Firestarter

by Stephen King

  "Thank you," she said. "What a nice compliment." Had she said that? Or had he imagined it?

  Grasping the last shreds of his mind, he said, "I think I crapped out on the distilled water, Vicky."

  She said placidly, "Me too."

  "Nice, isn't it?"

  "Nice," she agreed dreamily.

  Somewhere someone was crying. Babbling hysterically. The sound rose and fell in interesting cycles. After what seemed like eons of contemplation, Andy turned his head to see what was going on. It was interesting. Everything had become interesting. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Slomo, as the avant-garde campus film critic always put it in his columns. In this film, as in others, Antonioni achieves some of his most spectacular effects with his use of slomo footage. What an interesting, really clever word; it had the sound of a snake slipping out of a refrigerator: slomo.

  Several of the grad assistants were running in slomo toward one of the cots that had been placed near Room 70's blackboard. The young fellow on the cot appeared to be doing something to his eyes. Yes, he was definitely doing something to his eyes, because his fingers were hooked into them and he seemed to be clawing his eyeballs out of his head. His hands were hooked into claws, and blood was gushing from his eyes. It was gushing in slomo. The needle flapped from his arm in slomo. Wanless was running in slomo. The eyes of the kid on the cot now looked like deflated poached eggs, Andy noted clinically. Yes indeedy.

  Then the white coats were all gathered around the cot, and you couldn't see the kid anymore. Directly behind him. a chart hung down. It showed the quadrants of the human brain. Andy looked at this with great interest for a while. Verrryin-der-rresting, as Arte Johnson said on Laugh-In-A bloody hand rose out of the huddle of white coats, like the hand of a drowning man. The fingers were streaked with gore and shreds of tissue hung from them. The hand smacked the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a large comma. The chart rattled up on its roller with a smacking sound.

  Then the cot was lifted (it was still impossible to see the boy who had clawed his eyes out) and carried briskly from the room.

  A few minutes (hours? days? years?) later, one of the grad assistants came over to Andy's cot, examined his drip, and then injected some more Lot Six into Andy's mind.

  "How you feeling, guy?" the GA asked, but of course he wasn't a GA, he wasn't a student, none of them were. For one thing, this guy looked about thirty-five, and that was a little long in the tooth for a graduate student. For another, this guy worked for the Shop. Andy suddenly knew it. It was absurd, but he knew it. And the man's name was...

  Andy groped for it, and he got it. The man's name was Ralph Baxter.

  He smiled. Ralph Baxter. Good deal.

  "I feel okay," he said. "How's that other fella?"

  "What other fella's that, Andy?"

  "The one who clawed his eyes out," Andy said serenely.

  Ralph Baxter smiled and patted Andy's hand. "Pretty visual stuff, huh, guy?"

  "No, really," Vicky said. "I saw it, too."

  "You think you did," the GA who was not a GA said. "You just shared the same illusion. There was a guy over there by the board who had a muscular reaction ... something like a charley horse. No clawed eyes. No blood."

  He started away again.

  Andy said, "My man, it is impossible to share the same illusion without some prior consultation." He felt immensely clever. The logic was impeccable, inarguable. He had old Ralph Baxter by the shorts.

  Ralph smiled back, undaunted. "With this drug, it's very possible," he said. "I'll be back in a bit, okay?"

  "Okay, Ralph," Andy said.

  Ralph paused and came back toward where Andy lay on his cot. He came back in slomo. He looked thoughtfully down at Andy. Andy grinned back, a wide, foolish, drugged-out grin. Got you there, Ralph old son. Got you right by the proverbial shorts. Suddenly a wealth of information about Ralph Baxter flooded in on him, tons of stuff: he was thirty-five, he had been with the Shop for six years, before that he'd been with the FBI for two years, he had--

  He had killed four people during his career, three men and one woman. And he had raped the woman after she was dead. She had been an AP stringer and she had known about--

  That part wasn't clear. And it didn't matter. Suddenly, Andy didn't want to know. The grin faded from his lips. Ralph Baxter was still looking down at him, and Andy was swept by a black paranoia that he remembered from his two previous LSD trips ... but this was deeper and much more frightening. He had no idea how he could know such things about Ralph Baxter--or how he had known his name at all--but if he told Ralph that he knew, he was terribly afraid that he might disappear from Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh with the same swiftness as the boy who had clawed his eyes out. Or maybe all of that really had been a hallucination; it didn't seem real at all now.

  Ralph was still looking at him. Little by little he began to smile. "See?" he said softly. "With Lot Six, all kinds of funky things happen."

  He left. Andy let out a slow sigh of relief. He looked over at Vicky and she was looking back at him, her eyes wide and frightened. She's getting your emotions, he thought. Like a radio. Take it easy on her! Remember she's tripping, whatever else this weird shit is!

  He smiled at her, and after a moment, Vicky smiled uncertainly back. She asked him what was wrong. He told her he didn't know, probably nothing.

  (but we're not talking--her mouth's not moving)

  (it's not?)

  (vicky? is that you)

  (is it telepathy, andy? is it?)

  He didn't know. It was something. He let his eyes slip closed.

  Are those really grad assistants? she asked him, troubled. They don't look the same. Is it the drug, Andy? I don't know, he said, eyes still closed. I don't know who they are. What happened to that boy? The one they took away? He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but Vicky was shaking her head. She didn't remember. Andy was surprised and dismayed to find that he hardly remembered himself. It seemed to have happened years ago. Got a charley horse, hadn't he, that guy? A muscular twitch, that's all. He--

  Clawed his eyes out.

  But what did it matter, really?

  Hand rising out of the huddle of white coats like the hand of a drowning man.

  But it happened a long time ago. Like in the twelfth century.

  Bloody hand. Striking the chart. The chart rattling, up on its roller with a smacking sound.

  Better to drift. Vicky was looking troubled again.

  Suddenly music began to flood down from the speakers in the ceiling, and that was nice ... much nicer than thinking about charley horses and leaking eyeballs. The music was soft and yet majestic. Much later, Andy decided (in consultation with Vicky) that it had been Rachmaninoff. And ever after when he heard Rachmaninoff, it brought back drifting, dreamy memories of that endless, timeless time in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh HalL

  How much of it had been real, how much hallucination? Twelve years of off-and-on thought had not answered that question for Andy McGee. At one point, objects had seemed to fly through the room as if an invisible wind were blowing--paper cups, towels, a blood-pressure cuff, a deadly hail of pens and pencils. At another point, sometime later (or had it really been earlier? there was just no linear sequence), one of the test subjects had gone into a muscular seizure followed by cardiac arrest--or so it had seemed. There had been frantic efforts to restore him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by a shot of something directly into the chest cavity, and finally a machine that made a high whine and had two black cups attached to thick wires. Andy seemed to remember one of the "grad assistants" roaring, "Zap him! Zap him! Oh, give them to me, you fuckhead!"

  At another point he had slept, dozing in and out of a twilight consciousness. He spoke to Vicky and they told each other about themselves. Andy told her about the car accident that had taken his mother's life and how he had spent the next year with his aunt in a semi-nervous breakdown of grief. She told him that when she was seven, a teenage baby-sitt
er had assaulted her and now she was terribly afraid of sex, even more afraid that she might be frigid, it was that more than anything else that had forced her and her boyfriend to the breakup. He kept... pressing her.

  They told each other things that a man and a woman don't tell each other until they've known each other for years ... things a man and woman often never tell, not even in the dark marriage bed after decades of being together.

  But did they speak?

  That Andy never knew.

  Time had stopped, but somehow it passed anyway.

  13

  He came out of the doze a little at a time. The Rachmaninoff was gone ... if it had ever been there at all. Vicky was sleeping peacefully on the cot beside him, her hands folded between her breasts, the simple hands of a child who has fallen asleep while offering her bedtime prayers. Andy looked at her and was simply aware that at some point he had fallen in love with her. It was a deep and complete feeling, above (and below) question.

  After a while he looked around. Several of the cots were empty. There were maybe five test subjects left in the room. Some were sleeping. One was sitting up on his cot and a grad assistant--a perfectly normal grad assistant of perhaps twenty-five--was questioning him and writing notes on a clipboard. The test subject apparently said something funny, because both of them laughed--in the low, considerate way you do when others around you are sleeping.

  Andy sat up and took inventory of himself. He felt fine. He tried a smile and found that it fit perfectly. His muscles lay peacefully against one another. He felt eager and fresh, every perception sharply honed and somehow innocent. He could remember feeling this way as a kid, waking up on Saturday morning, knowing his bike was heeled over on its kickstand in the garage, and feeling that the whole weekend stretched ahead of him like a carnival of dreams where every ride was free.

  One of the grad assistants came over and said, "How you feeling, Andy?"

  Andy looked at him. This was the same guy that had injected him--when? A year ago? He rubbed a palm over his cheek and heard the rasp of beard stubble. "I feel like Rip van Winkle," he said.

  The GA smiled. "It's only been forty-eight hours, not twenty years. How do you feel, really?"

  "Fine."

  "Normal?"

  "Whatever that word means, yes. Normal. Where's Ralph?"

  "Ralph?" The GA raised his eyebrows.

  "Yes, Ralph Baxter. About thirty-five. Big guy. Sandy hair."

  The grad assistant smiled. "You dreamed him up," he said.

  Andy looked at the GA uncertainly. "I did what?"

  "Dreamed him up. Hallucinated him. The only Ralph I know who's involved in all the Lot Six tests in any way is a Dartan Pharmaceutical rep named Ralph Steinham. And he's fifty-five or so."

  Andy looked at the GA for a long time without saying anything. Ralph an illusion? Well, maybe so. It had all the paranoid elements of a dope dream, certainly; Andy seemed to remember thinking Ralph was some sort of secret agent who had wasted all sorts of people. He smiled a little. The GA smiled back ... a little too readily, Andy thought. Or was that paranoia, too? Surely it was.

  The guy who had been sitting up and talking when Andy woke up was now being escorted from the room, drinking from a paper cup of orange juice.

  Cautiously, Andy said: "No one got hurt, did they?"

  "Hurt?"

  "Well--no one had a convulsion, did they? Or--"

  The grad assistant leaned forward, looking concerned. "Say, Andy, I hope you won't go spreading anything like that around campus. It would play bloody hell with Dr. Wanless's research program. We have Lots Seven and Eight coming up next semester, and--"

  "Was there anything?"

  "There was one boy who had a muscular reaction, minor but quite painful," the GA said. "It passed in less than fifteen minutes with no harm done. But there's a witch-hunt atmosphere around here now. End the draft, ban ROTC, ban Dow Chemical job recruiters because they make napalm.... Things get out of proportion, and I happen to think this is pretty important research."

  "Who was the guy?"

  "Now you know I can't tell you that. All I am saying is please remember you were under the influence of a mild hallucinogenic. Don't go mixing up your drug-induced fantasies with reality and then start spreading the combination around."

  "Would I be allowed to do that?" Andy asked.

  The GA looked puzzled. "I don't see how we could stop you. Any college experimental program is pretty much at the mercy of its volunteers. For a lousy two hundred bucks we can hardly expect you to sign an oath of allegiance, can we?"

  Andy felt relief. If this guy was lying, he was doing a really superlative job of it. It had all been a series of hallucinations. And on the cot beside his, Vicky was beginning to stir.

  "Now what about it?" the GA asked, smiling. "I think I'm supposed to be asking the questions."

  And he did ask questions. By the time Andy finished answering them, Vicky was fully awake, looking rested and calm and radiant, and smiling at him. The questions were detailed. Many of them were the questions Andy himself would have asked.

  So why did he have the feeling they were all window dressing?

  14

  Sitting on a couch in one of the smaller Union lounges that evening, Andy and Vicky compared hallucinations.

  She had no memory of the thing that troubled him the most: that bloody hand waving limply above the knot of white tunics, striking the chart, and then disappearing. Andy had no recollection of the thing that was most vivid to her: a man with long blond hair had set up a folding table by her cot, so that it was just at her eye level. He had put a row of great big dominoes on the table and said, "Knock them down, Vicky. Knock them all down." And she had raised her hands to push them over, wanting to oblige, and the man had gently but firmly pressed her hands back down on her chest. "You don't need your hands, Vicky," he had said. "Just knock them down." So she had looked at the dominoes and they had fallen over, one after the other. A dozen or so in all.

  "It made me feel very tired," she told Andy, smiling that small, slantwise smile of hers. "And I had gotten this idea somehow that we were discussing Vietnam, you know. So I said something like, 'Yes, that proves it, if South Vietnam goes, they all go.' And he smiled and patted my hands and said, 'Why don't you sleep for a while, Vicky? You must be tired.' So I did." She shook her head. "But now it doesn't seem real at all. I think I must have made it up entirely or built a hallucination around some perfectly normal test. You don't remember seeing him, do you? Tall guy with shoulder-length blond hair and a little scar on his chin?"

  Andy shook his head.

  "But I still don't understand how we could share any of the same fantasies," Andy said, "unless they've developed a drug over there that's a telepathic as well as an hallucinogenic. I know there's been some talk about it in the last few years ...the idea seems to be that if hallucinogens can heighten perception ..." He shrugged, then grinned. "Carlos Castenada, where are you when we need you?"

  "Isn't it more likely that we just discussed the same fantasy and then forgot we did?" Vicky asked.

  He agreed it was a strong possibility, but he still felt disquieted by the whole experience. It had been, as they say, a bummer.

  Taking his courage in his hands, he said, "The only thing I really am sure of is that I seem to be falling in love with you, Vicky."

  She smiled nervously and kissed the comer of his mouth. "That's sweet, Andy, but--"

  "But you're a little afraid of me. Of men in general, maybe."

  "Maybe I am," she said.

  "All I'm asking for is a chance."

  "You'll have your chance," she said. "I like you, Andy. A lot. But please remember that I get scared. Sometimes I just ... get scared." She tried to shrug lightly, but it turned into something like a shudder.

  "I'll remember," he said, and drew her into his arms and kissed her. There was a moment's hesitation, and then she kissed him back, holding his hands firmly in hers.

  15

/>   "Daddy!" Charlie screamed.

  The world revolved sickly in front of Andy's eyes. The sodium arc lamps lining the Northway were below him, the ground was above him and shaking him loose. Then he was on his butt, sliding down the lower half of the embankment like a kid on a slide. Charlie was below him rolling helplessly over and over.

  Oh no, she's going to shoot right out into the traffic "Charliel" he yelled hoarsely, hurting his throat, his head. "Watch itl"

  Then she was down, squatting in the breakdown lane, washed by the harsh lights of a passing car, sobbing. A moment later he landed beside her with a solid whap! that rocketed all the way up his spine to his head. Things doubled in front of his eyes, tripled, and then gradually settled down.

  Charlie was sitting on her haunches, her head cradled in her arms.

  "Charlie," he said, touching her arm. "It's all right, honey."

  "I wish I did go in front of the cars!" she cried out, her voice bright and vicious with a self-loathing that made Andy's heart ache in his chest. "I deserve to for setting that man on fire!"

  "Shhh," he said. "Charlie, you don't have to think of that anymore."

  He held her. The cars swashed by them. Any one of them could be a cop, and that would end it. At this point it would almost be a relief.

  Her sobs faded off little by little. Part of it, he realized, was simple tiredness. The same thing that was aggravating his headache past the screaming point and bringing this unwelcome flood of memories. If they could only get somewhere and lie down....

  "Can you get up, Charlie?"

  She got to her feet slowly, brushing the last of the tears away. Her face was a pallid moonlet in the dark. Looking at her, he felt a sharp lance of guilt. She should be snugly tucked into a bed somewhere in a house with a shrinking mortgage, a teddy bear crooked under one arm, ready to go back to school the next morning and do battle for God, country, and the second grade. Instead, she was standing in the breakdown lane of a turnpike spur in upstate New York at one-fifteen in the morning, on the run, consumed with guilt because she had inherited something from her mother and father-something she herself had had no more part in determining than the direct blue of her eyes. How do you explain to a seven-year-old girl that Daddy and Mommy had once needed two hundred dollars and the people they had talked to said it was all right, but they had lied?