So maybe, between the time Alan had made his discovery and the time Annie went to see Dr. Van Allen, the headaches had gone away. Probably they had gone away. Ray had told Alan later, in a long conversation over glasses of brandy at the doctor's Castle View home, that the symptoms often came and went in cases where the tumor was located high on the stem of the brain. "Seizures are often associated with stem tumors," he told Alan. "If she'd had a seizure, maybe -..." And he had shrugged. Yes. Maybe. And maybe a man named Thad Beaumont was an unindicted co-conspirator in the deaths of his wife and son, but Alan could not find blame in his heart for Thad, either.
Not all the things which happen in small towns are known to the residents, no matter how sharp their ears are or how energetically their tongues wag. In Castle Rock they knew about Frank Dodd, the cop who went crazy and killed the women back in Sheriff Bannerman's day, and they knew about Cujo, the Saint Bernard who had gone rabid out on Town Road #3, and they knew that the lakeside home of Thad Beaumont, novelist and local Famous Person, had burned to the ground during the summer of 1989, but they did not know the circumstances of that burning, or that Beaumont had been haunted by a man who was really not a man at all, but a creature for which there may be no name. Alan Pangborn knew these things, however, and they still haunted his sleep from time to time. All that was over by the time Alan became fully aware of Annie's headaches... except it really wasn't over. By virtue of Thad's drunken phonecalls, Alan had become an unwilling witness to the crash of Thad's marriage and the steady erosion of the man's sanity. And there was the matter of his own sanity, as well. Alan had read an article in some doctor's office about black holes-great celestial empty places that seemed to be whirlpools of anti-matter, voraciously sucking up everything within their reach. In the late summer and fall of 1989, the Beaumont affair had become Alan's own personal black hole. There were days when he found himself questioning the most elementary concepts of reality, and wondering if any of it had actually happened. There were nights when he lay awake until dawn stained the east, afraid to go to sleep, afraid the dream would come: a black Toronado bearing down on him, a black Toronado with a decaying monster behind the wheel and a sticker reading HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH on the rear bumper. In those days, the sight of a single sparrow perched on the porch railing or hopping about on the lawn had made him feel like screaming.
If asked, Alan would have said, "When Annie's trouble began, I was distracted." But it wasn't a matter of distraction; somewhere deep down inside of his mind he had been fighting a desperate battle to hold onto his sanity. HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCHhow that came back to him.
How it haunted him. That, and the sparrows.
He had still been distracted on the day in March when Annie and Todd had gotten into the old Scout they kept for around-town errands and had headed off to Hemphill's Market. Alan had gone over and over her behavior that morning, and could find nothing unusual about it, nothing out of the ordinary. He had been in his study when they left.
He had looked out the window by his desk and waved goodbye. Todd had waved back before getting in the Scout. It was the last time he saw them alive. Three miles down Route 117 and less than a mile from Hemphill's, the Scout had veered off the road at high speed and had struck a tree. The State Police estimated from the wreckage that Annie, ordinarily the most careful of drivers, had been doing at least seventy. Todd had been wearing his seatbelt. Annie had not. She had probably been dead as soon as she went through the windshield, leaving one leg and half an arm behind. Todd might still have been alive when the ruptured gas-tank exploded. That preyed on Alan more than anything else. That his ten-year-old son, who wrote a joke astrology column for the school paper and lived for Little League, might still have been alive. That he might have burned to death trying to work the clasp on his seatbelt.