Firestarter

  But when he was sleeping, he stole all the blankets.

  She went into the bathroom, shucked off her underpants, and turned on the shower. She used the toilet while the water got warm and then stepped into the shower stall. The hot water hit her and she closed her eyes, smiling. Nothing in the world was any nicer than the first minute or two in a hot shower.

  (you were bad last night)

  A frown creased her brow.

  (No. Daddysaid not.)

  (lit that man's shoes on fire, bad girl,very bad, do you like teddy all black?)

  The frown deepened. Unease was now tinctured with fear and shame. The idea of her teddy bear never even fully surfaced; it was an underthought, and as so often happened, her guilt seemed to be summed up in a smell--a burned, charred smell. Smoldering doth and stuffing. And this smell summoned hazy pictures of her mother and father leaning over her, and they were big people, giants; and they were scared; they were angry, their voices were big and crackling, like boulders jumping and thudding down a mountainside in a movie.

  ("bad girl! very bad! you mustn't, Charlie! never! never! never!")

  How old had she been then? Three? Two? How far back could a person remember? She had asked Daddy that once and Daddy said he didn't know. He said he remembered getting a bee sting and his mother had told him that happened when he was only fifteen months old.

  This was her earliest memory: the giant faces leaning over her; the big voices like boulders rolling downhill; and a smell like a burned waffle. That smell had been her hair. She had lit her own hair on fire and had burned nearly all of it off. It was after that that Daddy mentioned "help" and Mommy got all funny, first laughing, then crying, then laughing again so high and strange that Daddy had slapped her face. She remembered that because it was the only time that she knew of that her daddy had done something like that to her mommy. Maybe we ought to think about getting "help" for her, Daddy had said. They were in the bathroom and her head was wet because Daddy had put her in the shower. Oh, yes, her mommy had said, let's go see Dr. Wanless, he'll give us plenty of "help," just like he did before ... then the laughing, the crying, more laughter, and the slap.

  (you were so BAD last night)

  "No," she murmured in the drumming shower. "Daddy said not. Daddy said it could have ... been ... his ... face."

  (YOU WERE VERY BAD LAST NIGHT)

  But they had needed the change from the telephones. Daddy had said so.

  (VERY BAD!)

  And then she began to think about Mommy again, about the time when she had been five, going on six. She didn't like to think about this but the memory was here now and she couldn't put it aside. It had happened just before the bad men had come and hurt Mommy

  (killed her, you mean, they killed her)

  yes, all right, before they killed her, and took Charlie away. Daddy had taken her on his lap for storytime, only he hadn't had the usual storybooks about Pooh and Tigger and Mr. Toad and Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator. Instead he had a number of thick books with no pictures. She had wrinkled her nose in distaste and asked for Pooh instead.

  "No, Charlie," he had said. "I want to read you some other stories, and I need you to listen. You're old enough now, I think, and your mother thinks so, too. The stories may scare you a little bit, but they're important. They're true stories."

  She remembered the names of the books Daddy had read the stories from, because the stories had scared her. There was a book called Lo! by a man named Charles Fort. A book called Stranger Than Scienceby a man named Frank Edwards. A book called Night's Truth. And there had been another book called Pyrokinesis : A Case Book, but Mommy would not let Daddy read anything from that one. "Later," Mommy had said, "when she's much older, Andy." And then that book had gone away. Charlie had been glad.

  The stories were scary, all right. One was about a man who had burned to death in a park. One was about a lady who had burned up in the living room of her trailer home, and nothing in the whole room had been burned but the lady and a little bit of the chair she had been sitting in while she watched TV. Parts of it had been too complicated for her to understand, but she remembered one thing: a policeman saying: "We have no explanation for this fatality. There was nothing left of the victim but teeth and a few charred pieces of bone. It would have taken a blowtorch to do that to a person, and nothing around her was even charred. We can't explain why the whole place didn't go up like a rocket."

  The third story had been about a big boy--he was eleven or twelve--who had burned up while he was at the beach. His daddy had put him in the water, burning himself badly in the process, but the boy had still gone on burning until he was all burned up. And a story about a teenage girl who had burned up while explaining all her sins to the priest in the confession room. Charlie knew all about the Catholic confession room because her friend Deenie had told her. Deenie said you had to tell the priest all the bad stuff you had done all week long. Deenie didn't go yet because she hadn't had first holy communion, but her brother Carl did. Carl was in the fourth grade, and he had to tell everything, even the time he sneaked into his mother's room and took some of her birthday chocolates. Because if you didn't tell the priest, you couldn't be washed in THE BLOOD OF CHRIST and you would go to THE HOT PLACE.

  The point of all these stories had not been lost on Charlie. She had been so frightened after the one about the girl in the confession room that she burst into tears. "Am I going to burn myself up?" She wept. "Like when I was little and caught my hair on fire? Am I going to burn to pieces?"

  And Daddy and Mommy had looked upset. Mommy was pale and kept chewing at her lips, but Daddy had put an arm around her and said, "No, honey. Not if you always remember to be careful and not think about that ... thing. That thing you do sometimes when you're upset and scared."

  "What is it?" Charlie had cried. "What is it, tell me what it is, I don't even know, I'll never do it, I promise!"

  Mommy had said, "As far we can tell, honey, it's called pyrokinesis. It means being able to light fires sometimes just by thinking about fires. It usually happens when people are upset. Some people apparently have that ... that power all their lives and never even know it. And some people ... well, the power gets hold of them for a minute and they ..." She couldn't finish.

  "They burn themselves up," Daddy had said. "Like when you were little and you caught your hair on fire, yes. But you can get control of that, Charlie. You have to. And God knows it isn't your fault." His eyes and Mommy's had met for a moment when he said that, and something had seemed to pass between them.

  Hugging her around the shoulders, he had said, "Sometimes you can't help it, I know. It's an accident, like when you were smaller and you forgot to go to the bathroom because you were playing and you wet your pants. We used to call that having an accident--do you remember?"

  "I never do that anymore."

  "No, of course you don't. And in a little while, you'll have control of this other thing in just the same way. But for now, Charlie, you've got to promise us that you'll never never never get upset that way if you can help it. In that way that makes you start fires. And if you do, if you can't help it, push it away from yourself. At a wastebasket or an ashtray. Try to get outside. Try to push it at water, if there's any around."

  "But never at a person," Mommy had said, and her face was still and pale and grave. "That would be very dangerous, Charlie. That would be a very bad girl. Because you could"--she struggled, forced the words up and out--"you could kill a person."

  And then Charlie had wept hysterically, tears of terror and remorse, because both of Mommy's hands were bandaged, and she knew why Daddy had read her all the scary stories. Because the day before, when Mommy told her she couldn't go over to Deenie's house because she hadn't picked up her room, Charlie had got very angry, and suddenly the firething had been there, popping out of nowhere as it always did, like some evil jack-in-the-box, nodding and grinning, and she had been so angry she had shoved it out of herself and at her mommy and then Mom
my's hands had been on fire. And it hadn't been too bad

  (could have been worse could have been her face)

  because the sink had been full of soapy water for the dishes, it hadn't been too bad, but it had been VERY BAD, and she had promised them both that she would never never never--

  The warm water drummed on her face, her chest, her shoulders, encasing her in a warm envelope, a cocoon, easing away memories and care. Daddy had told her it was all right. And if Daddy said a thing was so, it was. He was the smartest man in the world.

  Her mind turned from the past to the present, and she thought about the men who were chasing them. They were from the government, Daddy said, but not a good part of the government. They worked for a part of the government called the Shop. The men chased them and chased them. Everywhere they went, after a little while, those Shop men showed up.

  I wonder how they'd like it if 1 set them on fire? a part of her asked coolly, and she squeezed her eyes shut in guilty horror. It was nasty to think that way. It was bad.

  Charlie reached out, grasped the HOT shower faucet, and shut it off with a sudden hard twist of her wrist. For the next two minutes she stood shivering and clutching her slight body under the ice-cold, needling spray, wanting to get out, not allowing herself to.

  When you had bad thoughts, you had to pay for them.

  Deenie had told her so.

  2

  Andy woke up a little at a time, vaguely aware of the drumming sound of the shower. At first it had been part of a dream: he was on Tashmore Pond with his grandfather and he was eight years old again, trying to get a squirming nightcrawler onto his hook without sticking the hook into his thumb. The dream had been incredibly vivid. He could see the splintery wicker creel in the bow of the boat, he could see the red tire patches on Granther McGee's old green boots, he could see his own old and wrinkled first baseman's mitt, and looking at it made him remember that he had Little League practice tomorrow at Roosevelt Field. But this was tonight, the last light and the drawing dark balanced perfectly on the cusp of twilight, the pond so still that you could see the small clouds of midges and noseeums skimming over its surface, which was the color of chrome. Heat lightning flashed intermittently ... or maybe it was real lightning, because it was raining. The first drops darkened the wood of Granther's dory, weatherbeaten white, in penny-sized drops. Then you could hear it on the lake, a low and mysterious hissing sound, like-- --like the sound of a--

  --shower, Charlie must be in the shower.

  He opened his eyes and looked at an unfamiliar beamed ceiling. Where are we?

  It fell back into place a piece at a time, but there was an instant of frightened free-fall that came of having been in too many places over the last year, of having too many close shaves and being under too much pressure. He thought longingly of his dream and wished he could be back in it with Granther McGee, who had been dead for twenty years now.

  Hastings Glen. He was in Hastings Glen. They were in Hastings Glen.

  He wondered about his head. It hurt, but not like last night, when that bearded guy had let them off. The pain was down to a steady low throb. If this one followed previous history, the throb would be just a faint ache by this evening, and entirely gone by tomorrow.

  The shower was turned off.

  He sat up in bed and looked at his watch. It was quarter to eleven.

  "Charlie?"

  She came back into the bedroom, rubbing herself vigorously with a towel.

  "Good morning, Daddy."

  "Good morning. How are you?"

  "Hungry," she said. She went over to the chair where she had put her clothes and picked up the green blouse. Sniffed it. Grimaced. "I need to change my clothes."

  "You'll have to make do with those for a while, babe.

  We'll get you something later on today."

  "I hope we don't have to wait that long to eat."

  "We'll hitch a ride," he said, "and stop at the first cafe we come to."

  "Daddy, when I started school, you told me never to ride with strangers." She was into her underpants and green blouse, and was looking at him curiously.

  Andy got out of bed, walked over to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. "The devil you don't know is sometimes better than the one you do," he said. "Do you know what that means, keed?"

  She thought about it carefully. The devil they knew was those men from the Shop, she guessed. The men that had chased them down the street in New York the day before. The devil they didn't know--

  "I guess it means that most people driving cars don't work for that Shop," she said.

  He smiled back. "You got it. And what I said before still holds, Charlie: when you get into a bad fix, you sometimes have to do things you'd never do if things were going good."

  Charlie's smile faded. Her face became serious, watchful. "Like getting the money to come out of the phones?"

  "Yes," he said.

  "And it wasn't bad?"

  "No. Under the circumstances, it wasn't bad."

  "Because when you get into a bad fix, you do what you have to do to get out of it."

  "With some exceptions, yes."

  "What are exceptions, Daddy?"

  He ruffled her hair. "Never mind now, Charlie. Lighten up."

  But she wouldn't. "And I didn't mean to set that man's shoes on fire. I didn't do it on purpose."

  "No, of course you didn't."

  Then she did lighten up; her smile, so much like Vicky's, came out radiantly. "How does your head feel this morning, Daddy?"

  "Much better, thanks."

  "Good." She looked at him closely. "Your eye looks funny."

  "Which eye?"

  She pointed at his left. "That one."

  "Yeah?" He went into the bathroom and wiped a clear place on the steamed mirror.

  He looked at his eye for a long time, his good humor fading. His right eye looked just as it always had, a gray green--the color of the ocean on an overcast spring day. His left eye was also gray green, but the white was badly bloodshot, and the pupil looked smaller than the right pupil. And the eyelid had a peculiar droop that he had never noticed before.

  Vicky's voice suddenly rang into his mind. It was so clear that she might have been standing beside him. The headaches, they scare me, Andy. You're doing something to yourself as well as to other people when you use that push or whatever you want to call it.

  The thought was followed by the image of a balloon being blown up ... and up ... and up ... and finally exploding with a loud bang.

  He began to go over the left side of his face carefully, touching it everywhere with the tips of his right fingers. He looked like a man in a TV commercial marveling over the closeness of his shave. He found three spots--one below his left eye, one on his left cheekbone, and one just below the left temple--where there was no feeling at all. Fright drifted through the hollow places of his body like quiet early-evening mist. The fright was not so much for himself as it was for Charlie, for what would happen to her if she got left on her own.

  As if he had called her, he could see her beyond him in the mirror.

  "Daddy?" She sounded a little scared. "You okay?"

  "Fine," he said. His voice sounded good. There was no tremor in it; nor was it too confident, falsely booming. "Just thinking how much I need a shave."

  She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. "Scratchy like a Brillo pad. Yuck. Gross."

  He chased her into the bedroom and rubbed his scratchy cheek against her smooth one. Charlie giggled and kicked.

  3

  As Andy was tickling his daughter with his stubbly beard, Orville Jamieson, aka OJ, aka The Juice, and another Shop agent named Bruce Cook were getting out of a light-blue Chevy outside the Hatings Diner.

  OJ paused for a moment, looking down Main Street with its slant parking, its appliance store, its grocery store, its two gas stations, its one drugstore, its wooden municipal building with a plaque out front commemorating some historical event no one gave a shit about. M
ain Street was also Route 40, and the McGees were not four miles from where OJ and Bruce Cook now stood.

  "Look at this burg," OJ said, disgusted. "I grew up close to here. Town called Lowville. You ever heard of Lowville, New York?"

  Bruce Cook shook his head.

  "It's near Utica, too. Where they make Utica Club beer. I was never so happy in my life as I was the day I got out of Lowville." OJ reached under his jacket and readjusted The Windsucker in its holster.

  "There's Tom and Steve," Bruce said. Across the street, a light-brown Pacer had pulled into a parking slot just vacated by a farm truck. Two men in dark suits were getting out of the Pacer. They looked like bankers. Farther down the street, at the blinker light, two more Shop people were talking to the old cunt that crossed the school kids at lunchtime. They were showing her the picture and she was shaking her head. There were ten Shop agents here in Hastings Glen, all of them coordinating with Norville Bates, who was back in Albany waiting for Cap's personal ramrod, Al Steinowitz.

  "Yeah, Lowville," OJ sighed. "I hope we get those two suckers by noon. And I hope my next assignment's Karachi. Or Iceland. Anyplace, as long as it's not upstate New York. This is too close to Lowville. Too close for comfort."

  "You think we will have them by noon?" Bruce asked.

  OJ shrugged "We'll have them by the time the sun goes down. You can count on that."

  They went into the diner, sat at the counter, and ordered coffee. A young waitress with a fine figure brought it to them.

  "How long you been on, sis?" OJ asked her.

  "If you got a sis, I pity her," the waitress said. "If there's any fambly resemblance, that is."

  "Don't be that way, sis," OJ said, and showed her his ID. She looked at it a long time. Behind her, an aging juvenile delinquent in a motorcycle jacket was pushing buttons on a Seeberg.

  "I been on since seven," she said. "Same as any other morning. Prolly you want to talk to Mike. He's the owner." She started to turn away and OJ caught her wrist in a tight grip. He didn't like women who made fun of his looks. Most women were sluts anyway, his mother had been right about that even if she hadn't been right about much else. And his mother surely would have known what to think about a high-tit bitch like this one.