The Dark Half

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.

   The second important thing to happen to him in 1960 began in August. That was when he began to have headaches. They weren't bad at first, but by the time school let in again in early September, the mild, lurking pains in his temples and behind his forehead had progressed to sick and monstrous marathons of agony. He could do nothing when these headaches held him in their grip but lie in his darkened room, waiting to die. By the end of September, he hoped he would die. And by the middle of October, the pain had progressed to the point where he began to fear he would not.

  The onset of these terrible headaches was usually marked by a phantom sound which only he could hear — it sounded like the distant cheeping of a thousand small birds. Sometimes he fancied he could almost see these birds, which he thought were sparrows, clustering on telephone lines and rooftops by the dozens, the way they did in the spring and the fall.

  His mother took him to see Dr Seward.

  Dr Seward peeked into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, and shook his head. Then, drawing the curtains closed and turning off the overhead light, he instructed Thad to look at a white space of wall in the examination room. Using a flashlight, he flicked a bright circle of light on and off rapidly while Thad looked at it.

  'Does that make you feet funny, son?'

  Thad shook his head.

  'You don't feel woozy? Like you might faint?'

  Thad shook his head again.

  'Do you smell anything? Like rotten fruit or burning rags?'

  'No.'

  'What about your birds? Did you hear them while you were looking at the flashing light?'

  'No,' Thad said, mystified.

'It's nerves,' his father said later, when Thad had been dismissed to the outer waiting room. 'The goddam kid's a bundle of nerves.

    'I think it's migraine,' Dr Seward told them. 'Unusual in one so young, but not unheard of. And he seems very . . . intense.'

'He is,' Shayla Beaumont said, not without some approval.

'Well, there may be a cure someday. For now, I'm afraid he 11 just have to suffer through them.'

'Yeah, and us with him,' Glen Beaumont said.

But it was not nerves, and it was not migraine, and it was not over.

Four days before Halloween, Shayla Beaumont heard one of the kids with whom Thad waited for the schoolbus each morning begin to holler. She looked out the kitchen window and saw her son lying in the driveway, convulsing. His lunchbox lay beside him, its freight of fruit and sandwiches spilled onto the driveway's hot-top surface. She ran out, shooed the other children away, and then just stood over him helplessly, afraid to touch him.

    If the big yellow bus with Mr Reed at the wheel had pulled up any later, Thad might have died right there at the foot of the driveway. But Mr Reed had been a medic in Korea. He was able to get the boy's head back and open an airway before Thad choked to death on his own tongue. He was taken to Bergenfield County Hospital by ambulance and a doctor named Hugh Pritchard just happened to be in the E.R., drinking coffee and swapping golf-lies with a friend, when the boy was wheeled in. And Hugh Pritchard also just happened to be the best neurologist in the State of New Jersey.

   Pritchard ordered the X-rays and read them. He showed them to the Beaumonts, asking them to look with particular care at a vague shadow he had circled with a yellow wax pencil.

  'This,' he said. 'What's this?'

  'How the hell should we know?' Glen Beaumont asked. 'You re the goddam doctor.'

  'Right,' Pritchard said dryly.

  'The wife said it looked like he pitched a fit,' Glen said.

    Dr Pritchard said, 'If you mean he had a seizure, yes, he did. If you mean he had an epileptic seizure, I'm pretty sure he didn't. A seizure as serious as your son's would surely have been grand mal, and Thad showed no reaction whatever to the Litton Light Test. In fact, if Thad had grand mal epilepsy, you wouldn't need a doctor to point the fact out to you. He'd be doing the Watusi on the living room rug every time the picture on your TV set decided to roll.'

'Then what is it?' Shayla asked timidly.

  Pritchard turned back to the X-ray mounted on the front of light-box. 'What is that?' he responded, and tapped the circled area again. 'The sudden onset of headaches coupled with any lack of previous seizures suggests to me that your son has a brain tumor, probably still small and hopefully benign.'

    Glen Beaumont stared at the doctor stonily while his wife stood beside him and wept into her handkerchief. She wept without making a sound. This silent weeping was the result of years of spousal training. Glen's fists were fast and hurtful and almost never left marks, and after twelve years of silent sorrow, she probably could not have cried out loud even if she had wanted to.

'Does all this mean you want to cut his brains?' Glen asked with his usual tact and delicacy.

    'I wouldn't put it quite that way, Mr Beaumont, but I believer exploratory surgery is called for, yes.' And he thought: If there, really is a God, and if He really made us in His Own image, I don't like to think about why there are so damned many men like this one, walking around with the fates of so many others in their hands.

   Glen was silent for several long moments, his head down, his brow furrowed in thought. At last he raised his head and asked the question which troubled him most of all.

'Tell me the truth, Doc — how much is all this gonna cost?'

The assisting O.R. nurse saw it first.

  Her scream was shrill and shocking in the operating room, where the only sounds for the last fifteen minutes had been Dr Pritchard's' murmured commands, the hiss of the bulky life-support machinery, and the brief, high whine of the Negli saw.

   She stumbled backward, struck a rolling Ross tray on which almost two dozen instruments had been neatly laid out, and knocked it over. It struck the tiled floor with an echoing clang which was followed by a number of smaller tinkling sounds.

   'Hilary!' the head nurse shouted. Her voice was full of shock and surprise. She forgot herself so far as to actually take half a step toward the fleeing woman in her flapping green- gown.

  Dr Albertson, who was assisting, kicked the head nurse briefly in the calf with one of his slippered feet. 'Remember where you are, please.'

   'Yes, Doctor.' She turned back at once, not even looking toward the O.R. door as it banged open and Hilary exited stage left, still screaming like a runaway fire engine.

  'Get the hardware in the sterilizer,' Albertson said. 'Right away. Chop-chop.'

  'Yes, Doctor.'

  She began to gather up the instruments, breathing hard, clearly flustered, but under control.

    Dr Pritchard seemed to have noticed none of this. He was looking with rapt attention into the window which had been carved in Thad Beaumont's skull.

    'Incredible,' he murmured. 'Just incredible. This is really one for the books. If I weren't seeing it with my own eyes — '

The hiss of the sterilizer seemed to wake him up, and he looked at Dr Albertson.

   'I want suction,' he said sharply. He glanced at the nurse. 'And what the fuck are you doing? The Sunday Times crossword? Get your ass over here with those!'

She came, carrying the instruments in a fresh pan.

   'Give me suction, Lester,' Pritchard said to Albertson. 'Right now. Then I'm going to show you something you never saw outside of a county fair freak-show.'

   Albertson wheeled over the suction- pump, ignoring the head nurse, who leaped back out of his way, balancing the instruments deftly as she did so.

Pritchard was looking at the anesthesiologist.