The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page A

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
    file://C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\DOUGIE\Stephen King\Stephen King - ... 7/22/2006
    The Road Virus Heads North
    Page 2 of 12
    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