Four Past Midnight

  "Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?"

  "I think so," Pop said. "They're a little bit different, ain't they? Not much, but a little."

  "Yeah," Kevin said. "I can see the difference in some of them, but ..."

  "Do you know which one is the first? I could prob'ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son."

  "That's easy," Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. "See the frosting?" He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture's white edging.

  "Ayup." Pop didn't spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler's velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light fell on the picture's surface.

  "That's neat!" Kevin said.

  "Ayup," Pop said again. Kevin could tell that for Pop he was no longer there. Pop was studying the picture closely.

  If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable ... and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn't what was wrong with it--that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child's swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique.

  What was wrong with the picture was the feeling that it was wrong. Kevin had remembered the sense of unease he had felt while composing his subjects for the picture he meant to take, and the ripple of gooseflesh up his back when, with the glare of the flashbulb still lighting the room, he had thought, It's mine. That was what was wrong, and as with the man in the moon you can't unsee once you've seen it, so, he was discovering, you couldn't unfeel certain feelings ... and when it came to these pictures, those feelings were bad.

  Kevin thought: It's like there was a wind-very soft, very cold-blowing out of that picture.

  For the first time, the idea that it might be something supernatural--that this was part of a Manifestation--did something more than just intrigue him. For the first time he found himself wishing he had simply let this thing go. It's mine--that was what he had thought when his finger had pushed the shutter-button for the first time. Now he found himself wondering if maybe he hadn't gotten that backward.

  I'm scared of it. Of what it's doing.

  That made him mad, and he bent over Pop Merrill's shoulder, hunting as grimly as a man who has lost a diamond in a sandpile, determined that, no matter what he saw (always supposing he should see something new, and he didn't think he would; he had studied all these photographs often enough now to believe he had seen all there was to see in them), he would look at it, study it, and under no circumstances allow himself to unsee it. Even if he could ... and a dolorous voice inside suggested very strongly that the time for unseeing was now past, possibly forever.

  What the picture showed was a large black dog in front of a white picket fence. The picket fence wasn't going to be white much longer, unless someone in that flat Polaroid world painted or at least whitewashed it. That didn't seem likely; the fence looked untended, forgotten. The tops of some pickets were broken off. Others sagged loosely outward.

  The dog was on a sidewalk in front of the fence. His hindquarters were to the viewer. His tail, long and bushy, drooped. He appeared to be smelling one of the fence-pickets--probably, Kevin thought, because the fence was what his dad called a "letter-drop," a place where many dogs would lift their legs and leave mystic yellow squirts of message before moving on.

  The dog looked like a stray to Kevin. Its coat was long and tangled and sown with burdocks. One of its ears had the crumpled look of an old battle-scar. Its shadow trailed long enough to finish outside the frame on the weedy, patchy lawn inside the picket fence. The shadow made Kevin think the picture had been taken not long after dawn or not long before sunset; with no idea of the direction the photographer (what photographer, ha-ha) had been facing, it was impossible to tell which, just that he (or she) must have been standing only a few degrees shy of due east or west.

  There was something in the grass at the far left of the picture which looked like a child's red rubber ball. It was inside the fence, and enough behind one of the lackluster clumps of grass so it was hard to tell.

  And that was all.

  "Do you recognize anything?" Pop asked, cruising his magnifying glass slowly back and forth over the photo's surface. Now the dog's hindquarters swelled to the size of hillocks tangled with wild and ominously exotic black undergrowth; now three or four of the scaly pickets became the size of old telephone poles; now, suddenly, the object behind the clump of grass clearly became a child's ball (although under Pop's glass it was as big as a soccer ball): Kevin could even see the stars which girdled its middle in upraised rubber lines. So something new was revealed under Pop's glass, and in a few moments Kevin would see something else himself, without it. But that was later.

  "Jeez, no," Kevin said. "How could I, Mr. Merrill?"

  "Because there are things here," Pop said patiently. His glass went on cruising. Kevin thought of a movie he had seen once where the cops sent out a searchlight-equipped helicopter to look for escaped prisoners. "A dog, a sidewalk, a picket fence that needs paintin or takin down, a lawn that needs tendin. The sidewalk ain't much--you can't even see all of it--and the house, even the foundation, ain't in the frame, but what I mean to say is there's that dog. You recognize it?"

  "No."

  "The fence?"

  "No."

  "What about that red rubber ball? What about that, son?"

  "No ... but you look like you think I should."

  "I look like I thought you might," Pop said. "You never had a ball like that when you were a tyke?"

  "Not that I remember, no."

  "You got a sister, you said."

  "Megan."

  "She never had a ball like that?"

  "I don't think so. I never took that much interest in Meg's toys. She had a BoLo bouncer once, and the ball on the end of it was red, but a different shade. Darker."

  "Ayuh. I know what a ball like that looks like. This ain't one. And that mightn't be your lawn?"

  "Jes--I mean jeepers, no." Kevin felt a little offended. He and his dad took good care of the lawn around their house. It was a deep green and would stay that way, even under the fallen leaves, until at least mid-October. "We don't have a picket fence, anyway." And if we did, he thought, it wouldn't look like that mess.

  Pop let go of the switch in the base of the magnifying glass, placed it on the square of jeweler's velvet, and with a care which approached reverence folded the sides over it. He returned it to its former place in the drawer and closed the drawer. He looked at Kevin closely. He had put his pipe aside, and there was now no smoke to obscure his eyes, which were still sharp but not twinkling anymore.

  "What I mean to say is, could it have been your house before you owned it, do you think? Ten years ago--"

  "We owned it ten years ago," Kevin replied, bewildered.

  "Well, twenty? Thirty? What I mean to say, do you recognize how the land lies? Looks like it climbs a little."

  "Our front lawn--" He thought deeply, then shook his head. "No, ours is flat. If it does anything, it goes down a little. Maybe that's why
the cellar ships a little water in a wet spring."

  "Ayuh, ayuh, could be. What about the back lawn?"

  "There's no sidewalk back there," Kevin said. "And on the sides--" He broke off. "You're trying to find out if my camera's taking pictures of the past!" he said, and for the first time he was really, actively frightened. He rubbed his 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. "Fucking 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 I.

  "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 boosom, 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 ring-meat 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 by accident. Now your pitchers of flyin saucers and that Lock Nest Monster, they almost always show up in the other kind. The kind some smart fella can get up to didos with in a darkroom."

  He dropped Kevin a third wink, expressing all the didos (whatever they were) an unscrupulous photographer might get up to in a well-equipped darkroom.

  Kevin thought of asking Pop if it was possible someone could get up to didos with a weegee and decided to continue keeping his mouth shut. It
still seemed by far the wisest course.

  "All by way of sayin I thought I'd ask if you saw somethin you knew in these Polaroid pitchers."

  "I don't, though," Kevin said so earnestly that he believed Pop would believe he was lying, as his mom always did when he made the tactical mistake of even controlled vehemence.

  "Ayuh, ayuh," Pop said, believing him so dismissively Kevin was almost irritated.

  "Well," Kevin said after a moment which was silent except for the fifty thousand ticking clocks, "I guess that's it, huh?"

  "Maybe not," Pop said. "What I mean to say is I got me a little idear. You mind takin some more pitchers with that camera?"

  "What good is it? They're all the same."

  "That's the point. They ain't."

  Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it.

  "I'll even chip in for the film," Pop said, and when he saw the amazed look on Kevin's face he quickly qualified: "A little, anyway."

  "How many pictures would you want?"

  "Well, you got ... what? Twenty-eight already, is that right?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Thirty more," Pop said after a moment's thought.

  "Why?"

  "Ain't gonna tell you. Not right now." He produced a heavy purse that was hooked to a belt-loop on a steel chain. He opened it and took out a ten-dollar bill, hesitated, and added two ones with obvious reluctance. "Guess that'd cover half of it."

  Yeah, right, Kevin thought.

  "If you really are int'rested in the trick that camera's doing, I guess you'd pony up the rest, wouldn't you?" Pop's eyes gleamed at him like the eyes of an old, curious cat.

  Kevin understood the man did more than expect him to say yes; to Pop it was inconceivable that he could say no. Kevin thought, If I said no he wouldn't hear it; he'd say "Good, that's agreed, then, " and I'd end up back on the sidewalk with his money in my pocket whether I wanted it or not.

  And he did have his birthday money.

  All the same, there was that chill wind to think about. That wind that seemed to blow not from the surface but right out of those photographs in spite of their deceptively flat, deceptively shiny surfaces. He felt that wind coming from them despite their mute declaration which averred We are Polaroids, and for no reason we can tell or even understand, we show only the undramatic surfaces of things. That wind was there. What about that wind?