The Dead Zone (27 page)

His father put his arms on Johnny's shoulders and wept. Weizak turned away and began to inspect the pictures on the walls, indifferent water colors by local artists.

Herb began to recover himself. He swiped his arm across his eyes and said, “Look at me, still in my pj top. I had time to change before the ambulance came. I guess I never thought of it. Must be getting senile.”

“No, you're not.”

“Well.” He shrugged. “Your doctor friend brought you down? That was nice of you, Dr. Weizak.”

Sam shrugged. “It was nothing.”

Johnny and his father walked toward the small waiting room and sat down. “Daddy, is she . . .”

“She's sinking,” Herb said. He seemed calmer now. “Conscious, but sinking. She's been asking for you, Johnny. I think she's been holding on for you.”

“My fault,” Johnny said. “All this is my f . . .”

The pain in his ear startled him, and he stared at his father, astonished. Herb had seized his ear and twisted it firmly. So much for the role reversal of having his father cry in his arms. The old twist-the-ear trick had been a punishment Herb had reserved for the gravest of errors. Johnny couldn't remember having his ear twisted since he was thirteen, and had gotten fooling around with their old Rambler. He had inadvertently pushed in the clutch and the old car had rumbled silently downhill to crash into their back shed.

“Don't you ever say that,” Herb said.

“Jeez Dad!
”

Herb let go, a little smile lurking just below the corners of his mouth. “Forgot all about the old twist-the-ear, huh? Probably thought I had, too. No such luck, Johnny.”

Johnny stared at his father, still dumbfounded.

“Don't you
ever
blame yourself.”

“But she was watching that damned . . .”

“News, yes. She was ecstatic, she was thrilled . . . then she was on the floor, her poor old mouth opening and closing like she was a fish out of water.” Herb leaned closer to his son. “The doctor won't come right out and tell me, but he asked me about ‘heroic measures.' I told him none of that stuff. She committed her own kind of sin, Johnny. She presumed to know the mind of God. So don't you ever blame yourself for her mistake.” Fresh tears glinted in his eyes. His voice roughened. “God knows I spent my life loving her and it got hard in the late going. Maybe this is just the best thing.”

“Can I see her?”

“Yes, she's at the end of the hall, Room 35. They're expecting you, and so is she. Just one thing, Johnny. Agree with anything and everything she might say. Don't . . . let her die thinking it was all for nothing.”

“No.” He paused. “Are you coming with me?”

“Not now. Maybe later.”

Johnny nodded and walked up the hall. The lights were turned down low for the nighttime. The brief moment in the soft, kind summer night seemed far away now, but his nightmare in the car seemed very close.

Room 35. VERA HELEN SMITH, the little card on the door read. Had he known her middle name was Helen? It seemed he must have, although he couldn't remember. But he could remember other things: her bringing him an ice-cream bar wrapped in her handkerchief one bright summer day at Old Orchard Beach, smiling and gay. He and his mother and father playing rummy for matches—later, after the religion business began to deepen its hold on her, she wouldn't have cards in the house, not even to play cribbage with. He remembered the day the bee had stung him and he ran to her, bawling his head off, and she had kissed the swelling and pulled out the stinger with tweezers and then had wrapped the wound in a strip of cloth that had been dipped in baking soda.

He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought,
That's what I looked like.
A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.

“Are you Mrs. Smith's son?”

“Yes.”

“Johnny?”
Her voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an
empty gourd. The voice—God help him—made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw.
Stroke,
he thought.
What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.

“Is that you, John?”

“It's me, Ma.”

“Johnny? Is that you?”

“Yes, Ma.”

He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.

“I want my Johnny,” she said querulously.

The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found himself wanting to smash his fist through it.

“Would you leave us alone?” he asked.

“I really shouldn't while . . .”

“Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,” Johnny said. “What about it?”

“Well . . .”

“Bring me my juice, Dad!” his mother cried hoarsely. “Feel like I could drink a quart!”

“Would you get
out
of here?” he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.

The nurse left.

“Ma,” he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him—seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.

“Ma,” he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.

“Gimme those nails, I can do that,” she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. “I want Johnny.”

“Ma, I'm here.”

“John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!”

“Ma,”
he said, afraid the nurse would come back.

“You . . .” She broke off and her head turned toward him a little.” Bend over here where I can see,” she whispered.

He did as she asked.

“You came,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.” Tears began to ooze from the good eye. The bad one, the one on
the side of her face that had been frozen by the shock, stared indifferently upward.

“Sure I came.”

“I saw you,” she whispered. “What a power God has given you, Johnny! Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?”

“Yes, you did.”

“He has a job for you,” she said. “Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave like Elijah or make him send a big fish to swallow you up. Don't do that, John.”

“No. I won't.” He held her claw-hand. His head throbbed.

“Not the potter but the potter's clay, John. Remember.”

“All right.”

“Remember that
!” she said stridently, and he thought,
She's going back into nonsense land.
But she didn't; at least she went no further into nonsense land than she had been since he came out of his coma.

“Heed the still, small voice when it comes,” she said.

“Yes, Ma. I will.”

Her head turned a tiny bit on the pillow, and—was she
smiling?

“You think I'm crazy, I guess.” She twisted her head a little more, so she could look directly at him. “But that doesn't matter. You'll know the voice when it comes. It'll tell you what to do. It told Jeremiah and Daniel and Amos and Abraham. It'll come to you. It'll tell you. And when it does, Johnny . . .
do your duty.”

“Okay, Ma.”

“What a power,” she murmured. Her voice was growing furry and indistinct. “What a power God has given you . . . I knew . . . I always knew . . .” Her voice trailed off. The good eye closed. The other stared blankly forward.

Johnny sat with her another five minutes, then got up to leave. His hand was on the doorknob and he was easing the door open when her dry, rattling voice came again, chilling him with its implacable, positive command.

“Do your duty, John.”

“Yes, Ma.”

It was the last time he ever spoke to her. She died at five minutes past eight on the morning of August 20. Somewhere north of them, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a discussion about Johnny that was almost an argument, and somewhere south of them, Greg Stillson was cutting himself some prime asshole.

“You don't understand,” Greg Stillson said in a voice of utter, reasonable patience to the kid sitting in the lounge at the back of the Ridgeway police station. The kid, shirtless, was tilted back in a padded folding chair and drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was smiling indulgently at Greg Stillson, not understanding that twice was all Greg Stillson ever repeated himself, understanding that there was one prime asshole in the room, but not yet understanding who it was.

That realization would have to be brought home to him.

Forcibly, if necessary.

Outside, the late August morning was bright and warm. Birds sang in the trees. And Greg felt his destiny was closer than ever. That was why he would be careful with this prime asshole. This was no long-haired bike-freak with a bad case of bowlegs and B.O.; this kid was a college boy, his hair was moderately long but squeaky clean, and he was George Harvey's nephew. Not that George cared for him much (George had fought his way across Germany in 1945, and he had two words for these long-haired freaks, and those two words were not Happy Birthday), but he was blood. And George was a man to be reckoned with on the town council.
See what you can do with him,
George had told Greg when Greg informed him that Chief Wiggins had arrested his sister's kid. But his eyes said,
Don't hurt him. He's blood.

The kid was looking at Greg with lazy contempt. “I understand,” he said. “Your Deputy Dawg took my shirt and I want it back. And
you
better understand something. If I don't get it back, I'm going to have the American Civil Liberties Union down on your red neck.”

Greg got up, went to the steel-gray file cabinet opposite the soda machine, pulled out his keyring, selected a key, and opened the cabinet. From atop a pile of accident and traffic
forms, he took a red T-shirt. He spread it open so the legend on it was clear: BABY LET'S FUCK.

“You were wearing this,” Greg said in that same mild voice. “On the street.”

The kid rocked on the back legs of his chair and swigged some more Pepsi. The little indulgent smile playing around his mouth—almost a sneer—did not change. “That's right,” he said. “And I want it back. It's my property.”

Greg's head began to ache. This smartass didn't realize how easy it would be. The room was soundproofed, and there had been times when that soundproofing had muffled screams. No—he didn't realize. He didn't
understand.

But keep your hand on it. Don't go overboard. Don't upset the applecart.

Easy to think. Usually easy to do. But sometimes, his temper—his temper got out of hand.

Greg reached into his pocket and pulled out his Bic lighter.

“So you just go tell your gestapo chief and my fascist uncle that the First Amendment . . .” He paused, eyes widening a little. “What are you . . . ? Hey!
Hey
!”

Taking no notice and at least outwardly calm, Greg struck a light. The Bic's gas flame vroomed upward, and Greg lit the kid's T-shirt on fire. It burned quite well, actually.

The front legs of the kid's chair came down with a bang and he leaped toward Greg with his bottle of Pepsi still in his hand. The self-satisfied little smirk was gone, replaced with a look of wide-eyed shock and surprise—and the anger of a spoiled brat who has had everything his own way for too long.

No one ever called
him
runt,
Greg Stillson thought, and his headache worsened. Oh, he was going to have to be careful.

“Gimme that!” the kid shouted. Greg was holding the shirt out, pinched together in two fingers at the neck, ready to drop it when it got too hot. “Gimme that, you asshole! That's mine! That's . . .”

Greg planted his hand in the middle of the kid's bare chest and shoved him as hard as he could—which was hard indeed. The kid went flying across the room, the anger dissolving into total shock, and—at last—what Greg needed to see: fear.

He dropped the shirt on the tile floor, picked up the kid's Pepsi, and poured what was left in the bottle onto the smouldering T-shirt. It hissed balefully.

The kid was getting up slowly, his back pressed against the
wall. Greg caught his eyes with his own. The kid's eyes were brown and very, very wide.

“We're going to reach an understanding,” Greg said, and the words seemed distant to him, behind the sick thud in his head. “We're going to have a little seminar right here in this back room about just who's the asshole. You got my meaning? We're gonna reach some conclusions. Isn't that what you college boys like to do? Reach conclusions?”

The kid drew breath in hitches. He wet his lips, seemed about to speak, and then yelled:
“Help!”

“Yeah, you need help, all right,” Greg said. “I'm going to give you some, too.”

“You're crazy,” George Harvey's nephew said, and then yelled again, louder: “HELP!”

“I may be,” Greg said. “Sure. But what we got to find out, Sonny, is who the prime asshole is. See what I mean?”

He looked down at the Pepsi bottle in his hand, and suddenly he swung it savagely against the corner of the steel cabinet. It shattered, and when the kid saw the scatter of glass on the floor and the jagged neck in Greg's hand pointing toward him, he screamed. The crotch of his jeans, faded almost white, suddenly darkened. His face went the color of old parchment. And as Greg walked toward him, gritting glass under the workboots he wore summer and winter, he cringed against the wall.