Four Past Midnight

that.'

'Meg?' Kevin said kindly.

'What?'

'If you dump that much ice cream on top of a ruptured spleen, you'll die horribly in the night. Of course, your spleen might not actually be ruptured, but -'

Meg stuck her tongue out at him and turned back to the movie.

Mr Delevan was looking at his son with an expression of mingled affection and exasperation. 'Look, Kev - it's your camera. No argument about that. You can do whatever you want with it. But -'

'Dad, aren't you even the least bit interested in why it's doing what it's doing?'

'Nope,' John Delevan said.

It was Kevin's turn to roll his eyes. Meanwhile, Mrs Delevan was looking from one to the other like someone who is enjoying a pretty good tennis match. Nor was this far from the truth. She had spent years watching her son and her husband sharpen themselves on each other, and she was not bored with it yet. She sometimes wondered if they would ever discover how much alike they really were.

'Well, I want to think it over.'

'Fine. I just want you to know that I can swing by Penney's tomorrow and exchange the thing - if you want me to and they agree to swap a piece of chipped merchandise, that is. If you want to keep it, that's fine, too. I wash my hands of it.' He dusted his palms briskly together to illustrate.

'I suppose you don't want my opinion,' Meg said.

'Right,' Kevin said.

'Of course we do, Meg,' Mrs Delevan said.

'I think it's a supernatural camera,' Meg said. She licked ice cream from her spoon. 'I think it's a Manifestation.'

'That's utterly ridiculous,' Mr Delevan said at once.

'No, it's not,' Meg said. 'It happens to be the only explanation that fits. You just don't think so because you don't believe in stuff like that. If a ghost ever floated up to you, Dad, you wouldn't even see it. What do you think, Kev?'

For a moment Kevin didn't - couldn't - answer. He felt as if another flashbulb had gone off, this one behind his eyes instead of in front of them.

'Kev? Earth to Kevin!'

'I think you might just have something there, squirt,' he said slowly.

'Oh my dear God,' John Delevan said, getting up. 'It's the revenge of Freddy and Jason - my kid thinks his birthday camera's haunted. I'm going to bed, but before I do, I want to say just one more thing. A camera that takes photographs of the same thing over and over again - especially something as ordinary as what's in these pictures - is a boring manifestation of the supernatural.'

'Still . . .' Kevin said. He held up the photos like a dubious poker hand.

'I think it's time we all went to bed,' Mrs Delevan said briskly. 'Meg, if you absolutely need to finish that cinematic masterpiece, you can do it in the morning.'

'But it's almost over!' Meg cried.

'I'll come up with her, Mom,' Kevin said, and, fifteen minutes later, with the malevolent Chuckie disposed of (at least until the sequel), he did. But sleep did not come easily for Kevin that night. He lay long awake in his bedroom, listening to a strong late-summer wind rustle the leaves outside into whispery conversation, thinking about what might make a camera take the same picture over and over and over again, and what such a thing might mean. He only began to slip toward sleep when he realized his decision had been made; he would keep the Polaroid Sun at least a little while longer.

It's mine, he thought again. He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and was sleeping deeply forty seconds later.

CHAPTER 2

Amid the tickings and tockings of what sounded like at least fifty thousand clocks and totally undisturbed by them, Reginald 'Pop' Merrill shone a pencil-beam of light from a gadget even more slender than a doctor's ophthalmoscope into Kevin's Polaroid 660 while Kevin stood by. Pop's eyeglasses, which he didn't need for close work, were propped on the bald dome of his head.

'Uh-huh,' he said, and clicked the light off.

'Does that mean you know what's wrong with it?' Kevin asked.

'Nope,' Pop Merrill said, and snapped the Sun's film compartment, now empty, closed. 'Don't have a clue.' And before Kevin could say anything else, the clocks began to strike four o'clock, and for a few moments conversation, although possible, seemed absurd.

I want to think it over, he had told his father on the evening he had turned fifteen - three days ago now - and it was a statement which had surprised both of them. As a child he had made a career of not thinking about things, and Mr Delevan had in his heart of hearts come to believe Kevin never would think about things, whether he ought to or not. They had been seduced, as fathers and sons often are, by the idea that their behavior and very different modes of thinking would never change, thus fixing their relationship eternally ... and childhood would thus go on forever. I want to think it over: there was a world of potential change implicit in that statement.

Further, as a human being who had gone through his life to that point making most decisions on instinct rather than reason (and he was one of those lucky ones whose instincts were almost always good - the sort of person, in other words, who drives reasonable people mad), Kevin was surprised and intrigued to find that he was actually on the Horns of a Dilemma.

Horn #1: he had wanted a Polaroid camera and he had gotten one for his birthday, but, dammit, he had wanted a Polaroid camera that worked.

Horn #2: he was deeply intrigued by Meg's use of the word supernatural.

His younger sister had a daffy streak a mile wide, but she wasn't stupid, and Kevin didn't think she had used the word lightly or thoughtlessly. His father, who was of the Reasonable rather than Instinctive tribe, had scoffed, but Kevin found he wasn't ready to go and do likewise . . . at least, not yet. That word. That fascinating, exotic word. It became a plinth which his mind couldn't help circling.

I think it's a Manifestation.

Kevin was amused (and a little chagrined) that only Meg had been smart enough - or brave enough - to actually say what should have occurred to all of them, given the oddity of the pictures the Sun produced, but in truth, it wasn't really that amazing. They were not a religious family; they went to church on the Christmas Day every third year when Aunt Hilda came to spend the holiday with them instead of her other remaining relatives, but except for the occasional wedding or funeral, that was about all. If any of them truly believed in the invisible world it was Megan, who couldn't get enough of walking corpses, living dolls, and cars that came to life and ran down people they didn't like.

Neither of Kevin's parents had much taste for the bizarre. They didn't read their horoscopes in the daily paper; they would never mistake comets or falling stars for signs from the Almighty; where one couple might see the face of Jesus on the bottom of an enchilada, John and Mary Delevan would see only an overcooked enchilada. It was not surprising that Kevin, who had never seen the man in the moon because neither mother nor father had bothered to point it out to him, had been likewise unable to see the possibility of a supernatural Manifestation in a camera which took the same picture over and over again, inside or outside, even in the dark of his bedroom closet, until it was suggested to him by his sister, who had once written a fan-letter to Jason and gotten an autographed glossy photo of a guy in a bloodstained hockey mask by return mail.

Once the possibility had been pointed out, it became difficult to unthink; as Dostoyevsky, that smart old Russian, once said to his little brother when the two of them were both smart young Russians, try to spend the next thirty seconds not thinking of a blue-eyed polar bear.

It was hard to do.