The Dead Zone (59 page)

He picked up the case again and walked on. The only sound was the squeak of his shoes on the snow. The big thermometer over the door of the Granite State Savings Bank stood at 3 degrees, and the air had that feeling of total silent inertia that belongs exclusively to cold New Hampshire mornings. Noting moved. The roadway was empty. The windshields of the parked cars were blinded with cataracts of frost. Dark windows, drawn shades. To Johnny it all seemed somehow dreadful and at the same time holy. He fought the feeling. This was no holy business he was on.

He crossed Jasper Street and there was the town hall, standing white and austerely elegant behind its plowed banks of twinkling snow.

What you going to do if the front door's locked, smart guy?

Well, he would find a way to cross that bridge if he had to. Johnny looked around, but there was no one to see him. If this had been the president coming for one of his famous town meetings, everything would have been different, of course. The place would have been blocked off since the night before, and men would be stationed inside already. But this was only a U.S. representative, one of over four hundred, no big deal. No big deal yet.

Johnny went up the steps and tried the door. The knob turned easily and he stepped into the cold entryway and pulled the door shut behind him. Now the headache was coming back, pulsing along with the steady thick beat of his heart. He set his case down and massaged his temples with his gloved fingers.

There was a sudden low scream. The coat-closet door was opening, very slowly, and then something white was falling out of the shadows toward him.

Johnny barely held back a cry. For one moment he thought it was a body, falling out of the closet like something from a spook movie. But it was only a heavy cardboard sign that read PLEASE HAVE PAPERS IN ORDER BEFORE APPEARING FOR EXAMINATION.

He set it back in place and then turned to the doorway giving upon the stairs.

This door was now locked.

He leaned down to get a better look at it in the dim white glow of the streetlight that filtered in the one window. It was
a spring lock, and he thought he might be able to open it with a coat hanger. He found one in the coat closet and hooked the neck of it into the crack between the door and the jamb. He worked it down to the lock and began to fumble around. His head was thudding fiercely now. At last he heard the bolt snap back as the wire caught it. He pulled the door open. He picked up his attaché case and went through, still holding the coat hanger. He pulled the door closed behind him and heard it lock again. He went up the narrow stairs, which creaked and groaned under his weight.

At the top of the stairs there was a short hallway with several doors on either side. He walked down the hall, past TOWN MANAGER and TOWN SELECTMEN, past TAX ASSESSOR and MEN'S and O'SEER OF THE POOR and LADIES'.

There was an unmarked door at the end. It was unlocked and he came out onto the gallery above the rear of the meeting hall, which was spread out below him in a crazy quilt of shadows. He closed the door behind him and shivered a little at the soft stir of echoes in the empty hall. His footfalls also echoed back as he walked to the right along the rear gallery, then turned left. Now he was walking along the right-hand side of the hall, about twenty-five feet above the floor. He stopped at a point above the woodstove and directly across from the podium where Stillson would be standing in about five-and-a-half hours.

He sat down cross-legged and rested for a while. Tried to get in control of the headache with some deep breathing. The woodstove wasn't operating and he felt the cold settling steadily against him—and then into him. Previews of the winding shroud.

When he had begun to feel a little better, he thumbed the catches on the attaché case. The double click echoed back as his footfalls had done, and this time it was the sound of cocking pistols.

Western justice,
he thought, for no reason at all. That was what the prosecutor had said when the jury found Claudine Longet guilty of shooting her lover.
She's found out what western justice means.

Johnny looked down into the case and rubbed his eyes. His vision doubled briefly and then things came together again. He was getting an impression from the very wood he was sitting on. A very old impression; if it had been a photograph,
it would have been sepia-toned. Men standing here and smoking cigars, talking and laughing and waiting for town meeting to begin. Had it been 1920? 1902? There was something ghostly about it that made him feel uneasy. One of them had been talking about the price of whiskey and cleaning his nose with a silver toothpick and

(and two years before he had poisoned his wife)

Johnny shivered. Whatever the impression was, it didn't matter. It was an impression of a man who was long dead now.

The rifle gleamed up at him.

When men do it in wartime, they give them medals,
he thought.

He began to assemble the rifle. Each
click!
echoed back, just once, solemnly, the sound of a cocking pistol.

He loaded the Remington with five bullets.

He placed it across his knees.

And waited.

Dawn came slowly. Johnny dozed a little, but he was too cold now to do more than doze. Thin, sketchy dreams haunted what sleep he did get.

He came fully awake at a little past seven. The door below was thrown open with a crash, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out,
Who's there?

It was the custodian. Johnny put his eye to one of the diamond shapes cut into the balustrade and saw a burly man who was bundled up in a thick Navy pea coat. He was coming up the center aisle with an armload of firewood. He was humming “Red River Valley.” He dropped the armload of wood into the woodbox with a crash and then disappeared below Johnny. A second later he heard the thin screeing noise of the stove's firebox door being swung open.

Johnny suddenly thought of the plume of vapor he was producing every time he exhaled. Suppose the custodian looked up? Would he be able to see that?

He tried to slow the rate of his breathing, but that made his head ache worse and his vision doubled alarmingly.

Now there was the crackle of paper being crumpled, then the scratch of a match. A faint whiff of sulphur in the cold
air. The custodian went on humming “Red River Valley,” and then broke into loud and tuneless song: “From this valley they say you are going . . . we will miss your bright eyes and sweet smiiiiile . . .”

Now a different crackling sound. Fire.

“That's got it, you sucker,” the custodian said from directly below Johnny, and then there was the sound of the firebox door being slammed shut again. Johnny pressed both hands over his mouth like a bandage, suddenly afflicted with suicidal amusement. He saw himself rising up from the floor of the gallery, as thin and white as any self-respecting ghost. He saw himself spreading his arms like wings and his fingers like talons and calling down in hollow tones: “That's got
you,
you sucker.”

He held the laughter behind his hands. His head throbbed like a tomato full of hot, expanding blood. His vision jittered and blurred crazily. Suddenly he wanted very badly to move away from the impression of the man who had been cleaning his nose with the silver toothpick, but he didn't dare make a sound. Dear Jesus, what if he had to sneeze?

Suddenly, with no warning a terrible wavering shriek filled the hall, drilling into Johnny's ears like thin silver nails, climbing, making his head vibrate. He opened his mouth to scream—

It cut off.

“Oh, you whore,” the custodian said conversationally.

Johnny looked through the diamond and saw the custodian standing behind the podium and fiddling with a microphone. The mike cord snaked down to a small portable amp. The custodian went down the few steps from the podium to the floor and pulled the amplifier farther from the mike, then fooled with the dials on top of it. He went back to the mike and turned it on again. There was another feedback whine, this one lower and then tapering away entirely. Johnny pressed his hands tight against his forehead and rubbed them back and forth.

The custodian tapped on the mike with his thumb, and the sound filled the big empty room. It sounded like a fist knocking on a coffin lid. Then his voice, still tuneless, but now amplified to the point of monstrosity, a giant's voice bludgeoning into Johnny's head:
“FROM THIS VAL-LEEE THEY SAY YOU ARE GOING . . .”

Stop it,
Johnny wanted to scream.
Oh, please stop it, I'm going crazy, can't you stop it?

The singing ended with a loud, amplified
snap!
and the custodian said in his own voice, “That's got you, whore.”

He walked out of Johnny's line of sight again. There was a sound of tearing paper and the low popping sounds of twine being snapped. Then the custodian reappeared, whistling and holding a large stack of booklets. He began to place them at close intervals along the benches.

When he had finished that chore, the custodian buttoned his coat and left the hall. The door slammed hollowly shut behind him. Johnny looked at his watch. It was 7:45. The town hall was warming up a little. He sat and waited. The headache was still very bad, but oddly enough, it was easier to bear than it had ever been before. All he had to do was tell himself that he wouldn't have to bear it for long.

The doors slammed open again promptly at nine o'clock, startling him out of a catnap. His hands clamped tightly over the rifle and then relaxed. He put his eye to the diamond-shaped peephole. Four men this time. One of them was the custodian, the collar of his pea coat turned up against his neck. The other three were wearing topcoats with suits underneath. Johnny felt his heartbeat quicken. One of them was Sonny Elliman. His hair was cut short now and handsomely styled, but the brilliant green eyes had not changed.

“Everything set?” he asked

“Check for yourself,” the custodian said.

“Don't be offended, Dad,” one of the others replied. They were moving to the front of the hall. One of them clicked the amplifier on and then clicked it off again, satisfied.

“People round these parts act like he was the bloody emperor,” the custodian grumbled.

“He is, he is,” the third man said—Johnny thought he also recognized this fellow from the Trimbull rally. “Haven't you got wise to that yet, Pop?”

“Have you been upstairs?” Elliman asked the custodian, and Johnny went cold.

“Stairway door's locked,” the custodian answered. “Same as always. I gave her a shake.”

Johnny silently gave thanks for the spring lock on the door.

“Ought to check it out,” Elliman said.

The custodian uttered an exasperated laugh. “I don't know about you guys,” he said. “Who are you expecting? The Phantom of the Opera?”

“Come on Sonny,” the fellow Johnny thought he recognized said. “There's nobody up there. We just got time for a coffee if we shag ass down to that resrunt on the corner.”

“That's not coffee,” Sonny said. “Fucking mud is all that is. Just run upstairs first and make sure no one's there, Moochie. We go by the book.”

Johnny licked his lips and clutched the gun. He looked up and down the narrow gallery. To his right it ended in a blank wall. To his left it went back to the suite of offices, and either way it made no difference. If he moved, they would hear him. This empty, the town hall served as a natural amplifier. He was stuck.

There were footfalls down below. Then the sound of the door between the hall and the entryway being opened and closed. Johnny waited, frozen and helpless. Just below him the custodian and the other two were talking, but he heard nothing they said. His head had turned on his neck like some slow engine and he stared down the length of the gallery, waiting for the fellow Sonny Elliman had called Moochie to appear at the end of it. His bored expression would suddenly turn to shock and incredulity, his mouth would open:
Hey Sonny, there's a guy up here!

Now he could hear the muffled sound of Moochie climbing the stairs. He tried to think of something, anything. Nothing came. They were going to discover him, it was less than a minute away now, and he didn't have any idea of how to stop it from happening. No matter what he did, his one chance was on the verge of being blown.

Doors began to open and close, the sound of each drawing closer and less muffled. A drop of sweat spilled from Johnny's forehead and darkened the leg of his jeans. He could remember each door he had come past on his way here. Moochie had checked TOWN MANAGER and TOWN SELECTMEN and TAX ASSESSOR. Now he was opening the door of MEN'S, now he was glancing through the office that belonged to the O'SEER OF THE POOR, now the LADIES' room. The next door would be the one leading to the galleries.

It opened.

There was the sound of two footfalls as Moochie approached the railing of the short gallery that ran along the back of the hall. “Okay, Sonny? You satisfied?”

“Everything look good?”

“Looks like a fucking dump,” Moochie responded, and there was a burst of laughter from below.

“Well, come on down and let's go for coffee,” the third man said. And incredibly, that was it. The door slammed to. The footsteps retreated back down the hall, and then down the steps to the first floor.

Johnny went limp and for a moment everything swam away from him into shades of gray. The slam of the entryway door as they went out for their coffee brought him partially out of it.

Below, the custodian presented his judgment: “Bunch of whores.” Then he left, too, and for the next twenty minutes or so, there was only Johnny.

Around 9:30
A.M.,
the people of Jackson began to file into their town hall. The first to appear was a trio of old ladies dressed in formal black, chattering together like magpies. Johnny watched them pick seats close to the stove—almost entirely out of the field of his vision—and pick up the booklets that had been left on the seats. The booklets appeared to be filled with glossy pictures of Greg Stillson.