wo Calls for Sheriff Pangborn

1

The first of the two calls which sent Alan Pangborn back into the heart of the thing came just after three o'clock, while Thad was pouring three quarts of Sapphire Motor Oil into Rawlie's thirsty Volkswagen at an Augusta service station. Alan himself was on his way to Nan's for a cup of coffee.

Sheila Brigham poked her head out of the dispatcher's office and yelled, 'Alan? Collect call for you - do you know somebody named Hugh Pritchard?'

Alan swung back. 'Yes! Take the call!'

He hurried into his office and picked up the phone just in time to hear Sheila accepting the charges.

'Dr Pritchard? Dr Pritchard, are you there?'

'Yes, right here.' The connection was a pretty good one, but Alan still had a moment of doubt - this man didn't sound seventy. Forty, maybe, but not seventy.

'Are you the Dr Hugh Pritchard who used to practice in Bergenfield, New Jersey?'

'Bergenfield, Tenafly, Hackensack, Englewood, Englewood Heights . . . hell, I doctored heads all the way to Paterson. Are you the Sheriff Pangborn who's been trying to get hold of me? My wife and I were way the hell and gone over to Devil's Knob. Just got back. Even my aches have aches.'

'Yes, I'm sorry. I want to thank you for calling, Doctor. You sound much younger than I expected.'

'Well, that's fine,' Pritchard said, 'but you should see the rest of me. I look like an alligator walking on two legs. What can I do for you?'

Alan had considered this and decided on a careful approach. Now he cocked the telephone between his ear and his shoulder, leaned back in his chair, and the parade of shadow animals commenced on the wall.

'I'm investigating a murder here in Castle County, Maine,' he said. 'The victim was a local man named Homer Gamache. There may be a witness to the crime, but I am in a very delicate situation

with this man, Dr Pritchard. There are two reasons why. First, he's famous. Second, he's exhibiting symptoms with which you were once familiar. I say so because you operated on him twenty-eight years ago. He had a brain tumor. I'm afraid that if this tumor has recurred, his testimony may not be very believ - '

'Thaddeus Beaumont,' Pritchard interrupted at once. 'And whatever symptoms he may be suffering, I doubt very much if it's a recurrence of that old tumor.'

'How did you know it was Beaumont?'

'Because I saved his life back in 1960,' Pritchard said, and added with an unconscious arrogance: 'If not for me, he wouldn't have written a single book, because he would have been dead before his twelfth birthday. I've followed his career with some interest ever since he almost.won that National Book Award for his first novel. I took one look at the photograph on the jacket

and knew it was the same guy. The face had changed, but the eyes were the same. Unusual eyes. Dreamy, I should have called them. And of course I knew that he lived in Maine, because of the recent article in People. It came out just before we went on vacation.'

He paused for a moment and then said something so stunning and yet so casual that Alan could not respond for a moment.

'You say he may have witnessed a murder. You sure you don't really suspect he may have committed one?'

'Well . . . I . . . '

'I only wonder,' Pritchard went on, 'because people with brain tumors often do very peculiar things. The peculiarity of the acts seems to rise in direct ratio to the intelligence of the man or woman so afflicted. But the boy didn't have a brain tumor at all, you know - at least, not in the usually accepted sense of the term. It was an unusual case. Extremely unusual. I've read of only three similar cases since 1960 - two of them since I retired. Has he had the standard neurological tests?'

'Yes.'

'And?'

'They were negative.'

'I'm not surprised. ' Pritchard fell silent for a few moments, then said: 'You're being less than honest with me, young man, aren't you?'

Alan stopped making shadow animals and sat forward in his chair. 'Yes, I suppose I am. But I very badly want to know what you mean when you say Thad Beaumont didn't have a brain tumor in 'the usually accepted sense of the term'. I know all about the confidentiality rule in doctor-patient relationships, and I don't know if you can trust a man you're talking to for the first time - and over the phone, at that - but I hope you'll believe me when I say that I'm on Thad's side here, and I'm sure he would want you to tell me what I want to know. And I can't take the time to have him call you and give you the go-ahead, Doctor - I need to know now.'

And Alan was surprised to find that this was true - or he believed it to be true. A funny tenseness had begun to creep over him, a feeling that things were happening. Things he didn't know about . . . but soon would.

'I have no problem with telling you about the case,' Pritchard said calmly. 'I have thought, on many occasions, that I ought to get in touch with Beaumont myself, if only to tell him what happened at the hospital shortly after his surgery was complete. I felt it might interest him.'

'What was that?'

'I'll get to it, I assure you. I didn't tell his parents what the operation had uncovered because it didn't matter - not in any practical way - and I didn't want anything more to do with them. With his father in particular. That man should have been born in a cave and spent his life hunting woolly mammoths. I decided at the time to tell them what they wanted to hear and get shot of them as fast as I could. Then, of course, time itself became a factor. You lose touch with your patients. I thought of writing to him when Helga showed me that first book, and I have thought of it on several occasions since then, but I also felt he might not believe me . . . or wouldn't care . . . or that he might think I was a crackpot. I don't know any famous people, but I pity them - I suspect they must five defensive, disorganized, fearful lives . It seemed easier to let sleeping dogs lie. Now this. As my grandchildren would say, it's a bummer.

'What was wrong with Thad? What brought him to you?'

'Fugues. Headaches. Phantom sounds. And finally - '.'Phantom sounds?'

'Yes - but you must let me tell it in my own way, Sheriff.' Again Alan heard that unconscious arrogance in the man's voice.

'All right.'

'Finally there was a seizure. The problems were all being caused by a small mass in the prefrontal lobe. We operated, assuming it was a tumor. The tumor turned out to be Thad Beaumont's twin.'

'What!'

'Yes, indeed,' Pritchard said. He sounded as if the unalloyed shock in Alan's voice rather pleased him. 'This is not entirely uncommon - twins are often absorbed in utero, and in rare cases the absorption is incomplete - but the location was unusual, and so was the growth-spurt of the foreign tissue. Such tissue almost always remains inert. I believe that Thad's problems may have been caused by the early onset of puberty.'

'Wait,' Alan said. 'Just wait.' He had read the phrase 'his mind reeled' a time or two in books, but this was the first time he had ever experienced such a feeling himself. 'Are you telling me that Thad was a twin, but he . . . he somehow . . . somehow ate his brother?'

'Or sister,' Pritchard said. 'But I suspect it was a brother, because I believe absorption is much more rare in cases of fraternal twins. That's based on statistical frequency, not hard fact, but I do believe it. And since identicals are always the same sex, the answer to your question is yes. I believe the fetus Thad Beaumont once was ate his brother in his mother's womb.'

'Jesus,' Alan said in a low voice. He could not remember hearing anything so horrible - or so alien - in his entire life.

'You sound revolted,' Dr Pritchard said cheerfully, 'but there is really no need to be, once you put the matter in its proper context. We are not talking about Cain rising up and slaying Abel with a rock. This was not an act of murder; it's just that some biological imperative we don't understand went to work here. A bad signal, perhaps, triggered by something in the mother's endocrine system. We aren't even talking about fetuses, if we speak exactly; at the time of absorption, there would have been two conglomerates of tissue in Mrs Beaumont's womb, probably not even humanoid. Living amphibians, if you will. And one of them - the larger, the stronger - simply swarmed over the weaker, enfolded it . . . and incorporated it.'

'It sounds fucking insectile,' Alan muttered.

'Does it? I suppose so, a little. At any rate, the absorption was not complete. A little of the other twin retained its integrity. This alien matter - I can think of no other way to put it - wound up entwined in the tissue which became Thaddeus Beaumont's brain. And for some reason, it became active not long after the boy turned eleven. It began to grow. There was no room at the inn. Therefore, it was necessary to excise it like a wart. Which we did, very successfully.'

'Like a wart,' Alan said, sickened, fascinated.

All sorts of ideas were flying in his mind. They were dark ideas, as dark as bats in a deserted church steeple. Only one was completely coherent: He is two men - he has ALWAYS been two men. That's what any man or woman who makes believe for a living must be. The one who exists in the normal world . . . and the one who creates worlds. They are two. Always at least two.

'I would remember such an unusual case no matter what,' Pritchard was saying, 'but something happened just before the boy woke up that was perhaps even more unusual. Something I have always wondered about.'

'What was it?'.'The Beaumont boy heard birds before each of his headaches,' Pritchard said. 'That in itself was

not unusual; it's a well-documented occurrence in cases of brain tumor or epilepsy. It is called sensory precursor syndrome. But shortly after the operation, there was an odd incident concerning real birds. Bergenfield County Hospital was, in fact, attacked by sparrows.'

'What do you mean?'

'It sounds absurd, doesn't it?' Pritchard seemed quite pleased with himself. 'It isn't the kind of thing I'd even talk about, except that it was an extremely well-documented event. There was even a story about it on the front page of the Bergenfield Courier, with a picture. At just past two in the afternoon on October 28th, 1960, an extremely large flock of sparrows flew into the west side of County Hospital. That is the side where the Intensive Care Unit was in those days, and of course that was where the Beaumont boy was taken following his operation.

'A great many windows were broken, and the maintenance men cleared away better than three hundred dead birds following the incident. An ornithologist was quoted in the Courier's article, as I recall - he pointed out that the west side of the building was almost wholly glass, and theorized that the birds might have been attracted by the bright sunlight reflected on that glass.'

'That's crazy,' Alan said. 'Birds only fly into glass when they can't see it.'

'I believe the reporter conducting the interview mentioned that, and the ornithologist pointed out that flocking birds seem to share a group telepathy which unites their many minds - if birds can be said to have minds - into one. Rather like foraging ants. He said that if one of the flock decided to fly into the glass, the rest probably just followed along. I wasn't at the hospital when it happened - I'd finished with the Beaumont boy, checked to make sure his vites were stable - '

'Vites?'

'Vital signs, Sheriff. Then I left to play golf. But I understand that those birds scared the bejabbers out of everyone in the Hirschfield Wing. Two people were cut by flying glass. I could accept the ornithologist's theory, but it still made a ripple in my mind . . . because I knew about young Beaumont's sensory precursor, you see. Not just birds, but specific birds: sparrows.'

'The sparrows are flying again,' Alan muttered in a distracted, horrified voice.

'I beg your pardon, Sheriff'

'Nothing. Go on.'

'I questioned him about his symptoms a day later. Sometimes there is localized amnesia about sensory precursors following an operation which removes the cause, but not in this case. He remembered perfectly well. He saw the birds as well as heard them. Birds everywhere, he said, all over the houses and lawns and streets of Ridgeway, which was the section of Bergenfield where he lived.

'I was interested enough to check his charts, and match them with the reports of the incident. The flock of sparrows hit the hospital at about two-oh-five. The boy woke up at two-ten. Maybe even a little earlier.' Pritchard paused and then added: 'In fact, one of the ICU nurses said she believed it was the sound of the breaking glass that woke him up.'

'Wow,' Alan said softly.

'Yes,' Pritchard said. 'Wow is right. I haven't spoken of that business in years, Sheriff Pangborn. Does any of it help?'

'I don't know,' Alan said honestly. 'It might. Dr Pritchard, maybe you didn't get it all - I mean, if you didn't, maybe it's started growing again.'

'You said he'd had tests. Was one of them a CAT-scan?'

'Yes.'

'And he was X-rayed, of course.'.'Uh-huh.'

'If those tests showed negative, then it's because there's nothing to show. For my part, I believe we did get it all.'

'Thank you, Dr Pritchard.' He had a little trouble forming the words; his lips felt numb and strange.

'Will you tell me what has happened in greater detail when this matter has resolved itself, Sheriff'? I've been very frank with you, and it seems a small favor to ask in return. I'm very curious.'

'I will if I can.'

'That's all I ask. I will let you get back to your job, and I will return to my vacation.'

'I hope you and your wife are having a good time.'

Pritchard sighed. 'At my age, I have to work harder and harder to have just a mediocre time, Sheriff. We used to love camping, but I think next year we'll stay home.

'Well, I sure appreciate you taking the time to return my call.'

'It was my pleasure. I miss my work, Sheriff Pangborn. Not the mystique of surgery - I never cared much for that - but the mystery. The mystery of the mind. That was very exciting.'

'I imagine it was,' Alan agreed, thinking he would be very happy if there were a little less mental mystery in his life right now. 'I'll be in touch if and when things . . . clarify themselves.'

'Thank you, Sheriff.' He paused and then said: 'This is a matter of great concern to you, isn't it?'

'Yes. Yes, it is.'

'The boy I remember was very pleasant. Scared, but pleasant. What sort of man is he?'

'A good one, I think,' Alan said. 'A trifle cold, maybe, and a trifle distant, but a good man for all that.' And he repeated: 'I think.'

'Thank you. I'll let you get on with your business. Goodbye, Sheriff Pangborn.'

There was a click on the line, and Alan replaced the receiver slowly. He leaned back in his chair, folded his limber hands, and made a large black bird flap slowly across the patch of sun on his office wall. A line from The Wizard of Oz occurred to him and went clanging around in his mind: 'I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks!' That had been the Cowardly Lion, hadn't it?

The question was, what did he believe?

It was easier for him to think of things he didn't believe. He didn't believe Thad Beaumont had murdered anybody. Nor did he believe Thad had written that cryptic sentence on anyone's wall. So how had it gotten there?

Simple. Old Dr Pritchard just flew east from Fort Laramie, killed Frederick Clawson, wrote THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN on his wall, then flew on up to New York from D.C., picked Miriam Cowley's lock with his favorite scalpel, and did the same thing to her. He operated on them because he missed the mystery of surgery.

No, of course not. But Pritchard wasn't the only one who knew about Thad's - what had he called it? - his sensory precursor. It hadn't been in the People article, true, but - You're forgetting the fingerprints and the voiceprints. You're forgetting Thad's and Liz's calm, flat assertion that George Stark is real; that he's willing to commit murder in order to STAY real. And now you're trying like hell not to examine the fact that you are starting to believe it all might be true. You talked to them about how crazy it would be to believe not just in a vengeful ghost, but in the ghost of a man who never was. But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never.were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their

fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it. Alan knotted his hands tightly, extended his pinkie fingers, and sent a much smaller bird flying across the sunny wall. A sparrow.

You can't explain the flock of sparrows that hit Bergenfield County Hospital almost thirty years ago any more than you can explain how two men can have the same fingerprints and voiceprints, but now you know that Thad Beaumont shared his mother's womb with someone else. With a stranger.

Hugh Pritchard had mentioned the early onset of puberty. Alan Pangborn suddenly found himself wondering if the growth of that alien tissue coincided with something else.

He wondered if it had begun to grow at the same time Thad Beaumont began to write. 2

The intercom on his desk beeped, startling him. It was Sheila again. 'Fuzzy Martin's on line one, Alan. He wants to talk to you.'

'Fuzzy? What in hell's name does he want?'

'I don't know. He wouldn't tell me.'

'Jesus,' Alan said. 'That's all I need today.'

Fuzzy had a large chunk of property out on Town Road #2, about four miles from Castle Lake. The Martin place had once been a prosperous dairy farm, but that had been in the days when Fuzzy had been known by his proper Christian name, Albert, and was still holding the whiskey jug instead of the other way around. His kids were grown, his wife had given him up as a bad job ten years ago, and now Fuzzy presided alone over twenty-seven acres of fields which were going slowly but steadily back to the wild. On the west side of his property, where Town Road #2

wound by on its way to the lake, the house and barn stood. The barn, which had once been home to forty cows, was a huge building, its roof now deeply swaybacked, its paint peeling, most of the windows blocked with squares of cardboard. Alan and Trevor Hartland, the Castle Rock Fire Chief, had been waiting for the Martin house, the Martin barn, or the Martin both to burn down for the last four years or so.

'Do you want me to tell him you're not here?' Sheila asked. 'Clut just came in - I could give it to him.'

Alan actually considered this for a moment, then sighed and shook his head. 'I'll talk to him, Sheila. Thanks.' He picked up the telephone and cocked it between his ear and his shoulder.

'Chief Pangborn?'

'This is the Sheriff, yes.'

'This is Fuzzy Martin, out on Number Two. Might have a problem out here, Chief.'

'Oh?' Alan drew the second telephone on the desk closer to him. This was a direct line to the other offices in the Municipal Building. The tip of his finger skated around the square keypad with the number 4 stamped on it. All he had to do was pick up the receiver and push the button to get Trevor Hartland. 'What kind of problem is that?'

'Well, Chief, I'll be dipped in shit if I edzackly know. I'd call it Grand Car Thievery, if it was a car I knew. But t'wasn't. Never seen it before in m'life. But it came out of my barn just the same.'.Fuzzy spoke with that deep and somehow satiric Maine accent that turned a simple word like barn

into something that sounded almost like a bray of laughter: baaa'n. Alan pushed the inter-office telephone back to its normal place. God favored fools and drunks

- a fact he had learned well in his many years of police work - and it seemed that Fuzzy's house and barn were still standing in spite of his habit of flicking live cigarette butts here, there, and everywhere while he was drunk. Now all I have to do, Alan thought, is sit here until he unravels whatever the problem is. Then I can figure out - or try to - if it's in the real world or only inside whatever is left of Fuzzy's mind.

He caught his hands flying another sparrow across the wall and made them stop.

'What car was it that came out of your barn, Albert?' Alan asked patiently. Almost everyone in The Rock (including the man himself) called Albert Fuzzy, and Alan might try it himself after he'd been in town another ten years. Or maybe twenty.

'Just told you I never seen it before,' Fuzzy Martin said in a tone that said oh you damned fool so clearly he might as well have spoken it. 'That's why I'm callin you, Chief. Sure wasn't one of mine.'

A picture at last began to form in Alan's mind. With his cows, his kids, and his wife gone, Fuzzy Martin didn't need a whole lot of hard cash - the land had been his free and clear, except for taxes, when he inherited it from his dad. What money Fuzzy did see came from various odd sources. Alan believed, almost knew, in fact, that a bale or two of marijuana joined the hay in Fuzzy's barn loft every couple of months or so' and that was just one of Fuzzy's little scams. He had thought from time to time that he ought to make a serious effort to bust Fuzzy for possession with intent to sell, but he doubted if Fuzzy even smoked the stuff, let alone had brains enough to

sell it. Most likely he just collected a hundred or two hundred dollars every now and again for providing storage space. And even in a little burg like Castle Rock, there were more important things to do than busting drunks for holding weed.

Another of Fuzzy's storage services - this a legal one, at least was keeping cars in his barn for summer people. When Alan first came to town, Fuzzy's barn had been a regular parking garage. You could go in there and see as many as fifteen cars - most of them summer cars owned by people who had places on the lake - stored where the cows used to spend their nights and winter afternoons. Fuzzy had knocked out the partitions to make one big garage and there the summer cars waited out the long months of fall and winter in the sweet hay-smelling shadows, their bright surfaces dulled by the steady fall of old chaff from the loft, parked bumper to bumper and side to side.

Over the years, Fuzzy's car-storage business had fallen off radically. Alan supposed that word of his careless smoking habits had gotten around and that had done it. No one wants to lose their car in a barn-fire, even if it's just an old lag you kept around to run errands when summer came. The last time he had been out to Fuzzy's, Alan had seen only two cars in the barn: Ossie Brannigan's 59 T-Bird - a car which would have been a classic if it hadn't been so rusted out and beat-to-shit - and Thad Beaumont's old Ford Woody wagon. Thad again.

Today it seemed that all roads led back to Thad Beaumont. Alan sat up straighter in his chair, unconsciously pulling the telephone closer to him.

'It wasn't Thad Beaumont's old Ford?' he asked Fuzzy now. 'You're sure?'

''Course I'm sure. This wasn't no Ford, and it sure as hell wasn't any Woody wagon. It was a black Toronado.'.Another flare went off in Alan's mind . . . but he wasn't quite sure why. Someone had said

something to him about a black Toronado, and not long ago. He couldn't think just who or when, not now . . . but it would come to him.

'I just happened to be in the kitchen, gettin myself a cool drink of lemonade,' Fuzzy was going on, 'when I seen that car backin out of the barn. First thing I thought of was bow I don't store no car like that. Second thing I thought of was how anybody got it in there in the first place, when there's a big old Kreig padlock on the barn door and I got the only key to it on my ring.'

'What about the people with cars stored in there? They don't have keys?'

'No, sir!' Fuzzy seemed offended by the very idea.

'You didn't happen to get the license plate number, did you?'

'You're damn tooting I got it!' Fuzzy cried. 'Got the goddam ote jeezly b'noc'lars right there on the kitchen windowsill, ain't I?'

Alan, who had been in the barn on inspection tours with Trevor Hartland but never in Fuzzy's kitchen (and had no plans to make such a trip soon, thanks), said: 'Oh, yeah. The binoculars. I forgot about them.'

'Well, I didn't!' Fuzzy said with happy truculence. 'You got a pencil?'

'I sure do, Albert.'

'Chief, why don't you just call me Fuzzy, like everyone else?'

Alan sighed. 'Okay, Fuzzy. And while we're at it, why don't you just call me Sheriff?'

'Whatever you say. Now do you want this plate number or not?'

'Shoot.'

'First off, it was a Mississippi plate,' Fuzzy said with something like triumph in his voice. 'What the hell do you think of that?'

Alan didn't know exactly what he thought of it . . . except a third flare had gone off in his head, this one even brighter than the others. A Toronado. And Mississippi. Something about Mississippi. And a town. Oxford? Was it Oxford? Like the one two towns over from here?

'I don't know,' Alan said, and then, supposing it was the thing Fuzzy wanted to hear: 'It sounds pretty suspicious.'

'Ain't you Christing right!' Fuzzy crowed. Then he cleared his throat and became businesslike.

'Okay. Miss'ippi plate 62284. You got that, Chief?'

'62284.'

'62284, ayuh, you can take that to the fuckin bank. Suspicious! Oh, ayuh! That's just what I thought! Jesus ate a can of beans!'

At the image of Jesus chewing down on a can of B & M beans, Alan had to cover the telephone for another brief moment.

'So,' Fuzzy said, 'what action you gonna take, Chief?'

I am going to try and get out of this conversation with my sanity intact, Alan thought. That's the first thing I'm going to do. And I'm going to try and remember who mentioned - Then it came to him in a flash of cold radiance that made his arms crown with gooseflesh and stretched the flesh on the back of his neck as tight as a drumhead. On the phone with Thad. Not long after the psycho called from Miriam Cowley's apartment.

The night the killing-spree had really started.

He heard Thad saying, He moved from New Hampshire to Oxford, Mississippi, with his mother .

. . he's lost all but a trace of his Southern accent.

What else had Thad said when he had been describing George Stark over the telephone?.Final thing: he may be driving a black Toronado. I don't know what year. One of the old ones with a lot of blasting powder under the hood, anyway. Black. It could have Mississippi plates, but he's undoubtedly switched them.

'f guess he was a little too busy to do that,' Alan muttered. The gooseflesh was still crawling over his body with its thousand tiny feet.

'What was that, Chief?'

'Nothing, Albert. Talking to myself.'

'My mom useta say that meant you was gonna get some money. Maybe I ought to start doin it myself.'

Alan suddenly remembered that Thad had added something else - one final detail.

'Albert - '

'Call me Fuzzy, Chief. Told you.'

'Fuzzy, was there a bumper sticker on the car you saw? Did you maybe notice - ?'

'How the hell did you know about that? You got a hot-sheet on that motor, Chief?' Fuzzy asked eagerly.

'Never mind the questions, Fuzzy. This is police business. Did you see what it said?'

''Course I did,' Fuzzy Martin said. 'HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH, that's what it said. Can you believe that?'

Alan hung up the phone slowly, believing it, but telling himself it proved nothing, nothing at all

. . . except that maybe Thad Beaumont was as crazy as a bedbug. It would just be plain stupid to think that what Fuzzy had seen proved anything - well, anything supernatural, for want of a better word . . . was going on.

Then he thought of the voice-prints and the fingerprints, he thought of hundreds of sparrows crashing into the windows of Bergenfield County Hospital, and he was overcome with a fit of violent shivering that lasted almost a full minute.

3

Alan Pangborn was neither a coward nor a superstitious countryman who forked the sign of the evil eye at crows and kept his pregnant womenfolk away from the fresh milk because he was afraid they would clabber it. He was not a rube; he was not susceptible to the blandishments of city stickers who wanted to sell famous bridges cheap; he had not been born yesterday. He believed in logic and reasonable explanations. So he waited out his flock of shivers and then he pulled his Rolodex over in front of him and found Thad's telephone number. He observed with wry amusement that the number on the card and the one in his head matched. Apparently Castle Rock's distinguished 'writer fella' had remained even more firmly fixed in his mind - some part of it, anyway - than he had thought.

It has to have been Thad in that car. If you eliminate the nutty stuff, what other alternative is there? He described it. What was the old radio quiz show? Name It and Claim It. Bergenfield County Hospital was, in fact, attacked by sparrows. And there were other questions - far too many.

Thad and his family were under protection from the Maine State Police. If they had decided to pack up and come down here for the weekend, the State boys should have given him a call - partially to alert him, partially as a gesture of courtesy. But the state police would have tried to.dissuade Thad from making such a trip, now that they had their protective surveillance down to routine up there in Ludlow. And if the trip had been of the spur-of-the-moment kind, their efforts to change his mind would have been even more strenuous.

Then there was what Fuzzy had not seen - namely, the back-up car or cars that would have been assigned the Beaumonts if they decided to put on their travelling shoes anyway . . . as they could have done; they weren't, after all, prisoners.

People with brain tumors often do very peculiar things.

If it was Thad's Toronado, and if he had been out at Fuzzy's to get it, and if he had been alone, that led to a conclusion Alan found very unpalatable, because he had taken a qualified liking to Thad. That conclusion was that he had deliberately ditched both his family and his protectors. The state police still should have called me, if that was the case. They'd put out an APB, and they'd know damned well this is one of the places he'd be likely to come. He dialed the Beaumont number. It was picked up on the first ring. A voice he didn't know answered. Which was only to say he could not put a name to the voice. That he was speaking to an officer of the law was something he knew from the first syllable.

'Hello, Beaumont residence.'

Guarded. Ready to drive a wedge of questions into the next gap if the voice happened to be the right one . . . or the wrong one.

What's happened? Pangborn wondered, and on the heels of that: They're dead. Whoever's out there has killed the whole family, as quickly, effortlessly, and with as little mercy as he showed the others. The protection, the interrogations, the traceback equipment . . . it was all for nothing. Not even a hint of these thoughts showed in his voice as he answered.

'This is Alan Pangborn,' he said crisply. 'Sheriff, Castle County. I was calling for Thad Beaumont. To whom am I speaking?'

There was a pause. Then the voice replied, 'This is Steve Harrison, Sheriff. Maine State Police. I was going to call you. Should have done it at least an hour ago. But things here . . . things here are fucked all the way to the ionosphere. Can I ask why you called?'

Without a pause for thought - that would certainly have changed his response - Alan lied. He did it without asking himself why he was doing it. That would come later.

'I called to check in with Thad,' he said. 'It's been awhile, and I wanted to know how they're doing. I gather there's been trouble.

Trouble so big you wouldn't believe it,' Harrison said grimly. Two of my men are dead. We're pretty sure Beaumont did it.'

We're pretty sure Beaumont did it.

The peculiarity of the acts seems to rise in direct ratio to the intelligence of the man or woman so afflicted.

Alan felt d?j vu not just stealing into his mind but marching over his whole body like an invading army. Thad, it always came back to Thad. Of course. He was intelligent, he was peculiar, and he was, by his own admission, suffering from symptoms which suggested a brain tumor. The boy didn't have a brain tumor at all, you know.

If those tests showed negative, then it's because there's nothing to show. Forget the tumor. The sparrows are what you want to be thinking about now - because the sparrows are flying again.

'What happened?' he asked Trooper Harrison..'He cut Tom Chatterton and lack Eddings dunned near to pieces, that's what happened!'

Harrison shouted, startling Alan with the depth of his fury. 'He's got his family with him, and I want that son of a bitch!'

'What . . . how did he get away?'

'I don't have the time to go into it,' Harrison said. 'It's a sorry fucking story, Sheriff. He was driving a red and gray Chevrolet Suburban, a goddam whale on wheels, but we think he must have ditched it someplace and switched. He's got a summer place down there. You know the locale and the layout, right?'

'Yes,' Alan said. His mind was racing. He looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was a minute or so shy of three-forty. Time. It all came back to time. And he realized he hadn't asked Fuzzy Martin what time it had been when he saw the Toronado rolling out of his barn. It hadn't seemed important at the moment. Now it did. 'What time did you lose him, Trooper Harrison?'

He thought he could feel Harrison fuming at that, but when he answered, he did so without anger or defensiveness. 'Around twelve-thirty. He must have taken awhile to switch cars, if that's what he did, and then he went to his house in Ludlow - '

'Where was he when you lost him? How far away from his house?'

'Sheriff, I'd like to answer all your questions, but there's no time. The point is, if he's headed for his place down there - it seems unlikely, but the guy's crazy, so you never know - he won't have arrived yet, and he'll be there soon. Him and his whole fam'damly. It would be very nice if you and a couple of your men were there to greet him. If something pops, you radio Henry Payton at the Oxford State Police Barracks and we'll send more back-up than you've ever seen in your life. Don't try to apprehend him yourself under any circumstances. We're assuming the wife's been taken hostage, if she's not dead already, and that goes double for the kids.'

'Yes, he'd have to have taken his wife by force if he killed the troopers on duty, wouldn't he?'

Alan agreed, and found himself thinking, But you'd make them part of it if you could, wouldn't you? Because your mind is made up and you're not going to change it. Hell, man, you're not even going to think, straight or otherwise, until the blood dries an your friends. There were a dozen questions he wanted to ask, and the answers to those would probably produce another four dozen - but Harrison was right about one thing. There wasn't time. He hesitated for a moment, wanting very badly to ask Harrison about the most important thing of all, wanting to ask the jackpot question: Was Harrison sure Thad had had time to get to his house, kill the men on guard, there, and spirit his family away, all before the first reinforcements arrived? But to ask the question would be to claw at the painful wound this Harrison was trying to deal with right now, because buried in the question was that condemning, irrefutable judgment: You lost him. Somehow you lost him. You had a job to do and you tucked it UP.

'Can I depend on you, Sheriff?' Harrison asked, and now his voice didn't sound angry, only tired and harried, and Alan's heart went out to him.

'Yes. I'll have the place covered almost immediately.'

'Good man. And you'll liaise with the Oxford Barracks?'

'Affirmative. Henry Payton's a friend.'

'Beaumont is dangerous, Sheriff. Extremely dangerous. If he does show up, you watch your ass.'

'I will.'

'And keep me informed.' Harrison broke the connection without saying goodbye. 4.His mind - the part of it that busied itself with protocol, anyway - awoke and started asking questions . . . or trying to. Alan decided he didn't have time for protocol. Not in any of its forms. He was simply going to keep all possible circuits open and proceed. He had a feeling things had reached the point where some of those circuits would soon begin to close of their own accord. At least call some of your own men.

But he didn't think he was ready to do that, either. Norris Ridgewick, the one he would have called, was off duty and out of town. John LaPointe was still laid up with poison ivy. Seat Thomas was out on patrol. Andy Clutterbuck was here, but Clut was a rookie and this was a nasty piece of work.

He would roll this one on his own for awhile.

You're crazy! Protocol screamed in his mind.

'I might be getting there, at that,' Alan said out loud. He looked up Albert Martin's number in the phone book and called him back to ask the questions he should have asked the first time. 5

'What time did you see the Toronado backing out of your barn, Fuzzy?' he asked when Martin answered, and thought: He won't know. Hell, I'm not entirely sure he knows how to tell time. But Fuzzy promptly proved him a liar. 'Just a cunt's hair past three, Chief.' Then, after a considering pause: ''Scuse my Frankais.'

'You didn't call until - ' Alan glanced at the day-sheet, where he had logged Fuzzy's call without even thinking about it. 'Until three-twenty-eight.'

'Had to think her over,' Fuzzy said. 'Man should always look before he leaps, Chief, at least that's the way I see her. Before I called you, I went down to the barn to see if whoever got the car was up to any other ructions in there.'

Ructions, Alan thought, bemused. Probably checked the bale of pot n the loft while you were at it, didn't you, Fuzzy?

'Had he been?'

'Been what?'

'Up to any other ructions.'

'Nope. Don't believe so.'

'What condition was the lock in?'

'Open,' Fuzzy said pithily.

'Smashed?'

'Nope. just hangin in the hasp with the arm popped up.'

'Key, do you think?'

'Don't know where the sonofawhore could've come by one. I think he picked it.'

'Was he alone in the car?' Alan asked. 'Could you tell that?'

Fuzzy paused, thinking it over. 'I couldn't tell for sure,' he said at last. 'I know what you're thinkin, Chief - if I could make out the breed o' plate and read that smart-ass sticker, I ought to.been able to make out how many folks was in it. But the sun was on the glass, and I don't think it was ordinary glass, either. I think it had some tint to it. Not a whole lot, but some.'

'Okay, Fuzzy. Thanks. We'll check it out.'

'Well, he's gone from here,' Fuzzy said, and then added in a lightning flash of deduction: 'But he must be somewhere.'

'That's very true,' Alan said. He promised to tell Fuzzy 'how it all warshed out' and hung up. He pushed away from his desk and looked at the clock.

Three, Fuzzy had said. Just a cunt's hair past three. 'Scuse my Frankais. Alan didn't think there was any way Thad could have gotten from Ludlow to Castle Rock in three hours short of rocket travel, not with a side-trip back to his house thrown in for good measure - a little side-trip during which, incidentally, he had kidnapped his wife and kids and killed a couple of state troopers. Maybe if it had been a straight shot right from Ludlow, but to come from someplace else, stop in Ludlow, and then get here in time to pick a lock and drive away in a Toronado he just happened to have conveniently stashed in Fuzzy Martin's barn? No way.

But suppose someone else had killed the troopers at the Beaumont house and snatched Thad's people? Someone who didn't have to mess around losing a police escort, switching vehicles,. and making side-trips? Someone who had simply piled Liz Beaumont and her twins into a car and headed for Castle Rock? Alan thought they could have gotten here in time for Fuzzy Martin to have seen them at just past three. They could have done it without even breathing hard. The police - read Trooper Harrison, at least for the time being thought it had to be Thad, but

Harrison and his compadres didn't know about the Toronado. Mississippi plates, Fuzzy had said.

Mississippi was George Stark's home state, according to Thad's fictional biography of the man. If Thad was schizo enough to think he was Stark, at least some of the time, he might well have provided himself with a black Toronado to enhance the illusion, or fantasy, or whatever it was . . . but in order to get plates, he'd not only have to have visited Mississippi, he'd have to claim residency there.

That's dumb. He could have stolen some Mississippi plates. Or bought an old set. Fuzzy didn't say anything about what year the tags were from the house he probably couldn't have read them, anyway, not even with binoculars.

But it wasn't Thad's car. Couldn't have been. Liz would have known, wouldn't she?

Maybe not. If he's crazy enough, maybe not.

Then there was the locked door. How could Thad have gotten into the barn without breaking the lock? He was a writer and a teacher, not a cracksman.

Duplicate key, his mind whispered, but Alan didn't think so. If Fuzzy was storing wacky tobaccy in there from time to time, Alan thought Fuzzy would be pretty careful of where he left his keys lying around, no matter how careless he was of his cigarette ends. And one final question, the killer: How come Fuzzy had never seen that black Toronado before if it had been in his barn all along? How could that be?

Try this, a voice in the back of his mind whispered as he grabbed his hat and left the office. This is a pretty funny idea, Alan. You'll laugh. You'll laugh like hell. Suppose Thad Beaumont was light all the way from the jump? Suppose there really is a monster named George Stark running around out there . . . and the elements of his life, the elements Thad created, come into being when he needs them? WHEN he needs them, but not always WHERE he needs them. Because they'd always show up at places connected to the primary creator's life. So Stark would have to get his car out of.storage where Thad stores his, just like he had to start from the graveyard where Thad symbolically buried him. Don't you love it? Isn't it a scream?

He didn't love it. It wasn't a scream. It wasn't even remotely funny. It drew an ugly scratch not just across everything he believed but across the way he had been taught to think. He found himself remembering something Thad had said. I don't know who I am when I'm writing. That wasn't exact, but it was close. And what's even more amazing, it never occurred to me to wonder until now.

'You were him, weren't you?' Alan said softly. 'You were him and he was you and that's the way the killer grew, pop goes the weasel.'

He shivered and Sheila Brigham looked up from her typewriter at the dispatcher's desk in time to see it. 'It's too hot to do that, Alan. You must be coming down with a cold.'

'Coming down with something, I guess,' Alan said. 'Cover the telephone, Sheila. Relay anything small to Seat Thomas. Anything big to me. Where's Clut?'

'I'm in here!' Clut's voice came drifting out of the john.

'I expect to be back in forty-five minutes or so!' Alan yelled at him. 'You got the desk until I get back!'

'Where you going, Alan?' Clut came out of the men's room tucking in his khaki shirt.

'The lake,' Alan said vaguely, and left before either Clut or Sheila could ask any more questions

. . . or before he could reflect on what he was doing. Leaving without a stated destination in a situation like this was a very bad idea. It was asking for more than trouble; it was asking to get killed.

But what he was thinking

(the sparrows are flying)

simply couldn't be true. Couldn't. There had to be a more reasonable explanation. He was still trying to convince himself of this as he drove his prowl-car out of town and into the worst trouble of his life.

6

There was a rest area on Route 5 about half a mile from Fuzzy Martin's property. Alan turned in, operating on something which was half hunch and half whim. The hunch part was simple enough: black Toronado or no black Toronado, they hadn't come down here from Ludlow on a magic carpet. They must have driven. Which meant there had to be a ditched car around someplace. The man he was hunting had ditched Homer Gamache's truck in a roadside parking area when he was through with it, and what a perp would do once he would do again. There were three vehicles parked in the turnaround: a beer truck, a new Ford escort, and a roaddusty Volvo.

As he got out of the prowler-car, a man in green fatigues came out of the men's convenience and walked toward the cab of the beer truck. He was short, dark-haired, narrow-shouldered. No George Stark here.

'Officer,' he said, and gave Alan a little salute. Alan nodded at him and walked down to where three elderly ladies were sitting at one of the picnic tables, drinking coffee from a Thermos and talking..'Hello, Officer,' one of them said. 'Can we do something for you?' Or did we maybe do something wrong? the momentarily anxious eyes asked.

'I just wondered if the Ford and the Volvo up there belonged to you ladies,' Alan said.

'The Ford is mine,' a second said. 'We all came in that. I don't know anything about a Volvo. Is it that sticker thing? Did that sticker thing run out again? My son is supposed to take care of that sticker thing, but he's so forgetful! Forty-three years old, and I still have to tell him ev - '

'The sticker's fine, ma'am,' Alan said, smiling his best The Policeman Is Your Friend smile.

'None of you happened to see the Volvo drive in, did you?'

They shook their heads.

'Have you seen anyone else during the last few minutes who might belong to it?'

'No,' the third lady said. She looked at him with bright little gerbil's eyes. 'Are you on the scent, Officer?'

'Pardon, ma'am?'

'Tracking a criminal, I mean.'

'Oh,' Alan said. He felt a moment of unreality. Exactly what was he doing here? Exactly what had he been thinking to get here? 'No, ma'am. I just like Volvos.' Boy, that sounded intelligent. That sounded just . . . fucking . . . crackerjack.

'Oh,' the first lady said. 'Well, we haven't seen anyone. Would you like a cup of coffee, Officer?

I believe there's just about one good one left.'

'No, thank you,' Alan said. 'You ladies have a nice day.'

'You too, Officer,' they chorused in an almost perfect three-part harmony. It made Alan feel more unreal than ever.

He walked back up to the Volvo. Tried the driver's side door. It opened. The inside of the car had a hot attic feel. It had been sitting here awhile. He looked in the back and saw a packet, a little bigger than a Sweet 'n Low packet, on the floor. He leaned between the seats and picked it up. HANDI-WIPE, the packet said, and he felt someone drop a bowling-ball in his stomach. It doesn't mean anything, the voice of Protocol and Reason spoke up at once. At least, not necessarily. I know what you're thinking: you're thinking babies. But, Alan, they give those things out at the roadside stands when you buy fried chicken, for heaven's sake. All the same . . .

Alan stuck the Handi-Wipe in one of the pockets of his uniform blouse and got out of the car. He was about to close the door and then leaned in again. He tried to look under the dashboard and couldn't quite do it on his feet. He had to get down on his knees. Someone dropped another bowling-ball. He made a muffled sound - the sound of a man who has been hit quite hard.

The ignition wires were hanging down, their copper cores bare and slightly kinked. The kink, Alan knew, came from being braided together. The Volvo had been hot-wired, and very efficiently from the look of it. The driver had grasped the wires above the bare cores and pulled them apart again to cut the engine when they had parked here.

So it was true . . . some of it, at least. The big question was how much. He was beginning to feel like a man edging closer and closer to a potentially lethal drop. He went back to his prowler-car, got in, started it up, and took the microphone off its prong. What's true? Protocol and Reason whispered. God, that was a maddening voice. That someone is at the Beaumonts' lake house? Yes - that might be true. That someone named George Stark backed that black Toronado out of Fuzzy Martin's bam? Come on, Alan..Two thoughts occurred to him almost simultaneously. The first was that, if he contacted Henry Payton at the State Police Barracks in Oxford, as Harrison had told him to do, he might never know how this came out. Lake Lane, where the Beaumonts' summer house was located, was a dead end. The state police would tell him not to approach the house on his own - not a single officer, not when they suspected the man who was holding Liz and the twins of at least a dozen murders. They would want him to block off the road and no more while they sent out a fleet of cruisers, maybe a chopper, and, for all Alan knew, a few destroyers and fighter-planes. The second thought was about Stark.

They weren't thinking about Stark; they didn't even know about Stark. But what if Stark was real?

If that was the case, Alan was coming to believe that sending a bunch of state troopers who didn't know any better up Lake Lane would be like marching men into a meat-grinder. He put the microphone back on its prong. He was going in, and he was going in alone. It might be wrong, probably was, but it was what he was going to do. He could live with the thought of his own stupidity; God knew he had done it before. What he couldn't live with was even the possibility that he might have caused the deaths of a woman and two infants by making a radio-call for back-up before he knew the real nature of the situation.

Alan pulled out of the rest area and headed for Lake Lane..