Four Past Midnight

Pop looked around the parlor. It was like the old lady's room in a horror movie he'd watched once on his VCR - a piece of claptrap called Burnt Offerings, where this big old beefy fella tried to drown his son in the swimming pool but nobody even took their clothes off. That lady's room had been filled, overfilled, actually stuffed with old and new photographs. They sat on the

tables and the mantel in every sort of frame; they covered so much of the walls you couldn't even tell what the pattern on the frigging paper was supposed to be.

The Pus Sisters' parlor wasn't quite that bad, but there were still plenty of photographs; maybe as many as a hundred and fifty, which seemed like three times that many in a room as small and dim as this one. Pop had been here often enough to notice most of them at least in passing, and he knew others even better than that, for he had been the one to sell them to Eleusippus and Meleusippus.

They had a great many more 'ghost photographs,' as Eleusippus Deere called them, perhaps as many as a thousand in all, but apparently even they had realized a room the size of their parlor was limited in terms of display-space, if not in those of taste. The rest of the ghost photographs were distributed among the mansion's other fourteen rooms. Pop had seen them all. He was one of the fortunate few who had been granted what the Pus Sisters called, with simple grandiosity, The Tour. But it was here in the parlor that they kept their prize 'ghost photographs,' with the prize of prizes attracting the eye by the simple fact that it stood in solitary splendor atop the closed Steinway baby grand by the bow windows. In it, a corpse was levitating from its coffin before fifty or sixty horrified mourners. It was a fake, of course. A child of ten - hell, a child of eight - would have known it was a fake. It made the photographs of the dancing elves which had so bewitched poor Arthur Conan Doyle near the end of his life look accomplished by comparison. In fact, as Pop ranged his eye about the room, he saw only two photographs that weren't obvious fakes. It would take closer study to see how the trickery had been worked in those. Yet these two ancient pussies, who had collected 'ghost photographs' all their lives and claimed to be great experts in the field, acted like a couple of teenage girls at a horror movie when he showed them not just a paranormal photograph but a goddam Jesus-jumping paranormal camera that didn't just do its trick once and then quit, like the one that had taken the picture of the ghost-lady watching the fox-hunters come home, but one that did it again and again and again, and how much had they spent on this stuff that was nothing but claptrap? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of

'-show us?' Meleusippus was asking him.

Pop Merrill forced his lips to turn up in what must have been at least a reasonable imitation of his Folksy Crackerbarrel Smile, because they registered no surprise or distrust.

'Pardon me, dear lady,' Pop said. 'M'mind went woolgatherin all on its own for a minute or two there. I guess it happens to all of us as we get on.'

'We're eighty-three, and our minds are as clear as window-glass,' Eleusippus said with clear disapproval.

'Freshly washed window-glass,' Meleusippus added. 'I asked if you have some new photographs you would care to show us ... once you've put that wretched thing away, of course.'

'It's been ages since we saw any really good new ones,' Eleusippus said, lighting a fresh Camel.

'We went to The New England Psychic and Tarot Convention in Providence last month,' Meleusippus said, 'and while the lectures were enlightening'

'and uplifting -'

'so many of the photographs were arrant fakes! Even a child of ten -' of seven! -'

'could have seen through them. So '. Meleusippus paused. Her face assumed an expression of perplexity which looked as if it might hurt (the muscles of her face having long since atrophied into expressions of mild pleasure and serene knowledge). 'I am puzzled. Mr Merrill, I must admit to being a bit puzzled.'

'I was about to say the same thing,' Eleusippus said.

'Why did you bring that awful thing?' Meleusippus and Eleusippus asked in perfect two-part harmony, spoiled only by the nicotine rasp of their voices.

The urge Pop felt to say Because I didn't know what a pair of chickenshit old cunts you two were was so strong that for one horrified second he believed he had said it, and he quailed, waiting for the twin screams of outrage to rise in the dim and hallowed confines of the parlor, screams which would rise like the squeal of rusty bandsaws biting into tough pine-knots, and go on rising until the glass in the frame of every bogus picture in the room shattered in an agony of vibration.

The idea that he had spoken such a terrible thought aloud lasted only a split-second, but when he relived it on later wakeful nights while the clocks rustled sleepily below (and while Kevin Delevan's Polaroid crouched sleeplessly in the locked drawer of the worktable), it seemed much longer. In those sleepless hours, he sometimes found himself wishing he had said it, and wondered if he was maybe losing his mind.

What he did do was react with speed and a canny instinct for selfpreservation that were nearly noble. To blow up at the Pus Sisters would give him immense gratification, but it would, unfortunately, be short-lived gratification. If he buttered them up - which was exactly what they expected, since they had been basted in butter all their fives (although it hadn't done a goddam thing for their skins) - he could perhaps sell them another three or four thousand dollars' worth of claptrap 'ghost photographs,' if they continued to elude the lung cancer which should surely have claimed one or both at least a dozen years ago.

And there were, after all, other Mad Hatters in Pop's mental file, although not quite so many as he'd thought on the day he'd set off to see Cedric McCarty. A little checking had revealed that two had died and one was currently learning how to weave baskets in a posh northern California retreat which catered to the incredibly rich who also happened to have gone hopelessly insane.

'Actually,' he said, 'I brought the camera out so you ladies could look at it. What I mean to say,' he hastened on, observing their expressions of consternation, 'is I know how much experience you ladies have in this field.'

Consternation turned to gratification; the sisters exchanged smug, comfy looks, and Pop found himself wishing he could douse a couple of their goddam packs of Camels with barbecue lighter fluid and jam them up their tight little old-maid asses and then strike a match. They'd smoke then, all right. They'd smoke just like plugged chimneys, was what he meant to say.

'I thought you might have some advice on what I should do with the camera, is what I mean to say,' he finished.

'Destroy it,' Eleusippus said immediately.

'I'd use dynamite,' Meleusippus said.

'Acid first, then dynamite,' Eleusippus said.

'Right,' Meleusippus finished. 'It's dangerous. You don't have to look at that devil-dog to know that.' She did look, though; they both did, and identical expressions of revulsion and fear crossed their faces.

'You can feel eeevil coming out of it,' Eleusippus said in a voice of such portentousness that it should have been laughable, like a high-school girl playing a witch in Macbeth, but which somehow wasn't. 'Destroy it, Mr Merrill. Before something awful happens. Before - perhaps, you'll notice I only say perhaps - it destroys you.'

'Now, now,' Pop said, annoyed to find he felt just a little uneasy in spite of himself, 'that's drawing it a little strong. It's just a camera, is what I mean to say.'

Eleusippus Deere said quietly: 'And the planchette that put out poor Colette Simineaux's eye a few years ago - that was nothing but a piece of fiberboard.'

'At least until those foolish, foolish, foolish people put their fingers on it and woke it up,' Meleusippus said, more quietly still.

There seemed nothing left to say. Pop picked up the camera - careful to do so by the strap, not touching the actual camera itself, although he told himself this was just for the benefit of these two old pussies - and stood.