Bannerman backed slowly out of the room and opened another door. His eyes were dazed and hurt. It was a guest bedroom, unoccupied. He opened the closet, which was empty except for a neat tray of D-Con rat-killer on the floor. Another door. This bedroom was unfinished and cold enough to show Bannerman’s breath. He looked around. There was another door, this one at the head of the stairs. He went to it, and Johnny followed. This door was locked.
“Frank? Are you in there?” He rattled the knob. “Open it, Frank!”
There was no answer. Bannerman raised his foot and kicked out, connecting with the door just below the knob. There was a flat cracking sound that seemed to echo in Johnny’s head like a steel platter dropped on a tile floor.
“Oh God,” Bannerman said in a flat, choked voice. “Frank.”
Johnny could see over his shoulder; could see too much. Frank Dodd was propped on the lowered seat of the toilet. He was naked except for the shiny black raincoat, which he had looped over his shoulders; the raincoat’s black hood (executioner’s hood, Johnny thought dimly) dangled down on the top of the toilet tank like some grotesque, deflated black pod. He had somehow managed to cut his own throat—Johnny would not have thought that possible. There was a package of Wilkinson Sword Blades on the edge of the washbasin. A single blade lay on the floor, glittering wickedly. Drops of blood had beaded on its edge. The blood from his severed jugular vein and carotid artery had splashed everywhere. There were pools of it caught in the folds of the raincoat which dragged on the floor. It was on the shower curtain, which had a pattern of paddling ducks with umbrellas held over their heads. It was on the ceiling.
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 Times, 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 Sheriffs payroll five years, as long as Bannerman himself.