Free The Dead Zone by Stephen King Page A

two A.M . on the morning of October 30, 1970, the telephone began to ring in the downstairs hall of a small house about a hundred and fifty miles south of Cleaves Mills.
    Herb Smith sat up in bed, disoriented, dragged halfway across the threshold of sleep and left in its doorway, groggy and disoriented.
    Vera’s voice beside him, muffled by the pillow. “Phone.”
    â€œYeah,” he said, and swung out of bed. He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his late forties, losing his hair, now dressed in blue pajama bottoms. He went out into the upstairs hall and turned on the light. Down below, the phone shrilled away.
    He went down to what Vera liked to call “the phone nook.” It consisted of the phone and a strange little desk-table that she had gotten with Green Stamps about three years ago. Herb had refused from the first to slide his two-hundred-and-forty-pound bulk into it. When he talked on the phone, he stood up. The drawer of the desk-table was full of Upper Rooms, Reader’s Digests, and Fate magazine.
    Herb reached for the phone, then let it ring again.
    A phone call in the middle of the night usually meant one of three things: an old friend had gotten totally shitfaced and had decided you’d be glad to hear from him even at two in the morning; a wrong number; bad news.
    Hoping for the middle choice. Herb picked up the phone. “Hello?”
    A crisp male voice said: “Is this the Herbert Smith residence?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œTo whom am I speaking, please?”
    â€œI’m Herb Smith. What . . .”
    â€œWill you hold for a moment?”
    â€œYes, but who . . .”
    Too late. There was a faint clunk in his ear, as if the party on the other end had dropped one of his shoes. He had been put on hold. Of the many things he disliked about the telephone—bad connections, kid pranksters who wanted to know if you had Prince Albert in a can, operators who sounded like computers, and smoothies who wanted you to buy magazine subscriptions—the thing he disliked the most was being on hold. It was one of those insidious things that had crept into modern life almost unnoticed over the last ten years or so. Once upon a time the fellow on the other end would simply have said, “Hold the phone, willya?” and set it down. At least in those days you were able to hear faraway conversations, a barking dog, a radio, a crying baby. Being on hold was a totally different proposition. The line was darkly, smoothly blank. You were nowhere. Why didn’t they just say, “Will you hold on while I bury you alive for a little while?”
    He realized he was just a tiny bit scared.
    â€œHerbert?”
    He turned around, the phone to his ear. Vera was at the top of the stairs in her faded brown bathrobe, hair up in curlers, some sort of cream hardened to a castlike consistency on her cheeks and forehead.
    â€œWho is it?”
    â€œI don’t know yet. They’ve got me on hold.”
    â€œOn hold? At quarter past two in the morning?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œIt’s not Johnny, is it? Nothing’s happened to Johnny?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said, struggling to keep his voice from rising. Somebody calls you at two in the morning, puts you on hold, you count your relatives and inventory their condition. You make lists of old aunts. You tot up the ailments of grandparents, if you still have them. You wonder if the ticker of one of your friends just stopped ticking. And you try not to think that you have one son you love very much, or about how these calls always seem to come at two in the morning, or how all of a sudden your calves are getting stiff and heavy with tension . . .
    Vera had closed her eyes and had folded her hands in the middle of her thin bosom. Herb tried to control his irritation. Restrained himself from saying, “Vera, the Bible makes the strong suggestion that you go and do that in your