Firestarter

  Rainbird hoped he would have the opportunity to find out for himself. In his business, death was often quick and unexpected, something that happened in the flick of an eye. He hoped that when his own death came, he would have time to prepare and feel everything. More and more lately he had watched the faces of the people he killed, trying to see the secret in the eyes.

  Death interested him.

  What also interested him was the little girl they were so concerned with. This Charlene McGee. As far as Cap knew, John Rainbird had only the vaguest knowledge of the McGees and none at all of Lot Six. Actually, Rainbird knew almost as much as Cap himself--something that surely would have marked him for extreme sanction if Cap had known. They suspected that the girl had some great or potentially great power--maybe a whole batch of them. He would like to meet this girl and see what her powers were. He also knew that Andy McGee was what Cap called "a potential mental dominant," but that did not concern John Rainbird. He had not yet met a man who could dominate him.

  The Crosswits ended. The news came on. None of it was good. John Rainbird sat, not eating, not drinking, not smoking, clean and empty and husked out, and waited for the killing time to come around.

  2

  Earlier that day Cap had thought uneasily of how silent Rainbird was. Dr. Wanless never heard him. He awoke from a sound sleep. He awoke because a finger was tickling him just below the nose. He awoke and saw what appeared to be a monster from a nightmare hulking over his bed. One eye glinted softly in the light from the bathroom, the light he always left on when he was in a strange place. Where the other eye should have been there was only an empty crater.

  Wanless opened his mouth to scream, and John Rainbird pinched his nostrils shut with the fingers of one hand and covered his mouth with the other. Wanless began to thrash.

  "Shhh." Rainbird said. He spoke with the pleased indulgence of a mother to her baby at fresh-diaper time.

  Wanless struggled harder.

  "If you want to live, be still and be quiet," Rainbird said.

  Wanless looked up at him, heaved once, and then lay still.

  "Will you be quiet?" Rainbird asked.

  Wanless nodded. His face was growing very red.

  Rainbird removed his hands and Wanless began to gasp hoarsely. A small rivulet of blood trickled from one nostril.

  "Who... are you ... Cap ... send you?"

  "Rainbird," he said gravely. "Cap sent me, yes."

  Wanless's eyes were huge in the dark. His tongue snaked out and licked his lips. Lying in his bed with the sheets kicked down around his knuckly ankles, he looked like the world's oldest child.

  "I have money," he whispered very fast. "Swiss bank account. Lots of money. All yours. Never open my mouth again. Swear before God."

  "It's not your money that I want, Dr. Wanless," Rainbird said.

  Wanless gazed up at him, the left side of his mouth sneering madly, his left eyelid drooping and quivering.

  "If you would like to be alive when the sun comes up," Rainbird said, "you will talk to me, Dr. Wanless. You will lecture me. I will be a seminar of one. I will be attentive; a good pupil. And I will reward you with your life, which you will live far away from the view of Cap and the Shop. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," Wanless said hoarsely.

  "Do you agree?"

  "Yes ... but what--?"

  Rainbird held two fingers to his lips and Dr. Wanless hushed immediately. His scrawny chest rose and fell rapidly.

  "I am going to say two words," Rainbird said, "and then your lecture will begin. It will include everything that you know, everything you suspect, everything you theorize. Are you ready for those two words, Dr. Wanless?"

  "Yes," Dr. Wanless said.

  "Charlene McGee," Rainbird said, and Dr. Wanless began to speak. His words came slowly at first, and then he began to speed up. He talked. He gave Rainbird the complete history of the Lot Six tests and the climactic experiment. Much of what he said Rainbird already knew, but Wanless also filled in a number of blank spots. The professor went through the entire sermon he had given Cap that morning, and here it did not fall on deaf ears. Rainbird listened carefully, frowning sometimes, clapping softly and chuckling at Wanless's toilet-training metaphor. This encouraged Wanless to speak even faster, and when he began to repeat himself, as old men will, Rainbird reached down again, pinched Wanless's nose shut with one hand again, and covered his mouth with the other again.

  "Sorry," Rainbird said.

  Wanless bucked and sunfished under Rainbird's weight. Rainbird applied more pressure, and when Wanless's struggles began to lessen, Rainbird abruptly removed the hand he had been using to pinch Wanless's nose shut. The sound of the good doctor's hissing breath was like air escaping from a tire with a big nail in it. His eyes were rolling wildly in their sockets, rolling like the eyes of a fear-maddened horse ... but they were still too hard to see.

  Rainbird seized the collar of Dr. Wanless's pajama jacket and yanked him sideways on the bed so that the cold white light from the bathroom shone directly across his face.

  Then he pinched the doctor's nostrils closed again.

  A man can sometimes survive for upward of nine minutes without permanent brain damage if his air is cut off and he remains completely quiet; a woman, with slightly greater lung capacity and a slightly more efficient carbon-dioxide-disposal system, may last ten or twelve. Of course, struggling and terror cuts that survival time a great deal.

  Dr. Wanless struggled briskly for forty seconds, and then his efforts to save himself began to flag. His hands beat lightly at the twisted granite that was John Rainbird's face. His heels drummed a muffled retreat tattoo on the carpeting. He began to drool against Rainbird's callused palm.

  This was the moment.

  Rainbird leaned forward and studied Wanless's eyes with a childlike eagerness.

  But it was the same, always the same. The eyes seemed to lose their fear and fill instead with a great puzzlement. Not wonder, not dawning comprehension or realization or awe, just puzzlement. For a moment those two puzzled eyes fixed on John Rainbird's one, and Rainbird knew he was being seen. Fuzzily, perhaps, fading back and back as the doctor went out and out, but he was being seen. Then there was nothing but glaze. Dr. Joseph Wanless was no longer staying at the Mayflower Hotel; Rainbird was sitting on his bed with a life-size doll.

  He sat still, one hand still over the doll's mouth, the other pinching the doll's nostrils tightly together. It was best to be sure. He would remain so for another ten minutes.

  He thought about what Wanless had told him concerning Charlene McGee. Was it possible that a small child could have such a power? He supposed it might be. In Calcutta he had seen a man put knives into his body--his legs, his belly, his chest, his neck--and then pull them out, leaving no wounds. It might be possible. And it was certainly ... interesting.

  He thought about these things, and then found himself wondering what it would be like to kill a child. He had never knowingly done such a thing (although once he had placed a bomb on an airliner and the bomb had exploded, killing all sixty-seven aboard, and perhaps one or more of them had been children, but that was not the same thing; it was impersonal). It was not a business in which the death of children was often required. They were not, after all, some terrorist organization like the IRA or the PLO, no matter how much some people--some of the yellowbellies in the Congress, for instance--would like to believe they were.

  They were, after all, a scientific organization.

  Perhaps with a child the result would be different. There might be another expression in the eyes at the end, something besides the puzzlement that made him feel so empty and so--yes, it was true--so sad.

  He might discover part of what he needed to know in the death of a child.

  A child like this Charlene McGee.

  "My life is like the straight roads in the desert," John Rainbird said softly. He looked absorbedly into the dull blue marbles that had been the eyes of Dr. Wanless. "But your life i
s no road at all, my friend ... my good friend."

  He kissed Wanless first on one cheek and then on the other. Then he pulled him back onto the bed and threw a sheet over him. It came down softly, like a parachute, and outlined Wanless's jutting and now tideless nose in white lawn.

  Rainbird left the room.

  That night he thought about the girl who could supposedly light fires. He thought about her a great deal. He wondered where she was, what she was thinking, what she was dreaming. He felt very tender about her, very protective.

  By the time he drifted off to sleep, at just past six A.M., he was sure: the girl would be his.

  Tashmore, Vermont

  1

  Andy and Charlie McGee arrived at the cottage on Tashmore Pond two days after the burning at the Manders farm. The Willys hadn't been in great shape to start with, and the muddy plunge over the woods roads that Irv had directed them onto had done little to improve it.

  When dusk came on the endless day that had begun in Hastings Glen, they had been less than twenty yards from the end of the second--and worse--of the two woods roads. Below them, but screened off by a heavy growth of bushes, was Route 22. Although they couldn't see the road, they could hear the occasional swish and whine of passing cars and trucks. They slept that night in the Willys, bundled up for warmth. They set out again the next morning--yesterday morning--at just past five A.M., with daylight nothing but a faint white tone in the east.

  Charlie looked pallid and listless and used up. She hadn't asked him what would happen to them if the roadblocks had been shifted east. It was just as well, because if the roadblocks had been shifted, they would be caught, and that was simply all there was to it. There was no question of ditching the Willys, either; Charlie was in no shape to walk, and for that matter, neither was he.

  So Andy had pulled out onto the highway and all that day in October they had jigged and jogged along secondary roads under a white sky that promised rain but never quite delivered it. Charlie slept a great deal, and Andy worried about her--worried that she was using the sleep in an unhealthy way, using it to flee what had happened instead of trying to come to terms with it.

  He stopped twice at roadside diners and picked up burgers and fries. The second time he used the five-dollar bill that the van driver, Jim Paulson, had laid on him. Most of the remaining phone change was gone. He must have lost some of it out of his pockets during that crazy time at the Manders place, but he didn't recall it. Something else was gone as well; those frightening numb places on his face had faded away sometime during the night. Those he didn't mind losing.

  Most of Charlie's share of the burgers and fries went uneaten.

  Last night they had driven into a highway rest area about an hour after dark. The rest area was deserted. It was autumn, and the season of the Winnebagos had passed for another year. A rustic woodburned sign read: NO CAMPING NO FIRES LEASH YOUR DOG $500 FINE FOR LITTERING.

  "They're real sports around here," Andy muttered, and drove the Willys down the slope beyond the far edge of the gravel parking lot and into a copse beside a small, chuckling stream. He and Charlie got out and went wordlessly down to the water. The overcast held, but it was mild; there were no stars visible and the night seemed extraordinarily dark. They sat down for a while and listened to the brook tell its tale. He took Charlie's hand and that was when she began to cry--great, tearing sobs that seemed to be trying to rip her apart.

  He took her in his arms and rocked her. "Charlie," he murmured. "Charlie, Charlie, don't. Don't cry."

  "Please don't make me do it again, Daddy," she wept. "Because if you said to I'd do it and then I guess I'd kill myself so please... please ... never..."

  "I love you," he said. "Be quiet and stop talking about killing yourself. That's crazy-talk."

  "No," she said. "It isn't. Promise, Daddy."

  He thought for a long time and then said slowly: "I don't know if I can, Charlie. But I promise to try. Will that be good enough?"

  Her troubled silence was answer enough.

  "I get scared, too," he said softly. "Daddies get scared, too. You better believe it."

  They spent that night, too, in the cab of the Willys. They were back on the road by six o'clock in the morning. The clouds had broken up, and by ten o'clock it had become a flawless, Indian-summery day. Not long after they crossed the Vermont state line they saw men riding ladders like masts in tossing apple trees and trucks in the orchards filled with bushel baskets of Macs.

  At eleven-thirty they turned off Route 34 and onto a narrow, rutted dirt road marked PRIVATE PROPERTY, and something in Andy's chest loosened. They had made it to Granther McGee's place. They were here.

  They drove slowly down toward the pond, a distance of perhaps a mile and a half. October leaves, red and gold, swirled across the road in front of the Jeep's blunt nose. Just as glints of water began to show through the trees, the road branched in two. A heavy steel chain hung across the smaller branch, and from the chain a rust-flecked yellow sign: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF COUNTY SHERIFF. Most of the rust flecks had formed around six or eight dimples in the metal, and Andy guessed that some summer kid had spent a few minutes working off his boredom by plinking at the sign with his .22. But that had been years ago.

  He got out of the Willys and took his keyring out of his pocket. There was a leather tab on the ring with his initials. A.McG., almost obliterated. Vicky had given him that piece of leather for Christmas one year--a Christmas before Charlie had been born.

  He stood by the chain for a moment, looking at the leather tab, then at the keys themselves. There were almost two dozen of them. Keys were funny things; you could index a life by the keys that had a way of collecting on your keyring. He supposed that some people, undoubtedly people who had realized a higher degree of organization than he had, simply threw their old keys away, just as those same organizational types made a habit of cleaning their wallets out every six months or so. Andy had never done either.

  Here was the key that opened the east-wing door of Prince Hall back in Harrison, where his office had been. His key to the office itself. To the English Department office. Here was the key to the house in Harrison that he had seen for the last time on the day the Shop killed his wife and kidnapped his daughter. Two or three more he couldn't even identify. Keys were funny things, all right.

  His vision blurred. Suddenly he missed Vicky, and needed her as he hadn't needed her since those first black weeks on the road with Charlie. He was so tired, so scared, and so full of anger. In that moment, if he'd had every employee of the Shop lined up in front of him along Granther's road, and if someone had handed him a Thompson submachine gun...

  "Daddy?" It was Charlie's voice, anxious. "Can't you find the key?"

  "Yes, I've got it," he said. It was among the rest, a small Yale key on which he had scratched T.P. for Tashmore Pond with his jackknife. The last time they had been here was the year Charlie was born, and now Andy had to wiggle the key a little before the stiff tumblers would turn. Then the lock popped open and he laid the chain down on the carpet of fall leaves.

  He drove the Willys through and then repadlocked the chain.

  The road was in bad shape, Andy was glad to see. When they came up regularly every summer, they would stay three or four weeks and he would always find a couple of days to work on the road--get a load of gravel from Sam Moore's gravel pit and put it down in the worst of the ruts, cut back the brush, and get Sam himself to come down with his old dragger and even it out. The camp road's other, broader fork led down to almost two dozen camp homes and cottages strung along the shorefront, and those folks had their Road Association, annual dues, August business meeting and all (although the business meeting was really only an excuse to get really loaded before Labor Day came and put an end to another summer), but Granther's place was the only one down this way, because Granther himself had bought all the land for a song back in the depths of the Depression.

  In the old days they'd had a family car, a Ford wagon.
He doubted if the old wagon would have made it down here now, and even the Willys, with its high axles, bottomed out once or twice. Andy didn't mind at all. It meant that no one had been down here.

  "Will there be electricity, Daddy?" Charlie asked.

  "No," he said, "and no phone, either. We don't dare get the electricity turned on, kiddo. It'd be like holding up a sign saying HERE WE ARE. But there are kerosene lamps and two range-oil drums. If the stuff hasn't been ripped off, that is." That worried him a little. Since the last time they'd been down here, the price of range oil had gone up enough to make the theft worthwhile, he supposed.

  "Will there be--" Charlie began.

  "Holy shit," Andy said. He jammed on the brakes. A tree had fallen across the road up ahead, a big old birch pushed down by some winter storm. "I guess we walk from here. It's only a mile or so anyway. We'll hike it." Later he would have to come back with Granther's one-handed buck and cut the tree up. He didn't want to leave Irv's Willys parked here. It was too open.

  He ruffled her hair. "Come on."

  They got out of the Willys, and Charlie scooted effortlessly mder the birch while Andy clambered carefully over, trying not to skewer himself anywhere important. The leaves crunched agreeably under their feet as they walked on, and he woods were aromatic with fall. A squirrel looked down at them from a tree, watching their progress closely. And now hey began to see bright slashes of blue again through the rees.

  "What did you start to say back there when we came to the tree?" Andy asked her.

  "If there would be enough oil for a long time. In case we stay the winter."

  "No, but there's enough to start with. And I'm going to cut a lot of wood. You'll haul plenty of it, too."

  Ten minutes later the road widened into a clearing on the shore of Tashmore Pond and they were there. They both stood quietly for a moment. Andy didn't know what Charlie was feeling, but for him there was a rush of remembrance too total to be called anything so mild as nostalgia. Mixed up in the memories was his dream of three mornings ago--the boat, the squirming nightcrawler, even the tire patches on Granther's boots.