She turned her head aside as he dropped it into the wastebasket, her lips pressed tightly together, her face a tense mask of revulsion.
'Don't worry,' he said serenely. 'They'll be better before long. Everything's going to be better before long. Poppa's going to be here soon.'
He was still drinking the soup when Thad pulled in behind the wheel of Rawlie's VW ten minutes later..
Chapter Twenty-five
Steel Machine
1
The Beaumont summer house was a mile up Lake Lane from Route 5, but Thad stopped less than a tenth of a mile in, goggling unbelievingly.
There were sparrows everywhere.
Every branch of every tree, every rock, every patch of open ground was covered with roosting sparrows. The world he saw was grotesque, hallucinatory: it was as if this piece of Maine had sprouted feathers. The road ahead of him was gone. Totally gone. Where it had been was a path of silent, jostling sparrows between the overburdened trees. Somewhere a branch snapped. The only other sound was Rawlie's VW. The muffler had been in bad shape when Thad began his run west; now it seemed to be performing no function at all. The engine farted and roared, backfiring occasionally, and its sound should have sent that monster flock aloft at once, but the birds did not move. The flock began less than twelve feet in front of the place where he had stopped the VW and thrown its balky transmission into neutral. There was a line of demarcation so clean it might have been drawn with a ruler.
No one has seen a flock of birds like this in years, he thought. Not since the extermination of the passenger pigeons at the end of the last century . . . if then. It's like something out of that Daphne du Maurier story.
A sparrow fluttered down on the hood of the VW and seemed to peer in at him. Thad sensed a frightening, dispassionate curiosity in the small bird's black eyes. How far do they go? he wondered. All the way to the house? If so, George has seen them . . . and there will be hell to pay, if hell hasn't been paid already. And even if they don't go that far, how am I supposed to get there? They're not just in the road; they ARE the road. But of course he knew the answer to that. If he meant to get to the house, he would have to drive over them.
No, his mind almost moaned. No, you can't. His imagination conjured up terrible images: the crunching, breaking sounds of small bodies in their thousands, the jets of blood squirting out from beneath the wheels, the soggy clots of stuck feathers revolving as the tires turned.
'But I'm going to,' he muttered. 'I'm going to because I have to.' A shaky grin began to stitch his face into a grimace of fierce, half-mad concentration. In that moment he looked eerily like George Stark. He shoved the stick-shift back into first gear and began to hum 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath. Rawlie's VW chugged, almost stalled, then blatted three loud backfires and began to roll forward.
The sparrow on the hood flew off and Thad's breath caught as he waited for all of them to take wing, as they did in his trance-visions: a great rising dark cloud accompanied by a sound like a hurricane in a bottle..Instead, the surface of the road ahead of the VW's nose began to writhe and move. The sparrows
? some of them, at least - were pulling back, revealing two bare strips . . . strips which exactly matched the path of the VW's wheels. 'Jesus,' Thad whispered. Then he was among them. Suddenly he passed from the world he had always known to an alien one which was populated only by these sentinels which guarded the border between the land of the living and that of the dead.
That's where I am now, he thought as he drove slowly along the twin tracks the birds were affording him. I am in the land of the living dead, and God help me. The path continued to open ahead him. He always had about twelve feet of clear travel, and as he covered that distance, another twelve feet opened before him. The VW's undercarriage was passing over sparrows which were massed between the wheel-tracks, but he did not seem to be killing them; he didn't see any dead birds behind him in the rearview mirror, at least. But it was hard to tell for sure, because the sparrows were closing the way behind him, recreating that flat, feathery carpet.
He could smell them - a light, crumbly smell that seemed to lie on the chest like a fall of bone-dust. Once, as a boy, he had put his face into a bag of rabbit pellets and inhaled deeply. This smell was like that. It was not dirty, but it was overpowering. And it was alien. He began to be troubled by the idea that this great mass of birds was stealing all the oxygen from the air, that he would
suffocate before he got where he was going.