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