The Dark Half - Stephen King [119]
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.
Yet it was not entirely dead, because the roof of every house was lined with twittering sparrows. Every TV antenna was freighted with them. Every tree was filled with them. They queued upon every telephone line. They sat on the tops of parked cars, on the big blue mailbox which stood at the corner of Duke Street and Marlborough Lane, and on the bike-rack in front of the Duke Street Convenience Store, where he had gone to buy milk and bread for his mother when he was a boy.
The world was filled with sparrows, waiting for the command to fly.
Thad Beaumont lolled back in his office chair, a thin froth spilling from the comers of his mouth, feet twitching aimlessly, and now all the windows of the study were lined with sparrows, looking in at him like strange avian spectators. A long, gargling sound escaped his mouth. His eyes rolled up in his head, revealing bulging, glistening whites.
The pencil touched the sheet and began to write.
it scrawled across the top line. It dropped two lines, made the L-shaped indent-mark that was characteristic of each new Stark paragraph, and wrote:
The sparrows flew.
All at once they all took flight, the ones in his head from that long-ago Bergenfield, and the ones outside his Ludlow home . . . the real ones. They flew up into two skies: