Four Past Midnight (112 page)

But Emory Chaffee had come out on his splintery porch now, where the paint on the boards was flaking off and the boards themselves were warping out of true and the screens were turning the rusty color of dried blood and gaping holes in some of them; Emory Chaffee wearing a blazer which had once been a natty blue but had now been cleaned so many times it was the nondescript gray of an elevator operator's uniform; Emory Chaffee with his high forehead sloping back and back until it finally disappeared beneath what little hair he had left and grinning his
Pip-pip, jolly good, old boy, jolly good, wot,
wot? grin that showed his gigantic buck teeth and made him look the way Pop imagined Bugs Bunny would look if Bugs had suffered some cataclysmic mental retardation.

Pop took hold of the camera's strap—God, how he had come to hate the thing!—got out of his car, and forced himself to return the man's wave and grin.

Business, after all, was business.

 

 

“That's one ugly pup, wouldn't you say?”

Chaffee was studying the Polaroid which was now almost completely developed. Pop had explained what the camera did, and had been encouraged by Chaffee's frank interest and curiosity. Then he had given the Sun to the man, inviting him to take a picture of anything he liked.

Emory Chaffee, grinning that repulsive buck-toothed grin, swung the Polaroid Pop's way.

“Except me,” Pop said hastily. “I'd ruther you pointed a shotgun at my head instead of that camera.”

“When you sell a thing, you really sell it,” Chaffee said admiringly, but he had obliged just the same, turning the Sun 660 toward the wide picture window with its view of the lake, a magnificent view that remained as rich now as the Chaffee family itself had been in those years which began after World War I, golden years which had somehow begun to turn to brass around 1970.

He pressed the shutter.

The camera whined.

Pop winced. He found that now he winced every time he heard that sound—that squidgy little whine. He had tried to control the wince and had found to his dismay that he could not.

 

 

“Yes, sir, one goddamned ugly brute!” Chaffee repeated after examining the developed picture, and Pop was sourly pleased to see that the repulsive buck-toothed wot-ho, bit-of-a-sticky-wicket grin had disappeared at last. The camera had been able to do that much, at least.

Yet it was equally clear to him that the man wasn't seeing what he, Pop, was seeing. Pop had had some preparation for this eventuality; he was, all the same, badly shaken behind his impassive Yankee mask. He believed that if Chaffee
had
been granted the power (for that was what it seemed to be) to see what Pop was seeing, the stupid fuck would have been headed for the nearest door, and at top speed.

The dog—well, it wasn't a dog, not anymore, but you had to call it
something
—hadn't begun its leap at the photographer yet, but it was getting ready; its hindquarters were simultaneously bunching and lowering toward the cracked anonymous sidewalk in a way that somehow reminded Pop of a kid's souped-up car, trembling, barely leashed by the clutch during the last few seconds of a red light; the needle on the rpm dial already standing straight up at 60 x 10, the engine screaming through chrome pipes, fat deep-tread tires ready to smoke the macadam in a hot soul-kiss.

The dog's face was no longer a recognizable thing at all. It had twisted and distorted into a carny freak-show thing that seemed to have but a single dark and malevolent eye, neither round nor oval but somehow
runny,
like the yolk of an egg that has been stabbed with the tines of a fork. Its nose was a black beak with deep flared holes drilled into either side. And was there
smoke
coming from those holes—like steam from the vents of a volcano? Maybe—or maybe that part was just imagination.

But he didn't want to find out. He looked at the black, murdering thing whose matted coat had caught perhaps two dozen wayward burdocks, the thing which no longer had fur, exactly, but stuff like living spikes, and a tail like a medieval weapon. He observed the shadow it had taken a damned snot-nosed kid to extract meaning from, and saw it had changed. One of the shadow-legs appeared to have moved a stride backward—a very
long
stride, even taking the effect of the lowering or rising sun (but it was going down; Pop had somehow become very sure it was going down, that it was night coming in that world over there, not day) into account.

The photographer over there in that world had finally discovered that his subject did not mean to sit for its portrait; that had never been a part of its plan. It intended to
eat,
not
sit.
That was the plan.

Eat, and, maybe, in some way he didn't understand, escape.

Find out! he thought ironically.
Go ahead! Just keep taking pitchers! You'll find out! You'll find out PLENTY!

“And you, sir,” Emory Chaffee was saying, for he had only been stopped for a moment; creatures of little imagination are rarely stopped for long by such trivial things as consideration, “are one hell of a salesman!”

The memory of McCarty was still very close to the surface of Pop's mind, and it still rankled.

“If you think it's a fake—” he began.

“A fake? Not at all! Not ... at
all!”
Chaffee's buck-toothed smile spread wide in all its repulsive splendor. He spread his hands in a surely-you-jest motion. “But I'm afraid, you see, that we can't do business on this particular item, Mr. Merrill. I'm sorry to say so, but—”

“Why?” Pop bit off. “If you don't think the goddam thing's a fake, why in the hell don't you want it?” And he was astonished to hear his voice rising in a kind of plaintive, balked fury. There had never been anything like this, never in the history of the
world,
Pop was sure of it, nor ever would be again. Yet it seemed he couldn't give the goddam thing away.

“But ...” Chaffee looked puzzled, as if not sure how to state it, because whatever it was he had to say seemed so obvious to him. In that moment he looked like a pleasant but not very capable pre-school teacher trying to teach a backward child how to tie his shoes. “But it doesn't
do
anything, does it?”

“Doesn't do anything?” Pop nearly screamed. He couldn't believe he had lost control of himself to such a degree as this, and was losing more all the time. What was happening to him? Or, cutting closer to the bone, what was the son-of-a-bitching
camera
doing to him? “Doesn't do anything? What are you, blind? It takes pitchers of
another world!
It takes pitchers that move in time from one to the next, no matter
where
you take em or
when
you take em in
this
world! And that ... that thing ... that
monster—”

Oh. Oh dear. He had finally done it. He had finally gone too far. He could see it in the way Chaffee was looking at him.

“But it's just a dog, isn't it?” Chaffee said in a low, comforting voice. It was the sort of voice you'd use to try and soothe a madman while the nurses ran for the cabinet where they kept the hypos and the knock-out stuff.

“Ayuh,” Pop said slowly and tiredly. “Just a dog is all it is. But you said yourself it was a hell of an ugly brute.”

“That's right, that's right, I did,” Chaffee said, agreeing much too quickly. Pop thought if the man's grin got any wider and broader he might just be treated to the sight of the top three-quarters of the idiot's head toppling off into his lap. “But ... surely you see, Mr. Merrill ... what a problem this presents for the collector. The
serious
collector.”

“No, I guess I don't,” Pop said, but after running through the entire list of Mad Hatters, a list which had seemed so promising at first, he was beginning to. In fact, he was beginning to see a whole
host
of problems the Polaroid Sun presented for the serious collector. As for Emory Chaffee ... God knew what Emory thought, exactly.

“There are most certainly such things as ghost photographs,” Chaffee said in a rich, pedantic voice that made Pop want to strangle him. “But these are not ghost photographs. They—”

“They're sure as hell not
normal
photographs!”

“My point exactly,” Chaffee said, frowning slightly. “But what sort of photographs are they? One can hardly say, can one? One can only display a perfectly normal camera that photographs a dog which is apparently preparing to leap. And once it leaps, it will be gone from the frame of the picture. At that point, one of three things may happen. The camera may start taking normal pictures, which is to say, pictures of the things it is aimed at; it may take no more pictures at all, its one purpose, to photograph—to
document,
one might even say—that dog, completed; or it may simply go on taking pictures of that white fence and the ill-tended lawn behind it.” He paused and added, “I suppose someone might walk by at some point, forty photographs down the line—or four hundred—but unless the photographer raised his angle, which he doesn't seem to have done in any of these, one would only see the passerby from the waist down. More or less.” And, echoing Kevin's father without even knowing who Kevin's father was, he added: “Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Merrill, but you've shown me something I thought I'd never see: an inexplicable and almost irrefutable paranormal occurrence that is really quite boring.”

This amazing but apparently sincere remark forced Pop to disregard whatever Chaffee might think about his sanity and ask again: “It really is only a dog, as far as you can see?”

“Of course,” Chaffee said, looking mildly surprised. “A stray mongrel that looks exceedingly bad-tempered.”

He sighed.

“And it wouldn't be taken seriously, of course. What I mean is it wouldn't be taken seriously by people who don't know you personally, Mr. Merrill. People who aren't familiar with your honesty and reliability in these matters. It looks like a trick, you see? And not even a very good one. Something on the order of a child's Magic Eight-Ball.”

Two weeks ago, Pop would have argued strenuously against such an idea. But that was before he had been not walked but actually
propelled
from that bastard McCarty's house.

“Well, if that's your final word,” Pop said, getting up and taking the camera by the strap.

“I'm very sorry you made a trip to such little purpose,” Chaffee said ... and then his horrid grin burst forth again, all rubbery lips and huge teeth shining with spit. “I was about to make myself a Spam sandwich when you drove in. Would you care to join me, Mr. Merrill? I make quite a nice one, if I do say so myself. I add a little horseradish and Bermuda onion—that's my secret—and then I—”

“I'll pass,” Pop said heavily. As in the Pus Sisters' parlor, all he really wanted right now was to get out of here and put miles between himself and this grinning idiot. Pop had a definite allergy to places where he had gambled and lost. Just lately there seemed to be a lot of those. Too goddam many. “I already had m'dinner, is what I mean to say. Got to be gettin back.”

Chaffee laughed fruitily. “The lot of the toiler in the vineyards is busy but yields great bounty,” he said.

“It's a livin, anyway,” Pop replied, and was eventually allowed out of the house, which was damp and chill (what it must be like to live in such a place come February, Pop couldn't imagine) and had that mousy, mildewed smell that might be rotting curtains and sofa-covers and such ... or just the smell money leaves behind when it has spent a longish period of time in a place and then departed. He thought the fresh October air, tinged with just a small taste of the lake and a stronger tang of pine-needles, had never smelled so good.

He got into his car and started it up. Emory Chaffee, unlike the Pus Sister who had shown him as far as the door and then closed it quickly behind him, as if afraid the sun might strike her and turn her to dust like a vampire, was standing on the front porch, grinning his idiot grin and actually
waving,
as if he were seeing Pop off on a goddam ocean cruise.

And, without thinking, just as he had taken the picture of (or at, anyway) the old black woman without thinking, he had snapped Chaffee and the just-starting-to-moulder house which was all that remained of the Chaffee family holdings. He didn't remember picking the camera up off the seat where he had tossed it in disgust before closing his door, was not even aware that the camera was in his hands or the shutter fired until he heard the whine of the mechanism shoving the photograph out like a tongue coated with some bland gray fluid—Milk of Magnesia, perhaps. That sound seemed to vibrate along his nerve-endings now, making them scream; it was like the feeling you got when something too cold or hot hit a new filling.

He was peripherally aware that Chaffee was laughing as if it was the best goddam joke in the world before snatching the picture from the slot in a kind of furious horror, telling himself he had imagined the momentary, blurred sound of a snarl, a sound like you might hear if a power-boat was approaching while you had your head ducked under water; telling himself he had imagined the momentary feeling that the camera had
bulged
in his hands, as if some huge pressure inside had pushed the sides out momentarily. He punched the glove-compartment button and threw the picture inside and then closed it so hard and fast that he tore his thumbnail all the way down to the tender quick.