The Dark Half(143)

'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 f**king 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 . . . f**king . . . 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.