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“I suppose so. Will he have to spend a lot of time in jail?”

“The newspaper said twenty-five years at a minimum.”

“Goodness! He’ll be, let me see …” Hooter did the arithmetic in his head. “… almost fifty-five when he gets out. Well, I suppose it’s what he deserves. If you kill someone, you have to pay the price.”

Dampy gave Hooter a funny smile. The matron at the residence had sewn up the wound in his neck and now his head tilted in the other direction in a way that was sometimes unnerving. “True,” he agreed. “But you know he didn’t kill Mrs. Fairfield.”

“Yes, yes, it’s like Mr. Habib says, there was nothing but circumstantial evidence.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

“You mean, she really did kill herself?”

“I mean I killed her.”

Hooter looked shocked. “But you couldn’t! You’re just—”

“Just a teddy bear?” Dampy asked with a smile. “And do you think teddy bears are just stupid cuddly dumb animals?”

Hooter shook his head.

“We may not live in the woods, but we are bears.”

“I’m an owl!” Hooter protested.

“And I’m a pussycat. But we’re both bears. Don’t deny it—look at your ears. Mr. Fairfield is best off right where he is, and as for us, I expect we’ll be adopted soon by someone nice. Mrs. Yardley says there have been lots of applications.”

And that is just what happened. They were adopted by Curtis and Maeve Bennet and moved to a house on the Jersey shore and there, just as in the poem

… hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

But their wedding ring is still where they left it, under the rock in the woods, marking the spot where they were wed.

Stephen King

THE ROAD VIRUS HEADS NORTH

What can I say about this guy Stephen King? I won’t mention his novels, since most of you have already read them all; most of you have also seen the movies made from the hooks, and listened to the audiotapes, and maybe even own the refrigerator magnets and T-shirts and God knows what other ancillary paraphernalia based on them.

I won’t talk about the shorter tales, except to say that some of them (here I’ll name names: “Apt Pupil,” for example) are still overlooked as some of the finest American stories, period.

I won’t talk about the critical writings King has produced, such as the many informative and iconoclastic book introductions, essays, and the collected wisdom of Danse Macabre; I also won’t talk about his basic support of the art of reading, or his boosterism of freedom of thought and expression; and finally, I won’t discuss the fact that he virtually invented the modern horror movement out of thin air in the 1910s.

So what can I say about this guy?

Actually, I think I’ll just shut up (no clapping please) and let Mr. King do what he does best: which is to throw down his own portable campfire in front of you, lean close so the flames dance across his features—ana tell you one hell of a story.

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