The Dark Half (52 page)

Still, it was hard to wait.

“All right,” Rawlie said at last. “I'll loan you my car, Thad. ”

Thad closed his eyes and had to stiffen his knees to keep them from buckling. He wiped his neck under his chin and his hand came away wet with sweat.

“But I hope you'll have the decency to stand good for any repairs if it comes back . . . wounded,” Rawlie said. “If you're a fugitive from justice, I doubt very much if my insurance company will pay. ”

A fugitive from justice? Because he had slipped out from under the gaze of the cops who couldn't possibly protect him? He didn't know if that made him a fugitive from justice or not. It was an interesting question, one he would have to consider at a later date. A later date when he wasn't half out of his mind with worry and fear.

“You know I would. ”

“I have one other condition,” Rawlie said.

Thad closed his eyes again. This time in frustration. “What's that?”

“I want to know all about this when it's over,” Rawlie said. “I want to know why you were really so interested in the folk meanings of sparrows, and why you turned white when I told you what psychopomps were and what it is they are supposed to do. ”

“Did I turn white?”

“As a sheet. ”

“I'll tell you the whole story,” Thad promised. He grinned a little. “You may even believe some of it. ”

“Where are you?” Rawlie asked.

Thad told him. And asked him to come as quickly as he could.

He hung up the telephone, walked back through the gate in the chain-link fence, and sat down on the wide bumper of a schoolbus which had, for some reason, been chopped in half. It was a good place to wait, if waiting was what you had to do. He was hidden from the road, but he could see the dirt parking area of the parts department simply by leaning forward. He looked around for sparrows and didn't see a one—only a large, fat crow picking listlessly at shiny bits of chrome in one of the aisles running between the junked cars. The thought that he had finished his second conversation with George Stark only a little over half an hour ago made him feel mildly unreal. It seemed that hours had passed since then. In spite of the steady pitch of anxiety to which he was tuned, he felt sleepy, as if it were bedtime.

That itching, crawling sensation began to invade him again about fifteen minutes after his conversation with Rawlie. He sang those snatches of “John Wesley Harding” he still remembered, and after a minute or two the feeling passed.

Maybe it's psychosomatic,
he thought, but he knew that was bullshit. The feeling was George trying to punch a keyhole into his mind, and as Thad grew more aware of it he became more sensitive to it. He supposed it would work the other way, too. And he supposed that, sooner or later, he might have to try to
make
it work the other way . . . but that meant trying to call the birds, and that wasn't a thing he was looking forward to. And there was something else, too—the last time he'd succeeded at peeking in on George Stark, he'd wound up with a pencil sticking out of his left hand.

The minutes crawled by with exquisite slowness. After twenty-five of them, Thad began to be afraid Rawlie had changed his mind and wasn't coming. He left the bumper of the dismembered bus and stood in the gateway between the automobile graveyard and the parking area, heedless of who might see him from the road. He began to wonder if he dared try hitchhiking

He decided to try Rawlie's office again instead and was halfway to the pre-fab parts building when a dusty Volkswagen beetle pulled into the lot. He recognized it at once and broke into a run, thinking with some amusement about Rawlie's insurance concerns. It looked to Thad as if he could total the VW and pay for the damage with a case of returnable soda bottles.

Rawlie pulled up beside the end of the parts building and got out. Thad was a little surprised to see that his pipe was lit, and giving off great clouds of what would have been
extremely
offensive smoke in a closed room.

“You're not supposed to smoke, Rawlie,” was the first thing he could think of to say.

“You're not supposed to run,” Rawlie returned gravely.

They looked at each other for a moment and then burst into surprised laughter.

“How will you get home?” Thad asked. Now that it had come down to this—just jumping into Rawlie's little car and following the long and winding road down to Castle Rock—he seemed to have nothing left in his store of conversation but
non sequiturs.

“Call a cab, I imagine,” Rawlie said. He eyed the glittering hills and valleys of junked cars. “I'd guess they must come out here quite frequently to pick up fellows who are rejoining the Great Unhorsed. ”

“Let me give you five dollars—”

Thad pulled his wallet from his back pocket, but Rawlie waved him away. “I'm loaded, for an English teacher in the summertime,” he said. “Why, I must have more than forty dollars. It's a wonder Billie lets me walk around without a Brinks guard.” He puffed at his pipe with great pleasure, removed it from his mouth, and smiled at Thad. “But I'll get a receipt from the cab-driver and present it to you at the proper moment, Thad, never fear. ”

“I'd started to think that maybe you weren't going to come. ”

“I stopped at the five-and-ten,” Rawlie said. “Picked up a couple of things I thought you might like to have, Thaddeus.” He leaned back into the beetle (which sagged quite noticeably to the left on a spring which was either broken or would be soon) and, after some time spent rummaging, muttering, and puffing out fresh clouds of smog, brought out a paper bag. He handed the bag to Thad, who looked in and saw a pair of sunglasses and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap which would cover his hair quite nicely. He looked up at Rawlie, absurdly touched.

“Thank you, Rawlie. ”

Rawlie waved a hand and gave Thad a sly and slanted little smile. “Maybe I'm the one who should thank
you, ”
he said. “I've been looking for an excuse to stoke up the old stinker for the last ten months. Things would come along from time to time—my youngest son's divorce, the night I lost fifty bucks playing poker at Tom Carroll's house—but nothing seemed quite . . . apocalyptic enough. ”

“This is apocalyptic, all right,” Thad said, and shivered a little. He looked at his watch. It was pushing one o'clock. Stark had at least an hour on him, maybe more. “I have to be going, Rawlie. ”

“Yes—it's urgent, isn't it?”

“I'm afraid so. ”

“I have one other thing—I stuck it in my coat pocket so I wouldn't lose it. This didn't come from the five-and-ten. I found it in my desk. ”

Rawlie began to rummage methodically through the pockets of the old checked sport-coat he wore winter and summer.

“If the oil light comes on, swing in someplace and get a jug of Sapphire,” he said, still hunting. “That's the recycled stuff. Oh! Here it is! I was starting to think I'd left it back at the office after all. ”

He took a tubular piece of peeled wood from his pocket. It was about as long as Thad's forefinger and hollow. A notch bad been cut in one end. It looked old.

“What is it?” Thad asked, taking it when Rawlie held it out. But he already knew, and he felt another block of whatever unthinkable thing it was that he was building slide into place.

“It's a bird-call,” Rawlie said, studying him from above the shimmering bowl of his pipe. “If you think you can use it, I want you to take it. ”

“Thank you,” Thad said, and put the bird-call into his breast pocket with a hand which was not quite steady. “It might come in handy. ”

Rawlie's eyes widened beneath the tangled hedge of his brows. He took the pipe from his mouth.

“I'm not sure you'll need it,” he said in a low, unsteady voice.

“What?”

“Look behind you. ”

Thad turned, knowing what Rawlie had seen even before he saw it himself.

There were not hundreds of sparrows now, or thousands; the dead cars and trucks stacked on the back ten acres of Gold's Junkyard and Auto Supply were
carpeted
with sparrows. They were everywhere . . . and Thad had not heard a single one of them come.

The two men looked at the birds with four eyes. The birds looked back with twenty thousand . . . or perhaps forty thousand. They did not make a sound. They only sat on hoods, windows, roofs, exhaust-pipes, grilles, engine blocks, universal joints, and frames.

“Jesus Christ,” Rawlie said hoarsely. “The psychopomps . . . what does it mean, Thad? What does it mean?”

“I think I'm just starting to know,” Thad said.

“My God,” Rawlie said. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them loudly. The sparrows did not move. And they had no interest in Rawlie; it was only Thad Beaumont they were looking at.

“Find George Stark,” Thad said in a quiet voice—really not much more than a whisper. “George Stark. Find him.
Fly!”

The sparrows rose into the hazy blue sky in a black cloud, wings whirring with a sound that was like thunder turned to thinnest lace, throats cheeping. Two men who had been standing just inside the doorway of the retail parts shop ran out to look. Overhead, the single black mass banked and turned, as the other, smaller, flock had done, and headed west.

Thad looked up at them, and for a moment this reality merged with the vision which marked the onset of his trances; for a moment past and present were one, entwined in some strange and gorgeous pigtail.

The sparrows were gone.

“Christ Almighty!” a man in a gray mechanic's coverall was bellowing. “Did you see those birds? Where'd all those fucking
birds
come from?”

“I have a better question,” Rawlie said, looking at Thad. He was in control of himself again, but it was dear he had been badly shaken. “Where are they
going?
You know, don't you, Thad?”

“Yes, of course,” Thad muttered, opening the VW's door. “I have to go, too, Rawlie—I really have to. I can't thank you enough. ”

“Be careful, Thaddeus. Be very careful. No man controls the agents of the afterlife. Not for long—and there is always a price. ”

“I'll be as careful as I can. ”

The VW's stick-shift protested, but finally gave up and went into gear. Thad paused long enough to put on the dark glasses and the baseball cap, then raised his hand to Rawlie and pulled out.

As he turned onto Route 2, he saw Rawlie trudging toward the same pay telephone he had used himself, and Thad thought:
Now I've GOT to keep Stark out. Because now I have a secret. I may not be able to control the psychopomps, but for a little while at least I own them—or they own me—and he must not know that.

He found second gear, and Rawlie DeLesseps' Volkswagen began to shudder itself into the largely unexplored realms of speed above thirty-five miles an hour.

The first of the two calls which sent Alan Pangborn back into the heart of the thing came just after three o'clock, while Thad was pouring three quarts of Sapphire Motor Oil into Rawlie's thirsty Volkswagen at an Augusta service station. Alan himself was on his way to Nan's for a cup of coffee.

Sheila Brigham poked her head out of the dispatcher's office and yelled, “Alan? Collect call for you—do you know somebody named Hugh Pritchard?”

Alan swung back. “Yes! Take the call!”

He hurried into his office and picked up the phone just in time to hear Sheila accepting the charges.

“Dr. Pritchard? Dr. Pritchard, are you there?”

“Yes, right here.” The connection was a pretty good one, but Alan still had a moment of doubt—this man didn't sound seventy. Forty, maybe, but not seventy.

“Are you the Dr. Hugh Pritchard who used to practice in Bergenfield, New Jersey?”

“Bergenfield, Tenafly, Hackensack, Englewood, Englewood Heights . . . hell, I doctored heads all the way to Paterson. Are you the Sheriff Pangborn who's been trying to get hold of me? My wife and I were way the hell and gone over to Devil's Knob. Just got back. Even my aches have aches. ”

“Yes, I'm sorry. I want to thank you for calling, Doctor. You sound much younger than I expected. ”

“Well, that's fine,” Pritchard said, “but you should see the rest of me. I look like an alligator walking on two legs. What can I do for you?”

Alan had considered this and decided on a careful approach. Now he cocked the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, leaned back in his chair, and the parade of shadow animals commenced on the wall.

“I'm investigating a murder here in Castle County, Maine,” he said. “The victim was a local man named Homer Gamache. There may be a witness to the crime, but I am in a very delicate situation with this man, Dr. Pritchard. There are two reasons why. First, he's famous. Second, he's exhibiting symptoms with which you were once familiar. I say so because you operated on him twenty-eight years ago. He had a brain tumor. I'm afraid that if this tumor has recurred, his testimony may not be very believ—”

“Thaddeus Beaumont,” Pritchard interrupted at once. “And whatever symptoms he may be suffering, I doubt very much if it's a recurrence of that old tumor. ”

“How did you know it was Beaumont?”

“Because I saved his life back in 1960,” Pritchard said, and added with an unconscious arrogance: “If not for me, he wouldn't have written a single book, because he would have been dead before his twelfth birthday. I've followed his career with some interest ever since he almost won that National Book Award for his first novel. I took one look at the photograph on the jacket and knew it was the same guy. The face had changed, but the eyes were the same. Unusual eyes. Dreamy, I should have called them. And of course I knew that he lived in Maine, because of the recent article in
People.
It came out just before we went on vacation. ”