The Dark Half Read Free Page A

golf-stroke thirty years from now, you can ask me then. I might have an answer. All I know now is that I have located and excised a very specialized, very rare sort of tumor. A benign tumor. And, barring complications, I believe that’s all the parents need to know. The kid’s father would make Piltdown Man look like one of the Quiz Kids. I can’t see explaining to him that I gave his eleven-year-old son an abortion. Les, let’s close him up. ”
    And, as an afterthought, he added pleasantly to the O. R. nurse:
    â€œI want that silly cunt who ran out of here fired. Make a note, please. ”
    â€œYes, Doctor. ”
    Â 
    Thad Beaumont left the hospital nine days after his surgery. The left side of his body was distressingly weak for nearly six months afterward, and occasionally, when he was very tired, he saw odd, not-quite-random patterns of flashing lights before his eyes.
    His mother had bought him an old Remington 32 typewriter as a get-well present, and these flashes of light happened most frequently when he was hunched over it in the hour before bedtime, struggling with the right way to say something or trying to figure out what should happen next in the story he was writing. Eventually these passed, too.
    That eerie, phantom chirruping sound—the sound of squadrons of sparrows on the wing—did not recur at all following the operation.
    He continued to write, gaining confidence and polishing his emerging style, and he sold his first story—to American Teen —six years after his real life began. After that, he just never looked back.
    So far as his parents or Thad himself ever knew, a small benign tumor had been removed from the prefrontal lobe of his brain in the autumn of his eleventh year. When he thought about it at all (which he did less and less frequently as the years passed), he thought only that he had been extremely lucky to survive.
    Many patients who underwent brain surgery in those primitive days did not.

I
    Fool’s Stuffing
    Machine straightened the paper-clips slowly and carefully with his long. strong fingers. “Hold his head. Jack,” he said to the man behind Halstead. “Hold it tightly, please. ”
    Halstead saw what Machine meant to do and began to scream as Jack Rangely pressed his big hands against the sides of his head, holding it steady. The screams rang and echoed is the abandoned warehouse. The vast empty space acted as a natural amplifier. Halstead sounded like an open singer warming up on opening night.
    â€œI’m back,” Machine said. Halstead squeezed his eyes shut, but it did so good. The small steel rod slid effortlessly through the left lid and punctured the eyeball beneath with a faint popping sound. Sticky, gelatinous fluid began to seep out. “I’m back from the dead and you don’t seem glad to see me at all, you ungrateful son of a bitch. ”
    Â 
    â€”Riding to Babylon
    by George Stark

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