The Dark Half(145)

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 waiting 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 closed 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 to turn the house! He yodeled crazy laughter and then the big hanging globe in 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 head. 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 closed 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 his 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.'.