The Dark Half Read Online Free PDF Page B

baby, Thad. ”
    â€œSorry,” he said humbly, and winked at the twins. Their identical green-rimmed smiles widened for a moment.
    Then he lowered his eyes and went on reading.
    â€œI started Machine’s Way on the night in 1975 I thought up the name, but there was one other thing. I rolled a sheet of paper into my typewriter when I got ready to start . . . and then I rolled it right back out again. I’ve typed all my books, but George Stark apparently didn’t hold with typewriters. ”
    The grin flashes out briefly again.
    â€œMaybe because they didn’t have typing classes in any of the stone hotels where he did time.
    Beaumont is referring to George Stark’s “jacket bio,” which says the author is thirty-nine and has done time in three different prisons on charges of arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with intent to kill. The jacket bio is only part of the story, however; Beaumont also produces an author-sheet from Darwin Press, which details his alter-ego’s history in the painstaking detail which only a good novelist could create out of whole cloth. From his birth in Manchester, New Hampshire, to his final residence in Oxford, Mississippi, everything is there except for George Stark’s interment six weeks ago at Homeland Cemetery in Castle Rock, Maine.
    â€œI found an old notebook in one of my desk drawers, and I used these.” He points toward the mason jar of pencils, and seems mildly surprised to find he’s holding one of them in the hand he uses to point. “I started writing, and the next thing I knew, Liz was telling me it was midnight and asking if I was ever going to come to bed. ”
    Liz Beaumont has her own memory of that night. She says, “I woke up at 11:45 and saw he wasn’t in bed and I thought, ‘Well, he’s writing. ’ But I didn’t hear the typewriter, and I got a little scared. ”
    Her face suggests it might have been more than just a little.
    â€œWhen I came downstairs and saw him scribbling in that notebook, you could have knocked me over with a feather.” She laughs. “His nose was almost touching the paper. ”
    The interviewer asks her if she was relieved.
    In soft, measured tones, Liz Beaumont says: “Very relieved. ”
    â€œI flipped back through the notebook and saw I’d written sixteen pages without a single scratch-out,” Beaumont says, “and I’d turned three-quarters of a brand-new pencil into shavings in the sharpener.” He looks at the jar with an expression which might be either melancholy or veiled humor. “I guess I ought to toss those pencils out now that George is dead. I don’t use them myself. I tried. It just doesn’t work. Me, I can’t work without a typewriter. My hand gets tired and stupid.
    â€œGeorge’s never did. ”
    He glances up and drops a cryptic little wink.
    â€œHon?” He looked up at his wife, who was concentrating on getting the last of William’s peas into him. The kid appeared to be wearing quite a lot of them on his bib.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œLook over here for a sec. ”
    She did.
    Thad winked.
    â€œWas that cryptic?”
    â€œNo, dear. ”
    â€œI didn’t think it was. ”
    The rest of the story is another ironic chapter in the larger history of what Thad Beaumont calls “the freak people call the novel. ”
    Machine’s Way was published in June of 1976 by the smallish Darwin Press (Beaumont’s “real” self has been published by Dutton) and became that year’s surprise success, going to number one on best-seller lists coast to coast. It was also made into a smash-hit movie.
    â€œFor a long time I waited for someone to discover I was George and George was me,” Beaumont says. “The copyright was registered in the name of George Stark, but my agent knew, and his wife—she’s his ex-wife now, but still a full