The Dark Half by Stephen King Page B

one innocent cushion had—her heart was beating rapidly under her massive left breast, and her breath was coming shallowly through her mouth. Something was not right here. Very much not right. The question was whether or not she would become a part of it if she hung around.
    Common sense told her to go, go while she still had a chance, and common sense was very strong. Curiosity told her to stay and peek . . . and it was stronger.
    She edged her head around the entrance to the living room and looked first to her right, where there was a fake fireplace, two windows giving a view on L Street, and not much else. She looked to the left and her head suddenly stopped moving. It actually seemed to lock in position. Her eyes widened.
    That locked stare lasted no more than three seconds, but it seemed much longer to her. And she saw everything, down to the smallest detail; her mind made its own photograph of what it was seeing, as clear and sharp as those the crime photographer would soon take.
    She saw the two bottles of Amstel beer on the coffee-table, one empty and the other half-full, with a collar of foam still inside the bottle-neck. She saw the ashtray with CHICAGOLAND! written on its curving surface. She saw two cigarette butts, unfiltered, squashed into the center of the tray’s pristine whiteness, although the bigshot didn’t smoke—not cigarettes, at least. She saw the small plastic box which had once been full of push-pins lying on its side between the bottles and the ashtray. Most of the push-pins, which the bigshot used to tack things to his kitchen bulletin board, were scattered across the glass surface of the coffee-table. She saw a few had come to rest on an open copy of People magazine, the one featuring the Thad Beaumont/George Stark story. She could see Mr. and Mrs. Beaumont shaking hands across Stark’s gravestone, although from here they were upside down. It was the story that, according to Frederick Clawson, would never be printed. It was going to make him a moderately wealthy man instead. He had been wrong about that. In fact, it seemed he had been wrong about everything.
    She could see Frederick Clawson, who had gone from Mr. Bigshot to no shot at all, sitting in one of his two living-room chairs. He had been tied in. He was naked, his clothes thrown into a snarly ball under the coffee-table. She saw the bloody hole at his groin. His testicles were still where they belonged; his penis had been stuffed into his mouth. There was plenty of room, because the murderer had also cut out Mr. Bigshot’s tongue. It was tacked to the wall. The push-pin had been driven into its pink meat so deeply that she could only see a grinning crescent of bright yellow which was the push-pin’s top, and her mind relentlessly photographed this, too. Blood had drizzled down the wallpaper below it, making a wavery fan-shape.
    The killer had employed another push-pin, this one with a bright green head, to nail the second page of the People magazine article to the ex-bigshot’s bare chest. She could not see Liz Beaumont’s face—it was obscured by Clawson’s blood—but she could see the woman’s hand, holding out the pan of brownies for Thad’s smiling inspection. She remembered that picture in particular had irked Clawson. What a put-up job! he had exclaimed. She hates to cook—she said so in an interview just after Beaumont published his first novel .
    Finger-written in blood above the severed tongue tacked to the wall were these five words:
    THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN.
    Jesus Christ, some distant part of her mind thought. It’s just like a George Stark novel . . . like something Alexis Machine would do.
    From behind her came a soft bumping sound.
    Dodie Eberhart screamed and whirled. Machine came at her with his terrible straight-razor, its steely glitter now sleeved with Frederick Clawson’s blood. His face was the twisted mask of scan which was all