S t e p h e n
KING
THE DARK HALF
Hodder & Stoughton
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
King, Stephen, 1947 —
The dark half.
I. Title
813'—54 [F]
ISBN 0-340-50911-2
Copyright ©1989 by Stephen King
First published in Great Britain 1989
Second impression 1989
Third impression 1989
Fourth impression 1989
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-34 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP.
Published by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd,
Mill Road, Dunton Green, Sevenoaks, Kent TNI3 2YA Editorial Office: 47 Bedford Square, London WCIB 3DP
Photoset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham plc,
Chatham, Kent
Contents
Prologue
PART I FOOL'S STUFFING
1 People Will Talk
2 Breaking Up Housekeeping 3 Graveyard Blues
4 Death in a Small Town 5 96529Q
6 Death in the Big City 7 Police Business
8 Pangborn Pays a Visit 9 The Invasion of the Creepazoid
10 Later That Night
11 Endsville
12 Sis
13 Sheer Panic
14 Fool's Stuffing
PART 2 STARK TAKES CHARGE
15 Stark Disbelief
16 George Stark Calling
17 Wendy Takes a Fall
18 Automatic Writing
19 Stark Makes a Purchase
20 Over the Deadline
21 Stark Takes Charge
PART 3 THE COMING OF THE PSYCHOPOMPS
22 Thad on the Run
23 Two Calls for Sheriff Pangborn
24 The Coming of the Sparrows
25 Steel Machine
26 The Sparrows Are Flying
Epilogue
Afterword
This book is for Shirley Sonderegger, who helps me mind my business, and for her husband, Peter.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I'm indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help
and inspiration. This novel could not have been written
without him.
S.K.
PROLOGUE
'Cut him,' Machine said. 'Cut him while I stand here and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.'
— Machine's Way by George Stark
People's lives — their real lives, as opposed to their simple physical existences — begin at different times. The real life of Thad Beaumont a young boy who was born and raised in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey, began in 1960. Two things happened to him that year. The first shaped his life; the second almost ended it. That was the year Thad Beaumont was eleven.
In January he submitted a short story to a writing contest sponsored by American Teen magazine. In June, he received a letter from the magazine's editors telling him that he had been awarded an Honorable Mention in the contest's Fiction category. The letter went on to say that the judges would have awarded him Second Prize had his application not revealed that he was still two years away from becoming a bona fide "American Teen." Still, the editors said, his story, "Outside Marty's House", was an extraordinarily mature work, and he was to be congratulated.
Two weeks later, a Certificate of Merit arrived from American Teen. It came registered mail, insured. The certificate had his name on it in letters so convolutedly Old English that he could barely read them, and a gold seal at the bottom, embossed with the American Teen logo — the silhouettes of a crewcut boy and a pony-tailed girl jitterbugging.
His mother swept Thad, a quiet, earnest boy who could never seem to hold onto things and often tripped over his own large feet, into her arms and smothered him with kisses.
His father was unimpressed.
'If it was so goddam good, why didn't they give him some money?' he grunted from the depths
of his easy-chair.
'Glen — '
'Never mind. Maybe Ernest Hemingway there could run me in a beer when you 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.