The Collective

"I'll show you in a moment," Cheyney said. "A five or a ten would

do as well."

Paladin studied him, then opened his wallet again. He took back

his pass, replaced it, and carefully took out a one-dollar bill. He

turned it so it faced Cheyney. Cheyney took his own wallet (a

scuffed old Lord Buxton with its seams unravelling; he should

replace it but found it easier to think of than to do) from his jacket

pocket, and removed a dollar bill of his own. He put it next to

Paladin's, and then turned them both around so Paladin could see

them right-side-up-so Paladin could study them.

Which Paladin did, silently, for almost a full minute. His face

slowly flushed dark red ... and then the color slipped from it a little

at a time. He'd probably meant to bellow WHAT THE FUCK IS

GOING ON HERE? Cheyney thought later, but what came out

was a breathless little gasp: -what-"

"I don't know," Cheyney said.

On the right was Cheyney's one, gray-green, not brand-new by any

means, but new enough so that it did not yet have that rumpled,

limp, shopworn look of a bill which has changed hands many

times. Big number 1's at the top corners, smaller 1's at the bottom

corners. FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE in small caps between the

top 1's and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in larger ones.

The letter A in a seal to the left of Washington, along with the

assurance that THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER, FOR ALL

DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. It was a series 1985 bill, the

signature that of James A. Baker III.

Paladin's one was not the same at all.

The 1's in the four corners were the same; THE UNITED STATES

OF AMERICA was the same; the assurance that the bill could be

used to pay all public and private debts was the same.

But Paladin's one was a bright blue.

Instead of FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE it said CURRENCY OF

GOVERNMENT.

Instead of the letter A was the letter F.

But most of all it was the picture of the man on the bill that drew

Cheyney's attention, just as the picture of the man on Cheyney's

bill drew Paladin's.

Cheyney's gray-green one showed George Washington.

Paladin's blue one showed James Madison.

Stephen King

The Crate

First appeared in:

Gallery magazine 1979

Available in comic book form in:

Creepshow

Dexter Stanley was scared. More; he felt as if that central axle that

binds us to the state we call sanity were under a greater strain than

it had ever been under before. As he pulled up beside Henry

Northrup's house on North Campus Avenue that August night, he

felt that if he didn't talk to someone, he really, would go crazy.

There was no one to talk to but Henry Northrup. Dex Stanley was

the head of the zoology department, and once might have been

university president if he had been better at academic politics. His

wife had died twenty years before, and they had been childless.

What remained of his own family was all west of the Rockies. He

was not good at making friends.

Northrup was an exception to that. In some ways, they were two of

a kind; both had been disappointed in the mostly meaningless, but

always vicious, game of university politics. Three years before,

Northrup had made his run at the vacant English department

chairmanship. He had lost, and one of the reasons had undoubtedly

been his wife, Wilma, an abrasive and unpleasant woman. At the

few cocktail parties Dex had attended where English people and

zoology people could logically mix, it seemed he could always

recall the harsh mule-bray of her voice, telling some new faculty

wife to "call me Billie, dear everyone does!"

Dex made his way across the lawn to Northrup's door at a

stumbling run. It was Thursday, and Northrup's unpleasant spouse

took two classes on Thursday nights. Consequently, it was Dex and

Henry's chess night. The two men had been playing chess together

for the last eight years.

Dex rang the bell beside the door of his friend's house; leaned on

it. The door opened at ast and Northrup was there.

"Dex," he said. I didn't expect you for another--"

Dex pushed in past him. "Wilma," he said. "Is she here?"

"No, she left fifteen minutes ago. I was just making myself some

chow. Dex, you look awful."

They had walked under the hall light, and it illuminated the cheesy

pallor of Dex's face and seemed to outline wrinkles as deep and

dark as fissures in the earth. Dex was sixty-one, but on the hot

August night, he looked more like ninety.

"I ought to." Dex wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Well, what is it?"

"I'm afraid I'm going crazy, Henry. Or that I've already gone."

"You want something to eat? Wilma left cold ham."

"I'd rather have a drink. A big one."

"All right."

"Two men dead, Henry," Dex said abruptly. "And I could be

blamed. Yes, I can see how I could be blamed. But it wasn't me. It

was the crate. And I don't even know what's in there!" He uttered a

wild laugh.

"Dead?" Northrup said. "What is this, Dex?"

"A janitor. I don't know his name. And Gereson. A graduate

student. He just happened to be there. In the way of... whatever it

was."

Henry studied Dex's face for a long moment and then said, "I'll get

us both a drink."

He left. Dex wandered into the living room, past the low table

where the chess table had already been set up, and stared out the

graceful bow window. That thing in his mind, that axle or

whatever it was, did not feel so much in danger of snapping now.

Thank God for Henry.

Northrup came back with two pony glasses choked with ice. Ice

from the fridge's automatic icemaker, Stanley thought randomly.

Wilma "just call me Billie, everyone does" Northrup insisted on all

the modern conveniences... and when Wilma insisted on a thing,

she did so savagely.

Northrup filled both glasses with Cutty Sark. He handed one of

them to Stanley, who slopped Scotch over his fingers, stinging a

small cut he'd gotten in the lab a couple of days before. He hadn't

realized until then that his hands were shaking. He emptied half the

glass and the Scotch boomed in his stomach, first hot, then

spreading a steadylng warmth.

"Sit down, man," Northrup said.

Dex sat, and drank again. Now it was a lot better. He looked at

Northrup, who was looking levelly back over the rim of his own

glass. Dex looked away, out at the bloody orb of moon sitting over

the rim of the horizon, over the university, which was supposed to

be the seat of rationality, the forebrain of the body politic. How did

that jibe with the matter of the crate? With the screams? With the

blood?

"Men are dead?" Northrup said at last.

"Are you sure they're dead?"

"Yes. The bodies are gone now. At least, I think they are. Even the

bones... the teeth... but the blood... the blood, you know..."

"No, I don't know anything. You've got to start at the beginning."

Stanley took another drink and set his glass down. "Of course I

do," he said. "Yes. It begins just where it ends. With the crate. The

janitor found the crate..."

Dexter Stanley had come into Amberson Hall, sometimes called

the Old Zoology Building, that afternoon at three o'clock. It was a

blaringly hot day, and the campus looked listless and dead, in spite

of the twirling sprinklers in front of the fraternity houses and the

Old Front dorms.

The Old Front went back to the turn of the century, but Amberson

Hall was much older than that. It was one of the oldest buildings

on a university campus that had celebrated its tricentennial two

years previous. It was a tall brick building, shackled with ivy that

seemed to spring out of the earth like green, clutching hands. Its

narrow windows were more like gun slits than real windows, and

Amberson seemed to frown at the newer buildings with their glass

walls and curvy, unorthodox shapes.

The new zoology building, Cather Hall, had been completed eight

months before, and the process of transition would probably go on

for another eighteen months. No one was completely sure what

would happen to Amberson then. If the bond issue to build the new

gym found favor with the voters, it would probably be demolished.

He paused a moment to watch two young men throwing a Frisbee

back and forth. A dog ran back and forth between them, glumly

chasing the spinning disc. Abruptly the mutt gave up and flopped

in the shade of a poplar. A VW with a NO NUKES sticker on the

back deck trundled slowly past, heading for the Upper Circle.

Nothing else moved. A week before, the final summer session had

ended and the campus lay still and fallow, dead ore on summer's

anvil.

Dex had a number of files to pick up, part of the seemingly endless

process of moving from Amberson to Cather. The old building

seemed spectrally empty. His footfalls echoed back dreamily as he

walked past closed doors with frosted glass panels, past bulletin

boards with their yellowing notices and toward his office at the end

of the first-floor corridor. The cloying smell of fresh paint hung in

the air.

He was almost to his door, and jingling his keys in his pocket,

when the janitor popped out of Room 6, the big lecture hall,

startling him.

He grunted, then smiled a little shamefacedly, the way people will

when they've gotten a mild zap. "You got me that time," he told the

janitor.

The janitor smiled and twiddled the gigantic key ring clipped to his

belt. "Sorry, Perfesser Stanley," he said. "I was hopin' it was you.

Charlie said you'd be in this afternoon."

"Charlie Gereson is still here?" Dex frowned. Gereson was a grad

student who was doing an involved--and possibly very important--

paper on negative environmental factors in long-term animal

migration. It was a subject that could have a strong impact on area

farming practices and pest control. But Gereson was pulling almost

fifty hours a week in the gigantic (and antiquated) basement lab.

The new lab complex in Cather would have been exponentially

better suited to his purposes, but the new labs would not be fully

equipped for another two to four months... if then.

"Think he went over the Union for a burger," the janitor said. "I

told him myself to quit a while and go get something to eat. He's

been here since nine this morning. Told him myself. Said he ought

to get some food. A man don't live on love alone."

The janitor smiled, a little tentatively, and Dex smiled back. The

janitor was right; Gereson was embarked upon a labor of love. Dex

had seen too many squadrons of students just grunting along and

making grades not to appreciate that... and not to worry about

Charlie Gereson's health and well-being from time to time.

"I would have told him, if he hadn't been so busy," the janitor said,

and offered his tentative little smile again. "Also, I kinda wanted to

show you myself."

"What's that?" Dex asked. He felt a little impatient. It was chess

night with Henry; he wanted to get this taken care of and still have

time for a leisurely meal at the Hancock House.

"Well, maybe it's nothin," the janitor said. "But... well, this buildin

is some old, and we keep turnin things up, don't we?"

Dex knew. It was like moving out of a house that has been lived in

for generations. Halley, the bright young assistant professor who

had been here for three years now, had found half a dozen antique

clips with small brass balls on the ends. She'd had no idea what the

clips, which looked a little bit like spring-loaded wishbones, could

be. Dex had been able to tell her. Not so many years after the Civil

War, those clips had been used to hold the heads of white mice,

who were then operated on without anesthetic. Young Halley, with

her Berkeley education and her bright spill of Farrah Fawcett-

Majors golden hair, had looked quite revolted. "No anti-

vivisectionists in those days," Dex had told her jovially. "At least

not around here." And Halley had responded with a blank look that

probably disguised disgust or maybe even loathing. Dex had put

his foot in it again. He had a positive talent for that, it seemed.

They had found sixty boxes of The American Zoologist in a

crawlspace, and the attic had been a maze of old equipment and

mouldering reports. Some of the impedimenta no one--not even

Dexter Stanley--could identify.

In the closet of the old animal pens at the back of the building,

Professor Viney had found a complicated gerbil-run with exquisite

glass panels. It had been accepted for display at the Musuem of

Natural Science in Washington.

But the finds had been tapering off this summer, and Dex thought

Amberson Hall had given up the last of its secrets."What have you

found?" he asked the janitor.

"A crate. I found it tucked right under the basement stairs. I didn't

open it. It's been nailed shut, anyway."

Stanly couldn't believe that anything very interesting could have

escaped notice for long, just by being tucked under the stairs. Tens

of thousands of people went up and down them every week during

the academic year. Most likely the janitor's crate was full of

department records dating back twenty-five years. Or even more

prosaic, a box of National Geographics.

"I hardly think--"

"It's a real crate," the janitor broke in earnestly. "I mean, my father

was a carpenter, and this crate is built tile way he was buildin 'em

back in the twenties. And he learned from his father."

"I really doubt if--"

"Also, it's got about four inches of dust on it. I wiped some off and

there's a date. Eighteen thirty-four."

That changed things. Stanley looked at his watch and decided he

could spare half all hour.

In spite of the humid August heat outside, the smooth tile-faced

throat of the stairway was almost cold. Above them, yellow frosted

globes cast a dim and thoughtful light. The stair levels had once

been red, but in the centers they shaded to a dead black where the

feet of years had worn away layer after layer of resurfacing. The

silence was smooth and nearly perfect.

The janitor reached the bottom first and pointed under the

staircase. "Under here," he said.

Dex joined him in staring into a shadowy, triangular cavity under

the wide staircase. He felt a small tremor of disgust as he saw

where the janitor had brushed away a gossamer veil of cobwebs.

He supposed it was possible that the man had found something a

little older than postwar records under there, now that he acutally

looked at the space. But 1834?

"Just a second," the janitor said, and left momentarily. Left alone,

Dex hunkered down and peered in. He could make out nothing but

a deeper patch of shadow in there. Then the janitor returned with a

hefty four-cell flashlight. "This'll show it up."

"What were you doing under there anyway?" Dex asked.

The janitor grinned. "I was only standin here tryin to decide if I

should buff that second-floor hallway first or wash the lab

windows. I couldn't make up my mind, so I flipped a quarter. Only

I dropped it and it rolled under there." He pointed to the shadowy,

triangular cave. "I prob'ly would have let it go, except that was my

only quarter for the Coke machine. So I got my flash and knocked

down the cobwebs, and when I crawled under to get it, I saw that

crate. Here, have a look."

The janitor shone his light into the hole. Motes of disturbed dust

preened and swayed lazily in the beam. The light struck the far

wall in a spotlight circle, rose to the zigzag undersides of the stairs

briefly, picking out an ancient cobweb in which long-dead bugs

hung mumified, and then the light dropped and centered on a crate

about five feet long and two-and-a-half wide. It was perhaps three

feet deep. As the janitor had said, it was no knocked-together affair

made out of scrap-boards. It was neatly constructed of a smooth,

dark heavy wood. A coffin, Dexter thought uneasily. It looks like a

child's coffin.

The dark color of the wood showed only a fan-shaped swipe on the

side. The rest of the crate was the uniform dull gray of dust.

Something was written on the side-stenciled there.

Dex squinted but couldn't read it. He fumbled his glasses out of his

breast pocket and still couldn't. Part of what had been stenciled on

was obscured by the dust--not four inches of it, by any means, but

an extraordinarily thick coating, all the same.

Not wanting to crawl and dirty his pants, Dex duck-walked under

the stairway, stifling a sudden and amazingly strong feeling of

claustrophobia. The spit dried in his mouth and was replaced by a

dry, woolly taste, like an old mitten. He thought of the generations

of students trooping up and down these stairs, all male until 1888,

then in coeducational platoons, carrying their books and papers and

anatomical drawings, their bright faces and clear eyes, each of

them convinced that a useful and exciting future lay ahead ... and

here, below their feet, the spider spun his eternal snare for the fly

and the trundling beetle, and here this crate sat impassively,

gathering dust, waiting...

A tendril of spidersilk brushed across his forehead and he swept it

away with a small cry of loathing and an uncharacteristic inner

cringe.

"Not very nice under there, is it?" the janitor asked

sympathetically, holding his light centered on the crate. "God, I

hate tight places."

Dex didn't reply. He had reached the crate. He looked at the letters

that were stenciled there and then brushed the dust away from

them. It rose in a cloud, intensifying that mitten taste, making him

cough dryly. The dust hung in the beam of the janitor's light like

old magic, and Dex Stanley read what some long-dead chief of

lading had stenciled on this crate.

SHIP TO HORLICKS UNIVERSITY, the top line read. VIA

JULIA CARPENTER, read the middle line. The third line read

simply: ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

Below that, someone had written in heavy black charcoal strokes:

JUNE 19, 1834. That was the one line the janitor's hand-swipe had

completely cleared.

ARCTIC EXPEDITION, Dex read again. His heart began to

thump. "So what do you think?" the janitor's voice floated in.

Dex grabbed one end and lifted it. Heavy. As he let it settle back

with a mild thud, something shifted inside--he did not hear it but

felt it through the palms of his hands, as if whatever it was had

moved of its own volition. Stupid, of course. It had been an almost

liquid feel, as if something not quite jelled had moved sluggishly.

ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

Dex felt the excitement of an antiques collector happening upon a

neglected armoire with a twenty-five dollar price tag in the back

room of some hick-town junk shop ... an armoire that just might be

a Chippendale. "Help me get it out," he called to the janitor.

Working bent over to keep from slamming their heads on the

underside of the stairway, sliding the crate along, they got it out

and then picked it up by the bottom. Dex had gotten his pants dirty

after all, and there were cobwebs in his hair.

As they carried it into the old-fashioned, train-terminal-sized lab,

Dex felt that sensation of shift inside the crate again, and he could

see by the expression on the janitor's face that he had felt it as well.

They set it on one of the formica-topped lab tables. The next one

over was littered with Charlie Gereson's stuff--notebooks, graph

paper, contour maps, a Texas Instruments calculator.

The janitor stood back, wiping his hands on his double-pocket gray

shirt, breathing hard. "Some heavy mother," he said. "That bastard

must weigh two hunnert pounds. You okay, Perfesser Stanley?"

Dex barely heard him. He was looking at the end of the box, where

there was vet another series of stencils:

PAELLA/SANTIAGO/SAN FRANCISCO/CHICAGO/NEW

YORK/HORLICKS

"Perfesser--"

"Paella," Dex muttered, and then said it again, slightly louder. He

was seized with an unbelieving kind of excitement that was held in

check only by the thought that it might be some sort of hoax.

"Paella!"

"Paella, Dex?" Henry Northrup asked. The moon had risen in the

sky, turning silver.

"Paella is a very small island south of Tierra del Fuego," Dex said.

"Perhaps the smallest island ever inhabited by the race of man. A

number of Easter Island-type monoliths were found there just after

World War II. Not very interesting compared to their bigger

brothers, but every bit as mysterious. The natives of Paella and

Tierra del Fuego were Stone-Age people. Christian missionaries

killed them with kindness."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's extremely cold down there. Summer temperatures rarely range

above the mid-forties. The missionaries gave them blankets, partly

so they would be warm, mostly to cover their sinful nakedness.

The blankets were crawling with fleas, and the natives of both

islands were wiped out by European diseases for which they had

developed no immunities. Mostly by smallpox."

Dex drank. The Scotch had lent his cheeks some color, but it was

hectic and flaring--double spots of flush that sat above his

cheekbones like rouge.

"But Tierra del Fuego--and this Paella--that's not the Arctic, Dex.

It's the Antarctic."

"It wasn't in 1834," Dex said, setting his glass down, careful in

spite of his distraction to put it on the coaster Henry had provided.

If Wilma found a ring on one of her end tables, his friend would

have hell to pay. "The terms subarctic, Antarctic and Antarctica

weren't invented yet. In those days there was only the north arctic

and the south arctic."

"Okay."

"Hell, I made the same kind of mistake. I couldn't figure out why

Frisco was on the itinerary as a port of call. Then I realized I was

figuring on the Panama Canal, which wasn't built for another

eighty vears or so.

"An Arctic expedition? In 1834?" Henry asked doubtfully.

"I haven't had a chance to check the records yet," Dex said, picking

up his drink again. "But I know from my history that there were

'Arctic expeditions' as early as Francis Drake. None of them made

it, that was all. They were convinced they'd find gold, silver,

jewels, lost civilizations, God knows what else. The Smithsonian

Institution outfitted an attempted exploration of the North Pole in, I

think it was 1881 or '82. They all died. A bunch of men from the

Explorers' Club in London tried for the South Pole in the 1850's.

Their ship was sunk by icebergs, but three or four of them

survived. They stayed alive by sucking dew out of their clothes and

eating the kelp that caught on their boat, until they were picked up.

They lost their teeth. And they claimed to have seen sea monsters."

"What happened, Dex?" Henry asked softly.

Stanley looked up. "We opened the crate," he said dully. "God help

us, Henry, we opened the crate."

He paused for a long time, it seemed, before beginning to speak

again.

"Paella?" the janitor asked. "What's that?"

"An island off the tip of South America," Dex said. "Never mind.

Let's get this open." He opened one of the lab drawers and began to

rummage through it, looking for something to pry with."

"Never mind that stuff," the janitor said. He looked excited himself

now. "I got a hammer and chisel in my closet upstairs. I'll get 'em.

Just hang on."

He left. The crate sat on the table's formica top, squat and mute. It

sits squat and mute, Dex thought, and shivered a little. Where had

that thought come from? Some story? The words had a cadenced

yet unpleasant sound. He dismissed them. He was good at

dismissing the extraneous. He was a scientist.

He looked around the lab just to get his eyes off the crate. Except

for Charlie's table, it was unnaturally neat and quiet--like the rest

of the university. White-tiled, subway-station walls gleamed

freshly under the overhead globes; the globes themselves seemed

to be double--caught and submerged in the polished formica

surfaces, like eerie lamps shining from deep quarry water. A huge,

old-fashioned slate blackboard dominated the wall opposite the

sinks. And cupboards, cupboards everywhere. It was easy enough--

too easy, perhaps--to see the antique, sepia-toned ghosts of all

those old zoology students, wearing their white coats with the

green cuffs, their hairs marcelled or pomaded, doing their

dissections and writing their reports...

Footfalls clattered on the stairs and Dex shivered, thinking again of

the crate sitting there--yes, squat and mute--under the stairs for so

many years, long after the men who had pushed it under there had

died and gone back to dust.

Paella, he thought, and then the janitor came back in with a

hammer and chisel.

"Let me do this for you, perfesser?" he asked, and Dex was about

to refuse when he saw the pleading, hopeful look in the man's eyes.

"Of course," he said. After all, it was this man's find.

"Prob'ly nothin in here but a bunch of rocks and plants so old

they'll turn to dust when you touch 'em. But it's funny; I'm pretty

hot for it."

Dex smiled noncommittally. He had no idea what was in the crate,

but he doubted if it was just plant and rock specimens. There was

that slightly liquid shifting sensation when they had moved it.

"Here goes," the janitor said, and began to pound the chisel under

the board with swift blows of the hammer. The board hiked up a

bit, revealing a double row of nails that reminded Dex absurdly of

teeth. The janitor levered the handle of his chisel down and the

board pulled loose, the nails shrieking out of the wood. He did the

same thing at the other end, and the board came free, clattering to

the floor. Dex set it aside, noticing that even the nails looked

different, somehow--thicker, squarer at the tip, and without that

blue-steel sheen that is the mark of a sophisticated alloying

process.

The janitor was peering into the crate through the long, narrow

strip he had uncovered. "Can't see nothin," he said. "Where'd I

leave my light?"

"Never mind," Dex said. "Go on and open it."

"Okay." He took off a second board, then a third. Six or seven had

been nailed across the top of the box. He began on the fourth,

reaching across the space he had already uncovered to place his

chisel under the board, when the crate began to whistle.

It was a sound very much like the sound a teakettle makes when it

has reached a rolling boil, Dex told Henry Northrup; no cheerful

whistle this, but something like an ugly, hysterical shriek by a

tantrumy child. And this suddenly dropped and thickened into a

low, hoarse growling sound. It was not loud, but it had a primitive,

savage sound that stood Dex Stanley's hair up on the slant. The

janitor stared around at him, his eyes widening... and then his arm

was seized. Dex did not see what grabbed it; his eyes had gone

instinctively to the man's face.

The janitor screamed, and the sound drove a stiletto of panic into

Dex's chest. The thought that came unbidden was: This is the first

time in my life that I've heard a grown man scream--what a

sheltered life I've led!

The janitor, a fairly big guy who weighed maybe two hundred

pounds, was suddenly yanked powerfully to one side. Toward the

crate. "Help me!" He screamed. "Oh help doc it's got me it's biting

me it's biting meeeee--"

Dex told himself to run forward and grab the janitor's free arm, but

his feet might as well have been bonded to the floor. The janitor

had been pulled into the crate up to his shoulder. That crazed

snarling went on and on. The crate slid backwards along the table

for a foot or so and then came firmly to rest against a bolted

instrument mount. It began to rock back and forth. The janitor

screamed and gave a tremendous lunge away from the crate.The

end of the box came up off the table and then smacked back down.

Part of his arm came out of the crate, and Dex saw to his horror

that the gray sleeve of his shirt was chewed and tattered and

soaked with blood. Smiling crescent bites were punched into what

he could see of the man's skin through the shredded flaps of cloth.

Then something that must have been incredibly strong yanked him

back down. The thing in the crate began to snarl and gobble. Every

now and then there would be a breathless whistling sound in

between.

At last Dex broke free of his paraiysis and lunged creakily forward.

He grabbed the janitor's free arm. He yanked ... with no result at

all. It was like trying to pull a man who has been handcuffed to the

bumper of a trailer truck.

The janitor screamed again--a long, ululating sound that rolled

back and forth between the lab's sparkling, white-tiled walls. Dex

could see the gold glimmer of the fillings at the back of the man's

mouth. He could see the yellow ghost of nicotine on his tongue.

The janitor's head slammed down against the edge of the board he

had been about to remove when the thing had grabbed him. And

this time Dex did see something, although it happened with such

mortal, savage speed that later he was unable to describe it

adequately to Henry. Something as dry and brown and scaly as a

desert reptile came out of the crate--something with huge claws. It

tore at the janitor's straining, knotted throat and severed his jugular

vein. Blood began to pump across the table, pooling on the formica

and jetting onto the white-tiled floor. For a moment, a mist of

blood seemed to hang in the air.

Dex dropped the janitor's arm and blundered backward, hands

clapped flat to his cheeks, eyes bulging.

The janitor's eyes rolled wildly at the ceiling. His mouth dropped

open and then snapped closed. The click of his teeth was audible

even below that hungry growling. His feet, clad in heavy black

work shoes, did a short and jittery tap dance on the floor.

Then he seemed to lose interest. His eyes grew almost benign as

they looked raptly at the overhead light globe, which was also

blood-spattered. His feet splayed out in a loose V. His shirt pulled

out of his pants, displaying his white and bulging belly.

"He's dead," Dex whispered. "Oh, Jesus."

The pump of the janitor's heart faltered and lost its rhythm. Now

the blood that flowed from the deep, irregular gash in his neck lost

its urgency and merely flowed down at the command of indifferent

gravity. The crate was stained and splashed with blood. The

snarling seemed to go on endlessly. The crate rocked back and

forth a bit, but it was too well-braced against the instrument mount

to go very far. The body of the janitor lolled grotesquely, still

grasped firmly by whatever was in there. The small of his back

was pressed against the lip of the lab table. His free hand dangled,

sparse hair curling on the fingers between the first and second

knuckles. His big key ring glimmered chrome in the light.

And now his body began to rock slowly this way and that. His

shoes dragged back and forth, not tap dancing now but waltzing

obscenely. And then they did not drag. They dangled an inch off

the floor... then two inches.., then half a foot above the floor. Dex

realized that the janitor was being dragged into the crate.

Tile nape of his neck came to rest against the board fronting the far

side of the hole in the top of the crate. He looked like a man resting

in some weird Zen position of contemplation. His dead eyes

sparkled. And Dex heard, below the savage growling noises, a

smacking, rending sound. And the crunch of a bone.

Dex ran.

He blundered his way across the lab and out the door and up the

stairs. Halfway up, he fell down, clawed at the risers, got to his

feet, and ran again. He gained the first floor hallway and sprinted

down it, past the closed doors with their frosted-glass panels, past

the bulletin boards. He was chased by his own footfalls. In his ears

he could hear that damned whistling.

He ran right into Charlie Gereson's arms and almost knocked him

over, and he spilled the milk shake Charlie had been drinking all

over both of them.

"Holy hell, what's wrong?" Charlie asked, comic in his extreme

surprise. He was short and compact, wearing cotton chinos and a

white tee shirt. Thick spectacles sat grimly on his nose, meaning

business, proclaiming that they were there for a long haul.

"Charlie," Dex said, panting harshly. "My boy... the janitor... the

crate... it whistles... it whistles when it's hungry and it whistles

again when it's full... my boy ... we have to ... campus security ...

we .... We..."

"Slow down, Professor Stanley," Charlie said. He looked

concerned and a little frightened. You don't expect to be seized by

the senior professor in your department when you had nothing

more aggressive in mind yourself than charting the continued

outmigration of sandflies. "Slow down, I don't know what you're

talking about."

Stanley, hardly aware of what he was saying, poured out a garbled

version of what had happened to the janitor. Charlie Gereson

looked more and more confused and doubtful. As upset as he was,

Dex began to realize that Charlie didn't believe a word of it. He

thought, with a new kind of horror, that soon Charlie would ask

him if he had been working too hard, and that when he did, Stanley

would burst into mad cackles of laughter.

But what Charlie said was, "That's pretty far out, Professor

Stanley."

"It's true. We've got to get campus security over here. We--"

"No, that's no good. One of them would stick his hand in there,

first thing." He saw Dex's stricken look and went on. "If I'm having

trouble swallowing this, what are they going to think?"

"I don't know," Dex said. "I... I never thought..."

"They'd think you just came off a helluva toot and were seeing

Tasmanian devils instead of pink elephants," Charlie Gereson said

cheerfully, and pushed his glasses up on his pug nose. "Besides,

from what you say, the responsibility has belonged with zo all

along... like for a hundred and forty years."

"But..." He swallowed, and there was a click in his throat as he

prepared to voice his worst fear. "But it may be out."

"I doubt that," Charlie said, but didn't elaborate. And in that, Dex

saw two things: that Charlie didn't believe a word he had said, and

that nothing he could say would dissuade Charlie from going back

down there.

Henry Northrup glanced at his watch. They had been sitting in the

study for a little over an hour; Wilma wouldn't be back for another

two. Plenty of time. Unlike Charlie Gereson, he had passed no

judgment at all on the factual basis of Dex's story. But he had

known Dex for a longer time than young Gereson had, and he

didn't believe his friend exhibited the signs of a man who has

suddenly developed a psychosis. What he exhibited was a kind of

bug-eyed fear, no more or

less than you'd expect to see a man who has had an extremely close

call with... well, just an extremely close call.

"He went down, Dex?"

"Yes. He did."

"You went with him?"

"Yes."

Henry shifted position a little. "I can understand why he didn't

want to get campus security until he had checked the situation

himself. But Dex, you knew you were telling the flat-out truth,

even if he didn't. Why didn't you call?"

"You believe me?" Dex asked. His voice trembled. "You believe

me, don't you, Henry?"

Henry considered briefly. The story was mad, no question about

that. The implication that there could be something in that box big

enough and lively enough to kill a man after some one hundred and

forty years was mad. He didn't believe it. But this was Dex... and

he didn't disbelieve it either.

"Yes," he said.

"Thank God for that," Dex said. He groped for his drink. "Thank

God for that, Henry."

"It doesn't answer the question, though. Why didn't you call the

campus cops?"

"I thought... as much as I did think... that it might not want to come

out of the crate, into the bright light. It must have lived in the dark

for so long... so very long... and ... grotesque as this sounds... I

though it might be pot-bound, or something. I thought ... well, he'll

see it... he'll see the crate... the janitor's body... he'll see the blood...

and then we'd call security. You see?" Stanley's eyes pleaded with

him to see, and Henry did. He thought that, considering the fact

that it had been a snap judgment in a presure situation, that Dex

had thought quite clearly. The blood. When the young graduate

student saw the blood, he would have been happy to call in the

cops.

"But it didn't work out that way."

"No." Dex ran a hand through his thinning hair.

"Why not?"

"Because when we got down there, the body was gone."

"It was gone?"

"That's right. And the crate was gone, too."

When Charlie Gereson saw the blood, his round and good-natured

face went very pale. His eyes, already magnified by his thick

spectacles, grew even huger. Blood was puddled on the lab table. It

had run down one of the table legs. It was pooled on the floor, and

beads of it clung to the light globe and to the white tile wall. Yes,

there was plenty of blood.

But no janitor. No crate.

Dex Stanley's jaw dropped. "What the fuck!" Charlie whispered.

Dex saw something then, perhaps the only thing that allowed him

to keep his sanity. Already he could feel that central axle trying to

pull free. He grabbed Charlie's shoulder and said, "Look at the

blood on the table!"

"I've seen enough," Charlie said.

His Adam's apple rose and fell like an express elevator as he

struggled to keep his lunch down.

"For God's sake, get hold of yourself," Dex said harshly. "You're a

zoology major. You've seen blood before."

It was the voice of authority, for that moment anyway. Charlie did

get a hold of himself, and they walked a little closer. The random

pools of blood on the table were not as random as they had first

appeared. Each had been neatly straight-edged on one side.

"The crate sat there," Dex said. He felt a little better. The fact that

the crate really had been there steadied him a good deal. "And look

there." He pointed at the floor. Here the blood had been smeared

into a wide, thin trail. It swept toward where the two of them stood,

a few paces inside the double doors. It faded and faded, petering

out altogether about halfway between the lab table and the doors. It

was crystal clear to Dex Stanley, and the nervous sweat on his skin

went cold and clammy.

It had gotten out.

It had gotten out and pushed the crate off the table. And then it had

pushed the crate... where? Under the stairs, of course. Back under

the stairs. Where it had been safe for so long.

"Where's the... the..." Charlie couldn't finish.

"Under the stairs," Dex said numbly. "It's gone back to where it

came from."

"No. The..." He jerked it out finally. "The body."

"I don't know," Dex said. But he thought he did know. His mind

would simply not admit the truth.

Charlie turned abruptly and walked back through the doors.

"Where are you going?" Dex called shrilly, and ran after him.

Charlie stopped opposite the stairs. The triangular black hole

beneath them gaped. The janitor's big four-cell flashlight still sat

on the floor. And beside it was a bloody scrap of gray cloth, and

one of the pens that had been clipped to the man's breast pocket.

"Don't go under there, Charlie! Don't." His heartbeat whammed

savagely in his ears, frightening him even more.

"No," Charlie said. "But the body..."

Charlie hunkered down, grabbed the flashlight, and shone it under

the stairs. And the crate was there, shoved up against the far wall,

just as it had been before, squat and mute. Except that now it was

free of dust and three boards had been pried off the top.

The light moved and centered on one of the janitor's big, sensible

work shoes. Charlie drew breath in a low, harsh gasp. The thick

leather of the shoe had been savagely gnawed and chewed. The

laces hung, broken, from the eyelets. "It looks like somebody put it

through a hay baler," he said hoarsely.

"Now do you believe me?" Dex asked.

Charlie didn't answer. Holding onto the stairs lightly with one

hand, he leaned under the overhang--presumably to get the shoe.

Later, sitting in Henry's study, Dex said he could think of only one

reason why Charlie would have done that--to measure and perhaps

categorize the bite of the thing in the crate. He was, after all, a

zoologist, and a damned good one.

"Don't!" Dex screamed, and grabbed the back of Charlie's shirt.

Suddenly there were two green gold eyes glaring over the top of

the crate. They were almost exactly the color of owls' eyes, but

smaller. There was a harsh, chattering growl of anger. Charlie

recoiled, startled, and slammed the back of his head on the

underside of the stairs. A shadow moved from the crate toward him

at projectile speed. Charlie howled. Dex heard the dry purr of his

shirt as it ripped open, the click as Charlie's glasses struck the floor

and spun away. Once more Charlie tried to back away. The thing

began to snarl--then the snarls suddenly stopped. And Charlie

Gereson began to scream in agony.

Dex pulled on the back of his white tee shirt with all his might. For

a moment Charlie came backwards and he caught a glimpse of a

furry, writhing shape spread-eagled on the young man's chest, a

shape that appeared to have not four but six legs and the flat bullet

head of a young lynx. The front of Charlie Gereson's shirt had been

so quickly and completely tattered that it now looked like so many

crepe streamers hung around his neck.

Then the thing raised its head and those small green gold eyes

stared balefully into Dex's own. He had never seen or dreamed

such savagery. His strength failed. His grip on the back of Charlie's

shirt loosened momentarily.

A moment was all it took. Charlie Gereson's body was snapped

under the stairs with grotesque, cartoonish speed. Silence for a

moment. Then the growling, smacking sounds began again.

Charlie screamed once more, a long sound of terror and pain that

was abruptly cut off... as if something had been clapped over his

mouth.

Or stuffed into it.

Dex fell silent. The moon was high in the sky. Half of his third

drink--an almost unheard-of phenomenon--was gone, and he felt

the reaction setting in as sleepiness and extreme lassitude.

"What did you do then?" Henry asked. What he hadn't done, he

knew, was to go to campus security; they wouldn't have listened to

such a story and then released him so he could go and tell it again

to his friend Henry.

"I just walked around, in utter shock, I suppose. I ran up the stairs

again, just as I had after... after it took the janitor, only this time

there was no Charlie Gereson to run into. I walked... miles, I

suppose. I think I was mad. I kept thinking about Ryder's Quarry.

You know that place?"

"Yes," Henry said.

"I kept thinking that would be deep enough. If... if there would be a

way to get that crate out there. I kept... kept thinking..." He put his

hands to his face. "I don't know. I don't know anymore. I think I'm

going crazy."

"If the story you just told is true, I can understand that," Henry said

quietly. He stood up suddenly. "Come on. I'm taking you home."

"Home?" Dex looked at this friend vacantly. "But--"

"I'll leave a note for Wilma telling her where we've gone and then

we'll call... who do you suggest, Dex? Campus security or the state

police?"

"You believe me, don't you? You believe me? Just say you do."

"Yes, I believe you," Henry said, and it was the truth. "I don't

know what that thing could be or where it came from, but I believe

you." Dex Stanley began to weep.

"Finish your drink while I write my wife," Henry said, apparently

not noticing the tears. He even grinned a little. "And for Christ's

sake, let's get out of here before she gets back."

Dex clutched at Henry's sleeve. "But we won't go anywhere near

Amberson Hall, will we? Promise me, Henry! We'll stay away

from there, won't we?"

"Does a bear shit in the woods?" Henry Northrup asked. It was a

three-mile drive to Dex's house on the outskirts of town, and

before they got there, he was half-asleep in the passenger seat.

"The state cops, I think," Henry said. His words seemed to come

from a great distance. "I think Charlie Gereson's assessment of the

campus cops was pretty accurate. The first one there would happily

stick his arm into that box."

"Yes. All right." Through the drifting, lassitudinous aftermath of

shock, Dex felt a dim but great gratitude that his friend had taken

over with such efficiency. Yet a deeper part of him believed that

Henry could not have done it if he had seen the things he had seen.

"Just... the importance of caution ..."

"I'll see to that," Henry said grimly, and that was when Dex fell

asleep.

He awoke the next morning with August sunshine making crisp

patterns on the sheets of his bed. Just a dream, he thought with

indescribable relief. All some crazy dream.

But there was a taste of Scotch in his mouth--Scotch and

something else. He sat up, and a lance of pain bolted through his

head. Not the sort of pain you got from a hangover, though; not

even if you were the type to get a hangover from three Scotches,

and he wasn't.

He sat up, and there was Henry, sitting across the room. His first

thought was that Henry needed a shave. His second was that there

was something in Henry's eyes that he had never seen before--

something like chips of ice. A ridiculous thought came to Dex; it

passed through his mind and was gone. Sniper's eyes. Henry

Northrup, whose specialty is the earlier English poets, has got

sniper's eyes.

"How are you feeling, Dex?"

"A slight headache," Dex said. "Henry... the police... what

happened?"

"The police aren't coming," Northrup said calmly. "As for your

head, I'm very sorry. I put one of Wilma's sleeping powders in

your third drink. Be assured that it will pass."

"Henry, what are you saying?"

Henry took a sheet of notepaper from his breast pocket. "This is

the note I left my wife. It will explain a lot, I think. I got it back

after everything was over. I took a chance that she'd leave it on the

table, and I got away with it."

"I don't know what you're--"

He took the note from Henry's fingers and read it, eyes widening.

Dear Billie,

I've just had a call from Dex Stanley. He's hysterical.

Seems to have committed some sort of indiscretion with

one of his female grad students. He's at Amberson Hall.

So is the girl. For God's sake, come quickly. I'm not

sure exactly what the situation is, but a woman's

presence may be imperative, and under the

circumstances, a nurse from the infirmary just won't do.

I know you don't like Dex much, but a scandal like this

could ruin his career. Please come.

Henry.

"What in God's name have you done?" Dex asked hoarsely.

Henry plucked the note from Dex's nerveless fingers, produced his

Zippo, and set flame to the corner. When it was burning well, he

dropped the charring sheet of paper into an ashtray on the

windowsill.

"I've killed Wilma," he said in the same calm voice. "Ding-dong,

the wicked bitch is dead." Dex tried to speak and could not. That

central axle was trying to tear loose again.The abyss of utter

insanity was below. "I've killed my wife, and now I've put myself

into your hands."

Now Dex did find his voice. It had a sound that was rusty yet

shrill. "The crate," he said. "What have you done with the crate?"

"That's the beauty of it," Henry said. "You put the final piece in the

jigsaw yourself. The crate is at the bottom of Ryder's Quarry."

Dex groped at that while he looked into Henry's eyes. The eyes of

his friend. Sniper's eyes. You can't knock off your own queen,

that's not in anyone's rules of chess, he thought, and restrained an

urge to roar out gales of rancid laughter. The quarry, he had said.

Ryder's Quarry. It was over four hundred feet deep, some said. It

was perhaps twelve miles east of the university. Over the thirty

years that Dex had been here, a dozen people had drowned there,

and three years ago the town had posted the place.

"I put you to bed," Henry said. "Had to carry you into your room.

You were out like a light. Scotch, sleeping powder, shock. But you

were breathing normally and well. Strong heart action. I checked

those things. Whatever else you believe, never think I had any

intention of hurting you, Dex."

"It was fifteen minutes before Wilma's last class ended, and it

would take her another fifteen minutes to drive home and another

fifteen minutes to get over to Amberson Hall. That gave me forty-

five minutes. I got over to Amberson in ten. It was unlocked. That

was enough to settle any doubts I had left."

"What do you mean?"

"The key ring on the janitor's belt. It went with the janitor."

Dex shuddered.

"If the door had been locked--forgive me, Dex, but if you're going

to play for keeps, you ought to cover every base--there was still

time enough to get back home ahead of Wilma and burn that note.

"I went downstairs--and I kept as close to the wall going down

those stairs as I could, believe me..."

Henry stepped into the lab and glanced around. It was just as Dex

had left it. He slicked his tongue over his dry lips and then wiped

his face with his hand. His heart was thudding in his chest. Get

hold of yourself, man. One thing at a time. Don't look ahead.

The boards the janitor had pried off the crate were still stacked on

the lab table. One table over was the scatter of Charlie Gereson's

lab notes, never to be completed now. Henry took it all in, and then

pulled his own flashlight--the one he always kept in the glovebox

of his car for emergencies--from his back pocket. If this didn't

qualify as an emergency, nothing did.

He snapped it on and crossed the lab and went out the door. The

light bobbed uneasily in the dark for a moment, and then he trained

it on the floor. He didn't want to step on anything he shouldn't.

Moving slowly and cautiously, Henry moved around to the side of

the stairs and shone the light underneath. His breath paused, and

then resumed again, more slowly. Sudenly the tension and fear

were gone, and he only felt cold. The crate was under there, just as

Dex had said it was. And the janitor's ballpoint pen. And his shoes.

And Charlie Gereson's glasses.

Henry moved the light from one of these artifacts to the next

slowly, spotlighting each. Then he glanced at his watch, snapped

the flashlight off and jammed it back in his pocket. He had half an

hour. There was no time to waste.

In the janitor's closet upstairs he found buckets, heavy-duty

cleaner, rags... and gloves. No prints. He went back downstairs like

the sorcerer's apprentice, a heavy plastic bucket full of hot water

and foaming cleaner in each hand, rags draped over his shoulder.

His footfalls clacked hollowly in the stillness. He thought of Dex

saying, It sits squat and mute. And still he was cold.

He began to clean up.

"She came," Henry said. "Oh yes, she came. And she was... excited

and happy."

"What?" Dex said.

"Excited," he repeated. "She was whining and carping the way she

always did in that high, unpleasant voice, but that was just habit, I

think. All those years, Dex, the only part of me she wasn't able to

completely control, the only part she could never get completely

under her thumb, was my friendship with you. Our two drinks

while she was at class. Our chess. Our... companionship."

Dex nodded. Yes, companionship was the right word. A little light

in the darkness of loneliness. It hadn't just been the chess or the

drinks; it had been Henry's face over the board, Henry's voice

recounting how things were in his department, a bit of harmless

gossip, a laugh over something.

"So she was whining and bitching in her best 'just call me Billie'

style, but I think it was just habit. She was excited and happy, Dex.

Because she was finally going to be able to get control over the last

... little.., bit." He looked at Dex calmly. "I knew she'd come, you

see. I knew she'd want to see what kind of mess you gotten

yourself into, Dex."

"They're downstairs," Henry told Wilma. Wilma was wearing a

bright yellow sleeveless blouse and green pants that were too tight

for her. "Right downstairs." And he uttered a sudden, loud laugh.

Wilma's head whipped around and her narrow face darkened with

suspicion. "What are you laughing about?" She asked in her loud,

buzzing voice. "Your best friend gets in a scrape with a girl and

you're laughing?"

No, he shouldn't be laughing. But he couldn't help it. It was sitting

under the stairs, sitting there squat and mute, just try telling that

thing in the crate to call you Billie, Wilma--and another loud laugh

escaped him and went rolling down the dim first-floor hall like a

depth charge.

"Well, there is a funny side to it," he said, hardly aware of what he

was saying. "Wait'Il you see. You'll think--"

Her eyes, always questing, never still, dropped to his front pocket,

where he had stuffed the rubber gloves.

"What are those? Are those gloves?"

Henry began to spew words. At the same time he put his arm

around Wilma's bony shoulders and led her toward the stairs.

"Well, he's passed out, you know. He smells like a distillery. Can't

guess how much he drank. Threw up all over everything. I've been

cleaning up. Hell of an awful mess, Billie. I persuaded the girl to

stay a bit. You'll help me, won't you? This is Dex, after all."

"I don't know," she said, as they began to descend the stairs to the

basement lab. Her eyes snapped with dark glee. "I'll have to see

what the situation is. You don't know anything, that's obvious.

You're hysterical. Exactly what I would have expected."

"That's right," Henry said. They had reached the bottom of the

stairs. "Right around here. Just step right around here."

"But the lab's that way--"

"Yes... but the girl..." And he began to laugh again in great,

loonlike bursts.

"Henry, what is wrong with you?" And now that acidic contempt

was mixed with something else--something that might have been

fear.

That made Henry laugh harder. His laughter echoed and

rebounded, filling the dark basement with a sound like laughing

banshees or demons approving a particularly good jest. "The girl,

Billie," Henry said between bursts of helpless laughter. "That's

what's so funny, the girl, the girl has crawled under the stairs and

won't come out, that what's so funny, ah-heh-heh-hahahahaa--"

And now the dark kerosene of joy lit in her eyes; her lips curled up

like charring paper in what the denizens of hell might call a smile.

And Wilma whispered, "What did he do to her?"

"You can get her out," Henry babbled, leading her to the dark.

triangular, gaping maw. "I'm sure you can get her out, no trouble,

no problem." He suddenly grabbed Wilma at the nape of the neck

and the waist, forcing her down even as he pushed her into the

space under the stairs.

"What are you doing?" she screamed querulously. "What are you

doing, Henry?"

"What I should have done a long time ago," Henry said, laughing.

"Get under there, Wilma. Just tell it to call you Billie, you bitch."

She tried to turn, tried to fight him. One hand clawed for his wrist--

he saw her spade-shaped nails slice down, but they clawed only

air. "Stop it, Henry!" She cried. "Stop it right now! Stop this

foolishness! I--I'll scream!"

"Scream all you want!" he bellowed, still laughing. He raised one

foot, planted it in the center of her narrow and joyless backside,

and pushed. "I'll help you, Wilma! Come on out! Wake up,

whatever you are! Wake up! Here's your dinner! Poison meat!

Wake up! Wake up!"

Wilma screamed piercingly, an inarticulate sound that was still

more rage than fear.

And then Henry heard it.

First a low whistle, the sound a man might make while working

alone without even being aware of it. Then it rose in pitch, sliding

up the scale to an earsplitting whine that was barely audible. Then

it suddenly descended again and became a growl... and then a

hoarse yammering. It was an utterly savage sound. All his married

life Henry Northrup had gone in fear of his wife, but the thing in

the crate made Wilma sound like a child doing a kindergarten

tantram. Henry had time to think: Holy God, maybe it really is a

Tasmanian devil... it's some kind of devil, anyway.

Wilma began to scream again, but this time it was a sweeter tune--

at least to the ear of Henry Northrup. It was a sound of utter terror.

Her yellow blouse flashed in the dark under the stairs, a vague

beacon. She lunged at the opening and Henry pushed her back,

using all his strength.

"Henry!" She howled. "Henreeeee!"

She came again, head first this time, like a charging bull. Henry

caught her head in both hands, feeling the tight, wiry cap of her

curls squash under his palms. He Pushed. And then, over Wilma's

shoulder, he saw something that might have been the gold-glinting

eyes of a small owl. Eyes that were infinitely cold and hateful. The

yammering became louder, reaching a crescendo. And when it

struck at Wilma, the vibration running through her body was

enough to knock him backwards.

He caught one glimpse of her face, her bulging eyes, and then she

was dragged back into the darkness. She screamed once more.Only

once.

"Just tell it to call you Billie," he whispered.

Henry Northrup drew a great, shuddering breath.

"It went on ... for quite a while," he said. After a long time, maybe

twenty minutes, the growling and the... the sounds of its feeding...

that stopped, too. And it started to whistle. Just like you said, Dex.

As if it were a happy teakettle or something. It whistled for maybe

five minutes, and then it stopped. I shone my light underneath

again. The crate had been pulled out a little way. Thre was... fresh

blood. And Wilma's purse had spilled everywhere. But it got both

of her shoes. That was something, wasn't it?"

Dex didn't answer. The room basked in sunshine. Outside, a bird

sang.

"I finished cleaning the lab," Henry resumed at last. "It took me

another forty minutes, and I almost missed a drop of blood that

was on the light globe ... saw it just as I was going out. But when I

was done, the place was as neat as a pin. Then I went out to my car

and drove across campus to the English department. It was getting

late, but I didn't feel a bit tired. In fact, Dex, I don't think I ever felt

more clear-headed in my life. There was a crate in the basement of

the English department. I flashed on that very early in your story.

Associating one monster with another, I suppose."

"What do you mean?"

"Last year when Badlinger was in England--you remember

Badlinger, don't you?"

Dex nodded. Badlinger was the man who had beaten Henry out for

the English department chair... partly because Badlinger's wife was

bright, vivacious and sociable, while Henry's wife was a shrew.

Had been a shrew.

"He was in England on sabbatical," Henry said. "Had all their

things crated and shipped back. One of them was a giant stuffed

animal. Nessie, they call it. For his kids. That bastard bought it for

his kids. I always wanted children, you know. Wilma didn't. She

said kids get in the way.

"Anyway, it came back in this gigantic wooden crate, and

Badlinger dragged it down to the English department basement

because there was no room in the garage at home, he said, but he

didn't want to throw it out because it might come in handy

someday. Meantime, our janitors were using it as a gigantic sort of

wastebasket. When it was full of trash, they'd dump it into the back

of the truck on trash day and then fill it up again.

"I think it was the crate Badlinger's damned stuffed monster came

back from England in that put the idea in my head. I began to see

how your Tasmanian devil could be gotten rid of. And that started

me thinking about something else I wanted to be rid of. That I

wanted so badly to be rid of.

"I had my keys, of course. I let myself in and went downstairs. The

crate was there. It was a big, unwieldy thing, but the janitors' dolly

was down there as well. I dumped out the little bit of trash that was

in it and got the crate onto the dolly by standing it on end. I pulled

it upstairs and wheeled it straight across the mall and back to

Amberson."

"You didn't take your car?"

"No, I left my car in my space in the English department parking

lot. I couldn't have gotten the crate in there, anyway."

For Dex, new light began to break. Henry would have been driving

his MG, of course--an elderly sportscar that Wilma had always

called Henry's toy. And if Henry had the MG, then Wilma would

have had the Scout--a jeep with a fold-down back seat. Plenty of

storage space, as the ads said.

"I didn't meet anyone," Henry said. "At this time of year--and at no

other--the campus is quite deserted. The whole thing was almost

hellishly perfect. I didn't see so much as a pair of headlights. I got

back to Amberson Hall and took Badlinger's crate downstairs. I left

it sitting on the dolly with the open end facing under the stairs.

Then I went back upstairs to the janitors' closet and got that long

pole they use to open and close the windows. They only have those

poles in the old buildings now. I went back down and got ready to

hook the crate--your Paella crate--out from under the stairs. Then I

had a bad moment. I realized the top of Badlinger's crate was gone,

you see. I'd noticed it before, but now I realized it. In my guts."

"What did you do?"

"Decided to take the chance," Henry said. "I took the window pole

and pulled the crate out. I eased it out, as if it were full of eggs. No

... as if it were full of Mason jars with nitroglycerine in them."

Dex sat up, staring at Henry. "What... what..."

Henry looked back somberly. "It was my first good look at it,

remember. It was horrible." He paused deliberately and then said it

again: "It was horrible, Dex. It was splattered with blood, some of

it seemingly grimed right into tile wood. It made me think of... do

you remember those joke boxes they used to sell? You'd push a

little lever and tile box would grind and shake, and then a pale

green hand would come out of the top and push the lever back and

snap inside again. It made me think of that.

"I pulled it out--oh, so carefully--and I said I wouldn't look down

inside, no matter what. But I did, of course. And I saw..." His voice

dropped helplessly, seeming to lose all strength. "I saw Wilma's

face, Dex. Her face."

"Henry, don't--"

"I saw her eyes, looking up at me from that box. Her glazed eyes. I

saw something else, too. Something white. A bone, I think. And a

black something. Furry. Curled up. Whistling, too. A very low

whistle. I think it was sleeping."

"I hooked it out as far as I could, and then I just stood there

looking at it, realizing that I couldn't drive knowing that thing

could come out at any time... come out and land on the back of my

neck. So I started to look around for something--anything--to cover

the top of Badlinger's crate.

"I went into the animal husbandry room, and there were a couple

of cages big enough to hold the Paella crate, but I couldn't find the

goddamned keys. So I went upstairs and I still couldn't find

anything. I don't know how long I hunted, but there was this

continual feeling of time... slipping away. I was getting a little

crazy. Then I happened to poke into that big lecture room at the far

end of the hall--"

"Room 6?"

"Yes, I think so. They had been painting the walls. There was a big

canvas dropcloth on the floor to catch the splatters. I took it, and

then I went back downstairs, and I pushed the Paella crate into

Badlinger's crate. Carefully!... you wouldn't believe how carefully

I did it, Dex."

When the smaller crate was nested inside the larger, Henry

uncinched the straps on the English department dolly and grabbed

the end of the dropcloth. It rustled stiffly in the stillness of

Amberson Hall's basement. His breathing rustled stiffly as well.

And there was that low whistle. He kept waiting for it to pause, to

change. It didn't. He had sweated his shirt through; it was plastered

to his chest and back.

Moving carefully, refusing to hurry, he wrapped the dropcloth

around Badlinger's crate three times, then four, then five. In the

dim light shining through from the lab, Badlinger's crate now

looked mummified. Holding the seam with one splayed hand, he

wrapped first one strap around it, then the other. He cinched them

tight and then stood back a moment. He glanced at his watch. It

was just past one o'clock. A pulse beat rhythmically at his throat.

Moving forward again, wishing absurdly for a cigarette (he had

given them up sixteen years before), he grabbed the dolly, tilted it

back, and began pulling it slowly up the stairs.

Outside, the moon watched coldly as he lifted the entire load, dolly

and all, into the back of what he had come to think of as Wilma's

Jeep--although Wilma had not earned a dime since the day he had

married her. It was the biggest lift he had done since he had

worked with a moving company in Westbrook as an

undergraduate. At the highest point of the lift, a lance of pain

seemed to dig into his lower back. And still he slipped it into the

back of the Scout as gently as a sleeping baby.

He tried to close the back, but it wouldn't go up; the handle of the

dolly stuck out four inches too far. He drove with the tailgate

down, and at every bump and pothole, his heart seemed to stutter.

His ears felt for the whistle, waiting for it to escalate into a shrill

scream and then descend to a guttural howl of fury waiting for the

hoarse rip of canvas as teeth and claws pulled their way through it.

And overhead the moon, a mystic silver disc, rode the sky.

"I drove out to Ryder's Quarry," Henry went on. "There was a

chain across the head of the road, but I geared the Scout down and

got around. I backed right up to the edge of the water. The moon

was still up and I could see its reflection way down in the

blackness, like a drowned silver dollar. I went around, but it was a

long time before I could bring myself to grab the thing. In a very

real way, Dex, it was three bodies... the remains of three human

beings. And I started wondering...where did they go? I saw

Wilma's face, but it looked ... God help me, it looked all flat, like a

Halloween mask. How much of them did it eat, Dex? How much

could it eat? And I started to understand what you meant about that

central axle pulling loose."

"It was still whistling. I could hear it, muffled and faint, through

that canvas dropcloth. Then I grabbed it and I heaved... I really

believe it was do it then or do it never. It came sliding out... and I

think maybe it suspected, Dex... because, as the dolly started to tilt

down toward the water it started to growl and yammer again ... and

the canvas started to ripple and bulge ... and I yanked it again. I

gave it all I had ... so much that I almost fell into the damned

quarry myself. And it went in. There was a splash ... and then it

was gone. Except for a few ripples, it was gone. And then the

ripples were gone, too."

He fell silent, looking at his hands.

"And you came here," Dex said.

"First I went back to Amberson Hall. Cleaned under the stairs.

Picked up all of Wilma's things and put them in her purse again.

Picked up the janitor's shoe and his pen and your grad student's

glasses. Wilma's purse is still on the seat. I parked the car in our--

in my--driveway. On the way there I threw the rest of the stuff in

the river."

"And then did what? Walked here?"

"Yes."

"Henry, what if I'd waked up before you got here? Called the

police?"

Henry Northrup said simply: "You didn't."

They stared at each other, Dex from his bed, Henry from the chair

by the window.

Speaking in tones so soft as to be nearly inaudible, Henry said,

"The question is, what happens now? Three people are going to be

reported missing soon. There is no one element to connect all

three. There are no signs of foul play; I saw to that. Badlinger's

crate, the dolly, the painters' dropcloth--those things will be

reported missing too, presumably. There will be a search. But the

weight of the dolly will carry the crate to the bottom of the quarry,

and ... there are really no bodies, are there, Dex?"

"No," Dexter Stanley said. "No, I suppose there aren't."

"But what are you going to do, Dex? What are you going to say?"

"Oh, I could tell a tale," Dex said. "And if I told it, I suspect I'd end

up in the state mental hospital. Perhaps accused of murdering the

janitor and Gereson, if not your wife. No matter how good your

cleanup was, a state police forensic unit could find traces of blood

on the floor and walls of that laboratory. I believe I'll keep my

mouth shut."

"Thank you," Henry said. "Thank you, Dex."

Dex thought of that elusive thing Henry had mentioned

companionship. A little light in the darkness. He thought of

playing chess perhaps twice a week instead of once. Perhaps even

three times a week... and if the game was not finished by ten,

perhaps playing until midnight if neither of them had any early

morning classes, instead of having to put the board away (and, as

likely as not, Wilma would just "accidentally" knock over the

pieces "while dusting," so that the game would have to be started

all over again the following Thursday evening). He thought of his

friend, at last free of that other species of Tasmanian devil that

killed more slowly but just as surely--by heart attack, by stroke, by

ulcer, by high blood pressure, yammering and whistling in the ear

all the while.

Last of all, he thought of the janitor, casually flicking his quarter,

and of the quarter coming down and rolling under the stairs, where

a very old horror sat squat and mute, covered with dust and

cobwebs, waiting... biding its time...

What had Henry said? The whole thing was almost hellishly

perfect.

"No need to thank me, Henry," he said.

Henry stood up. "If you got dressed," he said, "you could run me

down to the campus. I could get my MG and go back home and

report Wilma missing."

Dex thought about it. Henry was inviting him to cross a nearly

invisible line, it seemed, from bystander to accomplice. Did he

want to cross that line?

At last he swung his legs out of bed. "All right, Henry."

"Thank you, Dexter."

Dex smiled slowly. "That's all right," he said. "After all, what are

friends for?"

STEPHEN KING

The Revelations Of 'Becka Paulson

From Rolling Stone Magazine 1984

An excerpt from The Tommyknockers

What happened was simple enough at least, at the start. What

happened was that Rebecca Paulson shot herself in the head with her

husband Joe's .22-caliber pistol. This occurred during her annual

spring cleaning, which took place this year (as it did most years)

around the middle of June. 'Becka had a way of falling behind in

such things.

She was standing on a short stepladder and rummaging through

the accumulated junk on the high shelf in the downstairs hall closet

while the Paulson cat, a big brindle tom named Ozzie Nelson, sat in

the living-room doorway, watching her. From behind Ozzie came the

anxious voices of Another World, blaring out of the Paulsons' big old

Zenith TV which would later become something much more than a

TV.

'Becka pulled stuff down and examined it, hoping for

something that was still good, but not really expecting to find such a

thing. There were four or five knitted winter caps, all moth-eaten and

unraveling. She tossed them behind her onto the hall floor. Here was

a Reader's Digest Condensed Book from the summer of 1954,

featuring Run Silent, Run Deep and Here's Goggle. Water damage

had swelled it to the size of a Manhattan telephone book. She tossed

it behind her. Ah! Here was an umbrella that looked salvageable ...

and a box with something in it.

It was a shoebox. Whatever was inside was heavy. When she

tilted the box, it shifted. She took the lid off, also tossing this behind

her (it almost hit Ozzie Nelson, who decided to split the scene). Inside

the box was a gun with a long barrel and imitation wood-grip

handles.

"Oh," she said. "That." She took it out of the box, not noticing

that it was cocked, and turned it around to look into the small beady

eye of the muzzle, believing that if there was a bullet in there she

would see it.

She remembered the gun. Until five years ago, Joe had been a

member of Derry Elks. Some ten years ago (or maybe it had been

fifteen), Joe had bought fifteen Elks raffle tickets while drunk. 'Becka

had been so mad she had refused to let him put his manthing in her

for two weeks. The first prize had been a Bombardier Skidoo, second

prize an Evinrude motor. This .22 target pistol had been the third

prize.

He had shot it for a while in the backyard, she remembered

plinking away at cans and bottles until 'Becka complained about the

noise. Then he had taken it up to the gravel pit at the dead end of

their road, although she had sensed he was losing interest, even then

he'd just gone on shooting for a while to make sure she didn't think

she had gotten the better of him. Then it had disappeared. She had

thought he had swapped it for something a set of snow tires, maybe,

or a battery but here it was.

She held the muzzle of the gun up to her eye, peering into the

darkness, looking for the bullet. She could see nothing but darkness.

Must be unloaded, then.

I'll make him get rid of it just the same, she thought, backing

down the stepladder. Tonight. When he gets back from the post

office. I'll stand right up to him. "Joe" I'll say, "it's no good having a

gun sitting around the house even if there's no kids around and it's

unloaded. You don't even use it to shoot bottles anymore." That's

what I'll say.

This was a satisfying thing to think, but her undermind knew

that she would of course say no such thing. In the Paulson house, it

was Joe who mostly picked the roads and drove the horses. She

supposed that it would be best to just dispose of it herself put it in a

plastic garbage bag under the other rickrack from the closet shelf.

The gun would go to the dump with everything else the next time

Vinnie Margolies stopped by to pick up their throw-out. Joe would

not miss what he had already forgotten the lid of the box had been

thick with undisturbed dust. Would not miss it, that was, unless she

was stupid enough to bring it to his attention.

'Becka reached the bottom of the ladder. Then she stepped

backward onto the Reader's Digest Condensed Book with her left

foot. The front board of the book slid backward as the rotted binding

gave way. She tottered, holding the gun with one hand and flailing

with the other. Her right foot came down on the pile of knitted caps,

which also slid backward. As she fell she realised that she looked

more like a woman bent on suicide than on cleaning.

Well, it ain't loaded, she had time to think, but the gun was

loaded, and it had been cocked; cocked for years, as if waiting for her

to come along. She sat down hard in the hallway and when she did

the hammer of the pistol snapped forward. There was a flat,

unimportant bang not much louder than a baby firecracker in a tin

cup, and a .22 Winchester short entered 'Becka Paulson's brain just

above the left eye. It made a small black hole what was the faint blue

of just-bloomed irises around the edges.

Her head thumped back against the wall, and a trickle of blood

ran from the hole into her left eyebrow. The gun, with a tiny thread of

white smoke rising from its muzzle, fell into her lap. Her hands

drummed lightly up and down on the floor for a period of about five

seconds, her right leg flexed, then shot straight out. Her loafer flew

across the hall and hit the far wall. Her eyes remained open for the

next thirty minutes, the pupils dilating and constricting, dilating and

constricting.

Ozzie Nelson came to the living-room door, miaowed at her,

and then began washing himself.

She was putting supper on the table that night before Joe

noticed the Band-Aid over her eye. He had been home for an hour

and a half, but just lately he didn't notice much at all around the

house he seemed preoccupied with something, far away from her a

lot of the time. This didn't bother her as much as it might have once

at least he wasn't always after her to let him put his manthing into her

ladyplace.

"What'd you do to your head?" he asked as she put a bowl of

beans and a plate of red hot dogs on the table.

She touched the Band-Aid vaguely. Yes what exactly had she

done to her head? She couldn't really remember. The whole middle of

the day had a funny dark place in it, like an inkstain. She

remembered feeding Joe his breakfast and standing on the porch as he

headed off to the post office in his Wagoneer that much was crystal

clear. She remembered doing the white load in the new Sears washer

while Wheel of Fortune blared from the TV. That was also clear.

Then the inkstain began. She remembered putting in the colors and

starting the cold cycle. She had the faintest, vaguest recollection of

putting a couple of Swanson's Hungary man frozen dinners in the

oven for herself 'Becka Paulson was a hefty eater but after that

there was nothing. Not until she had awakened sitting on the living-

room couch. She had changed from slacks and her flowed smock into

a dress and high heel; she had put her hair in braids. There was

something heavy in her lap and on her shoulders and her forehead

tickled. It was Ozzie Nelson. Ozzie was standing with his hind legs in

her crotch and his forepaws on her shoulders. He was busily licking

blood off her forehead and out of her eyebrow. She swotted Ozzie

away from her lap and then looked at the clock. Joe would be home

in an hour and she hadn't even started dinner. Then she had touched

her head, which throbbed vaguely.

"'Becka?"

"What?" She sat down at her place and began to spoon beans

onto her plate.

"I asked you what you did to your head?"

"Bumped it," she said ... although, when she went down to the

bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, it hadn't looked like a

bump; it had looked like a hole. "I just bumped it."

"Oh," he said, losing interest. He opened the new issue of

Sports Illustrated which had come that day and immediately fell into

a daydream. In it he was running his hands slowly over the body of

Nancy Voss an activity he had been indulging in the last six weeks

or so. God bless the United States Postal Authority for sending Nancy

Voss from Falmouth to Haven, that was all he could say. Falmouth's

loss was Joe Paulson's gain. He had whole days when he was quite

sure he had died and gone to heaven, and his pecker hadn't been so

frisky since he was nineteen and touring West Germany with the U.S.

Army. It would have taken more than a Band-Aid on his wife's

forehead to engage his full attention.

'Becka helped herself to three hot dogs, paused to debate a

moment, and then added a fourth. She doused the dogs and the beans

with ketchup and then stirred everything together. The result looked a

bit like the aftermath of a bad motorcycle accident. She poured

herself a glass of grape Kool-Aid from the pitcher on the table (Joe

had a beer) and then touched the Band-Aid with the tips of her fingers

she had been doing that ever since she put it on. Nothing but a cool

plastic strip. That was okay ... but she could feel the circular

indentation beneath. The hole. That wasn't so okay.

"Just bumped it," she murmured again, as if saying would

make it so. Joe didn't look up and 'Becka began to eat.

Hasn't hurt my appetite any, whatever it was, she thought. Not

that much ever does probably nothing ever will. When they say on

the radio that all those missiles are flying and it's the end of the world.

I'll probably go right on eating until one of those rockets lands on

Haven.

She cut herself a piece of bread from the homemade loaf and

began mopping up bean juice with it.

Seeing that ... that mark on her forehead had unnerved her at

the time, unnerved her plenty. No sense kidding about that, just as

there was no sense kidding that it was just a mark, like a bruise. And

in case anyone ever wanted to know, 'Becka thought, she would tell

them that looking into the mirror and seeing that you had an extra

hole in your head wasn't one of life's cheeriest experiences. Your

head, after all, was where your brains were. And as for what she had

done next

She tried to shy away from that, but it was too late.

Too late, 'Becka, a voice tolled in her mind it sounded like

her dead father's voice.

She had stared at the hole, stared at it and stared at it, and then

she had pulled open the drawer to the left of the sink and had pawed

through her few meager items of makeup with hands that didn't seem

to belong to her. She took out her eyebrow pencil and then looked

into the mirror again.

She raised the hand holding the eyebrow pencil with the blunt

end towards her, and slowly began to push it into the hole in her

forehead. No, she moaned to herself, stop it, 'Becka, you don't want to

do this

But apparently part of her did, because she went right on doing

it. There was no pain and the eyebrow pencil was a perfect fit. She

pushed it in an inch, then two, then three. She looked at herself in the

mirror, a woman in a flowered dress who had a pencil sticking out of

her head. She pushed it in a fourth inch.

Not much left, 'Becka, be careful, wouldn't want to lose it in

there, I'd rattle when you turned over in the night, wake up Joe

She tittered hysterically.

Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had

finally encountered resistance. It was hard, but a gentle push also

communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same moment the

whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing

of memories jigged through her mind sledding at four in her older

brother's snowsuit, washing high school blackboards, a '59 Impala

her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut hay.

She pulled the eyebrow pencil out of her head, shocked back to

herself, terrified that blood would come gushing out of the hole. But

no blood came, nor was there any blood on the shiny surface of the

eyebrow pencil. Blood or ... or ...

But she would not think of that. She threw the pencil back into

the drawer and slammed the draw shut. Her first impulse, to cover the

hole, came back, stronger than ever.

She swung the mirror away from the medicine cabinet and

grabbed the tin box of Band-Aids. It fell from her trembling fingers

and cluttered into the basin. 'Becka had cried out at the sound and

then told herself to stop it, just stop it. Cover it up, make it gone. That

was the thing to do; that was the ticket. Never mind the eyebrow

pencil, just forget that she had none of the signs of brain injury she

had seen on the afternoon stories and Marcus Welby, M.D., that was

the important thing. She was all right. As for the eyebrow pencil, she

would just forget that part.

And so she had, at least until now. She looked at her half-eaten

dinner and realized with a sort of dull humor that she had been wrong

about her appetite she couldn't eat another bite.

She took her plate over to the garbage and scrapped what was

left into the can, while Ozzie wound restlessly around her ankles. Joe

didn't look up from his magazine. In his mind, Nancy Voss was

asking him again if that tongue of his was as long as it looked.

She woke up in the middle of the night from some confusing dream in

which all the clocks in the house had been talking in her father's

voice. Joe lay beside her, flat on his back in his boxer shorts, snoring.

Her hand went to the Band-Aid. The hole didn't hurt, didn't

exactly throb, but it itched. She rubbed at it gently, afraid of another

of those dazzling green flashes. None came.

She rolled over on her side and though: You got to go to the

doctor, 'Becka. You got to get that seen to. I don't know what you

did, but

No, she answered herself. No doctor. She rolled to her other

side, thinking she would be awake for hours now, wondering, asking

herself frightened questions. Instead, she was asleep again in

moments.

In the morning the hole under the Band-Aid hardly itched at all,

and that made it easier not to think about. She made Joe his breakfast

and saw him off to work. She finished washing the dishes and took

out the garbage. They kept it in a little shed beside the house that Joe

had built, a structure not much bigger than a doghouse. You had to

lock it up or the coons came out of the woods and made a mess.

She stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and put the

green bag down with the others. Vinnie would be by in Friday or

Saturday and then she would give the shed a good airing. As she was

backing out, she saw a bag that hadn't been tied up like the others. A

curved handle, like the handle of a cane protruded from the top.

Curious, she pulled it out and saw it was an umbrella. A

number of moth-eaten, unraveling hats came out with the umbrella.

A dull warning sound in her head. For a moment she could

almost see through the inkstain to what was behind it, to what had

happened to her

(bottom it's in the bottom something heavy something in a box

what Joe don't remember won't)

yesterday. But did she want to know?

No.

She didn't.

She wanted to forget.

She backed out of the little shed and rebolted the door with

hands that trembled the slightest bit.

A week later (she still changed the band-Aid each morning, but

the wound was closing up she could see the pink new tissue filling

it when she shone Joe's flashlight into it and peered into the bathroom

mirror) 'Becka found out what half of have already either knew or

surmised that Joe was cheating on her. Jesus told her. In the last

three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible,

distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her

sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but were they wonderful?

Weren't they just! And would she stop listening, simply tip Jesus over

on His face, perhaps scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For

one thing, he was the Savior. For another thing, there was a grisly

sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her.

Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Zenith television and He had

been in that same spot for just about twenty years. Before resting atop

the Zenith, He had rested atop two RCAs (Joe Paulson had always

bought American). This was a beautiful 3-D picture of Jesus that

Rebecca's sister, who lived in Portsmouth, had sent her. Jesus was

dressed in a simple white robe, and He was holding a Shepard's staff.

Because the picture had been created ('Becka considered "made"

much too mundane a word for a likeness which seemed so real you

could almost stick your hand into it) before the Beatles and the

changes they had wreaked on male hairstyles, His hair was not too

long, and perfectly neat. The Christ on 'Becka Paulson's TV combed

His hair a little bit like Elvis Presley after Elvis got out of the army.

His eyes were brown and mild and kind. Behind Him, in perfect

perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials

trailed away into the distance. 'Becka and her sister Corinne and her

brother Roland had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester,

and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that

white and uniformly woolly, like little fair weather clouds that had

fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine

and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He

couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps

disappear if He wanted to.

A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV,

and she supposed that now she new why, oh yessirree Bob, oh yes

indeedy. Joe of course, had his trumped-up tales. "it doesn't seem

right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching

Three's Company or Charlie's Angels" he'd say. "Why don't you put it

up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or ... I'll tell you what! Why not put it

up on your bureau until Sunday, and then you can bring it down and

out it back on the TV while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Rex

Humbard and Jerry Falwell? I'll bet Jesus likes Jerry Falwell one hell

of a lot better than he likes Charlie's Angels."

She refused.

"When it's my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the

guys don't like it," he said another time. "No one wants to have Jesus

Christ looking at them while He tries to fill a flush or draw to an

inside straight."

"Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling's

the Devil's work," 'Becka said.

Joe, who was a good poker player, bridled. "then it was the

Devil's work that bought you your hair dryer and that garnet ring you

like so well," he said. "better take 'em back for refunds and give the

money to the Salvation Army. Wait, I think I got the receipts in my

den."

She allowed as how Joe could turn the 3-D picture of Jesus

around to face the wall on the one Thursday night a month that he

had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker ... but

that was all.

And now she knew the real reason he wanted to get rid of that

picture. He must have had an idea all along that that picture was a

magic picture. Oh ... she supposed sacred was a better word, magic

was for pagans headhunters and Catholics and people like that

but the came almost to one and the same, didn't they? All along Joe

must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means

by which his sin would be found out.

Oh, she supposed she must have had some idea of what all his

recent preoccupation had meant, must have known there was a reason

why he was never after her at night anymore. But the truth was, that

had been a relief sex was just as her mother had told her it would

be, nasty and brutish, sometimes painful and always humiliating.

Had she also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time? If so,

she had ignored that, too, and she might have gone on ignoring it

indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on the Sony hadn't begun to speak

on July 7th. She realized now that she had ignored a third factor, as

well; at about the same time the pawings had stopped the perfume

smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired and a woman

named Nancy Voss had come up from the Falmouth post office to

take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom, 'Becka had

now come to think of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years

older than her and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she

was a trim, well-kept and handsome fifty. 'Becka herself had put on a

little weight during her marriage, going from one hundred and

twenty-six to a hundred and ninety-three, most of that since Byron,

their only chick and child, had flown from the nest.

She could have gone on ignoring it, and perhaps what would

even have been for the best. If The Hussey really enjoyed the

animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and

that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and

looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved that The Hussy

was little more than an animal herself and of course it freed 'Becka

of a tiresome, if ever more occasional, obligation. But when the

picture of Jesus spoke up, telling her exactly what was going on, it

became impossible to ignore. She knew that something would have to

be done.

The picture first spoke at just past three in the afternoon on

Thursday. This was eight days after shooting herself in the head and

about four days after her resolution to forget it was a hole and not

just a mark had begun to take effect. 'Becka was coming back into

the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffeecake

and a beer stein filled with Kool-Aid) to watch General Hospital. She

no longer really believed that Luke would ever find Laura, but she

could not quite find it in her heart to completely give up hope.

She was bending down to turn on the Zenith when Jesus said,

"'Becka, Joe is putting the boots to that Hussey down at the pee-oh

just about every lunch hour and sometimes after punching out time in

the afternoon. Once he was so randy he drove it to her while he was

supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what?

She never even said 'At least wait until I get the first-class into the

boxes.' "

'Becka screamed and spilled her Kool-Aid down the front of the

TV. It was a wonder, she thought later, when she was able to think at

all, that the picture tube didn't blow. Her coffeecake went on the rug.

"And that's not all," Jesus told her. He walked halfway across

the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a

rock that jutted out of the ground. He held His staff between his

knees and looked at her grimly. "There's a lot going on in Haven.

Why, you wouldn't believe the half of it."

'Becka screamed again and fell on her knees. One of them

landed squarely on her coffeecake and squirted raspberry filling into

the face of Ozzie Nelson, who had crept into the living room to see

what was going on. "My Lord! My Lord!" 'Becka shrieked. Ozzie

ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove with

red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed under there the rest of

the day.

"Well, none of the Paulsons was ever any good," Jesus said. A

sheep wandered towards Him and He whacked it away, using His

staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded 'Becka, even in

her current frozen state, of her long-dead father. The sheep went,

rippling slightly through the 3-D effect. It disappeared from the

picture, actual seeming to curve as it went off the edge ... but that

was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. "No good at all, "Jesus went

on. "Joe's granddad was a whoremaster of the purest sense, as you

well know, 'Becka. Spent his whole life pecker-led. And when he

came up here, do you know what we said? 'No room!' that's what we

said." Jesus leaned forward, still holding His staff. "'Go see Mr.

Splitfoot down below,' we said. 'You'll find your haven-home, all

right. But you may find you new landlord a hard taskmaster,' we

said." Incredibly, Jesus winked at her ... and that was when 'Becka

fled, shrieking, from the house.

She stopped in the backyard, panting, her hair, a mousy blond

that was really not much of any color at all, hanging in her face. Her

heart was beating so fast in her chest that it frightened her. No one

had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and

Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were

the Brodskys were half a mile away. If anyone had heard her, they

would have thought there was a crazywoman down at Joe and 'Becka

Paulson's.

Well there is a crazywoman at the Paulsons', isn't there? she

thought. If you really think that picture of Jesus started to talk to you,

why, you really must be crazy. Daddy'd beat you three shades of blue

for thinking such a thing one shade for lying, another shade for

believing the lie, and a third for raising your voice. 'Becka, you are

crazy. Pictures don't talk.

No ... and it didn't, another voice spoke up suddenly. That

voice came out of your own head, 'Becka. I don't know how it could

be ... how you could know such things ... but that's what happened.

Maybe it had something to do with what happened to you last week,

or maybe not, but you made that picture of Jesus talk your own self.

It didn't really no more than that little rubber Topo Gigio mouse on

the Ed Sullivan Show.

But somehow the idea that it might have something to do with

that ... that

(hole)

other thing was scarier than the idea that the picture itself had

spoken, because that was the sort of thing they sometimes had on

Marcus Welby, like that show about the fellow who had the brain

tumor and it was making him wear his wife's nylon stockings and

step-ins. She refused to allow it mental houseroom. It might be a

miracle. After all, miracles happened every day. There was the

Shroud of Turin, and the cures at Lourdes, and that Mexican fellow

who had a picture of the Virgin Mary burned into the surface of a

taco or an enchilada or something. Not to mention those children that

had made the headlines of one of the tabloids children who cried

rocks. Those were all bona fide miracles (the children who wept

rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Jimmy

Swaggart sermon. Hearing voices was only crazy.

But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for

quite a little while now, haven't you? You've been hearing His voice.

Joe's voice. And that's where it came from, not from Jesus but from

Joe, from Joe's head

"No," 'Becka whimpered. "No, I ain't heard any voices in my

head."

She stood by her clothesline in the hot backyard, looking

blankly off toward the woods on the other side of the Nista Road,

blue-gray-hazy in the heat. She wrung her hands in front of her and

begun to weep.

"I ain't no heard no voices in my head."

Crazy, her dead father's implacable voice replied. Crazy with

the heat. You come on over here, 'Becka Bouchard, I'm gonna beat

you three shades of blister-blue for that crazy talk.

"I ain't heard no voices in my head," 'Becka moaned. "That

picture really did talk, I swear, I can't do ventriloquism!"

Better believe the picture. If it was the hole, it was a brain

tumor, sure. If it was the picture, it was a miracle. Miracles came

from God. Miracles came from Outside. A miracle could drive you

crazy and the dear God knew she felt like she was going crazy now

but it didn't mean you were crazy, or that your brains were

scrambled. As for believing that you could hear other people's

thoughts ... that was just crazy.

'Becka looked down at her legs and saw blood gushing from her

left knee. She shrieked again and ran back into the house to call the

doctor, MEDIX, somebody. She was in the living room again,

pawing at the dial with the phone to her ear, when Jesus said:

"That's raspberry filling from your coffeecake, 'Becka. Why

don't you just relax, before you have a heart attack?"

She looked at the TV, the telephone receiver falling to the table

with a clunk. Jesus was still sitting on the rock outcropping. It looked

as though He had crossed His legs. It was really surprising how much

He looked like her own father ... only He didn't seem forbidding,

ready to be hitting angry at a moment's notice. He was looking at her

with a kind of exasperated patience.

"Try it and see if I'm not right," Jesus said.

She touched her knee gently, wincing, expecting pain. There

was none. She saw the seeds in the red stuff and relaxed. She licked

the raspberry filling off her fingers.

"Also," Jesus said, "you have got to get these ideas about

hearing voices and going crazy out of your head. It's just Me. And I

can talk to anyone I want to, any way I want to."

"Because you're the Savior," 'Becka whispered.

"That's right," Jesus said, and looked down. Below Him, a

couple of animated salad bowls were dancing in appreciation of the

hidden Valley Ranch Dressing which they were about to receive.

"And I'd like you to please turn that crap off, if you don't mind. We

don't need that thing running. Also, it makes My feet tingle."

'Becka approached the TV and turned it off.

"My Lord," she whispered.

Now it was Sunday, July 10th. Joe was lying fast asleep out in

the backyard hammock with Ozzie lying limply across him ample

stomach like a black and white fur stole. She stood in the living

room, holding the curtain back with her left hand and looking out at

Joe. Sleeping in the hammock, dreaming of The Hussy, no doubt

dreaming of throwing her down in a great big pile of catalogs from

Carroll Reed and fourth-class junk mail and then how would Joe

and his piggy poker-buddies out it? "putting the boots to her."

She was holding the curtain with her left hand because she had

a handful of square nine-volt batteries in her right. She had

bought them yesterday down at the town hardware store. Now she let

the curtain drop and took the batteries into the kitchen, where she was

assembling a little something on the counter. Jesus had told her how

to make it. She told Jesus she couldn't build things. Jesus told her not

to be a cussed fool. If she could follow a recipe, she could build this

little gadget. She was delighted to find that Jesus was absolutely

right. It was not only easy, it was fun. A lot more fun than cooking,

certainly; she had never really had the knack for that. Her cakes

almost always fell and her breads almost never rose. She had begun

this little thing yesterday, working with the toaster, the motor from

her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic

things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She

thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to

watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.

Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few

days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to

her at odd moments.

Her sewing machine, for instance she'd always wanted one of

those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her

she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new

machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of

Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she

just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had

been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could

make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver even

a dummy like her could use one of those and it worked just as well

as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp

out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there

were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.

Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that

one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her

how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier.

She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic

Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke

them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus'

instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells

to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to

program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured

this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now

it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by

itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the

bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the

toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the

granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a

thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to

catch up on the afternoon stories and now these included true

stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice

awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own

electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and

hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time

after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.

Or ... just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe

was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to

'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school)

that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them

you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they

the numbers were letters, you could pour them into any old mold

you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and

that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and

keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later

on.

That way you could always figure things out, 'Becka had

thought, delighted. She was unaware that her fingers had gone to the

spot above her left eye and were rubbing, rubbing, rubbing. For

instance, just look! You could make things fall into a line every time

by saying ax + bx + c = 0, and that proves it. It always works. It's

like Captain Marvel saying Shazam! Well, there is the zero factor;

you can't let "a" be zero or that spoils it. But otherwise

She had lain awake a while longer, considering this, and then

had fallen asleep, unaware that she had just reinvented the quadratic

equation, and polynomials, and the concept of factoring.

Ideas. Quite a few of them just lately.

'Becka picked up Joe's little blowtorch and lit it deftly with a

kitchen match. She would have laughed last month if you'd told her

she would ever be working with something like this. But it was easy.

Jesus had told her exactly how to solder the wires to the electronics

board from the old radio. It was just like fixing up the vacuum

cleaner, only this idea was even better.

Jesus had told her a lot of other things in the last three days or

so. They had murdered her sleep (and what little sleep she had gotton

was nightmare-driven), they had made her afraid to show her face in

the village itself (I'll always know when you've done something

wrong, 'Becka, her father had told her, because your face just can't

keep a secret), they had made her lose her appetite. Joe, totally

bound up in his work, the Red Sox, and his Hussy, noticed none of

these tings ... although he had noticed the other night as the watched

television that 'Becka was gnawing her fingernails, something she

had never done before it was, in fact, one of the many things she

nagged him about. But she was doing it now, all right; they were

bitten right down to the quick. Joe Paulson considered this for all of

twelve seconds before looking back at the Sony TV and losing

himself in dreams of Nancy Voss's billowy white breasts.

Here were just a few of the afternoon stories Jesus had told her

which had caused 'Becka to sleep poorly and to begin biting her

fingernails at the advanced age of forty-five:

In 1973, Moss Harlingen, one of Joe's poker buddies, had

murdered his father. They had been hunting deer up in

Greenville and it had supposedly been one of those tragic

accidents, but the shooting of Abel Harlingen had been no

accident. Moss simply lay up behind a fallen tree with his rifle

and waited until his father splashed towards him across a small

stream about fifty yards down the hill from where Moss was.

Moss shot his father carefully and deliberately through the

head. Moss thought he had killed his father for money. His

(Moss's) business, Big Ditch Construction, had two notes

falling due with two different banks, and neither bank would

extend because of the other. Moss went to Abel, but Abel

refused to help, although he could afford to. So Moss shot his

father and inherited a lot of money as soon as the county

coroner handed down his verdict of death by misadventure. The

note was paid and Moss Harlingen really believed (except

perhaps in his deepest dreams) that he had committed the

murder for gain. The real motive had been something else. Far

in the past, when Moss was ten and his little brother Emery but

seven, Abel's wife went south to Rhode Island for one whole

winter. Moss's and Emery's uncle had died suddenly, and his

wife needed help getting on her feet. While their mother was

gone, there were several incidents of buggery in the Harlingens'

Troy home. The buggery stopped when the boy's mother came

back, and the incidents were never repeated. Moss had

forgotten all about them. He never remembered lying awake in

the dark anymore, lying awake in mortal terror and watching

the doorway for the shadow of his father. He had absolutely no

recollection of lying with his mouth pressed against his

forearm, hot salty tears of shame and rage squeezing out of his

eyes and coursing down his face to his mouth as Abel

Harlingen slathered lard onto his cock and then slid it up his

son's back door with a grunt and a sigh. It had all made so little

impression on Moss that he could not remember biting his arm

until it bled to keep from crying out, and he certainly could not

remember Emery's breathless little cries from the next bed

"Please, no, daddy, please not me tonight, please, daddy, please

no." Children, of course, forget very easily. But some

subconscious memory must have lingered, because when Moss

Harlingen actually pulled the trigger, as he had dreamed of

doing every night for the last thirty-two years of his life, as the

echoes first rolled away and then rolled back, finally

disappearing into the great forested silence of the up-Maine

wilderness, Moss whispered: "Not you, Em, not tonight." That

Jesus had told her this not two hours after Moss had stopped in

to return a fishing rod which belonged to Joe never crossed

'Becka's mind.

1 Alice Kimball, who taught at the Haven Grammar School,

was a lesbian. Jesus told 'Becka this Friday, not long after the

lady herself, looking large and solid and respectable in a green

pant suit, had stopped by, collecting for the American Cancer

Society.

2 Darla Gaines, the pretty seventeen-year-old girl who brought

the Sunday paper, had half an ounce of "bitchin' reefer"

between the mattress and box spring of her bed. Jesus told

'Becka not fifteen minutes after Darla had come by on Saturday

to collect for the last five weeks (three dollars plus a fifty-cent

tip 'Becka now wished she had withheld). That she and her

boyfriend smoked the reefer in Darla's bed after doing what

they called "the horizontal bop." They did the horizontal bop

and smoked reefer almost every weekday from two until three

o'clock or so. Darla's parents both worked at Splended Shoe in

Derry and they didn't get home until well past four.

3 Hank Buck, another of Joe's poker buddies, worked at a

large supermarket in Bangor and hated his boss so much that a

year ago he had put half a box of Ex-Lax in the man's chocolate

shake when he, the boss, sent Hank out to McDonald's to get

his lunch one day. The boss had shit his pants promptly at

quarter past three in the afternoon, as he was slicing luncheon

meat in the deli of Paul's Down-East Grocery Mart. Hank

managed to hold on until punching-out time, and then he sat in

his car, laughing until he almost shit his pants. "He laughed,"

Jesus told 'Becka. "He laughed. Can you believe that?"

And these things were only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It

seemed that Jesus knew something unpleasant or upsetting about

everyone everyone 'Becka herself came in contact with, anyway.

She couldn't live with such an awful outpouring.

But she didn't know if she could live without it anymore, either.

One thing was certain she had to do something. Something.

"You are doing something," Jesus said. He spoke from behind

her, from the picture on top of the TV of course He did and the

idea that the voice was coming from inside her own head, and that it

was a cold mutation of her own thoughts ... that was nothing but a

dreadful passing illusion. "In fact, you're almost done with this part,

'Becka. Just solder that red wire to that point beside the long

doohickey ... not that one, the one next to it ... that's right. Not too

much solder! It's like Brylcreem, 'Becka. A little dab'll do ya."

Strange, hearing Jesus Christ talk about Brylcreem.

Joe woke up at quarter of two, tossed Ozzie off his lap, strolled

to the back of his lawn, had a comfortable whizz into the poison ivy

back there, then headed into the house to watch the Yankees and the

Red Sox. He opened the refrigerator in the kitchen, glancing briefly

at the little snips of wire on the counter and wondering just what the

hell his wife had been up to. Then he dismissed it and grabbed a quart

of Bud.

He padded into the living room. 'Becka was sitting in her

rocking chair, pretending to read a book. Just ten minutes before Joe

came in, she had finished wiring her little gadget into the Zenith

console television, following Jesus' instructions to the letter.

"You got to be careful, taking the back off a television,

'Becka," Jesus had told her. "More juice back there than there is in a

Bird's Eye warehouse."

"Thought you'd have this all warmed up for me," Joe said.

"I guess you can do it," 'Becka said.

"Ayuh, guess I can," Joe said, completing the last

conversational exchange the two of them would ever have.

He pushed the button that made the TV come on and better

than two thousand volts of electricity slammed into him. His eyes

popped wide open. When the electricity hit him, his hand clenched

hard enough to break the bottle in his hand and drive brown glass

into his palm and fingers. Beer foamed and ran.

"EEEEEEOOOOOOOOAARRRRRRRUMMMMMMMM!"

Joe screamed.

His face began to turn black. Blue smoke began to pour from

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 Audi 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 living 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

know something, the grin said. I know something you never will.

"Well, I guess you'd have to believe the fella who did this was high

on drugs," she said, sounding upset - authentically upset, Kinnell

thought. "No wonder he could kill himself and break his mamma's

heart."

"I've got to be heading north myself," Kinnell said, tucking the

picture under his arm. "Thanks for-"

" Mr. Kinnell?"

"Yes?"

"Can I see your driver's license?" She apparently found nothing

ironic or even amusing in this request. "I ought to write the number

on the back of your check."

Kinnell put the picture down so he could dig for his wallet. "Sure.

You bet."

The woman who'd bought the Star Wars placemats had paused on

her way back to her car to watch some of the soap opera playing on

the lawn TV. Now she glanced at the picture, which Kinnell had

propped against his shins.

"Ag," she said. "Who'd want an ugly old thing like that? I'd think

about it every time I turned the lights out."

"What's wrong with that?" Kinnell asked.

Kinnell's Aunt Trudy lived in Wells, which is about six miles north

of the Maine - New Hampshire border. Kinnell pulled off at the

exit which circled the bright green Wells water tower, the one with

the comic sign on it (KEEP MAINE GREEN, BRING MONEY in

letters four feet high), and five minutes later he was turning into

the driveway of her neat little saltbox house. No TV sinking into

the lawn on paper ashtrays here, only Aunt Trudy's amiable masses

of flowers. Kinnell needed to pee and hadn't wanted to take care of

that in a roadside rest stop when he could come here, but he also

wanted an update on all the family gossip. Aunt Trudy retailed the

best; she was to gossip what Zabar's is to deli. Also, of course, he

wanted to show her his new acquisition.

She came out to meet him, gave him a hug, and covered his face

with her patented little birdy-kisses, the ones that had made him

shiver all over as a kid.

"Want to see something?" he asked her. "It'll blow your pantyhose

off."

"What a charming thought," Aunt Trudy said, clasping her elbows

in her palms and looking at him with amusement.

He opened the trunk and took out his new picture. It affected her,

all right, but not in the way he had expected. The color fell out of

her face in a sheet-he had never seen anything quite like it in his

entire life. "It's horrible," she said in a tight, controlled voice. "I

hate it. I suppose I can see what attracted you to it, Richie, but

what you play at, it does for, real. Put it back in your trunk, like a

good boy. And when you get to the Saco River, why don't you pull

over into the breakdown lane and throw it in?"

He gaped at her. Aunt Trudy's lips were pressed tightly together to

stop them trembling, and now her long, thin hands were not just

clasping her elbows but clutching them, as if to keep her from

flying away. At that moment she looked not sixty-one but ninety-

one.

" Auntie?" Kinnell spoke tentatively, not sure what was going on

here. "Auntie, what's wrong?"

"That." she said, unlocking her right hand and pointing at the

picture. "I'm surprised you don't feel it more strongly yourself, an

imaginative guy like you."

Well, he felt something, obviously he had, or he never would have

unlimbered his checkbook in the first place. Aunt Trudy was

feeling something else, though ... or something more. He turned

the picture around so he could see it (he had been holding it out for

her, so the side with the Dymotaped title faced him), and looked at

it again. What he saw hit him in the chest and belly like a one-two

punch.

The picture had changed, that was punch number one. Not much,

but it had dearly changed. The young blond man's smile was wider,

revealing more of those filed cannibal-teeth. His eyes were

squinted down more, too, giving his face a look which was more

knowing and nastier than ever.

The degree of a smile ... the vista of sharpened teeth widening

slightly ... the tilt and squint of the eyes ... all pretty subjective

stuff. A person could be mistaken about things like that, and of

course he hadn't really studied the painting before buying it. Also,

there had been the distraction of Mrs. Diment, who could probably

talk the cock off a brass monkey.

But there was also punch number two, and that wasn't subjective.

In the darkness of the Audi's trunk, the blond young man had

turned his left arm, the one cocked on the door, so that Kinnell

could now see a tattoo which had been hidden before. It was a

vine-wrapped dagger with a bloody tip. Below it were words.

Kinnell could make Out DEATH BEFORE, and he supposed you

didn't have to be a big best-selling novelist to figure out the word

that was still hidden. DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was, after

all, just the sort of a thing a hoodoo traveling man like this was apt

to have on his arm. And an ace of spades or a pot plant on the other

one, Kinnell thought.

"You hate it, don't you, Auntie?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, and now he saw an even more amazing thing: she

had turned away from him, pretending to look out at the street

(which was dozing and deserted in the hot afternoon sunlight), so

she wouldn't have to look at the picture. "In fact, Auntie loathes it.

Now put it away and come on into the house. I'll bet you need to

use the bathroom."

Aunt Trudy recovered her savoir faire almost as soon as the

watercolor was back in the trunk. They talked about Kinnell's

mother (Pasadena), his sister (Baton Rouge), and his ex-wife, Sally

(Nashua). Sally was a space-case who ran an animal shelter out of

a double-wide trailer and published two newsletters each month.

Survivors was filled with astral info and supposedly true tales of

the spirit world; Visitors contained the reports of people who'd had

close encounters with space aliens. Kinnell no longer went to fan

conventions which specialized in fantasy and horror. One Sally in

a lifetime, he sometimes told people, was enough.

When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was fourthirty

and he'd turned down the obligatory dinner invitation. "I can get

most of the way back to Derry in daylight, if I leave now."

"Okay," she said. "And I'm sorry I was so mean about your picture.

Of course you like it, you've always liked your ... your oddities. It

just hit me the wrong way. That awful face. " She shuddered. "As

if we were looking at him . . . and he was looking right back."

Kinnell grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. "You've got quite an

imagination yourself, sweetheart."

"Of course, it runs in the family. Are you sure you don't want to

use the facility again before you go?"

He shook his head. "That's not why I stop, anyway, not really."

"Oh? Why do you?"

He grinned. "Because you know who's being naughty and who's

being nice. And you're not afraid to share what you know."

"Go on, get going," she said, pushing at his shoulder but clearly

pleased. "If I were you, I'd want to get home quick. I wouldn't want

that nasty guy riding along behind me in the dark, even in the

trunk. I mean, did you see his teeth? Ag!"

He got on the turnpike, trading scenery for speed, and made it as

far as the Gray service area before deciding to have another look at

the picture. Some of his aunt's unease had transmitted itself to him

like a germ, but he didn't think that was really the problem. The.

problem was his perception that the picture had changed.

The service area featured the usual gourmet chow - burgers by Roy

Rogers, cones by TCBY - and had a small, littered picnic and

dogwalking area at the rear. Kinnell parked next to a van with

Missouri plates, drew in a deep breath, let it out. He'd driven to

Boston in order to kill some plot gremlins in the new book, which

was pretty ironic. He'd spent the ride down working out what he'd

say on the panel if certain tough questions were tossed at him, but

none had been-once they'd found out he didn't know where he got

his ideas, and yes, he did sometimes scare himself, they'd only

wanted to know how you got an agent.

And now, heading back, he couldn't think of anything but the

damned picture.

Had it changed? If it had, if the blond kid's arm had moved enough

so he, Kinnell, could read a tattoo which had been partly hidden

before, then he could write a column for one of Sally's magazines.

Hell, a fourpart series. If, on the other hand, it wasn't changing,

then ... what? He was suffering a hallucination? Having a

breakdown? That was crap. His life was pretty much in order, and

he felt good. Had, anyway, until his fascination with the picture

had begun to waver into something else, something darker.

"Ah, fuck, you just saw it wrong the first time," he said out loud as

he got out of the car. Well, maybe. Maybe. It wouldn't be the first

time his head had screwed with his perceptions. That was also a

part of what he did. Sometimes his imagination got a little ...well ...

"Feisty," Kinnell said, and opened the trunk. He took the picture

out of the trunk and looked at it, and it was during the space of the

ten seconds when he looked at it without remembering to breathe

that he became authentically afraid of the thing, afraid the way you

were afraid of a sudden dry rattle in the bushes, afraid the way you

were when you saw an insect that would probably sting if you

provoked it.

The blond driver was grinning insanely at him now-yes, at him,

Kinnell was sure of it-with those filed cannibal-teeth exposed all

the way to the gumlines. His eyes simultaneously glared and

laughed. And the Tobin Bridge was gone. So was the Boston

skyline. So was the sunset. It was almost dark in the painting now,

the car and its wild rider illuminated by a single streetlamp that ran

a buttery glow across the road and the car's chrome. It looked to

Kinnell as if the car (he was pretty sure it was a Grand Am) was on

the edge of a small town on Route 1, and he was pretty sure he

knew what town it was-he had driven through it himself only a few

hours ago.

"Rosewood," he muttered. "That's Rosewood. I'm pretty sure."

The Road Virus was heading north, all right, coming up Route 1

just as he had. The blond's left arm was still cocked out the

window, but it had rotated enough back toward its original position

so that Kinnell could no longer see the tattoo. But he knew it was

there, didn't he? Yes, you bet.

The blond kid looked like a Metallica fan who had escaped from a

mental asylum for the criminally insane.

"Jesus," Kinnell whispered, and the word seemed to come from

someplace else, not from him. The strength suddenly ran out of his

body, ran out like water from a bucket with a hole in the bottom,

and he sat down heavily on the curb separating the parking lot

from the dog-walking zone. He suddenly understood that this was

the truth he'd missed in all his fiction, this was how people really

reacted when they came face-to-face with something which made

no rational sense. You felt as if you were bleeding to death, only

inside your head.

"No wonder the guy who painted it killed himself," he croaked,

still staring at the picture, at the ferocious grin, at the eyes that

were both shrewd and stupid.

There was a note pinned to his shirt, Mrs. Diment had said. "I can't

stand what's happening to me. " Isn't that awful, Mr. Kinnell?

Yes, it was awful, all right.

Really awful.

He got up, gripping the picture by its top, then strode across the

dog-walking area. He kept his eyes trained strictly in front of him,

looking for canine land mines. He did not look down at the picture.

His legs felt trembly and untrustworthy, but they seemed to

support him all right. just ahead, close to the belt of trees at the rear

of the service area, was a pretty young thing in white shorts and a

red halter. She was walking a cocker spaniel. She began to smile at

Kinnell, then saw something in his face that straightened her lips

out in a hurry. She headed left, and fast. The cocker didn't want to

go that fast so she dragged it, coughing, in her wake.

The scrubby pines behind the service area sloped down to a boggy

area that stank of plant and animal decomposition. The carpet of

pine needles was a road litter fallout zone: burger wrappers, paper

soft drink cups, TCBY napkins, beer cans, empty wine-cooler

bottles, cigarette butts. He saw a used condom lying like a dead

snail next to a torn pair of panties with the word TUESDAY

stitched on them in cursive girly-girl script.

Now that he was here, he chanced another look down at the

picture. He steeled himself for further changes even for the

possibility that the painting would be in motion, like a movie in a

frame - but there was none. There didn't have to be, Kinnell

realized; the blond kid's face was enough. That stone-crazy grin.

Those pointed teeth. The face said, Hey, old man, guess what? I'm

done fucking with civilization. I'm a representative of the real

generation X, the next millennium is tight here behind the wheel of

this fine, high-steppin' mo-sheen.

Aunt Trudy's initial reaction to the painting had been to advise

Kinnell that he should throw it into the Saco River. Auntie had

been right. The Saco was now almost twenty miles behind him,

but...

"This'll do," he said. "I think this'll do just fine."

He raised the picture over his head like a guy holding up some

kind of sports trophy for the postgame photographers and then

heaved it down the slope. It flipped over twice, the frame caching

winks of hazy late-day sun, then struck a tree. The glass facing

shattered. The picture fell to the ground and then slid down the dry,

needle-carpeted slope, as if down a chute. It landed in the bog, one

comer of the frame protruding from a thick stand of reeds.

Otherwise, there was nothing visible but the strew of broken glass,

and Kinnell thought that went very well with the rest of the litter.

He turned and went back to his car, already picking up his mental

trowel. He would wall this incident off in its own special niche, he

thought ... and it occurred to him that that was probably what most

people did when they ran into stuff like this. Liars and wannabees

(or maybe in this case they were wannasees) wrote up their

fantasies for publications like Survivors and called them truth;

those who blundered into authentic occult phenomena kept their

mouths shut and used those trowels. Because when cracks like this

appeared in your life, you had to do something about them; if you

didn't, they were apt to widen and sooner or later everything would

fall in.

Kinnell glanced up and saw the pretty young thing watching him

apprehensively from what she probably hoped was a safe distance.

When she saw him looking at her, she turned around and started

toward the restaurant building, once more dragging the cocker

spaniel behind her and trying to keep as much sway Out of her hips

as possible.

You think I'm crazy, don't you pretty girl? Kinnell thought. He saw

he had left his trunk lid up. It gaped like a mouth. He slammed it

shut. You and half the fiction-reading population of America, I

guess. But I'm not crazy. Absolutely not. I just made a little

mistake, that's all. Stopped at a yard sale I should have passed up.

Anyone could have done it. You could have done it. And that

picture

" What picture?" Rich Kinnell asked the hot summer evening, and

tried on a smile. "I don't see any picture."

He slid behind the wheel of his Audi and started the engine. He

looked at the fuel gauge and saw it had dropped under a half. He

was going to need gas before he got home, but he thought he'd fill

the tank a little further up the line. Right now all he wanted to do

was to put a belt of miles - as thick a one as possible - between him

and the discarded painting.

Once outside the city limits of Derry, Kansas Street becomes

Kansas Road. As it approaches the incorporated town limits (an

area that is actually open countryside), it becomes Kansas Lane.

Not long after,, Kansas Lane passes between two fieldstone posts.

Tar gives way to' gravel. What is one of Derry's busiest downtown

streets eight miles east of here has become a driveway leading up a

shallow hill, and on moonlit summer nights it glimmers like

something out of an Alfred Noyes poem. At the top of the hill

stands an angular, handsome barn-board structure with

reflectorized windows, a stable that is actually a garage, and a

satellite dish tilted at the stars. A waggish reporter from the Derry

News once called it the House that Gore Built ... not meaning the

vice president of the United States. Richard Kinnell simply called

it home, and he parked in front of it that night with a sense of

weary satisfaction. He felt as if he had lived through a week's

worth of time since getting up in the Boston Harbor hotel that

morning at nine o'clock.

No more yard sales, he thought, looking up at the moon. No more

yard sales ever.

I "Amen," he said, and started toward the house. He probably

should stick the car in the garage, but the hell with it. What he

wanted right now was a drink, a light meal - something

microwaveable - and then sleep. Preferably the kind without

dreams. He couldn't wait to put this day behind him.

He stuck his key in the lock, turned it, and punched 3817 to silence

the warning bleep from the burglar alarm panel. He turned on the

front hall light, stepped through the door, pushed it shut behind

him, began to turn, saw what was on the wall where his collection

of framed book covers had been just two days ago, and screamed.

In his head he screamed. Nothing actually came out of his mouth

but a harsh exhalation of air. He heard a thump and a tuneless little

jingle as his keys fell out of his relaxing hand and dropped to the

carpet between his feet.

The Road Virus Heads North was no longer in the puckerbrush

behind the Gray turnpike service area.

It was mounted on his entry wall.

It had changed yet again. The car was now parked in the driveway

of the yard sale yard. The goods were still spread out

everywhereglassware and furniture and ceramic knickknacks

(Scottie dogs smoking pipes, bare-assed toddlers, winking fish),

but now they gleamed beneath the light of the same skullface

moon that rode in the sky above Kinnell's house. The TV was still

there, too, and it was still on, casting its own pallid radiance onto

the grass, and what lay in front of it, next to an overturned lawn

chair. Judy Diment was on her back, and she was no longer all

there. After a moment, Kinnell saw the rest. It was on the ironing

board, dead eyes glowing like fifty-cent pieces in the moonlight.

The Grand Am's taillights were a blur of red-pink watercolor paint.

It was Kinnell's first look at the car's back deck. Written across it

in Old English letters were three words: THE ROAD VIRUS.

Makes perfect sense, Kinnell thought numbly. Not him, his car.

Except for a guy like this, there's probably not much difference.

"This isn't happening," he whispered, except it was. Maybe it

wouldn't have happened to someone a little less open to such

things, but it was happening. And as he stared at the painting he

found himself remembering the little sign on Judy Diment's card

table. ALL SALES CASH, it had said (although she had taken his

check, only adding his driver's license ID number for safety's

sake). And it had said something else, too.

ALL SALES FINAL.

Kinnell walked past the picture and into the living room. He felt

like a stranger inside his own body, and he sensed part of his mind

groping for the trowel he had used earlier. He seemed to have

misplaced it.

He turned on the TV, then the Toshiba satellite tuner which sat on

top of it. He turned to V-14, and all the time he could feel the

picture out there in the hall, pushing at the back of his head. The

picture that had somehow beaten him here.

"Must have known a shortcut," Kinnell said, and laughed.

He hadn't been able to see much of the blond in this version of the

picture, but there had been a blur behind the wheel which Kinnell

assumed had been him. The Road Virus had finished his business

in Rosewood. It was time to move north. Next stop

He brought a heavy steel door down on that thought, cutting it off

before he could see all of it. "After all, I could still be imagining all

this," he told the empty living room. Instead of comforting him, the

hoarse, shaky quality of his voice frightened him even more. "This

could be ... But he couldn't finish. All that came to him was an old

song, belted out in the pseudo-hip style of some early '50s Sinatra

done: This could be the start of something BIG ...

The tune oozing from the TV's stereo speakers wasn't Sinatra but

Paul Simon, arranged for strings. The white computer type on the

blue screen said WELCOME TO NEW ENGLAND NEWSWIRE.

There were ordering instructions below this, but Kinnell didn't

have to read them; he was a Newswire junkie and knew the drill by

heart. He dialed, punched in his Mastercard number, then 508.

"You have ordered Newswire for [slight pause] central and

northem Massachusetts," the robot voice said. "Thank you very m-

-"

Kinnell dropped the phone back into the cradle and stood looking

at the New England Newswire logo, snapping his fingers

nervously. "Come on," he said. "Come on, come on."

The screen flickered then, and the blue background became green.

Words began scrolling up, something about a house fire in

Taunton. This was followed by the latest on a dog-racing scandal,

then tonight's weather - clear and mild. Kinnell was starting to

relax, starting to wonder if he'd really seen what he thought he'd

seen on the entryway wall or if it had been a bit of travel-induced

fugue, when the TV beeped shrilly and the words BREAKING

NEWS appeared. He stood watching the caps scroll up.

NENphAUG19/8:40P A ROSEWOOD WOMAN HAS BEEN

BRUTALLY MURDER-ED WHILE DOING A FAVOR FOR AN

ABSENT FRIEND. 38-YEAR-OLD JUDITH DIMENT WAS

SAVAGELY HACKED TO DEATH ON THE LAWN OF HER

NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, WHERE SHE HAD BEEN

CONDUCTING A YARD SALE. NO SCREAMS WERE

HEARD AND MRS. DIMENT WAS NOT FOUND UNTIL

EIGHT O'CLOCK, WHEN A NEIGHBOR ACROSS THE

STREET CAME OVER TO COMPLAIN ABOUT LOUD

TELEVISION NOISE. THE NEIGHBOR, DAVID GRAVES,

SAID THAT MRS. DIMENT HAD BEEN DECAPITATED.

"HER HEAD WAS ON THE IRONING BOARD," HE SAID. "IT

WAS THE MOST AWFUL THING I'VE EVER SEEN IN MY

LIFE." GRAVES SAID HE HEARD NO SIGNS OF A

STRUGGLE, ONLY THE TV AND, SHORTLY BEFORE

FINDING THE BODY, A LOUD CAR, POSSIBLY EQUIPPED

WITH A GLASSPACK MUFFLER, ACCELERATING AWAY

FROM THE VICINITY ALONG ROUTE ONE. SPECULATION

THAT THIS VEHICLE MAY HAVE BELONGED TO THE

KILLER

Except that wasn't speculation; that was a simple fact.

Breathing hard, not quite panting, Kinnell hurried back into the

entryway. The picture was still there, but it had changed once

more. Now it showed two glaring white circles - headlights - with

the dark shape of the car hulking behind them.

He's on the move again, Kinnell thought, and Aunt Trudy was on

top of his mind now - sweet Aunt Trudy, who always knew who

had been naughty and who had been nice. Aunt Trudy, who lived

in Wells, no more than forty miles from Rosewood.

"God, please God, please send him by the coast road," Kinnell

said, reaching for the picture. Was it his imagination or were the

headlights farther apart now, as if the car were actually moving

before his eyes ... but stealthily, the way the minute hand moved on

a Pocket watch? "Send him by the coast road, please."

He tore the picture off the wall and ran back into the living room

with it. The screen was in place before the fireplace, of course; it

would be at least two months before a fire was wanted in here.

Kinnell batted it aside and threw the painting in, breaking the glass

fronting-which he had already broken once, at the Gray service

area - against the firedogs. Then he pelted for the kitchen,

wondering what he would do if this didn't work either.

It has to, he thought. It will because it has to, and that's A there is

to it.

He opened the kitchen cabinets and pawed through them, spilling

the oatmeal, spilling a canister of salt, spilling the vinegar. The

bottle broken open on the counter and assaulted his nose and eyes

with the high stink.

Not there. What he wanted wasn't there.

He raced into the pantry, looked behind the door - nothing but a

plastic bucket and an 0 Cedar - and then on the shelf by the dryer.

There it was, next to the briquettes.

Lighter fluid.

He grabbed it and ran back, glancing at the telephone on the

kitchen wall as he hurried by. He wanted to stop, wanted to call

Aunt Trudy. Credibility wasn't an issue with her; if her favorite

nephew called and told her to get out of the house, to get out light

now, she would do it ... but what if the blond kid followed her?

Chased her?

And he would. Kinnell knew he would.

He hurried across the living room and stopped in front of the

fireplace.

"Jesus," he whispered. "Jesus, no."

The picture beneath the splintered glass no longer showed

oncoming headlights. Now it showed the Grand Am on a sharply

curving piece of road that could only be an exit ramp. Moonlight

shone like liquid satin on the car's dark flank. In the background

was a water tower, and the words on it were easily readable in the

moonlight. KEEP MAINE GREEN, they said. BRING MONEY.

Kinnell didn't hit the picture with the first squeeze of lighter fluid;

his hands were shaking badly and the aromatic liquid simply ran

down the unbroken part of the glass, blurring the Road Virus's

back deck. He took a deep breath, aimed, then squeezed again.

This time the lighter fluid squirted in through the jagged hole made

by one of the firedogs and ran down the picture, cutting through

the paint, making it run, turning a Goodyear Wide Oval into a

sooty teardrop.

Kinnell took one of the ornamental matches from the jar on the

mantel, struck it on the hearth, and poked it in through the hole in

the glass. The painting caught at once, fire billowing up and down

across the Grand Am and the water tower. The remaining glass in

the frame turned black, then broke outward in a shower of flaming

pieces. Kinnell crunched them under his sneakers, putting them out

before they could set the rug on fire.

He went to the phone and punched in Aunt Trudy's number,

unaware that he was crying. On the third ring, his aunt's answering

machine picked up. "Hello," Aunt Trudy said, "I know it

encourages the burglars to say things like this, but I've gone up to

Kennebunk to watch the new Harrison Ford movie. If you intend to

break in, please don't take my china pigs. If you want to leave a

message, do so at the beep."

Kinnell waited, then, keeping his voice as steady as possible, he

said:

"It's Richie, Aunt Trudy. Call me when you get back, okay? No

matter how late."

He hung up, looked at the TV, then dialed Newswire again, this

time punching in the Maine area code. While the computers on the

other end processed his order, he went back and used a poker to jab

at the blackened, twisted thing in the fireplace. The stench was

ghastly - it made the spilled vinegar smell like a flower patch in

comparison-but Kinnell found he didn't mind. The picture was

entirely gone, reduced to ash, and that made it worthwhile.

Mat if it comes back again?

"It won't," he said, putting the poker back and returning to the TV.

"I'm sure it won't."

But every time the news scroll started to recycle, he got up to

check. The picture was just ashes on the hearth ... and there was no

word of elderly women being murdered in the Wells-Saco-

Kennebunk area of the state. Kinnell kept watching, almost

expecting to see A GRAND AM MOVING AT HIGH SPEED

CRASHED INTO A KENNEBUNK MOVIE THEATER

TONIGHT, KILLING AT LEAST TEN, but nothing of the sort

showed up.

At a quarter of eleven the telephone rang. Kinnell snatched it up.

"Hello?"

"It's Trudy, dear. Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine."

"You don't sound fine," she said. "Your voice sounds trembly and

funny. What's wrong? What is it?" And then, chilling him but not

really surprising him: "It's that picture you were so pleased with,

isn't it? That goddamned picture!"

It calmed him somehow, that she should guess so much ... and, of

course, there was the relief of knowing she was safe.

"Well, maybe," he said. "I had the heebie-jeebies all the way back

here, so I burned it. In the fireplace."

She's going to find out about Judy Diment, you know, a voice

inside warned. She doesn't have a twenty-thousand-dollar satellite

hookup, but she does subscribe to the Union-Leader and this'll be

on the front page. She'll put two and two together. She's far from

stupid.

Yes, that was undoubtedly true, but further explanations could wait

until the morning, when he might be a little less freaked ... when he

might've found a way to think about the Road Virus without losing

his mind ... and when he'd begun to be sure it was really over.

"Good!" she said emphatically. "You ought to scatter the ashes,

too!" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was lower.

"You were worried about me, weren't you? Because you showed it

to me.

"A little, yes."

"But you feel better now?"

He leaned back and closed his eyes. It was true, he did. "Uh-huh.

How was the movie?"

"Good. Harrison Ford looks wonderful in a uniform. Now, if he'd

just get rid of that little bump on his chin . . ."

"Good night, Aunt Trudy. We'll talk tomorrow."

"Will we?"

"Yes," he said. "I think so."

He hung up, went over to the fireplace again, and stirred the ashes

with the poker. He could see a scrap of fender and a ragged little

flap of road, but that was it. Fire was what it had needed all along,

apparently. Wasn't that how you usually killed supernatural

emissaries of evil? Of course it was. He'd used it a few times

himself, most notably in The Departing, his haunted train station

novel.

"Yes, indeed," he said. "Bum, baby, bum."

He thought about getting the drink he'd promised himself, then

remembered the spilled bottle of vinegar (which by now would

probably be soaking into the spilled oatmeal-what a thought). He

decided he would simply go on upstairs instead. In a book-one by

Richard Kinnell, for instance - sleep would be out of the question

after the sort of thing which had just happened to him.

In real life, he thought he might sleep just fine.

He actually dozed off in the shower, leaning against the back wall

with his hair full of shampoo and the water beating on his chest.

He was at the yard sale again, and the TV standing on the paper

ashtrays was broadcasting Judy Diment. Her head was back on, but

Kinnell could see the medical examiner's primitive industrial stitch

work; it circled her throat like a grisly necklace. "Now this New

England Newswire update," she said, and Kinnell, who had always

been a vivid dreamer, could actually see the stitches on her neck

stretch and relax as she spoke. "Bobby Hastings took all his

paintings and burned them, including yours, Mr. Kinnell ... and it

is yours, as I'm sure you know. All sales are final, you saw the

sign. Why, you just ought to be glad I took your check."

Burned all his paintings, yes, of course he did, Kinnell thought in

his watery dream. He couldn't stand what was happening to him,

that's what the note said, and when you get to that point in the

festivities, you don't pause to see if you want to except one special

piece of work from the bonfire. It's just that you got something

special into The Road Virus Heads North, didn't you, Bobby? And

probably completely by accident. You were talented, I could see

that right away, but talent has nothing to do with what's going on

in that picture.

"Some things are just good at survival," Judy Diment said on the

TV. "They keep coming back no matter how hard you try to get rid

of them. They keep coming back like viruses."

Kinnell reached out and changed the channel, but apparently there

was nothing on all the way around the dial except for The Judy

Diment Show.

" You might say he opened a hole into the basement of the

universe," she was saying now. "Bobby Hastings, I mean. And this

is what drove out. Nice, isn't it?"

Kinnell's feet slid then, not enough to go out from under him

completely, but enough to snap him to.

He opened his eyes, winced at the immediate sting of the soap

(Prell had run down his face in thick white rivulets while he had

been dozing), and cupped his hands under the shower-spray to

splash it away. He did this once and was reaching out to do it again

when he heard something. A ragged rumbling sound.

Don't be stupid, he told himself. All you hear is the shower. The

rest is only imagination.

Except it wasn't.

Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from

outside.

He got out of the shower and walked, dripping, across his bedroom

on the second floor. There was still enough shampoo in his hair to

make him look as if it had turned white while he was dozing-as if

his dream of Judy Diment had turned it white.

My did I ever stop at that yard sale? he asked himself, but for this

he had no answer. He supposed no one ever did.

The rumbling sound grew louder as he approached the window

overlooking the driveway-the driveway that glimmered in the

summer moonlight like something out of an Alfred Noyes poem.

As he brushed aside the curtain and looked out, he found himself

thinking of his ex-wife, Sally, whom he had met at the World

Fantasy Convention in 1978. Sally, who now published two

magazines out of

her trailer home, one called Survivors, one called Visitors. Looking

down at the driveway, these two tides came together in Kinnell's

mind like a double image in a stereopticon.

He had a visitor who was definitely a survivor.

The Grand Am idled in front of the house, the white haze from its

twin chromed tailpipes rising in the still night air. The Old English

letters on the back deck were perfectly readable. The driver's side

door stood open, and that wasn't all; the light spilling down the

porch steps suggested that Kinnell's front door was also open.

Forgot to lock it, Kinnell thought, wiping soap off his forehead

with a hand he could no longer feel. Forgot to reset the burglar

alarm, too . not that it would have made much difference to this

guy.

Well, he might have caused it to detour around Aunt Trudy, and

that was something, but just now the thought brought him no

comfort.

Survivors.

The soft rumble of the big engine, probably at least a 442 with a

four-barrel carb, reground valves, fuel injection.

He turned slowly on legs that had lost all feeling, a naked man with

a headful of soap, and saw the picture over his bed, just as he'd

known he would. In it, the Grand Am stood in his driveway with

the driver's door open and two plumes of exhaust rising from the

chromed tailpipes. From this angle he could also see his own front

door, standing open, and a long man-shaped shadow stretching

down the hall.

Survivors.

Survivors and visitors.

Now he could hear feet ascending the stairs. It was a heavy tread,

and he knew without having to see that the blond kid was wearing

motorcycle boots. People with DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR

tattooed on their arms always wore motorcycle boots, just as they

always smoked unfiltered Camels. These things were like a

national law.

And the knife. He would be carrying a long, sharp knife - more of

a machete, actually, the sort of knife that could strike off a person's

head in a single sweeping stroke.

And he would be grinning, showing those filed cannibal-teeth.

Kinnell knew these things. He was an imaginative guy, after all.

He didn't need anyone to draw him a picture.

"No," he whispered, suddenly conscious of his global nakedness,

suddenly freezing all the way around his skin. "No, please, go

away." But the footfalls kept coming, of course they did. You

couldn't tell a guy like this to go away. It didn't work; it wasn't the

way the story was supposed to end.

Kinnell could hear him nearing the top of the stairs. Outside the

Grand Am went on rumbling in the moonlight.

The feet coming down the hall now, worn bootheels rapping on

polished hardwood.

A terrible paralysis had gripped Kinnell. He threw it off with an

effort and bolted toward the bedroom door, wanting to lock it

before the thing could get in here, but he slipped in a puddle of

soapy water and this time he did go down, flat on his back on the

oak planks, and what he saw as the door clicked open and the

motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and

with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over

his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house

with the driver's side door open.

The driver's side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I'm going

outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes.

Will We Close the Book on Books?

BY STEPHEN KING

From: Visions of the 21st Century

Time Magazine, June 2000

Book lovers are the Luddites of the intellectual world. I can no

more imagine their giving up the printed page than I can imagine a

picture in the New York Post showing the Pope technoboogieing

the night away in a disco. My adventure in cyberspace ("Riding the

Bullet", available on any computer near you) has confirmed this

idea dramatically. My mail and the comments on my website

(www.stephenking.com) reflect two things: first, readers enjoyed

the story; second, most didn't like getting it on a screen, where it

appeared and then disappeared like Aladdin's genie.

Books have weight and texture; they make a pleasant presence in

the hand. Nothing smells as good as a new book, especially if you

get your nose right down in the binding, where you can still catch

an acrid tang of the glue. The only thing close is the peppery smell

of an old one. The odor of an old book is the odor of history, and

for me, the look of a new one is still the look of the future.

I suspect that the growth of the Internet has actually been

something of a boon when it comes to reading: people with more

Beanie Babies than books on their shelves spend more time

reading than they used to as they surf from site to site. But it's not a

book, dammit, that perfect object that speaks without speaking,

needs no batteries and never crashes unless you throw it in the

corner. So, yes, there'll be books. Speaking personally, you can

have my gun, but you'll take my book when you pry my cold, dead

fingers off the binding.

NOT FOR SALE

This PDF file was created for educational,

scholarly, and Internet archival use ONLY.

With utmost respect & courtesy to the

author, NO money or profit will ever be

made from this text or it's distribution.

xxXsTmXxx

06/2000