He wrote for nearly forty minutes, picking up speed as be 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.
Thad 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 semiautomatics, 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 Mall 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 bell 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 falling 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, were all in on it. Sparrows. And they started flying even before Machine shouted into his sparrow-talkie.
"Well?" Stark asked when Thad put his 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. Th e 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 bird-call 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, be wrote.
The whole world seemed to still, to list
en.
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 wailing 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 dosed 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 turn the house! He yodeled crazy laughter and then the big hanging globe ill 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 bead. 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 dosed 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 hit 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.