The Dark Half

come so cussed early in the morning, while the grass was still wet, the sun would have dried the earth and it would have fallen apart in loose little crumbles that meant nothing.

   He wished he had come later, that he had gone out to Grace Cemetery first, as he had set out to do when he left home.

  But he hadn't, and that was all.

  The fragments of footprints petered out less than twelve feet from the

  (grave)

  hole in the ground. Digger suspected the dewy grass farther on might still hold impressions, though, and he supposed he would check on that, although he didn't much want to. For the time being, however, he re-directed his gaze to the clearest marks, the ones in the little pile of dirt close to the hole.

  Grooves which had been drawn by fingers; a round impression slightly ahead of them; a footprint beside the round mark. What story did that configuration tell?

    Digger hardly had to ask Iiimself before the answer dropped into his mind like the secret woid on that old Groucho Marx show, You Bet Your Life. He saw it as clearly as if he had been here when it happened, and that was precisely why he didn't want any more to do with this at all. Gawdam creepy was what it was.

  Because look: here's a man standing in a new-dug hole in the ground.

  Yes, but how'd he get down there?

  Yes, but did he make the hole, or did someone else do it?

  Yes, but how come the little roots look twisted and frayed and torn, as if the sods were pulled apart with bare hands instead of sheared cleanly apart with a spade?

    Never mind the buts. Never mind them at all. It was better, maybe, not to think of them. Just stick with the man standing in the hole, a hole that is a little too deep to just jump out of. So what does he do? He puts his palms in the closest pile of dirt and boosts himself out. No particular trick to do that, if it was a full—grown man, that was, and not a kid. Digger looked at the few clear and complete tracks he could see and thought, If it was a kid, he had awful damn big feet. Those have got to be size twelves, at least.

    Hands out. Boost the body up. During the boost, the hands slip a little bit in the loose dirt, so you dig in with your fingers, leaving those short grooves. Then you're out, and you balance your weight on one knee, creating that round depression. You put one foot down next to the knee you're balanced on, shift your weight from the knee to the foot, get up, and walk away. Simple as knitting kitten-britches.

  So some guy dug himself out of his grave and just walked away, is that it? Maybe got a little hungry down there and decided to hit Nan's Luncheonette for a cheeseburger and a beer?

   'Gawdammit, it ain't a grave, it's a friggin hole in the ground!' he said aloud, and then jumped a little as a sparrow scolded him.

    Yes, nothing but a hole in the ground — hadn't he said so himself? But how come he couldn't see any marks of the sort he associated with spadework? How come there was just that one set of footprints going away from the hole and none around it, none pointing toward it, the way there would be if a fellow had been digging and stepping in his own dirt every now and then, as fellows digging holes tended to do?

  It occurred to him to wonder just what he was going to do about all this, and Digger was gawdamned if he knew. He supposed that, technically, a crime had been committed, but you couldn't accuse the criminal of grave-robbing — not when the plot which had been dug over didn't contain a body. The worst you could call it was vandalism, and if there was more to be made of it than that, Digger Holt wasn't sure he was the one who wanted to do the making.

  Best, maybe, to just fill the hole back in, replace what flaps of sod he could find whole, get enough fresh sod to finish the job, then forget the whole thing.

  After all, he told himself for the third time, it ain't as if anyone was really buried there.

  In the eye of his memory, that rainy spring day glimmered momentarily. My, that gravestone had looked real! When you saw that willowy assistant carrying it around, you knew it was makebelieve, but when they had it set up, with those fake flowers in front of it and all, you'd have sworn it was real, and that there was really somebody —

  His arms were crawling with hard little knots of flesh.

    'You just quit on it, now,' he told himself harshly, and when the sparrow scolded again, Digger welcomed its unlovely but perfectly real and perfectly ordinary sound. 'You go on and yell, Mother,' he said, and walked over to the last fragment of footprint.

    Beyond it, as he had more or less suspected, he could see other prints smashed into the grass. They were widely spaced. Looking at them, Digger didn't think the fellow had been running, but he sure hadn't been wasting any time. Forty yards farther along, he found his eye could mark the fellow's progress in another way: a large basket of flowers had been kicked over. Although he couldn't see any prints that far away, the basket would have been right in the path of the prints he could see. Man could have gone around that basket, but he hadn't chosen to do so. Instead, he had simply kicked it aside and kept on going.

    Men who did things like that were not, in Digger Holt's opinion, the sort of men you wanted to fuck around with unless you had a damned good reason.

    Moving diagonally across the cemetery, he had been, as if on his way to the low wall between the boneyard and the main road. Moving like a man who had places to go and things to do.

  Although Digger was not much better at imagining things than he was at fooling himself (the two things, after all, have a way of going hand in hand), Digger saw this man for a moment, literally saw him: a big fellow with big feet, striding through this silent suburb of the dead in the darkness, moving confidently and steadily on his big feet, booting the basket of flowers out of his way without even breaking stride when he came to it. He was not afraid, either — not this man. Because if there were things here which were still lively, as some people believed, they would be afraid of him. Moving, walking, striding, and God befriend the man or woman who got in his way.

  The bird scolded.

  Digger jumped.

  'Forget it, Chummy,' he told himself once more. 'Just fill the friggin thing in and never mind thinkin about it!'

    Fill it in he did, and forget it he intended to, but late that afternoon Deke Bradford found him out at the Stackpole Road burying ground and told him the news about Homer Gamache, who had been found late that morning less than a mile up from Homeland on Route 35. The whole town had been agog with rumors and speculation most of the day.

  Then, reluctantly, Digger Holt went to talk to Sheriff Pangborn. He didn't know if the hole and the tracks had anything to do with the murder of Homer Gamache, but he thought he'd best tell what he knew and let those who were paid for it do the sorting out.

Four

Death in a Small Town

1

Castle Rock has been, at least in recent years, an unlucky town.

  As if to prove that old saw about lightning and how often it strikes in the same place isn't always right, a number of bad things had happened in Castle Rock over the last eight or ten years — things bad enough to make the national news. George Bannerman was the local sheriff when those things occurred, but Big George, as he had been affectionately called, would not have to deal with Homer Gamache, because Big George was dead. He had survived the first bad thing, a series of rape—strangulations committed by one of his own officers, but two years later he had been killed by a rabid dog out on Town Road #3 — not just killed, either, but almost literally torn apart. Both of these cases had been extremely strange, but the world was a strange place. And a hard one. And, sometimes, an unlucky one.

    The new sheriff (he had been in office going on eight years, but Alan Pangborn had decided he was going to be 'the new sheriff' at least until the year 2000 — always assuming, he told his wife, that he went on running and being elected that long) hadn't been in Castle Rock then; until 1980 he had been in charge of highway enforcement in a small-going-on-medium- sized city in upstate New York, not far from Syracuse.

   Looking at Homer Gamache's battered body, lying in a ditch beside Route 35, he wished he was still there. It looked like not all of the town's bad luck had died with Big George Bannerman after all.

  Oh, quit it — you don't wish you were anyplace else on God's green earth. Don't say you do, or bad luck will really come down and take a ride on your shoulder. This has been a damned good place