Stephen King - Firestarter

“It is the girl I am primarily worried about,” Wanless told him for the twentieth? thirtieth? fiftieth? time. “McGee and Tomlinson marrying… a thousand-to-one chance. It should have been prevented at all costs. Yet who could have foreseen-”

“You were all in favor of it at the time,” Cap said, and then added dryly, “I do believe you would have given the bride away if they’d asked you.”

“None of us realized,” Wanless muttered. “It took a stroke to make me see. Lot Six was nothing but a synthetic copy of a pituitary extract, after all… an incredibly powerful painkiller hallucinogen that we did not understand then and that we don’t understand now. We know-or at least we are ninety-nine-percent sure-that the natural counterpart of this substance is responsible in some way for the occasional flashes of psi ability that nearly all human beings demonstrate from time to time. A surprisingly wide range of phenomena: precognition, telekinesis, mental domination, bursts of superhuman strength, temporary control over the sympathetic nervous system. Did you know that the pituitary gland becomes suddenly overactive in nearly all biofeedback experiments?”

Cap did. Wanless had told him this and all the rest times without number. But there was no need to answer; Wanless’s rhetoric was in full fine flower this morning, the sermon well-launched. And Cap was disposed to listen… this one last time. Let the old man have his turn at bat. For Wanless, it was the bottom of the ninth.

“Yes, this is true,” Wanless answered himself. “It’s active in biofeedback, it’s active in REM sleep, and people with damaged pituitaries rarely dream normally. People with damaged pituitaries have a tremendously high incidence of brain tumours and leukemia. The pituitary gland, Captain Hollister. It is, speaking in terms of evolution, the oldest endocrine gland in the human body. During early adolescence it dumps many times its own weight in glandular secretions into the bloodstream. It’s a terribly important gland, a terribly mysterious gland. If I believed in the human soul, Captain Hollister, I would say it resides within the pituitary gland.”

Cap grunted.

“We know these things,” Wanless said, “and we know that Lot Six somehow changed the physical composition of the pituitary glands of those who participated in the experiment. Even that of your so-called “quiet one,” James Richardson. Most importantly, we can deduce from the girl that it also changes the chromosome structure in some way… and that the change in the pituitary gland may be a genuine mutation.”

“The X factor was passed on.”

“No,” Wanless said. “That is one of the many things you fail to grasp, Captain Hollister. Andrew McGee became an X factor in his post experiment life. Victoria Tomlinson became a Y factor-also affected, but not in the same way as her husband. The woman retained a low-threshold telekinetic power. The man retained a mid-level mental dominance ability. The little girl, though… the little girl, Captain Hollister… what is she? We don’t really know. She is the Z factor.”

“We intend to find out,” Cap said softly.

Now both sides of Wanless’s mouth sneered. “You intend to find out,” he echoed. “Yes, if you persist, you certainly may… you blind, obsessive fools.” He closed his eyes for a moment and put one hand over them. Cap watched him calmly.

Wanless said: “One thing you know already. She lights fires.” “Yes.” “You assume that she has inherited her mother’s telekinetic ability. In fact, you strongly suspect it.” “Yes.” “As a very small child, she was totally unable to control these… these talents, for want of a better word…” “A small child is unable to control its bowels,” Cap said, using one of the examples set forth in the extracta. “But as the child grows older-”

“Yes, yes, I am familiar with the analogy. But an older child may still have accidents.”

Smiling, Cap answered, “We’re going to keep her in a fireproof room.”

“A cell.”

Still smiling, Cap said, “If you prefer.”

“I offer you this deduction,” Wanless said. “She does not like to use this ability she has. She has been frightened of it, and this fright has been instilled in her quite deliberately. I will give you a parallel example. My brother’s child. There were matches in the house. Freddy wanted to play with them. Light them and then shake them out. ‘Pretty, pretty,” he would say. And so my brother set out to make a complex. To frighten him so badly he would never play with the matches again. He told Freddy that the heads of the matches were sulfur and that they would make his teeth rot and fall out. That looking at struck matches would eventually blind him. And finally, he held Freddy’s hand momentarily over a lit match and singed him with it.

“Your brother,” Cap murmured, “sounds like a true prince among men.”

“Better a small red place on the boy’s hand than a child in the burn unit, wetpacked, with third-degree burns over sixty percent of his body,” Wanless said grimly.

“Better still to put the matches out of the child’s reach.”

“Can you put Charlene McGee’s matches out of her reach?” Wanless asked.

Cap nodded slowly. “You have a point of a sort, but-”

“Ask yourself this, Captain Hollister: how must it have been for Andrew and Victoria McGee when this child was an infant? After they begin to make the necessary connection? The bottle is late. The baby cries. At the same time, one of the stuffed animals right there in the crib with her bursts into smoky flame. There is a mess in the diaper. The baby cries. A moment later the dirty clothes in the hamper begin to burn spontaneously. You have the records, Captain Hollister; you know how it was in that house. A fire extinguisher and a smoke detector in every single room. And once it was her hair , Captain Hollister; they came into her room and found her standing in her crib and screaming and her hair was on fire.”

“Yes,” Cap said, “it must have made them goddam nervous.”

“So,” Wanless said, “they toilet-trained her… and they fire-trained her.”

“Fire-training,” Cap mused.

“Which is only to say that, like my brother and his boy Freddy, they made a complex. You have quoted me that analogy, Captain Hollister, so let us examine it for a moment. What is toilet-training? It is making a complex, pure and simple.” And suddenly astonishingly, the old man’s voice climbed to a high, wavering treble, the voice of a woman scolding a baby. Cap looked on with disgusted astonishment.

“You bad baby!” Wanless cried. “Look what you’ve done! It’s nasty, baby, see how nasty it is? It’s nasty to do it in your pants! Do grown-ups do it in their pants? Do it on the pot, baby, on the pot .”

“Please,” Cap said, pained.

“It is the making of a complex,” Wanless said. “Toilet-training is accomplished by focusing the child’s attention on his own eliminatory processes in a way we would consider unhealthy if the object of fixation were something different. How strong is the complex inculcated in the child, you might ask? Richard Damon of the University of Washington asked himself this question and made an experiment to find out. He advertised for fifty student volunteers. He filled them up with water and soda and milk until they all badly needed to urinate. After a certain set time had passed, he told them they could go… if they went in their pants.”

“That’s disgusting!” Cap said loudly. He was shocked and sickened. That wasn’t an experiment; it was an exercise in degeneracy.

“See how well the complex has set in your own psyche,” Wanless said quietly. “You did not think it was so disgusting when you were twenty months old. Then, when you had to go, you went. You would have gone sitting on the pope’s lap if someone had set you there and you had to go. The point of the Damon experiment, Captain Hollister, is this: most of them couldn’t . They understood that the ordinary rules of behavior had been set aside, at least for the course of the experiment; they were each alone in quarters at least as private as the ordinary bathroom… but fully eighty-eight percent of them just couldn’t . No matter how strong the physical need was, the complex instilled by their parents was stronger.”