Firestarter by Stephen King
So the place had all the amenities, even extending to a microwave oven in the kitchenette. It was all done in decorator colors, there was a thick shag rug on the living-room floor, the pictures were all good prints. But for all of that, a dog turd covered with frosting is not a wedding cake; it is simply a frosted dog turd, and none of the doors leading out of this tasteful little apartment had doorknobs on the inside. There were small glass loopholes scattered here and there around the apartment--the sort of loopholes you see in the doors of hotel rooms. There was even one in the bathroom, and Andy had calculated that they provided sightlines to just about anyplace in the apartment. TV monitoring devices was Andy's guess, and probably equipped with infrared as well, so you couldn't even jerk off in relative privacy.
He wasn't claustrophobic, but he didn't like being closed up for long periods of time. It made him nervous, even with the drugs. It was a low nervousness, usually evidenced by long sighs and periods of apathy. He had indeed asked to go out. He wanted to see the sun again, and green grass.
"Yes," he said softly to Pynchot. "I have expressed an interest in going out."
But he didn't get to go out.
The volunteer was nervous at first, undoubtedly expecting Andy to make him stand on his head and cluck like a chicken or something equally ridiculous. He was a football fan. Andy got the man, whose name was Dick Albright, to bring him up to date on the previous season--who had made it to the playoffs and how they went, who had won the Super BowL
Albright kindled. He spent the next twenty minutes reliving the entire season, gradually losing his nervousness. He was up to the lousy reffing that had allowed the Pats to triumph over the Dolphins in the AFC championship game when Andy said, "Have a glass of water, if you want. You must be thirsty."
Albright glanced up at him. "Yeah, I am kinda thirsty. Say ... am I talkin too much? Is it screwin up their tests, do you think?"
"No, I don't think so," Andy said. He watched Dick Albright pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher.
"You want some?" Albright asked.
"No, I'll pass," Andy said, and suddenly gave a hard push. "Have some ink in it, why don't you?"
Albright looked up at him, then reached for the bottle of "ink." He picked it up, looked at it, and put it back down again. "Put ink in it? You must be crazy."
Pynchot grinned as much after the test as before it, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all. Andy was not pleased either. When he had pushed out at Albright there had been none of that sideslipping sensation ... that curious feeling of doubling that usually accompanied the push. And no headache. He had concentrated all of his will toward suggesting to Albright that putting ink in his water would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and Albright had made a perfectly reasonable reply: that Andy was nuts. In spite of all the pain it had caused him, he had felt a touch of panic at the thought the talent might have deserted him.
"Why do you want to keep it under wraps?" Pynchot asked him. He lit a Chesterfield and grinned. "I don't understand you, Andy. What good does it do you?"
"For the tenth time," Andy had replied, "I wasn't holding back. I wasn't faking. I pushed him as hard as I could. Nothing happened, that's all." He wanted his pill. He fe1t depressed and nervous. All the colors seemed too bright, the light too strong, voices too loud. It was better with the pills. With the pills, his useless outrage over what had happened and his loneliness for Charlie and his worry over what might be happening to her--these things faded back and became manageable.
"I'm afraid I don't believe that," Pynchot said, and grinned. "Think it over, Andy. We're not asking you to make someone walk off a cliff or shoot himself in the head. I guess you didn't want that walk as badly as you thought you did."
He stood up as if to go.
"Listen," Andy said, unable to keep the desperation entirely out of his voice, "I'd like one of those pills."
"Would you?" Pynchot said. "Well, it might interest you to know that I'm lightening your dosage ... just in case it's the Thorazine that's interfering with your ability." His grin bloomed anew. "Of course, if your ability suddenly came back ..."
"There are a couple of things you should know," Andy told him. "First, the guy was nervous, expecting something. Second, he wasn't all that bright. It's a lot harder to push old people and people with low or low-normal IQs. Bright people go easier."
"Is that so?" Pynchot said.
"Yes."
"Then why don't you push me into giving you a pill right now? My tested IQ is one-fifty-five."
Andy had tried--with no results at all.
Eventually he had got his walk outside, and eventually they had increased the dosage of his medication again as well--after they became convinced that he really wasn't faking, that he was, in fact, trying desperately hard to use the push, with no success at all. Quite independently of each other, both Andy and Dr. Pynchot began to wonder if he hadn't tipped himself over permanently in the run that had taken him and Charlie from New York to Albany County Airport to Hastings Glen, if he hadn't simply used the talent up. And both of them wondered if it wasn't some kind of psychological block. Andy himself came to believe that either the talent was really gone or it was simply a defense mechanism: his mind refusing to use the talent because it knew it might kill him to do so. He hadn't forgotten the numb places on his cheek and neck, and the bloodshot eye.
Either way, it amounted to the same thing--a big goose-egg. Pynchot, his dreams of covering himself with glory as the first man to get provable, empirical data on phychic mental domination now flying away, came around less and less often.
The tests had continued through May and June--first more volunteers and then totally unsuspecting test subjects. Using the latter was not precisely ethical, as Pynchot was the first to admit, but some of the first tests with LSD hadn't been precisely ethical, either. Andy marveled that by equating these two wrongs in his mind, Pynchot seemed to come out the other side feeling that everything was okay. It didn't matter, because Andy had no success pushing any of them.
A month ago, just after the Fourth of July, they had begun testing him with animals. Andy protested that pushing an animal was even more impossible than trying to push a stupid person, but his protests cut zero ice with Pynchot and his team, who were really only going through the motions of a scientific investigation at this point. And so once a week Andy found himself sitting in a room with a dog or a cat or a monkey, feeling like a character from an absurdist noveL He remembered the cab driver who had looked at a dollar bill and had seen a five hundred. He remembered the timid executives he had managed to tip gently in the direction of more confidence and assertiveness. Before them, in Port City, Pennsylvania, there had been the Weight-Off program, the classes attended mostly by lonely fat housewives with an addiction to Snackin' Cakes, Pepsi-Cola, and anything between two slices of bread. These were things that filled up the emptiness of their lives a little. That had simply been a matter of pushing a little bit, because most of them had really wanted to lose weight. He had helped them do that. He thought also of what had happened to the two Shop ramrods who had taken Charlie.
He had been able to do it, but no more. It was hard even to remember exactly what it had felt like. So he sat in the room with dogs that lapped his hand and cats that purred and monkeys that moodily scratched their asses and sometimes showed their teeth in apocalyptic, fang-filled grins that were obscenely like Pynchot's grins, and of course none of the animals did anything unusual at all. And later on he would be taken back to his apartment with no doorknobs on the doors and there would be a blue pill in a white dish on the counter in the kitchennette and in a little while he would stop feeling nervous and depressed. He would start feeling pretty much okay again. And he would watch one of the Home Box Office movies--something with Clint Eastwood, if he could get it--or perhaps The PTL Club. It didn't bother him so much that he had lost his talent and become a superfluous person.
5
On the afternoon of the big storm, he
The woman finished her story of how God had saved her from shaking herself to pieces. Earlier in the program an actor who had been famous in the early 1950s had told how God had saved him from the bottle. Now the woman with the beehive hairdo began to cry and the once-famous actor embraced her. The camera dollied in for a close-up. In the background, the PTL Singers began to hum. Andy shifted in his seat a little. It was almost time for his pill.
In a dim sort of way he realized that the medication was only partially responsible for the peculiar changes that had come over him in the last five months, changes of which his soft weight gain was only an outward sign. When the Shop had taken Charlie away from him, they had knocked the one solid remaining prop out from under his life. With Charlie gone--oh, she was undoubtedly somewhere near, but she might as well have been on the moon--there seemed to be no reason for holding himself together.
On top of that, all the running had induced a nervous kind of shellshock. He had lived on the tightrope for so long that when he had finally fallen off, total lethargy had been the result. In fact, he believed he had suffered a very quiet sort of nervous breakdown. If he did see Charlie, he wasn't even sure she would recognize him as the same person, and that made him sad.
He had never made any effort to deceive Pynchot or cheat on the tests. He did not really think that doing so would rebound on Charlie, but he would not have taken even the most remote chance of that happening. And it was easier to do what they wanted. He had become passive. He had screamed the last of his rage on Granther's porch, as he cradled his daughter with the dart sticking out of her neck. There was no more rage left in him. He had shot his wad.
That was Andy McGee's mental state as he sat watching TV that August 19 while the storm walked the hills outside. The PTL host made a donations pitch and then introduced a gospel trio. The trio began to sing, and suddenly the lights went out.
The TV also went, the picture dwindling down to a bright speck. Andy sat in his chair, unmoving, not sure just what had happened. His mind had just enough time to register the scary totality of the dark, and then the lights went on again. The gospel trio reappeared, singing "I Got a Telephone Call from Heaven and Jesus Was on the Line." Andy heaved a sigh of relief, and then the lights went out again.
He sat there, gripping the arms of the chair as if he would fly away if he let go. He kept his eyes desperately fixed on the bright speck of light from the TV even after he knew it was gone and he was only seeing a lingering after-image ... or wishful thinking.
It'll be back on in a second or two, he told himself. Secondary generators somewhere. You don't trust to house current to run a place like this.
Still, he was scared. He suddenly found himself recalling the boys'-adventure stories of his childhood. In more than one of them, there had been an accident in some cave with the lights or candles blown out. And it seemed that the author would always go to great lengths to describe the dark as "palpable" or "utter" or "total." There was even that tried-and-true old standby "the living dark," as in "The living dark engulfed Tom and his friends." If all of this had been meant to impress the nine-year-old Andy McGee, it hadn't done. As far as he was concerned, if he wanted to be "engulfed by the living dark," all he had to do was go into his closet and put a blanket along the crack at the bottom of the door. Dark was, after all, dark.
Now he realized that he had been wrong about that; it wasn't the only thing he'd been wrong about as a kid, but it was maybe the last one to be discovered. He would just as soon have forgone the discovery, because dark wasn't dark. He had never been in a dark like this one in his life. Except for the sensation of the chair beneath his butt and under his hands, he could have been floating in some lightless Lovecraftian gulf between the stars. He raised one hand and floated it in front of his eyes. And although he could feel the palm lightly touching his nose, he couldn't see it.
He took the hand away from his face and gripped the arm of the chair with it again. His heart had taken on a rapid and thready beat in his chest. Outside, someone called out hoarsely, "Richie! Where the fuck areya?" and Andy cringed back in his chair as if he had been threatened. He licked his lips.
It'll be back on in just a second or two now, he thought, but a scared part of his mind that refused to be comforted by mere rationalities asked: How long is a second or two, or a minute or two, in total darkness? How do you measure time in total darkness?
Outside, beyond his "apartment," something fell over and someone screamed in pain and surprise. Andy cringed back again and moaned shakily. He didn't like this. This was no good.
Well, if it takes them longer than a few minutes to fix it--to reset the breakers or whatever--they'll come and let me out. They'll have to.
Even the scared part of his mind--the part that was only a short distance away from gibbering--recognized the logic of this, and he relaxed a little. After all, it was just the dark; that's all it was--just the absence of light. It wasn't as if there were monsters in the dark, or anything like that.
He was very thirsty. He wondered if he dared get up and go get a bottle of ginger ale out of the fridge. He decided he could do it if he was careful. He got up, took two shuffling steps forward, and promptly barked his shin on the edge of the coffee table. He bent and rubbed it, eyes watering with pain.
This was like childhood, too. They had played a game called "blind man"; he supposed all kids did. You had to try to get from one end of the house to the other with a bandanna or something over your eyes. And everyone else thought it was simply the height of humor when you fell over a hassock or tripped over the riser between the dining room and the kitchen. The game could teach you a painful lesson about how little you actually remembered about the layout of your supposedly familiar house and how much more you relied upon your eyes than your memory. And the game could make you wonder how the hell you'd live if you went blind.
But I'll be all right, Andy thought. I'll be all right if I just take it slow and easy.
He moved around the coffee table and then began to shuffle his way slowly across the open space of the living room with his hands out in front of him. It was funny how threatening open space could feel in the dark. Probably the lights'll come on right now and I can have a good laugh at myself. Just have a good I--
"Ow!"
His outstretched fingers struck the wall and bent back painfully. Something fell--the picture of the barn and hay-field after the style of Wyeth that hung near the kitchen door, he guessed. It swished by him, sounding ominously like a whickering sword blade in the dark, and clattered to the floor. The sound was shockingly loud.
He stood still, holding his aching fingers, feeling the throb of his barked shin. He was cotton-mouthed with fear.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, don't forget about me, you guys!"
He waited and listened. There was no answer. There were still sounds and voices, but they were farther away now. If they got much farther away, he would be in total silence.
Forgotten all about me, he thought, and his fright deepened.
His heart was racing. He could feel cold sweat on his arms and brow, and he found himself remembering the time at Tashmore Pond when he had gone out too deep, got tired, and begun to thrash and scream, sure he was going to die ... but when he put his feet down the bottom was there, the water only nipple high. Where was the bottom now? He licked at his dry lips, but his tongue was dry, too.
"HEY
Oh goddammit all anyway, why'd it have to happen when It was time for my pill? If I had my pill I'd be all right. I'd be okay then. Christ it feels like my head's full of broken glass--
He stood there, breathing heavily. He had aimed for the kitchen door, had gone off course and run into the wall. Now he felt totally disoriented and couldn't even remember if that stupid barn picture had been hung to the right or left of the doorway. He wished miserably that he had stayed in his chair.
"Get hold," he muttered aloud. "Get hold."
It was not just panic, he recognized that. It was the pill that was now overdue, the pill on which he had come to depend. It just wasn't fair that this had happened when his pill was due.
"Get hold," he muttered again.
Ginger ale. He had got up to get ginger ale and he was going to by-God get it. He had to fix on something. That's all it came down to, and ginger ale would do as well as anything else.
He began to move again, toward the left, and promptly fell over the picture that had come off the wall.
Andy screamed and went down, pinwheeling his arms wildly and fruitlessly for balance. He struck his head hard and screamed again.
Now he was very frightened. Help me, he thought. Somebody help me, bring me a candle, for Christ's sake, something, I'm scared--
He began to cry. His fumbling fingers felt thick wetness on the side of his head--blood--and he wondered with numb terror how bad it was.
"Where are you people?" he screamed. There was no answer. He heard--or thought he heard--a single faraway shout, and then there was silence. His fingers found the picture he had tripped over and he threw it across the room, furious at it for hurting him. It struck the end table beside the couch, and the now-useless lamp that stood there fell over. The lightbulb exploded with a hollow sound, and Andy cried out again. He felt the side of his head. More blood there now. It was crawling over his cheek in little rivulets.