a great gush of blood. He lay in the splintered remains of the benches he had struck and thought: It’s over. I punked out. Blew it.
Hands were on him, not gentle. They were turning him over. Elliman, Moochie, and the other guy were there. Elliman was the one who had turned him over.
Stillson came, shoving Moochie aside.
“Never mind this guy,” he said harshly. “Find the son of a bitch that took that picture. Smash his camera.”
Moochie and the other guy left. Somewhere close by the woman with the dark hair was crying out: “... behind a kid, hiding behind a kid and I’ll tell everybody ...”
“Shut her up, Sonny,” Stillson said.
“Sure,” Sonny said, and left Stillson’s side.
Stillson got down on his knees above Johnny. “Do we know each other, Fella? No sense lying. You’ve had the course.”
Johnny whispered, “We knew each other.”
“It was that Trimbull rally, wasn’t it?”
Johnny nodded.
Stillson got up abruptly, and with the last bit of his strength Johnny reached out and grasped his ankle. It was only for a second; Stillson pulled free easily. But it was long enough.
Everything had changed.
People were drawing near him now, but he saw only feet and legs no faces. It didn’t matter. Everything had changed.
He began to cry a little. Touching Stillson this time had been like touching a blank. Dead battery. Fallen tree. Empty house. Bare bookshelves. Wine bottles ready for candles.
Fading. Going away. The feet and legs around him were becoming misty and indistinct. He heard their voices, the excited gabble of speculation, but not the words. Only the sound of the words, and even that was fading, blurring into a high, sweet humming sound.
He looked over his shoulder and there was the corridor he had emerged from so long ago. He had come out of that corridor and into this bright placental place. Only then his mother had been alive and his father had been there, calling him by hame, until he broke through to them. Now it was only time to go back. Now it was right to go back.
I did it. Somehow I did it. I don’t understand how, but I have.
He let himself drift toward that corridor with the dark chrome walls, not knowing if there might be something at the far end of it or not, content to let time show him that. The sweet hum of the voices faded. The misty brightness faded. But he was still he—Johnny Smith—intact.
Get into the corridor, he thought. All right.
He thought that if he could get into that corridor, he would be able to walk.
III
Notes from the Dead Zone
1
Portsmouth, N.H.
January 23, 1979
Dear Dad,
This is a terrible letter to have to write, and I will try to keep it short. When you get it, I guess I will probably be dead. An awful thing has happened to me, and I think now that it may have started a long time before the car accident and the coma. You know about the psychic business, of course, and you may remember Mom swearing on her deathbed that God had meant for it to be this way, that God had something for me to do. She asked me not to run from it, and I promised her that I wouldn’t—not meaning it seriously, but wanting her mind to be easy. Now it looks as if she was right, in a funny sort of way. I still don’t really believe in God, not in a real Being who plans for us and gives us all little jobs to do, like Boy Scouts winning merit badges on The Great Hike of Life. But neither do I believe that all the things that have happened to me are blind chance.
In the summer of 1976, Dad, I went to a Greg Stillson rally in Trimbull, which is in New Hampshire’s third district. He was running for the first time then, you may recall. When he was on his way to the speaker’s rostrum he shook a lot of hands, and one of them was mine. This is the part you may find hard to believe even though you have seen the ability in action. I had one of my “flashes,” only this one was no flash, Dad. It was a vision, either in the biblical sense or in something very near it. Oddly enough, it wasn’t as clear as some of my other “insights” have been—there was a puzzling blue glow over everything that has never been there before—but it was incredibly powerful. I saw