The Dark Half(4)

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

Chapter One

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  p**n ; 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 Bike-A-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 f**king 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.