The Dark Half by Stephen King Page A

them an inch they took a mile), and after she had taken care of her business and he had promised to deliver a check to her by noon the following day, she asked him if the collected works of George Stark were now required reading for a career before the bar.
    â€œNo,” Clawson had said with a bright, cheerful, and utterly predatory smile, “but they might just finance one. ”
    It was the smile more than anything else which had hooked her and caused her to pay out line in his case where she had snubbed it brutally tight in all others. She had seen that smile many times before in her own mirror. She had believed then that such a smile could not be faked, and, just for the record, she still believed it. Clawson really had had the goods on Thaddeus Beaumont; his mistake had been believing so confidently that Beaumont would go along with the plans of a Mr. Bigshot like Frederick Clawson. And it had been her mistake, too.
    She had read one of the two Beaumont novels— Purple Haze —following Clawson’s explanation of what he had discovered, and thought it an exquisitely stupid book. In spite of the correspondence and photocopies Mr. Bigshot had shown her, she would have found it difficult or impossible to believe both writers were the same man. Except. . . about three-quarters of the way through it, at a point where she had been about ready to throw the boring piece of shit across the room and forget the whole thing, there was a scene in which a farmer shot a horse. The horse had two broken legs and needed to be shot, but the thing was, old Farmer John had enjoyed it. Had, in fact, put the barrel of the gun against the horse’s head and then jerked himself off, squeezing the trigger at the moment of climax.
    It was, she thought, as if Beaumont had stepped out to get a cup of coffee when he got to that part . . . and George Stark had stepped in and written the scene, like a literary Rumpelstiltskin. Certainly it was the only gold in that particular pile of hay.
    Well, none of it mattered now. All it proved was that no one was immune to bullshit forever. The bigshot had taken her for a ride, but at least it had been a short ride. And it was now over.
    Dodie Eberhart reached the third-floor landing, her hand already curling into the sort of tight fist she made when the time had come not for polite knocking but hammering, and then she saw hammering would not be necessary. The bigshot’s door was standing ajar.
    â€œJesus wept!” Dodie muttered, her lip curling. This wasn’t a junkie neighborhood, but when it came to ripping off some idiot’s apartment, the junkies were more than willing to cross boundary lines. The guy was even stupider than she had thought.
    She rapped on the door with her knuckles and it swung open. “Clawson!” she called in a voice which promised doom and damnation.
    There was no answer. Looking up the short corridor, she could see the shades in the living room were drawn and the overhead light was burning. A radio was playing softly.
    â€œClawson, I want to talk to you!”
    She started up the short corridor . . . and stopped.
    One of the sofa cushions was on the floor.
    That was all. No sign that the place had been trashed by a hungry junkie, but her instincts were still sharp, and her wind was up in a moment. She smelled something. It was very faint, but it was there. A little like food which had spoiled but not yet rotted. That wasn’t it, but it was as close as she could come. Had she smelled it before? She thought she had.
    And there was another smell, although she didn’t think it was her nose which was making her aware of it. She knew that one right away. She and Trooper Hamilton from Connecticut would have agreed at once on what it was: the smell of bad.
    She stood just outside the living room, looking at the tumbled cushion, listening to the radio. What the climb up three flights of stairs hadn’t been able to do that