The Dark Half - Stephen King [56]
They nodded.
'The phrase was 'The sparrows are flying again.' Does that mean anything to either of you?'
'No,' Liz said.
'No,' Thad said in a neutral voice after a momentary hesitation.
Alan's gaze stayed on Thad's face for a moment. 'You are quite sure?'
'Quite sure.'
Alan sighed. 'I doubted if it would, but it seemed like a shot worth taking. There are so many other weird connections, I thought there just might be one more. Goodnight, Thad, Liz. Remember to get in touch if anything occurs.'
'We will,' Liz said.
'Count on it,' Thad agreed.
A moment later they were both inside again, with the door closed against Alan Pangborn — and the dark through which he would make his long trip home.
Ten
Later That Night
1
They carried the sleeping twins upstairs, then began to get ready for bed themselves. Thad undressed to his shorts and undershirt his form of pajamas — and went into the bathroom. He was brushing his teeth when the shakes hit. He dropped the toothbrush, spat a mouthful of white foam into the basin, and then lurched over to the toilet on legs with no more feeling in them than a pair of wooden stilts.
He retched once — a miserable dry sound — but nothing came up. His stomach began to settle again . . . at least on a trial basis.
When he turned around, Liz was standing in the doorway, wearing a blue nylon nightie that stopped several inches north of the knee. She was looking at him levelly.
'You're keeping secrets, Thad. That's no good. It never was.'
He sighed harshly and held his hands out in front of him with the fingers splayed. They were still trembling. 'How long have you known?'
'There's been something off-beat about you ever since the sheriff came back tonight. And when he asked that last question . . . about the thing written on Clawson's wall . . . you might as well have had a neon sign on your forehead.'
'Pangborn didn't see any neon.'
'Sheriff Pangborn doesn't know you as well as I do . . . but if you didn't see him do a doubletake there at the end, you weren't looking. Even he saw something wasn't quite kosher. It was the way he looked at you.'
Her mouth drew down slightly. It emphasized the old lines in her face, the ones he had first seen after the accident in Boston and the miscarriage, the ones which had deepened as she watched him struggle harder and harder to bring water from a well which seemed to have gone dry.
It was around then that his drinking had begun to waver out of control. All these things — Liz's accident, the miscarriage, the critical and financial failure of Purple Haze following the wild success of Machine's Way under the Stark name, the sudden binge drinking had combined to bring on a deep depressive state. He had recognized it as a selfish, inward-turning frame of mind, but recognition hadn't helped. Finally he had washed a handful of sleeping pills down his throat with half a bottle of Jack Daniel's. It had been an unenthusiastic suicide attempt . . . but suicide attempt it had been. All of these things had taken place in a period of three years. It had seemed much longer at the time. At the time it had seemed forever.
And of course, little or none of it had made it into the pages of People magazine.
Now he saw Liz looking at him the way she had looked at him then. He hated it. The worry was bad; the mistrust was worse. He thought outright hate would have been easier to bear than that odd, wary look.
'I hate it when you lie to me,' she said simply.
'I didn't lie, Liz! For God's sake!'
'Sometimes people lie just by being quiet.'
'I was going to tell you anyway,' he said. 'I was only trying to find my way to it.'
But was that true? Was it really? He didn't know. It was weird shit, crazy shit, but that wasn't the reason he might have lied by silence. He had felt the urge to be silent the way a man who has observed blood in his stool or felt a lump