Firestarter

by Stephen King

  He didn't like going to Bradford. He didn't like the certain knowledge that the oldsters who sat around the big potbellied stove down by the cash register were talking about the stranger who was staying across the lake in one of the camps. Stories had a way of getting around, and sometimes they got into the wrong ears. It wouldn't take much--only a whisper--for the Shop to make an inevitable connection between Andy, his grandfather, and his grandfather's cottage in Tashmore, Vermont. But he simply didn't know what else to do. They had to eat, and they couldn't spend the entire winter living on canned sardines. He wanted fresh fruit for Charlie, and vitamin pills, and clothes. Charlie had arrived with nothing to her name but a dirty blouse, a pair of red pants, and a single pair of underdrawers. There was no cough medicine that he trusted, there were no fresh vegetables, and, crazily enough, hardly any matches. Every camp he broke into had a fireplace, but he found only a single box of Diamond wooden matches.

  He could have gone farther afield--there were other camps and cottages--but many of the other areas were plowed out and patrolled by the Tashmore constabulary. And on many of the roads there were at least one or two year-round residents.

  In the Bradford general store he was able to buy all the things he needed, including three pairs of heavy pants and three woolen shirts that were approximately Charlie's size. There was no girls' underwear, and she had to make do with size-eight Jockey shorts. This disgusted and amused Charlie by turns.

  Making the six-mile round trip across to Bradford on Granther's skis was both a burden and a pleasure to Andy. He didn't like leaving Charlie alone, not because he didn't trust her but because he always lived with the fear of coming back and finding her gone ... or dead. The old boots gave him blisters no matter how many pairs of socks he put on. If he tried to move too fast, he gave himself headaches, and then he would remember the small numb places on his face and envision his brain as an old bald tire, a tire that had been used so long and hard that it was down to the canvas in places. If he had a stroke in the middle of this damned lake and froze to death, what would happen to Charlie then?

  But he did his best thinking on these trips. The silence had a way of clearing his head. Tashmore Pond itself was not wide--Andy's path across it from the west bank to the east was less than a mile--but it was very long. With the snow lying four feet deep over the ice by February, he sometimes paused halfway across and looked slowly to his right and left. The lake then appeared to be a long corridor floored with dazzling white tile--clean, unbroken, stretching out of sight in either direction. Sugar-dusted pines bordered it all around. Above was the hard, dazzling, and merciless blue sky of winter, or the low and featureless white of coming snow. There might be the far-off call of a crow, or the low, rippling thud of the ice stretching, but that was all. The exercise toned up his body. He grew a warm singlet of sweat between his skin and his clothes, and it felt good to work up a sweat and then wipe it off your brow. He had somehow forgotten that feeling while teaching Yeats and Williams and correcting bluebooks.

  In this silence, and through the exertion of working his body hard, his thoughts came clear and he worked the problem over in his mind. Something had to be done--should have been done long since, but that was in the past. They had come to Granther's place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy way he felt about the old-timers sitting around the stove with their pipes and their inquisitive eyes was enough to ram that fact home. He and Charlie were in a corner, and there had to be some way out of it.

  And he was still angry, because it wasn't right. They had no right. His family were American citizens, living in a supposedly open society, and his wife had been murdered, his daughter kidnapped, the two of them hunted like rabbits in a hedgerow.

  He thought again that if he could get the story across to someone--or to several someones--the whole thing could be blown out of the water. He hadn't done it before because that odd hypnosis--the same sort of hypnosis that had resulted in Vicky's death--had continued, at least to some degree. He hadn't wanted his daughter growing up like a freak in a side-show. He hadn't wanted her institutionalized--not for the good of the country and not for her own good. And worst of all, he had continued to lie to himself. Even after he had seen his wife crammed into the ironing closet in the laundry with that rag in her mouth, he had continued to lie to himself and tell himself that sooner or later they would be left alone. Just playing for funzies, they had said as kids. Everybody has to give back the money at the end.

  Except they weren't kids, they weren't playing for funzies, and nobody was going to give him and Charlie anything back when the game was over. This game was for keeps.

  In silence he began to understand certain hard truths. In a way, Charlie was a freak, not much different from the thalidomide babies of the sixties or those girl children of mothers who had taken DES; the doctors just hadn't known that those girl children were going to develop vaginal tumors in abnormal numbers fourteen or sixteen years down the road. It was not Charlie's fault, but that did not change the fact. Her strangeness, her freakishness, was simply on the inside. What she had done at the Manders farm had been terrifying, totally terrifying, and since then Andy had found himself wondering just how far her ability reached, how far it could reach. He had read a lot of the literature of parapsychology during their year on the dodge, enough to know that both pyrokinesis and telekinesis were suspected to be tied in with certain poorly understood ductless glands. His reading had also told him that the two talents were closely related, and that most documented cases centered around girls not a whole lot older than Charlie was right now.

  She had been able to initiate that destruction at the Manders farm at the age of seven. Now she was nearly eight. What might happen when she turned twelve and entered adolescence ? Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. She said she wasn't going to use the power anymore, but if she was forced to use it? What if it began to come out spontaneously? What if she began to light fires in her sleep as a part of her own strange puberty, a fiery counterpart of the nocturnal seminal emissions most teenage boys experienced? What if the Shop finally decided to call off its dogs ... and Charlie was kidnapped by some foreign power?

  Questions, questions.

  On his trips across the pond, Andy tried to grapple with them and came reluctantly to believe that Charlie might have to submit to some sort of custody for the rest of her life, if only for her own protection. It might be as necessary for her as the cruel leg braces were for the victims of muscular dystrophy or the strange prosthetics for the thalidomide babies.

  And then there was the question of his own future. He remembered the numb places, the bloodshot eye. No man wants to believe that his own death-warrant has been signed and dated, and Andy did not completely believe that, but he was aware that two or three more hard pushes might kill him, and he realized that his normal life expectancy might already have been considerably shortened. Some provision had to be made for Charlie in case that happened.

  But not the Shop's way.

  Not the small room. He would not allow that to happen.

  So he thought it over, and at last he came to a painful decision.

  7

  Andy wrote six letters. They were almost identical. Two were to Ohio's United States senators. One was to the woman who represented the district of which Harrison was a part in the U.S. House of Representatives. One was to the New York Times. One was to the Chicago Tribune. And one was to the Toledo Blade. All six letters told the story of what had happened, beginning with the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall and ending with his and Charlie's enforced isolation on Tashmore Pond.

  When he had finished, he gave one of the letters to Charlie to read. She went through it slowly and carefully, taking almost an hour. It was the first time she had got the entire story, from beginning to end.

  "You're going to mail these?" she asked when she finished.

  "Yes," he said. "Tomorrow. I think tomorrow will be the last time I dare go across the pond." It had at last be
gun to warm up a little. The ice was still solid, but it creaked constantly now, and he didn't know how much longer it would be safe.

  "What will happen, Daddy?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know for sure. All I can do is hope that once the story is out, those people who have been chasing us will have to give it up."

  Charlie nodded soberly. "You should have done it before."

  "Yes," he said, knowing that she was thinking of the near cataclysm at the Manders farm last October. "Maybe I should have. But I never had a chance to think much, Charlie. Keeping us going was all I had time to think about. And what thinking you do get a chance to do when you're on the run ... well, mostly it's stupid thinking. I kept hoping they'd give up and leave us alone. That was a terrible mistake."

  "They won't make me go away, will they?" Charlie asked. "From you, I mean. We can stay together, can't we, Daddy?"

  "Yes," he said, not wanting to tell her that his conception of what might happen after the letters were mailed and received was probably as vague as hers. It was just "after."

  "Then that's all I care about. And I'm not going to make any more fires."

  "All right," he said, and touched her hair. His throat was suddenly thick with a premonitory dread, and something that had happened near here suddenly occurred to him, something that he hadn't thought of for years. He had been out with his father and Granther, and Granther had given Andy his .22, which he called his varmint rifle, when Andy clamored for it. Andy had seen a squirrel and wanted to shoot it. His dad had started to protest, and Granther had hushed him with an odd little smile.

  Andy had aimed the way Granther taught him; he squeezed the trigger rather than Just jerking back on it (as Granther had also taught him), and he shot the squirrel. It tumbled off its limb like a stuffed toy, and Andy ran excitedly for it after handing the gun back to Granther. Up close, he had been struck dumb by what he saw. Up close, the squirrel was no stuffed toy. It wasn't dead. He had got it in the hindquarters and it lay there dying in its own bright dapples of blood, its black eyes awake and alive and full of a horrible suffering. Its fleas, knowing the truth already, were trundling off the body in three busy little lines.

  His throat had closed with a snap, and at the age of nine, Andy tasted for the first time that bright, painty flavor of self-loathing. He stared numbly at his messy kill, aware that his father and grandfather were standing behind him, their shadows lying over him--three generations of McGees standing over a murdered squirrel in the Vermont woods. And behind him, Granther said softly, Well, you done it, Andy. How do you like it?And the tears had come suddenly, overwhelming him, the hot tears of horror and realization--me realization that once it's done, it's done. He swore suddenly that he would never kill anything with a gun again. He swore it before God.

  I'm not going to make any more fires, Charlie had said, and in his mind Andy heard Granther's reply to him on the day he had shot the squirrel, the day he had sworn to God he would never do anything like that again. Never say that, Andy. God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control. About what Irv Manders had said to Charlie.

  Charlie had found a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy books in the attic and was working her way slowly but surely through them. Now Andy looked at her, sitting in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the old black rocker, sitting just where his grandmother had always sat, usually with a basket of mending between her feet, and he struggled with an urge to tell her to take it back, to take it back while she still could, to tell her that she didn't understand the terrible temptation: if the gun was left there long enough, sooner or later you would pick it up again.

  God loves to make a man break a vow.

  8

  No one saw Andy mail his letters except Charlie Payson, the fellow who had moved into Bradford in November and had since been trying to make a go of the old Bradford Notions 'n' Novelties shop. Payson was a small, sad-faced man who had tried to buy Andy a drink on one of his visits to town. In the town itself, the expectation was that if Payson didn't make it work during the coming summer, Notions 'n' Novelties would have a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign back in the window by September 15. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was having a hard scrabble. Bradford wasn't the town it used to be.

  Andy walked up the street--he had left his skis stuck in the snow at the head of the road leading down to the Bradford Town Landing--and approached the general store. Inside, the oldsters watched him with mild interest. There had been a fair amount of talk about Andy that winter. The consensus about yonder man there was that he was on the run from something--a bankruptcy, maybe, or a divorce settlement. Maybe an angry wife who had been cheated out of custody of the kid; the small clothes Andy had bought hadn't been lost on them. The consensus was also that he and the kid had maybe broken into one of the camps across the Pond and were spending the winter there. Nobody brought this possibility up to Bradford's constable, a johnny-come-lately who had lived in town for only twelve years and thought he owned the place. Yonder man came from across the lake, from Tashmore, from Vermont. None of the old-timers who sat around Jake Rowley's stove in the Bradford general store had much liking for Vermont ways, them with their income tax and their snooty bottle law and that fucking Russian laid up in his house like a Czar, writing books no one could understand. Let Vermonters handle their own problems, was the unanimous, if unstated, view.

  "He won't be crossin' the pond much longer," one of them said. He took another bite from his Milky Way bar and began to gum it.

  "Not less he's got him a pair of water wings," another answered, and they all chuckled.

  "We won't be seein him much longer," Jake said complacently as Andy approached the store. Andy was wearing Granther's old coat and had a blue wool band pulled over his ears, and some memory--perhaps a family resemblance going back to Granther himself--danced fleetingly in Jake's mind and then blew away. "When the ice starts to go out, hell just dry up and blow away. Him and whoever he's keepin over there."

  Andy stopped outside, unslung his pack, and took out several letters. Then he came inside. The men forgathered there examined their nails, their watches, the old Pearl Kineo stove itself. One of them took out a gigantic blue railroad bandanna and hawked mightily into it.

  Andy glanced around. "Morning, gentlemen."

  "Mawnin to you," Jake Rowley said. "Get you anything?"

  "You sell stamps, don't you?"

  "Oh yes, Gov'ment trusts me that far."

  "I'd like six fifteens, please."

  Jake produced them, tearing them carefully from one of the sheets in his old black postage book. "Something else for you today."

  Andy thought, then smiled. It was the tenth of March. Without answering Jake, he went to the card rack beside the coffee grinder and picked out a large, ornate birthday card. TO YOU, DAUGHTER ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY, it said. He brought it back and paid for it.

  "Thanks," Jake said, and rang it up.

  "Very welcome," Andy replied, and went out. They watched him adjust his headband, then stamp his letters one by one. The breath smoked out of his nostrils. They watched him go around the building to where the postbox stood, but none of them sitting around the stove could have testified in court as to whether or not he mailed those letters. He came back into view shouldering into his pack.

  "Off he goes," one of the old-timers remarked.

  "Civil enough fella," Jake said, and that closed the subject. Talk turned to other matters.

  Charles Payson stood in the doorway of his store, which hadn't done three hundred dollars' worth of custom all winter long, and watched Andy go. Payson could have testified that the letters had been mailed; he had stood right here and watched him drop them into the slot in a bunch.

  When Andy disappeared from sight, Payson went back inside and through the doorway behind the counter where he sold penny candy and Bang caps and bubble gum and into the living quarters behind. His telephone had a scrambler device attache
d to it. Payson called Virginia for instructions.

  9

  There was and is no post office in Bradford, New Hampshire (or in Tashmore, Vermont, for that matter); both towns were too small. The nearest post office to Bradford was in Teller, New Hampshire. At one-fifteen P.M. on that March 10, the small postal truck from Teller pulled up in front of the general store and the postman emptied the mail from the standing box around to the side where Jake had pumped Jenny gas until 1970. The deposited mail consisted of Andy's six letters and a postcard from Miss Shirley Devine, a fifty-year-old maiden lady, to her sister in Tampa, Florida. Across the lake, Andy McGee was taking a nap and Charlie McGee was building a snowman.

  The postman, Robert Everett, put the mail in a bag, swung the bag into the back of his blue and white truck, and then drove on to Williams, another small New Hampshire town in Teller's zip-code area. Then he U-turned in the middle of what the Williams residents laughingly called Main Street and started back to Teller, where all the mail would be sorted and sent on at about three o'clock that afternoon. Five miles outside of town, a beige Chevrolet Caprice was parked across the road, blocking both of the narrow lanes. Everett parked by the snowbank and got out of his truck to see if he could help.

  Two men approached him from the car. They showed him their credentials and explained what they wanted.

  "No!" Everett said. He tried on a laugh and it came out sounding incredulous, as if someone had just told him they were going to open Tashmore Beach for swimming this very afternoon.

  "If you doubt we are who we say we are--" one of them began. This was Orville Jamieson, sometimes known as OJ, sometimes known as The Juice. He didn't mind dealing with this hick postman; he didn't mind anything as long as his orders didn't take him any closer than three miles to that hellish little girl.

  "No, it ain't that; it ain't that at all," Robert Everett said. He was scared, as scared as any man is when suddenly confronted with the force of the government, when gray enforcement bureaucracy suddenly takes on a real face, like something grim and solid swimming up out of a crystal ball. He was determined nonetheless. "But what I got here is the mail. The U.S. mail. You guys must understand that."