And dreamed the dream again.
It was the same (or seemed so, anyway) right up until the very end: Stark took him through the deserted house, always remaining behind him, telling Thad he was mistaken when Thad insisted in a trembling, distraught voice that this was his own house. You are quite wrong, Stark said from behind his right shoulder (or was it the left? and did it matter?). The owner of this house, he told Thad again, was dead. The owner of this house was in that fabled place where all rail service terminated, that place which everyone down here (wherever that was) called Endsville. Everything the same. Until they got to the back hall, where Liz was no longer alone. Frederick Clawson had joined her. He was naked except for an absurd leather coat. And he was just as dead as Liz. From over his shoulder, Stark said reflectively: 'Down here, that's what happens to squealers. They get turned into fool's stuffing. Now he's taken care of. I'm going to take care of all of them, one by one. Just make sure I don't have to take care of you. The sparrows are flying again, Thad - remember that. The sparrows are flying.'.And then, outside the house, Thad heard them: not just thousands of them but millions, perhaps
billions, and the day turned dark as the gigantic flock of birds first began to cross the sun and then blotted it out entirely.
'I can't see!' he screamed, and from behind him George Stark whispered: 'They're flying again, old hoss. Don't forget. And don't get in my way.'
He woke up, trembling and cold all over, and this time sleep was a long time coming. He lay in the dark, thinking how absurd it was, the idea the dream had brought with it - perhaps it had the first time, too, but it had been so much clearer this time. How totally absurd. The fact that he had always visualized Stark and Alexis Machine as looking alike (and why not, since in a very real sense both had been born at the same time, with Machine's Way), both tall and broad-shouldered
- men who looked not as if they had grown but as if they had somehow been built out of solid blocks of material - and both blonde . . . that fact didn't change the absurdity. Pen names did not come to life and murder people. He would tell Liz at breakfast, and they would laugh over it . . . well, maybe they wouldn't actually laugh, considering the circumstances, but they would share a rueful grin.
I will call it my William Wilson complex, he thought, drifting back into sleep again. But when the morning came, the dream did not seem worth talking about - not on top of everything else. So he didn't . . . but as the day passed, he found his mind turning to it again and again, considering it like a dark jewel..
Chapter Eleven
End sville
1
Early Monday morning, before Liz could bug him about it, he made an appointment with Dr Hume. The removal of the tumor in 1960 was a part of his medical records. He told Hume that he had recently had two recurrences of the bird-sounds which had presaged his headaches during the months leading up to the diagnosis and the excision. Dr Hume wanted to know if the headaches themselves had returned. Thad told him they had not. He said nothing about the trance state, or what he had written while in that state, or what had been found written on the apartment wall of a murder victim in Washington, D.C. It already seemed as distant as last night's dream. In fact, he found himself trying to pooh-pooh the whole thing.
Dr Hume, however, took it seriously. Very seriously. He ordered Thad to go to the Eastern Maine Medical Center that afternoon. He wanted both a cranial X-ray series and a computerized axial tomography . . . a CAT-scan.
Thad went. He sat for the pictures and then put his head inside a machine which looked like an industrial clothes-dryer. It clashed and ratcheted for fifteen minutes, and then he was released from captivity . . . for the time being, anyway. He telephoned Liz, told her they could expect results around the end of the week, and said he was going up to his office at the University for a little while.
'Have you thought any more about calling Sheriff Pangborn?' she asked.
'Let's wait for the test results,' he said. 'Once we see what we've got, maybe we can decide.'
2
He was in his office, clearing a semester's worth of deadwood out of his desk and off his shelves,
when the birds began to cry inside his head again. There were a few isolated twitters, these were joined by others, and they quickly became a deafening chorus. White sky - he saw a white sky broken by the silhouettes of houses and telephone poles. And everywhere there were sparrows. They lined every roof, crowded every pole, waiting only for the command of the group mind. Then they would explode skyward with a sound like thousands of sheets flapping in a brisk wind.
Thad staggered blindly toward his desk, groped for his chair, found it, collapsed into it. Sparrows.