The Dark Half

on the American way of death, don't you think so, Thad?'

  He supposed that, in light of her rather macabre interests, it wasn't all that surprising that the Myers woman had commissioned George Stark's tombstone and brought it with her from New York. It was papier-mache.

    'You don't mind shaking hands in front of this, do you?' she had asked them with a smile that was at the same time wheedling and complacent. 'It'll make a wonderful shot.'

   Liz had looked at Thad, questioning and a little horrified. Then they both had looked at the fake tombstone which had come from New York City (year-round home of People magazine) to Castle Rock, Maine (summer home of Thad and Liz Beaumont), with a mixture of amazement and bemused wonder. It was the inscription to which Thad's eye kept returning:

Not a Very Nice Guy

Stripped to its essentials, the story People wanted to tell the breathless celebrity-watchers of America was pretty simple. Thad Beaumont was a well-regarded writer whose first novel, The Sudden Dancers, had been nominated for the National Book Award in 1972. This sort of thing swung some weight with literary critics, but the breathless celebrity—watchers of America didn't care a dime about Thad Beaumont, who had only published one other novel under his own name since. The man many of them did care about wasn't a real man at all. Thad had written one huge best-seller and three extremely successful follow-up novels under another name. The name, o course, was George Stark.

  Jerry Harkavay, who was the Associated Press's entire Waterville staff, had been the first to break the George Stark story wide after Thad's agent, Rick Cowley, gave it to Louise Booker at Publishers Weekly with Thad's approval. Neither Harkavay nor Booker had got the whole story — for one thing, Thad was adamant about not giving that smarmy little prick Frederick Clawson so much as a mention — but it was still good enough to rate a wider circulation it than either the AP wire service or the book—publishing industry's trade magazine could give. Clawson, Thad had told Liz and Rick, was not the story — he was just the asshole who was forcing them to go public with the story.

   In the course of that first interview, Jerry had asked him what sort of a fellow George Stark was. 'George,' Thad had replied, 'wasn't a very nice guy.' The quote had run at the top of Jerry's piece, and it had given the Myers woman the inspiration to actually commission a fake tombstone with that line on it. Weird world. Weird, weird world.

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.'