"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 bad 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 staffed, boiling air with identical expressions of wonder and delight. Their hands were raised, as if to cheek 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," be 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. . .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 east 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 Li
z 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 Mary 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're 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 h
eard 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.