The Dark Half(118)

'Thank you, Rawlie.'

Rawlie waved a hand and gave Thad a sly and slanted little smile. 'Maybe I'm the one who should thank you,' he said. 'I've been looking for an excuse to stoke up the old stinker again for the last ten months. Things would come along from time to time - my youngest son's divorce, the night I lost fifty bucks playing poker at Tom Carroll's house - but nothing seemed quite . . . apocalyptic enough.'.'This is apocalyptic, all right,' Thad said, and shivered a little. He looked at his watch. It was

pushing one o'clock. Stark had at least an hour on him, maybe more. 'I have to be going, Rawlie.'

'Yes - it's urgent, isn't it?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'I have one other thing - I stuck it in my coat pocket so I wouldn't lose it. This didn't come from the five-and-ten. I found it in my desk.'

Rawlie began to rummage methodically through the pockets of the old checked sport-coat he wore winter and summer.

'If the oil light comes on, swing in someplace and get a jug of Sapphire,' he said, still hunting.

'That's the recycled stuff. Oh! Here it is! I was starting to think I'd left it back at the office after all.'

He took a tubular piece of peeled wood from his pocket. It was about as long as Thad's forefinger and hollow. A notch had been cut in one end. It looked old.

'What is it?' Thad asked, taking it when Rawlie held it out. But he already knew, and he felt another block of whatever unthinkable thing it was that he was building slide into place.

'It's a bird-call,' Rawlie said, studying him from above the shimmering bowl of his pipe. 'If you think you can use it, I want you to take it.'

'Thank you,' Thad said, and put the bird-call into his breast pocket with a hand which was not quite steady. 'It might come in handy.'

Rawlie's eyes widened beneath the tangled hedge of his brows. He took the pipe from his mouth.

'I'm not sure you'll need it,' he said in a low, unsteady voice.

'What?'

'Look behind you.'

Thad turned, knowing what Rawlie had seen even before he saw it himself. There were not hundreds of sparrows now, or thousands; the dead cars and trucks stacked on the back ten acres of Gold's junkyard and Auto Supply were carpeted with sparrows. They were everywhere . . . and Thad had not heard a single one of them come.

The two men looked at the birds with four eyes. The birds looked back with twenty thousand . .

. or perhaps forty thousand. They did not make a sound. They only sat on hoods, windows, roofs, exhaust-pipes, grilles, engine blocks, universal joints, and frames.

'Jesus Christ,' Rawlie said hoarsely. 'The psychopomps . . . what does it mean, Thad? What does it mean?'

'I think I'm just starting to know,' Thad said.

'My God,' Rawlie said. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them loudly. The sparrows did not move. And they had no interest in Rawlie; it was only Thad Beaumont they were looking at.

'Find George Stark,' Thad said in a quiet voice - really not much more than a whisper. 'George Stark. Find him. Fly!'

The sparrows rose into the hazy blue sky in a black cloud, wings whirring with a sound that was like thunder turned to thinnest lace, throats cheeping. Two men who had been standing just inside the doorway of the retail parts shop ran out to look. Overhead, the single black mass banked and turned, as the other, smaller, flock had done, and headed west. Thad looked up at them, and for a moment this reality merged with the vision which marked the onset of his trances; for a moment past and present were one, entwined in some strange and gorgeous pigtail..The sparrows were gone.

'Christ Almighty!' a man in a gray mechanic's coverall was bellowing. 'Did you see those birds?

Where'd all those f**king birds come from?'

'I have a better question,' Rawlie said, looking at Thad. He was in control of himself again, but it was clear he had been badly shaken. 'Where are they going? You know, don't you, Thad?'

'Yes, of course,' Thad muttered, opening the VW's door. 'I have to go, too, Rawlie - I really have to. I can't thank you enough.'

'Be careful, Thaddeus. Be very careful. No man controls the agents of the afterlife. Not for long

- and there is always a price.'

'I'll be as careful as I can.'

The VW's stick-shift protested, but finally gave up and went into gear. Thad paused long enough to put on the dark glasses and the baseball cap, then raised his hand to Rawlie and pulled out.

As he turned onto Route 2, he saw Rawlie trudging toward the same pay telephone he had used himself, and Thad thought: Now I've GOT to keep Stark out. Because now I have a secret. I may not be able to control the psychopomps, but for a little while at least I own them - or they own me

- and he must not know that.

He found second gear, and Rawlie DeLesseps's Volkswagen began to shudder itself into the largely unexplored realms of speed above thirty-five miles an hour..

Chapter Twenty-three

Two Calls for Sheriff Pangborn

1

The first of the two calls which sent Alan Pangborn back into the heart of the thing came just after three o'clock, while Thad was pouring three quarts of Sapphire Motor Oil into Rawlie's thirsty Volkswagen at an Augusta service station. Alan himself was on his way to Nan's for a cup of coffee.