George Stark's Toronado

George Stark's Toronado is more than the decaying antagonist's car: it carries the recurring image of his arrival, becomes a practical instrument in the final destruction, and is consumed in the fire that also takes the house and Thad's handwritten pages. Its transformation from ominous vehicle to improvised incendiary device gives a physical shape to the story's passage from Stark's haunting presence to his removal.

Identity and recurring association

The Toronado is identified with George Stark, and Thad's recurring nightmare repeatedly brings him and Stark to the house in it. At the climax, the car stands beside the driveway as the sparrows gather, its dark presence embedded in the scene before the final confrontation is over. The dream ends at 9:15 on the night the psychopomps carry Stark away, with the Toronado as its last image: the car has become inseparable from the mental pattern through which Thad has experienced Stark's threat.

The car's physical details reinforce that association. Alan finds its interior dark-smelling and unpleasant, an odor that makes him woozy and that he compares in thought to a room where chloroform has been spilled. He is glad to pull his head back out. The car is not simply a neutral means of transport; even before its final use, its enclosed interior registers as an unsettling extension of Stark's world.

The gathering of the sparrows

After retrieving the pencils, Alan stands beside the Toronado and looks up the driveway. Sparrows cover the drive in a living carpet, with more arriving and the woods also full of them. They land and stare at him in silence. Alan thinks they have come for Stark, then abruptly wonders whether they might be coming for the men as well. The car thus occupies the threshold of a scene whose meaning remains dangerous even to those opposing Stark: the birds appear to be converging on him, but their purpose is not fully legible to Alan.

The Toronado's presence also links this arrival to the nightmare that is ending. The car that carried Thad and Stark in the recurrent dream remains physically present after Stark's defeat, but its condition has changed. Liz and the twins wait near the top of the driveway, where it meets Lake Lane; Thad and Alan stand by the vehicle, now gray with bird droppings rather than black. The shift from black to gray registers the aftermath materially: the car has been marked by the mass of birds and no longer presents the polished, ominous image associated with Stark.

Turning the car into a fuse

Alan discovers that the Toronado has a standard shift, which he considers consistent with Stark's macho self-image, unlike the automatic he associates with the supposedly more domesticated Thad. To avoid setting his bare feet among the dead sparrows, Alan takes off his shoes and socks without stepping out of them. He knots the socks together, adds Thad's socks, and uses the improvised cotton length as a fuse: one end goes into the car's fuel tank, where it becomes soaked with gasoline, while the dry end hangs against the guano-splattered body.

Alan has a paper matchbook ready. Its cover bears an advertisement for stamp collecting and the picture of a bird, an incongruously small image of a bird in a scene dominated by the dead and living sparrows. He instructs Thad to light the socks only once the car is rolling. Alan depresses the clutch, puts the Hurst shifter into neutral, and the Toronado begins to move. For a moment he fears Thad has failed to light the fuse; then a bright line of flame appears against the rear of the car.

The car rolls down the final fifteen feet of the driveway, bumps over a small asphalt curb, and coasts onto the back porch. It thumps into the side of the house and stops. In the fuse's orange light, Alan can read its bumper sticker: HIGH-TONED SON OF A BITCH. The words remain visible for an instant as the vehicle moves from Stark's signature possession to the instrument of its own destruction.

Destruction and aftermath

Alan and Thad retreat ten paces before the Toronado becomes a fireball. Flames shoot up the damaged east side of the house, setting the study wall's opening aglow like a staring black eye. Alan urges Thad to leave for the cruiser so they can report the fire, but both linger while the dry, cedar-shingled house catches quickly. The car's destruction therefore does not remain confined to the vehicle: it initiates the burning of the house and reaches the study, the space most closely associated with Thad's writing.

As the study burns, handwritten pages are drawn from the opening in the wall by the fire's draft. They crinkle, ignite, char, and rise into the night like a swirling squadron of dark birds. The Toronado's fire and the pages' flight converge in a final image that recalls the sparrows while also carrying away the words on which Thad's writing life has depended. By the time Thad and Alan stand beside the car after Stark's departure, the vehicle that anchored the nightmare has been reduced to part of the ruined scene; its destruction closes the car's role as Stark's arrival-image and makes it an agent in the destruction of the house and manuscript.