The Dark Half

He hung up the telephone gently and turned to Stark. 'Okay?'

'Very much okay,' Stark said. 'I particularly liked the part about the key under the doormat. It added that extra touch that means so much.'

'What a dink you are,' Alan said. Under the circumstances it wasn't a very wise thing to say, but his own anger surprised him.

Stark surprised him, too. He laughed. 'Nobody likes me very much, do they, Sheriff Alan?'

'No,' Alan said.

'Well, that's okay — I like myself enough for everybody. I'm a real New Age sort of fella that way. The important thing is that I think we're in pretty good shape here. I think all that will fly just fine.' He wrapped one hand around the telephone wire and ripped it out of the telephone jack.

'I guess it will,' Alan said, but he wondered. It was thin — a lot thinner than Stark, who perhaps believed all the cops north of Portland were a bunch of sleepy Deputy Dawg types, seemed to realize. Dan Eamons in Oxford would probably let it pass, unless someone from Orono or Augusta lit a fire under him. But Henry Payton? He was a lot less sure Henry would buy the idea that Alan had taken a single quick, casual look for Homer Gamache's murderer before going off for a chicken basket at Cluck-Cluck Tonite. Henry might smell a rat.

Watching Stark tickle the baby with the muzzle of the .45, Alan wondered if he wanted that to happen or not, and discovered he didn't know.

'Now what?' he asked Stark.

Stark drew a deep breath and looked outside at the sunlit woods with evident enjoyment: 'Let's ask Bethie if she can rustle us up a spot of grub. I'm hungry. Country living's great, isn't it, Sheriff Alan? Goddam!'

'All right,' Alan said. He started back toward the kitchen and Stark grabbed him with one hand.

'That crack about vapor-lock,' he said. 'That didn't mean anything special, did it?'

'No,' Alan said. 'It was just another case of . . . what do you call it? The extra touch that means so much. Several of our units have had carburetor troubles this last year.'

'That better be the truth,' Stark said, looking at Alan with his dead eyes. Thick pus was running down from their inner corners and down the sides of his peeling nose like gummy crocodile tears. 'It'd be a shame to have to hurt one of these kids because you had to go and get clever. Thad won't work half so good if he finds out I had to blow one of his twins away in order to keep you in line.' He grinned and pressed the muzzle of the .45 into William's armpit. William giggled and wriggled. 'He's just as cute as a warm kitten, ain't he?'

Alan swallowed around what felt like a large dry fuzzball in his throat. 'You doing that makes me nervous as hell, fellow.'

'You go ahead and stay nervous,' Stark said, smiling at him. 'I'm just the sort of guy a man wants to stay nervous around. Let's eat, Sheriff Alan. I believe this one's gettin lonesome for his sister.'

Liz heated Stark a bowl of soup in the microwave. She offered him a frozen dinner first, but he shook his head, smiling, then reached into his mouth and plucked a tooth. It came out of the gum with rotten ease.

She turned her head aside as he dropped it into the wastebasket, her lips pressed tightly together, her face a tense mask of revulsion.

'Don't worry,' he said serenely. 'They'll be better before long.

Everything's going to be better before long. Poppa's going to be here soon.'

He was still drinking the soup when Thad pulled in behind the wheel of Rawlie's VW ten minutes later.

Twenty-five

Steel Machine

1

The Beaumont summer house was a mile up Lake Lane from Route 5, but Thad stopped less than a tenth of a mile in, goggling unbelievingly.

There were sparrows everywhere.

Every branch of every tree, every rock, every patch of open ground was covered with roosting sparrows. The world he saw was grotesque, hallucinatory: it was as if this piece of Maine had sprouted feathers. The road ahead of him was gone. Totally gone. Where it had been was a path of silent, jostling sparrows between the overburdened trees.

Somewhere a branch snapped. The only other sound was Rawlie's

VW. The muffler had been in bad shape when Thad began his run west; now it seemed to be performing no function at all. The engine farted and roared, backfiring occasionally, and its sound should have sent that monster flock aloft at once, but the birds did not move.

The flock began less than twelve feet in front of the place where he had stopped the VW and thrown its balky transmission into neutral. There was a line of demarcation so clean it might have been drawn with a ruler.

No one has seen a flock of birds like this in years, he thought. Not since the extermination of the passenger pigeons at the end of the last century . . . if then. It's like something out of that Daphne du Maurier story.

A sparrow fluttered down on the hood of the VW and seemed to peer in at him. Thad sensed a frightening, dispassionate curiosity in the small bird's black eyes.

How far do they go? he wondered. All the way to the house? If so, George has seen them . . . and there will be hell to pay, if hell hasn't been paid already. And even if they don't go that far, how am I supposed to get there? They're not just in the road; they ARE the road.

But of course he knew the answer to that. If he meant to get to the house, he would have to drive over them.

No, his mind almost moaned. No, you can't. His imagination conjured up terrible images: the crunching, breaking sounds of small bodies in their thousands, the jets of blood squirting out from beneath the wheels, the soggy clots of stuck feathers revolving as the tires turned.

'But I'm going to,' he muttered. 'I'm going to because I have to.' A shaky grin began to stitch his face into a grimace of fierce, half-mad concentration. In that moment he looked eerily like George Stark. He shoved the stick-shift back into first gear and began to hum 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath. Rawlie's VW chugged, almost stalled, then blatted three loud backfires and began to roll forward.

The sparrow on the hood flew off and Thad's breath caught as he waited for all of them to take wing, as they did in his trance-visions: a great rising dark cloud accompanied by a sound like a hurricane in a bottle.

Instead, the surface of the road ahead of the VW's nose began to writhe and move. The sparrows — some of them, at least — were pulling back, revealing two bare strips . . . strips which exactly matched the path of the VW's wheels.

'Jesus,' Thad whispered.

Then he was among them. Suddenly he passed from the world he had always known to an alien one which was populated only by these sentinels which guarded the border between the land of the living and that of the dead.

That's where I am now, he thought as he drove slowly along the twin tracks the birds were affording him. I am in the land of the living dead, and God help me.

The path continued to open ahead him. He always had about twelve feet of clear travel, and as he covered that distance, another twelve feet opened before him. The VW's undercarriage was passing over sparrows which were massed between the wheel-tracks, but he did not seem to be killing them; he didn't see any dead birds behind him in the rearview mirror, at least. But it was hard to tell for sure, because the sparrows were closing the way behind him, recreating that flat, feathery carpet.

He could smell them — a light, crumbly smell that seemed to lie on the chest like a fall of bonedust. Once, as a boy, he had put his face into a bag of rabbit pellets and inhaled deeply. This smell was like that. It was not dirty, but it was overpowering. And it was alien. He began to be troubled by the idea that this great mass of birds was stealing all the oxygen from the air, that he would suffocate before he got where he was going.

Now he began to hear light tak-tak-tak sounds from overhead, and imagined the sparrows roosting up there on the VW's roof, somehow communicating with their fellows, guiding them, telling them when to move away and create the wheel-tracks, telling them when it was safe to move back.

He crested the first hill on Lake Drive and looked down into a valley of sparrows — sparrows everywhere, sparrows covering every object and filling every tree, changing the landscape to a nightmarish bird-world that was more than beyond his ability to imagine; it was beyond his greatest powers of comprehension.

Thad felt himself slipping toward a faint and slapped his cheek viciously. It was a small sound — spat! — compared to the rough roar of the VW's engine, but he saw a great ripple go through the sweep of the massed birds . . . a ripple like a shudder.

I can't go down there. I can't.

You must. You are the knower. You are the bringer. You are the owner.

And besides — where else was there to go? He thought of Rawlie saying, Be very careful, Thaddeus. No man controls the agents of the afterlife. Not for long. Suppose he tried to reverse back out to Route 5? The birds had opened a way before him . . . but he did not thin they would open one behind him. He believed that the consequences of trying to change his mind now would be unthinkable.

Thad began to creep down the hill . . . and the sparrows opened the path before him.

He never precisely remembered the rest of that trip; his mind drew a merciful curtain over it as soon as it was over. He remembered thinking over and over again, They're only SPARROWS, for Christ's sake . . . they're not tigers or alligators or piranha fish . they're only SPARROWS!

And that was true, but seeing so many of them at once, seeing them everywhere, crammed onto every branch and jostling for place on every fallen log that did something to your mind. It hurt your mind.

As he came around the sharp curve in Lake Lane about half a mile in, Schoolhouse Meadow was revealed on the left . . . except it wasn't. Schoolhouse Meadow was gone. Schoolhouse Meadow was black with sparrows.

It hurt your mind.

How many? How many millions? Or is it billions?

Another branch cracked and gave way in the woods with a sound like distant thunder. He passed the Williamses', but the A-frame was only a fuzzy hump under the weight of the sparrows. He had no idea that Alan Pangborn's cruiser was parked in the Williamses' driveway; he saw only a feathery hill.

He passed the Saddlers'. The Massenburgs'. The Paynes'. Others he didn't know or couldn't remember. And then, still four hundred yards from his own house, the birds just stopped. There was a place where the whole world was sparrows; six inches farther along there were none at all. Once again it seemed that someone had drawn a ruler-straight line across the road. The birds hopped and fluttered aside, revealing wheel-paths that now opened onto the bare packed dirt of Lake Lane.

Thad drove back into the clear, stopped suddenly, opened the door, and threw up on the ground. He moaned and armed sick sweat from his forehead. Ahead he could see woods on both sides and bright blue winks of light from the lake on his left.

He looked behind and saw a black, silent, waiting world.

The psychopomps, he thought. God help me if this goes wrong, if he gains control of those birds somehow. God help us all.

He slammed the door and closed his eyes.

You get hold of yourself now, Thad. You didn't go through that just to blow it now. You get hold of yourself. Forget the sparrows.

I can't forget them! a part of his mind wailed. It was horrified, offended, teetering on the brink of madness. I can't! I CAN'T!

But he could. He would.

The sparrows were waiting. He would wait, too. He would wait until the right time came. He would trust himself to know that time when he arrived. If he could not do it for himself, he would do it for Liz and the twins.

Pretend it's a story. Just a story you're writing. A story with no birds in it.

'Okay,' he muttered. 'Okay, I'll try.'

He began to drive again. At the same time, he began to sing 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath.

2

Thad killed the VW — it died with one final triumphant backfire and got out of the little car slowly. He stretched. George Stark came out the door, now holding Wendy, and stepped onto the porch, facing Thad.

Stark also stretched.

Liz, standing beside Alan, felt a scream building not in her throat but behind her forehead. She wanted more than anything else to pull her eyes away from the two men, and found she couldn't do it.

Watching them was like watching a man do stretching exercises in a mirror.

They looked nothing whatever alike — even subtracting Stark's accelerating decay from the picture. Thad was slim and darkish, Stark broad-shouldered and fair in spite of his tan (what little remained of it). Yet they were mirror images, just the same. The similarity was eerie precisely because there was no one thing the Protesting, horrified eye could pin it on. It was sub rosa deeply buried between the lines, but so real it shrieked: that 'trick of crossing the feet during the stretch, of spraying the fingers stiffly beside either thigh, the tight little crinkle of the eyes.

They relaxed at exactly the same time.

'Hello, Thad.' Stark sounded almost shy.

'Hello, George,' Thad said flatly. 'The family?'

'Just fine, thanks. You mean to do it? Are you ready?'

'Yes.'

Behind them, back toward Route 5, a branch cracked. Stark's eyes jumped in that direction.

'What was that?'

'A tree-branch,' Thad said. 'There was a tornado down here about four years ago, George. The deadwood is still failing. You know that.'

Stark nodded. 'How are you, old hoss?'

'I'm all right.'

'You look a little peaky.' Stark's eyes darted over Thad's face; he could feel them trying to pry into the thoughts behind it.

'You don't look so hot yourself.'

Stark laughed at this, but there was no humor in the laugh. 'I guess I don't.'

'You'll let them alone?' Thad asked. 'If I do what you want, you'll really let them alone?'

'Yes.'

'Give me your word.'

'All right,' Stark said. 'You have it. The word of a Southern man, which is not a thing given lightly.' His bogus, almost burlesque, cracker accent had disappeared entirely. He spoke with a simple and horrifying dignity. The two men faced each other in the late afternoon sunlight, so bright and golden it seemed surreal.

'Okay,' Thad said after a long moment, and thought: He doesn't know. He really doesn't. The sparrows . . . they are still hidden from him. That secret is mine. 'Okay, we'll go for it.'

3

As the two men stood by the door, Liz realized she had just had the perfect opportunity to tell Alan about the knife under the couch . . . and had let it slip by.

Or had she?

She turned to him, and at that moment Thad called, 'Liz?'

His voice was sharp. It held a commanding note he rarely used, and it seemed almost as if he knew what she was up to . . . and didn't want her to do it. That was impossible, of course. Wasn't it? She didn't know. She didn't know anything anymore.

She looked at him, and saw Stark hand Thad the baby. Thad held Wendy close. Wendy put her arms around her father's neck as chummily as she had put them around Stark's.

Now! Liz's mind screamed at her. Tell him now! Tell him to run! Now, while we've got the twins!

But of course Stark had a gun, and she didn't think any of them were fast enough to outrun a bullet. And she knew Thad very well; she would never say it out loud, but it suddenly occurred to her that he might very well trip over his own feet.

And now Thad was very close to her, and she couldn't even kid herself that she didn't understand the message in his eyes.

Leave it alone, Liz, they said. It's my play.

Then he put his free arm around her and the whole family stood in a clumsy but fervent fourway embrace.

'Liz,' he said, kissing her coot lips. 'Liz, Liz, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry for this. I didn't mean for anything like this to happen. I didn't know. I thought it was . . . harmless. A joke.'

She held him tightly, kissed him, let his lips warm hers.

'It's okay,' she said. 'It will be okay, won't it, Thad?'

'Yes,' he said. He drew away so he could look in her eyes. 'It's going to be okay.'

He kissed her again, then looked at Alan.

'Hello, Alan,' he said, and smiled a little. 'Changed your mind about anything?'

'Yes. Quite a few things. I talked to an old acquaintance of Yours today.' He looked at Stark. 'Yours, too.'

Stark raised what remained of his eyebrows. 'I didn't think Thad and I had any friends in common, Sheriff Alan.'

'Oh, you had a very close relationship with this guy,' Alan said. 'In fact, he killed you once.'

'What are you talking about?' Thad asked sharply.

'It was Dr Pritchard I talked to. He remembers both of you very well. You see, it was a pretty unusual sort of operation. What he took out of your head was him.' He nodded toward Stark.

'What are you talking about?' Liz asked, and her voice cracked on the last word.

So Alan told them what Pritchard had told him . . . but at the last moment he omitted the part about the sparrows dive-bombing the hospital. He did it because Thad hadn't said anything about the sparrows . . . and Thad had to have driven past the Williams place to get here. That suggested two possibilities: either the sparrows had been gone by the time Thad arrived, or Thad didn't want Stark to know they were there.

Alan looked very closely at Thad. Something going on in there. Some idea. Pray to God it's a good one.

When Alan finished, Liz looked stunned. Thad was nodding. Stark — from whom Alan would have expected the strongest reaction of all — did not seem much affected one way or the other. The only expression Alan could read on that ruined face was amusement.

'It explains a lot,' Thad said. 'Thank you, Alan.'

'It doesn't explain a goddam thing to me!' Liz cried so shrilly that the twins began to whimper.

Thad looked at George Stark. 'You're a ghost,' he said. 'A weird kind of ghost. We're all standing here and looking at a ghost. Isn't that amazing? This isn't just a psychic incident; it's a goddam epic!'

'I don't think it matters,' Stark said easily. 'Tell em the William Burroughs story, Thad. I remember it well. I was inside, of course . . . but I was listening.'

Liz and Alan looked at Thad questioningly.

'Do you know what he's talking about?' Liz asked.

'Of course I do,' Thad said. 'Ike and Mike, they think alike.'

Stark threw back his head and laughed. The twins stopped whimpering and laughed along with him. 'That's good, old hoss! That is gooood!'

'I was — or perhaps I should say we were — on a panel with Burroughs in 1981. At the New School, in New York. During the Q-and-A, some kid asked Burroughs if he believed in life after death. Burroughs said he did — he thought we were all living it.'

'And that man's smart,' Stark said, smiling. 'Couldn't shoot a pistol worth shit, but smart. Now — you see? You see how little it matters?'

But it does, Alan thought, studying Thad carefully. It matters a lot. Thad's face says so . . . and the sparrows you don't know about say so, too.

Thad's knowledge was more dangerous than even he knew, Alan suspected. But it might be all they had. He decided he had been right to keep the end of Pritchard's story to himself . . . but he still felt like a man standing on the edge of a cliff and trying to juggle too many flaming torches.

'Enough chit-chat, Thad,' Stark said.

He nodded. 'Yes. Quite enough.' He looked at Liz and Alan. 'I don't want either of you trying anything . . . well . . . out of line. I'm going to do what he wants.'

'Thad! No! You can't do that!'

'Shhh.' He put a finger across her lips. 'I can, and I will. No tricks, no special effects. Words on paper made him, and words on paper are the only things that will get rid of him.' He cocked his head at Stark. 'Do you think he knows this will work? He doesn't. He's just hoping.'

'That's right,' Stark said. 'Hope springs eternal in the human tits.' He laughed. It was a crazy, lunatic sound, and Alan understood that Stark was also juggling flaming torches on the edge of a cliff.

Sudden movement twitched in the corner of his eye. Alan turned his head slightly and saw a sparrow land on the deck railing outside the sweep of glass that formed the living room's western wall. It was joined by a second and a third. Alan looked back at Thad and saw the writer's eyes move slightly. Had he also seen? Alan thought he had. He had been right, then. Thad knew . . . but he didn't want Stark to know.

'The two of us are just going to do a little writing and then say goodbye,' Thad said. His eyes shifted to Stark's ruined face. 'That is what we're going to do, isn't it, George?'

'You got it, guy.'

'So you tell me,' Thad said to Liz. 'Are you holding back? Got something in your head? Some plan?'

She stood looking desperately into her husband's eyes, unaware that between them, William and Wendy were holding hands and looking at each other delightedly, like long-lost relatives at a surprise reunion.

You don't mean it, do you, Thad? her eyes asked him. It's a trick, isn't it? A trick to lull him, put his suspicions to sleep?

No, Thad's gray gaze answered. Right down the line. This is what I want.

And wasn't there something else, as well? Something so deep and hidden that perhaps she was the only one who could see it?

I'm going to take care of him, babe. I know how. I can.

Oh Thad, I hope you're right.

'There's a knife under the couch,' she said slowly, looking into his face. 'I got it out of the kitchen while Alan and . . . and him . . . were in the front hall, using the telephone.'

'Liz, Christ!' Alan nearly screamed, making the babies jump. He was not, in fact, as upset as he hoped he sounded. He had come to understand that if this business was to end in some way that did not mean total horror for all of them, Thad would have to be the one to bring it about. He had made Stark; he would have to unmake him.

She looked around at Stark and saw that hateful grin surfacing on the remains of his face.

'I know what I'm doing,' Thad said. 'Trust me, Alan. Liz, get the knife and throw it off the deck.'

I have a part to play here, Alan thought. It's a bit part, but remember what the guy used to say in our college drama class — there are no small parts, only small actors. 'You think he's going to just let us go?' Alan asked incredulously. 'That he's going to trot off over the hill with his tail bobbing behind him like Mary's little lamb? Man, you're crazy.'

'Sure, I'm crazy,' Thad said, and laughed. It was eerily like the sound Stark had made — the laughter of a man who was dancing on the edge of oblivion. ' He is, and he came from me, didn't he? Like some cheap demon from the brow of a third-rate Zeus. But I know how it has to be.' He turned and looked at Alan fully and gravely for this first time. 'I know how it has to be,' he repeated slowly and with great emphasis. 'Go ahead, Liz.'

Alan made a rude, disgusted sound and turned his back, as if to disassociate himself from all of them.

Feeling like a woman in a dream, Liz crossed the living room, knelt down, and fished the knife out from under the couch.

'Be careful of that thing,' Stark said. He sounded very alert, very serious. 'Your kids would tell you the same thing, if they could talk.'

She looked around, brushed her hair out of her face, and saw he was pointing his gun at Thad and William.

'I am being careful!' she said in a shaky, scolding voice that was close to tears. She slid the door in the window-wall back on its track and stepped out onto the deck. There were now half a dozen sparrows perched on the rail. They moved aside in two groups of three as she approached the rail and the steep drop beyond it, but they did not fly.

Alan saw her pause for a moment, considering them, the handle of the knife pinched between her fingers and the tip of the blade pointing down at the deck like a plumb-bob. He glanced at Thad and saw Thad watching her tensely. Last of all, he glanced at Stark.

He was watching Liz carefully, but there was no look of surprise or suspicion on his face, and a sudden wild thought streaked across Alan Pangborn's mind: He doesn't see them! He doesn't remember what he wrote on the apartment walls, and he doesn't see them now! He doesn't know they're there!

Then he suddenly realized Stark was looking back at him, appraising him with that flat, mouldy stare.

'Why are you looking at me?' Stark asked,

'I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is,' Alan said. 'I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.'

'If you don't watch your fucking mouth, you won't have to worry about grandchildren,' Stark said. 'Not a bit. You want to quit doin that starin thing, Sheriff Alan. It's just not wise.'

Liz threw the butcher-knife over the deck rail. When she heard it land in the bushes twenty-five feet below, she did begin to cry.

4

'Let's all go upstairs,' Stark said. 'That's where Thad's office is. I reckon you'll want your typewriter, won't you, old hoss?'

'Not for this one,' Thad said. 'You know better.'

A smile touched Stark's cracked lips. 'Do I?'

Thad pointed to the pencils which lined his breast pocket. 'These are what I use when I want to get back in touch with Alexis Machine and Jack Rangely.'

Stark looked absurdly pleased. 'Yeah, that's right, isn't it? I guess I thought this time you'd want to do it different.'

'No different, George.'

'I brought my own,' he said. 'Three boxes of them. Sheriff Alan, why don't you be a good boy and trot on out to my car and get em? They're in the glove-compartment. The rest of us will babysit.' He looked at Thad, laughed his loony laugh, and shook his head. 'You dog, you!'

'That's right, George,' Thad said. He smiled a little. 'I'm a dog. So are you. And you can't teach old dogs new tricks.'

'You're kind of up for it, ain't you, hoss? No matter what you say, part of you is just raaarin to go. I see it in your eyes. You want it.'

'Yes,' Thad said simply, and Alan didn't think he was lying.

'Alexis Machine,' Stark. said. His yellow eyes were gleaming.

'That's right,' Thad said, and now his own eyes were gleaming.

''Cut him while I stand here and watch.''

'You got it!' Stark cried, and began to laugh. ''I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.''

Now they both began to laugh.

Liz looked from Thad to Stark and then back at her husband again and the blood fell from her cheeks because she could not tell the difference.

All at once the edge of the cliff felt closer than ever.

5

Alan went out to get the pencils. His head was only in the car for a moment, but it seemed much longer and he was very glad to get it out again. The car had a dark and unpleasant smell that left him feeling slightly woozy. Rooting around in Stark's Toronado was like sticking his head into an attic room where someone had spilled a bottle of chloroform.

If that's the odor of dreams, Alan thought, I never want to have another one.

He stood for a moment beside the black car, the boxes of Berol pencils in his hands, and looked up the driveway.

The sparrows had arrived.

The driveway was disappearing beneath a carpet of them. As he watched, more of them landed. And the woods were full of them. They only landed and sat staring at him, ghastly-silent, a massed living conundrum.

They are coming for you, George, he thought, and started back toward the house. Halfway there he stopped suddenly as a nasty idea struck him.

Or are they coming for us? He looked back at the birds for a long moment, but they told no secrets, and he went inside.

6

'Upstairs,' Stark said. 'You go first, Sheriff Alan. Go to the rear of the guest bedroom. There's a glass case filled with pictures and glass paperweights and little souvenirs against the wall there. When you push against the left-hand side of the case, it rotates inward on a central spindle. Thad's study is beyond it.'

Alan looked at Thad, who nodded.

'You know a hell of a lot about this place,' Alan said, 'for a man who's never been here.'

'But I have been here,' Stark said gravely. 'I have been here often, in my dreams.'

7

Two minutes later, all of them were gathered outside the unique door of Thad's small study. The glass case was turned inward, creating two entrances to the room separated by the thickness of the case. There were no windows in here; give me a window down here by the lake, Thad had told Liz once, and what I'll do is write two words and then stare out of the damned thing for two hours, watching the boats go by.

A lamp with a flexible goose-neck and a brilliant quartz-halogen bulb cast a circle of white light on the desk. An office chair and a folding camp chair stood behind the desk, side by side, facing the two blank notebooks which had been placed side by side in the circle of light. Resting on top of each notebook were two sharpened Berol Black Beauty pencils. The IBM electric Thad sometimes used down here had been unplugged and stuck in a corner.

Thad himself had brought in the folding chair from the hall closet, and the room now expressed a duality Liz found both startling and extremely unpleasant. It was, in a way, another version of the mirror-creature she fancied she had seen when Thad finally arrived. Here were two chairs where there had always been one; here were two little writing stations, also side by side, where there should have been only one. The writing implement which she associated with Thad's

(better)

normal self had been shunted aside, and when they sat down, Stark in Thad's office chair and Thad in the folding chair, the disorientation was complete. She felt almost sea-sick.

Each of them had a twin on his lap.

'How long do we have before someone gets suspicious and decides to check on this place?' Thad asked Alan, who was standing in the doorway with Liz. 'Be honest, and be as accurate as you can. You have to believe me when I tell you this is the only chance we have.'

'Thad, look at him!' Liz burst out wildly. 'Can't you see what's happening to him? He doesn't just want help writing a book! He wants to steal your life! Don't you see that?'

'Shhh,' he said. 'I know what he wants. I think I have since the start. This is the only way. I know what I'm doing. How long, Alan?'

Alan thought about it carefully. He had told Sheila he was going to get a take-out, and he had already called in, so it would be awhile before she got nervous. Things might have happened quicker if Norris Ridgewick had been around.

'Maybe until my wife calls to ask where I am,' he said. 'Maybe longer. She's been a cop's wife for a long time. She expects long hours and weird nights.' He didn't like hearing himself say this. This was not the way the game was supposed to be played; it was the exact opposite of the way the game was supposed to be played.

Thad's eyes compelled him. Stark did not seem to be listening at all; he had picked up the slate paperweight which sat atop an untidy stack of old manuscript in the corner of the desk and was playing with it.

'I think it will be at least four hours.' And then, reluctantly, he added: 'Maybe all night. I left Andy Clutterbuck on the desk, and Clut isn't exactly Quiz Kids material. If someone gets his wind up, it will probably be that guy Harrison — the one you ditched — or someone I know at the State Police Barracks in Oxford. A guy named Henry Payton.'

Thad looked at Stark. 'Will it be enough?'

Stark's eyes, brilliant jewels in the ruined setting of his face, were distant, hazed. His bandaged hand toyed absently with the paperweight. He put it back and smiled at Thad. 'What do you think? You know as much about this as I do.'

Thad considered it. Both of us know what we're talking about, but I don't think either of us could express it in words. Writing is not what we're doing here, not really. Writing is just the ritual. We're talking about passing some sort of baton. An exchange of power. Or, more properly put, a trade: Liz's and the twins' lives in exchange for . . . what? What, exactly?

But he knew, of course. It would have been strange if he had not, for he had been meditating on this very subject not so many days ago. It was his eye that Stark wanted — no, demanded. That odd third eye that, being buried in his brain, could only look inward.

He felt that crawling sensation again, and fought it off. No fair peeking, George. You've got the firepower; all I've got is a bunch of scraggy birds. So no fair peeking.

'I think it probably will be,' he said. 'We'll know it when it happens, won't we?'

'Yes.'

'Like a teeter-totter, when one end of the board goes up . . . and the other end goes down.'

'Thad, what are you hiding? What are you hiding from me?'

There was a moment of electrical silence in the room, a room which suddenly seemed far too small for the emotions careening around inside it.

'I might ask you the same question,' Thad said at last.

'No,' Stark replied slowly. 'All my cards are on the table. Tell me, Thad.' His cold, rotting hand slipped around Thad's wrist with the inexorable force of a steel manacle. 'What are you hiding?'

Thad forced himself to turn and look into Stark's eyes. That crawling sensation was everywhere now, but it was centered in the hole in his hand.

'Do you want to do this book or not?' he asked.

For the first time, Liz saw the underlying expression in Stark's face — not on it but in it — change. Suddenly there was uncertainty there. And fear? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if not, it was somewhere near, waiting to happen.

'I didn't come here to eat cereal with you, Thad.'

'Then you figure it out,' Thad said. Liz heard a gasp and realized she had made the sound

herself.

Stark glanced up at her briefly, then looked back at Thad. 'Don't jive me, Thad,' he said softly. 'You don't want to jive me, hoss.'

Thad laughed. It was a cold and desperate sound . . . but not entirely without humor. That was the worst part. It was not entirely without humor, and Liz heard George Stark in that laugh, just as she had seen Thad Beaumont in Stark's eyes when he was playing with the babies.

'Why not, George? I know what I have to lose. That's all on the table, too. Now do you want to write or do you want to talk?'

Stark considered him for a long moment, his flat and baleful gaze painting Thad's face. Then he said, 'Ah, fuck it. Let's go.'

Thad smiled. 'Why not?'

'You and the cop leave,' Stark said to Liz. 'This is just the boys now. We're down to that.'

'I'll take the babies,' Liz heard herself say, and Stark laughed.

'That's pretty funny, Beth. Uh-uh. The babies are insurance. Like write-protect on a floppy disc, isn't that so, Thad?'

'But — ' Liz began.

'It's okay,' Thad said. 'They'll be fine. George can mind them while I get us started. They like him. Haven't you noticed?'

'Of course I've noticed,' she said in a low, hate-filled voice.

'Just remember that they're in here with us,' Stark said to Alan. 'Keep it in mind, Sheriff Alan. Don't be inventive. If you try pulling something cute, it'll be just like Jonestown. They'll bring all of us out feet first. You got that?'

'Got it,' Alan said.

'And shut the door on the way out.' Stark turned to Thad. 'It's time.'

'That's right,' Thad said, and picked up a pencil. He turned to Liz and Alan, and George Stark's eyes looked out at them from Thad Beaumont's face. 'Go on. Get out.'

8

Liz stopped halfway downstairs. Alan almost ran into her. She was staring across the living room and out through the window-wall.

The world was birds. The deck was buried beneath them; the slope down to the lake was black with them in the failing light; above the lake the sky was dark with them as more swarmed toward the Beaumont lake house from the west.

'Oh my God,' Liz said.

Alan grabbed her arm. 'Be quiet,' he said. 'Don't let him hear you.'

'But what — '

He guided her the rest of the way downstairs, still holding firmly to her arm. When they were in the kitchen, Alan told her the rest of what Dr Pritchard had told him earlier this afternoon, a thousand years ago.

'What does it mean?' she whispered. Her face was grey with pallor. 'Alan, I'm so frightened.'

He put his arms around her and was aware, even though he was also deeply afraid, that this was quite a lot of woman.

'I don't know,' he said, 'but I know they're here because either Thad or Stark called to them. I'm pretty sure it was Thad. Because he must have seen them when he came in. He saw them, but he didn't mention them.'

'Alan, he's not the same.'

'I know.'

'Part of him loves Stark. Part of him loves Stark's . . . his blackness.'

'I know.'

They went to the window by the telephone table in the hall and looked out. The driveway was full of sparrows, and the woods, and the small areaway around the shed where the .22 was still locked away. Rawlie's VW had disappeared beneath them.

There were no sparrows on George Stark's Toronado, however. And there was a neat circle of empty driveway around it, as if it had been quarantined.

A bird flew into the window with a soft thump. Liz uttered a tiny cry. The other birds shifted restlessly — a great wavelike movement that rotted up the hill — and then they were still again.

'Even if they are Thad's,' she said, 'he may not use them on Stark. Part of Thad is crazy, Alan. Part of him has always been crazy. He . . . he likes it.'

Alan said nothing, but he knew that, too. He had sensed it.

'All of this is like a terrible dream,' she said. 'I wish I could wake up. I wish I could wake up and things would be the way they were. Not the way they were before Clawson; the way they were before Stark.'

Alan nodded.

She looked up at him. 'So what do we do now?'

'We do the hard thing,' he said. 'We wait.'

9

The evening seemed to go on forever, the light bleeding slowly out of the sky as the sun made its exit beyond the mountains on the western side of the lake, the mountains that marched off to join the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's chimney.

Outside, the last flocks of sparrows arrived and joined the main flock. Alan and Liz could sense them on the roof overhead, a burial-mound of sparrows, but they were silent. They were waiting.

When they moved about the room their heads turned as they walked, turned like radar dishes locked in on a signal. It was the study they were listening to, and the most maddening thing was that there was no sound at all from behind the trick door which led into it. She could not even hear the babies babbling and cooing to each other. She hoped they had gone to sleep, but it was not possible to silence the voice which insisted that Stark had killed them both, and Thad, too.

Silently.

With the razor he carried.

She told herself that if something like that happened the sparrows would know, they would do something, and it helped, but only a little. The sparrows were a great mind-bitching unknown surrounding the house. God knew what they would do . . . or when.

Twilight was slowly surrendering to full dark when Alan said harshly, 'They'll change places if it goes on long enough, won't they? Thad will start to get sick . . . and Stark will start to get well.'

She was so startled she almost dropped the bitter cup of coffee she was holding.

'Yes. I think so.'

A loon called on the lake — an isolated, aching, lonely sound. Alan thought of them upstairs, the two sets of twins, one get at rest, the other engaged in some terrible struggle in the merged twilight of their single imagination.

Outside, the birds watched and waited as twilight drew down.

That teeter-totter is in motion, Alan thought. Thad's end is going up, Stark's end is going down. Up there, behind that door which made two entrances when it was open, the change had begun.

It's almost the end, Liz thought. One way or the other.

And as if this thought had caused it to happen, she heard a wind begin to blow — a strange, whirring wind. Only, the take was as flat as a dish.

She stood up, eyes wide, hands going to her throat. She stared out through the window-wall. Alan, she tried to say, but her voice failed her. It didn't matter.

Upstairs there was a strange, weird whistling sound, like a note blown from a crooked flute. Stark cried out suddenly, sharply. 'Thad? What are you doing? What are you doing?' There was a short banging sound, like the report of a cap pistol. A moment later Wendy began to cry.

And outside in the deepening gloom, a million sparrows went on fluttering their wings, preparing to fly.

Twenty-six

The Sparrows Are Flying

1

When Liz closed the door and left the two men alone, Thad opened his notebook and looked at the blank page for a moment. Then he picked up one of the sharpened Berol pencils.

'I am going to start with the cake,' he said to Stark.

'Yes,' Stark said. A kind of longing eagerness filled his face. 'That's right.'

Thad poised the pencil over the blank page. This was the moment that was always the best — just before the first stroke. This was surgery of a kind, and in the end the patient almost always died, but you did it anyway. You had to, because it was what you were made for. Only that.

Just remember, he thought. Remember what you're doing.

But a part of him — the part that really wanted to write Steel Machine — protested.

Thad bent forward and began to fill up the empty space.

STEEL MACHINE

by George Stark

Chapter I: The Wedding

Alexis Machine was rarely whimsical, and for him to have a whimsical thought in such a situation as this was something which had never happened before. Yet it occurred to him: Of all the people an earth — what? five billion of them? — I'm the only one who is currently standing inside a moving wedding cake with a Heckler& Koch. 223 semiautomatic weapon in my hands.

He had never been so shut up in a place. The air had gotten bad almost at once, but he could not have drawn a deep breath in any case. The Trojan Cake's frosting was real, but beneath it was nothing but a thin layer of a gypsum product called Nartex — a kind of high-class cardboard. If he filled his chest, the bride and groom standing on top of the cake's top tier would probably topple. Surely the icing would crack and . . .

He wrote for nearly forty minutes, picking up speed as he went along, his mind gradually filling up with the sights and sounds of the wedding party which would end with such a bang.

Finally he put the pencil down. He had written it blunt.

'Give me a cigarette,' he said.

Stark raised his eyebrows.

'Yes,' Thad said.

There was a pack of Pall Malls lying on the desk. Stark shook one out and Thad took it. The cigarette felt strange between his lips after so many years . . . too big, somehow. But it felt good. It felt right.

Stark scratched a match and held it out to Thad, who inhaled deeply. The smoke bit his lungs in its old merciless, necessary way. He felt immediately woozy, but he didn't mind the feeling at all.

Now I need a drink, he thought. And if this ends with me still alive and standing up, that's the first thing I'm going to have.

'I thought you quit,' Stark said.

That nodded. 'Me too. What can I say, George? I was wrong.' He took another deep drag and feathered smoke out through his nostrils. He turned his notebook toward Stark. 'Your turn,' he said.

Stark leaned over the notebook and read the last paragraph Thad had written; there was really no need to read more. They both knew how this story went.

Back in the house, Jack Rangely and Tony Westerman were in the kitchen, and Rollick should be upstairs now. All three of them were armed with Steyr-Aug semi-automatics, the only good machine-gun made in America, and even if some of the bodyguards masquerading as guests were very fast, the three of them should be able to lay down a fire-storm more than adequate to cover their retreat. Just let me out of this cake, Machine thought. That's all I ask.

Stark lit a Pall Mail himself, picked up one of his Berols, opened his own notebook . . . and then paused. He looked at Thad with naked honesty.

'I'm scared, hoss,' he said.

And Thad felt a great wave of sympathy for Stark — in spite of everything he knew. Scared. Yes, of course you are, he thought. Only the ones just starting out — the kids — aren't scared. The years go by and the words on the page don't get any darker . . . but the white space sure does get whiter. Scared? You'd be crazier than you are if you weren't.

'I know,' he said. 'And you know what it comes down to — the only way to do it is to do it.'

Stark nodded and bent over his notebook. Twice more he checked back at the last paragraph Thad had written . . . and then he began to write.

The words formed themselves with agonized slowness in Thad's mind.

Machine . . . had . . . never wondered . . .

A long pause, then, all in a burst:

. . . what it would be like to have asthma, but if anyone ever asked him after this . . .

A shorter pause.

. . . he would remember the Scoretti job.

He read over what he had written, then looked at Thad unbelievingly.

Thad nodded. 'It makes sense, George.' He fingered the corner of his mouth, which suddenly stung, and felt a fresh sore breaking there. He looked at Stark and saw that a similar sore had disappeared from the corner of Stark's mouth.

It's happening. It's really happening.

'Go for it, George,' he said. 'Knock the hell out of it.'

But Stark had already bent over his notebook again, and now he was writing faster.

2

Stark wrote for almost half an hour, and at last he put the pencil down with a little gasp of satisfaction.

'It's good,' he said in a low, gloating voice. 'It's just as good as can be.'

Thad picked up the notebook and began to read — and, unlike Stark, he read the whole thing. What he was looking for began to show up on the third page of the nine Stark had written.

Machine heard scraping sounds and stiffened, hands tightening on the Heckler & Sparrow, and then understood what they were doing. The guests — some two hundred of them — gathered at the long tables under the huge blue-and-yellow-striped marquee were pushing their folding sparrows back along the boards which had been laid to protect the lawn from the punctuation of the women's high-heeled sparrows. The guests were giving the sparrow cake a fucking standing ovation.

He doesn't know, Thad thought. He's writing the word sparrows over and over again and he doesn't have the slightest . . . fucking . . . idea.

Overhead he heard them moving restlessly back and forth, and the twins had looked up several times before failing asleep, so he knew they had noticed it, too.

Not George, though.

For George, the sparrows did not exist.

Thad went back to the manuscript. The word began to creep in more and more frequently, and by the last paragraph, the whole phrase had begun to show up.

Machine found out later that the sparrows were flying and the only people on his hand-picked string that really were his sparrows were Jack Rangely and Lester Rollick. All the others, sparrows he had flown with for ten years, were all in an it. Sparrows. And they started flying even before Machine shouted into his sparrow-talkie.

'Well?' Stark asked when Thad put the manuscript down.

'What do you think?'

'I think it's fine,' Thad said. 'But you knew that, didn't you?'

'Yes . . . but I wanted to hear you say it, hoss.'

'I also think you're looking much better.'

Which was true. While George had been lost in the fuming, violent world of Alexis Machine, he had begun to heal.

The sores were disappearing. The broken, decaying skin was growing pink again; the edges of this fresh skin were reaching across the healing sores toward each other, in some cases already knitting together. Eyebrows which had disappeared into a soup of rotting flesh were reappearing. The trickles of pus which had turned the collar of Stark's shirt an ugly sodden yellow were drying.

Thad reached up with his left hand and touched the sore which was beginning to erupt on his own left temple, and held the pads of his fingers in front of his eyes for a moment. They were wet. He reached up again and touched his forehead. The skin was smooth. The small white scar, souvenir of the operation which had been performed on him in the year when his real life began, was gone.

One end of the teeter-totter goes up, the other end has to come down. Just another law of nature, baby. Just another law of nature.

Was it dark outside yet? Thad supposed it must be — dark or damned near. He looked at his watch, but there was no help there. It had stopped at quarter of five. The time didn't matter. He would have to do it soon.

Stark smashed a cigarette out in the overflowing ashtray. 'You want to go on or take a break?'

'Why don't you go on?' Thad said. 'I think you can.'

'Yeah,' Stark said. He was not looking at Thad. He had eyes only for the words, the words, the words. He ran a hand through his blonde hair, which was becoming lustrous again. 'I think I can, too. In fact, I know I can.'

He began to scribble again. He looked up briefly when Thad got out of his chair and went to the pencil-sharpener, then looked back down. Thad sharpened one of the Berols to a razor point. And as he turned back, he took the birdcall Rawlie had given him out of his pocket. He closed it in his hand and sat down again, looking at the notebook in front of him.

This was it; this was the time. He knew it as well and as truly as he knew the shape of his own face under his hand. The only question left was whether or not he had the guts to try it.

Part of him did not want to; a part of him still lusted after the book. But he was surprised to find that feeling was not as strong as it had been when Liz and Alan left the study, and he supposed he knew why. A separation was taking place. A kind of obscene birth. It wasn't his book anymore. Alexis Machine was with the person who had owned him from the start.

Still holding the bird-call cupped tightly in his left hand, Thad bent over his own notebook.

I am the bringer, he wrote.

Overhead, the restless shifting of the birds stopped.

I am the knower, he wrote.

The whole world seemed to still, to listen.

I am the owner.

He stopped and glanced at his sleeping children.

Five more words, he thought. Just five more.

And he discovered he wanted to write them more than any words he had ever written in his life.

He wanted to write stories . . . but more than that, more than he wanted the lovely visions that third eye sometimes presented, he wanted to be free.

Five more words.

He raised his left hand to his mouth and gripped the bird-call in his lips like a cigar.

Don't look up now, George. Don't look up, don't look out of the world you're making. Not now. Please, dear God, don't let him look out into the world of real things now.

On the blank sheet in front of him he wrote the word PSYCHOPOMPS in cold capital letters. He circled it. He drew an arrow below it, and below the arrow he wrote: THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING.

Outside, a wind began to blow — only it was no wind; it was the ruffling of millions of feathers. And it was inside Thad's head. Suddenly that third eye opened in his mind, opened wider than it ever had before, and he saw Bergenfield, New Jersey — the empty houses, the empty streets, the mild spring sky. He saw the sparrows everywhere, more than there had ever been before. The world he had grown up in had become a vast aviary.

Only it wasn't Bergenfield.

It was Endsville.

Stark quit writing. His eyes widened with sudden, belated alarm.

Thad drew in a deep breath and blew. The bird-call Rawlie DeLesseps had given him uttered a strange, squealing note.

'Thad? What are you doing? What are you doing?'

Stark snatched for the bird-call. Before he could touch it, there was a bang and it split open in Thad's mouth, cutting his lips. The sound woke the twins. Wendy began to cry.

Outside, the rustle of the sparrows rose to a roar.

They were flying.

3

Liz had started for the stairs when she heard Wendy begin to cry. Alan stood where he was for a moment, transfixed by what he saw outside. The land, the trees, the lake, the sky — they were all blotted out. The sparrows rose in a great wavering curtain, darkening the window from top to bottom and side to side.

As the first small bodies began to thud into the reinforced glass, Alan's paralysis broke.

'Liz!' he screamed. 'Liz, down!'

But she wasn't going to get down; her baby was crying, and that was all she could think about.

Alan sprinted across the room toward her, employing that almost eerie speed which was his own secret, and tackled her just as the entire window-wall blew inward under the weight of twenty thousand sparrows. Twenty thousand more followed them, and twenty thousand more, and twenty thousand more. In a moment the living room was filled with them. They were everywhere.

Alan threw himself on top of Liz and pulled her under the couch. The world was filled with the shrill cheeping of sparrows. Now they could hear the other windows breaking, all the windows. The house rattled with the thuds of tiny suicide bombers. Alan looked out and saw a world that was nothing but brown-black movement.

Smoke-detectors began to go off as birds crashed into them. Somewhere there was a monstrous crash as the TV screen exploded. Clatters as pictures on the walls fell. A series of metallic xylophone bonks as sparrows struck the pots hanging on the wall by the stove and knocked them to the floor.

And still he could hear the babies crying and Liz screaming.

'Let me go! My babies! Let me go! I HAVE TO GET MY BABIES!

She squirmed halfway out from beneath him and her upper body was immediately covered with sparrows. They caught in her hair and fluttered madly there. She beat at them wildly. Alan grabbed her and pulled her back. Through the eddying air of the living room he could see a vast black cord of sparrows flowing up the stairs up toward the office.

4

Stark reached for Thad as the first birds began to thump into the secret door. Beyond the wall, Thad could hear the muffled thud of falling paperweights and the tinkle of breaking glass. Both twins were waiting now. Their cries rose, blended with the maddening cheeping of the sparrows, and the two of them together made a kind of hell's harmony.

'Stop it!' Stark yelled. 'Stop it, Thad! Whatever the hell you're doing, just stop it!'

He snatched for the gun, and Thad buried the pencil he had been holding in Stark's throat.

Blood poured out in a rush. Stark turned toward him, gagging, clawing at the pencil. It bobbed up and down as he tried to swallow. He got one hand around it and pulled it out. 'What are you doing?' he croaked. 'What is it?' He heard the birds now; he did not understand them, but he heard them. His eyes rolled toward the closed door and Thad saw real terror in those eyes for the first time.

'I'm writing the end, George,' Thad said in a low voice neither Liz nor Alan heard downstairs. 'I'm writing the end in the real world.

'All right,' Stark said. 'Let's write it for all of us, then.'

He turned toward the twins with the bloody pencil in one hand and the .45 in the other.

5

There was a folded afghan on the end of the sofa. Alan reached up for it, and what felt like a dozen hot sewing needles jabbed at his hand.

'Damn!' he yelled, and pulled the hand back.

Liz was still trying to squirm out from under him. The monstrous whirring sound seemed to fill the whole universe now, and Alan could no longer hear the babies . . . but Liz Beaumont could. She wriggled and twisted and pulled. Alan fastened his left hand in her collar and felt the fabric rip.

'Wait a minute!' he bellowed at her, but it was useless. There was nothing he could say to stop her while her children were screaming. Annie would have been the same. Alan reached up with his right hand again, ignoring the stabbing beaks this time, and snagged the afghan. It opened in tangled folds as it fell from the couch. From the master bedroom there was a tremendous crash as some piece of furniture — the bureau, perhaps — fell over. Alan's distracted, overburdened mind tried to imagine how many sparrows it would take to tip over a bureau and could not.

How many sparrows does it take to screw in a lightbulb? his mind asked crazily. Three to hold the bulb and three billion to turn the house! He yodeled crazy laughter and then the big hanging globe in the center of the living room exploded like a bomb. Liz screamed and cringed back for a moment, and Alan was able to throw the afghan over her head. He got under it himself. They weren't alone even beneath it; half a dozen sparrows were in there with them. He felt feathery wings flutter against his cheek, felt bright pain tattoo his left temple, and socked himself through the afghan. The sparrow tumbled to his shoulder and fell from beneath the blanket onto the floor.

He yanked Liz against him and shouted into her ear. 'We're going to walk! Walk, Liz! Under this blanket! If you try to run, I'll knock you out! Nod your head if you understand!'

She tried to pull away. The afghan stretched. Sparrows landed briefly, bounced on it as if it were a trampoline, then flew again. Alan pulled her back against him and shook her by the shoulder. Shook her hard.

'Nod if you understand, goddammit!

He felt her hair tickle his cheek as she nodded. They crawled out from beneath the sofa. Alan kept his arm tightly around her shoulders, afraid she would bolt. And slowly they began to move across the swarming room, through the light, maddening clouds of crying birds. They looked like a joke animal in a county fair — a dancing donkey with Mike as the head and Ike as the hindquarters.

The living room of the Beaumont house was spacious, with a high cathedral ceiling, but now there seemed to be no air left. They walked through a yielding, shifting, gluey atmosphere of birds.

Furniture crashed. Birds thudded off walls, ceilings, and appliances. The whole world had become bird-stink and strange percussion.

At last they reached the stairs and began to sway slowly up them beneath the afghan, which was already coated with feathers and birdshit. And as they started to climb, a pistol-shot crashed in the study upstairs.

Now Alan could hear the twins again. They were shrieking.

6

Thad groped on the desk as Stark aimed the gun at William, and came up with the paperweight Stark had been playing with. It was a heavy chunk of gray-black slate, flat on one side. He brought it down on Stark's wrist an instant before the big blonde man fired, breaking the bone and driving the barrel of the gun downward. The crash was deafening in the small room. The bullet ploughed into the floor an inch from William's left foot, kicking splinters onto the legs of his fuzzy blue sleep-suit. The twins began to shriek, and as Thad closed with Stark, he saw them put their arms around each other in a gesture of spontaneous mutual protection.

Hansel and Gretel, he thought, and then Stark drove the pencil into his shoulder.

Thad yelled with pain and shoved Stark away. Stark tripped over the typewriter which had been placed in the corner and fell backward against the wall. He tried to switch the pistol over to his right hand . . . and dropped it.

Now the sound of the birds against the door was a steady thunder and it began to slip slowly open on its central pivot. A sparrow with a crushed wing oozed in and fell, twitching, on the floor.

Stark felt in his back pocket . . . and brought out the straight-razor. He pulled the blade open with his teeth. His eyes sparkled crazily above the steel.

'You want it, hoss?' he asked, and Thad saw the decay falling into his face again, coming all at once like a dropped load of bricks. 'You really do? Okay. You got it.'

7

Halfway up the stairs, Liz and Alan were stopped. They ran into a yielding, suspended wall of birds and simply could make no progress against it. The air fluttered and hummed with sparrows. Liz shrieked in terror and fury.

The birds did not turn on them, did not attack them; they just thwarted them. All the sparrows in the world, it seemed, had been drawn here, to the second story of the Beaumont house in Castle Rock.

'Down!' Alan shouted at her. 'Maybe we can crawl under them!'

They dropped to their knees. Progress was possible at first, although not pleasant; they found themselves crawling over a crunching, bleeding carpet of sparrows at least eighteen inches deep. Then they ran into that wall again. Looking under the hem of the afghan, Alan could see a crowded, confused mass that beggared description. The sparrows on the stair-risers were being crushed. Layers and layers of the living — but soon to be dead — stood on top of them. Farther up — perhaps three feet off the stairs — sparrows flew in a kind of suicide traffic zone, colliding and falling, some rising and flying again, others squirming in the masses of their fallen mates with broken legs or wings. Sparrows, Alan remembered, could not hover.

From somewhere above them, on the other side of this grotesque living barrier, a man screamed.

Liz seized him, pulled him close. 'What can we do? ' she screamed. 'What can we do, Alan?'

He didn't answer her. Because the answer was nothing. There was nothing they could do.

8

Stark came toward Thad with the razor in his right hand. Thad backed toward the slowly moving study door with his eyes on the blade. He snatched up another pencil from the desk.

'That ain't gonna do you no good, hoss, ' Stark said. 'Not now.' Then his eyes shifted to the door. It had opened wide enough, and the sparrows flowed in, a river of them . . . and they flowed at George Stark.

In an instant his expression became one of horror . . . and understanding.

'No!' he screamed, and began to slash at them with Alexis Machine's straight-razor. 'No, I won't! I won't go back! You can't make me!'

He cut one of the sparrows cleanly in half; it fell out of the air in two fluttering pieces. Stark ripped and flailed at the air around him.

And Thad suddenly understood

(I won't go back)

what was happening here.

The psychopomps, of course, had come to serve as George Stark's escort. George Stark's escort back to Endsville; back to the land of the dead.

Thad dropped the pencil and retreated toward his children. The air was filled with sparrows. The door had opened almost all the way now; the river had become a flood.

Sparrows settled on Stark's broad shoulders. They settled on his arms, on his head. Sparrows struck his chest, dozens of them at first, then hundreds. He twisted this way and that in a cloud of falling feathers and flashing, slashing beaks, trying to give back what he was getting.

They covered the straight-razor; its evil silver gleam was gone, buried beneath the feathers that were stuck to it.

Thad looked at his children. They had stopped weeping. They were looking up into the stuffed, boiling air with identical expressions of wonder and delight. Their hands were raised, as if to check for rain. Their tiny fingers were outstretched. Sparrows stood on them . . . and did not peck.

But they were pecking Stark.

Blood burst from his face in a hundred places. One of his blue eyes winked out. A sparrow landed on the collar of his shirt and sent his beak diving into the hole Thad had made with the pencil in Stark's throat — the bird did it three times, fast, rat-tat-tat, like a machine-gun, before Stark's groping hand seized it and crushed it like a piece of living origami.

Thad crouched by the twins and now the birds lit on him as well. Not pecking; just standing.

And watching.

Stark had disappeared. He had become a living, squirming bird-sculpture. Blood oozed through the jostling wings and feathers. From somewhere below, Thad heard a shrieking, splintering sound — wood giving way.

They have broken their way into the kitchen, he thought. He thought briefly of the gas-lines that fed the stove, but the thought was distant, unimportant.

And now he began to hear the loose, wet plop and smack of the living flesh being torn off George Stark's bones.

'They've come for you, George,' he heard himself whisper. 'They've come for you. God help you now.'

9

Alan sensed space above him again, and looked up through the diamond-shaped holes in the afghan. Birdshit dripped onto his cheek and he wiped it away. The stairwell was still full of birds, but their numbers had thinned. Most of those still alive had apparently gotten where they were going.

'Come on,' he said to Liz, and they began to move up over the ghastly carpet of dead birds again. They had managed to gain the second-floor landing when they heard Thad shriek: 'Take him, then! Take him! TAKE HIM BACK TO HELL WHERE HE BELONGS!

And the whirring of the birds became a hurricane.

10

Stark made one last galvanic effort to get away from them. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run, but he tried, anyway. It was his style.

The column of birds which had covered him moved forward with him; gigantic, puffy arms covered with feathers and heads and wings rose, beat themselves across his torso, rose again, and crossed themselves at the chest. Birds, some wounded, some dead, fell to the floor, and for one moment Thad was afforded a vision which would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The sparrows were eating George Stark alive. His eyes were gone; where they had been only vast dark sockets remained. His nose had been reduced to a bleeding flap. His forehead and most of his hair had been struck away, revealing the mucus-bleared surface of his skull. The collar of his shirt still ringed his neck, but the rest was gone. Ribs poked out of his skin in white lumps. The birds had opened his belly. A drove of sparrows sat on his feet and looked up with bright attention and squabbled for his guts as they fell out in dripping, shredded chunks.

And he saw something else.

The sparrows were trying to lift him up. They were trying . . . and very soon, when they had reduced his body-weight enough, they would do just that.

'Take him, then!' he screamed. 'Take him! TAKE HIM BACK TO HELL WHERE HE BELONGS!'

Stark's screams stopped as his throat disintegrated beneath a hundred hammering, dipping beaks. Sparrows clustered under his armpits and for a second his feet rose from the bloody carpet.

He brought his arms — what remained of them — down into his sides in a savage gesture, crushing dozens . . . but dozens upon dozens more came to take their places.

The sound of pecking and splintering wood to Thad's right suddenly grew louder, hollower. He looked in that direction and saw the wood of the study's cast wall disintegrating like tissue-paper. For an instant he saw a thousand yellow beaks burst through at once, and then he grabbed the twins and rolled over them, arching his body to protect them, moving with real grace for perhaps the only time in his life.

The wall crashed inward in a dusty cloud of splinters and sawdust. Thad closed his eyes and hugged his children close to him.

He saw no more.

11

But Alan Pangborn did, and Liz did, too.

They had pulled the afghan down to their shoulders as the cloud of birds over them and around them shredded apart. Liz began to stumble into the guest bedroom, toward the open study door, and Alan followed her.

For a moment he couldn't see into the study; it was only a cloudy brown-black blur. And then he made out a shape — a horrible, padded shape. It was Stark. He was covered with birds, eaten alive, and yet he still lived.

More birds came; more still. Alan thought their horrid shrill cheeping would drive him mad. And then he saw what they were doing.

'Alan!' Liz screamed. 'Alan, they're lifting him!'

The thing which had been —George Stark, a thing which was now only vaguely human, rose into the air on a cushion of sparrows. It moved across the office, almost fell, then rose unsteadily once more. It approached the huge, splinter-ringed hole in the east wall.

More birds flew in through this hole; those which still remained in the guest-room rushed into the study.

Flesh fell from Stark's twitching skeleton in a grisly rain.

The body floated through the hole with sparrows flying around it and tearing out the last of its hair.

Alan and Liz struggled over the rug of dead birds and into the study. Thad was rising slowly to his feet, a weeping twin in each arm. Liz ran to them and took them from him. Her hands flew over them, looking for wounds.

'Okay,' Thad said. 'I think they're okay.'

Alan went to the ragged hole in the study wall. He looked out and saw a scene from some malign fairy-tale. The sky was black with birds, and yet in one place it was ebony, as if a hole had been torn in the fabric of reality.

This black hole bore the unmistakable shape of a struggling man.

The birds lifted it higher, higher, higher. It reached the tops of the trees and seemed to pause there. Alan thought he heard a high-pitched, inhuman scream from the center of that cloud. Then the sparrows began to move again. In a way, watching them was like watching a film run backward. Black streams of sparrows boiled from all the shattered windows in the house; they funnelled upward from the driveway, the trees, and the curved roof of Rawlie's Volkswagen.

They all moved toward that central darkness.

That man-shaped patch began to move again . . . over the trees . . . into the dark sky . . . and there it was lost to view.

Liz was sitting in the corner, the twins in her lap, rocking them, comforting them — but neither of them seemed particularly upset any longer. They were looking cheerily up into her haggard, tear-stained face. Wendy patted it, as if to comfort her mother. William reached up, plucked a feather from her hair, and examined it closely.

'He's gone,' Thad said hoarsely. He had joined Alan at the hole in the study wall.

'Yes,' Alan said. He suddenly burst into tears. He had no idea that was coming; it just happened.

Thad tried to put his arms around him and Alan stepped away, his boots crunching dryly in drifts of dead sparrows.

'No,' he said. 'I'll be all right.'

Thad was looking out through the ragged hole again, into the night. A sparrow came out of that dark and landed on his shoulder.

'Thank you,' Thad said to it. 'Th — '

The sparrow pecked him, suddenly and viciously, bringing blood just below his eye.

Then it flew away to join its mates.

'Why?' Liz asked. She was looking at Thad in shocked wonder. 'Why did it do that?'

Thad did not respond, but he thought he knew the answer. He thought Rawlie DeLesseps would have known, too. What had just happened was magical enough . . . but it had been no fairy-tale. Perhaps the last sparrow had been moved by some force which felt Thad needed to be reminded of that. Forcibly reminded.

Be careful, Thaddeus — no man controls the agents of the afterlife. Not for long — and there is always a price.

What price will I have to pay? he wondered coldly. Then: And the bill . . . when does it come due?

But that was a question for another time, another day. And there was this — perhaps the bill had been paid.

Perhaps he was finally even.

'Is he dead?' Liz was asking . . . almost begging.

'Yes,' Thad said. 'He's dead, Liz. Third time's the charm. The book is closed on George Stark. Come on, you guys — let's get out of here.

And that was what they did.

EPILOGUE

Henry did not kiss Ma Lou that day, but he did not leave her without a word, either, as he could have done. He saw her, he endured her anger, and waited for it to subside into that blockaded silence he knew so well. He had come to recognize that most of these sorrows were hers, and not to be shared or even discussed. Mary Lou had always danced best when she danced alone.

At last they walked through the field and looked once more at the play-house where Evelyn had died three years ago. It was not much of a goodbye, but it was the best they could do. Henry felt it was good enough.

He put Evelyn's little paper ballerinas in the high grass by the ruined stoop, knowing the wind would carry them off soon enough. Then he and Mary Lou left the old place together for the last time. It wasn't good, but it was all right. Right enough. He was not a man who believed in happy endings. What little serenity he knew came chiefly from that.

— The Sudden Dancers by Thaddeus Beaumont

People's dreams — their real dreams, as opposed to those hallucinations of sleep, which come or not, just as they will — end at different times. Thad Beaumont's dream of George Stark ended at quarter past nine on the night the psychopomps carried his dark half away to whatever place it was that had been appointed to him. It ended with the black Toronado, that tarantula in which he and George had always arrived at this house in his recurrent nightmare.

Liz and the twins were at the top of the driveway, where it merged with Lake Lane. Thad and Alan stood by George Stark's black car, which was no longer black. Now it was gray with bird droppings.

Alan didn't want to look at the house, but he could not take his eyes from it. It was a splintered ruin. The east side — the study side — had taken the brunt of the punishment, but the entire house was a wreck. Huge holes gaped everywhere. The railing hung from the deck on the lake side like a jointed wooden ladder. There were huge drifts of dead birds in a circle around the building. They were caught in the folds of the roof; they stuffed the gutters. The moon had come up and it sent back silverish tinkles of light from sprays of broken glass. Sparks of that same elf-light dwelt deep in the glazing eyes of the dead sparrows.

'You're sure this is okay with you?' Thad asked.

Alan nodded.

'I ask, because it's destroying evidence.'

Alan laughed harshly. 'Would anyone believe what it's evidence of'?'

'I suppose not.' He paused and then said, 'You know, there was a time when I felt that you sort of liked me. I don't feel that anymore. Not at all. I don't understand it. Do you hold me responsible for . . . all this?'

'I don't give a fuck,' Alan said. 'It's over. That's all I give a fuck about, Mr Beaumont. Right now that's the only thing in the whole world I give a fuck about.'

He saw the hurt on Thad's tired, harrowed face and made a great effort.

'Look, Thad. It's too much. Too much all at once. I just saw a man carried off into the sky by a bunch of sparrows. Give me a break, okay?'

Thad nodded. 'I understand.'

No you don't, Alan thought. You don't understand what you are, and I doubt that you ever will. Your wife might . . . although I wonder if things will ever be right between the two of you after this, if she'll ever want to understand, or dare to love you again. Your kids, maybe, someday. . . but not you, Thad. Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of. The monster is gone now, but you still don't like to be too close to where it came from. Because there might be another. Probably not; your mind knows that, but your emotions — they play a different tune, don't they? Oh boy. And even if the cave is empty forever, there are the dreams. And the memories. There's Homer Gamache, for instance, beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. Because of you, Thad. All because of you.

That wasn't fair, and part of Alan knew it. Thad hadn't asked to be a twin; he hadn't destroyed his twin brother in the womb out of malice (We are not talking about Cain rising up and slaying Abel with a rock, Dr Pritchard had said); he had not known what sort of monster was waiting when he began writing as George Stark.

Still, they had been twins.

And he could not forget the way Stark and Thad had laughed together.

That crazy, loony laughter and the look in their eyes.

He wondered if Liz would be able to forget.

A little breeze gusted and blew the nasty smell of LP gas toward him.

'Let's burn it,' he said abruptly. 'Let's burn it all. I don't care who thinks what later on. There's hardly any wind; the fire trucks will get here before it spreads much in any direction. If it takes some of the woods around this place, so much the better.'

'I'll do it,' Thad said. 'You go on up with Liz. Help with the twi — '

'We'll do it together,' Alan said. 'Give me your socks.'

'What?'

'You heard me — I want your socks.'

Alan opened the door of the Toronado and looked inside. Yes a standard shift, as he'd thought. A macho man like George Stark would never be satisfied with an automatic; that was for married Walter Mitty types like Thad Beaumont.

Leaving the door open, he stood on one foot and took off his right shoe and sock. Thad watched him and began to do the same. Alan put his shoe back on and repeated the process with his left foot. He had no intention of putting his bare feet down in that mass of dead birds, even for a moment.

When he was done, he knotted the two cotton socks together. Then he took Thad's and added them to his own. He walked around to the passenger-side rear, dead sparrows crunching under his shoes like newspaper, and opened the Toronado's fuel port. He spun off the gas cap and stuck the makeshift fuse into the throat of the tank. When he pulled it out again, it was soaked. He reversed it, sticking in the dry end, leaving the wet end hanging against the guano-splattered flank of the car. Then he turned to Thad, who had followed him. Alan fumbled in the pocket of his uniform shirt and brought out a book of paper matches. It was the sort of matchbook they give you at newsstands with your cigarettes. He didn't know where he had gotten this one, but there was a stamp-collecting ad on the cover.

The stamp shown was a picture of a bird.

'Light the socks when the car starts to roll,' Alan said. 'Not a moment before, do you understand?'

'Yes.'

'It'll go with a bang. The house will catch. Then the LP tanks around back. When the fire inspectors get here, it's going to look like your friend lost control and hit the house and the car exploded. At least that's what I hope.'

'Okay.'

Alan walked back around the car.

'What's going on down there?' Liz called nervously. 'The babies are getting cold!'

'Just another minute!' Thad called back.

Alan reached into the Toronado's unpleasantly smelly interior and popped the emergency brake. 'Wait until it's rolling,' he called back over his shoulder.

'Yes.'

Alan depressed the clutch with his foot and put the Hurst shifter into neutral.

The Toronado began to roll at once.

He drew back and for a moment he thought Thad hadn't managed his end . . . and then the fuse blazed alight against the rear of the car in a bright line of flame.

The Toronado rolled slowly down the last fifteen feet of driveway, bumped over the little asphalt curb there, and coasted tiredly onto the small back porch. It thumped into the side of the house and stopped. Alan could read the bumper sticker clearly in the orange light of the fuse: HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH.

'Not anymore,' he muttered.

'What?'

'Never mind. Get back. The car's going to blow.'

They had retreated ten paces when the Toronado turned into a fireball. Flames shot up the pecked and splintered east side of the house, turning the hole in the study wall into a staring black eyeball.

'Come on,' Alan said. 'Let's get to my cruiser. Now that we've done it, we've got to turn in the alarm. No need for everybody on the lake to lose their places over this.'

But Thad lingered a moment longer and Alan lingered with him. The house was dry wood beneath cedar shingles, and it was catching fast. The flames boiled into the hole where Thad's study was, and as they watched, sheets of paper were caught in the draft the fire had created and were pulled outward and upward. In the brightness, Alan could see that they were covered with words written in longhand. The sheets of paper crinkled, caught fire, charred, and turned black. They flew upward into the night above the flames like a swirling squadron of dark birds.

Once they were above the draft, Alan thought that more normal breezes would catch them. Catch them and carry them away, perhaps even to the ends of the earth.

Good, he thought, and began to walk up the driveway toward Liz and the babies with his head down.

Behind him, Thad Beaumont slowly raised his hands and placed them over his face.

He stood there like that for a long time.

November 3, 1987 - March 16, 1989

AFTERWORD

The name Alexis Machine is not original to me. Readers of Dead City, by Shane Stevens, will recognize it as the name of the fictional hoodlum boss in that novel. The name so perfectly summed up the character of George Stark and his own fictional crime boss that I adopted it for the work you have just read . . . but I also did it as an hommage to Mr Stevens, whose other novels include Rat Pack, By Reason of Insanity, and The Anvil Chorus. These works, where the so-called 'criminal mind' and a condition of irredeemable psychosis interweave to create their own closed system of perfect evil, are three of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream. They are, in their own way, as striking as Frank Norris's McTeague or Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. I recommend them unreservedly . . . but only readers with strong stomachs and stronger nerves need apply.

S.K.