Firestarter

turned into something like a shudder.

“I’ll remember,” he said, and drew her into his arms and kissed her. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then she kissed back, holding his hands firmly in hers.

15

“Daddy!” Charlie screamed.

The world revolved sickly in front of Andy’s eyes. The sodium arc lamps lining the Northway were below him, the ground was above him and shaking him loose. Then he was on his butt, sliding down the lower half of the embankment like a kid on a slide. Charlie was below him rolling helplessly over and over.

Oh no, she’s going to shoot right out into the traffic-

“Charlie!” he yelled hoarsely, hurting his throat, his head. “Watch it!”

Then she was down, squatting in the breakdown lane, washed by the harsh lights of a passing car, sobbing. A moment later he landed beside her with a solid whap! that rocketed all the way up his spine to his head. Things doubled in front of his eyes, tripled, and then gradually settled down.

Charlie was sitting on her haunches, her head cradled in her arms.

“Charlie,” he said, touching her arm. “It’s all right, honey.”

“I wish I did go in front of the cars!” she cried out, her voice bright and vicious with a self-loathing that made Andy’s heart ache in his chest. “I deserve to for setting that man on fire!”

“Shhh,” he said. “Charlie, you don’t have to think of that anymore.” He held her. The cars swashed by them. Any one of them could be a cop, and that would end it. At this point it would almost be a relief.

Her sobs faded off little by little. Part of it, he realized, was simple tiredness. The same thing that was aggravating his headache past the screaming point and bringing this unwelcome flood of memories. If they could only get somewhere and lie down…

“Can you get up, Charlie?”

She got to her feet slowly, brushing the last of the tears away. Her face was a pallid moonlet in the dark. Looking at her, he felt a sharp lance of guilt. She should be snugly tucked into a bed somewhere in a house with a shrinking mortgage, a teddy bear crooked under one arm, ready to go back to school the next morning and do battle for God, country, and the second grade. Instead, she was standing in the breakdown lane of a turnpike spur in upstate New York at one-fifteen in the morning, on the run, consumed with guilt because she had inherited something from her mother and father-something she herself had had no more part in determining than the direct blue of her eyes. How do you explain to a seven-year-old girl that Daddy and Mommy had once needed two hundred dollars and the people they had talked to said it was all right, but they had lied?

“We’re going to hook us a ride,” Andy said, and he couldn’t tell if he had slung his arm around her shoulders to comfort her or to support himself. “We’ll get to a hotel or a motel and we’ll sleep. Then we’ll think about what to do next. That sound all right?”

Charlie nodded listlessly.

“Okay,” he said, and cocked his thumb. The cars rushed by it, unheeding, and less than two miles away the green car was on its way again. Andy knew nothing of this; his harried mind had turned back to that night with Vicky in the Union. She was staying at one of the dorms and he had dropped her off there, relishing her lips again on the step just outside the big double doors, and she had put her arms hesitantly around his neck, this girl who had still been a virgin. They had been young, Jesus they had been young.

The cars rushed by, Charlie’s hair lifted and dropped in each backwash of air, and he remembered the rest of what had happened that night twelve years ago.

16

Andy started across campus after seeing Vicky into her dorm, headed for the highway where he could hitch a ride into town. Although he could feel it only faintly against his face, the May wind beat strongly through the elms lining the mall, as if an invisible river ran through the air just above him, a river from which he could detect only the faintest, farthest ripples.

Jason Gearneigh Hall was on his way and he stopped in front of its dark bulk. Around it, the trees with their new foliage danced sinuously in the unseen current of that river of wind. A cool chill wormed its way down his spine and then settled in his stomach, freezing him lightly. He shivered even though the evening was warm. A big silver-dollar moon rode between the growing rafts of clouds gilded keelboats running before the wind, running on that dark river of air. The moonlight reflected on the building’s windows, making them glare like blankly unpleasant eyes.

Something happened in there, he thought. Something more than what we were told or led to expect. What was it?

In his mind’s eye he saw that drowning, bloody hand again-only this time he saw it striking the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a comma… and then the chart rolling up with a rattling, smacking sound.

He walked toward the building. Crazy. They’re not going to let you into a lecture hall at past ten o'clock. And-

And I’m scared.

Yes. That was it. Too many disquieting half memories. Too easy to persuade himself they had only been fantasies; Vicky was already on her way to accomplishing that. A test subject clawing his eyes out. Someone screaming that she wished she were dead, that being dead would be better than this, even if it meant going to hell and burning there for eternity. Someone else going into cardiac arrest and then being bundled out of sight with chilling professionalism. Because, let’s face it, Andy old kid, thinking about telepathy doesn’t scare you.

What scares you is the thought that one of those things might have happened.

Heels clicking, he walked up to the big double doors and tried them. Locked. Behind them he could see the empty lobby. Andy knocked, and when he saw someone coming out of the shadows, he almost ran. He almost ran because the face that was going to appear out of those swimming shadows would be the face of Ralph Baxter, or of a tall man with shoulder-length blond hair and a scar on his chin.

But it was neither; the man who came over to the lobby doors and unlocked them and stuck his querulous face out was a typical college security guard: about sixty- two, lined cheeks and forehead, wary blue eyes that were rheumy from too much bottle time. A big time clock was clipped to his belt.

“Building’s closed!” he said.

“I know,” Andy said, “but I was part of an experiment in Room Seventy that finished up this morning and-”

“That don’t matter! Building closes at nine on week-nights! Come back tomorrow!”

“-and I think I left my watch in there,” Andy said. He didn’t own a watch. “Hey, what do you say? Just one quick look around.” “I can’t do that,” the night man said, but all at once he sounded strangely unsure. With no thought at all about it one way or another, Andy said in a low voice: “Sure you can. I’ll just take a look and then I’ll be out of your way. You won’t even remember I was here, right?” A sudden weird feeling in his head: it was as if he had reached out, and pushed this elderly night security man, only with his head instead of his hands. And the guard did take two or three uncertain steps backward, letting go of the door. Andy stepped in, a little concerned. There was a sudden sharp pain in his head, but it subsided to a low throb that was gone half an hour later. “Say, are you all right?” he asked the security man.

“Huh? Sure, I’m okay.” The security man’s suspicion was gone; he gave Andy a smile that was entirely friendly. “Go on up and look for your watch, if you want to. Take your time. I probably won’t even remember that you’re here.”

And he strolled off:

Andy looked after him disbelievingly and then rubbed his forehead absently, as if to soothe the mild ache there. What in God’s name had he done to that old duck? Something, that was for sure.

He turned, went to the stairs, and began climbing them. The upper hall was deeply shadowed and narrow; a nagging feeling of claustrophobia slipped around him and seemed to tighten his breathing, like an invisible dog-collar. Up here, the building had poked into that river of wind, and the air went skating under the eaves, screaming thinly. Room 70 had two double doors, the top halves two squares of frosted, pebbled glass. Andy stood outside them, listening to the wind move through the old gutters and downspouts, rattling the rusty leaves of dead years. His heart was thudding heavily in his chest.

He almost walked away from it then; it seemed suddenly easier not to know, just to forget it. Then he reached out and grasped one of the doorknobs, telling himself there was nothing to worry about anyway because the damn room would be locked and good riddance to it.

Except that it wasn’t. The knob turned freely. The door opened.

The room was empty, lit only by stuttering moonlight through the moving branches of the old elms outside. There was enough light for him to see that the cots had been removed. The blackboard had been erased and washed. The chart was rolled up like a windowshade, only the pull ring dangling. Andy stepped toward it, and after a moment he reached up with a hand that trembled slightly and pulled it down.

Quadrants of the brain; the human mind served up and marked like a butcher’s diagram. Just seeing it made him get that trippy feeling again, like an acid flash. Nothing fun about it; it was sickening, and a moan escaped his throat, as delicate as a silver strand of spiderweb.

The bloodstain was there, comma-black in the moon’s uneasy light. A printed legend that had undoubtedly read CORPUS CALLOSUM before this weekend’s experiment now read COR OSUM, the comma-shaped stain intervening.

Such a small thing.

Such a huge thing.

He stood in the dark, looking at it, starting to shake for real. How much of it did this make true? Some? Most? All? None of the above?

From behind him he heard a sound, or thought he did: the stealthy squeak of a shoe.

His hands jerked and one of them struck the chart with that same awful smacking sound. It rattled back up on its roller, the sound dreadfully loud in this black pit of a room.

A sudden knocking on the moonlight-dusted far window; a branch, or perhaps dead fingers streaked with gore and tissue: let me in I left my eyes in there oh let me in let me in-

He whirled in a slow-motion dream, a slomo dream, sinkingly sure that it would be that boy, a spirit in a white robe, dripping black holes