Her eyelids fluttered, and then she was looking up at him. “Daddy?” she asked, her voice was blurred, still half in her dreams. “I got out of sight like you said.”

“I know, honey,” he said. “I know you did. Come on. We’re going to bed.”

22

Twenty minutes later they were both in the double bed of Unit 16, Charlie fast asleep and breathing evenly, Andy still awake but drifting toward sleep, only the steady thump in his head still holding him up. And the questions.

They had been on the run for about a year. It was almost impossible to believe, maybe because it hadn’t seemed so much like running, not when they had been in Port City, Pennsylvania, running the Weight-Off program. Charlie had gone to school in Port City, and how could you be on the run if you were holding a job and your daughter was going to first grade? They had almost been caught in Port City, not because they had been particularly good (although they were terribly dogged, and that frightened Andy a lot) but because Andy had made that crucial lapse-he had allowed himself temporarily to forget they were fugitives.

No chance of that now.

How close were they? Still back in New York? If only he could believe that-they hadn’t got the cabby’s number; they were still tracking him down. More likely they were in Albany, crawling over the airport like maggots over a pile of meat scraps. Hastings Glen? Maybe by morning. But maybe not. Hastings Glen was fifteen miles from the airport. No need to let paranoia sweep away good sense.

I deserve it! I deserve to go in front of the cars for setting that man on fire!

His own voice replying: It could have been worse. It could have been his face.

Voices in a haunted room.

Something else came to him. He was supposed to be driving a Vega. When morning came and the night man didn’t see a Vega parked in front of Unit 16, would he just assume his United Vending Company man had pushed on? Or would he investigate? Nothing he could do about it now. He was totally wasted.

I thought there was something funny about him. He looked pale, sick. And he paid with change. He said he worked for a vending-machine company, but he couldn’t fix the cigarette machine in the lobby.

Voices in a haunted room.

He shifted onto his side, listening to Charlie’s slow, even breathing. He thought they had taken her, but she’d only gone farther back in the bushes. Out of sight. Charlene Norma McGee, Charlie since… well, since forever. If they took you, Charlie, I don’t know what I’d do.

23

One last voice, his roommate Quincey’s voice, from six years ago.

Charlie had been a year old then, and of course they knew she wasn’t normal. They had known that since she was a week old and Vicky had brought her into their bed with them because when she was left in the little crib, the pillow began to… well, began to smolder. The night they had put the crib away forever, not speaking in their fright, a fright too big and too strange to be articulated, it had got hot enough to blister her cheek and she had screamed most of the night, in spite of the Solarcaine Andy had found in the medicine chest. What a crazyhouse that first year had been, no sleep, endless fear. Fires in the wastebaskets when her bottles were late; once the curtains had burst into flame, and if Vicky hadn’t been in the room-It was her fall down the stairs that had finally prompted him to call Quincey. She had been crawling then, and was quite good at going up the stairs on her hands and knees and then backing down again the same way. Andy had been sitting with her that day; Vicky was out at Senter’s with one of her friends, shopping. She had been hesitant about going, and Andy nearly had to throw her out the door. She was looking too used lately, too tired. There was something starey in her eyes that made him think about those combat-fatigue stories you heard during wartime.

He had been reading in the living room, near the foot of the stairs. Charlie was going up and down. Sitting on the stairs was a teddy bear. He should have moved it, of course, but each time she went up, Charlie went around it, and he had become lulled-much as he had become lulled by what appeared to be their normal life in Port City.

As she came down the third time, her feet got tangled around the bear and she came all the way to the bottom, thump, bump, and tumble, wailing with rage and fear. The stairs were carpeted and she didn’t even have a bruise-God watches over drunks and small children, that had been Quincey’s saying, and that was his first conscious thought of Quincey that day-but Andy rushed to her, picked her up, held her, cooed a lot of nonsense to her while he gave her the quick once-over, looking for blood, or a limb hanging wrong, signs of concussion. And-

And he felt it pass him-the invisible, incredible bolt of death from his daughter’s mind. It felt like the backwash of warm air from a highballing subway train, when it’s summertime and you’re standing maybe a little too close on the platform. A soft, soundless passage of warm air… and then the teddy bear was on fire. Teddy had hurt Charlie; Charlie would hurt Teddy. The flames roared up, and for a moment, as it charred, Andy was looking at its black shoebutton eyes through a sheet of flame, and the flames were spreading to the carpeting on the stair where the bear had tumbled.

Andy put his daughter down and ran for the fire extinguisher on the wall near the TV. He and Vicky didn’t talk about the thing their daughter could do-there were times when Andy wanted to, but Vicky wouldn’t hear of it; she avoided the subject with hysterical stubbornness, saying there was nothing wrong with Charlie, nothing wrong-but fire extinguishers had appeared silently, undiscussed, with almost the same stealth as dandelions appear during that period when spring and summer overlap. They didn’t talk about what Charlie could do, but there were fire extinguishers all over the house.

He grabbed this one, smelling the heavy aroma of frying carpet, and dashed for the stairs… and still there was time to think about that story, the one he had read as a kid, “It’s a Good Life,” by some guy named Jerome Bixby, and that had been about a little kid who had enslaved his parents with psychic terror, a nightmare of a thousand possible deaths, and you never knew… you never knew when the little kid was going to get mad…

Charlie was wailing, sitting on her butt at the foot of the stairs.

Andy twisted the knob on the fire extinguisher savagely and sprayed foam on the spreading fire, dousing it. He picked up Teddy, his fur stippled with dots and puffs and dollops of foam, and carried him back downstairs.

Hating himself, yet knowing in some primitive way that it had to be done, the line had to be drawn, the lesson learned, he jammed the bear almost into Charlie’s screaming, frightened, tear-streaked face. Oh you dirty bastard, he had thought desperately, why don’t you just go out to the kitchen and get a paring knife and cut a line up each cheek? Mark her that way? And his mind had seized on that. Scars. Yes. That’s what he had to do. Scar his child. Burn a scar on her soul.

“Do you like the way Teddy looks?” he roared. The bear was scalded, the bear was blackened, and in his hand it was still as warm as a cooling lump of charcoal. “Do you like Teddy to be all burned so you can’t play with him anymore, Charlie?”

Charlie was crying in great, braying whoops, her skin all red fever and pale death, her eyes swimming with tears. “Daaaaa! Ted! Ted!”

“Yes, Teddy,” he said grimly. “Teddy’s all burned, Charlie. You burned Teddy. And if you burn Teddy, you might burn Mommy. Daddy. Now… don’t you do it anymore!” He leaned closer to her, not picking her up yet, not touching her. “Don’t you do it anymore because it is a Bad Thing!” “Daaaaaaaaaa-”