Question: How did he know where I'd be?
And that was a mighty good question, wasn't it? That was right up there with such questions as how can two different men share the same fingerprints and voice-prints and how can two different babies have exactly the same bruise . . . especially when only one of the babies in question happened to bump her leg.
Except he knew that similar mysteries were well-documented and accepted, at least in cases where twins were involved; the bond between identicals was even more eerie. There had been an article about it in one of the news magazines a year or so ago. Because of the twins in his own life, Thad had read the article closely.
There was the case of identical twins who were separated by an entire continent — but when one of them broke his left leg, the other suffered excruciating pains in his own left leg without even knowing something had happened to his sib. There were the identical girls who had developed their own special language, a language known and understood by no one else on earth. These twin girls had never learned English in spite of their identical high IQs. What need for English had they? They had each other . . . and that was all they wanted. And, the article said, there were the twins who, separated at birth, were reunited as adults and found they had both married on the same day of the same year, women with the same first name and strikingly similar looks. Furthermore, both couples had named their first sons Robert. Both Roberts had been born in the same month and in the same year.
Half and half.
Criss and cross.
Snick and snee.
'Ike and Mike, they think alike,' Thad muttered. He reached out and circled the last line he had written:
Question: How did he know where I'd be?
Below this he wrote:
Answer: Because the sparrows are flying again. And because we are twins.
He turned to a fresh page in his journal and laid the pen aside. Heart thumping hard, skin freezing with fear, he reached out a trembling right hand and pulled one of the Berol pencils from the jar. It seemed to burn with a low and unpleasant heat in his hand.
Time to go to work.
Thad Beaumont leaned over the blank page, paused, and then printed THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN in large block letters at the top.
2
What, exactly, did he mean to do with the pencil?
But he knew that, too. He was going to try to answer the last question, the one so obvious he hadn't even bothered to write it down: Could he consciously induce the trance state? Could he make the sparrows fly?
The idea embodied a form of psychic contact he had read about but had never seen demonstrated: automatic writing. The person attempting to contact a dead soul (or a living one) by this method held a pen or pencil loosely in his hand with the tip on a blank sheet of paper and simply waited for the spirit — pun most definitely intended — to move him. Thad had read that automatic writing, which could be practiced with the aid of a Ouija board, was often approached as a kind of lark, a party—game, even, and that this could be extremely dangerous — that it could, in fact, lay the practitioner wide open to some form of possession.
Thad had neither believed nor disbelieved this when reading it; it seemed as foreign to his own life as the worship of pagan idols or the practice of trepanning to relieve headaches. Now it seemed to have its own deadly logic. But he would have to summon the sparrows.
He thought of them. He tried to summon up the image of all those birds, all those thousands of birds, sitting on roofpeaks and telephone wires beneath a mild spring sky, waiting for the telepathic signal to take off.
And the image came . . . but it was flat and unreal, a kind of mental painting with no life in it. When he began writing it was often like this — a dry and sterile exercise. No, it was worse than that. Starting off always felt a little obscene to him, like French-kissing a corpse.
But he had learned that, if he kept at it, if he simply kept pushing the words along the page, something else kicked in, something which was both wonderful and terrible. The words as individual units began to disappear. Characters who were stilted and lifeless began to limber up, as if he had kept them in some small closet overnight and they had to loosen their muscles before they could begin their complicated dances. Something began to happen in his brain; he could almost feel the shape of the electrical waves there changing, losing their prissy goose-step discipline, turning into the soft, sloppy delta waves of dreaming sleep.
Now Thad sat hunched over his journal, pencil in hand, and tried to make this happen. As the moments spun themselves out and nothing did happen, he began to feel more and more foolish.
A line from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show got into his head and refused to leave: Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, the spirits are about to speak! What in God's name was he going to say to Liz if she showed up and asked him what he was doing here with a pencil in his hand and a blank sheet of paper in front of him, at just a few minutes before midnight? That he was trying to draw the bunny on the matchbook and win a scholarship to the Famous Artists School in New Haven? Hell, he didn't even have one of those matchbooks.
He moved to put the pencil back, and then paused. He had turned in his chair a little so he was looking out the window to the left of his desk.
There was a bird out there, sitting on the window-ledge and looking in at him with bright black eyes.
It was a sparrow.
As he watched, it was joined by another.
And another.
'Oh my God,' he said in a trembling, watery voice. He had never been so terrified in his life . . . and suddenly that sensation of going filled him again. It was as it had been when he spoke to Stark on the telephone, but now it was stronger, much stronger.
Another sparrow landed, jostling the other three aside for place, and beyond them he saw a whole line of birds sitting on top of the carriage-house where they kept the lawn equipment and Liz's car. The antique weathervane on the carriage-house's single gable was covered with them, swinging beneath their weight.
'Oh my God,' he repeated, and he heard his voice from a million miles away, a voice which was filled with horror and terrible wonder. 'Oh my dear God, they're real — the sparrows are real.'
In all his imaginings he had never suspected this . . . but there was no time to consider it, no mind to consider it with. Suddenly the study was gone, and in its place he saw the Ridgeway section of Bergenfield, where he had grown up. It lay as silent and deserted as the house in his Stark nightmare; he found himself peering at a silent suburb in a dead world.