Firestarter

“Oh, gross!”

“They turned me into an animal,” he said, and was quiet for a moment, breathing loudly. “You got it better than me, kid, but it comes down to pretty much the same thing. A rat in a trap. You think they’ll get the lights on pretty soon?”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and he was coldly afraid that he had gone too far. Then Charlie said, “It doesn’t matter. We’re together.”

“All right,” he said, and then in a rush: “You won’t tell, will you? They’d fire me for the.” way I been talking. I need this job. When you look the way I do, you need a good job.”

“No, I won’t tell.”

He felt the chisel slip smoothly in another notch. They had a secret between them now.

He was holding her in his hands.

In the dark, he thought how it would be to slip his hands around her neck. That was the final object in view, of course-not their stupid tests, their playground games. Her… and then perhaps himself. He liked her, he really did. He might even be falling in love with her. The time would come when he would send her over, looking carefully into her eyes all the time. And then, if her eyes gave him the signal he had looked for for so long, perhaps he would follow her. Yes. Perhaps they would go into the real darkness together.

Outside, beyond the locked door, eddies of confusion passed back and forth, sometimes near, sometimes far away.

Rainbird mentally spat on his hands and then went back to work on her.

9

Andy had no idea that they hadn’t come to get him out because the power failure had automatically locked the doors. He sat in a half-swoon of panic for some unknown time, sure the place was burning down, imagining the smell of smoke. Outside, the storm had cleared and late afternoon sunshine was slanting down toward dusk.

Quite suddenly Charlie’s face came into his mind, as clearly as if she had been standing there in front of him.

(she’s in danger charlie’s in danger)

It was one of his hunches, the first he’d had since that last day in Tashmore. He thought he had lost that along with the push, but apparently that was not so, because he had never had a hunch clearer than this one-not even on the day Vicky was killed.

Did that mean the push was still there, too? Not gone at all, but only hiding?

(charlie’s in danger!)

What sort of danger?

He didn’t know. But the thought, the fear, had brought her face clearly in front of him, outlined on this darkness in every detail. And the image of her face, her wide set blue eyes and fine-spun blond hair, brought guilt like a twin… except that guilt was too mild a word for what he. felt; it was something like horror that he felt. He had been in a craze of panic ever since the lights went out, and the panic had been completely for himself. It had never even occurred to him that Charlie must be in the dark, too.

No, they’ll come and get her out, they probably came and got her out long ago. Charlie’s the one they want. Charlie’s their meal ticket.

That made sense, but he still felt that suffocating surety that she was in some terrible danger.

His fear for her had the effect of sweeping the panic for himself away, or at least of making it more manageable. His awareness turned outward again and became more objective. The first thing he became aware of was that he was sitting in a puddle of ginger ale. His pants were wet and tacky with it, and he made a small sound of disgust.

Movement. Movement was the cure for fear.

Re got on his knees, felt for the overturned Canada Dry can, and batted it away. It went clinkrolling across the tiled floor. He got another can out of the fridge; his mouth was still dry. He pulled the tab and dropped it down into the can and then drank. The ringtab tried to escape into his mouth and he spat it back absently, not pausing to reflect that only a little while ago, that alone would have been excuse enough for another fifteen minutes of fear and trembling.

He began to feel his way out of the kitchen, trailing his free hand along the wall. This level was entirely quiet now, and although he heard an occasional faraway call, there seemed to be nothing upset or panicky about the sound. The smell of smoke had been a hallucination. The air was a bit stale because all the convectors had stopped when the power went off, but that was all.

Instead of crossing the living room, Andy turned left and crawled into his bedroom. He felt his way carefully to the bed, set his can of ginger ale on the bedtable, and then undressed. Ten minutes later he was dressed in fresh clothes and feeling much better. It occurred to him that he had done all of this with no particular trouble, whereas after the lights went out, crossing the living room had been like crossing a live minefield.

(charlie-what’s wrong with charlie?)

But it wasn’t really a feeling that something was wrong with her, just a feeling that she was in danger of something happening. If he could see her, he could ask her what He laughed bitterly in the dark. Yes, right. And pigs will whistle, beggars will ride. Might as well wish for the moon in a mason jar. Might as well For a moment his thoughts stopped entirely, and then moved on-but more slowly, and with no bitterness.

Might as well wish to think businessmen into having more self-confidence.

Might as well wish to think fat ladies thin.

Might as well wish to blind one of the goons who had kidnapped Charlie.

Might as well wish for the push to come back.

His hands were busy on the bedspread, pulling it, kneading it, feeling it-the mind’s need, nearly unconscious, for some sort of constant sensory input. There was no sense in hoping for the push to come back. The push was gone. He could no more push his way to Charlie than he could pitch for the Reds. It was gone.

(is it!)

Quite suddenly he wasn’t sure. Part of him some very deep part-had maybe just decided it didn’t buy his conscious decision to follow the path of least resistance and give them whatever they wanted. Perhaps some deep part of him had decided not to give up.

He sat feeling the bedspread, running his hands over and over it.

Was that true, or only wishful thinking brought on by one sudden and unprovable hunch? The hunch itself might have been as false as the smoke he’d thought he smelled, brought on by simple anxiety. There was no way to check the hunch, and there was certainly no one here to push.

He drank his ginger ale.

Suppose the push had come back. That was no universal cure-all; he of all people knew that. He could give a lot of little pushes or three or four wallopers before he tipped himself over. He might get to Charlie, but he didn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting them out of here. All he would succeed in doing was pushing himself into the grave via a brain hemorrhage (and as he thought of this, his fingers went automatically to his face, where the numb spots had been).

Then there was the matter of the Thorazine they had been feeding him. The lack of it-the lateness of the dose due when the lights had gone out-had played a large part in his panic, he knew. Even now, feeling more in control of himself, he wanted that Thorazine and the tranquil, coasting feeling it brought. At the beginning, they had kept him off the Thorazine for as long as two days before testing him. The result had been constant nervousness and a low depression like thick clouds that never seemed to “let up… and back then he hadn’t built up a heavy thing, as he had now.

“Face it, you’re a junky,” he whispered.

He didn’t know if that was true or not. He knew that there were physical addictions like the one to nicotine, and to heroin, which caused physical changes in the central nervous system. And then there were psychological addictions. He had taught with a fellow named Bill Wallace who got very, very nervous without his three or four Cokes a day, and his old college buddy Quincey had been a potato-chip freak-but he had to have an obscure New England brand, Humpty Dumpty; he claimed no other kind satisfied. Andy supposed those qualified as psychological addictions. He didn’t know if his craving for his pill was physical or psychological; he only knew that he needed it, he really needed it. Just sitting here and thinking about the blue pill in the white dish had him cotton mouthed all over again. They no longer kept him without the drug for forty-eight hours before testing him, although whether that was because they felt he couldn’t go that long without getting the screaming meemies or because they were just going through the motions of testing, he didn’t know.

The result was a cruelly neat, insoluble problem; he couldn’t push if he was full of Thorazine, and yet he simply didn’t have the will to refuse it (and, of course, if they caught him refusing it, that would open a whole new can of worms for them, wouldn’t it?-real night-crawlers). When they brought him the blue pill in the white dish after this was over, he would take it. And little by little, he would work his way back to the calmly apathetic steady state he had been in when the power went off: All of this was just a spooky little side-trip. He would be back to watching PTL Club and Clint Eastwood on Home Box Office soon enough, and snacking too much out of the always-well-stocked fridge. Back to putting on weight.

(charlie, charlie’s in danger, charlie’s in all sorts of trouble, she’s in a world of hurt)

If so, there was nothing he could do about it.

And even if there was, even if he could somehow conquer the monkey on his back and get them out of here-pigs will whistle and beggars will ride, why the hell not? any ultimate solution concerning Charlie’s future would be as far away as ever.

He lay back on his bed, spread-eagled. The small department of his mind that now dealt exclusively with Thorazine continued to clamor restlessly. There were no solutions in the present, and so he drifted into the past. He saw himself and Charlie fleeing up Third Avenue in a kind of slow-motion nightmare, a big man in a scuffed cord jacket and a little girl in red and green. He saw Charlie, her face strained and pale, tears running down her cheeks after she had got all the change from the pay phones at the airport… she got the change and set some serviceman’s shoes on fire.

His mind drifted back even further to the storefront in Port City, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Gurney. Sad, fat Mrs. Gurney, who had come into the Weight-Off office in a green pantsuit, clutching at the carefully lettered slogan that had actually been Charlie’s idea. You Will Lose Weight or We Will Buy Your Groceries for the Next Six Months.

Mrs. Gurney, who had borne her truck-dispatcher husband four children between 1950 and 1957, and now the children were grown and they were disgusted with her, and her husband was disgusted with her, and he was seeing another woman, and she could understand that because Stan Gurney was still a good-looking, vital, virile man at fiftyfive, and she had slowly gained one hundred and sixty pounds over the years since the second-to-last child had left for college, going from the one-forty she had weighed at marriage to an even three hundred pounds. She had come in, smooth and monstrous and desperate in her green pantsuit, and her ass was nearly as wide as a bank president’s desk. When she looked down into her purse to find her checkbook, her three chins became six.

He had put her in a class with three other fat women. There were exercises and a mild diet, both of which Andy had researched at the Public Library; there were mild pep talks, which he billed as “counseling”-and every now and then there was a medium-hard push.