Four Past Midnight (101 page)

“But
you
never have?”

“Once,” Pop said shortly, and said nothing else for so long Kevin was beginning to think he was done when he added, “It was one word. Clear as a bell. 'Twas recorded in the parlor of an empty house in Bath. Man killed his wife there in 1946.”

“What was the word?” Kevin asked, knowing he would not be told just as surely as he knew no power on earth, certainly not his own willpower, could have kept him from asking.

But Pop
did
tell.

“Basin.”

Kevin blinked. “Basin?”

“Ayuh.”

“That doesn't mean anything.”

“It might,” Pop said calmly, “if you know he cut her throat and then held her head over a basin to catch the blood.”

“Oh my God!”

“Ayuh.”

“Oh my God, really?”

Pop didn't bother answering that.

“It couldn't have been a fake?”

Pop gestured with the stem of his pipe at the Polaroids. “Are those?”

“Oh my God.”

“Polaroids, now,” Pop said, like a narrator moving briskly to a new chapter in a novel and reading the words
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest,
“I've seen pitchers with people in em that the other people in the pitcher swear weren't there with em when the pitcher was taken. And there's one—this is a famous one—that a lady took over in England. What she did was snap a pitcher of some fox-hunters comin back home at the end of the day. You see em, about twenty in all, comin over a little wooden bridge. It's a tree-lined country road on both sides of that bridge. The ones in front are off the bridge already. And over on the right of the pitcher, standin by the road, there's a lady in a long dress and a hat with a veil on it so you can't see her face and she's got her pocketbook over her arm. Why, you can even see she's wearin a locket on her boosom, or maybe it's a watch.

“Well, when the lady that took the pitcher saw it, she got wicked upset, and wasn't nobody could blame her, son, because what I mean to say is she meant to take a pitcher of those fox-hunters comin home and no one else, because there wasn't nobody else there. Except in the pitcher there is. And when you look real close, it seems like you can see the trees right through that lady.”

He's making all this up, putting me on, and when I leave he'll have a great big horselaugh,
Kevin thought, knowing Pop Merrill was doing nothing of the sort.

“The lady that took that pitcher was stayin at one of those big English homes like they have on the education-TV shows, and when she showed that pitcher, I heard the man of the house fainted dead away. That part could be made up. Prob'ly is. Sounds made up, don't it? But I seen that pitcher in an article next to a painted portrait of that fella's great-grandmother, and it could be her, all right. Can't tell for certain because of the veil. But it
could
be.”

“Could be a hoax, too,” Kevin said faintly.

“Could be,” Pop said indifferently. “People get up to all sorts of didos. Lookit my nephew, there, for instance, Ace.” Pop's nose wrinkled. “Doin four years in Shawshank, and for what? Bustin into The Mellow Tiger. He got up to didos and Sheriff Pangborn slammed him in the jug for it. Little ring-meat got just what he deserved.”

Kevin, displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, said nothing.

“But when ghosts show up in photographs, son—or, like you say, what people claim to be ghosts—it's almost always in
Polaroid
photographs. And it almost always seems to be by accident. Now your pitchers of flyin saucers and that Lock Nest Monster, they almost always show up in the other kind. The kind some smart fella can get up to didos with in a darkroom.”

He dropped Kevin a third wink, expressing all the didos (whatever
they
were) an unscrupulous photographer might get up to in a well-equipped darkroom.

Kevin thought of asking Pop if it was possible someone could get up to didos with a weegee and decided to continue keeping his mouth shut. It still seemed by far the wisest course.

“All by way of sayin I thought I'd ask if you saw somethin you knew in
these
Polaroid pitchers.”

“I don't, though,” Kevin said so earnestly that he believed Pop would believe he was lying, as his mom always did when he made the tactical mistake of even controlled vehemence.

“Ayuh, ayuh,” Pop said, believing him so dismissively Kevin was almost irritated.

“Well,” Kevin said after a moment which was silent except for the fifty thousand ticking clocks, “I guess that's it, huh?”

“Maybe not,” Pop said. “What I mean to say is I got me a little idear. You mind takin some more pitchers with that camera?”

“What good is it? They're all the same.”

“That's the point. They ain't.”

Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it.

“I'll even chip in for the film,” Pop said, and when he saw the amazed look on Kevin's face he quickly qualified: “A little, anyway.”

“How many pictures would you want?”

“Well, you got ... what? Twenty-eight already, is that right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thirty more,” Pop said after a moment's thought.

“Why?”

“Ain't gonna tell you. Not right now.” He produced a heavy purse that was hooked to a belt-loop on a steel chain. He opened it and took out a ten-dollar bill, hesitated, and added two ones with obvious reluctance. “Guess that'd cover half of it.”

Yeah, right,
Kevin thought.

“If you really are int'rested in the trick that camera's doing, I guess you'd pony up the rest, wouldn't you?” Pop's eyes gleamed at him like the eyes of an old, curious cat.

Kevin understood the man did more than expect him to say yes; to Pop it was inconceivable that he could say no. Kevin thought,
If I said no he wouldn't hear it; he'd say “Good, that's agreed, then, ” and I'd end up back on the sidewalk with his money in my pocket whether I wanted it or not.

And he
did
have his birthday money.

All the same, there was that chill wind to think about. That wind that seemed to blow not from the surface but right out of those photographs in spite of their deceptively flat, deceptively shiny surfaces. He felt that wind coming from them despite their mute declaration which averred
We are Polaroids, and for no reason we can tell or even understand, we show only the undramatic surfaces of things.
That wind was there. What about that wind?

Kevin hesitated a moment longer and the bright eyes behind the rimless spectacles measured him.
I ain't gonna ask you if you're a man or a mouse,
Pop Merrill's eyes said.
You're fifteen years old, and what I mean to say is at fifteen you may not be a man yet, not quite, but you are too goddam old to be a mouse and both of us know it. And besides you're not from Away; you're from town, just like me.

“Sure,” Kevin said with a hollow lightness in his voice. It fooled neither of them. “I can get the film tonight, I guess, and bring the pictures in tomorrow, after school.”

“Nope,” Pop said.

“You're closed tomorrow?”

“Nope,” Pop said, and because he was from town, Kevin waited patiently. “You're thinkin about takin thirty pitchers all at once, aren't you?”

“I guess so.”

“That ain't the way I want you to do it,” Pop said. “It don't matter
where
you take them, but it does matter when. Here. Lemme figure.”

Pop figured, and then even wrote down a list of times, which Kevin pocketed.

“So!” Pop said, rubbing his hands briskly together so that they made a dry sound that was like two pieces of used-up sandpaper rubbing together. “You'll see me in ... oh, three days or so?”

“Yes ... I guess so.”

“I'll bet you'd just as lief wait until Monday after school, anyway,” Pop said. He dropped Kevin a fourth wink, slow and sly and humiliating in the extreme. “So your friends don't see you coming in here and tax you with it, is what I mean to say.”

Kevin flushed and dropped his eyes to the worktable and began to gather up the Polaroids so his hands would have something to do. When he was embarrassed and they didn't, he cracked his knuckles.

“I—” He began some sort of absurd protest that would convince neither of them and then stopped, staring down at one of the photos.

“What?” Pop asked. For the first time since Kevin had approached him, Pop sounded entirely human, but Kevin hardly heard his words, much less his tone of faint alarm. “Now you look like you seen a ghost, boy.”

“No,” Kevin said. “No ghost. I see who took the picture. Who really took the picture.”

“What in glory are you talking about?”

Kevin pointed to a shadow. He, his father, his mother, Meg, and apparently Mr. Merrill himself had taken it for the shadow of a tree that wasn't itself in the frame. But it wasn't a tree. Kevin saw that now, and what you had seen could never be unseen.

More hieroglyphics on the plinth.

“I don't see what you're gettin at,” Pop said. But Kevin knew the old man knew he was getting at
something,
which was why he sounded put out.

“Look at the shadow of the dog first,” Kevin said. “Then look at this one here again.” He tapped the left side of the photograph. “In the picture, the sun is either going down or coming up. That makes all the shadows long, and it's hard to tell what's throwing them. But looking at it, just now, it clicked home for me.”

“What
clicked home, son?” Pop reached for the drawer, probably meaning to get the magnifying glass with the light in it again ... and then stopped. All at once he didn't need it. All at once it had clicked into place for him, too.

“It's the shadow of a man, ain't it?” Pop said. “I be go to hell if that one ain't the shadow of a man.”

“Or a woman. You can't tell. Those are legs, I'm sure they are, but they could belong to a woman wearing pants. Or even a kid. With the shadow running so long—”

“Ayuh, you can't tell.”

Kevin said, “It's the shadow of whoever took it, isn't it?”

“Ayuh.”

“But it wasn't
me,”
Kevin said. “It came out of my camera—all of them did—but I didn't take it. So who did, Mr. Merrill? Who did?”

“Call me Pop,” the old man said absently, looking at the shadow in the picture, and Kevin felt his chest swell with pleasure as those few clocks still capable of running a little fast began to signal the others that, weary as they might be, it was time to charge the half-hour.

When Kevin arrived back at the Emporium Galorium with the photographs on Monday after school, the leaves had begun to turn color. He had been fifteen for almost two weeks and the novelty had worn off.

The novelty of that plinth,
the supernatural,
had not, but this wasn't anything he counted among his blessings. He had finished taking the schedule of photographs Pop had given him, and by the time he had, he had seen clearly—clearly enough, anyway—why Pop had wanted him to take them at intervals: the first ten on the hour, then let the camera rest, the second ten every two hours, and the third at three-hour intervals. He'd taken the last few that day at school. He had seen something else as well, something none of them could have seen at first; it was not clearly visible until the final three pictures. They had scared him so badly he had decided, even before taking the pictures to the Emporium Galorium, that he wanted to get rid of the Sun 660. Not exchange it; that was the last thing he wanted to do, because it would mean the camera would be out of his hands and hence out of his control. He couldn't have that.

It's mine,
he had thought, and the thought kept recurring, but it wasn't a true thought. If it was—if the Sun only took pictures of the black breedless dog by the white picket fence when he, Kevin, was the one pushing the trigger—that would have been one thing. But that wasn't the case. Whatever the nasty magic inside the Sun might be, he was not its sole initiator. His father had taken the same (well,
almost
the same) picture, and so had Pop Merrill, and so had Meg when Kevin had let her take a couple of the pictures on Pop's carefully timed schedule.

“Did you number em, like I asked?” Pop asked when Kevin delivered them.

“Yes, one to fifty-eight,” Kevin said. He thumbed through the stack of photographs, showing Pop the small circled numbers in the lower lefthand corner of each. “But I don't know if it matters. I've decided to get rid of the camera.”

“Get rid of it? That ain't what you mean.”

“No. I guess not. I'm going to break it up with a sledgehammer.”

Pop looked at him with those shrewd little eyes. “That so?”

“Yes,” Kevin said, meeting the shrewd gaze steadfastly. “Last week I would have laughed at the idea, but I'm not laughing now. I think the thing is dangerous.”

“Well, I guess you could be right, and I guess you could tape a charge of dynamite to it and blow it to smithereens if you wanted. It's yours, is what I mean to say. But why don't you hold off a little while? There's somethin I want to do with these pitchers. You might be interested.”

“What?”

“I druther not say,” Pop answered, “case it don't turn out. But I might have somethin by the end of the week that'd help you decide better, one way or the other.”

“I have decided,” Kevin said, and tapped something that had shown up in the last two photographs.