Twenty-two

Thad on the Run

1

Pretend it's a book you're writing, he thought as he turned left onto College Avenue, leaving the campus behind. And pretend you're a character in that book.

It was a magic thought. His mind had been filled with roaring panic — a kind of mental tornado in which fragments of some possible plan spun like chunks of uprooted landscape. But at the idea that he could pretend it was all a harmless fiction, that he could move not only himself but the other characters in this story (characters like Harrison and Manchester, for instance) around the way he moved characters on paper, in the safety of his study with bright lights overhead and either a cold can of Pepsi or a hot cup of tea beside him . . . at this idea, it was as if the wind howling between his ears suddenly blew itself out. The extraneous shit blew away with it, leaving him with the pieces of his plan lying around . . . pieces he found he was able to put together quite easily. He discovered he had something which might even work.

It better work, Thad thought. If it doesn't, you'll wind up in protect ve custody and Liz and the kids will most likely wind up dead.

But what about the sparrows? Where did the sparrows fit?

He didn't know. Rawlie had told him they were psychopomps, the harbingers of the living dead, and that fit, didn't it? Yes. Up to a point, anyway. Because foxy old George was alive again, but foxy old George was also dead . . . dead and rotting. So the sparrows fit in . . . but not all the way. If the sparrows had guided George back from

(the land of the dead)

wherever he had been, how come George himself knew nothing about them? How come he did not remember writing that phrase, THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN, in blood on the walls of two apartments?

'Because I wrote it,' Thad muttered, and his mind flew back to the things he had written in his journal while he had been sitting in his study, on the edge of a trance.

Question: Are the birds mine?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Who wrote about the sparrows?

Answer: The one who knows . . . I am the knower. I am the owner.

Suddenly all the answers trembled almost within his grasp — the terrible, unthinkable answers. Thad heard a long, shaky sound emerging from his own mouth. It was a groan.

Question: Who brought George Stark back to life?

Answer. The owner. The knower.

'I didn't mean to!' he cried.

But was that true? Was it really? Hadn't there always been a part of him in love with George Stark's simple, violent nature? Hadn't part of him always admired George, a man who didn't stumble over things or bump into things, a man who never looked weak or silly, a man who would never have to fear the demons locked away in the liquor cabinet? A man with no wife or children to consider, with no loves to bind him or slow him down? A man who had never waded through a shitty student essay or agonized over a Budget Committee meeting? A man who had a sharp, straight answer to all of life's more difficult questions?

A man who was not afraid of the dark because he owned the dark?

'Yes, but he's a BASTARD!' Thad screamed into the hot interior of his sensible American-made four-wheel-drive car.

Right — and part of you finds that so attractive, doesn't it?

Perhaps he, Thad Beaumont, had not really created George . . . but was it not possible that some longing part of him had allowed Stark to be re-created?

Question: If I own the sparrows, can I use them?

No answer came. It wanted to come; he could feel its longing. But it danced just out of his reach, and Thad found himself suddenly afraid that he himself — some Stark-loving part of him — might be holding it off. Some part that didn't want George to die.

I am the knower. I am the owner. I am the bringer.

He paused at the Orono traffic light and then was heading out along Route 2, toward Bangor and Ludlow beyond.

Rawlie was a part of his plan — a part of it which he at least understood. What would he do if he actually managed to shake the cops following him only to find that Rawlie had already left his office?

He didn't know.

What would he do if Rawlie was there but refused to help him?

He didn't know that, either.

I'll burn those bridges when and if I come to them.

And he would be coming to them soon enough.

He was passing Gold's on the right, now. Gold's was a long, tubular building constructed of prefab aluminum sections. It was painted a particularly offensive shade of aqua and was surrounded by a dozen acres of junked-out cars. Their windshields glittered in the hazy sunlight in a galaxy of white starpoints. It was Saturday afternoon — had been for almost twenty minutes now. Liz and her dark kidnapper would be on their way to The Rock. And, although there would be a clerk or two selling parts to weekend mechanics in the prefab building where Gold's did its retail business, Thad could reasonably hope that the junkyard itself would be unattended. With nearly twenty thousand cars in varying states of decay roughly organized into dozens of zigzagging rows, he should be able to hide the Suburban . . . and he had to hide it. Highshouldered, boxy, gray with brilliant red sides, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

SLOW

SCHOOL ZONE, the sign coming up read. Thad felt a hot wire poke into his gut. This was it.

He checked the rearview mirror and saw the Plymouth was still riding two cars back. It wasn't as good as he could have wished, but it was probably as good as it was going to get. For the rest, he would have to depend on luck and surprise. They weren't expecting him to make a break; why would he? And for a moment he thought of not doing it. Suppose he just pulled over instead? And when they pulled up behind him and Harrison got out to ask what was wrong, he would say: Plenty. Stark's got my family. The sparrows are still flying, you see.

'Thad, he says he killed the two that were watching the house. I don't know how he did it, but he says he did . . . and I . . . I believe him.'

Thad believed him, too. That was the hell of it. And that was the reason he couldn't just stop and ask for help. If he tried anything funny, Stark would know. He didn't think Stark could read his thoughts, at least not the way aliens read thoughts in comic books and science fiction movies, but he could 'tune in' on Thad . . . could get a very good idea of what he was up to. He might be able to prepare a little surprise for George — if he was able to clarify his idea about the goddam birds, that was — but for now he intended to play it by the script.

If he could, that was.

Here was the school intersection and the four—way stop. It was far too busy, as always; for years there had been fender-benders at this intersection, mostly caused by people who simply couldn't grok the idea of a four-way stop where everybody took turns, and just went bashing through instead. A spate of letters, most of them written by worried parents, demanding that the town put in a stop-light at the intersection, followed each accident, and a statement from the Veazie selectmen saying a stop-light was 'under consideration' would follow that . . . and then the issue would simply go to steep until the next fender-bender.

Thad joined the line of cars waiting to cross southbound, checked to make sure the brown Plymouth was still two cars back, then watched the your-turn-to-curtsey-my-turn-to-bow action at the intersection. He saw a car filled with blue-haired ladies almost crash into a young couple in a Datsun Z, saw the girl in the Z shoot the blue-haired ladies the bird, and saw that he himself would cross north-south just before a long Grant's Dairy tanker crossed east-west. That was an unexpected break.

The car in front of him crossed, and Thad was up. The hot wire poked into his belly again. He checked the rearview mirror a final time. Harrison and Manchester were still two cars back. A pair of cars crisscrossed in front of him. On his left, the milk tanker moved into position. Thad took a deep breath and rolled the Suburban sedately through the intersection. A pick-up truck, northbound toward Orono, passed him in the other lane.

On the far side, he was gripped by an almost irresistible urge — a need — to tromp the pedal to the metal and blast the Suburban up the road. Instead, he went rolling along at a calm and perfectly school-zone-legal fifteen miles an hour, eyes glued to the rearview mirror. The Plymouth was still waiting in line to cross, two cars back.

Hey, milk-truck! he thought, concentrating, really bearing down, as if he could make it come by simple force of will . . . as he made people and things come and go in a novel by force of will. Milktruck, come now!

And it did come, rolling across the intersection in slow, silver dignity, like a mechanized dowager.

The moment it blotted out the dark brown Plymouth in his rearview mirror, Thad did floor the Suburban's gas-pedal.

2

There was a right turn half a block up. Thad took it and roared up a short street at forty, praying no little kid would pick this instant to chase his rubber ball out into the road. He had a nasty moment when it seemed the street must be a dead end, then saw he could make another right after all — the cross-street had been partially blocked by the high fine of hedge which belonged to the house on the corner.

He made a California stop at the T—junction, then swerved right with the tires waiting softly. A hundred and eighty yards farther up, he made another right and scooted the Suburban back down to this street's intersection with Route 2. He had worked his way back to the main road about a quarter of a mile north of the four-way stop. If the milk-truck had blocked his right turn from view, as he hoped, the brown Plymouth was still heading south along 2. They might not even know anything was wrong yet . . . although Thad seriously doubted that Harrison was that dumb. Manchester maybe, but not Harrison.

He cut a left, scooting into a break in traffic so narrow that the driver of a Ford in the southbound lane had to hit his brakes. The Ford's driver shook his fist at Thad as Thad cut across his bows and headed back down toward Gold's junkyard, the pedal again stamped to the floor. If a roving cop happened to observe him not just breaking the speed limit but apparently trying to disintegrate it, that was just too bad. He couldn't afford to finger. He had to get this vehicle, which was just too big and too bright, off the road as fast as he could.

It was half a mile back to the automobile junkyard. Thad drove most of it with his eyes on the rearview mirror, looking for the Plymouth. It was still nowhere to be seen when he turned left into Gold's.

He rolled the Suburban slowly through an open gate in the chain-link fence. A sign, faded red letters on a dirty white background, read EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT! On a weekday he would have been spotted almost at once, and turned back. But it was Saturday, and now well into the lunch-hour to boot.

Thad drove down an aisle lined with wrecked cars stacked up two and sometimes three deep. The ones on the bottom had lost their essential shapes and seemed to be melting slowly into the ground. The earth was so black with oil you would have believed nothing could grow there, but rank green weeds and huge, silently nodding sunflowers sprouted in cheesy clusters, like survivors of a nuclear holocaust. One large sunflower had grown up through the broken windshield of a bakery truck lying on its back like a dead dog. Its hairy green stern had curled like a knotted fist around the stump of a wheel, and a second fist clung to the hood ornament of the old Cadillac which lay on top of the truck. It seemed to stare at Thad like the black-and-yellow eye of a dead monster.

It was a large and silent Detroit necropolis, and it gave Thad the creeps. He made a right turn, then a left. Suddenly he could see sparrows everywhere, perched on roofs and trunks and greasy amputated engines. He saw a trio of the small birds bathing in a hubcap fined with water. They did not fly away as he approached but stopped what they were doing and watched him with their beady black eyes. Sparrows lined the top of a windshield which leaned against the side of an old Plymouth. He passed within three feet of them. They fluttered their wings nervously but held their positions as he passed.

The harbingers of the living dead, Thad thought. His hand went to the small white scar on his forehead and began to rub it nervously.

Looking through what appeared to be a meteor-hole in the windshield of a Datsun as he passed it, he observed a wide splash of dried blood on the dashboard.

It wasn't a meteor that made that hole, he thought, and his stomach turned over slowly and giddily.

A congregation of sparrows sat on the Datsun's front seat.

'What do you want with me?' he asked hoarsely. 'What in God's name do you want?'

And in his mind he seemed to hear an answer of sorts; in his mind he seemed to hear the shrill single voice of that avian intelligence: No, Thad — what do You want with us? You are the owner. You are the bringer. You are the knower.

'I don't know jack shit,' he muttered.

At the end of this row, space was available in front of a late-model Cutlass Supreme —

someone had amputated its entire front end.

He backed the Suburban in and got out. Looking from one side of the narrow aisle to the other, Thad felt a little bit like a rat in a maze. The place smelled of oil and the higher, sourer odor of transmission fluid. There were no sounds but the faraway drone of cars on Route 2. The sparrows looked at him from everywhere — a silent convocation of small brown—black birds.

Then, abruptly, they took wing all at once — hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. For a moment the air was harsh with the sound of their wings. They flocked across the sky, then banked west — in the direction where Castle Rock lay. And abruptly he began to feel that crawling sensation again . . . not so much on his skin as inside it.

Are we trying to have a little peek, George?

Under his breath he began to sing a Bob Dylan song: 'John Wesley Harding . . . was a friend to the poor . . . he travelled with a gun in every hand . . . '

That crawling, itching sensation seemed to increase. It found and centered upon the hole in his left hand. He could have been completely wrong, engaging in wishful thinking and no more, but Thad seemed to sense anger . . . and frustration.

'All along the telegraph his name it did resound . . . ' Thad sang under his breath. Ahead, lying on the oily ground like the twisted remnant of some steel statue no one had ever really wanted to look at in the first place, was a rusty motor-mount. Thad picked it up and walked back to the Suburban, still singing snatches of 'John Wesley Harding' under his breath and remembering his old raccoon buddy of the same name. If he could camouflage the Suburban by beating on it a little, if he could give himself even an extra two hours, it could mean the difference between life and death to Liz and the twins.

'All along the countryside. sorry, big guy, this hurts me more than it does you . . . he opened many a door . . .' He threw the motor-mount at the driver's side of the Suburban, bashing a dent as deep as a washbasin in it. He picked up the motor-mount again, walked around to the front of the Suburban, and pegged it at the grill hard enough to strain his shoulder. Plastic splintered and flew. Thad unlatched the hood and raised it a little, giving the Suburban the dead-alligator smile which seemed to be the Gold's version of automotive haute couture.

' . . . but he was never known to hurt an honest man . . . '

He picked up the motor-mount again, observing as he did so that fresh blood had begun to stain the bandage on his wounded hand. Nothing he could do about it now.

'. . . with his lady by his side, he took a stand . . . '

He threw the mount a final time, sending it through the windshield with a heavy crunch, which

— absurd as it might be — pained his heart.

He thought the Suburban now looked enough like the other wrecks to pass muster. Thad started walking up the row. He turned right at the first intersection, heading back toward the gate and the retail parts shop beyond it. He had seen a pay telephone on the wall by the door when he drove in. Halfway there he stopped walking and stopped singing. He cocked his head. He looked like a man straining to catch some small sound. What he was really doing was listening to his body, auditing it.

The crawling itch had disappeared.

The sparrows were gone, and so was George Stark, at least for the time being. Smiling a little, Thad began to walk faster.

3

After two rings, Thad began to sweat. If Rawlie was still there, he should have picked up his phone by now. The faculty offices in the English-Math building were just not that big. Who else could he call? Who the hell else was there? He could think of no one. Halfway through the third ring, Rawlie picked up his phone. 'Hello, DeLesseps.'

Thad closed his eyes at the sound of that smoke-roughened voice and leaned against the cool metal side of the parts shop for a moment.

'Hello?'

'Hi, Rawlie. It's Thad.'

'Hello, Thad.' Rawlie did not seem terribly surprised to hear from him. 'Forget something?'

'No. Rawlie, I'm in trouble.'

'Yes.' Just that, and not a question. Rawlie spoke the word and then just waited.

'You know those two' — Thad hesitated for a moment — 'those two fellows who were with me?'

'Yes,' Rawlie said calmly. 'The police escort.'

'I ditched them,' Thad said, then took a quick glance over his shoulder at the sound of a car rumbling onto the packed dirt which served as Gold's customer parking area. For a moment he was so sure it was the brown Plymouth that he actually saw it . . . but it was some sort of foreign car, what he had taken at first for brown was a deep red dulled by road—dust, and the driver was just turning around. 'At least I hope I've ditched them.' He paused. He had come to the place where the only choice was to jump or not to jump, and he had no time to delay the decision. When you came right down to it, there really wasn't any decision, either, because he had no choice. 'I need help, Rawlie. I need a car they don't know.'

Rawlie was silent.

'You said if there was anything you could do for me, I should ask.

'I'm aware of what I said,' Rawlie replied mildly. 'I also recall saying that if those two men were following you around in a protective capacity, you might be wise to give them as much help as you could.' He paused. 'I think I can infer you chose not to take my advice.'

Thad came very close to saying, I couldn't, Rawlie. The man who has my wife and our babies would only kill them, too. It wasn't that he didn't dare tell Rawlie what was going on, that Rawlie would think he was crazy if he did; college and university professors have much more flexible views on the subject of craziness than most other people, and sometimes they have no view of it at all, preferring to think of people as either dull (but sane), rather eccentric (but sane), or very eccentric (but still quite sane, old boy). He kept his mouth shut because Rawlie DeLesseps was one of those men so inner-directed that Thad could probably say nothing at all which would persuade him . . . and anything which came out of his mouth might only damage his case. But, inner-directed or not, the grammarian had a good heart . . . he was brave, in his way . . . and Thad believed Rawlie was more than a little interested in what was going on with Thad, his police escort, and his odd interest in sparrows. In the end he simply believed — or only hoped — that it was in his best interest to keep quiet.

Still, it was hard to wait.

'All right,' Rawlie said at last. 'I'll loan you my car, Thad.'

Thad closed his eyes and had to stiffen his knees to keep them from buckling. He wiped his neck under his chin and his hand came away wet with sweat.

'But I hope you'll have the decency to stand good for any repairs if it comes back . . . wounded,'

Rawlie said. 'If you're a fugitive from justice, I doubt very much if my insurance company will pay.'

A fugitive from justice? Because he had slipped out from under the gaze of the cops who couldn't possibly protect him? He didn't know if that made him a fugitive from justice or not. It was an interesting question, one he would have to consider at a later date. A later date when he wasn't half out of his mind with worry and fear.

'You know I would.'

'I have one other condition,' Rawlie said.

Thad closed his eyes again. This time in frustration. 'What's that?'

'I want to know all about this when it's over,' Rawlie said. 'I want to know why you were really so interested in the folk meanings of sparrows, and why you turned white when I told you what psychopomps were and what it is they are supposed to do.'

'Did I turn white?'

'As a sheet.'

'I'll tell you the whole story,' Thad promised. He grinned a little. 'You may even believe some of it.'

'Where are you?' Rawlie asked.

Thad told him. And asked him to come as quickly as he could.

4

He hung up the telephone, walked back through the gate in the chain-link fence, and sat down on the wide bumper of a schoolbus which had, for some reason, been chopped in half It was a good place to wait, if waiting was what you had to do. He was out of sight from the road, but he could see the dirt parking area of the parts department simply by leaning forward. He looked around for sparrows and didn't see a one — only a large, fat crow picking listlessly at shiny bits of chrome in one of the aisles running between the junked cars. The thought that he had finished his second conversation with George Stark only a little over half an hour ago made him feel mildly unreal. It seemed that hours had passed since then. In spite of the steady pitch of anxiety to which he was tuned, he felt sleepy, as if it were bedtime.

That itching, crawling sensation began to invade him again about fifteen minutes after his conversation with Rawlie. He sang those snatches of 'John Wesley Harding' he still remembered, and after a minute or two the feeling passed.

Maybe it's psychosomatic, he thought, but he knew that was bullshit. The feeling was George trying to punch a keyhole into his mind, and as Thad grew more aware of it he became more sensitive to it. He supposed it would work the other way, too. And he supposed that, sooner or later, he might have to try to make it work the other way . . . but that meant trying to call the birds, and that wasn't a thing he was looking forward to. And there was something else, too — the last time he'd succeeded at peeking in on George Stark, he'd wound up with a pencil sticking out of his left hand.

The minutes crawled by with exquisite slowness. After twenty-five of them, Thad began to be afraid Rawlie had changed his mind and wasn't coming. He left the bumper of the dismembered bus and stood in the gateway between the automobile graveyard and the parking area, heedless of who might see him from the road. He began to wonder if he dared try hitchhiking. He decided to try Rawlie's office again instead and was halfway to the pre-fab parts building when a dusty Volkswagen beetle pulled into the lot. He recognized it at once and broke into a run, thinking with some amusement about Rawlie's insurance concerns. It looked to Thad as if he could total the VW and pay for the damage with a case of returnable soda bottles. Rawlie pulled up beside the end of the parts building and got out. Thad was a little surprised to see that his pipe was lit, and giving off great clouds of what would have been extremely offensive smoke in a closed room.

'You're not supposed to smoke, Rawlie,' was the first thing he could think of to say.

'You're not supposed to run,' Rawlie returned gravely.

They looked at each other for a moment and then burst into surprised laughter.

'How will you get home?' Thad asked. Now that it had come down to this — just jumping into Rawlie's little car and following the long and winding road down to Castle Rock — he seemed to have nothing left in his store of conversation but non sequiturs.

'Call a cab, I imagine,' Rawlie said. He eyed the glittering hills and valleys of junked cars. 'I'd guess they must come out here quite frequently to pick up fellows who are rejoining the Great Unhorsed.'

'Let me give you five dollars — '

Thad pulled his wallet from his back pocket, but Rawlie waved him away. 'I'm loaded, for an English teacher in the summertime,' he said. 'Why, I must have more than forty dollars. It's a wonder Billie lets me walk around without a Brinks guard.' He puffed at his pipe with great pleasure, removed it from his mouth, and smiled at Thad. 'But I'll get a receipt from the cab-driver and present it to you at the proper moment, Thad, never fear.'

'I'd started to think that maybe you weren't going to come.'

'I stopped at the five-and-ten,' Rawlie said. 'Picked up a couple of things I thought you might like to have, Thaddeus.' He leaned back into the beetle (which sagged quite noticeably to the left on a spring which was either broken or would be soon) and, after some time spent rummaging, muttering, and puffing out fresh clouds of smog brought out a paper bag. He handed the bag to Thad, who looked in and saw a pair of sunglasses and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap which would cover his hair quite nicely. He looked up at Rawlie, absurdly touched.

'Thank you, Rawlie.'

Rawlie waved a hand and gave Thad a sly and slanted little smile. 'Maybe I'm the one who should thank you,' he said. 'I've been looking for an excuse to stoke up the old stinker again for the last ten months. Things would come along from time to time — my youngest son's divorce, the night I lost fifty bucks playing poker at Tom Carroll's house — but nothing seemed quite . . . apocalyptic enough.'

'This is apocalyptic, all right,' Thad said, and shivered a little. He looked at his watch. It was pushing one o'clock. Stark had at least an hour on him, maybe more. 'I have to be going, Rawlie.'

'Yes — it's urgent, isn't it?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'I have one other thing — I stuck it in my coat pocket so I wouldn't lose it. This didn't come from the five-and-ten. I found it in my desk.'

Rawlie began to rummage methodically through the pockets of the old checked sport—coat he wore winter and summer.

'If the oil light comes on, swing in someplace and get a jug of Sapphire,' he said, still hunting.

'That's the recycled stuff. Oh! Here it is! I was starting to think I'd left it back at the office after all.'

He took a tubular piece of peeled wood from his pocket. It was about as long as Thad's forefinger and hollow. A notch had been cut in one end. It looked old.

'What is it?' Thad asked, taking it when Rawlie held it out. But he already knew, and he felt another block of whatever unthinkable thing it was that he was building slide into place.

'It's a bird-call,' Rawlie said, studying him from above the shimmering bowl of his pipe. 'If you think you can use it, I want you to take it.'

'Thank you,' Thad said, and put the bird-call into his breast pocket with a hand which was not quite steady. 'It might come in handy.'

Rawlie's eyes widened beneath the tangled hedge of his brows. He took the pipe from his mouth.

'I'm not sure you'll need it,' he said in a low, unsteady voice.

'What?'

'Look behind you.'

Thad turned, knowing what Rawlie had seen even before he saw it himself. There were not hundreds of sparrows now, or thousands; the dead cars and trucks stacked on the back ten acres of Gold's junkyard and Auto Supply were carpeted with sparrows. They were everywhere . . . and Thad had not heard a single one of them come.

The two men looked at the birds with four eyes. The birds looked back with twenty thousand... or perhaps forty thousand. They did not make a sound. They only sat on hoods, windows, roofs, exhaust-pipes, grilles, engine blocks, universal joints, and frames.

'Jesus Christ,' Rawlie said hoarsely. 'The psychopomps . . . what does it mean, Thad? What does it mean?'

'I think I'm just starting to know,' Thad said.

'My God,' Rawlie said. He lifted his hands above his head and clapped them loudly. The sparrows did not move. And they had no interest in Rawlie; it was only Thad Beaumont they were looking at.

'Find George Stark,' Thad said in a quiet voice — really not much more than a whisper. 'George Stark. Find him. Fly!'

The sparrows rose into the hazy blue sky in a black cloud, wings whirring with a sound that was like thunder turned to thinnest lace, throats cheeping. Two men who had been standing just inside the doorway of the retail parts shop ran out to look. Overhead, the single black mass banked and turned, as the other, smaller, flock had done, and headed west.

Thad looked up at them, and for a moment this reality merged with the vision which marked the onset of his trances; for a moment past and present were one, entwined in some strange and gorgeous pigtail.

The sparrows were gone.

'Christ Almighty!' a man in a gray mechanic's coverall was bellowing. 'Did you see those birds?

Where'd all those fucking birds come from?'

'I have a better question,' Rawlie said, looking at Thad. He was in control of himself again, but it was clear he had been badly shaken. 'Where are they going? You know, don't you, Thad?'

'Yes, of course,' Thad muttered, opening the VW's door. 'I have to go, too, Rawlie — I really have to. I can't thank you enough.'

'Be careful, Thaddeus. Be very careful. No man controls the agents of the afterlife. Not for long — and there is always a price.'

'I'll be as careful as I can.'

The VW's stick-shift protested, but finally gave up and went into gear. Thad paused long enough to put on the dark glasses and the baseball cap, then raised his hand to Rawlie and pulled out.

As he turned onto Route 2, he saw Rawlie trudging toward the same pay telephone he had used himself, and Thad thought: Now I've GOT to keep Stark out. Because now I have a secret. I may not be able to control the psychopomps, but for a little while at least I own them — or they own me — and he must not know that.

He found second gear, and Rawlie DeLesseps's Volkswagen began to shudder itself into the largely unexplored realms of speed above thirty-five miles an hour.