The Dark Half

S t e p h e n

KING

THE DARK HALF

Hodder & Stoughton

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

King, Stephen, 1947 —

The dark half.

I. Title

813'—54 [F]

ISBN 0-340-50911-2

Copyright ©1989 by Stephen King

First published in Great Britain 1989

Second impression 1989

Third impression 1989

Fourth impression 1989

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-34 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP.

Published by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd,

Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TNI3 2YA Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WCIB 3DP

Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham plc,

Chatham, Kent

Contents

Prologue

PART I FOOL'S STUFFING

1 People Will Talk

2 Breaking Up Housekeeping 3 Graveyard Blues

4 Death in a Small Town 5 96529Q

6 Death in the Big City 7 Police Business

8 Pangborn Pays a Visit 9 The Invasion of the Creepazoid

10 Later That Night

11 Endsville

12 Sis

13 Sheer Panic

14 Fool's Stuffing

PART 2 STARK TAKES CHARGE

15 Stark Disbelief

16 George Stark Calling

17 Wendy Takes a Fall

18 Automatic Writing

19 Stark Makes a Purchase

20 Over the Deadline

21 Stark Takes Charge

PART 3 THE COMING OF THE PSYCHOPOMPS

22 Thad on the Run

23 Two Calls for Sheriff Pangborn

24 The Coming of the Sparrows

25 Steel Machine

26 The Sparrows Are Flying

Epilogue

Afterword

This book is for Shirley Sonderegger, who helps me mind my business, and for her husband, Peter.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I'm indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help

and inspiration. This novel could not have been written

without him.

S.K.

PROLOGUE

'Cut him,' Machine said. 'Cut him while I stand here and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.'

— Machine's Way by George Stark

People's lives — their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences — begin at different times. The real life of Thad Beaumont a young boy who was born and raised in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey, began in 1960. Two things happened to him that year. The first shaped his life; the second almost ended it. That was the year Thad Beaumont was eleven.

In January he submitted a short story to a writing contest sponsored by American Teen magazine. In June, he received a letter from the magazine's editors telling him that he had been awarded an Honorable Mention in the contest's Fiction category. The letter went on to say that the judges would have awarded him Second Prize had his application not revealed that he was still two years away from becoming a bona fide "American Teen." Still, the editors said, his story, "Outside Marty's House", was an extraordinarily mature work, and he was to be congratulated.

Two weeks later, a Certificate of Merit arrived from American Teen. It came registered mail, insured. The certificate had his name on it in letters so convolutedly Old English that he could barely read them, and a gold seal at the bottom, embossed with the American Teen logo — the silhouettes of a crewcut boy and a pony-tailed girl jitterbugging.

His mother swept Thad, a quiet, earnest boy who could never seem to hold onto things and often tripped over his own large feet, into her arms and smothered him with kisses.

His father was unimpressed.

'If it was so goddam good, why didn't they give him some money?' he grunted from the depths

of his easy-chair.

'Glen — '

'Never mind. Maybe Ernest Hemingway there could run me in a beer when you get done maulin him.'

His mother said no more . . . but she had the original letter and the certificate which followed it framed, paying for the job out of her pin-money, and hung it in his room, over the bed. When relatives or other visitors came, she took them in to see it. Thad, she told her company, was going to be a great writer someday. She had always felt he was destined for greatness, and here was the first proof. This embarrassed Thad, but he loved his mother far too much to say so.

Embarrassed or not, Thad decided his mother was at least par right. He didn't know if he had it in him to be a great writer or not, but he was going to be some kind of a writer no matter what. Why not? He was good at it. More important, he got off on doing it. When the words came right, he got off on it in a big way. And they wouldn't always be able to withhold the money from him on a technicality. He wouldn't be eleven forever.

The second important thing to happen to him in 1960 began in August. That was when he began to have headaches. They weren't bad at first, but by the time school let in again in early September, the mild, lurking pains in his temples and behind his forehead had progressed to sick and monstrous marathons of agony. He could do nothing when these headaches held him in their grip but lie in his darkened room, waiting to die. By the end of September, he hoped he would die. And by the middle of October, the pain had progressed to the point where he began to fear he would not.

The onset of these terrible headaches was usually marked by a phantom sound which only he could hear — it sounded like the distant cheeping of a thousand small birds. Sometimes he fancied he could almost see these birds, which he thought were sparrows, clustering on telephone lines and rooftops by the dozens, the way they did in the spring and the fall.

His mother took him to see Dr Seward.

Dr Seward peeked into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, and shook his head. Then, drawing the curtains closed and turning off the overhead light, he instructed Thad to look at a white space of wall in the examination room. Using a flashlight, he flicked a bright circle of light on and off rapidly while Thad looked at it.

'Does that make you feet funny, son?'

Thad shook his head.

'You don't feel woozy? Like you might faint?'

Thad shook his head again.

'Do you smell anything? Like rotten fruit or burning rags?'

'No.'

'What about your birds? Did you hear them while you were looking at the flashing light?'

'No,' Thad said, mystified.

'It's nerves,' his father said later, when Thad had been dismissed to the outer waiting room. 'The goddam kid's a bundle of nerves.

'I think it's migraine,' Dr Seward told them. 'Unusual in one so young, but not unheard of. And he seems very . . . intense.'

'He is,' Shayla Beaumont said, not without some approval.

'Well, there may be a cure someday. For now, I'm afraid he 11 just have to suffer through them.'

'Yeah, and us with him,' Glen Beaumont said.

But it was not nerves, and it was not migraine, and it was not over.

Four days before Halloween, Shayla Beaumont heard one of the kids with whom Thad waited for the schoolbus each morning begin to holler. She looked out the kitchen window and saw her son lying in the driveway, convulsing. His lunchbox lay beside him, its freight of fruit and sandwiches spilled onto the driveway's hot-top surface. She ran out, shooed the other children away, and then just stood over him helplessly, afraid to touch him.

If the big yellow bus with Mr Reed at the wheel had pulled up any later, Thad might have died right there at the foot of the driveway. But Mr Reed had been a medic in Korea. He was able to get the boy's head back and open an airway before Thad choked to death on his own tongue. He was taken to Bergenfield County Hospital by ambulance and a doctor named Hugh Pritchard just happened to be in the E.R., drinking coffee and swapping golf-lies with a friend, when the boy was wheeled in. And Hugh Pritchard also just happened to be the best neurologist in the State of New Jersey.

Pritchard ordered the X-rays and read them. He showed them to the Beaumonts, asking them to look with particular care at a vague shadow he had circled with a yellow wax pencil.

'This,' he said. 'What's this?'

'How the hell should we know?' Glen Beaumont asked. 'You re the goddam doctor.'

'Right,' Pritchard said dryly.

'The wife said it looked like he pitched a fit,' Glen said.

Dr Pritchard said, 'If you mean he had a seizure, yes, he did. If you mean he had an epileptic seizure, I'm pretty sure he didn't. A seizure as serious as your son's would surely have been grand mal, and Thad showed no reaction whatever to the Litton Light Test. In fact, if Thad had grand mal epilepsy, you wouldn't need a doctor to point the fact out to you. He'd be doing the Watusi on the living room rug every time the picture on your TV set decided to roll.'

'Then what is it?' Shayla asked timidly.

Pritchard turned back to the X-ray mounted on the front of light-box. 'What is that?' he responded, and tapped the circled area again. 'The sudden onset of headaches coupled with any lack of previous seizures suggests to me that your son has a brain tumor, probably still small and hopefully benign.'

Glen Beaumont stared at the doctor stonily while his wife stood beside him and wept into her handkerchief. She wept without making a sound. This silent weeping was the result of years of spousal training. Glen's fists were fast and hurtful and almost never left marks, and after twelve years of silent sorrow, she probably could not have cried out loud even if she had wanted to.

'Does all this mean you want to cut his brains?' Glen asked with his usual tact and delicacy.

'I wouldn't put it quite that way, Mr Beaumont, but I believer exploratory surgery is called for, yes.' And he thought: If there, really is a God, and if He really made us in His Own image, I don't like to think about why there are so damned many men like this one, walking around with the fates of so many others in their hands.

Glen was silent for several long moments, his head down, his brow furrowed in thought. At last he raised his head and asked the question which troubled him most of all.

'Tell me the truth, Doc — how much is all this gonna cost?'

The assisting O.R. nurse saw it first.

Her scream was shrill and shocking in the operating room, where the only sounds for the last fifteen minutes had been Dr Pritchard's' murmured commands, the hiss of the bulky life-support machinery, and the brief, high whine of the Negli saw.

She stumbled backward, struck a rolling Ross tray on which almost two dozen instruments had been neatly laid out, and knocked it over. It struck the tiled floor with an echoing clang which was followed by a number of smaller tinkling sounds.

'Hilary!' the head nurse shouted. Her voice was full of shock and surprise. She forgot herself so far as to actually take half a step toward the fleeing woman in her flapping green-gown.

Dr Albertson, who was assisting, kicked the head nurse briefly in the calf with one of his slippered feet. 'Remember where you are, please.'

'Yes, Doctor.' She turned back at once, not even looking toward the O.R. door as it banged open and Hilary exited stage left, still screaming like a runaway fire engine.

'Get the hardware in the sterilizer,' Albertson said. 'Right away. Chop-chop.'

'Yes, Doctor.'

She began to gather up the instruments, breathing hard, clearly flustered, but under control.

Dr Pritchard seemed to have noticed none of this. He was looking with rapt attention into the window which had been carved in Thad Beaumont's skull.

'Incredible,' he murmured. 'Just incredible. This is really one for the books. If I weren't seeing it with my own eyes — '

The hiss of the sterilizer seemed to wake him up, and he looked at Dr Albertson.

'I want suction,' he said sharply. He glanced at the nurse. 'And what the fuck are you doing? The Sunday Times crossword? Get your ass over here with those!'

She came, carrying the instruments in a fresh pan.

'Give me suction, Lester,' Pritchard said to Albertson. 'Right now. Then I'm going to show you something you never saw outside of a county fair freak-show.'

Albertson wheeled over the suction-pump, ignoring the head nurse, who leaped back out of his way, balancing the instruments deftly as she did so.

Pritchard was looking at the anesthesiologist.

'Give me good B.P., my friend. Good B.P. is all I ask.'

'He's one-oh-five over sixty-eight, Doctor. Steady as a rock.'

'Well, his mother says we've got the next William Shakespeare laid out here, so keep it that way. Suck on him, Lester — don't tickle him with the goddam thing!'

Albertson applied suction, clearing the blood. The monitoring equipment beeped steadily, monotonously, comfortingly, in the background. Then it was his own breath he was sucking in. He felt as if someone had punched him high up in the belly.

'Oh my God. Oh Jesus. Jesus Christ.' He recoiled for a moment . . . then leaned in close. Above his mask and behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were wide with sudden glinting curiosity. 'What is it?'

'I think you see what it is,' Pritchard said. 'It's just that it takes a second to get used to. I've read about it but never expected to actually see it.'

Thad Beaumont's brain was the color of a conch shell's outer edge — a medium gray with just the slightest tinge of rose.

Protruding from the smooth surface of the dura was a single blind and malformed human eye. The brain was pulsing slightly. The eye pulsed with it. It looked as if it were trying to wink at them. It was this — the look of the wink — which had driven the assisting nurse from the O. R.

'Jesus God, what is it?' Albertson asked again.

'It's nothing,' Pritchard said. 'Once it might have been a living, breathing human being. Now it's nothing. Except trouble that is. And this happens to be trouble we can handle.'

Dr Loring, the anesthesiologist, said: 'Permission to look, Dr Pritchard?'

'He still steady?'

'Yes.

'Come on, then. It's one to tell your grandchildren about. But be quick.'

While Loring had his look, Pritchard turned to Albertson. I want the Negli,' he said. 'I'm going to open him a little wider. Then we probe. I don't know if I can get all of it, but I'm going to get all of it I can.'

Les Albertson, now acting as head O.R. nurse, slapped the freshly sterilized probe into Pritchard's gloved hand when Pritchard called for it. Pritchard — who was now humming the Bonanza theme-song under his breath — worked the wound quickly and almost effortlessly, referring to the dental-type mirror mounted on the end of the probe only occasionally. He worked chiefly by sense of touch alone. Albertson would later say he had never witnessed such a thrilling piece of seat-of-the-pants surgery in his entire life.

In addition to the eye, they found part of a nostril, three fingernails, and two teeth. One of the teeth had a small cavity in it. The eye went on pulsing and trying to wink right up to the second when Pritchard used the needle-scalpel to first puncture and then excise it. The entire operation, from initial probe to final excision, took only twenty-seven minutes. Five chunks of flesh plopped wetly into the stainless steel pan on the Ross tray beside Thad's shaven head.

'I think we're clear,' Pritchard said at last. 'All the foreign tissue seemed to be connected by rudimentary ganglia. Even if there are other chunks, I think the chances are good that we've killed them.

'But . . . how can that be, if the kid's still alive? I mean, it's all a part of him, isn't it?' Loring asked, bewildered.

Pritchard pointed toward the tray. 'We find an eye, some teeth, and a bunch of fingernails in this kid's head and you think it was a part of him? Did you see any of his nails missing? Want to check?'

'But even cancer is just a part of the patient's own — '

'This wasn't cancer,' Pritchard told him patiently. His hands went about their own work as he talked. 'In a great many deliveries where the mother gives birth to a single child, that child actually started existence as a twin, my friend. It may run as high as two in every ten. What happens to the other fetus? The stronger absorbs the weaker.'

'Absorbs it? Do you mean it eats it?' Loring asked. He looked a little green. 'Are we talking about in utero cannibalism here?'

'Call it whatever you like; it happens fairly often. If they ever develop the sonargram device they keep talking about at the med conferences, we may actually get to find out how often. But no matter how frequently or infrequently it happens, what we saw today is much more rare. Part of this boy's twin went unabsorbed. It happened to end up in his prefrontal lobe. It could just as easily have wound up in his intestines, his spleen, his spinal cord, anywhere. Usually the only doctors who see something like this are pathologists — it turns up in autopsies, and I've never heard of one where the foreign tissue was the cause of death.'

'Well, what happened here?' Albertson asked.

'Something set this mass of tissue, which was probably submicroscopic in size a year ago, going again. The growth clock of the absorbed twin, which should have run down forever at least a month before Mrs Beaumont gave birth, somehow got wound up again . . . and the damned thing actually started to run. There is no mystery about what happened; the intercranial pressure alone was enough to cause the kid's headaches and the convulsion that got him here.'

'Yes,' Loring said softly, 'but why did it happen?'

Pritchard shook his head. 'If I'm still practicing anything more demanding than my golf-stroke thirty years from now, you can ask me then. I might have an answer. All I know now is that I have located and excised a very specialized, very rare sort of tumor. A benign tumor. And, barring complications, I believe that's all the parents need to know. The kid's father would make Piltdown Man look like one of the Quiz Kids. I can't see explaining to him that I gave his eleven-year-old son an abortion. Les, let's close him up.'

And, as an afterthought, he added pleasantly to the O.R. nurse: 'I want that silly cunt who ran out of here fired. Make a note, please.'

'Yes, Doctor.'

Thad Beaumont left the hospital nine days after his surgery. The left side of his body was distressingly weak for nearly six months afterward, and occasionally, when he was very tired, he saw odd, not-quite-random patterns of flashing lights before his eyes.

His mother had bought him an old Remington 32 typewriter as a get-well present, and these flashes of light happened most frequently when he was hunched over it in the hour before bedtime, struggling with the right way to say something or trying to figure out what should happen next in the story he was writing. Eventually these passed, too.

That eerie, phantom chirruping sound — the sound of squadrons of sparrows on the wing — did not recur at all following the operation.

He continued to write, gaining confidence and polishing his emerging style, and he sold his first story — to American Teen — six years after his real life began. After that, he just never looked back.

So far as his parents or Thad himself ever knew, a small benign tumor had been removed from the prefrontal lobe of his brain in the autumn of his eleventh year. When he thought about it at all (which he did less and less frequently as the years passed), he thought only that he had been extremely lucky to survive.

Many patients who underwent brain surgery in those primitive days did not.

PART 1

FOOL'S STUFFING

Machine straightened the paper-clips slowly and carefully with his long, strong fingers. 'Hold his head, Jack,' he said to the man behind Halstead. 'Hold it tightly, please.'

Halstead saw what Machine meant to do and began to scream as Jack Rangely pressed his big hand against the sides of his head, holding it steady. The screams rang and echoed in the abandoned warehouse. The vast empty space acted as a natural amplifier. Halstead sounded like an opera singer warming up on opening night.

'I'm back,' Machine said. Halstead squeezed his eyes shut, but it did not good. The small steel rod slid effortlessly through the left lid and punctured the eyeball beneath with a faint popping sound. Sticky, gelatinous fluid began to seep out. 'I'm back from the dead and you don't seem glad to see me at all, you ungrateful son of a bitch.'

— Riding to Babylon by George Stark

One

People Will Talk

1

The May 23rd issue of People magazine was pretty typical.

The cover was graced by that week's Dead Celebrity, a rock and roll star who had hanged himself in a jail cell after being taken into custody for possession of cocaine and assorted satellite drugs. Inside was the usual smorgasbord: nine unsolved sex murders in the desolate western half of Nebraska; a health-food guru who had been busted for kiddie porn; a Maryland housewife who had grown a squash that looked a bit like a bust of Jesus Christ — if you looked at it with your eyes half-closed in a dim room, that was; a game paraplegic girl training for the Big Apple BikeA-Thon, a Hollywood divorce; a New York society marriage; a wrestler recovering from a heart attack; a comedian fighting a palimony suit.

There was also a story about a Utah entrepreneur who was marketing a hot new doll called Yo Mamma! Yo Mamma! supposedly looked like 'everyone's favorite (?) mother-in-law.' She had a built-in tape recorder which spat out bits of dialogue such as 'Dinner was never cold at my house when he was growing up, dear' and, 'Your brother never acts like I'm dog-breath when I come to spend a couple of weeks.' The real howler was that, instead of pulling a string in the back of Yo Mamma! to get her to talk, you kicked the fucking thing as hard as you could. 'Yo Mamma! is well-padded guaranteed not to break, and also guaranteed not to chip walls and furniture,' said its proud inventor, Mr Gaspard Wilmot (who, the piece mentioned in passing, had once been indicted for income tax, evasion — charges dropped).

And on page thirty-three of this amusing and informative issue of America's premier amusing and informative magazine, was a page headed with a typical People cut-line: punchy, pithy, and pungent. BIO, it said.

'People,' Thad Beaumont told his wife Liz as they sat side by side at the kitchen table, reading the article together for the second time, 'likes to get right to the point. Bio. If you don't want a BIO, move on to IN TROUBLE and read about the girls w o are getting greased deep in the heart of Nebraska.'

'That's not that funny, when you really think about it,' Liz Beaumont said, and then spoiled it by snorting a giggle into one curled fist.

'Not ha-ha, but certainly peculiar,' Thad said, and began to leaf through the article again. He rubbed absently at the small white scar high on his forehead as he did so.

Like most People BIOS, it was the one piece in the magazine where more space was allotted to words than to pictures.

'Are you sorry you did it?' Liz asked. She had an ear cocked for the twins, but so far they were being absolutely great, sleeping like lambs.

'First of all,' Thad said, 'I didn't do it. We did it. Both for one and one for both, remember?' He tapped a picture on the second page of the article which showed his wife holding a pan of brownies out to Thad, who was sitting at his typewriter with a sheet rolled under the platen. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, was written on the paper. That was probably just as well, since it had to be gobbledegook. Writing had always been hard work for him, and it wasn't the sort of thing he could do with an audience — particularly if one member of the audience happened to be a photographer for People magazine. It had come a lot easier for George, but for Thad Beaumont it was goddam hard. Liz didn't come near when he was trying — and sometimes actually succeeding in doing it. She didn't bring him telegrams, let alone brownies.

'Yes, but — '

'Second of all . . . '

He looked at the picture of Liz with the brownies and him looking up at her. They were both grinning. These grins looked fairly peculiar on the faces of people who, although pleasant, were careful doling out even such common things as smiles. He remembered back to the time he had spent as an Appalachian Trail Guide in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. He'd had a pet raccoon in those dim days, name of John Wesley Harding. Not that he'd made any attempt to domesticate John; the coon had just sort of fallen in with him. He liked his nip on cold evenings, too, did old J.W., and sometimes, when he got more than a single bite from the bottle, he would grin like that.

'Second of all what?'

Second of all, there's something funny about a one-time National Book Award nominee and his wife grinning at each other like a couple of drunk raccoons, he thought, and could hold onto his laughter no longer: it bellowed out of him.

'Thad, you'll wake the twins!'

He tried, without much success, to muffle the gusts.

'Second of all, we look like a pair of idiots and I don't mind a bit he said, and hugged her tight and kissed the hollow of her throat.

In the other room, first William and then Wendy started to cry.

Liz tried to look at him reproachfully, but could not. It was too good to hear him laugh. Good, maybe, because he didn't do enough of it. The sound of his laughter had an alien, exotic charm for her. Thad Beaumont had never been a laughing man.

'My fault,' he said. 'I'll get them.'

He began to get up, bumped the table, and almost knocked it over. He was a gentle man, but strangely clumsy; that part of the boy he had been still lived in him.

Liz caught the pitcher of flowers she had set out as a centerpiece just before it could slide over the edge and shatter on the floor.

'Honestly, Thad!' she said, but then she began to laugh, too' He sat down again for a moment. He didn't take her hand, exactly, but caressed it gently between both of his. 'Listen, babe, do you mind?'

'No,' she said. She thought briefly of saying It makes me uneasy, though. Not because we look mildly foolish but because . . . well, I don't know the because. It just makes me a little uneasy, that's all.

Thought of it but didn't say it. It was just too good to hear him laugh. She caught one of his hands and gave it a brief squeeze. 'No,' she said, 'I don't mind. I think it's fun. And if the publicity helps The Golden Dog when you finally decide to get serious about finishing the damned thing, so much the better.'

She got up, pressing him back down by the shoulders when he tried to join her.

'You can get them next time,' she said. 'I want you to sit right there until your subconscious urge to destroy my pitcher finally passes.'

'Okay,' he said, and said. 'I love you, Liz.'

'I love you, too.' She went to get the twins, and Thad Beaumont began to leaf through his BIO again.

Unlike most People articles, the Thaddeus Beaumont Bio began not with a full-page photograph but with one which was less than a quarter-page. It caught the eye regardless, because some layout man with an eye for the unusual had bordered the picture, which showed Thad and Liz in a graveyard, in black. The lines of type below stood out in almost brutal contrast.

In the photograph, Thad had a spade and Liz had a pick. Set off to one side was a wheelbarrow with more cemetery implements in it. On the grave itself, several bouquets of flowers had been arranged, but the gravestone itself was still perfectly readable.

GEORGE STARK

1975 — 1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

In almost jagged contrast to the place and the apparent act (a recently completed interment of what, from the dates, should have been a boy barely in his teens), these two bogus sextons were shaking their free hands across the freshly placed sods — and laughing cheerily.

It was a posed job, of course. AU of the photos accompanying the article — burying the body, exhibiting the brownies, and the one of Thad wandering lonely as a cloud down a deserted Ludlow woods road, presumably 'getting ideas' — were posed. It was funny. Liz had been buying People at the supermarket for the last five years or so, and they both made fun of it, but they both took their turn leafing through it at supper, or possibly in the john if there wasn't a good book handy. Thad had mused from time to time on the magazine's success, wondering if it was its devotion to the celebrity sideshow that made it so weirdly interesting, or just the way it was set up, with all those big black-and-white photographs and the boldface text, consisting mostly of simple declarative sentences. But it had never crossed his mind to wonder if the pictures were staged.

The photographer had been a woman named Phyllis Myers. She informed Thad and Liz that she had taken a number of photographs of teddy bears in child-sized coffins, all of the teddies dressed in children's clothes. She hoped to sell these as a book to a major New York publisher. It was not until late on the second day of the photo-and-interview session that Thad realized the woman was sounding him out about writing the text. Death and Teddy Bears, she said, would be 'the final, perfect comment on the American way of death, don't you think so, Thad?'

He supposed that, in light of her rather macabre interests, it wasn't all that surprising that the Myers woman had commissioned George Stark's tombstone and brought it with her from New York. It was papier-mâché.

'You don't mind shaking hands in front of this, do you?' she had asked them with a smile that was at the same time wheedling and complacent. 'It'll make a wonderful shot.'

Liz had looked at Thad, questioning and a little horrified. Then they both had looked at the fake tombstone which had come from New York City (year-round home of People magazine) to Castle Rock, Maine (summer home of Thad and Liz Beaumont), with a mixture of amazement and bemused wonder. It was the inscription to which Thad's eye kept returning:

Not a Very Nice Guy

Stripped to its essentials, the story People wanted to tell the breathless celebrity-watchers of America was pretty simple. Thad Beaumont was a well-regarded writer whose first novel, The Sudden Dancers, had been nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. This sort of thing swung some weight with literary critics, but the breathless celebrity—watchers of America didn't care a dime about Thad Beaumont, who had only published one other novel under his own name since. The man many of them did care about wasn't a real man at all. Thad had written one huge best-seller and three extremely successful follow-up novels under another name. The name, o course, was George Stark.

Jerry Harkavay, who was the Associated Press's entire Waterville staff, had been the first to break the George Stark story wide after Thad's agent, Rick Cowley, gave it to Louise Booker at Publishers Weekly with Thad's approval. Neither Harkavay nor Booker had got the whole story — for one thing, Thad was adamant about not giving that smarmy little prick Frederick Clawson so much as a mention — but it was still good enough to rate a wider circulation it than either the AP wire service or the book—publishing industry's trade magazine could give. Clawson, Thad had told Liz and Rick, was not the story — he was just the asshole who was forcing them to go public with the story.

In the course of that first interview, Jerry had asked him what sort of a fellow George Stark was. 'George,' Thad had replied, 'wasn't a very nice guy.' The quote had run at the top of Jerry's piece, and it had given the Myers woman the inspiration to actually commission a fake tombstone with that line on it. Weird world. Weird, weird world.

All of a sudden, Thad burst out laughing again.

2

There were two lines of white type on the black field below the picture of Thad and Liz in one of Castle Rock's finer boneyards.

THE DEAR DEPARTED WAS EXTREMELY CLOSE TO THESE TWO PEOPLE, read the first.

SO WHY ARE THEY LAUGHING? read the second.

'Because the world is one strange fucking place,' Thad Beaumont said, and snorted into one cupped hand.

Liz Beaumont wasn't the only one who felt vaguely uneasy about this odd little burst of publicity. He felt a little uneasy himself. All the same, he found it difficult to stop laughing. He'd quit for a few seconds and then a fresh spate of guffaws would burst out of him as his eye caught on that line — Not a Very Nice Guy — again. Trying to quit was like trying to plug the holes in a poorly constructed earthen dam; as soon as you got one leak stopped up, you saw a new one someplace else.

Thad suspected there was something not quite right about such helpless laughter — it was a form of hysteria. He knew that humor rarely if ever had anything to do with such fits. In fact, the cause was apt to be something quite the opposite of funny.

Something to be afraid of, maybe.

You're afraid of a goddam article in People magazine? Is that what you're thinking? Dumb. Afraid of being embarrassed, of having your colleagues in the English Department look at those pictures and think you've lost the poor cracked handful of marbles you had?

No. He had nothing to fear from his colleagues, not even the ones who had been there since dinosaurs walked the earth. He finally had tenure, and also enough money to face life as — flourish of trumpets, please! — a full-time writer if he so desired (he wasn't sure he did; he didn't care much for the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of university life, but the teaching part was just fine). Also no because he had passed beyond caring much about what his colleagues thought of him some years ago. He cared about what his friends thought, yes, and in some cases his friends, Liz's friends, and the friends they had in common happened to be colleagues, but he thought those people were also apt to think it was sort of a hoot.

If there was anything to be afraid of, it was —

Stop it, his mind ordered in the dry, stern tone that had a way of causing even the most obstreperous of his undergrad English students to fall pale and silent. Stop this foolishness right now.

No good. Effective as that voice might be when he used it on his students, it wielded no power over Thad himself.

He looked down again at that picture and this time his eye paid no attention to the faces of his wife and himself, mugging cheekily at each other like a couple of kids performing an initiation stunt.

GEORGE STARK

1975 — 1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

That was what made him uneasy.

That tombstone. That name. Those dates. Most of all that sour epitaph, which made him bellow laughter but was not, for some reason, one bit funny underneath the laughter.

That name.

That epitaph.

'Doesn't matter,' Thad muttered. 'Motherfucker's dead now.' But the uneasiness remained.

When Liz came back in with a freshly changed and dressed twin curled in each arm, Thad was bent over the story again.

'Did I murder him?'

Thaddeus Beaumont, once hailed as America's most promising novelist and a

National Book Award nominee for The Sudden Dancers in 1972, repeats the

question thoughtfully. He looks slightly bemused. 'Murder,' he says again, softly, as

if the word had never occurred to him . . . even though murder was almost all his

'dark half,' as Beaumont calls George Stark, did think about.

From the wide-mouthed mason jar beside his old-fashioned Remington 32

typewriter, he draws a Berol Black Beauty pencil (all Stark would write with,

according to Beaumont) and begins to gnaw lightly on it. From the look of the dozen

or so other pencils in the mason jar, the gnawing is a habit.

'No,' he says at last, dropping the pencil back into the jar. 'I didn't murder him.'

He looks up and smiles. Beaumont is thirty-nine, but when he smiles in that open

way, he might be mistaken for one of his own undergrads. 'George died of natural

causes.'

Beaumont says George Stark was his wife's idea. Elizabeth Stephens Beaumont, a

cool and lovely blonde, refuses to take full credit. 'All I did,' she says, 'was suggest

he write a novel under another name and see what happened to it. Thad was

suffering from serious writer's block, and he needed a jumpstart. And really' — she

laughs — 'George Stark was there all along. I'd seen signs of him in some of the

unfinished stuff that Thad did from time to time. It was just a case of getting him to

come out of the closet.'

According to many of his contemporaries, Beaumont's problems went a little

further than writer's block. At least two well-known writers (who refused to be

quoted directly) say that they were worried about Beaumont's sanity during that

crucial period between the first book and the second. One says he believes

Beaumont may have attempted suicide following the publication of The Sudden

Dancers, which earned more critical acclaim than royalties.

Asked if he ever considered suicide, Beaumont only shakes his head and says,

'That's a stupid idea. The real problem wasn't popular acceptance; it was writer's

block. And dead writers have a terminal case of that.'

Meanwhile, Liz Beaumont kept 'lobbying' — Beaumont's word — for the idea of

a pseudonym. 'She said I could kick up my heels for once, if I wanted to. Write any

damn thing I pleased without The New York Times Book Review looking over my

shoulder the whole time I wrote it. She said I could write a Western, a mystery, a

science fiction story. Or I could write a crime novel.'

Thad Beaumont grins.

'I think she put that one last on purpose. She knew Id been fooling around with

an idea for a crime novel, although I couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

'The idea of a pseudonym had this funny draw for me. It felt free, somehow — like

a secret escape hatch, if you see what I mean.

'But there was something else, too. Something that's very hard to explain.'

Beaumont stretches a hand out toward the neatly sharpened Berols in the mason

jar, then withdraws it. He looks off toward the window-wall at the back of his study,

which gives on a spring spectacular of greening trees.

'Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking bout being

invisible,' he finally says almost hesitantly. 'The More I played with the idea, the

more I felt that I would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself.'

His hand steals out and this time succeeds in filching one of the pencils from the

mason jar while his mind is otherwise engaged.

Thad turned the page and then looked up at the twins in their double high chair. Boy-girl twins were always fraternal . . . or brother-and-sisteral, if you didn't want to be a male chauvinist pig about it. Wendy and William were, however, about as identical as you could get without being identical.

William grinned at Thad around his bottle.

Wendy also grinned at him around her bottle, but she was sporting an accessory her brother didn't have — one single tooth near the front, which had come up with absolutely no teething pain, simply breaking through the surface of the gum as silently as a submarine's periscope sliding through the surface of the ocean.

Wendy took one chubby hand from her plastic bottle. Opened it, showing the clean pink palm. Closed it. Opened it. A Wendy-wave.

Without looking at her, William removed one of his hands from his bottle, opened it, closed it, opened it. A William-wave.

Thad solemnly raised one of his own hands from the table, opened it, closed it, opened it.

The twins grinned around their bottles.

He looked down at the magazine again. Ah, People, he thought where would we be, what would we do, without you? This is American star-time, folks.

The writer had dragged out all the soiled linen there was to drag out, of course — most notably the four—year—long bad patch after The Sudden Dancers had failed to win the NBA — but that was to be expected, and he found himself not much bothered by the display. For one thing, it wasn't all that dirty, and for another, he had always felt it was easier to live with the truth than with a lie. In the long run, at least.

Which of course raised the question of whether or not People magazine and 'the long run' had anything at all in common.

Oh well. Too late now.

The name of the guy who had written the piece was Mike — he remembered that much, but Mike what? Unless you were an earl tattling on royalty or a movie star tattling on other movie stars, when you wrote for People your byline came at the end of the piece. Thad had to leaf through four pages (two of them full-page ads) to find the name. Mike Donaldson. He and Mike had sat up late, just shooting the shit, and when Thad had asked the man if anyone would really care that he had written a few books under another name, Donaldson had said something which made Thad laugh hard. 'Surveys show that most People readers have extremely narrow noses. That makes them hard to pick, so they pick as many other people's as they can. They'll want to know all about your friend George.'

'He's no friend of mine,' Thad had responded, still laughing.

Now he asked Liz, who had gone to the stove, 'You got it together, babe? You need some help?'

'I'm fine,' she said. 'Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven't got enough of yourself yet?'

'Not yet,' Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.

'The hardest part was actually coming up with the name,' Beaumont continues,

nipping lightly at the pencil. 'But it was important. I knew it could work. I knew it

could break the writer's block I was struggling with . . . if I had an identity. The

right identity, one that was separate from mine.

How did he choose George Stark?

'Well, there's a crime writer named Donald E. Westlake,' Beaumont explains.

'And under his real name, Westlake uses the crime novel to write these very funny

social comedies about American life and American mores.

'But from the early sixties until the mid-seventies or so, he wrote a series of novels

under the name of Richard Stark, and those books are very different. They're about

a man named Parker who is a professional thief. He has no past, no future, and in

the best books, no interests other than robbery.

'Anyway, for reasons you'd have to ask Westlake about, he eventually stopped

writing novels about Parker, but I never forgot something Westlake said after the

pen name was blown. He said he wrote books on sunny days and Stark took over on

the rainy ones. I liked that, because those were rainy days for me, between 1973 and

early 1975.

'In the best of those books, Parker is really more Re a killer robot than a man.

The robber robbed is a pretty consistent theme in them. And Parker goes through

the bad guys — the other bad guys, I mean — exactly like a robot that's been

programmed with one single goal. 'I want my money,' he says, and that's just about

all he says. 'I want my money, I want my money.' Does that remind you of anyone?'

The interviewer nods. Beaumont is describing Alexis Machine, the main character

of the first and last George Stark novels.

'If Machine's Way had finished up the way it started out, I would have shoved it in

a drawer forever,' Beaumont says. 'Publishing it would have been plagiarism. But

about a quarter of the way through, it found its own rhythm, and everything just

clicked into place.'

The interviewer asks if Beaumont is saying that, after he had spent awhile

working on the book, George Stark woke up and started to talk.

'Yes,' Beaumont says. 'That's close enough.'

Thad looked up, almost laughing again in spite of himself. The twins saw him smiling and grinned back around the pureed peas Liz was feeding them. What he had actually said, as he remembered, was: 'Christ, that's melodramatic! You make it sound like the part of Frankenstein where the lightning finally strikes the rod on the highest castle battlement and juices up the monster!'

'I'm not going to be able to finish feeding them if you don't stop that,' Liz remarked. She had a very small dot of pureed peas on the tip of her nose, and Thad felt an absurd urge to kiss it off.

'Stop what?'

'You grin, they grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad.'

'Sorry,' he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green—rimined smiles widened for a moment.

Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.

'I started Machine's Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there

was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to

start . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but

George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters.'

The grin flashes out briefly again.

'Maybe because they didn't have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he

did time.'

Beaumont is referring to George Stark's 'jacket bio', which says the author is

thirty-nine and has done time in three different prisons on charges of arson, assault

with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill. The jacket bio is only part of

the story, however; Beaumont also produces an author-sheet from Darwin Press,

which details his after-ego's history in the painstaking detail which only a good

novelist could create out of whole cloth. From his birth in Manchester, New

Hampshire, to his final residence in Oxford, Mississippi, everything is there except

for George Stark's interment six weeks ago at Homeland Cemetery in Castle Rock,

Maine.

'I found an old notebook in one of my desk drawers, and I used these.' He points

toward the mason jar of pencils, and seems mildly surprised to find he's holding one

of them in the hand he uses to point. 'I started writing, and the next thing I knew,

Liz was telling me it was midnight and asking if I was ever going to come to bed.'

Liz Beaumont has her own memory of that night. She says, 'I woke up at 11:45

and saw he wasn't in bed and I thought, 'Well, he's writing.' But I didn't hear the

typewriter, and I got a little scared.'

Her face suggests it might have been more than just a little.

'When I came downstairs and saw him scribbling in that notebook, you could

have knocked me over with a feather.' She laughs. 'His nose was almost touching the

paper.

The interviewer asks her if she was relieved.

In soft, measured —tones, Liz Beaumont says: 'Very relieved.'

'I flipped back through the notebook and saw I'd written sixteen pages without a

single scratch-out,' Beaumont says, 'and I'd turned three-quarters of a brand-new

pencil into shavings in the sharpener.' He looks at the jar with an expression which

might be either melancholy or veiled humor. 'I guess I ought to toss those pencils out

now that George is dead. I don't use them myself. I tried. It just doesn't work. Me, I

can't work without a typewriter. My hand gets tired and stupid.

'George's never did.'

He glances up and drops a cryptic little wink.

'Hon?' he looked up at his wife, who was concentrating on getting the last of William's peas into him. The kid appeared to be wearing quite a lot of them on his bib.

'What?'

'Look over here for a sec.'

She did.

Thad winked.

'Was that cryptic?'

'No, dear.'

'I didn't think it was.'

The rest of the story is another ironic chapter in the larger history of what Thad

Beaumont calls 'the freak people call the novel.'

Machine's Way was published in June of 1976 by the smallish Darwin Press

(Beaumont's 'real' self has been published by Dutton) and became that year's

surprise success, going to number one on best-seller lists coast to coast. It was also

made into a smash-hit movie.

'For a long time I waited for someone to discover I was George and George was

me,' Beaumont says. 'The copyright was registered in the name of George Stark, but

my agent knew, and his wife — she's his ex-wife now, but still a full partner in the

business — and, of course, the top execs and the comptroller at Darwin Press knew.

He had to know, because George could write novels in longhand, but he had this

little problem endorsing checks. And of course, the IRS had to know. So Liz and I

spent about a year and a half waiting for somebody to blow the gaff. It didn't

happen. I think it was just dumb luck, and all it proves is that, when you think

someone has just got to blab, they all hold their tongues.'

And went on holding them for the next ten years, while the elusive Mr Stark, a far

more prolific writer than his other half, published another three novels. None of

them ever repeated the blazing success of Machine's Way, but all of them cut a

swath up the best-seller lists.

After a long, thoughtful pause, Beaumont begins to talk about the reasons why he

finally decided to call off the profitable charade. 'You have to remember that

George Stark was only a paper man, after all. I enjoyed him for a long time . . . and

hell, the guy was making money. I called it my f — you money. Just knowing I could

quit teaching if I wanted to and go on paying off the mortgage had a tremendously

liberating effect on me.

'But I wanted to write my own books again, and Stark was running out of things

to say. It was as simple as that. I knew it, Liz knew it, my agent knew it . . . I think

that even George's editor at Darwin Press knew it. But if I'd kept the secret, the

temptation to write another George Stark novel would eventually have been too

much for me. I'm as vulnerable to the siren—song of money as anyone else. The

solution seemed to be to drive a stake through his heart once and for all.

'In other words, to go public. Which is what I did. What I'm doing right now, as a

matter of fact.'

Thad looked up from the article with a little smile. All at once his amazement at People's staged photographs seemed itself a little sanctimonious, a little posed. Because magazine photographers weren't the only ones who sometimes arranged things so they'd have the look readers wanted and expected. He supposed most interview subjects did it, too, to a greater or lesser degree. But he guessed he might have been a little better at arranging things than some; he was, after all, a novelist . . . and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

Stark was running out of things to say. It was as simple as that. How direct.

How winning.

How utterly full of shit.

'Honey?'

'Hmmm?'

She was trying to wipe Wendy clean. Wendy was not keen on the idea. She kept twisting her small face away, babbling indignantly, and Liz kept chasing it with the washcloth. Thad thought his wife would catch her eventually, although he supposed there was always a chance she would tire first. It looked like Wendy thought that was a possibility, too.

'Were we wrong to lie about Clawson's part in all this?'

'We didn't lie, Thad. We just kept his name out of it.'

'And he was a nerd, right?'

'No, dear.'

'He wasn't?'

'No,' Liz said serenely. She was now beginning to clean William's face. 'He was a dirty little Creepazoid.'

Thad snorted. 'A Creepazoid?'

'That's right. A Creepazoid.'

'I think that's the first time I ever heard that particular term.'

'I saw it on a videotape box last week when I was down at the corner store looking for something to rent. A horror picture called The Creepazoids. And I thought, 'Marvelous. Someone made a movie about Frederick Clawson and his family. I'll have to tell Thad.' But I forgot until just now.'

'So you're really okay on that part of it?'

'Really very much okay,' she said. She pointed the hand holding the washcloth first at Thad and then at the open magazine on the table. 'Thad, you got your pound of flesh out of this. People got their pound of flesh out of this. And Frederick Clawson got jack shit . . . which was just what he deserved.'

'Thanks,' he said.

She shrugged. 'Sure. You bleed too much sometimes, Thad.'

'Is that the trouble?'

'Yes — all the trouble . . . William, honestly! Thad, if you'd help me just a little — '

Thad closed the magazine and carried Will into the twins' bedroom behind Liz, who had Wendy. The chubby baby was warm and pleasantly heavy, his arms slung casually around Thad's neck as he goggled at everything with his usual interest. Liz laid Wendy down on one changing table; Thad laid Will down on the other. They swapped dry diapers for soggy ones, Liz moving a little faster than Thad.

'Well,' Thad said, 'we've been in People magazine, and that's the end of that. Right?'

'Yes,' she said, and smiled. Something in that smile did not ring quite true to Thad, but he remembered his own weird laughing fit and decided to leave it be. Sometimes he was just not very sure about things — it was a kind of mental analogue to his physical clumsiness — and then he picked away at Liz. She rarely snapped at him about it, but sometimes he could see a tiredness creep into her eyes when he went on too long. What had she said? You bleed too much sometimes, Thad.

He pinned Will's diapers closed, keeping a forearm on the wriggling but cheerful baby's stomach while he worked so Will wouldn't roll off the table and kill himself, as he seemed determined to do.

'Bugguyrah!' Will cried.

'Yeah,' Thad agreed.

'Divvit!' Wendy yelled.

Thad nodded. 'That makes sense, too.'

'It's good to have him dead,' Liz said suddenly.

Thad looked up. He considered for a moment, then nodded. There was no need to specify who he was; they both knew. 'Yeah.'

'I didn't like him much'

That's a hell of a thing to say about your husband, he almost replied, then didn't. It wasn't odd, because she wasn't talking about him. George Stark's methods of writing hadn't been the only essential difference between the two of them.

'I didn't, either,' he said. 'What's for supper?'

Two

Breaking Up Housekeeping

1

That night Thad had a nightmare. He woke from it near tears and trembling like a puppy caught out in a thunderstorm. He was with George Stark in the dream, only George was a real estate agent instead of a writer, and he was always standing just behind Thad, so he was only a voice and a shadow.

2

The Darwin Press author-sheet — which Thad had written just before starting Oxford Blues, the second George Stark opus — stated that Stark drove 'a 1967 GMC pick-up truck held together by prayer and primer paint.' In the dream, however, they had been riding in a dead black Toronado, and Thad knew he had gotten the pick-up truck part wrong. This was what Stark drove. This jetpropelled hearse.

The Toronado was jacked in the back and didn't look like a realtor's car at all. What it looked like was something a third-echelon mobster might drive around in. Thad looked over his shoulder at it as they walked toward the house Stark was for some reason showing him. He thought he would see Stark, and an icicle of sharp fear slid into his heart. But now Stark was standing just behind his other shoulder (although Thad had no idea how he could have gotten there so fast and so soundlessly), and all he could see was the car, a steel tarantula gleaming in the sunlight. There was a sticker on the high-rise rear bumper. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, it read. The words were flanked left and right by a skull and crossbones.

The house Stark had driven him to was his house — not the winter home in Ludlow, not too far from the University, but the summer place in Castle Rock. The north bay of Castle Lake opened out behind the house, and Thad could hear the faint sound of waves lapping against the shore. There was a FOR SALE sign on the small patch of lawn beyond the driveway.

Nice house, isn't it? Stark almost whispered from behind his shoulder. His voice was rough yet caressing, like the lick of a tomcat's tongue.

It's my house, Thad answered.

You're quite wrong. The owner of this one is dead. He killed his wife and children and then himself. He pulled the plug. Just wham and jerk and bye-bye. He had that streak in him. You didn't have to look hard to see it, either. You might say it was pretty stark.

Is that supposed to be funny? he intended to ask — it seemed very important to show Stark he wasn't frightened of him. The reason it was important was that he was utterly terrified. But before he could frame the words, a large hand which appeared to have no lines on it at all (although it was hard to tell for sure because the way the fingers were folded cast a tangled shadow over the palm) was reaching over his shoulder and dangling a bunch of keys in his face.

No — not dangling. If it had just been that, he might have spoken anyway, might even have brushed the keys away in order to show how little he feared this fearsome man who insisted on standing behind him. But the hand was bringing the keys toward his face. Thad had to grab them to keep them from crashing into his nose.

He put one of them into the lock on the front door, a smooth oak expanse broken only by the knob and a brass knocker that looked like a small bird. The key turned easily, and that was strange, since it wasn't a housekey at all but a typewriter key on the end of a long steel rod. All the other keys on the ring appeared to be skeleton keys, the kind burglars carry.

He grasped the knob and turned it. As he did, the iron-bound wood of the door shrivelled and shrank in on itself with a series of explosions as loud as firecrackers. Light showed through the new cracks between the boards. Dust puffed out. There was a brittle snap and one of the decorative pieces of ironmongery fell off the door and thumped on the doorstep at Thad's feet.

He stepped inside.

He didn't want to; he wanted to stand on the stoop and argue with Stark. More! Remonstrate with him, ask him why in God's name he was doing this, because going inside the house was even more frightening than Stark himself. But this was a dream, a bad one, and it seemed to him that the essence of bad dreams was lack of control. It was like being on a roller-coaster that might at any second crest an incline and plunge you down into a brick wall where you would die as messily as a bug slapped with a flyswatter.

The familiar hallway had been rendered unfamiliar, almost hostile, by no more than the absence of the faded turkey-colored rug-runner which Liz kept threatening to replace . . . and while this seemed a small thing during the dream itself, it was what he kept returning to later, perhaps because it was authentically horrifying — horrifying outside the context of the dream. How secure could any life be if the subtraction of something as minor as a hallway rug-runner could cause such strong feelings of disconnection, disorientation, sadness and dread?

He didn't like the echo his footfalls made on the hardwood floor, and not just because they made the house sound as if the villain standing behind him had told the truth — that it was untenanted, full of the still ache of absence. He didn't like the sound because his own footsteps sounded lost and dreadfully unhappy to him.

He wanted to turn and leave, but he couldn't do that. Because Stark was behind him, and somehow he knew that Stark was now holding Alexis Machine's pearl-handled straight-razor, the one his mistress had used at the end of Machine's Way to carve up the bastard's face.

If he turned around, George Stark would do a little whittling of his own.

Empty of people the house might be, but except for the rugs (the wall-to-wall salmon-colored carpet in the living room was also gone), all the furnishings were still there. A vase of flowers stood on the little deal table at the end of the hall, where you could either go straight ahead into the living room with its high cathedral ceiling and window-wall facing the lake, or turn right into the kitchen. Thad touched the vase and it exploded into shards and a cloud of acrid-smelling ceramic powder. Stagnant water poured out, and the half-dozen garden roses which had been blooming there were dead and gray-black before they landed in the puddle of smelly water on the table. He touched the table itself. The wood gave a dry, parched crack and the table split in two, seeming to swoon rather than fall to the bare wood floor in two separate pieces.

What have you done to my house? he cried to the man behind him . . . but without turning. He didn't need to turn in order to verify the presence of the straight-razor, which, before Nonie Griffiths had used it on Machine, leaving his cheeks hanging in red and white flaps and one eye dangling from its socket, Machine himself had employed to flay open the noses of his 'business rivals.'

Nothing, Stark said, and Thad didn't have to see him in order to verify the smile he heard in the man's voice. You are doing it, old hoss.

Then they were in the kitchen.

Thad touched the stove and it split in two with a dull noise like the clanging of a great bell clotted with dirt. The heating coils popped upward and askew, funny spiral hats blown cocked in a gale. A noxious stench eddied out of the dark hole in the stove's middle, and, peering in, he saw a turkey. It was putrescent and noisome. Black fluid filled with unnameable gobbets of flesh oozed from the cavity in the bird.

Down here we call that fool's stuffing, Stark remarked from behind him.

What do you mean? Thad asked. Where do you mean, down here?

Endsville, Stark said calmly. This is the place where all rail service terminates, Thad.

He added something else, but Thad missed it. Liz's purse was on the floor, and Thad stumbled over it. When he grasped the kitchen table to keep himself from falling, the table fell into splinters and sawdust on the linoleum. A bright nail spun into one corner with a tiny metallic chattering noise.

Stop this right now! Thad cried. I want to wake up! I hate to break things!

You always were the clumsy one, old hoss, Stark said. He spoke as if Thad had had a great many siblings, all of them as graceful as gazelles.

I don't have to be, Thad informed him in an anxious voice that teetered on the edge of a whine. I don't have to be clumsy. I don't have to break things. When I'm careful, everything is fine.

Yes — too bad you stopped being careful, Stark said in that same smiling I-am-just-remarkingon-how-things-are voice. And they were in the back hall.

Here was Liz, sitting splay-legged in the corner by the door to the woodshed, one loafer off, one loafer on. A dead sparrow lay in her lap. She was wearing nylon stockings, and Thad could see a run in one of them. Her head was down, her slightly coarse honey-blonde hair obscuring her face. He didn't want to see her face. As he hadn't needed to see either the razor or Stark's razor grin to know that both were there, so he didn't need to see Liz's face to know she was not sleeping or unconscious but dead.

Turn on the lights, you'll be able to see better, Stark said in that same smiling I-am-just-passingthe-time-of-day-with-you-my-friend voice. His hand appeared over Thad's shoulder, pointing to the lights Thad himself had installed back here. They were electric, of course, but looked quite authentic: two hurricane lamps mounted on a wooden spindle and controlled by a dimmer switch on the wall.

I don't want to see!

He was trying to sound hard and sure of himself, but this was starting to get to him. He could hear a hitching, uneven quality to his voice which meant he was getting ready to blubber. And what he said seemed to make no difference anyway, because he reached for the circular rheostat on the wall. When he touched it, blue painless electric fire squirted out between his fingers, so thick it was more like jelly than light. The rheostat's round ivory—colored knob turned black, blew off the wall, and zizzed across the room like a miniature flying saucer. It broke the small window on the other side and disappeared into a day which had taken on a weird green cast of light, like weathered copper.

The electric hurricane lamps glowed supernaturally bright and the spindle began to turn, winding up the chain from which the fixture depended and sending shadows flying across the room in a lunatic carousel dance. First one and then the other of the lamp-chimneys shattered, showering Thad with glass.

Without thinking he leaped forward and grabbed his sprawled wife, wanting to get her out from under before the chain could snap and drop the heavy wooden spindle on her. This impulse was so strong it overrode everything, including his sure knowledge that it didn't matter, she was dead. Stark could have uprooted the Empire State Building and dropped it on her and it wouldn't have mattered. Not to her, anyway. Not anymore.

As he slid his arms under hers and locked his hands between her shoulder-blades, her body shifted forward and her head lolled back. The skin of her face was cracking like the surface of a Ming vase. Her glazed eyes suddenly exploded. Noxious green jelly, sickeningly warm, spurted up into his face. Her mouth gaped ajar and her teeth flew out in a white storm. He could feel their small smooth hardnesses peppering his cheeks and brow. Half-clotted blood jetted from between her pitted gums. Her tongue rolled out of her mouth and fell off, plummeting into the lap of her skirt like a bloody chunk of snake.

Thad began to shriek — in the dream and not for real, thank God, or he would have frightened Liz very badly.

I'm not done with you, cock-knocker, George Stark said softly from behind him. His voice was no longer smiling. His voice was as cold as Castle Lake in November. Remember that. You don't want to fuck with me, because when you fuck with me . . .

3

Thad woke with a jerk, his face wet, his pillow, which he had clutched convulsively against his face, also wet. The moisture might have been sweat or it might have been tears.

'. . . you're fucking with the best,' he finished into the pillow, and then lay there, knees pulled up to his chest, shuddering convulsively.

'Thad?' Liz muttered thickly from somewhere in the thickets of her own dream. 'Twins okay?'

'Okay,' he managed. 'I . . . nothing. Go back to sleep.'

'Yeah, everything's . . .' She said something else, but he caught it no more than he had caught whatever Stark had said after telling Thad that the house in Castle Rock was Endsville . . . the place where all rail service terminates.

Thad lay inside his own sweaty outline on the sheet, slowly releasing his pillow. He rubbed his face with his bare arm, and waited for the dream to let go of him, waited for the shakes to let go of him. They did, but with surprising slowness. At least he had managed not to wake Liz.

He stared thoughtlessly into the darkness, not trying to make sense of the dream, only wanting it to go away, and some endless time later Wendy awoke in the next room and began to cry to be changed. William of course awoke moments later, deciding he needed to be changed (although when Thad took off his diapers he found them quite dry).

Liz woke at once and sleepwalked into the nursery. Thad went with her, considerably more awake and grateful for once that the twins needed servicing in the middle of the night. The middle of this night, anyway. He changed William while Liz changed Wendy, neither of them speaking much, and when they went back to bed, Thad was grateful to find himself drifting toward sleep again. He'd had an idea that he was probably through sleeping for the night. And when he had first awakened with the image of Liz's explosive decomposition still fresh behind his eyes, he had thought he would never sleep again.

It'll be gone in the morning, the way dreams always are.

This was his last waking thought of the night, but when he woke the next morning he remembered the dream in all its details (although the lost and lonely echo of his footfalls in the bare corridor was the only one which retained its full emotional color), and it did not fade as days went by, the way dreams usually do.

That was one of the rare ones he kept with him, as real as a memory. The key that was a typewriter key, the lineless palm, and the dry, almost uninflected voice of George Stark, telling him from behind his shoulder that he wasn't done with him, and that when you fucked with this high-toned son of a bitch, you were fucking with the best.

Three

Graveyard Blues

1

The head of Castle Rock's three-man groundskeeping crew was named Steven Holt, so of course everyone in The Rock called him Digger. It is a nickname thousands of public groundskeepers in thousands of small New England towns hold in common. Like most of them, Holt was responsible for a fairly large amount of work, given the size of his crew. The town had two Little League fields that needed tending, one near the railroad trestle between Castle Rock and Harlow, the other in Castle View; there was a town common which had to be seeded in the spring, mown in the summer, and raked clear of leaves in the fall (not to mention the trees that needed pruning and sometimes cutting, and the upkeep of the bandstand and the seats around it); there were the town parks, one on Castle Stream near the old sawmill, the other out by Castle Falls, where lovechildren beyond numbering had been conceived since time out of mind.

He could have been in charge of all this and remained plain old Steve Holt until his dying day. But Castle Rock also had three graveyards, and his crew was also in charge of these. Planting the customers was the least of the work involved in cemetery maintenance. There was planting, raking, and re-sodding. There was litter patrol. You had to get rid of the old flowers and faded flags after the holidays — Memorial Day left the biggest pile of crap to clear up, but July Fourth, Mother's Day, and Father's Day were also busy. You also had to clean off the occasional disrespectful comments kids scrawled on tombs and grave-markers.

All that didn't matter to the town, of course. It was the planting of the customers which earned fellows like Holt their nickname. His mother had christened him Steven, but Digger Holt he was, Digger Holt he had been since he took the job in 1964, and Digger Holt he would be until his dying day, even if he took another job in the meanwhile — which, at the age of sixty-one, he was hardly likely to do.

At seven in the morning on the Wednesday which was the first of June, a fine bright presummer day, Digger pulled his truck up to Homeland Cemetery and got out to open the iron gates. There was a lock on them, but it was used only twice a year — on graduation night at the high school and Halloween. Once the gates were open, he drove slowly up the central lane.

This morning was strictly reconnaissance. There was a clipboard beside him on which he would note the areas of the cemetery which needed work between now and Father's Day. After finishing with Homeland, he would go on to Grace Cemetery across town, and then out to the Stackpole boneyard at the intersection of Stackpole Road and Town Road #3. This afternoon he and his crew would start whatever work needed to be done. It shouldn't be too bad; the heavy work had been done in late April, which Digger thought of as spring cleaning time.

During those two weeks he and Dave Phillips and Deke Bradford, who was the head of the town Public Works Department, had put in ten-hour days, as they did each spring, clearing blocked culverts, re-sodding places where the spring runoff had torn the old groundcover away, righting tombstones and monuments which had been toppled by ground-heaves. In spring there were a thousand chores, great and small, and Digger would go home barely able to keep his eyes open long enough to cook himself a little dinner and have a can of beer before tumbling into bed. Spring cleaning always ended on the same day: the one on which he felt that his constant backache was going to drive him completely out of his mind.

June spruce-up wasn't anywhere near as bad, but it was important. Come late June the summer people would start arriving in their accustomed droves, and with them would come old residents (and their children) who had moved away to warmer or more profitable parts of the country but who still held property in town. These were the people Digger regarded as the real ass-aches, the ones who would raise the roof if one blade was off the old waterwheel down at the sawmill or if Uncle Reginald's gravestone had tumbled over on its inscription.

Well, winter's coming, he thought. It was what he used to comfort himself with in all seasons, including this one, when winter seemed as distant as a dream.

Homeland was the biggest and prettiest of the town boneyards. Its central lane was almost as wide as a regular road, and it was crossed by four narrower lanes, little more than wheel—tracks with neatly mown grass growing up between them. Digger drove up the central avenue through Homeland, crossed the first and second intersections, reached the third . . . and slammed on the brakes.

'Oh piss in the shithouse!' he exclaimed, turning off the pick-up's engine and getting out. He walked down the lane toward a ragged hole in the grass some fifty feet down and to the right of the cross—lane. Brown clumps and piles of dirt lay around the hole like shrapnel around a grenade explosion. 'Gawdam kids!'

He stood by the hole, big callused hands planted on the hips of his faded green work-pants. This was a mess. On more than one occasion he and his co-workers had had to clean up after a bunch of kids who had either talked or drunk themselves into a little midnight grave-digging — it was usually an initiation stunt or just a handful of teenage dimbulbs, randy with the moonlight and kicking up their heels. To Digger Holt's knowledge, none of them had actually dug up a coffin or, God forbid, disinterred one of the paying customers — no matter how drunk these happy assholes happened to be, they usually didn't do more than dig a hole two or three feet deep before getting tired of the game and leaving off. And, although digging holes in one of the local boneatoriums was in bad taste (unless you happened to be a fellow like Digger, who was paid and duly empowered to plant the customers, that was), the mess wasn't too bad. Usually.

This, however, wasn't a case of usually.

The hole had no definition; it was just a blob. It surely didn't look like a grave, with neatly squared corners and a rectangular shape. It was deeper than the drunks and high-school kids usually managed, but its depth was not uniform; it tapered to a kind of cone, and when Digger realized what the hole did look like he felt a nasty chill race up his spine.

It looked the way a grave would look if someone had been buried before he was dead, come to, and dug his way out of the ground with nothing but his bare hands.

'Oh, cut it out,' he muttered. 'Fucking prank. Fucking kids.'

Had to be. There was no coffin down there and no tumbled headstone up here, and that made perfect sense because there was no body buried here. He didn't have to go back to the toolshed, where a detailed map of the graveyard was tacked up on the wall, to know that. This was part of the six-plot segment owned by the town's First Selectman, Danforth 'Buster' Keeton. And the only plots actually occupied by customers held the bodies of Buster's father and uncle. They were off to the right, their headstones standing straight and unmolested.

Digger remembered this particular plot well for another reason. This was where those New York people had set up their fake gravestone when they were doing their story on Thad Beaumont. Beaumont and his wife had a summer home here in town, on Castle Lake. Dave Phillips caretook their place, and Digger himself had helped Dave tarring the driveway last fall, before the leaves fell and things got busy again. Then this spring, Beaumont had asked him in kind of an embarrassed way if some photographer could set up a fake tombstone in the cemetery for what he called 'a trick shot.'

'If it's not okay, just say so,' Beaumont had told him, sounding more embarrassed than ever. 'It's really not a big deal.'

'You go right ahead,' Digger had answered kindly. 'People magazine, did you say?'

Thad nodded.

'Well, say! That's something, isn't it? Somebody from town in People magazine! I'll have to get that issue for sure!'

'I'm not sure I will,' Beaumont said. 'Thanks, Mr Holt.'

Digger liked Beaumont, even if he was a writer. Digger had only gone as far as the eighth grade himself — and had to try twice before he could get through that one — and it wasn't everybody in town called him 'Mister.'

'Darn magazine folk'd prob'ly like to take your pitcher stark naked with your old hog-leg stuck up a Great Dane's poop-chute if they could get it that way, wouldn't they?'

Beaumont went off into a rare gale of laughter. 'Yeah, that's just what they would like, I think,' he had said, and clapped Digger on the shoulder.

The photographer had turned out to be a woman of the sort Digger called A High-Class Cunt from the City. The city in this case was, of course, New York. She walked as if she had a spindle up her box and another one tucked up her butt and both of them turning just as brisk as you please. She'd gotten a station wagon from one of the car-rental places at the Portland jetports and it was stuffed so full of photo equipment it was a wonder there was room for her and her assistant inside. If the car got too full and it came to a choice between getting rid of her assistant or some of that photo equipment, Digger reckoned there would be one pansy from the Big Apple trying to hitch him a ride back to the airport.

The Beaumonts, who followed in their own car and parked it behind the station wagon, had looked both embarrassed and amused. Since they seemed to be with the High-Class Cunt from the City of their own free will, Digger guessed that amusement still held the upper hand with them. Still, he had leaned in to make sure, ignoring the High-Class Cunt's snooty look. 'Everything fine, Mr B.?' he had asked.

'Christ, no, but I guess it'll do,' he had replied, and dropped Digger a wink. Digger dropped him one right back.

Once he had it clear in his mind that the Beaumonts intended to go through with the thing, Digger had settled back to watch — he had as much appreciation for a free show as the next man. The woman had a big fake gravestone tucked in amidst the rest of her travelling goods, the old— fashioned kind that was round on top. It looked more like the ones Charles Addams drew in his cartoons than any of the real ones Digger had set up just lately. She fussed around it, getting her assistant to set it up again and again. Digger had stepped in once to ask if he could help, but she just said no thank you in her snotty New York way, so Digger had retreated again.

Finally she had it the way she wanted it, and got the assistant to work dicking around with the lights. That used up another half-hour or so. And all the time Mr Beaumont had stood there and watched, sometimes rubbing the small white scar on his forehead in that odd, characteristic way he had. His eyes fascinated Digger.

Man's takin his own photographs, he thought. Probably better than hers, and apt to last a lot longer, to boot. He's storin her up to put in a book someday and she don't even know it.

At last the woman had been ready to take a few pictures. She had the Beaumonts shake hands over that gravestone a dozen times if she had them do it once, and it was pretty gawdam raw that day, too. Ordered them around just like she did that squeaky, mincing assistant of hers. Between her braying New York voice and the repeated orders to do it over again because the light wasn't right or their faces weren't right or maybe her own damned asshole wasn't right, Digger had kept expecting Mr Beaumont — not exactly the longest-tempered of men according to the gossip he'd heard — to explode all over her. But Mr Beaumont — and his wife, too — seemed more amused than pissed off, and they just kept on doing what the High-Class Cunt from the City told them to do, even though it had been right nippy that day. Digger believed that, if it had been him, he would have gotten a might pissed off at the lady after awhile. Like in about fifteen seconds.

And it was here, right where this stupid gawdam hole was, that they had planted that fake gravemarker. Why, if he needed any further proof, there were still round marks in the sod, marks which had been left by that High-Class Cunt's heels. She had been from New York, all right; only a New York woman would show up in high heels at the end of slop season and then goose-step around a cemetery in them, taking pitchers. If that wasn't —

His thoughts broke off, and that feeling of coldness reasserted itself in his flesh again. He had been looking at the fading tattoos left by the photographer's high heels, and as he looked at those marks, his eye happened on other, fresher marks.

2

Tracks? Were those tracks?

'Course they ain't, it's just that the doofus who dug this hole flang some of the dirt further than he did the rest of it. That's all it is.

Except that wasn't all, and Digger Holt knew it wasn't. Before he could even get to the first blotch of dirt on the green grass, he saw the deep impression of a shoe in the pile of dirt closest to the hole.

So there's footprints, so what? Did you think whoever done this just sorta floated around with a shovel in his hand like Caspar the Friendly Ghost?

There are people in the world who are quite good at lying to themselves, but Digger Holt wasn't one of them. That nervous, scoffing voice in his mind could not change what his eyes saw. He had tracked and hunted wild things all his life, and this sign was just too easy to read. He wished to Christ it wasn't.

Here in this pile of dirt close to the grave was not only a footprint, but a circular depression almost the size of a dinner dish. This dimple was to the left of the footprint. And on either side of the circular print and the foot-mark, but farther back, were grooves in the dirt that were clearly the marks of fingers, fingers which had slipped a little before catching hold.

He looked beyond the first footprint and saw another. Beyond that, on the grass, was half of a third, formed when some of the dirt on the shoe which stepped there fell off in a clump. It had fallen off, but remained moist enough to hold the impression . . . and that's what the three or four others which had originally caught his eye had done. If he hadn't come so cussed early in the morning, while the grass was still wet, the sun would have dried the earth and it would have fallen apart in loose little crumbles that meant nothing.

He wished he had come later, that he had gone out to Grace Cemetery first, as he had set out to do when he left home.

But he hadn't, and that was all.

The fragments of footprints petered out less than twelve feet from the

(grave)

hole in the ground. Digger suspected the dewy grass farther on might still hold impressions, though, and he supposed he would check on that, although he didn't much want to. For the time being, however, he re-directed his gaze to the clearest marks, the ones in the little pile of dirt close to the hole.

Grooves which had been drawn by fingers; a round impression slightly ahead of them; a footprint beside the round mark. What story did that configuration tell?

Digger hardly had to ask Iiimself before the answer dropped into his mind like the secret woid on that old Groucho Marx show, You Bet Your Life. He saw it as clearly as if he had been here when it happened, and that was precisely why he didn't want any more to do with this at all. Gawdam creepy was what it was.

Because look: here's a man standing in a new-dug hole in the ground.

Yes, but how'd he get down there?

Yes, but did he make the hole, or did someone else do it?

Yes, but how come the little roots look twisted and frayed and torn, as if the sods were pulled apart with bare hands instead of sheared cleanly apart with a spade?

Never mind the buts. Never mind them at all. It was better, maybe, not to think of them. Just stick with the man standing in the hole, a hole that is a little too deep to just jump out of. So what does he do? He puts his palms in the closest pile of dirt and boosts himself out. No particular trick to do that, if it was a full—grown man, that was, and not a kid. Digger looked at the few clear and complete tracks he could see and thought, If it was a kid, he had awful damn big feet. Those have got to be size twelves, at least.

Hands out. Boost the body up. During the boost, the hands slip a little bit in the loose dirt, so you dig in with your fingers, leaving those short grooves. Then you're out, and you balance your weight on one knee, creating that round depression. You put one foot down next to the knee you're balanced on, shift your weight from the knee to the foot, get up, and walk away. Simple as knitting kitten-britches.

So some guy dug himself out of his grave and just walked away, is that it? Maybe got a little hungry down there and decided to hit Nan's Luncheonette for a cheeseburger and a beer?

'Gawdammit, it ain't a grave, it's a friggin hole in the ground!' he said aloud, and then jumped a little as a sparrow scolded him.

Yes, nothing but a hole in the ground — hadn't he said so himself? But how come he couldn't see any marks of the sort he associated with spadework? How come there was just that one set of footprints going away from the hole and none around it, none pointing toward it, the way there would be if a fellow had been digging and stepping in his own dirt every now and then, as fellows digging holes tended to do?

It occurred to him to wonder just what he was going to do about all this, and Digger was gawdamned if he knew. He supposed that, technically, a crime had been committed, but you couldn't accuse the criminal of grave-robbing — not when the plot which had been dug over didn't contain a body. The worst you could call it was vandalism, and if there was more to be made of it than that, Digger Holt wasn't sure he was the one who wanted to do the making.

Best, maybe, to just fill the hole back in, replace what flaps of sod he could find whole, get enough fresh sod to finish the job, then forget the whole thing.

After all, he told himself for the third time, it ain't as if anyone was really buried there.

In the eye of his memory, that rainy spring day glimmered momentarily. My, that gravestone had looked real! When you saw that willowy assistant carrying it around, you knew it was makebelieve, but when they had it set up, with those fake flowers in front of it and all, you'd have sworn it was real, and that there was really somebody —

His arms were crawling with hard little knots of flesh.

'You just quit on it, now,' he told himself harshly, and when the sparrow scolded again, Digger welcomed its unlovely but perfectly real and perfectly ordinary sound. 'You go on and yell, Mother,' he said, and walked over to the last fragment of footprint.