Chapter 12 Chapter Eleven Trance

one Early Monday morning, Ted made an appointment with Dr. Humer without Liz prompting him. The removal of the tumor in 1960 is recorded in his medical records, and he told Humer that he had recently experienced two bird calls in his brain, which had been a harbinger of his headaches, leading to the diagnosis and removal of the tumor.Dr. Humer wondered if the headache itself had returned, and Ted told him no. He didn't talk about his trance, or what he wrote in it, or what he found on the wall of a victim's apartment in Washington, which was as distant as last night's dream.In fact, he found himself trying to forget the whole incident.

But Dr. Humer took it very seriously, very seriously.He ordered Ted to go to Maine Medical Center that afternoon for head X-rays and tomography. Ted went.He looks at the photo, then puts his head in a machine that looks like an industrial clothes dryer, and the machine rattles away for fifteen minutes before he pulls his head out.He called Liz, told her the results would be out by the weekend, and said he was going to his office at the university for a while. "Do you still want to call Sheriff Pangbo?" she asked. "Let's wait for the results of the film to come out," he said. "We will make a decision after we know the results."

two He was in his office, clearing desks and shelves of useless things from a semester, when the birds began to sing in his head again.It started with the chirping of a few birds, and then other birds joined in, and it quickly turned into a deafening chorus. The white sky—he saw the white sky interrupted by the silhouettes of houses and utility poles.Sparrows are everywhere, densely packed on the roofs of houses, huddled on every telephone pole, waiting for the command of the collective consciousness, and then they soar into the sky, making the sound of thousands of wings flapping in the gust of wind.

Tad staggered toward his desk, reached for his chair, and fell into it. sparrow. Sparrows and late spring white sky. The sound filled his brain, a cacophony of noise, his eyes staring blankly at the roof as he pulled a sheet of paper and began to write on it, the pen moving up and down and left and right as if it were moving itself. In his mind, all the birds spread their wings and soared like a black cloud that completely covered the white March sky. three Within five minutes of the first bird call, he woke up, sweating profusely, with a violent twitch in his left wrist, but no headache.He looked down and saw the paper on the table - it was the back of an order form - and he stared blankly at what was written on it:

Miss Pussy Fool is flying again little girl millie now little girl forever fool Deswey chick on the phone sister terminates chick Miss Razor is here miss millie the sparrow is here Sparrow Miss Millie Razor Chick forever now and forever chick Millie the cat stuff chick sparrow "It doesn't make any sense," he murmured, massaging his temples with his fingers, waiting for the headache to set in, or the words scribbled on the paper to make sense. He didn't want either of those things to happen...they didn't happen.Repeated over and over again, word after word, some clearly from his Stark dreams, others unrelated nonsense.

His head didn't hurt at all. I won't tell Liz this time, he thought.Never tell her.And not just because I'm scared...although I am.It's simple - not all secrets are bad secrets, some are good secrets, some have to be kept, and this one is both. He doesn't know if it's true, but he finds himself relieved that he doesn't care anymore, he's so tired of racking his brains and still not understanding, and he's tired of being intimidated, like a man who walks into a lark's hole, now Began to suspect that he was lost. "Don't think about it at all, this is the solution."

He wondered if he really didn't care anymore, didn't know if he could actually do it...but he was going to try to do it.He slowly reached out, grabbed the order with both hands, and began to tear it into long strips. The messy writing on it began to disappear. He tore the long strips sideways and threw the pieces into the wastebasket.He stared at the shards for ten minutes, half-hoping they would close together and return to his desk, like something out of a movie played backwards. Finally, he picked up the wastebasket and carried it to a small stainless steel door on the wall next to the elevator, under which was written "Incinerator."

He opened the little door and dumped the trash into the black chute. "Go there!" He said to the silent English-Mathematics Building, "Go." "Here we call them fools." "Here we call it bullshit," he whispered, returning to the office with the empty wastebasket in hand. It disappeared, disappeared without a trace along the groove.Until his results come out of the hospital—or another bout of vertigo, or trance, or whatever—he won't say anything more, nothing at all.It was more likely that what was written on paper came entirely from his mind, like the dream of Stark and the empty house, and had no connection with the killing of Homer or Clausen.

Right here in Anderswell, the railroad doesn't work. "It meant nothing," Ted emphasized...but when he left college that day, it was almost like running away.