Four Past Midnight (111 page)

What he
did
do was react with a speed and a canny instinct for self-preservation that were nearly noble. To blow up at the Pus Sisters would give him immense gratification, but it would, unfortunately, be
short-lived
gratification. If he buttered them up—which was exactly what they expected, since they had been basted in butter all their lives (although it hadn't done a goddam thing for their skins)—he could perhaps sell them another three or four thousand dollars' worth of claptrap “ghost photographs,” if they continued to elude the lung cancer which should surely have claimed one or both at least a dozen years ago.

And there were, after all, other Mad Hatters in Pop's mental file, although not quite so many as he'd thought on the day he'd set off to see Cedric McCarty. A little checking had revealed that two had died and one was currently learning how to weave baskets in a posh northern California retreat which catered to the incredibly rich who also happened to have gone hopelessly insane.

“Actually,” he said, “I brought the camera out so you ladies could look at it. What I mean to say,” he hastened on, observing their expressions of consternation, “is I know how much experience you ladies have in this field.”

Consternation turned to gratification; the sisters exchanged smug, comfy looks, and Pop found himself wishing he could douse a couple of their goddam packs of Camels with barbecue lighter fluid and jam them up their tight little old-maid asses and then strike a match. They'd smoke then, all right. They'd smoke just like plugged chimneys, was what he meant to say.

“I thought you might have some advice on what I should do with the camera, is what I mean to say,” he finished.

“Destroy it,” Eleusippus said immediately.

“I'd use dynamite,” Meleusippus said.

“Acid first,
then
dynamite,” Eleusippus said.

“Right,” Meleusippus finished. “It's dangerous. You don't have to look at that devil-dog to know that.” She did look though; they both did, and identical expressions of revulsion and fear crossed their faces.

“You can feel eeevil coming out of it,” Eleusippus said in a voice of such portentousness that it should have been laughable, like a high-school girl playing a witch in
Macbeth,
but which somehow wasn't. “Destroy it, Mr. Merrill. Before something awful happens. Before—perhaps, you'll notice I only say
perhaps
—it destroys
you.”

“Now, now,” Pop said, annoyed to find he felt just a little uneasy in spite of himself, “that's drawing it a little strong. It's just a camera is what I mean to say.”

Eleusippus Deere said quietly: “And the planchette that put out poor Colette Simineaux's eye a few years ago—that was nothing but a piece of fiberboard.”

“At least until those foolish, foolish,
foolish
people put their fingers on it and woke it up,” Meleusippus said, more quietly still.

There seemed nothing left to say. Pop picked up the camera—careful to do so by the strap, not touching the actual camera itself, although he told himself this was just for the benefit of these two old pussies—and stood.

“Well, you're the experts,” he said. The two old women looked at each other and preened.

Yes; retreat. Retreat was the answer ... for now, at least. But he wasn't done yet. Every dog had its day, and you could take that to the bank. “I don't want to take up any more of y'time, and I surely don't want to discommode you.”

“Oh, you haven't !” Eleusippus said, also rising.

“We have so very few guests these days!” Meleusippus said, also rising.

“Put it in your car, Mr. Merrill,” Eleusippus said, “and then—”

“—come in and have tea.”

“High tea!”

And although Pop wanted nothing more in his life than to be out of there (and to tell them exactly that:
Thanks but no thanks, I want to get the fuck out of here),
he made a courtly little half-bow and an excuse of the same sort. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, “but I'm afraid I have another appointment. I don't get to the city as often as I'd like.” If you're going to tell one lie, you might as well tell a pack, Pop's own Pop had often told him, and it was advice he had taken to heart. He made a business of looking at his watch. “I've stayed too long already. You girls have made me late, I'm afraid, but I suppose I'm not the first man you've done that to.”

They giggled and actually raised identical blushes, like the glow of very old roses. “Why, Mr.
Merrill!”
Eleusippus trilled.

“Ask me next time,” he said, smiling until his face felt as if it would break. “Ask me next time, by the Lord Harry! You just ask and see if I don't say yes faster'n a hoss can trot!”

He went out, and as one of them quickly closed the door behind him (maybe they think the sun'll fade their goddam fake ghost photographs, Pop thought sourly), he turned and snapped the Polaroid at the old black woman, who was still raking leaves. He did it on impulse, as a man with a mean streak may on impulse swerve across a country road to kill a skunk or raccoon.

The black woman's upper lip rose in a snarl, and Pop was stunned to see she was actually forking the sign of the evil eye at him.

He got into his car and backed hurriedly down the driveway.

The rear end of his car was halfway into the street and he was turning to check for traffic when his eye happened upon the Polaroid he had just taken. It wasn't fully developed; it had the listless, milky look of all Polaroid photographs which are still developing.

Yet it had come up enough so that Pop only stared at it, the breath he had begun to unthinkingly draw into his lungs suddenly ceasing like a breeze that unaccountably drops away to nothing for a moment. His very heart seemed to cease in mid-beat.

What Kevin had imagined was now happening. The dog had finished its pivot, and had now begun its relentless ordained irrefutable approach toward the camera and whoever held it ... ah, but he had held it this time, hadn't he? He, Reginald Marion “Pop” Merrill, had raised it and snapped it at the old black woman in a moment's pique like a spanked child that shoots a pop bottle off the top of a fence-post with his BB gun because he can't very well shoot his father, although in that humiliating, bottom-throbbing time directly after the paddling he would be more than happy to.

The dog was coming. Kevin had known that would happen next, and Pop would have known it, too, if he'd had occasion to think on it, which he hadn't—although from this moment on he would find it hard to think of anything else when he thought of the camera, and he would find those thoughts filling more and more of his time, both waking and dreaming.

It's coming,
Pop thought with the sort of frozen horror a man might feel standing in the dark as some Thing, some unspeakable and unbearable Thing, approaches with its razor-sharp claws and teeth.
Oh my God, it's coming, that dog is coming.

But it wasn't just
coming; it was changing.

It was impossible to say how. His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they
were
seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one: it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fish-eye, so that the dog's forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog's murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people's eyes.

The dog's
body
seemed to have elongated but not thinned; if anything, it seemed thicker—not fatter, but more heavily muscled.

And its teeth were bigger. Longer. Sharper.

Pop suddenly found himself remembering Joe Camber's Saint Bernard, Cujo—the one who had killed Joe and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and Big George Bannerman. The dog had gone rabid. It had trapped a woman and a young boy in their car up there at Camber's place and after two or three days the kid had died. And now Pop found himself wondering if
this
was what they had been looking at during those long days and nights trapped in the steaming oven of their car; this or something like this, the muddy red eyes, the long sharp teeth—

A horn blared impatiently.

Pop screamed, his heart not only starting again but
gunning,
like the engine of a Formula One racing-car.

A van swerved around his sedan, still half in the driveway and half in the narrow residential street. The van's driver stuck his fist out his open window and his middle finger popped up.

“Eat my dick, you son of a whore!”
Pop screamed. He backed the rest of the way out, but so jerkily that he bumped up over the curb on the far side of the street. He twisted the wheel viciously (inadvertently honking his horn in the process) and then drove off. But three blocks south he had to pull over and just sit there behind the wheel for ten minutes, waiting for the shakes to subside enough so he could drive.

So much for the Pus Sisters.

 

 

During the next five days, Pop ran through the remaining names on his mental list. His asking price, which had begun at twenty thousand dollars with McCarty and dropped to ten with the Pus Sisters (not that he had gotten far enough into the business to mention price in either case), dropped steadily as he ran out the string. He was finally left with Emory Chaffee, and the possibility of realizing perhaps twenty-five hundred.

Chaffee presented a fascinating paradox: in all Pop's experience with the Mad Hatters—an experience that was long and amazingly varied—Emory Chaffee was the only believer in the “other world” who had absolutely no imagination whatsoever. That he had ever spared a single thought for the “other world” with such a mind was surprising; that he
believed
in it was amazing; that he paid good money to collect objects connected with it was something Pop found absolutely astounding. Yet it was so, and Pop would have put Chaffee much higher on his list save for the annoying fact that Chaffee was by far the least well off of what Pop thought of as his “rich” Mad Hatters. He was doing a game but poor job of holding onto the last unravelling threads of what had once been a great family fortune. Hence, another large drop in Pop's asking price for Kevin's Polaroid.

But, he had thought, pulling his car into the overgrown driveway of what had in the '20s been one of Sebago Lake's finest summer homes and which was now only a step or two away from becoming one of Sebago Lake's shabbiest year-round homes (the Chaffee house in Portland's Bramhall district had been sold for taxes fifteen years before),
if anyone'll buy this beshitted thing, I reckon Emory will.

The only thing that really distressed him—and it had done so more and more as he worked his way fruitlessly down the list—was the demonstration part. He could
describe
what the camera did until he was black in the face, but not even an odd duck like Emory Chaffee would lay out good money on the basis of a description alone.

Sometimes Pop thought it had been stupid to have Kevin take all those pictures so he. could make that videotape. But when you got right down to where the bear shit in the buckwheat, he wasn't sure it would have made any difference. Time passed over there in that world (for, like Kevin, he had come to think of it as that: an actual world), and it passed much more slowly than it did in this one ... but wasn't it speeding up as the dog approached the camera? Pop thought it was. The movement of the dog along the fence had been barely visible at first; now only a blind man could fail to see that the dog was closer each time the shutter was pressed. You could see the difference in distance even if you snapped two photographs one right after the other. It was almost as if time over there were trying to ... well, trying to
catch up
somehow, and get in sync with time over here.

If that had been all, it would have been bad enough. But it
wasn't
all.

That was no
dog,
goddammit.

Pop didn't know what it
was,
but he knew as well as he knew his mother was buried in Homeland Cemetery that it was no
dog.

He thought it had been a dog, when it had been snuffling its way along that picket fence which it had now left a good ten feet behind; it had
looked
like one, albeit an exceptionally mean one once it got its head turned enough so you could get a good look at its phiz.

But to Pop it now looked like no creature that had ever existed on God's earth, and probably not in Lucifer's hell, either. What troubled him even more was this: the few people for whom he had taken demonstration photographs did not seem to see this. They inevitably recoiled, inevitably said it was the ugliest, meanest-looking junkyard mongrel they had ever seen, but that was all. Not a single one of them suggested that the dog in Kevin's Sun 660 was turning into some kind of monster as it approached the photographer. As it approached the lens which might be some sort of portal between that world and this one.

Pop thought again (as Kevin had),
But it could never get through. Never. If something is going to happen, I'll tell you what that something will be, because that thing is an ANIMAL, maybe a goddam ugly one, a scary one, even, like the kind of thing a little kid imagines in his closet after his momma turns off the lights, but it's still an ANIMAL, and if anything happens it'll be this: there'll be one last pitcher where you can't see nothing but blur because that devil-dog will have jumped, you can see that's what it means to do, and after that the camera either won't work, or if it does, it won't take pitchers that develop into anything but black squares, because you can't take pitchers with a camera that has a busted lens or with one that's broke right in two for that matter, and if whoever owns that shadow drops the camera when the devil-dog hits it and him, and I imagine he will, it's apt to fall on the sidewalk and it probably WILL break. Goddam thing's nothing but plastic, after all, and plastic and cement don't get along hardly at all.