She tried to shunt the thought aside.
(or dead inside)
but it would not be shunted.
But he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t. His terror in the blackout. His story about what those Cong had done to him. Could that be a lie? Could it, with the ruined map of his face to back up the tale?
Her head went back and forth on the pillow, back and forth, back and forth, in an endless gesture of negation. She did not want to think about it, did not, did not.
But couldn’t help it.
Suppose… suppose they had made the blackout happen? Or suppose it had just happened… and he had used it? (NO! NO! NO! NO!)
And yet her mind was now out of her conscious control, and it circled this maddening, horrifying patch of nettles with a kind of inexorable, cold determination. She was a bright girl, and she handled her chain of logic carefully, one bead at a time, telling it as a bitter penitent must tell the terrible beads of utter confession and surrender.
She remembered a TV show she had seen once, it had been on Starsky and Hutch. They put this cop into jail in the same cell with this bad guy who knew all about a robbery. They had called the cop pretending to be a jailbird a “ringer.”
Was John Rainbird a ringer?
Her father said he was. And why would her father lie to her?
Who do you believe in? John or Daddy? Daddy or John?
No, no, no, her mind repeated steadily, monotonously… and to no effect. She was caught in a torture of doubt that no eight-year-old girl should have to stand, and when sleep came, the dream came with it. Only this time she saw the face of the silhouette, which stood to block the light.
11
“All right, what is it?” Hockstetter asked grumpily.
His tone indicated that it had better be pretty goddam good. He had been home watching James Bond on the Sunday Night Movie when the phone rang and a voice told him that they had a potential problem with the little girl. Over an open line, Hockstetter didn’t dare ask what the problem was. He just went as he was, in a pair of paint-splattered jeans and a tennis shirt.
He had come frightened, chewing a Rolaid to combat the boil of sour acid in his stomach. He had kissed his wife good-bye, answering her raised eyebrows by saying it was a slight problem with some of the equipment and he would be right back. He wondered what she would say if she knew the “slight problem” could kill him at any moment.
Standing here now, looking into the ghostly infrared monitor, they used to watch Charlie when the lights were out, he wished again that this was over and the little girl out of the way. He had never bargained for this when the whole thing was just an academic problem outlined in a series of blue folders. The truth was the burning cinderblock wall; the truth was spot temperatures of thirty thousand degrees or more; the truth was Brad Hyuck talking about whatever forces fired the engine of the universe; and the truth was that he was very scared. He felt as if he were sitting on top of an unstable nuclear reactor.
The man on duty, Neary, swung around when Hockstetter came in. “Cap came down to visit her around five,” he said. “She turned her nose up at supper. Went to bed early.” Hockstetter looked into the monitor. Charlie was tossing restlessly on top of her bed, fully dressed. “She looks like maybe she’s having a nightmare.” “One, or a whole series of them,” Neary said grimly. “I called because the temperature in there has gone up three degrees in the last hour.” “That’s not much.” “It is when a room’s temperature-controlled the way that one is. Not much doubt that she’s doing it. Hockstetter considered this, biting on a knuckle. “I think someone should go in there and wake her up,” Neary said, finally drifting down to the bottom line. “Is that what you got me down here for?” Hockstetter cried. “To wake up a kid and give her a glass of warm milk?” “I didn’t want to exceed my authority,” Neary said stonily.
“No.” Hockstetter said, and had to bite down on the rest of the words. The little girl would have to be wakened if the temperature went much higher, and there was always a chance that if she was frightened enough, she might strike out at the first person she saw upon waking. After all, they had been busy removing the checks and balances on her pyrokinetic ability and had been quite successful.
“Where’s Rainbird?” he asked. Neary shrugged. “Whipping his weasel in Winnipeg, for all I know. But as far as she’s concerned, he’s of duty. I think she’d be pretty suspicious if he showed up n-“The digital thermometer inset on Neary’s control board flicked over another degree, hesitated, and then flicked over two more in quick succession. “Somebody’s got to go in there,” Neary said, and now his voice was a bit unsteady. “It’s seventy-four in there now. What if she blows sky-high?” Hockstetter tried to think what to do, but his brain seemed frozen. He was sweating freely now, but his mouth had gone as dry as a woolly sock. He wanted to be back home, tipped back in his La-Z-Boy, watching James Bond go after SMERSH or whatever the hell it was. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be looking at the red numbers under the little square of glass, waiting for them to suddenly blur upwards in tens, thirties, hundreds, as they had when the cinderblock wall
Think! he screamed at himself. What do you do? What do you-
“She just woke up,” Neary said softly.
They both stared intently at the monitor. Charlie had swung her legs over onto the floor and was sitting with her head down, her palms on her cheeks, her hair obscuring her face. After a moment she got up and went into the bathroom, face blank, eyes mostly closed-more asleep than awake, Hockstetter guessed.
Neary flicked a switch and the bathroom monitor came on. Now the picture was clear and sharp in the light of the fluorescent bar. Hockstetter expected her to urinate, but Charlie just stood inside the door, looking at the toilet.
“Oh Mother of Mary, look at that,” Neary murmured.
The water in the toilet bowl had begun to steam slightly. This went on for more than a minute (one-twenty-one in Neary’s log), and then Charlie went to the toilet, flushed it, urinated, flushed it again, drank two glasses of water, and went back to bed. This time her sleep seemed easier, deeper. Hockstetter glanced at the thermometer and saw it had dropped four degrees. As he watched, it dropped another degree, to sixty-nine-just one degree above the suite’s normal temperature.
He remained with Neary until after midnight.
“I’m going home to bed. You’ll get this written up, won’t you?”
“That’s what I get paid for,” Neary said stolidly.
Hockstetter went home. The next day he wrote a memo suggesting that any further gains in knowledge that further testing might provide ought to be balanced against the potential hazards, which in his opinion were growing too fast for comfort.
12
Charlie remembered little of the night. She remembered being hot, getting up, getting rid of the heat. She remembered the dream but only vaguely-a sense of freedom.
(up ahead was the light-the end of the forest, open land where she and Necromancer would ride forever)
mingled with a sense of fear and a sense of loss. It had been his face, it had been John’s face, all along. And perhaps she had known it. Perhaps she had known that
(the woods are burning don’t hurt the horses o please don’t hurt the horses)
all along.
When she woke up the next morning, her fear, confusion, and desolation had begun their perhaps inevitable change into a bright, hard gem of anger.
He better be out of the way on Wednesday, she thought. He just better. If it’s true about what he did, he better not come near me or Daddy on Wednesday.