Firestarter Read online

  "We're going to hook us a ride," Andy said, and he couldn't tell if he had slung his arm around her shoulders to comfort her or to support himself. "We'll get to a hotel or a motel and we'll sleep. Then well think about what to do next. That sound all right?"

  Charlie nodded listlessly.

  "Okay," he said, and cocked his thumb. The cars rushed by it, unheeding, and less than two miles away the green car was on its way again. Andy knew nothing of this; his harried mind had turned back to that night with Vicky in the Union. She was staying at one of the dorms and he had dropped her off there, relishing her lips again on the step just outside the big double doors, and she had put her arms hesitantly around his neck, this girl who had still been a virgin. They had been young, Jesus they had been young.

  The cars rushed by, Charlie's hair lifted and dropped in each backwash of air, and he remembered the rest of what had happened that night twelve years ago.

  16

  Andy started across campus after seeing Vicky into her dorm, headed for the highway where he would hitch a ride into town. Although he could feel it only faintly against his face, the May wind beat strongly through the elms lining the mall, as if an invisible river ran through the air just above him, a river from which he could detect only the faintest, farthest ripples.

  Jason Gearneigh Hall was on his way and he stopped in front of its dark bulk. Around it, the trees with their new foliage danced sinuously in the unseen current of that river of wind. A cool chill wormed its way down his spine and then settled in his stomach, freezing him lightly. He shivered even though the evening was warm. A big silver-dollar moon rode between the growing rafts of clouds-gilded keelboats running before the wind, running on that dark river of air. The moonlight reflected on the building's windows, making them glare like blankly unpleasant eyes.

  Something happened in there, he thoughl Something more than what we were told or led to expect. What was it?

  In his mind's eye he saw that drowning, bloody hand again--only this time he saw it striking the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a comma ... and then the chart rolling up with a rattling, smacking sound.

  He walked toward the building. Crazy. They're not going to let you into a lecture hall at past ten o'clock. And-And I'm scared.

  Yes. That was it. Too many disquieting half-memories. Too easy to persuade himself they had only been fantasies; Vicky was already on her way to accomplishing that. A test subject clawing his eyes out. Someone screaming that she wished she were dead, that being dead would be better than this, even if it meant going to hell and burning there for eternity. Someone else going into cardiac arrest and then being bundled out of sight with chilling professionalism. Because, let's face it, Andy old kid, thinking about telepathy doesn't scare you. What scares you is the thought that one of those things might have happened.

  Heels clicking, he walked up to the big double doors and tried them. Locked. Behind them he could see the empty lobby. Andy knocked, and when he saw someone coming out of the shadows, he almost ran. He almost ran because the face that was going to appear out of those swimming shadows would be the face of Ralph Baxter, or of a tall man with shoulder-length blond hair and a scar on his chin.

  But it was neither; the man who came over to the lobby doors and unlocked them and stuck his querulous face out was a typical college security guard: about sixty-two, lined cheeks and forehead, wary blue eyes that were rheumy from too much bottle time. A big time clock was clipped to his belt.

  "Building's closed!" he said.

  "I know," Andy said, "but I was part of an experiment in Room Seventy that finished up this morning and--"

  "That don't matter! Building closes at nine on weeknights! Come back tomorrow!"

  "--and I think I left my watch in there," Andy said. He didn't own a watch. "Hey, what do you say? Just one quick look around."

  "I can't do that," the night man said, but all at once he sounded strangely unsure.

  With no thought at all about it one way or another, Andy said in a low voice: "Sure you can. I'll just take a look and then I'll be out of your way. You won't even remember I was here, right?"

  A sudden weird feeling in his head: it was as if he had reached out and pushed this elderly night security man, only with his head instead of his hands. And the guard did take two or three uncertain steps backward, letting go of the door.

  Andy stepped in, a little concerned. There was a sudden sharp pain in his head, but it subsided to a low throb that was gone half an hour later.

  "Say, are you all right?" he asked the security man.

  "Huh? Sure, I'm okay." The security man's suspicion was gone; he gave Andy a smile that was entirely friendly. "Go on up and look for your watch, if you want to. Take your time. I probably won't even remember that you're here."

  And he strolled off.

  Andy looked after him disbelievingly and then rubbed his forehead absently, as if to soothe the mild ache there. What in God's name had he done to that old duck? Something, that was for sure.

  He turned, went to the stairs, and began climbing them. The upper hall was deeply shadowed and narrow; a nagging feeling of claustrophobia slipped around him and seemed to tighten his breathing, like an invisible dogcollar. Up here, the building had poked into that river of wind, and the air went skating under the eaves, screaming thinly. Room 70 had two double doors, the top halves two squares of frosted, pebbled glass. Andy stood outside them, listening to the wind move through the old gutters and downspouts, rattling the rusty leaves of dead years. His heart was thudding heavily in his chest.

  He almost walked away from it then; it seemed suddenly easier not to know, just to forget it. Then he reached out and grasped one of the doorknobs, telling himself there was nothing to worry about anyway because the damn room would be locked and good riddance to it.

  Except that it wasn't. The knob turned freely. The door opened.

  The room was empty, lit only by stuttering moonlight through the moving branches of the old elms outside. There was enough light for him to see that the cots had been removed. The blackboard had been erased and washed. The chart was rolled up like a windowshade, only the pull ring dangling. Andy stepped toward it, and after a moment he reached up with a hand that trembled slightly and pulled it down.

  Quadrants of the brain; the human mind served up and marked like a butcher's diagram. Just seeing it made him get that trippy feeling again, like an acid flash. Nothing fun about it; it was sickening, and a moan escaped his throat, as delicate as a silver strand of spiderweb.

  The bloodstain was there, comma-black in the moon's uneasy light. A printed legend that had undoubtedly read CORPUS CALLOSUM before this weekend's experiment now read COR OSUM, the comma-shaped stain intervening .

  Such a small thing.

  Such a huge thing.

  He stood in the dark, looking at it, starting to shake for reaL How much of it did this make true? Some? Most? All? None of the above?

  From behind him he heard a sound, or thought he did: the stealthy squeak of a shoe.

  His hands jerked and one of them struck the chart with that same awful smacking sound. It rattled back up on its roller, the sound dreadfully loud in this black pit of a room.

  A sudden knocking on the moonlight-dusted far window; a branch or perhaps dead fingers streaked with gore and tissue: let me in I left my eyes in there oh let me in let me in-He whirled in a slow-motion dream, a slomo dream, sinkingly sure that it would be that boy, a spirit in a white robe, dripping black holes where his eyes had been. His heart was a live thing in his throat.

  No one there.

  No thing there.

  But his nerve was broken and when the branch began its implacable knocking again, he fled, not bothering to close the classroom door behind him. He sprinted down the narrow corridor and suddenly footfalls were pursuing him, echoes of his own running feet. He went down the stairs two at a time and so came back into the lobby, breathing hard, the blood hammering at his temples. The air in his
throat prickled like cut hay.

  He didn't see the security man anywhere about. He left, shutting one of the big glass lobby doors behind him and slinking down the walk to the quad like the fugitive he would later become.

  17

  Five days later, and much against her will, Andy dragged Vicky Tomlinson down to Jason Gearneigh Hall. She had already decided she never wanted to think about the experiment again. She had drawn her two-hundred-dollar check from the Psychology Department, banked it, and wanted to forget where it had come from.

  He persuaded her to come, using eloquence he hadn't been aware he possessed. They went at the two-fifty change of classes; the bells of Harrison Chapel played a carillon in the dozing May air. "Nothing can happen to us in broad daylight," he said, uneasily refusing to clarify, even in his own mind, exactly what he might be afraid of. "Not with dozens of people all around."

  "I just don't want to go, Andy," she had said, but she had gone.

  There were two or three kids leaving the lecture room with books under their arms. Sunshine painted the windows a prosier hue than the diamond-dust of moonlight Andy remembered. As Andy and Vicky entered, a few others trickled in for their three-o'clock biology seminar. One of them began to talk softly and earnestly to a pair of the others about an end-ROTC march that was coming off that weekend. No one took the slightest notice of Andy and Vicky.

  "All right," Andy said, and his voice was thick and nervous. "See what you think."

  He pulled the chart down by the dangling ring. They were looking at a naked man with his skin flayed away and his organs labeled. His muscles looked like interwoven skeins of red yarn. Some wit had labeled him Oscar the Grouch.

  "Jesus!" Andy said.

  She gripped his arm and her hand was warm with nervous perspiration. "Andy," she said. "Please, let's go. Before someone recognizes us."

  Yes, he was ready to go. The fact that the.chart had been changed somehow scared him more than anything else. He jerked the pull ring down sharply and let it go. It made that same smacking sound as it went up.

  Different chart. Same sound. Twelve years later he could still hear the sound it made--when his aching head would let him. He never stepped into Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall after that day, but he was acquainted with that sound.

  He heard it frequently in his dreams ... and saw that questing, drowning, bloodstained hand.

  18

  The green car whispered along the airport feeder road toward the Northway entrance ramp. Behind the wheel, Norville Bates sat with his hands firmly at ten and two o'clock. Classical music came from the FM receiver in a muted, smooth flow. His hair was now short and combed back, but the small, semicircular scar on his chin hadn't changed--the place where he had cut himself on a jagged piece of Coke bottle as a kid. Vicky, had she still been alive, would have recognized him.

  "We have one unit on the way," the man in the Botany 500 suit said. His name was John Mayo. "The guy's a stringer. He works for DIA as well as us."

  "Just an ordinary whore," the third man said, and all three of them laughed in a nervous, keyed-up way. They knew they were close; they could almost smell blood. The name of the third man was Orville Jamieson, but he preferred to be called OJ, or even better, The Juice. He signed all his office memos OJ. He had signed one The Juice and that bastard Cap had given him a reprimand. Not just an oral one; a written one that had gone in his record.

  "You think it's the Northway, huh?" OJ asked.

  Norville Bates shrugged. "Either the Northway or they headed into Albany," he said. "I gave the local yokel the hotels in town because it's his town, right?"

  "Right," John Mayo said. He and Norville got along well together. They went back a long way. All the way back to Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall, and that, my friend, should anyone ever ask you had been hairy. John never wanted to go through anything that hairy again. He had been the man who zapped the kid who went into cardiac arrest. He had been a medic during the early days in Nam and he knew what to do with the denbrillator--in theory, at least. In practice, it hadn't gone so well, and the kid had got away from them. Twelve kids got Lot Six that day. Two of them had died-the kid who had gone into cardiac arrest and a girl who died six days later in her dorm, apparently of a sudden brain embolism. Two others had gone hopelessly insane--one of them the boy who had blinded himself, the other a girl who later developed a total paralysis from the neck down. Wanless had said that was psychological, but who the fuck knew? It had been a nice day's work, all right "The local yokel is taking his wife along," Norville was saying. "She's looking for her granddaughter. Her son ran away with the little girl. Nasty divorce case, all of that. She doesn't want to notify the police unless she has to, but she's afraid the son might be going mental. If she plays it right, there isn't a night clerk in town that won't tell her if the two of them have checked in."

  "If she plays it right," OJ said. "With these stringers you can never tell."

  John said, "We're going to the closest on-ramp, right?"

  "Right," Norville said. "Just three, four minutes now."

  "Have they had enough time to get down there?"

  "They have if they were busting ass. Maybe we'll be able to pick them up trying to thumb a ride right there on the ramp. Or maybe they took a shortcut and went over the side into the breakdown lane. Either way, all we have to do is cruise along until we come to them."

  "Where you headed, buddy, hop in," The Juice said, and laughed. There was a .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster under his left arm. He called it The Windsucker.

  "If they already hooked them a ride, we're shit out of luck, Norv," John said.

  Norville shrugged. "Percentage play. It's quarter past one in the morning. With the rationing, traffic's thinner than ever. What's Mr. Businessman going to think if he sees a big guy and a little girl trying to hitch a ride?"

  "He's gonna think it's bad news," John said.

  "That's a big ten-four."

  The Juice laughed again. Up ahead the stop-and-go light that marked the Northway ramp gleamed in the dark. OJ put his hand on the walnut stock of The Windsucker. Just in case.

  19

  The van passed them by, backwashing cool air ... and then its brakelights flashed brighter and it swerved over into the breakdown lane about fifty yards farther up.

  "Thank God," Andy said softly. "You let me do the talking, Charlie."

  "All right, Daddy." She sounded apathetic. The dark circles were back under her eyes. The van was backing up as they walked toward it. Andy's head felt like a slowly swelling lead balloon.

  There was a vision from the Thousand and One Nights painted on the side-caliphs, maidens hiding under gauzy masks, a carpet floating mystically in the air. The carpet was undoubtedly meant to be red, but in the light of the turnpike sodiums it was the dark maroon of drying blood.

  Andy opened the passenger door and boosted Charlie up and in. He followed her. "Thanks, mister," he said. "Saved our lives."

  "My pleasure," the driver said. "Hi, little stranger."

  "Hi," Charlie said in a small voice.

  The driver checked the outside mirror, drove down the breakdown lane at a steadily increasing pace, and then crossed into the travel lane. Glancing past Charlie's slightly bowed head, Andy felt a touch of guilt: the driver was exactly the sort of young man Andy himself always passed by when he saw him standing on the shoulder with his thumb out. Big but lean, he wore a heavy black beard that curled down to his chest and a big felt hat that looked like a prop in a movie about feudin Kentucky hillbillies. A cigarette that looked home-rolled was cocked in the corner of his mouth, curling up smoke. Just a cigarette, by the smell; no sweet odor of cannabis.

  "Where you headed, my man?" the driver asked.

  "Two towns up the line," Andy said.

  "Hastings Glen?"

  "That's right."

  The driver nodded. "On the run from someone, I guess." Charlie tensed and Andy put a soothing hand on her back and rubbed gently until she loosened up
again. He had detected no menace in the driver's voice.

  "There was a process server at the airport," he said.

  The driver grinned--it was almost hidden beneath his fierce beard--plucked the cigarette from his mouth, and offered it delicately to the wind sucking just outside his half-open vent window. The slipstream gulped it down.

  "Something to do with the little stranger here is my guess," he said.

  "Not far wrong," Andy said.

  The driver fell silent. Andy settled back and tried to cope with his headache. It seemed to have leveled off at a final screaming pitch. Had it ever been this bad before? Impossible to tell. Each time he overdid it, it seemed like the worst ever. It would be a month before he dared use the push again. He knew that two towns up the line was not nearly far enough, but it was all he could manage tonight. He was tipped over. Hastings Glen would have to do.

  "Who do you pick, man?" the driver asked him.

  "Huh?"

  "The Series. The San Diego Padres in the World Series-how do you figure that?"

  "Pretty far out," Andy agreed. His voice came from far away, a tolling undersea bell.

  "You okay, man? You look pale."

  "Headache," Andy said. "Migraine."

  "Too much pressure," the driver said. "I can dig it. You staying at a hotel? You need some cash? I could let you have five. Wish it was more, but I'm on my way to California, and I got to watch it careful. Just like the-Joads in The Grapes of Wrath."

  Andy smiled gratefully. "I think we're okay."

  "Fine." He glanced at Charlie, who had dozed off. "Pretty little girl, my man. Are you watching out for her?"

  "As best I can," Andy said.

  "All right," the driver said. "That's the name of that tune."

  20

  Hastings Glen was little more than a wide place in the road; at this hour all the traffic lights in town had turned to blinkers. The bearded driver in the hillbilly hat took them up the exit ramp, through the sleeping town, and down Route 40 to the Slumberland Motel, a redwood place with the skeletal remains of a harvested cornfteld in back and a pinkish-red neon sign out front that stuttered the nonword VA A CY into the dark. As her sleep deepened, Charlie had tilted farther and farther to the left, until her head was resting on the driver's blue-jeaned thigh. Andy had offered to shift her, and the driver shook his head.