Four Past Midnight (107 page)

“I think I owe you the cost of that camera, Delevan,” Pop said, knowing exactly how the man would respond.

“No,” Delevan said. “Let's smash it and forget this whole crazy thing ever hap—” He paused. “I almost forgot—we were going to look at those last few photos under your magnifying glass. I wanted to see if I could make out the thing the dog's wearing. I keep thinking it looks familiar.”

“We can do that after we get rid of the camera, can't we?” Kevin asked. “Okay, Dad?”

“Sure.”

“And then,” Pop said, “it might not be such a bad idear to burn the pitchers themselves. You could do it right in my stove.”

“I think that's a great idea,” Kevin said. “What do you think, Dad?”

“I think Mrs. Merrill never raised any fools,” his father said.

“Well,” Pop said, smiling enigmatically from behind folds of rising blue smoke, “there was five of us, you know.”

 

 

The day had been bright blue when Kevin and his father walked down to the Emporium Galorium; a perfect autumn day. Now it was four-thirty, the sky had mostly clouded over, and it looked like it might rain before dark. The first real chill of the fall touched Kevin's hands. It would chap them red if he stayed out long enough, but he had no plans to. His mom would be home in half an hour, and already he wondered what she would say when she saw Dad was with him, and what his dad would say.

But that was for later.

Kevin set the Sun 660 on the chopping block in the little backyard, and Pop Merrill handed him a sledgehammer. The haft was worn smooth with usage. The head was rusty, as if someone had left it carelessly out in the rain not once or twice but many times. Yet it would do the job, all right. Kevin had no doubt of that. The Polaroid, its lens broken and most of the housing around it shattered as well, looked fragile and defenseless sitting there on the block's chipped, chunked, and splintered surface, where you expected to see a length of ash or maple waiting to be split in two.

Kevin set his hands on the sledgehammer's smooth handle and tightened them.

“You're sure, son?” Mr. Delevan asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Kevin's father glanced at his own watch. “Do it, then.”

Pop stood to one side with his pipe clamped between his wretched teeth, hands in his back pockets. He looked shrewdly from the boy to the man and then back to the boy, but said nothing.

Kevin lifted the sledgehammer and, suddenly surprised by an anger at the camera he hadn't even known he felt, he brought it down with all the force he could muster.

Too hard,
he thought.
You're going to miss it, be lucky not to mash your own foot, and there it will sit, not much more than
a piece
of hollow plastic a little kid could stomp flat without half trying, and even if you're lucky enough to miss your foot, Pop will look at you. He won't say anything: he won't have to. It'll all be in the way he looks at you.

And thought also:
It doesn't matter if I hit it or not. It's magic, some kind of magic camera, and you can't break it. Even if you hit it dead on the money the sledge will just bounce off it, like bullets off Superman's chest.

But then there was no more time to think anything, because the sledge connected squarely with the camera. Kevin really had swung much too hard to maintain anything resembling control, but he got lucky. And the sledgehammer didn't just bounce back up, maybe hitting Kevin square between the eyes and killing him, like the final twist in a horror story.

The Sun didn't so much shatter as detonate. Black plastic flew everywhere. A long rectangle with a shiny black square at one end—a picture which would never be taken, Kevin supposed—fluttered to the bare ground beside the chopping block and lay there, face down.

There was a moment of silence so complete they could hear not only the cars on Lower Main Street but kids playing tag half a block away in the parking lot behind Wardell's Country Store, which had gone bankrupt two years before and had stood vacant ever since.

“Well, that's
that,”
Pop said. “You swung that sledge just like Paul Bunyan, Kevin! I should smile n kiss a pig if you didn't.

“No need to do that,” he said, now addressing Mr. Delevan, who was picking up broken chunks of plastic as prissily as a man picking up the pieces of a glass he has accidentally knocked to the floor and shattered. “I have a boy comes in and cleans up the yard every week or two. I know it don't look like much as it is, but if I didn't have that kid ... Glory!”

“Then maybe we ought to use your magnifying glass and take a look at those pictures,” Mr. Delevan said, standing up. He dropped the few pieces of plastic he had picked up into a rusty incinerator that stood nearby and then brushed off his hands.

“Fine by me,” Pop said.

“Then burn them,” Kevin reminded. “Don't forget that.”

“I didn't,” Pop said. “I'll feel better when they're gone, too.”

 

 

“Jesus!” John Delevan said. He was bending over Pop Merrill's worktable, looking through the lighted magnifying glass at the second-to-last photograph. It was the one in which the object around the dog's neck showed most clearly; in the last photo, the object had swung back in the other direction again. “Kevin, look at that and tell me if it's what I think it is.”

Kevin took the magnifying glass and looked. He had known, of course, but even so it still wasn't a look just for form's sake. Clyde Tombaugh must have looked at an actual photograph of the planet Pluto for the first time with the same fascination. Tombaugh had known it was there; calculations showing similar distortions in the orbital paths of Neptune and Uranus had made Pluto not just a possibility but a necessity. Still, to
know
a thing was there, even to know what it was ... that did not detract from the fascination of actually seeing it for the first time.

He let go of the switch and handed the glass back to Pop. “Yeah,” he said to his father. “It's what you think it is.” His voice was as flat as ... as flat as the things in that Polaroid world, he supposed, and he felt an urge to laugh. He kept the sound inside, not because it would have been inappropriate to laugh (although he supposed it would have been) but because the sound would have come out sounding ... well... flat.

Pop waited and when it became clear to him they were going to need a nudge, he said: “Well, don't keep me hoppin from one foot to the other! What the hell is it?”

Kevin had felt reluctant to tell him before, and he felt reluctant now. There was no reason for it, but—

Yes. If he was around when that happened, he thought it would be the final touch; he would just go completely bananas and they could cart him away to Juniper Hill, raving about real dogs in Polaroid worlds and cameras that took the same picture over and over again except not quite.

“The Polaroid camera was a birthday present,” he heard himself saying in that same dry voice. “What it's wearing around its neck was another one.”

Pop slowly pushed his glasses up onto his bald head and squinted at Kevin. “I don't guess I'm followin you, son.”

“I have an aunt,” Kevin said. “Actually she's my great-aunt, but we're not supposed to call her that, because she says it makes her feel old. Aunt Hilda. Anyway, Aunt Hilda's husband left her a lot of money—my mom says she's worth over a million dollars—but she's a tightwad.”

He stopped, leaving his father space to protest, but his father only smiled sourly and nodded. Pop Merrill, who knew all about that situation (there was not, in truth, much in Castle Rock and the surrounding areas Pop didn't know at least something about), simply held his peace and waited for the boy to get around to spilling it.

“She comes and spends Christmas with us once every three years, and that's about the only time we go to church, because she goes to church. We have lots of broccoli when Aunt Hilda comes. None of us like it, and it just about makes my sister puke, but Aunt Hilda likes broccoli a lot, so we have it. There was a book on our summer reading list,
Great Expectations,
and there was a lady in it who was just like Aunt Hilda. She got her kicks dangling her money in front of her relatives. Her name was Miss Havisham, and when Miss Havisham said frog, people jumped. We jump, and I
guess the rest of our
family does, too.”

“Oh, your Uncle Randy makes your mother look like a piker,” Mr. Delevan said unexpectedly. Kevin thought his dad meant it to sound amused in a cynical sort of way, but what came through was a deep, acidic bitterness. “When Aunt Hilda says frog in Randy's house, they all just about turn cartwheels over the roofbeams.”

“Anyway,” Kevin told Pop, “she sends me the same thing for my birthday every year. I mean, each one is different, but each one's really the same.”

“What is it she sends you, boy?”

“A string tie,” Kevin said. “Like the kind you see guys wearing in old-time country-music bands. It has something different on the clasp every year, but it's always a string tie.”

Pop snatched the magnifying glass and bent over the picture with it. “Stone the crows!” he said, straightening up. “A string tie! That's just what it is! Now how come I didn't see that?”

“Because it isn't the sort of thing a dog would wear around his neck, I guess,” Kevin said in that same wooden voice. They had been here for only forty-five minutes or so, but he felt as if he had aged another fifteen years.
The thing to remember, his mind told him over and over, is that the camera is gone. It's nothing but splinters. Never mind all the King's horses and all the King's men; not even all the guys who work making cameras at the Polaroid factory in Schenectady could put that baby back together again.

Yes, and thank God. Because this was the end of the line. As far as Kevin was concerned, if he never encountered the
supernatural
again until he was eighty, never so much as brushed up against it, it would still be too soon.

“Also, it's very small,” Mr. Delevan pointed out. “I was there when Kevin took it out of the box, and we all knew what it was going to be. The only mystery was what would be on the clasp this year. We joked about it.”

“What is on the clasp?” Pop asked, peering into the photograph again ... or peering at it, anyway: Kevin would testify in any court in the land that peering
into
a Polaroid was simply impossible.

“A bird,” Kevin said. “I'm pretty sure it's a woodpecker. And that's what the dog in the picture is wearing around its neck. A string tie with a woodpecker on the clasp.”

“Jesus!” Pop said. He was in his own quiet way one of the world's finer actors, but there was no need to simulate the surprise he felt now.

Mr. Delevan abruptly swept all the Polaroids together. “Let's put these goddam things in the woodstove,” he said.

 

 

When Kevin and his father got home, it was ten minutes past five and starting to drizzle. Mrs. Delevan's two-year-old Toyota was not in the driveway, but she had been and gone. There was a note from her on the kitchen table, held down by the salt and pepper shakers. When Kevin unfolded the note, a ten-dollar bill fell out.

Mom

 

They looked at each other, both saying
Well, there's one thing we don't have to worry about
without having to say it out loud. Apparently neither she nor Meg had noticed that Mr. Delevan's car was still in the garage.

“Do you want me to—” Kevin began, but there was no need to finish because his father cut across him: “Yes. Check. Right now.”

Kevin went up the stairs by twos and into his room. He had a bureau and a desk. The bottom desk drawer was full of what Kevin simply thought of as “stuff”: things it would have seemed somehow criminal to throw away, although he had no real use for any of them. There was his grandfather's pocket-watch, heavy, scrolled, magnificent ... and so badly rusted that the jeweler in Lewiston he and his mother had brought it to only took one look, shook his head, and pushed it back across the counter. There were two sets of matching cufflinks and two orphans, a
Penthouse
gatefold, a paperback book called
Gross Jokes,
and a Sony Walkman which had for some reason developed a habit of eating the tapes it was supposed to play. It was just stuff, that was all. There was no other word that fit.

Part of the stuff, of course, was the thirteen string ties Aunt Hilda had sent him for his last thirteen birthdays.

He took them out one by one, counted, came up with twelve instead of thirteen, rooted through the stuff-drawer again, then counted again. Still twelve.

“Not there?”

Kevin, who had been squatting, cried out and leaped to his feet.

“I'm sorry,” Mr. Delevan said from the doorway. “That was dumb.”