Firestarter(92)

Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twentyfive pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn't believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.

His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him-to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher... something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.

But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.

Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before-like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn't her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to anorexia nervosa. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn't want to kill anyone doing it.

"You ought to be declared a national resource for what you're doing," Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.

Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.

He smiled a little.

And smiling, slept.

10

He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.

And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was... what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white-stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and, tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.

Of course there isn't, he told himself. There's no pain because it's a dream. You'll pay for it later. You'll have the pain later.

He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn't know what or where it was-

You'll know it when you see it, his mind whispered.

So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn't hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.

The brain is a muscle, his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child's song, a little girl's skipping rhyme: The brain is a, muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move-

Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read

THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.

Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream-buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie's shoulders and cried hoarsely, "We'll do "em yet, kid!"

Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie's attention-she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn't what he seemed.

But he couldn't stop. He had this damned

(box? chest?)

to

(???)