The twins giggled together and waved their hands at him. Stark waved gaily back. As he backed the car out of the garage, Liz reached stealthily behind Wendy, who was sitting on her lap, and touched the rounds that were the fingerholes of the scissors. Not now, but soon. She had no intention of waiting for Thad. She was too uneasy about what this dark creature might decide to do to the twins in the meantime.
Or to her.
As soon as he was sufficiently distracted, she intended to free the scissors from their hiding place and bury them in his throat.
PART 3
THE COMING OF THE
PSYCHOPOMPS
'The poets talk about love,' Machine said, running the straight-razor back and forth along the strop in a steady, hypnotic rhythm, 'and that's okay. There is love. The politicians talk about duty, and that's okay, too. There is duty. Eric Hoffer talks about post-modernism, Hugh Hefner talks about sex, Hunter Thompson talks about drugs, and Jimmy Swaggart talks about God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Those things all exist and they are all okay. Do you know what I mean, Jack?'
'Yeah, I guess so,' Jack Rangely said. He really didn't know, didn't have the slightest idea, but when Machine was in this sort of mood, only a lunatic would argue with him.
Machine turned the straight-razor's edge down and suddenly slashed the strop in two. A long section fell to the pool—hall floor like a severed tongue. 'But what I talk about is doom,' he said. 'Because, in the end, doom is all that counts.'
— Riding to Babylon by George Stark
Twenty-two
Thad on the Run
1
Pretend it's a book you're writing, he thought as he turned left onto College Avenue, leaving the campus behind. And pretend you're a character in that book.
It was a magic thought. His mind had been filled with roaring panic — a kind of mental tornado in which fragments of some possible plan spun like chunks of uprooted landscape. But at the idea that he could pretend it was all a harmless fiction, that he could move not only himself but the other characters in this story (characters like Harrison and Manchester, for instance) around the way he moved characters on paper, in the safety of his study with bright lights overhead and either a cold can of Pepsi or a hot cup of tea beside him . . . at this idea, it was as if the wind howling between his ears suddenly blew itself out. The extraneous shit blew away with it, leaving him with the pieces of his plan lying around . . . pieces he found he was able to put together quite easily. He discovered he had something which might even work.
It better work, Thad thought. If it doesn't, you'll wind up in protect ve custody and Liz and the kids will most likely wind up dead.
But what about the sparrows? Where did the sparrows fit?
He didn't know. Rawlie had told him they were psychopomps, the harbingers of the living dead, and that fit, didn't it? Yes. Up to a point, anyway. Because foxy old George was alive again, but foxy old George was also dead . . . dead and rotting. So the sparrows fit in . . . but not all the way. If the sparrows had guided George back from
(the land of the dead)
wherever he had been, how come George himself knew nothing about them? How come he did not remember writing that phrase, THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, in blood on the walls of two apartments?
'Because I wrote it,' Thad muttered, and his mind flew back to the things he had written in his journal while he had been sitting in his study, on the edge of a trance.
Question: Are the birds mine?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Who wrote about the sparrows?
Answer: The one who knows . . . I am the knower. I am the owner.
Suddenly all the answers trembled almost within his grasp — the terrible, unthinkable answers. Thad heard a long, shaky sound emerging from his own mouth. It was a groan.
Question: Who brought George Stark back to life? Answer. The owner. The knower.
'I didn't mean to!' he cried.
But was that true? Was it really? Hadn't there always been a part of him in love with George Stark's simple, violent nature? Hadn't part of him always admired George, a man who didn't stumble over things or bump into things, a man who never looked weak or silly, a man who would never have to fear the demons locked away in the liquor cabinet? A man with no wife or children to consider, with no loves to bind him or slow him down? A man who had never waded through a shitty student essay or agonized over a Budget Committee meeting? A man who had a sharp, straight answer to all of life's more difficult questions?
A man who was not afraid of the dark because he owned the dark?
'Yes, but he's a BASTARD!' Thad screamed into the hot interior of his sensible American-made four-wheel-drive car.
Right — and part of you finds that so attractive, doesn't it?
Perhaps he, Thad Beaumont, had not really created George . . . but was it not possible that some longing part of him had allowed Stark to be re-created?
Question: If I own the sparrows, can I use them?
No answer came. It wanted to come; he could feel its longing. But it danced just out of his reach, and Thad found himself suddenly afraid that he himself — some Stark-loving part of him — might be holding it off. Some part that didn't want George to die.
I am the knower. I am the owner. I am the bringer.
He paused at the Orono traffic light and then was heading out along Route 2, toward Bangor and Ludlow beyond.
Rawlie was a part of his plan — a part of it which he at least understood. What would he do if he actually managed to shake the cops following him only to find that Rawlie had already left his office?
He didn't know.
What would he do if Rawlie was there but refused to help him?
He didn't know that, either.
I'll burn those bridges when and if I come to them.
And he would be coming to them soon enough.
He was passing Gold's on the right, now. Gold's was a long, tubular building constructed of prefab aluminum sections. It was painted a particularly offensive shade of aqua and was surrounded by a dozen acres of junked-out cars. Their windshields glittered in the hazy sunlight in a galaxy of white starpoints. It was Saturday afternoon — had been for almost twenty minutes now. Liz and her dark kidnapper would be on their way to The Rock. And, although there would be a clerk or two selling parts to weekend mechanics in the prefab building where Gold's did its retail business, Thad could reasonably hope that the junkyard itself would be unattended. With nearly twenty thousand cars in varying states of decay roughly organized into dozens of zigzagging rows, he should be able to hide the Suburban . . . and he had to hide it. Highshouldered, boxy, gray with brilliant red sides, it stuck out like a sore thumb.