The Dead Zone Read online

  “I’m sure she’ll be all right,” Sarah said. She had a protective arm around Dawn’s shoulders. “Just give her a minute or two.”

  “No, I don’t want to stay.” Dawn said, and left in a hurry, knocking one of the hard plastic contour chairs over with a clatter. A few moments later Sarah saw the girl sitting out on the steps in the cold, late, October sunshine with her head on her knees.

  Vera Smith read her Bible.

  By five o’clock most of the students had left. Dawn had also left; Sarah had not seen her go. At seven P.M., a young man with DR. STRAWNS pinned askew to the lapel of his white coat came into the waiting room, glanced around, and walked toward them.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Smith?” he asked.

  Herb took a deep breath. “Yes. We are.”

  Vera shut her Bible with a snap.

  “Would you come with me, please?”

  That’s it, Sarah thought. The walk down to the small private room, and then the news. Whatever the news is. She would wait, and when they came back, Herb Smith would tell her what she needed to know. He was a kind man.

  “Have you news of my son?” Vera asked in that same clear, strong, and nearly hysterical voice.

  “Yes.” Dr. Strawns glanced at Sarah. “Are you family, ma’am?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “A friend.”

  “A close friend,” Herb said. A warm, strong hand closed above her elbow, just as another had closed around Vera’s upper arm. He helped them both to their feet. “We’ll all go together, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.”

  He led them past the elevator bank and down a hallway to an office with CONFERENCE ROOM on the door. He let them in and turned on the overhead fluorescent lights. The room was furnished with a long table and a dozen office chairs.

  Dr. Strawns closed the door, lit a cigarette, and dropped the burned match into one of the ashtrays that marched up and down the table. “This is difficult,” he said, as if to himself.

  “Then you had best just say it out.” Vera said.

  “Yes, perhaps I’d better.”

  It was not her place to ask, but Sarah could not help it. “Is he dead? Please don’t say he’s dead ...”

  “He’s in a coma.” Strawns sat down and dragged deeply on his cigarette. “Mr. Smith has sustained serious head injuries and an undetermined amount of brain damage. You may have heard the phrase ‘subdural hematoma’ on one or the other of the doctor shows. Mr. Smith has suffered a very grave subdural hematoma, which is localized cranial bleeding. A long operation was necessary to relieve the pressure, and also to remove bone-splinters from his brain.”

  Herb sat down heavily, his face doughy and stunned. Sarah noticed his blunt, scarred hands and remembered Johnny telling her his father was a carpenter.

  “But God has spared him,” Vera said. “I knew he would. I prayed for a sign. Praise God, Most High! All ye here below praise His name!”

  “Vera,” Herb said with no force.

  “In a coma,’ ” Sarah repeated. She tried to fit the information into some sort of emotional frame and found it wouldn’t go. That Johnny wasn’t dead, that he had come through a serious and dangerous operation on his brain—those things should have renewed her hope. But they didn’t. She didn’t like that word coma. It had a sinister, stealthy sound. Wasn’t it Latin for “sleep of death”?

  “What’s ahead for him?” Herb asked.

  “No one can really answer that now.” Strawns said. He began to play with his cigarette, tapping it nervously over the ashtray. Sarah had the feeling he was answering Herb’s question literally while completely avoiding the question Herb had really asked. “He’s on life support equipment, of course.”

  “But you must know something about his chances,” Sarah said. “You must know ...” She gestured helplessly with her hands and let them drop to her sides.

  “He may come out of it in forty-eight hours. Or a week. A month. He may never come out of it. And ... there is a strong possibility that he may die. I must tell you frankly that’s the most likely. His injuries ... grave.”

  “God wants him to live,” Vera said. “I know it.”

  Herb had put his face into his hands and was scrubbing it slowly.

  Dr. Strawns looked at Vera uncomfortably. “I only want you to be prepared for ... any eventuality.”

  “Would you rate his chances for coming out of it?” Herb asked.

  Dr. Strawns hesitated, puffed nervously on his cigarette. “No, I can’t do that,” he said finally.

  5

  The three of them waited another hour and then left. It was dark. A cold and gusty wind had come up and it whistled across the big parking lot. Sarah’s long hair streamed out behind her. Later, when she got home, she would find a crisp yellow oak leaf caught in it. Overhead, the moon rode the sky, a cold sailor of the night.

  Sarah pressed a scrap of paper into Herb’s hand. Written on it was her address and phone number. “Would you call me if you hear something? Anything at all?”

  “Yes, of course.” He bent suddenly and kissed her cheek, and Sarah held his shoulder for a moment in the blowing dark.

  “I’m very sorry if I was stiff with you earlier, dear,” Vera said, and her voice was surprisingly gentle. “I was upset.”

  “Of course you were,” Sarah said.

  “I thought my boy might die. But I’ve prayed. I’ve spoken to God about it. As the song says, ‘Are we weak and heavy-laden? Cumbered with a load of care? We must never be discouraged. Take it to the Lord in prayer.’ ”

  “Vera, we ought to go along,” Herb said. “We ought to get some sleep and see how things look in the ...”

  “But now I’ve heard from my God,” Vera said, looking dreamily up at the moon. “Johnny isn’t going to die. It isn’t in God’s plan for Johnny to die. I listened and I heard that still, small voice speaking in my heart, and I am comforted.”

  Herb opened the car door. “Come on, Vera.”

  She looked back at Sarah and smiled. In that smile Sarah suddenly saw Johnny’s own easy, devil-may-care grin—but at the same time she thought it was the most ghastly smile she had ever seen in her life.

  “God has put his mark on my Johnny,” Vera said, “and I rejoice.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Smith,” Sarah said through numb lips.

  “Good night, Sarah,” Herb said. He got in and started the car. It pulled out of its space and moved across the parking lot to State Street, and Sarah realized she hadn’t asked where they were staying. She guessed they might not know themselves yet.

  She turned to go to her own car and paused, struck by the river that ran behind the hospital, the Penobscot. It flowed like dark silk, and the reflected moon was caught in its center. She looked up into the sky, standing alone in the parking lot now. She looked at the moon.

  God has put his mark on my Johnny and I rejoice.

  The moon hung above her like a tawdry carnival toy, a Wheel of Fortune in the sky with the odds all slugged in favor of the house, not to mention the house numbers—zero and double zero. House numbah, house numbah, y’all pay the house, hey-hey-hey.

  The wind blew rattling leaves around her legs. She went to her car and sat behind the wheel. She felt suddenly sure she was going to lose him. Terror and loneliness woke in her. She began to shiver. At last she started her car and drove home.

  6

  There was a great outpouring of comfort and good wishes from the Cleaves Mills student body in the following week; Herb Smith told her later that Johnny received better than three hundred cards. Almost all of them contained a hesitant personal note saying they hoped Johnny would be well soon. Vera answered each of them with a thank-you note and a Bible verse.

  Sarah’s discipline problem in her classes disappeared. Her previous feeling that some returning jury of class consciousness was bringing in an unfavorable verdict changed to just the opposite. Gradually she realized that the kids were viewing her as a tragic heroine, Mr. Smith’s lost love. This idea
struck her in the teacher’s room during her free period on the Wednesday following the accident, and she went off into sudden gales of laughter that turned into a crying jag. Before she was able to get herself under control she had frightened herself badly. Her nights were made restless with incessant dreams of Johnny—Johnny in the Halloween Jekyll-and-Hyde mask, Johnny standing at the Wheel of Fortune concession while some disembodied voice chanted, “Man, I love to watch this guy get a beatin,” over and over. Johnny saying, “It’s all right now, Sarah, everything’s fine,” and then coming into the room with his head gone above the eyebrows.

  Herb and Vera Smith spent the week in the Bangor House, and Sarah saw them every afternoon at the hospital, waiting patiently for something to happen. Nothing did. Johnny lay in a room on the intensive care ward on the sixth floor, surrounded by life-support equipment, breathing with the help of a machine. Dr. Strawns had grown less hopeful. On the Friday following the accident, Herb called Sarah on the phone and told her he and Vera were going home.

  “She doesn’t want to,” he said, “but I’ve gotten her to see reason. I think.”

  “Is she all right?” Sarah asked.

  There was a long pause, long enough to make Sarah think she had overstepped the bounds. Then Herb said, “I don’t know. Or maybe I do and I just don’t want to say right out that she isn’t. She’s always had strong ideas about religion and they got a lot stronger after her operation. Her hysterectomy. Now they’ve gotten worse again. She’s been talking a lot about the end of the world. She’s connected Johnny’s accident with the Rapture, somehow. Just before Armageddon, God is supposed to take all the faithful up to heaven in their actual bodies.”

  Sarah thought of a bumper sticker she had seen somewhere: IF THE RAPTURE’S TODAY, SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL! “Yes, I know the idea,” she said.

  “Well,” Herb said uncomfortably, “some of the groups she ... she corresponds with ... they believe that God is going to come for the faithful in flying saucers. Take them all up to heaven in flying saucers, that is. These ... sects ... have proved, at least to themselves, that heaven is somewhere out in the constellation of Orion. No, don’t ask me how they proved it. Vera could tell you. It’s ... well, Sarah, it’s all a little hard on me.”

  “Of course it must be.”

  Herb’s voice strengthened. “But she can still distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. She needs time to adjust. So I told her she could face whatever’s coming at home as easily as here. I’ve ...” He paused, sounding embarrassed, then cleared his throat and went on. “I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got jobs. I’ve signed contracts ...”

  “Sure, of course.” She paused. “What about insurance? I mean, this must be costing a Denver mint ...” It was her turn to feel embarrassed.

  “I’ve talked with Mr. Pelsen, your assistant principal there at Cleaves Mills,” Herb said. “Johnny had the standard Blue Cross, but not that new Major Medical. The Blue Cross will cover some of it, though. And Vera and I have our savings.”

  Sarah’s heart sank. Vera and I have our savings. How long would one passbook stand up to expenses of two hundred dollars a day or more? And for what purpose in the end? So Johnny could hang on like an insensible animal, pissing brainlessly down a tube while he bankrupted his dad and mom? So his condition could drive his mother mad with unrealized hope? She felt the tears start to slip down her cheeks and for the first time—but not the last—she found herself wishing Johnny would die and be at peace. Part of her revolted in horror at the thought, but it remained.

  “I wish you all the best,” Sarah said.

  “I know that, Sarah. We wish you the best. Will you write?”

  “I sure will.”

  “And come see us when you can. Pownal’s not so far away.” He hesitated. “Looks to me like Johnny had picked himself out the right girl. It was pretty serious, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. The tears were still coming and the past tense was not lost on her. “It was.”

  “Good-bye, honey.”

  “Good-bye, Herb.”

  She hung up the phone, held the buttons down for a second or two, and then called the hospital and asked about Johnny. There had been no change. She thanked the intensive care nurse and walked aimlessly back and forth through the apartment. She thought about God sending out a fleet of flying saucers to pick up the faithful and buzz them off to Orion. It made as much sense as anything else about a God crazy enough to scramble John Smith’s brains and put him in a coma that was probably never going to end—except in an unexpected death.

  There was a folder of freshman compositions to correct. She made herself a cup of tea and sat down to them. If there was any one moment when Sarah Bracknell picked up the reins of her post-Johnny life again, that was it.

  Chapter 4

  1

  The killer was slick.

  He sat on a bench in the town park near the bandstand, smoking a Marlboro and humming a song from the Beatles’ white album—“you don’t know how lucky you are, boy, back in the, back in the, back in the USSR ...”

  He wasn’t a killer yet, not really. But it had been on his mind a long time, killing had. It had been itching at him and itching at him. Not in a bad way, no. He felt quite optimistic about it. The time was right. He didn’t have to worry about getting caught. He didn’t have to worry about the clothespin. Because he was slick.

  A litle snow began to drift down from the sky. It was November 12, 1970, and a hundred and sixty miles northeast of this middle-sized western Maine town, John Smith’s dark sleep went on and on.

  The killer scanned the park—the town common, the tourists who came to Castle Rock and the Lakes Region liked to call it. But there were no tourists now. The common that was so green in the summer was now yellow, balding, and dead. It waited for winter to cover it decently. The wire-mesh backstop behind the Little League home plate stood in rusty overlapping diamonds, framed against the white sky. The bandstand needed a fresh coat of paint.

  It was a depressing scene, but the killer was not depressed. He was almost manic with joy. His toes wanted to tap, his fingers wanted to snap. There would be no shying away this time.

  He crushed his smoke under one boot heel and lit another immediately. He glanced at his watch. 3:02 P.M. He sat and smoked. Two boys passed through the park, tossing a football back and forth, but they didn’t see the killer because the benches were down in a dip. He supposed it was a place where the nasty-fuckers came at night when the weather .was warmer. He knew all about the nasty-fuckers and the things they did. His mother had told him, and he had seen them.

  Thinking about his mother made his smile fade a little. He remembered a time when he had been seven, she had come into his room without knocking—she never knocked—and had caught him playing with his thing. She had just about gone crazy. He had tried to tell her it was nothing. Nothing bad. It had just stood up. He hadn’t done anything to make it stand up, it did it all on its own. And he just sat there, boinging it back and forth. It wasn’t even that much fun. It was sort of boring. But his mother had just about gone crazy.

  Do you want to be one of those nasty-fuckers? she had screamed at him. He didn’t even know what that word meant—not nasty, he knew that one, but the other one—although he had heard some of the bigger kids use it in the play-yard at the Castle Rock Elementary School. Do you want to be one of those nasty-fuckers and get one of those diseases? Do you want to have pus running out of it? Do you want it to turn black? Do you want it to rot off? Huh? Huh? Huh?

  She began to shake him back and forth then, and he began to blubber with fear, even then she was a big woman, a dominant and overbearing ocean liner of a woman, and he was not the killer then, he was not slick then, he was a little boy blubbering with fear, and his thing had collapsed and was trying to shrivel back into his body.

  She had made him wear a clothespin on it for two hours, so he would know how those diseases felt.

  The pain was exc
ruciating.

  The little snow flurry had passed. He brushed the image of his mother out of his mind, something he could do effortlessly when he was feeling good, something he couldn’t do at all when he was feeling depressed and low.

  His thing was standing up now.

  He glanced at his watch. 3:07. He dropped his cigarette half-smoked. Someone was coming.

  He recognized her. It was Alma, Alma Frechette from the Coffee Pot across the street. Just coming off-shift. He knew Alma: he had dated her up once or twice, shown her a good time. Took her to Serenity Hill over in Naples. She was a good dancer. Nasty-fuckers often were. He was glad it was Alma coming.

  She was by herself.

  Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR—

  “Alma!” he called and waved. She started a little, looked around, and saw him. She smiled and walked over to the bench where he sat, saying hello and calling him by name. He stood up, smiling. He wasn’t worried about anyone coming. He was untouchable. He was Superman.

  “Why you wearing that?” she asked, looking at him.

  “Slick, isn’t it?” he said. smiling.

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly ...”

  “You want to see something?” he asked. “On the bandstand. It’s the goddamdest thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “Come and look.”

  “All right.”

  As simple as that. She went with him to the bandstand. If anyone had been coming, he still could have called it off. But no one came. No one passed. They had the common to themselves. The white sky brooded over them. Alma was a small girl with light blonde hair. Dyed blonde hair, he was quite sure. Sluts dyed their hair.

  He led her up onto the enclosed bandstand. Their feet made hollow, dead echoes on the boards. An overturned music stand lay in one corner. There was an empty Four Roses bottle. This was a place where the nasty-fuckers came, all right.