The Dead Zone (53 page)

“To your grave,” Johnny said a little sickly.

“Are you okay, Johnny?”

Johnny made himself return Chuck's smile. “Fine. I guess my heart just missed a beat or something.”

Chuck went on with
Jude
under the mildly cloudy sky.

May.

The smell of cut grass was back for yet another return engagement—also those long-running favorites, honeysuckle, dust, and roses. In New England spring really only comes for one priceless week and then the deejays drag out the Beach Boys golden oldies, the buzz of the cruising Honda is heard throughout the land, and summer comes down with a hot thud.

On one of the last evenings of that priceless spring week, Johnny sat in the guest house, looking out into the night. The spring dark was soft and deep. Chuck was off at the senior prom with his current girl friend, a more intellectual type than the last half-dozen. She
reads,
Chuck had confided to Johnny, one man of the world to another.

Ngo was gone. He had gotten his citizenship papers in late March, had applied for a job as head groundskeeper at a North Carolina resort hotel in April, had gone down for an interview three weeks ago, and had been hired on the spot. Before he left, he had come to see Johnny.

“You worry too much about tigers that are not there, I think,” he said. “The tiger has stripes that will fade into the background so he will not be seen. This makes the worried man see tigers everywhere.”

“There's a tiger,” Johnny had answered.

“Yes,” Ngo agreed. “Somewhere. In the meantime, you grow thin.”

Johnny got up, went to the fridge, and poured himself a Pepsi. He went outside with it to the little deck. He sat down and sipped his drink and thought how lucky everyone was that time travel was a complete impossibility. The moon came up, an orange eye above the pines, and beat a bloody path across the swimming pool. The first frogs croaked and thumped. After a little while Johnny went inside and poured a hefty dollop of Ron Rico into his Pepsi. He went back outside and sat down again, drinking and watching as the moon rose higher in the sky, changing slowly from orange to mystic, silent silver.

On June the 23rd, 1977, Chuck graduated from high school. Johnny, dressed in his best suit, sat in the hot auditorium with Roger and Shelley Chatsworth and watched as he graduated forty-third in his class. Shelley cried.

Afterward, there was a lawn party at the Chatsworth home. The day was hot and humid. Thunderheads with purple bellies had formed in the west; they dragged slowly back and forth across the horizon, but seemed to come no closer. Chuck, flushed with three screwdrivers, came over with his girl friend, Patty Strachan, to show Johnny his graduation present from his parents—a new Pulsar watch.

“I told them I wanted that R2D2 robot, but this was the best they could do,” Chuck said, and Johnny laughed. They talked a while longer and then Chuck said with almost rough abruptness: “I want to thank you, Johnny. If it hadn't been for you, I wouldn't be graduating today at all.”

“No, that isn't true,” Johnny said. He was a little alarmed to see that Chuck was on the verge of tears. “Class always tells, man.”

“That's what I keep telling him,” Chuck's girl said. Behind her glasses, a cool and elegant beauty was waiting to come out.

“Maybe,” Chuck said. “Maybe it does. But I think I know which side my diploma is buttered on. Thanks a hell of a lot.” He put his arms around Johnny and gave him a hug.

It came suddenly—a hard, bright bolt of image that made Johnny straighten up and clap his hand against the side of his head as if Chuck had struck him instead of hugging him. The image sank into his mind like a picture done by electroplate.

“No,” he said. “No
way.
You two stay right away from there.”

Chuck drew back uneasily. He had felt
something.
Something cold and dark and incomprehensible. Suddenly he didn't
want to touch Johnny; at that moment he never wanted to touch Johnny again. It was as if he had found out what it would be like to lie in his own coffin and watch the lid nailed down.

“Johnny,” he said, and then faltered. “What . . . what's . . .”

Roger had been on his way over with drinks, and now he paused, puzzled. Johnny was looking over Chuck's shoulder, at the distant thunderheads. His eyes were vague and hazy.

He said: “You want to stay away from that place. There are no lightning rods.”

“Johnny
 . . .” Chuck looked at his father, frightened. “It's like he's having some kind of . . .
fit,
or something.”

“Lightning,” Johnny proclaimed in a carrying voice. People turned their heads to look at him. He spread his hands. “Flash fire. The insulation in the walls. The doors . . . jammed. Burning people smell like hot pork.”

“What's he talking about?”
Chuck's girl cried, and conversation trickled to a halt. Now everyone was looking at Johnny, as they balanced plates of food and glasses.

Roger stepped over. “John! Johnny! What's wrong? Wake up” He snapped his fingers in front of Johnny's vague eyes. Thunder muttered in the west, the voice of giants over gin rummy, perhaps. “What's wrong?”

Johnny's voice was clear and moderately loud, carrying to each of the fifty-some people who were there—businessmen and their wives, professors and their wives, Durham's upper middle class. “Keep your son home tonight or he's going to burn to death with the rest of them. There is going to be a fire, a terrible fire. Keep him away from Cathy's. It's going to be struck by lightning and it will burn flat before the first fire engine can arrive. The insulation will burn. They will find charred bodies six and seven deep in the exits and there will be no way to identify them except by their dental work. It . . . it . . .”

Patty Strachan screamed then, her hand going to her mouth, her plastic glass tumbling to the lawn, the ice cubes spilling out onto the grass and gleaming there like diamonds of improbable size. She stood swaying for a moment and then she fainted, going down in a pastel billow of party dress, and her mother ran forward, crying at Johnny as she passed: “What's
wrong
with you? What in God's name is
wrong
with you?”

Chuck stared at Johnny. His face was paper-white.

Johnny's eyes began to clear. He looked around at the staring knots of people. “I'm sorry,” he muttered.

Patty's mother was on her knees, holding her daughter's head in her arms and patting her cheeks lightly. The girl began to stir and moan.

“Johnny?” Chuck whispered, and then, without waiting for an answer, went to his girl.

It was very still on the Chatsworth back lawn. Everyone was looking at him. They were looking at him because it had happened again. They were looking at him the way the nurses had. And the reporters. They were crows strung out on a telephone line. They were holding their drinks and their plates of potato salad and looking at him as if he were a bug, a freak. They were looking at him as if he had suddenly opened his pants and exposed himself to them.

He wanted to run, he wanted to hide. He wanted to puke.

“Johnny,” Roger said, putting an arm around him. “Come on in the house. You need to get off your feet for . . .”

Thunder rumbled, far off.

“What's Cathy's?” Johnny said harshly, resisting the pressure of Roger's arm over his shoulders. “It isn't someone's house, because there were exit signs. What is it? Where is it?”

“Can't you get him out of here?” Patty's mother nearly screamed. “He's upsetting her all over again!”

“Come on, Johnny.”

“But . . .”

“Come on.”

He allowed himself to be led away toward the guest house. The sound of their shoes on the gravel drive was very loud. There seemed to be no other sound. They got as far as the pool, and then the whispering began behind them.

“Where's Cathy's?” Johnny asked again.

“How come you don't know?” Roger asked. “You seemed to know everything else. You scared poor Patty Strachan into a faint.”

“I can't see it. It's in the dead zone. What is it?”

“Let's get you upstairs first.”

“I'm not sick!”

“Under strain, then,” Roger said. He spoke softly and soothingly, the way people speak to the hopelessly mad. The sound of his voice made Johnny afraid. And the headache started to come. He willed it back savagely. They went up the stairs to the guest house.

“Feel any better?” Roger asked.

“What's Cathy's?”

“It's a very fancy steakhouse and lounge in Somersworth. Graduation parties at Cathy's are something of a tradition, God knows why. Sure you don't want these aspirin?”

“No. Don't let him go, Roger. It's going to be hit by lightning. It's going to burn flat.”

“Johnny,” Roger Chatsworth said, slowly and very kindly, “you can't know a thing like that.”

Johnny drank ice water a small sip at a time and set the glass back down with a hand that shook slightly. “You said you checked into my background I thought . . .”

“Yes, I did. But you're drawing a mistaken conclusion. I knew you were supposed to be a psychic or something, but I didn't want a psychic. I wanted a tutor. You've done a fine job as a tutor. My personal belief is that there isn't any difference between good psychics and bad ones, because I don't believe in any of that business. It's as simple as that. I don't believe it.”

“That makes me a liar, then.”

“Not at all,” Roger said in that same kind, low voice. “I have a foreman at the mill in Sussex who won't light three on a match, but that doesn't make him a bad foreman. I have friends who are devoutly religious, and although I don't go to church myself, they're still my friends. Your belief that you can see into the future or sight things at a distance never entered into my judgment of whether or not to hire you. No . . . that isn't quite true. It never entered into it once I'd decided that it wouldn't interfere with your ability to do a good job with Chuck. It hasn't. But I no more believe that Cathy's is going to burn down tonight than I believe the moon is green cheese.”

“I'm not a liar, just crazy,” Johnny said. In a dull sort of way it was interesting. Roger Dussault and many of the people who wrote Johnny letters had accused him of trickery, but Chatsworth was the first to accuse him of having a Jeanne d'Arc complex.

“Not that, either,” Roger said. “You're a young man who was involved in a terrible accident and who has fought his
way back against terrible odds at what has probably been a terrible price. That isn't a thing I'd ever flap my jaw about freely, Johnny, but if any of those people out there on the lawn—including Patty's mother—want to jump to a lot of stupid conclusions, they'll be invited to shut their mouths about things they don't understand.”

“Cathy's,” Johnny said suddenly. “How did I know the name, then? And how did I know it wasn't someone's house?”

“From Chuck. He's talked about the party a lot this week.”

“Not to me.”

Roger shrugged. “Maybe he said something to Shelley or me while you were in earshot. Your subconscious happened to pick it up and file it away . . .”

“That's right,” Johnny said bitterly. “Anything we don't understand, anything that doesn't fit into our scheme of the way things are, we'll just file it under
S
for subconscious, right? The twentieth-century god. How many times have you done that when something ran counter to your pragmatic view of the world, Roger?”

Roger's eyes might have flickered a little—or it might have been imagination.

“You associated lightning with the thunderstorm that's coming,” he said. “Don't you see that? It's perfectly sim . . .”

“Listen,” Johnny said. “I'm telling you this as simply as I can. That place is going to be struck by lightning. It's going to burn down.
Keep Chuck home.”

Ah, God, the headache was coming for him. Coming like a tiger. He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed it unsteadily.

“Johnny, you've been pushing much too hard.”

“Keep him home,” Johnny repeated.

“It's his decision, and I wouldn't presume to make it for him. He's free, white, and eighteen.”

There was a tap at the door. “Johnny?”

“Come in,” Johnny said, and Chuck himself came in. He looked worried.

“How are you?” Chuck asked.

“I'm all right,” Johnny said. “I've got a headache, that's all. Chuck . . . please stay away from that place tonight. I'm asking you as a friend. Whether you think like your dad or not.
Please.”

“No problem, man,” Chuck said cheerfully, and whumped
down on the sofa. He hooked a hassock over with one foot. “Couldn't drag Patty within a mile of that place with a twenty-foot towin chain. You put a scare into her.”

“I'm sorry,” Johnny said. He felt sick and chilly with relief. “I'm sorry but I'm glad.”

“You had some kind of a flash, didn't you?” Chuck looked at Johnny, then at his father, and then slowly back to Johnny. “I felt it. It was bad.”

“Sometimes people do. I understand it's sort of nasty.”

“Well, I wouldn't want it to happen again,” Chuck said. “But hey . . . that place isn't really going to burn down, is it?”

“Yes,” Johnny said. “You want to just keep away.”

“But . . .” He looked at his father, troubled. “The senior class reserved the whole damn place. The school encourages that, you know. It's safer than twenty or thirty different parties and a lot of people drinking on the back roads. There's apt to be . . .” Chuck fell silent for a moment and then began to look frightened. “There's apt to be two hundred couples there,” he said. “Dad . . .”