Somewhere overhead, on the next level, something fell over with a tremendous clang. Andy jerked up on his knees. His nerve broke and he lost himself. He began to scream. “Help! Help! Help!” over and over until he was hoarse. He had no idea how long he might have screamed there, on his hands and knees in the black kitchen.
At last he stopped and tried to get hold of himself. His hands and arms were shaking helplessly. His head ached from the thump he had given it, but the flow of blood seemed to have stopped. That was a little reassuring. His throat felt hot and flayed from all his screaming, and that made him think of the ginger ale again.
He began to crawl once more, and he found the refrigerator with no further incident. He opened it (ridiculously expecting the interior light to come on with its familiar frosty-white glow) and fumbled around in the cool dark box until he found a can with a ringtab on top. Andy shut the fridge door and leaned against it. He opened the can and swilled half the ginger ale at a draft. His throat blessed him for it.
Then a thought came and his throat froze.
The place is on fire, his mind told him with spurious calmness. That’s why no one’s come to get you out. They’re evacuating. You, now… you’re expendable.
This thought brought on an extremity of claustrophobic terror that was beyond panic. He simply cringed back against the refrigerator, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. The strength went out of his legs. For a moment, he even imagined he could smell smoke, and heat seemed to rush over him. The soda can slipped from his fingers and gurgled its contents out onto the floor, wetting his pants.
Andy sat in the wetness, moaning.
6
John Rainbird thought later that things could not have worked better if they had planned it… and if those fancy psychologists had been worth a tin whistle in a high wind, they would have planned it. But as it happened, it was only the lucky happen stance of the blackout’s occurring when it did that allowed him to finally get his chisel under one corner of the psychological steel that armored Charlie McGee. Luck and his own inspired intuition.
He let himself into Charlie’s quarters at three thirty, just as the storm was beginning to break outside. He pushed a cart before him that was no different from the ones most hotel and motel maids push as they go from room to room. It contained clean sheets and pillow slips, furniture polish, a rug-shampoo preparation for spot stains. There was a floor bucket and a mop. A vacuum cleaner was clipped to one end of the cart.
Charlie was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, wearing a bright blue Danskin leotard and nothing else. Her long legs were crossed in a lotuslike position. She sat that way a great deal. An outsider might have thought she was stoned, but Rainbird knew better. She was still being lightly medicated, but now the dosage was little more than a placebo. All of the psychologists were in disappointed agreement that she meant what she said about never lighting fires again. The drugs had originally been meant to keep her from burning her way out, but now it seemed sure that she wasn’t going to do that… or anything else.
“Hi, kid,” Rainbird said. He unclipped the vacuum cleaner. She glanced over at him but didn’t respond. He plugged the vacuum in, and when he started it, she got up gracefully and went into the bathroom. She shut the door.
Rainbird went on vacuuming the rug. He had no plan in mind. It was a case of looking for small signs and signals, picking up on them, and following them. His admiration for the girl was unalloyed. Her father was turning into a fat, apathetic pudding, the psychologists had their own terms for it “dependency shock,” and “loss of identity,” and “mental fugue,” and “mild reality dysfunction” but what it all came down to was he had given up and could now be canceled out of the equation. The girl hadn’t done that. She had simply hidden herself. And Rainbird never felt so much like an Indian as he did when he was with Charlie McGee.
He vacuumed and waited for her to come out maybe. He thought she was coming out of the bathroom a little more frequently now. At first she had always hidden there until he was gone. Now sometimes she came out and watched him. Perhaps she would today. Perhaps not. He would wait. And watch for signs.
7
Charlie sat in the bathroom with the door shut. She would have locked it if she could. Before the orderly came to clean the place, she had been doing some simple exercises she had found in a book. The orderly came to keep it orderly. Now the toilet seat felt cold under her. The white light from the fluorescents that ringed the bathroom mirror made everything seem cold, and too bright.
At first there had been a live-in “companion,” a woman of about forty-five. She was supposed to be “motherly,” but the “motherly companion” had hard green eyes with small flecks in them. The flecks were like ice. These were the people who had killed her real mother; now they wanted her to live here with the “motherly companion.” Charlie told them she didn’t want the “motherly companion.” They smiled. Then Charlie stopped talking, and she didn’t say another word until the “motherly companion” left, taking her green ice-chip eyes with her. She had made a deal with that man Hockstetter: she would, answer his questions, and his alone, if he would get that “motherly companion” out. The only companion she wanted was her father, and if she couldn’t have him, she would be alone.
In many ways she felt that the last five months (they told her it was five months; it didn’t feel like anything) had been a dream. There was no way to mark time, faces came and went with no memories attached to them, disembodied as balloons, and food had no particular taste. She felt like a balloon herself sometimes. She felt as if she were floating. But in a way, her mind told her with perfect certitude, it was fair. She was a murderer.
She had broken the worst of the Ten Commandments and was surely damned to hell.
She thought about this at night, with the lights turned down low so that the apartment itself seemed like a dream. She saw it all. The men on the porch wearing their crowns of flame. The cars exploding. The chickens catching fire. The smell of burning that was always the smell of smoldering stuffing, the smell of her teddy bear.
(and she had liked it)
That was it; that was the trouble. The more she had done it the more she had liked it; the more she had done it the more she had been able to feel the power, a living thing, getting stronger and stronger. It was like a pyramid standing upside down, standing on its tip, and the more you did it the harder it got to stop it. It hurt to stop it.
(and it was fun)
and so she was never going to do it again. She would die in here before she did it again. Maybe she even wanted to die in here. The idea of dying in a dream wasn’t scary at all.
The only two faces that weren’t totally dissociated were Hockstetter’s and that of the orderly who came to clean her apartment every day. Charlie had asked him once why he had to come every day, since she wasn’t messy.
John-that was his name-had taken a scrungy old pad from his back pocket and a cheap ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He said “That’s just my job, kid.” And on the paper he wrote Because they’re full of shit, why else?
She had almost giggled but had stopped herself in time by thinking of men with crowns of fire, men who smelled like smoldering teddy bears. Giggling would have been dangerous. So she simply pretended that she hadn’t seen the note or didn’t understand it. The orderly’s face was a mess. He wore an eyepatch. She felt sorry for him and once she had almost asked him what happened-if he had been in a car accident or something-but that would have been even more dangerous than giggling at his note. She didn’t know why, but she felt that in every fiber.