The Dark Half(83)

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 hoss!

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 tightly 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 voiceprints.

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 sparrows? 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 . .