Firestarter(17)

"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 dog-collar. 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 then 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.