Firestarter (36 page)

Charlie was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, wearing a bright blue Danskin leotard and nothing else. Her long legs were crossed in a lotuslike position. She sat that way a great deal. An outsider might have thought she was stoned, but Rainbird knew better. She was still being lightly medicated, but now the dosage was little more than a placebo. All of the psychologists were in disappointed agreement that she meant what she said about never lighting fires again. The drugs had originally been meant to keep her from burning her way out, but now it seemed sure that she wasn't going to do that … or anything else.

“Hi, kid,” Rainbird said. He undipped the vacuum cleaner.

She glanced over at him but didn't respond. He plugged the vacuum in, and when he started it, she got up gracefully and went into the bathroom. She shut the door.

Rainbird went on vacuuming the rug. He had no plan in mind. It was a case of looking for small signs and signals, picking up on them, and following them. His admiration for the girl was unalloyed. Her father was turning into a fat, apathetic pudding; the psychologists had their own terms for it—“dependency shock,” and “loss of identity,” and “mental fugue,” and “mild reality dysfunction”—but what it all came down to was he had given up and could now be canceled out
of the equation. The girl hadn't done that. She had simply hidden herself. And Rainbird never felt so much like an Indian as he did when he was with Charlie McGee.

He vacuumed and waited for her to come out—maybe. He thought she was coming out of the bathroom a little more frequently now. At first she had always hidden there until he was gone. Now sometimes she came out and watched him. Perhaps she would today. Perhaps not. He would wait. And watch for signs.

Charlie sat in the bathroom with the door shut. She would have locked it if she could. Before the orderly came to clean the place, she had been doing some simple exercises she had found in a book. The orderly came to keep it orderly. Now the toilet seat felt cold under her. The white light from the fluorescents that ringed the bathroom mirror made everything seem cold, and too bright.

At first there had been a live-in “companion,” a woman of about forty-five. She was supposed to be “motherly,” but the “motherly companion” had hard green eyes with small flecks in them. The flecks were like ice. These were the people who had killed her real mother; now they wanted her to live here with the “motherly companion.” Charlie told them she didn't want the “motherly companion.” They smiled. Then Charlie stopped talking, and she didn't say another word until the “motherly companion” left, taking her green ice-chip eyes with her. She had made a deal with that man Hockstetter: she would answer his questions, and his alone, if he would get that “motherly companion” out. The only companion she wanted was her father, and if she couldn't have him, she would be alone.

In many ways she felt that the last five months (they told her it was five months; it didn't feel like anything) had been a dream. There was no way to mark time, faces came and went with no memories attached to them, disembodied as balloons, and food had no particular taste. She felt like a balloon herself sometimes. She felt as if she were floating. But in a way, her mind told her with perfect certitude, it was fair. She was a murderer. She had broken the worst of the Ten Commandments and was surely damned to hell.

She thought about this at night, with the lights turned down low so that the apartment itself seemed like a dream. She saw it all. The men on the porch wearing their crowns of flame. The cars exploding. The chickens catching fire. The smell of burning that was always the smell of smoldering stuffing, the smell of her teddy bear.

(and she had liked it)

That was it; that was the trouble. The more she had done it the more she had liked it; the more she had done it the more she had been able to feel the power, a living thing, getting stronger and stronger. It was like a pyramid standing upside down, standing on its tip, and the more you did it the harder it got to stop it. It
hurt
to stop it.

(and it was fun)

and so she was never going to do it again. She would die in here before she did it again. Maybe she even wanted to die in here. The idea of dying in a dream wasn't scary at all.

The only two faces that weren't totally dissociated were Hockstetter's and that of the orderly who came to clean her apartment every day. Charlie had asked him once why he had to come every day, since she wasn't messy.

John—that was his name—had taken a scrungy old pad from his back pocket and a cheap ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He said, “That's just my job, kid.” And on the paper he wrote
Because they're full of shit, why else?

She had almost giggled but had stopped herself in time by thinking of men with crowns of fire, men who smelled like smoldering teddy bears. Giggling would have been dangerous. So she simply pretended that she hadn't seen the note or didn't understand it. The orderly's face was a mess. He wore an eyepatch. She felt sorry for him and once she had almost asked him what happened—if he had been in a car accident or something—but that would have been even more dangerous than giggling at his note. She didn't know why, but she felt that in every fiber.

His face was very horrible to look at, but he seemed pleasant enough, and his face was no worse than the face of little Chuckle Eberhardt back in Harrison. Chuckle's mother had been frying potatoes when Chuckie was three and Chuckie had pulled the pan of hot fat off the stove all over himself and had almost died. Afterward the other kids sometimes called him Chuckie Hamburger and Chuckie Frankenstein, and Chuckie would cry. It was mean. The other kids didn't seem to understand that a thing like that could happen
to any kid. When you were three you didn't have much in the smarts department.

John's face was all ripped up, but that didn't scare her. It was Hockstetter's face that scared her, and his face—except for the eyes—was as ordinary as anyone else's. His eyes were even worse than the eyes of the “motherly companion.” He was always using them to pry at you. Hockstetter wanted her to make fires. He asked her again and again. He took her to a room, and sometimes there would be crumpled-up pieces of newspaper and sometimes there would be little glass dishes filled with oil and sometimes there would be other things. But for all the questions, and all the fake sympathy, it always came down to the same thing: Charlie, set this on fire.

Hockstetter scared her. She sensed that he had all sorts of … of

(things)

that he could use on her to make her light fires. But she wouldn't. Except she was scared that she would. Hockstetter would use anything. He didn't play fair, and one night she had had a dream, and in this dream she had set Hockstetter on fire and she had awakened with her hands stuffed into her mouth to keep back a scream.

One day, in order to postpone the inevitable request, she had asked when she could see her father. It had been much on her mind, but she hadn't asked, because she knew what the answer would be. But on this day she was feeling specially tired and low-spirited, and it had just slipped out.

“Charlie, I think you know the answer to that,” Hockstetter had said. He pointed to the table in the little room. There was a steel tray on the table and it was filled with heaps of curly wood shavings. “If you'll light that, I'll take you to your father right away. You can be with him in two minutes.” Beneath his cold, watching eyes, Hockstetter's mouth spread wide in a just-pals sort of grin. “Now, what say?”

“Give me a match,” the tears threaten. “I'll light it.”

“You can light it just by thinking about it. You know that.”

“No. I can't. And even if I could, I wouldn't. It's wrong.”

Hockstetter looked at her sadly, the just-pals smile fading. “Charlie, why do you hurt yourself like this? Don't you want to see your dad? He wants to see you. He told me to tell you it was all right.”

And then she
did
cry, she cried hard and long, because she
did want to see him, not a minute of any day went by without her thoughts turning to him, without missing him, without wanting to feel his solid arms around her. Hockstetter watched her cry and there was no sympathy in his face, no sorrow or kindness. There was, however, careful calculation. Oh, she hated him.

That had been three weeks ago. Since then she had stubbornly not mentioned her father, although Hockstetter had dangled him before her constantly, telling her that her father was sad, that her father said it was okay to make fires, and worst of all, that her father had told Hockstetter that he guessed Charlie didn't love him anymore.

She looked at her pale face in the bathroom mirror and listened to the steady whine of John's vacuum cleaner. When he finished that, he would change her bed. Then he would dust. Then he would be gone. Suddenly she didn't want him to be gone, she wanted to listen to him talk.

At first she had always gone into the bathroom and stayed in there until he was gone, and once he had turned off the vacuum cleaner and knocked on the bathroom door, calling worriedly: “Kid? You all right? You ain't sick, are you?”

His voice was so kind—and kindness, simple kindness, was so hard to come by in here—that she had had to struggle to keep her voice calm and cool because the tears were threatening again. “Yes … I'm okay.”

She waited, wondering if he would try to take it further, try to get inside her like the others did, but he had simply gone away and started his vacuum up again. In a way she had been disappointed.

Another time he had been washing the floor and when she came out of the bathroom, he had said, without looking up, “Watch out for that wet floor, kid, you don't want to break your arm.” That was all, but again she had been nearly surprised into tears—it was concern, so simple and direct it was unconscious.

Just lately she had been coming out of the bathroom to watch him more and more. To watch him … and to listen to him. He would ask her questions sometimes, but they were never threatening ones. Still, most times she wouldn't answer, just on general principles. It didn't stop John. He would talk to her anyway. He would talk about his bowling scores, about his dog, about how his TV got broken and it would be a couple of weeks before he could get it fixed because they wanted so much for those little tiny tubes.

She supposed he was lonely. With a face like his, he probably didn't have a wife or anything. She liked to listen to him because it was like a secret tunnel to the outside. His voice was low, musical, sometimes wandering. It was never sharp and interrogative, like Hockstetter's. He required no reply, seemingly.

She got off the toilet seat and went to the door, and that was when the lights went out. She stood there, puzzled, one hand on the doorknob, her head cocked to one side. It immediately came to her that this was some sort of trick. She could hear the dying whine of John's vacuum cleaner and then he said, “Well, what the
Christ?
”

Then the lights came back on. Still Charlie didn't come out. The vacuum cleaner cycled back up again. Footsteps approached the door and John said, “Did the lights go out in there for a second?”

“Yes.”

“It's the storm, I guess.”

“What storm?”

“Looked like it was going to storm when I came to work. Big thunderheads.”

Looked like it was going to storm
. Outside. She wished she could go outside and see the big thunderheads. Smell that funny way the air got before a summer storm. It got a rainy, wet smell. Everything looked gr—

The lights went out again.

The vacuum died. The darkness was total. Her only connection with the world was her hand on the brushed-chrome doorknob. She began to tap her tongue thoughtfully against her upper lip.

“Kid?”

She didn't answer. A trick? A storm, he had said. And she believed that. She believed John. It was surprising and scary to find that she believed what someone had told her, after all this time.

“Kid?”
It was him again. And this time he sounded … frightened.

Her own fear of the dark, which had only begun to creep up on her, was sublimated in his.

“John, what's the matter?” She opened the door and groped in front of her. She didn't go out, not yet. She was afraid of tripping over the vacuum cleaner.

“What happened?” Now there was a beat of panic in his voice. It scared her. “Where's the lights?”

“They went out,” she said. “You said … the storm …”

“I can't stand the dark,” he said. There was terror in his voice and a kind of grotesque apology. “You don't understand, I can't … I got to get out …” She heard him make a sudden blundering rush across the living room, and then there was a loud and frightening crash as he fell over something—the coffee table, most likely. He cried out miserably and that frightened her even more.

“John? John! Are you all right?”

“I got to get out!” he screamed. “Make them let me out, kid!”

“What's wrong?”

There was no answer, not for a long time. Then she heard a low, choked sound and understood that he was crying.

“Help me,” he said then, and Charlie stood in the bathroom doorway, trying to decide. Part of her fear had already dissolved into sympathy, but part of it remained questioning, hard and bright.

“Help me, oh somebody help me,” he said in a low voice, so low it was as if he expected no one to hear or heed. And that decided her. Slowly she began to feel her way across the room toward him, her hands held out in front of her.

Rainbird heard her coming and could not forbear a grin in the dark—a hard, humorless grin that he covered with the palm of his hand, in case the power should come back on at that precise instant.