Firestarter

by Stephen King

  Norma was looking more and more troubled.

  "I dunno," Irv repeated. "I guess I have got to think on it some. I see what you're sayin ... but if you knew the people that was after her ..."

  Hofferitz's eyes sharpened at this, but he said nothing.

  "I got to think on it some. But will you keep quiet about her for the time being?"

  Hofferitz popped the last of his olives into his mouth, sighed, stood up, holding onto the edge of the table. "Yeah," he said. "She's stable. That V-cillin will knock out the bugs. I'll keep my mouth shut, Irv. But you better think on it, all right. Long and hard. Because a kid ain't a parrot."

  "No," Norma said softly. "No, of course not."

  "Something strange about that kid," Hofferitz said, picking up his black bag. "Something damn funny about her. I couldn't see it and I couldn't put my finger on it ... but I felt it."

  "Yeah," Irv said. "There's something strange about her, all right, Karl. That's why she's in trouble."

  He saw the doctor out into the warm and rainy November night.

  5

  After the doctor had finished probing and pressing with his old, gnarled, but wonderfully gentle hands, Charlie fell into a feverish but not unpleasant doze. She could hear their voices in the other room and understood that they were talking about her, but she felt sure that they were only talking ... not hatching plans.

  The sheets were cool and clean; the weight of the crazy quilt was comforting on her chest. She drifted. She remembered the woman calling her a witch. She remembered walking away. She remembered hitching a ride with a vanful of hippies, all of them smoking dope and drinking wine, and she remembered that they had called her little sister and asked her where she was going.

  "North," she had replied, and that had caused a roar of approval.

  After that she remembered very little until yesterday, and the hog that had charged her, apparently meaning to eat her. How she had got to the Manders farm, and why she had come here--whether it had been a conscious decision or something else--she could not remember.

  She drifted. The doze deepened. She slept. And in her dream they were back in Harrison and she was starting up in her bed, her face wet with tears, screaming with terror, and her mother rushed in, auburn hair blinding and sweet in the morning light, and she had cried, "Mommy, I dreamed you and Daddy were deadl" And her mother stroked her hot forehead with a cool hand and said, "Shhh, Charlie, shhh. It's morning now, and wasn't that a silly dream?"

  6

  There was very little sleep for Irv and Norma Manders that night. They sat watching a succession of inane prime-time sitcoms, then the news, then the Tonight show. And every fifteen minutes or so Norma would get up, leave the living room quietly, and go to check on Charlie.

  "How is she?" Irv asked around quarter of one.

  "Fine. Sleeping."

  Irv grunted.

  "Have you thought of it, Irv?"

  "We've got to keep her until she's better," Irv said. "Then we'll talk to her. Find out about her dad. I can only see that far ahead."

  "If they come back--"

  "Why should they?" Irv asked. "They shut us up. They think they scared us--"

  "They did scare me," Norma said softly.

  "But it wasn't right," Irv replied, just as softly. "You know that. That money ... that 'insurance money' ... I never felt right about that, did you?"

  "No," she said, and shifted restlessly. "But what Doc Hofferitz said is true, Irv. A little girl has got to have people ... and she's got to go to school ... and have friends ... and ...and--"

  "You saw what she did that time," Irv said flatly. "That pyrowhatsis. You called her a monster." "I've regretted that unkind word ever since," Norma said.

  "Her father--he seemed like such a nice man. If only we knew where he was now."

  "He's dead," a voice said from behind them, and Norma actually cried out as she turned and saw Charlie standing in the doorway, clean now and looking all the more pallid for that. Her forehead shone like a lamp. She floated in one of Norma's flannel nightgowns. "My daddy is dead. They killed him and now there's nowhere I can go. Won't you please help me? I'm sorry. It's not my fault. I told them it wasn't my fault ... I told them ... but that lady said I was a witch ... she said ..." The tears were coming now, streaming down her cheeks, and Charlie's voice dissolved into incoherent sobs.

  "Oh, honey, come here," Norma said, and Charlie ran to her.

  7

  Dr. Hoffertiz came the next day and pronounced Charlie improved. He came two days after that and pronounced her much improved. He came over the weekend and pronounced her well.

  "Irv, you decided what you're going to do?"

  Irv shook his head.

  8

  Norma went to church by herself that Sunday morning, telling people that Irv had "a touch of the bug." Irv sat home with Charlie, who was still weak but able to get around inside the house now. The day before, Norma had bought her a lot of clothes--not in Hastings Glen, where such a purchase would have caused comment, but in Albany.

  Irv sat beside the stove whittling, and after a while Charlie came and sat with him. "Don't you want to know?" she said.

  "Don't you want to know what happened after we took your car and left here?"

  He looked up from his whittling and smiled at her. "Figure you'll tell when you're ready, button."

  Her face, white, tense, and unsmiling, didn't change. "Aren't you afraid of me?"

  "Should I be?"

  "Aren't you afraid I'll burn you up?"

  "No, button. I don't think so. Let me tell you something. You're no little girl anymore. Maybe you ain't a big girl--you're someplace in the middle--but you're big enough. A kid your age--any kid--could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to? Why should you want to? A kid your age should be able to be trusted with a jackknife or a pack of matches, if they're halfway bright. So, no. I ain't scared."

  At that Charlie's face relaxed; an expression of almost indescribable relief flowed across it.

  "I'll tell you," she said then. "I'll tell you everything." She began to speak and was still speaking when Norma returned an hour later. Norma stopped in the doorway, listening, then slowly unbuttoned her coat and took it off. She put her purse down. And still Charlie's young but somehow old voice droned, on and on, telling it, telling it all.

  And by the time she was done, both of them understood just what the stakes were, and how enormous they had become.

  9

  Winter came with no firm decision made. Irv and Norma began to go to church again, leaving Charlie alone in the house with strict instructions not to answer the telephone if it rang and to go down the cellar if someone drove in while they were gone. Hofferitz's words, like a parrot in a cage, haunted Irv. He bought a pile of schoolbooks--in Albany--and took up teaching Charlie himself. Although she was quick, he was not particularly good at it. Norma was a little better. But sometimes the two of them would be sitting at the kitchen table, bent over a history or geography book, and Norma would look up at him with a question in her eyes ... a question for which Irv had no answer.

  The New Year came; February; March. Charlie's birthday. Presents bought in Albany. Like a parrot in a cage. Charlie did not seem entirely to mind, and in some ways, Irv reasoned to himself on nights when he couldn't sleep, perhaps it had been the best thing in the world for her, this period of slow healing, of each day taken in its slow winter course. But what came next? He didn't know.

  There was the day in early April after a drenching two-day rain when the damned kindling was so damp he couldn't get the kitchen stove lit.

  "Stand back a second," Charlie said, and he did, automatically, thinking she wanted to look at something in there. He felt something pass him in midair, something tight and hot, and a moment later the kindling was blazing nicely.

  Irv stared around at her, wide-eyed, and saw Charlie looking back at him with a kind of nervous, guilty hope
on her face.

  "I helped you, didn't I?" she said in a voice that was not quite steady. "It wasn't really bad, was it?"

  "No," he said. "Not if you can control it, Charlie."

  "I can control the little ones."

  "Just don't do it around Norma, girl. She'd drop her teddies."

  Charlie smiled a little.

  Irv hesitated and then said, "For myself, anytime you want to give me a hand and save me messing around with that damned kindling, you go right ahead. I've never been any good at it."

  "I will," she said, smiling more now. "And I'll be careful."

  "Sure. Sure you will," he said, and for just a moment he saw those men on the porch again, beating at their flaming hair, trying to put it out.

  Charlie's healing quickened, but still there were bad dreams and her appetite remained poor. She was what Norma Manders called "peckish."

  Sometimes she would wake up from these nightmares with shuddering suddenness, not so much pulled from sleep as ejected from it, like a fighter pilot from his plane. This happened to her one night during the second week of April; at one moment she was asleep, and at the next she was wide awake in her narrow bed in the back room, her body coated with sweat. For a moment the nightmare remained with her, vivid and terrible (the sap was running freely in the maples now, and Irv had taken her with him that afternoon to change the buckets; in her dream they had been sapping again, and she had heard something behind and had looked back to see John Rainbird creeping up on them, flitting from tree to tree, barely visible; his one eye glittered with a baleful lack of mercy, and his gun, the one he had shot her daddy with, was in one hand, and he was gaining). And then it slipped away. Mercifully, she could remember none of the bad dreams for long, and she rarely screamed anymore upon awakening from them, frightening Irv and Norma into her room to see what was wrong.

  Charlie heard them talking in the kitchen. She fumbled for the Big Ben on her dresser and brought it close to her face. It was ten o'clock. She had been asleep only an hour and a half.

  "--going to do?" Norma asked.

  It was wrong to eavesdrop, but how could she help it? And they were talking about her; she knew it.

  "I don't know," Irv said.

  "Have you thought anymore about the paper?"

  Papers, Charlie thought. Daddy wanted to talk to the papers. Daddy said it would be all right then.

  "Which one?" Irv asked. "The Hastings Bugle? They can put it right next to the A&P ad and this week's shows at the Bijou."

  "It was what her father was planning to do."

  "Norma," he said. "I could take her to New York City. I could take her to the Times. And what would happen if four guys pulled guns and started shooting in the lobby?"

  Charlie was all ears now. Norma's footfalls crossed the kitchen; there was the rattle of the teapot's lid, and what she said in reply was mostly lost under running water.

  Irv said, "Yeah, I think it might happen. And I tell you what might be even worse, as much as I love her. She might get the drop on them. And if it got out of control, like it did at that place where they kept her ... well, there's pretty nearly eight million people in New York City, Norma. I just feel like I'm too old to take a risk like that."

  Norma's footfalls crossed back to the table again, the old flooring of the farmhouse creaking comfortably beneath them. "But, Irv, listen to me now," she said. Norma spoke carefully and slowly, as if she had been thinking this out carefully over a long period of time. "Even a little paper, even a little weekly like the Bugle, they're hooked into those AP tickers. News comes from everyplace these days. Why, just two years ago a little paper in Southern California won the Pulitzer Prize for some news story, and they had a circulation of under fifteen hundred!"

  He laughed, and Charlie suddenly knew he had taken her hand across the table. "You've been studying on this, haven't you?"

  "Yes I have, and there's no reason to laugh at me for it, Irv Mandersl This is serious, a serious business! We're in a box! How long can we keep her here before somebody finds out? You took her sapping out in the woods just this afternoon--"

  "Norma, I wasn't laughin at you, and the child has got to get out sometime--"

  "Don't you think I know that? I didn't say no, did I? That's just itl A growing child needs fresh air, exercise. Got to have those things if you're going to have any appetite, and she's--"

  "Peckish, I know."

  "Pale and peckish, that's right. So I didn't say no. I was glad to see you take her. But, Irv, what if Johnny Gordon or Ray Parks had been out today and had just happened to drift over to see what you were doing, like they sometimes do?"

  "Honey, they didn't." But Irv sounded uneasy.

  "Not this time! Not the time before! But Irv, it can't go on! We been lucky already, and you know itl"

  Her footsteps crossed the kitchen again, and then there was the sound of tea being poured.

  "Yeah," Irv said. "Yeah, I know we have. But ... thanks, darlin."

  "Welcome," she said, sitting down again. "And never mind the buts, either. You know it only takes one person, or maybe two. It'll spread. It'll get out, Irv, that we got a little girl up here. Never mind what it's doing to her; what happens if it gets back to them?"

  In the darkness of the back room, Charlie's arms rashed out in goosebumps.

  Slowly, Irv answered her. "I know what you're saying, Norma. We got to do something, and I keep going over and over it in my head. A little paper ... well, it's not just sure enough. You know we've got to get this story out right if we're going to make that girl safe for the rest of her life. If she's going to be safe, a lot of people have got to know she exists and what she can do--isn't that right? A lot of people."

  Norma Manders stirred restlessly but said nothing.

  Irv pressed on. "We got to do it right for her, and we got to do right for us. Because it could be our lives at stake, too. Me, I've already been shot once. I believe that. I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma. She could get us killed."

  Charlie felt her face grow hot with shame ... and with terror. Not for herself but for them. What had she brought on their house?

  "And it's not just us or her. You remember what that man Tarkington said. The files he showed us. It's your brother and my nephew Fred and Shelley, and--"

  "--and all those people back in Poland," Norma said.

  "Well, maybe he was only bluffing about that. I pray to God he was. It's hard for me to believe anyone could get that low."

  Norma said grimly, "They've been pretty low already."

  "Anyway," Irv said, "we know they'll follow through on as much as they can, the dirty bastards. The shit is going to fly. All I'm saying, Norma, is I don't want the shit to fly to no good purpose. If we're going to make a move, I want it to be a good one. I don't want to go to some country weekly and then have them get wind of it and squash it. They could do it. They could do it."

  "But what does that leave?"

  "That," Irv said heavily, "is what I keep tryin to figure out. A paper or a magazine, but one they won't think of. It's got to be honest, and it ought to be nationwide. But most of all, it can't have any ties to the government or to the government's ideas."

  "You mean to the Shop," she said flatly.

  "Yeah. That's what I mean." There was the soft sound of Irv sipping his tea. Charlie lay in her bed, listening, waiting. ... it could be our lives at stake, too ... I've already been shot once ... I love her like my own, and I know you do, too, but we got to be realists about it, Norma ... she could get us killed.

  (no please I)

  (she could get us killed like she got her mother killed)

  (no please please don't don't say that)

  (like she got her daddy killed)

  (please stop)

  Tears rolled across her side-turned face, catching in her ears, wetting the pillowcase.

  "Well, we'll think on it some more," Norma said finally. "There's an answer to this, Irv.
Somewhere."

  "Yeah. I hope so."

  "And in the meantime," she said, "we just got to hope no one knows she's here." Her voice suddenly kindled with excitement. "Irv, maybe if we got a lawyer--"

  "Tomorrow," he said. "I'm done in, Norma. And no one knows she's here yet."

  But someone did. And the news had already begun to spread.

  10

  Until he was in his late sixties, Dr. Hofferitz, an inveterate bachelor, had slept with his longtime housekeeper, Shirley McKenzie. The sex part of it had slowly dried up: the last time, as well as Hofferitz could recall, had been about fourteen years before, and that had been something of an anomaly. But the two of them had remained close; in fact, with the sex gone, the friendship had deepened and had lost some of that tense prickliness that seems to be at the center of most sexual relationships. Their friendship had become of that platonic variety that seems to genuinely obtain only in the very young and in the very old of the opposite sex.

  Still, Hofferitz held on to his knowledge of the Manderses' "boarder" for better than three months. Then, one night in February, after three glasses of wine while he and Shirley (who had just that January turned seventy-five) were watching television, he told her the whole story, after swearing her to complete secrecy.

  Secrets, as Cap could have told Dr. Hofferitz, are even more unstable than U-235, and stability lessens proportionately as the secret is told. Shirley McKenzie kept the secret for almost a month before telling her best girlfriend, Hortense Barclay. Hortense kept the secret for about ten days before telling her best girlfriend, Christine Traegger. Christine told her husband and her best friends (all three of them) almost immediately.

  This is how the truth spreads in small towns; and by the night in April when Irv and Norma had their overheard conversation, a good deal of Hastings Glen knew that they had taken in a mysterious girl. Curiosity ran high. Tongues wagged.

  Eventually the news reached the wrong pair of ears. A telephone call was made from a scrambler phone.

  Shop agents closed in on the Manders farm for the second time on the last day of April; this time they came across the dawn fields through a spring mist, like horrific invaders from Planet X in their bright flame-resistant suits. Backing them up was a National Guard unit who didn't know what the fuck they were doing or why they had been ordered out to the peaceful little town of Hastings Glen, New York.