Stephen King: The Dead Zone

Take the check and I’ll leave you in peace. That’s the deal. Send it on to UNICEF, if you want, or give it to a home for orphan bloodhounds, or blow it all on the ponies. I don’t care. Just take it.

I’m sorry you felt you had to leave in such a hurry, but I believe I understand. We all hope to see you soon. Chuck leaves for Stovington Prep on September 4.

Johnny, take the check. Please.

All regards,

Roger Chatsworth

September 1 1977

Dear Johnny,

Will you believe that I’m not going to let this go? Please. Take the check.

Regards,

Roger

Dear Johnny,

September 10, 1977

Charlie and l were both so glad to know where you are, and it was a relief to get a letter from you that sounded so natural and like yourself. But there was one thing that bothered me very much, son. I called up Sam Weizak and read him that part of your letter about the increasing frequency of your headaches. He advises you to see a doctor, Johnny, without delay. He is afraid that a clot may have formed around the old scar tissue. So that worries me, and it worries Sam, too. You’ve never looked really healthy since you came out of the coma, Johnny, and when I last saw you in early June, I thought you looked very tired. Sam didn’t say, but I know what he’d really like you to do is to catch a plane out of Phoenix and come on home and let him be the one to look at you. You certainly can’t plead poverty now!

Roger Chatsworth has called here twice, and I tell him what I can. I think he’s telling the truth when he says it isn’t conscience-money or a reward for saving his son’s life. I believe your mother would have said that the man is doing penance the only way he knows how. Anyway, you’ve taken it, and I hope you don’t mean it when you say you only did it to ‘get him off your back’. I believe you have too much grit in you to do anything for a reason like that.

Now this is very hard for me to say, but l will do the best I can. Please come home, Johnny. The publicity has died down again I can hear you saying, ‘Oh bullshit, it will never die down again, not after this’ and I suppose you are right in a way, but you are also wrong. Over the phone Mr. Chatsworth said, ‘If you talk to him, try to make him understand that no psychic except Nostradamus has ever been much more than a nine-days’ wonder.’ I worry about you a lot, son. I worry about you blaming yourself for the dead instead of blessing your. self for the living, the ones you saved, the ones that were at the Chatsworths’ house that night. I worry and I miss you, too. ‘I miss you like the dickens,’ as your grand-mother used to say. So please come home as soon as you can.

Dad

P.S. I’m sending the clippings about the fire and about your part in it. Charlie collected them up. As you will see, you were correct in guessing that ‘everyone who was at that lawn party will spill their guts to the papers’. I suppose these clippings may just upset you more, and if they do, just toss them away. But Charlie’s idea was that you may look at them and say, ‘That wasn’t as bad as I thought, I can face that.’ I hope it turns out that way.

Dad

September 29, 1977

Dear Johnny,

I got your address from my dad. How is the great American desert. Seen any redskins (ha-ha)? Well here I am at Stovington Prep. This place isn’t so tough. I am taking sixteen hours of credit. Advanced chemistry is my favorite although it’s really something of a tit after the course at DHS. I always had the feeling that our teacher there, old Fearless Farnham, would really have been more happy making doomsday weapons and blowing up the world. In English we are reading three things by J. D. Salinger this first four weeks, Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beams,