The Dark Half

  Except he knew that similar mysteries were well-documented and accepted, at least in cases where twins were involved; the bond between identicals was even more eerie. There had been an article about it in one of the news magazines a year or so ago. Because of the twins in his own life, Thad had read the article closely.

  There was the case of identical twins who were separated by an entire continent--but when one of them broke his left leg, the other suffered excruciating pains in his own left leg without even knowing something had happened to his sib. There were the identical girls who had developed their own special language, a language known and understood by no one else on earth. These twin girls had never learned English in spite of their identical high IQs. What need for English had they? They had each other . . . and that was all they wanted. And, the article said, there were the twins who, separated at birth, were reunited as adults and found they had both married on the same day of the same year, women with the same first name and strikingly similar looks. Furthermore, both couples had named their first sons Robert. Both Roberts had been born in the same month and in the same year.

  Half and half.

  Criss and cross.

  Snick and snee.

  "Ike and Mike, they think alike," Thad muttered. He reached out and circled the last line he had written:

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

  Below this he wrote:

  Answer: Because the sparrows are flying again. And because we are twins.

  He turned to a fresh page in his journal and laid the pen aside. Heart thumping hard, skin freezing with fear, he reached out a trembling right hand and pulled one of the Berol pencils from the jar. It seemed to burn with a low and unpleasant heat in his hand.

  Time to go to work.

  Thad Beaumont leaned over the blank page, paused, and then printed THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN in large block letters at the top.

  2

  What, exactly, did he mean to do with the pencil?

  But he knew that, too. He was going to try and answer the last queston, the one so obvious he hadn't even bothered to write it down: Could he consciously induce the trance state? Could he make the sparrows fly?

  The idea embodied a form of psychic contact he had read about but had never seen demonstrated: automatic writing. The person attempting to contact a dead soul (or a living one) by this method held a pen or pencil loosely in his hand with the tip on a blank sheet of paper and simply waited for the spirit--pun most definitely intended--to move him. Thad had read that automatic writing, which could be practiced with the aid of a Ouija board, was often approached as a kind of lark, a party-game, even, and that this could be extremely dangerous--that it could, in fact, lay the practitioner wide open to some form of possession.

  Thad had neither believed nor disbelieved this when reading it; it seemed as foreign to his own life as the worship of pagan idols or the practice of trepanning to relieve headaches. Now it seemed to have its own deadly logic. But he would have to summon the sparrows.

  He thought of them. He tried to summon up the image of all those birds, all those thousands of birds, sitting on roofpeaks and telephone wires beneath a mild spring sky, waiting for the telepathic signal to take off.

  And the image came . . . but it was flat and unreal, a kind of mental painting with no life in it. When he began writing it was often like this--a dry and sterile exercise. No, it was worse than that. Starting off always felt a little obscene to him, like French-kissing a corpse.

  But he had learned that, if he kept at it, if he simply kept pushing the words along the page, something else kicked in, something which was both wonderful and terrible. The words as individual units began to disappear. Characters who were stilted and lifeless began to limber up, as if he had kept them in some small closet overnight and they had to loosen their muscles before they could begin their complicated dances. Something began to happen in his brain; he could almost feel the shape of the electrical waves there changing, losing their prissy goose-step discipline, turning into the soft, sloppy delta waves of dreaming sleep.

  Now Thad sat hunched over his journal, pencil in hand, and tried to make this happen. As the moments spun themselves out and nothing did happen, he began to feel more and more foolish.

  A line from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show got into his head and refused to leave: Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, the spirits are about to speak! What in God's name was he going to say to Liz if she showed up and asked him what he was doing here with a pencil in his hand and a blank sheet of paper in front of him, at just a few minutes before midnight? That he was trying to draw the bunny on the matchbook and win a scholarship to the Famous Artists School in New Haven? Hell, he didn't even have one of those matchbooks.

  He moved to put the pencil back, and then paused. He had turned in his chair a little so he was looking out the window to the left of his desk.

  There was a bird out there, sitting on the window-ledge and looking in at him with bright black eyes.

  It was a sparrow.

  As he watched, it was joined by another.

  And another.

  "Oh my God," he said in a trembling, watery voice. He had never been so terrified in his life . . . and suddenly that sensation of going filled him again. It was as it had been when he spoke to Stark on the telephone, but now it was stronger, much stronger.

  Another sparrow landed, jostling the other three aside for place, and beyond them he saw a whole line of birds sitting on top of the carriage-house where they kept the lawn equipment and Liz's car. The antique weathervane on the carriage-house's single gable was covered with them, swinging beneath their weight.

  "Oh my God," he repeated, and he heard his voice from a million miles away, a voice which was filled with horror and terrible wonder. "Oh my dear God, they're real--the sparrows are real. "

  In all his imaginings he had never suspected this . . . but there was no time to consider it, no mind to consider it with. Suddenly the study was gone, and in its place he saw the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, where he had grown up. It lay as silent and deserted as the house in his Stark nightmare; he found himself peering at a silent suburb in a dead world.

  Yet it was not entirely dead, because the roof of every house was lined with twittering sparrows. Every TV antenna was freighted with them. Every tree was filled with them. They queued upon every telephone line. They sat on the tops of parked cars, on the big blue mailbox which stood at the corner of Duke Street and Marlborough Lane, and on the bike-rack in front of the Duke Street Convenience Store, where he had gone to buy milk and bread for his mother when he was a boy.

  The world was filled with sparrows, waiting for the command to fly.

  Thad Beaumont lolled back in his office chair, a thin froth spilling from the corners of his mouth, feet twitching aimlessly, and now all the windows of the study were lined with sparrows, looking in at him like strange avian spectators. A long, gargling sound escaped his mouth. His eyes rolled up in his head, revealing bulging, glistening whites.

  The pencil touched the sheet and began to write.

  it scrawled across the top line. It dropped two lines, made the L-shaped indent-mark that was characteristic of each new Stark paragraph, and wrote:

  The sparrows flew.

  All at once they all took flight, the ones in his head from that long-ago Bergenfield, and the ones outside his Ludlow home . . . the real ones. They flew up into two skies: a white spring sky in the year 1960, and a dark summer sky in the year 1988.

  They flew and they were gone in a ruffling blast of wings.

  Thad sat up . . . but his hand was still nailed to the pencil, being pulled along.

  The pencil was writing by itself.

  I made it, he thought dazedly, wiping spit and froth from his mouth and chin with his left hand. I made it . . . and I wish to God I had let it alone. What is this?

  He stared down at the words pouring out of his fist, his heart thumping so hard he felt the pulse, high and fa
st, in his throat. The sentences spilling out on the blue lines were in his own handwriting--but then, all of Stark's novels had been written in his hand. With the same fingerprints, the same taste in cigarettes, and exactly the same vocal characteristics, it would be odder if it were someone else's handwriting, he thought.

  His handwriting, just as it had been all the other times, but where were the words coming from? Not from his own head, that was certain; there was nothing up there right now but terror overlaid with loud, roaring confusion. And there was no feeling in his hand anymore. His right arm seemed to end roughly three inches above his wrist. There was not even a remote sense of pressure in his fingers, although he could see he was gripping the Berol tightly enough to turn his thumb and first two fingers white at the tips. It was as if he had been given a healthy shot of Novocain.

  He reached the bottom of the first sheet. His unfeeling hand tore it back, his unfeeling palm raced up the journal's binding, creasing the page flat, and began to write again.

  Thad realized with mounting horror that he was reading an account of Miriam Cowley's murder . . . and this time it was not a broken, confused stew of words, but the coherent, brutal narration of a man who was, in his own horrid way, an extremely effective writer--effective enough so that millions of people had bought his fiction.

  George Stark's nonfiction debut, he thought sickly.

  He had done exactly what he had set out to do: had made contact, had somehow tapped into Stark's mind, just as Stark must somehow have tapped into Thad's own mind. But who would have guessed what monstrous, unknown forces he would touch in doing so? Who could have guessed? The sparrows--and the realization that the sparrows were real--had been bad, but this was worse. Had he thought both the pencil and the notebook were warm to the touch? No wonder. This man's mind was a fucking furnace.

  And now--Jesus! Here it was! Unrolling out of his own fist! Jesus Christ!

  What's wrong, George? Are you losing some of your happy thoughts?

  No wonder it had stopped the black-hearted son of a bitch for a moment when he had said that. If this was the way it really had been, then Stark had used the same phrase before killing Miriam.

  I WAS tapped into his mind during the murder-I WAS. That's why I used that phrase during the conversation we had at Dave's.

  Here was Stark forcing Miriam to call Thad, dialing the number for her because she was too terrified to remember it, although there were weeks when she must have dialed it half a dozen times. Thad found this forgetfulness and Stark's understanding of it both horrible and persuasive. And now Stark was using his razor to--

  But he didn't want to read that, wouldn't read that. He pulled his arm up, lifting his numb hand along with it like a lead weight. The instant the pencil's contact with the notebook was broken, feeling flooded back into the hand. The muscles were cramped, and the side of his second finger ached dully; the barrel of the pencil had left an indentation which was now turning red.

  He looked down at the scrawled page, full of horror and a dumb species of wonder. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was to put that pencil back down again, to complete that obscene circuit between Stark and himself again . . . but he hadn't gotten into this just to read Stark's first-hand account of Mir Cowley's murder, had he?

  Suppose the birds come back?

  But they wouldn't. The birds had served their purpose. The circuit he had achieved was still whole and functioning. Thad had no idea how he knew that, but he did know.

  Where are you, George? he thought. How come I don't feel you? Is it because you are as unaware of my presence as I am of yours? Or is it something else? Where the fuck ARE you?

  He held the thought in the front of his mind, trying to visualize it as a bright red neon sign. Then he gripped the pencil again and began lowering it toward his journal.

  As soon as the tip of the pencil touched the paper, his hand rose again and flipped to a blank sheet. The palm flattened the turned sheet along the crease as it had done once before. Then the pencil returned to the paper, and wrote:

  All places are the same. He recognized that line first, then the whole quote. It was from the first chapter of Stark's first novel, Machine's Way.

  The pencil had stopped of its own accord this time. He raised it and looked down at the scribbled words, cold and prickling. Except maybe home. And I'll know that when I get there.

  In Machine's Way, home had been Flatbush Avenue, where Alexis Machine had spent his childhood, sweeping up in the billiard parlor of his diseased alcoholic father. Where was home in this story?

  Where is home? he thought at the pencil, and slowly lowered it to the paper again.

  The pencil made a quick series of sloping m-shapes. It paused, then moved again.

  the pencil wrote below the birds.

  A pun. Did it mean anything? Was the contact really still there, or was he fooling himself now? He hadn't been fooling himself about the birds, and he hadn't been fooling himself during that first frenzied spate of writing, he knew that, but the feeling of heat and compulsion seemed to have abated. His hand still felt numb, but how tightly he was gripping the pencil--and that was very tightly indeed, judging from the mark on the side of his finger--could have something to do with that. Hadn't he read in that same piece on automatic writing that people often fooled themselves with the Ouija board--that in most cases it was guided not by the spirits but by the subconscious thoughts and desires of the operator?

  Home is where the start is. If it was still Stark, and if the pun had some meaning, it meant here, in this house, didn't it? Because George Stark had been born here.

  Suddenly part of the damned People magazine article floated into his mind.

  "I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter. . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters. Maybe because they didn't have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he did time. "

  Cute. Very cute. But it had only a second-cousinship with the actual facts, didn't it? It wasn't the first time Thad had told a story that had only a tenuous relationship to the truth, and he supposed it wouldn't be the last--assuming he lived through this, of course. It wasn't exactly lying; it wasn't even embroidering the truth, strictly speaking. It was the almost unconscious act of fictionalizing one's own life, and Thad didn't know a single writer of novels or short stories who didn't do it. You didn't do it to make yourself look better than you'd actually been in any given situation; sometimes that happened, but you were just as apt to relate a story that cast you in a bad light or made you look comically stupid. What was the movie where some newspaperman had said, "When you've got a choice between truth and legend, print the legend"? The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, maybe. It might make for shitty and immoral reporting, but it made for wonderful fiction. The overflow of make-believe into one's own life seemed to be an almost unavoidable side-effect of story-telling-like getting calluses on the pads of your fingers from playing the guitar, or developing a cough after years of smoking.

  The facts of Stark's birth were actually quite different from the People version. There had been no mystic decision to write the Stark novels longhand, although time had turned it into a kind of ritual. And when it came to ritual, writers were as superstitious as professional athletes. Baseball players might wear the same socks day after day or cross themselves before stepping into the batter's box if they were hitting well; writers, when successful, were apt to follow the same patterns until they became rituals in an effort to ward off the literary equivalent of a batting slump . . . which was known as writer's block.

  George Stark's habit of writing his novels longhand had begun simply because Thad forgot to bring any fresh ribbons for the Underwood in his little office at the summer house in Castle Rock. He'd had no typewriter ribbons, but the idea had been too hot and promising to wait, so he had rooted through the drawers of the little desk he kept down there until he found a notebook and some pencils and--


  In those days we used to get down to the place at the lake a lot later in the summer, because I taught that three-week block course--what was it called? Creative Modes. Stupid damned thing. It was late June that year, and I remember going up to the office and discovering there weren't any ribbons. Hell, I remember Liz bitching that there wasn't even any coffee--

  Home is where the start is.

  Talking to Mike Donaldson, the guy from People magazine, telling the semi-fictional story of George Stark's genesis, he had switched the location to the big house here in Ludlow without even thinking about it--because, he supposed, Ludlow was where he did most of his writing and it was perfectly normal to set the scene here--especially if you were setting a scene, thinking of a scene, the way you did when you were making a piece of fiction. But it wasn't here that George Stark had made his debut; not here that be had first used Thad's eyes to look out at the world, although it was here that he had done most of his work both as Stark and as himself, it was here that they lived most of their odd dual lives.

  Home is where the start is.

  In this case, home must mean Castle Rock. Castle Rock, which also happened to be the location of Homeland Cemetery. Homeland Cemetery, which was where, in Thad's mind if not in Alan Pangborn's, George Stark had first appeared in his murderous physical incarnation, about two weeks ago.

  Then, as if it were the most natural progression in the world (and for all he knew, it might have been), another question occurred to him, one that was so basic and occurred so spontaneously that he heard himself mutter it aloud, like a shy fan at a meet-the-author tea: "Why do you want to go back to writing?"

  He lowered his hand until the tip of the pencil touched the paper. That numbness flowed back over it and into it, making it feel as if it were immersed in a stream of very cold, very clear water.

  Once more the hand's first act was to rise again and turn to a fresh page in the journal. It came back down, creased the turned sheet. flat . . . but this time the writing did not begin at once. Thad had time to think that the contact, whatever it was, had been broken in spite of the numbness, and then the pencil jerked in his hand as if it were a live thing itself . . . alive but badly wounded. It jerked, making a mark like a sleepy comma, jerked again, making a dash, and then wrote