'Why not?' he said dully. 'It was true. For awhile.'
He went back into the bathroom and used the mouthwash to rinse away the last of the toothpaste. It was non-alcoholic mouthwash. Like the cough medicine. And the ersatz vanilla in the kitchen cupboard. He had not taken a drink since completing the last Stark novel. Her hand touched his shoulder lightly. 'Thad . we're being angry. That hurts us both, and it won't help whatever is wrong. You said there might be a man out there - a psychotic - who thinks he is George Stark. He's killed two people we know. One of them was partly responsible for blowing the Stark pseudonym. It must have occurred to you that you could be high on that man's enemies list. But in spite of that, you held something back. What was that phrase?'
'The sparrows are flying again,' Thad said. He looked at his face in the harsh white light thrown by the fluorescents over the bathroom mirror. Same old face. A little shadowy under the eyes, maybe, but it was still the same old face. He was glad. It was no movie star's mug, but it was his.
'Yes. That meant something to you. What was it?'
He turned off the bathroom light and put his arm over her shoulders. They walked to the bed and lay down on it.
'When I was eleven years old,' he said, 'I had an operation. It was to remove a small tumor from the frontal lobe - I think it was the frontal lobe - of my brain. You knew about that.'
'Yes?' she was looking at him, puzzled.
'I told you I had bad headaches before that tumor was diagnosed, right?'.'Right.'
He began to stroke her thigh absently. She had lovely long legs, and the nightie was really very short.
'What about the sounds?'
'Sounds?' she looked puzzled.
'I didn't think so . . . but you see, it never seemed very important. All that happened such a long time ago. People with brain tumors often have headaches, sometimes they have seizures, and sometimes they have both. Quite often these symptoms have their own symptoms. They're called sensory precursors. The most common ones are smells - pencil shavings, freshly cut onions, mouldy fruit. My sensory precursor was auditory. It was birds.'
He looked at her levelly, their noses almost touching. He could feel a stray strand of her hair tickling against his forehead.
'Sparrows, to be exact,'
He sat up, not wanting to look at her expression of sudden shock, He took her hand.
'Come on.'
'Thad . . . where?'
'The study,' he said. 'I want to show you something.'
2
Thad's study was dominated by a huge oak desk. It was neither fashionably antique nor fashionably modern. It was just an extremely large, extremely serviceable hunk of wood. It stood like a dinosaur under three hanging glass globes; the combined light they threw upon the worksurface was just short of fierce. Very little of the desk's surface was visible. Manuscripts, piles of correspondence, books, and galley-proofs which had been sent to him were stacked everywhere and anywhere. On the white wall beyond the desk was a poster depicting Thad's favorite structure in the whole world: the Flatiron Building in New York. Its improbable wedge shape never failed to delight him.
Beside the typewriter was the manuscript of his new novel, The Golden Dog. On top of the typewriter was that day's output. Six pages. It was his usual number . . . when he was working as himself, that was. As Stark he usually did eight, and sometimes ten.
'This is what I was fooling with before Pangborn showed up,' he said, picking up the little stack of pages on top of the typewriter and handing them to her. 'Then the sound came - the sound of the sparrows. For the second time today, only this time it was much more intense. You see what's written across that top sheet?'
She looked for a long time, and he could see only her hair and the top of her head. When she looked back at him, all the color had dropped out of her face. Her lips were pressed together in a narrow gray line.
'It's the same,' she whispered. 'It's the very same. Oh, Thad, what is this? What - ?'
She swayed and he moved forward, afraid for a moment she was actually going to faint. He grasped her shoulders, his foot tangled in the X-shaped foot of his office chair, and he almost
spilled them both onto his desk.
'Are you all right?'
'No,' she said in a thin voice. 'Are you?'.'Not exactly,' he said. 'I'm sorry. Same old clumsy Beaumont. As a knight in shining armor, I
make a hell of a good doorstop.'
'You wrote this before Pangborn ever showed up,' she said. She seemed to find this impossible to fully grasp. 'Before.'
'That's right.'
'What does it mean?' She was looking at him with frantic intensity, the pupils of her eyes large and dark in spite of the bright light.
'I don't know,' he said. 'I thought you might have an idea.'
She shook her head and put the pages back on his desk. Then she rubbed her hand against the short nylon skirt of her nightie, as if she had touched something nasty. Thad didn't believe she was aware of what she was doing, and he didn't tell her.