The Dead Zone (34 page)

Johnny didn't see Sarah Hazlett again for three years.

The snow came early that year. There were six inches on the ground by November 7, and Johnny had taken to lacing on a pair of old green gumrubber boots and wearing his old parka for the trek up to the mailbox. Two weeks before, Dave
Pelsen had mailed down a package containing the texts he would be using in January, and Johnny had already begun making tentative lesson plans. He was looking forward to getting back. Dave had also found him an apartment on Howland Street in Cleaves. 24 Howland Street. Johnny kept that on a scrap of paper in his wallet, because the name and number had an irritating way of slipping his mind.

On this day the skies were slatey and lowering, the temperature hovering just below the twenty-degree mark. As Johnny tramped up the driveway, the first spats of snow began to drift down. Because he was alone, he didn't feel too self-conscious about running his tongue out and trying to catch a flake on it. He was hardly limping at all, and he felt good. There hadn't been a headache in two weeks or more.

The mail consisted of an advertising circular, a
Newsweek,
and a small manila envelope addressed to John Smith, no return address. Johnny opened it on the way back, the rest of the mail stuffed into his hip pocket. He pulled out a single page of newsprint, saw the words
Inside View
at the top, and came to a halt halfway back to the house.

It was page three of the previous week's issue. The headline story dealt with a reporter's “exposé” on the handsome second banana of a TV crime show; the second banana had been suspended from high school twice (twelve years ago) and busted for possession of cocaine (six years ago). Hot news for the
hausfraus
of America. There was also an all-grain diet, a cute baby photo, and the story of a nine-year-old girl who had been miraculously cured of cerebral palsy at Lourdes (DOCTORS MYSTIFIED, the headline trumpeted gleefully). A story near the bottom of the page had been circled. MAINE “PSYCHIC” ADMITS HOAX, the headline read. The story was not by-lined.

IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE POLICY of
Inside View
not only to bring you the fullest coverage of the psychics which the so-called “National Press” ignores, but to expose the tricksters and charlatans who have held back true acceptance of legitimate psychic phenomena for so long.

One of these tricksters admitted his own hoax to an
Inside View
source recently. This so-called “psychic,” John Smith of Pownal, Maine, admitted to our source that “it was all a gimmick to pay back my hospital bills.
If there's a book in it, I might come out with enough to pay off what I owe and retire for a couple of years in the bargain,” Smith grinned. “These days, people will believe anything—why shouldn't I get on the gravy train?”

Thanks to
Inside View,
which has always cautioned readers that there are two phony psychics for each real one, John Smith's gravy train has just been derailed. And we reiterate our standing offer of $1000 to anyone who can prove that any nationally known psychic is a fraud.

Hoaxers and charlatans, be warned!

Johnny read the article twice as the snow began to come down more heavily. A reluctant grin broke over his features. The ever-vigilant press apparently didn't enjoy being thrown off some bumpkin's front porch, he thought. He tucked the tear sheet back into its envelope and stuffed it into his back pocket with the rest of the mail.

“Dees,” he said aloud, “I hope you're still black and blue.”

His father was not so amused. Herb read the clipping and then slammed it down on the kitchen table in disgust. “You ought to sue that son of a whore. That's nothing but slander, Johnny. A deliberate hatchet job.”

“Agreed and agreed,” Johnny said. It was dark outside. This afternoon's silently falling snow had developed into tonight's early winter blizzard. The wind shrieked and howled around the eaves. The driveway had disappeared under a dunelike progression of drifts. “But there was no third party when we talked, and Dees damn well knows it. It's his word against mine.”

“He didn't even have the guts to put his own name to this lie,” Herb said. “Look at this ‘an
Inside View
source.' What's this source? Get him to name it, that's what I say.”

“Oh, you can't do that,” Johnny said, grinning. “That's like walking up to the meanest street-fighter on the block with a KICK ME HARD sign taped to your crotch. Then they turn it into a holy war, page one and all. No thanks. As far as I'm concerned, they did me a favor. I don't want to make a career out of telling people where gramps hid his stock certificates or who's going to win the fourth at Scarborough Downs. Or
take this lottery.” One of the things that had most surprised Johnny on coming out of his coma was to discover that Maine and about a dozen other states had instituted a legal numbers game. “In the last month I've gotten sixteen letters from people who want me to tell them what the number's going to be. It's insane. Even if I could tell them, which I couldn't, what good would it do them? You can't pick your own number in the Maine lottery, you get what they give you. But still I get the letters.”

“I don't see what that has to do with this crappy article.”

“If people think I'm a phony, maybe they'll leave me alone.”

“Oh,” Herb said. “Yeah, I see what you mean.” He lit his pipe. “You've never really been comfortable with it, have you?”

“No,” Johnny said. “We never talk much about it, either, which is something of a relief. It seems like the only thing other people
do
want to talk about.” And it wasn't just that they wanted to talk; that wouldn't have bothered him so much. But when he
was
in Slocum's Store for a sixpack or a loaf of bread, the girl would try to take his money without touching his hand, and the frightened, skittish look in her eyes was unmistakable. His father's friends would give him a little wave instead of a handshake. In October Herb had hired a local high school girl to come in once a week to do some dusting and vacuum the floors. After three weeks she had quit for no stated reason at all—probably someone at her high school had told her who she was cleaning for. It seemed that for everyone who was anxious to be touched, to be informed, to be in contact with Johnny's peculiar talent, there was another who regarded him as a kind of leper. At times like these, Johnny would think of the nurses staring at him the day he had told Eileen Magown that her house was on fire, staring at him like magpies on a telephone wire. He would think of the way the TV reporter had drawn back from him after the press conference's unexpected conclusion, agreeing with everything he said but not wanting to be touched. Unhealthy either way.

“No, we don't talk about it,” Herb agreed. “It makes me think of your mother, I suppose. She was so sure you'd been given the . . . the whatever-it-is for some reason. Sometimes I wonder if she wasn't right.”

Johnny shrugged. “All I want is a normal life. I want to
bury the whole damn thing. And if this little squib helps me do it, so much the better.”

“But you still can do it, can't you?” Herb asked. He was looking closely at his son.

Johnny thought about a night not quite a week ago. They had gone out to dinner, a rare happening on their strapped budget. They had gone to Cole's Farm in Gray, probably the best restaurant in the area, a place that was always packed. The night had been cold, the dining room cheery and warm. Johnny had taken his father's coat and his own into the cloakroom, and as he thumbed through the racked coats, looking for empty hangers, a whole series of clear impressions had cascaded through his mind. It was like that sometimes, and on another occasion he could have handled every coat for twenty minutes and gotten nothing at all. Here was a lady's coat with a fur collar. She was having an affair with one of her husband's poker buddies, was scared sick about it, but didn't know how to close it off. A man's denim jacket, sheepskin-lined. This guy was also worried—about his brother, who had been badly hurt on a construction project the week before. A small boy's parka—his grandmother in Durham had given him a Snoopy transistor radio just today and he was mad because his father hadn't let him bring it into the dining room with him. And another one, a plain, black topcoat, that had turned him cold with terror and robbed him of his appetite. The man who owned this coat was going mad. So far he had kept up appearances—not even his wife suspected—but his vision of the world was being slowly darkened by a series of increasingly paranoid fantasies. Touching that coat had been like touching a writhing coil of snakes.

“Yes, I can still do it,” Johnny said briefly. “I wish to hell I couldn't.”

“You really mean that?”

Johnny thought of the plain, black topcoat. He had only picked at his meal, looking this way and that, trying to single the man out of the crowd, unable to do so.

“Yes,” he said. “I mean it.”

“Best forgotten then,” Herb said, and clapped his son on the shoulder.

And for the next month or so it seemed that it would be forgotten. Johnny drove north to attend a meeting at the high school for mid-year teachers and to take a load of his personal things up to his new apartment, which he found small but liveable.

He went in his father's car, and as he was getting ready to leave Herb asked him, “You're not nervous? About driving?”

Johnny shook his head. Thoughts of the accident itself troubled him very little now. If something was going to happen to him, it would. And deep down he felt confident that lightning would not strike in the same place again—when he died, he didn't believe it would be in a car accident.

In fact, the long trip was quiet and soothing, the meeting a little bit like Old Home Week. All of his old colleagues who were still teaching at CMHS dropped by to wish him the best. But he couldn't help noticing how few of them actually shook hands with him, and he seemed to sense a certain reserve, a wariness in their eyes. Driving home, he convinced himself it was probably imagination. And if not, well . . . even that had its amusing side. If they had read their
Inside View,
they would know he was a hoax and nothing to worry about.

The meeting over, there was nothing to do but go back to Pownal and wait for the Christmas holidays to come and go. The packages containing personal objects stopped coming, almost as if a switch had been thrown—the power of the press, Johnny told his father. They were replaced by a brief spate of angry—and mostly anonymous—letters and cards from people who seemed to feel personally cheated.

“You ort to burn in H!E!L!L! for your slimey skeems to bilk this American Republic,” a typical one read. It had been written on a crumpled sheet of Ramada Inn stationery and was postmarked York, Pennsylvania. “You are nothing but a
Con Artist
and a
dirty rotten cheet.
I bless God for that paper that saw thru you. You ort to be ashamed of yourself Sir. The Bible says an ordinary sinner will be cast into the Lake OF F!I!R!E! and be consomed but a F!A!U!L!S!E P!R!O!F!I!T shall burn
forever
and
EVER!
Thats you a False Profit who sold your Immortal Soul for a few cheep bucks. So thats the end of my letter and I hope for your sake I never catch you
out on the Streets of your Home Town. Signed, A FRIEND (of God not you Sir)!”

Over two dozen letters in this approximate vein came in during the course of about twenty days following the appearance of the
Inside View
story. Several enterprising souls expressed an interest in joining in with Johnny as partners. “I used to be a magician's assistant,” one of these latter missives bragged, “and I could trick an old whore out of her g-string. If you're planning a mentalist gig, you need me in!”

Then the letters dried up, as had the earlier influx of boxes and packages. On a day in late November when he had checked the mailbox and found it empty for the third afternoon in a row, Johnny walked back to the house remembering that Andy Warhol had predicted that a day would come when everyone in America would be famous for fifteen minutes. Apparently his fifteen minutes had come and gone, and no one was any more pleased about it than he was.

But as things turned out, it wasn't over yet.

“Smith?” The telephone voice asked. “John Smith?”

“Yes.” It wasn't a voice he knew, or a wrong number. That made it something of a puzzle since his father had had the phone unlisted about three months ago. This was December 17, and their tree stood in the corner of the living room, its base firmly wedged into the old tree stand Herb had made when Johnny was just a kid. Outside it was snowing.

“My name is Bannerman. Sheriff George Bannerman, from Castle Rock.” He cleared his throat. “I've got a . . . well, I suppose you'd say I've got a proposal for you.”

“How did you get this number?”

Bannerman cleared his throat again. “Well, I could have gotten it from the phone company, I suppose, it being police business. But actually I got it from a friend of yours. Doctor by the name of Weizak.”

“Sam Weizak gave you my number?”

“That's right.”

Johnny sat down in the phone nook, utterly perplexed. Now the name Bannerman meant something to him. He had come across the name in a Sunday supplement article only recently. He was the sheriff of Castle County, which was considerably
west of Pownal, in the Lakes region. Castle Rock was the county seat, about thirty miles from Norway and twenty from Bridgton.