Thad automatically writes “The sparrows are flying again”

Thaddeus “Thad” Beaumont’s automatic writing of “THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN” turns a private recurrence of childhood terror into a warning of George Stark’s return. In his study, while working on The Golden Dog, Thad hears and sees the sparrows again; when the vision passes, he finds the words written across his manuscript in large capitals, in a hand and with a pencil whose use he cannot remember. The episode joins an old medical fear to the novel’s supernatural conflict, and the birds that first invade his perception will later gather in the physical world and escort Stark to the dead.

The Vision Returns

After supper, Thad goes upstairs to proof the day’s work on The Golden Dog. As he bends over the manuscript to make a minor correction, the sound of thousands of birds fills his head. This time the noise arrives with an image: sparrows crowded along roofpeaks and telephone wires, as they might be in early spring while dirty remnants of March snow still lie on the ground. The remembered scene is not simply a sound or a vague disturbance; it has a season, a landscape, and a massed flock.

The intensity of the vision brings back the frightened boy’s voice in Thad’s thoughts. He recognizes the quality of that voice, and familiarity gives way to memory and terror. His immediate fear is that the brain tumor removed in childhood has returned, perhaps malignantly. The birds grow louder, nearly deafening, while a thin flutter of wings accompanies their sudden takeoff, thousands of small shapes darkening a white spring sky. For Thad, the episode is at once a sensory assault and a possible sign of bodily danger.

At the height of the experience, Thad hears himself speak in a low, guttural voice that does not sound like his own. Then the vision and sound stop. It is 1988, not 1960: he is back in his study, an adult with a wife, children, and a typewriter. No headache follows, and he feels physically well. The abrupt return to the present does not resolve what happened; instead, the unexplained writing left behind makes the episode harder to dismiss.

The Message on the Manuscript

Looking down, Thad discovers that something has been written across the neat type on his manuscript in large capital letters: “THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN.” The words are not a remembered sentence he deliberately set down. He has no memory of changing writing tools, yet the Scripto pen has been discarded and one of the Berol Black Beauties has made the inscription. He no longer uses those pencils; they belong to the dark period associated with his earlier life. After returning the pencil to its jar, he bundles the materials into a drawer, his hand not quite steady.

The physical details give the episode a disturbing double character. The message appears on the work Thad was already preparing, but its force comes from the interruption of his ordinary authorship: he has written without knowing that he was writing, and with a tool he had left behind. The manuscript becomes evidence of an action his conscious memory cannot account for. Its declarative warning also turns the flock’s return into a statement that seems to precede the events it portends.

Fear, Misrecognition, and Stark

When Liz calls Thad downstairs to help get the twins ready for bed, he wants to tell her what has happened. Fear of the childhood tumor and of a possible malignant recurrence seals his lips. He might have spoken despite that fear, but the doorbell interrupts; Liz answers it and, in irritation and dismay, announces that someone is back. Her remark refers to the immediate situation, but Thad’s terror gives it another meaning. For one second, before ordinary reality reasserts itself, he is certain she means George Stark.

That mistaken recognition fuses the sparrows’ return to the possibility of Stark’s return. Thad knows Stark is supposed to be dead and publicly buried, and that he never really existed as an ordinary person in the first place. None of those facts reassures him: the vision and the unaccountable words have made the impossible feel present. The episode’s decisive effect is therefore not proof, but apprehension. It brings the old terror back into Thad’s present and directs that terror toward the figure whose existence already unsettles the boundary between fiction and reality.

The Flock as an Independent Presence

Elsewhere in the unfolding crisis, the sparrows appear not only in Thad’s visions but as a vast, silent physical gathering. At Gold’s Junkyard and Auto Supply, dead cars and trucks across the back ten acres are carpeted with birds. Thad and Rawlie DeLesseps have not heard them arrive; the flock’s sudden presence makes its movement seem coordinated, yet the birds offer no explanation. Rawlie recognizes them as psychopomps, giving the accumulating flock a role as escorts of the dead rather than merely as a disturbing image in Thad’s mind.

The birds’ approach is selective and measured in other scenes. One lands on Alan Pangborn’s shoulder, hops onto his hand, and pauses with its beak lowered as if about to peck; when Alan lowers his hand, it hops away and joins the birds on the driveway. He brushes at it, then holds still, while the flock continues to stare with bright, senseless eyes. Trees on the visible side of Castle Lake are so full of sparrows that a branch cracks under their weight. Alan retreats up the Williamses’ driveway and sees the birds covering his car, but none on the stretch of Lake Lane where he stops. He imagines the road and trees as a staging area, as though the flock does not yet want to come closer.

When Thad later encounters the flock on the road, its boundary is sharply drawn: the birds begin less than twelve feet in front of his stopped Volkswagen. One sparrow settles on the hood and peers in at him with a frighteningly dispassionate curiosity. The road ahead is no longer merely a route to the house; it is covered by the birds, and Thad understands that reaching the house will mean driving over them. The earlier study vision thus anticipates a presence that can obstruct movement, provoke fear, and alter what human characters must do.

Escort to the Dead

At the confrontation with Stark, Thad recognizes the flock’s purpose: the psychopomps have come to serve as Stark’s escort back to Endsville, the land of the dead. Thad drops the pencil and retreats toward his children as the door opens farther and the sparrows surge from a river into a flood. They settle on Stark’s shoulders, arms, and head, then strike his chest in increasing numbers. Stark twists and struggles to fight back as feathers fall and beaks flash against him.

This ending gives the written warning a meaning larger than Thad’s first fear of medical relapse. The sparrows are not simply a symptom, a memory, or a private metaphor: the narrative shows them acting in the world and carrying out a supernatural task no human can fully govern. The message on the manuscript anticipates their return, while the later gathering supplies its consequence. What begins as an involuntary inscription in Thad’s study culminates in a visible escort for Stark, making the birds’ flight the link between Thad’s childhood terror and the final movement of the conflict.