Firestarter(93)

to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it? But he would know when it was time. He went past dozens of other rooms-he could't remember all of the things he saw-and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.

Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.

DISPOSAL, it read.

And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You'd never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.

He tried to lift the box, but couldn't. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse... It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horror he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding

"I'll help you," Mrs. Gurney said. "You helped me; now I'll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me."

"You look so pretty," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.

"I feel like I've been let out of prison," Mrs. Gurney responded. "Let me help you."

"It's just that my head aches-"

"Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle."

Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn't remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked DISPOSAL, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn't the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills his pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.

"No!" he shouted.

"Yes," Mrs. Gurney answered firmly. "The brain is a muscle that can move the world."

Then he saw it her way.

It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.

Thud thud, thud...

11

He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except

"Oww, Jesus!"

Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.

No concrete sensory input except this. rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have

No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push... harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies and shy businessmen, not quite as hard as the ones he had given the fellows at the turnpike rest stop that time.

Andy's hands flew to his face and felt it all over, from brow to chin. There were no spots where the feeling trailed away to numbness. When he smiled, both corners of his mouth went up just as they always had. He wished to God for a light so he could look into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror to see if either of them showed that tell-tale blood sheen...

Push? Pushing?

That was ridiculous. Who was there to push?

Who, except

His breath slowed to a stop in his throat and then resumed slowly.

He had thought of it before but had never tried it. He thought it would be like overloading a circuit by cycling a charge through it endlessly. He had been scared to try it.

My pill, he thought. My pill is overdue and I want it, I really want it, I really need it. My pill will make everything all right.

It was just a thought. It brought on no craving at all. The idea of taking a Thorazine had all the emotional gradient of please pass the butter. The fact was, except for the rotten headache, he felt pretty much all right. And the fact also was he had had headaches a lot worse than this-the one at the Albany airport, for instance. This one was a baby compared to that.

I've pushed myself, he thought, amazed.

For the first time he could really understand how Charlie felt, because for the first time he was a little frightened by his own psi talent. For the first time he really understood how little he understood about what it was and what it could do. Why had it gone? He didn't know. Why had it come back? He didn't know that either. Did it have something to do with his intense fear in the dark? His sudden feeling that Charlie was being threatened (he had a ghostly memory of the piratical one-eyed man and then it floated away, gone) and his own dismal self-loathing at the way he had forgotten her? Possibly even the rap on the head he had taken when he fell down?