Firestarter (39 page)

Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie's attention—she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn't what he seemed.

But he couldn't stop. He had this damned

(box? chest?)

to

(
???
)

to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it?

But he would know when it was time.

He went past dozens of other rooms—he couldn't remember all of the things he saw—and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.

Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.

DISPOSAL
, it read.

And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You'd never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.

He tried to lift the box, but couldn't. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse. It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horror he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding—

“I'll help you,” Mrs. Gurney said. “You helped me; now I'll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me.”

“You look so pretty,” he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.

“I feel like I've been let out of prison,” Mrs. Gurney responded. “Let me help you.”

“It's just that my head aches—”

“Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle.”

Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn't remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked
DISPOSAL
, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn't the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills,
his
pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.

“No!” he shouted.

“Yes,” Mrs. Gurney answered firmly. “The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”

Then he saw it her way.

It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.

Thud, thud, thud …

He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except—

“Oww, Jesus!”

Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.

No concrete sensory input except this rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have—

No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push … harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies and shy businessmen, not quite as hard as the ones he had given the fellows at the turnpike rest stop that time.

Andy's hands flew to his face and felt it all over, from brow to chin. There were no spots where the feeling trailed away to numbness. When he smiled, both corners of his mouth went up just as they always had. He wished to God for a light so he could look into his own eyes in the
bathroom mirror to see if either of them showed that telltale blood sheen.…

Push? Pushing?

That was ridiculous. Who was there to push?

Who, except—

His breath slowed to a stop in his throat and then resumed slowly.

He had thought of it before but had never tried it. He thought it would be like overloading a circuit by cycling a charge through it endlessly. He had been scared to try it.

My pill,
he thought.
My pill is overdue and I want it, I really want it, I really need it. My pill will make everything all right
.

It was just a thought. It brought on no craving at all. The idea of taking a Thorazine had all the emotional gradient of
please pass the butter
. The fact was, except for the rotten headache, he felt pretty much all right. And the fact also was he had had headaches a lot worse than this—the one at the Albany airport, for instance. This one was a baby compared to that.

I've pushed myself, he thought, amazed.

For the first time he could really understand how Charlie felt, because for the first time he was a little frightened by his own psi talent. For the first time he really understood how little he understood about what it was and what it could do. Why had it gone? He didn't know. Why had it come back? He didn't know that either. Did it have something to do with his intense fear in the dark? His sudden feeling that Charlie was being threatened (he had a ghostly memory of the piratical one-eyed man and then it floated away, gone) and his own dismal self-loathing at the way he had forgotten her? Possibly even the rap on the head he had taken when he fell down?

He didn't know; he knew only that he had pushed himself.

The brain is a muscle that can move the world.

It suddenly occurred to him that while he was giving little nudges to businessmen and fat ladies, he could have become a one-man drug-rehabilitation center, and he was seized in a shivery ecstasy of dawning supposition. He had gone to sleep thinking that a talent that could help poor fat Mrs. Gurney couldn't be all bad. What about a talent that could knock the monkey off the back of every poor junkie in New York City? What about
that,
sports fans?

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Am I really clean?”

There was no craving. Thorazine, the image of the blue pill on the white plate—that thought had become unmistakably neutral.

“I am clean,” he answered himself.

Next question: could he stay clean?

But he had no more than asked himself that one when other questions flooded in. Could he find out exactly what was happening to Charlie? He had used the push on himself in his sleep, like a kind of autohypnosis. Could he use it on others while awake? The endlessly, repulsively grinning Pynchot, for instance? Pynchot would know what was happening to Charlie. Could he be made to tell? Could he maybe even get her out of here after all? Was there a way to do that? And if they did get out, what then? No more running, for one thing. That was no solution. There had to be a place to go.

For the first time in months he felt excited, hopeful. He began to try scraps of plan, accepting, rejecting, questioning. For the first time in months he felt at home in his own head, alive and vital, capable of action. And above all else, there was this: if he could fool them into believing two things—that he was still drugged and that he was still incapable of using his mental-domination talent, he might—he just might have a chance of doing—doing
something
.

He was still turning it all over restlessly in his mind when the lights came back on. In the other room, the TV began spouting that same old Jesus-will-take-care-of-your-soul-and-we'll-take-care-of-your-bank-book jive.

The eyes, the electric eyes! They're watching you again, or soon will be.… Don't forget that!

For one moment, everything came home to him—the days and weeks of subterfuge that would surely lie ahead if he was to have any chance at all, and the near certainty that he would be caught at some point. Depression waved in … but it brought no craving for the pill with it, and that helped him to catch hold of himself.

He thought of Charlie, and that helped more.

He got up slowly from the bed and walked into the living room. “What happened?” he cried loudly. “I was scared! Where's my medication? Somebody bring me my medication!”

He sat down in front of the TV, his face slack and dull and heavy.

And behind that vapid face, his brain—that muscle that could move the world—ticked away faster and faster.

Like the dream her father had had at the same time, Charlie McGee could never remember the details of her long conversation with John Rainbird, only the high spots. She was never quite sure how she came to pour out the story of how she came to be here, or to speak of her intense loneliness for her father and her terror that they would find some way to trick her into using her pyrokinetic ability again.

Part of it was the blackout, of course, and the knowledge that
they
weren't listening. Part of it was John himself, he had been through so much, and he was so pathetically afraid of the dark and of the memories it brought of the terrible hole those “Congs” had put him in. He had asked her, almost apathetically, why they had locked her up, and she had begun talking just to distract his mind. But it had quickly become more than that. It began to come out faster and faster, everything she had kept bottled up, until the words were tumbling out all over one another, helter-skelter. Once or twice she had cried, and he held her clumsily. He was a sweet man … in many ways he reminded her of her father.

“Now if they find out you know all of that,” she said, “they'll probably lock you up, too. I shouldn't have told.”

“They'd lock me up, all right,” John said cheerfully. “I got a D clearance, kid. That gives me clearance to open bottles of Johnson's Wax and that's about all.” He laughed. “We'll be all right if you don't let on that you told me, I guess.”

“I won't,” Charlie said eagerly. She had been a little uneasy herself, thinking if John told, they might use him on her like a lever. “I'm awful thirsty. There's icewater in the refrigerator. You want some?”

“Don't leave me,” he said immediately.

“Well, let's go together. We'll hold hands.”

He appeared to think about this. “All right,” he said.

They shuffled across to the kitchen together, hands gripped tightly.

“You better not let on, kid. Especially about this. Heap-big
Indian afraid of the dark. The guys'd laugh me right out of this place.”

“They wouldn't laugh if they knew—”

“Maybe not. Maybe so.” He chuckled a little. “But I'd just as soon they never found out. I just thank God you was here, kid.”

She was so touched that her eyes filled again and she had to struggle for control of herself. They reached the fridge, and she located the jug of icewater by feel. It wasn't icy cold anymore, but it soothed her throat. She wondered with fresh unease just how long she had talked, and didn't know. But she had told … everything. Even the parts she had meant to hold back, like what had happened at the Manders farm. Of course, the people like Hockstetter knew, but she didn't care about them. She did care about John … and his opinion of her.

But she had told. He would ask a question that somehow pierced right to the heart of the matter, and … she had told, often with tears. And instead of more questions and cross-examination and mistrust, there had been only acceptance and calm sympathy. He seemed to understand the hell she had been through, maybe because he had been through hell himself.

“Here's the water,” she said.

“Thanks.” She heard him drink, and then it was placed back in her hands. “Thanks a lot.”

She put it away.

“Let's go back in the other room,” he said. “I wonder if they'll ever get the lights back on.” He was impatient for them to come on now. They had been off more than seven hours, he guessed. He wanted to get out of here and think about all of this. Not what she had told him—he knew all of that—but how to use it.

“I'm sure they'll be on soon,” Charlie said.

They shuffled their way back to the sofa and sat down.

“They haven't told you anything about your old man?”

“Just that he's all right,” she said.

“I'll bet I could get in to see him,” Rainbird said, as if this idea had just occurred to him.

“You could? You really think you could?”

“I could change with Herbie someday. See him. Tell him you're okay. Well, not tell him but pass him a note or something.”

“Oh, wouldn't that be dangerous?”

“It would be dangerous to make a business of it, kid. But I owe you one. I'll see how he is.”

She threw her arms around him in the dark and kissed him. Rainbird gave her an affectionate hug. In his own way, he loved her, now more than ever. She was his now, and he supposed he was hers. For a while.

They sat together, not talking much, and Charlie dozed. Then he said something that woke her up as suddenly and completely as a dash of cold water in the face:

“Shit, you ought to light their damn fires, if you can do it.”

Charlie sucked her breath in, shocked, as if he had suddenly hit her.

“I
told
you,” she said. “It's like letting a … a wild animal out of a cage. I promised myself I'd never do it again. That soldier at the airport … and those men at that farm … I killed them … burned them
up!
” Her face was hot, burning, and she was on the verge of tears again.