He always left before first light, with Granther’s knapsack on his back, and never arrived back before three in the afternoon. On one occasion he barely beat a howling snowstorm that would have left him blinded and directionless and wandering on the ice. Charlie cried with relief when he came in-and then went into a long, alarming coughing fit.
The trips to Bradford were for supplies and clothes for him and Charlie. He had Granther’s struttin money, and later on, he broke into three of the larger camps at the far end of Tashmore Pond and stole money. He was not proud of this, but it seemed to him a matter of survival. The camps he chose might have sold on the real-estate market for eighty thousand dollars apiece, and he supposed the owners could afford to lose their thirty or forty dollars” worth of cookie-jar money-which was exactly where most of them kept it. The only other thing he touched that winter was the large range-oil drum behind the large, modern cottage quaintly named CAMP CONFUSION. From this drum he took about forty gallons of oil.
He didn’t like going to Bradford. He didn’t like the certain knowledge that the oldsters who sat around the big potbellied stove down by the cash register were talking about the stranger who was staying across the lake in one of the camps. Stories had a way of getting around, and sometimes they got into the wrong ears. It wouldn’t take much-only a whisper-for the Shop to make an inevitable connection between Andy, his grandfather, and his grandfather’s cottage in Tashmore, Vermont. But he simply didn’t know what else to do. They had to eat, and they couldn’t spend the entire winter living on canned sardines. He wanted fresh fruit for Charlie, and vitamin pills, and clothes. Charlie had arrived with nothing to her name but a dirty blouse, a pair of red pants, and a single pair of underdrawers. There was no cough medicine that he trusted, there were no fresh vegetables, and, crazily enough, hardly any matches. Every camp he broke into had a fireplace, but he found only a single box of Diamond wooden matches.
He could have gone farther afield-there were other camps and cottages-but many of the other areas were plowed out and patrolled by the Tashmore constabulary. And on many of the roads there were at least one or two year-round residents.
In the Bradford general store he was able to buy all the things he needed, including three pairs of heavy pants and three woolen shirts that were approximately Charlie’s size. There was no girls” underwear, and she had to make do with size-eight Jockey shorts. This disgusted and amused Charlie by turns.
Making the six-mile round trip across to Bradford on Granther’s skis was both a burden and a pleasure to Andy. He didn’t like leaving Charlie alone, not because he didn’t trust her but because he always lived with the fear of coming back and finding her gone… or dead. The old boots gave him blisters no matter how many pairs of socks he put on. If he tried to move too fast, he gave himself headaches, and then he would remember the small numb places on his face and envision his brain as an old bald tire, a tire that had been used so long and hard that it was down to the canvas in places. If he had a stroke in the middle of this damned lake and froze to death, what would happen to Charlie then?
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.