The Dead Zone

by Stephen King

  “Blue!” Denny remarked, and spat back a mouthful of mixed fruit.

  “That’s not nice,” Sarah said to Denny. To Walt: “Are you talking about Johnny Smith?”

  “The one and only.”

  She got up and came around to Walt’s side of the table. “He’s all right, isn’t he?”

  “Feeling good and kicking up dickens by the sound of this,” Walt said dryly.

  She had a hazy idea that it might be related to what had happened to her when she went to see Johnny, but the size of the headline shocked her: REAWAKENED COMA PATIENT DEMONSTRATES PSYCHIC ABILITY AT DRAMATIC NEWS CONFERENCE. The story was under David Bright’s by-line. The accompanying photo showed Johnny, still looking thin and, in the unsparing glare of the flash, pitifully confused, standing over the sprawled body of a man the caption identified as Roger Dussault, a reporter for the Lewiston paper. Reporter Faints after Revelation, the caption read.

  Sarah sank down into the chair next to Walt and began to read the article. This did not please Denny, who began to pound on the tray of his highchair for his morning egg.

  “I believe you’re being summoned,” Walt said.

  “Would you feed him, honey? He eats better for you anyway.” Story Continued Page 9, Col. 3. She folded the paper open to page nine.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” Walt said agreeably. He slipped off his sports coat and put on her apron. “Here it comes, guy,” he said, and began feeding Denny his egg.

  When she had finished the story, Sarah went back and read it again. Her eyes were drawn again and again to the picture, to Johnny’s confused, horror-struck face. The people loosely grouped around the prone Dussault were looking at Johnny with an expression close to fear. She could understand that. She remembered kissing him, and the strange, preoccupied look that had slipped over his face. And when he told her where to find the lost wedding ring, she had been afraid.

  But Sarah, what you were afraid of wasn’t quite the same thing, was it?

  “Just a little more, big boy,” Walt was saying, as if from a thousand miles away. Sarah looked up at them, sitting together in a bar of mote-dusted sunlight, her apron flapping between Walt’s knees, and she was suddenly afraid again. She saw the ring sinking to the bottom of the toilet bowl, turning over and over. She heard the small clink as it struck the porcelain. She thought of Halloween masks, of the kid saying, I love to see this guy take a beatin. She thought of promises made and never kept, and her eyes went to this thin newsprint face, looking out at her with such haggard, wretched surprise.

  “... gimmick, anyway,” Walt said, hanging up her apron. He had gotten Denny to eat the egg, every bit of it, and now their son and heir was sucking contentedly away at a juice-bottle.

  “Huh?” Sarah looked up as he came over to her.

  “I said that for a man who must have almost half a million dollars’ worth of hospital bills outstanding, it’s a helluva good gimmick.”

  “What are you talking about? What do you mean, gimmick?”

  “Sure,” he said, apparently missing her anger. “He could make seven, maybe ten thousand dollars doing a book about the accident and the coma. But if he came out of the coma psychic, the sky’s the limit.”

  “That’s one hell of an allegation!” Sarah said, and her voice was thin with fury.

  He turned to her, his expression first one of surprise and then of understanding. The understanding look made her angrier than ever. If she had a nickel for every time Walt Hazlett had thought he understood her, they could fly first-class to Jamaica.

  “Look, I’m sorry I brought it up,” he said.

  “Johnny would no more lie than the Pope would ... would ... you know.”

  He bellowed laughter, and in that moment she nearly picked up his own coffee cup and threw it at him. Instead, she locked her hands together tightly under the table and squeezed them. Denny goggled at his father and then burst into his own peal of laughter.

  “Honey,” Walt said. “I have nothing against him, I have nothing against what he’s doing. In fact, I respect him for it. If that fat old mossback Fisher can go from a broke lawyer to a millionaire during fifteen years in the House of Representatives, then this guy should have a perfect right to pick up as much as he can playing psychic ....”

  “Johnny doesn’t lie,” she repeated tonelessly.

  “It’s a gimmick for the blue-rinse brigade who read the weekly tabloids and belong to the Universe Book Club,” he said cheerily. “Although I will admit that a little second sight would come in handy during jury selection in this damn Timmons trial.”

  “Johnny Smith doesn’t lie,” she repeated, and heard him saying: It slipped off your finger. You were putting his shaving stuff into one of those side pockets and it just slipped off ... you go up in the attic and look, Sarah. You’ll see. But she couldn’t tell Walt that. Walt didn’t know she had been to see Johnny.

  Nothing wrong in going to see him, her mind offered uneasily.

  No, but how would he react to the news that she had thrown her original wedding ring into the toilet and flushed it away? He might not understand the sudden twitch of fear that had made her do it—the same fear she saw mirrored on those other newsprint faces, and, to some degree, on Johnny’s own. No, Walt might not understand that at all. After all, throwing your wedding ring into the toilet and then pushing the flush did suggest a certain vulgar symbolism.

  “All right,” Walt was saying, “he doesn’t lie. But I just don’t believe ...”

  Sarah said softly, “Look at the people behind him, Walt. Look at their faces. They believe.”

  Walt gave them a cursory glance. “Sure, the way a kid believes in a magician as long as the trick is ongoing.”

  “You think this fellow Dussault was a, what-do-you-call-it, a shill? According to the article, he and Johnny had never met before.”

  “That’s the only way the illusion will work, Sarah,” Walt said patiently. “It doesn’t do a magician any good to pull a bunny out of a rabbit hutch, only out of a hat. Either Johnny Smith knew something or he made a terribly good guess based on this guy Dussault’s behavior at the time. But I repeat, I respect him for it. He got a lot of mileage out of it. If it turns him a buck, more power to him.”

  In that moment she hated him, loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor—just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket. This morning he could call Harrison Fisher a fat old mossback; last night he had been bellowing with laughter at Fisher’s stories about Greg Stillson, the funny mayor of some-town-or-other and who might just be crazy enough to run as an independent in the House race next year.

  No, in the world of Walt Hazlett, no one had psychic powers and there were no heroes and the doctrine of we-have-to-change-the-system-from-within was all-powerful. He was a good man, a steady man, he loved her and Denny, but suddenly her soul cried out for Johnny and the five years together of which they had been robbed. Or the lifetime together. A child with darker hair.

  “You better get going, babe,” she said quietly. “They’ll have your guy Timmons in stocks and bonds, or whatever they are.”

  “Sure.” He smiled at her, the summation done, session adjourned. “Still friends?”

  “Still friends.” But he knew where the ring was. He knew.

  Walt kissed her, his right hand resting lightly on the back of her neck. He always had the same thing for breakfast, he always kissed her the same way, some day they were going to Washington, and no one was psychic.

  Five minutes later he was gone, backing their little red Pinto out onto Pond Street, giving his usual brief toot on the horn, and putting away. She was left alone with Denny, who was in the process of strangling himself while he tried to wiggle under his highchair tray.

  “You’re going at that all wrong, Sluggo,” Sarah s
aid, crossing the kitchen and unlatching the tray.

  “Blue!” Denny said, disgusted with the whole thing.

  Speedy Tomato, their tomcat, sauntered into the kitchen at his usual slow, hipshot juvenile delinquent’s stride, and Denny grabbed him, making little chuckling noises. Speedy laid his ears back and looked resigned.

  Sarah smiled a little and cleared the table. Inertia. A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and she was at rest. Never mind Walt’s darker side; she had her own. She had no intention of doing more than sending Johnny a card at Christmas. It was better, safer, that way—because a body in motion tends to keep moving. Her life here was good. She had survived Dan, she had survived Johnny, who had been so unfairly taken from her (but so much in this world was unfair), she had come through her own personal rapids to this smooth water, and here she would stay. This sunshiny kitchen was not a bad place. Best to forget county fairs, Wheels of Fortune, and Johnny Smith’s face.

  As she ran water into the sink to do the dishes she turned on the radio and caught the beginning of the news. The first item made her freeze with a just-washed plate in one hand, her eyes looking out over their small backyard in startled contemplation. Johnny’s mother had had a stroke while watching a TV report on her son’s press conference. She had died this morning, not an hour ago.

  Sarah dried her hands, snapped off the radio, and pried Speedy Tomato out of Denny’s hands. She carried her boy into the living room and popped him into his playpen. Denny protested this indignity with loud, lusty howls of which she took no notice. She went to the telephone and called the EMMC. A switchboard operator who sounded tired of repeating the same piece of intelligence over and over again told her that John Smith had discharged himself the night before, slightly before midnight.

  She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Denny continued to cry from his playpen. Water ran into the kitchen sink. After a while she got up, went into the kitchen, and turned it off.

  Chapter 14

  1

  The man from Inside View showed up on October 16, not long after Johnny had walked up to get the mail.

  His father’s house was set well back from the road; their graveled driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, running through a heavy stand of second-growth spruce and pine. Johnny did the total round trip every day. At first he had returned to the porch trembling with exhaustion, his legs on fire, his limp so pronounced that he was really lurching along. But now, a month and a half after the first time (when the half a mile had taken him an hour to do), the walk had become one of his day’s pleasures, something to look forward to. Not the mail, but the walk.

  He had begun splitting wood for the coming winter, a chore Herb had been planning to hire out since he himself had landed a contract to do some inside work on a new housing project in Libertyville. “You know when old age has started lookin over your shoulder, John,” he had said with a smile. “It’s when you start lookin for inside work as soon as fall rolls around.”

  Johnny climbed the porch and sat down in the wicker chair beside the glider, uttering a small sound of relief. He propped his right foot on the porch railing, and with a grimace of pain, used his hands to lift his left leg over it. That done, he began to open his mail.

  It had tapered off a lot just lately. During the first week he had been back here in Pownal, there had sometimes been as many as two dozen letters and eight or nine packages a day, most of them forwarded through the EMMC, a few of them sent to General Delivery, Pownal (and assorted variant spellings: Pownell, Poenul, and, in one memorable case, Poonuts).

  Most of them were from disassociated people who seemed to be drifting through life in search of any rudder. There were children who wanted his autograph, women who wanted to sleep with him, both men and women seeking advice to the lovelorn. Some sent lucky charms. Some sent horoscopes. A great many of the letters were religious in nature, and in these badly spelled missives, usually written in a large and careful handwriting but one step removed from the scrawl of a bright first-grader, he seemed to feel the ghost of his mother.

  He was a prophet, these letters assured him, come to lead the weary and disillusioned American people out of the wilderness. He was a sign that the Last Times were at hand. To this date, October 16, he had received eight copies of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth—his mother surely would have approved of that one. He was urged to proclaim the divinity of Christ and put a stop to the loose morals of youth.

  These letters were balanced off by the negative contingent, which was smaller but just as vocal—if usually anonymous. One correspondent, writing in grubby pencil on a sheet of yellow legal paper proclaimed him the Antichrist and urged him to commit suicide. Four or five of the letter writers had inquired about how it felt to murder your own mother. A great many wrote to accuse him of perpetrating a hoax. One wit wrote, “PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!”

  And then they sent things. That was the worst of it.

  Every day on his way home from work, Herb would stop at the Pownal post office and pick up the packages that were too big to fit in their mailbox. The notes accompanying the things were all essentially the same; a lowgrade scream. Tell me, tell me, tell me.

  This scarf belonged to my brother, who disappeared on a fishing trip in the Allagash in 1969. I feel very strongly that he is still alive. Tell me where he is.

  This lipstick came from my wife’s dressing table. I think she’s having an affair, but I’m not sure. Tell me if she is.

  This is my son’s ID bracelet. He never comes home after school anymore, he stays out until all hours, I’m worried sick. Tell me what he’s doing.

  A woman in North Carolina—God knew how she had found out about him; the press conference in August had not made the national media—sent a charred piece of wood. Her house had burned down, her letter explained, and her husband and two of her five children had died in the blaze. The Charlotte fire department said it was faulty wiring, but she simply couldn’t accept that. It had to be arson. She wanted Johnny to feel the enclosed blackened relic and tell her who had done it, so the monster would spend the rest of his life rotting in prison.

  Johnny answered none of the letters and returned all the objects (even the charcoaled hunk of wood) at his cost and with no comment. He did touch some of them. Most, like the charred piece of wallboard from the grief-stricken woman in Charlotte, told him nothing at all. But when he touched a few of them, disquieting images came, like waking dreams. In most cases there was barely a trace; a picture would form and fade in seconds, leaving him with nothing concrete at all, only a feeling. But one of them ...

  It had been the woman who sent the scarf in hopes of finding out what had happened to her brother. It was a white knitted scarf, no different from a million others. But as he handled it, the reality of his father’s house had suddenly been gone, and the sound of the television in the next room rose and flattened, rose and flattened, until it was the sound of drowsing summer insects and the faraway babble of water.

  Woods smells in his nostrils. Green shafts of sunlight falling through great old trees. The ground had been soggy for the last three hours or so, squelchy, almost swamplike. He was scared, plenty scared, but he had kept his head. If you were lost in the big north country and panicked, they might as well carve your headstone. He had kept pushing south. It had been two days since he had gotten separated from Stiv and Rocky and Logan. They had been camping near

  (but that wouldn’t come, it was in the dead zone)

  some stream, trout-fishing, and it had been his own damn fault; he had been pretty damn drunk.

  Now he could see his pack leaning against the edge of an old and moss-grown blowdown, white deadwood poking through the green here and there like bones, he could see his pack, yes, but he couldn’t reach it because he had walked a few yards away to take a leak and he had walked into a really squelchy place, mud almost to the tops of his L.L. Bean’s boots, and he tried to back out, find a dr
yer place to do his business, but he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t get out because it wasn’t mud at all. It was ... something else.

  He stood there, looking around fruitlessly for something to grab onto, almost laughing at the idiocy of having walked right into a patch of quicksand while looking for a place to take a piss.

  He stood there, at first positive that it must be a shallow patch of quicksand, at the very worst over his boot-tops, another tale to tell when he was found.

  He stood there, and real panic did not begin to set in until the quicksand oozed implacably over his knees. He began to struggle then, forgetting that if you got your stupid self into quicksand you were supposed to remain very still. In no time at all the quicksand was up to his waist and now it was chest-high, sucking at him like great brown lips, constricting his breathing; he began to scream and no one came, nothing came except for a fat brown squirrel that picked its way down the side of the mossy deadfall and perched on his pack and watched him with his bright, black eyes.

  Now it was up to his neck, the rich, brown smell of it in his nose and his screams became thin and gasping as the quicksand implacably pressed the breath out of him. Birds flew swooping and cheeping and scolding, and green shafts of sunlight like tarnished copper fell through the trees, and the quicksand rose over his chin. Alone, he was going to die alone, and he opened his mouth to scream one last time and there was no scream because the quicksand flowed into his mouth, it flowed over his tongue, it flowed between his teeth in thin ribbons, he was swallowing quicksand and the scream was never uttered—