The Dark Half(142)

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..

Chapter 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 semi-automatic 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.