The Dark Half(91)

Stark reached out, not physically, but with his mind, and seized that disappearing tail of Thad's mental probe. In the eye of Stark's own mind it looked like a worm, a fat white maggot deliriously stuffed with offal and decay.

He thought of making Thad grab another pencil from the mason jar and use it to stab himself again - in the eye this time. Or perhaps he would have him drive the pencil's point deep into his ear, rupturing the eardrum and digging for the soft meat of the brain beyond. He could almost hear Thad's scream. He would not be able to muffle that one.

Then he stopped. He didn't want Beaumont dead. At least not yet. Not until Beaumont had taught him how to live on his own. Stark slowly relaxed his fist, and as he did, he felt the fist in which he held Beaumont's essence

- the mental fist, which had proved every bit as quick and merciless as his physical one - also open. He felt Beaumont, the plump white maggot, slip away, squealing and moaning..'Only for now,'

he whispered, and turned to the other necessary business. He closed his left hand around the pen jutting out of his right hand. He drew it smoothly out. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket.

3

There was a bottle of Glenlivet standing on the stainless-steel dish-drainer by the sink. Stark picked it up and walked into the bathroom. His right hand swung by his side as he walked, splattering dime-sized droplets of blood on the warped and faded linoleum. The hole in his hand was about half an inch above the ridge of the knuckles and slightly to the right of the third one. It was perfectly round. The stain of the black ink around the edge of the hole, combined with the internal bleeding and trauma, made it look like a gunshot wound. He tried to flex the hand. The fingers moved . . . but the sickening wave of pain that resulted was too great for further experimentation.

He pulled the chain depending from the fixture above the medicine cabinet mirror, and the unshaded sixty-watt bulb came on. He used his right arm to hold the bottle of whiskey clamped against his side so he could unscrew the cap. Then he held his wounded hand splayed out over the basin. Was Beaumont doing the same thing in Maine? He doubted it. He doubted if Beaumont had the guts to clean up his own mess. He would undoubtedly be on his way to the hospital by now. Stark tipped whiskey into the wound, and a bolt of pure, steely pain leaped up his arm to his shoulder. He saw the whiskey bubbling in the wound, saw little threads of blood in the amber, and had to bury his face against the sweat-soaked arm of his shirt again. He thought the pain would never fade, but at last it began to. He tried to put the bottle of whiskey on the shelf bolted to the tile wall below the mirror. His hand was shaking too badly for this operation to stand much chance of success, so he set it on the rust-splotched tin floor of the shower stall instead. He would want a drink in a minute. He raised the hand to the light and peered into the hole. He could see the bulb through it, but dimly - it was like looking through a red filter bleared with some kind of membranous muck. He hadn't driven the pen all the way through his hand, but it had been damned close. Maybe Beaumont had done better.

He could always hope.

He held his hand under the cold water tap, spraying the fingers to draw the hole as wide open as possible, then steeled himself for the pain. It was bad at first - he had to strain another scream through teeth which were clenched and lips which were pressed together in a thin white line - but then the hand grew numb and it was better. He forced himself to hold it under the tap for a full three minutes. Then he turned the faucet off and held it up to the light again. The glow of the bulb through the hole was still there, but now it was dim and distant. The wound was closing up. His body seemed to have amazing powers of regeneration, and that was rather amusing, because at the same time he was falling apart. Losing cohesion, he had written. And that was close enough.

He looked at his face fixedly in the wavery, spotted mirror on the medicine chest for thirty seconds or more, then shook himself back to awareness with a physical jerk. Looking at his face, so well-known and familiar and yet so new and strange, always made him feel as if he were falling into a hypnotic trance. He supposed if he looked at it long enough, he would do just that..Stark opened the medicine cabinet, swinging the mirror and his repulsively fascinating face aside. There was an odd little collection of items in the chest: two disposable razors, one used; bottles of make-up; a compact; several wedges of fine-grained sponge, ivory-colored where they had not been stained a slightly darker color by face-powder; a bottle of generic aspirin. No BandAids. Band-Aids were like cops, he thought - never one around when you really needed one. That was all right, though - he would disinfect the wound with some more whiskey (after disinfecting his insides with a healthy wallop, that was) and then wrap it in a handkerchief. He didn't think it would turn septic; he seemed immune to infection. He also found this amusing. He used his teeth to uncap the aspirin bottle, spat the cap into the basin, then upended the bottle and shook half a dozen pills into his mouth. He took the whiskey out of the shower stall and washed the aspirins down with a slug. The booze hit his stomach and opened its comforting blossom of heat there. Then he used some more on his hand. Stark went into the bedroom and opened the top drawer of a bureau which had seen better - much better - days. It and an ancient sofa-bed were the only pieces of furniture in the room. The top drawer was the only one with anything in it save newspaper liners from the Daily News: three pairs of undershorts still in the store wrapper, two pairs of socks with the manufacturer's label still banded around them, a pair of Levi's, and a Hav-a-Hank, also still in its wrapper. He tore the cellophane open with his teeth and tied the Hav-a-Hank around his hand. Amber whiskey soaked through the thin cloth, then one small bloom of blood. Stark waited to see if the bloom would spread, but it didn't. Good deal. A very good deal. Had Beaumont been able to pick up any sensory input? he wondered. Did he, maybe, know that George Stark was currently sheltering in a cruddy little East Village apartment in a cheesy building where the roaches looked big enough to steal the welfare checks? He didn't think so, but it made no sense to take chances when he didn't have to. He had promised Thad a week to decide, and although he was now all but positive that Thad had no plans to start writing as Stark again, he would see that Thad got all the time he had been promised. He was a man of his word, after all.