The Dark Half

invisible,' he finally says almost hesitantly. 'The More I played with the idea, the

more I felt that I would be . . . well . . . reinventing myself.'

His hand steals out and this time succeeds in filching one of the pencils from the

mason jar while his mind is otherwise engaged.

    Thad turned the page and then looked up at the twins in their double high chair. Boy-girl twins were always fraternal . . . or brother-and-sisteral, if you didn't want to be a male chauvinist pig about it. Wendy and William were, however, about as identical as you could get without being identical.

  William grinned at Thad around his bottle.

  Wendy also grinned at him around her bottle, but she was sporting an accessory her brother didn't have — one single tooth near the front, which had come up with absolutely no teething pain, simply breaking through the surface of the gum as silently as a submarine's periscope sliding through the surface of the ocean.

    Wendy took one chubby hand from her plastic bottle. Opened it, showing the clean pink palm. Closed it. Opened it. A Wendy-wave.

   Without looking at her, William removed one of his hands from his bottle, opened it, closed it, opened it. A William-wave.

Thad solemnly raised one of his own hands from the table, opened it, closed it, opened it.

The twins grinned around their bottles.

   He looked down at the magazine again. Ah, People, he thought where would we be, what would we do, without you? This is American star-time, folks.

   The writer had dragged out all the soiled linen there was to drag out, of course — most notably the four—year—long bad patch after The Sudden Dancers had failed to win the NBA — but that was to be expected, and he found himself not much bothered by the display. For one thing, it wasn't all that dirty, and for another, he had always felt it was easier to live with the truth than with a lie. In the long run, at least.

    Which of course raised the question of whether or not People magazine and 'the long run' had anything at all in common.

Oh well. Too late now.

    The name of the guy who had written the piece was Mike — he remembered that much, but Mike what? Unless you were an earl tattling on royalty or a movie star tattling on other movie stars, when you wrote for People your byline came at the end of the piece. Thad had to leaf through four pages (two of them full-page ads) to find the name. Mike Donaldson. He and Mike had sat up late, just shooting the shit, and when Thad had asked the man if anyone would really care that he had written a few books under another name, Donaldson had said something which made Thad laugh hard. 'Surveys show that most People readers have extremely narrow noses. That makes them hard to pick, so they pick as many other people's as they can. They'll want to know all about your friend George.'

  'He's no friend of mine,' Thad had responded, still laughing.

  Now he asked Liz, who had gone to the stove, 'You got it together, babe? You need some help?'

  'I'm fine,' she said. 'Just cooking up some goo for the kiddos. You haven't got enough of yourself yet?'

  'Not yet,' Thad said shamelessly, and went back to the article.

'The hardest part was actually coming up with the name,' Beaumont continues,

nipping lightly at the pencil. 'But it was important. I knew it could work. I knew it

could break the writer's block I was struggling with . . . if I had an identity. The

right identity, one that was separate from mine.

How did he choose George Stark?

'Well, there's a crime writer named Donald E. Westlake,' Beaumont explains.

'And under his real name, Westlake uses the crime novel to write these very funny

social comedies about American life and American mores.

'But from the early sixties until the mid-seventies or so, he wrote a series of novels

under the name of Richard Stark, and those books are very different. They're about

a man named Parker who is a professional thief. He has no past, no future, and in

the best books, no interests other than robbery.

'Anyway, for reasons you'd have to ask Westlake about, he eventually stopped

writing novels about Parker, but I never forgot something Westlake said after the

pen name was blown. He said he wrote books on sunny days and Stark took over on

the rainy ones. I liked that, because those were rainy days for me, between 1973 and

early 1975.

'In the best of those books, Parker is really more Re a killer robot than a man.

The robber robbed is a pretty consistent theme in them. And Parker goes through

the bad guys — the other bad guys, I mean — exactly like a robot that's been

programmed with one single goal. 'I want my money,' he says, and that's just about

all he says. 'I want my money, I want my money.' Does that remind you of anyone?'

The interviewer nods. Beaumont is describing Alexis Machine, the main character

of the first and last George Stark novels.

'If Machine's Way had finished up the way it started out, I would have shoved it in

a drawer forever,' Beaumont says. 'Publishing it would have been plagiarism. But

about a quarter of the way through, it found its own rhythm, and everything just

clicked into place.'

The interviewer asks if Beaumont is saying that, after he had spent awhile

working on the book, George Stark woke up and started to talk.

'Yes,' Beaumont says. 'That's close enough.'

  Thad looked up, almost laughing again in spite of himself. The twins saw him smiling and grinned back around the pureed peas Liz was feeding them. What he had actually said, as he remembered, was: 'Christ, that's melodramatic! You make it sound like the part of Frankenstein where the lightning finally strikes the rod on the highest castle battlement and juices up the monster!'

    'I'm not going to be able to finish feeding them if you don't stop that,' Liz remarked. She had a very small dot of pureed peas on the tip of her nose, and Thad felt an absurd urge to kiss it off.

  'Stop what?'

  'You grin, they grin. You can't feed a grinning baby, Thad.'

    'Sorry,' he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green—rimined smiles widened for a moment.

Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.

'I started Machine's Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there

was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to

start . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but

George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters.'

The grin flashes out briefly again.

'Maybe because they didn't have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he

did time.'

Beaumont is referring to George Stark's 'jacket bio', which says the author is

thirty-nine and has done time in three different prisons on charges of arson, assault

with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill. The jacket bio is only part of

the story, however; Beaumont also produces an author-sheet from Darwin Press,

which details his after-ego's history in the painstaking detail which only a good

novelist could create out of whole cloth. From his birth in Manchester, New

Hampshire, to his final residence in Oxford, Mississippi, everything is there except

for George Stark's interment six weeks ago at Homeland Cemetery in Castle Rock,

Maine.

'I found an old notebook in one of my desk drawers, and I used these.' He points

toward the mason jar of pencils, and seems mildly surprised to find he's holding one

of them in the hand he uses to point. 'I started writing, and the next thing I knew,

Liz was telling me it was midnight and asking if I was ever going to come to bed.'