Stephen King - The Dark Half (1989)

VIP免费

2024-12-04 0 0 957.83KB 288 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

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

First published in Great Britain 1989

Second impression 1989

Third impression 1989

Fourth impression 1989

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

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.

His mother took him to see Dr Seward.

Dr Seward peeked into his eyes with an ophthalmoscope, and shook his head. Then, drawing

the curtains closed and turning off the overhead light, he instructed Thad to look at a white space

of wall in the examination room. Using a flashlight, he flicked a bright circle of light on and off

rapidly while Thad looked at it.

'Does that make you feet funny, son?'

Thad shook his head.

'You don't feel woozy? Like you might faint?'

Thad shook his head again.

'Do you smell anything? Like rotten fruit or burning rags?'

'No.'

'What about your birds? Did you hear them while you were looking at the flashing light?'

'No,' Thad said, mystified.

'It's nerves,' his father said later, when Thad had been dismissed to the outer waiting room. 'The

goddam kid's a bundle of nerves.

'I think it's migraine,' Dr Seward told them. 'Unusual in one so young, but not unheard of. And

he seems very . . . intense.'

'He is,' Shayla Beaumont said, not without some approval.

'Well, there may be a cure someday. For now, I'm afraid he 11 just have to suffer through them.'

'Yeah, and us with him,' Glen Beaumont said.

But it was not nerves, and it was not migraine, and it was not over.

Four days before Halloween, Shayla Beaumont heard one of the kids with whom Thad waited for

the schoolbus each morning begin to holler. She looked out the kitchen window and saw her son

lying in the driveway, convulsing. His lunchbox lay beside him, its freight of fruit and sandwiches

spilled onto the driveway's hot-top surface. She ran out, shooed the other children away, and then

just stood over him helplessly, afraid to touch him.

If the big yellow bus with Mr Reed at the wheel had pulled up any later, Thad might have died

right there at the foot of the driveway. But Mr Reed had been a medic in Korea. He was able to get

the boy's head back and open an airway before Thad choked to death on his own tongue. He was

taken to Bergenfield County Hospital by ambulance and a doctor named Hugh Pritchard just

happened to be in the E.R., drinking coffee and swapping golf-lies with a friend, when the boy

was wheeled in. And Hugh Pritchard also just happened to be the best neurologist in the State of

New Jersey.

Pritchard ordered the X-rays and read them. He showed them to the Beaumonts, asking them to

look with particular care at a vague shadow he had circled with a yellow wax pencil.

'This,' he said. 'What's this?'

'How the hell should we know?' Glen Beaumont asked. 'You re the goddam doctor.'

'Right,' Pritchard said dryly.

'The wife said it looked like he pitched a fit,' Glen said.

Dr Pritchard said, 'If you mean he had a seizure, yes, he did. If you mean he had an epileptic

seizure, I'm pretty sure he didn't. A seizure as serious as your son's would surely have been grand

mal, and Thad showed no reaction whatever to the Litton Light Test. In fact, if Thad had grand

mal epilepsy, you wouldn't need a doctor to point the fact out to you. He'd be doing the Watusi on

the living room rug every time the picture on your TV set decided to roll.'

'Then what is it?' Shayla asked timidly.

Pritchard turned back to the X-ray mounted on the front of light-box. 'What is that?' he

responded, and tapped the circled area again. 'The sudden onset of headaches coupled with any

lack of previous seizures suggests to me that your son has a brain tumor, probably still small and

hopefully benign.'

Glen Beaumont stared at the doctor stonily while his wife stood beside him and wept into her

handkerchief. She wept without making a sound. This silent weeping was the result of years of

spousal training. Glen's fists were fast and hurtful and almost never left marks, and after twelve

years of silent sorrow, she probably could not have cried out loud even if she had wanted to.

'Does all this mean you want to cut his brains?' Glen asked with his usual tact and delicacy.

'I wouldn't put it quite that way, Mr Beaumont, but I believer exploratory surgery is called for,

yes.' And he thought: If there, really is a God, and if He really made us in His Own image, I don't

like to think about why there are so damned many men like this one, walking around with the fates

of so many others in their hands.

Glen was silent for several long moments, his head down, his brow furrowed in thought. At last

he raised his head and asked the question which troubled him most of all.

'Tell me the truth, Doc — how much is all this gonna cost?'

The assisting O.R. nurse saw it first.

Her scream was shrill and shocking in the operating room, where the only sounds for the last

fifteen minutes had been Dr Pritchard's' murmured commands, the hiss of the bulky life-support

machinery, and the brief, high whine of the Negli saw.

She stumbled backward, struck a rolling Ross tray on which almost two dozen instruments had

been neatly laid out, and knocked it over. It struck the tiled floor with an echoing clang which was

followed by a number of smaller tinkling sounds.

'Hilary!' the head nurse shouted. Her voice was full of shock and surprise. She forgot herself so

far as to actually take half a step toward the fleeing woman in her flapping green-gown.

Dr Albertson, who was assisting, kicked the head nurse briefly in the calf with one of his

slippered feet. 'Remember where you are, please.'

'Yes, Doctor.' She turned back at once, not even looking toward the O.R. door as it banged open

and Hilary exited stage left, still screaming like a runaway fire engine.

'Get the hardware in the sterilizer,' Albertson said. 'Right away. Chop-chop.'

'Yes, Doctor.'

She began to gather up the instruments, breathing hard, clearly flustered, but under control.

Dr Pritchard seemed to have noticed none of this. He was looking with rapt attention into the

window which had been carved in Thad Beaumont's skull.

'Incredible,' he murmured. 'Just incredible. This is really one for the books. If I weren't seeing it

with my own eyes — '

The hiss of the sterilizer seemed to wake him up, and he looked at Dr Albertson.

'I want suction,' he said sharply. He glanced at the nurse. 'And what the fuck are you doing? The

Sunday Times crossword? Get your ass over here with those!'

She came, carrying the instruments in a fresh pan.

'Give me suction, Lester,' Pritchard said to Albertson. 'Right now. Then I'm going to show you

something you never saw outside of a county fair freak-show.'

Albertson wheeled over the suction-pump, ignoring the head nurse, who leaped back out of his

way, balancing the instruments deftly as she did so.

Pritchard was looking at the anesthesiologist.

'Give me good B.P., my friend. Good B.P. is all I ask.'

'He's one-oh-five over sixty-eight, Doctor. Steady as a rock.'

'Well, his mother says we've got the next William Shakespeare laid out here, so keep it that

way. Suck on him, Lester — don't tickle him with the goddam thing!'

Albertson applied suction, clearing the blood. The monitoring equipment beeped steadily,

monotonously, comfortingly, in the background. Then it was his own breath he was sucking in. He

felt as if someone had punched him high up in the belly.

'Oh my God. Oh Jesus. Jesus Christ.' He recoiled for a moment . . . then leaned in close. Above

his mask and behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were wide with sudden glinting

curiosity. 'What is it?'

'I think you see what it is,' Pritchard said. 'It's just that it takes a second to get used to. I've read

about it but never expected to actually see it.'

Thad Beaumont's brain was the color of a conch shell's outer edge — a medium gray with just

the slightest tinge of rose.

Protruding from the smooth surface of the dura was a single blind and malformed human eye.

The brain was pulsing slightly. The eye pulsed with it. It looked as if it were trying to wink at

them. It was this — the look of the wink — which had driven the assisting nurse from the O. R.

'Jesus God, what is it?' Albertson asked again.

'It's nothing,' Pritchard said. 'Once it might have been a living, breathing human being. Now it's

nothing. Except trouble that is. And this happens to be trouble we can handle.'

Dr Loring, the anesthesiologist, said: 'Permission to look, Dr Pritchard?'

'He still steady?'

'Yes.

'Come on, then. It's one to tell your grandchildren about. But be quick.'

While Loring had his look, Pritchard turned to Albertson. I want the Negli,' he said. 'I'm going

to open him a little wider. Then we probe. I don't know if I can get all of it, but I'm going to get all

of it I can.'

Les Albertson, now acting as head O.R. nurse, slapped the freshly sterilized probe into

Pritchard's gloved hand when Pritchard called for it. Pritchard — who was now humming the

Bonanza theme-song under his breath — worked the wound quickly and almost effortlessly,

referring to the dental-type mirror mounted on the end of the probe only occasionally. He worked

chiefly by sense of touch alone. Albertson would later say he had never witnessed such a thrilling

piece of seat-of-the-pants surgery in his entire life.

In addition to the eye, they found part of a nostril, three fingernails, and two teeth. One of the

teeth had a small cavity in it. The eye went on pulsing and trying to wink right up to the second

when Pritchard used the needle-scalpel to first puncture and then excise it. The entire operation,

from initial probe to final excision, took only twenty-seven minutes. Five chunks of flesh plopped

wetly into the stainless steel pan on the Ross tray beside Thad's shaven head.

'I think we're clear,' Pritchard said at last. 'All the foreign tissue seemed to be connected by

rudimentary ganglia. Even if there are other chunks, I think the chances are good that we've killed

them.

'But . . . how can that be, if the kid's still alive? I mean, it's all a part of him, isn't it?' Loring

asked, bewildered.

Pritchard pointed toward the tray. 'We find an eye, some teeth, and a bunch of fingernails in this

kid's head and you think it was a part of him? Did you see any of his nails missing? Want to

check?'

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

StephenKINGTHEDARKHALFHodder&StoughtonBritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationDataKing,Stephen,1947—Thedarkhalf.I.Title813'—54[F]ISBN0-340-50911-2Copyright©1989byStephenKingFirstpublishedinGreatBritain1989Secondimpression1989Thirdimpression1989Fourthimpression1989Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicat...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen King - The Dark Half (1989).pdf

共288页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - The Dark Half (1989)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: