They weren't thinking about Stark; they didn't even know about Stark. But what if Stark was real?
If that was the case, Alan was coming to believe that sending a bunch of state troopers who didn't know any better up Lake Lane would be like marching men into a meat-grinder. He put the microphone back on its prong. He was going in, and he was going in alone. It might be wrong, probably was, but it was what he was going to do. He could live with the thought of his own stupidity; God knew he had done it before. What he couldn't live with was even the possibility that he might have caused the deaths of a woman and two infants by making a radio-call for back-up before he knew the real nature of the situation.
Alan pulled out of the rest area and headed for Lake Lane..
Chapter Twenty-four
The Coming of the Sparrows
1
Thad avoided the turnpike on the way down (Stark had instructed Liz to use it, cutting half an hour off their time), and so he had to go through either Lewiston-Auburn or Oxford. L.A., as the natives called it, was a much bigger metropolitan area . . . but the state police barracks was in Oxford. He chose Lewiston-Auburn.
He was waiting at an Auburn traffic light and checking his rearview mirror constantly for police cars when the idea he'd first grasped clearly while talking to Rawlie at the auto junkyard struck him again. This time it was not just a tickle; it was something like a hard open-handed blow. I am the knower. I am the owner. I am the bringer.
It's magic we are dealing with here, Thad thought, and any magician worth his salt has got to have a magic wand. Everyone knows that. Luckily, I know just where such an item may be had. Where, in fact, they sell them by the dozen.
The nearest stationer's store was on Court Street, and now Thad diverted in that direction. He was sure there were Berol Black Beauty pencils at the house in Castle Rock, and he was equally sure Stark had brought his own supply, but he didn't want them. What he wanted were pencils Stark had never touched, either as a part of Thad or as a separate entity. Thad found a parking space half a block down from the stationer's, killed the engine of Rawlie's VW (it died hard, with a wheeze and several lunging chugs), and got out. It was good to get away from the ghost of Rawlie's pipe and into the fresh air for awhile. At the stationer's he bought a box of Berol Black Beauty pencils. The clerk told him to be his guest when Thad asked if he could use the pencil-sharpener on the wall. He used it to sharpen six of the Berols. These he put in his breast pocket, lining it from side to side. The leads stuck up like the warheads of small, deadly missiles. Presto and abracadabra, he thought. Let the revels commence. He walked back to Rawlie's car, got in, and just sat there for a moment, sweating in the heat and softly singing 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath. Almost all of the words had come back. It was really amazing what the human mind could do under pressure. This could be very, very dangerous, he thought. He found that he didn't care so much for himself. He had, after all, brought George Stark into the world, and he supposed that made him responsible for him. It didn't seem terribly fair; he didn't think he had created George with any evil intent. He couldn't see himself as either of those infamous doctors, Messrs Jekyll and Frankenstein, in spite of what might be happening to his wife and children. He had not set out to write a series of novels which would make a great deal of money, and he had certainly not set out to create a monster. He had only been trying to feet a way around the block that had dropped into his path. He had only wanted to find a way to write another good story, because doing that made him happy..Instead, he had caught some sort of supernatural disease. And there were diseases, lots of them,
that found homes in the bodies of people who had done nothing to deserve them - fun things like cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, Alzheimer's - but once you got one, you had to deal with it. What was the name of that old radio quiz show? Name It and Claim It?
This could be very dangerous for Liz and the kids, though, his mind insisted, reasonably enough.
Yes. Brain surgery could be dangerous, too . . . but if you had a tumor growing in there, what choice did you have?
He'll be looking. Peeking. The pencils are okay; he might even be flattered. But if he senses what you plan to do with them, or if he finds out about the bird-call . . . if he guesses about the sparrows . . . hell, if he even guesses there's something to guess . . . then you're in deep shit. But it could work, another part of his mind whispered. Goddammit, you know it could work. Yes. He did know it. And because the deepest part of his mind insisted that there was really nothing else to do or try, Thad started the VW and pointed it toward Castle Rock. Fifteen minutes later he had left Auburn behind and was out in the country again, heading west toward the Lakes Region.