by Stephen King
"Of course, Beth," he said. He took one of the bags for her. His other hand, the left, he kept free.
10
They crossed the side yard, passed through the little greenbelt between properties, and then walked across the Clarks' yard to their driveway. Stark insisted that she move fast, and she was panting by the time they stopped in front of the closed garage door. He had offered to take one of the twins, but she'd refused.
He set down the cooler, took his wallet from his back pocket, removed a narrow strip of metal which tapered to a point, and stamped it into the lock of the garage door. He turned it first to the right and then back to the left, one ear cocked. There was a click and he smiled.
"Good," he said. "Even Mickey Mouse locks on garage doors can be a pain in the ass. Big springs. Hard to tip them over. This one's as tired as an old whore's twat at daybreak, though. Lucky for us." He turned the handle and shoved. The door rumbled up on its tracks.
The garage was hot as a haymow, and the Clarks' Volvo wagon was even hotter inside. Stark bent beneath the dashboard, exposing the back of his neck to her as she sat in the passenger seat. Her fingers twitched. It would only take a second to rip the scissors free, but that could still be too long. She had seen how quickly he reacted to the unexpected. It did not really surprise her that his reflexes were as fast as those of a wild animal, since that was what he was.
He raked down a bunch of wires from behind the dash, then produced a bloody straight-razor from his front pocket. She shivered a little and had to swallow twice, fast, to stifle a gag-reflex. He unfolded the blade, bent down again, stripped insulation from two of the wires, and touched the bare copper cores together. There was a sliver of blue spark, and then the engine began to turn over. A moment later the car was running.
"Well, all right!" George Stark crowed. "Let's roll, what do you say?"
The twins giggled together and waved their hands at him. Stark waved gaily back. As he backed the car out of the garage, Liz reached stealthily behind Wendy, who was sitting on her lap, and touched the rounds that were the fingerholes of the scissors. Not now, but soon. She had no intention of waiting for Thad. She was too uneasy about what this dark creature might decide to do to the twins in the meantime.
Or to her.
As soon as he was sufficiently distracted, she intended to free the scissors from their hiding place and bury them in his throat.
III
The Coming of the Psychopomps
"The poets talk about love," Machine said. running the straight-razor back and forth along the strop in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, "and that's okay. There is love. The politicians talk about duty, and that's okay. too. There is duty. Eric Hoffer talks about post-modernism, Hugh Hefner talks about sex, Hunter Thompson talks about drugs, and Jimmy Swaggart talks about God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those things all exist and they are all okay. Do you know what I mean, Jack?"
"Yeah, I guess so." Jack Rangely said. He really didn't know. didn't have the slightest idea, but when Machine was in this sort of mood, only a lunatic would argue with him.
Machine turned the straight-razor's edge down and suddenly slashed the strop in two. A long section fell to the pool-hall floor like a severed tongue. "But what I talk about is doom," he said. "Because, in the end, doom is all that counts. "
--Riding to Babylon
by George Stark
Twenty - two
THAD ON THE RUN
1
Pretend it's a book you're writing, he thought as he turned left onto College Avenue, leaving the campus behind. And pretend you're a character in that book.
It was a magic thought. His mind had been filled with roaring panic--a kind of mental tornado in which fragments of some possible plan spun like chunks of uprooted landscape. But at the idea that he could pretend it was all a harmless fiction, that he could move not only himself but the other characters in this story (characters like Harrison and Manchester, for instance) around the way he moved characters on paper, in the safety of his study with bright lights overhead and either a cold can of Pepsi or a hot cup of tea beside him . . . at this idea, it was as if the wind howling between his ears suddenly blew itself out. The extraneous shit blew away with it, leaving him with the pieces of his plan lying around . . . pieces he found he was able to put together quite easily. He discovered he had something which might even work.
It better work, Thad thought. If it doesn't, you'll wind up in protective custody and Liz and the kids will most likely wind up dead.
But what about the sparrows? Where did the sparrows fit?.
He didn't know. Rawlie had told him they were psychopomps, the harbingers of the living dead, and that fit, didn't it? Yes. Up to a point, anyway. Because foxy old George was alive again, but foxy old George was also dead . . . dead and rotting. So the sparrows fit in . . . but not all the way. If the sparrows had guided George back from
(the land of the dead)
wherever he had been, bow come George himself knew nothing about them? How come he did not remember writing that phrase, THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, in blood on the walls of two apartments?
"Because I wrote it," Thad muttered, and his mind flew back to the things he had written in his journal while he had been sitting in his study, on the edge of a trance.
Question: Are the birds mine?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Who wrote about the sparrows?
Answer: The one who knows. . . I am the knower. I am the owner.
Suddenly all the answers trembled almost within his grasp--the terrible, unthinkable answers. Thad heard a long, shaky sound emerging from his own mouth. It was a groan.
Question : Who brought George Stark back to life?
Answer: The owner. The knower.
"I didn't mean to!" he cried.
But was that true? Was it really? Hadn't there always been a part of him in love with George Stark's simple, violent nature? Hadn't part of him always admired George, a man who didn't stumble over things or bump into things, a man who never looked weak or silly, a man who would never have to fear the demons locked away in the liquor cabinet? A man with no wife or children to consider, with no loves to bind him or slow him down? A man who had never waded through a shitty student essay or agonized over a Budget Committee meeting? A man who had a sharp, straight answer to all of life's more difficult questions?
A man who was not afraid of the dark because he owned the dark?
"Yes, but he's a BASTARD!" Thad screamed into the hot interior of his sensible American-made four-wheel-drive car.
Right--and part of you finds that so attractive, doesn't it?
Perhaps he, Thad Beaumont, had not really created George . . . but was it not possible that some longing part of him had allowed Stark to be recreated?
Question: If I own the sparrows, can I use them?
No answer came. It wanted to come; be could feel its longing. But it danced just out of his reach, and Thad found himself suddenly afraid that he himself--some Stark-loving part of him--might be holding it off. Some part that didn't want George to die.
I am the knower. I am the owner. I am the bringer.
He paused at the Orono traffic light and then was heading out along Route 2, toward Bangor and Ludlow beyond.
Rawlie was a part of his plan--a part of it which he at least understood. What would he do if he actually managed to shake the cops following him only to find that Rawlie had already left his office?
He didn't know.
What would he do if Rawlie was there but refused to help him?
He didn't know that, either.
I'll burn those bridges when and if I come to them.
And he would be coming to them soon enough.
He was passing Gold's on the right, now. Gold's was a long, tubular building constructed of pre-fab aluminum sections. It was painted a particularly offensive shade of aqua and was surrounded by a dozen acres of junked-out cars. Their windshields glittered in the hazy
sunlight in a galaxy of white starpoints. It was Saturday afternoon--had been for almost twenty minutes now. Liz and her dark kidnapper would be on their way to The Rock. And, although there would be a clerk or two selling parts to weekend mechanics in the pre-fab building where Gold's did its retail business, Thad could reasonably hope that the junkyard itself would be unattended. With nearly twenty thousand cars in varying states of decay roughly organized into dozens of zig-zagging rows, he should be able to hide the Suburban . . . and he had to hide it. High-shouldered, boxy, gray with brilliant red sides, it stuck out like a sore thumb.
SLOW SCHOOL ZONE. the sign coming up read. Thad felt a hot wire poke into his gut. This was it.
He checked the rearview minor and saw the Plymouth was still riding two cars back. It wasn't as good as he could have wished, but it was probably as good as it was going to get. For the rest, he would have to depend on luck and surprise. They weren't expecting him to make a break; why would he? And for a moment he thought of not doing it. Suppose he just pulled over instead? And when they pulled up behind him and Harrison got out to ask what was wrong, he would say: Plenty. Stark's got my family. The sparrows are still flying, you see.
"Thad, he says he killed the two that were watching the house. I don't know how he did it, but he says he did . . . and I . . . I believe him. "
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 fourway 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.
2
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 intelligenc
e: 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.
Are we trying to have a little peek, George?
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.