The Dark Half(87)

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 he 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.before coming to rest like a wheezy piece of machinery.

Yes. You can write your name. And you can deny the sparrows. Very good. But why do you want to go back to writing? Why is it so important? Important enough to kill people?

the pencil wrote.

'What do you mean?' Thad muttered, but he felt a wild hope explode in his head. Could it possibly be that simple? He supposed that it could be, especially for a writer who had no business existing in the first place. Christ, there were enough real writers who couldn't exist unless they were writing, or felt they couldn't . . . and in the case of men like Ernest Hemingway, it really came down to the same thing, didn't it?

The pencil trembled, then drew a long, scrawling line below the last message. It looked weirdly like the voice-print.

'Come on,' Thad whispered. 'What the hell do you mean?'

the pencil wrote. The letters were stilted, reluctant. The pencil jerked and wavered between his fingers, which were wax-white. If I exert much more pressure, Thad thought, it's just gonna snap off..Suddenly his arm flew up. At the same time his numb hand flicked the pencil with the agility of a stage-magician manipulating a card, and instead of holding it between his fingers most of the way down its barrel, he was gripping the pencil in his fist like a dagger. He brought it down - Stark brought it down - and suddenly the pencil was buried in the web of flesh between the thumb and first finger of his left hand. The graphite tip, somewhat dulled by the writing Stark had done with it, passed almost all the way through it. The pencil snapped. A bright puddle of blood filled the depression the pencil's barrel had dragged into his flesh, and suddenly the force which had gripped him was gone. Red pain raved up from his hand, which lay on his desk with the pencil jutting out of it.

Thad threw his head back and clamped his teeth shut against the agonized howl which fought to escape his throat.

3

There was a small bathroom off the study, and when Thad felt able to walk, he took his monstrously throbbing hand there and examined the wound under the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent tube. It looked like a bullet-wound - a perfectly round hole rimmed with a flaring black smudge. The smudge looked like gunpowder, not graphite. He turned his hand over and saw a bright red dot, the size of a pinprick, on the palm side. The tip of the pencil. That's how close it came to going all the way through, he thought. He ran cold water over and into the wound until his hand was numb, then took the bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the cabinet. He found he could not hold the bottle in his left hand, so he pressed it against his body with his left arm in order to get the cap off. Then he poured disinfectant into the hole in his hand, watching the liquid turn white and foam, gritting his teeth against the pain.

He put the hydrogen peroxide back and then took down the few bottles of prescription medicine in the cabinet one by one, examining their labels. He had had terrible back-spasms after a fall he had taken while cross-country skiing two years ago, and good old Dr Hume had given him a prescription for Percodan. He had taken only a few of them; he had found the pills f**ked up his sleep-cycle and made it hard for him to write.

He finally discovered the plastic vial hiding behind a can of Barbasol shaving cream that had to be at least a thousand years old. Thad pried the vial's cap off with his teeth and shook one of the.pills out onto the side of the sink. He debated adding a second, and decided against it. They were

strong.

And maybe they're spoiled. Maybe you can end this wild night of fun with a good convulsion and a trip to the hospital - how about that?

But he decided to take the chance. There really wasn't even a question - the pain was