Firestarter(21)

He had been reading in the living room, near the foot of the stairs. Charlie was going up and down. Sitting on the stairs was a teddy bear. He should have moved it, of course, but each time she went up, Charlie went around it, and he had become lulled-much as he had become lulled by what appeared to be their normal life in Port City.

As she came down the third time, her feet got tangled around the bear and she came all the way to the bottom, thump, bump, and tumble, wailing with rage and fear. The stairs were carpeted and she didn't even have a bruise-God watches over drunks and small children, that had been Quincey's saying, and that was his first conscious thought of Quincey that day-but Andy rushed to her, picked her up, held her, cooed a lot of nonsense to her while he gave her the quick once-over, looking for blood, or a limb hanging wrong, signs of concussion. And-

And he felt it pass him-the invisible, incredible bolt of death from his daughter's mind. It felt like the backwash of warm air from a highballing subway train, when it's summertime and you're standing maybe a little too close on the platform. A soft, soundless passage of warm air... and then the teddy bear was on fire. Teddy had hurt Charlie; Charlie would hurt Teddy. The flames roared up, and for a moment, as it charred, Andy was looking at its black shoebutton eyes through a sheet of flame, and the flames were spreading to the carpeting on the stair where the bear had tumbled.

Andy put his daughter down and ran for the fire extinguisher on the wall near the TV. He and Vicky didn't talk about the thing their daughter could do-there were times when Andy wanted to, but Vicky wouldn't hear of it; she avoided the subject with hysterical stubbornness, saying there was nothing wrong with Charlie, nothing wrong-but fire extinguishers had appeared silently, undiscussed, with almost the same stealth as dandelions appear during that period when spring and summer overlap. They didn't talk about what Charlie could do, but there were fire extinguishers all over the house.

He grabbed this one, smelling the heavy aroma of frying carpet, and dashed for the stairs... and still there was time to think about that story, the one he had read as a kid, "It's a Good Life," by some guy named Jerome Bixby, and that had been about a little kid who had enslaved his parents with psychic terror, a nightmare of a thousand possible deaths, and you never knew... you never knew when the little kid was going to get mad...

Charlie was wailing, sitting on her butt at the foot of the stairs.

Andy twisted the knob on the fire extinguisher savagely and sprayed foam on the spreading fire, dousing it. He picked up Teddy, his fur stippled with dots and puffs and dollops of foam, and carried him back downstairs.

Hating himself, yet knowing in some primitive way that it had to be done, the line had to be drawn, the lesson learned, he jammed the bear almost into Charlie's screaming, frightened, tear-streaked face. Oh you dirty bastard, he had thought desperately, why don't you just go out to the kitchen and get a paring knife and cut a line up each cheek? Mark her that way? And his mind had seized on that. Scars. Yes. That's what he had to do. Scar his child. Burn a scar on her soul.

"Do you like the way Teddy looks?" he roared. The bear was scalded, the bear was blackened, and in his hand it was still as warm as a cooling lump of charcoal. "Do you like Teddy to be all burned so you can't play with him anymore, Charlie?"

Charlie was crying in great, braying whoops, her skin all red fever and pale death, her eyes swimming with tears. "Daaaaa! Ted! Ted!"

"Yes, Teddy," he said grimly. "Teddy's all burned, Charlie. You burned Teddy. And if you burn Teddy, you might burn Mommy. Daddy. Now... don't you do it anymore!" He leaned closer to her, not picking her up yet, not touching her. "Don't you do it anymore because it is a Bad Thing!" "Daaaaaaaaaa-"

And that was all the heartbreak he could stand to inflict, all the horror, all the fear. He picked her up, held her, walked her back and forth until-a very long time later-her sobs tapered off to irregular hitchings of her chest, and sniffles. When he looked at her, she was asleep with her cheek on his shoulder.

He put her on the couch and went to the phone in the kitchen and called Quincey.

Quincey didn't want to talk. He was working for a large aircraft corporation in that year of 1975, and in the notes that accompanied each of his yearly Christmas cards to the McGees he described his job as Vice-President in Charge of Stroking. When the men who made the airplanes had problems, they were supposed to go see Quincey. Quincey would help them with their problems-feelings of alienation, identity crises, maybe just a feeling that their jobs were dehumanizing them-and they wouldn't go back to the line and put the widget where the wadget was supposed to go and therefore the planes wouldn't crash and the world would continue to be safe for democracy. For this Quincey made thirty-two thousand dollars a year, seventeen thousand more than Andy made. "And I don't feel a bit guilty," he had written. "I consider it a small salary to extract for keeping America afloat almost single-handed."

That was Quincey, as sardonically funny as ever. Except he hadn't been sardonic and he hadn't been funny that day when Andy called from Ohio with his daughter sleeping on the couch and the smell of burned bear and singed carpeting in his nostrils:

"I've heard things," Quincey said finally, when he saw that Andy wasn't going to let him off without something. "But sometimes people listen in on phones, old buddy. It's the era of Watergate."