The Dark Half

4 Death in a Small Town 5 96529Q

6 Death in the Big City 7 Police Business

8 Pangborn Pays a Visit 9 The Invasion of the Creepazoid

10 Later That Night

11 Endsville

12 Sis

13 Sheer Panic

14 Fool's Stuffing

PART 2 STARK TAKES CHARGE

15 Stark Disbelief

16 George Stark Calling

17 Wendy Takes a Fall

18 Automatic Writing

19 Stark Makes a Purchase

20 Over the Deadline

21 Stark Takes Charge

PART 3 THE COMING OF THE PSYCHOPOMPS

22 Thad on the Run

23 Two Calls for Sheriff Pangborn

24 The Coming of the Sparrows

25 Steel Machine

26 The Sparrows Are Flying

Epilogue

Afterword

This book is for Shirley Sonderegger, who helps me mind my business, and for her husband, Peter.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I'm indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help

and inspiration. This novel could not have been written

without him.

S.K.

PROLOGUE

'Cut him,' Machine said. 'Cut him while I stand here and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.'

— Machine's Way by George Stark

People's lives — their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences — begin at different times. The real life of Thad Beaumont a young boy who was born and raised in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey, began in 1960. Two things happened to him that year. The first shaped his life; the second almost ended it. That was the year Thad Beaumont was eleven.

  In January he submitted a short story to a writing contest sponsored by American Teen magazine. In June, he received a letter from the magazine's editors telling him that he had been awarded an Honorable Mention in the contest's Fiction category. The letter went on to say that the judges would have awarded him Second Prize had his application not revealed that he was still two years away from becoming a bona fide "American Teen." Still, the editors said, his story, "Outside Marty's House", was an extraordinarily mature work, and he was to be congratulated.

    Two weeks later, a Certificate of Merit arrived from American Teen. It came registered mail, insured. The certificate had his name on it in letters so convolutedly Old English that he could barely read them, and a gold seal at the bottom, embossed with the American Teen logo — the silhouettes of a crewcut boy and a pony-tailed girl jitterbugging.

  His mother swept Thad, a quiet, earnest boy who could never seem to hold onto things and often tripped over his own large feet, into her arms and smothered him with kisses.

  His father was unimpressed.

'If it was so goddam good, why didn't they give him some money?' he grunted from the depths

of his easy-chair.

'Glen — '

   'Never mind. Maybe Ernest Hemingway there could run me in a beer when you get done maulin him.'

    His mother said no more . . . but she had the original letter and the certificate which followed it framed, paying for the job out of her pin-money, and hung it in his room, over the bed. When relatives or other visitors came, she took them in to see it. Thad, she told her company, was going to be a great writer someday. She had always felt he was destined for greatness, and here was the first proof. This embarrassed Thad, but he loved his mother far too much to say so.

   Embarrassed or not, Thad decided his mother was at least par right. He didn't know if he had it in him to be a great writer or not, but he was going to be some kind of a writer no matter what. Why not? He was good at it. More important, he got off on doing it. When the words came right, he got off on it in a big way. And they wouldn't always be able to withhold the money from him on a technicality. He wouldn't be eleven forever.