tark Makes a Purchase

1

Waking up wasn't like waking up.

When you came right down to it, he didn't think he had ever really been awake or asleep, at least in the way normal people used those words. In a way it was as if he were always asleep, and only moved from one dream to another. In that way, his life - what little of it he remembered - was like a nest of Chinese boxes that never ended, or like peering into an endless hall of mirrors.

This dream was a nightmare.

He came slowly out of sleep knowing he hadn't really been asleep at all. Somehow Thad Beaumont had managed to capture him for a little while; had managed to bend him to his will for a little while. Had he said things, revealed things, while Beaumont had been in control of him? He had a feeling he might have done . . . but he also felt quite sure Beaumont would not know how to interpret those things, or how to tell the important things he might have said from the things that didn't matter.

He also came out of sleep to pain.

He had rented a two-room 'efficiency' in the East Village, just off Avenue B. When he opened his eyes he was sitting at the lopsided kitchen table with an open notebook in front of him. A rivulet of bright blood ran across the faded oilcloth which covered the table, and there was nothing very surprising about that, because there was a Bic pen sticking out of the back of his right hand. Now the dream began to come back.

That was how he had been able to drive Beaumont out of his mind, the only way he had been able to break the bond the cowardly shit had somehow forged between them. Cowardly? Yes. But he was also sly, and it would be a bad idea to forget that. A very bad idea, indeed. Stark could vaguely remember dreaming that Thad was with him, in his bed - they were talking together, whispering together, and at first this had seemed both pleasant and oddly comforting - like talking with your brother after lights out. Except they were doing more than talking, weren't they?

What they had been doing was exchanging secrets . . . or, rather, Thad was asking him questions and Stark found himself answering. It was pleasant to answer, it was comforting to answer. But it was also alarming. At first his alarm was centered on the birds - why did Thad keep asking him about birds? There were no birds. Once, perhaps . . . a long, long time ago . . . but not anymore. It was just a mind-game, a puny effort to freak him out. Then, little by little, his sense of alarm became entwined with his almost exquisitely attuned survival instinct - it grew sharper and more specific as he continued trying to struggle awake. He felt as if he were being held underwater, drowned . . .

So, still in that half-waking, half-dreaming state, he had gone into the kitchen, opened the notebook, and picked up the ballpoint pen. Thad hadn't tipped to any of that; why should he have?.Wasn't he also writing five hundred miles away? The pen wasn't right, of course - didn't even feel right -in his hand - but it would do. For now.

Falling APART, he had watched himself write, and by then he had been very close to the magic mirror that divided sleep from wakefulness, and he struggled to impose his own thoughts upon the pen, his own will upon what would and would not appear on the blankness of the paper, but it was hard, good God, good Christ, it was so damned hard.

He had bought the Bic pen and half a dozen notebooks in a stationery shop right after he had arrived in New York City; had done it even before renting the wretched 'efficiency'. There were Berol pencils in the shop, and he had wanted to buy them, but he hadn't. Because, no matter whose mind it was that had driven the pencils, it had been Thad Beaumont's hand which held them, and he needed to know if that was a bond he could break. So he had left the pencils and had taken the pen instead.

If he could write, if he could write on his own, all would be well and he wouldn't need the wretched, whining creature up in Maine at all. But the pen had been useless to him. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how mightily he concentrated, the only thing he had been able to write was his own name. He had written it over and over again: George Stark, George Stark, George Stark, until, at the bottom of the sheet, they were not recognizable words at all but only the jittery scribbles of a pre-schooler.

Yesterday he had gone to a branch of the New York Public Library and had rented an hour's time on one of the grim gray electric IBMs in the Writing Room. The hour had seemed to last a thousand years. He sat in a carrel which was enclosed on three sides, fingers trembling on the keys, and typed his name, this time in capital letters: GEORGE STARK, GEORGE STARK, GEORGE STARK.

Break it! he had screamed at himself. Type something else, anything else, just break it!

So he had tried. He had bent over the keys, sweating, and typed: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Only when he looked up at the paper, he saw that what he had written was The george George Stark george starked over the starky stark.

He had felt an urge to rip the IBM right off its bolts and go rampaging through the room with it, swinging the typewriter like a barbarian's mace, splitting heads and breaking backs: if he could not create, let him uncreate!

Instead, he had controlled himself (with a mighty effort) and had walked out of the library, crumpling the useless sheet of paper in one strong hand as he went and dropping it into a litter basket on the sidewalk. He remembered now, with the Bic pen in his hand, the utter blind rage he

had felt at discovering that without Beaumont he couldn't write anything but his own name. And the fear.

The panic.

But he still had Beaumont, didn't he? Beaumont might think it was the other way around, but maybe . . . maybe Beaumont was in for one large fucking surprise. losing, he wrote, and Jesus, he couldn't tell Beaumont any more - what he had written already was bad enough. He made a mighty effort to seize control of his traitor hand. To wake up. necessary COHESION, his hand wrote, as if to amplify the previous thought, and suddenly Stark saw himself stabbing Beaumont with the pen. He thought: And I can do it, too. I don't think you could, Thad, because when it comes down to it, you're just a long drink of milk, aren't you?

But when it comes to the sticking point . . . I can handle it, you bastard. It's time you learned that, I think..Then, even though this was like a dream within a dream, even though he was gripped by that horrible, vertiginous feeling of being out of control, some of his savage and unquestioning selfconfidence returned and he was able to pierce the shield of sleep. In that triumphant moment of breaking the surface before Beaumont could drown him, he seized control of the pen . . . and was finally able to write with it.

For a moment - and it was only a moment - there was a sensation of two hands grasping two writing instruments. The feeling was too clear, too real, to be anything but real. there are no birds, he wrote - the first real sentence he had ever written as a physical being. It was terribly hard to write; only a creature of supernatural determination could have suffered through the effort. But once the words were out, he felt his control strengthen. The grip of that other hand weakened, and Stark laid his own grip over it, showing no mercy or hesitation. Drown for awhile, he thought. See how YOU like it.

In a rush quicker and far more satisfying than even the most powerful orgasm, he wrote: THERE ARE NO FUCKING BIRDS Oh you son of a bitch get out of my HEAD!

Then, before he could think about it - thinking might have provoked fatal hesitation - he swept the Bic pen around in a short, shallow arc. The steel tip plunged into his right hand . . . and, hundreds of miles north, he could feel Thad Beaumont sweeping a Berol Black Beauty pencil around and plunging it into his left hand.

That was when he woke up - when they both woke up - for real. 2

The pain was sizzling and enormous - but it was also liberating. Stark screamed, turning his sweaty head against his arm to muffle the sound, but it was a scream of joy and exhilaration as well as pain.

He could feel Beaumont stifling his own scream in his study up there in Maine. The awareness Beaumont had created between them did not break; it was more like a hastily tied knot which gave way under the pressure of a final tremendous yank. Stark sensed, almost saw, the probe the treacherous bastard had sent wriggling into his head while he slept, now twisting and twitching and slithering away.

Stark reached out, not physically, but with his mind, and seized that disappearing tail of Thad's mental probe. In the eye of Stark's own mind it looked like a worm, a fat white maggot deliriously stuffed with offal and decay.

He thought of making Thad grab another pencil from the mason jar and use it to stab himself again - in the eye this time. Or perhaps he would have him drive the pencil's point deep into his ear, rupturing the eardrum and digging for the soft meat of the brain beyond. He could almost hear Thad's scream. He would not be able to muffle that one.

Then he stopped. He didn't want Beaumont dead. At least not yet. Not until Beaumont had taught him how to live on his own. Stark slowly relaxed his fist, and as he did, he felt the fist in which he held Beaumont's essence

- the mental fist, which had proved every bit as quick and merciless as his physical one - also open. He felt Beaumont, the plump white maggot, slip away, squealing and moaning..'Only for now,'

he whispered, and turned to the other necessary business. He closed his left hand around the pen jutting out of his right hand. He drew it smoothly out. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket.

3

There was a bottle of Glenlivet standing on the stainless-steel dish-drainer by the sink. Stark picked it up and walked into the bathroom. His right hand swung by his side as he walked, splattering dime-sized droplets of blood on the warped and faded linoleum. The hole in his hand was about half an inch above the ridge of the knuckles and slightly to the right of the third one. It was perfectly round. The stain of the black ink around the edge of the hole, combined with the internal bleeding and trauma, made it look like a gunshot wound. He tried to flex the hand. The fingers moved . . . but the sickening wave of pain that resulted was too great for further experimentation.

He pulled the chain depending from the fixture above the medicine cabinet mirror, and the unshaded sixty-watt bulb came on. He used his right arm to hold the bottle of whiskey clamped against his side so he could unscrew the cap. Then he held his wounded hand splayed out over the basin. Was Beaumont doing the same thing in Maine? He doubted it. He doubted if Beaumont had the guts to clean up his own mess. He would undoubtedly be on his way to the hospital by now. Stark tipped whiskey into the wound, and a bolt of pure, steely pain leaped up his arm to his shoulder. He saw the whiskey bubbling in the wound, saw little threads of blood in the amber, and had to bury his face against the sweat-soaked arm of his shirt again. He thought the pain would never fade, but at last it began to. He tried to put the bottle of whiskey on the shelf bolted to the tile wall below the mirror. His hand was shaking too badly for this operation to stand much chance of success, so he set it on the rust-splotched tin floor of the shower stall instead. He would want a drink in a minute. He raised the hand to the light and peered into the hole. He could see the bulb through it, but dimly - it was like looking through a red filter bleared with some kind of membranous muck. He hadn't driven the pen all the way through his hand, but it had been damned close. Maybe Beaumont had done better.

He could always hope.

He held his hand under the cold water tap, spraying the fingers to draw the hole as wide open as possible, then steeled himself for the pain. It was bad at first - he had to strain another scream through teeth which were clenched and lips which were pressed together in a thin white line - but then the hand grew numb and it was better. He forced himself to hold it under the tap for a full three minutes. Then he turned the faucet off and held it up to the light again. The glow of the bulb through the hole was still there, but now it was dim and distant. The wound was closing up. His body seemed to have amazing powers of regeneration, and that was rather amusing, because at the same time he was falling apart. Losing cohesion, he had written. And that was close enough.

He looked at his face fixedly in the wavery, spotted mirror on the medicine chest for thirty seconds or more, then shook himself back to awareness with a physical jerk. Looking at his face, so well-known and familiar and yet so new and strange, always made him feel as if he were falling into a hypnotic trance. He supposed if he looked at it long enough, he would do just that..Stark opened the medicine cabinet, swinging the mirror and his repulsively fascinating face aside. There was an odd little collection of items in the chest: two disposable razors, one used; bottles of make-up; a compact; several wedges of fine-grained sponge, ivory-colored where they had not been stained a slightly darker color by face-powder; a bottle of generic aspirin. No BandAids. Band-Aids were like cops, he thought - never one around when you really needed one. That was all right, though - he would disinfect the wound with some more whiskey (after disinfecting his insides with a healthy wallop, that was) and then wrap it in a handkerchief. He didn't think it would turn septic; he seemed immune to infection. He also found this amusing. He used his teeth to uncap the aspirin bottle, spat the cap into the basin, then upended the bottle and shook half a dozen pills into his mouth. He took the whiskey out of the shower stall and washed the aspirins down with a slug. The booze hit his stomach and opened its comforting blossom of heat there. Then he used some more on his hand. Stark went into the bedroom and opened the top drawer of a bureau which had seen better - much better - days. It and an ancient sofa-bed were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The top drawer was the only one with anything in it save newspaper liners from the Daily News: three pairs of undershorts still in the store wrapper, two pairs of socks with the manufacturer's label still banded around them, a pair of Levi's, and a Hav-a-Hank, also still in its wrapper. He tore the cellophane open with his teeth and tied the Hav-a-Hank around his hand. Amber whiskey soaked through the thin cloth, then one small bloom of blood. Stark waited to see if the bloom would spread, but it didn't. Good deal. A very good deal. Had Beaumont been able to pick up any sensory input? he wondered. Did he, maybe, know that George Stark was currently sheltering in a cruddy little East Village apartment in a cheesy building where the roaches looked big enough to steal the welfare checks? He didn't think so, but it made no sense to take chances when he didn't have to. He had promised Thad a week to decide, and although he was now all but positive that Thad had no plans to start writing as Stark again, he would see that Thad got all the time he had been promised. He was a man of his word, after all.

Beaumont was probably going to need a little inspiration. One of those little propane torches you could buy in hardware stores turned on the soles of his kids' feet for a couple of seconds ought to do the trick, Stark thought, but that was for later. For the time being he would play a waiting game . . . and while he did, it wouldn't hurt to start drifting north. To get a little field position, you might say. There was, after all, his car - the black Toronado. It was in storage, but that didn't mean it had to stay in storage. He could leave New York City tomorrow morning. But before he

did, he had a purchase to make . . . and right now he ought to use some of the cosmetics in the bathroom cabinet.

4

He took out the little jars of liquid make-up, the powder, the sponges. He took another hefty drink from the bottle before starting. His hands were steady again, but his right throbbed nastily. This did not particularly upset him; if his was throbbing, Beaumont's must be screaming. He faced himself in the mirror, touched the arc of skin under his left eye with his left finger, then ran it down his cheek to the corner of his mouth. 'Losing cohesion,' he muttered, and oh boy, that certainly was the truth..When Stark had first looked at his face - kneeling outside Homeland Cemetery, gazing into a

mud-puddle whose still and scummy surface had been lit by the round white moon of a nearby streetlamp - he had been satisfied. It was exactly as it had appeared in the dreams he'd had while imprisoned in the womblike dungeon of Beaumont's imagination. He had seen a conventionally handsome man whose features were a little too broad to attract much attention. Had the forehead not been quite so high, the eyes not so far apart, it might have been the sort of face that would make women turn their heads for a second look. A perfectly nondescript face (if there is such a thing) may attract attention just because there is no one feature to catch the eye before the eye dismisses it and moves on; its utter ordinariness may trouble that eye, and cause it to return for a second glance. The face Stark had seen for the first time with real eyes in the mud-puddle missed that degree of plainness by a comfortable margin. He had thought it the perfect face, one no one would be able to describe afterward. Blue eyes. . . a tan that might seem the tiniest bit odd on one with such fair hair. . . and that was it! That was all! The witness would be forced to move on to the broad shoulders which were really the most distinguishing thing about him. . . and the world was full of broad-shouldered men.

Now everything had changed. Now his face had become decidedly strange . . . and if he did not begin writing again soon, it would become more than strange. It would become grotesque. Losing cohesion, he thought again. But you're going to put a stop to that, Thad. When you start the book about the armored-car job, what's happening to me will start to reverse itself. I don't know how I know that, but I do know it.

It had been two weeks since he had seen himself for the first time in that puddle, and his face had undergone a steady degeneration since then. It had been subtle at first, so subtle that he had been able to persuade himself it was only his imagination . . . but, as the changes began to speed up, that position had become untenable and he had been forced to retreat from it. Seeing a photograph of him taken then and one taken now might have made someone think of a man who had been exposed to some weird radiation or corrosive chemical substance. George Stark seemed to be experiencing a spontaneous breakdown of all his soft tissues at the same time. The crow's feet around the eyes, ordinary marks of middle age which he had seen in the puddle, were now deep grooves. His lids had grown droopy and had taken on the rough texture of crocodile skin. His cheeks had begun to take on a similar seamed and cracked look. The rims of the eyes themselves had grown reddish, giving him the sorrowful look of a man who didn't know it was time to take his nose out of the bottle. Deep lines had carved themselves in the flesh of his face from the comers of his lips to the line of his jaw, giving his mouth the disquietingly hinged look of a ventriloquist's dummy. His blonde hair, fine to begin with, had grown finer still, drawing back from his temples and showing the pink skin of his pate. Liver-spots had appeared on the backs of his hands.

He could have abided all this without resorting to make-up. He only looked old, after all, and old age was hardly remarkable. His strength seemed unimpaired. Plus, there was that unshakable surety that once he and Beaumont started writing again - writing as George Stark, that was - the process would reverse itself.

But now his teeth had grown loose in his gums. And there were sores, too. He had noticed the first one inside his right elbow three days ago a red patch with a lace of dead white skin around the edges. It was the sort of blemish he associated with pellagra, which had been endemic in the deep South even into the 1960s. The day before yesterday he had seen another

one, on his neck this time, below the lobe of his left ear. Two more yesterday, one on his chest between his nipples, the other below his navel..Today the first one had appeared on his face, at the right temple.

They didn't hurt. There was a dull, deep-seated itch, but that was all . . . at least, as far as sensation went. But they spread rapidly. His right arm was now a dull, swollen red from the fold of his elbow halfway to his shoulder. He had made the mistake of scratching, and the flesh had given way with sickening ease. A mixture of blood and yellowish pus had oozed out along the trenches his fingernails had left, and the wounds gave off a ghastly, gassy smell. Yet it was not infection. He would have sworn to that. It was more like . . . damp-rot. Looking at him now, someone - even a trained medical person would probably have guessed

grass-fire melanoma, perhaps caused by exposure to high-level radiation. Still, the sores did not worry him greatly. He supposed they would multiply in number, spread in area, join each other, and eventually eat him alive . . . if he let them. Since he didn't intend to let that happen, there was no need for them to worry him. But he couldn't be just another face in the crowd if the features on that face were transforming themselves into an erupting volcano. Hence, the make-up.

He applied the liquid foundation carefully with one of the sponge wedges, spreading it up from cheekbones to temples, eventually covering the dull red lump beyond the end of his right brow and the new sore just beginning to poke through the skin over his left cheekbone. A man wearing pancake make-up looked like only one thing on God's earth, Stark had discovered, and that was a man wearing pancake make-up. Which was to say, either an actor in a TV soap opera or a guest on the Donahue show. But anything was an improvement on the sores, and the tan mitigated some of the phony effect. If he stayed in the gloom or was seen in artificial lighting, it was hardly noticeable at all. Or so he hoped. There were other reasons to stay out of direct sunlight, as well. He suspected the sun actually accelerated the disastrous chemical reaction going on inside him. It was almost as if he were turning into a vampire. But that was all right; in a way, he had always been one. Besides - I'm a night-person, always have been; that's just my nature. This made him grin, and the grin exposed teeth like fangs. He screwed the cover back on the liquid make-up and began to powder. I can smell myself, he thought, and pretty soon other people are going to be able to smell me, too - a thick, unpleasant smell, like a can of potted meat that's spent the day standing in the sun. This is not good, friends and dear hearts. This is not good at all.

'You will write, Thad,' he said, looking at himself in the mirror. 'But with luck, you won't have to do it for long.'

He grinned more widely, exposing an incisor which had gone dark and dead.

'I'm a quick study.'

5

At half-past ten the next day, a stationer on Houston Street sold three boxes of Berol Black Beauty pencils to a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a checked shirt, blue-jeans, and very large sunglasses. The man was also wearing pancake make-up, the stationer observed - probably the remains of a night spent tomcatting around in the leather bars. And from the way he smelled, the stationer thought he had done a little more than just splash on the old English Leather; he smelled as if he had bathed in it. The cologne didn't disguise the fact that the broad-shouldered dude smelled filthy. The stationer thought briefly - very briefly - about making a wisecrack, and then.thought again. The dude smelled bad but looked strong. Also, the transaction was mercifully brief.

After all, it was just pencils the fruitcake was buying, not a Rolls-Royce Corniche. Best to leave ill enough alone.

6

Stark made a brief stop back at the East Village 'efficiency' to stuff his few belongings into the packsack he had bought in an Army-Navy store on his first day in the maggoty old Big Apple. If not for the bottle of Scotch, he probably would not have bothered to return at all. On his way up the crumbling front steps, he passed the small bodies of three dead sparrows without noticing them.

He left Avenue B on foot . . . but he didn't walk for long. A determined man, he had discovered, can always find a ride if he really needs one..