The Dark Half

What in God's name was he going to say to Liz if she showed up and asked him what he was doing here with a pencil in his hand and a blank sheet of paper in front of him, at just a few minutes before midnight? That he was trying to draw the bunny on the matchbook and win a scholarship to the Famous Artists School in New Haven? Hell, he didn't even have one of those matchbooks.

   He moved to put the pencil back, and then paused. He had turned in his chair a little so he was looking out the window to the left of his desk.

   There was a bird out there, sitting on the window-ledge and looking in at him with bright black eyes.

It was a sparrow.

As he watched, it was joined by another.

And another.

   'Oh my God,' he said in a trembling, watery voice. He had never been so terrified in his life . . . and suddenly that sensation of going filled him again. It was as it had been when he spoke to Stark on the telephone, but now it was stronger, much stronger.

  Another sparrow landed, jostling the other three aside for place, and beyond them he saw a whole line of birds sitting on top of the carriage-house where they kept the lawn equipment and Liz's car. The antique weathervane on the carriage-house's single gable was covered with them, swinging beneath their weight.

   'Oh my God,' he repeated, and he heard his voice from a million miles away, a voice which was filled with horror and terrible wonder. 'Oh my dear God, they're real — the sparrows are real.'

    In all his imaginings he had never suspected this . . . but there was no time to consider it, no mind to consider it with. Suddenly the study was gone, and in its place he saw the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, where he had grown up. It lay as silent and deserted as the house in his Stark nightmare; he found himself peering at a silent suburb in a dead world.

   Yet it was not entirely dead, because the roof of every house was lined with twittering sparrows. Every TV antenna was freighted with them. Every tree was filled with them. They queued upon every telephone line. They sat on the tops of parked cars, on the big blue mailbox which stood at the corner of Duke Street and Marlborough Lane, and on the bike-rack in front of the Duke Street Convenience Store, where he had gone to buy milk and bread for his mother when he was a boy.

  The world was filled with sparrows, waiting for the command to fly.

  Thad Beaumont lolled back in his office chair, a thin froth spilling from the comers of his mouth, feet twitching aimlessly, and now all the windows of the study were lined with sparrows, looking in at him like strange avian spectators. A long, gargling sound escaped his mouth. His eyes rolled up in his head, revealing bulging, glistening whites.

  The pencil touched the sheet and began to write.

it scrawled across the top line. It dropped two lines, made the L-shaped indent-mark that was characteristic of each new Stark paragraph, and wrote:

The sparrows flew.

  All at once they all took flight, the ones in his head from that long-ago Bergenfield, and the ones outside his Ludlow home . . . the real ones. They flew up into two skies: a white spring sky in the year ig6o, and a dark summer sky in the year 1988.

  They flew and they were gone in a giant ruffling blast of wings.

  Thad sat up . . . but his hand was still nailed to the pencil, being pulled along.

  The pencil was writing by itself.

  I made it, he thought dazedly, wiping spit and froth from his mouth and chin with his left hand. I made it . . . and I wish to God I had let it alone. What IS this?

   He stared down at the words pouring out of his fist, his heart thumping so hard he felt the pulse, high and fast, in his throat. The sentences spilling out on the blue lines were in his own handwriting — but then, all of Stark's novels had been written in his hand. With the same fingerprints, the same taste in cigarettes, and exactly the same vocal characteristics, it would be odder if it were someone else's handwriting, he thought.

   His handwriting, just as it had been all the other times, but where were the words coming from? Not from his own head, that was certain; there was nothing up there right now but terror overlaid with loud, roaring confusion. And there was no feeling in his hand anymore. His right arm seemed to end roughly three inches above his wrist. There was not even a remote sense of pressure in his fingers, although he could see he was gripping the Berol tightly enough to turn his thumb and first two fingers white at the tips. It was as if he had been given a healthy shot of Novocain.

  He reached the bottom of the first sheet. His unfeeling hand tore it back, his unfeeling palm raced up the journal's binding, creasing the page flat, and began to write again.

   Thad realized with mounting horror that he was reading an account of Miriam Cowley's murder . . . and this time it was not a broken, confused stew of words, but the coherent, brutal narration of a man who was, in his own horrid way, an extremely effective writer — effective enough so that millions of people had bought his fiction.

George Stark's nonfiction debut, he thought sickly.

    He had done exactly what he had set out to do: had made contact, had somehow tapped into Stark's mind, just as Stark must somehow have tapped into Thad's own mind. But who would have guessed what monstrous, unknown forces he would touch in doing so? Who could have guessed? The sparrows — and the realization that the sparrows were real — had been bad, but this was worse. Had he thought both the pencil and the notebook were warm to the touch? No wonder. This man's mind was a fucking furnace.

And now — Jesus! Here it was! Unrolling out of his own fist! Jesus Christ!

What's wrong, George? Are you losing some of your happy thoughts?

  No wonder it had stopped the black-hearted son of a bitch for a moment when he had said that. If this was the way it really had been, then Stark had used the same phrase before killing Miriam.

  I WAS tapped into his mind during the murder — I WAS. That's why I used that phrase during the conversation we had at Dave's.

   Here was Stark forcing Miriam to call Thad, getting the number out of her book for her because she was too terrified to remember it, although there were weeks when she must have dialed it half a dozen times. Thad found this forgetfulness and Stark's understanding of it both horrible and persuasive. And now Stark was using his razor to —

    But he didn't want to read that, wouldn't read that. He pulled his arm up, lifting his numb hand along with it like a lead weight. The instant the pencil's contact with the notebook was broken, feeling flooded back into the hand. The muscles were cramped, and the side of his second finger ached dully; the barrel of the pencil had left an indentation which was now turning red.

    He looked down at the scrawled page, full of horror and a dumb species of wonder. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was to put that pencil back down again, to complete that obscene circuit between Stark and himself again . . . but he hadn't gotten into this just to read Stark's firsthand account of Mir Cowley's murder, had he?

  Suppose the birds come back?

  But they wouldn't. The birds had served their purpose. The circuit he had achieved was still whole and functioning. Thad had no idea how he knew that, but he did know.

  Where are you, George? he thought. How come I don't feel you? Is it because you are as unaware of my presence as I am of yours? Or is it something else? Where the fuck ARE you?

   He held the thought in the front of his mind, trying to visualize it as a bright red neon sign. Then he gripped the pencil again and began lowering it toward his journal.

    As soon as the tip of the pencil touched the paper, his hand rose again and flipped to a blank sheet. The