Firestarter

and worked his way across the wide, frozen expanse of Tashmore Pond to the Bradford Town Landing. From there, a small, winding road led into the village, tucked neatly away in the hills two miles east of the lake.

He always left before first light, with Granther’s knapsack on his back, and never arrived back before three in the afternoon. On one occasion he barely beat a howling snowstorm that would have left him blinded and directionless and wandering on the ice. Charlie cried with relief when he came in-and then went into a long, alarming coughing fit.

The trips to Bradford were for supplies and clothes for him and Charlie. He had Granther’s struttin money, and later on, he broke into three of the larger camps at the far end of Tashmore Pond and stole money. He was not proud of this, but it seemed to him a matter of survival. The camps he chose might have sold on the real-estate market for eighty thousand dollars apiece, and he supposed the owners could afford to lose their thirty or forty dollars” worth of cookie-jar money-which was exactly where most of them kept it. The only other thing he touched that winter was the large range-oil drum behind the large, modern cottage quaintly named CAMP CONFUSION. From this drum he took about forty gallons of oil.

He didn’t like going to Bradford. He didn’t like the certain knowledge that the oldsters who sat around the big potbellied stove down by the cash register were talking about the stranger who was staying across the lake in one of the camps. Stories had a way of getting around, and sometimes they got into the wrong ears. It wouldn’t take much-only a whisper-for the Shop to make an inevitable connection between Andy, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s cottage in Tashmore, Vermont. But he simply didn’t know what else to do. They had to eat, and they couldn’t spend the entire winter living on canned sardines. He wanted fresh fruit for Charlie, and vitamin pills, and clothes. Charlie had arrived with nothing to her name but a dirty blouse, a pair of red pants, and a single pair of underdrawers. There was no cough medicine that he trusted, there were no fresh vegetables, and, crazily enough, hardly any matches. Every camp he broke into had a fireplace, but he found only a single box of Diamond wooden matches.

He could have gone farther afield-there were other camps and cottages-but many of the other areas were plowed out and patrolled by the Tashmore constabulary. And on many of the roads there were at least one or two year-round residents.

In the Bradford general store he was able to buy all the things he needed, including three pairs of heavy pants and three woolen shirts that were approximately Charlie’s size. There was no girls” underwear, and she had to make do with size-eight Jockey shorts. This disgusted and amused Charlie by turns.

Making the six-mile round trip across to Bradford on Granther’s skis was both a burden and a pleasure to Andy. He didn’t like leaving Charlie alone, not because he didn’t trust her but because he always lived with the fear of coming back and finding her gone… or dead. The old boots gave him blisters no matter how many pairs of socks he put on. If he tried to move too fast, he gave himself headaches, and then he would remember the small numb places on his face and envision his brain as an old bald tire, a tire that had been used so long and hard that it was down to the canvas in places. If he had a stroke in the middle of this damned lake and froze to death, what would happen to Charlie then?

But he did his best thinking on these trips. The silence had a way of clearing the head. Tashmore Pond itself was not wide-Andy’s path across it from the west bank to the east was less than a mile-but it was very long. With the snow lying four feet deep over the ice by February, he sometimes paused halfway across and looked slowly to his right and left. The lake then appeared to be a long corridor floored with dazzling white tile-clean, unbroken, stretching out of sight in either direction. Sugar-dusted pines bordered it all around. Above was the hard, dazzling, and merciless blue sky of winter, or the low and featureless white of coming snow. There might be the far-off call of a crow, or the low, rippling thud of the ice stretching, but that was all. The exercise toned up his body. He grew a warm singlet of sweat between his skin and his clothes, and it felt good to work up a sweat and then wipe it off your brow. He had somehow forgotten that feeling while teaching Yeats and Williams and correcting bluebooks.

In this silence, and through the exertion of working his body hard, his thoughts came clear and he worked the problem over in his mind. Something had to be done- should have been done long since, but that was in the past. They had come to Granther’s place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy way he felt about the oldtimers sitting around the stove with their pipes and their inquisitive eyes was enough to ram that fact home. He and Charlie were in a corner, and there had to be some way out of it.

And he was still angry, because it wasn’t right. They had no right. His family were American citizens, living in a supposedly open society, and his wife had been murdered, his daughter kidnapped, the two of them hunted like rabbits in a hedgerow.

He thought again that if he could get the story across to someone-or to several someones-the whole thing could be blown out of the water. He hadn’t done it before because that odd hypnosis-the same sort of hypnosis that had resulted in Vicky’s death-had continued, at least to some degree. He hadn’t wanted his daughter growing up like a freak in a sideshow. He hadn’t wanted her institutionalized-not for the good of the country and not for her own good. And worst of all, he had continued to lie to himself. Even after he had seen his wife crammed into the ironing closet in the laundry with that rag in her mouth, he had continued to lie to himself and tell himself that sooner or later they would be left alone. Just playing for funzies, they had said as kids. Everybody has to give back the money at the end.

Except they weren’t kids, they weren’t playing for funzies, and nobody was going to give him and Charlie anything back when the game was over. This game was for keeps.

In silence he began to understand certain hard truths. In a way, Charlie was a freak, not much different from the thalidomide babies of the sixties or those children of mothers who had taken DES; the doctors just hadn’t known that those girl children were going to develop vaginal tumors in abnormal numbers fourteen or sixteen years down the road. It was not Charlie’s fault, but that did not change the fact. Her strangeness, her freakishness, was simply on the inside. What she had done at the Manders farm had been terrifying, totally terrifying, and since then Andy had found himself wondering just how far her ability reached, how far it could reach. He had read a lot of the literature of parapsychology during their year on the dodge, enough to know that both pyrokinesis and telekinesis were suspected to be tied in with certain poorly understood ductless glands. His reading had also told him that the two talents were closely related, and that most documented cases centered around girls not a whole lot older than Charlie was right now.

She had been able to initiate that destruction at the Manders farm at the age of seven. Now she was nearly eight. What might happen when she turned twelve and entered adolescence? Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. She said she wasn’t going to use the power anymore, but if she was forced to use it? What if it began to come out spontaneously? What if she began to light fires in her sleep as a part of her own strange puberty, a fiery counterpart of the nocturnal seminal emissions most teenage boys experienced? What if the Shop finally decided to call off its dogs… and Charlie was kidnapped by some foreign power?

Questions, questions.

On his trips across the pond, Andy tried to grapple with them and came reluctantly to believe that Charlie might have to submit to some sort of custody for the rest of her life, if only for her own protection. It might be as necessary for her as the cruel leg braces were for the victims of muscular dystrophy or the strange prosthetics for the thalidomide babies.

And then there was the question of his own future. He remembered the numb places, the bloodshot eye. No man wants to believe that his own death-warrant has been signed and dated, and Andy did not completely believe that, but he was aware that two or three more hard pushes might kill him, and he realized that his normal life expectancy might already have been considerably shortened. Some provision had to be made for Charlie in case that happened.

But not the Shop’s way.

Not the small room. He would not allow that to happen.

So he thought it over, and at last he came to a painful decision.

7

Andy wrote six letters. They were almost identical. Two were to Ohio’s United States senators. One was to the woman who represented the district of which Harrison was a part in the U.S. House of Representatives. One was to the New York Times. One was to the Chicago Tribune. And one was to the Toledo Blade. All six letters told the story of what had happened, beginning with the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall and ending with his and Charlie’s enforced isolation on Tashmore Pond.

When he had finished, he gave one of the letters to Charlie to read. She went through it slowly and carefully, taking almost an hour. It was the first time she had got the entire story, from beginning to end.

“You’re going to mail these?” she asked when she finished.

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow. I think tomorrow will be the last time I dare go across the pond.” It had at last begun to warm up a little. The ice was still solid, but it creaked constantly now, and he didn’t know how much longer it would be safe.

“What will happen, Daddy?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. All I can do is hope that once the story is out, those people who have been chasing us will have to give it up.”

Charlie nodded soberly. “You should have done it before.”

“Yes,” he said, knowing that she was thinking of the near cataclysm at the Manders farm last October. “Maybe I should have. But I never had a chance to think much, Charlie. Keeping us going was all I had time to think about. And what thinking you do get a chance to do when you’re on the run… well, mostly it’s stupid thinking. I kept hoping they’d give up and leave us alone. That was a terrible mistake.”

“They won’t make me go away, will they?” Charlie asked. “From you, I mean. We can stay together, can’t we, Daddy?” “Yes,” he said, not wanting to tell her that his conception of what might happen after the letters were mailed and received was probably as vague as hers. It was just “after.”

“Then that’s all I care about. And I’m not going to make anymore fires.”

“All right,” he said, and touched her hair. His throat was suddenly thick with a premonitory dread, and something that had happened near here suddenly occurred to him, something that he hadn’t thought of for years. He had been out with his father and Granther, and Granther had given Andy his.22, which he called his varmint rifle, when Andy clamored for it. Andy had seen a squirrel and wanted to shoot it. His dad had started to protest, and Granther had hushed him with an odd little smile.

Andy had aimed the way Granther taught him; he squeezed the trigger rather than just jerking back on it (as Granther had also taught him), and he shot the squirrel. It tumbled off its limb like a stuffed toy, and Andy ran excitedly for it after handing the gun back to Granther. Up close, he had been struck dumb by what he saw. Up close, the squirrel was no stuffed toy. It wasn’t dead. He had got it in the hindquarters and it lay there dying in its own bright dapples of blood, its black eyes awake and alive and full of a horrible suffering. Its fleas, knowing the truth already, were trundling off the body in three busy little lines.

His throat had closed with a snap, and at the age of nine, Andy tasted for the first time that bright, painty flavor of self-loathing. He stared numbly at his messy kill, aware that leis father and grandfather were standing behind him, their shadows lying over him-three generations of McGees standing over a murdered squirrel in the Vermont woods. And behind him, Granther said softly, Well, you done it, Andy. How do you like it? And the tears had come suddenly, overwhelming him, the hot tears of horror and realization-the realization that once it’s done, it’s done. He swore suddenly that he would never kill anything with a gun again. He swore it before God.

I’m not going to make anymore fires, Charlie had said, and in his mind Andy heard Granther’s reply to him on the day he had shot the squirrel, the day he had sworn to God he would never do anything like that again. Never say that, Andy. God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control. About what Irv Manders had said to Charlie.

Charlie had found a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy books in the attic and was working her way slowly but surely through them. Now Andy looked at her, sitting in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the old black rocker, sitting just where his grandmother had always sat, usually with a basket of mending between her feet, and he struggled with an urge to tell her to take it back, to take it back while she still could, to tell her that she didn’t understand. the terrible temptation: if the gun was left there long enough, sooner or later you would pick it up again.