Stephen King: The Dead Zone

Stephen King: The Dead Zone

Stephen King: The Dead Zone

PROLOGUE

1.

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.

Johnny had walked down from his house, just over the Pownal line, with his skates hung over his shoulder. At six, he was a pretty fair skater. Not good enough to join in the big kids’ hockey games yet, but able to skate rings around most of the other first graders, who were always pinwheeling their arms for balance or sprawling on their butts.

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 flannel snowpants.

Chuck grinned at him. ‘Get outta here, kid. I hear your mother callin you.’

Grinning, six-year old Johnny Smith skated on. And on the road side of the skating area, he saw Timmy Benedix himself coming down the slope, with his father behind him.

‘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!’ Johnny didn’t hear. He was doing it I He was skating backward! He had caught the rhythm – all at once. It was in a kind of sway of the legs…

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, ‘Johnny! Watch out!’

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.

Johnny went flying, arms out. A bare moment later his head connected with the ice and he blacked out.

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. ‘Johnny… you okay? You took a hell of a knock.’

‘Black,’ Johnny said gutturally. ‘Black ice. Don’t jump it no more, Chuck.’

Chuck looked around, a little scared, then back at Johnny. He touched the large knot that was rising on the boy’s forehead.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *