The Dark Half

  Liz had set them out on the floor to play in a bright patch of sun around quarter of five in the afternoon. After ten minutes or so of confident crawling and shaky standing (the latter accompanied by lusty crows of accomplishment to their parents and to each other), William pulled himself up on the edge of the coffee-table. He glanced around and made several imperious gestures with his right arm. These gestures reminded Thad of old newsfilm showing Il Duce addressing his constituency from his balcony. Then William seized his mother's teacup and managed to pour the lees all over himself before toppling backward onto his bottom. The tea was fortunately cold, but William held onto the cup and managed to rap it against his mouth smartly enough to make his lower lip bleed a little. He began to wail. Wendy promptly joined in.

  Liz picked him up, examined him, rolled her eyes at Thad, and took him upstairs to soothe him and then clean him up. "Keep an eye on the princess," she said as she went.

  "I will," Thad said, but he had discovered and would shortly rediscover that, in the Golden Age of Mess-Making, such promises often amount to little. William had managed to snatch Liz's teacup from under her very nose, and Thad saw that Wendy was going to fall from the third stair-riser just a moment too late to save her the tumble.

  He had been looking at a news magazine--not reading it but thumbing idly through it, glancing every now and then at a picture. When he was finished, he went over to the large knitting basket by the fireplace which served as a sloppy sort of magazine-rack to put it back and get another. Wendy was crawling across the floor, her tears forgotten before they were entirely dry on her chubby cheeks. She was making the breathy little rum-rum-rum sound both of them uttered when crawling, a sound that sometimes made Thad wonder if they associated all movement with the cars and trucks they saw on TV. He squatted, put the magazine on top of the pile in the basket, and thumbed through the others, finally selecting a month-old Harper's for no particular reason. It occurred to him that he was behaving quite a bit like a man in a dentist's office waiting for a tooth extraction.

  He turned around and Wendy was on the stairs. She had crawled up to the third one and was now rising shakily to her feet, holding onto one of the spindles which ran between the rail of the bannister and the floor. As he looked at her she spied him and gave a particularly grandiloquent arm-gesture and a grin. The sweep of her arm sent her chubby body swaying forward over the short drop.

  "Jesus," he said under his breath, and as he rose to his feet, knees popping dryly, be saw her take a step forward and let go of the spindle. "Wendy, don't do that!"

  He nearly leaped across the room, and almost made it. But he was a clumsy man, and one of his feet caught on the leg of the armchair. It fell over, and Thad went sprawling. Wendy fell outward and forward with a startled little squawk. Her body turned slightly in midair. He grabbed for her from his knees, trying to make a saving catch, and missed by a good two feet. Her right leg struck the first stair-riser, and her head struck the carpeted floor of the living room with a muffled thud.

  She screamed, and he had time to think how terrifying a baby's cry of pain is, and then he had swept her into his arms.

  Overhead, Liz called out, "Thad?" in a startled voice, and he heard the thump-thump of her slippered feet running down the hall.

  Wendy was trying to cry. Her first yell of pain had expelled all but the tidal air from her lungs, and now came the paralyzing, eternal moment when she struggled to unlock her chest and draw in breath for the next whoop. It would bludgeon the eardrums when it finally came.

  If it came.

  He held her, looking anxiously into her twisted, blood-engorged face. It had gone a color which was almost puce, except for the red mark like a very large comma on her forehead. God, what if she passes out? What if she strangles to death, unable to pull in breath and utter the cry locked in her flat little lungs?

  "Cry, damn it!" he shouted down at her. God, her purple face! Her bulging stricken eyes! "Cry!"

  "Thad!" Liz sounded very scared now, but she also seemed very distant. In those few eternal seconds between Wendy's first cry and her struggle to free the second one and so go on breathing, George Stark was driven totally out of Thad's mind for the first time in the last eight days. Wendy drew in a great convulsive breath and began to whoop. Thad, trembling with relief, hugged her to his shoulder and began to stroke her back gently, making shushing sounds.

  Liz came pounding downstairs, a struggling William clasped against her side like a small bag of grain. "What happened? Thad, is she all right?"

  "Yes. She took a tumble from the third stair up. She's fine now. Once she started crying. At first it was like . . . like she just locked up." He laughed shakily and traded Wendy for William, who was now bellowing in sympathetic harmony with his sister.

  "Weren't you watching her?" Liz asked reproachfully. She was automatically swinging her body back and forth at the hips, rocking Wendy, trying to soothe her.

  "Yes . . . no. I went over to get a magazine. Next thing I knew, she was on the stairs. It was like Will and the teacup. They're just so damned . . . eely. Is her head all right, do you think? She hit on the carpet, but she hit hard. "

  Liz held Wendy at arm's length for a moment, looked at the red mark, then kissed it gently. Wendy's sobs were already beginning to diminish in volume.

  "I think it's okay. She'll have a bump for a day or two, that's all. Thank God for the carpet. I didn't mean to jump on you, Thad. I know how quick they are. I'm just . . . I feel like I'm going to have my period, only it's all the time now. "

  Wendy's sobs were winding down to sniffles. Accordingly, William also began to dry up. He reached out a chubby arm and snatched at his sister's white cotton t-shirt. She looked around. He cooed, then babbled at her. To Thad, their babbling always sounded a little eerie: like a foreign language which had been speeded up just enough so you couldn't quite tell which one it was, let alone understand it. Wendy smiled at her brother, although her eyes were still streaming tears and her cheeks were wet with them. She cooed and babbled in reply. For a moment it was as if they were holding a conversation in their own private world--the world of twins.

  Wendy reached out and caressed William's shoulder. They looked at each other and went on cooing.

  Are you all right, sweet one?

  Yes; I hurt myself, dear William, but not badly.

  Will you want to stay home from the Stadleys' dinner-party, dear heart?

  I should think not, although you are very thoughtful to ask.

  Are you quite sure, my dear Wendy?

  Yes, darling William, no darnage has been done, although. I gready fear I have shit in my diapers.

  Oh sweetheart, how TIRESOME!

  Thad smiled a little, then looked at Wendy's leg. "That's going to bruise," he said. "In fact, it looks like it's started already. "

  Liz offered him a little smile. "It will heal," she said. "And it won't be the last. "

  Thad leaned forward and kissed the tip of Wendy's nose, thinking how fast and how furiously these storms blew in--not three minutes ago he had been afraid she might die from lack of oxygen--and bow fast they blew back out again. "No," he agreed. "God willing, it won't be the last. "

  3

  By the time the twins got up from their late naps at seven that evening, the bruise on Wendy's upper thigh had turned a dark purple. It had an odd and distinctive mushroom shape.

  "Thad?" Liz said from the other changing-table. "Look at this. "

  Thad had removed Wendy's nap-diaper, slightly dewy but not really wet, and dropped it into the diaper-bucket marked HERS. He carried his naked daughter over to his son's changing-table to see what Liz wanted him to see. He looked down at William and his eyes widened.

  "What do you think?" she asked quietly. "Is that weird, or what?"

  Thad looked down at William for a long time. "Yeah," he said at last. "That's pretty weird. "

  She was holding their wriggling son on the changing-table with a hand on his chest. Now she looked sharpl
y around at Thad. "Are you okay?"

  "Yes," Thad said. He was surprised at how calm he sounded to himself. A large white light seemed to have gone off, not in front of his eyes, like a flashgun, but behind them. Suddenly be thought he understood about the birds--a little--and what the next step should be. Just looking down at his son and seeing the bruise on his leg, identical in shape, color, and location to the one on Wendy's leg, had made him understand that. When Will had grabbed Liz's teacup and upended it all over himself, he bad sat down hard on his butt. So far as Thad knew, William hadn't done anything to his leg at all. Yet there it was--a sympathetic bruise on the upper thigh of his right leg, a bruise which was almost mushroom-shaped.

  "You sure you're okay?" Liz persisted.

  "They share their bruises, too," he said, looking down at William's leg.

  "Thad?"

  "I'm fine," he said, and brushed her cheek with his lips. "Let's get Psycho and Somatic dressed, what do you say?"

  Liz burst out laughing. "Thad, you're crazy," she said.

  He smiled at her. It was a slightly peculiar, slightly distant smile. "Yeah," he said. "Crazy like a fox. "

  He took Wendy back to her changing-table and began to diaper her.

  Eighteen

  AUTOMATIC WRITING

  1

  He waited until Liz had gone to bed before going up to his study. He paused outside their bedroom door for a minute or so on his way, listening to the regular ebb and flow of her breathing, assuring himself that she was asleep. He wasn't at all sure that what he was going to try would work, but if it did, it might be dangerous. Extremely dangerous.

  His study was one large room--a renovated barn loft--which had been divided into two areas: the "reading room," which was a book-lined area with a couch, a reclining chair, and track lighting, and, at the far end of the long room, his work-area. This part of the study was dominated by an old-fashioned business desk without a single feature to redeem its remarkable ugliness. It was a scarred, battered, uncompromisingly utilitarian piece of furniture. Thad had owned it since he was twenty-six, and Liz sometimes told people he wouldn't let it go because he secretly believed that it was his own private Fountain of Words. They would both smile when she said this, as if they really believed it was a joke.

  Three glass-shaded lights hung down over this dinosaur, and when Thad turned on only these lights, as he did now, the savage, overlapping circles of light they made on the desk's littered landscape made it seem as if he were about to play some strange version of billiards there--what the rules for play on such a complex surface might be it was impossible to tell, but on the night after Wendy's accident, the tight set of his face would have convinced an observer that the game would be for very high stakes, whatever the rules.

  Thad would have agreed with that one hundred per cent. It had, after all, taken him over twenty-four hours to work his courage up to this.

  He looked at the Remington Standard for a moment, a vague hump under its cover with the stainless-steel return lever sticking out from the left side like a hitchhiker's thumb. He sat down in front of it, drummed his fingers restlessly on the edge of the desk for a few moments, then opened the drawer to the left of the typewriter.

  This drawer was both wide and deep. He took his journal out of it, then opened the drawer all the way to its stop. The mason jar in which he kept the Berol Black Beauties had rolled all the way to the back, spilling pencils as it went. He took it out, set it in its accustomed place, then gathered up the pencils and put them back into it.

  He shut the drawer and looked at the jar. He had tossed it in the drawer after that first fugue, during which he had used one of the Black Beauties to write THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN on the manuscript of The Golden Dog. He had never intended to use one again . . . yet he had been fooling with one just a couple of nights ago and here they were, sitting where they had sat during the dozen or so years when Stark had lived with him, lived in him. For long periods Stark would be quiet, hardly there at all. Then an idea would strike and foxy old George would leap out of his head like a crazed jack-in-the-box. Ka-POP! Here I am, Thad! Let's go, old boss! Saddle up!

  And every day for about three months thereafter Stark would leap out promptly at ten o'clock every day, weekends included. He would pop out, seize one of the Berol pencils, and commence writing his crazed nonsense--the crazed nonsense which paid the bills Thad's own work could not pay. Then the book would be done and George would disappear again, like the crazy old man who had woven straw into gold for Rapunzel.

  Thad took out one of the pencils, looked at the teeth-marks lightly tattooed on the wooden barrel, and then dropped it back into the jar. It made a tiny clink! sound.

  "My dark half," he muttered.

  But was George Stark his? Had he ever been his? Except for the fugue, or trance, or whatever it had been, he had not used one of these pencils, not even to make notes, since writing The End at the bottom of the last page of the last Stark novel, Riding to Babylon.

  There had been nothing to use them for, after all; they were George Stark's pencils and Stark was dead . . . or so he had assumed. He supposed he would have gotten around to throwing them out in time.

  But now it seemed he had a use for them after all.

  He reached toward the wide-mouthed jar, then pulled his hand back, as if from the side of a furnace which glows with its own deep and jealous heat.

  Not yet.

  He took the Scripto pen from his shirt pocket, opened his journal, uncapped the pen, hesitated, and then wrote.

  If William cries, Wendy cries. But I've discovered the link between them is much deeper and stronger than that. Yesterday Wendy fell down the stairs and earned a bruise--a bruise that looks like a big purple mushroom. When the twins got up from their naps, William had one, too. Same location, same shape.

  Thad lapsed into the self-interview style which characterized a good part of his journal. As he did so, he realized this very habit--this way of finding a path to the things he really thought--suggested yet another form of duality . . . or perhaps it was only another aspect of a single split in his mind and spirit, something which was both fundamental and mysterious.

  Question: If you took slides of the bruises on my children's legs, then overlaid them, would you end up with what looked like a single image?

  Answer: Yes, I think you would. I think it is like the fingerprints. I think it is like the voice-prints.

  Thad sat quietly for a moment, tapping the end of the pen against the journal page, considering this. Then he leaned forward again and began to write more quickly.

  Question: Does William KNOW he has a bruise?

  Answer: No. I don't think he does.

  Question: Do I know what the sparrows are, or what they mean?

  Answer: No.

  Question: But I do know there ARE sparrows. I know that much, don't I? Whatever Alan Pangborn or anyone else may believe, I know there ARE sparrows, and I know that they are flying again, don't I?

  Answer: Yes.

  Now the pen was racing over the page. He had not written so quickly or unselfconsciously in months.

  Question: Does Stark know there are sparrows?

  Answer: No. He said he doesn't, and I believe him.

  Question: Am I SURE I believe him?

  He stopped again, briefly, and then wrote:

  Stark knows there is SOMETHING. But William must know there is something, too--if his leg is bruised, it must hurt. But Wendy gave him the bruise when she fell downstairs. William only knows he has a hurt place.

  Question: Does Stark know he has a hurt place? A vulnerable place?

  Answer: Yes. I think he does.

  Question: Are the birds mine?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: Does that mean that when he wrote THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN on Clawson's wall and Miriam's wall, he didn't know what he was doing and didn't remember it when he was done?

  Answer: Yes.

  Question: Who wrote about the sparr
ows? Who wrote it in blood?

  Answer: The one who knows. The one to whom the sparrows belong.

  Question: Who is the one who knows? Who owns the sparrows?

  Answer: I am the knower. I am the owner.

  Question: Was I there? Was I there when he murdered them?

  He paused again, briefly. Yes, he wrote, and then: No. Both. I didn't have a fugue when Stark killed either Homer Gamache or Clawson, at least not that I remember. I think that what I know . . . what I SEE. . . may be growing.

  Question: Does he see you?

  Answer: I don't know. But . . .

  "He must," Thad muttered.

  He wrote: He must know me. He must see me. If he really DID write the novels, he has known me for a long time. And his own knowing, his own seeing, is also growing. All that traceback and recording equipment didn't faze foxy old George a bit, did it? No--of course not. Because foxy old George knew it would be there. You don't spend almost ten years writing crime fiction without finding out about stuff like that. That's one reason it didn't faze him. But the other one's even better, isn't it? When he wanted to talk to me, talk to me privately, he knew exactly where I'd be and how to get hold of me, didn't he?

  Yes. Stark had called the house when he wanted to be overheard, and he had called Dave's Market when he didn't. Why had he wanted to be overheard in the first case? Because he had a message to send to the police he knew would be listening--that he wasn't George Stark and knew he wasn't . . . and that he was done killing, he wasn't coming after Thad and Thad's family. And there was another reason, too. He wanted Thad to see the voice-prints he knew they would make. He knew the police wouldn't believe their evidence, no matter how incontrovertible it seemed . . . but Thad would.

  Question: How did he know where I'd be?

  And that was a mighty good question, wasn't it? That was right up there with such questions as how can two different men share the same fingerprints and voice-prints and how can two different babies have exactly the same bruise . . . especially when only one of the babies in question happened to bump her leg.