The Dead Zone (11 page)

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.

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 little 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 excruciating.

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.

“What?” she asked, sounding a little puzzled now. A little nervous.

The killer smiled joyously and pointed to the left of the music stand. “There. See?”

She followed his finger. A used condom lay on the boards like a shriveled snakeskin.

Alma's face went tight and she turned to go so quickly that she almost got by the killer. “That's not very funny . . .”

He grabbed her and threw her back. “Where do you think you're going?”

Her eyes were suddenly watchful and frightened. “Let me out of here. Or you'll be sorry. I don't have any time for sick jokes . . .”

“It's no joke,” he said. “It's no joke, you nasty-fucker.” He was light-headed with the joy of naming her, naming her for what she was. The world whirled.

Alma broke left, heading for the low railing that surrounded the bandstand, meaning to leap over it. The killer caught the back of her cheap cloth coat at the collar and yanked her back again. The cloth ripped with a low purring sound and she opened her mouth to scream.

He slammed his hand over her mouth, mashing her lips back against her teeth. He felt warm blood trickle over his palm. Her other hand was beating at him now clawing for purchase, but there was no purchase. There was none because he . . . he was . . .

Slick!

He threw her to the board floor. His hand came off her mouth, which was now smeared with blood, and she opened her mouth to scream again, but he landed on top of her, panting, grinning, and the air was driven out of her lungs in a soundless whoosh. She could feel him now, rock hard, gigantic and throbbing, and she quit trying to scream and went on struggling. Her fingers caught and slipped, caught and slipped. He forced her legs rudely apart and lay between them. One
of her hands glanced off the bridge of his nose, making his eyes water.

“You nasty-fucker,” he whispered, and his hands closed on her throat. He began to throttle her, yanking her head up from the bandstand's board flooring and then slamming it back down. Her eyes bulged. Her face went pink, then red, then a congested purple. Her struggles began to weaken.

“Nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker, nasty-fucker,” the killer panted hoarsely. He really was the killer now, Alma Frechette's days of rubbing her body all over people at Serenity Hill were done now. Her eyes bugged out like the eyes of some of those crazy dolls they sold along carnival midways. The killer panted hoarsely. Her hands lay limp on the boards now. His fingers had almost disappeared from sight.

He let go of her throat, ready to grab her again if she stirred. But she didn't. After a moment he ripped her coat open with shaking hands and shoved the skirt of her pink waitress uniform up.

The white sky looked down. The Castle Rock town common was deserted. In fact, no one found the strangled, violated corpse of Alma Frechette until the next day. The sheriffs theory was that a drifter had done it. There were statewide newspaper headlines, and in Castle Rock there was general agreement with the sheriffs idea.

Surely no hometown boy could have done such a dreadful thing.

Herb and Vera Smith went back to Pownal and took up the embroidery of their days. Herb finished a house in Durham that December. Their savings did indeed melt away, as Sarah had foreseen, and they applied to the state for Extraordinary Disaster Assistance. That aged Herb almost as much as the accident itself had done. EDA was only a fancy way of saying “welfare” or “charity” in his mind. He had spent a lifetime
working hard and honestly with his hands and had thought he would never see the day when he would have to take a state dollar. But here that day was.

Vera subscribed to three new magazines which came through the mail at irregular intervals. All three were badly printed and might have been illustrated by talented children.
God's Saucers, The Coming Transfiguration,
and
God's Psychic Miracles. The Upper Room,
which still came monthly, now sometimes lay unopened for as long as three weeks at a stretch, but she read these others to tatters. She found a great many things in them that seemed to bear upon Johnny's accident, and she read these nuggets to her tired husband at supper in a high, piercing voice that trembled with exaltation. Herb found himself telling her more and more frequently to be quiet, and on occasion shouting at her to shut up that drivel and let him alone. When he did that, she would give him long-suffering, compassionate, and hurt glances—then slink upstairs to continue her studies. She began to correspond with these magazines, and to exchange letters with the contributors and with other pen-friends who had had similar experiences in their lives.

Most of her correspondents were good-hearted people like Vera herself, people who wanted to help and to ease the nearly insupportable burden of her pain. They sent prayers and prayer stones, they sent charms, they sent promises to include Johnny in their nightly devotions. Yet there were others who were nothing but con-men and -women, and Herb was alarmed by his wife's increasing inability to recognize these. There was an offer to send her a sliver of the One True Cross of Our Lord for just $99.98. An offer to send a vial of water drawn from the spring at Lourdes, which would almost certainly work a miracle when rubbed into Johnny's forehead. That one was $110 plus postage. Cheaper (and more attractive to Vera) was a continuously playing cassette tape of the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord's Prayer as spoken by southern evangelist Billy Humbarr. Played at Johnny's bedside over a period of weeks it would almost certainly effect a marvelous recovery, according to the pamphlet. As an added blessing (For A Short Time Only) an autographed picture of Billy Humbarr himself would be included.

Herb was forced to step in more and more frequently as her passion for these pseudoreligious geegaws grew. Sometimes he surreptitiously tore up her checks and simply
read-justed the checkbook balance upward. But when the offer specified cash and nothing but, he simply had to put his foot down—and Vera began to draw away from him, to view him with distrust as a sinner and an unbeliever.

Sarah Bracknell kept school during her days. Her afternoons and evenings were not much different than they had been following the breakup with Dan; she was in a kind of limbo, waiting for something to happen. In Paris, the peace talks were stalled. Nixon had ordered the bombing of Hanoi continued in spite of rising domestic and foreign protests. At a press conference he produced pictures proving conclusively that American planes were surely not bombing North Vietnamese hospitals, but he went everywhere by Army helicopter. The investigation into the brutal rape-murder of a Castle Rock waitress was stalled following the release of a wandering sign painter who had once spent three years in the Augusta State Mental Hospital—against everyone's expectations, the sign painter's alibi had turned out to hold water. Janis Joplin was screaming the blues. Paris decreed (for the second year in a row) that hemlines would go down, but they didn't. Sarah was aware of all these things in a vague way, like voices from another room where some incomprehensible party went on and on.

The first snow fell—just a dusting—then a second dusting, and ten days before Christmas there was a storm that closed area schools for the day and she sat home, looking out at the snow as it filled Flagg Street. Her brief thing with Johnny—she could not even properly call it an affair—was part of another season now, and she could feel him beginning to slip away from her. It was a panicky feeling, as if a part of her was drowning. Drowning in days.

She read a good deal about head injuries, comas, and brain damage. None of it was very encouraging. She found out there was a girl in a small Maryland town who had been in a coma for six years; there had been a young man from Liverpool, England, who had been struck by a grappling hook while working on the docks and had remained in a coma for fourteen years before expiring. Little by little this brawny young dock-walloper had severed his connections with the world,
wasting away, losing his hair, optic nerves degenerating into oatmeal behind his closed eyes, body gradually drawing up into a fetal position as his ligaments shortened. He had reversed time, had become a fetus again, swimming in the placental waters of coma as his brain degenerated. An autopsy following his death had shown that the folds and convolutions of his cerebrum had smoothed out, leaving the frontal and prefrontal lobes almost utterly smooth and blank.