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 afrai
d 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.
&n
bsp; 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
The Collective Page 39
