The Dark Half - Stephen King [57]
And there was something else: he was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one — including himself — who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything. He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.
Inside him a voice whispered for the first time: Who are you when you write, Thad? Who are you then?
And for that voice he had no answer.
'Well?' Liz asked. Her tone was sharp, teetering on the edge of anger.
He looked up out of his own thoughts startled. 'Pardon?'
'Have you found your way to it? Whatever it may be?'
'Look,' he said, 'I don't understand why you sound so pissed, Liz!'
'Because I'm scared!' she cried angrily . . . but he saw tears in the corners of her eyes now. 'Because you held out on the sheriff, and I still wonder if you won't hold out on me! If I hadn't seen that expression on your face . . . '
'Oh?' Now he began to feel angry himself. 'And what expression was it? What did it look like to you?'
'You looked guilty,' she snapped. 'You looked the way you used to look when you were telling people you'd stopped drinking and you hadn't. When — ' She stopped then. He did not know what she saw in his face — wasn't sure he wanted to know — but it wiped away her anger. A stricken look replaced it. 'I'm sorry. That wasn't fair.'
'Why not?' he said dully. 'It was true. For awhile.'
He went back into the bathroom and used the mouthwash to rinse away the last of the toothpaste. It was non-alcoholic mouthwash. Like the cough medicine. And the ersatz vanilla in the kitchen cupboard. He had not taken a drink since completing the last Stark novel.
Her hand touched his shoulder lightly. 'Thad . we're being angry. That hurts us both, and it won't help whatever is wrong. You said there might be a man out there — a psychotic — who thinks he is George Stark. He's killed two people we know. One of them was partly responsible for blowing the Stark pseudonym. It must have occurred to you that you could be high on that man's enemies list. But in spite of that, you held something back. What was that phrase?'
'The sparrows are flying again,' Thad said. He looked at his face in the harsh white light thrown by the fluorescents over the bathroom mirror. Same old face. A little shadowy under the eyes, maybe, but it was still the same old face. He was glad. It was no movie star's mug, but it was his.
'Yes. That meant something to you. What was it?'
He turned off the bathroom light and put his arm over her shoulders. They walked to the bed and lay down on it.
'When I was eleven years old,' he said, 'I had an operation. It was to remove a small tumor from the frontal lobe — I think it was the frontal lobe — of my brain. You knew about that.'
'Yes?' she was looking at him, puzzled.
'I told you I had bad headaches before that tumor was diagnosed, right?'
'Right.'
He began to stroke her thigh absently. She had lovely long legs, and the nightie was really very short.
'What about the sounds?'
'Sounds?' she looked puzzled.
'I didn't think so . . . but you see, it never seemed very important. All that happened such a long time ago. People with brain tumors often have headaches, sometimes they have seizures, and sometimes they have both. Quite often these symptoms have their own symptoms. They're called sensory precursors. The most common ones are smells — pencil shavings, freshly cut onions, mouldy fruit. My sensory precursor was auditory. It was birds.'
He looked at her levelly, their noses almost touching. He could feel a stray strand of her hair tickling against his forehead.
'Sparrows, to be exact,'
He sat up, not wanting to look at her expression of sudden shock, He took her hand.
'Come on.'
'Thad . . . where?'
'The study,' he