tark Disbelief

1

Thad and Liz sat encased in shock so deep and blue it felt like ice, listening as Alan Pangborn told them how the early morning hours had gone in New York City. Mike Donaldson, slashed and beaten to death in the hallway of his apartment building; Phyllis Myers and two policemen gunned down at her West Side condo. The night doorman at Myers's building had been hit with something heavy, and had suffered a fractured skull. The doctors held out odds slightly better than even that he would wake up on the mortal side of heaven. The doorman at Donaldson's building was dead. The wet-work had been carried out gangland-style in all cases, with the hitter simply walking up to his victims and starting in.

As Alan talked, he referred to the killer repeatedly as Stark. He's calling him by his right name without even thinking about it, Thad mused. Then he shook his head, a little impatient with himself. You had to call him something, he supposed, and Stark was maybe a little better than 'the perp' or 'Mr X.' It would be a mistake at this point to think Pangborn was using the name in any way other than as a convenient handle.

'What about Rick)' he asked when Alan had finished and he was finally able to unlock his tongue.

'Mr Cowley is alive and well and under police protection.' It was quarter of ten in the morning; the explosion which would kill Rick and one of his guardians was still almost two hours away.

'Phyllis Myers was under police protection, too,' Liz said. In the big playpen, Wendy was fast asleep and William was nodding out. His head would go down on his chest, his eyes would close .

. . then he would jerk his head up again. To Alan he looked comically like a sentry trying not to fall asleep on duty. But each head-jerk was a little weaker. Watching the twins, his notebook now closed and in his lap, Alan noticed an interesting thing: every time William jerked his head up in an effort to stay awake, Wendy twitched in her sleep. Have the parents noticed that? he wondered, and then thought, Of course they have.

'That's true, Liz. He surprised them. Police are as prone to surprise as anyone else, you know; they're just supposed to react to it better. On the floor where Phyllis Myers lived, several people along the hall opened their doors and looked out after the shots were fired, and we've got a pretty good idea of what went down from their statements and what the police found at the crime scene. Stark pretended to be a blind man. He hadn't changed his clothes following the murders of Miriam Cowley and Michael Donaldson, which were . . . forgive me, both of you, but they were messy. He comes out of the elevator, wearing dark glasses he probably bought in Times Square or from a pushcart vendor and waving a white cane covered with blood. God knows where he got the cane, but N.Y.P.D. thinks he also used it to bash the doormen.'

'He stole it from a real blind man, of course,' Thad said calmly. 'This guy is not Sir Galahad, Alan.'.'Obviously not. He was probably yelling that he'd been mugged, or maybe that he had been attacked by burglars in his apartment. Either way, he came on to them so fast they didn't have much time to react. They were, after all, a couple of prowl-car cops who were hauled off their beat and stuck in front of this woman's door without much warning.'

'But surely they knew that Donaldson had been murdered, too?' Liz protested. 'If something like that couldn't alert them to the fact the man was dangerous - '

'They also knew Donaldson's police protection had arrived after the man had been murdered,'

Thad said. 'They were overconfident.'

'Maybe they were, a little,' Alan conceded. 'I have no way of knowing. But the guys with Cowley know that this man is daring and quite clever as well as homicidal. Their eyes are open. No, Thad - your agent is safe. You can count on it.'

'You said there were witnesses,' Thad said.

'Oh yeah. Lots of witnesses. At the Cowley woman's place, at Donaldson's. at Myers's. He didn't seem to give a shit.' He looked at Liz and said, 'Excuse me.'

She smiled briefly. 'I've heard that one a time or two before, Alan.'

He nodded, gave her a little smile, and turned back to Thad.

'The description I gave you?'

'It checks out all down the line,' Alan said. 'He's big, blonde, got a pretty good tan. So tell me who he is, Thad. Give me a name. I've got a lot more than Homer Gamache to worry about now. I've got the goddam Police Commissioner of New York City leaning on me. Sheila Brigham - that's my chief dispatcher - thinks I'm going to be a media star, but it's still Homer I care about. Even more than the two dead police officers who were trying to protect Phyllis Myers, I care about Homer. So give me a name.'

'I already have,' Thad said.

There was a long silence - perhaps ten seconds. Then, very softly, Alan said, 'What?'

'His name is George Stark.' Thad was surprised to hear how calm he sounded, even more surprised to find that he felt calm . . . unless deep shock and calm felt the same. But the relief of actually saying that - You have his name, his name is George Stark - was inexpressible.

'I don't think I understand you,' Alan said after another long pause.

'Of course you do, Alan,' Liz said. Thad looked at her, startled by the crisp, no-nonsense tone of

her voice. 'What my husband is saying is that his pseudonym has somehow come to life. The tombstone in the picture . . . what it says on that tombstone where there should be a homily or a little verse is something Thad said to the wire-service reporter who originally broke the story. NOT A VERY NICE GUY. Do you recall that?'

'Yes, but Liz - ' He was looking at them both with a kind of helpless surprise, as if realizing for the first time that he had been holding a conversation with people who had lost their minds.

'Save your buts,' she said in the same brisk tone. 'You'll have plenty of time for buts and rebuttals. You and everyone else. For the time being, just listen to me. Thad wasn't kidding when he said George Stark wasn't a very nice guy. He may have thought he was kidding, but he wasn't. I knew it even if he didn't. Not only was George Stark not a very nice guy, he was in fact a horrible guy. He made me more nervous with each of the four books he wrote, and when Thad finally decided to kill him, I went upstairs to our bedroom and cried with relief.' She looked at Thad, who was staring at her. She measured him with her gaze before nodding.

'That's right. I cried. I really cried. Mr Clawson in Washington was a disgusting little Creepazoid, but he did us a favor, maybe the biggest favor of our married life together, and for that reason I'm sorry he's dead, if for no other.'.'Liz, I don't think you really mean - '

'Don't tell me what I do and do not mean!' she said.

Alan blinked. Her voice remained modulated, not loud enough to waken Wendy or cause William to do more than raise his head one final time before lying down on his side and falling asleep beside his sister. Alan had a feeling that, if not for the kids, he would have heard a louder voice, though. Maybe even one turned up to full volume.

'Thad has got some things to tell you now. You need to listen to him very carefully, Alan, and you need to try and believe him. Because if you don't, I'm afraid this man - or whatever he is - will go on killing until he's worked all the way to the bottom of his butcher's bill. I have some very personal reasons for not wanting that to happen. You see, I think Thad and I and our babies may well be on that list.'

'All right.' His own voice was mild, but his thoughts were clicking over at a rapid rate. He made a conscious effort to push frustration, anger, even wonder aside and consider this mad idea as clearly as he could. Not the question of whether it was true or false - it was, of course, impossible even to consider it as true - but the one of just why they were even bothering to tell such a story in the first place. Was it concocted to hide some imagined complicity in the murders?

A real one? Was it even possible that they believed it? It seemed impossible that such a pair of well-educated and rational - up to now, anyway people could believe it, but it was as it had been on the day he had come to arrest Thad for Homer's murder; they just didn't give off the faint but unmistakable aroma of people who were lying. Consciously lying, he amended to himself. 'Go on, Thad.'

'All right,' Thad said. He cleared his throat nervously and got up. His hand went to his breast pocket and he realized with an amusement that was half-bitter what he was doing: reaching for the cigarettes which had not been there for years now. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and looked at Alan Pangborn as he might look at a troubled advisee who had washed up on the mostly friendly shores of Thad's office.

'Something very odd is going on here. No - it's more than odd. It's terrible and it's inexplicable, but it is happening. And it started, I think, when I was just eleven years old.'

2

Thad told it all: the childhood headaches, the shrill cries and muddy visions of the sparrows which had heralded the arrival of these headaches, the return of the sparrows. He showed Alan the manuscript page with THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING slashed across it in dark pencil strokes. He told him about the fugue state he had entered at his office yesterday, and what he had written (as well as he could remember it) on the back of the order-form. He explained what had happened to the form, and tried to express the fear and bewilderment which had compelled him to destroy it. Alan's face remained impassive.

'Besides,' Thad finished, 'I know it's Stark. Here.' He made a fist and knocked lightly on his own chest.

Alan said nothing at all for a few moments. He had begun turning his wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand, and this operation seemed to have captured all his attention.

'You've lost weight since you were married,' Liz said quietly. 'If you don't have that ring sized, Alan, you'll lose it one day.'.'I suppose I will.' He raised his head and looked at her. When he spoke, it was as if Thad had

left the room on some errand and only the two of them were there. 'Your husband took you upstairs to his study and showed you this first message from the spirit world after I left . . . is that correct?'

'The only spirit world I know about for sure is the Agency Liquor Store about a mile down the road,' Liz said evenly, 'but he did show me the message after you left, yes.'

'Right after I left?'

'No - we put the twins to bed, and then, while we were getting ready for bed ourselves, I asked Thad what he was hiding.'

'Between the time when I left and the time when he told you about the blackouts and the birdsounds, there were periods when he was out of your sight? Times when he could have gone upstairs and written the phrase I mentioned to you?'

'I don't remember for sure,' she said. 'I think we were together all that time, but I can't say absolutely. And it wouldn't matter even if I told you he never left my sight, would it?'

'What do you mean, Liz?'

'I mean you'd then assume I was also lying, wouldn't you?'

Alan sighed deeply. It was the only answer either of them really needed.

'Thad isn't lying about this.'

Alan nodded his head. 'I appreciate your honesty . . . but since you can't swear he never left you for a couple of minutes, I don't have to accuse you of lying. I'm a glad of that. You admit the opportunity may have been there, and I think you'll also admit that the alternative is pretty wild.'

Thad leaned against the mantel, his eyes shifting back and forth like the eyes of a man watching a tennis match. Sheriff Pangborn was not saying a thing Thad had not foreseen, and he was pointing out the holes in his story a good deal more kindly than he might have done, but Thad found that he was still bitterly disappointed . . . almost heartsick. That premonition that Alan would believe somehow just instinctively believe - had proved as bogus as a bottle of medicine show cure-all.

'Yes, I admit those things,' Liz said evenly.

'As for what Thad claims happened at his office . . . there are no witnesses to either the blackout or to what he claims to have written down. In fact, he didn't mention the incident to you at all until after Ms Cowley called, did he?'

'No. He did not.'

'And so . . .' He shrugged.

'I have a question for you, Alan.'

'All right.'

'Why would Thad lie? What purpose would it serve?'

'I don't know.' Alan looked at her with complete candor. 'He may not know himself.' He glanced briefly at Thad, then returned his eyes to Liz's. 'He may not even know he is lying. What I'm saying is pretty flat: this is not the sort of thing any police officer could accept without strong proof And there is none.'

'Thad is telling the truth about this. I understand everything you've said, but I want very badly for you to believe he is telling the truth, too. I want that desperately. You see, I lived with George Stark. And I know how Thad was about him as time went on. I'll tell you something that wasn't in People magazine. Thad started talking about getting rid of Stark two books before the last one -'

'Three,' Thad said quietly from his place by the mantel. His craving for a cigarette had become a dry fever. 'I started talking about it after the first one.'.'Okay, three. The magazine article made it sound as though this was a pretty recent thing, and

that just wasn't true. That's the point I'm trying to make. If Frederick Clawson hadn't come along and forced my husband's hand, I think Thad would still be talking about getting rid of him in the same way. The way an alcoholic or drug addict tells his family and his friends that he'll quit tomorrow . . . or the next day . . . or the day after that.'

'No,' Thad said. 'Not exactly like that. Right church but the wrong pew.'

He paused, frowning, doing more than thinking. Concentrating. Alan reluctantly gave up the idea that they were lying, or having him on for some weird reason. They were not spending their efforts in order to convince him, or even themselves, but only to articulate how it had been . . . the way men might try to describe a fire-fight long after it was over.

'Look,' Thad said finally. 'Let's drop the subject of the black-outs and the sparrows and the precognitive visions - if that's what they were - for a minute. If you feel you need to, you can talk to my doctor, George Hume, about the physical symptoms. Maybe the head-tests I took yesterday will show something odd when they come back, and even if they don't, the doctor who performed the operation on me when I was a kid may still be alive and able to talk to you about the case. He may know something that could cast some light on this mess. I can't remember his name right off-hand, but I'm sure it's in my medical records. But right now, all of this psychic shit is a side-track.'

This struck Alan as a very odd thing for Thad to say . . . if he had planted the one precognitive note and lied about the other. Someone crazy enough to do such a thing - and crazy enough to forget he'd done it, to actually believe the notes were real manifestations of psychic phenomena - would want to talk about nothing else. Wouldn't he? His head was beginning to ache.

'All right,' he said evenly, 'if what you call 'this psychic shit' is a side-track, then what's the main

line?'

'George Stark is the main line,' Thad said, and thought-The line that goes to Endsville, where all rail service terminates. 'Imagine that some stranger moved into your house. Someone you've always been a little bit frightened of, the way Jim Hawkins was always a little bit frightened of the Old Sea-Dog at the Admiral Benbow have you read Treasure Island, Alan?'

He nodded.

'Well, you know the sort of feeling I'm trying to express, then. You're scared of this guy, and you don't like him at all, but you let him stay. You don't run an inn, like in Treasure Island, but maybe you think he's a distant relative of your wife's, or something. Do you follow me?'

Alan nodded.

'And finally one day, after this bad guest has done something like slam the salt-cellar against the wall because it's clogged, you say to your wife, 'How long is your idiot second cousin going to hang around, anyway?' And she looks at you and says, 'My second cousin? I thought he was your second cousin!''

Alan grunted laughter in spite of himself.

'But do you kick the guy out?' Thad went on. 'No. For one thing, he's already been in your house for awhile, and as grotesque as it might sound to someone who's not actually in the situation, it seems like he's got . . . squatter's rights, or something. But that isn't the important thing.'

Liz had been nodding. Her eyes had the excited, grateful look of a woman who has just been told the word which has been dancing on the tip of her tongue all day long.

'The important thing is how goddamned scared of him you are,' she said. 'Scared of what he might do if you actually told him, flat out, to take his act and put it on the road.'.'There you go,'

Thad said. 'You want to be brave and tell him to leave, and not just because you're afraid he might be dangerous, either. It becomes a matter of self-respect. But . . . you keep putting it off. You find reasons to put it off. Like it's raining out, and he's less apt to raise the roof about going if you show him the door on a sunny day. Or maybe after you've all had a good night's sleep. You think of a thousand reasons to put it off. You find that, if the reasons sound good enough to yourself, you can retain at least some of your self-respect, and some is better than none at all. Some is also better than all of it, if having all of it means you wind up hurt, or dead.

'And maybe not just you.'

Liz chimed in again, speaking with the composed and pleasant voice of a woman addressing a gardening club - perhaps on the subject of when to plant corn, or how to tell when your tomatoes will be ready for harvesting. 'He was an ugly, dangerous man when he was . . . living with us . . . and he is an ugly, dangerous man now. The evidence suggests that if anything has happened, he's gotten much worse. He's insane, of course, but by his own lights what he's doing is a perfectly reasonable thing: tracking down the people who conspired to kill -him and wiping them out, one after another.'

'Are you done?'

She looked at Alan, startled, as if his voice had brought her out of a deep private reverie.

'What?'

'I asked if you were done. You wanted to have your say, and I want to make sure you got it.'

Her calm broke. She fetched a deep sigh and ran her hands distractedly through her hair. 'You don't believe it, do you? Not a single word of it.'

'Liz,' Alan said, 'this is just . . . nuts. I'm sorry to use a word like that, but considering the circumstances, I'd say it's the kindest one available. There will be other cops here soon enough. FBI, I imagine - this man can now be considered an interstate fugitive, and that'll bring them into it. If you tell them this story complete with the blackouts and the ghost-writing, you'll hear plenty of less kind ones. If you told me these people had been murdered by a ghost, I wouldn't believe you, either.' Thad stirred, but Alan held a hand up and he subsided, at least for the moment. 'But I could have come closer to believing a ghost story than this. We're not just talking about a ghost, we're talking about a man who never was.'

'How do you explain my description?' Thad asked suddenly. 'What I gave you was my private picture of what George Stark looked - looks - like. Some of it is in the author-profile sheet Darwin Press has in its files. Some was just stuff I had in my head. I never sat down and deliberately visualized the guy, you know - I just formed a kind of mental picture over a period of years, the way you form a mental picture of the disc jockey you listen to every morning on your way to work. But if you ever happen to meet the disc jockey, it turns out you had it all wrong, in most cases. It appears I had it mostly right. How do you explain that?'

'I can't,' Alan said. 'Unless, of course, you're lying about where the description came from.'

'You know I'm not.'

'Don't assume that,' Alan said. He rose, walked over to the fireplace, and jabbed restlessly with the poker at the birch logs piled there. 'Not every lie springs from a conscious decision. If a man has persuaded himself he's telling the truth, he can even pass a lie-detector test with flying colors. Ted Bundy did it.'

'Come on,' Thad snapped. 'Stop straining so goddam hard. This is like the fingerprint business all over again. The only difference is that this time I can't just trot out a bunch of corroboration. What about the fingerprints, by the way? When you add that in, doesn't it at least suggest that we're telling the truth?'.Alan turned around. He was suddenly angry at Thad . . . at both of them. He felt as if he were

being relentlessly driven into a corner, and they had no goddam right to make him feel that way. It was like being the only person at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society who believes the earth is round.

'I can't explain any of that stuff . . . yet,' he said. 'But in the meantime, maybe you'd like to tell me exactly where this guy - the real one - came from, Thad. Did you just sort of give birth to him one night? Did he pop out of a damn sparrow's egg? Did you look like him while you were writing the books that eventually appeared under his name? Exactly how did it go?'

'I don't know how he came to be,' Thad said wearily. 'Don't you think I'd tell you if I could? So far as I know, or can remember, I was me when I wrote Machine's Way and Oxford Blues and Sharkmeat Pie and Riding to Babylon. I don't have the slightest idea when he became a . . . a separate person. He seemed real to me when I was writing as him, but only in the way all the stories I write seem real to me when I'm writing them. Which is to say, I take them seriously but I don't believe them . . . except I do . . . then .

He paused and barked a bewildered little laugh.

'All the times I've talked about writing,' he said. 'Hundreds of lectures, thousands of classes, and I don't believe I ever said a single word about a fiction-writer's grasp of the twin realities that exist for him - the one in the real world and the one in the manuscript world. I don't think I ever even thought about it. And now I realize . . . well . . . I don't even seem to know how to think about it.'

'It doesn't matter,' Liz said. 'He didn't have to be a separate person until Thad tried to kill him.'

Alan turned toward her. 'Well, Liz, you know Thad better than anyone else. Did he change from Dr Beaumont into Mr Stark when he was working on the crime stories? Did he slap you around?

Did he threaten people with a straight-razor at parties?'

'Sarcasm isn't going to make this any easier to discuss,' she said, looking at him steadily. He threw up his hands in exasperation - although he wasn't sure if it was them, himself, or all three of them he was exasperated with. 'I'm not being sarcastic, I'm trying to use a little verbal shock-treatment to make you see how crazy you both sound! You are talking about a goddam pen name coming to life! If you tell the FBI even half of this stuff, they'll be looking up the State of Maine Involuntary Committal laws!'

'The answer to your question is no,' Liz said. 'He didn't beat me up or wave a straight-razor around at cocktail parties. But when he was writing as George Stark - and, in particular, when he was writing about Alexis Machine - Thad wasn't the same. When he - opened the door is maybe the best way to put it - when he did that and invited Stark in, he'd become distant. Not cold, not even cool, just distant. He was less interested in going out, in seeing people. He'd sometimes blow off faculty meetings, even student appointments . . . although that was fairly rare. He'd go to bed later at night, and sometimes he'd still be tossing and turning an hour after he did come to bed. When he fell asleep he'd twitch and mutter a lot, as if he were having bad dreams. I asked him on a few occasions if that was the case and he'd say he felt headachy and unrested, but if he'd been having bad dreams, he couldn't remember what they were.

'There was no big personality change . . . but he wasn't the same. My husband quit drinking alcohol some time ago, Alan. He doesn't go to Alcoholics Anonymous or anything, but he quit. With one exception. When one of the Stark novels was finished, he'd get drunk. Then it was as if he were blowing it all off, saying to himself, 'The son of a bitch is gone again. At least for awhile, he's gone again. George has returned to his farm in Mississippi. Hooray.''

'She's got it right,' Thad said. 'Hooray - that's just what it felt like. Let me sum up what we have if we leave the blackouts and the automatic writing out of the picture entirely. The man.you're looking for is killing people I know, people who were, with the exception of Homer Gamache, responsible for 'executing' George Stark . . . in conspiracy with me, of course. He's got my blood-type, which isn't one of the really rare ones, but is still one that only six people in every hundred have. He conforms to the description I gave you, which was a distillation of my own image of what George Stark would look like if he existed. He smokes the cigarettes I used to smoke. Last, and most interesting, he appears to have fingerprints which are identical to mine. Maybe six in every hundred have type-A blood with a negative Rh factor, but so far as we know, nobody else in this whole green world has my fingerprints. Despite all of this, you refuse to even consider my assertion that Stark is somehow alive. Now, Sheriff Alan Pangborn, you tell me: who is the one who's operating in a fog, so to speak?'

Alan felt the bedrock which he had once believed sure and solid shift a little. It really wasn't possible, was it? But . . . if he did nothing else today, he would have to speak to Thad's doctor and start chasing down the medical history. It occurred to him that it would be really wonderful to discover there hadn't been any brain tumor, that Thad had either lied about it . . . or hallucinated it.

If he could prove the man was a psycho, it would all be so much more comfortable. Maybe - Maybe shit. There was no George Stark, there never had been any George Stark. He might not be an FBI whiz-kid, but that didn't mean he was gullible enough to fall for that. They might collar the crazy bastard in New York City, going after Cowley, probably would, in fact, but if not, the psycho might decide to vacation in Maine this summer. If he did come back, Alan wanted a shot at him. He didn't think swallowing any of this Twilight Zone shit would help him if the chance came up. And he didn't want to waste any more time talking about it now.

'Time will tell, I suppose,' he said vaguely. 'For now, I'd advise you two to stick to the line you took with me last night - this is a guy who thinks he's George Stark, and he's crazy enough to have started at the logical place - logical for a crazyman, anyway - the place where Stark was officially buried.'

'If you don't at least allow the idea some mental house-room, you're going to be in shit up to your armpits,' Thad said. 'This guy - Alan, you can't reason with him, you can't plead with him. You could beg him for mercy - if he gave you the time - but it wouldn't do any good. If you ever get close to him with your guard down, he will make sharkmeat pie out of you.'

'I'll check with your doctor,' Alan said, 'and with the doctor who operated on you as a kid. I don't know what good it will do, or what light it might shed on this business, but I'll do it. Otherwise, I guess I'll just have to take my chances.'

Thad smiled with no humor whatsoever. 'From my standpoint, there's a problem with that. My wife and kids and I will be taking our chances right along with you.'

3

Fifteen minutes later a trim blue-and-white panel truck pulled into Thad's driveway behind Alan's car. It looked like a telephone van, and that was what it turned out to be, although the words maine state police were written on the side in discreet lower-case letters. Two technicians came to the door, introduced themselves, apologized for having taken so long (an apology that was wasted on Thad and Liz, since they hadn't known these guys were coming at all), and asked Thad if he had any problem signing the form one of them carried on a clipboard. He scanned it quickly and saw it empowered them to place recording and traceback equipment on.his phone. It did not give them blanket permission to use the transcripts obtained in any court proceeding.

Thad scratched his signature in the proper place, both Alan Pangborn and one of the technicians (Thad bemusedly noticed that he had a telephone-tester slung on one side of his belt, a .45 on the other) witnessed it.

'This traceback stuff really works?' Thad asked several minutes later, after Alan had left for the Orono State Police Barracks. It seemed important to say something; following the return of their document, the technicians had fallen silent.

'Yeah,' one of them answered. He had picked the living-room telephone out of its cradle and was rapidly levering off the handset's plastic inner sleeve. 'We can trace a call back to its point of origination anywhere in the world. It's not like the old telephone traces you see in the movies, where you have to keep the caller on the line until the trace is done. As long as no one hangs up the phone on this end' - he waggled the phone, which now looked a little like an android demolished by ray-gun fire in a science fiction epic - 'we can trace back to the point of origination. Which more often than not turns out to be a pay telephone in a shopping mall.'

'You got that right,' his partner said. He was doing something to the telephone jack, which he had removed from its baseboard plug. 'You got a phone upstairs?'

'Two of them,' Thad said. He was beginning to feel as if someone had pushed him rudely down Alice's rabbit hole. 'One in my study and one in the bedroom.'

'They on a separate line?'

'No - we just have the one. Where will you put the tape-recorder?'

'Probably down cellar,' the first said absently. He was sticking wires from the telephone into a Lucite block which bristled with spring connectors, and there was a wouldja-mind-lettin-us-do-our-job undertone to his voice. Thad put his arm around Liz's waist and guided her away, wondering if there was anyone who could or would understand that not all the tape-recorders and high-tech state-of-the-art Lucite blocks in the world would stop George Stark. Stark was out there, maybe resting up, maybe already on his way.

And if no one would believe him, just what in the hell was he going to do about it? How in the hell was he supposed to protect his family? Was there a way? He thought deeply, and when thought accomplished nothing, he simply listened to himself. Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - the answer came that way when it would come no other. Not this time, though. And he was amused to find himself suddenly, desperately horny. He thought about coaxing Liz upstairs - and then remembered the state police technicians would shortly be up there, wanting to do more arcane things to his outmoded one-line telephones. Can't even get laid, he thought. So what do we do?

But the answer was simple enough. They waited, that's what they did. Nor did they have to wait long for the next horrible tidbit: Stark had gotten Rick Cowley, after all - booby-trapped his door somehow after ambushing the technicians who had been doing the same thing to Rick's telephone that the men in the living room were doing to the Beaumonts'. When Rick turned his latchkey, the door simply blew up.

It was Alan who brought them the news. He had gotten less than three miles down the road toward Orono when word of the explosion came over the radio. He had turned back immediately.

'You told us Rick was safe,' Liz said. Her voice and her eyes were dull. Even her hair seemed to have lost its luster. 'You practically guaranteed it.'

'I was wrong. I'm sorry.'.Alan felt as deeply shocked as Liz Beaumont looked and sounded, but he was trying hard not to

let it show. He glanced at Thad, who was looking back at him with a kind of bright-eyed stillness. A humorless little smile lurked just around the edges of Thad's mouth. He knows just what I am thinking. This was probably not true, but it felt true to Alan. Well . . . maybe not EVERYTHING, but some of it. Quite a bit of it, maybe. It could be that I'm doing a shitty job of covering up, but I don't think that's it. I think it's him. I think he sees too much.

'You made an assumption that turned out to be wrong, that's all,' Thad said. 'Happens to the best of us. Maybe you ought to go back and think about George Stark a little more. What do you think, Alan?'

'That you could be right,' Alan said, and told himself he was only saying that to soothe both of them. But the face of George Stark, as yet unglimpsed except through Thad Beaumont's description, had begun to peer over his shoulder. He couldn't see it as yet, but he could feel it there, looking.

'I want to talk with this Dr Hurd - '

'Hume,' Thad said. 'George Hume.'

'Thanks. I want to talk to him, so I'll be around. If the FBI does show up, would you two like me to drop back later on?'

'I don't know about Thad, but I'd like that very much,' Liz said. Thad nodded.

Alan said, 'I'm sorry about this whole thing, but the thing I'm sorriest about is promising you something would be okay when it turned out not to be.'

'In a situation like this, I guess it's easy to underestimate,' Thad said. 'I told you the truth - at least, the truth as I understand it for a simple reason. If it is Stark, I think a lot of people are going to underestimate him before this is over.'

Alan looked from Thad to Liz and back again. After a long time during which there was no sound except for Thad's police guard talking together outside the front door (there was another around back), Alan said: 'The bitch of it is, you guys really believe this, don't you?'

Thad nodded. 'I do, anyway.'

'I don't,' Liz said, and they both looked at her, startled. 'I don't believe. I know.'

Alan sighed and stuffed his hands deep into his pockets. 'There's one thing I'd like to know,' he said. 'If this is what you say it is . . . I don't believe it, can't believe it, I suppose you'd say . . . but if it is, what the hell does this guy want? Just revenge?'

'Not at all,' Thad said. 'He wants the same thing you or I would want if we were in his position. He wants not to be dead anymore. That's all he wants. Not to be dead anymore. I'm the only one who might be able to make that happen. And if I can't, or won't . . . well . . . he can at least make sure he isn't lonely..