The Dark Half Read online

  Beside the typewriter was the manuscript of his new novel, The Golden Dog. On top of the typewriter was that day's output. Six pages. It was his usual number . . . when be was working as himself, that was. As Stark he usually did eight, and sometimes ten.

  "This is what I was fooling with before Pangborn showed up," he said, picking up the little stack of pages on top of the typewriter and handing them to her. "Then the sound came--the sound of the sparrows. For the second time today, only this time it was much more intense. You see what's written across that top sheet?"

  She looked for a long time, and he could see only her hair and the top of her bead. When she looked back at him, all the color had dropped out of her face. Her lips were pressed together in a narrow gray line.

  "It's the same," she whispered. "It's the very same. Oh, Thad, what is this? What--"

  She swayed and he moved forward, afraid for a moment she was actually going to faint. He grasped her shoulders, his foot tangled in the X-shaped foot of his office chair, and he almost spilled them both onto his desk.

  "Are you all right?"

  "No," she said in a thin voice. "Are you?"

  "Not exactly," he said. "I'm sorry. Same old clumsy Beaumont. As a knight in shining armor, I make a hell of a good doorstop. "

  "You wrote this before Pangborn ever showed up," she said. She seemed to find this impossible to fully grasp. "Before. "

  "That's right. "

  "What does it mean?" She was looking at him with frantic intensity, the pupils of her eyes large and dark in spite of the bright light.

  "I don't know," he said. "I thought you might have an idea. "

  She shook her head and put the pages back on his desk. Then she rubbed her hand against the short nylon skirt of her nightie, as if she had touched something nasty. Thad didn't believe she was aware of what she was doing, and he didn't tell her.

  "Now do you understand why I held it back?" he asked.

  "Yes . . . I think so. "

  "What would he have said? Our practical Sheriff from Maine's smallest county, who puts his faith in computer print-outs from A. S. R. and I. and eyewitness testimony? Our Sheriff who found it more plausible that I might be hiding a twin brother than that someone has somehow discovered how to duplicate fingerprints? What would he have said to this?"

  "I . . . I don't know." She was struggling to bring herself back, to haul herself out of the shockwave. He had seen her do it before, but that did not lessen his admiration for her. "I don't know what he would have said, Thad. "

  "Me either. I think at the very worst, he might assume some foreknowledge of the crime. It's probably more likely he'd believe I ran up here and wrote that after he left tonight. "

  "Why would you do a thing like that? Why?"

  "I think insanity would be the first assumption," Thad said dryly. "I think a cop like Pangborn would be a lot more likely to believe insanity than to accept an occurrence which seems to have no explanation outside the paranormal. But if you think I'm wrong to hold this back until I have a chance to make something of it myself--and I might be--say so. We can call the Castle Rock Sheriff's Office and leave a message for him. "

  She shook her head. "I don't know. I've heard--on some talk-show or other, I guess--about psychic links . . . "

  "Do you believe in them?"

  "I never had any reason to think much about the idea one way or the other," she said. "Now I guess I do." She reached over and picked up the sheet with the words scrawled on it. "You wrote it with one of George's pencils," she said.

  "It was the closest thing to hand, that's all," be said testily. He thought briefly of the Scripto pen and then shut it out of his mind. "And they aren't George's pencils and never were. They're mine. I'm getting goddam tired of referring to him as a separate person. It's lost any marginal cuteness it might once have had. "

  "Yet you used one of his phrases today, too--'lie me an alibi. ' I never heard you use it before, outside of a book. Was that just coincidence?"

  He started to tell her that it was, of course it was, and stopped. It probably was, but in light of what he had written on that sheet of paper, how could he know for sure?

  "I don't know. "

  "Were you in a trance, Thad? Were you in a trance when you wrote this?"

  Slowly, reluctantly, he replied: "Yes. I think I was. "

  "Is this all that happened? Or was there more?"

  "I can't remember," he said, and then added even more reluctantly: "I think I might have said something, but I really can't remember. "

  She looked at him for a long time and said, "Let's go to bed. "

  "Do you think we'll sleep, Liz?"

  She laughed forlornly.

  3

  But twenty minutes later he was actually drifting away when Liz's voice brought him back. "You have to go to the doctor," she said. "On Monday. "

  "There are no headaches this time," he protested. "Just the bird-sounds. And that weird thing I wrote." He paused, then added hopefully: "You don't suppose it could just be a coincidence?"

  "I don't know what it is," Liz said, "but I've got to tell you, Thad, coincidence is very low on my list. "

  For some reason this struck them both as funny and they lay in bed, giggling as softly as they could, so as not to wake the babies, and holding each other. It was all right between them again, anyway--there was not much Thad felt he could be sure of just now, but that was one thing. It was all right. The storm had passed. The sorry old bones had been buried again, at least for the time being.

  "I'll make the appointment," she said when their giggles had dried up.

  "No," he said. "I'll do it. "

  "And you won't indulge in any creative forgetting?"

  "No. I'll do it first thing Monday. Honest John. "

  "All right, then." She sighed. "It'll be a goddam miracle if I get any sleep." But five minutes later she was breathing softly and regularly, and not five minutes after that, Thad was asleep himself.

  4

  And dreamed the dream again.

  It was the same (or seemed so, anyway) right up until the very end: Stark took him through the deserted house, always remaining behind him, telling Thad he was mistaken when Thad insisted in a trembling, distraught voice that this was his own house. You are quite wrong, Stark said from behind his right shoulder (or was it the left? and did it matter?). The owner of this house, he told Thad again, was dead. The owner of this house was in that fabled place where all rail service terminated, that place which everyone down here (wherever that was) called Endsville. Everything the same. Until they got to the back hall, where Liz was no longer alone. Frederick Clawson had joined her. He was naked except for an absurd leather coat. And he was just as dead as Liz.

  From over his shoulder, Stark said reflectively: "Down here, that's what happens to squealers. They get turned into fool's stuffing. Now he's taken care of. I'm going to take care of all of them, one by one. Just make sure I don't have to take care of you. The sparrows are flying again, Thad--remember that. The sparrows are flying. "

  And then, outside the house, Thad heard them: not just thousands of them but millions, perhaps billions, and the day turned dark as the gigantic flock of birds first began to cross the sun and then blotted it out entirely.

  "I can't see!" he screamed, and from behind him George Stark whispered: "They're flying again, old boss. Don't forget. And don't get in my way. "

  He woke up, trembling and cold all over, and this time sleep was a long time coming He lay in the dark, thinking how absurd it was, the idea the dream had brought with it--perhaps it had the first time, too, but it had been so much clearer this time. How totally absurd. The fact that he had always visualized Stark and Alexis Machine as looking alike (and why not, since in a very real sense both had been born at the same time, with Machine's Way), both tall and broad-shouldered--men who looked not as if they had grown but as if they had somehow been built out of solid blocks of material--and both blonde . . . that fact didn't change th
e absurdity. Pen names did not come to life and murder people. He would tell Liz at breakfast, and they would laugh over it . . . well, maybe they wouldn't actually laugh, considering the circumstances, but they would share a rueful grin.

  I will call it my William Wilson complex, he thought, drifting back into sleep again. But when the morning came, the dream did not seem worth talking about--not on top of everything else. So he didn't . . . but as the day passed, he found his mind returning to it again and again, considering it like a dark jewel.

  Eleven

  ENDSVILLE

  1

  Early Monday morning, before Liz could bug him about it, he made an appointment with Dr. Hume. The removal of the tumor in 1960 was a part of his medical records. He told Hume that he had recently had two recurrences of the bird-sounds which had presaged his headaches during the months leading up to the diagnosis and the excision. Dr. Hume wanted to know if the headaches themselves had returned. Thad told him they had not.

  He said nothing about the trance state, or what he had written while in that state, or what had been found written on the apartment wall of a murder victim in Washington, D. C. It already seemed as distant as last night's dream. In fact, he found himself trying to pooh-pooh the whole thing.

  Dr. Hume, however, took it seriously. Very seriously. He ordered Thad to go to the Eastern Maine Medical Center that afternoon. He wanted both a cranial X-ray series and a computerized axial tomography . . . a CAT-scan.

  Thad went. He sat for the pictures and then put his head inside a machine which looked like an industrial clothes-dryer. It clashed and ratcheted for fifteen minutes, and then he was released from captivity . . . for the time being, anyway. He telephoned Liz, told her they could expect results around the end of the week, and said he was going up to his office at the University for a little while.

  "Have you thought any more about calling Sheriff Pangborn?" she asked.

  "Let's wait for the test results," he said. "Once we see what we've got, maybe we can decide. "

  2

  He was in his office, clearing a semester's worth of deadwood out of his desk and off his shelves, when the birds began to cry inside his head again. There were a few isolated twitters, these were joined by others, and they quickly became a deafening chorus.

  White sky--he saw a white sky broken by the silhouettes of houses and telephone poles. And everywhere there were sparrows. They lined every roof, crowded every pole, waiting only for the command of the group mind. Then they would explode skyward with a sound like thousands of sheets flapping in a brisk wind.

  Thad staggered blindly toward his desk, groped for his chair, found it, collapsed into it.

  Sparrows.

  Sparrows and the white sky of late spring.

  The sound filled his head, a jumbled cacophony, and when he drew a sheet of paper toward him and began to write, he was not aware of what he was doing. His head lolled back on his neck; his eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. The pen flew back and forth and up and down, seeming to do so of its own accord.

  In his head, all the birds took wing in a dark cloud that blotted out the white sky of March in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey.

  3

  He came back to himself less than five minutes after the first isolated cries had begun to sound in his mind. He was sweating heavily and his left wrist throbbed, but there was no headache. He looked down, saw the paper on his desk--it was the back of an order-form for complimentary American Lit textbooks--and stared stupidly at what was written there.

  "It means nothing," he whispered. He was rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers, waiting for the headache to start, or for the scrawled words on the paper to connect and make some sense.

  He did not want either of those things to happen . . . and neither of them did. The words were just words, repeated over and over. Some were obviously culled from his dream of Stark; the others were so much unconnected gibberish.

  And his head felt just fine.

  I'm not going to tell Liz this time, he thought. Be damned if I will. And not just because I'm scared, either . . . although I am. It's perfectly simple--not all secrets are bad secrets. Some are good secrets. Some are necessary secrets. And this one is both of those.

  He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost.

  Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution.

  He suspected that was true. He did not know if he could do it or not . . . but he intended to give it the old college try. Very slowly he reached out, took the order-form in both hands, and began to tear it into strips. The stew of squirming words written on it began to disappear. He turned the strips lengthwise, tore them across again, and tossed the pieces in the wastebasket, where they rested like confetti on top of all the other crap he had dumped in there. He sat staring at the pieces for almost two minutes, half-expecting them to fly back together and then return to his desk, like the images in a reel of movie-film which is run backward.

  At last he picked up the wastebasket and took it down the hall to a stainless-steel panel set into the wall next to the elevator. The sign beneath read INCINERATOR.

  He opened the panel and dumped his trash down the black chute.

  "There," he said into the odd summer silence of the English-Math building. "All gone. "

  Down here we call that fool's stuffing.

  "Up here we call it horseshit," he muttered, and walked back down to his office with the empty wastebasket in his hand.

  It was gone. Down the chute into oblivion. And until his test results came back from the hospital--or until there was another blackout, or trance, or fugue, or whatever the hell it was--he intended to say nothing. Nothing at all. More than likely the words written on that sheet of paper had been wholly grown in his own mind, like the dream of Stark and the empty house, and had nothing at all to do with either the murder of Homer Gamache or that of Frederick Clawson.

  Down here in Endsville, where all rail service terminates.

  "It means nothing at all," Thad said, in a flat, emphatic voice . . . but when he left the University that day, he was almost fleeing.

  Twelve

  SIS

  She knew something was wrong when she went to slide her key into the big Kreig lock on her apartment door and instead of slipping into the slot with its familiar and reassuring series of clicks, it pushed the door open instead. There was no moment of thinking how stupid she had been, going off to work and leaving her apartment door unlocked behind her, gee, Miriam, why not just hang a note on the door that says HELLO ROBBERS, I KEEP EXTRA CASH IN THE WOK ON THE TOP KITCHEN SHELF?

  There was no moment like that because once you'd been in New York six months, maybe even four, you didn't forget. Maybe you only locked up when you were going away on vacation if you lived in the sticks, and maybe you forgot to lock up once in awhile when you went to work if you lived in a small city like Fargo, North Dakota, or Ames, Iowa, but after you'd been in the maggoty old Big Apple for awhile, you locked up even if you were just taking a cup of sugar to a neighbor down the hall. Forgetting to lock up would be like exhaling a breath and just forgetting to take the next one. The city was full of museums and galleries, but the city was also full of junkies and psychos, and you didn't take chances. Not unless you had been born stupid, and Miriam had not been born that way. A little silly, maybe, but not stupid

  So she knew something was wrong, and while the thieves Miriam was sure had broken into her apartment had probably left three or four hours ago, taking everything there was even a remote chance of hocking (not to mention the eighty or ninety dollars in the wok . . . and maybe the wok itself, now that she thought of it; after all, was it not a hockable wok?), they could still be in there. It was the assumption you made, anyway,
just as boys who have received their first real guns are taught, before they are taught anything else, to assume the gun is always loaded, that even when you take it out of the box in which it came from the factory, the gun is loaded.

  She began to step away from the door. She did this almost at once, even before the door had stopped its short inward swing, but it was already too late. A hand came out of the darkness, shooting through the two-inch gap between door and jamb like a bullet. It clamped over her hand. Her keys dropped to the hall carpet.

  Miriam Cowley opened her mouth to scream. The big blonde man had been standing just inside the door, waiting patiently for just over four hours now, not drinking coffee, not smoking cigarettes. He wanted a cigarette, and would have one as soon as this was over, but before, the smell might have alerted her--New Yorkers were like very small animals cowering in the underbrush, senses attuned for danger even when they thought they were having a good time.

  He had her right wrist in his right hand before she could even think. Now he put the palm of his left hand against the door, bracing it, and yanked the woman forward just as hard as he could. The door looked like wood, but it was of course metal, as were all good apartment doors in the maggoty old Big Apple. The side of her face struck its edge with a thud. Two of her teeth broke off at the gumline and cut her mouth. Her lips, which had tightened, relaxed in shock and blood spilled over the lower one. Droplets spattered on the door. Her cheekbone snapped like a twig.

  She sagged, semi-conscious. The blonde man released her. She collapsed to the hall carpet. This had to be very quick. According to New York folklore, no one in the maggoty old Big Apple gave a shit what went down, as long as it didn't go down on them According to the folklore, a psycho could stab a woman twenty or forty times outside of a twenty-chair barber-shop at high noon on Seventh Avenue and no one would say a thing except maybe Could you trim it a little higher over the ears or I think Ill skip the cologne this time, Joe. The blonde man knew the folklore was false. For small, hunted animals, curiosity is a part of the survival package. Protect your own skin, yes, that was the name of the game, but an incurious animal was apt to be a dead animal very soon. Therefore, speed was of the essence.