'Thank you. I'll let you get on with your business. Goodbye, Sheriff Pangborn.'
There was a click on the line, and Alan replaced the receiver slowly. He leaned back in his chair, folded his limber hands, and made a large black bird flap slowly across the patch of sun on his office wall. A line from The Wizard of Oz occurred to him and went clanging around in his mind: 'I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks!' That had been the Cowardly Lion, hadn't it?
The question was, what did he believe?
It was easier for him to think of things he didn't believe. He didn't believe Thad Beaumont had murdered anybody. Nor did he believe Thad had written that cryptic sentence on anyone's wall. So how had it gotten there?
Simple. Old Dr Pritchard just flew east from Fort Laramie, killed Frederick Clawson, wrote THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN on his wall, then flew on up to New York from D.C., picked Miriam Cowley's lock with his favorite scalpel, and did the same thing to her. He operated on them because he missed the mystery of surgery.
No, of course not. But Pritchard wasn't the only one who knew about Thad's - what had he called it? - his sensory precursor. It hadn't been in the People article, true, but - You're forgetting the fingerprints and the voiceprints. You're forgetting Thad's and Liz's calm, flat assertion that George Stark is real; that he's willing to commit murder in order to STAY real. And now you're trying like hell not to examine the fact that you are starting to believe it all might be true. You talked to them about how crazy it would be to believe not just in a vengeful ghost, but in the ghost of a man who never was. But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never.were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their
fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it. Alan knotted his hands tightly, extended his pinkie fingers, and sent a much smaller bird flying across the sunny wall. A sparrow.
You can't explain the flock of sparrows that hit Bergenfield County Hospital almost thirty years ago any more than you can explain how two men can have the same fingerprints and voiceprints, but now you know that Thad Beaumont shared his mother's womb with someone else. With a stranger.
Hugh Pritchard had mentioned the early onset of puberty. Alan Pangborn suddenly found himself wondering if the growth of that alien tissue coincided with something else.
He wondered if it had begun to grow at the same time Thad Beaumont began to write. 2
The intercom on his desk beeped, startling him. It was Sheila again. 'Fuzzy Martin's on line one, Alan. He wants to talk to you.'
'Fuzzy? What in hell's name does he want?'
'I don't know. He wouldn't tell me.'
'Jesus,' Alan said. 'That's all I need today.'
Fuzzy had a large chunk of property out on Town Road #2, about four miles from Castle Lake. The Martin place had once been a prosperous dairy farm, but that had been in the days when Fuzzy had been known by his proper Christian name, Albert, and was still holding the whiskey jug instead of the other way around. His kids were grown, his wife had given him up as a bad job ten years ago, and now Fuzzy presided alone over twenty-seven acres of fields which were going slowly but steadily back to the wild. On the west side of his property, where Town Road #2
wound by on its way to the lake, the house and barn stood. The barn, which had once been home to forty cows, was a huge building, its roof now deeply swaybacked, its paint peeling, most of the windows blocked with squares of cardboard. Alan and Trevor Hartland, the Castle Rock Fire Chief, had been waiting for the Martin house, the Martin barn, or the Martin both to burn down for the last four years or so.
'Do you want me to tell him you're not here?' Sheila asked. 'Clut just came in - I could give it to him.'
Alan actually considered this for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. 'I'll talk to him, Sheila. Thanks.' He picked up the telephone and cocked it between his ear and his shoulder.
'Chief Pangborn?'
'This is the Sheriff, yes.'
'This is Fuzzy Martin, out on Number Two. Might have a problem out here, Chief.'
'Oh?' Alan drew the second telephone on the desk closer to him. This was a direct line to the other offices in the Municipal Building. The tip of his finger skated around the square keypad with the number 4 stamped on it. All he had to do was pick up the receiver and push the button to get Trevor Hartland. 'What kind of problem is that?'
'Well, Chief, I'll be dipped in shit if I edzackly know. I'd call it Grand Car Thievery, if it was a car I knew. But t'wasn't. Never seen it before in m'life. But it came out of my barn just the same.'.Fuzzy spoke with that deep and somehow satiric Maine accent that turned a simple word like barn