top of Liz's bent head.

'Now, listen. I'm gonna find this Rawlie DeLesseps's number and have a brief little pow-wow with Thad. And while I do that, you're gonna go upstairs and pack whatever duds and other things your babies will need down at your summer place. When you're finished, roust em and bring em on down here.'

'How did you know they were - ?'

He smiled a little at her look of surprise. 'Oh, I know your schedule,' he said. 'I know it better than you do, maybe. You get cm up, Beth, and get cm ready, and bring cm down here. I know the layout of the house as well as I know your schedule, and if you try to get away from me, honey, I will know. There's no need to dress cm; just pack what they'll need and bring cm down in their didies. You can dress cm later, after we're on our merry way.'

'Castle Rock? You want to go to Castle Rock?'

'Uh-huh. But you don't need to think about that now. All you need to think about right now is that if you're longer than ten minutes by my watch, I'll have to come upstairs to see what's keeping you.' He looked at her levelly, the dark glasses creating skull-like eyesockets below his peeling, oozing brow. 'And I'll come with my little blowtorch lit and ready for action. You understand?'

'I . . . yes.'

'Above all, Beth, you want to remember one thing. If you cooperate with me, you are going to be all right. And your children will be all right.' He smiled again. 'Bein a good mother like you are, I suspect that's much more important to you. I only want you to know better than to try gettin clever with me. Those two state cops arc out there in the back of their bubblemobile, drawing flies, because they had the bad luck to be on the tracks when my express was comin through. There's a bunch of dead cops in New York City who had the same sort of bad luck . . . as you well know. The way to help yourself, and your kids - and Thad, too, because if he does what I want, he's gonna be fine - is to stay dumb and helpful. You understand?'.'Yes,' she said hoarsely.

'You may get an idea. I know how that can happen when a person feels like his back's to the wall. But if you do get one, you want to shoo that idea right away. You want to remember that, although I may not look so hot, my ears are great. If you try to open a window, I'll hear it. If you try to take out a screen, I'll hear that. Bethie, I'm a man who can hear the angels singin in heaven and the devils screamin in the deepest holes of hell. You have to ask yourself if you dare take the chance. You're a smart woman. I think you'll make the right decision. Move, girl. Get goin.'

He was looking at his watch, actually timing her. And Liz bounded for the stairs on legs which felt nerveless.

6

She heard him speak briefly on the telephone downstairs. There was a long pause, and then he began to speak again. His voice changed. She didn't know who he had talked to before the pause Rawlie DeLesseps, maybe - but when he began to speak again, she was almost positive Thad was on the other end. She couldn't make out the words and didn't dare go to the extension phone,

but she was still sure it was Thad. There was no time for eavesdropping, anyway. He had asked her to ask herself if she dared chance crossing .him. She did not. She threw diapers into the diaper-bag, clothes into a suitcase. She swept the creams, baby powder, Handi-Wipes, diaper pins, and other odds and ends into a shoulder-bag. The conversation had ended downstairs. She was heading for the twins, about to wake them, when he called up to her.

'Beth! It's time!'

'I'm coming!' She lifted Wendy, who began to cry sleepily.

'I want you down here - I'm expecting a telephone call, and you're the sound effects.'

But she barely heard this last. Her eyes were fixed on the plastic diaper-pin caddy on top of the twins' bureau.

Lying beside the caddy was a bright pair of sewing scissors. She put Wendy back in her crib, threw a glance at the door, and then hurried across to the bureau. She took the scissors and two of the diaper pins. She stuck the pins in her mouth like a woman making a dress, and unzipped her skirt. She pinned the scissors to the inside of her panties, then zipped the skirt again. There was a small bulge where the handle of the scissors and the heads of the pins were. She didn't think an ordinary man would notice, but George Stark was not an ordinary man. She left her blouse hanging out. Better.

'Beth! ' The voice was on the verge of being angry now. Worse, it was coming from halfway up the stairs and she had never even heard him, although she would have said it was impossible to use the main staircase in this old place without producing all sorts of creaks and groans. Just then the telephone rang.

'You get them down here now!' he screamed up at her, and she hurried to rouse William. She had no time to be gentle, and as a result she had a baby squalling at top volume in each arm when she came downstairs.

Stark was on the telephone and she expected that he would be even more furious at the noise. On the contrary, he looked quite pleased . . . and then she realized that if he was talking to Thad,.he should be pleased. He could hardly have done better if he had brought his own soundeffects record.

The ultimate persuader, she thought, and felt a flash of powerful hate for this rotten creature who had no business existing but who refused to disappear. Stark was holding a pencil in one hand, tapping the eraser end gently on the edge of the telephone table, and she realized with a little shock of recognition that it was a Berol Black Beauty. One of Thad's pencils, she thought. Has he been in the study?

No - of course he hadn't been in the study, nor was it one of Thad's pencils. They had never been Thad's pencils, not really he just bought them sometimes. The Black Beauties belonged to Stark. He had used the pencil to write something in block letters on the back of the faculty directory. As she neared him she could read two sentences. GUESS WHERE I CALLED FROM, THAD? read the first one. The second was brutally direct: TELL ANYBODY AND THEY DIE. As if to confirm this, Stark said: 'Not a thing, as you can hear for yourself. I haven't harmed a hair of their precious little heads.'

He turned toward Liz and winked at her. It was somehow the most hideous thing of all - as if they were in on this together. Stark was twirling his sunglasses between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His eyeballs glared out of his face like marbles in the face of a melting wax statue.

'Yet,' he added.

He listened, then grinned. Even if his face had not been decomposing almost before her eyes, that grin would have struck her as teasing and vicious.

'What about her?' Stark asked in a voice which was almost lilting, and that was when her anger got on top of her fear and she thought for the first time of Aunt Martha and the rats. She wished Aunt Martha were here now, to take care of this particular rat. She had the scissors, but that didn't mean he would give her the opening she would need to use them. But Thad . . . Thad knew about Aunt Martha. And the idea winked into her mind.

7

When the conversation was over and Stark had hung up, she asked him what he meant to do.

'Move fast,' he said. 'It's my specialty.' He held out his arms. 'Give me one of the kids. It doesn't matter which one.'

She shrank away from him, reflexively hugging both babies tighter to her breasts. They had quieted down, but at her convulsive hug, both began to whimper and wriggle again. Stark looked at her patiently. 'I don't have time to argue with you, Beth. Don't make me persuade you with this.' He patted the cylindrical bulge in the pocket of the hunting vest. 'I'm not going to hurt your kids. In a funny sort of way, you know, I'm their daddy, too.'

'Don't you say that!' she shrieked at him, drawing away farther still. She trembled on the edge of flight.

'You get control of yourself, woman.'

The words were flat, accentless, and deadly cold. They made her feel as if she had been slapped across the face with a bag of cold water.

'Get hip, sweetheart. I have to go outside and move that cop car into your garage. I can't have you running down the road in the other direction while I do it. If I'm holding one of your kids - as collateral, so to speak - I won't have to worry about that. I mean what I say about bearing you.and them no ill will . . . and even if I did, what good would I do myself by hurting one of your kids? I need your cooperation. That's not the way to get it. Now you give one of them over right now, or I'll hurt them both - not kill them but hurt them, really hurt them - and you'll be the one to blame.'

He held out his arms. His ruined face was stern and set. Looking at it, she saw that no argument would sway him, no plea would turn him. He would not even listen. He would just do what he had threatened.

She walked toward him, and when he tried to take Wendy her arm tightened again, balking him for a moment. Wendy began to sob harder. Liz relaxed, letting the girt go, and began to cry again herself. She looked into his eyes. 'If you hurt her, I'll kill you.'

'I know you'd try,' Stark said gravely. 'I have great respect for motherhood, Beth. You think I am a monster, and maybe you're right. But real monsters are never without feelings. I think in the end it's that, and not how they look, that makes them so scary. I'm not going to hurt this little one, Beth. She's safe with me . . . as long as you cooperate.'

Liz now held William in both arms . . . and the circle her arms made had never felt so empty to her. Never in her life had she been so convinced she had made a mistake. But what else was there to do?

'Besides . . . look!' Stark cried, and there was something in his voice that she could not, would not, credit. The tenderness she believed she heard had to be counterfeit, only more of his monstrous teasing. But he was looking down at Wendy with a profound and disturbing attention . .

. and Wendy was looking up at him, rapt, no longer crying. 'The little one doesn't know how I look. She's not scared of me a bit, Beth. Not a bit.'

She watched in silent horror as he raised his right hand. He had stripped off the gloves and she could see a heavy gauze bandage across it, exactly where Thad was wearing a bandage over the back of his left hand. Stark opened his fist, closed it, opened it again. It was clear from the tightening of his jaw that flexing his hand caused him some pain, but he did it, anyway, Thad does that, he does it just that way, oh my God he does It JUST THAT SAME WAY - Wendy now appeared to be totally calm. She gazed up into Stark's face, studying him with close attention, her cool gray eyes on Stark's muddy blue ones. With the skin fallen away beneath them, his eyes looked as if they might fall out at any moment and dangle on his cheeks by their stalks. And Wendy waved back.

Hand open; hand closed; hand open.

A Wendy-wave.

Liz felt movement in her arms, looked down, and saw that William was looking at George Stark with the same rapt blue-gray gaze. He was smiling.

William's hand opened; closed; opened.

A William-wave.

'No,' she moaned, almost too low to hear. 'Oh God, no, please don't let this be happening.'

'You see?' Stark said, looking up at her. He was grinning his frozen Sardonicus grin at her, and the most horrible thing about it was her understanding that he was trying to be gentle . . . and could not be. 'You see? They like me, Beth. They like me.'

8.Stark carried Wendy out to the driveway after putting his dark glasses on again. Liz ran to the window and looked after them anxiously. Part of her was positive he intended to hop into the police cruiser and drive away with her baby on the seat beside him and the two dead state troopers in the back.

But for a moment he did nothing - simply stood there in hazy sunshine by the driver's door, head down, the baby cradled in his arms. He remained in that motionless position for some time, as if speaking seriously to Wendy, or perhaps praying. Later, when she had more information, she decided he had been trying to get in touch with Thad again, perhaps to read his thoughts and divine whether he intended to do what Stark wanted him to do, or if he had plans of his own. After about thirty seconds of this, Stark lifted his head, shook it briskly, as if to clear it, then got into the cruiser and started it up. The keys were in the ignition, she thought dully. He didn't even have to hot-wire it, or whatever they do. That man has got the luck of the devil. Stark drove the cruiser into the garage and cut the motor. Then she heard the car door slam and he came back out, pausing long enough to hit the button that sent the door rumbling down on its tracks.

A few moments later he was in the house again and handing Wendy back to her.

'You see?' he asked. 'She's fine. Now tell me about the people next door. The Clarks.'

'The Clarks?' she asked, feeling extraordinarily stupid. 'Why do you want to know about them?

They're in Europe this summer.'

He smiled. It was, in a way, the most hideous thing yet, because under more ordinary circumstances it would have been a smile of genuine pleasure . . . and quite a winning one, she suspected. And didn't she feel just an instant of attraction? A freakish flicker? It was insane, of course, but did that mean she could deny it? Liz didn't think so, and she even understood why it might be. After all, she had married this man's closest relative.

'Wonderful!' he said. 'Couldn't be better! And do they have a car?'

Wendy began to cry. Liz looked down and saw her daughter looking at the man with the rotten face and the bulging marble eyes, holding her small and pleasantly chubby arms out. She was not crying because she was afraid of him; she was crying because she wanted to go back to him.

'Isn't that sweet!' Stark said. 'She wants to come back to Daddy. '

'Shut up, you monster!' she spat at him.

Foxy George Stark threw his head back and laughed.

9

He gave her five minutes to pack a few more things for herself and the twins. She told him it would be impossible to get together half of what they'd need in that length of time, and he told her to do the best she could.

'You're lucky I'm giving you any more time at all, Beth, under the circumstances - there are two dead cops in your garage and your husband knows what's going on. If you want to take the five minutes debating the point with me, that's your choice. You're already down to . . . ' He glanced at his watch, then smiled at her. 'Four-and-a-half.'

So she did what she could, pausing once while tossing jars of baby food into a shopping bag to look at her children. They were sitting side by side on the floor, playing an idle sort of pat-acake.with each other and looking at Stark. She was dreadfully afraid she knew what they were thinking

about.

Isn't that sweet.

No. She wouldn't think about it. She wouldn't think about it but it was all she could think about: Wendy, crying and holding out her pudgy little arms. Holding them out to the murderous stranger. They want to go back to Daddy.

He was standing in the kitchen doorway, watching her, smiling, and she wanted to use the scissors right then. She had never in her life wanted anything so badly. 'Can't you give me a hand?'

she cried angrily at him, gesturing at the two bags and the cooler she had filled.

'Of course, Beth,' he said. He took one of the bags for her. His other hand, the left, he kept free. 10

They crossed the side yard, passed through the little greenbelt between properties, and then walked across the Clarks' yard to their driveway. Stark insisted that she move fast, and she was panting by the time they stopped in front of the closed garage door. He had offered to take one of the twins, but she'd refused.

He set down the cooler, took his wallet from his back pocket, removed a narrow strip of metal which tapered to a point, and slipped it into the lock of the garage door. He turned it first to the right and then back to the left, one car cocked. There was a click and he smiled.

'Good,' he said. 'Even Mickey Mouse locks on garage doors can be a pain in the ass. Big springs. Hard to tip them over. This one's as tired as an old whore's twat at daybreak, though. Lucky for us.' He turned the handle and shoved. The door rumbled up on its tracks. The garage was hot as a haymow, and the Clarks' Volvo wagon was even hotter inside. Stark bent beneath the dashboard, exposing the back of his neck to her as she sat in the passenger seat. Her fingers twitched. It would only take a second to rip the scissors free, but that could still be too long. She had seen how quickly he reacted to the unexpected. It did not really surprise her that his reflexes were as fast as those of a wild animal, since that was what he was. He raked down a bunch of wires from behind the dash, then produced a bloody straight-razor from his front pocket. She shivered a little and had to swallow twice, fast, to stifle a gag-reflex. He unfolded the blade, bent down again, stripped insulation from two of the wires, and touched the bare copper cores together. There was a sliver of blue spark, and then the engine began to turn over. A moment later the car was running.

'Well, all right!' George Stark crowed. 'Let's roll, what do you say?'

The twins giggled together and waved their hands at him. Stark waved gaily back. As he backed the car out of the garage, Liz reached stealthily behind Wendy, who was sitting on her lap, and touched the rounds that were the fingerholes of the scissors. Not now, but soon. She had no intention of waiting for Thad. She was too uneasy about what this dark creature might decide to do to the twins in the meantime.

Or to her.

As soon as he was sufficiently distracted, she intended to free the scissors from their hiding

place and bury them in his throat..PART 3

THE COMING OF THE

PSYCHOPOMPS

'The poets talk about love,' Machine said, running the straight-razor back and forth along the strop in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, 'and that's okay. There is love. The politicians talk about duty, and that's okay, too. There is duty. Eric Hoffer talks about post-modernism, Hugh Hefner talks about sex, Hunter Thompson talks about drugs, and Jimmy Swaggart talks about God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those things all exist and they are all okay. Do you know what I mean, Jack?'

'Yeah, I guess so,' Jack Rangely said. He really didn't know, didn't have the slightest idea, but when Machine was in this sort of mood, only a lunatic would argue with him. Machine turned the straight-razor's edge down and suddenly slashed the strop in two. A long section fell to the pool-hall floor like a severed tongue. 'But what I talk about is doom,' he said.

'Because, in the end, doom is all that counts.'

? Riding to Babylon

by George Stark.