Firestarter

by Stephen King

  11

  "All right, what is it?" Hockstetter asked grumpily.

  His tone indicated that it had better be pretty goddam good. He had been home watching James Bond on the Sunday Night Movie when the phone rang and a voice told him that they had a potential problem with the little girL Over an open line, Hockstetter didn't dare ask what the problem was. He just went as he was, in a pair of paint-splattered jeans and a tennis shirt.

  He had come frightened, chewing a Rolaid to combat the boil of sour acid in his stomach. He had kissed his wife good-bye, answering her raised eyebrows by saying it was a slight problem with some of the equipment and he would be right back. He wondered what she would say if she knew the "slight problem" could kill him at any moment.

  Standing here now, looking into the ghostly infrared monitor they used to watch Charlie when the lights were out, he wished again that this was over and the little girl out of the way. He had never bargained for this when the whole thing was just an academic problem outlined in a series of blue folders. The truth was the burning cinderblock wall; the truth was spot temperatures of thirty thousand degrees or more; the truth was Brad Hyuck talking about whatever forces fired the engine of the universe; and the truth was that he was very scared. He felt as if he were sitting on top of an unstable nuclear reactor.

  The man on duty, Neary, swung around when Hockstetter came in. "Cap came down to visit her around five," he said.

  "She turned her nose up at supper. Went to bed early."

  Hockstetter looked into the monitor. Charlie was tossing restlessly on top of her bed, fully dressed. "She looks like maybe she's having a nightmare."

  "One, or a whole series of them," Neary said grimly. "I called because the temperature in there has gone up three degrees in the last hour."

  "That's not much."

  "It is when a room's temperature-controlled the way that one is. Not much doubt that she's doing it."

  Hockstetter considered this, biting on a knuckle.

  "I think someone should go in there and wake her up," Neary said, finally drifting down to the bottom line.

  "Is that what you got me down here for?" Hockstetter cried. "To wake up a kid and give her a glass of warm milk?"

  "I didn't want to exceed my authority," Neary said stonily.

  "No," Hockstetter said, and had to bite down on the rest of the words. The little girl would have to be wakened if the temperature went much higher, and there was always a chance that if she was frightened enough, she might strike out at the first person she saw upon waking. After all, they had been busy removing the checks and balances on her pyrokinetic ability and had been quite successful.

  "Where's Rainbird?" he asked.

  Neary shrugged. "Whipping his weasel in Winnipeg, for all I know. But as far as she's concerned, he's off duty. I think she'd be pretty suspicious if he showed up n--"

  The digital thermometer inset on Neary's control board flicked over another degree, hesitated, and then flicked over two more in quick succession.

  "Somebody's got to go in there," Neary said, and now his voice was a bit unsteady. "It's seventy-four in there now. What if she blows sky-high?"

  Hockstetter tried to think what to do, but his brain seemed frozen. He was sweating freely now, but his mouth had gone as dry as a woolly sock. He wanted to be back home, tipped back in his La-Z-Boy, watching James Bond go after SMERSH or whatever the hell it was. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to be looking at the red numbers under the little square of glass, waiting for them to suddenly blur upward in tens, thirties, hundreds, as they had when the cinderblock wall--

  Think! he screamed at himself. What do you do? What do you--

  "She just woke up," Neary said softly.

  They both stared intently at the monitor. Charlie had swung her legs over onto the floor and was sitting with her head down, her palms on her cheeks, her hair obscuring her face. After a moment she got up and went into the bathroom, face blank, eyes mostly closed--more asleep than awake, Hockstetter guessed.

  Neary flicked a switch and the bathroom monitor came on. Now the picture was clear and sharp in the light of the flurorescent bar. Hockstetter expected her to urinate, but Charlie just stood inside the door, looking at the toilet.

  "Oh Mother Mary, look at that," Neary murmured.

  The water in the toilet bowl had begun to steam slightly. This went on for more than a minute (one-twenty-one in Neary's log), and then Charlie went to the toilet, flushed it, urinated, flushed it again, drank two glasses of water, and went back to bed. This time her sleep seemed easier, deeper. Hockstetter glanced at the thermometer and saw it had dropped four degrees. As he watched, it dropped another degree, to sixty-nine--just one degree above the suite's normal temperature.

  He remained with Neary until after midnight. "I'm going home to bed. You'll get this written up, won't you?"

  "That's what I get paid for," Neary said stolidly.

  Hockstetter went home. The next day he wrote a memo suggesting that any further gains in knowledge that further testing might provide ought to be balanced against the potential hazards, which in his opinion were growing too fast for comfort.

  12

  Charlie remembered little of the night. She remembered being hot, getting up, getting rid of the heat She remembered the dream but only vaguely--a sense of freedom (up ahead was the light--the end of the forest,open land where she and Necromancer would ride forever)

  mingled with a sense of fear and a sense of loss. It had been his face, it had been John's face, all along. And perhaps she had known it Perhaps she had known that (the woods are burning don't hurt the horses o please don't hurt the horses)

  all along.

  When she woke up the next morning, her fear, confusion, and desolation had begun their perhaps inevitable change into a bright, hard gem of anger.

  He better be out of the way on Wednesday, she thought. He just better. If it's true about what he did, he better not come near me or Daddy on Wednesday.

  13

  Late that morning, Rainbird came in, rolling his wagon of cleaning products, mops, sponges, and rags. His white orderly's uniform flapped softly around him.

  "Hi, Charlie," he said.

  Charlie was on the sofa, looking at a picture book. She glanced up, her face pale and unsmiling in that first moment ... cautious. The skin seemed stretched too tightly over her cheekbones. Then she smiled. But it was not, Rainbird thought, her usual smile.

  "Hello, John."

  "You don't look so great this morning, Charlie, you should forgive me for sayin."

  "I didn't sleep very well."

  "Oh yeah?" He knew she hadn't. That fool Hockstetter was almost foaming at the mouth because she'd popped the temperature five or six degrees in her sleep. "I'm sorry to hear that. Is it your dad?"

  "I guess so." She closed her book and stood up. "I think I'll go and lie down for a while. I just don't feel like talking or anything."

  "Sure. Gotcha."

  He watched her go, and when the bedroom door had clicked shut, he went into the kitchen to fill his floorbucket. Something about the way she had looked at him. The smile. He didn't like it. She'd had a bad night, yes, okay. Everyone has them from time to time, and the next morning you snap at your wife or stare right through the paper or whatever. Sure. But ... something inside had begun to jangle an alarm. It had been weeks since she had looked at him that way. She hadn't come to him this morning, eager and glad to see him, and he didn't like that, either. She had kept her own space today. It disturbed him. Maybe it was just the aftermath of a bad night, and maybe the bad dreams of the night before had just been caused by something she ate, but it disturbed him all the same.

  And there was something else nibbling at him: Cap had been down to see her late yesterday afternoon. He had never done that before.

  Rainbird set down his bucket and hooked the mop squeegee over its rim. He dunked the mop, wrung it out, and began to mop the floor in long, slow strokes. His mauled face wa
s calm and at rest.

  Have you been putting a knife in my back, Cap? Figure you've got enough? Or maybe you just went chickenshit on me.

  If that last was true, then he had badly misjudged Cap. Hockstetter was one thing. Hockstetter's experience with Senate committees and subcommittees was almost zilch; a piddle here and a piddle there. Corroborative stuff. He could allow himself the luxury of indulging his fear. Cap couldn't. Cap would know there was no such thing as sufficient evidence, especially when you were dealing with something as potentially explosive (pun certainly intended) as Charlie McGee. And it wasn't just funding Cap would be asking for; when he got before that closed session, the most dread and mystic of all bureaucratic phrases would fall from his lips: long-term funding. And in the background, lurking unspoken but potent, the implication of eugenics. Rainbird guessed that in the end, Cap would find it impossible to avoid having a group of senators down here to watch Charlie perform. Maybe they should be allowed to bring their kids, Rainbird thought, mopping and rinsing. Better than the trained dolphins at Sea World.

  Cap would know he needed all the help he could get.

  So why had he come to see her last night? Why was he rocking the boat?

  Rainbird squeezed his mop and watched dirty gray water run back into the bucket. He looked through the open kitchen door at the closed door of Charlie's bedroom. She had shut him out and he didn't like that.

  It made him very, very nervous.

  14

  On that early October Monday night, a moderate windstorm came up from the Deep South, sending black clouds flying raggedly across a full moon that lolled pregnantly just above the horizon. The first leaves fell, rattling across the neatly manicured lawns and grounds for the indefatigable corps of groundskeepers to remove in the morning. Some of them swirled into the duckpond, where they floated like small boats. Autumn had come to Virginia again.

  In his quarters, Andy was watching TV and still getting over his headache. The numb spots on his face had diminished in size but had not disappeared. He could only hope he would be ready by Wednesday afternoon. If things worked as he had planned, he could keep the number of times he would have to actively push to a bare minimum. If Charlie had got his note, and if she was able to meet him at the stables across the way ... then she would become his push, his lever, his weapon. Who was going to argue with him when he had the equivalent of a nuclear rifle in his possession?

  Cap was at home in Longmont Hills. As on the night Rainbird had visited him, he had a snifter of brandy, and music was coming from the stereo at low volume. Chopin tonight. Cap was sitting on the couch. Across the room, leaning below a pair of van Gogh prints, was his old and scuffed golf bag. He had fetched it from the basement, where a rickrack of sports equipment had built up over the twelve years he had lived here with Georgia, while not on assignment somewhere else in the world. He had brought the golf bag into the living room because he couldn't seem to get golf off his mind lately. Golf, or snakes.

  He had brought the golf bag up meaning to take out each of the irons and his two putters and look them over, touch them, see if that wouldn't ease his mind. And then one of the irons had seemed to ... well, it was funny (ridiculous, in fact), but one of the irons had seemed to move. As if it wasn't a golf club at all but a snake, a poison snake that had crawled in there--

  Cap dropped the bag against the wall and scuttered away. Half a glass of brandy had stopped the minute shakes in his hands. By the time he finished the glass, he might be able to tell himself they had never trembled at all.

  He started the glass on its way to his mouth and then halted. There it was again ! Movement ... or just a trick of his eyes?

  Trick of the eyes, most definitely. There were no snakes in his damned golf bag. Just clubs he hadn't been using enough lately. Too busy. And he was a pretty good golfer, too. No Nicklaus or Tom Watson, hell no, but he could keep it on the course. Not always slicing, like Puck. Cap didn't like to slice the baD, because then you were in the rough, the tall grass, and sometimes there were--

  Get hold of yourself. Just get hold of yourself. Is you still the Captain or is you ain't?

  The trembling was back in his fingers again. What had done this? What in God's name had done this? Sometimes it seemed that there was an explanation, a perfectly reasonable one--something, perhaps, that someone had said and he just ... couldn't... remember. But at other times

  (like now Jesus Christ like now)

  it felt as if he were on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It felt as if his brain was being pulled apart like warm taffy by these alien thoughts he couldn't get rid of.

  (is you the Captain or is you ain't?)

  Cap suddenly threw his brandy glass into the fireplace, where it shattered like a bomb. A strangled sound--a sob--escaped his tight throat like something rotten that had to be sicked up whatever the miserable cost. Then he made himself cross the room (and he went at a drunken, stiltlike lurch), grab the strap of his golf bag (again something seemed to move and shift in there ... to shifffft ... and hissssss) and slip it over his shoulder. He hauled it back into the shadow-draped cavern of the cellar, going on nothing but guts, drops of sweat perched huge and clear on his forehead. His face was frozen in a grimace of fear and determination.

  Nothing there but golf clubs, nothing there but golf clubs, his mind chanted over and over again, and at every step of the way he expected something long and brown, something with beady black eyes and small sharp fangs dripping poison, to slither out of the bag and jab twin hypos of death into his neck.

  Back in his own living room he felt much better. Except for a nagging headache, he felt much better.

  He could think coherently again.

  Almost.

  He got drunk.

  And in the morning he felt better again.

  For a while.

  15

  Rainbird spent that windy Monday night gathering information. Disturbing information. First he went in and talked to Neary, the man who had been watching the monitors when Cap paid his visit to Charlie the night before.

  "I want to see the videotapes," Rainbird said.

  Neary didn't argue. He set Rainbird up in a small room down the hall with the Sunday tapes and a Sony deck complete with close-up and freeze-frame features. Neary was glad to be rid of him and only hoped that Rainbird wouldn't be coming back and wanting something else. The girl was bad enough. Rainbird, in his own reptilian way, was somehow worse.

  The tapes were three-hour Scotch jobs, marked from 0000 to 0300 and so on. Rainbird found the one with Cap on it and watched it four times, not moving except to rewind the tape at the point where Cap said, "Well, I'll be going now. But I'll be seeing you, Charlie. And don't worry."

  But there was plenty in that tape that worried John Rainbird.

  He didn't like the way Cap looked. He seemed to have got older; at times while he was talking to Charlie he seemed to lose the thread of what he was saying, like a man on the edge of senility. His eyes had a vague, bemused look that was uncannily similar to the look Rainbird associated with the onset of combat fatigue, which a comrade-in-arms had once aptly dubbed The Brain Squitters and Trots.

  I think I ought to be able to arrange it ... by Wednesday. Yes, by Wednesday, for sure.

  Now why in the name of God had he said that?

  Setting up an expectation like that in the kid's mind was the surest way Rainbird could think of to blow further testing right out of the water. The obvious conclusion was that Cap was playing his own little game--intriguing in the best Shop tradition.

  But Rainbird didn't believe it. Cap didn't look like a man engaged in an intrigue. He looked like a man who was profoundly fucked up. That remark about Charlie's father playing golf, for instance. That had come right out of left field. It bore on nothing they had said before and nothing they said afterward. Rainbird toyed briefly with the idea that it was some sort of code phrase, but that was patently ridiculous. Cap knew that everything that went on in Charlie's rooms was moni
tored and recorded, subject to almost constant review. He was capable of disguising a trip phrase better than that. A remark about golf. It just hung there, irrelevant and puzzling.

  And then there was the last thing.

  Rainbird played it over and over. Cap pauses. Oh, almost forgot. And then he hands her something that she looks at curiously and then puts away in the pocket of her robe.

  With Rainbird's fingers on the buttons of the Sony VCR, Cap said Oh, almost forgot half a dozen times. He passed the thing to her half a dozen times. At first Rainbird thought it was a stick of gum, and then he used the freeze-frame and zoom gadgets. That convinced him that it was, very likely, a note.

  Cap, what the fuck are you up to?

  16

  He spent the rest of that night and the early hours of Tuesday morning at a computer console, calling up every scrap of information he could think of on Charlie McGee, trying to make out some kind of pattern. And there was nothing. His head began to ache from eyestrain.

  He was getting up to shut off the lights when a sudden thought, a totally off-the-wall connection, occurred to him. It had to do not with Charlie but with the portly, drugged-out cipher that was her father.

  Pynchot. Pynchot had been in charge of Andy McGee, and last week Herman Pynchot had killed himself in one of the most grisly ways Rainbird could imagine. Obviously unbalanced. Crackers. Toys in the attic. Cap takes Andy to the funeral--maybe a little strange when you really stopped to think about it, but in no way remarkable.

  Then Cap starts to act a little weird--talking about golf and passing notes.

  That's ridiculous.He's tippedover.

  Rainbird stood with his hand on the light switches. The computer-console screen glowed a dull green, the color of a freshly dug emerald.

  Who says he's tipped over? Him?

  There was another strange thing here as well, Rainbird suddenly realized. Pynchot had given up on Andy, had decied to send him to the Maui compound. If there was nothing Andy could do that would demonstrate what Lot Six was capable of, there was no reason to keep him around at all ... and it would be safer to separate him from Charlie.