From somewhere above them, on the other side of this grotesque living barrier, a man screamed.
Liz seized him, pulled him close.
He didn't answer her. Because the answer was nothing. There was nothing they
8
Stark came toward Thad with the razor in his right hand. Thad backed toward the slowly moving study door with his eyes on the blade. He snatched up another pencil from the desk.
'That ain't gonna do you no good, hoss, ' Stark said. 'Not now.' Then his eyes shifted to the door. It had opened wide enough, and the sparrows flowed in, a river of them . . . and they flowed at George Stark.
In an instant his expression became one of horror . . . and understanding.
He cut one of the sparrows cleanly in half; it fell out of the air in two fluttering pieces. Stark ripped and flailed at the air around him.
And Thad suddenly understood
what was happening here.
The psychopomps, of course, had come to serve as George Stark's escort. George Stark's escort back to Endsville; back to the land of the dead.
Thad dropped the pencil and retreated toward his children. The air was filled with sparrows. The door had opened almost all the way now; the river had become a flood.
Sparrows settled on Stark's broad shoulders. They settled on his arms, on his head. Sparrows struck his chest, dozens of them at first, then hundreds. He twisted this way and that in a cloud of falling feathers and flashing, slashing beaks, trying to give back what he was getting.
They covered the straight-razor; its evil silver gleam was gone, buried beneath the feathers that were stuck to it.
Thad looked at his children. They had stopped weeping. They were looking up into the stuffed, boiling air with identical expressions of wonder and delight. Their hands were raised, as if to check for rain. Their tiny fingers were outstretched. Sparrows stood on them . . . and did not peck.
But they were pecking Stark.
Blood burst from his face in a hundred places. One of his blue eyes winked out. A sparrow landed on the collar of his shirt and sent his beak diving into the hole Thad had made with the pencil in Stark's throat — the bird did it three times, fast,
Thad crouched by the twins and now the birds lit on him as well. Not pecking; just standing.
And watching.
Stark had disappeared. He had become a living, squirming bird-sculpture. Blood oozed through the jostling wings and feathers. From somewhere below, Thad heard a shrieking, splintering sound — wood giving way.
And now he began to hear the loose, wet plop and smack of the living flesh being torn off George Stark's bones.
'They've come for you, George,' he heard himself whisper. 'They've come for you. God help you now.'
9
Alan sensed space above him again, and looked up through the diamond-shaped holes in the afghan. Birdshit dripped onto his cheek and he wiped it away. The stairwell was still full of birds, but their numbers had thinned. Most of those still alive had apparently gotten where they were going.
'Come on,' he said to Liz, and they began to move up over the ghastly carpet of dead birds again. They had managed to gain the second-floor landing when they heard Thad shriek:
And the whirring of the birds became a hurricane.
10
Stark made one last galvanic effort to get away from them. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run, but he tried, anyway. It was his style.
The column of birds which had covered him moved forward with him; gigantic, puffy arms covered with feathers and heads and wings rose, beat themselves across his torso, rose again, and crossed themselves at the chest. Birds, some wounded, some dead, fell to the floor, and for one moment Thad was afforded a vision which would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The sparrows were eating George Stark alive. His eyes were gone; where they had been only vast dark sockets remained. His nose had been reduced to a bleeding flap. His forehead and most of his hair had been struck away, revealing the mucus-bleared surface of his skull. The collar of his shirt still ringed his neck, but the rest was gone. Ribs poked out of his skin in white lumps. The birds had opened his belly. A drove of sparrows sat on his feet and looked up with bright attention and squabbled for his guts as they fell out in dripping, shredded chunks.
And he saw something else.
The sparrows were trying to lift him up. They were trying . . . and very soon, when they had reduced his body-weight enough, they would do just that.
Stark's screams stopped as his throat disintegrated beneath a hundred hammering, dipping beaks. Sparrows clustered under his armpits and for a second his feet rose from the bloody carpet.
He brought his arms — what remained of them — down into his sides in a savage gesture, crushing dozens . . . but dozens upon dozens more came to take their places.
The sound of pecking and splintering wood to Thad's right suddenly grew louder, hollower. He looked in that direction and saw the wood of the study's cast wall disintegrating like tissue-paper. For an instant he saw a thousand yellow beaks burst through at once, and then he grabbed the twins and rolled over them, arching his body to protect them, moving with real grace for perhaps the only time in his life.
The wall crashed inward in a dusty cloud of splinters and sawdust. Thad closed his eyes and hugged his children close to him.
He saw no more.
11
But Alan Pangborn did, and Liz did, too.
They had pulled the afghan down to their shoulders as the cloud of birds over them and around them shredded apart. Liz began to stumble into the guest bedroom, toward the open study door, and Alan followed her.
For a moment he couldn't see into the study; it was only a cloudy brown-black blur. And then he made out a shape — a horrible, padded shape. It was Stark. He was covered with birds, eaten alive, and yet he still lived.
More birds came; more still. Alan thought their horrid shrill cheeping would drive him mad. And then he saw what they were doing.
The thing which had been —George Stark, a thing which was now only vaguely human, rose into the air on a cushion of sparrows. It moved across the office, almost fell, then rose unsteadily once more. It approached the huge, splinter-ringed hole in the east wall.
More birds flew in through this hole; those which still remained in the guest-room rushed into the study.
Flesh fell from Stark's twitching skeleton in a grisly rain.
The body floated through the hole with sparrows flying around it and tearing out the last of its hair.
Alan and Liz struggled over the rug of dead birds and into the study. Thad was rising slowly to his feet, a weeping twin in each arm. Liz ran to them and took them from him. Her hands flew over them, looking for wounds.
'Okay,' Thad said. 'I think they're okay.'
Alan went to the ragged hole in the study wall. He looked out and saw a scene from some malign fairy-tale. The sky was black with birds, and yet in one place it was
This black hole bore the unmistakable shape of a struggling man.
The birds lifted it higher, higher, higher. It reached the tops of the trees and seemed to pause there. Alan thought he heard a high-pitched, inhuman scream from the center of that cloud. Then the sparrows began to move again. In a way, watching them was like watching a film run backward. Black streams of sparrows boiled from all the shattered windows in the house; they funnelled upward from the driveway, the trees, and the curved roof of Rawlie's Volkswagen.
They all moved toward that central
