The Dead Zone

by Stephen King

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Well? What do you think?”

  Johnny leaned forward toward Dees. He grabbed the sleeve of Dees’s new L.L. Bean shirt in one hand and the collar of Dees’s new L.L. Bean shirt in the other.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re d ...”

  Johnny bunched the shirt in both hands and drew Dees forward. Five months of daily exercise had toned up the muscles in his hands and arms to a formidable degree.

  “You asked me what I thought,” Johnny said. His head was beginning to throb and ache. “I’ll tell you. I think you’re a ghoul. A grave robber of people’s dreams. I think someone ought to put you to work at Roto-Rooter. I think your mother should have died of cancer the day after she conceived you. If there’s a hell, I hope you burn there.”

  “You can’t talk to me like that!” Dees cried. His voice rose to a fishwife’s shriek. “You’re fucking crazy! Forget it! Forget the whole thing, you stupid hick sonofabitch! You had your chance! Don’t come crawling around ...”

  “Furthermore, you sound like you’re talking through a Saltine box,” Johnny said, standing up. He lifted Dees with him. The tails of his shirt popped out of the waistband of his new jeans, revealing a fishnet undershirt beneath. Johnny began to shake Dees methodically back and forth. Dees forgot about being angry. He began to blubber and roar.

  Johnny dragged him to the porch steps, raised one foot, and planted it squarely in the seat of the new Levi’s. Dees went down in two big steps, still blubbering and roaring. He fell in the dirt and sprawled full-length. When he got up and turned around to face Johnny, his country-cousin duds were caked with dooryard dust. It made them look more real, somehow, Johnny thought, but doubted if Dees would appreciate that.

  “I ought to put the cops on you,” he said hoarsely. “And maybe I will.”

  “You do whatever turns you on,” Johnny said. “But the law around here doesn’t take too kindly to people who stick their noses in where they haven’t been invited.”

  Dees’s face worked in an uneasy contortion of fear, anger, and shock. “God help you if you ever need us,” he said.

  Johnny’s head was aching fiercely now, but he kept his voice even. “That’s just right,” he said. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “You’re going to be sorry, you know. Three million readers. That cuts both ways. When we get done with you the people in this country wouldn’t believe you if you predicted spring in April. They wouldn’t believe you if you said the World Series is going to come in October. They wouldn’t believe you if ... if ...” Dees spluttered, furious.

  “Get out of here, you cheap cocksucker,” Johnny said.

  “You can kiss off that book!” Dees screamed, apparently summoning up the worst thing he could think of. With his working, knotted face and his dust-caked shirt, he looked like a kid having a class-A tantrum. His Brooklyn accent had deepened and darkened to the point where it was almost a patois. “They’ll laugh you out of every publishing house in New York! Nightstand Readers wouldn’t touch you when I get done with you! There are ways of fixing smart guys like you and we got em, fuckhead! We ...”

  “I guess I’ll go get my Remmy and shoot myself a trespasser,” Johnny remarked.

  Dees retreated to his rental car, still shouting threats and obscenities. Johnny stood on the porch and watched him, his head thudding sickly. Dees got in, revved the car’s engine mercilessly, and then screamed out, throwing dirt into the air in clouds. He let the car drift just enough on his way out to knock the chopping block by the shed flying. Johnny grinned a little at that in spite of his bad head. He could set up the chopping block a lot more easily than Dees was going to be able to explain the big dent in that Ford’s front fender to the Hertz people.

  Afternoon sun twinkled on chrome again as Dees sprayed gravel all the way up the driveway to the road. Johnny sat down in the rocker again and put his forehead in his hand and got ready to wait out the headache.

  2

  “You’re going to do what?” the banker asked. Outside and below, traffic passed back and forth along the bucolic main street of Ridgeway, New Hampshire. On the walls of the banker’s pine-panelled, third-floor office were Frederick Remington prints and photographs of the banker at local functions. On his desk was a lucite cube, and embedded in this cube were pictures of his wife and his son.

  “I’m going to run for the House of Representatives next year,” Greg Stillson repeated. He was dressed in khaki suntan pants, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black tie with a single blue figure. He looked out of place in the banker’s office, somehow, as if at any moment he might rise to his feet and begin an aimless, destructive charge around the room, knocking over furniture, sweeping the expensively framed Remington prints to the floor, pulling the drapes from their rods.

  The banker, Charles “Chuck” Gendron, president of the local Lions Club, laughed—a bit uncertainly. Stillson had a way of making people feel uncertain. As a boy he had been scrawny, perhaps; he liked to tell people that “a high wind woulda blowed me away”; but in the end his father’s genes had told, and sitting here in Gendron’s office, he looked very much like the Oklahoma oilfield roughneck that his father had been.

  He frowned at Gendron’s chuckle.

  “I mean, George Harvey might have something to say about that, mightn’t he, Greg?” George Harvey, besides being a mover and a shaker in town politics, was the third district Republican godfather.

  “George won’t say boo,” Greg said calmly. There was a salting of gray in his hair, but his face suddenly looked very much like the face of the man who long ago had kicked a dog to death in an Iowa farmyard. His voice was patient. “George is going to be on the sidelines, but he’s gonna be on my side of the sidelines, if you get my meaning. I ain’t going to be stepping on his toes, because I’m going to run as an independent. I don’t have twenty years to spend learning the ropes and licking boots.”

  Chuck Gendron said hesitantly, “You’re kidding, aren’t you, Greg?”

  Greg’s frown returned. It was forbidding. “Chuck, I never kid. People ... they think I kid. The Union-Leader and those yo-yos on the Daily Democrat, they think I kid. But you go see George Harvey. You ask him if I kid around, or if I get the job done. You ought to know better, too. After all, we buried some bodies together, didn’t we, Chuck?”

  The frown metamorphosed into a somehow chilling grin—chilling to Gendron, perhaps, because he had allowed himself to be pulled along on a couple of Greg Stillson’s development schemes. They had made money, yes, of course they had, that wasn’t the problem. But there had been a couple of aspects of the Sunningdale Acres development (and the Laurel Estates deal as well, to be honest) that hadn’t been—well, strictly legal. A bribed EPA agent for one thing, but that wasn’t the worst thing.

  On the Laurel Estates thing there had been an old man out on the Back Ridgeway Road who hadn’t wanted to sell, and first the old man’s fourteen-or-so chickens had died of some mysterious ailment and second there had been a fire in the old man’s potato house and third when the old man came back from visiting his sister, who was in a nursing home in Keene, one weekend not so long ago, someone had smeared dogshit all over the old man’s living room and dining room and fourth the old man had sold and fifth Laurel Estates was now a fact of life.

  And, maybe sixth: That motorcycle spook, Sonny Elliman, was hanging around again. He and Greg were good buddies, and the only thing that kept that from being town gossip was the counterbalancing fact that Greg was seen in the company of a lot of heads, hippies, freaks, and cyclists—as a direct result of the Drug Counselling Center he had set up, plus Ridgeway’s rather unusual program for young drug, alcohol, and road offenders. Instead of fining them or locking them up, the town took out their services in trade. It had been Greg’s idea—and a good one, the banker would be the first to admit. It had been one of the things that had helped Greg to get elected mayor.

  But this—this was utter crazine
ss.

  Greg had said something else. Gendron wasn’t sure what.

  “Pardon me,” he said.

  “I asked you how you’d like to be my campaign manager,” Greg repeated.

  “Greg ...” Gendron had to clear his throat and start again. “Greg, you don’t seem to understand. Harrison Fisher is the Third District representative in Washington. Harrison Fisher is Republican, respected, and probably eternal.”

  “No one is eternal,” Greg said.

  “Harrison is damn close,” Gendron said. “Ask Harvey. They went to school together. Back around 1800, I think.”

  Greg took no notice of this thin witticism. “I’ll call myself a Bull Moose or something ... and everyone will think I’m kidding around ... and in the end, the good people of the Third District are going to laugh me all the way to Washington.”

  “Greg, you’re crazy.”

  Greg’s smile disappeared as if it had never been there. Something frightening happened to his face. It became very still, and his eyes widened to show too much of the whites. They were like the eyes of a horse that smells bad water.

  “You don’t want to say something like that, Chuck. Ever.”

  The banker felt more than chilled now.

  “Greg, I apologize. It’s just that ...”

  “No, you don’t ever want to say that to me, unless you want to find Sonny Elliman waiting for you some afternoon when you go out to get your big fucking Imperial.”

  Gendron’s mouth moved but no sound came out.

  Greg smiled again, and it was like the sun suddenly breaking through threatening clouds. “Never mind. We don’t want to be kicking sand if we’re going to be working together.”

  “Greg ...”

  “I want you because you know every damn businessman in this part of New Hampshire. We’re gonna have plenty good money once we get this thing rolling, but I figure we’ll have to prime the pump. Now’s the time for me to expand a little, and start looking like the state’s man as well as Ridgeway’s man. I figure fifty thousand dollars ought to be enough to fertilize the grass roots.”

  The banker, who had worked for Harrison Fisher in his last four canvasses, was so astounded by Greg’s political naiveté that at first he was at a loss on how to proceed. At last he said, “Greg. Businessmen contribute to campaigns not out of the goodness of their hearts but because the winner ends up owing them something. In a close campaign they’ll contribute to any candidate who has a chance of winning, because they can write off the loser as a tax loss as well. But the operant phrase is chance of winning. Now Fisher is a ...”

  “Shoo-in,” Greg supplied. He produced an envelope from his back pocket. “Want you to look at these.”

  Gendron looked doubtfully at the envelope, then up at Greg. Greg nodded encouragingly. The banker opened the envelope.

  There was a long silence in the pine-panelled office after Gendron’s initial harsh gasp for breath. It was unbroken except for the faint hum of the digital clock on the banker’s desk and the hiss of a match as Greg lit a Phillies cheroot. On the walls of the office were Frederick Remington pictures. In the lucite cube were family pictures. Now, spread on the desk, were pictures of the banker with his head buried between the thighs of a young woman with black hair—or it might have been red, the pictures were high-grain black-and-white glossies and it was hard to tell. The woman’s face was very clear. It was not the face of the banker’s wife. Some residents of Ridgeway would have recognized it as the face of one of the waitresses at Bobby Strang’s truckstop two towns over.

  The pictures of the banker with his head between the legs of the waitress were the safe ones—her face was clear but his was not. In others, his own grandmother would have recognized him. There were pictures of Gendron and the waitress involved in a whole medley of sexual delights—hardly all the positions of the Kama Sutra, but there were several positions represented that had never made the “Sexual Relationships” chapter of the Ridgeway High health textbook.

  Gendron looked up, his face cheesy, his hands trembling. His heart was galloping in his chest. He feared a heart attack.

  Greg was not even looking at him. He was looking out the window at the bright blue slice of October sky visible between the Ridgeway Five and Ten and the Ridgeway Card and Notion Shoppe.

  “The winds of change have started to blow,” he said, and his face was distant and preoccupied; almost mystical. He looked back at Gendron. “One of those drug-freaks down at the Center, you know what he gave me?”

  Chuck Gendron shook his head numbly. With one of his shaking hands he was massaging the left side of his chest—just in case. His eyes kept falling to the photographs. The damning photographs. What if his secretary came in right now? He stopped massaging his chest and began gathering up the pictures, stuffing them back into the envelope.

  “He gave me Chairman Mao’s little red book,” Greg said. A chuckle rumbled up from the barrel chest that had once been so thin, part of a body that had mostly disgusted his idolized father. “And one of the proverbs in there ... I can’t remember exactly how it went, but it was something like, ‘The man who senses the wind of change should build not a wind-break but a windmill.’ That was the flavor of it, anyway.”

  He leaned forward.

  “Harrison Fisher’s not a shoo-in, he’s a has-been. Ford is a has-been. Muskie’s a has-been. Humphrey’s a has-been. A lot of local and state politicians all the way across this country are going to wake up the day after election day and find out that they’re as dead as dodo birds. They forced Nixon out, and the next year they forced out the people who stood behind him in the impeachment hearings, and next year they’ll force out Jerry Ford for the same reason.”

  Greg Stillson’s eyes blazed at the banker.

  “You want to see the wave of the future? Look up in Maine at this guy Longley. The Republicans ran a guy named Erwin and the Demos ran a guy named Mitchell and when they counted the votes for governor, they both got a big surprise, because the people went and elected themselves an insurance man from Lewiston that didn’t want any part of either party. Now they’re talking about him as a dark horse candidate for president.”

  Gendron still couldn’t talk.

  Greg drew in his breath. “They’re all gonna think I’m kiddin, see? They thought Longley was kiddin. But I’m not kiddin. I’m building windmills. And you’re gonna supply the building materials.”

  He ceased. Silence fell in the office, except for the hum of the clock. At last Gendron whispered, “Where did you get these pictures? Was it that Elliman?”

  “Aw, hey. You don’t want to talk about that. You forget all about those pictures. Keep them.”

  “And who keeps the negatives?”

  “Chuck,” Greg said earnestly, “you don’t understand. I’m offering you Washington. Sky’s the limit, boy! I’m not even asking you to raise that much money. Like I said, just a bucket of water to help prime the pump. When we get rolling, plenty of money is going to come in. Now, you know the guys that have money. You have lunch with them down at the Caswell House. You play poker with them. You have written them commercial loans tied to the prime rate at no more than their say so. And you know how to put an armlock on them.”

  “Greg you don’t understand, you don’t ...”

  Greg stood up. “The way I just put an armlock on you,” he said.

  The banker looked up at him. His eyes rolled helplessly. Greg Stillson thought he looked like a sheep that had been led neatly to the slaughter.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” he said. “You find it.”

  He walked out, closing the door gently behind him. Gendron heard his booming voice even through the thick walls, bandying with his secretary. His secretary was a sixty-year-old flat-chested biddy, and Stillson probably had her giggling like a schoolgirl. He was a buffoon. It was that as much as his programs for coping with youthful crime that had made him mayor of Ridgeway. But the people didn’t elect buffoons to Washington.

  Well—
hardly ever.

  That wasn’t his problem. Fifty thousand dollars in campaign contributions, that was his problem. His mind began to scurry around the problem like a trained white rat scurrying around a piece of cheese on a plate. It could probably be done. Yes, it could probably be done—but would it end there?

  The white envelope was still on his desk. His smiling wife looked at it from her place in the lucite cube. He scooped the envelope up and jammed it into the inner pocket of his suitcoat. It had been Elliman, somehow Elliman had found out and had taken the pictures, he was sure of it.

  But it had been Stillson who told him what to do.

  Maybe the man wasn’t such a buffoon after all. His assessment of the political climate of 1975-76 wasn’t completely stupid. Building windmills instead of windbreaks ... the sky’s the limit.

  But that wasn’t his problem.

  Fifty thousand dollars was his problem.

  Chuck Gendron, president of the Lions and all-round good fellow (last year he had ridden one of those small, funny motorcycles in the Ridgeway Fourth of July parade), pulled a yellow legal tablet out of the top drawer of his desk and began jotting down a list of names. The trained white rat at work. And down on Main Street Greg Stillson turned his face up into the strong autumn sunlight and congratulated himself on a job well-done—or well-begun.

  Chapter 15

  1

  Later, Johnny supposed that the reason he ended up finally making love to Sarah—almost five years to the day after the fair—had a lot to do with the visit of Richard Dees, the man from Inside View. The reason he finally weakened and called Sarah and invited her to come and visit was little more than a wistful urge to have someone nice come to call and take the nasty taste out of his mouth. Or so he told himself.

  He called her in Kennebunk and got the former roommate, who said Sarah would be right with him. The phone clunked down and there was a moment of silence when he contemplated (but not very seriously) just hanging up and closing the books for good. Then Sarah’s voice was in his ear.