The Dark Half

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The Dark Half One

PEOPLE WILL TALK

1

The May 23rd issue of People magazine was pretty typical.

The cover was graced by that week’s Dead Celebrity, a rock and roll star who had hanged himself in a jail cell after being taken into custody for possession of cocaine and assorted satellite drugs. Inside was the usual smorgasbord: nine unsolved sex murders in the desolate western half of Nebraska; a health-food guru who had been busted for kiddie porn; a Maryland housewife who had grown a squash that looked a bit like a bust of Jesus Christ—if you looked at it with your eyes half-closed in a dim room, that was; a game paraplegic girl training for the Big Apple Bike-A-Thon; a Hollywood divorce; a New York society marriage; a wrestler recovering from a heart attack; a comedian fighting a palimony suit.

There was also a story about a Utah entrepreneur who was marketing a hot new doll called Yo Mamma! Yo Mamma! supposedly looked like “everyone’s favorite (?) mother-in-law.” She had a built-in tape recorder which spat out bits of dialogue such as “Dinner was never cold at my house when he was growing up, dear” and “Your brother never acts like I’m dog-breath when I come to spend a couple of weeks.” The real howler was that, instead of pulling a string in the back of Yo Mamma! to get her to talk, you kicked the fucking thing as hard as you could. “Yo Mamma! is well-padded, guaranteed not to break, and also guaranteed not to chip walls and furniture,” said its proud inventor, Mr. Gaspard Wilmot (who, the piece mentioned in passing, had once been indicted for income tax evasion—charges dropped).

And on page thirty-three of this amusing and informative issue of America’s premier amusing and informative magazine, was a page headed with a typical People cut-line: punchy, pithy, and pungent. BIO, it said.

“People,” Thad Beaumont told his wife Liz as they sat side by side at the kitchen table, reading the article together for the second time, “likes to get right to the point. BIO. If you don’t want a BIO, move on to IN TROUBLE and read about the girls who are getting greased deep in the heart of Nebraska.”

“That’s not that funny, when you really think about it,” Liz Beaumont said, and then spoiled it by snorting a giggle into one curled fist.

“Not ha-ha, but certainly peculiar,” Thad said, and began to leaf through the article again. He rubbed absently at the small white scar high on his forehead as he did so.

Like most People BIOS, it was the one piece in the magazine where more space was allotted to words than to pictures.

“Are you sorry you did it?” Liz asked. She had an ear cocked for the twins, but so far they were being absolutely great, sleeping like lambs.

“First of all,” Thad said, “I didn’t do it. We did it. Both for one and one for both, remember?” He tapped a picture on the second page of the article which showed his wife holding a pan of brownies out to Thad, who was sitting at his typewriter with a sheet rolled under the platen. It was impossible to tell what, if anything, was written on the paper. That was probably just as well, since it had to be gobbledegook. Writing had always been hard work for him, and it wasn’t the sort of thing he could do with an audience—particularly if one member of the audience happened to be a photographer for People magazine. It had come a lot easier for George, but for Thad Beaumont it was goddam hard. Liz didn’t come near when he was trying—and sometimes actually succeeding—in doing it. She didn’t bring him telegrams, let alone brownies.

“Yes, but—”

“Second of all . . .”

He looked at the picture of Liz with the brownies and him looking up at her. They were both grinning. These grins looked fairly peculiar on the faces of people who, although pleasant, were careful doling out even such common things as smiles. He remembered back to the time he had spent as an Appalachian Trail Guide in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. He’d had a pet raccoon in those dim days, name of John Wesley Harding. Not that he’d made any attempt to domesticate John; the coon had just sort of fallen in with him. He liked his nip on cold evenings, too, did old J.W., and sometimes, when he got more than a single bite from the bottle, he would grin like that.

“Second of all what?”

Second of all, there’s something funny about a one-time National Book Award nominee and his wife grinning at each other like a couple of drunk raccoons, he thought, and could hold onto his laughter no longer: it bellowed out of him.

“Thad, you’ll wake the twins!”

He tried, without much success, to muffle the gusts.

“Second of all, we look like a pair of idiots and I don’t mind a bit,” he said, and hugged her tight and kissed the hollow of her throat.

In the other room, first William and then Wendy started to cry.

Liz tried to look at him reproachfully, but could not. It was too good to hear him laugh. Good, maybe, because he didn’t do enough of it. The sound of his laughter had an alien, exotic charm for her. Thad Beaumont had never been a laughing man.

“My fault,” he said. “I’ll get them.”

He began to get up, bumped the table, and almost knocked it over. He was a gentle man, but strangely clumsy; that part of the boy he had been still lived in him.

Liz caught the pitcher of flowers she had set out as a centerpiece just before it could slide over the edge and shatter on the floor.

“Honestly, Thad!” she said, but then she began to laugh, too.

He sat down again for a moment. He didn’t take her hand, exactly, but caressed it gently between both of his. “Listen, babe, do you mind?”

“No,” she said. She thought briefly of saying It makes me uneasy, though. Not because we look mildly foolish but because . . . well, I don’t know the because. It just makes me a little uneasy, that’s all.

Thought of it but didn’t say it. It was just too good to hear him laugh. She caught one of his hands and gave it a brief squeeze. “No,” she said. “I don’t mind. I think it’s fun. And if the publicity helps The Golden Dog when you finally decide to get serious about finishing the damned thing, so much the better.”

She got up, pressing him back down by the shoulders when he tried to join her.

“You can get them next time,” she said. “I want you to sit right there until your subconscious urge to destroy my pitcher finally passes.”

“Okay,” he said, and smiled. “I love you, Liz.”

“I love you, too.” She went to get the twins, and Thad Beaumont began to leaf through his BIO again.

Unlike most People articles, the Thaddeus Beaumont BIO began not with a full-page photograph but with one which was less than a quarter-page. It caught the eye regardless, because some layout man with an eye for the unusual had bordered the picture, which showed Thad and Liz in a graveyard, in black. The lines of type below stood out in almost brutal contrast.

In the photograph, Thad had a spade and Liz had a pick. Set off to one side was a wheelbarrow with more cemetery implements in it. On the grave itself, several bouquets of flowers had been arranged, but the gravestone itself was still perfectly readable.

GEORGE STARK

1975–1988

Not a Very Nice Guy

In almost jagged contrast to the place and the apparent act (a recently completed interment of what, from the dates, should have been a boy barely in his teens), these two bogus sextons were shaking their free hands across the freshly placed sods—and laughing cheerily.

It was a posed job, of course. All of the photos accompanying the article—burying the body, exhibiting the brownies, and the one of Thad wandering lonely as a cloud down a deserted Ludlow woods road, presumably “getting ideas”—were posed. It was funny. Liz had been buying People at the supermarket for the last five years or so, and they both made fun of it, but they both took their turn leafing through it at supper, or possibly in the john if there wasn’t a good book handy. Thad had mused from time to time on the magazine’s success, wondering if it was its devotion to the celebrity sideshow that made it so weirdly interesting, or just the way it was set up, with all those big black-and-white photographs, and the boldface text, consisting mostly of simple declarative sentences. But it had never crossed his mind to wonder if the pictures were staged.

The photographer had been a woman named Phyllis Myers. She informed Thad and Liz that she had taken a number of photographs of teddy bears in child-sized coffins, all of the teddies dressed in children’s clothes. She hoped to sell these as a book to a major New York publisher. It was not until late on the second day of the photo-and-interview session that Thad realized the woman was sounding him out about writing the text. Death and Teddy Bears, she said, would be “the final, perfect comment 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-mâché.

“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, of 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 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 t...