The Dark Half - Stephen King [187]
'You think I'm going to kill you,' he said. 'No need to deny it, Sheriff; I can see it in your eyes, and it is a look I'm familiar with. I could lie and say it's not true, but I think you'd doubt me. You have a certain amount of experience in these matters yourself, isn't that right?'
'I suppose,' Alan said. 'But something like this is a little bit . . . well, outside the normal run of police business.'
Stark threw back his head and laughed. The twins looked toward the sound, and laughed along with him. Alan glanced at Liz and saw terror and hate on her face. And there was something else there as well, wasn't there? Yes. Alan thought it was jealousy. He wondered idly if there was something else George Stark didn't know. He wondered if Stark had any idea of how dangerous this woman could be to him.
'You got that right!' Stark said, still chuckling. Then he grew serious. He leaned toward Alan, and Alan could smell the cheesy odor of his decomposing flesh. 'But it doesn't have to go that way, Sheriff. The odds are against you walking out of this affair alive, I will freely grant you that, but the possibility exists. I have something to do here. A bit of writing. Thad is going to help me — he's going to prime the pump, you might say. I think we'll probably work through the night, he and I, but by the time the sun comes up tomorrow morning, I should pretty much have my house in order.'
'He wants Thad to teach him how to write on his own,' Liz said from the galley. 'He says they're going to collaborate on a book.'
'That's not quite right,' Stark said. He glanced at her for a moment, a ripple of annoyance passing over the previously unbroken surface of his good temper. 'And he owes me, you know. Maybe he knew how to write before I showed up, but I was the one who taught him how to write stuff people would want to read. And what good is it, writing a thing, if no one wants to read it?'
'No — you wouldn't understand that, would you?' Liz asked.
'What I want from him,' Stark told Alan, 'is a kind of transfusion. I seem to have some sort of . . . of gland that's quit on me. Temporarily quit. I think Thad knows how to make that gland work. He ought to, because he sort of cloned mine from his own, if you see what I mean. I guess you could say he built most of my equipment.'
Oh no, my friend, Alan thought. That's not right. You might not know it, but it's not. You did it together, you two, because you were there all along. And you have been terribly persistent. Thad tried to put an end to you before he was born and couldn't quite do it. Then, eleven years later, Dr Pritchard tried his hand, and that worked, but only for awhile. Finally, Thad invited you back. He did it, but he didn't know what he was doing . . . because he didn't know about YOU. Pritchard never told him. And you came, didn't you? You are the ghost of his dead brother . . . but you're both much more and much less than that.
Alan caught Wendy, who was by the fireplace, before she could topple over backward into the woodbox.
Stark looked at William and Wendy, then back at Alan. 'Thad and I come from a long history of twins, you know. And, of course, I came into being following the deaths of the twins who would have been these two kids' older brothers or sisters. Call it some sort of transcendental balancing act, if you like.'
'I call it crazy,' Alan said.
Stark laughed. 'Actually, so do I. But it happened. The word became flesh, you might say. How it happened doesn't much matter what matters is that I'm here.'
You're wrong, Alan thought. How it happened may be all that DOES matter now. To us, if not to you . . . because it may be all that can save us.
'Once things got to a certain point, I created myself,' Stark went on. 'And it really isn't so surprising that I've been havin problems with my writing, is it? Creating one's own self . . . that takes a lot of energy. You don't think this sort of thing happens every day, do you?'
'God forbid,' Liz said.
That was either a direct hit or close to it. Stark's head whipped toward her