The Dark Half

Liz Beaumont has her own memory of that night. She says, 'I woke up at 11:45

and saw he wasn't in bed and I thought, 'Well, he's writing.' But I didn't hear the

typewriter, and I got a little scared.'

Her face suggests it might have been more than just a little.

'When I came downstairs and saw him scribbling in that notebook, you could

have knocked me over with a feather.' She laughs. 'His nose was almost touching the

paper.

The interviewer asks her if she was relieved.

In soft, measured —tones, Liz Beaumont says: 'Very relieved.'

'I flipped back through the notebook and saw I'd written sixteen pages without a

single scratch-out,' Beaumont says, 'and I'd turned three-quarters of a brand-new

pencil into shavings in the sharpener.' He looks at the jar with an expression which

might be either melancholy or veiled humor. 'I guess I ought to toss those pencils out

now that George is dead. I don't use them myself. I tried. It just doesn't work. Me, I

can't work without a typewriter. My hand gets tired and stupid.

'George's never did.'

He glances up and drops a cryptic little wink.

   'Hon?' he looked up at his wife, who was concentrating on getting the last of William's peas into him. The kid appeared to be wearing quite a lot of them on his bib.

  'What?'

  'Look over here for a sec.'

  She did.

  Thad winked.

  'Was that cryptic?'

  'No, dear.'

  'I didn't think it was.'

The rest of the story is another ironic chapter in the larger history of what Thad

Beaumont calls 'the freak people call the novel.'

Machine's Way was published in June of 1976 by the smallish Darwin Press

(Beaumont's 'real' self has been published by Dutton) and became that year's

surprise success, going to number one on best-seller lists coast to coast. It was also

made into a smash-hit movie.

'For a long time I waited for someone to discover I was George and George was

me,' Beaumont says. 'The copyright was registered in the name of George Stark, but

my agent knew, and his wife — she's his ex-wife now, but still a full partner in the

business — and, of course, the top execs and the comptroller at Darwin Press knew.

He had to know, because George could write novels in longhand, but he had this

little problem endorsing checks. And of course, the IRS had to know. So Liz and I

spent about a year and a half waiting for somebody to blow the gaff. It didn't

happen. I think it was just dumb luck, and all it proves is that, when you think

someone has just got to blab, they all hold their tongues.'

And went on holding them for the next ten years, while the elusive Mr Stark, a far

more prolific writer than his other half, published another three novels. None of

them ever repeated the blazing success of Machine's Way, but all of them cut a

swath up the best-seller lists.

After a long, thoughtful pause, Beaumont begins to talk about the reasons why he

finally decided to call off the profitable charade. 'You have to remember that

George Stark was only a paper man, after all. I enjoyed him for a long time . . . and

hell, the guy was making money. I called it my f — you money. Just knowing I could

quit teaching if I wanted to and go on paying off the mortgage had a tremendously

liberating effect on me.

'But I wanted to write my own books again, and Stark was running out of things

to say. It was as simple as that. I knew it, Liz knew it, my agent knew it . . . I think

that even George's editor at Darwin Press knew it. But if I'd kept the secret, the

temptation to write another George Stark novel would eventually have been too

much for me. I'm as vulnerable to the siren—song of money as anyone else. The

solution seemed to be to drive a stake through his heart once and for all.

'In other words, to go public. Which is what I did. What I'm doing right now, as a

matter of fact.'

   Thad looked up from the article with a little smile. All at once his amazement at People's staged photographs seemed itself a little sanctimonious, a little posed. Because magazine photographers weren't the only ones who sometimes arranged things so they'd have the look readers wanted and expected. He supposed most interview subjects did it, too, to a greater or lesser degree. But he guessed he might have been a little better at arranging things than some; he was, after all, a novelist . . . and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

  Stark was running out of things to say. It was as simple as that. How direct.

  How winning.

  How utterly full of shit.

  'Honey?'

  'Hmmm?'

    She was trying to wipe Wendy clean. Wendy was not keen on the idea. She kept twisting her small face away, babbling indignantly, and Liz kept chasing it with the washcloth. Thad thought his wife would catch her eventually, although he supposed there was always a chance she would tire first. It looked like Wendy thought that was a possibility, too.

  'Were we wrong to lie about Clawson's part in all this?'

  'We didn't lie, Thad. We just kept his name out of it.'

  'And he was a nerd, right?'

  'No, dear.'

  'He wasn't?'

  'No,' Liz said serenely. She was now beginning to clean William's face. 'He was a dirty little Creepazoid.'

  Thad snorted. 'A Creepazoid?'

  'That's right. A Creepazoid.'