Stephen King - Firestarter

Andy groped for it, and he got it. The man’s name was Ralph Baxter.

He smiled. Ralph Baxter. Good deal.

“I feel okay,” he said. “How’s that other fella?”

“What other fella’s that, Andy?”

“The one who clawed his eyes out,” Andy said serenely.

Ralph Baxter smiled and patted Andy’s hand. “Pretty visual stuff', huh, guy?”

“No, really,” Vicky said. “I saw it, too.”

“You think you did,” the GA who was not a GA said. “You just shared the same illusion. There was a guy over there by the board who had a muscular reaction… something like a charley horse. No clawed eyes. No blood.”

He started away again.

Andy said, “My man, it is impossible to share the same illusion without some prior consultation.” He felt immensely clever. The logic was impeccable, inarguable. He had old Ralph Baxter by the shorts.

Ralph smiled back, undaunted. “With this drug, it’s very possible,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”

“Okay, Ralph,” Andy said.

Ralph paused and came back toward where Andy lay on his cot. He came back in slomo. He looked thoughtfully down at Andy. Andy grinned back, a wide, foolish, drugged-out grin. Got you there, Ralph old son. Got you right by the proverbial shorts. Suddenly a wealth of information about Ralph Baxter flooded in on him, tons of stuff: he was thirty-five, he had been with the Shop for six years, before that he’d been with the FBI for two years, he had-

He had killed four people during his career, three men and one woman. And he had raped the woman after she was dead. She had been an AP stringer and she had known about-

That part wasn’t clear. And it didn’t matter. Suddenly Andy didn’t want to know. The grin faded from his lips. Ralph Baxter was still looking down at him, and Andy was swept by a black paranoia that he remembered from his two previous LSD trips… but this was deeper and much more frightening. He had no idea how he could know such things about Ralph Baxter-or how he had known his name at all-but if he told Ralph that he knew, he was terribly afraid that he might disappear from Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh with the same swiftness as the boy who had clawed his eyes out: Or maybe all of that really had been a hallucination; it didn’t seem real at all now.

Ralph was still looking at him. Little by little he began to smile. “See?” he said softly. “With Lot Six, all kinds of funky things happen.”

He left. Andy let out a slow sigh of relief. He looked over at Vicky and she was looking back at him, her eyes were wide and frightened. She’s getting your emotions, he thought. Like a radio. Take it easy on her! Remember she’s tripping, whatever else this weird shit is!

He smiled at her, and after a moment, Vicky smiled uncertainly back. She asked him what was wrong. He told her he didn’t know, probably nothing.

(but we’re not talking-her mouth’s not moving)

(it’s not?)

(vicky? is that you)

(is it telepathy, andy? is it?)

He didn’t know. It was something. He let his eyes slip closed.

Are those really grad assistants? she asked him, troubled. They don’t look the same. Is it the drug, Andy? I don’t know, he said, eyes still closed. I don’t know who they are. What happened to that boy? The one they took away? He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but Vicky was shaking her head. She didn’t remember. Andy was surprised and dismayed to find that he hardly remembered himself. It seemed to have happened years ago. Got a charley horse, hadn’t he, that guy? A muscular twitch, that’s all. He-

Clawed his eyes out .

But what did it matter, really?

Hand rising out of the huddle of white coats like the hand of a drowning man .

But it happened a long time ago. Like in the twelfth century.

Bloody hand. Striking the chart. The chart rattling up on its roller with a smacking sound .

Better to drift. Vicky was looking troubled again.

Suddenly music began to flood down from the speakers in the ceiling, and that was nice… much nicer than thinking about charley horses and leaking eyeballs. The music was soft and yet majestic. Much later, Andy decided (in consultation with Vicky) that it had been Rachmaninoff. And ever after when he heard Rachmaninoff, it brought back drifting, dreamy memories of that endless, timeless time in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall.

How much of it had been real, how much hallucination? Twelve years of off-and-on thought had not answered that question for Andy McGee. At one point, objects had seemed to fly through the room as if an invisible wind were blowing-paper cups, towels, a blood-pressure cuff, a deadly hail of pens and pencils. At another point, sometime later (or had it really been earlier? there was just no linear sequence), one of the test subjects had gone into a muscular seizure followed by cardiac arrest-or so it had seemed. There had been frantic efforts to restore him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by a shot of something directly into the chest cavity, and finally a machine that made a high whine and had two black cups attached to thick wires. Andy seemed to remember one of the “grad assistants” roaring, “Zap him! Zap him! Oh, give them to me, you fuckhead!”

At another point he had slept, dozing in and out of a twilight consciousness. He spoke to Vicky and they told each other about themselves. Andy told her about the car accident that had taken his mother’s life and how he had spent the next year with his aunt in a semi-nervous breakdown of grief. She told him that when she was seven, a teenage babysitter had assaulted her and now she was terribly afraid of sex, even more afraid that she might be frigid, it was that more than anything else that had forced her and her boyfriend to the breakup. He kept… pressing her.

They told each other things that a man and a woman don’t tell each other until they’ve known each other for years… things a man and a woman often never tell, not even in the dark marriage bed after decades of being together.

But did they speak?

That Andy never knew.

Time had stopped, but somehow it passed anyway.

He came out of the doze a little at a time. The Rachmaninoff was gone… if it had ever been there at all. Vicky was sleeping peacefully on the cot beside him, her hands folded between her breasts, the simple hands of a child who has fallen asleep while offering her bedtime prayers. Andy looked at her and was simply aware that at some point he had fallen in love with her. It was a deep and complete feeling, above (and below) question.

After a while he looked around. Several of the cots were empty. There were maybe five test subjects left in the room. Some were sleeping. One was sitting up on his cot and a grad assistant-a perfectly normal grad assistant of perhaps twenty-five-was questioning him and writing notes on a clipboard. The test subject apparently said something funny, because both of them laughed in the low, considerate way you do when others around you are sleeping.

Andy sat up and took inventory of himself. He felt fine. He tried a smile and found that it fit perfectly. His muscles lay peacefully against one another. He felt eager and fresh, every perception sharply honed and somehow innocent. He could remember feeling this way as a kid, waking up on Saturday morning, knowing his bike was heeled over on its kickstand in the garage, and feeling that the whole weekend stretched ahead of him like a carnival of dreams where every ride was free.

One of the grad assistants came over and said, “How you feeling, Andy?”

Andy looked at him. This was the same guy that had injected him-when? A year ago? He rubbed a palm over his cheek and heard the rasp of beard stubble. “I feel like Rip van Winkle,” he said.