The Dark Half Epilogue

A/N: Warning! Spoilers for The Dark Half

One Year Later

You could write it, the devious part of Thad's mind taunted as he sat in front of the typewriter, staring a blank page. His fingers twitched with the longing to be writing something. Anything.

You could write it. You don't need him. If you publish it under your own name, he won't come back.

Thad believed this was true, but he couldn't risk it. Things had been tense between him and Liz ever since he and his dark half had come face-to-face. He knew she saw bits of his evil twin in him, and she hated what she saw. So did Thad. The only difference is that she didn't have to continue living with it if she didn't want to, so Thad hid that part of himself as well as he could. It was the real reason he did not dare write Steel Machine. It wasn't because he dreaded George or feared for the safety of his family. He knew Liz would leave him if she even suspected he was re-entering the world he had unknowingly created with George. It was one thing when Thad did not know what he was creating and who he was releasing by writing those disturbing books. Now that they knew, he had a responsibility to stay away from that darkness. No matter how much he privately missed being George Stark, back when he was just a pseudonym, that period of his life was over if he wanted to keep Liz and his family, not to mention his sanity, so he convinced himself Steel Machine could never be.

Yet the typewriter mocked him with its blank page.

And the one black Berol pencil he kept hidden beckoned him. It called out to him often. He knew he'd be better off getting rid of it. It was like keeping a cyanide pill in the house. What good could possibly come from it? But as Thad emptied the glass jar—with Liz as a witness—he found himself rummaging in the trashcan hours later in the dead of night to grant one of the pencils a reprieve from the landfill. Just in case.

In case of what?

In case I have to get rid of this writer's block by any means necessary.

Could writer's block be lethal? To Thad, who had written very little over the past year, it seemed possible. He felt a constipation of the mind, which he believed was appropriate because his writing was full of shit, as was he when he told himself he couldn't write because of his stress with Liz, the PTSD from his encounter with George Stark, and because he was swamped with teaching creative writing courses at the school. He knew he was just making excuses, trying to shield himself from the disturbing truth.

He couldn't write because George Stark was gone.

If he couldn't write, how the hell was he supposed to function? Was he supposed to give up his dream because for some fucked up reason George Stark's dormant presence in Thad's mind was somehow integral to his writing process?

I could write just a few paragraphs, a chapter at most. Just write until that one Berol pencil is sharpened to the eraser, just to cleanse the mental blockage.

But he would lose Liz. She would know. Even if he shredded the words immediately after he wrote them, she would sense it—his sudden euphoria at creating well-written words again—and then she would leave him. And God, what if one chapter was all it took to bring George back?

I can't do it, he thought. I can't do that to Liz. To my children.

Suddenly determined to remove temptation before it could strike him again, he went to the secret hiding spot and picked up the pencil. As he held it in his hand, he felt the urge to put it to paper and let his mind go wild. It was an insane compulsion similar to the urge to jump in front of train tracks or throw oneself from a moving vehicle. He felt inspired, and that inspiration was equally exhilarating and frightening. Being so close to using the pencil gave him the courage he needed to snap it in half. He threw it in the waste bin and sat back down at his desk. The typewriter was through mocking him, but it still wouldn't give him what he truly wanted.

He was beginning to fear nothing ever would.

"That is a fantastic story," Rawlie told him once Thad spilled all the details of what had led to his need of a vehicle to save his family, as well as what happened after. Thad had taken a long break from work following the events of George's death, and once he returned, he always found a way to escape the other man so that he didn't have to relive the experience. Rawlie never pressured him to talk about it. That thought that maybe he knew he would tell him everything in his own time. Rawlie was never wrong.

"I strongly suspect if you wrote about what happened, you would have a bestseller on your hands, all your own, with no help from George Stark."

Thad winced.

"Please don't say that name," Thad said.

"Of course. How very rude of me. I'm sorry."

"And Liz would kill me if I wrote about what happened. She just wants to forget."

"Ahhh, but I sense you don't?"

"I can't forget. Not completely. I feel like if I do, I could do something that brings him back into our lives. And . . . I can't help but feel like I am waiting for something to happen."

Rawlie nodded his head in understanding.

"You said there would be a price for using the sparrows."

"I did say that. I say a lot of things. Many of them are nonsense."

"Nothing you said that day was nonsense. In fact, I think it may have saved my life and my family."

"Well, you know what they say. Even a broken clock tells the time correctly twice a day."

"You're not a broken clock."

"I'm afraid the cuckoo in this clock would beg to disagree. I have been known to say all kinds of things. I am glad I could help you in your time of need, but I am afraid what I told you is no longer of help to you. You seem to be living in constant fear. That is no way to live."

He lowered his voice to a kinder tone and smiled at Thad.

"Maybe there is no price. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you owned the sparrows just long enough to do the job you had to do without any further repercussions. At any rate, you can't live your whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Go out and live your life, Thad. It's a beautiful one."

Thad promised he would try.

William and Wendy showed no signs of trauma or any indication at all that they were affected by the incident with George Stark. Only one thing seemed to have changed since that night. The twin telepathy that seemed to exist between them had been broken. They no longer mirrored each others movements or spoke in that special language only they seemed to know. They still cried together, but now there was a small lag in time between when one of them would start and the other would begin to join in. There were no more matching injuries either. The connection that had bonded them had broken the same night their father separated from his own twin. Thad doubted this was coincidence. Thad also believed that was not the only change that had occurred that night, nor the only loss.

There is always a price.

Thad ignored that tidbit of warning as well as he could for as long as possible. It wasn't until Thad and Liz had begun to gain some semblance of normality that those words he'd tried to bury came back again.

All four of them went to the park. Wendy and Will were playing in the sandbox while a few older kids raced around the monkey bars. The toddler twins were mostly picking up the handfuls of sand and letting them slip through their tiny fingers. While Wendy was busy swirling her hands in circles, effectively creating a figure 8, Will stared off into the distance.

"Hey buddy, what are you looking at?" Thad asked.

He tracked his son's gaze and tried to locate the source of his amusement. He saw an empty park bench and some tall pine trees. The wind blew some of the branches back and forth. He heard Liz's voice call out to him from a few feet away.

"Thad! Come here a minute." There was a nervous edge to her voice. He turned to Liz, who was staring into the cold black orbs of a wicked looking avian creature.

"I'm pretty sure that's a crow," he said. He wrapped his arm around her. She sighed in relief and smiled at Thad.

"I may have developed a pathological fear of birds," she said. He kissed the top of her head.

"That's understandable."

"Hey, what is William looking at?"

"I have no idea."

William threw his arms up in the air and turned his head up towards the sky.

"Bird!" he said as he pointed to the clear, blue sky. "Bird!"

Thad and Liz looked in the direction he pointed, and then at each other.

"Do you see anything?"

"No. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything there."

Wendy looked in that direction. Seeing nothing worthy of her attention, she turned back towards playing in the sandbox.

"Maybe he's just pretending," Liz said with a shrug. She crossed her arms over her chest and shuddered.

"Somehow, I seriously doubt that."

"Sparrows are said to be the outriders of the deceased. Their job is to guide lost souls back into the land of the living."

Will struck his sister with an open palm. She teared up and began to wail.

"WILL!" Liz yelled. "Don't hit your sister!"

"Bird!" he yelled, frantically pointing to the sky, the trees, and the empty benches. "Bird! BIRD! MORE BIRDS!"

"There is always a price."

The sparrows were not yet flying as they had been, but they were there. They had returned. Rawlie had been right. Thad's debt for utilizing the agents of the afterlife was not yet repaid. The price would be steeper than any of them had once imagined, and as he looked into his son's eyes, Thad feared that he would not be the one to pay it.

The End

A/N: While reading The Dark Half, there were many issues that I thought were going to be brought back up before the story ended, including:

1. Thad's strong desire to continue writing the Machine series

2. Wendy/Will's spiritual twin connection. I understand it was a parallel for George/Thad, but there was so much emphasis on it, I thought there would be something more to it.

3. What the price was for using the psychopomps. I realize we find out what the price is in Needful Things and Bag of Bones, but I felt like there should have been a strong insinuation of what the price was going to be in the epilogue.

4. Rawlie told Thad that he needed to tell him everything when he got back, and then he never does. I didn't even like Rawlie that much, but I wanted to see his reaction.

Writing this gave me some closure on a great novel. I hope you enjoyed reading it!