The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King

THE ROAD VIRUS
    HEADS NORTH

    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 a cigar box, a pad of paper, and another handlettered sign on it. This
    sign read ALL SALES CASH, ALL SALES FINAL. The TV was on, turned to an afternoon soap opera where two beautiful young
    people looked on the verge of having deeply unsafe sex. The fat
    woman glanced at Kinnell, then back at the TV. She looked at it for a moment, then looked back at him again. This time her mouth
    was slightly sprung.
    Ah, Kinnell thought, looking around for the liquor box fined with paperbacks that was sure to be here someplace, a fan.
    He didn't see any paperbacks, but he saw the picture, leaning against an ironing board and held in place by a couple of plastic laundry
    baskets, and his breath stopped in his throat. He wanted it at once.
    He walked over with a casualness that felt exaggerated and dropped to one knee in front of it. The painting was a watercolor, and
    technically very