Firestarter

Voices in a haunted room.

He shifted onto his side, listening to Charlie’s slow, even breathing. He thought they had taken her, but she’d only gone farther back in the bushes. Out of sight. Charlene Norma McGee, Charlie since… well, since forever. If they took you, Charlie, I don’t know what I’d do.

23

One last voice, his roommate Quincey’s voice, from six years ago.

Charlie had been a year old then, and of course they knew she wasn’t normal. They had known that since she was a week old and Vicky had brought her into their bed with them because when she was left in the little crib, the pillow began to… well, began to smolder. The night they had put the crib away forever, not speaking in their fright, a fright too big and too strange to be articulated, it had got hot enough to blister her cheek and she had screamed most of the night, in spite of the Solarcaine Andy had found in the medicine chest. What a crazyhouse that first year had been, no sleep, endless fear. Fires in the wastebaskets when her bottles were late; once the curtains had burst into flame, and if Vicky hadn’t been in the room-It was her fall down the stairs that had finally prompted him to call Quincey. She had been crawling then, and was quite good at going up the stairs on her hands and knees and then backing down again the same way. Andy had been sitting with her that day; Vicky was out at Senter’s with one of her friends, shopping. She had been hesitant about going, and Andy nearly had to throw her out the door. She was looking too used lately, too tired. There was something starey in her eyes that made him think about those combat-fatigue stories you heard during wartime.

He had been reading in the living room, near the foot of the stairs. Charlie was going up and down. Sitting on the stairs was a teddy bear. He should have moved it, of course, but each time she went up, Charlie went around it, and he had become lulled-much as he had become lulled by what appeared to be their normal life in Port City.

As she came down the third time, her feet got tangled around the bear and she came all the way to the bottom, thump, bump, and tumble, wailing with rage and fear. The stairs were carpeted and she didn’t even have a bruise-God watches over drunks and small children, that had been Quincey’s saying, and that was his first conscious thought of Quincey that day-but Andy rushed to her, picked her up, held her, cooed a lot of nonsense to her while he gave her the quick once-over, looking for blood, or a limb hanging wrong, signs of concussion. And-

And he felt it pass him-the invisible, incredible bolt of death from his daughter’s mind. It felt like the backwash of warm air from a highballing subway train, when it’s summertime and you’re standing maybe a little too close on the platform. A soft, soundless passage of warm air… and then the teddy bear was on fire. Teddy had hurt Charlie; Charlie would hurt Teddy. The flames roared up, and for a moment, as it charred, Andy was looking at its black shoebutton eyes through a sheet of flame, and the flames were spreading to the carpeting on the stair where the bear had tumbled.

Andy put his daughter down and ran for the fire extinguisher on the wall near the TV. He and Vicky didn’t talk about the thing their daughter could do-there were times when Andy wanted to, but Vicky wouldn’t hear of it; she avoided the subject with hysterical stubbornness, saying there was nothing wrong with Charlie, nothing wrong- but fire extinguishers had appeared silently, undiscussed, with almost the same stealth as dandelions appear during that period when spring and summer overlap. They didn’t talk about what Charlie could do, but there were fire extinguishers all over the house.

He grabbed this one, smelling the heavy aroma of frying carpet, and dashed for the stairs… and still there was time to think about that story, the one he had read as a kid, “It’s a Good Life,” by some guy named Jerome Bixby, and that had been about a little kid who had enslaved his parents with psychic terror, a nightmare of a thousand possible deaths, and you never knew… you never knew when the little kid was going to get mad…

Charlie was wailing, sitting on her butt at the foot of the stairs.

Andy twisted the knob on the fire extinguisher savagely and sprayed foam on the spreading fire, dousing it. He picked up Teddy, his fur stippled with dots and puffs and dollops of foam, and carried him back downstairs.

Hating himself, yet knowing in some primitive way that it had to be done, the line had to be drawn, the lesson learned, he jammed the bear almost into Charlie’s screaming, frightened, tear-streaked face. Oh you dirty bastard, he had thought desperately, why don’t you just go out to the kitchen and get a paring knife and cut a line up each cheek? Mark her that way? And his mind had seized on that. Scars. Yes. That’s what he had to do. Scar his child. Burn a scar on her soul.

“Do you like the way Teddy looks?” he roared. The bear was scalded, the bear was blackened, and in his hand it was still as warm as a cooling lump of charcoal. “Do you like Teddy to be all burned so you can’t play with him anymore, Charlie?”

Charlie was crying in great, braying whoops, her skin all red fever and pale death, her eyes swimming with tears. “Daaaaa! Ted! Ted!”

“Yes, Teddy,” he said grimly. “Teddy’s all burned, Charlie. You burned Teddy. And if you burn Teddy, you might burn Mommy. Daddy. Now… don’t you do it anymore!” He leaned closer to her, not picking her up yet, not touching her. “Don’t you do it anymore because it is a Bad Thing!” “Daaaaaaaaaa-”

And that was all the heartbreak he could stand to inflict, all the horror, all the fear. He picked her up, held her, walked her back and forth until-a very long time later- her sobs tapered off to irregular hitchings of her chest, and sniffles. When he looked at her, she was asleep with her cheek on his shoulder.

He put her on the couch and went to the phone in the kitchen and called Quincey.

Quincey didn’t want to talk. He was working for a large aircraft corporation in that year of 1975, and in the notes that accompanied each of his yearly Christmas cards to the McGees he described his job as Vice-President in Charge of Stroking. When the men who made the airplanes had problems, they were supposed to go see Quincey. Quincey would help them with their problems-feelings of alienation, identity crises, maybe just a feeling that their jobs were dehumanizing them-and they wouldn’t go back to the line and put the widget where the wadget was supposed to go and therefore the planes wouldn’t crash and the world would continue to be safe for democracy. For this Quincey made thirty-two thousand dollars a year, seventeen thousand more than Andy made. “And I don’t feel a bit guilty,” he had written. “I consider it a small salary to extract for keeping America afloat almost single-handed.”

That was Quincey, as sardonically funny as ever. Except he hadn’t been sardonic and he hadn’t been funny that day when Andy called from Ohio with his daughter sleeping on the couch and the smell of burned bear and singed carpeting in his nostrils:

“I’ve heard things,” Quincey said finally, when he saw that Andy wasn’t going to let him off without something. “But sometimes people listen in on phones, old buddy. It’s the era of Watergate.”

“I’m scared,” Andy said. “Vicky’s scared. And Charlie’s scared too. What have you heard, Quincey?” “Once upon a time there was an experiment in which twelve people participated,” Quincey said. “About six years ago. Do you remember that?” “I remember it,” Andy said grimly. “There aren’t many of those twelve people left. There were four, the last I heard. And two of them married each other.” “Yes,” Andy said, but inside he felt growing horror. Only four left? What was Quincey talking about?

“I understand one of them can bend keys and shut doors without even touching them.” Quincey’s voice, thin, coming across two thousand miles of telephone cable, coming through switching stations, through the open-relay points, through junction boxes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Iowa. A million places to tap into Quincey’s voice.

“Yes?” he said, straining to keep his voice level. And he thought of Vicky, who could sometimes turn on the radio or turn off the TV without going anywhere near it- and Vicky was apparently not even aware she was doing those things.

“Oh yes, he’s for real,” Quincey was saying. “He’s-what would you say?-a documented case: It hurts his head if he does those things too often, but he can do them. They keep him in a little room with a door he can’t open and a lock he can’t bend. They do tests on him. He bends keys. He shuts doors. And I understand he’s nearly crazy.”

“Oh… my… God,” Andy said faintly.

“He’s part of the peace effort, so it’s all right if he goes crazy,” Quincey went on. “He’s going crazy so two hundred and twenty million Americans can stay safe and free. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Andy had whispered.

“What about the two people who got married? Nothing. So far as they know. They live quietly, in some quiet middle-American state like Ohio. There’s maybe a yearly check on them. Just to see if they’re doing anything like bending keys or closing doors without touching them or doing funny little mentalist routines at the local Backyard Carnival for Muscular Dystrophy. Good thing those people can’t do anything like that, isn’t it, Andy?”

Andy closed his eyes and smelled burned cloth. Sometimes Charlie would pull open the fridge door, look in, and then crawl off again. And if Vicky was ironing, she would glance at the fridge door and it would swing shut again-all without her being aware that she was doing anything strange. That was sometimes. At other times it didn’t seem to work, and she would leave her ironing and close the refrigerator door herself (or turn off the radio, or turn on the TV). Vicky couldn’t bend keys or read thoughts or fly or start fires or predict the future. She could sometimes shut a door from across the room and that was about the extent of it. Sometimes, after she had done several of these things, Andy had noticed that she would complain of a headache or an upset stomach, and whether that was a physical reaction or some sort of muttered warning from her subconscious, Andy didn’t know. Her ability to do these things got maybe a little stronger around the time of her period. Such small things, and so infrequently, that Andy had come to think of them as normal. As for himself… well he could push people. There was no real name for it; perhaps autohypnosis came closest. And he couldn’t do it often, because it gave him headaches. Most days he could forget completely that he wasn’t utterly normal and never really had been since that day in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh.

He closed his eyes and on the dark field inside his eyelids he saw that comma-shaped bloodstain and the nonwords COR OSUM.

“Yes, it’s a good thing,” Quincey went on, as if Andy had agreed. “Or they might put them-in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.”

“A good thing,” Andy agreed.

“Those twelve people,” Quincey said, “maybe they gave those twelve people a drug they didn’t fully understand. It might have been that someone-a certain Mad Doctor-might have deliberately misled them. Or maybe he thought he was misleading them and they were deliberately leading him on. It doesn’t matter.”

“No.”

“So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn’t they be interested in that child?”

“I bet they would,” Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at all. He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

“It’s like you got lemon, and that’s nice, and you got meringue, and that’s nice, too, but when you put them together, you’ve got… a whole new taste treat. I bet they’d want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except… keep your head down.”

24

Voices in a haunted room.