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