nd 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.

Sparrows and the white sky of late spring.

The sound filled his head, a jumbled cacophony, and when he drew a sheet of paper toward him and began to write, he was not aware of what he was doing. His head lolled back on his neck; his.eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. The pen flew back and forth and up and down, seeming to do

so of its own accord.

In his head, all the birds took wing in a dark cloud that blotted out the white sky of March in the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, New Jersey.

3

He came back to himself less than five minutes after the first isolated cries had begun to sound in his mind. He was sweating heavily and his left wrist throbbed, but there was no headache. He looked down, saw the paper on his desk - it was the back of an order-form for complimentary American Lit textbooks - and stared stupidly at what was written there.

'It means nothing,' he whispered. He was rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers, waiting for the headache to start, or for the scrawled words on the paper to connect and make some sense.

He did not want either of those things to happen . . . and neither of them did. The words were just words, repeated over and over. Some were obviously culled from his dream of Stark; the others were so much unconnected gibberish.

And his head felt just fine.

I'm not going to tell Liz this time, he thought. Be damned if I will. And not just because I'm scared, either . . . although I am. It's perfectly simple - not all secrets are bad secrets. Some are good secrets. Some are necessary secrets. And this one is both of those. He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not.knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost.

Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution.

He suspected that was true. He did not know if he could do it or not . . . but he intended to give it the old college try. Very slowly he reached out, took the order-form in both hands, and began to tear it into strips. The stew of squirming words written on it began to disappear. He turned the strips lengthwise, tore them across again, and tossed the pieces in the wastebasket, where they rested like confetti on top of all the other crap he had dumped in there. He sat staring at the pieces for almost two minutes, half expecting them to fly back together and then return to his desk, like the images in a reel of movie-film which is run backward. At last he picked up the wastebasket and took it down the hall to a stainless steel panel set into the wall next to the elevator. The sign beneath read INCINERATOR. He opened the panel and dumped his trash down the black chute.

'There,' he said into the odd summer silence of the English-Math building. 'All gone.'

Down here we call that fool's stuffing.

'Up here we call it horseshit,' he muttered, and walked back down to his office with the empty wastebasket in his hand.

It was gone. Down the chute into oblivion. And until his test results came back from the hospital - or until there was another blackout, or trance, or fugue, or whatever the hell it was - he intended to say nothing. Nothing at all. More than likely the words written on that sheet of paper had been wholly grown in his own mind, like the dream of Stark and the empty house, and had nothing at all to do with either the murder of Homer Gamache or that of Frederick Clawson. Down here in Endsville, where all rail service terminates.

'It means nothing at all,' Thad said, in a flat, emphatic voice but when he left the University that day, he was almost fleeing..