Four Past Midnight (102 page)

“What is it?” Pop asked. “I've looked at it with m'glass, and I feel like I
should
know what it is—it's like a name you can't quite remember but have right on the tip of your tongue, is what I mean to say—but I don't quite.”

“I suppose I could hold off until Friday or so,” Kevin said, choosing not to answer the old man's question. “I really don't want to hold off much longer.”

“Scared?”

“Yes,” Kevin said simply. “I'm scared.”

“You told your folks?”

“Not all of it, no.”

“Well, you might want to. Might want to tell your dad, anyway, is what I mean to say. You got time to think on it while I take care of what it is I want to take care of.”

“No matter what you want to do, I'm going to put my dad's sledgehammer on it come Friday,” Kevin said. “I don't even want a camera anymore. Not a Polaroid or any other kind.”

“Where is it now?”

“In my bureau drawer. And that's where it's going to stay.”

“Stop by the store here on Friday,” Pop said. “Bring the camera with you. We'll take a look at this little idear of mine, and then, if you want to bust the goddam thing up, I'll provide the sledgehammer myself. No charge. Even got a chopping block out back you can set it on.”

“That's a deal,” Kevin said, and smiled.

“Just what have you told your folks about all this?”

“That I'm still deciding. I didn't want to worry them. My mom, especially.” Kevin looked at him curiously. “Why did you say I might want to tell my dad?”

“You bust up that camera, your father is going to be mad at you,” Pop said. “That ain't so bad, but he's maybe gonna think you're a little bit of a fool, too. Or an old maid, squallin burglar to the police on account of a creaky board is what I mean to say.”

Kevin flushed a little, thinking of how angry his father had gotten when the idea of the supernatural had come up, then sighed. He hadn't thought of it in that light at all, but now that he did, he thought Pop was probably right. He didn't like the idea of his father being mad at him, but he could live with it. The idea that his father might think him a coward, a fool, or both, though ... that was a different kettle of fish altogether.

Pop was watching him shrewdly, reading these thoughts as they crossed Kevin's face as easily as a man might read the headlines on the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

“You think he could meet you here around four in the afternoon on Friday?”

“No way,” Kevin said. “He works in Portland. He hardly ever gets home before six.”

“I'll give him a call, if you want,” Pop said. “He'll come if I call.”

Kevin gave him a wide-eyed stare.

Pop smiled thinly. “Oh, I know him,” he said. “Know him of old. He don't like to let on about me any more than you do, and I understand that, but what I mean to say is I know him. I know a lot of people in this town. You'd be surprised, son.”

“How?”

“Did him a favor one time,” Pop said. He popped a match alight with his thumbnail, and veiled those eyes behind enough smoke so you couldn't tell if it was amusement, sentiment, or contempt in them.

“What kind of favor?”

“That,” Pop said, “is between him and me. Just like this business here”—he gestured at the pile of photographs—“is between me and you.
That's
what I mean to say.”

“Well ... okay ... I guess. Should I say anything to him?”

“Nope!” Pop said in his chipper way. “You let me take care of everything.” And for a moment, in spite of the obfuseating pipe-smoke, there was something in Pop Merrill's eyes Kevin Delevan didn't care for. He went out, a sorely confused boy who knew only one thing for sure: he wanted this to be over.

 

 

When he was gone, Pop sat silent and moveless for nearly five minutes. He allowed his pipe to go out in his mouth and drummed his fingers, which were nearly as knowing and talented as those of a concert violinist but masqueraded as equipment which should more properly have belonged to a digger of ditches or a pourer of cement, next to the stack of photographs. As the smoke dissipated, his eyes stood out clearly, and they were as cold as ice in a December puddle.

Abruptly he put the pipe in its holder and called a camera-and-video shop in Lewiston. He asked two questions. The answer to both of them was yes. Pop hung up the phone and went back to drumming his fingers on the table beside the Polaroids. What he was planning wasn't really fair to the boy, but the boy had uncovered the corner of something he not only didn't understand but didn't want to understand.

Fair or not, Pop didn't believe he intended to let the boy do what the boy wanted to do. He hadn't decided what he himself meant to do, not yet, not entirely, but it was wise to be prepared.

That was always wise.

He sat and drummed his fingers and wondered what that thing was the boy had seen. He had obviously felt Pop would know—or might know—but Pop hadn't a clue. The boy might tell him on Friday. Or not. But if the boy didn't, the father, to whom Pop had once loaned four hundred dollars to cover a bet on a basketball game, a bet he had lost and which his wife knew nothing about, certainly would. If, that was, he could. Even the best of fathers didn't know all about their sons anymore once those sons were fifteen or so, but Pop thought Kevin was a very
young
fifteen, and that his dad knew most things ... or could find them out.

He smiled and drummed his fingers and all the clocks began to charge wearily at the hour of five.

Pop Merrill turned the sign which hung in his door from OPEN to CLOSED at two o‘clock on Friday afternoon, slipped himself behind the wheel of his 1959 Chevrolet, which had been for years perfectly maintained at Sonny's Texaco at absolutely no cost at all (the fallout of another little loan, and Sonny Jackett another town fellow who would prefer hot coals pressed against the soles of his feet to admitting that he not only knew but was deeply indebted to Pop Merrill, who had gotten him out of a desperate scrape over in New Hampshire in '69), and took himself up to Lewiston, a city he hated because it seemed to him that there were only two streets in the whole town (maybe three) that weren't one-ways. He arrived as he always did when Lewiston and only Lewiston would do: not by driving to it but arriving somewhere near it and then spiraling slowly inward along those beshitted one-way streets until he reckoned he was as close as he could get and then walking the rest of the way, a tall thin man with a bald head, rimless specs, clean khaki pants with creases and cuffs, and a blue workman's shirt buttoned right up to the collar.

There was a sign in the window of Twin City Camera and Video that showed a cartoon man who appeared to be battling a huge tangle of movie-film and losing. The fellow looked just about ready to blow his stack. The words over and under the picture read: TIRED OF FIGHTING? WE TRANSFER YOUR 8 MM MOVIES (SNAPSHOTS TOO!) ONTO VIDEO TAPE!

Just another goddam gadget, Pop thought, opening the door and going in. World's dying of em.

But he was one of those people—world's dying of em—not at all above using what he disparaged if it proved expedient. He spoke briefly with the clerk. The clerk got the proprietor. They had known each other for many years (probably since Homer sailed the wine-dark sea, some wits might have said). The proprietor invited Pop into the back room, where they shared a nip.

“That's a goddam strange bunch of photos,” the proprietor said.

“Ayuh.”

“The videotape I made of them is even stranger.”

“I bet so.”

“That all you got to say?”

“Ayuh.”

“Fuck ya, then,” the proprietor said, and they both cackled their shrill old-man's cackles. Behind the counter, the clerk winced.

Pop left twenty minutes later with two items: a video cassette, and a brand-new Polaroid Sun 660, still in its box.

 

 

When he got back to the shop, he called Kevin's house. He was not surprised when it was John Delevan who answered.

“If you've been fucking my boy over, I'll kill you, you old snake,” John Delevan said without preamble, and distantly Pop could hear the boy's wounded cry:
“Da-ad!”

Pop's lips skinned back from his teeth—crooked, eroded, pipe-yellow, but his own, by the bald-headed Christ—and if Kevin had seen him in that moment he would have done more than
wonder
if maybe Pop Merrill was something other than the Castle Rock version of the Kindly Old Sage of the Crackerbarrel: he would have
known.

“Now, John,” he said. “I've been trying to help your boy with that camera. That's all in the world I've been trying to do.” He paused. “Just like that one time I gave you a help when you got a little too proud of the Seventy-Sixers, is what I mean to say.”

A thundering silence from John Delevan's end of the line which meant he had plenty to say on
that
subject, but the kiddo was in the room and that was as good as a gag.

“Now, your kid don't know nothing about
that,”
Pop said, that nasty grin broadening in the tick-tock shadows of the Emporium Galorium, where the dominant smells were old magazines and mouse-turds. “I told him it wasn't none of his business, just like I told him that this business here
was.
I wouldn't have even brought up that bet if I knew another way to get you here, is what I mean to say. And you ought to see what I've got, John, because if you don't you won't understand why the boy wants to smash that camera you bought him—”

“Smash
it!”

“—and why I think it's a hell of a good idea. Now are you going to come down here with him, or not?”

“I'm not in Portland, am I, dammit?”

“Never mind the CLOSED sign on the door,” Pop said in the serene tone of a man who has been getting his own way for many years and expects to go right on getting it for many more. “Just knock.”

“Who in hell gave my boy your name, Merrill?”

“I didn't ask him,” Pop said in that same infuriatingly serene tone of voice, and hung up the telephone. And, to the empty shop: “All I know is that he came. Just like they always do.”

 

 

While he waited, he took the Sun 660 he had bought in Lewiston out of its box and buried the box deep in the trash-can beside his worktable. He looked at the camera thoughtfully, then loaded the four-picture starter-pack that came with the camera. With that done, he unfolded the body of the camera, exposing the lens. The red light to the left of the lightning-bolt shape came on briefly, and then the green one began to stutter. Pop was not very surprised to find he was filled with trepidation.
Well,
he thought,
God hates a coward,
and pushed the shutter-release. The clutter of the Emporium Galorium's barnlike interior was bathed in an instant of merciless and improbable white light. The camera made its squidgy little whine and spat out what would be a Polaroid picture—perfectly adequate but somehow lacking; a picture that was all surfaces depicting a world where ships undoubtedly
would
sail off the fuming and monster-raddled edge of the earth if they went far enough west.

Pop watched it with the same mesmerized expression Clan Delevan had worn as it waited for Kevin's first picture to develop. He told himself this camera would not do the same thing, of course not, but he was stiff and wiry with tension just the same and, tough old bird or not, if a random board had creaked in the place just then, he almost certainly would have cried out.

But no board
did
creak, and when the picture developed it showed only what it was supposed to show: clocks assembled, clocks in pieces, toasters, stacks of magazines tied with twine, lamps with shades so horrible only women of the British upper classes could truly love them, shelves of quarter paperbacks (six for a buck) with titles like
After Dark My Sweet
and
Fire in the Flesh and The Brass Cupcake,
and, in the distant background, the dusty front window. You could read the letters EMPOR backward before the bulky silhouette of a bureau blocked off the rest.

No hulking creature from beyond the grave; no knife-wielding doll in blue overalls. Just a camera. He supposed the whim which had caused him to take a picture in the first place, just to see, showed how deeply this thing had worked its way under his skin.

Pop sighed and buried the photograph in the trash-can. He opened the wide drawer of the worktable and took out a small hammer. He held the camera firmly in his left hand and then swung the hammer on a short arc through the dusty tick-tock air. He didn't use a great deal of force. There was no need. Nobody took any pride in workmanship anymore. They talked about the wonders of modern science, synthetics, new alloys, polymers, Christ knew what. It didn't matter. Snot. That was what everything was really made out of these days, and you didn't have to work very hard to bust a camera that was made of snot.

The lens shattered. Shards of plastic flew from around it, and that reminded Pop of something else. Had it been the left or right side? He frowned. Left. He thought. They wouldn't notice anyway, or remember which side themselves if they did, you could damn near take that to the bank, but Pop hadn't feathered his nest with damn-nears. It was wise to be prepared.

Always wise.

He replaced the hammer, used a small brush to sweep the broken chunks of glass and plastic off the table and onto the floor, then returned the brush and took out a grease-pencil with a fine tip and an X-Act-O knife. He drew what he thought was the approximate shape of the piece of plastic which had broken off Kevin Delevan's Sun when Meg knocked it on the floor, then used the X-Act-O to carve along the lines. When he thought he had dug deep enough into the plastic, he put the X-Act-O back in the drawer, and then knocked the Polaroid camera off the worktable. What had happened once ought to happen again, especially with the fault-lines he had pre-carved.