his hair. His finger appeared nailed to the Zenith's ON button. A
picture popped up on the TV. It showed Joe and Nancy Voss
screwing on the post office floor in a litter of catalogues and
Congressional newsletters and sweepstakes announcements from
Publishers' Clearing House.
"No!" 'Becka screamed, and the picture changed. Now she saw
Moss Harlingen behind a fallen pine, slightly down the barrel of a
.30-.30. the picture changed and she saw Darla Gaines and her
boyfriend doing the horizontal bop in Darla's upstairs bedroom while
Rick Springfield stared at them from the wall.
Joe Paulson's clothes burst into flames.
The living room was filled with the hot smell of cooking beer.
A moment later, the 3-D picture of Jesus exploded.
"No!" 'Becka shrieked, suddenly understanding that it had been
her all along, her, her, her, she had thought everything up, she had
read their thoughts, somehow read their thoughts, it had been the hole
in her head and it had done something to her mind had suped it up
somehow. The picture on the TV changed again and she saw herself
backing down the stepladder with the .22 pistol in her hand, pointed
toward her she looked like a woman bent on suicide rather than on
cleaning.
Her husband was turning black before her very eyes.
She ran to him, seized his shredded, wet hand and ... and was
herself galvanized by electricity. She was no more able to let go than
Brer Rabbit had been after he slapped the tar baby for insolence.
Jesus oh Jesus, she thought as the current slammed into her,
driving her up on her toes.
And a mad, cackling voice, the voice of her father, rode in her
brain: Fooled you, 'Becka! Fooled you, didn't I? Fooled you good!
The back of the television, which she had screwed back on after
she had finished with her alterations (on the off-chance that Joe might
look back there), exploded backward in a mighty blue flash of light.
Joe and 'Becka Paulson tumbled to the carpet. Joe was already dead.
And by the time the smouldering wallpaper behind the TV had
ignited the, 'Becka was dead, too.
STEPHEN
KING
THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH
Appears in novel
999
published in 1999
Richard Kinnell wasn't frightened when he first saw the picture at
the yard sale in Rosewood.
He was fascinated by it, and he felt he'd had the good luck to find
something which might be very special, but fright? No. It didn't
occur to him until later ("not until it was too late," as he might
have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that
he had felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a
young man.
He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England
conference tided "The Threat of Popularity." You could count on
PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was
actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty
miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a plot
impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to
work it out.
At the conference, he sat on a panel where people who should have
known better asked him where he got his ideas and if he ever
scared himself. He left the city by way of the Tobin Bridge, then
got on Route 1. He never took the turnpike when he was trying to
work out problems; the turnpike lulled him into a state that was
like dreamless, waking sleep. It was restful, but not very creative.
The stop-and-go traffic on the coast road, however, acted like grit
inside an oyster-it created a fair amount of mental activity ... and
sometimes even a pearl.
Not, he supposed, that his critics would use that word. In an issue
of Esquire last year, Bradley Simons had begun his review of
Nightmare City this way: "Richard Kinnell, who writes like Jeffery
Dahmer cooks, has suffered a fresh bout of projectile vomiting. He
has tided this most recent mass of ejecta Nightmare City."
Route 1 took him through Revere, Malden, Everett, and up the
coast to Newburyport. Beyond Newburyport and just south of the
Massachusetts-New Hampshire border was the tidy little town of
Rosewood. A mile or so beyond the town center, he saw an array
of cheap-looking goods spread out on the lawn of a two-story
Cape. Propped against an avocado-colored electric stove was a
sign reading YARD SALE. Cars were parked on both sides of the
road, creating one of those bottlenecks which travelers unaffected
by the yard sale mystique curse their way through. Kinnell liked
yard sales, particularly the boxes of old books you sometimes
found at them. He drove through the bottleneck, parked his Audi at
the head of the line of cars pointed toward Maine and New
Hampshire, then walked back.
A dozen or so people were circulating on the littered front lawn of
the blue-and-gray Cape Cod. A large television stood to the left of
the cement walk, its feet planted on four paper ashtrays that were
doing absolutely nothing to protect the lawn. On top was a sign
reading MAKE AN OFFER-YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED. An
electrical cord, augmented by an extension, mailed back from the
TV and through the open front door. A fat woman sat in a lawn
chair before it, shaded by an umbrella with CINZANO printed on
the colorful scalloped flaps. There was a card table beside her with
a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it.
This sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV
was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful
young people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex.
The fat woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked
at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her
mouth was slightly sprung.
Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with
paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.
He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning
against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic
laundry baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it
at once.
He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and
dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor,
and technically very good. Kinnell didn't care about that; technique
didn't interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly
noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more
unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department.
He knelt between the two laundry baskets, which had been filled
with a jumble of small appliances, and let his fingers slip over the
glass facing of the picture. He glanced around briefly, looking for
others like it, and saw none - only the usual yard sale art collection
of Little Bo Peeps, praying hands, and gambling dogs.
He looked back at the framed watercolor, and in his mind he was
already moving his suitcase into the backseat of the Au
di so he
could slip the picture comfortably into the trunk.
It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car-maybe a
Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway -
crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset. The T-top was off, turning the
black car into a half-assed convertible. The young man's left arm.
was cocked on the door, his right wrist was draped casually over
the wheel. Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of
yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink. The young man
had lank blond hair that spilled over his low forehead. He was
grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at
all but fangs.
Or maybe they're filed to points, Kinnell thought. Maybe he's
supposed to be a cannibal.
He liked that; liked the idea of a cannibal crossing the Tobin
Bridge at sunset. In a Grand Am. He knew what most of the
audience at the PEN panel discussion would have thought - Oh,
yes, great picture for Rich Kinnell he probably wants it for
inspiration, a feather to tickle his tired old gorge into one more fit
of projectile vomiting-but most of those folks were ignoramuses, at
least as far as his work went, and what was more, they treasured
their ignorance, cossetted it the way some people inexplicably
treasured and cossetted those stupid, mean-spirited little dogs that
yapped at visitors and sometimes bit the paperboy's ankles. He
hadn't been attracted to this painting because he wrote horror
stories; he wrote horror stories because he was attracted to things
like this painting. His fans sent him stuff - pictures, mostly - and he
threw most of them away, not because they were bad art but
because they were tiresome and predictable. One fan from Omaha
had sent him a little ceramic sculpture of a screaming, horrified
monkey's head poking out of a refrigerator door, however, and that
one he had kept. It was unskillfully executed, but there was an
unexpected juxtaposition there that lit UP his dials. This painting
had some of the same quality, but it was even better. Much better.
As he was reaching for it, wanting to pick it up right now, this
second, wanting to tuck it under his arm and proclaim his
intentions, a voice spoke up behind him: "Aren't you Richard
Kinnell?"
He jumped, then turned. The fat woman was standing directly
behind him, blotting out most of the immediate landscape. She had
put on fresh lipstick before approaching, and now her mouth had
been transformed into a bleeding grin.
"Yes, I am," he said, smiling back.
Her eyes dropped to the picture. "I should have known you'd go
right to that," she said, simpering. "It's so You."
"It is, isn't it?" he said, and smiled his best celebrity smile. "How
much would you need for it?"
"Forty-five dollars," she said. "I'll be honest with you, I started it at
seventy, but nobody likes it, so now it's marked down. If you come
back tomorrow, you can probably have it for thirty." The simper
had grown to frightening proportions. Kinnell could see little gray
spit-buds in the dimples at the comers of her stretched mouth.
"I don't think I want to take that chance," he said. "I'll write you a
check right now."
The simper continued to stretch; the woman now looked like some
grotesque John Waters parody. Divine does Shirley Temple. "I'm
really not supposed to take checks, but all right," she said, her tone
that of a teenage girl finally consenting to have sex with her
boyfriend. "Only while you have your pen out, could you write an
autograph for my daughter? Her name is Michela?"
"What a beautiful name," Kinnell said automatically. He took the
picture and followed the fat woman back to the card table. On the
TV next to it, the lustful young people had been temporarily
displaced by an elderly woman gobbling bran flakes.
" Michela reads all your books," the fat woman said. "Where in the
world do you get all those crazy ideas?"
"I don't know," Kinnell said, smiling more widely than ever. "They
just come to me. Isn't that amazing?. "
The yard sale minder's name was Judy Diment, and she lived in the
house next door. When Kinnell asked her if she knew who the
artist happened to be, she said she certainly did; Bobby Hastings
had done it, and Bobby Hastings was the reason she was selling off
the Hastings' things. "That's the only painting he didn't bum," she
said. "Poor Iris! She's the one I really feel sorry for. I don't think
George cared much, really. And I know he didn't understand why
she wants to sell the house." She rolled her eyes in her large,
sweaty face - the old can-you-imagine-that look. She took
Kinnell's check when he tore it off, then gave him the pad where
she had written down all the items she'd sold and the prices she'd
obtained for them. "Just make it out to Michela," she said. "Pretty
please with sugar on it?" The simper reappeared, like an old
acquaintance you'd hoped was dead.
"Uh-huh," Kinnell said, and wrote his standard thanks-for-being-a-
fan message. He didn't have to watch his hands or even think about
it anymore, not after twenty-five years of writing autographs. "Tell
me about the picture, and the Hastingses."
Judy Diment folded her pudgy hands in the manner of a woman
about to recite a favorite story.
"Bobby was just twenty-three when he killed himself this spring.
Can you believe that? He was the tortured genius type, you know,
but still living at home." Her eyes rolled, again asking Kinnell if he
could imagine it. "He must have had seventy, eighty paintings, plus
all his sketchbooks. Down in the basement, they were." She
pointed her chin at the Cape Cod, then looked at the picture of the
fiendish young man driving across the Tobin Bridge at sunset.
"Iris-that's Bobby's mother - said most of them were real bad, lots
worse'n this. Stuff that'd curl your hair." She lowered her voice to a
whisper, glancing at a woman who was looking at the Hastings'
mismatched silverware and a pretty good collection of old
McDonald's plastic glasses in a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids motif.
"Most of them had sex stuff in them."
"Oh no," Kinnell said.
"He did the worst ones after he got on drugs," Judy Diment
continued. "After he was dead-he hung himself down in the
basement, where he used to paint-they found over a hundred of
those little bottles they sell crack cocaine in. Aren't drugs awful,
Mr. Kinnell?"
"They sure are."
"Anyway, I guess he finally just got to the end of his rope, no pun
intended. He took all of his sketches and paintings out into the
back yard-except for that one, I guess - and burned them. Then he
hung himself down in the basement. He pinned a note to his shirt.
It said, 'I can't stand what's happening to me.' Isn't that awful, Mr.
Kinnell? Isn't that just the awfulest thing you ever heard?"
'Yes," Kinnell said, sincerely enough. "It just about is."
'Like I say, I think George would go right on livi
ng in the house if
he had his druthers, " Judy Diment said. She took the sheet of
paper with Michela's autograph on it, held it up next to Kinnell's
check, and shook her head, as if the similarity of the signatures
amazed her. "But men are different."
"Are they?"
"Oh, yes, much less sensitive. By the end of his life, Bobby
Hastings was just skin and bone, dirty all the time-you could smell
him - and he wore the same T-shirt, day in and day out. It had a
picture of the Led Zeppelins on it. His eyes were red, he had a
scraggle on his cheeks that you couldn't quite call a beard, and his
pimples were coming back, like he was a teenager again. But she
loved him, because a mother's love sees past all those things."
The woman who had been looking at the silverware and the glasses
came over with a set of Star Wars placemats. Mrs. Diment took
five I dollars for them, wrote the sale carefully down on her pad
below "ONE DOZ. ASSORTED POTHOLDERS & HOTPADS,"
then turned back to Kinnell.
They went out to Arizona," she said, "to stay with Iris's folks. I
know George is looking for work out there in Flagstaff-he's a
draftsman-but I don't know if he's found any yet. If he has, I
suppose we might not ever see them again here in Rosewood. She
marked out all the stuff she wanted me to sell-Iris did - and told me
I could keep twenty percent for my trouble. I'll send a check for the
rest. There won't be much." She sighed.
"The picture is great," Kinnell said.
"Yeah, too bad he burned the rest, because most of this other stuff
is your standard yard sale crap, pardon my French. What's that?"
Kinnell had turned the picture around. There was a length of
Dymotape pasted to the back.
"A tide, I think."
"What does it say?"
He grabbed the picture by the sides and held it up so she could read
it for herself This put the picture at eye level to him, and he studied
it eagerly, once again taken by the simpleminded weirdness of the
subject; kid behind the wheel of a muscle car, a kid with a nasty,
knowing grin that revealed the filed points of an even nastier set of
teeth.
It fits, he thought. If ever a title futted a painting, this one does.
" The Road Virus Heads North," she read. "I never noticed that
when my boys were lugging stuff out. Is it the tide, do you think?"
"Must be." Kinnell couldn't take his eyes off the blond kid's grin. I
The Collective Page 38