The Dark Half

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.

Twelve

Sis

She knew something was wrong when she went to slide her key into the big Kreig lock on her apartment door and instead of slipping into the slot with its familiar and reassuring series of clicks, it pushed the door open instead. There was no moment of thinking how stupid she had been, going off to work and leaving her apartment door unlocked behind her, gee, Miriam, why not just hang a note on the door that says HELLO, ROBBERS, I KEEP EXTRA CASH IN THE WOK ON THE TOP KITCHEN SHELF?

   There was no moment like that because once you'd been in New York six months, maybe even four, you didn't forget. Maybe you only locked up when you were going away on vacation if you lived in the sticks, and maybe you forgot to lock up once in awhile when you went to work if you lived in a small city like Fargo, North Dakota, or Ames, Iowa, but after you'd been in the maggoty old Big Apple for awhile, you locked up even if you were just taking a cup of sugar to a neighbor down the hall. Forgetting to lock up would be like exhaling a breath and just forgetting to take the next one. The city was full of museums and galleries, but the city was also full of junkies and psychos, and you didn't take chances. Not unless you had been born stupid, and Miriam had not been born that way. A little silly, maybe, but not stupid.

    So she knew something was wrong, and while the thieves Miriam was sure had broken into her apartment had probably left three or four hours ago, taking everything there was even a remote chance of hocking (not to mention the eighty or ninety dollars in the wok . . . and maybe the wok itself, now that she thought of it; after all, was it not a hockable wok?), they could still be in there. It was the assumption you made, anyway, just as boys who have received their first real guns are taught, before they are taught anything else, to assume the gun is always loaded, that even when you take it out of the box in which it came from the factory, the gun is loaded.

    She began to step away from the door. She did this almost at once, even before the door had stopped its short inward swing, but it was already too late. A hand came out of the darkness, shooting through the two-inch gap between door and jamb like a bullet. It clamped over her hand. Her keys dropped to the hall carpet.

  Miriam Cowley opened her mouth to scream. The big blonde man had been standing just inside the door, waiting patiently for just over four hours now, not drinking coffee, not smoking cigarettes. He wanted a cigarette, and would have one as soon as this was over, but before, the smell might have alerted her — New Yorkers were like very small animals cowering in the underbrush, senses attuned for danger even when they thought they were having a good time.

   He had her right wrist in his right hand before she could even think. Now he put the palm of his left hand against the door, bracing it, and yanked the woman forward just as hard as he could. The door looked like wood, but it was of course metal, as were all good apartment doors in the maggoty old Big Apple. The side of her face struck its edge with a thud. Two of her teeth broke off at the gumline and cut her mouth. Her lips, which had tightened, relaxed in shock and blood spilled over the lower one. Droplets spattered on the door. Her cheekbone snapped like a twig.

   She sagged, semi-conscious. The blonde man released her. She collapsed to the hall carpet. This had to be very quick. According to New York folklore, no one in the maggoty old Big Apple gave a shit what went down, as long as it didn't go down on them. According to the folklore, a psycho could stab a woman twenty or forty times outside of a twenty-chair barber shop at high noon on Seventh Avenue and no one would say a thing except maybe Could you trim it a little higher over the ears or I think I'll skip the cologne this time, Joe. The blonde man knew the folklore was false. For small, hunted animals, curiosity is a part of the survival package. Protect your own skin, yes, that was the name of the game, but an incurious animal was apt to be a dead animal very soon. Therefore, speed was of the essence.

He opened the door, seized Miriam by the hair, and yanked her inside.

   A bare moment later he heard the snick of a deadbolt being released down the hall, followed by the click of an opening door. He didn't have to look out to see the face which would now be peering out of another apartment, a little hairless rabbit face, nose almost twitching.

   'You didn't break it, Miriam, did you?' he