Firestarter

by Stephen King

  Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn't seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn't seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow ... well, it sounded almost crazy, but ... she kept forgetting they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you could think of. It certainly hadn't been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.

  The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning-up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to walk. They all agreed that if they hadn't walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.

  But the one day she had taken it--because her thigh muscles did ache that much--she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.

  Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twenty-five pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn't believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.

  His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him--to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher ... something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.

  But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.

  Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before--like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn't her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to anorexia nervosa. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn't want to kill anyone doing it.

  "You ought to be declared a national resource for what you're doing," Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.

  Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.

  He smiled a little.

  And smiling, slept.

  10

  He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.

  And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was ... what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white-stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.

  Of course there isn't, he told himself. There's no pain because it's a dream. You'll pay for it later. You'll have the pain later.

  He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn't know what or where it was--

  You'll know It when you see it, his mind whispered.

  So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn't hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.

  The brain is a muscle, his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child's song, a little girl's skipping rhyme: The brain is a muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move--

  Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read THERE ARE NONE so BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.

  Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream--buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that--because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie's shoulders and cried hoarsely, "Well do 'em yet, kid!"

  Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie's attention--she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn't what he seemed.

  But he couldn't stop. He had this damned

  (box? chest?)

  to

  (???)

  to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it?

  But he would know when it was time.

  He went past dozens of other rooms--he couldn't remember all of the things he saw--and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.

  Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.

  DISPOSAL, it read.

  And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You'd never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.

  He tried to lift the box, but couldn't. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse. It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horr
or he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding--

  "I'll help you," Mrs. Gurney said. "You helped me; now I'll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me."

  "You look so pretty," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.

  "I feel like I've been let out of prison," Mrs. Gurney responded. "Let me help you."

  "It's just that my head aches--"

  "Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle."

  Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn't remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked DISPOSAL, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn't the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills, his pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.

  "No!" he shouted.

  "Yes," Mrs. Gurney answered firmly "The brain is a muscle that can move the world."

  Then he saw it her way.

  It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.

  Thud, thurd, thud ...

  11

  He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except--

  "Oww. Jesus!"

  Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.

  No concrete sensory input except this rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have--

  No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push ... harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies and shy businessmen, not quite as hard as the ones he had given the fellows at the turnpike rest stop that time.

  Andy's hands flew to his face and felt it all over, from brow to chin. There were no spots where the feeling trailed away to numbness. When he smiled, both corners of his mouth went up just as they always had. He wished to God for a light so he could look into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror to see if either of them showed that telltale blood sheen....

  Push? Pushing?

  That was ridiculous. Who was there to push?

  Who, except--

  His breath slowed to a stop in his throat and then resumed slowly.

  He had thought of it before but had never tried it. He thought it would be like overloading a circuit by cycling a charge through it endlessly. He had been scared to try it.

  My pill, he thought. My pill is overdue and I want it, I really want it, I reallyneed it. My pill will make everything all right.

  It was just a thought. It brought on no craving at all. The idea of taking a Thorazine had all the emotional gradient of please pass the butter. The fact was, except for the rotten headache, he felt pretty much all right. And the fact also was he had had headaches a lot worse than this--the one at the Albany airport, for instance. This one was a baby compared to that.

  I've pushed myself, he thought, amazed.

  For the first time he could really understand how Charlie felt, because for the first time he was a little frightened by his own psi talent. For the first time he really understood how little he understood about what it was and what it could do. Why had it gone? He didn't know. Why had it come back? He didn't know that either. Did it have something to do with his intense fear in the dark? His sudden feeling that Charlie was being threatened (he had a ghostly memory of the piratical one-eyed man and then it floated away, gone) and his own dismal self-loathing at the way he had forgotten her? Possibly even the rap on the head he had taken when he fell down?

  He didn't know; he knew only that he had pushed himself.

  The brain is a muscle that can move the world.

  It suddenly occurred to him that while he was giving little nudges to businessmen and fat ladies, he could have become a one-man drug-rehabilitation center, and he was seized in a shivery ecstasy of dawning supposition. He had gone to sleep thinking that a talent that could help poor fat Mrs. Gurney couldn't be all bad. What about a talent that could knock the monkey off the back of every poor junkie in New York City? What about that, sports fans?

  "Jesus," he whispered. "Am I really clean?"

  There was no craving. Thorazine, the image of the blue pill on the white plate--that thought had become unmistakably neutral.

  "I am clean," he answered himself.

  Next question: could he stay clean?

  But he had no more than asked himself that one when other questions flooded in. Could he find out exactly what was happening to Charlie? He had used the push on himself in his sleep, like a kind of autohypnosis. Could he use it on others while awake? The endlessly, repulsively grinning Pynchot, for instance? Pynchot would know what was happening to Charlie. Could he be made to tell? Could he maybe even get her out of here after all? Was there a way to do that? And if they did get out, what then? No more running, for one thing. That was no solution. There had to be a place to go.

  For the first time in months he felt excited, hopeful. He began to try scraps of plan, accepting, rejecting, questioning. For the first time in months he felt at home in his own head, alive and vital, capable of action. And above all else, there was this: if he could fool them into believing two things--that he was still drugged and that he was still incapable of using his mental-domination talent, he might--he just might have a chance of doing--doing something.

  He was still turning it all over restlessly in his mind when the lights came back on. In the other room, the TV began spouting that same old Jesus-will-take-care-of-your-soul-and-we' ll-take-me-of-your-bank-book jive.

  The eyes, the electric eyes! They're watching you again, or soon will be.... Don't forget that!

  For one moment, everything came home to him--the days and weeks of subterfuge that would surely lie ahead if he was to have any chance at all, and the near certainty that he would be caught at some point. Depression waved in ... but it brought no craving for the pill with it, and that helped him to catch hold of himself.

  He thought of Charlie, and that helped more.

  He got up slowly from the bed and walked into the living room. "What happened?" he cried loudly. "I was scared! Where's my medication? Somebody bring me my medication!"

  He sat down in front of the TV, his face slack and dull and heavy.

  And behind that vapid face, his brain--that muscle that could move the world--ticked away faster and faster.

  12

  Like the dream her father had had at the same time, Charlie McGee could never remember the details of her long conversation with John Rainbird, only the high spots. She was never quite sure how she came to pour out the story of how she came to be here, or to speak of her intense loneliness for her father and her terror that they would find some way to trick her into using her pyrokinetic ability again.

  Part of it was the blackout, of course, and the knowledge that they weren't listening. Part of it was John himself, he had been through so much, and he was so pathetically afraid of the dark and of the memories it brought of the terrible hole those "C
ongs" had put him in. He had asked her, almost apathetically, why they had locked her up, and she had begun talking just to distract his mind. But it had quickly become more than that. It began to come out faster and faster, everything she had kept bottled up, until the words were tumbling out all over one another, helter-skelter. Once or twice she had cried, and he held her clumsily. He was a sweet man ... in many ways he reminded her of her father.

  "Now if they find out you know all of that," she said, "they'll probably lock you up, too. I shouldn't have told."

  "They'd lock me up, all right," John said cheerfully. "I got a D clearance, kid. That gives me clearance to open bottles of Johnson's Wax and that's about all." He laughed. "We'll be all right if you don't let on that you told me, I guess."

  "I won't," Charlie said eagerly. She had been a little uneasy herself, thinking if John told, they might use him on her like a lever. "I"m awful thirsty. There's icewater in the refrigerator. You want some?"

  "Don't leave me," he said immediately.

  "Well, let's go together. Well hold hands."

  He appeared to think about this. "All right," he said.

  They shuffled across to the kitchen together, hands gripped tightly.

  "You better not let on, kid. Especially about this. Heap-big Indian afraid of the dark. The guys'd laugh me right out of this place."

  "They wouldn't laugh if they knew--"

  "Maybe not. Maybe so." He chuckled a little. "But I'd just as soon they never found out. I just thank God you was here, kid."

  She was so touched that her eyes filled again and she had to struggle for control of herself. They reached the fridge, and she located the jug of icewater by feel. It wasn't icy cold anymore, but it soothed her throat. She wondered with fresh unease just how long she had talked, and didn't know. But she had told ... everything. Even the parts she had meant to hold back, like what had happened at the Manders farm. Of course, the people like Hockstetter knew, but she didn't care about them. She did care about John ... and his opinion of her.

  But she had told. He would ask a question that somehow pierced right to the heart of the matter, and ... she had told, often with tears. And instead of more questions and cross-examination and mistrust, there had been only acceptance and calm sympathy. He seemed to understand the hell she had been through, maybe because he had been through hell himself.