ater That Night

1

They carried the sleeping twins upstairs, then began to get ready for bed themselves. Thad undressed to his shorts and undershirt his form of pajamas - and went into the bathroom. He was brushing his teeth when the shakes hit. He dropped the toothbrush, spat a mouthful of white foam into the basin, and then lurched over to the toilet on legs with no more feeling in them than a pair of wooden stilts.

He retched once - a miserable dry sound - but nothing came up. His stomach began to settle again . . . at least on a trial basis.

When he turned around, Liz was standing in the doorway, wearing a blue nylon nightie that stopped several inches north of the knee. She was looking at him levelly.

'You're keeping secrets, Thad. That's no good. It never was.'

He sighed harshly and held his hands out in front of him with the fingers splayed. They were still trembling. 'How long have you known?'

'There's been something off-beat about you ever since the sheriff came back tonight. And when he asked that last question . . . about the thing written on Clawson's wall . . . you might as well have had a neon sign on your forehead.'

'Pangborn didn't see any neon.'

'Sheriff Pangborn doesn't know you as well as I do . . . but if you didn't see him do a double-take there at the end, you weren't looking. Even he saw something wasn't quite kosher. It was the way he looked at you.'

Her mouth drew down slightly. It emphasized the old lines in her face, the ones he had first seen after the accident in Boston and the miscarriage, the ones which had deepened as she watched him struggle harder and harder to bring water from a well which seemed to have gone dry. It was around then that his drinking had begun to waver out of control. All these things - Liz's accident, the miscarriage, the critical and financial failure of Purple Haze following the wild success of Machine's Way under the Stark name, the sudden binge drinking had combined to bring on a deep depressive state. He had recognized it as a selfish, inward-turning frame of mind, but recognition hadn't helped. Finally he had washed a handful of sleeping pills down his throat with half a bottle of Jack Daniel's. It had been an unenthusiastic suicide attempt . . . but suicide attempt it had been. All of these things had taken place in a period of three years. It had seemed much longer at the time. At the time it had seemed forever.

And of course, little or none of it had made it into the pages of People magazine. Now he saw Liz looking at him the way she had looked at him then. He hated it. The worry was bad; the mistrust was worse. He thought outright hate would have been easier to bear than that odd, wary look.

'I hate it when you lie to me,' she said simply.

'I didn't lie, Liz! For God's sake!'.'Sometimes people lie just by being quiet.'

'I was going to tell you anyway,' he said. 'I was only trying to find my way to it.'

But was that true? Was it really? He didn't know. It was weird shit, crazy shit, but that wasn't the reason he might have lied by silence. He had felt the urge to be silent the way a man who has observed blood in his stool or felt a lump in his groin might feet the urge to be silent. Silence in such cases is irrational . . . but fear is also irrational. And there was something else: he was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one - including himself - who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything. He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.

Inside him a voice whispered for the first time: Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?

And for that voice he had no answer.

'Well?' Liz asked. Her tone was sharp, teetering on the edge of anger. He looked up out of his own thoughts startled. 'Pardon?'

'Have you found your way to it? Whatever it may be?'

'Look,' he said, 'I don't understand why you sound so pissed, Liz!'

'Because I'm scared!' she cried angrily . . . but he saw tears in the corners of her eyes now.

'Because you held out on the sheriff, and I still wonder if you won't hold out on me! If I hadn't seen that expression on your face . . . '

'Oh?' Now he began to feel angry himself. 'And what expression was it? What did it look like to you?'

'You looked guilty,' she snapped. 'You looked the way you used to look when you were telling people you'd stopped drinking and you hadn't. When - ' She stopped then. He did not know what she saw in his face - wasn't sure he wanted to know - but it wiped away her anger. A stricken look replaced it. 'I'm sorry. That wasn't fair.'

'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.

'Now do you understand why I held it back?' he asked.

'Yes . . . I think so.'

'What would he have said? Our practical sheriff from Maine's smallest county, who puts his faith in computer print-outs from A.S.R. and I. and eyewitness testimony? Our sheriff who found it more plausible that I might be hiding a twin brother than that someone has somehow discovered how to duplicate fingerprints? What would he have said to this?'

'I . . . I don't know.' She was struggling to bring herself back, to haul herself out of the shockwave. He had seen her do it before, but that did not lessen his admiration for her. 'I don't know what he would have said, Thad.'

'Me either. I think at the very worst, he might assume some foreknowledge of the crime. It's probably more likely he'd believe I ran up here and wrote that after he left tonight.'

'Why would you do a thing like that? Why?'

'I think insanity would be the first assumption,' Thad said dryly. 'I think a cop like Pangborn would be a lot more likely to believe insanity than to accept an occurrence which seems to have no explanation outside the paranormal. But if you think I'm wrong to hold this back until I have a chance to make something of it myself - and I might be - say so. We can call the Castle Rock sheriff's office and leave a message for him.'

She shook her head. 'I don't know. I've heard - on some talk-show or other, I guess - about psychic links . . . '

'Do you believe in them?'

'I never had any reason to think much about the idea one way or the other,' she said. 'Now I guess I do.' She reached over and picked up the sheet with the words scrawled on it. 'You wrote it with one of George's pencils,' she said.

'It was the closest thing to hand, that's all,' he said testily. He thought briefly of the Scripto pen and then shut it out of his mind. 'And they aren't George's pencils and never were. They're mine. I'm getting goddam tired of referring to him as a separate person. It's lost any marginal cuteness it might once have had.'

'Yet you used one of his phrases today, too - 'lie me an alibi.' I never heard you use it before, outside of a book. Was that just coincidence?'

He started to tell her that it was, of course it was, and stopped. It probably was, but in light of what he had written on that sheet of paper, how could he know for sure?

'I don't know.'

'Were you in a trance, Thad? Were you in a trance when you wrote this?'

Slowly, reluctantly, he replied: 'Yes. I think I was.'

'Is this all that happened? Or was there more?'.'I can't remember,' he said, and then added even more reluctantly: 'I think I might have said

something, but I really can't remember.'

She looked at him for a long time and said, 'Let's go to bed.'

'Do you think we'll sleep, Liz?'

She laughed forlornly.

3

But twenty minutes later he was actually drifting away when Liz's voice brought him back. 'You have to go to the doctor,' she said. 'On Monday.'

'There are no headaches this time,' he protested. 'Just the bird-sounds. And that weird thing I wrote.' He paused, then added hopefully: 'You don't suppose it could just be a coincidence?'

'I don't know what it is,' Liz said, 'but I've got to tell you, Thad, that coincidence is very low on my list.'

For some reason this struck them both as funny and they lay in bed, giggling as softly as they could, so as not to wake the babies, and holding each other. It was all right between them again, anyway - there was not much Thad felt he could be sure of just now, but that was one thing. It was all right. The storm had passed. The sorry old bones had been buried again, at least for the time being.

'I'll make the appointment,' she said when their giggles had dried up.

'No,' he said. 'I'll do it.'

'And you won't indulge in any creative forgetting?'

'No. I'll do it first thing Monday. Honest John.'

'All right, then.' She sighed. 'It'll be a goddam miracle if I get any sleep.' But five minutes later she was breathing softly and regularly, and not five minutes after that, Thad was asleep himself. 4

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..