Four Past Midnight (108 page)

“That's okay,” Kevin said. He wondered briefly how fast a person's heart could beat before the person in question simply blew his engine. “I'm just ... on edge. Stupid.”

“It's not.” His father looked at him soberly. “When I saw that tape, I got so scared I felt like maybe I'd have to reach into my mouth and push my stomach back down with my fingers.”

Kevin looked at his father gratefully.

“It's not there, is it?” Mr. Delevan asked. “The one with the woodpecker or whatever in hell it was supposed to be?”

“No. It's not.”

“Did you keep the camera in that drawer?”

Kevin nodded his head slowly. “Pop—Mr. Merrill—said to let it rest every so often. That was part of the schedule he made out.”

Something tugged briefly at his mind, was gone.

“So I stuck it in there.”

“Boy,” Mr. Delevan said softly.

“Yeah.”

They looked at each other in the gloom, and then suddenly Kevin smiled. It was like watching the sun burst through a raft of clouds.

“What?”

“I was remembering how it felt,” Kevin said. “I swung that sledgehammer so hard—”

Mr. Delevan began to smile, too. “I thought you were going to take off your own damned—”

“—and when it hit it made this CRUNCH! sound—”

“—flew every damn whichway—”

“BOOM!” Kevin finished. “Gone!”

They began to laugh together in Kevin's room, and Kevin found he was almost—
almost
—glad all this had happened. The sense of relief was as inexpressible and yet as perfect as the sensation one feels when, either by happy accident or by some psychic guidance, another person manages to scratch that one itchy place on one's back that one cannot scratch oneself, hitting it exactly, bang on the money, making it wonderfully worse for a single second by the simple touch, pressure, arrival, of those fingers ... and then, oh blessed relief.

It was like that with the camera and with his father's knowing.

“It's gone,” Kevin said. “Isn't it?”

“As gone as Hiroshima after the
Enola Gay
dropped the A-bomb on it,” Mr. Delevan replied, and then added: “Smashed to shit, is what I mean to say.”

Kevin gawped at his father and then burst into helpless peals—screams, almost—of laughter. His father joined him. They orderd a loaded pizza shortly after. When Mary and Meg Delevan arrived home at twenty past seven, they both still had the giggles.

“Well, you two look like you've been up to no good,” Mrs. Delevan said, a little puzzled. There was something in their hilarity that struck the woman center of her—that deep part which the sex seems to tap into fully only in times of childbirth and disaster—as a little unhealthy. They looked and sounded like men who may have just missed having a car accident. “Want to let the ladies in on it?”

“Just two bachelors having a good time,” Mr. Delevan said.

“Smashing
good time,” Kevin amplified, to which his father added, “Is what we mean to say,” and they looked at each

other and were howling again.

Meg, honestly bewildered, looked at her mother and said: “Why are they doing that, Mom?”

Mrs. Delevan said, “Because they have penises, dear. Go hang up your coat.”

 

 

Pop Merrill let the Delevans,
père et fils,
out, and then locked the door behind them. He turned off all the lights save for the one over the worktable, produced his keys, and opened his own stuff-drawer. From it he took Kevin Delevan's Polaroid Sun 660, chipped but otherwise undamaged, and looked at it fixedly. It had scared both the father and the son. That was clear enough to Pop; it had scared him as well, and still did. But to put a thing like this on a block and smash it to smithereens? That was crazy.

There was a way to turn a buck on this goddam thing.

There always was.

Pop locked it away in the drawer. He would sleep on it, and by the morning he would know how to proceed. In truth, he already had a pretty goddam good idea.

He got up, snapped off the work-light, and wove his way through the gloom toward the steps leading up to his apartment. He moved with the unthinking surefooted grace of long practice.

Halfway there, he stopped.

He felt an urge, an amazingly strong urge, to go back and look at the camera again. What in God's name for? He didn't even have any
film
for the Christless thing ... not that
he
had any intentions of taking any pictures with it. If someone
else
wanted to take some snapshots, watch that dog's progress, the buyer was welcome. Caveet
emperor, as he always said.
Let the goddam emperor caveet or not as it suited him. As for him, he'd as soon go into a cage filled with lions without even a goddam whip and chair.

Still ...

“Leave it,” he said roughly in the darkness, and the sound of his own voice startled him and got him moving and he went upstairs without another look back.

Very early the next morning, Kevin Delevan had a nightmare so horrible he could only remember parts of it, like isolated phrases of music heard on a radio with a defective speaker.

He was walking into a grungy little mill-town. Apparently he was on the bum, because he had a pack on his back. The name of the town was Oatley, and Kevin had the idea it was either in Vermont or upstate New York.
You know anyone hiring here in Oatley?
he asked an old man pushing a shopping-cart along a cracked sidewalk. There were no groceries in the cart; it was full of indeterminate junk, and Kevin realized the man was a wino.
Get away!
the wino screamed.
Get away! Feef! Fushing feef! Fushing FEEF!

Kevin ran, darted across the street, more frightened of the man's madness than he was of the idea anyone might believe that he, Kevin, was a thief. The wino called after him:
This ain't Oatley! This is Hildasville! Get out of town, you fushing feef!

It was then that he realized that this town wasn't Oatley or Hildasville or any other town with a normal name. How could an utterly abnormal town have a normal name?

Everything—streets, buildings, cars, signs, the few pedestrians—was two-dimensional. Things had height, they had width ... but they had no thickness. He passed a woman who looked the way Meg's ballet teacher might look if the ballet teacher put on a hundred and fifty pounds. She was wearing slacks the color of Bazooka bubble gum. Like the wino, she was pushing a shopping-cart. It had a squeaky wheel. It was full of Polaroid Sun 660 cameras. She looked at Kevin with narrow suspicion as they drew closer together. At the moment when they passed each other on the sidewalk, she disappeared. Her
shadow
was still there and he could still hear that rhythmic squeaking, but she was no longer there. Then she reappeared, looking back at him from her fat flat suspicious face, and Kevin understood the reason why she had disappeared for a moment. It was because the concept of “a side view” didn't exist,
couldn't
exist, in a world where everything was perfectly flat.

This is
Polaroidsville,
he thought with a relief which was strangely mingled with horror.
And that means this is only a dream.

Then he saw the white picket fence, and the dog, and the photographer standing in the gutter. There were rimless spectacles propped up on his head. It was Pop Merrill.

Well, son, you found him,
the two-dimensional Polaroid Pop said to Kevin without removing his eye from the shutter.
That's the dog, right there. The one tore up that kid out in Schenectady. YOUR dog, is what I mean to say.

Then Kevin woke up in his own bed, afraid he had screamed but more concerned at first not about the dream but to make sure he was
all there,
all three dimensions of him.

He was. But something was wrong.

Stupid dream, he thought.
Let it go, why can't you? It's over. Photos are burned, all fifty-eight of them. And the camera's bus
—

His thought broke off like ice as that something, that something wrong, teased at his mind again.

It's not over,
he thought.
It's
n—

But before the thought could finish itself, Kevin Delevan fell deeply, dreamlessly asleep. The next morning, he barely remembered the nightmare at all.

The two weeks following his acquisition of Kevin Delevan's Polaroid Sun were the most aggravating, infuriating,
humiliating
two weeks of Pop Merrill's life. There were quite a few people in Castle Rock who would have said it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. Not that anyone in Castle Rock did know ... and that was just about all the consolation Pop could take. He found it cold comfort. Very cold indeed, thank you very much.

But who would have ever believed the Mad Hatters would have,
could
have, let him down so badly?

It was almost enough to make a man wonder if he was starting to slip a little.

God forbid.

Back in September, he hadn't even bothered to wonder if he would sell the Polaroid; the only questions were how soon and how much. The Delevans had bandied the word
supernatural
about, and Pop hadn't corrected them, although he knew that what the Sun was doing would be more properly classed by psychic investigators as a paranormal rather than supernatural phenomenon. He
could
have told them that, but if he
had,
they might both have wondered how come the owner of a small-town used-goods store (and part-time usurer) knew so much about the subject. The fact was this: he knew a lot because it was
profitable
to know a lot, and it was profitable to know a lot because of the people he thought of as “my Mad Hatters.”

Mad Hatters were people who recorded empty rooms on expensive audio equipment not for a lark or a drunken party stunt, but either because they believed passionately in an unseen world and wanted to prove its existence, or because they wanted passionately to get in touch with friends and/or relatives who had “passed on” (“passed on”: that's what they always called it; Mad Hatters never had relatives who did something so simple as die).

Mad Hatters not only owned and used Ouija Boards, they had regular conversations with “spirit guides” in the “other world” (never “heaven,” “hell,” or even “the rest area of the dead” but the “other world”) who put them in touch with friends, relatives, queens, dead rock-and-roll singers, even arch-villains. Pop knew of a Mad Hatter in Vermont who had twice-weekly conversations with Hitler. Hitler had told him it was all a bum rap, he had sued for peace in January of 1943 and that son of a bitch Churchill had turned him down. Hitler had also told him Paul Newman was a space alien who had been born in a cave on the moon.

Mad Hatters went to séances as regularly (and as compulsively) as drug addicts visited their pushers. They bought crystal balls and amulets guaranteed to bring good luck; they organized their own little societies and investigated reputedly haunted houses for all the usual phenomena: teleplasm, tablerappings, floating tables and beds, cold spots, and, of course, ghosts. They noted all of these, real or imagined, with the enthusiasm of dedicated bird-watchers.

Most of them had a ripping good time. Some did not. There was that fellow from Wolfeboro, for instance. He hanged himself in the notorious Tecumseh House, where a gentleman farmer had, in the 1880s and '90s, helped his fellow men by day and helped himself to them by night, dining on them at a formal table in his cellar. The table stood upon a floor of sour packed dirt which had yielded the bones and decomposed bodies of at least twelve and perhaps as many as thirty-five young men, all vagabonds. The fellow from Wolfeboro had left this brief note on a pad of paper beside his Ouija Board:
Can't leave the house. Doors all locked. I hear him eating. Tried cotton. Does no good.

And the poor deluded asshole probably thought he really
did, Pop had mused after hearing this story from a source he trusted.

Then there was a fellow in Dunwich, Massachusetts, to whom Pop had once sold a so-called spirit trumpet for ninety dollars; the fellow had taken the trumpet to the Dunwich Cemetery and must have heard something exceedingly unpleasant, because he had been raving in a padded cell in Arkham for almost six years now, totally insane. When he had gone into the boneyard, his hair had been black; when his screams awoke the few neighbors who lived close enough to the cemetery to hear them and the police were summoned, it was as white as his howling face.

And there was the woman in Portland who lost an eye when a session with the Ouija Board went cataclysmically wrong ... the man in Kingston, Rhode Island, who lost three fingers on his right hand when the rear door of a car in which two teenagers had committed suicide closed on it ... the old lady who landed in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital short most of one ear when her equally elderly cat, Claudette, supposedly went on a rampage during a séance ...

Pop believed some of these things, disbelieved others, and mostly held no opinion—not because he didn't have enough hard evidence one way or the other, but because he didn't give a fart in a high wind about ghosts, séances, crystal balls, spirit trumpets, rampaging cats, or the fabled John the Conquerer Root. As far as Reginald Marion “Pop” Merrill was concerned, the Mad Hatters could all take a flying fuck at the moon.

As long, of course, as one of them handed over some mighty tall tickets for Kevin Delevan's camera before taking passage on the next shuttle.

Pop didn't call these enthusiasts Mad Hatters because of their spectral interests; he called them that because the great majority—he was sometimes tempted to say
all
of them—seemed to be rich, retired, and just begging to be plucked. If you were willing to spend fifteen minutes with them nodding and agreeing while they assured you they could pick a fake medium from a real one just by walking into the
room,
let alone sitting down at the séance table, or if you spent an equal amount of time listening to garbled noises which might or might not be words on a tape player with the proper expression of awe on your face, you could sell them a four-dollar paperweight for a hundred by telling them a man had once glimpsed his dead mother in it. You gave them a smile and they wrote you a check for two hundred dollars. You gave them an encouraging word and they wrote you a check for two
thousand
dollars. If you gave them both things at the same time, they just kind of passed the checkbook over to you and asked you to fill in an amount.