Stephen King: Firestarter

On the run. He and Charlie. He was thirty-four years old and until last year he had been an instructor of English at Harrison State College in Ohio. Harrison was a sleepy little college town. Good old Harrison, the very heart of mid-America. Good old Andrew McGee, fine, upstanding young man. Remember the riddle? Why is a farmer the pillar of his community? Because he’s always outstanding in his field.

Thud, thud thud riderless black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, ironshod hooves digging up soft gray clods of brain tissue, leaving hoofprints to fill up with mystic crescents of blood.

The cabby had been a pushover. Sure. An outstanding cab driver.

He dozed and saw Charlie’s face. And Charlie’s face became Vicky’s face.

Andy McGee and his wife, pretty Vicky. They had pulled her fingernails out, one by one. They had pulled out four of them and then she had talked. That, at least, was his deduction. Thumb, index, second, ring. Then: Stop. I’ll talk. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just stop the hurting. Please. So she had told. And then… perhaps it had been an accident… then his wife had died. Well, some things are bigger than both of us, and other things are bigger than all of us.

Things like the Shop, for instance.

Thud, thud thud riderless black horse coming on, coming on, and coming on: behold, a black horse.

Andy slept.

And remembered.

The man in charge of the experiment was Dr. Wanless. He was fat and balding and had at least one rather bizarre habit.

“We’re going to give each of you twelve young ladies and gentlemen an injection,” he said, shredding a cigarette into the ashtray in front of him. His small pink fingers plucked at the thin cigarette paper, spilling out neat little cones of golden-brown tobacco. “Six of these injections will be water. Six of them will be water mixed with a tiny amount of a chemical compound which we call Lot Six. The exact nature of this compound is classified, but it is essentially an hypnotic and mild hallucinogenic. Thus you understand that the compound will be administered by the double-blind method… which is to say, neither you nor we will know who has gotten a clear dose and who has not until later. The dozen of you will be under close supervision for forty-eight hours following the injection. Questions?”

There were several, most having to do with the exact composition of Lot Six-that word classified was like putting bloodhounds on a convict’s trail. Wanless slipped these questions quite adroitly. No one had asked the question twenty-two-year-old Andy McGee was most interested in. He considered raising his hand in the hiatus that fell upon the nearly deserted lecture hall in Harrison’s combined Psychology/Sociology building and asking, Say, why are you ripping up perfectly good cigarettes like that? Better not to. Better to let the imagination run on a free rein while this boredom went on. He was trying to give up smoking. The oral retentive smokes them; the anal retentive shreds them. (This brought a slight grin to Andy’s lips, which he covered with a hand.) Wanless’s brother had died of lung cancer and the doctor was symbolically venting his aggressions on the cigarette industry. Or maybe it was just one of those flamboyant tics that college professors felt compelled to flaunt rather than suppress. Andy had one English teacher his sophomore year at Harrison (the man was now mercifully retired) who sniffed his tie constantly while lecturing on William Dean Howells and the rise of realism.

“If there are no more questions, I’ll ask you to fill out these forms and will expect to see you promptly at nine next Tuesday.”

Two grad assistants passed out photocopies with twenty-five ridiculous questions to answer yes or no. Have you ever undergone psychiatric counselling?-No.8. Do you believe you have ever had an authentic psychic experience?-No.14. Have you ever used hallucinogenic drugs?-No.18. After a slight pause, Andy checked “no” to that one, thinking, In this brave year 1969, who hasn’t used them?

He had been put on to this by Quincey Tremont, the fellow he had roomed with in college. Quincey knew that Andy’s financial situation wasn’t so hot. It was May of Andy’s senior year; he was graduating fortieth in a class of five hundred and six, third in the English program. But that didn’t buy no potatoes, as he had told Quincey, who was a psych major. Andy had a GA lined up for himself starting in the fall semester, along with a scholarhip-loan package that would be just about enough to buy groceries and keep him in the Harrison grad program. But all of that was fall, and in the meantime there was the summer hiatus. The best he had been able to line up so far was a responsible, challenging position as an Arco gas jockey on the night shift.

“How would you feel about a quick two hundred?” Quincey had asked. Andy brushed long, dark hair away from his green eyes and grinned. “Which men’s room do I set up my concession in?” “No, it’s a psych experiment,” Quincey said. “Being run by the Mad Doctor, though. Be warned.”

“Who he?”

“Him Wanless, Tonto. Heap big medicine man in-um Psych Department.”

“Why do they call him the Mad Doctor?”

“Well,” Quincey said, “he’s a rat man and a Skinner man both. A behaviorist. The behaviorists are not exactly being overwhelmed with love these days.”

“Oh,” Andy said, mystified.

“Also, he wears very thick little rimless glasses, which makes him look quite a bit like the guy that shrank the people in Dr. Cyclops . You ever see that show?”

Andy, who was a late-show addict, had seen it, and felt on safer ground. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to participate in any experiments run by a prof who was classified as a.) a rat man and b.) a Mad Doctor.

“They’re not trying to shrink people, are they?” he asked.

Quincey had laughed heartily. “No, that’s strictly for the special-effects people who work on the B horror pictures,” he said. “The Psych Department has been testing a series of low-grade hallucinogens. They’re working with the U.S. Intelligence Service.”

“CIA?” Andy asked. “Not CIA, DIA, or NSA,” Quincey said. “Lower profile than any of them. Have you ever heard of an outfit called the Shop?” “Maybe in a Sunday supplement or something. I’m not sure.”

Quincey lit his pipe. “These things work in about the same way all across the board,” he said. “Psychology, chemistry, physics, biology… even the sociology boys get some of the folding green. Certain programs are subsidized by the government. Anything from the mating ritual of the tsetse fly to the possible disposal of used plutonium slugs. An outfit like the Shop has to spend all of its yearly budget to justify a like amount the following year.”

“That shit troubles me mightily,” Andy said.

“It troubles almost any thinking person,” Quincey said with a calm, untroubled smile. “But the train just keeps rolling. What does our intelligence branch want with low-grade halucinogens? Who knows? Not me. Not you. Probably they don’t either. But the reports look good in closed committees come budget-renewal time. They have their pets in every department. At Harrison, Wanless is their pet in the Psych Department”

“The administration doesn’t mind?”

“Don’t be naive, my boy.” He had his pipe going to his satisfaction and was puffing great stinking clouds of smoke out into the ratty apartment living room. His voice accordingly became more rolling, more orotund, more Buckleyesque. “What’s good for Wanless is good for the Harrison Psychology Department, which next year will have its very own building-no more slumming with those sociology types. And what’s good for Psych is good for Harrison State College. And for Ohio. And all that blah-blah.”