Bet you wish it'd been your turn in the puckies, don't you, son? the gamewarden had asked, ruffling Kevin's hair (he had been twelve then, the growth spurt which had begun about seventeen months ago and which had so far taken him to just an inch under six feet still a year away ... which meant he had not been big enough to be resentful of a man who wanted to ruffle his hair). Kevin had nodded, keeping his secret to himself. he was glad it hadn't been his turn in the puckies, his the rifle which must be responsible for throwing the slug or not throwing it ... and, if he had turned out to have the courage to do the shooting, his reward would have been only another troublesome responsibility to shoot the buck clean. He didn't know if he could have mustered the courage to put another bullet in the thing if the kill wasn't clean, or the strength to chase the trail of its blood and steaming, startled droppings and finish what he had started if it ran. He had smiled up at the gamewarden and nodded and his dad had snapped a picture of that, and there had never been any need to tell his dad that the thought going on behind that upturned brow and under the gamewarden's ruffling hand had been No. I don't wish it. The world is full of tests, but twelve's too young to go hunting them. I'm glad it was Mr Roberson. I'm not ready yet to try a man's tests. But now he was the one in the blind, wasn't he? And the animal was coming, wasn't it? And it was no harmless eater of grasses this time, was it? This was a killing engine big enough and mean enough to swallow a tiger whole, and it meant to kill him, and that was only for starters, and he was the only one that could stop it. The thought of turning the Polaroid over to his father crossed his mind, but only momentarily. Something deep inside himself knew the truth to pass the camera would be tantamount to murdering his father and committing suicide himself. His father believed something, but that wasn't specific enough. The camera wouldn't work for his father even if his father managed to break out of his current stunned condition and press the shutter. It would only work for him. So he waited on the test, peering through the viewfinder of the camera as if it were the gunsight of a rifle, peering at the photograph as it continued to spread and force that shiny, liquescent bubble wider and wider and higher and higher. Then the actual birthing of the Sun dog into this world began to happen. The camera seemed to gain weight and turn to lead as the thing roared again with a sound like a whiplash loaded with steel shot. The camera trembled in his hands and he could feel his wet, slippery fingers simply wanting to uncurl and let go. He held on, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a sick and desperate grin. Sweat ran into one eye, momentarily doubling his vision. He threw his head back, snapping his hair off his forehead and out of his eyebrows, and then nestled his staring eye back into the viewfinder as a great ripping sound, like heavy cloth being torn in half by strong, slow hands, filled the Emporium Galorium. The shiny surface of the bubble tore open. Red smoke, like the blast from a tea kettle set in front of red neon, billowed out. The thing roared again, an angry, homicidal sound. A gigantic jaw, filled with croggled teeth, burst up through the shrivelling membrane of the nowcollapsing bubble like the jaw of a breaching pilot whale. It ripped and chewed and gnawed at the membrane, which gave way with gummy splattering sounds. The clocks struck wildly, crazily. His father grabbed him again, so hard that Kevin's teeth rapped against the plastic body of the camera and it came within a hair of spilling out of his hands and shattering on the floor. 'Shoot it!' his father screamed over the thing's bellowing din. 'Shoot it, Kevin, if you can shoot it, SHOOT IT Now, Christ Jesus, it's going to ' Kevin yanked away from his father's hand. 'Not yet,' he said. 'Not just y' The thing screamed at the sound of Kevin's voice. The Sun dog lunged up from wherever it was, driving the picture still wider. It gave and stretched with a groaning sound. This was replaced by the thick cough of ripping fabric again. And suddenly the Sun dog was up, its head rising black and rough and tangled through the hole in reality like some weird periscope which was all tangled metal and glittering, glaring lenses ... except it wasn't metal but that twisted, spiky fur Kevin was looking at, and those were not lenses but the thing's insane, raging eyes. It caught at the neck, the spines of its pelt shredding the edges of the hole it had made into a strange sunburst pattern. It roared again, and sickly yellowred fire licked out of its mouth. John Delevan took a step backward and struck a table overloaded with thick copies of Weird Tales and Fantastic Universe. The table tilted and Mr Delevan flailed helplessly against it, his heels first rocking back and then shooting out from under him. Man and table went over with a crash. The Sun dog roared again, then dipped its head with an unsuspected delicacy and tore at the membrane which held it. The membrane ripped. The thing barked out a thin stream of fire which ignited the membrane and turned it to ash. The beast lunged upward again and Kevin saw that the thing on the tie around its neck was no longer a tieclasp but the spoonshaped tool which Pop Merrill had used to clean his pipe. In that moment a clean calmness fell over the boy. His father bellowed in surprise and fear as he tried to untangle himself from the table he had fallen over, but Kevin took no notice. The cry seemed to come from a great distance away. It's all right, Dad, he thought, fixing the struggling, emerging beast more firmly in the viewfinder. It's all right, don't you see? It can be all right, anyway ... because the charm it wears has changed. He thought that perhaps the Sun dog had its master, too, and its master had realized that Kevin was no longer sure prey. And perhaps there was a dogcatcher in that strange nowhere town of Polaroidsville; there must be, else why had the fat woman been in his dream? It was the fat woman who had told him what he must do, either on her own or because that dogcatcher had put her there for him to see and notice the twodimensional fat woman with her twodimensional shoppingcart full of twodimensional cameras. Be careful, boy. Pop's dog broke his leash and he's a mean 'un ... It's hard to take his pitcher, but you can't do it at all, 'less you have a cam'ra. And now he had his camera, didn't he? It was not sure, not by any means, but at least he had it. The dog paused, head turning almost aimlessly ... until its muddy, burning gaze settled on Kevin Delevan. Its black lips peeled back from its corkscrewed boar's fangs, its muzzle opened to reveal the smoking channel of its throat, and it gave a high, drilling howl of fury. The ancient hanging globes that lit Pop's place at night shattered one after another in rows, sending down spinning shards of frosted flybeshitted glass. It lunged, its broad, panting chest bursting through the membrane between the worlds. Kevin's finger settled on the Polaroid's trigger. It lunged again, and now its front legs popped free, and those cruel spurs of bone, so like gigantic thorns, scraped and scrabbled for purchase on the desk. They dug long vertical scars in the heavy rockmaple. Kevin could hear the dusky thudandscratch of its pistoning rear legs digging for a grip down there (wherever down there was), and he knew that this was the final short stretch of seconds in which it would be trapped and at his mercy; the next convulsive lunge would send it flying over the desk, and once free of the hole through which it was squirming, it would move as fast as liquid death, charging across the space between them, setting his pants ablaze with its fiery breath splitseconds before it tore into his warm innards. Very clearly, Kevin instructed 'Say cheese, you motherfucker.' And triggered the Polaroid. CHAPTER 24 The flash was so bright that Kevin could not conceive of it later; could, in fact, barely remember it at all. The camera he was holding did not grow hot and melt; instead there were three or four quick, decisive breaking sounds from inside it as its groundglass lenses burst and its springs either snapped or simply disintegrated. In the white afterglare he saw the Sun dog frozen, a perfect blackandwhite Polaroid photograph, its head thrown back, every twisting fold and crevasse in its wildly bushedout fur caught like the complicated topography of a dry rivervalley. Its teeth shone, no longer subtly shaded yellow but as white and nasty as old bones in that sterile emptiness where water had quit running millennia ago. Its single swollen eye, robbed of the dark and bloody porthole of iris by the merciless flash, was as white as an eye in the head of a Greek bust. Smoking snot drizzled from its flared nostrils and ran like hot lava in the narrow gutters between its rolledback muzzle and its gums. It was like a negative of all the Polaroids Kevin had ever seen blackandwhite instead of color, and in three dimensions instead of two. And it was like watching a living creature turned instantly to stone by a careless look at the head of Medusa. 'You're done, you son of a bitch!' Kevin screamed in a cracked, hysterical voice, and as if in agreement, the thing's frozen forelegs lost their hold on the desk and it began to disappear, first slowly and then rapidly, into the hole from which it had come. It went with a rocky coughing sound, like a landslide. What would I see if I ran over now and looked into that hole? he wondered incoherently. Would I see that house, that fence, the old man with his shoppingcart, staring with wideeyed wonder at the face of a giant, not a boy but a Boy, staring back at him from a torn and charred hole in the hazy sky? Would it suck me in? What? Instead, he dropped the Polaroid and raised his hands to his face. Only John Delevan, lying on the floor, saw the final act the twisted, dead membrane shrivelling in on itself, pulling into a complicated but unimportant node around the hole, crumpling there, and then falling (or being inhaled) into itself. There was a whooping sound of air, which rose from a broad gasp to a thin teakettle whistle. Then it turned insideout and was gone. Simply gone, as if it had never been. Getting slowly and shakily to his feet, Mr Delevan saw that the final inrush (or outrush, he supposed, depending on which side of that hole you were on) of air had pulled the deskblotter and the other Polaroids the old man had taken in with it. His son was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands over his face, weeping. 'Kevin,' he said quietly, and put his arms around his boy. 'I had to take its picture,' Kevin said through his tears and through his hands. 'It was the only way to get rid of it. I had to take the rotten whoredog's picture. That's what I mean to say.' 'Yes.' He hugged him tighter. 'Yes, and you did it.' Kevin looked at his father with naked, streaming eyes. 'That's how I had to shoot it, Dad. Do you see?' 'Yes,' his father said. 'Yes, I see that.' He kissed Kevin's hot cheek again. 'Let's go home, son.' He tightened his grip around Kevin's shoulders, wanting to lead him toward the door and away from the smoking, bloody body of the old man (Kevin hadn't really noticed yet, Mr Delevan thought, but if they spent much longer here, he would), and for a moment Kevin resisted him. 'What are people going to say?' Kevin asked, and his tone was so prim and spinsterish that Mr Delevan laughed in spite of his own sizzling nerves. 'Let them say whatever they want,' he told Kevin. 'They'll never get within shouting distance of the truth, and I don't think anyone will try very hard, anyway.' He paused. 'No one really liked him much, you know.' 'I never want to be in shouting distance of the truth,' Kevin whispered. 'Let's go home.' 'Yes. I love you, Kevin.' 'I love you, too,' Kevin said hoarsely, and they went out of the smoke and the stink of old things best left forgotten and into the bright light of day. EPILOGUE It was Kevin Delevan's sixteenth birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted a WordStar 70 PC and word processer. It was a seventeenhundreddollar toy, and his parents could never have afforded it in the old days, but in January, about three months after that final confrontation in the Emporium Galorium, Aunt Hilda had died quietly in her sleep. She had indeed Done Something for Kevin and Meg; had, in fact, Done Quite a Lot for the Whole Family. When the will cleared probate in early june, the Delevans found themselves richer by nearly seventy thousand dollars ... and that was after taxes, not before. 'Jeez, it's neat! Thank you!' Kevin cried, and kissed his mother, his father, and even his sister, Meg (who giggled but, being a year older, made no attempt to rub it off; Kevin couldn't decide if this change was a step in the right direction or not). He spent much of the afternoon in his room, fussing over it and trying out the test program. Around four o'clock, he came downstairs and into his father's den. 'Where's Mom and Meg?' he asked. 'They've gone out to the craft fair at ... Kevin? Kevin, what's wrong?' 'You better come upstairs,' Kevin said hollowly. At the door to his room, he turned his pale face toward his father's equally pale face. There was something more to pay, Mr Delevan had been thinking as he followed his son up the stairs. Of course there was. And hadn't he also learned that from Reginald Marion 'Pop' Merrill? The debt you incurred was what hurt you. It was the interest that broke your back. 'Can we get another one of these?' Kevin asked, pointing to the laptop computer which stood open on his desk, glowing a mystic yellow oblong of light onto the blotter. 'I don't know,' Mr Delevan said, approaching the desk. Kevin stood behind him, a pallid watcher. 'I guess, if we had to He stopped, looking down at the screen. 'I booted up the wordprocessing program and typed "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog,"' Kevin said. 'Only that was what came out of the printer.' Mr Delevan stood, silently reading the hard copy. His hands and forehead felt very cold. The words there read The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It's coming for you, Kevin. The original debt was what hurt you, he thought again; it was the interest that broke your back. The last two lines read It's very hungry. And it's VERY angry. Contents The Langoliers CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 Secret Window, Secret Garden The Library Policeman CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 THE Sun Dog CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 21 CHAPTER 22 CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24 CHAPTER 1 Bad News for Captain Engle. The Little Blind Girl. The Lady's Scent. The Dalton Gang Arrives in Tombstone. The Strange Plight of Flight 29. 1 Brian Engle rolled the American Pride LIOII to a stop at Gate 22 and flicked off the FASTEN SEATBELT light at exactly 1014 P.M. He let a long sigh hiss through his teeth and unfastened his shoulder harness. He could not remember the last time he had been so relieved  and so tired  at the end of a flight. He had a nasty, pounding headache, and his plans for the evening were firmly set. No drink in the pilots' lounge, no dinner, not even a bath when he got back to Westwood. He intended to fall into bed and sleep for fourteen hours. American Pride's Flight 7  Flagship Service from Tokyo to Los Angeles  had been delayed first by strong headwinds and then by typical congestion at LAX ... which was, Engle thought, arguably America's worst airport, if you left out Logan in Boston. To make matters worse, a pressurization problem had developed during the latter part of the flight. Minor at first, it had gradually worsened until it was scary. It had almost gotten to the point where a blowout and explosive decompression could have occurred ... and had mercifully grown no worse. Sometimes such problems suddenly and mysteriously stabilized themselves, and that was what had happened this time. The passengers now disembarking just behind the control cabin had not the slightest idea how close they had come to being people pate on tonight's flight from Tokyo, but Brian knew ... and it had given him a whammer of a headache. 'This bitch goes right into diagnostic from here,' he told his copilot. 'They know it's coming and what the problem is, right?' The copilot nodded. 'They don't like it, but they know.' 'I don't give a shit what they like and what they don't like, Danny. We came close tonight.' Danny Keene nodded. He knew they had. Brian sighed and rubbed a hand up and down the back of his neck. His head ached like a bad tooth. 'Maybe I'm getting too old for this business.' That was, of course, the sort of thing anyone said about his job from time to time, particularly at the end of a bad shift, and Brian knew damned well he wasn't too old for the job  at fortythree, he was just entering prime time for airline pilots. Nevertheless, tonight he almost believed it. God, he was tired. There was a knock at the compartment door; Steve Searles, the navigator, turned in his seat and opened it without standing up. A man in a green American Pride blazer was standing there. He looked like a gate agent, but Brian knew he wasn't. It was John (or maybe it was James) Deegan, Deputy Chief of Operations for American Pride at LAX. 'Captain Engle?' 'Yes?' An internal set of defenses went up, and his headache flared. His first thought, born not of logic but of strain and weariness, was that they were going to try and pin responsibility for the leaky aircraft on him. Paranoid, of course, but he was in a paranoid frame of mind. 'I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Captain.' 'Is this about the leak?' Brian's voice was too sharp, and a few of the disembarking passengers glanced around, but it was too late to do anything about that now. Deegan was shaking his head. 'It's your wife, Captain Engle.' For a moment Brian didn't have the foggiest notion what the man was talking about and could only stand there, gaping at him and feeling exquisitely stupid. Then the penny dropped. He meant Anne, of course. 'She's my exwife. We were divorced eighteen months ago. What about her?' 'There's been an accident,' Deegan said. 'Perhaps you'd better come up to the office.' Brian looked at him curiously. After the last three long, tense hours, all of this seemed strangely unreal. He resisted an urge to tell Deegan that if this was some sort of Candid Camera bullshit, he could go fuck himself. But of course it wasn't. Airline brass weren't into pranks and games, especially at the expense of pilots who had just come very close to having nasty midair mishaps. 'What about Anne?' Brian heard himself asking again, this time in a softer voice. He was aware that his copilot was looking at him with cautious sympathy. 'Is she all right?' Deegan looked down at his shiny shoes and Brian knew that the news was very bad indeed, that Anne was a lot more than not all right. Knew, but found it impossible to believe. Anne was only thirtyfour, healthy, and careful in her habits. He had also thought on more than one occasion that she was the only completely sane driver in the city of Boston ... perhaps in the whole state of Massachusetts. Now he heard himself asking something else, and it was really like that  as if some stranger had stepped into his brain and was using his mouth as a loudspeaker. 'Is she dead?' John or James Deegan looked around, as if for support, but there was only a single flight attendant standing by the hatch, wishing the deplaning passengers a pleasant evening in Los Angeles and glancing anxiously toward the cockpit every now and then, probably worried about the same thing that had crossed Brian's mind  that the crew was for some reason to be blamed for the slow leak which had made the last few hours of the flight such a nightmare. Deegan was on his own. He looked at Brian again and nodded. 'Yes  I'm afraid she is. Would you come with me, Captain Engle?' 2 At quarter past midnight, Brian Engle was settling into seat 5A of American Pride's Flight 29  Flagship Service from Los Angeles to Boston. In fifteen minutes or so, that flight known to transcontinental travellers as the redeye would be airborne. He remembered thinking earlier that if LAX wasn't the most dangerous commercial airport in America, then Logan was. Through the most unpleasant of coincidences, he would now have a chance to experience both places within an eighthour span of time into LAX as the pilot, into Logan as a deadheading passenger. His headache, now a good deal worse than it had been upon landing Flight 7, stepped up another notch. A fire, he thought. A goddamned fire. What happened to the smokedetectors, for Christ's sake? It was a brandnew building.' It occurred to him that he had hardly thought about Anne at all for the last four or five months. During the first year of the divorce, she was all he had thought about, it seemed  what she was doing, what she was wearing, and, of course, who she was seeing. When the healing finally began, it had happened very fast ... as if he had been injected with some spiritreviving antibiotic. He had read enough about divorce to know what that reviving agent usually was not an antibiotic but another woman. The rebound effect, in other words. There had been no other woman for Brian  at least not yet. A few dates and one cautious sexual encounter (he had come to believe that all sexual encounters outside of marriage in the Age of AIDS were cautious), but no other woman. He had simply ... healed. Brian watched his fellow passengers come aboard. A young woman with blonde hair was walking with a little girl in dark glasses. The little girl's hand was on the blonde's elbow. The woman murmured to her charge, the girl looked immediately toward the sound of her voice, and Brian understood she was blind  it was something in the gesture of the head. Funny, he thought, how such small gestures could tell so much. Anne, he thought. Shouldn't you be thinking about Anne? But his tired mind kept trying to slip away from the subject of Anne Anne who had been his wife, Anne, who was the only woman he had ever struck in anger, Anne who was now dead. He supposed he could go on a lecture tour; he would talk to groups of divorced men. Hell, divorced women as well, for that matter. His subject would be divorce and the art of forgetfulness. Shortly after the fourth anniversary is the optimum time for divorce, he would tell them. Take my case, I spent the following year in purgatory, wondering just how much of it was my fault and how much was hers, wondering how right or wrong it was to keep pushing her on the subject of kids  that was the big thing with us, nothing dramatic like drugs or adultery, just the old kidsversuscareer thing  and then it was like there was an express elevator inside my head, and Anne was in it, and down it went. Yes. Down it had gone. And for the last several months, he hadn't really thought of Anne at all ... not even when the monthly alimony check was due. It was a very reasonable, very civilized amount; Anne had been making eighty thousand a year on her own before taxes. His lawyer paid it, and it was just another item on the monthly statement Brian got, a little two thousanddollar item tucked between the electricity bill and the mortgage payment on the condo. He watched a gangly teenaged boy with a violin case under his arm and a yarmulke on his head walk down the aisle. The boy looked both nervous and excited, his eyes full of the future. Brian envied him. There had been a lot of bitterness and anger between the two of them during the last year of the marriage, and finally, about four months before the end, it had happened his hand had said go before his brain could say no. He didn't like to remember that. She'd had too much to drink at a party, and she had really torn into him when they got home. Leave me alone about it, Brian. Just leave me alone. No more talk about kids. If you want a spermtest, go to a doctor. My job is advertising, not babymaking. I'm so tired of all your macho bullsh That was when he had slapped her, hard, across the mouth. The blow had clipped the last word off with brutal neatness. They had stood looking at each other in the apartment where she would later die, both of them more shocked and frightened than they would ever admit (except maybe now, sitting here in seat 5A and watching Flight 29'S passengers come on board, he was admitting it, finally admitting it to himself). She had touched her mouth, which had started to bleed. She held out her fingers toward him. You hit me, she said. It was not anger in her voice but wonder. He had an idea it might have been the first time anyone had ever laid an angry hand upon any part of Anne Quinlan Engle's body. Yes, he had said. You bet. And I'll do it again if you don't shut up. You're not going to whip me with that tongue of yours anymore, sweetheart. You better put a padlock on it. I'm telling you for your own good. Those days are over. If you want something to kick around the house, buy a dog. The marriage had crutched along for another few months, but it had really ended in that moment when Brian's palm made brisk contact with the side of Anne's mouth. He had been provoked  God knew he had been provoked  but he still would have given a great deal to take that one wretched second back. As the last passengers began to trickle on board, he found himself also thinking, almost obsessively, about Anne's perfume. He could recall its fragrance exactly, but not the name. What had it been? Lissome? Lithsome? Lithium, for God's sake? It danced just beyond his grasp. It was maddening. I miss her, he thought dully. Now that she's gone forever, I miss her. Isn't that amazing? Lawnboy? Something stupid like that? Oh stop it, he told his weary mind. Put a cork in it. Okay, his mind agreed. No problem; I can quit. I can quit anyttime I want. Was it maybe Lifebuoy? No  that's soap. Sorry. Lovebite? Lovelorn? Brian snapped his seatbelt shut, leaned back, closed his eyes, and smelled a perfume he could not quite name. That was when the flight attendant spoke to him. Of course Brian Engle had a theory that they were taught  in a highly secret postgraduate course, perhaps called Teasing the Geese  to wait until the passenger closed his or her eyes before offering some notquiteessential service. And, of course, they were to wait until they were reasonably sure the passenger was asleep before waking them to ask if he would like a blanket or a pillow. 'Pardon me . . .' she began, then stopped. Brian saw her eyes go from the epaulets on the shoulders of his black jacket to the hat, with its meaningless squiggle of scrambled eggs, on the empty seat beside him. She rethought herself and started again. 'Pardon me, Captain, would you like coffee or orange juice?' Brian was faintly amused to see he had flustered her a little. She gestured toward the table at the front of the compartment, just below the small rectangular movie screen. There were two icebuckets on the table. The slender green neck of a wine bottle poked out of each. 'Of course, I also have champagne.' Engle considered (Love Bo that's not it close but no cigar) the champagne, but only briefly. 'Nothing, thanks,' he said. 'And no inflight service. I think I'll sleep all the way to Boston. How's the weather look?' 'Clouds at 20,000 feet from the Great Plains all the way to Boston, but no problem. We'll be at thirtysix. Oh, and we've had reports of the aurora borealis over the Mojave Desert. You might want to stay awake for that.' Brian raised his eyebrows. 'You're kidding. The aurora borealis over California? And at this time of year?' 'That's what we've been told.' 'Somebody's been taking too many cheap drugs,' Brian said, and she laughed. 'I think I'll just snooze, thanks.' 'Very good, Captain.' She hesitated a moment longer. 'You're the captain who just lost his wife, aren't you?' The headache pulsed and snarled, but he made himself smile. This woman who was really no more than a girl  meant no harm. 'She was my exwife, but otherwise, yes. I am.' 'I'm awfully sorry for your loss.' 'Thank you.' 'Have I flown with you before, sir?' His smile reappeared briefly. 'I don't think so. I've been on overseas for the past four years or so.' And because it seemed somehow necessary, he offered his hand. 'Brian Engle.' She shook it. 'Melanie Trevor.' Engle smiled at her again, then leaned back and closed his eyes once more. He let himself drift, but not sleep  the preflight announcements, followed by the takeoff roll, would only wake him up again. There would be time enough to sleep when they were in the air. Flight 29, like most redeye flights, left promptly  Brian reflected that was high on their meager list of attractions. The plane was a 767, a little over half full. There were half a dozen other passengers in first class. None of them looked drunk or rowdy to Brian. That was good. Maybe he really would sleep all the way to Boston. He watched Melanie Trevor patiently as she pointed out the exit doors, demonstrated how to use the little gold cup if there was a pressure loss (a procedure Brian had been reviewing in his own mind, and with some urgency, not long ago), and how to inflate the life vest under the seat. When the plane was airborne, she came by his seat and asked him again if she could get him something to drink. Brian shook his head, thanked her, then pushed the button which caused his seat to recline. He closed his eyes and promptly fell asleep. He never saw Melanie Trevor again. 3 About three hours after Flight 29 took off, a little girl named Dinah Bellman woke up and asked her Aunt Vicky if she could have a drink of water. Aunt Vicky did not answer, so Dinah asked again. When there was still no answer, she reached over to touch her aunt's shoulder, but she was already quite sure that her hand would touch nothing but the back of an empty seat, and that was what happened. Dr Feldman had told her that children who were blind from birth often developed a high sensitivity  almost a kind of radar  to the presence or absence of people in their immediate area, but Dinah hadn't really needed the information. She knew it was true. It didn't always work, but it usually did ... especially if the person in question was her Sighted Person. Well, she's gone to the bathroom and she'll be right back, Dinah thought, but she felt an odd, vague disquiet settle over her just the same. She hadn't come awake all at once; it had been a slow process, like a diver kicking her way to the surface of a lake. If Aunt Vicky, who had the window seat, had brushed by her to get to the aisle in the last two or three minutes, Dinah should have felt her. So she went sooner, she told herself. Probably she had to Number Two  It's really no big deal, Dinah. Or maybe she stopped to talk with somebody on her way back. Except Dinah couldn't hear anyone talking in the big airplane's main cabin; only the steady soft drone of the jet engines. Her feeling of disquiet grew. The voice of Miss Lee, her therapist (except Dinah always thought of her as her blind teacher), spoke up in her head You mustn't be afraid to be afraid, Dinah  all children are afraid from time to time, especially in situations that are new to them. That goes double for children who are blind. Believe me, I know. And Dinah did believe her, because, like Dinah herself, Miss Lee had been blind since birth. Don't give up your fear ... but don't give in to it, either.


Sit still and try to reason things out. You'll be surprised how often it works. Especially in situations that are new to them. Well, that certainly fits; this was the first time Dinah had ever flown in anything, let alone coast to coast in a huge transcontinental jetliner. Try to reason it out. Well, she had awakened in a strange place to find her Sighted Person gone. Of course that was scary, even if you knew the absence was only temporary  after all, your Sighted Person couldn't very well decide to pop off to the nearest Taco Bell because she had the munchies when she was shut up in an airplane flying at 37,000 feet. As for the strange silence in the cabin ... well, this was the redeye, after all. The other passengers were probably sleeping. All of them? the worried part of her mind asked doubtfully. ALL of them are sleeping? Can that be? Then the answer came to her the movie. The ones who were awake were watching the inflight movie. Of course. A sense of almost palpable relief swept over her. Aunt Vicky had told her the movie was Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, and said she planned to watch it herself ... if she could stay awake, that was. Dinah ran her hand lightly over her aunt's seat, feeling for her headphones, but they weren't there. Her fingers touched a paperback book instead. One of the romance novels Aunt Vicky liked to read, no doubt  tales of the days when men were men and women weren't, she called them. Dinah's fingers went a little further and happened on something else  smooth, finegrained leather. A moment later she felt a zipper, and a moment after that she felt the strap. It was Aunt Vicky's purse. Dinah's disquiet returned. The earphones weren't on Aunt Vicky's seat, but her purse was. All the traveller's checks, except for a twenty tucked deep into Dinah's own purse, were in there  Dinah knew, because she had heard Mom and Aunt Vicky discussing them before they left the house in Pasadena. Would Aunt Vicky go off to the bathroom and leave her purse on the seat? Would she do that when her travelling companion was not only ten, not only asleep, but blind? Dinah didn't think so. Don't give up your fear ... but don't give in to it, either. Sit still and try to reason things out. But she didn't like that empty seat, and she didn't like the silence of the plane. It made perfect sense to her that most of the people would be asleep, and that the ones who were awake would be keeping as quiet as possible out of consideration for the rest, but she still didn't like it. An animal, one with extremely sharp teeth and claws, awakened and started to snarl inside of her head. She knew the name of that animal; it was panic, and if she didn't control it fast, she might do something which would embarrass both her and Aunt Vicky. When I can see, when the doctors in Boston fix my eyes, I won't have to go through stupid stuff like this. This was undoubtedly true, but it was absolutely no help to her right now. Dinah suddenly remembered that, after they sat down, Aunt Vicky had taken her hand, folded all the fingers but the pointer under, and then guided that one finger to the side of her seat. The controls were there  only a few of them, simple, easy to remember. There were two little wheels you could use once you put on the headphones  one switched around to the different audio channels; the other controlled the volume. The small rectangular switch controlled the light over her seat. You won't need that one, Aunt Vicky had said with a smile in her voice. At least, not yet. The last one was a square button  when you pushed that one, a flight attendant came. Dinah's finger touched this button now, and skated over its slightly convex surface. Do you really want to do this? she asked herself, and the answer came back at once. Yeah, I do. She pushed the button and heard the soft chime. Then she waited. No one came. There was only the soft, seemingly eternal whisper of the jet engines. No one spoke. No one laughed (Guess that movie isn't as funny as Aunt Vicky thought it would be, Dinah thought). No one coughed. The seat beside her, Aunt Vicky's seat, was still empty, and no flight attendant bent over her in a comforting little envelope of perfume and shampoo and faint smells of makeup to ask Dinah if she could get her something  a snack, or maybe that drink of water. Only the steady soft drone of the jet engines. The panic animal was yammering louder than ever. To combat it, Dinah concentrated on focussing that radar gadget, making it into a kind of invisible cane she could jab out from her seat here in the middle of the main cabin. She was good at that; at times, when she concentrated very hard, she almost believed she could see through the eyes of others. If she thought about it hard enough, wanted to hard enough. Once she had told Miss Lee about this feeling, and Miss Lee's response had been uncharacteristically sharp. Sightsharing is a frequent fantasy of the blind, she'd said. Particularly of blind children. Don't ever make the mistake of relying on that feeling, Dinah, or you're apt to find yourself in traction after falling down a flight of stairs or stepping in front of a car. So she had put aside her efforts to 'sightshare,' as Miss Lee had called it, and on the few occasions when the sensation stole over her again  that she was seeing the world, shadowy, wavery, but there  through her mother's eyes or Aunt Vicky's eyes, she had tried to get rid of it ... as a person who fears he is losing his mind will try to block out the murmur of phantom voices. But now she was afraid and so she felt for others, sensed for others, and did not find them. Now the terror was very large in her, the yammering of the panic animal very loud. She felt a cry building up in her throat and clamped her teeth against it. Because it would not come out as a cry, or a yell; if she let it out, it would exit her mouth as a firebell scream. I won't scream, she told herself fiercely. I won't scream and embarrass Aunt Vicky. I won't scream and wake up all the ones who are asleep and scare all the ones who are awake and they'll all come running and say look at the scared little girl, look at the scared little blind girl. But now that radar sense  that part of her which evaluated all sorts of vague sensory input and which sometimes did seem to see through the eyes of others (no matter what Miss Lee said)  was adding to her fear rather than alleviating it. Because that sense was telling her there was nobody within its circle of effectiveness. Nobody at all. 4 Brian Engle was having a very bad dream. In it, he was once again piloting Flight 7 from Tokyo to LA, but this time the leak was much worse. There was a palpable feeling of doom in the cockpit; Steve Searles was weeping as he ate a Danish pastry. If you're so upset, how come you're eating? Brian asked. A shrill, teakettle whistling had begun to fill the cockpit  the sound of the pressure leak, he reckoned. This was silly, of course  leaks were almost always silent until the blowout occurred  but he supposed in dreams anything was possible. Because I love these things, and I'm never going to get to eat another one, Steve said, sobbing harder than ever. Then, suddenly, the shrill whistling sound stopped. A smiling, relieved flight attendant  it was, in fact, Melanie Trevor  appeared to tell him the leak had been found and plugged. Brian got up and followed her through the plane to the main cabin, where Anne Quinlan Engle, his exwife, was standing in a little alcove from which the seats had been removed. Written over the window beside her was the cryptic and somehow ominous phrase SHOOTING STARS ONLY. It was written in red, the color of danger. Anne was dressed in the darkgreen uniform of an American Pride flight attendant, which was strange  she was an advertising executive with a Boston agency, and had always looked down her narrow, aristocratic nose at the stews with whom her husband flew. Her hand was pressed against a crack in the fuselage. See, darling? she said proudly. It's all taken care of. It doesn't even matter that you hit me. I have forgiven you. Don't do that, Anne! he cried, but it was already too late. A fold appeared in the back of her hand, mimicking the shape of the crack in the fuselage. It grew deeper as the pressure differential sucked her hand relentlessly outward. Her middle finger went through first, then the ring finger, then the first finger and her pinky. There was a brisk popping sound, like a champagne cork being drawn by an overeager waiter, as her entire hand was pulled through the crack in the airplane. Yet Anne went on smiling. It's L'Envoi, darling, she said as her arm began to disappear. Her hair was escaping the clip which held it back and blowing around her face in a misty cloud. It's what I've always worn, don't you remember? He did ... now he did. But now it didn't matter. Anne, come back! he screamed. She went on smiling as her arm was sucked slowly into the emptiness outside the plane. It doesn't hurt at all, Brian  believe me. The sleeve of her green American Pride blazer began to flutter, and Brian saw that her flesh was being pulled out through the crack in a thickish white ooze. It looked like Elmer's Glue. L'Envoi, remember? Anne asked as she was sucked out through the crack, and now Brian could hear it again  that sound which the poet James Dickey once called 'the vast beastwhistle of space.' It grew steadily louder as the dream darkened, and at the same time it began to broaden. To become not the scream of wind but that of a human voice. Brian's eyes snapped open. He was disoriented by the power of the dream for a moment, but only a moment  he was a professional in a highrisk, highresponsibility job, a job where one of the absolute prerequisites was fast reaction time. He was on Flight 29, not Flight 7, not Tokyo to Los Angeles but Los Angeles to Boston, where Anne was already dead  not the victim of a pressure leak but of a fire in her Atlantic Avenue condominium near the waterfront. But the sound was still there. It was a little girl, screaming shrilly. 5 'Would somebody speak to me, please?' Dinah Bellman asked in a low, clear voice. 'I'm sorry, but my aunt is gone and I'm blind.' No one answered her. Forty rows and two partitions forward, Captain Brian Engle was dreaming that his navigator was weeping and eating a Danish pastry. There was only the continuing drone of the jet engines. The panic overshadowed her mind again, and Dinah did the only thing she could think of to stave it off she unbuckled her seatbelt, stood up, and edged into the aisle. 'Hello?' she asked in a louder voice. 'Hello, anybody!' There was still no answer. Dinah began to cry. She held onto herself grimly, nonetheless, and began walking forward slowly along the portside aisle. Keep count, though, part of her mind warned frantically. Keep count of how many rows you pass, or you'll get lost and never find your way back again. She stopped at the row of portside seats just ahead of the row in which she and Aunt Vicky had been sitting and bent, arms outstretched, fingers splayed. She knew there was a man here, because Aunt Vicky had spoken to him only a minute or so before the plane took off. When he spoke back to her, his voice had come from the seat directly in front of Dinah's own. She knew that; marking the locations of voices was part of her life, an ordinary fact of existence like breathing. The sleeping man would jump when her outstretched fingers touched him, but Dinah was beyond caring. Except the seat was empty. Completely empty. Dinah straightened up again, her cheeks wet, her head pounding with fright. They couldn't be in the bathroom together, could they? Of course not. Perhaps there were two bathrooms. In a plane this big there must be two bathrooms. Except that didn't matter, either. Aunt Vicky wouldn't have left her purse, no matter what. Dinah was sure of it. She began to walk slowly forward, stopping at each row of seats, reaching into the two closest her first on the port side and then on the starboard. She felt another purse in one, what felt like a briefcase in another, a pen and a pad of paper in a third. In two others she felt headphones. She touched something sticky on an earpiece of the second set. She rubbed her fingers together, then grimaced and wiped them on the mat which covered the headrest of the seat. That had been earwax. She was sure of it. It had its own unmistakable, yucky texture. Dinah Bellman felt her slow way up the aisle, no longer taking pains to be gentle in her investigations. It didn't matter. She poked no eye, pinched no cheek, pulled no hair. Every seat she investigated was empty. This can't be, she thought wildly. It just can't be! They were all around us when we got on! I heard them! I felt them! I smelled them! Where have they all gone? She didn't know, but they were gone she was becoming steadily more sure of that. At some point, while she slept, her aunt and everyone else on Flight 29 had disappeared. No! The rational part of her mind clamored in the voice of Miss Lee. No, that's impossible, Dinah! If everyone's gone, who is flying the plane? She began to move forward faster now, hands gripping the edges of the seats, her blind eyes wide open behind her dark glasses, the hem of her pink travelling dress fluttering. She had lost count, but in her greater distress over the continuing silence, this did not matter much to her. She stopped again, and reached her groping hands into the seat on her right. This time she touched hair ... but its location was all wrong. The hair was on the seat  how could that be? Her hands closed around it ... and lifted it. Realization, sudden and terrible, came to her. It's hair, but the man it belongs to is gone. It's a scalp. I'm holding a dead man's scalp. That was when Dinah Bellman opened her mouth and began to give voice to the shrieks which pulled Brian Engle from his dream. 6 Albert Kaussner was belly up to the bar, drinking Branding Iron Whiskey. The Earp brothers, Wyatt and Virgil, were on his right, and Doc Halliday was on his left. He was just lifting his glass to offer a toast when a man with a peg leg ranhopped into the Sergio Leone Saloon. 'It's the Dalton Gang!' he screamed. 'The Daltons have just rid into Dodge!' Wyatt turned to face him calmly. His face was narrow, tanned, and handsome. He looked a great deal like Hugh O'Brian. 'This here is Tombstone, Muffin,' he said. 'You got to get yore stinky ole shit together.' 'Well, they're ridin in, wherever we are!' Muffin exclaimed. 'And they look maaad, Wyatt! They look reeely reeely maaaaaaad!' As if to prove this, guns began to fire in the street outside  the heavy thunder of Army .44s (probably stolen) mixed in with the higher whipcrack explosions of Garand rifles. 'Don't get your panties all up in a bunch, Muffy,' Doc Halliday said, and tipped his hat back. Albert was not terribly surprised to see that Doc looked like Robert De Niro. He had always believed that if anyone was absolutely right to play the consumptive dentist, De Niro was the one. 'What do you say, boys?' Virgil Earp asked, looking around. Virgil didn't look like much of anyone. 'Let's go,' Wyatt said. 'I've had enough of these damned Clantons to last me a lifetime.' 'It's the Daltons, Wyatt,' Albert said quietly. 'I don't care if it's John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd!' Wyatt exclaimed. 'Are you with us or not, Ace?' 'I'm with you,' Albert Kaussner said, speaking in the soft but menacing tones of the born killer. He dropped one hand to the butt of his longbarrelled Buntline Special and put the other to his head for a moment to make sure his yarmulke was on solidly. It was. 'Okay, boys,' Doc said. 'Let's go cut some Dalton butt.' They strode out together, four abreast through the batwing doors, just as the bell in the Tombstone Baptist Church began to toll high noon. The Daltons were coming down Main Street at a full gallop, shooting holes in plateglass windows and false fronts. They turned the waterbarrel in front of Duke's Mercantile and Reliable Gun Repair into a fountain. Ike Dalton was the first to see the four men standing in the dusty street, their frock coats pulled back to free the handles of their guns. Ike reined his horse in savagely and it rose on its rear legs, squealing, foam splattering in thick curds around the bit. Ike Dalton looked quite a bit like Rutger Hauer. 'Look what we have got here,' he sneered. 'It is Wyatt Earp and his pansy brother Virgil.' Emmett Dalton (who looked like Donald Sutherland after a month of hard nights) pulled up beside Ike. 'And their faggot dentist friend, too,' he snarled. 'Who else wants ' Then he looked at Albert and paled. The thin sneer faltered on his lips. Paw Dalton pulled up beside his two sons. Paw bore a strong resemblance to Slim Pickens. 'Christ,' Paw whispered. 'It's Ace Kaussner!' Now Frank James pulled his mount into line next to Paw. His face was the color of dirty parchment. 'What the hell, boys!' Frank cried. 'I don't mind hoorawin a town or two on a dull day, but nobody told me The Arizona Jew was gonna be here!' Albert 'Ace' Kaussner, known from Sedalia to Steamboat Springs as The Arizona Jew, took a step forward. His hand hovered over the butt of his Buntline. He spat a stream of tobacco to one side, never taking his chilly gray eyes from the hardcases mounted twenty feet in front of him. 'Go on and make your moves, boys,' said The Arizona Jew. 'By my count, hell ain't half full.' The Dalton Gang slapped leather just as the clock in the tower of the Tombstone Baptist Church beat the last stroke of noon into the hot desert air. Ace went for his own gun, his draw as fast as blue blazes, and as he began to fan the hammer with the flat of his left hand, sending a spray of .45caliber death into the Dalton Gang, a little girl standing outside The Longhorn Hotel began to scream. Somebody make that brat stop yowling, Ace thought. What's the matter with her, anyway? I got this under control. They don't call me the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi for nothing. But the scream went on, ripping across the air, darkening it as it came, and everything began to break up. For a moment Albert was nowhere at all  lost in a darkness through which fragments of his dream tumbled and spun in a whirlpool. The only constant was that terrible scream; it sounded like the shriek of an overloaded teakettle. He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in his seat toward the front of Flight 29'S main cabin. Coming up the aisle from the rear of the plane was a girl of about ten or twelve, wearing a pink dress and a pair of dittybop shades. What is she, a movie star or something? he thought, but he was badly frightened, all the same. It was a bad way to exit his favorite dream. 'Hey!' he cried  but softly, so as not to wake the other passengers. 'Hey, kid! What's the deal?' The little girl whiplashed her head toward the sound of his voice. Her body turned a moment later, and she collided with one of the seats which ran down the center of the cabin in fouracross rows. She struck it with her thighs, rebounded, and tumbled backward over the armrest of a portside seat. She fell into it with her legs up. 'Where is everybody?' she was screaming. 'Help me! Help me!' 'Hey, stewardess!' Albert yelled, concerned, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He stood up, slipped out of his seat, turned toward the screaming little girl ... and stopped. He was now facing fully toward the back of the plane, and what he saw froze him in place. The first thought to cross his mind was, I guess I don't have to worry about waking up the other passengers, after all. To Albert it looked like the entire main cabin of the 767 was empty. 7 Brian Engle was almost to the partition separating Flight 29'S firstclass and businessclass sections when he realized that first class was now entirely empty. He stopped for just a moment, then got moving again. The others had left their seats to see what all the screaming was about, perhaps. Of course he knew this was not the case; he had been flying passengers long enough to know a good bit about their group psychology. When a passenger freaked out, few if any of the others ever moved. Most air travellers meekly surrendered their option to take individual action when they entered the bird, sat down, and buckled their seatbelts around them. Once those few simple things were accomplished, all problemsolving tasks became the crew's responsibility. Airline personnel called them geese, but they were really sheep ... an attitude most flight crews liked just fine. It made the nervous ones easier to handle. But, since it was the only thing that made even remote sense, Brian ignored what he knew and plunged on. The rags of his own dream were still wrapped around him, and a part of his mind was convinced that it was Anne who was screaming, that he would find her halfway down the main cabin with her hand plastered against a crack in the body of the airliner, a crack located beneath a sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY. There was only one passenger in the business section, an older man in a brown threepiece suit. His bald head gleamed mellowly in the glow thrown by his reading lamp. His arthritisswollen hands were folded neatly over the buckle of his seatbelt. He was fast asleep and snoring loudly, ignoring the whole ruckus. Brian burst through into the main cabin and there his forward motion was finally checked by utter stunned disbelief. He saw a teenaged boy standing near a little girl who had fallen into a seat on the port side about a quarter of the way down the cabin. The boy was not looking at her, however; he was staring toward the rear of the plane, with his jaw hanging almost all the way to the round collar of his Hard Rock Cafe teeshirt. Brian's first reaction was about the same as Albert Kaussner's My God, the whole plane is empty! Then he saw a woman on the starboard side of the airplane stand up and walk into the aisle to see what was happening. She had the dazed, puffy look of someone who has just been jerked out of a sound sleep. Halfway down, in the center aisle, a young man in a crewnecked jersey was craning his neck toward the little girl, and staring with flat, incurious eyes. Another man, this one about sixty, got up from a seat close to Brian and stood there indecisively. He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and he looked utterly bewildered. His hair was fluffed up around his head in untidy madscientist corkscrews. 'Who's screaming?' he asked Brian. 'Is the plane in trouble, mister? You don't think we're goin down, do you?' The little girl stopped screaming. She struggled up from the seat she had fallen into, and then almost tumbled forward in the other direction. The kid caught her just in time; he was moving with dazed slowness. Where have they gone? Brian thought. My dear God, where have they all gone? But his feet were moving toward the teenager and the little girl now. As he went, he passed another passenger who was still sleeping, this one a girl of about seventeen. Her mouth was open in an unlovely yawp and she was breathing in long, dry inhalations. He reached the teenager and the girl in the pink dress. 'Where are they, man?' Albert Kaussner asked. He had an arm around the shoulders of the sobbing child, but he wasn't looking at her; his eyes slipped relentlessly back and forth across the almost deserted main cabin. 'Did we land someplace while I was asleep and let them off?' 'My aunt's gone!' the little girl sobbed. 'My Aunt Vicky! I thought the plane was empty! I thought I was the only one! Where's my aunt, please? I want my aunt!' Brian knelt beside her for a moment, so they were at approximately the same level. He noticed the sunglasses and remembered seeing her get on with the blonde woman. 'You're all right,' he said. 'You're all right, young lady. What's your name?' 'Dinah,' she sobbed. 'I can't find my aunt. I'm blind and I can't see her. I woke up and the seat was empty ' 'What's going on?' the young man in the crewneck jersey asked. He was talking over Brian's head, ignoring both Brian and Dinah, speaking to the boy in the Hard Rock teeshirt and the older man in the flannel shirt. 'Where's everybody else?' 'You're all right, Dinah,' Brian repeated. 'There are other people here. Can you hear them?' 'YYes. I can hear them. But where's Aunt Vicky? And who's been killed?' 'Killed?' a woman asked sharply. It was the one from the starboard side. Brian glanced up briefly and saw she was young, darkhaired, pretty. 'Has someone been killed? Have we been hijacked?' 'No one's been killed,' Brian said. It was, at least, something to say. His mind felt weird like a boat which has slipped its moorings. 'Calm down, honey.' 'I felt his hair!' Dinah insisted. 'Someone cut off his HAIR!' This was just too odd to deal with on top of everything else, and Brian dismissed it. Dinah's earlier thought suddenly struck home to him with chilly intensity  who the fuck was flying the plane? He stood up and turned to the older man in the red shirt. 'I have to go forward,' he said. 'Stay with the little girl.' 'All right,' the man in the red shirt said. 'But what's happening?' They were joined by a man of about thirtyfive who was wearing pressed bluejeans and an oxford shirt. Unlike the others, he looked utterly calm. He took a pair of hornrimmed spectacles from his pocket, shook them out by one bow, and put them on. 'We seem a few passengers short, don't we?' he said. His British accent was almost as crisp as his shirt. 'What about crew? Anybody know?' 'That's what I'm going to find out,' Brian said, and started forward again. At the head of the main cabin he turned back and counted quickly. Two more passengers had joined the huddle around the girl in the dark glasses. One was the teenaged girl who had been sleeping so heavily; she swayed on her feet as if she were either drunk or stoned. The other was an elderly gent in a fraying sportcoat. Eight people in all. To those he added himself and the guy in business class, who was, at least so far, sleeping through it all. Ten people. For the love of God, where are the rest of them? But this was not the time to worry about it  there were bigger problems at hand. Brian hurried forward, barely glancing at the old bald fellow snoozing in business class. 8 The service area squeezed behind the movie screen and between the two firstclass heads was empty. So was the galley, but there Brian saw something which was extremely troubling the beverage trolley was parked kittycorner by the starboard bathroom. There were a number of used glasses on its bottom shelf. They were just getting ready to serve drinks, he thought. When it happened whatever 'it' was  they'd just taken out the trolley. Those used glasses are the ones that were collected before the rollout. So whatever happened must have happened within half an hour of takeoff, maybe a little longer  weren't there turbulence reports over the desert? I think so. And that weird shit about the aurora borealis For a moment Brian was almost convinced that last was a part of his dream  it was certainly odd enough  but further reflection convinced him that Melanie Trevor, the flight attendant, had actually said it. Never mind that; what did happen? In God's name, what? He didn't know, but he did know that looking at the abandoned drinks trolley put an enormous feeling of terror and superstitious dread into his guts. For just a moment he thought that this was what the first boarders of the Mary Celeste must have felt like, coming upon a totally abandoned ship where all the sail was neatly laid on, where the captain's table had been set for dinner, where all ropes were neatly coiled and some sailor's pipe was still smouldering away the last of its tobacco on the foredeck ... Brian shook these paralyzing thoughts off with a tremendous effort and went to the door between the service area and the cockpit. He knocked. As he had feared, there was no response. And although he knew it was useless to do so, he curled his fist up and hammered on it. Nothing. He tried the doorknob. It didn't move. That was SOP in the age of unscheduled sidetrips to Havana, Lebanon, and Tehran. Only the pilots could open it. Brian could fly this plane . . . but not from out here. 'Hey!' he shouted. 'Hey, you guys! Open the door!' Except he knew better. The flight attendants were gone; almost all the passengers were gone; Brian Engle was willing to bet the 767's twoman cockpit crew was also gone. He believed Flight 29 was heading east on automatic pilot. CHAPTER 1 September 15th was Kevin's birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted a Sun. The Kevin in question was Kevin Delevan, the birthday was his fifteenth, and the Sun was a Sun 660, a Polaroid camera which does everything for the novice photographer except make bologna sandwiches. There were other gifts, of course; his sister, Meg, gave him a pair of mittens she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent  as she always did  a string tie with a horrible clasp. She had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already had twelve unused string ties with horrible clasps in a drawer of his bureau, to which this would be added  lucky thirteen. He had never worn any of them but was not allowed to throw them away. Aunt Hilda lived in Portland. She had never come to one of Kevin's or Meg's birthday parties, but she might decide to do just that one of these years. God knew she could; Portland was only fifty miles south of Castle Rock. And suppose she did come ... and asked to see Kevin in one of his other ties (or Meg in one of her other scarves, for that matter)? With some relatives, an excuse might do. Aunt Hilda, however, was different. Aunt Hilda presented a certain golden possibility at a point where two essential facts about her crossed she was Rich, and she was Old. Someday, Kevin's Mom was convinced, she might DO SOMETHING for Kevin and Meg. It was understood that the SOMETHING would probably come after Aunt Hilda finally kicked it, in the form of a clause in her will. In the meantime, it was thought wise to keep the horrible string ties and the equally horrible scarves. So this thirteenth string tie (on the clasp of which was a bird Kevin thought was a woodpecker) would join the others, and Kevin would write Aunt Hilda a thankyou note, not because his mother would insist on it and not because he thought or even cared that Aunt Hilda might DO SOMETHING for him and his kid sister someday, but because he was a generally thoughtful boy with good habits and no real vices. He thanked his family for all his gifts (his mother and father had, of course, supplied a number of lesser ones, although the Polaroid was clearly the centerpiece, and they were delighted with his delight), not forgetting to give Meg a kiss (she giggled and pretended to rub it off but her own delight was equally clear) and to tell her he was sure the mittens would come in handy on the ski team this winter  but most of his attention was reserved for the Polaroid box, and the extra film packs which had come with it. He was a good sport about the birthday cake and the ice cream, although it was clear he was itching to get at the camera and try it out. And as soon as he decently could, he did. That was when the trouble started. He read the instruction booklet as thoroughly as his eagerness to begin would allow, then loaded the camera while the family watched with anticipation and unacknowledged dread (for some reason, the gifts which seem the most wanted are the ones which so often don't work). There was a little collective sigh  more puff than gust  when the camera obediently spat out the cardboard square on top of the film packet, just as the instruction booklet had promised it would.


There were two small dots, one red and one green, separated by a zigzag lightningbolt on the housing of the camera. When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed on for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly. 'It's ready,' Kevin said, in the same strainingtobeoffhandbutnotquitemakingit tone with which Neil Armstrong had reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. 'Why don't all you guys stand together?' 'I hate having my picture taken!' Meg cried, covering her face with the theatrical anxiety and pleasure which only subteenage girls and really bad actresses can manage. 'Come on, Meg,' Mr Delevan said. 'Don't be a goose, Meg,' Mrs Delevan said. Meg dropped her hands (and her objections), and the three of them stood at the end of the table with the diminished birthday cake in the foreground. Kevin looked through the viewfinder. 'Squeeze a little closer to Meg, Mom,' he said, motioning with his left hand. 'You too, Dad.' This time he motioned with his right. 'You're squishing me!' Meg said to her parents. Kevin put his finger on the button which would fire the camera, then remembered a briefly glimpsed note in the instructions about how easy it was to cut off your subjects' heads in a photograph. Off with their heads, he thought, and it should have been funny, but for some reason he felt a little tingle at the base of his spine, gone and forgotten almost before it was noticed. He raised the camera a little. There. They were all in the frame. Good. 'Okay!' he sang. 'Smile and say Intercourse!' 'Kevin!' his mother cried out. His father burst out laughing, and Meg screeched the sort of mad laughter not even bad actresses often essay; girls between the ages of ten and twelve own sole title to that particular laugh. Kevin pushed the button. The flashbulb, powered by the battery in the film pack, washed the room in a moment of righteous white light. It's mine, Kevin thought, and it should have been the surpassing moment of his fifteenth birthday. Instead, the thought brought back that odd little tingle. It was more noticeable this time. The camera made a noise, something between a squeal and a whirr, a sound just a little beyond description but familiar enough to most people, just the same the sound of a Polaroid camera squirting out what may not be art but what is often serviceable and almost always provides instant gratification. 'Lemme see it!' Meg cried. 'Hold your horses, muffin,' Mr Delevan said. 'They take a little time to develop.' Meg was staring at the stiff gray surface of what was not yet a photograph with the rapt attention of a woman gazing into a crystal ball. The rest of the family gathered around, and there was that same feeling of anxiety which had attended the ceremony of Loading the Camera still life of the American Family waiting to let out its breath. Kevin felt a terrible tenseness stealing into his muscles, and this time there was no question of ignoring it. He could not explain it ... but it was there. He could not seem to take his eyes from that solid gray square within the white frame which would form the borders of the photograph. 'I think I see me!' Meg cried brightly. Then, a moment later 'No. I guess I don't. I think I see ' They watched in utter silence as the gray cleared, as the mists are reputed to do in a seer's crystal when the vibrations or feelings or whatever they are are right, and the picture became visible to them. Mr Delevan was the first to break the silence. 'What is this?' he asked no one in particular. 'Some kind of joke?' Kevin had absently put the camera down rather too close to the edge of the table in order to watch the picture develop. Meg saw what the picture was and took a single step away. The expression on her face was neither fright nor awe but just ordinary surprise. One of her hands came up as she turned toward her father. The rising hand struck the camera and knocked it off the table onto the floor. Mrs Delevan had been looking at the emerging picture in a kind of trance, the expression on her face either that of a woman who is deeply puzzled or who is feeling the onset of a migraine headache. The sound of the camera hitting the floor startled her. She uttered a little scream and recoiled. In doing this, she tripped over Meg's foot and lost her balance. Mr Delevan reached for her, propelling Meg, who was still between them, forward again, quite forcefully. Mr Delevan not only caught his wife, but did so with some grace; for a moment they would have made a pretty picture indeed Mom and Dad, showing they still know how to Cut A Rug, caught at the end of a spirited tango, she with one hand thrown up and her back deeply bowed, he bent over her in that ambiguous male posture which may be seen, when divorced from circumstance, as either solicitude or lust. Meg was eleven, and less graceful. She went flying back toward the table and smacked into it with her stomach. The hit was hard enough to have injured her, but for the last year and a half she had been taking ballet lessons at the YWCA three afternoons a week. She did not dance with much grace, but she enjoyed ballet, and the dancing had fortunately toughened the muscles of her stomach enough for them to absorb the blow as efficiently as good shock absorbers absorb the pounding a road full of potholes can administer to a car. Still, there was a band of black and blue just above her hips the next day. These bruises took almost two weeks to first purple, then yellow, then fade ... like a Polaroid picture in reverse. At the moment this Rube Goldberg accident happened, she didn't even feel it; she simply banged into the table and cried out. The table tipped. The birthday cake, which should have been in the foreground of Kevin's first picture with his new camera, slid off the table. Mrs Delevan didn't even have time to start her Meg, are you all right? before the remaining half of the cake fell on top of the Sun 660 with a juicy splat! that sent frosting all over their shoes and the baseboard of the wall. The viewfinder, heavily smeared with Dutch chocolate, peered out like a periscope. That was all. Happy birthday, Kevin. Kevin and Mr Delevan were sitting on the couch in the living room that evening when Mrs Delevan came in, waving two dogeared sheets of paper which had been stapled together. Kevin and Mr Delevan both had open books in their laps (The Best and the Brightest for the father; ShootOut at Laredo for the son), but what they were mostly doing was staring at the Sun camera, which sat in disgrace on the coffee table amid a litter of Polaroid pictures. All the pictures appeared to show exactly the same thing. Meg was sitting on the floor in front of them, using the VCR to watch a rented movie. Kevin wasn't sure which one it was, but there were a lot of people running around and screaming, so he guessed it was a horror picture. Megan had a passion for them. Both parents considered this a low taste (Mr Delevan in particular was often outraged by what he called 'that useless junk'), but tonight neither of them had said a word. Kevin guessed they were just grateful she had quit complaining about her bruised stomach and wondering aloud what the exact symptoms of a ruptured spleen might be. 'Here they are,' Mrs Delevan said. 'I found them at the bottom of my purse the second time through.' She handed the papers  a sales slip from J. C. Penney's and a MasterCard receipt  to her husband. 'I can never find anything like this the first time. I don't think anyone can. It's like a law of nature.' She surveyed her husband and son, hands on her hips. 'You two look like someone just killed the family cat.' 'We don't have a cat,' Kevin said. 'Well, you know what I mean. It's a shame, of course, but we'll get it sorted out in no time. Penney's will be happy to exchange it ' 'I'm not so sure of that,' John Delevan said. He picked up the camera, looked at it with distaste (almost sneered at it, in fact), and then set it down again. 'It got chipped when it hit the floor. See?' Mrs Delevan took only a cursory glance. 'Well, if Penney's won't, I'm positive that the Polaroid company will. I mean, the fall obviously didn't cause whatever is wrong with it. The first picture looked just like all these, and Kevin took that one before Meg knocked it off the table.' 'I didn't mean to,' Meg said without turning around. On the screen, a pintsized figure  a malevolent doll named Chuckie, if Kevin had it right  was chasing a small boy. Chuckie was dressed in blue overalls and waving a knife. 'I know, dear. How's your stomach?' 'Hurts,' Meg said. 'A little ice cream might help. Is there any left over?' 'Yes, I think so.' Meg gifted her mother with her most winning smile. 'Would you get some for me?' 'Not at all,' Mrs Delevan said pleasantly. 'Get it yourself. And what's that horrible thing you're watching?' 'Child's Play,' Megan said. 'There's this doll named Chuckie that comes to life. It's neat.' Mrs Delevan wrinkled her nose. 'Dolls don't come to life, Meg,' her father said. He spoke heavily, as if knowing this was a lost cause. 'Chuckie did,' Meg said. 'In movies, anything can happen.' She used the remote control to freeze the movie and went to get her ice cream. 'Why does she want to watch that crap?' Mr Delevan asked his wife, almost plaintively. 'I don't know, dear.' Kevin had picked up the camera in one hand and several of the exposed Polaroids in the other  they had taken almost a dozen in all. 'I'm not so sure I want a refund,' he said. His father stared at him. 'What? Jesus wept!' 'Well,' Kevin said, a little defensively, 'I'm just saying that maybe we ought to think about it. I mean, it's not exactly an ordinary defect, is it? I mean, if the pictures came out overexposed ... or underexposed ... or just plain blank ... that would be one thing. But how do you get a thing like this? The same picture, over and over? I mean, look! And they're outdoors, even though we took every one of these pictures inside!' 'It's a practical joke,' his father said. 'It must be. The thing to do is just exchange the damned thing and forget about it.' 'I don't think it's a practical joke,' Kevin said. 'First, it's too complicated to be a practical joke. How do you rig a camera to take the same picture over and over? Plus, the psychology is all wrong.' 'Psychology, yet,' Mr Delevan said, rolling his eyes at his wife. 'Yes, psychology!' Kevin replied firmly. 'When a guy loads your cigarette or hands you a stick of pepper gum, he hangs around to watch the fun, doesn't he? But unless you or Mom have been pulling my leg ' 'Your father isn't much of a legpuller, dear,' Mrs Delevan said, stating the obvious gently. Mr Delevan was looking at Kevin with his lips pressed together. It was the look he always got when he perceived his son drifting toward that area of the ballpark where Kevin seemed most at home left field. Far left field. There was a hunchy, intuitive streak in Kevin that had always puzzled and confounded him. He didn't know where it had come from, but he was sure it hadn't been his side of the family. He sighed and looked at the camera again. A piece of black plastic had been chipped from the left side of the housing, and there was a crack, surely no thicker than a human hair, down the center of the viewfinder lens. The crack was so thin it disappeared completely when you raised the camera to your eye to set the shot you would not get  what you would get was on the coffee table, and there were nearly a dozen other examples in the dining room. What you got was something that looked like a refugee from the local animal shelter. 'All right, what in the devil are you going to do with it?' he asked. 'I mean, let's think this over reasonably, Kevin. What practical good is a camera that takes the same picture over and over?' But it was not practical good Kevin was thinking about. In fact, he was not thinking at all. He was feeling ... and remembering. In the instant when he had pushed the shutter release, one clear idea (it's mine) had filled his mind as completely as the momentary white flash had filled his eyes. That idea, complete yet somehow inexplicable, had been accompanied by a powerful mixture of emotions which he could still not identify completely ... but he thought fear and excitement had predominated. And besides  his father always wanted to look at things reasonably. He would never be able to understand Kevin's intuitions or Meg's interest in killer dolls named Chuckie. Meg came back in with a huge dish of ice cream and started the movie again. Someone was now attempting to toast Chuckie with a blowtorch, but he went right on waving his knife. 'Are you two still arguing?' 'We're having a discussion,' Mr Delevan said. His lips were pressed more tightly together than ever. 'Yeah, right,' Meg said, sitting down on the floor again and crossing her legs. 'You always say 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 latesummer 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 pencilbeam 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. 'Uhhuh,' 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 fanletter 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 blueeyed polar bear. It was hard to do. So he had spent two days circling that plinth in his mind, trying to read hieroglyphics that weren't even there, for pity's sake, and trying to decide which he wanted more the camera or the possibility of a Manifestation. Or, put another way, whether he wanted the Sun ... or the man in the moon. By the end of the second day (even in fifteenyearolds who are clearly destined for the Reasonable tribe, dilemmas rarely last longer than a week), he had decided to take the man in the moon ... on a trial basis, at least. He came to this decision in study hall period seven, and when the bell rang, signalling the end of both the study hall and the schoolday, he had gone to the teacher he respected most, Mr Baker, and had asked him if he knew of anyone who repaired cameras. 'Not like a regular camerashop guy,' he explained. 'More like a ... you know ... a thoughtful guy.' 'An Fstop philosopher?' Mr Baker asked. His saying things like that was one of the reasons why Kevin respected him. It was just a cool thing to say. 'A sage of the shutter? An alchemist of the aperture? A' 'A guy who's seen a lot,' Kevin said cagily. 'Pop Merrill,' Mr Baker said. 'Who?' 'He runs the Emporium Galorium.' 'Oh. That place.' 'Yeah,' Mr Baker said, grinning. 'That place. If, that is, what you're looking for is a sort of homespun Mr Fixit.' 'I guess that's what I am looking for.' 'He's got damn near everything in there,' Mr Baker said, and Kevin could agree with that. Even though he had never actually been inside, he passed the Emporium Galorium five, ten, maybe fifteen times a week (in a town the size of Castle Rock, you had to pass everything a lot, and it got amazingly boring in Kevin Delevan's humble opinion), and he had looked in the windows. It seemed crammed literally to the rafters with objects, most of them mechanical. But his mother called it 'a junkstore' in a sniffing voice, and his father said Mr Merrill made his money 'rooking the summer people,' and so Kevin had never gone in. If it had only been a 'junkstore,' he might have; almost certainly would have, in fact. But doing what the summer people did, or buying something where summer people 'got rooked' was unthinkable. He would be as apt to wear a blouse and skirt to high school. Summer people could do what they wanted (and did). They were all mad, and conducted their affairs in a mad fashion. Exist with them, fine. But be confused with them? No. No. And no sir. 'Damn near everything,' Mr Baker repeated, 'and most of what he's got, he fixed himself. He thinks that crackerbarrelphilosopher act he does, glasses up on top of the head, wise pronouncements, all of that  fools people. No one who knows him disabuses him. I'm not sure anyone would dare disabuse him.' 'Why? What do you mean?' Mr Baker shrugged. An odd, tight little smile touched his mouth. 'Pop  Mr Merrill, I mean  has got his fingers in a lot of pies around here. You'd be surprised, Kevin.' Kevin didn't care about how many pies Pop Merrill was currently fingering, or what their fillings might be. He was left with only one more important question, since the summer people were gone and he could probably slink into the Emporium Galorium unseen tomorrow afternoon if he took advantage of the rule which allowed all students but freshmen to cut their lastperiod study hall twice a month. 'Do I call him Pop or Mr Merrill?' Solemnly, Mr Baker replied, 'I think the man kills anyone under the age of sixty who calls him Pop.' And the thing was, Kevin had an idea Mr Baker wasn't exactly joking. 'You really don't know, huh?' Kevin said when the clocks began to wind down. It had not been like in a movie, where they all start and finish striking at once; these were real clocks, and he guessed that most of them  along with the rest of the appliances in the Emporium Galorium  were not really running at all but sort of lurching along. They had begun at what his own Seiko quartz watch said was 358. They began to pick up speed and volume gradually (like an old truck fetching second gear with a tired groan and jerk). There were maybe four seconds when all of them really did seem to be striking, bonging, chiming, clanging, and cuckooing at the same time, but four seconds was all the synchronicity they could manage. And 'winding down' was not exactly what they did. What they did was sort of give up, like water finally consenting to gurgle its way down a drain which is almost but not quite completely plugged. He didn't have any idea why he was so disappointed. Had he really expected anything else? For Pop Merrill, whom Mr Baker had described as a crackerbarrel philosopher and homespun Mr Fixit, to pull out a spring and say, 'Here it is  this is the bastard causing that dog to show up every time you push the shutter release. It's a dogspring, belongs in one of those toy dogs a kid winds up so it'll walk and bark a little, some joker on the Polaroid Sun 660 assembly line's always putting them in the damn cameras.' Had he expected that? No. But he had expected ... something. 'Don't have a friggin clue,' Pop repeated cheerfully. He reached behind him and took a Douglas MacArthur corncob pipe from a holder shaped like a bucket seat. He began to tamp tobacco into it from an imitationleather pouch with the words EVIL WEED stamped into it. 'Can't even take these babies apart, you know.' 'You can't ?' 'Nope,' Pop said. He was just as chipper as a bird. He paused long enough to hook a thumb over the wire ridge between the lenses of his rimless specs and give them a yank. They dropped off his bald dome and fell neatly into place, hiding the red spots on the sides of his nose, with a fleshy little thump. 'You could take apart the old ones,' he went on, now producing a Diamond Blue Tip match from a pocket of his vest (of course he was wearing a vest) and pressing the thick yellow thumbnail of his right hand on its head. Yes, this was a man who could rook the summer people with one hand tied behind his back (always assuming it wasn't the one he used to first fish out his matches and then light them)  even at fifteen years of age, Kevin could see that. Pop Merrill had style. 'The Polaroid Land cameras, I mean. Ever seen one of those beauties?' 'No,' Kevin said. Pop snapped the match alight on the first try, which of course he would always do, and applied it to the corncob, his words sending out little smokesignals which looked pretty and smelled absolutely foul. 'Oh yeah,' he said. 'They looked like those oldtime cameras people like Mathew Brady used before the turn of the century  or before the Kodak people introduced the Brownie box camera, anyway. What I mean to say is' (Kevin was rapidly learning that this was Pop Merrill's favorite phrase; he used it the way some of the kids in school used 'you know,' as intensifier, modifier, qualifier, and most of all as a convenient thoughtgathering pause) 'they tricked it up some, put on chrome and real leather sidepanels, but it still looked oldfashioned, like the sort of camera folks used to make daguerreotypes with. When you opened one of those old Polaroid Land cameras, it snapped out an accordion neck, because the lens needed half a foot, maybe even nine inches, to focus the image. It looked oldfashioned as hell when you put it next to one of the Kodaks in the late forties and early fifties, and it was like those old daguerreotype cameras in another way  it only took blackandwhite photos.' 'Is that so?' Kevin asked, interested in spite of himself. 'Oh, ayuh!' Pop said, chipper as a chickadee, blue eyes twinkling at Kevin through the smoke from his fuming stewpot of a pipe and from behind his round rimless glasses. It was the sort of twinkle which may indicate either good humor or avarice. 'What I mean to say is that people laughed at those cameras the way they laughed at the Volkswagen Beetles when they first come out ... but they bought the Polaroids just like they bought the VWs. Because the Beetles got good gas mileage and didn't go bust so often as American cars, and the Polaroids did one thing the Kodaks and even the Nikons and Minoltas and Leicas didn't.' 'Took instant pictures.' Pop smiled. 'Well ... not exactly. What I mean to say is you took your pitcher, and then you yanked on this flap to pull it out. It didn't have no motor, didn't make that squidgy little whining noise like modern Polaroids.' So there was a perfect way to describe that sound after all, it was just that you had to find a Pop Merrill to tell it to you the sound that Polaroid cameras made when they spat out their produce was a squidgy little whine. 'Then you had to time her,' Pop said. 'Time ?' 'Oh, ayuh!' Pop said with great relish, bright as the early bird who has found that fabled worm. 'What I mean to say is they didn't have none of this happy automatic crappy back in those days. You yanked and out come this long strip which you put on the table or whatever and timed off sixty seconds on your watch. Had to be sixty, or right around there, anyway. Less and you'd have an underexposed pitcher. More and it'd be overexposed.' 'Wow,' Kevin said respectfully. And this was not bogus respect, jollying the old man along in hopes he would get back to the point, which was not a bunch of longdead cameras that had been wonders in their day but his own camera, the damned balky Sun 660 sitting on Pop's worktable with the guts of an old sevenday clock on its right and something which looked suspiciously like a dildo on its left. It wasn't bogus respect and Pop knew it, and it occurred to Pop (it wouldn't have to Kevin) how fleeting that great white god 'stateoftheart' really was; ten years, he thought, and the phrase itself would be gone. From the boy's fascinated expression, you would have thought he was hearing about something as antique as George Washington's wooden dentures instead of a camera everyone had thought was the ultimate only thirtyfive years ago. But of course this boy had still been circling around in the unhatched void thirtyfive years ago, part of a female who hadn't yet even met the male who would provide his other half. 'What I mean to say is it was a regular little darkroom goin on in there between the pitcher and the backing,' Pop resumed, slow at first but speeding up as his own mostly genuine interest in the subject resurfaced (but the thoughts of who this kid's father was and what the kid might be worth to him and the strange thing the kid's camera was up to never completely left his mind). 'And at the end of the minute, you peeled the pitcher off the back  had to be careful when you did it, too, because there was all this goo like jelly on the back, and if your skin was in the least bit sensitive, you could get a pretty good burn.' 'Awesome,' Kevin said.