The Dead Zone(60)

'()h,' Johnny said softly ... then: 'Is that it?'

His fingers loosened slowly. He looked at Dussault.

'Well?' Dussault asked, but the authority was suddenly gone from his voice. The tired, nervous young man who had answered the reporters' questions seemed also to be gone. There was a half-smile on Johnny's lips, but there was nothing warm about it. The blue of his eyes had darkened. They had grown cold and distant. Weizak saw and felt a chill of gooseflesh. He later told his wife that it had been the face of a man looking through a high-powered microscope and observing an interesting species of paramecium.

'It's your sister's medallion,' he said to Dussault. 'Her name was Anne but everyone called her Terry. Your older sister. You loved her. You almost worshiped the ground she walked on.'

Suddenly, terribly, Johnny Smith's voice began to climb and change. It became the cracked and unsure voice of an adolescent.

'It's for when you cross Lisbon Street against the lights, Terry, or when you're out parking with one of those guys from E.L. Don't forget, Terry... don't forget...'

The plump woman who had asked Johnny who the Democrats would nominate next year uttered a frightened little moan. One of the TV cameramen muttered 'Holy Jesus!' in a hoarse voice.

'Stop it,' Dessault whispered. His face had gone a sick shade of gray. His eyes bulged and spittle shone like chrome on his lower lip in this harsh light. His hands moved for the medallion, which was now looped on its fine gold chain over Johnny's fingers. But his hands moved with no power or authority. The medallion swung back and forth, throwing off hypnotic gleams of light.

'Remember me, Terry,' the adolescent voice begged. 'Stay clean, Terry.. . please, for God's sake stay clean...'

'Stop it! Stop it, you bastard!'

Now Johnny spoke in his own voice again. 'It was speed, wasn't it? Then meth. She died of a heart attack at twenty-seven. But she wore it ten years, Rog. She remembered you. She never forgot. Never forgot ... never

never. .. never.'

The medallion slipped from his fingers and struck the floor with a small, musical sound. Johnny stared away into emptiness for a moment, his face calm and cool and distant. Dussault grubbed at his feet for the medallion, sobbing hoarsely in the stunned silence.

A flashbulb popped, and Johnny's face cleared and became his own again. Horror touched it, and then pity. He knelt clumsily beside Dussault.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean ...

'You cheapjack, bastard hoaxer!' Dussault screamed at him. 'It's a lie! All a lie! All a lie!' He struck Johnny a clumsy, open-handed blow on the neck and Johnny fell over, striking his head on the floor, hard. He saw stars.

Uproar.

He was dimly aware that Dussault was pushing his way blindly through the crowd and toward the doors. People milled around Dussault, around Johnny. He saw Dussault through a forest of legs and shoes. Then Weizak was beside him, helping him to sit up.

'John, are you all right? Did he hurt you?'

'Not as bad as I hurt him. I'm okay.' He struggled to his feet. Hands - maybe Weizak's, maybe someone else's -helped him. He felt dizzy and sick; almost revolted. This had been a mistake, a terrible mistake.

Someone screamed piercingly - the stout woman who had asked about the Democrats. Johnny saw Dussault pitch forward to his knees, grope at the sleeve of the stout woman's print blouse and then slide tiredly forward onto the tile near the doorway he had been trying to reach. The St. Christopher medal was still in one hand.

'Fainted,' someone said. 'Fainted dead away. I'll be damned.'

'My fault,' Johnny said to Sam Weizak. His throat felt close and tight with shame, with tears. 'All my fault.'

'No,' Sam said. 'No, John.'

But it was. He shook loose of Weizak's hands and went to where Dussault lay, coming around now, eyes blinking dazedly at the ceiling. Two of the doctors had come over to where he lay.

'Is he all right?' Johnny asked. He turned toward the woman reporter in the slacksuit and she shrank away from him. A cramp of fear passed over her face.

Johnny turned the other way, toward the TV reporter who had asked him if he'd had any flashes before his accident. It suddenly seemed very important that he explained to someone. 'I didn't mean to hurt him,' he said. 'Honest to God, I never meant to hurt him. I didn't know ...

The TV reporter backed up a step. 'No,' he said. 'Of course you didn't. He was asking for it, anybody could see that. Just... don't touch me, huh?'

Johnny looked at him dumbly, lips quivering. He was still in shock but beginning to understand. Oh yes. He was beginning to understand. The TV reporter tried to smile and could only produce a death's-head rictus.

'Just don't touch me, Johnny. Please.'

'It's not like that,' Johnny said - or tried to. Later, he was never sure if any sound had come out.

'Don't touch me, Johnny, okay?'

The reporter backed up to where his cameraman was packing his gear. Johnny stood and watched him. He began to shake all over.

3.

'It's for your own good, John,' Weizak said. The nurse stood behind him, a white ghost, a sorcerer's apprentice with her hands hovering above the small, wheeled medication table, a junkie's paradise of sweet dreams.