Four Past Midnight

tongue on the roof of his mouth and seemed to taste metal.

'I was just askin.' Pop rapped his fingers beside the photographs, and when he spoke, it seemed to be more to himself than to Kevin. 'You know,' he said, 'some goddam funny things seem to happen from time to time with two gadgets we've come to take pretty much for granted. I ain't sayin they do happen; only if they don't, there are a lot of liars and out-n-out hoaxers in the world.'

'What gadgets?'

'Tape recorders and Polaroid cameras,' Pop said, still seeming to talk to the pictures, or himself, and there was no Kevin in this dusty clock-drumming space at the back of the Emporium Galorium at all. 'Take tape recorders. Do you know how many people claim to have recorded the voices of dead folks on tape recorders?'

'No,' Kevin said. He didn't particularly mean for his own voice to come out hushed, but it did; he didn't seem to have a whole lot of air in his lungs to speak with, for some reason or other.

'Me neither,' Pop said, stirring the photographs with one finger. It was blunt and gnarled, a finger which looked made for rude and clumsy motions and operations, for poking people and knocking vases off endtables and causing nosebleeds if it tried to do so much as hook a humble chunk of dried snot from one of its owner's nostrils. Yet Kevin had watched the man's hands and thought there was probably more grace in that one finger than in his sister Meg's entire body (and maybe in his own; Clan Delevan was not known for its lightfootedness or handedness, which was probably one reason why he thought that image of his father so nimbly catching his mother on the way down had stuck with him, and might forever). Pop Merrill's finger looked as if it would at any moment sweep all the photographs onto the floor - by mistake; this sort of clumsy finger would always poke and knock and tweak by mistake - but it did not. The Polaroids seemed to barely stir in response to its restless movements.

Supernatural, Kevin thought again, and shivered a little. An actual shiver, surprising and dismaying and a little embarrassing even if Pop had not seen it.

'But there's even a way they do it,' Pop said, and then, as if Kevin had asked: 'Who? Damn if I know. I guess some of them are 'psychic investigators,' or at least call themselves that or some such, but I guess it's more'n likely most of em are just playin around, like folks that use Ouija Boards at parties.'

He looked up at Kevin grimly, as if rediscovering him.

'You got a Ouija, son?'

'No.'

'Ever played with one?'

'No.'

'Don't,' Pop said more grimly than ever. 'Fuckin things are dangerous.'

Kevin didn't dare tell the old man he hadn't the slightest idea what a weegee board was.

'Anyway, they set up a tape machine to record in an empty room. It's supposed to be an old house, is what I mean to say, one with a History, if they can find it. Do you know what I mean when I say a house with a History, son?'

'I guess ... like a haunted house?' Kevin hazarded. He found he was sweating lightly, as he had done last year every time Mrs Whittaker announced a pop quiz in Algebra 1.

'Well, that'll do. These ... people ... like it best if it's a house with a Violent History, but they'll take what they can get. Anyhow, they set up the machine and record that empty room. Then, the next day - they always do it at night is what I mean to say, they ain't happy unless they can do it at night, and midnight if they can get it - the next day they play her back.'

'An empty room?'

'Sometimes,' Pop said in a musing voice that might or might not have disguised some deeper feeling, 'there are voices.'

Kevin shivered again. There were hieroglyphics on the plinth after all. Nothing you'd want to read, but ... yeah. They were there.

'Real voices?'

'Usually imagination,' Pop said dismissively. 'But once or twice I've heard people I trust say they've heard real voices.'

'But you never have?'

'Once,' Pop said shortly, and said nothing else for so long Kevin was beginning to think he was done when he added, 'It was one word. Clear as a bell. 'Twas recorded in the parlor of an empty house in Bath. Man killed his wife there in 1946.'

'What was the word?' Kevin asked, knowing he would not be told just as surely as he knew no power on earth, certainly not his own willpower, could have kept him from asking.

But Pop did tell.

'Basin.'

Kevin blinked. 'Basin?'

'Ayuh.'

'That doesn't mean anything.'

'It might,' Pop said calmly, 'if you know he cut her throat and then held her head over a basin to catch the blood.'

'Oh my God!'

'Ayuh.'

'Oh my God, really?'

Pop didn't bother answering that.

'It couldn't have been a fake?'

Pop gestured with the stem of his pipe at the Polaroids. 'Are those?'

'Oh my God.'

'Polaroids, now,' Pop said, like a narrator moving briskly to a new chapter in a novel and reading the words Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, 'I've seen pitchers with people in em that the other people in the pitcher swear weren't there with em when the pitcher was taken. And there's one - this is a famous one - that a lady took over in England. What she did was snap a pitcher of some fox-hunters comin back home at the end of the day. You see em, about twenty in all, comin over a little wooden bridge. It's a tree-lined country road on both sides of that bridge. The ones in front are off the bridge already. And over on the right of the pitcher, standin by the road, there's a lady in a long dress and a hat with a veil on it so you can't see her face and she's got her pocketbook over her arm. Why, you can even see she's wearin a locket on her bosom, or maybe it's a watch.

'Well, when the lady that took the pitcher saw it, she got wicked upset, and wasn't nobody could blame her, son, because what I mean to say is she meant to take a pitcher of those fox-hunters comin home and no one else, because there wasn't nobody else there. Except in the pitcher there is. And when you look real close, it seems like you can see the trees right through that lady.'

He's making all this up, putting me on, and when I leave he'll have a great big horselaugh, Kevin thought, knowing Pop Merrill was doing nothing of the sort.

'The lady that took that pitcher was stayin at one of those big English homes like they have on the education-TV shows, and when she showed that pitcher, I heard the man of the house fainted dead away. That part could be made up. Prob'ly is. Sounds made up, don't it? But I seen that pitcher in an article next to a painted portrait of that fella's great-grandmother, and it could be her, all right. Can't tell for certain because of the veil. But it could be.'

'Could be a hoax, too,' Kevin said faintly.

'Could be,' Pop said indifferently. 'People get up to all sorts of didos. Lookit my nephew, there, for instance, Ace.' Pop's nose wrinkled. 'Doin four years in Shawshank, and for what? Bustin into The Mellow Tiger. He got up to didos and Sheriff Pangborn. slammed him in the jug for it. Little ringmeat got just what he deserved.'

Kevin, displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, said nothing.

'But when ghosts show up in photographs, son - or, like you say, what people claim to be ghosts - it's almost always in Polaroid photographs. And it almost always seems to be