He thought the answer was yes . . . but he also thought it would render him vulnerable again. And next time it might not be a pencil in the hand. Next time it might be a letter-opener in the neck.
He looked at the pantry door and thought about how he could go in there . . . and from there outside again, on the other side of the house.
He could not answer that one. At least not yet. And one failed experiment might kill him.
Thad finished his milk, rinsed his glass, and put it into the dish drainer. Then he went into. the pantry. Here, between shelves of canned goods on the right and shelves of paper goods on the left, was a Dutch door leading out to the wide expanse of lawn which they called the back yard. He unlocked the door, pushed both halves open, and saw the picnic table and the barbecue out there, standing silent sentinel. He stepped out onto the asphalt walk which ran around this side of the house and finally joined the main walk in front.
The walk glimmered like black glass in the chancy light of the half-moon. He could see white splotches on it at irregular intervals.
Thad walked slowly up the asphalt path until he was standing directly below his study windows. An Orinco truck came over the horizon and pelted down Route 15 toward the house, casting a momentary bright light across the lawn and the asphalt walk. In this brief light, Thad saw the corpses of two sparrows lying on the walk — tiny heaps of feathers with trifurcate feet sticking out of them. Then the truck was gone. In the moonlight, the bodies of the dead birds became irregular patches of shadow once again — no more than that.
He didn't know.
He didn't know that, either. But he felt sure of one thing: the sparrows which had come tonight, the real sparrows which had come just before the trance had swallowed him, were only a fraction of all
But he suspected that what he wanted did not matter. That was the real horror; he had touched some terrible paranormal talent in himself, but he could not control it. The very idea of control in this matter was a joke.
And he believed that before this was over, they would be back.
Thad shuddered and went back to the house. He slipped into his own pantry like a burglar, then locked the door behind him and took his throbbing hand up to bed. Before he went, he swallowed another Percodan, washing it down with water from the kitchen tap.
Liz did not wake when he lay down beside her. Some time later he escaped into three hours of grainy, fitful sleep in which nightmares flew and circled around him, always just out of reach.
Nineteen
Stark Makes a Purchase
1
Waking up wasn't like waking up.
When you came right down to it, he didn't think he had
He came slowly out of sleep knowing he hadn't really been asleep at all. Somehow Thad Beaumont had managed to capture him for a little while; had managed to bend him to his will for a little while. Had he said things,
He also came out of sleep to pain.
He had rented a two-room 'efficiency' in the East Village, just off Avenue B. When he opened his eyes he was sitting at the lopsided kitchen table with an open notebook in front of him. A rivulet of bright blood ran across the faded oilcloth which covered the table, and there was nothing very surprising about that, because there was a Bic pen sticking out of the back of his right hand.
Now the dream began to come back.
Stark could vaguely remember dreaming that Thad was with him, in his bed — they were talking together, whispering together, and at first this had seemed both pleasant and oddly comforting — like talking with your brother after lights out.
Except they were doing more than
What they had been doing was
So, still in that half- waking, half-dreaming state, he had gone into the kitchen, opened the notebook, and picked up the ballpoint pen. Thad hadn't tipped to any of that; why should he have? Wasn't he also writing five hundred miles away? The pen wasn't right, of course — didn't even feel right —in his hand — but it would do. For now.
He had bought the Bic pen and half a dozen notebooks in a stationery shop right after he had arrived in New York City; had done it even before renting the wretched 'efficiency'. There were Berol pencils in the shop, and he had wanted to buy
If he could write, if he could write
Yesterday he had gone to a branch of the New York Public Library and had rented an hour's time on one of the grim gray electric IBMs in the Writing Room. The hour had seemed to last a thousand years. He sat in a carrel which was enclosed on three sides, fingers trembling on the keys, and typed his name, this time in capital letters: GEORGE STARK, GEORGE STARK, GEORGE STARK.