The Dead Zone(98)

Around Frank Dodd's neck on a string was a sign crayoned in lipstick. It read: I CONFESS.

The pain in Johnny's head began to climb to a sizzling, insupportable peak. He groped out with a hand and found the doorjamb.

Knew, he thought incoherently. Knew somehow when he' saw me. Knew it was all over. Came home. Did this.

Black rings overlaying his sight, spreading like evil ripples.

What a talent God has given you, Johnny.

(I CONFESS)

'Johnny?'

From far away.

'Johnny, are you all...'

Fading. Everything fading away. That was good. Would have been better if he had never come out of the coma at all. Better for all concerned. Well, he had had his chance.

' Johnny -'

Frank Dodd had come up here and somehow he had slit his throat from the ear to the proverbial ear while the storm howled outside like all the dark things of the earth let loose. Gone a gusher, as his father had said that winter twelve years or so ago, when the pipes in the basement had frozen and burst. Gone a gusher. Sure as hell had. All the way up to the ceiling.

He believed that he might have screamed then, but afterward was never sure. It might only have been in his own head that he screamed. But he had wanted to scream;

to scream out all the horror and pity and agony in his heart.

Then he was falling forward into darkness, and grateful to go. Johnny blacked out.

15.

From the New York Time's, December 19, 1975:

MAINE PSYCHIC DIRECTS SHERIFF TO KILLER DEPUTY'S HOME AFTER VISITING SCENE OF THE CRIME

(Special to the Times) John Smith of Pownal may not actually be psychic, but one would have difficulty persuading Sheriff George F. Bannerman of Castle County, Maine, to believe that. Desperate after a sixth assault-murder in the small western Maine town of Castle Rock, Sheriff Bannerman called Mr. Smith on the phone and asked him to come over to Castle Rock and lend a hand, if possible. Mr. Smith, who received national attention earlier this year when he recovered from a deep coma after fifty-five months of unconsciousness, had been condemned by the weekly tabloid Inside View as a hoaxer, but at a press conference yesterday Sheriff Bannerman would only say, 'We don't put a whole lot of stock up here in Maine in what those New York reporters think.'

According to Sheriff Bannerman, Mr. Smith crawled on his hands and knees around the scene of the sixth murder, which occurred on the Castle Rock town common. He came up with a mild case of frostbite and the murderer's name - Sheriff's Deputy Franklin Dodd, who had been on the Castle County Sheriff's payroll five years, as long as Bannerman himself.

Earlier this year Mr. Smith stirred controversy in his native state when he had a psychic flash that his physical therapist's house had caught fire. The flash turned out to be nothing but the truth. At a press conference following, a reporter challenged him to...

From Newsweek, page 41, week of December 24, 1975:.

THE NEW HURKOS

It may be that the first genuine psychic since Peter Hurkos has been uncovered in this country Hurkos was the German-born seer who has been able to tell questioners all about their private lives by touching their hands, silverware, or items from their handbags.

John Smith is a shy and unassuming young man from the south-central Maine town of Pownal. Earlier this year he returned to consciousness after a period of more than four years in a deep coma following a car accident (see photo). According to the consulting neurologist in the case, Dr. Samuel Weizak, Smith made a 'perfectly astounding recovery'. Today he is recovering from a mild case of frostbite and a four-hour blackout following the bizarre resolution of a long-unsolved multiple murder case in the town of...

December 27, 1975

Dear Sarah,

Dad and I both enjoyed your le'tter, which arrived just this afternoon. I'm really fine, so you can stop worrying, okay? But I thank you for your concern. The' 'frostbite' was greatly exaggerated in the press. Just a couple of patches on the' tips of three' fingers of my left hand. The' blackout was really nothing much more' than a fainting spell 'brought on by emotional overload', Weizak says. Yes, he came down himself and insisted on driving me to the hospital in Portland. Just watching him in action is nearly worth the price of admission. He bullied them into giving him a consultation room and an EEG machine and a technician to run it. He says he can find no new brain damage or signs of progressive brain damage. He wants to do a whole series of tests, some of them sound utterly inquisitorial - 'Renounce, heretic, or we'll give you another pneumo-brainscan!' (Ha-ha, and are you still sniffin' that wicked cocaine', darlin'?) Anyway, I turned down the kind offer to be pumped and prodded some more. Dad is rather pissed at me about turning the tests down, keeps trying to draw a parallel between my refusal to have them and my mother's refusal to take her hypertension medicine. It's very hard to make him see' that, if Weizak did find something, the odds would be' nine-to-one against him being able to do anything about it.

Yes, I saw the Newsweek article. That picture of me is from the press conference, only cropped. Don't look like anyone you'd like to meet in a dark alley, do I? Ha-ha! Holy Gee (as your buddy Anne Strafford is so fond of saying), but I wish they hadn't run that story. The packages, cards, and letters have started coming again. l don't open any of them anymore unless I recognize the return address, just mark them 'Return to Sender'. They are too pitiful, too full of hope and hate and belief and unbelief, and somehow they all remind me of the way my Mom was.