The Dark Half

All of a sudden, Thad burst out laughing again.

2

There were two lines of white type on the black field below the picture of Thad and Liz in one of Castle Rock's finer boneyards.

   THE DEAR DEPARTED WAS EXTREMELY CLOSE TO THESE TWO PEOPLE, read the first.

  SO WHY ARE THEY LAUGHING? read the second.

  'Because the world is one strange fucking place,' Thad Beaumont said, and snorted into one cupped hand.

  Liz Beaumont wasn't the only one who felt vaguely uneasy about this odd little burst of publicity. He felt a little uneasy himself. All the same, he found it difficult to stop laughing. He'd quit for a few seconds and then a fresh spate of guffaws would burst out of him as his eye caught on that line — Not a Very Nice Guy — again. Trying to quit was like trying to plug the holes in a poorly constructed earthen dam; as soon as you got one leak stopped up, you saw a new one someplace else.

  Thad suspected there was something not quite right about such helpless laughter — it was a form of hysteria. He knew that humor rarely if ever had anything to do with such fits. In fact, the cause was apt to be something quite the opposite of funny.

  Something to be afraid of, maybe.

  You're afraid of a goddam article in People magazine? Is that what you're thinking? Dumb. Afraid of being embarrassed, of having your colleagues in the English Department look at those pictures and think you've lost the poor cracked handful of marbles you had?

   No. He had nothing to fear from his colleagues, not even the ones who had been there since dinosaurs walked the earth. He finally had tenure, and also enough money to face life as — flourish of trumpets, please! — a full-time writer if he so desired (he wasn't sure he did; he didn't care much for the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of university life, but the teaching part was just fine). Also no because he had passed beyond caring much about what his colleagues thought of him some years ago. He cared about what his friends thought, yes, and in some cases his friends, Liz's friends, and the friends they had in common happened to be colleagues, but he thought those people were also apt to think it was sort of a hoot.

  If there was anything to be afraid of, it was —

  Stop it, his mind ordered in the dry, stern tone that had a way of causing even the most obstreperous of his undergrad English students to fall pale and silent. Stop this foolishness right now.

   No good. Effective as that voice might be when he used it on his students, it wielded no power over Thad himself.

    He looked down again at that picture and this time his eye paid no attention to the faces of his wife and himself, mugging cheekily at each other like a couple of kids performing an initiation stunt.

GEORGE STARK

1975 — 1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

That was what made him uneasy.

    That tombstone. That name. Those dates. Most of all that sour epitaph, which made him bellow laughter but was not, for some reason, one bit funny underneath the laughter.

  That name.

  That epitaph.

  'Doesn't matter,' Thad muttered. 'Motherfucker's dead now.' But the uneasiness remained.

    When Liz came back in with a freshly changed and dressed twin curled in each arm, Thad was bent over the story again.

'Did I murder him?'

Thaddeus Beaumont, once hailed as America's most promising novelist and a

National Book Award nominee for The Sudden Dancers in 1972, repeats the

question thoughtfully. He looks slightly bemused. 'Murder,' he says again, softly, as

if the word had never occurred to him . . . even though murder was almost all his

'dark half,' as Beaumont calls George Stark, did think about.

From the wide-mouthed mason jar beside his old-fashioned Remington 32

typewriter, he draws a Berol Black Beauty pencil (all Stark would write with,

according to Beaumont) and begins to gnaw lightly on it. From the look of the dozen

or so other pencils in the mason jar, the gnawing is a habit.

'No,' he says at last, dropping the pencil back into the jar. 'I didn't murder him.'

He looks up and smiles. Beaumont is thirty-nine, but when he smiles in that open

way, he might be mistaken for one of his own undergrads. 'George died of natural

causes.'

Beaumont says George Stark was his wife's idea. Elizabeth Stephens Beaumont, a

cool and lovely blonde, refuses to take full credit. 'All I did,' she says, 'was suggest

he write a novel under another name and see what happened to it. Thad was

suffering from serious writer's block, and he needed a jumpstart. And really' — she

laughs — 'George Stark was there all along. I'd seen signs of him in some of the

unfinished stuff that Thad did from time to time. It was just a case of getting him to

come out of the closet.'

According to many of his contemporaries, Beaumont's problems went a little

further than writer's block. At least two well-known writers (who refused to be

quoted directly) say that they were worried about Beaumont's sanity during that

crucial period between the first book and the second. One says he believes

Beaumont may have attempted suicide following the publication of The Sudden

Dancers, which earned more critical acclaim than royalties.

Asked if he ever considered suicide, Beaumont only shakes his head and says,

'That's a stupid idea. The real problem wasn't popular acceptance; it was writer's

block. And dead writers have a terminal case of that.'

Meanwhile, Liz Beaumont kept 'lobbying' — Beaumont's word — for the idea of

a pseudonym. 'She said I could kick up my heels for once, if I wanted to. Write any

damn thing I pleased without The New York Times Book Review looking over my

shoulder the whole time I wrote it. She said I could write a Western, a mystery, a

science fiction story. Or I could write a crime novel.'

Thad Beaumont grins.

'I think she put that one last on purpose. She knew Id been fooling around with

an idea for a crime novel, although I couldn't seem to get a handle on it.

'The idea of a pseudonym had this funny draw for me. It felt free, somehow — like

a secret escape hatch, if you see what I mean.

'But there was something else, too. Something that's very hard to explain.'

Beaumont stretches a hand out toward the neatly sharpened Berols in the mason

jar, then withdraws it. He looks off toward the window-wall at the back of his study,

which gives on a spring spectacular of greening trees.

'Thinking about writing under a pseudonym was like thinking bout being