He could get rid of the sparrows and the burning, maddening itch in his hand only by using the typewriter.
The instinct to sit down in front of it was too strong to deny. Doing it seemed horribly natural, somehow, like wanting to stick your hand in cold water after you had burned it. I have to write a note to Mrs Fenton.
You just want to get going by nightfall, or you're going to be one sorry son of a bitch. And you won't be the only one.
That itchy, wormy feeling under his skin was getting steadily stronger. It radiated out from the hole in his hand in waves. His eyeballs seemed to be pulsing in perfect sync with that feeling. And in the eye of his mind, the vision of the sparrows intensified. It was the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield; Ridgeway under a mild white spring sky; it was 1960; the whole world was dead except for these terrible, common birds, these psychopomps, and as he watched, they all took wing. The sky went dark with their great, wheeling mass. The sparrows were flying again. Outside Thad's window, the sparrows on the wires, the infirmary, and Bennett Hall flew upward together in a whir of wings. A few early students paused in their walk across the quad to watch the flock bank left across the sky and disappear into the west. Thad did not see this. He saw nothing but the neighborhood of his childhood somehow transformed into the weird dead country of a dream. He sat down in front of the typewriter, sinking deeper into the twilit world of his trance as he did so. Yet one thought held firm. Foxy
George could make him sit down and twiddle the keys of the IBM, yes, but he wouldn't write the book, no matter what . . . and if he held to that, foxy old George would either fall apart or simply whiff out of existence, like a candle-flame. He knew that. He felt it. His hand seemed to be whamming in and out now, and he felt that, if he could see it, it would look like the paw of a cartoon character - Wile E. Coyote, perhaps - after it had been hit with a sledgehammer. It wasn't pain, exactly; it was more like the I'm-going-to-go-crazy-soon feeling you get when the middle of your back, the one place you can never quite reach, starts to itch. Not a surface itch, but that nerve-deep, throbbing itch that makes you clamp your teeth together. But even that seemed distant, unimportant. He sat down at the typewriter. 7
The moment he turned the machine on, the itch went away and the vision of the sparrows went with it.
Yet the trance held, and at the center of it was some harsh imperative; there was something which needed to be written, and he could feel his whole body yelling at him to get to it, do it, get it done. In its own way, it was much worse than either the vision of the sparrows or the itch in his hand. This itch seemed to be emanating from a place deep in his mind..He rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter, then just sat there for a moment, feeling distant and lost. Then he laid his fingers in the touch-typist's 'home' position on the middle row of keys, although he had given up touch-typing years ago.
They trembled there for a moment, and then all but the index fingers withdrew. Apparently when Stark did type, he did it the same way Thad himself did - hunt and peck. He would, of course; the typewriter was not his instrument of choice. There was a distant tug of pain when he moved the fingers of his left hand, but that was all. His index fingers typed slowly, but it still didn't take long for the message to form itself on the white sheet. It was chillingly brief. The Letter Gothic type-ball whirled and produced six words in capitals:
GUESS WHERE I CALLED FROM, THAD?
The world suddenly swam back into sharp focus. He had never felt such dismay, such horror, in his whole life. God, of course - it was so right, so clear. The son of a bitch called from my house! He's got Liz and the twins!
He started to get up with no idea of where he meant to go. He was not even aware that he was doing it until his hand flared with pain, like a smouldering torch which is swung hard through the air to produce a bright bloom of fire. His lips peeled back from his teeth and he made a low groaning noise. He dropped back into the chair in front of the IBM, and before he knew what was happening, his hands had groped their way back to the keys and were slamming at them again. Five words this time.
TELL ANYBODY AND THEY DIE
He stared at the words dully. As soon as he typed the final E, everything cut off suddenly - it was as if he were a lamp and someone had pulled his plug. No more pain in his hand. No more itch. No more wormy, watched feeling under his skin.