The Dead Zone(64)

He pushed the door open and went in. She was a vague hump in the bed and Johnny thought, That's what I looked like. A nurse was taking her pulse; she turned when the door opened and the dim hall lights flashed on her spectacles.

'Are you Mrs. Smith's son?'

'Yes.'

'Johnny?' The voice rose from the hump in the bed, dry and hollow, rattling with death as a few pebbles will rattle in an empty gourd. The voice - God help him -made his skin crawl. He moved closer. Her face was twisted into a snarling mask on the left-hand side. The hand on the counterpane was a claw. Stroke, he thought. What the old people call a shock. Yes. That's better. That's what she looks like. Like she's had a bad shock.

'Is that you, John?'

'It's me, Ma.'

'Johnny? Is that you?'

'Yes, Ma.'

He came closer yet, and forced himself to take the bony claw.

'I want my Johnny,' she said querulously.

The nurse shot him a pitying look, and he found him-self wanting to smash his fist through it.

'Would you leave us alone?' he asked.

'I really shouldn't while...'

'Come on, she's my mother and I want some time alone with her,' Johnny said. 'What about it?'

'Well...'

'Bring me my juice, Dad!' his mother cried hoarsely. 'Feel like I could drink a quart!'

'Would you get out of here?' he cried at the nurse. He was filled with a terrible sorrow of which he could not even find the focus. It seemed like a whirlpool going down into darkness.

The nurse left.

'Ma,' he said, sitting beside her. That weird feeling of doubled time, of reversal, would not leave him. How many times had she sat over his bed like this, perhaps holding his dry hand and talking to him? He recalled the timeless period when the room had seemed so close to him - seen through a gauzy placental membrane, his mother's face bending over him, thundering senseless sounds slowly into his upturned face.

'Ma,' he said again, and kissed the hook that had replaced her hand.

'Gimme those nails, I can do that,' she said. Her left eye seemed frozen in its orbit; the other rolled wildly. It was the eye of a gutshot horse. 'I want Johnny.'

'Ma, I'm here.'

'John-ny! John-ny! JOHN-NY!'

'Ma,' he said, afraid the nurse would come back.

'You ...' She broke off and her head turned toward him a little. 'Bend over here where I can see,' she whispered.

He did as she asked.

'You came,' she said. 'Thank you. Thank you.' Tears began to ooze from the good eye. The bad one, the one on the side of her face that had been frozen by the shock, stared indifferently upward.

'Sure I came.'

'I saw you,' she whispered. 'What a power God has given you, Johnny! Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say it was so?'

'Yes, you did.'

'He has a job for you,' she said. 'Don't run from him, Johnny. Don't hide away in a cave like Elijah or make him send a big fish to swallow you up. Don't do that, John.'

'No. I won't.' He held her claw-hand. His head throbbed.

'Not the potter but the potter's clay, John. Remember.'

'All right.'

'Remember that!' she said stridently, and he thought, She's going back into nonsense land. But she didn't; at least she went no further into nonsense land than she had been since he came out of his coma.

'Heed the still, small voice when it comes,' she said.

'Yes, Ma. I will.'

Her head turned a tiny bit on the pillow, and - was she smiling?

'You think I'm crazy, I guess.' She twisted her head a little more, so she could look directly at him. 'But that doesn't matter. You'll know the voice when it comes. It'll tell you what to do. It told Jeremiah and Daniel and Amos and Abraham. It'll come to you. It'll tell you. And when it does, Johnny... do your duty.'

'Okay, Ma.'

'What a power,' she murmured. Her voice was growing furry and indistinct. 'What a power God has given you... I knew ... I always knew...' Her voice trailed off. The good eye closed. The other stared blankly forward.

Johnny sat with her another five minutes, then got up to leave. His hand was on the doorknob and he was easing the door open when her dry, rattling voice came again, chilling him with its implacable, positive command.

'Do your duty, John.'

'Yes, Ma.'

It was the last time he ever spoke to her. She died at five minutes past eight on the morning of August 20. Somewhere north of them, Walt and Sarah Hazlett were having a discussion about Johnny that was almost an argument, and somewhere south of them, Greg Stillson was cutting himself some prime ass**le.

Chapter Thirteen

1.

'You don't understand,' Greg Stillson said in a voice of utter, reasonable patience to the kid sitting in the lounge at the back of the Ridgeway police station. The kid, shirt-less, was tilted back in a padded folding chair and drinking a bottle of Pepsi. He was smiling indulgently at Greg Stillson, not understanding that twice was all Greg Still-son ever repeated himself, understanding that there was one prime ass**le in the room, but not yet understanding who it was.

That realization would have to be brought home to him.