he Invasion of the Creepazoid

1

'I call him a Creepazoid,' Liz began. 'I'm sorry that he's dead . . . but that's what he was, just the same. I don't know if genuine Creepazoids are born or made, but they rise to their own slimy station in life either way, so I guess it doesn't matter. Frederick Clawson's happened to be Washington, D.C. He went to the biggest legal snake-pit on earth to study for the bar.

'Thad, the kiddos are stirring - will you give them their night-bottles? And I'd like another beer, please.'

He got her the beer and then went out into the kitchen to warm the bottles. He wedged the kitchen door open so he could hear better . . . and slammed his kneecap in the process. This was something he had done so many times before that he barely noticed it. The sparrows are flying again, he thought, and rubbed at the scar on his forehead as he first filled a saucepan with warm water, then put it on the stove. Now if I only knew what the fuck that means.

'We eventually got most of this story from Clawson himself,' Liz went on, 'but his perspective was naturally a little skewed Thad likes to say all of us are the heroes of our own lives, and according to Clawson he was more of a Boswell than a Creepazoid . . . but we were able to put together a more balanced version by adding stuff we got from the people at Darwin Press, which published the novels Thad wrote under Stark's name, and the stuff Rick Cowley passed along.'

'Who is Rick Cowley?' Alan asked.

'The literary agent who handled Thad under both names.'

'And what did Clawson - your Creepazoid - want?'

'Money,' Liz said dryly.

In the kitchen, Thad took the two night-bottles (only half fun to help cut down on those inconvenient changes in the middle of the night) from the fridge and popped them in the pan of water. What Liz had said was right . . . but it was also wrong. Clawson had wanted a great deal more than money.

Liz might have read his mind.

'Not that money was all he wanted. I'm not even sure that was the main thing. He also wanted to be known as the man who exposed George Stark's real identity,'

'Sort of like being the one who finally manages to unmask The Incredible Spider-Man?'

'Exactly.'

Thad put a finger in the saucepan to test the water, then leaned back against the stove with his arms crossed, listening. He realized that he wanted a cigarette - for the first time in years he wanted a cigarette again.

Thad shivered..2

'Clawson was in too many right places at too many right times,' Liz said. 'Not only was he a law student, he was a part-time bookstore clerk. Not only was he a bookstore clerk, he was an avid fan of George Stark's. And he may have been the only George Stark fan in the country who had also read Thad Beaumont's two novels.'

In the kitchen, Thad grinned - not without some sourness - and tested the water in the saucepan again.

'I think he wanted to create some sort of grand drama out of his suspicions,' Liz went on. 'As things turned out, he had to work his fanny off to rise above the pedestrian. Once he had decided Stark was really Beaumont and vice versa, he called Darwin Press.'

'Stark's book publisher.'

'Right. He got to Ellie Golden, the woman who edited the Stark novels. He asked the question straight out - please tell me if George Stark is really Thaddeus Beaumont. Ellie said the idea was ridiculous. Clawson then asked about the author photo on the back of the Stark novels. He said he wanted the address of the man in the picture. Ellie told him she couldn't give out the addresses of

the publishing company's authors.

'Clawson said, 'I don't want Stark's address, I want the address of the man in the picture. The man posing as Stark.' Ellie told him he was being ridiculous - that the man in the author photo was George Stark.

'Previous to this, the publisher never came out and said it was just a pen name?' Alan asked. He sounded genuinely curious. 'They took the position that he was a real man all along?'

'Oh yes - Thad insisted.'

Yes, he thought, taking the bottles out of the saucepan and testing the milk against the inside of his wrist. Thad insisted. In retrospect, Thad doesn't know just why he insisted, does not in fact have the slightest idea, but Thad did indeed insist.

He took the bottles back into the living room, avoiding a collision with the kitchen table on the way. He gave a bottle to each twin. They hoisted them solemnly, sleepily, and began to suck. Thad sat down again. He listened to Liz and told himself that the thought of a cigarette was the furthest thing from his mind.

'Anyway,' Liz said, 'Clawson wanted to ask more questions he had a whole truckload of them, I guess - but Ellie wouldn't play. She told him to call Rick Cowley and then hung up on him. Clawson then called Rick's office and got Miriam. She's Rick's ex-wife. Also his partner in the agency. The arrangement's a little odd, but they get along very well.

'Clawson asked her the same thing - if George Stark was really Thad Beaumont. According to Miriam, she told him yes. Also that she was Dolley Madison. 'I've divorced James,' she said, 'Thad is divorcing Liz, and we two shall marry in the spring!' And hung up. She then rushed into Rick's office and told him some guy in Washington, D.C., was prying around the edges of Thad's secret identity. After that, Clawson's calls to Cowley Associates netted him nothing but quick hang-ups.'

Liz took a long swallow of her beer.

'He didn't give up, though. I've decided that real Creepazoids never do. He just decided that pretty-please wasn't going to work.'

'And he didn't call Thad?' Alan asked.

'No, not once.'

'You have an unlisted number, I suppose.'.Thad made one of his few direct contributions to the story. 'We're not listed in the public

directories, Alan, but the phone here in Ludlow is listed in the faculty directory. It has to be. I'm a teacher, and I have advisees.'

'But the guy never went directly to the horse's mouth,' Alan marvelled.

'He got in touch later on . . . by letter,' Liz said. 'But that's getting ahead of things. Should I go on?'

'Please,' Alan said. 'It's a fascinating story in its own right.'

'Well,' Liz said, 'it took our Creepazoid just three weeks and probably less than five hundred dollars to ferret out what he was positive about all along - that Thad and George Stark were the same man.

'He started with Literary Market Place, which publishing types just call LMP. It's a digest of names, addresses, and business phone numbers for just about everyone in the field - writers, editors, publishers, agents. Using that and the 'People' column in Publishers Weekly, he managed to isolate half a dozen Darwin Press employees who left the company between the summer of 1986 and the summer of 1987.

'One of them had the information and was willing to spill it. Ellie Golden's pretty sure the culprit was the girl who was the chief comptroller's secretary for eight months in '85 and '86. Ellie called her a slut from Vassar with bad nasal habits.'

Alan laughed.

'Thad believes that's who it was, too,' Liz went on, 'because the smoking gun turned out to be photostats of royalty statements for George Stark. They came from the office of Roland Burrets.'

'The Darwin Press chief comptroller,' Thad said. He was watching the twins while he listened. They were lying on their backs now, sleep-suited feet pressed chummily together, bottles pointed toward the ceiling. Their eyes were glassy and distant. Soon, he knew, they would fall asleep for the night . . . and when they did, they would do it together. They do everything together, Thad thought. The babies are sleepy and the sparrows are flying - He touched the scar again.

'Thad's name wasn't on the photostats,' Liz said. 'Royalty statements sometimes lead to checks, but they're not checks themselves, so it didn't have to appear there. You follow that, don't you?'

Alan nodded.

'But the address still told him most of what he needed to know. It was Mr George Stark, P.O. Box 1642, Brewer, Maine 04412. That's a long way from Mississippi, where Stark was supposed to live. A look at a Maine map would have told him that the town immediately south of Brewer is Ludlow, and he knew what well regarded if not exactly famous writer lived there. Thaddeus Beaumont.

What a coincidence.

'Neither Thad nor I ever saw him in person, but he saw Thad. He knew when Darwin Press mailed out its quarterly royalty checks from the photostats he had already received. Most royalty checks go to the author's agent first. Then the agent issues a new one, which reflects the original amount minus his commission. But in Stark's case, the comptroller mailed the checks directly to the Brewer post office box.'

'What about the agent's commission?' Alan asked.

'Clipped off the total amount at Darwin Press and sent to Rick by separate check,' Liz said. 'That would have been another clear signal to Clawson that George Stark wasn't what he claimed to be .

. . only by then, Clawson didn't need any more clues. He wanted hard proof. And set out to get it.

'When it was time for the royalty check to be issued, Clawson flew up here. He stayed at the Holiday Inn nights; he spent his days 'staking out' the Brewer post office. That's exactly how he.put it in the letter Thad got later on. It was a stakeout. All very film noir. It was a pretty cut-rate investigation, though. If 'Stark' hadn't shown up to collect his check on the fourth day of his stay, Clawson would have had to fold his tent and steal back into the night. But I don't think it would have ended there. When a genuine Creepazoid gets his teeth in you, he doesn't let go until he's bitten out a big chunk.'

'Or until you knock his teeth out,' Thad grunted. He saw Alan turn in his direction, eyebrows raised, and grimaced. Bad choice of words. Someone had apparently done just that to Liz's Creepazoid . . . or something even worse.

'It's a moot question, anyway,' Liz resumed, and Alan turned back to her. 'It didn't take that long. On the third day, while he was sitting on a park bench across from the post office, he saw Thad's Suburban pull into one of the ten-minute parking slots near the post office.'

Liz took another swallow of beer and wiped foam off her upper lip. When her hand came away, she was smiling.

'Now here's the part I like,' she said. 'It's just d-d-delicious, as the gay fellow in Brideshead Revisited used to say. Clawson had a camera. This little tiny camera, the sort you can cup in the palm of your hand. When you're ready to take your shot, you just spread your fingers a little to let the lens peek through, and bingo! There you are.'

She giggled a little, shaking her head at the image.

'He said in his letter he got it from some catalogue that sells spy gear - telephone bugs, goo you swab on envelopes to turn them transparent for ten or fifteen minutes, self-destructing briefcases, stuff like that. Secret Agent X-9 Clawson, reporting for duty. I bet he would have gotten a hollow tooth filled with cyanide, if it was legal to sell them. He was heavily into the image.

'Anyhow, he got half a dozen fairly passable photos. Not arty stuff, but you could see who the subject was and what he was doing. There was a shot of Thad approaching the post office boxes in the lobby, a shot of Thad putting his key into box 1642, and one of him removing an envelope.'

'He sent you copies of these?' Alan asked. She had said he wanted money, and Alan guessed the lady knew what she was talking about. The setup did more than smell of blackmail; it reeked of it.

'Oh yes. And an enlargement of the last one. You can read part of the return address - the letters DARW, and you can clearly make out the Darwin Press colophon above it.'

'X-9 strikes again,' Alan said.

'Yes. X-9 strikes again. He got the photos developed, and then he flew back to Washington. We got his letter, with the photos included, only a few days later. The letter was really marvelous. He skated up to the edge of threat, but never once over the edge.'

'He was a law student,' Thad said.

'Yes,' Liz agreed. 'He knew just how far he could go, apparently. Thad can get you the letter, but I can paraphrase. He started by saying how much he admired both halves of what he called Thad's

'divided mind.' He recounted what he'd found out and how he'd done it. Then he went on to his real business. He was very careful about showing us the hook, but the hook was there. He said he was an aspiring writer himself, but he didn't have much time to write - his law studies were demanding, but that was only part of it. The real problem, he said, was that he had to work in a bookstore to help pay his tuition and other bills. He said he would like to show Thad some of his work, and if Thad thought it showed promise, perhaps he might feel moved to put together an assistance package to help him along the way.'

'An assistance package,' Alan said, bemused. 'Is that what they're calling it these days?'

Thad threw back his head and laughed..'That's what Clawson called it, anyway. I think I can quote the last bit by heart. 'I know this

must seem a very forward request to you on first reading,' he said, 'but I am sure that if you studied my work, you would quickly understand that such an arrangement might hold advantages for both of us.'

'Thad and I raved about it for awhile, then we laughed about it, then I think we raved some more.'

'Yeah,' Thad said. 'I don't know about the laughing, but we sure did do a lot of raving.'

'Finally we got down to just plain talking. We talked almost until midnight. We both recognized Clawson's letter and his photographs for what they were, and once Thad got over being angry - '

'I'm still not over being angry,' Thad interjected, 'and the guy's dead.'

'Well, once the yelling died down, Thad was almost relieved. He'd wanted to jettison Stark for quite awhile, and he'd already gotten to work on a long, serious book of his own. Which he's still doing. It's called The Golden Dog. I've read the first two hundred pages, and it's lovely. Much better than the last couple of things he churned out as George Stark. So Thad decided - '

'We decided,' Thad said.

'Okay, we decided that Clawson was a blessing in disguise, a way to hurry along what was already coming. Thad's only fear was that Rick Cowley wouldn't like the idea much, because George Stark was earning more for the agency than Thad, by far. But he was a real honey about it. In fact, he said it might just generate some publicity that would help in a number of areas: Stark's backlist, Thad's own backlist - '

'All two books of it,' Thad put in with a smile.

'-and the new book, when it finally comes out.'

'Pardon me - what's a backlist?' Alan asked.

Grinning now, Thad said: 'The old books they no longer put in the big fancy dump-bins at the front of the chain bookstores.'

'So you went public.'

'Yes,' Liz said. 'First to the AP here in Maine and to Publishers Weekly, but the story popped up on the national wire Stark was a best-selling writer, after all, and the fact that he never really existed at all made for interesting filler on the back pages. And then People magazine got in touch.

'We got one more squealing, angry letter from Frederick Clawson, telling us how mean and nasty and thankless we were. He seemed to think we had no right to take him out of things the way we had, because he had done all the work and all Thad had done was to write a few books. After that he signed off.'

'And now he's signed off for good,' Thad said.

'No,' Alan said. 'Someone signed off for him . . . and that's a big difference.'

A silence fell among them. It was short . . . but very, very heavy. 3

Alan thought for several minutes. Thad and Liz let him. At last he looked up and said, 'Okay. Why? Why would anyone resort to murder over this? Especially after the secret had already come out?'

Thad shook his head. 'If it has to do with me, or the books I wrote as George Stark, I don't know who or why.'.'And over a pen name?' Alan asked in a musing voice. 'I mean - no offense intended, Thad, but

it wasn't exactly a classified document or a big military secret.'

'No offense taken,' Thad said. 'In fact, I couldn't agree more.'

'Stark had a lot of fans,' Liz said. 'Some of them were angry that Thad wasn't going to write any more novels as Stark. People got some letters after the article, and Thad's gotten a bunch. One lady went so far as to suggest that Alexis Machine should come out of retirement and cook Thad's goose.'

'Who's Alexis Machine?' Alan had produced the notebook again. Thad grinned. 'Soft, soft, my good Inspector. Machine's just a character in two of the novels George wrote. The first and the last.'

'A fiction by a fiction,' Alan said, putting the notebook back. 'Great.'

Thad, meanwhile, looked mildly startled. 'A fiction by a fiction,' he said. 'That's not bad. Not bad at all.'

'My point was this,' Liz said. 'Maybe Clawson had a friend always assuming Creepazoids have friends - who was a rabid Stark fan. Maybe he knew Clawson was really responsible for blowing the story wide open, and got so mad because there wouldn't be any more Stark novels that he . . . '

She sighed, looked down at her beer-bottle for a moment, then raised her head again.

'That's actually pretty lame, isn't it?'

'I'm afraid so,' Alan said kindly, then looked at Thad. 'You ought to be down on your knees thanking God for your alibi now, even if you weren't before. You do realize this makes you look even tastier as a suspect, don't you?'

'I suppose in a way it does,' Thad agreed. 'Thaddeus Beaumont has written two books hardly anybody has read. The second, published eleven years ago, didn't even review very well. The infinitesimal advances he got didn't earn out; it'll be a wonder if he can even get published again, with the business being what it is. Stark, on the other hand, makes money by the fistful. They're discreet fistfuls, but the books still earn six times what I make teaching each year. This guy Clawson comes along, with his carefully worded blackmail threat. I refuse to cave in, but my only option is to go public with the story myself. Not long after, Clawson is killed. It looks like a great

motive, but it's really not. Killing a would-be blackmailer after you've already told the secret yourself would be dumb.'

'Yes . . . but there's always revenge.'

'I suppose - until you look at the rest of it. What Liz told you is perfectly true. Stark was just about ready for the scrap-heap, anyway. There might have been one more book, but only one. And one of the reasons Rick Cowley was such a honey, as Liz put it, was because he knew it, And he was right about the publicity. The People article, silly as it was, has done wonders for sales. Rick tells me Riding to Babylon has a shot at going back on the best-seller list, and sales are up on all Stark novels. Dutton's even planning to bring The Sudden Dancers and Purple Maze back into print. You look at it that way, Clawson did me a favor.'

'So where does that leave us?' Alan asked.

'I'll be damned if I know,' Thad replied.

Into the silence that followed, Liz said in a soft voice: 'It's a crocodile-hunter. I was thinking about them just this morning. It's a crocodile-hunter, and he's just as crazy as a loon.'

'Crocodile-hunter?' Alan turned to her.

Liz explained about Thad's see-the-living-crocodiles syndrome. 'It could have been a crazy fan,'

she said. 'It's not that lame, not when you think about the fellow who shot John Lennon and the.one who tried to kill Ronald Reagan to impress Jody Foster. They are out there. And if Clawson could find out about Thad, someone else could have found out about Clawson.'

'But why would a guy like that try to implicate me, if he loves my stuff so much?' Thad asked.

'Because he doesn't!' Liz said vehemently. 'Stark's the man the crocodile-hunter loves. He probably hates you almost as much as he hates - hated - Clawson. You said you weren't sorry Stark was dead. That could be reason enough right there.'

'I still don't buy it,' Alan said. 'The fingerprints - '

'You say prints have never been copied or planted, Alan, but since they were in both places, there must be a way. It's the only thing that fits.'

Thad heard himself say, 'No, you're wrong, Liz. If there is such a guy, he doesn't just love Stark.' He looked down at his arms and saw they were covered with goosebumps.

'No?' Alan asked.

Thad looked up at them both.

'Have you thought that the man who killed Homer Gamache and Frederick Clawson might think he is George Stark?'

4

On the steps, Alan said: 'I'll keep you in touch, Thad.' In one hand he held photocopies - made on the machine in Thad's office - of Frederick Clawson's two letters. Thad thought privately that Alan's willingness to accept photocopies - at least for the present rather than insisting on taking the originals into evidence was the clearest sign of all that he had given over most of his suspicions.

'And be back to arrest me if you find the loophole in my alibi?' Thad asked, smiling.

'I don't think that's going to happen. The only thing I'd ask is that you keep me in touch, as well.'

'If something comes up, you mean?'

'Yes. That's what I mean.'

'I'm sorry we couldn't be more helpful,' Liz told him.

Alan grinned. 'You've helped me a lot. I couldn't decide whether to hang on another day, which would mean another night in a cinderblock Ramada Inn room, or drive back to Castle Rock. Thanks to what you've told me, I'm opting for the drive. Starting now. It'll be good to get back. Just lately my wife Annie's been a little under the weather.'

'Nothing serious, I hope,' Liz said.

'Migraine,' Alan said briefly. He started down the walk, then turned back, 'There is one other thing.'

Thad rolled his eyes at Liz. 'Here it comes,' he said. 'It's the old Columbo crumplediraincoat zinger.'

'Nothing like that,' Alan said, 'but the Washington P.D. is holding back one piece of physical evidence in the Clawson killing. It's common practice; helps to weed out the crazies who like to confess to crimes they didn't commit. Something was written on the wall of Clawson's apartment.'

Alan paused and then added, almost apologetically: 'It was written in the victim's blood. If I tell you what it was, will you give me your word you'll keep it under your hats?'

They nodded.

'The phrase was 'The sparrows are flying again.' Does that mean anything to either of you?'.'No,' Liz said.

'No,' Thad said in a neutral voice after a momentary hesitation. Alan's gaze stayed on Thad's face for a moment. 'You are quite sure?'

'Quite sure.'

Alan sighed. 'I doubted if it would, but it seemed like a shot worth taking. There are so many

other weird connections, I thought there just might be one more. Goodnight, Thad, Liz. Remember to get in touch if anything occurs.'

'We will,' Liz said.

'Count on it,' Thad agreed.

A moment later they were both inside again, with the door closed against Alan Pangborn - and the dark through which he would make his long trip home..