The Dark Half(89)

I wonder if I could tap into his WAKING thoughts . . . his conscious thoughts?

He thought the answer was yes . . . but he also thought it would render him vulnerable again. And next time it might not be a pencil in the hand. Next time it might be a letter-opener in the neck.

He can't. He needs me.

Yeah, but he's crazy. Crazy people are not always hip to their own best interests..He looked at the pantry door and thought about how he could go in there . . . and from there outside again, on the other side of the house.

Could I make him do something The way he made me do something?

He could not answer that one. At least not yet. And one failed experiment might kill him. Thad finished his milk, rinsed his glass, and put it into the dish drainer. Then he went into. the pantry. Here, between shelves of canned goods on the right and shelves of paper goods on the left, was a Dutch door leading out to the wide expanse of lawn which they called the back yard. He unlocked the door, pushed both halves open, and saw the picnic table and the barbecue out there, standing silent sentinel. He stepped out onto the asphalt walk which ran around this side of the house and finally joined the main walk in front.

The walk glimmered like black glass in the chancy light of the half-moon. He could see white splotches on it at irregular intervals.

Sparrow-shit, not to put too fine a point on it, he thought. Thad walked slowly up the asphalt path until he was standing directly below his study windows. An Orinco truck came over the horizon and pelted down Route 15 toward the house, casting a momentary bright light across the lawn and the asphalt walk. In this brief light, Thad saw the corpses of two sparrows lying on the walk - tiny heaps of feathers with trifurcate feet sticking out of them. Then the truck was gone. In the moonlight, the bodies of the dead birds became irregular patches of shadow once again - no more than that. They were real, he thought again. The sparrows were real. That blind, revolted horror returned, making him feel somehow unclean. He tried to make his hands into fists, and his left responded with a wounded bellow. What little relief he had gotten from the Percodan was already passing. They were here. They were real. How can that be?

He didn't know.

Did I call them, or did I create them out of thin air?

He didn't know that, either. But he felt sure of one thing: the sparrows which had come tonight, the real sparrows which had come just before the trance had swallowed him, were only a fraction of all possible sparrows. Perhaps only a microscopic fraction. Never again, he thought. Please - never again.

But he suspected that what he wanted did not matter. That was the real horror; he had touched some terrible paranormal talent in himself, but he could not control it. The very idea of control in this matter was a joke.

And he believed that before this was over, they would be back. Thad shuddered and went back to the house. He slipped into his own pantry like a burglar, then locked the door behind him and took his throbbing hand up to bed. Before he went, he swallowed another Percodan, washing it down with water from the kitchen tap. Liz did not wake when he lay down beside her. Some time later he escaped into three hours of grainy, fitful sleep in which nightmares flew and circled around him, always just out of reach..

Chapter Ninteen

Stark Makes a Purchase

1

Waking up wasn't like waking up.

When you came right down to it, he didn't think he had ever really been awake or asleep, at least in the way normal people used those words. In a way it was as if he were always asleep, and only moved from one dream to another. In that way, his life - what little of it he remembered - was like a nest of Chinese boxes that never ended, or like peering into an endless hall of mirrors.

This dream was a nightmare.

He came slowly out of sleep knowing he hadn't really been asleep at all. Somehow Thad Beaumont had managed to capture him for a little while; had managed to bend him to his will for a little while. Had he said things, revealed things, while Beaumont had been in control of him? He had a feeling he might have done . . . but he also felt quite sure Beaumont would not know how to interpret those things, or how to tell the important things he might have said from the things that didn't matter.

He also came out of sleep to pain.

He had rented a two-room 'efficiency' in the East Village, just off Avenue B. When he opened his eyes he was sitting at the lopsided kitchen table with an open notebook in front of him. A rivulet of bright blood ran across the faded oilcloth which covered the table, and there was nothing very surprising about that, because there was a Bic pen sticking out of the back of his right hand. Now the dream began to come back.

That was how he had been able to drive Beaumont out of his mind, the only way he had been able to break the bond the cowardly shit had somehow forged between them. Cowardly? Yes. But he was also sly, and it would be a bad idea to forget that. A very bad idea, indeed. Stark could vaguely remember dreaming that Thad was with him, in his bed - they were talking together, whispering together, and at first this had seemed both pleasant and oddly comforting - like talking with your brother after lights out. Except they were doing more than talking, weren't they?

What they had been doing was exchanging secrets . . . or, rather, Thad was asking him questions and Stark found himself answering. It was pleasant to answer, it was comforting to answer. But it was also alarming. At first his alarm was centered on the birds - why did Thad keep asking him about birds? There were no birds. Once, perhaps . . . a long, long time ago . . . but not anymore. It was just a mind-game, a puny effort to freak him out. Then, little by little, his sense of alarm became entwined with his almost exquisitely attuned survival instinct - it grew sharper and more specific as he continued trying to struggle awake. He felt as if he were being held underwater, drowned . . .