The Dark Half

palm flattened the turned sheet along the crease as it had done once before. Then the pencil returned to the paper, and wrote:

  All places are the same. He recognized that line first, then the whole quote. It was from the first chapter of Stark's first novel, Machine's Way.

  The pencil had stopped of its own accord this time. He raised it and looked down at the scribbled words, cold and prickling. Except maybe home. And I'll know that when I get there.

  In Machine's Way, home had been Flatbush Avenue, where Alexis Machine had spent his childhood, sweeping up in the billiard parlor of his diseased alcoholic father. Where was home in this story?

  Where is home? he thought at the pencil, and slowly lowered it to the paper again.

  The pencil made a quick series of sloping m-shapes It paused, then moved again.

the pencil wrote below the birds.

    A pun. Did it mean anything? Was the contact really still there, or was he fooling himself now? He hadn't been fooling himself about the birds, and he hadn't been fooling himself during that first frenzied spate of writing, he knew that, but the feeling of heat and compulsion seemed to have abated. His hand still felt numb, but how tightly he was gripping the pencil — and that was very tightly indeed, judging from the mark on the side of his finger could have something to do with that. Hadn't he read in that same piece on automatic writing that people often fooled themselves with the Ouija board — that in most cases it was guided not by the spirits but by the subconscious thoughts and desires of the operator?

  Home is where the start is. If it was still Stark, and if the pun had some meaning, it meant here, in this house, didn't it? Because George Stark had been born here.

  Suddenly part of the damned People magazine article floated into his mind.

  'I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I've typed all my books, but George Stark apparently didn't hold with typewriters. Maybe because they didn't have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he did time.'

   Cute. Very cute. But it had only a second-cousinship with the actual facts, didn't it? It wasn't the first time Thad had told a story that had only a tenuous relationship to the truth, and he supposed it wouldn't be the last — assuming he lived through this, of course. It wasn't exactly lying; it wasn't even embroidering the truth, strictly speaking. It was the almost unconscious art of fictionalizing one's own life, and Thad didn't know a single writer of novels or short stories who didn't do it. You didn't do it to make yourself look better than you'd actually been in any given situation; sometimes that happened, but you were just as apt to relate a story that cast you in a bad light or made you look comically stupid. What was the movie where some newspaperman had said, 'When you've got a choice between truth and legend, print the legend'? The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, maybe. It might make for shitty and immoral reporting, but it made for wonderful fiction. The overflow of make-believe into one's own life seemed to be an almost unavoidable side-effect of story-telling — like getting calluses on the pads of your fingers from playing the guitar, or developing a cough after years of smoking.

    The facts of Stark's birth were actually quite different from the People version. There had been no mystic decision to write the Stark novels longhand, although time had turned it into a kind of ritual. And when it came to ritual, writers were as superstitious as professional athletes. Baseball players might wear the same socks day after day or cross themselves before stepping into the batter's box if they were hitting well; writers, when successful, were apt to follow the same patterns until they became rituals in an effort to ward off the literary equivalent of a batting slump . . . which was known as writer's block.

  George Stark's habit of writing his novels longhand had begun simply because Thad forgot to bring any fresh ribbons for the Underwood in his little office at the summer house in Castle Rock. He'd had no typewriter ribbons, but the idea had been too hot and promising to wait, so he had rooted through the drawers of the little desk he kept down there until he found a notebook and some pencils and —

  In those days we used to get down to the place at the lake a lot later in the summer, because I taught that three—week block course — what was it called? Creative Modes. Stupid damned thing. It was late June that year, and I remember going up to the office and discovering there weren't any ribbons. Hell, I remember Liz bitching that there wasn't even any coffee —

  Home is where the start is.

  Talking to Mike Donaldson, the guy from People magazine, telling the semi-fictional story of George Stark's genesis, he had switched the location to the big house here in Ludlow without even thinking about it — because, he supposed, Ludlow was where he did most of his writing and it was perfectly normal to set the scene here — especially if you were setting a scene, thinking of a scene, the way you did when you were making a piece of fiction. But it wasn't here that George Stark had made his debut; not here that he had first used Thad's eyes to look out at the world, although it was here that he had done most of his work both as Stark and as himself, it was here that they lived most of their odd dual lives.

  Home is where the start is.

   In this case, home must mean Castle Rock. Castle Rock. which also happened to be the location of Homeland Cemetery. Homeland Cemetery, which was where, in Thad's mind if not in Alan Pangborn's, George Stark had first appeared in his murderous physical incarnation, about two weeks ago.

   Then, as if it were the most natural progression in the world (and for all he knew, it might have been), another question occurred to him, one that was so basic and occurred so spontaneously that he heard himself mutter it aloud, like a shy fan at a meet-the-author tea: 'Why do you want to go back to writing?'

    He lowered his hand until the tip of the pencil touched the paper. That numbness flowed back over it and into it, making it feel as if it were immersed in a stream of very cold, very clear water.

   Once more the hand's first act was to rise again and turn to a fresh page in the journal. It came back down, creased the turned sheet flat . . . but this time the writing did not begin at once. Thad had time to think that the contact, whatever it was, had been broken in spite of the numbness, and then the pencil jerked in his hand as if it were a live thing itself . . . alive but badly wounded. It jerked, making a mark like a sleepy comma, jerked again, making a dash, and then wrote

before coming to rest like a wheezy piece of machinery.

  Yes. You can write your name. And you can deny the sparrows. Very good. But why do you want to go back to writing? Why is it so important? Important enough to kill people?

the pencil wrote.

  'What do you mean?' Thad muttered, but he felt a wild hope explode in his head. Could it possibly be that simple? He supposed that it could be, especially for a writer who had no business existing in the first place. Christ, there were enough real writers who couldn't exist unless they were writing, or felt they couldn't . . . and in the case of men like Ernest Hemingway, it really came down to the same thing, didn't it?

    The pencil trembled, then drew a long, scrawling line below the last message. It looked weirdly like the voice-print.

'Come on,' Thad whispered. 'What the hell do you mean?'

the pencil wrote. The letters were stilted, reluctant. The pencil jerked and wavered between his fingers, which were wax-white. If I exert much more pressure, Thad thought, it's just gonna snap off.