The Dead Zone(5)

Sarah rapped on his door and Johnny's voice, oddly muffled, called, 'It's open, Sarah!'

Frowning a little, she pushed the door open. Johnny's apartment was in total darkness except for the fitful yellow glow of the blinker half a block up the street. The furniture was so many humped black shadows.

'Johnny...?'

Wondering if a fuse had blown or something, she took a tentative step forward - and then the face appeared before her, floating in the darkness, a horrible face out of a nightmare. It glowed a spectral, rotting green. One eye was wide open, seeming to stare at her in wounded fear. The other was squeezed shut in a sinister leer. The left half of the face, the half with the open eye, appeared to be normal. But the right half was the face of a monster, drawn and inhuman. the thick lips drawn back to reveal snaggle teeth that were also glowing.

Sarah uttered a strangled little shriek and took a stumble-step backward. Then the lights came on and it was just Johnny's apartment again instead of some black limbo, Nixon on the wall trying to sell used cars, the braided rug Johnny's mother had made on the floor, the wine bottles made into candle bases. The face stopped glowing and she saw it was a dime-store Halloween mask, nothing more. Johnny's blue eye was twinkling out of the open eyehole at her.

He stripped it off and stood smiling amiably at her, dressed in faded jeans and a brown sweater.

'Happy Halloween, Sarah,' he said.

Her heart was still racing. He had really frightened her. 'Very funny,' she said, and turned to go. She didn't like being scared like that.

He caught her in the doorway. 'Hey... I'm sorry. 'Well you ought to be.' She looked at him coldly - or tried to. Her anger was already melting away. You just couldn't stay mad at Johnny, that was the thing. Whether she loved him or not - a thing she was still trying to puzzle out - it was impossible to be unhappy with him for very long, or to harbor a feeling of resentment. She wondered if anyone had ever succeeded in harboring a grudge against Johnny Smith, and the thought was so ridiculous she just had to smile.

'There, that's better. Man, I thought you were going to walk out on me.'

'I'm not a man.'

He cast his eyes upon her. 'So I've noticed.' She was wearing a bulky fur coat - imitation raccoon or something vulgar like that - and his innocent lechery made her smile again. 'In this thing you couldn't tell.'

'Oh, yeah, I can tell,' he said. He put an arm around her and kissed her. At first she wasn't going to kiss back, but of course she did.

'I'm sorry I scared you,' he said, and rubbed her nose companionably with his own before letting her go. He held up the mask. 'I thought you'd get a kick out of it. I'm gonna wear it in homeroom Friday.'

'Oh, Johnny, that won't be very good for discipline.'

'I'll muddle through somehow,' he said with a grin. And the hell of it was, he would.

She came to school every day wearing big, schoolmarmish glasses, her hair drawn back into bun so severe it seemed on the verge of a scream. She wore her skirts just above the knee in a season when most of the girls wore them just below the edges of their underpants (and my legs are better than any of theirs, Sarah thought resent-fully). She maintained alphabetical seating charts which, by the law of averages, at least, should have kept the troublemakers away from each other, and she resolutely sent unruly pupils to the assistant principal, her reasoning being that he was getting an extra five hundred a year to act as ramrod and she wasn't. And still her days were a constant struggle with that freshman teacher demon, Discipline. More disturbing, she had begun to sense that there was a collective, unspoken jury - a kind of school consciousness, maybe - that went into deliberations over every new teacher, and that the verdict being returned on her was not so good.

Johnny, on the face of it, appeared to be the antithesis of everything a good teacher should be. He ambled from dass to dass in an agreeable sort of daze, often showing up tardy because he had stopped to chat with someone between bells. He let the kids sit where they wanted so that the same face was never in the same seat from day to day (and the class thuds invariably gravitated to the back of the room). Sarah would not have been able to learn their names that way until March, but Johnny seemed to have them down pat already.

He was a tall man who had a tendency to slouch, and the kids called him Frankenstein. Johnny seemed amused rather than outraged by this. And yet his classes were mostly quiet and well-behaved, there were few skippers (Sarah had a constant problem with kids cutting class), and that same jury seemed to be coming back in his favor.

He was the sort of teacher who, in another ten years, would have the school yearbook dedicated to him. She just wasn't. And sometimes wondering why drove her crazy.

'You want a beer before we go? Glass of wine? Anything?'

'No, but I hope you're going well-heeled,' she said, taking his arm and deciding not to be mad anymore. 'I always eat at least three hot dogs. Especially when it's the last county fair of the year.' They were going to Esty, twenty miles north of Cleave Mills, a town whose only dubious claim to fame was that it held ABSOLUTELY THE LAST AGRICULTRAL FAIR OF THE YEAR IN NEW ENGLAND. The fair would close Friday night, on Halloween.

'Considering Friday's payday, I'm doing good. I got eight bucks.'

'Oh ... my ... God,' Sarah said, rolling her eyes. 'I always knew if I kept myself pure I'd meet a sugar daddy someday.'