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"So you "

"Maybe"

The unseen birds began to screech again The residents at the television set turned the sound off and looked around, trying to identify the source of the squealing

Holly looked toward the courtyardNo birds there But she knehy their cries made the hair stand up on the back of her neck: they were somehow connected with Jiraveyard and how he had studied the

" , Jamie, our son, was like his mother, Hen said as if he did not even hear the birds "He just soifted than Lena And after Janant, Lena just one day up and said, The baby’s going to be special, he’s going to be a real e?" "Country talk for so special about hi special and Jamie, too Only she meant real special So Jim was born, and by the tis Like once he touched ht at the local barbershop here, and he started talking about things that were in the shop, though he’d never been in there in his life ’cause he lived with Jaeles"

He paused and took a few deep breaths The slur in his voice had begun to thicken His right eyelid drooped Talking seemed to tire him as if it were a physical labor

A ht was at the fireplace He was squinting up into the flue, past the cracks around the da to see if any birds were trapped up in there

The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings

"Jimmy would touch an item and knohere it’d been, bits and pieces about ned it Not everything about them, mind you He just knehatever he knew, that was it Maybe he’d touch a personal item of yours and know the na

Then he’d touch a personal iteone to school, nas, he couldn’t control it But he always ca when he tried"

The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, hadup at the air-conditioning vents

The quarrelsoh the roo up

"Wait," Henry said with some distress, "let me finish this, let ht, hold on another minute, just another minute or two

Reluctantly she sat down

Henry said, "Jim’s specialness was a family secret, like Lena’s and Ja around, call us freaks and God knohat But Cara, she alanted so bad to be in show business Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which here’d he’d met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring therave;when all the ti at it, too, and it was good for theether every day

They’d been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road No parents ever loved their child iven back to them

They were so closeit was i apart"

Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky

Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them

They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and caed forht have coar Allan Poe As a kid he’d had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry Morbidity had its fascination

The bird shrieks suddenly stopped The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, htened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of therew," Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position

For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke-altered body "By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he couldit to move, slide it back and forth, ht, he could pitch it in the air, float it there By the tiraph record, a cake tin It was theyou ever saw"

You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought

"They never used any of that in their act," Henry said, "they just stuck to thepersonal ites about themselves that just, you know, astonished theured to include soured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta

and that was the end of everything"

Not the end of everything It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another

She realized why the absence of the birds’ screa than the sound itself The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking fuse as it burned doard an explosive charge As long as she could hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable

"And that’s why I figure Jiht he should’ve been able to save thes with his ht he should’ve been able un, freeze the trigger, lock the safety in place, so"

"Could he have done that?" "Yeah, s with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate

No ti that day"

Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuduchuda

"So e brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a word or t and then Wouldn’tdied in hi it back again, no matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried His power died, too Or seeain, and after a lot of years it was sos when he was little"

In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of his eighty years Now he appeared to be far older, ancient

He said, "Jie after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of ragesometimes it was possible to love hiive me, I suspected hihtened, and he looked sharply at her