Thad’s first episode of sparrow-triggered automatic writing is the moment when a childhood symptom returns in adult life as an apparent connection to George Stark. The sound of sparrows, once associated with the illness that led to surgery on Thad’s brain, precedes a trance in which he writes words that alarm Liz because they match writing connected to a murder. The episode makes his medical past newly present without resolving whether the event is neurological, psychic, or supernatural.

Childhood Symptoms and Medical History

In 1960, Thad’s headaches began mildly in August and intensified after school resumed in early September. By the end of that month he hoped he would die; by mid-October, as the pain worsened, he feared that he would not. The attacks left him lying in a darkened room, unable to do anything but wait for the agony to pass. Their onset was often marked by a sound only he could hear: the distant cheeping of what he imagined were thousands of small birds, which he thought might be sparrows gathered on telephone wires and rooftops.

The childhood symptoms had a physical explanation, though an extraordinary one. A mass in Thad’s prefrontal lobe was discovered after he suffered a seizure, and doctors operated on what they assumed was a tumor. The tissue proved to be part of Thad’s twin, incompletely absorbed before birth. Such absorption was described as fairly common, but retained tissue in the brain was rare; the mass had begun growing again, and the resulting intracranial pressure accounted for the headaches and convulsion. This history gives the later bird-sound a clinical precedent, but it does not explain the writing that follows it.

The Adult Recurrence

Years later, Thad tells Liz that he had been working at his desk when the sparrow sound returned. It was the second recurrence that day, and this time it was much more intense. The episode interrupted his work on a new novel: six pages lay on top of the typewriter, his usual daily output when writing under his own name. The room’s ordinary details—the crowded oak desk, manuscripts and proofs, and the pages beside the typewriter—place the strange event in the routine setting of his writing life.

Liz studies the top sheet and recognizes its writing as the same as writing she has seen elsewhere. The fact that Thad produced it before Alan Pangborn arrived is crucial to her reaction: the apparent match cannot be attributed to a later encounter with the sheriff. She insists on the order of events, repeating that Thad wrote it beforehand. The timing turns the page into more than an alarming resemblance; it suggests that the writing anticipated information or a pattern not yet presented to him in the scene.

Trance, Pencil, and Uncertain Agency

Liz notices that Thad used one of George Stark’s pencils. Thad objects to treating the pencils as Stark’s property, insisting they are his, and resents the habit of speaking of Stark as a separate person. But the object makes the boundary between the two writers harder to ignore. Liz also points out that Thad has used the phrase lie me an alibi, which she associates with Stark’s writing and has not heard Thad use outside a book. Thad initially considers calling it coincidence, then admits that he cannot be sure.

When Liz asks whether he was in a trance, Thad answers that he thinks he was. That reluctant acknowledgment distinguishes the event from deliberate composition: he has produced writing, but cannot confidently claim ordinary conscious control over it. His explanation remains partial. He reports the sound and the pages, recognizes the significance of their apparent connection to Stark, and concedes the trance, yet does not establish how the words came to him or what the experience means.

From Private Symptom to Wider Pattern

The episode changes how Thad and Liz understand the old bird-sound. Thad later explains that it had been an auditory sensory precursor to the headaches caused by the brain mass; unlike more commonly reported sensory warnings such as smells, his had been birds, specifically sparrows. After the adult recurrences, he consults George Hume, reporting that the sounds have returned but that his headaches have not. He withholds the trance, what he wrote, and the writing found on a murder victim’s apartment wall. Hume nevertheless takes the recurrence seriously and orders cranial X-rays and a CAT scan. The medical inquiry therefore begins with a symptom Thad recognizes, while the most disturbing elements remain undisclosed.

Later scenes broaden the birds beyond Thad’s private perception. At Gold’s Junkyard and Auto Supply, sparrows cover the stacked vehicles in numbers so great that Thad and Rawlie DeLesseps find them carpeting the back acreage; the flock is silent, and Thad has heard none of them arrive. Near the Williamses’ driveway, a bird lands on Alan Pangborn’s shoulder, hops onto his hand, and stops before pecking him. Alan sees sparrows filling the nearby trees, while their concentration on the slope seems to leave the lane comparatively clear. The birds thus appear as a coordinated presence that can approach people selectively, not merely as a sound accompanying Thad’s symptoms.

As Thad drives toward the house, the flock forms a sharply bounded barrier across the road. A sparrow settles on the hood of his Volkswagen and seems to regard him with dispassionate curiosity; he understands that reaching the house means driving over the birds. At the climax, the sparrows’ role becomes explicit: they have come to escort George Stark back to the land of the dead. The apparent symptom that once announced illness has become part of a larger supernatural pattern. The first automatic-writing episode does not itself settle whether Thad is linked to Stark through illness, psychic influence, or something beyond medical explanation, but it establishes the recurring birds as the sign through which those possibilities converge.