The Dead Zone

Stephen King

The Dead Zone

PROLOGUE

By the time he graduated from college, John Smith had forgotten all about the bad fall he took on the ice that January day in 1953. In fact, he would have been hard put to remember it by the time he graduated from grammar school. And his mother and father never knew about it at all.

They were skating on a cleared patch of Runaround Pond in Durham. The bigger boys were playing hockey with old taped sticks and using a couple of potato baskets for goals. The little kids were just farting around the way little kids have done since time immemorial-their ankles bowing comically in and out, their breath puffing in the frosty twenty-degree air. At one corner of the cleared ice two rubber tires burned sootily, and a few parents sat nearby, watching their children. The age of the snowmobile was still distant and winter fun still consisted of exercising your body rather than a gasoline engine.

Joh

Now he skated slowly around the outer edge of the clear patch, wishing he could go backward like Timmy Benedix, listening to the ice thud and crackle mysteriously under the snow cover farther out, also listening to the shouts of the hockey players, the rumble of a pulp truck crossing the bridge on its way to U. S. Gypsum in Lisbon Falls, the murmur of conversation from the adults. He was very glad to be alive on that cold, fair winter day. Nothing was wrong with him, nothing troubled his mind, he wanted nothing… except to be able to skate backward, like Timmy Benedix.

He skated past the fire and saw that two or three of the grown-ups were passing around a bottle of booze.

“Gimme some of that!” he shouted to Chuck Spier. who was bundled up in a big lumberjack shirt and green fla

Chuck gri

Gri

“Timmy!” he shouted. “Watch this!”

He turned around and began to skate clumsily backward. Without realising it, he was skating into the area of the hockey game.

“Hey kid!” someone shouted. “Get out the way!” Joh

He looked down, fascinated, to see what his legs were doing.

The big kids” hockey puck, old and scarred and gouged around the edges, buzzed past him, unseen. One of the big kids, not a very good skater, was chasing it with what was almost a blind, headlong plunge.

Chuck Spier saw it coming. He rose to his feet and shouted, “Joh

John raised his head-and the next moment the dumsy skater, all one hundred and sixty pounds of him, crashed into little John Smith at full speed.

Joh

Blacked out… black i. e… blacked out -… black ice black. Black.

They told him he had blacked out. All he was really sure of was that strange repeating thought and suddenly looking up at a circle of faces-scared hockey players, worried adults, curious little kids. Timmy Benedix smirking. Chuck Spier was holding him-

Black ice. Black.

“What?” Chuck asked. “Joh

“Black,” Joh

Chuck looked around, a little scared, then back at Joh

“I'm sorry,” the clumsey hockey player said. “I never even saw him. Little kids are supposed to stay away from the hockey. It's the rules. “He looked around uncertainly for support.

“Joh

“Don't jump it no more,” Joh

“Think we ought to take him to the doctor?” Chuck asked Bill Gendron. “He don't know what he's sayin?

“Give him a minute,” Bill advised.

They gave him a minute, and Joh

“You come on over and sit down by the fire for a while,” Chuck said. “You took a hell of a knock.”

Joh

“Can you remember who you are and everything?” Bill asked.

“Sure. Sure I can. I'm okay.”

“Who's your dad and mom?”

“Herb and Vera Herb and Vera Smith.”

Bill and Chuck looked at each other and shrugged.

“I think he's okay,” Chuck said, and then; for the third time, “but he sure took a hell of a knock, didn't he? Wow.”

“Kids,” Bill said, looking fondly out at his eight year old twin girls, skating hand in hand, and then back at Joh

“Not a Polack,” Chuck replied, and they both burst out laughing. The bottle of Bushmill's began making its rounds again.

Ten minutes later Joh

“God's mercy!” Vera Smith said when she saw him. “How did you get that?”

“Fell down,” he said, and began to slurp up Campbell's tomato soup.

“Are you all right, John?” she asked, touching it gently. “Sure, Mom. “He was, too except for the occasional bad dreams that came over the course of the next month or so… the bad dreams and a tendency to sometimes get very dozy at times of the day when he had never been dozy before. And that stopped happening at about the same time the bad dreams stopped happening.

He was all right.

In mid-February, Chuck Spier got up one morning and found that the battery of his old “48 De Soto was dead. He tried to jump it from his farm truck. As he attached the second damp to the De Soto's battery, it exploded in his face, showering him with fragments and corrosive battery acid. He lost an eye. Vera said it was God's own mercy he hadn't lost them both. Joh

From time to time in the years afterward, Joh

And the hunches were never that startling, or even very frequent. It was not until the night of the county fair and the mask that anything very startling happened. Before the second accident.