The Dark Half (51 page)

Thad believed him, too. That was the hell of it. And that was the reason he couldn't just stop and ask for help. If he tried anything funny, Stark would know. He didn't think Stark could read his thoughts, at least not the way aliens read thoughts in comic books and science fiction movies, but he
could
“tune in” on Thad . . . could get a very good idea of what he was up to. He might be able to prepare a little surprise for George—if he was able to clarify his idea about the goddam birds, that was—but for now he intended to play it by the script.

If he could, that was.

Here was the school intersection and the four-way stop. It was far too busy, as always; for years there had been fender-benders at this intersection, mostly caused by people who simply couldn't grok the idea of a fourway stop where everybody took turns, and just went bashing through instead. A spate of letters, most of them written by worried parents, demanding that the town put in a stop-light at the intersection, followed each accident, and a statement from the Veazie selectmen saying a stop-light was “under consideration” would follow
that
. . . and then the issue would simply go to sleep until the next fender-bender.

Thad joined the line of cars waiting to cross southbound, checked to make sure the brown Plymouth was still two cars back, then watched the your-turn-to-curtsey- my-turn-to-bow action at the intersection. He saw a car filled with blue-haired ladies almost crash into a young couple in a Datsun Z, saw the girl in the Z shoot the blue-haired ladies the bird, and saw that he himself would cross north-south just before a long Grant's Dairy tanker crossed east-west. That was an unexpected break.

The car in front of him crossed, and Thad was up. The hot wire poked into his belly again. He checked the rearview mirror a final time. Harrison and Manchester were still two cars back.

A pair of cars criss-crossed in front of him. On his left, the milk-tanker moved into position. Thad took a deep breath and rolled the Suburban sedately through the intersection. A pick-up truck, northbound toward Orono, passed him in the other lane.

On the far side, he was gripped by an almost irresistible urge—a
need
—to tromp the pedal to the metal and blast the Suburban up the road. Instead, be went rolling along at a calm and perfectly school-zone-legal fifteen miles an hour, eyes glued to the rearview mirror. The Plymouth was still waiting in line to cross, two cars back.

Hey, milk-truck!
he thought, concentrating, really bearing down, as if he could make it come by simple force of will . . . as he made people and things come and go in a novel by force of will.
Milk-truck, come now!

And it
did
come, rolling across the intersection in slow, silver dignity, like a mechanized dowager.

The moment it blotted out the dark brown Plymouth in his rearview mirror, Thad did floor the Suburban's gas pedal.

There was a right turn half a block up. Thad took it and roared up a short street at forty, praying no little kid would pick this instant to chase his rubber ball out into the road.

He had a nasty moment when it seemed the street must be a dead end, then saw he could make another right after all—the cross-street had been partially blocked by the high line of hedge which belonged to the house on the corner.

He made a California stop at the T-junction, then swerved right with the tires wailing softly. A hundred and eighty yards farther up, he made another right and scooted the Suburban back down to this street's intersection with Route 2. He had worked his way back to the main road about a quarter of a mile north of the fourway stop. If the milk-truck had blocked his right turn from view, as he hoped, the brown Plymouth was still beading south along 2. They might not even know anything was wrong yet . . . although Thad seriously doubted that Harrison was that dumb. Manchester maybe, but not Harrison.

He cut a left, scooting into a break in traffic so narrow that the driver of a Ford in the southbound lane had to hit his brakes. The Ford's driver shook his fist at Thad as Thad cut across his bows and headed back down toward Gold's Junkyard, the pedal again stamped to the floor. If a roving cop happened to observe him not just breaking the speed limit but apparently trying to disintegrate it, that was just too bad. He couldn't afford to linger. He had to get this vehicle, which was just too big and too bright, off the road as fast as he could.

It was half a mile back to the automobile junkyard. Thad drove most of it with his eyes on the rearview mirror, looking for the Plymouth. It was still nowhere to be seen when he turned left into Gold's.

He rolled the Suburban slowly through an open gate in the chainlink fence. A sign, faded red letters on a dirty white background, read EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THE POINT! On a weekday he would have been spotted almost at once, and turned back. But it was Saturday, and now well into the lunch-hour to boot.

Thad drove down an aisle lined with wrecked cars stacked up two and sometimes three deep. The ones on the bottom had lost their essential shapes and seemed to be melting slowly into the ground. The earth was so black with oil you would have believed nothing could grow there, but rank green weeds and huge, silently nodding sunflowers sprouted in cheesy clusters, like survivors of a nuclear holocaust. One large sunflower had grown up through the broken windshield of a bakery truck lying on its back like a dead dog. Its hairy green stem had curled like a knotted fist around the stump of a wheel, and a second fist dung to the hood ornament of the old Cadillac which lay on top of the truck. It seemed to stare at Thad like the black-and-yellow eye of a dead monster.

It was a large and silent Detroit necropolis, and it gave Thad the creeps.

He made a right turn, then a left. Suddenly he could see sparrows everywhere, perched on roofs and trunks and greasy amputated engines. He saw a trio of the small birds bathing in a hubcap filled with water. They did not fly away as he approached but stopped what they were doing and watched him with their beady black eyes. Sparrows lined the top of a windshield which leaned against the side of an old Plymouth. He passed within three feet of them. They fluttered their wings nervously but held their positions as he passed.

The harbingers of the living dead,
Thad thought. His hand went to the small white scar on his forehead and began to rub it nervously.

Looking through what appeared to be a meteor-hole in the windshield of a Datsun as he passed it, he observed a wide splash of dried blood on the dashboard.

It wasn't a meteor that made that hole,
he thought, and his stomach turned over slowly and giddily.

A congregation of sparrows sat on the Datsun's front seat.

“What do you want with me?” he asked hoarsely. “What in God's name do you want?”

And in his mind he seemed to hear an answer of sorts; in his mind he seemed to hear the shrill single voice of their avian intelligence:
No, Thad—what do YOU want with us? You are the owner. You are the bringer. You are the knower.

“I don't know jack shit,” he muttered.

At the end of this row, space was available in front of a late-model Cutlass Supreme—someone had amputated its entire front end. He backed the Suburban in and got out. Looking from one side of the narrow aisle to the other, Thad felt a little bit like a rat in a maze. The place smelled of oil and the higher, sourer odor of transmission fluid. There were no sounds but the faraway drone of cars on Route 2.

The sparrows looked at him from everywhere—a silent convocation of small brown-black birds.

Then, abruptly, they took wing all at once—hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand. For a moment the air was harsh with the sound of their wings. They flocked across the sky, then banked west—in the direction where Castle Rock lay. And abruptly he began to feel that crawling sensation again . . . not so much on his skin as
inside
it.

Under his breath he began to sing a Bob Dylan song: “John Wesley Harding . . . was a friend to the poor . . . he travelled with a gun in every hand . . . ”

That crawling, itching sensation seemed to increase. It found and centered upon the hole in his left hand. He could have been completely wrong, engaging in wishful thinking and no more, but Thad seemed to sense anger . . . and frustration.

“All along the telegraph . . . his name it did resound . . .” Thad sang under his breath. Ahead, lying on the oily ground like the twisted remnant of some steel statue no one had ever really wanted to look at in the first place, was a rusty motor-mount. Thad picked it up and walked back to the Suburban, still singing snatches of “John Wesley Harding” under his breath and remembering his old raccoon buddy of the same name. If he could camouflage the Suburban by beating on it a little, if he could give himself even an extra two hours, it could mean the difference between life and death to Liz and the twins.

“All along the countryside . . . sorry, big guy, this hurts me more than it does you . . . he opened many a door . . .” He threw the motor-mount at the driver's side of the Suburban, bashing a dent as deep as a washbasin in it. He picked up the motor-mount again, walked around to the front of the Suburban, and pegged it at the grille hard enough to strain his shoulder. Plastic splintered and flew. Thad unlatched the hood and raised it a little, giving the Suburban the dead-alligator smile which seemed to be the Gold's version of automotive
haute couture.

“. . . but he was never known to hurt an honest man . . . ”

He picked up the motor-mount again, observing as he did so that fresh blood had begun to stain the bandage on his wounded hand. Nothing he could do about it now.

“ . . . with his lady by his side, he took a stand . . .” He threw the mount a final time, sending it through the windshield with a heavy crunch, which—absurd as it might be-pained his heart.

He thought the Suburban now looked enough like the other wrecks to pass muster.

Thad started walking up the row. He turned right at the first intersection, heading back toward the gate and the retail parts shop beyond it. He had seen a pay telephone on the wall by the door when he drove in. Halfway there he stopped walking and stopped singing. He cocked his head. He looked like a man straining to catch some small sound. What he was really doing was listening to his body, auditing it.

The crawling itch had disappeared.

The sparrows were gone, and so was George Stark, at least for the time being.

Smiling a little, Thad began to walk faster.

After two rings, Thad began to sweat. If Rawlie was still there, he should have picked up his phone by now. The faculty offices in the English-Math Building were just not that big. Who else could he call? Who the hell else was there? He could think of no one.

Halfway through the third ring, Rawlie picked up his phone. “Hello, DeLesseps. ”

Thad closed his eyes at the sound of that smoke-roughened voice and leaned against the cool metal side of the parts shop for a moment.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Rawlie. It's Thad. ”

“Hello, Thad.” Rawlie did not seem terribly surprised to hear from him. “Forget something?”

“No. Rawlie, I'm in trouble. ”

“Yes.” Just that, and not a question. Rawlie spoke the word and then just waited.

“You know those two”—Thad hesitated for a moment—“those two fellows who were with me?”

“Yes,” Rawlie said calmly. “The police escort. ”

“I ditched them,” Thad said, then took a quick glance over his shoulder at the sound of a car rumbling onto the packed dirt which served as Gold's customer parking area. For a moment he was so sure it was the brown Plymouth that he actually
saw
it . . . but it was some sort of foreign car, what he had taken at first for brown was a deep red dulled by road-dust, and the driver was just turning around. “At least I
hope
I've ditched them.” He paused. He had come to the place where the only choice was to jump or not to jump, and he had no time to delay the decision. When you came right down to it, there really wasn't any decision, either, because he had no choice. “I need help, Rawlie. I need a car they don't know. ”

Rawlie was silent.

“You said if there was anything you could do for me, I should ask. ”

“I'm aware of what I said,” Rawlie replied mildly. “I also recall saying that if those two men were following you around in a protective capacity, you might be wise to give them as much help as you could.” He paused. “I think I can infer you chose not to take my advice. ”

Thad came very dose to saying,
I couldn't, Rawlie. The man who has my wife and our babies would only kill them, too.
It wasn't that he didn't dare tell Rawlie what was going on, that Rawlie would think he was crazy if he did; college and university professors have much more flexible views on the subject of craziness than most other people, and sometimes they have no view of it at all, preferring to think of people as either dull (but sane), rather eccentric (but sane), or
very
eccentric (but still quite sane, old boy). He kept his mouth shut because Rawlie DeLesseps was one of those men so inner-directed that Thad could probably say nothing at all which would persuade him . . . and anything which came out of his mouth might only damage his case. But, inner-directed or not, the grammarian had a good heart . . . he was brave, in his way . . . and Thad believed Rawlie was more than a little interested in what was going on with Thad, his police escort, and his odd interest in sparrows. In the end he simply believed—or only hoped—that it was in his best interest to keep quiet.