Firestarter (9 page)

“No, man,” the driver said kindly. He touched the back of Andy's neck lightly. “Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other. The comic-book philosophy of Jim Paulson in a nutshell. Take good care of the little stranger.”

“Sure,” Andy said, brushing his eyes. He put the five-dollar bill in the pocket of his corduroy coat. “Charlie? Hon? Wake up. Just a little bit longer now.”

Three minutes later Charlie was leaning sleepily against him while he watched Jim Paulson go up the road to a closed restaurant, turn around, and then head back past them toward the Interstate. Andy raised his hand. Paulson raised his in return. Old Ford van with the Arabian Nights on the side, jinns and grand viziers and a mystic, floating carpet. Hope California's good to you, guy, Andy thought, and then the two of them walked back toward the Slumberland Motel.

“I want you to wait for me outside and out of sight,” Andy said. “Okay?”

“Okay, Daddy.” Very sleepy.

He left her by an evergreen shrub and walked over to the office and rang the night bell. After about two minutes, a middle-aged man in a bathrobe appeared, polishing his glasses. He opened the door and let Andy in without a word.

“I wonder if I could have the unit down on the end of the left wing,” Andy said. “I parked there.”

“This time of year, you could have
all
of the west wing if you wanted it,” the night man said, and smiled around a mouthful of yellow dentures. He gave Andy a printed index card and a pen advertising business supplies. A car passed by outside, silent headlights that waxed and waned.

Andy signed the card Bruce Rozelle. Bruce was driving a 1978 Vega, New York license LMS 240. He looked at the blank marked
ORGANIZATION
/
COMPANY
for a moment, and then, in a flash of inspiration (as much as his aching head would allow), he wrote United Vending Company of America. And checked
CASH
under form of payment.

Another car went by out front.

The clerk initialed the card and tucked it away. “That's seventeen dollars and fifty cents.”

“Do you mind change?” Andy asked. “I never did get a chance to cash up, and I'm dragging around twenty pounds of silver. I hate these country milk runs.”

“Spends just as easy. I don't mind.”

“Thanks.” Andy reached into his coat pocket, pushed aside the five-dollar bill with his fingers, and brought out a fistful of quarters, nickels, and dimes. He counted out fourteen dollars, brought out some more change, and made up the rest. The clerk had been separating the coins into neat piles and now he swept them into the correct compartments of the cash drawer.

“You know,” he said, closing the drawer and looking at Andy hopefully, “I'd knock five bucks off your room bill if you could fix my cigarette machine. It's been out of order for a week.”

Andy walked over to the machine, which stood in the corner, pretended to look at it, and then walked back. “Not our brand,” he said.

“Oh. Shit. Okay. Goodnight, buddy. You'll find an extra blanket on the closet shelf if you should want it.”

“Fine.”

He went out. The gravel crunched beneath his feet, hideously amplified in his ears, sounding like stone cereal. He walked over to the evergreen shrub where he had left Charlie and Charlie wasn't there.

“Charlie?”

No answer. He switched the room key on its long green plastic tab from one hand to the other. Both hands were suddenly sweaty.

“Charlie?”

Still no answer. He thought back and now it seemed to him that the car that had gone past when he had been filling out the registration card had been slowing down. Maybe it had been a green car.

His heartbeat began to pick up, sending jolts of pain up to his skull. He tried to think what he should do if Charlie was gone, but he couldn't think. His head hurt too badly. He—

There was a low, snorting, snoring sound from deeper back in the bushes. A sound he knew very well. He leaped toward it, gravel spurting out from under his shoes. Stiff evergreen
branches scraped his legs and raked back the tails of his corduroy jacket.

Charlie was lying on her side on the verge of the motel lawn, knees drawn up nearly to her chin, hands between them. Fast asleep. Andy stood with his eyes closed for a moment and then shook her awake for what he hoped would be the last time that night. That long, long night.

Her eyelids fluttered, and then she was looking up at him. “Daddy?” she asked, her voice was blurred, still half in her dreams. “I got out of sight like you said.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “I know you did. Come on. We're going to bed.”

Twenty minutes later they were both in the double bed of Unit 16, Charlie fast asleep and breathing evenly, Andy still awake but drifting toward sleep, only the steady thump in his head still holding him up. And the questions.

They had been on the run for about a year. It was almost impossible to believe, maybe because it hadn't
seemed
so much like running, not when they had been in Port City, Pennsylvania, running the Weight-Off program. Charlie had gone to school in Port City, and how could you be on the run if you were holding a job and your daughter was going to first grade? They had almost been caught in Port City, not because they had been particularly good (although they were terribly dogged, and that frightened Andy a lot) but because Andy had made that crucial lapse—he had allowed himself temporarily to forget they were fugitives.

No chance of that now.

How close were they? Still back in New York? If only he could believe that—they hadn't got the cabby's number; they were still tracking him down. More likely they were in Albany, crawling over the airport like maggots over a pile of meat scraps. Hastings Glen? Maybe by morning. But maybe not. Hastings Glen was fifteen miles from the airport. No need to let paranoia sweep away good sense.

I deserve it! I deserve to go in front of the cars for setting that man on fire!

His own voice replying:
It could have been worse. It could have been his face.

Voices in a haunted room.

Something else came to him. He was supposed to be driving a Vega. When morning came and the night man didn't see a Vega parked in front of Unit 16, would he just assume his United Vending Company man had pushed on? Or would he investigate? Nothing he could do about it now. He was totally wasted.

I thought there was something funny about him. He looked pale, sick. And he paid with change. He said he worked for a vending-machine company, but he couldn't fix the cigarette machine in the lobby.

Voices in a haunted room.

He shifted onto his side, listening to Charlie's slow, even breathing. He thought they had taken her, but she'd only gone farther back in the bushes. Out of sight. Charlene Roberta McGee, Charlie since … well, since forever.
If they took you, Charlie, I don't know what I'd do
.

One last voice, his roommate Quincey's voice, from six years ago.

Charlie had been a year old then, and of course they knew she wasn't normal. They had known that since she was a week old and Vicky had brought her into their bed with them because when she was left in the little crib, the pillow began to … well, began to smolder. The night they had put the crib away forever, not speaking in their fright, a fright too big and too strange to be articulated, it had got hot enough to blister her cheek and she had screamed most of the night, in spite of the Solarcaine Andy had found in the medicine chest. What a crazyhouse that first year had been, no sleep, endless fear. Fires in the wastebaskets when her bottles were late; once the curtains had burst into flame, and if Vicky hadn't been in the room—

It was her fall down the stairs that had finally prompted him to call Quincey. She had been crawling then, and was quite good at going up the stairs on her hands and knees and then backing down again the same way. Andy had been sitting with her that day; Vicky was out at Senter's with one of her friends, shopping. She had been hesitant about going, and
Andy nearly had to throw her out the door. She was looking too used lately, too tired. There was something starey in her eyes that made him think about those combat-fatigue stories you heard during wartime.

He had been reading in the living room, near the foot of the stairs. Charlie was going up and down. Sitting on the stairs was a teddy bear. He should have moved it, of course, but each time she went up, Charlie went around it, and he had become lulled—much as he had become lulled by what appeared to be their normal life in Port City.

As she came down the third time, her feet got tangled around the bear and she came all the way to the bottom, thump, bump, and tumble, wailing with rage and fear. The stairs were carpeted and she didn't even have a bruise—God watches over drunks and small children, that had been Quincey's saying, and that was his first conscious thought of Quincey that day—but Andy rushed to her, picked her up, held her, cooed a lot of nonsense to her while he gave her a quick once-over, looking for blood, or a limb hanging wrong, signs of concussion. And—

And he
felt
it pass him—the invisible, incredible bolt of death from his daughter's mind. It felt like the backwash of warm air from a highballing subway train, when it's summertime and you're standing maybe a little too close on the platform. A soft, soundless passage of warm air … and then the teddy bear was on fire. Teddy had hurt Charlie; Charlie would hurt Teddy. The flames roared up, and for a moment, as it charred, Andy was looking at its black shoebutton eyes through a sheet of flame, and the flames were spreading to the carpeting on the stairs where the bear had tumbled.

Andy put his daughter down and ran for the fire extinguisher on the wall near the TV. He and Vicky didn't talk about the thing their daughter could do—there were times when Andy wanted to, but Vicky wouldn't hear of it; she avoided the subject with hysterical stubbornness, saying there was nothing wrong with Charlie,
nothing wrong
—but fire extinguishers had appeared silently, undiscussed, with almost the same stealth as dandelions appear during that period when spring and summer overlap. They didn't talk about what Charlie could do, but there were fire extinguishers all over the house.

He grabbed this one, smelling the heavy aroma of frying carpet, and dashed for the stairs … and still there was time
to think about that story, the one he had read as a kid, “It's a
Good
Life,” by some guy named Jerome Bixby, and that had been about a little kid who had enslaved his parents with psychic terror, a nightmare of a thousand possible deaths, and you never knew … you never knew when the little kid was going to get mad.…

Charlie was wailing, sitting on her butt at the foot of the stairs.

Andy twisted the knob on the fire extinguisher savagely and sprayed foam on the spreading fire, dousing it. He picked up Teddy, his fur stippled with dots and puffs and dollops of foam, and carried him back downstairs.

Hating himself, yet knowing in some primitive way that it had to be done, the line had to be drawn, the lesson learned, he jammed the bear almost into Charlie's screaming, frightened, tear-streaked face.
Oh you dirty bastard, he had thought desperately, why don't you just go out to the kitchen and get a paring knife and cut a line up each cheek? Mark her that way?
And his mind had seized on that. Scars. Yes. That's what he had to do. Scar his child. Burn a scar on her soul.

“Do you like the way Teddy looks?” he roared. The bear was scalded, the bear was blackened, and in his hand it was still as warm as a cooling lump of charcoal. “Do you like Teddy to be all burned so you can't play with him anymore, Charlie?”

Charlie was crying in great, braying whoops, her skin all red fever and pale death, her eyes swimming with tears.
“Daaaaa! Ted! Ted!”

“Yes, Teddy,” he said grimly. “Teddy's all burned, Charlie. You burned Teddy. And if you burn Teddy, you might burn Mommy. Daddy. Now …
don't you do it anymore!
” He leaned closer to her, not picking her up yet, not touching her. “Don't you do it anymore because
it is a Bad Thing
!”

“Daaaaaaaaaa—”

And that was all the heartbreak he could stand to inflict, all the horror, all the fear. He picked her up, held her, walked her back and forth until—a very long time later—her sobs tapered off to irregular hitchings of her chest, and sniffles. When he looked at her, she was asleep with her cheek on his shoulder.

He put her on the couch and went to the phone in the kitchen and called Quincey.

Quincey didn't want to talk. He was working for a large aircraft corporation in that year of 1975, and in the notes that accompanied each of his yearly Christmas cards to the McGees he described his job as Vice-President in Charge of Stroking. When the men who made the airplanes had problems, they were supposed to go see Quincey. Quincey would help them with their problems—feelings of alienation, identity crises, maybe just a feeling that their jobs were dehumanizing them—and they wouldn't go back to the line and put the widget where the wadget was supposed to go and therefore the planes wouldn't crash and the world would continue to be safe for democracy. For this Quincey made thirty-two thousand dollars a year, seventeen thousand more than Andy made. “And I don't feel a bit guilty,” he had written. “I consider it a small salary to extract for keeping America afloat almost single-handed.”

That was Quincey, as sardonically funny as ever. Except he hadn't been funny that day when Andy called from Ohio with his daughter sleeping on the couch and the smell of burned bear and singed carpeting in his nostrils.

“I've heard things,” Quincey said finally, when he saw that Andy wasn't going to let him off without
something.
“But sometimes people listen in on phones, old buddy. It's the era of Watergate.”