The Buick also called Buick 8 is a possessed 1953 Buick Roadmaster and main antagonist from the Stephen King's novel From a Buick 8.
History[]
The Buick was left at a gas station by an enigmatic owner who immediately disappeared without a trace and was never seen again. As a "lost object", it is then held by police Troop D. How the owner was able to drive the Buick is unknown, as the car appears to humans as unusable: the steering wheel is immobile, the dashboard inoperable, the engine has no moving parts and ignition wires that go nowhere. In addition, the Buick has a regenerative factor, healing off damage inflicted to it.
The Buick's most notable feature is that it acts as a portal to a parallel dimension - not all the time, but apparently whenever it feels like it. This portal goes both ways. It can fling extradimensional items and creatures (all extremely alien in their biology) into our dimension. Usually, creatures coughed up by the Buick into our world quickly die and eventually decompose, though some can survive for a while and pose a substantial threat. Even worse, the Buick can absorb objects and creatures from our dimension in the vicinity and send them into the other and has occasionally done this to humans.
In addition, the Buick occasionally starts producing pulsing flashes of extremely bright light ("lightquakes"), strong enough to blind unprotected eyes. Those light shows are associated with all electronic items in the vicinity going dead. The abilities of the Buick are extremely erratic and it is hard to predict when it is just a very strange car and when it is a hazardous portal. The mechanisms of the portal are also poorly understood. At one point, it has snatched a gerbil from a closed cage (without damaging the cage), but another time a simple rope stopped it from pulling a human in.
The Buick is hinted to be at least somewhat sentient and malevolent. It seems to be able to implant suggestions into nearby minds in order to lure them close and snatch them into the other dimension (this seems to have happened to Ned Wilcox, who attempted to destroy the automobile in a brainwashed trance and was nearly absorbed into the parallel dimension, getting saved just in time by members of Troop D).
It has also been theorized that destroying the Buick may result in the dimensional portal going completely out of control and causing massive damage to our world.
At the end of the novel, the Buick's window cracks and remains cracked, its regeneration not kicking in. It is implied it expanded the last of its energy and is at the end of its rope, though anyone does not get to see its ultimate destruction.
Trivia[]
- Stephen King says that he was inspired to write this book about a car trip he took in 1999. During the trip he stopped at a gas station in western Pennsylvania. While he looks slipped around and almost fell into a stream of water. The thought that they might not have been discovered until a long time later drove him into the fabric of history. In the novel King describes a fatal car accident, and coincidentally King himself was the victim of a bad accident that nearly killed him in late 1999. However, he said there was no change to any of the details in the novel to match. with his accident.
- The novel is a series of memorabilia by members of Contributing D, a police station in western Pennsylvania. After Curt Wilcox, a desired asset contributed by the members of D, is killed by a drunk driver, his son Ned begins to visit Contribute D. The police, dispatcher and custodian quickly take a liking to him, and soon begin saying about him the "Buick 8" of the title. It is in a sense a ghost story in the way that the novel is about a group of people telling an old but haunting story. And while the Buick 8 is not a traditional Phantom, it is, indeed, not from the world of it.
- The Buick 8 resembles a vintage 1954 Buick Roadmaster, and was left at a gas station by a mysterious man dressed in black, who disappeared shortly after abandoning the car that was refueled. The "car" is later held by D-contributing Pennsylvania Rural Police in one of his ships. The car, to discover, is not a car at all. It appears to be a Buick, but the steering wheel does not move, the dashboard props immovable, the car heals when dents or scratches, dirt and all debris disappear and disappear from it.
- Sandy Dearborn, now the Sergeant Commander of Troop D, is the main narrator of the book, and tells the story of Ned, discussing various things that have happened to the car, and his father's fascination with it. The car is frequently given off copying "earthquake light", or large flashes of violet light over an extended period of time, and occasionally "giving birth" to strange plants and creatures that are nothing like what I have seen in your world. Two people have disappeared in the vicinity of the car - a fellow soldier named Ennis and an escaped lowlife named Brian Lippy who he picked up for driving while intoxicated and being under the influence of angel dust. It was later revealed in the book that perhaps one thing the Buick was: a portal, between our world and another.
- After hearing the story of the Buick and how it has been kept secret from D-contributing countries for so long, Ned becomes convinced that the car was somehow related to his father's death in a seemingly random traffic accident. After all, the gas station attendant who first sat the Buick in front of the station was the same man who, years later, would kill his father. Ned is determined to destroy the Buick, but before he can Sandy Dearborn realizes that the Buick, in fact, wants to have Ned in the world he controls as a kind of sacrifice.
- Sandy returns to the ship to find Ned sitting on it, and just as Ned extracts it, the Buick transforms into a portal, trying to call both Ned and Sandy inside her. The rest of the staff come to feel that something bad may happen, all of them helping to remember the Buick's home story at their station, and managing to pull Ned and Sandy free, but not before Sandy glimpses into the world at the other side of the Buick. He sees the Lippy swastika cowboy collar and boot, along with Ennis del Stetson and Ruger.