reaking Up Housekeeping

1

That night Thad had a nightmare. He woke from it near tears and trembling like a puppy caught out in a thunderstorm. He was with George Stark in the dream, only George was a real estate agent instead of a writer, and he was always standing just behind Thad, so he was only a voice and a shadow.

2

The Darwin Press author-sheet - which Thad had written just before starting Oxford Blues, the second George Stark opus - stated that Stark drove 'a 1967 GMC pick-up truck held together by prayer and primer paint.' In the dream, however, they had been riding in a dead black Toronado, and Thad knew he had gotten the pick-up truck part wrong. This was what Stark drove. This jetpropelled hearse.

The Toronado was jacked in the back and didn't look like a realtor's car at all. What it looked like was something a third-echelon mobster might drive around in. Thad looked over his shoulder at it as they walked toward the house Stark was for some reason showing him. He thought he would see Stark, and an icicle of sharp fear slid into his heart. But now Stark was standing just behind his other shoulder (although Thad had no idea how he could have gotten there so fast and so soundlessly), and all he could see was the car, a steel tarantula gleaming in the sunlight. There was a sticker on the high-rise rear bumper. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, it read. The words were flanked left and right by a skull and crossbones.

The house Stark had driven him to was his house - not the winter home in Ludlow, not too far from the University, but the summer place in Castle Rock. The north bay of Castle Lake opened out behind the house, and Thad could hear the faint sound of waves lapping against the shore. There was a FOR SALE sign on the small patch of lawn beyond the driveway. Nice house, isn't it? Stark almost whispered from behind his shoulder. His voice was rough yet caressing, like the lick of a tomcat's tongue.

It's my house, Thad answered.

You're quite wrong. The owner of this one is dead. He killed his wife and children and then himself. He pulled the plug. Just wham and jerk and bye-bye. He had that streak in him. You didn't have to look hard to see it, either. You might say it was pretty stark. Is that supposed to be funny? he intended to ask - it seemed very important to show Stark he wasn't frightened of him. The reason it was important was that he was utterly terrified. But before he could frame the words, a large hand which appeared to have no lines on it at all (although it was hard to tell for sure because the way the fingers were folded cast a tangled shadow over the palm) was reaching over his shoulder and dangling a bunch of keys in his face. No - not dangling. If it had just been that, he might have spoken anyway, might even have brushed the keys away in order to show how little he feared this fearsome man who insisted on.standing behind him. But the hand was bringing the keys toward his face. Thad had to grab them to keep them from crashing into his nose.

He put one of them into the lock on the front door, a smooth oak expanse broken only by the knob and a brass knocker that looked like a small bird. The key turned easily, and that was strange, since it wasn't a housekey at all but a typewriter key on the end of a long steel rod. All the

other keys on the ring appeared to be skeleton keys, the kind burglars carry. He grasped the knob and turned it. As he did, the iron-bound wood of the door shrivelled and shrank in on itself with a series of explosions as loud as firecrackers. Light showed through the new cracks between the boards. Dust puffed out. There was a brittle snap and one of the decorative pieces of ironmongery fell off the door and thumped on the doorstep at Thad's feet. He stepped inside.

He didn't want to; he wanted to stand on the stoop and argue with Stark. More! Remonstrate with him, ask him why in God's name he was doing this, because going inside the house was even more frightening than Stark himself. But this was a dream, a bad one, and it seemed to him that the essence of bad dreams was lack of control. It was like being on a roller-coaster that might at any second crest an incline and plunge you down into a brick wall where you would die as messily as a bug slapped with a flyswatter.

The familiar hallway had been rendered unfamiliar, almost hostile, by no more than the absence of the faded turkey-colored rug-runner which Liz kept threatening to replace . . . and while this seemed a small thing during the dream itself, it was what he kept returning to later, perhaps because it was authentically horrifying - horrifying outside the context of the dream. How secure could any life be if the subtraction of something as minor as a hallway rug-runner could cause such strong feelings of disconnection, disorientation, sadness and dread?

He didn't like the echo his footfalls made on the hardwood floor, and not just because they made the house sound as if the villain standing behind him had told the truth - that it was untenanted, full of the still ache of absence. He didn't like the sound because his own footsteps sounded lost and dreadfully unhappy to him.

He wanted to turn and leave, but he couldn't do that. Because Stark was behind him, and somehow he knew that Stark was now holding Alexis Machine's pearl-handled straight-razor, the one his mistress had used at the end of Machine's Way to carve up the bastard's face. If he turned around, George Stark would do a little whittling of his own. Empty of people the house might be, but except for the rugs (the wall-to-wall salmon-colored carpet in the living room was also gone), all the furnishings were still there. A vase of flowers stood on the little deal table at the end of the hall, where you could either go straight ahead into the living room with its high cathedral ceiling and window-wall facing the lake, or turn right into the kitchen. Thad touched the vase and it exploded into shards and a cloud of acrid-smelling ceramic powder. Stagnant water poured out, and the half-dozen garden roses which had been blooming there were dead and gray-black before they landed in the puddle of smelly water on the table. He touched the table itself. The wood gave a dry, parched crack and the table split in two, seeming to swoon rather than fall to the bare wood floor in two separate pieces. What have you done to my house? he cried to the man behind him . . . but without turning. He didn't need to turn in order to verify the presence of the straight-razor, which, before Nonie Griffiths had used it on Machine, leaving his cheeks hanging in red and white flaps and one eye dangling from its socket, Machine himself had employed to flay open the noses of his 'business rivals.'.Nothing, Stark said, and Thad didn't have to see him in order to verify the smile he heard in the man's voice. You are doing it, old hoss.

Then they were in the kitchen.

Thad touched the stove and it split in two with a dull noise like the clanging of a great bell clotted with dirt. The heating coils popped upward and askew, funny spiral hats blown cocked in a gale. A noxious stench eddied out of the dark hole in the stove's middle, and, peering in, he saw a turkey. It was putrescent and noisome. Black fluid filled with unnameable gobbets of flesh oozed from the cavity in the bird.

Down here we call that fool's stuffing, Stark remarked from behind him. What do you mean? Thad asked. Where do you mean, down here?

Endsville, Stark said calmly. This is the place where all rail service terminates, Thad. He added something else, but Thad missed it. Liz's purse was on the floor, and Thad stumbled over it. When he grasped the kitchen table to keep himself from falling, the table fell into splinters and sawdust on the linoleum. A bright nail spun into one corner with a tiny metallic chattering noise.

Stop this right now! Thad cried. I want to wake up! I hate to break things!

You always were the clumsy one, old hoss, Stark said. He spoke as if Thad had had a great many siblings, all of them as graceful as gazelles.

I don't have to be, Thad informed him in an anxious voice that teetered on the edge of a whine. I don't have to be clumsy. I don't have to break things. When I'm careful, everything is fine. Yes - too bad you stopped being careful, Stark said in that same smiling I-am-just-remarking-on-how-things-are voice. And they were in the back hall. Here was Liz, sitting splay-legged in the corner by the door to the woodshed, one loafer off, one loafer on. A dead sparrow lay in her lap. She was wearing nylon stockings, and Thad could see a

run in one of them. Her head was down, her slightly coarse honey-blonde hair obscuring her face. He didn't want to see her face. As he hadn't needed to see either the razor or Stark's razor grin to know that both were there, so he didn't need to see Liz's face to know she was not sleeping or unconscious but dead.

Turn on the lights, you'll be able to see better, Stark said in that same smiling I-am-just-passingthe-time-of-day-with-you-my-friend voice. His hand appeared over Thad's shoulder, pointing to the lights Thad himself had installed back here. They were electric, of course, but looked quite authentic: two hurricane lamps mounted on a wooden spindle and controlled by a dimmer switch on the wall.

I don't want to see!

He was trying to sound hard and sure of himself, but this was starting to get to him. He could hear a hitching, uneven quality to his voice which meant he was getting ready to blubber. And what he said seemed to make no difference anyway, because he reached for the circular rheostat on the wall. When he touched it, blue painless electric fire squirted out between his fingers, so thick it was more like jelly than light. The rheostat's round ivory-colored knob turned black, blew off the wall, and zizzed across the room like a miniature flying saucer. It broke the small window on the other side and disappeared into a day which had taken on a weird green cast of light, like weathered copper.

The electric hurricane lamps glowed supernaturally bright and the spindle began to turn, winding up the chain from which the fixture depended and sending shadows flying across the room in a lunatic carousel dance. First one and then the other of the lamp-chimneys shattered, showering Thad with glass..Without thinking he leaped forward and grabbed his sprawled wife, wanting to get her out from under before the chain could snap and drop the heavy wooden spindle on her. This impulse was so strong it overrode everything, including his sure knowledge that it didn't matter, she was dead. Stark could have uprooted the Empire State Building and dropped it on her and it wouldn't have mattered. Not to her, anyway. Not anymore.

As he slid his arms under hers and locked his hands between her shoulder-blades, her body shifted forward and her head lolled back. The skin of her face was cracking like the surface of a Ming vase. Her glazed eyes suddenly exploded. Noxious green jelly, sickeningly warm, spurted up into his face. Her mouth gaped ajar and her teeth flew out in a white storm. He could feel their small smooth hardnesses peppering his cheeks and brow. Half-clotted blood jetted from between her pitted gums. Her tongue rolled out of her mouth and fell off, plummeting into the lap of her skirt like a bloody chunk of snake.

Thad began to shriek - in the dream and not for real, thank God, or he would have frightened Liz very badly.

I'm not done with you, cock-knocker, George Stark said softly from behind him. His voice was no longer smiling. His voice was as cold as Castle Lake in November. Remember that. You don't want to fuck with me, because when you fuck with me . . . 3

Thad woke with a jerk, his face wet, his pillow, which he had clutched convulsively against his face, also wet. The moisture might have been sweat or it might have been tears.

'. . . you're fucking with the best,' he finished into the pillow, and then lay there, knees pulled up to his chest, shuddering convulsively.

'Thad?' Liz muttered thickly from somewhere in the thickets of her own dream. 'Twins okay?'

'Okay,' he managed. 'I . . . nothing. Go back to sleep.'

'Yeah, everything's . . .' She said something else, but he caught it no more than he had caught whatever Stark had said after telling Thad that the house in Castle Rock was Endsville . . . the place where all rail service terminates.

Thad lay inside his own sweaty outline on the sheet, slowly releasing his pillow. He rubbed his face with his bare arm, and waited for the dream to let go of him, waited for the shakes to let go of him. They did, but with surprising slowness. At least he had managed not to wake Liz. He stared thoughtlessly into the darkness, not trying to make sense of the dream, only wanting it to go away, and some endless time later Wendy awoke in the next room and began to cry to be changed. William of course awoke moments later, deciding he needed to be changed (although when Thad took off his diapers he found them quite dry). Liz woke at once and sleepwalked into the nursery. Thad went with her, considerably more awake and grateful for once that the twins needed servicing in the middle of the night. The middle of this night, anyway. He changed William while Liz changed Wendy, neither of them speaking much, and when they went back to bed, Thad was grateful to find himself drifting toward sleep again. He'd had an idea that he was probably through sleeping for the night. And when he had first awakened with the image of Liz's explosive decomposition still fresh behind his eyes, he had thought he would never sleep again.

It'll be gone in the morning, the way dreams always are..This was his last waking thought of the night, but when he woke the next morning he

remembered the dream in all its details (although the lost and lonely echo of his footfalls in the bare corridor was the only one which retained its full emotional color), and it did not fade as days went by, the way dreams usually do.

That was one of the rare ones he kept with him, as real as a memory. The key that was a typewriter key, the lineless palm, and the dry, almost uninflected voice of George Stark, telling him from behind his shoulder that he wasn't done with him, and that when you fucked with this high-toned son of a bitch, you were fucking with the best..