Firestarter(55)

But Mr. Hammond was not the point. Mrs. Bacon wasn't the point, nor were those two luscious peaches in their white jag with the dull red primer paint around the headlights. The point was that after a while your brain formed its own subconscious subset: people who belong in Lakeland.

But in the months before Vicky was killed and Charlie snatched from the Dugans" house, there had been people around who didn't belong to that subset. Andy had dismissed them, telling himself it would be foolish to alarm Vicky just because talking to Quincey had made him paranoid.

The people in the light-gray van. The man with the red hair that he had seen slouched behind the wheel of an AMC Matador one night and then behind the wheel of a Plymouth Arrow one night about two weeks later and then in the shotgun seat of the gray van about ten days after that. Too many salesmen came to call. There had been evenings when they had come home from a day out or from taking Charlie to see the latest Disney epic when he had got the feeling that someone had been in the house, that things had been moved around the tiniest bit.

That feeling of being watched.

But he hadn't believed it would go any further than watching. That had been his crazy mistake. He was still not entirely convinced that it had been a case of panic on their part. They might have been planning to snatch Charlie and himself, killing Vicky because she was relatively useless-who really needed a low-grade psychic whose big trick for the week was closing the refrigerator door from across the room?

Nevertheless, the job had a reckless, hurry-up quality to it that made him think that Charlie's surprise disappearance had made them move more quickly than they had intended. They might have waited if it had been Andy who dropped out of sight, but it hadn't been. It had been Charlie, and she was the one they were really interested in. Andy was sure of that now.

He got up and stretched, listening to the bones in his spine crackle. Time he went to bed, time he stopped hashing over these old, hurtful memories. He was not going to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Vicky's death. He had only been an accessory before the fact, after all. And the rest of his life might not be that long, either. The action on Irv Manders's porch hadn't been lost on Andy McGee. They had meant to waste him. It was only Charlie they wanted now.

He went to bed, and after a while he slept. His dreams were not easy ones. Over and over he saw that trench of fire running across the beaten dirt of the dooryard, saw it divide to make a fairy-ring around the chopping block, saw the chickens going up like living incendiaries. In the dream, he felt the heat capsule around him, building and building.

She said she wasn't going to make fires anymore.

And maybe that was best.

Outside, the old October moon shone down on Tashmore Pond on Bradford, New Hampshire, across the water, and on the rest of New England. To the south, it shone down on Longmont, Virginia.

4

Sometimes Andy McGee had feelings-hunches of extraordinary vividness. Ever since the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall. He didn't know if the hunches were a low-grade sort of precognition or not, but he had learned to trust them when he got them.

Around noon on that August day in 1980, he got a bad one.

It began during lunch in the Buckeye Room, the faculty lounge on the top floor of the Union building. He could even pinpoint the exact moment. He had been having creamed chicken on rice with Ev O'Brian, Bill Wallace, and Don Grabowski, all in the English Department. Good friends, all of them. And as usual, someone had brought along a Polish joke for Don, who collected them. It had been Ev's joke, something about being able to tell a Polish ladder from a regular one because the Polish ladder had the word STOP lettered on the top rung. All of them were laughing when a small, very calm voice spoke up in Andy's mind.

(something's wrong at home)

That was all. That was enough. It began to build up almost the same way that his headaches built up when he overused the push and tipped himself over. Only this wasn't a head thing; all his emotions seemed to be tangling themselves up, almost lazily, as if they were yarn and some bad-tempered cat had been let loose along the runs of his nervous system to play with them and snarl them up.

He stopped feeling good. The creamed chicken lost whatever marginal appeal it had had to begin with. His stomach began to flutter, and his heart was beating rapidly, as if he had just had a bad scare. And then the fingers of his right hand began abruptly to throb, as if he had got them jammed in a door.

Abruptly he stood up. Cold sweat was breaking on his forehead.

"Look, I don't feel so good," he said. "Can you take my one o'clock, Bill?"

"Those aspiring poets? Sure. No problem. What's wrong?"

"I don't know. Something I ate, maybe."

"You look sort of pale," Don Grabowski said. "You ought to cruise over to the infirmary, Andy."

"I may do that," Andy said.

He left, but with no intention whatever of going to the infirmary. It was quarter past twelve, the late summer campus drowsing through the last week of the final summer session. He raised a hand to Ev,

Bill, and Don as he hurried out. He had not seen any of them since that day.

He stopped on the Union's lower level, let himself into a telephone booth, and called home. There was no answer. No real reason why there should have been; with Charlie at the Dugans, Vicky could have been out shopping, having her hair done, she could have been over at Tammy Upmore's house or even having lunch with Eileen Bacon. Nevertheless, his nerves cranked up another notch. They were nearly screaming now.