heer Panic

1

For several moments - he never had any idea how long - Thad was in the grip of a panic so utter and complete he was literally unable to function in any way. It was really amazing that he was even able to breathe. Later he would think that the only time he had ever felt remotely like this was when he was ten and he and a couple of friends had decided to go swimming in mid-May. This was at least three weeks earlier than any of them had ever gone swimming before, but it seemed a fine idea all the same; the day was clear and very hot for May in New Jersey, temperatures in the high eighties. The three of them had walked down to Lake Davis, their satiric name for the little pond a mile from Thad's house in Bergenfield. He was the first out of his clothes and into his bathing suit, hence the first into the water. He simply cannonballed in from the bank, and he still thought he might have come close to dying then - just how close was not anything he really wanted to know. The air that day might have felt like mid-summer, but the water felt like that last day in early winter before ice skims itself over the surface. His nervous system had momentarily short-circuited. His breath had stopped dead in his lungs, his heart had stopped in the very act of beating, and when he broke the surface it was as if he were a car with a dead battery and he needed a jump-start, needed it quick, and didn't know how to do it. He remembered how bright the sunlight had been, making ten thousand gold sparks on the blueblack surface of the water, he remembered Harry Black and Randy Wister standing on the bank, Harry pulling his faded gym-trunks up and over his generous butt, Randy standing there naked with his bathing suit in one hand and yelling How's the water, Thad? as he came bursting up, and all he had been able to think was I'm dying, I'm right here in the sun with my two best friends and it's after school and I have no homework and Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House is going to be on the Early Show tonight and Mom said I could eat in front of the TV but I'll never see it because I'm going to be dead. What had been easy, uncomplicated breath only seconds before was a clogged athletic sock in his throat, something he could neither push out nor suck in. His heart lay in his chest like a small cold stone. Then it had broken, he sucked in a great, whooping breath, his body rashed out in a billion goose-pimples, and he had answered Randy with the unthinking malicious glee which is the sole province of little boys: Water's fine! Not too cold! Jump in! It occurred to him only years later that he could have killed one or both of them, just as he had almost killed himself.

That was how it was now; he was in exactly the same sort of whole-body lock. They had a

name for something like this in the army - a cluster fuck. Yes. Good name. When it came to terminology, the army was great. He was sitting here in the middle of a great big cluster fuck. He sat on the chair, not in it but on it, leaning forward, the phone still in his hand, staring at the dead eye of the television. He was aware that Liz had come into the doorway, she was asking him first who it was and then what was wrong, and it was like that day at Lake Davis, just like it, his breath a dirty cotton sock in his throat, one that wouldn't go either way, all the lines of communication.between brain and heart suddenly down, we are sorry for this unscheduled stop, service will be

resumed as soon as possible, or maybe service will never be resumed, but either way, please enjoy your stay in beautiful downtown Endsville, the place where all rail service terminates. Then it just broke, as it had broken that other time, and he took a gasping breath. His heart took two rapid random galloping beats in his chest and then resumed its regular rhythm . . . although its pace was still fast, much too fast.

That scream. Jesus Christ Our Lord, that scream.

Liz was running across the room now, and he was aware that she'd snatched the telephone receiver out of his hand only when he saw her shouting Hello? and Who is this? into it again and again. Then she heard the hum of the broken connection and put it back down.

'Miriam,' he managed to say at last as Liz turned to him. 'It was Miriam and she was screaming.'

Except in books, I've never killed anyone.

The sparrows are flying.

Down here we call that fool's stuffing.

Down here we call it Endsville.

Gonna hook back north, hoss. You gotta lie me an alibi, because I'm gonna hook back north. Gonna cut me some beef.

'Miriam? Screaming? Miriam Cowley? Thad, what's going on?'

'It is him,' Thad said. 'I knew it was. I think I knew it almost from the first, and then today . . . this afternoon . . . I had another one.'

'Another what?' Her fingers pressed against the side of her neck, rubbing hard. 'Another blackout? Another trance?'

'Both,' he said. 'The sparrows again first. I wrote a lot of crazy shit on a piece of paper while I was knocked out. I threw it away, but her name was on the sheet, Liz, Miriam's name was part of what I wrote this time when I was out . . . and . . . '

He stopped. His eyes were widening, widening.

'What? Thad, what is it?' She seized one of his arms, shook it. 'What is it?'

'She has a poster in her living room,' he said. He heard his voice as though it were someone else's - a voice coming from far away. Over an intercom, perhaps. 'A poster from a Broadway musical. Cats. I saw it the last time we were there. Cats, NOW AND FOREVER. I wrote that down, too. I wrote it because he was there, and so I was there, part of me was, part of me was seeing with his eyes . . . '

He looked at her. He looked at her with his wide, wide eyes.

'This is no tumor, Liz. At least, not one that's inside of my body.'

'I don't know what you're talking about!' Liz nearly screamed.

'I've got to call Rick,' he muttered. Part of his mind seemed to be lifting off, moving brilliantly and talking to itself in images and crude bright symbols. It was this way when he wrote, sometimes, but it was the first time he could remember ever being this way in real life - was writing real life? he wondered suddenly. He didn't think it was. More like intermission.

'Thad, please!'

'I've got to warn Rick. He may be in danger.'

'Thad, you're not making sense!'

No; of course he wasn't. And if he stopped to explain, he would appear to be making even less .

. . and while he paused to confide his fears to his wife, probably accomplishing nothing but causing her to wonder how long it took to get the proper committal papers filled out, George Stark could be crossing the nine city blocks in Manhattan that separated Rick's apartment from his ex.wife's. Sitting in the back of a cab or behind the wheel of a stolen car, hell, sitting behind the wheel of the black Toronado from his dream, for all Thad knew - if you were going to go this far down the path to insanity, why not just say fuck it and go all the way? Sitting there, smoking, getting ready to kill Rick as he had Miriam -

Had he killed her?

Maybe he had just frightened her, left her sobbing and in shock. Or maybe he had hurt her - only on second thought, make that probably. What had she said? Don't let him cut me again, don't let the bad man cut me again. And on paper it had said cuts. And . . . hadn't it also said terminate?

Yes. Yes, it had, But that had to do with the dream, didn't it? That had to do with Endsville, the place where all rail service terminates . . . didn't it?

He prayed that it did.

He had to get her help, or at least had to try, and he had to warn Rick. But if he just called Rick, called him out of a clear blue sky and told him to be on his guard, Rick would want to know why. What's wrong, Thad? What's happened?

And if he so much as mentioned Miriam's name Rick would be up and off like a shot to her place, because Rick still cared for her. He still cared a hell of a lot. And then he would be the one to find her . . . maybe in pieces (part of Thad's mind tried to shy away from that thought, that image, but the rest of his mind was relentless, forcing him to see what pretty Miriam would look like, chopped up like meat on a butcher's counter).

And maybe that was just what Stark was counting on. Stupid Thad, sending Rick into a trap. Stupid Thad, doing his job for him.

But haven't I been doing his job for him all along? Isn't that what the pen name was all about, for Christ's sake?

He could feel his mind jamming up again, softly closing itself into a knot like a charley horse, into a cluster fuck, and he couldn't afford that, just now he couldn't afford that at all.

'Thad. . . please! Tell me what's going on!'

He took a deep breath and grasped her cold arms in his cold hands.

'It was the same man who killed Homer Gamache and Clawson. He was with Miriam. He was . .

. threatening her. I hope that's all he was doing. I don't know. She screamed. The line went dead.'

'Oh, Thad! Jesus!'

'There's no time for either of us to have hysterics,' he said, and thought, Although God knows part of me wants to. 'Go upstairs. Get your address book. I don't have Miriam's phone number and address in mine. I think you do.'

'What did you mean, you knew it almost from the first?'

'There's no time for that now, Liz. Get your address book. Get it quick. Okay?'

She hesitated a moment longer.

'She may be hurt! Go!'

She turned and ran from the room. He heard the quick, light pad of her feet going upstairs and tried to get his thoughts working again.

Don't call Rick. If it is a trap, calling Rick would be a very bad idea. Okay - we've gotten that far. It's not much, but it's a start. Who, then?

The New York City Police Department? No - they would be full of time-consuming questions

- how come a fellow in Maine was reporting a crime in New York, for starters. Not the N.Y.P.D. Another very bad idea.

Pangborn..His mind seized on the idea. He would call Pangborn first. He would have to be careful what he

said, at least for now. What he might or might not decide to say later on - about the blackouts, about the sound of the sparrows, about Stark - could take care of itself. For now, Miriam was the important thing. If Miriam was hurt but still alive, it wouldn't do to inject any elements into the situation which might slow Pangborn down. He was the one who'd have to call the New York cops. They would act faster and ask fewer questions if word came from one of their own, even if this particular brother cop happened to be up in Maine.

But Miriam first. Pray God she answered the phone.

Liz came flying back into the room with her address book. Her face was almost as pale as it had been after she had finally succeeded in squeezing William and Wendy into the world. 'Here it is,'

she said. She was breathing fast, nearly panting.

This is going to be all right, he thought to say to her, but held it back. He didn't want to say anything which could so easily turn out to be a lie . . . and the sound of Miriam's scream suggested things had gone. well past the all-right stage. That for Miriam, at least, things might never return to the all-right stage.

There's a man here, there's a bad man here.

Thad thought of George Stark and shuddered a little. He was a very bad man, all right. Thad knew the truth of that better than anyone. He had, after all, built George Stark from the ground up .

. . hadn't he?

'We're okay,' he said to Liz - that much, at least, was true. So far, his mind insisted on adding in a whisper. 'Get hold of yourself if you can, babe. Hyperventilating and fainting on the floor won't help Miriam.'

She sat down, ramrod straight, staring at him while her teeth gnawed relentlessly at her lower lip. He started to punch Miriam's number. His fingers, shaking a little, stuttered on the second digit, hitting it twice. You're a great one to be telling people to get hold of themselves. He drew in another long breath, held it, hit the disconnect button on the phone, and started in again, forcing himself to slow down. He hit the last button and listened to the deliberate clicks of the connection falling into place.

Let her be all right, God, and if she's not entirely all right, if You can't manage that, at least let her be all right enough to answer the telephone. Please.

But the phone didn't ring. There was only the insistent dah-dah-dah of a busy signal. Maybe it really was busy; maybe she was calling Rick or the hospital. Or maybe the phone was off the hook.

There was another possibility, though, he thought as he pushed the disconnect button again. Maybe Stark had pulled the phone cord out of the wall. Or maybe (don't let the bad man cut me again)

he had cut it.

As he had cut Miriam.

Razor, Thad thought, and a shudder twisted up his back. That had been another of the words in the stew of them he had written that afternoon. Razor.

2.The next half-hour or so was a return to the ominous surrealism he had felt when Pangborn and the two state troopers had turned up on his doorstep to arrest him for a murder he hadn't even known about. There was no sense of personal threat - no immediate personal threat, at least - but the same feeling of walking through a dark room filled with delicate strands of cobweb which brushed across your face, first tickling and ultimately maddening, strands which did not stick but whispered away just before you could grab them.

He tried Miriam's number again, and when it was still busy, he pushed the disconnect button once more and hesitated for just a moment, torn between calling Pangborn and calling an operator in New York to check Miriam's phone. Didn't they have some means of differentiating among a line where someone was talking, one that was off the hook, and one which had been rendered inoperable in some way? He thought they did, but surely the important thing was that Miriam's communication with him had suddenly ceased, and she was no longer reachable. Still, they could find out - Liz - could find out - if they had two lines instead of just one. Why didn't they have two lines? It was stupid not to have two lines, wasn't it?

Although these thoughts went through his mind in perhaps two seconds, they seemed to take much longer, and he berated himself for playing Hamlet while Miriam Cowley might be bleeding to death in her apartment. Characters in books - at least in Stark's books - never took pauses like this, never stopped to wonder something nonsensical like why they had never had a second telephone line put in for cases where a woman in another state might be bleeding to death. People in books never had to take time out so they could move their bowels, and they never clutched up like this.

The world would be a more efficient place if everyone in it came out of a pop novel, he thought. People in pop novels always manage to keep their thoughts on track as they move smoothly from one chapter to the next.

He dialed Maine directory assistance, and when the operator asked 'What city, please?' he foundered for a moment because Castle Rock was a town, not a city but a small town, county seat or not, and then he thought: This is panic, Thad. Sheer panic. You've got to get it under control. You mustn't let Miriam die because you panicked. And he even had time, it seemed, to wonder why he couldn't let that happen and to answer the question: he was the only real character over whom he had any control at all, and panic was simply not a part of that character's image. At least as he saw it.

Down here we call that bullshit, Thad. Down here we call it fool's -

'Sir?' the operator was prodding. 'What city, please?'

Okay. Control.

He took a deep breath, got his shit together, and said, 'Castle City.' Christ. Closed his eyes. And with them still closed, said slowly and clearly: 'I'm sorry, operator. Castle Rock. I'd like the number for the sheriff's office.'

There was a lag, and then a robot voice began to recite the number. Thad realized he had no pen or pencil. The robot repeated it a second time, Thad strove mightily to remember it, and the number zipped right across his mind and into blackness again, not even leaving a faint trace behind.

'If you need further assistance,' the robot voice was continuing, please remain on the line for an operator - '

'Liz?' he pleaded. 'Pen? Something to write with?'

There was a Bic tucked into her address book and she handed it to him. The operator - the human operator - came back on the line. Thad told her he hadn't noted the number down. The.operator summoned the robot, who recited once again in her jig-jagging, vaguely female voice. Thad jotted the number on the cover of a book, almost hung up, then decided to double-check by listening to the second programmed recital. The second rendition showed he had transposed two of the numbers. Oh, he was getting right on top of his panic, that was crystal clear. He punched the disconnect button. Light sweat had broken out all over his body.

'Take it easy, Thad.'

'You didn't hear her,' he said grimly, and dialed the sheriff's office. The phone rang four times before a bored Yankee voice said, 'Castle County sheriff 's office,

Deputy Ridgewick speaking, may I help you?'

'This is Thad Beaumont. I'm calling from Ludlow.'

'Oh?' No recognition. None. Which meant more explanations. More cobwebs. The name Ridgewick rang a faint bell. Of course - the officer who had interviewed Mrs Arsenault and found Gamache's body. Jesus bleeding Christ, how could he have found the old man Thad was supposed to have murdered and not know who he was?

'Sheriff Pangborn came up here to . . . to discuss the Homer Gamache murder with me, Deputy Ridgewick. I have some information on that, and it's important that I speak to him right away.

'Sheriff's not here,' Ridgewick said, sounding monumentally unimpressed with the urgency in Thad's voice.

'Well, where is he?'

'T'home.'

'Give me the number, please.'

And, unbelievably: 'Oh, I don't know's I should, Mr Bowman. The sheriff - Alan, I mean - hasn't had much time off just lately, and his wife has been a trifle poorly. She has headaches.'

'I have to talk to him!'

'Well,' Ridgewick said comfortably, 'it's pretty clear you think you do, anyway. Maybe you even do. Really do, I mean. Tell you what, Mr Bowman! Why don't you just lay it out for me and kind of let me be the ju - '

'He came up here to arrest me for the murder of Homer Gamache, Deputy, and something else has happened, and if you don't give me his number right Now - '

'Oh, holy crow!' Ridgewick cried. Thad heard a faint bang and could imagine Ridgewick's feet coming down off his desk - or, more likely, Pangborn's desk - and landing on the floor as he straightened up in his seat. 'Beaumont, not Bowman!'

'Yes, and - '

'Oh, Judas! Judas Priest! The sheriff - Alan - said if you was to call, I should see you got through right away!'

'Good. Now - '

'Judas Priest! I'm a damn lunkhead!'

Thad, who could not have agreed more, said: 'Give me his number, please.' Somehow, calling upon reserves he'd had no idea he possessed, he managed not to scream it.

'Sure. Just a sec. Uh . . .' An excruciating pause ensued. Seconds only, of course, but it seemed to Thad that the pyramids could have been built during that pause. Built and then tom down again. And all the while, Miriam's life could be draining out on her living-room rug five hundred miles away. I may have killed her, he thought, simply by deciding to call Pangborn and getting this congenital idiot instead of calling the New York Police Department in the first place. Or 911. That's what I probably should have done; dialed 911 and thrown it into their laps..Except that option did not seem real, even now. It was the trance, he supposed, and the words he had written while in that trance. He did not think he had foreseen the attack on Miriam . . . but he had, in some dim way, witnessed Stark's preparations for the attack. The ghostly cries of those thousands of birds seemed to make this whole crazy thing his responsibility. But if Miriam died simply because he had been too panicked to dial 911, how would he ever be able to face Rick again?

Fuck that; how would he ever be able to look at himself again in a mirror?

Ridgewick the Down-Home Yankee Idiot was back. He gave Thad the sheriff's number, speaking each digit slowly enough for a retarded person to have taken the number down . . .but Thad made him repeat it anyway, in spite of the burning, digging urge to hurry. He was still shaken by how effortlessly he had screwed up the sheriff's office number, and what could be done once could be done again.

'Okay,' he said. 'Thanks.'

'Uh, Mr Beaumont? Sure would appreciate it if you'd kinda soft-pedal any stuff about how I - Thad hung up on him without the slightest twinge of remorse and dialed the number Ridgewick had given him. Pangborn would not answer the phone, of course; that was simply too much to hope for on The Night of the Cobwebs. And whoever did answer would tell him (after the obligatory few minutes of verbal ring-around-the-rosy, that was) that the sheriff had gone out for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk. In Laconia, New Hampshire, probably, although Phoenix was not entirely out of the question.

He uttered a wild bark of laughter, and Liz looked at him, startled. 'Thad? Are you all right?'

He started to answer, then just flapped a hand at her to show he was, as the phone was picked up. It wasn't Pangborn; he'd had that much right, anyway. It was a little boy who sounded about ten.

'Hello, Pangborn residence,' he piped, 'Todd Pangborn speaking.'

'Hi,' Thad said. He was dimly aware that he was holding the phone receiver much too tightly and tried to loosen his fingers. They creaked but didn't really budge. 'My name is Thad - '

Pangborn, he almost finished, oh Jesus, that would be good, you're on top of this, all right, Thad, you missed your calling, you should have been an air traffic controller. ' - Beaumont,' he finished after the brief mid-course correction. 'Is the sheriff there?'

No, he had to go to Lodi, California, for beer and cigarettes. Instead, the boy's voice moved away from the telephone mouthpiece and bugled, 'DAAAD!

PHONE!' This was followed by a heavy clunk that made Thad's ear ache. A moment later, O praise God and all His holy Saints, the voice of Alan Pangborn said, 'Hello?'

At the sound of that voice, some of Thad's mental buck fever melted away.

'It's Thad Beaumont, Sheriff Pangborn. There's a lady in New York that may need help very badly right now. It has to do with the matter we were discussing Saturday night.'

'Shoot,' Alan said crisply, just that, and the relief, oh boy. Thad felt like a picture coming back into focus.

'The woman is Miriam Cowley, my agent's ex-wife.' Thad reflected that only a minute ago he undoubtedly would have identified Miriam as 'my ex-wife's agent.'

'She called here. She was crying, extremely distraught. I didn't even know who she was at first. Then I heard a man's voice in the background. He said for her to tell me who she was and what was going on. She said there was a man in her apartment, threatening to hurt her. To . . .' Thad swallowed. '. . . to cut her. I'd recognized her voice by then, but the man shouted at her, told her if she didn't identify herself he'd cut her fucking head off. Those were his words. 'Do what I say or.I'll cut your fucking head off.' Then she said she was Miriam and begged me . . .' He swallowed again. There was a click in his throat, as clear as the letter E sent on a Morse key. 'She begged me not to let the bad man do that. Cut her again.'

Across from him, Liz was growing steadily whiter. Don't let her faint, Thad wished or prayed. Please don't let her faint now.

'She was screaming. Then the line went dead. I think he cut it or pulled it out of the wall.'

Except that was bullshit. He didn't think anything. He knew. The line had been cut, all right. With a straight-razor. 'I tried to get her again, but - '

'What's her address?'

Pangborn's voice was still crisp, still pleasant, still calm. But for the bright line of urgency and command running through it, he might have simply been batting the breeze with an old friend. It was right to call him, Thad thought. Thank God for people who know what they are doing, or at least believe they do. Thank God for people who behave like characters in pop novels. If I had to deal with a Saul Bellow person here, I believe I would lose my mind. Thad looked below Miriam's name in Liz's book. 'Honey, is this a three or an eight?'

'Eight,' she said in a distant voice.

'Good. Sit in the chair again. Put your head in your lap.'

'Mr Beaumont? Thad?'

'I'm sorry. My wife is very upset. She looks faint.'

'I'm not surprised. You're both upset. It's an upsetting situation. But you're doing well. Just keep it together, Thad.'

'Yes.' He realized dismally that if Liz fainted, he would have to leave her lying on the floor and plug along until Pangborn had enough information to make a move. Please don't faint, he thought again, and looked back at Liz's address book. 'Her address is 109 West 84th Street.'

'Phone number?'

'I tried to tell you - her phone doesn't - '

'I need the number just the same, Thad.'

'Yes. Of course you do.' Although he didn't have the slightest idea why. 'I'm sorry.' He recited the number.

'How long ago was this call?'

Hours, he thought, and looked at the clock over the mantelpiece. His first thought was that it had stopped. Must have stopped.

'Thad?'

'I'm right here,' he said in a calm voice which seemed to be coming from someone else. 'It was approximately six minutes ago. That's when my communication with her ended. Was broken off.'

'Okay, not much time lost. If you'd called N.Y.P.D., they might have had you on hold three times that long. I'll get back to you as quick as I can, Thad.'

'Rick,' he said. 'Tell the police when you talk to them her ex can't know yet. If the guy's . . . you know, done something to Miriam, Rick will be next on his list.'

'You're pretty sure this is the same guy who did Homer and Clawson, aren't you?'

'I am positive.' And the words were out and flying down the wire before he could be sure he even wanted to say them: 'I think I know who it is.'

After the briefest hesitation, Pangborn said: 'Okay. Stay by the phone. I'll want to talk to you about this when there's time.' He was gone.

Thad looked over at Liz and saw she had slumped sideways in the chair. Her eyes were large and

glassy. He got up and went to her quickly, straightened her, tapped her cheeks lightly..'Which one is it?' she asked him thickly from the gray world of not-quite-consciousness. 'Is it Stark or Alexis Machine? Which one, Thad?'

And after a very long time he said, 'I don't think there's any difference. I'll make tea, Liz.'

3

He was sure they would talk about it. How could they avoid it? But they didn't. For a long time they only sat, looking at each other over the rims of their mugs, and waited for Alan to call back. And as the endless minutes dragged by, it began to seem right to Thad that they not talk - not until Alan called back and told them whether Miriam was dead or alive. Suppose, he thought, watching her bring her mug of tea to her mouth with both hands and sipping at his own, suppose we were sitting here one night, with books in our hands (we'd look, to an outsider, as if we were reading, and we might be, a little, but what we'd really be doing is savoring the silence as if it were some particularly fine wine, the way only parents of very young children can savor it, because they have so little of it), and further suppose that while we were doing that, a meteorite crashed through the roof and landed, smoking and glowing, on the livingroom floor. Would one of us go into the kitchen and fill up the floor-bucket with water, douse it before it could light up the carpet, and then just go on reading? No - we'd talk about it. We'd have to. The way we have to talk about this.

Perhaps they would begin after Alan called back. Perhaps they would even talk through him, Liz listening carefully as Alan asked questions and Thad answered them. Yes - that might be how their own talking would start' Because it seemed to Thad that Alan was the catalyst. In a weird way it seemed to Thad that Alan was the one who had gotten this thing started, even though the sheriff had only been responding to what Stark had already done. In the meantime, they sat and waited.

He felt an urge to try Miriam's number again, but didn't dare Alan might pick that very moment to call back, and would find the Beaumont number busy. He found himself again wishing, in an aimless sort of way, that they had a second line. Well, he thought, wish in one hand, spit in the other.

Reason and rationality told him that Stark could not be out there, ramming around like some weird cancer in human form, killing people. As the country rube in Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer was wont to say, it was perfectly unpossible, Diggory. He was, though. Thad knew he was, and Liz knew it, too. He wondered if Alan would also know when he told him. You'd think not; you'd expect the man would simply send for those fine young men in their clean white coats. Because George Stark was not real, and neither was Alexis Machine, that fiction within a fiction. Neither of them had ever existed, any more than George Eliot had ever existed, or Mark Twain, or Lewis Carroll, or Tucker Coe, or Edgar Box. Pseudonyms were only a higher form of fictional character. Yet Thad found it difficult to believe Alan Pangborn would not believe, even if he did not want to at first. Thad himself did not want to, yet found himself helpless to do anything else. It was, if you could pardon the expression, inexorably plausible.

'Why doesn't he call?' Liz asked restlessly.

'It's only been five minutes, babe.'

'Closer to ten.'.He resisted an urge to snap at her - this wasn't the Bonus Round in a TV game-show, Alan

would not be awarded extra points and valuable prizes for calling back before nine o'clock. There was no Stark, part of his mind continued to insist upon insisting. The voice was rational but oddly powerless, seeming to repeat this screed not out of any real conviction but only by rote, like a parrot trained to say Pretty boy! or Polly wants a cracker! Yet it was true, wasn't it? Was he supposed to believe Stark had come BACK FROM THE GRAVE, like a monster in a horror movie? That would be a neat trick, since the man - or un-man - had never been buried, his marker only a papier-m ch? headstone set up on the surface of an empty cemetery plot, as fictional as the rest of him -

Anyhow, that brings me to the last point . . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it . . . What's your shoe-size, Mr Beaumont?

Thad had been slouched in his chair, crazily close to dozing in spite of everything. Now he sat up so suddenly he almost spilled his tea. Footprints. Pangborn had said something about - What footprints are these?

Doesn't matter. We don't even have photos. We've got almost everything on the table . . .

'Thad? What is it?' Liz asked.

What footprints? Where? In Castle Rock, of course, or Alan wouldn't have known about them. Had they perhaps been in Homeland Cemetery, where the neurasthenic lady photographer had shot the picture he and Liz had found so amusing?

'Not a very nice guy,' he muttered.

'Thad?'

Then the phone rang, and both of them spilled their tea. 4

Thad's hand dived for the receiver . . . then paused for a moment, floating just above it. What if it's him?

I'm not done with you, Thad. You don't want to fuck with me, because when you fuck with me, you're fucking with the best.

He made his hand go down, close around the telephone, and bring it to his ear. 'Hello?'

'Thad?' It was Alan Pangborn's voice. Suddenly Thad felt very limp, as if his body had been held together with stiff little wires which had just been removed.

'Yes,' he said. The word came out sibilant, in a kind of sigh. He drew in another breath. 'Is Miriam all right?'

'I don't know,' Alan Pangborn said. 'I've given the N.Y.P.D. her address. We should hear quite soon, although I want to caution you that fifteen minutes or half an hour may not seem like quite soon to you and your wife this evening.'

'No. It won't.'

'Is she all right?' Liz was asking, and Thad covered the phone mouthpiece long enough to tell her that Pangborn didn't know yet. Liz nodded and settled back, still too white but seeming calmer and more in control than before. At least people were doing things now, and it wasn't solely their responsibility anymore.

'They also got Mr Cowley's address from the telephone company - '

'Hey! They won't - '.'Thad, they won't do anything until they know what the Cowley woman's condition is. I told

them we had a situation where a mentally unbalanced man might be after a person or persons named in the People magazine article about the Stark pen name, and explained the connection the Cowleys had to you. I hope I got it right. I don't know much about writers and even less about their agents. But they do understand it would be wrong for the lady's ex-husband to go rushing over there before they arrive.'

'Thank you. Thank you for everything, Alan.'

'Thad, N.Y.P.D. is too busy moving on this to want or need further explanations right now, but they will want them. I do, too. Who do you think this guy is?'

'That's something I don't want to tell you over the telephone. I'd come to you, Alan, but I don't want to leave my wife and children right now. I think you can understand. You'll have to come here.'

'I can't do that,' Alan said patiently. 'I have a job of my own, and - '

'Is your wife ill, Alan?'

'Tonight she seems quite well. But one of my deputies called in sick, and I've got the duty. Standard procedure in small towns. I was just getting ready to leave. What I'm saying is that this is a very bad time for you to be coy, Thad. Tell me.'

He thought about it. He felt strangely confident that Pangborn would buy it when he heard it. But maybe not over the telephone.

'Could you get up here tomorrow?'

'We'll have to get together tomorrow, certainly,' Alan said. His voice was both even and utterly insistent. 'But I need whatever you know tonight. The fact that the fuzz in New York are going to want an explanation is secondary, as far as I'm concerned. I have my own garden to tend. There are a lot of people here in town who want Homer Gamache's murderer collared, pronto. I happen to be one of them. So don't make me ask you again. It's not so late that I can't get the Penobscot County D.A. on the phone and ask him to collar you as a material witness in a Castle County murder case. He knows already from the state police that you're a suspect, alibi or no alibi.'

'Would you do that?' Thad asked, bemused and fascinated.

'I would if you made me, but I don't think you will.'

Thad's head seemed clearer now; his thoughts actually seemed to be going somewhere. It wouldn't really matter, either to Pangborn or to the N.Y.P.D., if the man they were looking for was a psycho who thought he was Stark, or Stark himself . . . would it? He didn't think so, any more than he thought they were going to catch him either way.

'I'm pretty sure it's a psychotic, as my wife said,' he told Alan finally. He locked eyes with Liz, tried to send her a message. And he must have succeeded in sending her something, because she nodded slightly. 'It makes a weird kind of sense. Do you remember mentioning footprints to me?'

'Yes.'

'They were in Homeland, weren't they?' Across the room, Liz's eyes widened.

'How did you know that?' Alan sounded off-balance for the first time. 'I didn't tell you that.'

'Have you read the article yet? The one in People?'

'Yes.

'That's where the woman set up the fake tombstone. That's where George Stark was buried.'

Silence from the other end. Then: 'Oh shit.'

'You get it?'

'I think so,' Alan said. 'If this guy thinks he's Stark, and if he's crazy, the idea of him starting at Stark's grave makes a certain kind of sense, doesn't it? Is this photographer in New York?'.Thad started. 'Yes.'

'Then she might also be in danger?'

'Yes, I . . . well, I never thought of that, but I suppose she might.'

'Name? Address?'

'I don't have her address.' She had given him her business card, he remembered - probably thinking about the book on which she hoped he would collaborate with her - but he had thrown it away. Shit. All he could give Alan was the name. 'Phyllis Myers.'

'And the guy who actually wrote the story?'

'Mike Donaldson.'

'Also in New York?'

Thad suddenly realized he didn't know that, not for sure, and backtracked a little. 'Well, I guess I just assumed both of them were - '

'It's a reasonable enough assumption. If the magazine's offices are in New York, they'd stick close, wouldn't they?'

'Maybe, but if one or both of them is freelance - '

'Let's go back to this trick photo. The cemetery wasn't specifically identified, either in the photo caption or in the body of the story, as Homeland. I'm sure of that. I should have recognized it from the background, but I was concentrating on the details.'

'No,' Thad said. 'I guess it wasn't.'

'The First Selectman, Dan Keeton, would have insisted that Homeland not be identified - that would have been a brass-bound condition. He's a very cautious type of guy. Sort of a pill, actually. I can see him giving permission to do the photos, but I think he would have nixed an ID of the specific cemetery in case of vandalism . . . people looking for the headstone and all of that.'

Thad was nodding. It made sense.

'So your psycho either knows you or comes from here,' Alan was going on. Thad had made an assumption of which he was now heartily ashamed: that the sheriff of a small Maine county where there were more trees than people must be a jerk. This was no jerk; he was certainly running rings around the world champeen novelist Thaddeus Beaumont.

'We have to assume that, at least for the time being, since it seems he had inside information.'

'Then the tracks you mentioned were in Homeland.'

'Sure they were,' Pangborn said almost absently. 'What are you holding back, Thad?'

'What do you mean?' he asked warily.

'Let's not dance, okay? I've got to call New York with these other two names, and you've got to put on your thinking cap and see if there are any more names I should have. Publishers . . . editors

. . . I don't know. Meantime, you tell me the guy we want actually thinks he is George Stark. We were theorizing about it Saturday night, blue-skying it, and tonight you tell me it's a stone fact. Then, to back it up, you throw the footprints at me. Either you've made some dizzying leap of deduction based on the facts we have in common, or you know something I don't. Naturally, I like the second alternative better. So give.'

But what did he have? Blackout trances which were announced by thousands of sparrows crying in unison? Words that he might have written on a manuscript after Alan Pangborn had told him those same words were written on the living-room wall of Frederick Clawson's apartment?

More words written on a paper which had been torn to shreds and then fed into the English-Math Building's incinerator? Dreams in which a terrible unseen man led him through his house in Castle Rock and everything he touched, including his own wife, self-destructed? I could call what I.believe a known fact of the heart instead of an intuition of the mind, he thought, but there's still no proof, is there? The fingerprints and saliva suggested something was very odd - sure! - but that odd?

Thad didn't think so.

'Alan,' he said slowly, 'you'd laugh. No - I take it back. I know you better than that now. You wouldn't laugh - but I strongly doubt if you would believe me, either. I've been up and down on this, but that's how it shakes out: I really don't think you'd believe me.'

Alan's voice came back at once, urgent, imperative, hard to resist. 'Try me.'

Thad hesitated, looked at Liz, then shook his head. 'Tomorrow. When we can look at each other face to face. Then I will. For tonight you'll just have to take my word that it doesn't matter, that what I've told you is everything of any practical value that I can tell you.'

'Thad, what I said about having you held as a material witness 'If you have to do it, do it. There will be no hard feelings on my part. But I won't go any further than I have right now until I see you, regardless of what you decide.'

Silence from Pangborn's end. Then a sigh. 'Okay.

'I want to give you a scratch description of the man the police are looking for. I'm not entirely sure it's right, but I think it's close. Close enough to give the cops in New York, anyway. Have you got a pencil?'

'Yes. Give it to me.'

Thad closed the eyes God had put in his face and opened the one God had put in his mind, the eye which persisted in seeing even the things he didn't want to look at. When people who had read his books met him for the first time, they were invariably disappointed. This was something they tried to hide from him and could not. He bore them no grudge, because he understood how they felt . . . at least a little bit. If they liked his work (and some professed even to love it), they thought of him beforehand as a guy who was first cousin to God. Instead of a God they saw a guy who stood six-feet-one, wore spectacles, was beginning to lose his hair, and had a habit of tripping over things. They saw a man whose scalp was rather flaky and whose nose had two holes in it, just like their own.

What they could not see was that third eye inside his head. That eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade . . . that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it. If they could, he thought many of them would try to steal it. Yes, even if it meant gouging it right out of his flesh with a dull knife.

Looking into the dark, he summoned up his private image of George Stark - the real George Stark, who looked nothing like the model who had posed for the jacket photo. He looked for the shadow-man who had accreted soundlessly over the years, found him, and began showing him to Alan Pangborn.

'He's fairly tall,' he began. 'Taller than me, anyway. Six-three, maybe six-four in a pair of boots. He's got blonde hair, cut short and neat. Blue eyes. His long vision is excellent. About five years ago he took to wearing glasses for close work. Reading and writing, mostly.

'The reason he gets noticed isn't his height but his breadth. He's not fat, but he's extremely wide. Neck size maybe eighteen-and-a-half, maybe nineteen. He's my age, Alan, but he's not fading the way I'm starting to or running to fat. He's strong. Like Schwarzenegger looks now that Schwarzenegger has started to build down a little. He works out with weights. He can pump a bicep hard enough to pop a sleeve-seam on his shirt, but he's not muscle-bound.

'He was born in New Hampshire, but following the divorce of his parents, he moved with his mother to Oxford, Mississippi, where she was raised. He's lived most of his life there. When he.was younger, he had an accent so thick he sounded like he came from Dogpatch. A lot of people made fun of that accent in college - not to his face, though, you don't make fun of a guy like this to his face - and he worked hard on getting rid of it. Now I think the only time you'd be apt to hear cracker in his voice would be when he gets mad, and I think people who make him mad are often not available for testimony later on. He's got a short fuse. He's violent. He's dangerous. He is, in fact, a practicing psychotic.'

'What -' Pangborn began, but Thad overrode him.

'He's quite deeply tanned, and since blonde men usually don't tan all that well, it might be a good point of identification. Big feet, big hands, big neck, wide shoulders. His face looks like somebody talented but in a hurry chopped it out of a hard rock.

'Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones that had a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's probably switched them.' He paused, then added: 'Oh, and there's a sticker on the back bumper. It says HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH.'

He opened his eyes.

Liz was staring at him. Her face was paler than ever.

There was a long pause on the other end of the tine.

'Alan? Are you - ?'

just a sec. I'm writing.' There was another, shorter, pause. 'Okay,' he said at last. 'I got it. You can tell me all of this but not who the guy is or your connection with him or how you know him?'

'I don't know, but I'll try. Tomorrow. Knowing his name isn't going to help anyone tonight anyway, because he's using another one.'

'George Stark.'

'Well, he could be crazy enough to be calling himself Alexis Machine, but I doubt it. Stark is what I think, yeah.' He tried to wink at Liz. He did not really believe the mood could be lightened by a wink or anything else, but he tried, anyway. He only succeeded in blinking both eyes, like a sleepy owl.

'There's no way I can persuade you to go on with this tonight, is there?'

'No. There's not. I'm sorry, but there's not.'

'All right. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.' And he was gone, just like that, no thank you, no goodbye. Thinking it over, Thad supposed he didn't really rate a thank you. He hung up the phone and went to his wife, who sat looking at him as if she had been turned into a statue. He took her hands - they were very cold - and said, 'This is going to be all right,

Liz. I swear it is.'

'Are you going to tell him about the trances when you talk to him tomorrow? The sound of the birds? How you heard it when you were a kid, and what it meant then? The things you wrote?'

'I'm going to tell him everything,' Thad said. 'What he chooses to pass on to the other authorities

. . . He shrugged. 'That's up to him.'

'So much,' she said in a strengthless little voice. Her eyes were still fixed on him - seemed powerless to leave him. 'You know so much about him. Thad . . . how?'

He could only kneel there before her, holding her cold hands. How could he know so much?

People asked him that all the time. They used different words to express it - how did you make that up? how did you put that into words? how did you remember that? how did you see that? - but it always came back to the same thing: how did you know that?

He didn't know how he knew.

He just did..'So much,' she repeated, and she spoke in the tone of a sleeper who is in the grip of a distressful

dream. Then they were both silent. He kept expecting the twins to sense their parents' upset, to wake up and begin crying, but there was only the steady tick of the clock. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the floor by her chair and went on holding her hands, hoping he could warm them up. They were still cold fifteen minutes later when the phone rang. 5

Alan Pangborn was flat and declarative. Rick Cowley was safe in his apartment, and was under police protection. He would soon be on his way to his ex-wife, who would now be his ex-wife forever; the reconciliation of which both had spoken from time to time, and with considerable longing, was never going to happen. Miriam was dead. Rick would make the formal identification at the Borough of Manhattan morgue on First Avenue. Thad should not expect a call from Rick tonight or attempt to make one himself; Thad's connection with Miriam Cowley's murder had been withheld from Rick 'pending developments.' Phyllis Myers had been located and was also under police protection. Michael Donaldson was proving a tougher nut, but they expected to have him located and covered by midnight.

'How was she killed?' Thad asked, knowing the answer perfectly well. But sometimes you had to ask. God knew why.

'Throat was cut,' Alan said with what Thad suspected was intentional brutality. He followed it up a moment later. 'Still sure there's nothing you want to tell me?'

'In the morning. When we can look at each other.'

'Okay. I didn't think there was any harm in asking.'

'No. No harm.'

'The New York City Police have an APB out on a man named George Stark, your description.'

'Good.' And he supposed it was, although he knew it was also probably pointless. They almost certainly wouldn't find him if he didn't want to be found, and if anyone did, Thad thought that person would be sorry.

'Nine o'clock,' Pangborn said. 'Make sure you're at home, Thad.'

'Count on it.'

6

Liz took a tranquilizer and finally fell asleep. Thad drifted in and out of a thin, scratchy doze and got up at quarter past three to use the bathroom. As he was standing there, urinating into the bowl, he thought he heard the sparrows. He tensed, listening, the flow of his water drying up at once. The sound neither grew nor diminished, and after a few moments he realized it was only crickets. He looked out the window and saw a state police cruiser parked across the road, dark and silent. He might have thought it was also deserted if he hadn't seen the fitful wink of a cigarette ember. It seemed that he, Liz, and the twins were also under police protection. Or police guard, he thought, and went back to bed..Whichever it was, it seemed to provide a little peace of mind. He fell asleep and woke at eight,

with no memory of bad dreams. But of course the real bad dream was still out there. Somewhere.