Four Past Midnight

kill him first, proclaimed that it wanted to kill him first, but after that?

Why, after Kevin, anyone would do.

Anyone at all.

In a way it was like another game you played when you were a little kid, wasn't it? It was like Giant Step. The dog had been walking along the fence. The dog had heard the Polaroid, that squidgy little whine. It turned, and saw ... what? Its own world or universe? A world or universe enough like its own so it saw or sensed it could or at least might be able to live and hunt here? It didn't matter. Now, every time someone took a picture of it, the dog would get closer. It would get closer and closer until ... well, until what? Until it burst through, somehow?

'That's stupid,' he muttered. 'It'd never fit.'

'What?' his father asked, roused from his own musings.

'Nothing,' Kevin said. 'I was just talking to myse -'

Then, from downstairs, muffled but audible, they heard Pop Merrill cry out in mingled dismay, irritation, and surprise: 'Well shit fire and save matches! Goddammit!'

Kevin and his father looked at each other, startled.

'Let's go see what happened,' his father said, and got up. 'I hope he didn't fall down and break his arm, or something. I mean, part of me does hope it, but ... you know.'

Kevin thought: What if he's been taking pictures? What if that dog's down there?

It hadn't sounded like fear in the old man's voice, and of course there really was no way a dog that looked as big as a medium-sized German shepherd could come through either a camera the size of the Sun 660 or one of the prints it made. You might as well try to drag a washing machine through a knothole.

Still, he felt fear enough for both of them - for all three of them - as he followed his father back down the stairs to the gloomy bazaar below.

Going down the stairs, Pop Merrill was as happy as a clam at high tide.

He had been prepared to make the switch right in front of them if he had to. Might have been a problem if it had just been the boy, who was still a year or so away from thinking he knew everything, but the boy's dad - ah, fooling that fine fellow would have been like stealing a bottle from a baby. Had he told the boy about the jam he'd gotten into that time? From the way the boy looked at him - a new, cautious way - Pop thought Delevan probably had. And what else had the father told the son? Well, let's see. Does he let you call him Pop? That means he's planning to pull a fast one on you. That was for starters. He's a lowdown snake in the grass, son. That was for seconds. And, of course, there was the prize of them all: Let me do the talking, boy. I know him better than you do. You just let me handle everything. Men like Delevan were to Pop Merrill what a nice platter of fried chicken was to some folks - tender, tasty, juicy, and all but falling off the bone. Once Delevan had been little more than a kid himself, and he would never fully understand that it wasn't Pop who had stuck his tit in the wringer but he himself. The man could have gone to his wife and she would have tapped that old biddy aunt of hers whose tight little ass was lined with hundred-dollar bills, and Delevan would have spent some time in the doghouse, but she would have let him out in time. He not only hadn't seen it that way; he hadn't seen it at all. And now, for no reason but idiot time, which came and went without any help from anyone, he thought he knew all there was to know about Reginald Marion Merrill.

Which was just the way Pop liked it.

Why, he could have swapped one camera for the other right in front of the man instead and Delevan never would have seen a goddamned thing - that was how sure he was he had old Pop figured out.

But this was better.

You never ever asked Lady Luck for a date; she had a way of standing men up just when they needed her the most. But if she showed up on her own ... well, it was wise to drop whatever it was you were doing and take her out and wine her and dine her just as lavishly as you could. That was one bitch who always put out if you treated her right.

So he went quickly to the worktable, bent, and extracted the Polaroid 660 with the broken lens from the shadows underneath. He put it on the table, fished a key-ring from his pocket (with one quick glance over his shoulder to be sure neither of them had decided to come down after all), and selected the small key which opened the locked drawer that formed the entire left side of the table. In this deep drawer were a number of gold Krugerrands; a stamp album in which the least valuable stamp was worth six hundred dollars in the latest Scott Stamp Catalogue; a coin collection worth approximately nineteen thousand dollars; two dozen glossy photographs of a bleary-eyed woman having sexual congress with a Shetland pony; and an amount of cash totalling just over two thousand dollars.

The cash, which he stowed in a variety of tin cans, was Pop's loan-out money. John Delevan would have recognized the bills. They were all crumpled tens.

Pop deposited Kevin's Sun 660 in this drawer, locked it, and put his key-ring back in his pocket. Then he pushed the camera with the broken lens off the edge of the worktable (again) and cried out 'Well shit fire and save matches! Goddammit!' loud enough for them to hear.

Then he arranged his face in the proper expression of dismay and chagrin and waited for them to come running to see what had happened.

'Pop?' Kevin cried. 'Mr Merrill? Are you okay?'

'Ayuh,' he said. 'Didn't hurt nothin but my goddam pride. That camera's just bad luck, I guess. I bent over to open the tool-drawer, is what I mean to say, and I knocked the fuckin thing right off onto the floor. Only I guess it didn't come through s'well this time. I dunno if I should say I'm sorry or not. I mean, you was gonna -'

He held the camera apologetically out to Kevin, who took it, looked at the broken lens and shattered plastic of the housing around it. 'No, it's okay,' Kevin told him, turning the camera over in his hands - but he did not handle it in the same gingerly, tentative way he had before: as if it might really be constructed not of plastic and glass but some sort of explosive. 'I meant to bust it up, anyhow.'

'Guess I saved you the trouble.'

'I'd feel better -' Kevin began.

'Ayuh, ayuh. I feel the same way about mice. Laugh if you want to, but when I catch one in a trap and it's dead, I beat it with a broom anyway. just to be sure, is what I mean to say.'

Kevin smiled faintly, then looked at his father. 'He said he's got a chopping block out back, Dad -'

'Got a pretty good sledge in the shed, too, if ain't nobody took it.'

'Do you mind, Dad?'

'It's your camera, Kev,' Delevan said. He flicked a distrustful glance at Pop, but it was a glance that said he distrusted Pop on general principles, and not for any specific reason. 'But if it will make you feel any better, I think it's the right decision.'

'Good,' Kevin said. He felt a tremendous weight go off his shoulders - no, it was from his heart that the weight was lifted. With the lens broken, the camera was surely useless ... but he wouldn't feel really at ease until he saw it in fragments around Pop's chopping block. He turned it over in his hands, front to back and back to front, amused and amazed at how much he liked the broken way it looked and felt.

'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 that 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 idea to burn the pitchers themselves. You could do it right in my stove.'