'Thad, you're not making sense. If you don't start pretty soon, a lot of people are gonna get hurt. Time is runnin out.'
'Oh, I'm paying attention,' Thad said. 'What I'm wondering is how you could have written what you did on Clawson's wall and then on Miriam's and not know about it.'
'You better stop talkin trash and start makin sense, my friend,' Stark said, but Thad could sense bewilderment and some rough fear just under the surface of that voice. 'There wasn't anything
written on their walls.'
'Oh yes. Yes there was. And do you know what, George? I think maybe the reason you don't know about that is because I wrote it. I think part of me was there. Somehow part of me was there, watching you. I think I'm the only one of us who knows about the sparrows, George. I think maybe I wrote it. You want to think about that . . . think about it hard . . . before you start pushing me.'
'Listen to me,' Stark said with gentle force. 'Hear me real good. First your kids . . . then your wife . . . then you. Start another book, Thad. It's the best advice I can give you. Best advice you ever got in y'damn life. Start another book. I'm not dead.'.A long pause. Then, softly, very deliberately:
'And I don't want to be dead. So you go home and you sharpen y'pencils, and if you need any inspiration, think about how your little babies would look with their faces full of glass.
'There ain't no goddam birds just forget about em and start writin.'
There was a click.
'Fuck you,' Thad whispered into the dead line, and slowly hung up the phone..
Chapter Seventeen
Wendy Takes a Fall
1
The situation would have resolved itself in some way or other no matter what happened - Thad was sure of that. George Stark wasn't simply going to go away. But Thad came to feel, and not without justification, that Wendy's tumble from the stairs two days after Stark called him at Dave's Market set just what course the situation would take for good and all. The most important result was that it finally showed him a course of action. He had spent those two days in a sort of breathless lull. He found it difficult to follow even the most simple-minded TV program, impossible to read, and the idea of writing seemed roughly akin to the idea of fasterthan-light travel. Mostly he wandered from one room to the next, sitting for a few moments, and then moving on again. He got under Liz's feet and on her nerves. She wasn't sharp with him about it, although he guessed she had to bite her tongue on more than one occasion to keep from giving him the verbal equivalent of a paper-cut.
Twice he set out to tell her about the second call from Stark, the one where foxy George had told him exactly what was on his mind, secure in the knowledge that the line wasn't tapped and they were speaking privately. On both occasions he had stopped, aware that he could do nothing but upset her more.
And twice he had found himself up in his study, actually holding one of those damned Berol pencils he had promised never to use again and looking at a fresh, cellophane-wrapped pile of the note-books Stark had used to write his novels.
You got an idea . . . The one about the wedding and the armored-car score. And that was true. Thad even had a title, a good one: Steel Machine. Something else was true, too: part of him really wanted to write it. That itch was there, like that one place on your back you can't quite reach when you need to scratch.
George would scratch it for you.
Oh yes. George would be happy to scratch it for him. But something would happen to him, because things had changed now, hadn't they? What, exactly, would that thing be? He didn't know, perhaps couldn't know, but a frightening image kept recurring to him. It was from that charming, racist children's tale of yore, Little Black Sambo. When Black Sambo climbed the tree and the tigers couldn't get him, they became so angry that they bit each other's tails and raced faster and faster around the tree until they turned into butter. Sambo gathered the butter up in a crock and took it home to his mother.
George the alchemist, Thad had mused, sitting in his office and tapping an unsharpened Berol Black Beauty against the edge of the desk. Straw into gold. Tigers into butter. Books into bestsellers. And Thad into . . . what?
He didn't know. He was afraid to know. But he would be gone, Thad would be gone, he was sure of that. There might be somebody living here who looked like him, but behind that Thad Beaumont face there would be another mind. A sick, brilliant mind..He thought the new Thad Beaumont would be a good deal less clumsy . . . and a good deal more dangerous.
Liz and the babies?
Would Stark leave them alone if he did make it into the driver's seat?
Not him.
He had considered running, as well. Packing Liz and the twins into the Suburban and just going. But what good would that do? What good when Foxy Old George could look out through Dumb Old Thad's eyes? It wouldn't matter if they ran to the end of the earth; they would get there, look around, and see George Stark mushing after them behind a team of huskies, his straight-razor in