“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 295
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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 clearly 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 travelling man like this was apt to have on his arm. And an ace of spades 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).
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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 thought, was enough.
When Aunt Trudy walked him back out to the car, it was four-thirty 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 dog-walking area at the rear. Kinnell parked next to a van with Missouri 297
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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 four-part 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 298
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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.