Firestarter(66)

But he did his best thinking on these trips. The silence had a way of clearing the head. Tashmore Pond itself was not wide-Andy's path across it from the west bank to the east was less than a mile-but it was very long. With the snow lying four feet deep over the ice by February, he sometimes paused halfway across and looked slowly to his right and left. The lake then appeared to be a long corridor floored with dazzling white tile-clean, unbroken, stretching out of sight in either direction. Sugar-dusted pines bordered it all around. Above was the hard, dazzling, and merciless blue sky of winter, or the low and featureless white of coming snow. There might be the far-off call of a crow, or the low, rippling thud of the ice stretching, but that was all. The exercise toned up his body. He grew a warm singlet of sweat between his skin and his clothes, and it felt good to work up a sweat and then wipe it off your brow. He had somehow forgotten that feeling while teaching Yeats and Williams and correcting bluebooks.

In this silence, and through the exertion of working his body hard, his thoughts came clear and he worked the problem over in his mind. Something had to be done-should have been done long since, but that was in the past. They had come to Granther's place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy way he felt about the oldtimers sitting around the stove with their pipes and their inquisitive eyes was enough to ram that fact home. He and Charlie were in a corner, and there had to be some way out of it.

And he was still angry, because it wasn't right. They had no right. His family were American citizens, living in a supposedly open society, and his wife had been murdered, his daughter kidnapped, the two of them hunted like rabbits in a hedgerow.

He thought again that if he could get the story across to someone-or to several someones-the whole thing could be blown out of the water. He hadn't done it before because that odd hypnosis-the same sort of hypnosis that had resulted in Vicky's death-had continued, at least to some degree. He hadn't wanted his daughter growing up like a freak in a sideshow. He hadn't wanted her institutionalized-not for the good of the country and not for her own good. And worst of all, he had continued to lie to himself. Even after he had seen his wife crammed into the ironing closet in the laundry with that rag in her mouth, he had continued to lie to himself and tell himself that sooner or later they would be left alone. Just playing for funzies, they had said as kids. Everybody has to give back the money at the end.

Except they weren't kids, they weren't playing for funzies, and nobody was going to give him and Charlie anything back when the game was over. This game was for keeps.

In silence he began to understand certain hard truths. In a way, Charlie was a freak, not much different from the thalidomide babies of the sixties or those children of mothers who had taken DES; the doctors just hadn't known that those girl children were going to develop vaginal tumors in abnormal numbers fourteen or sixteen years down the road. It was not Charlie's fault, but that did not change the fact. Her strangeness, her freakishness, was simply on the inside. What she had done at the Manders farm had been terrifying, totally terrifying, and since then Andy had found himself wondering just how far her ability reached, how far it could reach. He had read a lot of the literature of parapsychology during their year on the dodge, enough to know that both pyrokinesis and telekinesis were suspected to be tied in with certain poorly understood ductless glands. His reading had also told him that the two talents were closely related, and that most documented cases centered around girls not a whole lot older than Charlie was right now.

She had been able to initiate that destruction at the Manders farm at the age of seven. Now she was nearly eight. What might happen when she turned twelve and entered adolescence? Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. She said she wasn't going to use the power anymore, but if she was forced to use it? What if it began to come out spontaneously? What if she began to light fires in her sleep as a part of her own strange puberty, a fiery counterpart of the nocturnal seminal emissions most teenage boys experienced? What if the Shop finally decided to call off its dogs... and Charlie was kidnapped by some foreign power?

Questions, questions.

On his trips across the pond, Andy tried to grapple with them and came reluctantly to believe that Charlie might have to submit to some sort of custody for the rest of her life, if only for her own protection. It might be as necessary for her as the cruel leg braces were for the victims of muscular dystrophy or the strange prosthetics for the thalidomide babies.

And then there was the question of his own future. He remembered the numb places, the bloodshot eye. No man wants to believe that his own death-warrant has been signed and dated, and Andy did not completely believe that, but he was aware that two or three more hard pushes might kill him, and he realized that his normal life expectancy might already have been considerably shortened. Some provision had to be made for Charlie in case that happened.

But not the Shop's way.

Not the small room. He would not allow that to happen.

So he thought it over, and at last he came to a painful decision.

7

Andy wrote six letters. They were almost identical. Two were to Ohio's United States senators. One was to the woman who represented the district of which Harrison was a part in the U.S. House of Representatives. One was to the New York Times. One was to the Chicago Tribune. And one was to the Toledo Blade. All six letters told the story of what had happened, beginning with the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall and ending with his and Charlie's enforced isolation on Tashmore Pond.