The Dark Half - Stephen King [113]
The only time he could recall being at such a loss with himself had been in the weeks after he had quit drinking — after he'd pulled the plug on the booze-bath he'd wallowed in after Liz's miscarriage and before Stark appeared. Then, as now, there had been the feeling that there was a problem, but it was as unapproachable as one of those water-mirages you see at the end of a flat stretch of highway on a hot afternoon. The harder he ran toward the problem, wanting to attack it with both hands, dismantle it, destroy it, the faster it receded, until he was finally left, panting and breathless, with that bogus ripple of water still mocking him at the horizon.
These nights he slept badly, and dreamed George Stark was showing him his own deserted house, a house where things exploded when he touched them and where, in the last room, the corpses of his wife and Frederick Clawson were waiting. At the moment he got there, all the birds would begin to fly, exploding upward from trees and telephone lines and electricity poles, thousands of them, millions of them, so many that they blotted out the sun.
Until Wendy fell on the stairs, he felt very much like fool's stuffing himself, just waiting for the right murderous somebody to come along, tuck a napkin into his collar, pick up his fork, and begin to eat.
2
The twins had been crawling for some time, and for the last month or so they had been pulling themselves up to a standing position with the aid of the nearest stable (or, in some cases, unstable) object — a chair-leg was good, as was the coffee-table, but even an empty cardboard carton would serve, at least until the twin in question put too much weight on it and it crumpled inward or turned turtle. Babies are capable of getting themselves into divine messes at any age, but at the age of eight months, when crawling has served its purpose and walking has not quite been learned, they are clearly in the Golden Age of Mess-Making.
Liz had set them out on the floor to play in a bright patch of sun around quarter of five in the afternoon. After ten minutes or so of confident crawling and shaky standing (the latter accompanied by lusty crows of accomplishment to their parents and to each other), William pulled himself up on the edge of the coffee-table. He glanced around and made several imperious gestures with his right arm. These gestures reminded Thad of old newsfilm showing Il Duce addressing his constituency from his balcony. Then William seized his mother's teacup and managed to pour the lees all over himself before toppling backward onto his bottom. The tea was fortunately cold, but William held onto the cup and managed to rap it against his mouth smartly enough to make his lower lip bleed a little. He began to wail. Wendy promptly joined in.
Liz picked him up, examined him, rolled her eyes at Thad, and took him upstairs to soothe him and then clean him up. 'Keep an eye on the princess,' she said as she went.
'I will,' Thad said, but he had discovered and would shortly rediscover that, in the Golden Age of Mess—Making, such promises often amount to little. William had managed to snatch Liz's teacup from under her very nose, and Thad saw that Wendy was going to fall from the third stair—riser just a moment too late to save her the tumble.
He had been looking at a news magazine — not reading it but thumbing idly through it, glancing every now and then at a picture. When he was finished, he went over to the large knitting basket by the fireplace which served as a sloppy sort of magazine-rack to put it back and get another. Wendy was crawling across the floor, her tears forgotten before they were entirely dry on her chubby cheeks. She was making the breathy little rum-rum-rum sound both of them uttered when crawling, a sound that sometimes made Thad wonder if they associated all movement with the cars