Everything's Eventual

   Kinnell took one of the ornamental matches from the jar on the mantel, struck it on the hearth, and poked it in through the hole in the glass. The painting caught at once, fire billowing up and down across the Grand Am and the water tower. The remaining glass in the frame turned black, then broke outward in a shower of flaming pieces. Kinnell crunched them under his sneakers, putting them out before they could set the rug on fire.

He went to the phone and punched in Aunt Trudy's number, unaware that he was crying. On the third ring, his aunt's answering machine picked up. 'Hello,' Aunt Trudy said, 'I know it encourages the burglars to say things like this, but I've gone up to 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 flowerpatch in comparison—but Kinnell found he didn't mind. The picture was entirely gone, reduced to ash, and that made it worthwhile.

   What 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. 'Burn, baby, burn.'

   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 stitchwork; 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 paint ings 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. Your stupid, overtrained imagination.

   Except it wasn't.

   Kinnell reached out and turned off the water.

   The rumbling sound continued. Low and powerful. Coming from outside.